Hotel Honolulu

52 Visiting Darkness

In his bedroom Lionberg turned on the movie that had put him to sleep the night before, The Barefoot Contessa, with Bogart and Ava Gardner, but he became self-conscious again. It was his memory of what Rain had said about the large screen, and he did resent her for this, for keeping him from enjoying the movie.

When he put the light out and lay in the darkness, he knew he was too wakeful to sleep. The floor plan of his house was in his head, so perfectly etched he was able to get up and walk through two rooms and a corridor without a light.

He went to the guest house using the covered walkway. Though the fluorescence of moonlight gave a blue-white, almost snowy gleam to the lawn and the paving, there was only darkness in the guest house itself. He did not hesitate. This was his world, and he kept on, treading lightly, barefoot, rotating his hands in front of him to feel his way forward, like a confident blind man.

Entering the room, his footfalls were soundless on the cool hardwood floor. He stood over her and watched her sleep.

She lay in the bed like a treasure in a Chinese box, sunken in silk.

She was canted sideways, one arm flung out, the other across her bare breasts, her legs apart, the sheet tangled around one of her legs, her hair

spread on the twisted pillow. The rarest and most fragile Chinese jades, many of them as asymmetrical as Rain in this posture of sleep, came to him in specially constructed boxes, fitted into a silk cushion, the beautiful thing presented just like this slender sleeping woman.

He lingered, listening to her breathe and liking the way the moonlight made white jade of her skin. He guessed that she was naked. He considered lifting a corner of the sheet.

Then he became self-conscious again, as he had at dinner and in his room, feeling awkward and confused, wondering what to do next. He stepped back noiselessly into a shadow just outside the doorway and paused. There he remained, and watched, studying the way the woman's body was configured, each detail, and then simplifying it and seeing it whole, as a finely carved jade with an entire story in bas-relief, or seeing it as a familiar shape, like a shell. But there was also something plantlike in the way Rain lay.

She got up and groped to the bathroom. Lionberg held his breath. He did not move. The silence hummed for a moment, and then from the far doorway there was an interval of dribbling, the bright sound of a small bottle emptying into a still pool, the last trickle and the high notes of the drops made echoey by the blue tiles. Finally the suck and splash of pipes, followed by a hiss and sigh, and by that time she was in bed again, in the same posture, her body pressed into silk.

The rapture that Lionberg felt just then immobilized him, and yet he had never felt more alive. He was aroused. He touched his useless erection

in a gesture of restraint, and it was as though his fingertips grazed solid bone. He could not move, had no wish to, and watching her claw at her beautiful hair and stretch and thrash in sleep — a slow supine ballet in the bed that batted the coverlet lower on her naked body — he felt like a bird on a branch, steadied by his toes, neck extended, beak forward.

With her fingertips against her head, Rain arched her back. She lay like that for a long time and then rolled onto her side, freeing herself from the sheet, and finally came to rest on her stomach. Her buttocks upraised, her feet parted and slightly pigeon-toed, she seemed to be lamenting in a posture of submission. Time did not exist for Lionberg then. He heard the girl's long fingernails gently clawing her pale skin with a lovely sound of chafing as she patiently scratched her smoothness. Lionberg had risen in a levitation that was opportune — silent, invisible — and he hovered just above the ground, not breathing, listening to her sigh as she stroked herself between her legs for the longest time, finishing with a sob of relief.

The night was not long enough. The moon sank and the shadows were being rinsed from the eastern sky by dawn as Lionberg stepped back without any sound, seeking darkness, to the main house and his room at the far side. In the blinking light of the video machine he saw that he had spent three hours in his vigil.

He was at breakfast first, and to make his hands busy, because he was unaccountably anxious, he deliberately cracked an egg as she entered the room.

"Did you sleep all right?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Hardly at all."

He said, "But you're the one who sleeps like a log."

"Not last night." She sipped a glass of mango juice. She said, "And you had a little trouble too."

"How did you guess?"

She smiled at him. He began to groan, and he looked away, because there was power in her smile.

"Paying me a visit like that," she said.

Lionberg blushed, his ears reddened. He had never blushed in his own house. But she had seen him by the bed. She knew that he was lurking while she was in the bathroom, that he had heard, and seen.

"I'm so sorry," he said.

"It's all right." The way she ate made her seem confident and unconcerned. "I pretended I was asleep. And then, I — " She laughed as a way of finishing the sentence.

"Were you afraid?"

She hesitated and then said, "I liked it. Couldn't you tell?"

Even in her most awkward moments she did not lie. Her truthfulness fascinated him — this revelation, for example.

"I just didn't know what to say. And I guess you didn't either."

In the way she spoke to him, she made him into a boy, and now it seemed she was the mistress of the house and he the clumsy guest.

The white-rumped shama began singing again, its whistling warbling song, and this helped him change the subject. She asked him to remind her of the name of the bird.

Soon after breakfast she said she was going to the beach. Lionberg gave her some bottled water and said, "Drink when you're not thirsty and you'll avoid dehydration." As she walked down the hill to the beach the sunshine followed her, increasing as she descended, until she was walking in a deepness of heat and light. Lionberg could see her bright shape through one of his low-powered telescopes. He spent all day watching her. She swam, she lay on the beach, she seemed to sleep.

He did nothing else that day except watch her and wait for her to return to the house. When she did finally come back, at five, and she saw that he was waiting, standing with his arms at his sides, mute, eager to hear her say something, she became tentative.

"Drink?" he said at last.

"I am so tired." She looked sunstruck, her skin glowed, her fatigue showed in her smile.

Lionberg watched helplessly as she went to her room. It was still light. He drank alone, and he felt his routine had been disturbed. He had started drinking too early, so it tasted different and wrong.

He ate dinner alone, conscious of being alone, that very word in his

mind. The book propped open next to his plate was Dong-xuan Zi — The

Thirty Methods. Though the paintings were good enough, Lionberg found

the text poorly written and bloodless. He murmured the captions aloud, as

though rehearsing them to amuse someone at dinner: "Wiggling Dragon.

The Great Peng Bird Soaring over the Dark Ocean. . Cat and Mouse

Share the Same Hole. . The Mule of Three Springs. . Autumn Dogs. ii

He stopped, shutting the big expensive book. He had lost his appetite. He caught himself staring at the empty chair and thought that perhaps Rain had had too much sun. Drink when you're not thirsty and you'll avoid dehydration. Hadn't he told her that?

Her room was in darkness. She had apparently drawn the curtains to shut out the sunlight, and now the moonbeams were blocked. It took Lionberg minutes of standing there in the dark, holding a glass of water, to make out her form on the bed — for the longest time he could not even see the glass of water in his hand. The sheet was tossed over her. If that small crumpled shadow on the floor was her bathing suit, she was perhaps naked.

He stood over her, feeling happy once again, and happier still when he realized that it was a recaptured feeling, inspired by her, belonging to him.

"What's that in your hand?"

Her voice was sudden and very clear and awake. Had her eyes been open all this time?

"Brought a glass of water for you."

"You read my mind."

She sat up, drawing the sheet over her shoulder like a toga. Yes, she had to be naked.

She drank quickly. Between her thirsty gasps the odd gulps stroked her throat like sobs. She put the glass down on the marble side table with such directness it was as though she could also see in the dark.

"Sit here."

He laughed with relief and went to her. It was what, in his mind, he had been imploring her to say.

"What time is it?"

"Maybe ten."

"Gosh."

"Not late."

Beneath this simple talk he slid nearer to her and touched her, moved his hand along the warm skin of her thigh. He was so close to her,

his arm was pressed against hers and he felt her fingers creeping across his own thigh. He was thinking how the most primitive reassurance in a person's life was the offering of warm skin, and the thought made him feel less like a man at the moment of conquest than an imploring child yearning to put his mouth on her.

The suddenness of her fingers reaching him where he was most tender made him sigh, but she drew back, startled by its bigness, as though it were an accident. He took her hand and clutched it, pleading, hand to hand.

He leaned forward to beg her, and kissed her instead in a begging way. Her lips tasted grapy, from the flavored water.

"No," she was saying into his mouth.

She moved away from him on the bed, so that there was now a shadow between them.

"Not now," she said.

There was desire in her voice. Lionberg knew that she wanted it as much as he did, but that she was being wise, because there was something all wrong about this, the timing especially, and he loved her for that.

She touched him where he was hard and raw and said, "I can't let you go like that."

Twisting herself in an unhesitating motion, she moved her head down his chest while gripping the raw stick of his penis with her hand. When she licked it and put her mouth on it, it was as if she were medicating it, coating it with warm ointment, a kind of salve she was administering with her tongue and lips, soothing it softly as she moved her head, her long hair tumbled over Lionberg's thighs. She seemed to concentrate more and held him harder as he let out a small cry, and then she used her hands, pumping the last of him into her mouth.

"I've dreamed of sex like that," he said in a voice he hardly recognized as his own.

From the way she moved against him, he could tell she was laughing. She said, "That's not sex."

He drew her up, kissed her smeared lips, and said, "I like you, honey," and left the room, striding into the darkness without looking back.