For James Laughlin
Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and coolness?
LOVE WEAVES ITS OWN TAPESTRY, SPINS ITS OWN GOLDEN thread, with its own sweet breath breathes into being its mysteries — bucolic, lusty, gentle as the eyes of daisies or thick with pain. And out of its own music creates the flesh of our lives. If the birds sing, the nudes are not far off. Even the dialogue of the frogs is rapturous.
As for me, since late boyhood and early manhood, and throughout the more than eighteen years of my nearly perfect marriage, I always allowed myself to assume whatever shape was destined to be my own in the silken weave of Love’s pink panorama. I always went where the thread wound. No awkward hesitation, no prideful ravaging. At an early age I came to know that the gods fashion us to spread the legs of woman, or throw us together for no reason except that we complete the picture, so to speak, and join loin to loin often and easily, humbly, deliberately. Throughout my life I have never denied a woman young or old. Throughout my life I have simply appeared at Love’s will. See me as small white porcelain bull lost in the lower left-hand corner of that vast tapestry, see me as great white creature horned and mounted on a trim little golden sheep in the very center of Love’s most explosive field. See me as bull, or ram, as man, husband, lover, a tall and heavy stranger in white shorts on a violet tennis court. I was there always. I completed the picture. I took my wife, took her friends, took the wives of my friends and a fair roster of other girls and women, from young to old and old to young, whenever the light was right or the music sounded.
Now there is only my little South European maid. She speaks an ugly language that will never be mine, she cannot understand a word of my lengthy erotic declarations. She does not smile, she has never known my sexual embrace, may never have known the sexual embrace of any man, this small solemn girl who appears to have been created only to draw water and build fires. But together we live in our otherwise abandoned villa which is one of a pair, long and single-storied, with broken red tiles and fireplaces like abandoned urinals, live together in our drafty and sometimes muddy villa where I knew my last mistress, sang my last song, last spread the legs of my wife. I have named my maid Rosella because the calves of her legs are raw, unshaven, and because she wears thick gray woolen socks. She cooks, she draws water, I spend my time attempting to inflame Rosella with words she does not understand, attempting to surround the ignorant virginity of Rosella’s spirit with at least the spoken tones of joy and desire. I have made myself rules: no touching, nothing overt. Only the spoken tones of joy and desire.
Why, after more than eighteen years, does the soft medieval fabric of my tapestry now hang in shreds — here the head of a rose, there the amputated hoof of some infant goat? Is it possible that in purging her field of Hugh’s sick innocence Love (impatient Love) purged me as well? Eliminated even her own faithful sex-singer from the joyous field? It is possible. The villa that is twin to mine and that lies just on the other side of the funeral cypresses is empty.
But I am patient, I am faithful, perhaps one day I will reach out and close my fingers on Rosella’s thigh, perhaps my last mistress may again become my mistress. It is possible. We shall wait and see.
YESTERDAY I PAID MY WEEKLY VISIT TO MY LAST MISTRESS. She has been given refuge in the sanctuary, that small white cluster of Moorish-looking buildings above the town. Each week I visit her. My ritual, my weekly ritual of hope and fidelity, and in the process I suppose I reveal vestiges of the former lover, the former man of good taste.
Yes, in these visits and in my personal habits which involve crude but elaborate baths, the selection of a shirt and faded tie for the day, the trimming of thick waves of hair around the ears, the care of fingernails as well as exercises for the body, and even an effort to pay some attention to shoes (to brush or knock the dried mud from them if not to polish them), yes, in visits and habits I tell myself and my indifferent and backward world that this abandoned man survives the period of his uselessness, that no catastrophe can destroy true elegance. Each night I wear my nearly ruined black dinner clothes, Even though I expect never again to travel, still I keep in the stone loft above my bed those old cowhide suitcases now covered with mold. Weekly visits, personal habits, a very nearly aesthetic memory— to me it is worth something to know that if circumstances ever gave me back my last mistress or my wife Fiona, I would be as attractive to both these women as I was in the days when, to both of them, I was the white bull brightly fired in Love’s kiln. To me fidelity is the most masculine trait of all.
Yesterday the small white cluster of Moorish-looking buildings above the town looked exactly as it had the week before, and as usual the little fat women in their white dresses, blue aprons and worn-down sandals were expecting me. Even while I was chaining the bicycle to the stunted tree (the bicycle is old, rusted, with large wheels and rotted tires and a pair of narrow handlebars without grips, a pathetic machine yet still functioning, so that if left unchained it would be stolen by the first man, woman or child who happened to see it leaning unguarded against the tree) and even while I was reaching for the thong that hangs from the clapper in the bell that is like a baby’s head cast in iron, even in the midst of these preliminaries, one of the little fat women was already staring at me over the low wall.
I smiled, nodded, threw away the small wet butt of my precious cigarette, and through a series of gestures (lifting of eyebrows, baring of teeth, a rolling motion of the hand) tried both to ask if I was to be admitted safely this morning and to make it clear that I knew perfectly well that I was.
Each week it is the same. My slow bike ride takes me from the villa where I live by choice with Rosella, through the poor coastal village with its ruined aqueduct and small houses of charred bone (that wet dark place always fetid with the faint bulbous aroma of sewer gas still rising from the deep pits dug by ancient barbarians), then out of the darkness and up the crusted slope of the hill and on to these white Moorish buildings and clean fat women and stubby men lolling in their constricting uniforms. The same each week, from dead snails and sediment and the stately gloom of the funeral cypresses to the sudden light, peace, charm of this walled sanctuary. The yellow fountain, the orange sand of the courtyard, the white walls and deep-set windows, the tobacco-colored trees with their enormous leaves in the shape of fat supplicating hands, the low balconies, and above everything the pale blue tile roofs that suggest a bright powdery fusion of sky, sea, child’s eye, a soft lively blue unlike any other blue I have ever seen. Each week I find all this waiting at the end of the bike ride, and enjoy it, delight in it, my sophistication only enriching if anything the aching candor of the blue tiles. The sanctuary is simple and mysterious too, is antithetical to the brambles and broken tiles of the primitive landscape above which it is set. Surely the sanctuary was conceived and built by someone who could never vocalize the harsh unimaginative language of this terrain.
Aching candor. Though I am a dispassionate man, the phrase is equally appropriate to me and to the blue tiles roofing the sanctuary. Aching candor describes exactly what I felt yesterday, and feel each week, when we crossed the remaining portion of the orange courtyard, passed into the shade of the trees, at last turned to the right and approached the nearest balcony where my last mistress sat wrapped in a large thick woolen blanket. I smiled, stood close beside her low balcony wall, stared at her apparently sleeping face until my own head, eyes, mouth, chest, felt saturated with aching candor. Once my mistress, now Hugh’s widow, perhaps some kind of essential invalid, though I think not, there sat Catherine merely feigning sleep, I knew, and in her silence still basking, blazing, bristling, collapsing in the invisible aftermath of our long adventure.
I spoke to her softly, as I do once each week: “Come on, Catherine, you know you still want me to woo you.” And then my voice filled with the honeyed sweetness of the golden lion or white porcelain bull: “Stop being a child, Catherine. Take the flowers.”
To her, I knew, my admonitions were like chocolate stars, chocolate half-moons, dark balls of honey. I knew she was listening, waiting, watching me behind those closed eyelids, in her mind was clutching at the gentle sounds of my voice and once again was slipping, rolling over the edge and falling among the shadows of her past life and mine.
The matrons were gone, my usual half-hour of peace with Catherine was mine once more, though nearby one of the small swarthy men in uniform was sitting on a low urn containing the ashes of a Roman lover. On the air I smelled a mixture of citrus leaves and the transparent secretions of pale and disintegrating roses. I had only to begin swinging my leg over the balcony wall to arouse the sentry to angry shouts of croak peonie. But I had discovered on previous visits that I could talk to Catherine, smoke, laugh, even sit on the wall, as long as I, the godlike foreigner suspected of being connected with her trouble and who in small dark smoldering eyes was too tall, too strong, too blond, too handsome, much too elegant and good natured, made no effort to cross the wall perhaps to do the large sick woman some further harm. But I could sit on the wall and did so, lit one of my precious puffy cigarettes that smelled of nitrates, burning paper, animal stains, sex. In my mouth and nose I bottled up that smoke, that tumultuous pungent smoke of the cigarette of my tragedy and good humor. And thanks to burning lips, burning eyes, thick golden cough, yesterday I was best able to study Catherine feigning sleep in the same hot woolly blanket that Fiona used to spread across our bed on cold nights in the villa.
I started to blow smoke rings. Tiny and egg-shaped, large and ragged, out they came from the casual oval of my pursed lips and then smashing one into the other, piling rapidly one on top of the next, soon they turned into silver cornucopias, silver wreaths, large ghostly horns of invisible rams. For I was an artist at blowing smoke rings, from an early age had delighted the little girls I knew with my swans, my elephants, my beach balls all blown in smoke. And between puffs: “Why don’t you open your eyes, Catherine? I know you want to watch your old smoke ring artist hard at work.”
But of course she was already watching me, I knew, behind those closed eyelids of hers, was watching every move I made and every thick gray acrid creation that sprang or floated from my large and sympathetic lips. And all this time, as I drew one foot up and rested it on the wall and crooked my right arm around the upraised knee on top of that low wall in the warm sun, all this while I was studying Catherine as she feigned sleep, through the luxury of my loosely packed and hotly burning cigarette was nodding and squinting attractively, scrutinizing each feature for the mere pleasure of the sight, but also hoping with my eyes alone to appeal to her as I had once appealed to her with all my unlimited gentleness, on those dark licorice-smelling nights in their villa or ours.
Sinuous smoke, sun on the back of my hand, smile reaching out for the pain that lay behind the skin of her face, the sound of my voice already gone, frames of golden eyeglasses warm on the bridge of my nose and behind the ears, and smiling in silence, leaning forward, waiting, receiving no answer. Then my shoe scraped, my eyes became heavier and larger with concentration and good humor, became even darker brown in color: “Listen, Catherine. There’s comforting silence, there’s childish silence. Yours is childish. I don’t even need to say it, do I?”
I saw what I had seen for weeks, the shape and substance of the woman both familiar and unfamiliar, both young and old, and I kept staring at her with admiration, remoteness, aching candor. Only her head was visible, the large head always seen in comparison with the head remembered on the pillow, gripped between my hands, rippling in Fiona’s little mirror, clouding over suddenly with her uncertain laugh. The body itself was hidden. Yet no blanket was thick enough, rough enough, dense enough, or so wildly colored or so grotesquely patterned or so filled with other associations (the sensations of Fiona, say, on a cold night) as to prevent that large female torso and the arms, legs, hips from taking solid and in a way maximum shape under my first glance.
I knew what lay beneath the blanket. I knew quite perfectly the hips and calves and thighs somewhat fallen and still minutely falling, spreading from classical lines, knew well indeed the navel oddly sculpted, as if her belly had been sealed with a final flare of some hot iron. I had seen and always would see beneath old blankets or behind black funeral cypresses the heavy knees and feet and hands, the placid buttocks, all the immensity of the plain flesh that still suggested classical lines. The large but ordinary body, then, of someone who had borne children and overcome self-consciousness, body of someone who had never been aware of the statuesque design the ancient artist had in mind for it, a body so plain and big, so close and yet so far from the target of beauty that to me it was the richest beauty of all. I knew Catherine’s body, saw it, loved it for its totally unconscious grandeur.
She moved, something trembled (or so I thought) beneath the ugly folds of Fiona’s blanket. And once again, smiling, reaching out to her with silent smoke, all this awareness came back to me as it does each week. My finger tips were burning but my mind was filled only with this vision of the body of my Catherine lying before me in pretended sleep.
It was a knee that moved. And had it not been for the squat man seated upright on the urn, I would have thrust out my hand, placed it firmly on the sloping forehead of Catherine’s knee and given her great uplifted knee a tender shake. It would have pleased me to touch the blanket just as it had pleased me when, in the stillness of absolute sexual purpose, I first swung her big plain body into the arc of my life.
Another amusing creation out of poisonous smoke, another silent sequence of meditation, and then I lifted my chin, stretched heavily, and nipped the undulating smoke ring with the very lips that had blown it. And softly laughing, in my own ears hearing the appealing sounds I knew she wanted to hear from deep in my diaphragm, hearing my own sympathetic laughter even while it was yet riding the tide of smoke in the dark resonant hollows of my nose and throat: “You can’t forget me, Catherine. Why try?”
All this awareness, all this richness of feeling came back to me. As it does each week. And now the emotion that was clouding Catherine’s face was pain (I could see it like schools of microscopic black fish drifting just beneath the skin), and now my precious cigarette was nothing more than the taste of black ashes and a small livid blister on my lower lip, while the last of the smoke was already dissolving in the sunlit peppery-looking leaves of the nearest tree. The blue tiles appeared to be white with frost.
And smiling, touching my burned lip with my tongue, slowing still further the cadences of my rich appeal: “I might have prevented our — what shall I call it? Idyl? Yes, I might have prevented our idyl. Maybe I could have stuck my hands in my pockets instead of using them to remove my golden eyeglasses. I didn’t have to climb into my dressing gown and silk pajamas and cross from our villa to yours and turn down the pink percale sheets on your bed. After all, I could have walked down to our pebbly beach and thrown pebbles into the phosphorous wash for a couple of hours. But a steady, methodical, undesigning lover like me really has no choice, Catherine. The eyeglasses come off in my hands, the skirts of the dressing gown fall open, I fold the wings of the glasses. No choice. And don’t forget you were waiting for me. You wanted my slow walk, my strong dark shadow, my full pack of cigarettes, the sound of my soft humming as I approached your villa. We both knew you were waiting, Catherine. Neither one of us had any choice that first night. It was inevitable.”
I shifted my position so that I was sitting sidesaddle, so to speak, on the low wall. I licked the small painful spot on my burned lip. And now a different bell was ringing. I listened to it, recognizing it, between its strokes I heard the silence that fell between Catherine and me like a festering marsh whenever I stopped talking.
Pain is saddest, I thought, on plain features. The dark swiftly floating schools of grief and bitterness were far more visible on Catherine’s round face, for instance, than they would have been on the proud and youthful face of my Fiona. Fiona had the face of a faun, an experienced faun, and its elegance would have obscured or leavened or enriched her pain. Catherine’s broad cheeks and heavy lids merely gave pain room to play — alone, unadorned. Pain, beneath Fiona’s eyes or in the corners of her mouth, would simply have become a kind of spice to her beauty. But when the shades of pain were drifting across Catherine’s face, as they were drifting now, there was nothing else to see, to marvel at, to desire. Catherine’s pain was her beauty.
The bell I listened for each week was ringing. From far below the sanctuary, from the top of the squat and crumbling tower in the center of the smashed shards of the little coastal town, it called to us faintly, tonelessly, not in firm even strokes as if the ringer meant to announce the hour or send forth a summons, but with an irregularity that to me sounded like the soft dispirited voices of all those who were dead. I listened and heard the ringing of Catherine’s soul, the toneless calling of Hugh’s voice. It continued to ring, to vibrate down there through empty windows and black olive branches, the faintly metallic sound so distant and pointless in this bright sun that it made me smile deeply, seriously, in the midst of these meditations with my big-limbed and heavy-hearted Catherine. Then softly: “Remember how Hugh’s coffin made that poor wreck of a hearse sag in the rear? I guess I like endings. I like flat bells, don’t you?”
And at that moment I stood up, as I do each week, and stretched, glanced away from Catherine where she lay at my feet, glanced swiftly at the blue tiles, the dark clumps of peppery leaves, the blue of the sky, and then breathed in an enormous amount of that sweet air and abruptly leaned down with my two hands spread on the wall and my two eyes once again cradling Catherine in their brown benevolence. The vest was tight around my heavy ribs, the black jacket was hot and heavy on my shoulders. Would she ever open her eyes and look at me, say my name, ever again hang around my neck in graceless confusion?
“Arise, arise, Catherine,”I whispered then, leaning on the wall and staring at her through golden eyeglasses, “climb to your feet, and let’s comfort each other.”
But she could not arise, or look at me, or say my name. It was in her power to help me speak for the past, to help me see the future. Her voice might have reinforced my voice, her eyes might have met mine. And yet I knew it was not to be. She still preferred to remain only the inert supine center of my life, the sun that neither sets nor rises. The bell had stopped ringing. I sighed, again I pushed off from the wall and smiled down at her in a way that said I had endless strength and patience to give her in small doses once each week. She could not have mistaken the sound of my breath or the meaning of that distant smile. I dug the toe of my left shoe into the orange sand, shoved both hands into my torn pockets. Nearby a finch was covering itself with pale dust.
No doubt she heard my breathing long after my heavy footsteps had died away. Perhaps she expected to see me or at least hoped to see me standing there when the little fat women approached her wearing their blue aprons and carrying their terra-cotta bowls and stiff brushes. Perhaps for a moment she did in fact see me, though I was already gone. Perhaps after today she would think more about me and less about Hugh, perhaps now would begin to prepare herself more agreeably for my next appearance. When next I saw her, wouldn’t she be digging happily among the flowers that grew in the little stone pots along the front of her balcony, or standing with her eyes open and her hands clasped together and a vague hopeful smile drawing the top lip from the bottom? I thought so. Soon I would move her back to the villa, soon she would be able to join me arm in arm beside Hugh’s grave.
And slowly riding back down the narrow path from Catherine’s sanctuary to the broken stones of the empty town, beyond which waited my silent villa and Rosella, squeezing the rusty hand brakes with my aching hands to keep the bike from tearing loose on the hill and pitching over the nearest shaggy precipice, squeezing the brakes and hearing the rusted spokes going around and the soft tires humming like inflated snakes, amused at the thought of the perfect beauty of my large formally attired self mounted on the rust-colored bike, and then thinking of Catherine, already planning my next visit to her balcony while my lip burned and while a mildly rancid breeze played about my face — suddenly in the midst of all this I went around a turn in the path and bumped through a cleft in the mossy rock and applied the brakes, put down both feet, held my breath, forgot all about Catherine and myself.
There on a low wall of small black stones that resembled the dark fossilized hearts of long-dead bulls with white hides and golden horns, there on the wall and silhouetted against the blue sky and black sea were two enormous game birds locked in love. They were a mass of dark blue feathers and silver claws, in the breeze they swayed together like some flying shield worthy of inclusion in the erotic dreams of the most discriminating of all sex-aestheticians. Together we were two incongruous pairs frozen in one feeling, I astride the old bike and hardly breathing, the larger bird atop the smaller bird and already beginning to grow regal, and all the details of that perfect frieze came home to me. Exposed on the bare rock, lightly blown by the breeze, the smaller bird lay with her head to one side and eyes turning white, as if nesting, while above her the big bird clung with gently pillowed claws to the slight shoulders and kept himself aloft, in motion, kept himself from becoming a dead weight on the smooth back of the smaller bird by flying, by spreading his wings and beating them slowly and turning his entire shape into a great slowly hovering blue shield beneath which his sudden act of love was undeniable. Grace and chaos, control and helplessness, mastery and collapsc — it was all there, as if the wind was having its way with the rocks. There before my eyes was the infusion itself, and the birds remained true to nature and undisturbed by the infinite rusty sounds of my old bike until it was all done and the larger bird loosed his claws, made a bell-like sound, then rose slowly and vertically on the hot breeze. Some time later his small partner toppled off the wall and half fell, half flew down toward the burnt clay roofs of the village, while I rode off slowly on my now humbled bike.
Obviously the two birds mating on the horizon were for me a sign, an emblem, a mysterious medallion, a good omen. They augured well for the time I had spent with Catherine and for my own future in the electrified field of Love’s art. But as I pedaled once more between the funeral cypresses and approached the villa, I found myself wondering if in the brief twining of that dark blue feathery pair I had actually witnessed Catherine’s dead husband and my own wife clasping each to each the sweet mutual dream which only months before had been denied them by the brief gust of catastrophe that had swept among us. Yes, Hugh and Fiona in the shape of birds and finding each other, so to speak, in final stationary flight. Could it have been? I smiled to realize that the pleasure and truth of the vision were worth pondering.
YOUTH HAS NO MONOPOLY ON LOVE, THE SAP DOES NOT flow solely in the young. In all my adventures and in all my diligent but unemotional study of sex literature I found nothing to justify the happy expressions of total self-confidence we generally read in the superficially attractive faces of so many younger men and still younger girls. Jaunty, spritely people with trim bodies and unclouded eyes are not necessarily the most capable of those thrust into the center of the pink tapestry. After all, at the height of our season Fiona and Hugh were almost forty, Catherine had passed that mark by several years, while I was already two or three long leaps beyond middle age. Furthermore, we were a quartet of tall and large-boned lovers aged in the wood. Too big for mere caprice, too old to waste time and yet old enough to appreciate immodesty, we were all four of us imposing in height, in weight, in blood pressure, in chest expansion. All except Hugh perhaps, who always said that his long thin legs were the legs of the Christ and whose spare fishy chest was actually day by day collapsing, though like me Hugh was nonetheless capable of carrying either Fiona or Catherine across one naked shoulder without stumbling or shortness of breath. Body to body, arms about each other’s waists, our undergarments and bathing apparel dangling together on a line strung hastily between the two villas, or each standing separately and exhibiting his characteristic gesture — Catherine with her hands at her sides, Hugh clutching his impertinent camera, Fiona unconsciously holding her breasts in hands as bold and sensitive as Leonardo’s, I bare-chested and cigarette in mouth and staring with bland eyes at a full wineglass lifted high in my weathered fingers — at the height of our brief season and in the four fully matured figures of our quartet, anyone with an eye for sex would have recognized an experience, purpose and continuity only hinted at in the poignant stances of young girls with thumbs hooked in bikinis and brown legs stiffly apart. There were four of us then, not merely two, and in our quaternion the vintage sap flowed freely, flowed and bled and boiled as it may never again.
Can youth make such claims?
ONCE AGAIN WE SEPARATED IN THE DARK EMPTY NAVE OF the squat church, Fiona and I, once again went our separate ways, each to the altar of his choice. The windows were cut through those deep walls as if for the arrows, lances, pikes and small cannon of sturdy peasants who might still attempt to defend this church from the barbarians, and without glass, never intended for glass, exposed us, hidden though we were, to the smells and harsh light of the rocky village around us. The windows, mere rude rectangular holes left high in the moist walls, were themselves barbaric, and made me smile. Yet I smiled not only because the windows were unsymmetrical and gave a feeling of ancient violence to altars, cross, shaky wooden seats for solemn populace, as if the dungeonlike church had been abandoned before they had even morticed the last volcanic stone in place, but smiled also at the symmetry of taste and feeling that pulled Fiona and me apart and drew us to altars so nearly opposite in color, mood, design. Hands in pockets, I could hear Fiona breathing quietly and could hear the sharp sounds of her footsteps as she bent all the energy of her tall and beautiful and impatient self toward finding still better angles from which to view the altar.
“Cyril, baby, why don’t you put out the cigarette? For God’s sake.”
And I smiled to hear Fiona’s voice clipped and imploring, harsh and sweet, a mere whisper filled with the richest possible sounds of assurance in the ear-ringing silence of the stone vault. It was like Fiona to talk without turning her head, to respect the sanctity of old stones in a whisper that ruffled the little moth-eaten dress of the infant in Mary’s arms, to comment on my cigarette in her distracted way while squatting all at once to examine a pair of short yellow bones crossed at the base of her favorite altar. Everywhere Fiona was in lovely character, yet nowhere was she more herself than here in the stone crypt where we joked about some day being buried together alive. Her graceful agitation, her girlish fixation on the altar of the dead, the absolute self-possession of a woman so large and yet so faunlike and hard — I could only smile to hear the soft silver of her voice and to see my athletic angel merging her fluted flesh with those cold shadows.
“What’s the matter with my cigarette?” I whispered across the nave in a deep and gentle echo as rich in reverence as Fiona’s. “The little boys have been relieving themselves back there in the darkness. Smell it?”
“Cyril, you’ re making me nervous. OK?”
Then my own slow, bemused, vigorous whisper: “If the little boys can make water, I can smoke.”
How like the two of us to spend each day these long minutes together and yet apart in this little medieval church of cold passion, how like us to choose these different altars. Hands in pockets, brief cigarette still in my mouth, I lounged against my own small altar which was of white marble and was devoted to gold, to fresh flowers, to the wooden Virgin recently lacquered in bright blue paint and stiffly cradling the crude doll dressed in his rotting gown of real lace. The two crowns, the sightless eyes, the feeling of water sprinkled over the whole thing and the sunlight that warmed altar and shoulders alike — here I could lounge suspended in a childish array of cheerful artifacts quite appropriate to my luminous good nature, here laugh aloud and take my time watching Fiona trying to penetrate the secrets of that other altar so absurdly opposite from mine.
“My God, I’ve found the skeleton of a child. Head, ribs, hands, feet — the whole works. How could they do it?”
A moment before she had been sitting on her heels, with the open coat of yellow suede drawn tight across her widened buttocks, but now, never at rest, she was standing on tiptoe directly in front of that black and white altar, while with my usual pleasure I noted her straight legs, her narrow calves stretching with a kind of girlish muscular determination, her hands spread wide and resting firmly on the black marble. Even stock still she was trembling, I thought, even motionless appeared already to be wheeling and running on naked white feet toward her next confrontation with bright light, old stones, new lovers.
“He’s beautiful, poor thing. I’m going to kiss him, Cyril. Shall I?”
Yellow was Fiona’s color, as in the case of the almost tissue-thin suede coat which, in her stretching efforts to reach the skull of the child, was now lifted high above the tight skin behind her knees. And for more than eighteen years she had been most obviously true to character and to her color yellow in the act of kissing, and had spent those years kissing each letter she wrote, each book she enjoyed, kissing flowers, shadows, dead birds, dogs, old ladies, attractive men, as if only by touching the world with her open lips could she make it real and bring herself to life. So even while I was grunting my approval and pleasure, which was the only way to reply to any of Fiona’s questions about kissing, she had already found the small white skull with her eager mouth, and I could only smile still more broadly at the sight of Fiona lavishing one of her brief floods of compassion on the tiny cold features of a grinning relic. It was like Fiona to leave her jasmine scent perfuming the mere skeleton of some unknown infant embedded along with thick-lettered unreadable injunctions against frivolity and sex in their unfrequented altar. To her, no expenditure of her own affection was ever wasted.
But I smelled wax, dust, flaking wood, rusting iron, all the effluvium of devotion and religious craftsmanship. Taking my left hand from my pocket and between thumb and first finger rubbing half-consciously the hem of the tattered dress on the Virgin’s doll, at that moment I found myself looking not at Fiona, who had forgotten me in her brief moment of frenzy in front of the dark altar, but up at a small pulpit lacquered with circus colors of blue and gold and somehow fastened high on the stone wall opposite me. The sun, as on my altar, warmed the pulpit and struck with fire a life-sized wooden arm that protruded over the edge of the pulpit and was extended, as in some kind of benediction, in the wet air. Except for the arm, with its crack near the elbow and its flowing wooden sleeve and pasty yellow hand, and except for the two altars and little peculiar pulpit, I might have been standing in some gutted cellar of the ancient world, some pit giving onto secret viaducts packed with the old world’s excrement.
“Look, Fiona, a wooden arm!”
Barefooted, wearing only her bra and brief for the beach, as well as the yellow coat, of course, which was her concession to the disapproving village and intended to spare us both from muttered threats of croak peonie, and alert, unappeasable, quick-breathing, austere and supple, the only woman I have ever known who, as sex-aesthetician, was nearly my equivalent, woman whose aging body was nonetheless a young green tree — how like my wife, Fiona, to thrust her proud chin and hungry mouth into the crumpled face of the sightless dead and then to fly on, magnificent and quite oblivious to my own discoveries, my own passing sensual interest in a wooden arm. Perhaps the aesthetic pleasures of the wooden arm were subtle, even for Fiona. Because now she spoke again in her whisper that was firm and clear, submissive and peremptory, and already her mind and eyes were elsewhere, had not comprehended the comic miracle of the arm in space, the wooden hand that no one would ever hold.
“Cyril, I want to light a candle. OK?”
She had turned, was facing me, the coat hung open, her stomach appeared to be unusually small and round above the wide hips and wonderfully frank pelvic area bound up in the tight spongy whiteness of her brief for the beach. So I drew the smoke back in through my heavy nose and took my time, once again admired myself for thinking to bring this woman into the humorless solemnity of empty nave and squat buttressed church, once again tried to follow the new course of her flight.
“Sure. But who on earth would we light it for?”
“Oh, Cyril, does it matter? I just want to light a candle, baby.”
And Fiona would have had her way, would have sailed in long quick strides to the other end of the nave, would have selected the perfect thin white candle and kissed it, impetuously kissed it, and then would have watched while I slowly took the candle from her firm hand and impaled this, Fiona’s candle, on one of the little upright spikes set in rows for that purpose, would have had me strike the match and light the wick for the benefit, perhaps, of the infant whose ancient and miniature skeleton she had already made her own — would have caused all this to happen, would have had us standing side by side and inhaling the long black strings of smoke and appreciating together the honeyed scent of the wax, had not the candle-lighting idea been destroyed the very instant Fiona was beginning to move by a sudden ominous clamor in the cobbled alley just outside the church. We heard men running and grunting, heard the sound-of boots on the stones. Simultaneously the nave was filled with the sharp clanging of the bell in the squat tower above our heads, and with the ugly blasts of the obsolete mechanical horn always blown by some village official in times of crisis.
“Is it a fire, Cyril?”
“Button your coat and we’ll find out,”I said, smiling at the disappearance of the flame that was never lit.
In the next instant we fled fragile bones and rotting lace and wooden arm, fled the rows of little upright spikes that were spattered with dusty clots of melted wax and on one of which a single crooked candle was, as a matter of fact, already burning, hand in hand ran from the cold nave, appeared together briefly against the sagging and worm-eaten wooden church door that we pushed shut behind us, and then took up the chase after two squat men in rubber boots and crude black leather helmets. Fiona’s coat was closed, the black horn was blowing. From a short distance ahead came gruff intermittent shouts, commands of croak peonie and, oddly enough, the sound of laughter.
“What the hell,” I said, pacing my breath, holding Fiona’s hand and restraining somewhat her flight, “they’re laughing.”
“Come on, baby. Please. I want to see.”
One more booted and helmeted figure, short and fat and carrying some kind of boat hook, thundered up from behind and passed us, despite his clumsiness, and sped on after the other two and disappeared. Broken tiles, the familiar stone cups filled with poison and set out on empty window ledges and in empty doorways, the closeness of the narrow walls that magnified every sound so that we could hear distinctly the choppy breathing of the three stunted men who were, I knew, members of the much-feared and openly hostile fire brigade — through this brief stretch of dismal labyrinth we ran, the elegant woman who dared show to all the village her hard naked feet and the spectacular man who, in actual sight of the church, had been seen to blow from his mouth disrespectful shapes in blue smoke.
But then we emerged from the hollow darkness of a low arch into full view of the black canal whose simple low cobbled embankment was wide enough to accommodate roving dogs, sullen families on foot and, one at a time, those rare engine-powered vehicles that appeared, now and again, from beyond the mountains. Here the crowd was gathered, we saw, not for fire or bicycle accident or fist fight between children with slack jaws and bloodshot eyes, but instead was pressing toward the edge of the canal in anger or with laughter because a large khaki-colored motorbus had somehow found its way off the sloping embankment and now sat, floated, right side up on the still water black with pollution.
“My God, Cyril, they’re going to drown!”
Her hand was long and white and cold in mine, gently I maneuvered myself so that Fiona could see — it was always essential that Fiona see the crudest accident, the smallest catastrophe, the gravest incident — but would not be able to pitch us without warning into the midst of the little factioned crowd or into the way of the rescuers. She pulled, I held her firmly, she leaned as far as she could toward the bus that was imperceptibly rocking now about ten feet from the embankment where the nearest brute-shaped member of the fire brigade stood shouting out his furious commands.
“It’s going to sink, Cyril. Isn’t it?”
I frowned, waited, and with pressure on her hand and a movement of my shoulders and a soft thoughtful sound in my nose and throat tried to convey that it was a question no one could answer.
“But people commit suicide that way, baby. It has to sink.”
In the air a handful of slim white pigeons circled the scene, on the embankment half the crowd bent themselves into lewd positions and laughed at the occupants in the bus and at the bus itself, while the other half scowled darkly and pointed to ropes and boat hooks and flimsy ladders. Across the canal a woman in a shuttered window was calling for someone to come and look. And there on the water before us the old high-bodied motorbus still floated. Derelict, obviously painted and repaired endlessly by lazy unskilled workers, khaki-colored and smeared here and there with swatches of lurid purple and smoky black, heavily dented from its long life of collisions (with stone fountains, cornices, rocks in the road, unlucky animals) still it floated in a kind of majestic dementia, though steam was hissing up from its hood and an oil stain was rising from all its submerged gearboxes, tanks, iron pockets packed with grease. I could see air bubbles where the tin body met the water, a drifting orange bobbed against the side of the still floating old machine.
Here, I thought, were several different modes of incongruity. In a matter of minutes we might be left staring at nothing more than the little orange drifting on the dark and apparently currentless flow of sewage. The pigeons, of course, were small and sweet and serene, while the helpless crowd and remnant of the fire brigade were clumsy, violent. But what of Fiona and me? In all their shock and fear, did those in the bus give a passing thought to Fiona and me? For one terrible instant did it occur to them, driver and passengers, that the tall man and woman on the edge of the crowd might be precisely strong enough and elegant enough to save them, since even the bulky members of the fire brigade were hopelessly entangled in the slick coils of their age-old brutal ignorance and despite all their activity could in fact do nothing? But what of the woman screaming behind the slatted shutter? And how did the motorbus arrive in its present state of danger and momentary suspension on waters more fetid than any waters I had ever smelled? A failure of brakes? Some physical or psychological failure in the stricken driver?
A single gasp went up then from the serious faction of the crowd, Fiona squeezed my hand and held her breath as if all her fear and courage and sweeping empathy were now mounted forever in still marble, across the canal the screaming woman burst open her shutter, glared out, and as quickly smashed it shut again, the brute-backed leader of the fire brigade fell to his knees, stuck out his arm, waited — because with a sucking sound the front of the old bus started down, dipped with sudden unalterable purpose toward the stinking depths of the timeless pestilential canal. Dipped, started down, but was then somehow relinquished by the deep intestinal tug of the canal and slowly, slowly, rose again to its original horizontal position with nothing to mark the near disappearance of motorbus and occupants except a thin ripple spreading out from the front bumper, some agitation in the orange, and a sigh from those of us who did not suffer from the abnormal attitudes born of the bad blood carried to this warm coast centuries before from central Europe.
“Do something, Cyril,” she whispered then. “Please, baby.”
All those on the embankment were quiet. Several of the leather-garbed stumping firemen began, like lunging turtles, to tie together two slender ladders with strips of wire. Fiona put her lips to my cheek.
The occupants of the bus were unaware of Fiona’s efforts on their behalf, were apparently unaware of the will power she was now exerting. Yet might not the power of Fiona’s psyche have been as much responsible as anything else for the continued presence of the motorbus on the viscous surface of the historically significant canal? And, as far as I could see, they were unaware of the disaster which, a moment before, had all but concluded. Pigeons, ladders, Fiona’s white face and yellow coat, an old man with a stack of twigs on his back and determined to tell someone that they should tie a rope to the head of a pike — none of it meant anything to the pathetically small group of occupants inside the bus. The driver gripped his wheel, the man and woman were holding the edges of the seats in front of them, only the heads of the three female children and the black dog were visible, but those few faces were cold, expressionless, unusually small, and were, all seven of them, including the dog’s, forced rigidly to the front. As I bent down to get a better look through the windows it occurred to me that driver and passengers did not in fact comprehend that they were afloat precariously in an ancient canal, but rather were expecting some more conventional catastrophe and were still looking ahead toward the as yet invisible landscape of the impending crash. It occurred to me also that beneath the water those six people and the small black animal would be lost, so to speak, in so large and so nearly empty a motorbus.
And then it sank. Again the crowd gasped, the old man threw down his twigs, Fiona with one round movement of her shoulders tore free of my hand. But of course I was familiar with all the bright severity and wildness of Fiona’s spirit and now was ready for one of her stronger displays of grace and determination. So in my left arm I caught her slender waist exactly as the motorbus went down.
“Wait a minute,” I whispered, feeling the fight going out of the stomach muscles against my arm, “just wait a minute, Fiona. It’s all right.”
Then once again the laughing faction of the crowd was laughing, and even while she felt my soothing voice in her ear and the comforting tension of my forearm drawn tight across the central portion of her body, still Fiona must have understood the laughter and forced herself to see what was actually happening to the old bus before our eyes. Because now it sat more firmly than it had ever rested on dirt road or cobbled street, sat immobile with all four wheels solidly positioned on the hard bed of excrement which, down through the centuries, had accumulated like lava in the bottom of the black canal. But windows, roof, luggage strapped to the roof, spare tire, hood — all the upper half of the old high-bodied machine rose above the water, would no doubt remain emerging from that motionless water as long as the canal walls stood and there were sudden figures to shout croak peonie and tip the contents of stinking buckets into the holes and stone gutters that fed the very smell of time. The waters were not deep (how like these villagers and members of the fire brigade and the old men not to know the depth of their own canal), not deep, yet deep enough to rise well above the wheels, to flood the interior of the bus at least as high as the knees of the still unmoving occupants, with its black weight to anchor the motorbus where it sat forever. In all the village there was no hoist to lift it, no barge to drag it down to the mouth of the canal. But even if they could, would red-eyed peasants ever take the trouble to remove the enormous old motorbus from a canal that had once been choked with the bodies of dead barbarians? I knew they would not.
“Baby, look! That little girl is waving at me!”
Then Fiona snatched my face into her two hands, kissed me, wheeled about and waved back at the child, while even above the shouts and clatter of the fire brigade we heard, suddenly, the muffled terror-stricken yelps of the black dog that was now jumping from seat to seat up and down the long water-filled interior of the half-sunken bus. Momentarily out of sight, it reappeared with wet shredded ears and tail, with wet fur slick on its belly and on its short black sturdy legs, had obviously fallen, had been swimming and barking in the fetid water between the seats. And now the woman was attempting to wade to the help of the smaller children who were kneeling, apparently, on the wooden seats, the oldest girl was waving timidly at Fiona, the tall black-haired man was stooping and holding to his chest an armful of photographic equipment and grinning.
“Oh, Cyril, he’s handsome! And look at his wife!”
The sucking of the boots of the brute-backed leader of the fire brigade, the sound of shattering glass, the wheezing and laughter and shouts of the crowd, all of whom clearly suffered from some congenital rasping respiratory disease, the thin high cries of the sopping wet dog — suddenly through all this abrasive noise I heard, as if directly into my left ear, the strong but milky vocal qualities of Fiona’s voice which told me, in sense and tone, that she was once more making one of her aesthetic evaluations.
“My God, he’s handsome. Just look at him!”
She had twisted her head in one direction, her shoulders in another, at the same time twisted her hips in the same direction as her sharp-featured and happily agitated face, and out of all this sinuous exertion and equilibrium had come her voice, her judgment, another fresh gift of discovery which, as usual, she gave to me swiftly and without hesitation. So now I listened, lit one of my clumsy cigarettes, glanced around at all the illiterate faces and powerful but sagging shoulders, and then leaned down again for another and better look at the man in the half-sunken bus. Fiona was already waving again at the white-faced girl.
Stroked my chin, leaned down, frowned a little and got some intensity into my large brown eyes, until suddenly I caught him there knee-deep in the excremental waters, from all the chaos of dog and children and large unsmiling wife was able to isolate his grinning face and for a moment to hold him still, so to speak, for appraisal.
She was right. As usual Fiona had made another good aesthetic judgment. Because the tall black-haired man stooping in the bus window was dressed, I could see, in a powdery blue tweed jacket and black turtleneck shirt which was a combination that had always been one of Fiona’s favorites. More important, perhaps, he had a well-weathered face, a face not tanned and darkened in the wind and sun like mine, for instance, but so weathered and pebbled, so grained in darkness and cold rain that it resembled stone. Gray stone. I knew I had never before seen the thin lips, narrow bright boyish eyes, high sandblasted cheekbones, pointed ears, black hair curling across his forehead and curling in a few odd ringlets in what appeared to be a beard newly grown. Yet I recognized his face immediately because its exact replica, an image of Saint Peter that was perfect except for the broken ears, had been chiseled along with the head of Saint Paul into the granite arch of the entrance to the squat church where one candle, I knew, was still burning. Saint Peter in stone. No wonder Fiona called his striking features to my attention. Any woman would have found Saint Peter attractive. And in the case of my wife, how could Fiona help but appreciate a face whose exact replica we had seen and admired during every one of our rambling visits to the squat church? On every one of our visits the stone face, with its strength and malice, had invariably caused Fiona to hold her breasts while standing perfectly still and gazing up at it. Now of course she was busily waving at the frightened child.
But then the tall figure with the saintly goatish face was grinning, not to himself, not at Fiona, but directly at me, and in that instant I recognized that we were friends already and, seeing the empty powdery blue sleeve bent double and fastened with a large safety pin just below the shoulder, realized that for some reason Fiona had failed to comment on his obvious deformity, which to me was the most interesting thing about him, and realized that it was in my power to lead them both to the exact spot where his missing arm was hidden.
“He’s great, Fiona. But did you notice his arm?”
I would have liked to see her face at that moment, but she went on waving. And then it was too late. Because suddenly the hatless driver and stunted members of the fire brigade began to cooperate, made large gestures with hairy hands, splashed into the water, manipulated the ladders tied together with wire and thongs, found the escape hatch in the roof of the bus, pushed and pulled and cried croak peonie beneath the slow wheeling of the pigeons, cut loose the baggage on the roof and mingled together inside the bus and then again waist-deep in the canal, bumped and struggled together until at last the empty motorbus was abandoned altogether to the smell of time.
The eyes of the rescuers were concealed, of course, beneath the thick curving brims of leather helmets. And yet as by a begrudging and prearranged signal, and somehow understanding that the man and woman in the bus were as tall as the man and woman on the embankment, and that there was in fact some similarity between yellow suede coat, white pullover, blue jacket, and pea-green slacks (which was what the woman in the bus was wearing), each struggling member of the fire brigade deposited one by one his burden of dog, child, suitcase in my own waiting arms or at my feet. I was picked out of the crowd, so to speak, as the man with the authority to receive survivors.
“Oh, baby, you’re doing beautifully,” came Fiona’s cold milky voice ringing with pleasure, and holding the dog by the long wet fur and folds of skin at its throat, holding one of the little girls by an elbow bundled into the sleeve of a sweater the color of her father’s coat, noticing that the laces of all three children’s blunt brown shoes were untied and dangling, and that the older girl had hair the color of ginger, and waiting now for the woman and the man himself to climb dripping to our embankment and repossess their dog, their girls, their wet luggage — during all these first moments of their rescue and their arrival I was grateful for the laughter in Fiona’s voice, took a curious pleasure in the smell and feeling of the large quantity of canal water that my pullover and beige-colored trousers had already absorbed from the clothes of the children and the black hair of the dog.
I was squatting down on a knee and a foot, one of the smaller girls was climbing onto my back, the luggage was piling up around us. I saw the round-faced woman in Fiona’s immediate embrace, watched the woman’s one-armed husband pushing toward us unassisted and with leather cases dangling from straps held high in his single hand. But it was not for us to see the future, not for me to know that the large woman trembling in the arms of my wife was soon to be my own last mistress, while the man with the face of Saint Peter and who was now climbing the shaky ladder into our midst was soon to use his one good hand to explore the cool white skin of Fiona’s life.
When at last he stood among us, grinning and dripping, smelling of the canal and dangling the leather cases of all his cameras against the wet knees of what I saw were long-legged navy-blue bell-bottom trousers, and when Fiona dropped her arms, turned quickly with aimless hands and bright eyes that appeared not to see flying pigeons or squatting husband or distant embarrassed driver of the motorbus, and then laughed and took a step and suddenly kissed the gaunt stony cheek of this tall hero who had come to us over the same mountains once crossed by the barbarians, certainly I knew then that we were due for some kind of new adventure, Fiona and I. What else could it be?
AM I EMBRACING AIR? COULD THAT BE ALL? IS THAT WHAT it feels like to discover with absolute certainty that you yourself have simply disappeared from the filmy field? When Love withdraws her breath from your body, and as with the tip of a long green tail flicks the very spot where you stood or thought you stood in the upper right or lower left-hand corner of the endless tapestry, is that what it is like? Embracing air?
Fiona’s mouth kissed dozens of aching mouths, including mine, and my own large mouth kissed at least an equal number of smaller mouths, including Fiona’s, and though her lips were small, Fiona’s mouth could in the proper light and proper mood become quite as hard and voracious as my own and nearly as large, and time after time we kissed so that bone struck bone and teeth lay against teeth, each of us struggling, maneuvering, to eat the other’s mouth, to catch the other’s jaw between the rows of his own hard teeth. Time after time I ate the darkness that Fiona pumped from her throbbing throat into her open mouth, time after time Fiona took from my own lips and tongue and teeth a taste much stronger than cigarettes or wine. For my part no flavor discovered in a kiss ever aroused my oral greed as did the special flavor I always found in Fiona’s mouth, a special taste of mint tinged with that faint suggestion of decay which I drew each time from the very roots of her perfect teeth.
Is it then mere pompous lyricism to talk, to chew, to blow smoke rings, to breathe when I am no longer able to look at Fiona or talk with her or run my finger along the curve of her smallest rib or put my mouth to hers? Are memory and clairvoyance mere twin languorous drafts of rose-tinted air? Or to notice Rosella’s raw hips beneath her mangy skirt and then not even to seize them for a moment in friendly hands, or to allow Rosella to sleep alone at the far end of my villa without so much as one clandestine visit from a man who was once master of the clandestine visit, or to do no more than smile at a few of Hugh’s now-faded photographs of naked girls, or to explain to Rosella in a language she cannot understand exactly what pleasures await us when the veil of dormancy dissolves — are all these further instances of mere wind feathering endlessly through hands, fingers, empty arms? Should I be feeling some kind of loss, some hollow pain? Or am I dying? Already dead?
But it is hardly a fault to have lived my life, and still to live it, without knowing pain. And dormancy, memory, clairvoyance, what more could I want? My dormancy is my hive, my honeypot, my sleeping castle, the golden stall in which the white bull lies quite alive and dreaming. For me the still air is thicker than leaves, and if memory gives me back the grape-tasting game and bursting sun, clairvoyance returns to me in a different way my wife, my last mistress, the little golden sheep who over her shoulder turns small bulging eyes in my direction. But not Hugh. He is gone for good. And Hugh is the man who died for love, not me.
And yet every man is vulnerable, no man is safe. If my world has flowered, still flowers, nonetheless it stands to reason that even the best of men and the most quiet and agreeable of lovers may earn his share of disapproval. There are those who in fact would like nothing better than to fill my large funnel-shaped white thighs with the fish hooks of their disapproval. There are those who would deny me all my nights in Fiona’s bed if they could, would strip me of silken dressing gown and fling me into some greasy whitetiled pit of naked sex-offenders. For some, love itself is a crime.
I realize all this. I could hardly have lived so long among the roses without feeling the thorns, could hardly have enjoyed so much in privacy without seeing the scowls of the crowd. But it will take a dark mind to strip my vines, to destroy the last shreds of my tapestry, to choke off my song. It will take a lot to destroy Hugh’s photographs or to gut the many bedrooms of the sleeping castle. I am a match, I hope, for the hatred of conventional enemies wherever they are.
THE SUN WAS SETTING, SINKING TO ITS PREDESTINED DEATH, and to the four of us, or at least to me, that enormous smoldering sun lay on the horizon like a dissolving orange suffused with blood. The tide was low, the smooth black oval stones beneath us were warm to the flesh, we could hear the distant sounds of the three girls playing with the dog behind the funeral cypresses. Fiona, wearing a pale lemon-colored bra and pale lemon-colored briefs for the beach, and I in my magenta trunks as sparse and thick and elastic as an athletic supporter, and Hugh in his long-sleeved cotton shirt and loose gray trunks like undershorts, and Catherine dressed in her faded madras halter and swimming skirt and shorts — together we sat with legs outstretched, soles of our feet touching or nearly touching, a four-pointed human starfish resting together in the last livid light of the day.
No one moved. Without calculation, almost without consciousness, Fiona lay propped on her elbows and with her head back, her eyes closed, her tense lips gently smiling. Even Catherine appeared to be sunk in a kind of worried slumber, aware somehow of the thick orange light on her knees. Prone bodies, silence hanging on the children’s voices and scattered barking of their old black dog, the empty wine bottles turning to gold. All of us felt the inertia, suspension, tranquility, though I found myself tapping out a silent expectant rhythm with one of my big toes while Hugh’s narrow black eyes were alert, unresting, I noticed, and to me revealed only too clearly his private thoughts. But the small black oval stones we lay on were for us much better than sand. Our beach, as we called it, was a glassy volcanic bed that made us draw closer together to touch toes, to dream. With one hand I was carelessly crushing a few thin navy-blue sea shells, making a small pile of crushed shell on my naked navel. And yet it was the sun, the sun alone that filled all our thoughts and was turning the exposed skin of all four bodies the same deepening color. The lower the sun fell the more it glowed.
I felt someone’s foot recoil from mine and then return. Even the tiny black ringlets in Hugh’s beard were turning orange. I could hear the powdery shells collecting in the well of my belly and I realized that all four of us were together on a black volcanic beach in the hour when fiercely illumined goats stand still and huddle and the moon prepares to pour its milk on the fire.
“Cyril. We don’t have to go back yet, do we?”
I glanced at Fiona, heard the matter-of-fact whisper and saw that her expression had not changed, that her lips had not moved. But rolling onto one hip, propping myself on one elbow, brushing away crushed shells with a hasty stroke of one hand, I saw also that there was movement in the curve of her throat and that the sun had saturated one of her broad white shoulders. And before I could answer, Fiona giggled. My sensible, stately, impatient, clear-bodied wife giggled, as if in a dream a small bird had alighted on her belly. Giggled for no reason apparently, she whose every impulsive gesture was informed with its own hidden sense, and at the sound Hugh became suddenly rigid, Catherine opened her eyes. I knew what to do.
In silence, while the sun flushed us most deeply and unrecognizably with orange light, I got to my knees beside Fiona, who did not move, and with a flick of my hand untied the silken strings of her pale lemon-colored halter, those thin silken cords knotted in a bow behind her bent neck and curving back, and then with a few more skillful movements removed altogether Fiona’s little lemon-colored bra. Then I folded this the briefest of all Fiona’s half-dozen bathing bras, stuck it for safekeeping inside one of my empty shoes, and flowed back slowly into my former position on the hot rocks.
Understandably perhaps, for the first few moments Catherine and even Hugh could not bear to look. I myself hardly dared to look. But then I heard a sound like a finger scratching inside Hugh’s throat and our three heads turned furtively, shyly, violently or calmly in my wife’s direction. And Fiona’s eyes, I saw, were open. We said nothing, Fiona was looking straight at the sun and smiling. But had she wanted me to expose her breasts, I wondered, for Hugh’s sake or mine? Or was the exposure purely my own idea and something that entered her consciousness and gave her pleasure only after I had touched her, untied the strings? I could not know. But I knew immediately that it was a good idea.
Fiona’s breasts were not large. Yet in the sun’s lurid effulgence they glistened, grew tight while the two nipples turned to liquid rings, bands, so that to me Fiona’s two firm breasts suddenly became the bursting irises of a young white owl’s wide-open eyes, and when in the next moment she giggled again, again apparently without reason, those bright naked eyes, breasts, recorded the little spasms of pleasure that, otherwise unseen, were traveling down Fiona’s chest and neck and arms.
“Baby, can’t we just stay like this forever?”
We heard the words, we watched the very motion of Fiona’s speech in her lips and breasts. In mouth and breasts my wife was singing, and despite the possibility of another unexpected giggle, which no doubt would be accompanied by another small eruption of rolling or bouncing in the lovely breasts as well as a slight twisting in the slope of the shoulders, despite all this or perhaps because of it the preciousness of what Fiona said maintained the silence, prevented the rest of us from talking. I could see the thin white edge of Fiona’s teeth between the slightly parted lips, the voice was soft and clear, the naked orange breasts were unimaginably free, her eyes were partially open. Even in the silence she was singing, and the rest of us were listening, watching.
Then suddenly Hugh began to scratch viciously at himself beneath the loose gray shorts, and Catherine moved. With a brief flashing sensation of regret, it occurred to me that she was about to climb heavily, angrily to her feet and leave. She too could hear that in the distance the children were beginning to quarrel, beginning to tease the dog. But I was wrong, and she merely drew herself slowly out of her supine state, raised her back and lifted up her long heavy legs and sat upright with her thighs pressed together on the black rocks and her knees bent and her strong calves crossed at the ankles.
And then Hugh spoke. Stopped scratching himself and spoke, while Catherine’s unreadable eyes met mine and I smiled, allowed my large right orange hand to lie comfortably where my upper thighs, which were about twice the girth of even Catherine’s thighs, joined in special harmony the inverted apex of my own magenta briefs for the beach.
“That’s it. All these years you’ve been castrating him!”
On this occasion it was hardly what I thought he would say. Was this the extent of the private thoughts I had been watching all this time in his black eyes? But then I laughed, because Hugh had been staring all this time at the bare breasts of my wife and because he was thin and because despite the ringlets of his beard and curls of black hair across his forehead was nonetheless wearing the long gray shapeless bathing trunks and the white cotton collarless shirt with the right sleeve pinned up with one of Catherine’s large steel safety pins. Perhaps he did not enjoy the sight of Fiona as much as I did, or would not admit that he did. Nonetheless, that he could lie in my shadow and stare at my wife as he was in fact staring at her, and then pronounce what he had just pronounced, aroused in me new admiration for so much craft, for so much comic design.
“Cyril is virile, baby. He really is.”
The absolute certainty of the soft voice which in timbre matched the curve of Fiona’s throat, the pleasing brevity of the assertion, the mild sex-message of the accompanying giggle, which was more than the giggle of a mere girl, the fact that Fiona still had not moved but lay back on her elbows with one slender leg raised at the knee and her breasts falling imperceptibly to either side — at that moment I could not have loved Fiona more or felt more affection for my courageous, self-betraying Saint Peter, as I had come to call Hugh mentally whenever our quaternion reached special intensity or special joy.
Suspension, suffusion, peace for the four of us on that black beach. But it was all beginning to pass, I knew, and still I waited, now hearing the older girl shouting at the smaller girls behind the funeral cypresses. Shifting a little, growing mildly impatient myself, I waited, wondering if this momentary idyl would pass before the rose and golden metallic threads could begin to spin our separate anatomies forever into the sunset scene, would come to a sudden conclusion, incomplete, unbalanced. What was the matter with Hugh? Why was he not holding up his end?
I could understand Hugh’s affected lack of gratitude, could enjoy his efforts to conceal his feelings on seeing Fiona without her bra. And of course Hugh could not possibly know that I was well aware of the fact that he had already seen Fiona’s naked breasts, had already held her breasts in his good hand, so that in taking off her halter I knew full well that I was violating no confidence and was merely extending naturally the pleasures of a treat already quite familiar to the two of us. And I realized also that Hugh did not know that already I was as familiar with Catherine’s naked breasts as he was with Fiona’s, so that the baring of Catherine’s breasts would be no surprise for me. Was he then thoughtless? Selfish? Without even the crudest idea of simple reciprocity? Certainly he must have known that it was up to him, not me, to unfasten Catherine’s overly modest halter and take it off. What was holding him back? Could he not see that Catherine herself was puzzled, uncomfortable? Could he deliberately mean to embarrass his wife and to tamper with the obviously intended symmetry of our little scene on the beach? Hugh was unmusical, but I had hoped I could count on him for at least a few signs of romantic temperament. After all, how could any man love my wife and yet fail to appreciate simple harmonious arrangements of flesh, shadow, voice, hair, which were as much the result of Fiona’s artistry as of mine. But perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps Hugh had no eye for the sex-tableau.
I yawned, glanced at the finely muscled music of Fiona’s breathing, began crushing another pile of shells. Back at the villas one of the smaller girls was now shrieking distantly in short monotonous bursts of pain.
And then, nearly too late, Catherine acted on her own behalf, brought herself to do what Hugh should have done, and out of feelings of exclusion or possibly pleasure or more likely irritable retaliation, managed to complete the picture that Hugh had almost destroyed. She frowned, tightened her lips, took a short breath and, crooking her elbows so that her bent arms became the rapidly moving wings of some large bird, reached behind her back and quickly, without help, unfastened her halter and pulled it off. It was an awkward, rapid, determined, self-sufficient gesture of compliance, and I was proud of her. And even though in that first moment of exposure she looked as if she wanted nothing more than to cross her arms and conceal beneath the flesh of her arms the flesh of her breasts, still she sat up straight and kept herself uncovered. I was proud of her.
And though I had already known what we would see when she finally bared herself, could visualize to the last detail the surfaces of Catherine’s nakedness, still it pleased me to see the round rising breasts and the nipples that resembled small dark rosebuds tightly furled, and to see all this, not at night in their villa, but here at sunset on the polished black stones born of the volcano’s chaotic fire.
How long would we manage to preserve this balance of nudity? For how long would we be allowed to appreciate the fact that the nude breathing torsos of these two very different women simply enhanced each other? I could not know. But here, at least, was the possibility of well-being, and though Catherine sat with eyes averted and arms straight and the large halter half-wadded, clutched, in one large hand in her lap, still at that moment I found myself tingling with the realization that Hugh’s wife had acted deliberately and in large part for me. And now, this instant, if Catherine had been able, say, to cup her breasts in her hands with Fiona’s thoughtless exhilaration, might not the sight of Catherine be as stimulating as that of Fiona? Then again, wasn’t the naturalness of Catherine’s slight lingering discomfort exactly as stimulating as the naturalness of my own wife’s erotic confidence? I smiled, I found that the ball of my right foot was pressed gently to the solid front of one of Catherine’s knees, I heard Fiona giggling and saw that Hugh’s blue-gray ankle was now trapped, so to speak, between both of Fiona’s energetic feet, and again I began to hope that I had not overestimated Hugh after all.
But rolling onto my hands and knees, getting to my feet with a cheerful groan, lumbering to cut off the oldest girl who was running toward us out of the cypresses and shouting for Catherine, and stopping her and displaying friendliness and knowing that when I turned to wave I would see distant gestures of busy hands fastening big and little halters once again into place — still I could only smile and do a few dancing bear steps for the angry child, because no sex-tableau was ever entirely abortive and because ahead of us lay an unlimited supply of dying suns and crescent moons which Fiona, and Catherine too, would know how to use.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,” whispered Meredith and shook off my hand. But after all, I told myself, her one poor sour note could never be any match for old Cyril’s song.
YESTERDAY ROSELLA AND I WENT HUNTING FOR BLACK snails. And yesterday, for the first time, Rosella and I ate a meal together. Side by side on hands and knees, or squatting together, prowling about the walls of the villa, spreading the tall grass that grows in senseless clumps against the smoke-blackened walls of my crumbling villa, or poking one after the other in the flower beds nearly invisible now under thickets of crab grass, dead brambles, translucent yellow weeds that turn to powder at the slightest touch, or taking turns with a stick at the base of the little well house which is like a miniature chapel and in fact once wore a small flimsy hand-wrought Byzantine cross of iron on its conical stone roof — for some time Rosella has joined me in my pursuit of the snails, in silent accord has accepted the snail hunt as one of my simple activities safe enough, perhaps, to share. But then yesterday, filling the two hot bowls and with no change in her reluctant movements or empty face, pretending that our meal for two was a mere matter of course, Rosella sat across from me and ate her evening meal at the same time that I ate mine.
Because of the way the birds changed the pitch of their singing, or because of subtle light changes where I sat under the low hand-hewn beams, or because I could tell by the smoke’s odor that the fire was out, and by the breath of air at my small lopsided window as well as the sounds that reached me from the dead gardens could tell that the day was fading, somehow I knew as usual that the time was right, that Rosella had put aside her broom of twigs, had emptied her buckets and left her scrub brushes out to dry, had once again come unstuck from the web of her crude and exhausting day. It was twilight and time to look for the silver trails. Rosella stood waiting for me beside the well house, and I was pleased to see the earthen pot in her arms, the worn-down wooden sandals on the naked feet, the thin earthen-colored dress worn with blunt indifference.
“Here you are again, Rosella. The girl by the well.”
I smiled, Rosella merely shifted the chipped pot in her arms. Did she yearn for my hand, did she sometimes wish that I might join her in the squat church of the wooden arm? Did she admire my shabby black coat and vest and trousers, did she yearn sometimes to feel between her stubby insensitive fingers the golden watch chain that hung across all the breadth of my black vest? Was she beginning to need some physical gesture of affection? I thought she was.
I was close enough now to see the pocks in the fired flesh of the old pot and to see the bones in Rosella’s shoulders and the crow’s-feet at the corners of her youthful eyes. Her skin was swarthy, her nose was oddly aquiline, no doubt she was a long-descended daughter of the barbarians. But in her childhood had she also been tutored in the lore of the female saints? Is that where she got her indifference, her strength, the blunt crippled look in her dark eyes, from wooden pitchforks and the lives of the female saints?
There was moisture in one of her nostrils, her hands curved naturally to the roundness of the pot, a little dried blood was caked on one of her feet. For a moment I thought of Catherine, as I often do, and then wished that Fiona could see me boxed in by the funeral cypresses with Rosella whose head barely reached my chest and whose voice I hardly heard from one month to the next.
And with my knuckle tapping the earthen shape in her arms: “This evening, let’s see if we can fill it right to the brim, Rosella.”
Moments later I was once more able to enjoy the sound of heavy snails falling into the wide-mouthed pot. In the twilight we were side by side, Rosella and I, kneeling together at the edge of a small rectangle of pulpy leaves. The snails were plentiful and the sticky silver trails crept down dead stems, climbed over exposed roots, disappeared under black chunks of decomposing stone. Everywhere the snails were massing or making their blind osmotic paths about the villa, eating and destroying and unwinding their silver trails. They were the eyes of night, the crawling stones. “Faster, Rosella,”I murmured, “a little faster.”
She seemed to understand, and shifted her knees further apart, tightened her kneeling animalistic posture, tugged at a small jagged shard of buried tile and suddenly unearthed a pocket as large as the blade of a shovel and packed like a nest of mud with the sightless snails. In both hands she scooped them up and, while I steadied the pot, dropped them covered with flecks and strings of fresh mud into the warm hole of the pot. Then I laughed, reached into the pot with my large white hand, frayed cuff and golden cuff link (anniversary gift from Fiona), seized one of the snails and pulled it out quickly and smashed it against the cream-colored grainy side of the pot.
“That’s what they look like, Rosella. Smell?”
She was backing up. Her haunches moved, her thighs began to work, again one of her sandals cracked against the pot, and suddenly one hand reached behind and tugged up the constricting skirt of her hemp-colored dress. Rosella, I saw, was moving backward. And smelling the gloom of the funeral cypresses, I laughed and, despite the rules, thrust out my hand so that in another moment my hand might have confronted her flesh and staved off the now partially exposed buttocks, though even my hand pushed hard against her buttocks could not have prevented us from tangling in what would have been a kind of accidental Arcadian embrace. I lost hold of the pot and it tipped over. Rosella looked at me, and in the clear rose-tinted twilight and amidst small noises of grass, brambles, stones all disturbed by our movements, I thought that Rosella’s eyes reminded me of the bulging eyes of my little long-lost golden sheep. And then we stopped. Stopped, waited, listened, heard the ticking of the grass, the brushing sounds of a few small birds, the slow dripping of contaminated water and, from somewhere in the increasing shadows, footsteps.
“Someone’s coming. Hear it?”
And then it was dark, and I smelled the flaking roof of the well house and stood up and brushed the burrs from the sleeve of my jacket, straightened my golden eyeglasses, pulled at the little points of my vest, and immediately saw the hunchback standing beneath the rotting arbor with a stone crock in his arms.
Leather coat, leather cap, rubber boots, shoulders as broad as mine, even in the deep green light from the funeral cypresses and with a cluster of dead grapes brushing his high muscular hump, still I could see that he was someone easily frightened. And yet he was staring not at me but at Rosella, seemed to expect not an assault from me but rather some kind of recognition from her. When he spoke as he then did, it became obvious that he was young. He took a breath, his lips moved, he spoke. And out of all that leathern bulk and deformity of a man who looked like a capped and muzzled bear came a voice that suggested only the softness and clarity of a young girl’s voice poured from a shy pitcher. Croak peonie, he must have said, or crespi fagag. I could not be sure.
“Who is he, Rosella? Your brother? Cousin?”
I was right, of course, because Rosella said a few words not to me but to the deformed intruder who turned, put down his crock, and in the darkness and crushing shriveled grapes beneath his boots, disappeared around the corner of my long low-silhouetted villa. By now everything had succumbed to the light of the somber trees, to the silence, to the purple shadows of the cypresses. And in this silence, this gloom, the crock was white and plainly visible. I took a step. I heard the slapping of the wooden flats, felt Rosella’s shoulder brush my sleeve in passing, saw her little shadowy figure stooping down. And Rosella and the white crock were gone.
Night. Silence. Decayed and dormant stones, tiles, vines. Crude arbor. From my pocket I fished a cigarette, glanced up at the stars, inhaled. Turning to retrieve the pot of snails I paused, inhaled again, thought I detected in the wall of funeral cypresses that narrow but convenient passage through which I used to make my nightly way to Catherine.
No regrets.
In my mouth the smoke was the color of mustard, around my ears the curling hair was both gold and gray, overhead the night was thick with stars. So I had no regrets. I smelled the peppery darkness, retrieved the pot and left it where Rosella could dump the snails down the hole in the flat stone of our crude lavatory in the morning. Then I groped my way toward Rosella and the light of the olive-twig fire, the smell of smoke.
At first glance I thought the crock was packed with fur, because by the uneven light of Rosella’s fire the soft brown substance rising somewhat higher than the square mouth of the crock rippled and gleamed softly, was alight with richness and flashing colors so that it suggested fur. But my fingers told me immediately that the crock was packed not with fur but birds. I could feel their concealed bodies smaller than the bodies of mice, could feel the fiercely contracted wings, the feet like flecks of wire, the little beaks that made me think of the sharp nibs of old-fashioned pens. I seized one by a brittle wing and held it to the light and recognized it immediately as some kind of sparrow. More than three or four dozen sparrows in a stone crock, and obviously Rosella intended to cook them all. And weighing the almost weightless bird in my palm I knew, suddenly, that the crock was a gift and that all the time we were hunting snails Rosella had known it would arrive, was perhaps instrumental in its arrival.
Had she asked that disfigured youth to shoot sparrows among the rocks and in the steep, sparsely wooded hills near the sanctuary? On her demand had he spent all day discharging his untrustworthy weapon at those swift targets? Had Catherine heard those very shots? And was all this for me? All this for the idle middle-aged man from over the mountains? Three or four dozen sparrows, I thought, were a good many.
We cooked them together, ate them together. For the first time I not only ate with Rosella but joined her in that damp cavelike room of stone and tile where, until now, Rosella had moved alone with a young woman’s bored carelessness through all her days and nights of cooking. I joined her and removed my black coat and in frayed shirt sleeves and soiled vest sat beside my standing Rosella and helped her, pulled the feathers from my share of the sparrows, which was no easy job, and despite my size hovered as near as I could to her shoulder while inside the casserole she built up the layers: butter, thyme, sparrows, onions, butter, thyme, sparrows, onions, and so forth. She prepared a sauce and I scrubbed out the iron vessel. Hovering stolidly beside Rosella, I sniffed the now browning sparrows and fed the fire, felt the oil of the cooking birds on my own brow and on my cheeks, felt without a single touch each movement of Rosella’s small bones, muscles, ligaments. I watched Rosella’s fingers at work, fingers even now stained with the black earth of my garden. Sometime toward the end of these preparations I sighed a deep sigh and realized that next time I too would be able to tie the wings, chop off the miniature feet.
“The heads. I see we eat the heads, Rosella. And the beaks. For the full effect we must eat the entire bird. I understand.”
Her example was not at first easy to follow. Beaks that were very much like little split black fingernails. Heads smaller than my thumb and without eyes. I noticed such details, calmly watched how Rosella ate each sparrow in a single bite, and realized that it would be difficult for even a seasoned sex-aesthetician to follow her example. But then I saw that Rosella’s two front teeth overlapped each other, and at this observation, this further instance of poignant incongruity, I could hesitate no more. And there amidst heat, shadows like finger puppets, savory taste and savory thoughts, how wrong I was to have hesitated in the first place. Because thanks to Rosella’s cooking, the sparrows, I found, were simply soft and crunchy too, as if the different textures of sweetness had been so combined that it was still necessary to chew a moment that very substance which had in fact already dissolved, melted, in the aching mouth.
“Rosella,” I said, with my jaws working and elbows propped casually on the table, “magnificent!”
Across from each other at that ancient broad lopsided table we sat, and according to the rules there was no touching of knees, no ravaging of sticky lips. My hand did not find her thigh and, in rhythm to that long slow dripping meal, please her thigh with the unexpected strength and tenderness of its unhurried caress. None of this. No removal of shoes and sandals, no meeting of bare feet. No slipping down the dress or licking fingers.
Throughout the meal I was unable to tell what Rosella was thinking, throughout the meal she managed to keep her face expressionless and her eyes averted. To me it was poignant that still I had no desire to put one finger behind her ear or to take her little mouth in mine. And yet her lips were sticky and there were a few drops of gravy on my vest while my plate, at last, was empty. Had I gone too far? Had I somehow raised false hopes? Was that whole vast tapestry beyond villa, cypresses, village, crying out for my re-entry into the pink field? Was my very skin about to be fired again in the kiln that has no flame? At least the sparrows inside me were already singing a different song, and I was listening.
YESTERDAY I KISSED MY MIMOSA TREE. AT NOON, WALKING slowly toward the well house with my shoulders heavy and hands thrust into empty pockets, I noticed that overnight my mimosa tree had reached its prime, had attained the totality of its yellow massiveness, and a little more. Each of its green filaments was bright, each of its seeds had become a puffy yellow globe as large as the tip of my middle finger, and packed together they hung, drooped, in thick puffy clumps, clouds, each one three times the size of a cluster of fat grapes. I stopped, reconsidered, turned to the mimosa tree, and with nothing more than a mild and rational interest in this sudden burgeoning, approached the tree and found myself standing unusually close to its silent flowering. Actually, at that moment one of the yellow clumps was already brushing against my vest. I stood there thinking of the delicate structure of so much airy growth and admiring this particular depth of yellow. I was alone, the sun had warmed the tree, the tree was full throated, I began to smell its gentle scent. And then I raised my hands, displaying my thick black coat sleeves, my frayed white cuffs, my golden cuff links and golden ring, and slowly thrust my hands deep into the vulnerable yellow substance of the mimosa tree. Into my hands I gathered with all possible tenderness one of the hivelike masses of yellow balls. And keeping my eyes open, deliberately I lowered my face into that cupped resiliency, and felt the little fat yellow balls working their way behind my spectacles and yielding somehow against my lips. I stopped breathing, I waited, slowly I opened my mouth and arched my tongue, pushed forward my open mouth and rounded expectant tongue until my mouth was filled and against all the most sensitive membranes of tongue and oral cavity I felt the yellow fuzzy pressure of the flowering tree.
The kiss, for it was a passionate kiss, really, reminded me of the grape-tasting game, though of course we never allowed ourselves to use hands in the grape-tasting game. But also in the midst of the kiss I thought I heard Fiona’s giggle, Catherine’s sigh. And Rosella may have seen me kissing the mimosa tree. If so, will she today or tomorrow follow my example? I think not. Kissing the rich yellow fluff of the mimosa tree may always lie just a step beyond Rosella’s abilities or inclinations. Yet kissing me, or her chances of kissing me, daily assume a still faint but ever-increasing tangibility. Perhaps I shall turn out to be Rosella’s mimosa tree as well as her white beast. Who knows?
TOGETHER TWO HEAVENLY CREATURES SPREAD THEIR BLUE feathers for me on a rock wall overlooking sea and sky. I uncupped Fiona’s breasts and Catherine lifted her own white breasts from the madras halter. The buttons on Catherine’s white cotton pajama top were like eyes of pearl. Fiona caressed the wooden arm, I removed my spectacles, Hugh moaned. Between the two villas I strung the clothesline high. Remember?
WITHOUT PAIN? PERHAPS NOT EXACTLY WITHOUT PAIN. After all, the artistic arbiter of all our lives — Love — is only too expert at depressing with one of her invisible fingers the lonely key, the sour note of pain, and most of us enjoy the occasional sound of pain, though it approaches agony. In fact, could any perfect marriage exist without hostile silences, without shadows, without sour notes? Obviously not. Throughout the many years of my sexually aesthetic union with Fiona, for instance, there were the momentary but nonetheless bitter whispered confrontations over use of the bed in the master bedroom, brief spurts of anger about a sudden loss of form on the violet tennis court. And there were also instances of deeper and more prolonged periods of threatened harmony, such as the nearly disastrous days of my love for a small young woman whose husband was one of the few men whose spirit and personality and entire body (his lips, his eyes, his fat chest, his beard) Fiona found intolerable. Revulsion in my wife was rare, this woman whose very quickness of breath could liberate the lover buried inside the flesh of almost any ordinary man in undershorts. But despite his strength and crippling desperation, the husband of the small young woman was clearly doomed. I pleaded for him. Fiona tried. We failed. There were tears, locked doors, a wedding ring slipped like a cigar band around a rolled-up handwritten note of accusation. We failed. Then luckily enough, Love herself changed the metallic scene, shifted to some sweeter pitch our melodies.
I am a man of feeling. And in our more than eighteen years of dreams and actuality, Fiona and I knew hours of miserable silence, knew the shock of intimacy momentarily spurned, attended funerals, held hands in the whiteness of other weddings, tasted departure and the last liquid kiss, tried to console each other for each pair of friends who, weaker or less fortunate than ourselves, went down in flames. Once in anger Fiona snatched from my hand the brief silken panties she had only moments before slipped down and removed. Once I was graceless enough to lead Fiona nude from our dimly lit living room under the quiet eyes of a naked man whose extended fingers were pressed together as if in prayer.
And more. The gradual discovery that most people detest a lover, no matter how modest. My unavoidable fist fight with an older wind-sucking man over the question of virginity in young girls. Fiona weeping through the wood with the sun running wild over her lovely buttocks. Hugh’s neck in his noose. All this and more we knew, all this we suffered.
Much of it must be described as pain, or at least as degrees of pain. But when I saw Fiona’s long fingers reaching inside somebody else’s heavily starched white shirt, or when I heard her voice receding, or when I listened with interest to one of her analytical and yet excited accounts of a night of love away from me, or smelled cigar smoke on her belly, or (to shift perspective) on all those occasions when I found myself alone for the last time with a weeping woman, when I tore myself away from the small sheep’s golden curls and gave back keys, turned off certain bedroom lights forever, understood that this small voice or that would never again lie coiled in my golden ear and that never again would I know this girl’s saliva, that woman’s passionate secretions, when an unhappy negative magic was actually transforming a real mistress into a mental mistress — was all this at least my true pain, my real agony?
Not at all. The nausea, the red eyes, the lips white in blind grief and silent hate, these may have been the externals of a pain that belonged to Hugh but never once to me. Hugh’s pain perhaps. Not mine. It is simply not in my character, my receptive spirit, to suffer sexual possessiveness, the shock of aesthetic greed, the bile that greases most matrimonial bonds, the rage and fear that shrivels your ordinary man at the first hint of the obvious multiplicity of love. Once Hugh told me that some small question of sex or the mere beginnings of jealousy often produced in him the sensation that he was drawing fire into his large intestine through a straw. But this pain, at least, is a pain I have never known. Not for me the red threads around the neck, the pillow in the open mouth, the ruptured days, the nights of shouting, the nights of trembling on the toilet. Jealousy, for me, does not exist, while anything that lies in the palm of love is good.
Of course in his own way Hugh was also a sex-singer of sorts. But Hugh was tormented, tempestuous, unreasonable. He was capable of greed and shame and jealousy. When at last he allowed the true artistic nature of our design to seep into consciousness, for instance, he persecuted himself and begrudged me Catherine, tried to deny me Catherine at a time when I knew full well that, thanks to my unseen helping hand, he himself was finally about to lurch down his own peculiar road with Fiona. And yet Hugh was also a sex-singer of sorts. But in Hugh’s dry mouth our lovely song became a shriek.
“THERE SHE IS!”
Hugh clutched my arm with that hand that served as two, whispering and pointing his flipper into a nearby field: “There she is. See her? Perfect, perfect!”
His whisper was as dark and sparkling as the light in the black center of his narrow eyes. Hearing his curiously eager words and the three small black cameras knocking together on the ends of their straps, and seeing the white sun and sandy hills and the sweat that was already seeping from under the alpine pack Hugh carried high on his shoulders, of course I felt that his black sylvan whisper and all this hot rich ceramic desolation augured well for this our first photographic expedition together. And in sympathy if not complete understanding, my own whisper became as deep and eager as Hugh’s.
“Perfect,” I said, “let’s hunt her down.”
For a moment his fingers squeezed my arm in a fierce rippling peristaltic motion, and then his hand, that serpent’s head, drifted down to one of the cameras and rested. Together we stared at the field, I with one hand in a convenient pocket, Hugh with his curly black hair uncombed as usual and the long black sailor pants low on his hips. The mattock, wielded by our quarry in a nearby field, continued to rise and fall, to flash in that hot clear air, to ping on an occasional stone. The crumbling cottage, the crumbling stone lean-to, the haystack shrunken and propped in position with pieces of fossilized wood, the small well without visible rope or chain or bucket — at a glance the desolation of the farm was obvious, and already I knew that so much desolation aroused in Hugh at least a shade of my own crisp appreciation. It was all complete, down to the usual upright skeleton of a dog affixed to the tall stake driven through the center of the haystack. And shading my eyes with one dry hand and nudging Hugh, gesturing toward the white bones strung intact to the pole, I could not help smiling at this poignant evidence of their archaic ways, could not help thinking that the bones of the dead dog might serve some greater purpose than the bones of the child Fiona had discovered that distant day in the church.
And nodding toward the field that looked like fired putty: “The haystack would make a pretty good picture. Don’t you think?”
He waited. “Hold on now,” he whispered. “When she’s warmed up a little, I’ll wave.”
Already I was beginning to see the afternoon through the eye of one of Hugh’s cameras. Sitting on a naturally sculpted boulder in the bend of our dirt road, smoking and clasping my knee, and with a certain mild intensity watching Catherine’s one-armed husband cross the field and in long cheerful strides approach the stooping figure, suddenly I began to smile at that total incongruity which must lie, I thought, at the center of what Hugh had several times referred to as his field trips into the old world of sex. At best a photograph could result in small satisfaction, I thought. Yet now even this small satisfaction was beginning to take shape in my mind, and for Hugh’s sake I welcomed it, breathed deeply of the scent of pepper on the hot air, made fish lips for myself and through them expelled a few thoughtful puffs of smoke, considered the artfulness my one-armed friend might yet display.
Certainly Hugh was artful even now. Watching them from my place of comfort on the large hot boulder, I could see that he was talking, though he could no more speak croak peonie than I could, was demonstrating his cameras and displaying the contents of his alpine sack, which by now he had unslung from the enormous bony construction of his shoulders. Already the mattock lay abandoned in the deep brown furrow, already the tall man and short girl were standing face to face, obviously Hugh was trying to use his pinned-up flipper to fence his way through the darkness and sullenness of her suspicion. In the distance and in the shade of my hand they faced each other, and already I knew that today the lone girl would farm no more.
Hugh’s head was nodding. Once he squatted and reached his single all-purpose hand into the furrow and then extended that dark hand palm up to the girl. What lay cupped in the palm of his unquenchable hand? Was he admiring the soil? Was he admiring some scrap of root, some fibrous hooflike bulb that the girl had been attempting to cultivate with patience and the dull hand-crafted mattock? To myself I laughed at Hugh’s ingenuity, energy, determination to win the lone figure in the field for the probing unblushing gaze of his high-powered cameras.
I changed hands, squinted at Hugh’s distant, persuasive, perhaps even poetic use of sign language. The heat was intense, I realized, and yet my skin was dry.
And then all the glazed ceramic substance of that colorful and nearly lifeless panorama trembled, shivered, cracked and splintered into new and suddenly moving fragments of light, color, shards of earth, and side by side Hugh and his new photographic subject turned, began to walk together in the direction of the crumbling barn. Hugh’s one long powerful arm was in the air and waving.
We stood in the earthen darkness of that barn, the three of us, and I saw immediately that two urine-colored sheep were trembling together in one heavily cobwebbed corner.
“My latest model is going to pose. These sullen types always end up compliant.”
“We’re in luck,” I said. “She looks beautifully indifferent. Anything I can do to help?”
Unleashing one of his small black cameras, Hugh frowned at the setting of its highly polished and unmerciful lens.
“In a minute. Right now just smile at her. Make her feel at ease.”
I had only to glance at the girl to see that she was in fact quite unafraid of Hugh, of me, of even the cold and completely foreign complexity of the cameras hanging in their black cases around Hugh’s neck. At once I saw that she was young, untutored, uninterested in anything except the clumsy mattock and challenge of the ceramic field. The dull rubber boots cut off at her bare knees, the dry knees that appeared to have been scoured with sand, the colorless apron tied around a long burlap skirt sewn no doubt by an old woman, and the leather coat — at once I saw that so many unappealing articles of dress might well conceal a body that would prove to be in absolute contrast to the clothes themselves. But would this girl actually pose for Hugh without her rubber boots and burlap skirt and stocky leather coat? I was unconvinced. Her mouth was small, her eyebrows were gently drawn. And yet her face was the color of green olives and made me suspect that the composition of her blood might have been determined at least in part by one of the barbaric strains. Perhaps she was strong. Perhaps her indifference was not at all the same as compliance. Perhaps the old woman who had sewn the skirt had also taught her some outlandish and hence all the more crippling version of a moral code — though the girl’s small eyes were dark, and I had faith in Hugh.
I smiled at Hugh’s latest model. She did not smile back. But her eyes remained on mine and I began to wonder if she was aware of my large and closely shaven face, my slice of pure gold hair. And the barn was filled with a warm aura of suspension. There were the shadows, the dust, the floor that was a soft black pebbled carpet of sheep droppings, the smells and light that made me think of the inside of a dying rose. Hugh was squatting while the girl waited and the sheep peered over their shoulders at the three of us.
“Peasant Nudes,” Hugh whispered, and simultaneously the girl and I glanced down at his camera which was now clicking. “That’s what I’m going to call my collection. Peasant Nudes.”
He was taking photographs, for some time now had been taking photographs. Oddly squatting with one knee sharply bent and one long leg stretched out in a nearly horizontal position, eyes and nose buried inside the back of his camera, in this way he was crouching, inching to and fro at the girl’s feet, aiming up at us the enormous wide-open lens of that clicking camera.
“That’s it. That’s perfect. Now let’s just shove her over against the beam.”
Coming between us, pushing and inching with his dark blue contorted legs, suddenly rising to both knees so that the girl drew back, and clicking the shutter release and rewind lever and hissing eagerly between his lips which had become little more than a tight shadow, slowly Hugh approached us on his knees and then, with little more than his own intensity and the aim of the camera, moved her, repositioned the small dark head against the dark worm-eaten flank of an upright beam.
“Easy. Easy. That’s perfect. See how she’s holding her head jammed against that old beam? Perfect. Most of the faces of these peasant nudes are just fat and happy. They’re all mothers, with or without children. But this one,” inching his knees across the carpet of sheep droppings, doing his one-handed sleight-of-hand tricks with two cameras and what I supposed was a light meter, “this face is skintight with the beauty of illiteracy. That’s what will show up in the pictures. Wait and see. The sullen face of an illiterate virgin.”
I waited, then heard my own low whisper: “I’ve been thinking the same thing. That she’s a virgin.”
“She’s got a few little brown hairs on her chin. She couldn’t be better.”
Yet now I was watching not the girl but Hugh. And Hugh remained on his knees, continued to walk about on his knees. His shoulders were struggling against the sudden unreasonable dictates of his dream, were working against impossible odds to maintain his balance. He was sweating. His thin cotton shirt had come free at the waist. But his arms, or rather that lurid combination of arm and partial arm, most held my attention. And in passing I noticed that the girl’s small dark expressionless eyes were fixed, like mine, on the excited and suddenly gesticulating remnant of his ruined arm.
“Make her smile! Come on, do something. Make her smile. Quick.”
While I was still contemplating the odd magic that Hugh somehow extracted from his injured arm, Hugh himself unaccountably changed position, bolted upright from his knees to his feet and thrust the camera into the girl’s face so that for one instant the poor lips parted in what might have been a silent laugh. I caught a glimpse of her tongue and the small overlapping front teeth, and heard the click of the camera, felt Hugh wheeling in my direction. He let go of the camera, expelled his breath in a single relieved heave of his expanded chest, ducked his head and, with the flat lower side of his twitching stump, wiped the perspiration from his forehead and thin gray face.
“Time to change tactics,” he said, and with one brutal thrust of his hand ripped a small flesh-colored wineskin from the alpine pack, held the wineskin at an angle of shocking self-confidence before his upturned face and shot a steady thin dark jet into his waiting mouth.
“Want some, boy? It’s hot work.”
I declined and hoisted myself to a seat on the ancient cart and crossed my knees, braced myself with both arms and hands. Again Hugh thrust up the bag and squeezed it, prolonged his exhibitionistic drinking as if he were an indelicate disheveled god in the act of forcing some invisible monster to send down its urine.
“Now, boy. To business.”
And suddenly the wineskin lay in the rancid hay, the third camera was in his claw, he was close to the girl. Once again his stone cheeks and little pointed beard were wet with the perspiration of his art photographer’s single-minded desire. He did not move. Yet his stump, though held tightly to the side of his body, was impatient to wag, to flex, to rise into action, and his eyes were sly but also vacant. He seemed to be listening to the girl’s silent life rather than staring at the visible shape of it. The girl continued to stare up at Hugh. The thin sheep had managed to turn and now were facing us and once more were rubbing together their crusted woolly coats. The girl was alert.
Then Hugh sprang back a step, let go of the camera, smiled with absurdly pretended helplessness, with his hand made sweeping motions from the girl’s head against the beam to her booted feet on the dung. Did she understand, he seemed to be asking, could she share his amusement at his own discovery of what was wrong? Slowly, with a mild tightening of the lips, she glanced down the length of her body. She saw nothing wrong.
So he held up the camera, turned it slowly in front of her face, in front of her narrow eyes, displaying and silently extolling its value, its delicacy, its enormous power, suggesting for all I knew that this one small instrument was more important than a simple illiterate young woman or even an entire farm. And then once again he dropped the camera. But now, suddenly, he was stern, insistent, and with one terrible extended finger he pointed at her pathetic boots, her clumsy coat, and slowly moved both hand and finger back and forth, at the same time using tongue and teeth to produce a cadenced clicking sound of austere disapproval and even, perhaps, of anger.
“No boots, no coat,” he said, rolling from side to side the enormous hand and rigid forefinger. “No boots, no coat.”
Again he pointed, again he sucked tongue to teeth, filling the barn with that loud unmistakable sound of exaggerated negation, and then with amusing yet somehow admirable restraint he actually pantomimed the removal of his own slick boots and the removal of an imaginary cumbersome sheepskin coat. She watched. She listened.
And then he transposed himself from the girl to the alpine pack and knelt and thrust his hand inside the pack. The girl, without a glance at Hugh, slowly unfastened her scarred leather coat and removed it, leaned against the and slowly pulled off first one worn-out rubber boot and then the other. Hugh’s back was turned. But I was watching, waiting, and was close enough to take from her the discarded coat, close enough to wait until she dropped the boots and then to indicate with gentle fingers the familiar apron and the billowing and slackening skirt which, after only a brief moment of further incomprehension, she also took off and gave me.
Perhaps I should have known, as Hugh had known, that without the coat and skirt and boots she would be nude. Should have known, perhaps, and yet had not, so that standing now with the apron, coat and skirt still warm in my arms, I was both pleased and surprised at her apparent indifference to her own nakedness, and was amused to think that for this naked girl the world of underclothing was a world unknown.
Did I hear the camera? Had Hugh returned again to his work? Perhaps, perhaps. But I too could become absorbed in the act of assessment, appreciation, and now it seemed to me that the mild sag in the breasts of this girl might in her case be an aesthetic attribute. Through my polished gold-rimmed spectacles I stared at the nude girl, and it occurred to me that I was at last acquiring a more personal understanding of Hugh’s photographic collection. I realized that never before had I seen a young female body quite so aesthetically self-defeating as this one. I stared and smiled. She glanced at me. She scratched her right flank.
Yes, self-defeating, as perhaps are the bodies of most girls whose origins lie in historical darkness beyond the mountains. The breasts, for instance, had never given suck and yet already they sagged. And the thickness of the fat at the waist seemed to pull against the hardness of the belly, the muscles in the calves detracted from the solid but symmetrical thighs, the narrow but slumping shoulders somehow maimed the aesthetic reality of the full and rounded buttocks. Self-defeating, I thought, but harmonious too.
Unaccountably she took hold of one of her breasts, appeared to squeeze it, then dropped her hand. And with this gesture I found that I was witness not only to the girl’s patient nudity but also to that leave-taking scene which perhaps only an hour before Hugh had disdained to photograph. In the acrid and rose-tinted darkness, and transparently superimposed on the olive and white reality of the undressed girl, clearly I saw Hugh’s wife and mine standing within arm’s length of each other beneath the clothesline on Hugh’s side of the funeral cypresses and waving, watching us depart, and saw the dog in mid-air, the two fat smaller children holding hands but also waving at their lanky father, saw Meredith with her back to us and no doubt scowling at Catherine’s white cotton pajamas on the clothesline, and beyond it all the rocks and bright sun and silhouetted wreckage of the small coastal fort. How they complemented each other, this girl we had conducted into a near-empty barn and this prior vision, our suddenly present bird song of domesticity embedded in the flank of collapsing time. Deliberately I shut my eyes, as if the better to taste some offered drink, and thought of the wine I planned to share with Catherine when the night was again ours.
“Come on, Cyril, give her the rake. Let’s try the rake. And then you can give her the pants.”
At the sound of his choking voice the tableau of domestic multiplicity dissolved in an instant. And with the girl breathing methodically within arm’s length of my softly sweatered chest and now and again shifting the position of her feet or glancing into the darkness overhead, it was no longer possible to separate the photographs and the waiting girl. While smelling the girl I could not help looking at Hugh and saw him sprawled on his back with head and shoulders propped against the alpine pack and the camera once more substituting its cyclopian lens for his eyes and nose. Above the sound of Hugh’s voice and the girl’s breathing I heard the clearly and inexorably rapid sounds of the camera and knew that I had been hearing it all this time.
“Look,”I whispered, knowing that prone on the dung he could not possibly have seen what I had just seen, “look there. She’s grazed a cobweb. My god, her breasts tangled in a broken cobweb. Can you see it?”
And writhing, jerking the camera to and from his face, lying on his back and with his sharp heels and single elbow propelling himself about in crablike motions for the sake of angle, light, depth, expression: “Magnificent… It’ll all show up in the enlargements… I’ve spent more than a year on my collection, my catalogue of natural art photographs, my peasant nudes… My unmarried girls of barren countries… Each one’s better than the last… I’ve got them sitting in straw, standing in the black and empty doorways of ruined barns … And all nude or nearly nude … My peasant specimens… Each one gets a cheap little gift…”
He laughed, gave me a long look over the swiftly lowered camera, and then I stood up to my knees in the white pulpy straw in order to reach down the wooden rake, dragged a bottomless iron bucket from under the straw, and hauled from beneath the oxcart a great leather skein of primitive mildewed harness. And thanks to my own patient industry and quickening interest, and also to Hugh’s sweating inventiveness, we managed that day to photograph our smallish naked girl holding the rake, holding the bucket, managed to photograph her with the entire length and weight of the crusty black leather harness draped over one narrow shoulder so that, front and back, it hung down stiffly as far as the bare feet.
“The pants,” he whispered. “Give her the pants.”
The girl watched my every move, the small red eyes of the sheep were filled with ruby-colored supplication. And of course I found the cotton underpants lying in a heap beside the alpine pack. I picked them up, turned to the girl, and between thumb and first finger of both hands held out the underpants in a cheerful and magnanimous display. Her eyes tightened, the camera clicked.
But what was wrong?
Silence. The clicking had stopped, the agonized camera was silent. And then Hugh moaned.
“What’s wrong?”I whispered. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”
At a glance it became apparent to me that Hugh lay there in the grip of something serious. He was not moaning in the throes of a pseudosexual climax resulting, say, from the many photographs he had taken of a girl who was, after all, young, naked and a stranger to us both. The hunching shoulders, the forgotten camera, the single hand driven against the center of his bony chest, the apparent sapping of that little color usually evident in the long thin granite face, the fact that he was frowning and that his usually crafty eyes were suddenly wide open and staring at what I was sure was nothing — all this told me that Catherine’s husband was sprawled motionless before me not in the aura of trivial physiological reaction, but in pain. He appeared to be thinking about some deeply unpleasant subject, the hand was trying to dig its way inside his chest.
I knelt beside him, I was concerned. But my life had not attuned me to medical emergencies and now, kneeling at Hugh’s side, large but at the same time trim with an excellent health I was unable to share, I did not know whether to touch him, to seize his gigantic deformed shoulders in my own enormous gentle hands, or leave him alone. Or should I shoot into his dry mouth a jet of the dark wine? Raise him to a sitting position? Go for help? Carry him in my two arms back to our wives?
“Heart attack,” I whispered. “Is it a heart attack?”
He moaned, licked the small wispy wings of his mustache with the tip of his tongue, finally glanced up at me. “Hand of death inside my chest, that’s all. But it doesn’t last…”
He winked, I felt relieved, already the shadows were massing in interesting patterns once more down the length of his rock-colored grainy face. He sighed, pushed himself up with his good arm. And yet for all my relief, and even as I was helping myself to a long curving drink from the wineskin, I could not help thinking that my preoccupied friend was dangerously ill and that this kind of collapse, along with his collection of “peasant nudes,” probably did not bode well for Fiona. If mere photographs had led in some devious way to this kind of prostration, what would happen to him when Fiona finally managed to gather him into her lovely arms? And did Fiona know already what she was up against? It would be my lot, I knew, to warn her.
When, blinded and laughing, Hugh and I stumbled out of the barn together, Hugh’s good arm resting powerfully and in unadmitted necessity on my own broad shoulders, and the straps of all three cameras and the alpine pack held firmly in my own left hand, I noticed that the girl was once more fully clothed and at work in the field. I knew that I would see her again, but also knew more immediately that in only a matter of minutes Hugh’s black flapping dog would race out yapping to welcome us back to villas, children, wives already involved in the pursuit of nudity, passion, love.
But when I finally did return alone to the little ceramic farm and to Rosella (for of course it was she), I returned only to procure for myself a silent companion willing to cook my meals and clean my cold villa. Thanks to Hugh, Rosella became mine, so to speak, along with the best of the photographs. And Hugh? Better for Hugh had he died at a blow of his black fist or whatever it was. Much better.
IN THE MIDDAY BRIGHTNESS, LYING NEAR OUR LITTLE WELL house on an old settee over which she had tossed one of her white percale sheets, and with her feet bare and her torso also bare, dressed only in her sky-blue slacks that she pulled on like a pair of dancing tights, and looking up at me with one long finger marking her place in the slender book and her other hand thrust into the open slacks — in this attitude she appealed to me with somber eyes, low voice, unhappy smile: “Baby, he says I’m Circe all over again and that he’s the only man left in the world who can resist my charms. What’ll I do?”
“I warned you a long time ago. Remember?”
“I remember.”
Hands in pockets, standing over her, smiling down at Fiona stretched out in one of her rare half-hours devoted to a kind of personal cessation that came as close as she was capable of coming to inertia, suddenly and with my lips so much thicker than hers I made a few silent kisses and sat down on the edge of the settee so that our hips rolled together and I could smell her breath. On the other side of the cypresses all was even more quiet than usual at this time of day, and I wondered what Hugh had done to muzzle the dog, the twins, the constantly accusing and complaining Meredith. I heard the little desolate rustling sound of the book landing beside the settee.
“Cyril is virile. Remember when I told him, baby?”
I nodded, slowly removed my eyeglasses and folded them, stuck them under the settee for safekeeping.
“And it’s so true. Oh, it’s so true.”
One of her rare half-hours of self-surrender. And yet the casualness of bare feet and partially unzipped slacks, the personal disregard expressed in the naked breasts, stomach, arms, the thoughtless and candid position of the hand thrust into the little blue open mouth of the slacks — all of this was rare and yet characteristic too, almost as characteristic as the familiar sight of Fionda smothering or sculpting her breasts in hands whose supple grip and long white fingers never failed to excite my admiration.
“You're wearing your magic pants again,” I whispered, and her body rippled against me. She bent her outside leg at the knee and allowed her tight blue knee, bent leg, to list away from me slightly in the direction taken by the now disregarded book. With two long fingers of her free hand she began to stroke the white naked heel that she had just drawn into sensitive proximity to those hard blue buttocks which at the moment I could not see but only imagine. She pursed her lips and, despite the still considerable space between us, began to blow a deliberate breath up toward my weathered bland expectant face.
“And you’re wearing your magic pants too, baby, aren’t you,” she said in that willowy voice which, no matter how soft, suggestive or dreamlike, never allowed for contradiction.
“Sure,” I murmured. “Of course I am.”
“Maybe I’ll steal your magic pants. For him. OK?”
The shadow of the thin Byzantine cross of rusted iron on top of the conical well house now lay directly in the center of her naked chest, and it amused me to think that sometime within the next half-hour the cross would lie not on Fiona’s chest but in the middle of my broad back. All around us the little orange marguerites had never been more profuse, more deeply orange, more innocent.
I patted her raised knee and leaned down, untied my fresh white espadrilles and pulled them off. When I straightened I saw the lower lip caught gently between her teeth and the long first finger of her left hand tracing firm lines up and down the inside of her shining thigh. I laughed. Because she was right, of course, and I knew as well as she did that my own elasticized underpants and Fiona’s sky-blue slacks were in fact magical, as she had said. My shorts, for instance, were like the bulging marble skin of a headless god. But Fiona’s sky-blue slacks, which she never wore except when alone, or with me, or with some privileged lover, certainly that garment clinging low on her hips and riding high on her ankles was matched for magic only by Fiona’s own total and angular nudity. The little masculine gold-plated zipper in front, the slanted pockets, the blue webbing that left an attractive pink welt around her squarish hips and lower belly and the soft eyes of her buttocks were all the true signs of a woman’s sex-suit, Fiona said. And in her moods of self-surrender, when she felt like wearing the blue slacks and nothing more, these were the details that enabled her to lie reasonably still and smile and enjoy the magical vacancy at her finger tips. And at the moment, the zipper was halfway down and the welt was pink.
“I want to see your magic pants. Right now.”
I obeyed, of course, and with languor and pleasure stood up beside my prostrate wife and, smiling down into her open eyes, which made me think of two doves frozen in the hard light of expectation, slowly pulled off my shirt and trousers and, glancing at the empty heavens, for a moment enjoyed the statuesque weight of myself contained and molded, so to speak, in my brief but extra-large white magical underpants. I could feel that my broad sloping shoulders were a little soft. Some tiny living creature splashed in the depths of the nearby well.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Submit.”
I sat down again slowly and carefully. With her free hand, the hand with which she had been stroking her upraised thigh, she now suddenly began pulling at some of the long soft brown hairs on my own mammoth thigh. Then her hand slipped, a finger grazed the broad sloping front of my elasticized white shorts, and in mid-air the hand began to tremble while her breathing, suddenly, changed pitch.
“Kiss me, Cyril. Kiss me.”
Even while smelling the sweetness of Fiona’s breath and tasting the taste of her mouth, sucking on the marrow of Fiona’s life, and biting her teeth, her small lips, her tongue, and while feeling the sun sealing us once more together, it occurred to me that this particular kiss was unusually cannibalistic, even for us. It is not easy to force a pair of heavy lips into an expression of mock disapproval while involved in such a kiss, and so when I became aware that our time was dissolving, and that we were indeed struggling to devour each other’s mouths, jaws, cheeks, I simply raised my head, pulled loose, stopped, listened. As usual Fiona’s preliminary humming was food for us both.
“Cyril,” she whispered, “Cyril …”
Her free hand gripped the back of my head, she held my head exactly where she wanted it and nuzzled my face and stared at me with her eyes that were like dying doves. With all the care I could summon I rested my right hand on the wrist of the hand that was driven so beautifully into the tight blue pit of the open slacks. Slowly I propelled my own hand down until it very nearly covered hers, and for a moment I thought that even Fiona had become insensible beneath the pressure of her hand and mine. But then it became evident that Fiona, my ageless tree, was still willowy, rational, self-possessed, and I was proud of her. Because now with considerable strength and slow determination, she began to inch her hand from under mine.
“Wait, baby. Wait a minute. Meredith isn’t watching us again, is she? I don’t want her watching us through the cypresses. OK?”
“Of course she’s not watching us,”I whispered, though I knew that Fiona did not intend me to turn now and study the dark green wall of cypresses for the little flashing white signs of Meredith’s face. I merely answered Fiona’s question as she wanted me to and pressed on.
Fiona’s hand came loose, my own impossibly large weathered hand was stuffed once more inside my wife’s unzippered pants.
“Baby … oh baby …
I forced my hand down and suddenly, as if to achieve nothing less than absolute display of her presence of mind, Fiona tilted up her pelvic area to meet me, and in my wet palm I held her eagerness and felt the center of her life beneath the brief pattern of hair like sandy down. On my part it took some presence of mind, finally, to disengage my hand, pull down her sky-blue pants, toss them aside with my own white marble shorts among all the bright orange marguerites.
And later, much later, both nude, she on her stomach on the flimsy rattan settee and I seated on the ground with knees drawn up and cigarette lighted and heavy shoulders drifting to the slow massage of her strong hand: “Why can’t they all be like you, baby? Why?”
THEY HAVE GIVEN HER RABBITS. YESTERDAY I FOUND CATHerine not wrapped in her blanket on the silent balcony as usual but rather sitting on her heels before the cage of rabbits. It was the moment of transformation, the beginning of Catherine’s cure, the first hopeful sign of metamorphosis cast in the powdery blue light from the reflecting tiles. My guide, the small fat woman in dark blue apron and wooden sandals, led me to the balcony and pointed at the blanket, the empty makeshift lounging chair. Her little round face and upraised pudgy arm were bright with unconcealed pleasure, as she watched my own responses to the obvious fact that something had changed in Catherine’s life and mine. Then she pointed in a different direction, beckoned me on to a fragment of whitewashed walls, warm cobblestones, empty sky, the low cage raised on a slight altar of stones and pink succulents. Again the matron pointed and of course I knew before looking that the large woman sitting on her heels and peering without sound into the rabbits’ cage was Catherine.
She was unaware of the little fat woman and myself now standing side by side behind her, was obviously unaware of her own dark jersey and faded maroon-colored shorts and the strand of hair hanging from the bun she had fastened indifferently at the back of her head. She was resting with her hands on her bare knees and leaning heavily forward into the darkness of the wooden cage and sweet smell of the shadowy rabbits. The jersey, I noticed, had pulled loose from the elasticized waistband of the cotton shorts, and in a sudden return of poignancy I found my consciousness brimming with the sight of this brief once familiar strip of nakedness.
I smiled, thinking of my now ruined bicycle, my hot climbs to the sanctuary, my playful smoke rings and patient monologues, all the ingredients of my timeless fidelity which had accomplished nothing, after all, had not moved Catherine to a single word or even to tears. But thanks to what I could only assume to be the sudden emergence of primitive intuition in the little fat untutored woman at my side, and to the curative powers of two large sable-colored rabbits, now Catherine was kneeling with open eyes and heavy girlish concentration and was slowly reaching toward the rusty hook on the little door of the cage. The life I had failed to arouse was now being restored by two soft mindless animals and a woman who was perhaps unfamiliar with even the crespi fagag alternative in her own language. The cure was obvious, I told myself, since for certain temperaments the presence of gentle animals is magical. Yet I my-self could not have thought of it. I watched Catherine’s fingers touch the hook, heard the twitching and chewing sounds of the rabbits.
Yes, I thought, Catherine’s large amber eyes must now be meeting the fearless but vulnerable eyes of one of the rabbits. Catherine lifted her upper body away from the naked heels, waited a moment, and unhooked the sagging wire-covered door of the cage and swung it open. Her arms were moving, a rip in the side of the maroon-colored shorts still betrayed some small long-forgotten carelessness, the jersey rose another few inches on her bare back, the sudden new smell from the cage might have burst from the slit belly of a golden faun brought down by a loving archer.
I felt the tugging at my sleeve and saw the large docile rabbit in Catherine’s arms. The sable-colored head was on her shoulder, one of the long soft ears was brushing against her neck. I nodded and retreated silently without disturbing this brief portion of my old tapestry that would now undulate forever, I thought, with gentle yet indestructible life.
Had she known I was there? Had she in fact cradled in her arms the warm trusting rabbit for my benefit as well as her own? Might she have heard my breathing, seen my shadow, and busied herself with these simple mysteries for the sake of the large perspiring middle-aged man who was the only lover she had ever known? The plain shorts, the kneeling position, the silken animals — were these fresh omens, the unmistakable signs that Catherine had finally changed her mind and retracted her vow of speechlessness? Yes, I thought, unmistakable. And striding down the caramel-colored hillside path with its purple rocks and white streaks of dust, and far below, the vista of the slick dark village and empty sea, walking more quickly and hearing my own hot dusty footfalls, the heavy irregular sounds of my lonely but powerful descent, at that moment I knew at last that it was only a question of time and that my final visit to the sanctuary was drawing near. If Catherine had begun her metamorphosis and could play with the rabbits, she could also return to my villa among the funeral cypresses and share with me the still music of what I had already come to think of as our condition of sexless matrimony.
After that, who knows?
TWILIGHT WAS ALWAYS MY FAVORITE HOUR, AND SO IT remains. At twilight I stroll, I smoke, I hum to myself, I inspect my lemon trees which are at their peak of bearing, and inspect my arbor thick now with hanging tendrils of grapes no larger than small warts or the heads of pins, mere intimations of all the bunches of fat clear green grapes to come. I stroll among my trees and under the arbor and then say good night to Rosella and sink into the darkness, sleep alone. And my nights are never sleepless. My concentration is quiet and slow paced, after all, and filled with purpose. My large hand never shakes. The headless god? Perhaps. I eat my lemons as other men eat oranges. In my slow mouth the lemon pulled by Rosella from one of my twisted trees and thoughtfully sliced by me with my faded gold-plated pocketknife is sweet. I think, I chew, I suck my cheeks. My mouth hardly puckers. I sleep in peace.
Catherine will have to learn to do the same.
WHAT WAS HE DOING? SUNBATHING? OR WAS HE LYING in naked embrace with my equally naked wife at last? He was there, I knew, a prone white emaciated figure just visible through a low, dark green fringe of crab grass agitated by a sultry midday wind, a long low sheet of green flame burning at the edge of the bed of black rocks about twenty feet from where I stood in the shadows cast by the thick growth of pine. Hands in pockets, freshly bathed, wearing my yellow shirt in the hopes of meeting Fiona on this dark seaside path, a path she often took alone, here I stood in the darkness on a blanket of dead pine needles, stroking my chin and wondering if I had indeed discovered Fiona but worn the yellow shirt in vain.
With my usual presence of mind I had awakened from my dreamless midafternoon sleep, had rolled over, found Fiona missing, had assumed that I would meet her on the ocean path. And fresh from immersion and scrubbing in the clear water of my ancient stone bathing tank, scented, externalizing my mood in the special color of my bright shirt, slowly I had strolled past the second villa, had paused to listen, had drifted on, assuming that Hugh and Catherine and all their distracting daughters lay just beyond those tight shutters and thick white walls drugged in the heat. On both counts had I been wrong? Taking a soft step forward and catching another glimpse of his naked movements out there in the crab grass, it appeared that I had indeed been wrong. But those movements, of course, were what Fiona wanted, so that my trivial mistakes were righted, so to speak, by the richness of the vision and what I took to be the abrupt fulfillment of Fiona’s latest dream.
He was facing south, and the horizontal position and the density and frenzy of the low wind-whipped screen of nearly black grass made his long white body appear longer than it actually was. I watched, pulled at my chin, took a few more slow steps that placed me definitely beyond the safety of the trees and into his aura of bright colorless sun and the hot wind that clashed in the ears. Beneath my thonged and silver-studded sandals, the blanket of dead pine needles had given way to a strip of unclean gray sand. I could not hear the ocean but saw that it was thrashing with unusual and irregular fury up and down the length of our desolate private beach of black stones.
Just as I had decided to return to the dark and echoing shelter of the pine trees, leaving the two of them to enjoy in peace whatever they had found together in that exposed and inhospitable spot amidst wind and sun, speculating to myself about the kind of passion that had driven them to strip off their clothes in all this shattering light and noise, suddenly it occurred to me that I could see nothing of Fiona’s brown arms and passionate hands which, even from this distance, should have been visible clasping Hugh’s thin white naked back or stony buttocks. I hesitated, turned again into the wind that now seemed to beat the motionless sunlight into my face, my hair, the depths of my yellow shirt. I took another look and, filled with a kind of voiceless compassion as well as a curiosity I had not known before, knew that Fiona’s invisibility was no longer a problem and that I could not retreat. Because Hugh was alone, I was convinced of it, and I could not abandon him there to sunstroke or aching muscles, certainly could not allow the reason for his lonely presence there on the empty beach to go unexplored.
But what was he doing? Sunbathing? Embarking on some kind of freakish photographic experiment? Reading one of his faded erotic periodicals hidden from my sight in the crab grass? What?
And then I stopped, leaning into the wind with legs apart, hands in pockets, head lowered, stood there frowning and trying to resist the temptation to lean down and shake him by the shoulder. He lay at my sandaled feet like a corpse, a long fish-colored corpse, or like some fallen stone figure sandblasted, so to speak, by centuries of cruel weather. Yes, an emaciated and mutilated corpse or statue, except that he in his oblivion was moving, while I, despite the compassionate concentration of all my analytical powers and alerted senses, had become immobile, only the immobile witness to this most florid and pathetic expression of Hugh’s reticence.
Because he lay there on his stomach embracing not Fiona but only his clothes, the twisted black long-legged sailor pants, soiled jersey and white shorts. No magazine, no camera, no living partner. Only the white shorts beneath his head and the pants and shirt bunched and almost out of sight now beneath his chest, his hidden loins, his rigid outstretched white legs of the Christ.
The motion in the pitted gray-white buttocks was intensifying, the shoulders were beginning to heave, the black grass was beating against his long meager thighs, the tight black curls on the back of his head were blowing, springing loose, were becoming drenched with black light. Was he moaning? Did he believe himself to be lying at midnight among our percale sheets a half mile away at my villa instead of sprawled out here in the grass with a few uninteresting broken sea shells and some large black ants that would soon be scurrying in aimless circles on his heaving back? I could not be sure.
Yet waiting, towering above him, watching the naked flickering gestures of his lonely one-sided prostration, I could only nod because suddenly I recognized that I had already lived whatever dream Hugh might be dreaming but also that without my presence Hugh’s agony did not exist. And yet, if he mistook rough cloth and patches of sand for Fiona’s life, flesh, firmness, did not the final agony of this discrepancy belong to Fiona, though she remained unaware of it, rather than to Hugh or to me? I thought so. But Fiona could take care of herself, of course. She always had.
Without a moment’s hesitation I decided to spare Fiona this sight of Hugh dreaming away their intimacy in the crab grass. Without hesitation I turned away from the now tightening and trembling white figure and waved, shouted back some cheerful greeting to the yet invisible woman (Fiona, my wife) who was now calling to me from within the gentle darkness of the long grove of pines. I reached her in time to keep her from stumbling on our sleeping and naked Saint Peter at the height of his pleasure.
“What on earth were you doing out there on the beach, baby? I’ve been looking for you.” We laughed, touched lips, I felt her fingers inside my yellow shirt after all.
“COME ON, BOY, HOW ABOUT SOME INDIAN WRESTLING?
What do you say?”
Why did I submit finally to the strained voice, the forced jocularity, the challenge only too evident in his eyes and little black pointed beard? There in the grape arbor, bathed in darkness and the light of Fiona’s candles, why did our two wives and even the children urge us on? When the two youngest girls began to clap their fat little star-shaped hands and even Meredith drew near and smiled her poignant introverted smile of spite and satisfaction at the contest she had already visualized as won inevitably and maliciously by her one-armed father, was there still not some way I might have evaded the ugly consequences of this abysmally classic situation?
“Go on, baby, be a good sport.”
But as soon as I felt his hand in mine, I knew that in this case I should not have listened, should not have allowed myself to inflict such pain on a man who was obviously determined to fill our idyllic days and nights with all the obscure tensions of his own unnecessary misery and impending doom.
He began to squeeze, his hand was a claw. As if in some ancient combat his upraised arm was dripping with raw meat and bloody bone, at any moment he might open his mouth and shriek. And in the midst of it I reminded myself that Fiona knew full well that the physical exercise I had undertaken throughout our married life surely guaranteed the muscle development of my thick arms. We were both at fault.
ITOO HAVE BEGUN TO HOLD THE LARGER OF THE TWO rabbits against my chest and in my lap. Silently we pass it back and forth, Catherine and I, pass it dangling from her arms to mine and from mine to hers. The pink succulents, the unhooked door of the cage, the powerful gently explosive smell of droppings and digested grass, the blue tiles turning into frosted metallic threads in the light of dawn— in all this it is apparent that both of the rabbits are female and that Catherine and I are equally attracted only to the larger, which has clear red eyes, crude musical notations on its long front legs (silent companion, I realize, to Love’s swooping birds) and big paws that sometimes find slow footing on my watch chain. I stroke the rabbit, glance at Catherine, smile. She looks away and brushes a piece of straw from the lip of the cage. But sooner or later she reaches out her arms and I hook my thumbs under the forelegs of the rabbit, whose trust is airy and limitless, and whose bones feel as if they are immersed in a limpid shape composed entirely of warm water, and lift, watch the amazing distension of the silken spine and totally relaxed rear legs, then swing her over to Catherine’s waiting hands.
An excellent basis for sexless matrimony, I tell myself. It will not be long.
FACE DOWN ON THE BLANKET, SMILING AT THE MUFFLED sound of my careless yet also stentorious whisper: “I am not opposed to domesticity,” I heard myself saying, “not at all.”
No wind, no spray, no evidence of dead sea birds, no dissolving sun, nothing to distract us from this hour of attentiveness on the beach of black stones. It was another left-hand right-hand day, as I had come to call them, another one of those days when the four of us, and even the dog and the children, fit together like the shapely pieces of a perfectly understandable puzzle. Catherine on her side, Hugh on his knees, Fiona flat on her back and I face down on my stomach — we were holding each other in place, so to speak, on Fiona’s blanket and talking softly, listening. A few yards away the twins were silent for once, held in check by the magnetism of the old sleeping dog, while Meredith was standing ankle-deep in the water and waiting, I thought, to be embarrassed. In the silence that met my unpremeditated remark I covered Catherine’s hand with mine and squeezed it, wondered how long we could fend off the inevitable nemesis.
“What a beautiful thing to say, baby. Good for you.”
Silence, more wine-flavored silence, and smiling into the hot blanket I saw distinctly our rigidly approaching nemesis (a small goat prancing out of a sacred wood) and knew that, despite the grip of my hand, Catherine was beginning to roll again under the weight of her fourteen years of motherhood.
“You didn’t have children. That’s all.”
Fiona’s turn, I thought, and wondered whether Catherine was actually aware of my tender grip or had in fact forgotten me, lost sight of me in the midst of thinking about Hugh’s little black pointed beard and her three deliveries. Though it was I, after all, who was once more touching flame to the idea of the family and lighting anew the possibilities of sex in the domestic landscape.
“Oh, but we decided against children long ago. And now it’s too late anyway. Thank God. But we love your children, Catherine. Don’t we, Cyril?”
I raised my head and nodded, then shifted my weight and lowered my head again so that my weathered cheek smothered beneath it Catherine’s fingers and now upturned palm. In nose and mouth and stomach I made the wordless contented sounds of an agreeable man settling down to sleep on a hot beach blanket, though in point of fact I had never been more crisp with attentiveness and lay listening to the epic inside Catherine’s lower abdomen. I was waiting for the parents to become lovers and the lovers parents.
“What’s the matter, Eveline? Come over here to your old dad.”
The little fists were in the eyes, the lips were turned down, the small fat body was naked except for the gray cotton panties riding well below the navel, the brown hair was filled with burrs which only moments before had been clinging to the black fur of the dog. Without moving or opening my eyes I saw it all, the upright and sunburned child midway between our blanket and the sleeping dog and stumbling toward us silently, unerringly, while Catherine frowned and Fiona caressed herself. I dozed on, watching, waiting, enjoying behind my patina of sun the sight of Hugh’s pebbly tight smile and the eyes that were glancing now at Eveline, now at Catherine and me, now at Fiona. It amused me to know that little Eveline was to be the lever with which her father would pry Catherine’s warm pillowing hand from beneath my cheek. How like him, I thought, to begrudge me Catherine’s hand in the middle of the afternoon and abandon her body to me throughout the night.
“Maybe she just needs to urinate,” Hugh said. “Could that be it?”
And then the soft toneless maternal voice beginning to withdraw at last from motherhood: “Of course she does. But it’s your turn, Hugh. I’m sun-bathing.”
Once more I was proud of Catherine, who had managed to add another still note to our silence. Already Meredith was blushing at the edge of the sea. I waited for the prolonged and uneasy sound of Fiona’s giggling. And then the little invisible white goat landed among us and I rolled toward Catherine, who did not move, and propped myself on one elbow in time to see Hugh sit heavily and deliberately on Catherine’s haunch, as if on a convenient stone, and hold the baffled child between his knees and with his one hand pull down her panties swiftly, expertly. He was whistling and aiming his small fat daughter in the direction of the still sea where Meredith stood listening, blushing, shriveling.
“Get off me, Hugh.”
“Hang on there. She’s nearly done.”
Would she throw him off? With a single heave would she dislodge him from his all-too-comfortable seat on her upraised hip? In some way would she appeal to me for help? But even as I wondered how long Hugh would be able to sustain this admittedly ingenious stroke of trivial revenge, wobbling happily on his wife’s prostrate body, I saw that Catherine’s eyes were open and that the small amber-colored pupils were fixed on my own in a long silent expression of love or indignation. I returned her secret stare and with slow pleasure began to realize that Catherine had chosen this moment to think of me and was quite oblivious to the weight on her hip.
Yet Hugh himself was thinking not of the naked sunburned child squatting between his angular protective legs, not of Fiona, though now I heard the prolonged and uneasy sound of Fiona’s giggling, but was thinking rather of the woman he was sitting on, because even while I watched the arm and hand that Catherine could not possibly see (long arm and large versatile hand still fresh from the parental ritual of pulling down little Eveline’s pants and holding her, caring for her), Hugh swung back his arm, reached down, and without changing his position or turning his head, fumbled briefly until his hand leapt suddenly like the small invisible white goat and, in a gesture of love or viciousness, closed on Catherine’s heavy breast inside the madras halter. Did he know that I was watching? Or more likely, had he again managed to forget my presence and the immediate fact that I was now lolling only inches away from this reclining person who even at this moment was perhaps more my partner than his? Why could he not respect Catherine’s conventional but nonetheless powerful intimacy? When would he ever respond to my omniscience and Fiona’s style? But of course the wedding ring worn bizarrely, fiercely, on the third finger of Hugh’s right hand told me that I must never allow myself to be unduly critical of Hugh. Even that monstrous hand of his wore its sign of love.
And then the nemesis of our brief respose became exactly the unpredictable display of cause and effect that I had anticipated, and Catherine struck away Hugh’s desperate hand, Hugh jumped to his feet. Fiona caught Hugh’s nearest thigh in her already waiting arms and squeezed slowly and yet for only an instant. There was no need to look and reassure myself that behind us Hugh was lapsing again into arrogance, was standing with his eyes shut, his stump upraised, his thin bare legs rigidly apart, his fingers driven into Fiona’s hair even while Fiona’s eager cheek lay pressed to his thigh. Would he never learn? I adjusted the faded strap of the halter, pushed my warm face into Catherine’s face and clothed her suddenly naked mouth with mine.
“Look, baby. A little goat!”
But was it possible? Had I heard her bright words correctly? Had Fiona actually spoken somewhere outside the no doubt pedestrian aura of the muttered sounds of contentment I must have been making while kissing Catherine? Was it dream, change, coincidence, or was my state of mind a menagerie of desire from which real animals might spring? Could it be that one of my speechless creatures of joy and sentiment had torn itself loose from the tapestry that only I could see? Was it now bearing down upon us with blue eyes and the wind in its hair? Was the little goat that had danced among us in my mind now going to leave its little hoofprints in the center of Fiona’s blanket or come rushing and butting between our legs? It did not seem possible. But of course it was.
“Oh, baby, look, he’s wonderful!”
We separated, climbed to our feet, stood apart, all four of us, and together stared in the direction indicated by Fiona’s outstretched arm and waving hand. And of course Fiona’s excitement was justified and the goat was real. But he was not white, as I had thought, but cream-colored, a small long-legged creamy animal splashed on the forelegs and masked around his eyes with brown. At first glance he was in the air, hung suspended at the height of his second leap from the gloomy pines, and even from where we stood we could see his bright blue eyes and the nubile horns embedded in soft down. At least I had been right about the color of his eyes, I thought, and smiled.
Then he sprang, leapt, danced his soaring stiff-legged dance. And while Hugh romped with the goat and I squatted beside the distasteful Eveline, comforting her and helping her climb back into the discarded pants, I glanced up and saw that Meredith had stripped off her modest trunks and halter at last and with both thin arms raised above her head was leaping up and down in the black water. She had kept her back to us and now her thin body was slick and brown, her little white porcelain buttocks were winking at me through the sheaves of spray.
“Meredith,” Catherine called over her shoulder, “come look at the baby goat.”
But their oldest daughter danced on and it occurred to me that after all there was hope for Meredith and even for Hugh. And Fiona was still sharing my thoughts because suddenly there she was, kneeling where I squatted with the child, and Fiona’s whisper was filled with pleasure, confidence, elation, the smell of jasmine.
“Isn’t he wonderful? I want him for my own, I really do.”
“Goat or man?”
“The man, baby. The man.”
LAST NIGHT (ONLY LAST NIGHT) I LAY UNACCOUNTABLY awake on my narrow iron bed in my small vaulted room and listened to Rosella snoring in the darkness at the other end of the villa. I was amused at the sound and in passing decided that it could only be the latent old peasant woman already snoring inside Rosella and that the sound was no doubt comforting to their partially domesticated animals. But what of myself? Why was I, who was always a heavy sleeper, now lying awake?
Slowly I raised my arms and clasped my large dry weathered hands behind my head. I had not been dreaming, there was no wind in the cypresses, the noises from Rosella’s little open mouth were distant, faint, and could not have awakened me. Why then my open eyes, my slow ordered speculations? What had become of my ponderous capacity for peaceful sleep? After all, I thought then with amusement and mild nostalgia, Fiona used to resort to little kicks and punches to wake me out of total darkness, used to thrust a lighted cigarette between my still sleeping lips, used to tug at my hair and pound my chest, in mock fury fight my pajama buttons before I managed to open my eyes and speak a few thick golden words of reassurance and with my own fingers pull what she used to call the rip cord of my pajama bottoms. How different I was from Fiona, how different I was from Hugh who claimed that he spent all the nights of his life in sleepless writhing.
The bedstead trembled, I could hear its rust flaking onto the stone floor. At that moment I knew that even if I raised myself on one elbow and glanced at the window I would not be able to distinguish the blackness of the funeral cypresses from the blackness of the night. Lying in the very darkness in which Hugh and Fiona had suffered both together and separately, I admitted to myself that even while laving my memories of them in silent thought I could not blame my wakefulness on Fiona’s long leaps through the night or on Hugh’s torment. But was it even a question of blame? I thought not. And suddenly I knew with a kind of certainty that whatever in fact accounted for my wakefulness it was somehow pleasant — immediate, obvious, pleasant. Something had happened, something had changed, and I knew that in the thick neutral night of my middle age I had only to think, to wait another few moments in order to know why I was awake in this darkness of measured expectancy.
I listened, I concentrated all my receptivity on the nearly invisible crude contours of my low stone vaulted ceiling. Beyond the wall of funeral cypresses the black inhospitable sea was unaccountably silent. Out there beyond the other darkened villa my pair of little owls was sleeping. My solid bed was just large enough for one, its lumpy mildewed mattress was a denial of love, my weight was extracting some kind of faint lonely music from its rows of archaic rusty springs. And then I realized that I had lain awake once before in exactly this same state of suspended lucidity. Rarely a dreamer, blind forever to the possibilities of insomnia, nonethless I had somewhere, sometime spent another night lying awake in the presence of some unidentifiable delight. But where? When? The narrow bed, the springs, my unrumpled pajamas, the absence of sheet or blanket — all these, I thought, were clues.
In the darkness I made fish lips, frowned. Why was I, with my memory, my self-understanding, my ability to expose the logic sewn into the seams of almost all of our precious sequences of love and friendship, now at a loss to locate two separate but similar sources of warmth, surprise, pleasure? What bed could I be trying to recall? What night?
The marriage bed, of course, the couch of love, the first formal gift of conjugal darkness. For a moment I felt a sensation of relief and shades of triumph, and told myself once more that Psyche was on my side and that given time and thought I could always count on myself for answers. At least I was now recalling exactly what I had been attempting to recall: the sight of the mid-thigh silver wedding dress, the white stockings, the hot medicinal taste of the brandy I drank rather foolishly perhaps from her silver shoe, the late moment when finally I unzipped the metallic dress and helped her strip off the stockings and then carried her nude to the edge of the warm dark fountain amidst the appreciative sounds of our most loyal friends.
Don’t bother being a husband, baby. Just be a sex-singer. OK?
Were those her words, her magic words? Again I heard them, again the stark ceremonial details returned, though lying there in the center of my night of analytical revery, I was amused to realize that as a matter of fact I could not remember the last time I had thought about this occasion, the exact identification of which would remain forever buried on the inside surface of the ring that served as its reminder. Then why now?
The answer was mine even before this last question was fully formulated, because suddenly and with total relief I remembered living through precisely this same perplexing night once before when, several hours after I had carried Fiona to the fountain, I rolled onto my back and discovered that I was awake and that my mind was as clear as usual but that something had changed, and that whatever had awakened me was immediate, obvious, yet in this instant unidentifiable. But I had overcome Psyche’s little dramatic ruse and had thought my way backward to the sudden fact of marriage and forward to the gift of Fiona, to the sudden recognition that I was lying in the conjugal darkness with my wife. And now Catherine, of course. My logical associations abruptly flowered, giving me not Fiona but Catherine, not the fact of marriage but the promise of sexless matrimony, not the bottle of champagne embedded in a basket of flowers but the rabbit waiting out this sleepless night in his new cage between the well house and the overgrown remains of my ruined bicycle. Not the couch of love but my single bed. Not wife but former mistress on her narrow iron bed like mine in the small white room next to mine. The waving matron, Rosella’s sullen greeting, my decision against touching Catherine’s elbow in the door to her room, Catherine staring at the empty villa through the funeral cypresses — lying there in the darkness I at last reviewed all the details of Catherine’s sunset arrival and thought that the two nights were oddly similar and that I was now as grateful to Catherine for coming to share my speculations on the painted bones of Love as I had once been to Fiona for feasting with me on the marrow.
On the night I had remembered Fiona in a shower of mental fireworks, so to speak, I had fallen again into the peace of my brandy-soaked sleep immediately. And now, remembering Catherine and knowing that I had only to grope my way along a few feet of whitewashed stone to confirm that this was in fact the first night of Catherine’s muted presence on the other side of my crude bedroom wall, I did the same and relaxed my feet, withdrew both hands from behind my head, rolled over and immediately fell into the bemused contentment of deep sleep.
THE NIGHT WAS GOING TO BE A LONG ONE, I DECIDED, AND began to feel that the kiss Fiona had impetuously planted on the cheek of our one-armed hero was infusing the darkness with even greater expectancy than Fiona herself had hoped for. The strangers were saved, the old motorbus was only hours into its first invasion by the curious water rats and but a few hours into what would surely be its long life of deterioration in the black canal, the unattractive children were sleeping at last, the adventure was more clearly defined and further along than I had thought it would be by the middle of what was only our first night together. The darkness was like a warm liquid poured from the throat of an enormous bird, and above our heads and within easy reach of our mouths vast clusters of stars and tumultuous bunches of black grapes were merging. Each grape contained its bright star, each star its grape. My mouth was brazen with the long slow taste of white wine.
“Cyril, baby, are you all right?”
“Sure,” I called softly toward the two figures momentarily visible among the lemon trees, “we’re fine.”
But already they had moved away from us once more, already the clear voice had lapsed again into a laughing, preoccupied frosty whisper, again we heard the playful confusion of footsteps and then the silence that told me that Fiona’s happiness was dripping between the lemon trees again like dew. The surprise of the second kiss was drawing near, I thought. Or was it the third?
In the darkness I groped for another bottle, pulled the cork and filled our two small invisible glasses. The stone bench we sat on was chalky and warm, overhead the grape arbor was a sagging foot-thick blanket of hanging grapes and climbing roses. I sipped, listened to the breathing of the large woman seated within easy reach of my hip, my knee, the toe of my bone-white tennis shoe. I cleared my throat and smiled to think that it was like Fiona, exactly like Fiona, to set the first stage of her impending adventure in nothing less than a small lemon grove where she could run at will, and exactly like myself to settle for an unobtrusive niche in a grape arbor. Fiona always spent first nights giving literal chase to her dreams, whereas I, of course, preferred to muse on approaching possibilities and to wait, to listen, to sit out the preliminaries in quiet thought. Again I cleared my throat and glanced at the woman beside me who, in the darkness, was audible rather than visible, a large soft black-and-white image blurred at the edges and rustling with bodily sounds that expressed not meaning but presence. She was breathing, swallowing, twisting to peer over her shoulder. Was she sighing also? Perhaps. I waited and knew that like the stone bench I too was warm to the touch, seemed to be giving off broad waves of pleasing heat.
“You’re not shivering, are you,” I said, stirring the embers, allowing my voice to drift again toward lower, more reassuring registers. “My wife thinks you must be exhausted. She’s worried about you.”
Beyond the arbor and through the funeral cypresses I could see traces of the light from the old kerosene lantern they had left burning for their children. Beside me the woman was sitting quietly in remoteness, loneliness, indecision. A lemon struck the ground behind us and I thought I caught sight of Fiona’s white hand waving at me from a slit in the darkness.
I sipped my wine and thought that the shoulder of the woman beside me was broad, soft, unknown. Unknown yet oddly familiar too. A warm shoulder, I thought, that was growing cool. Would the woman beside me manage unwittingly to earn my attention and find out for herself that she needed it? Had Love determined that this woman’s shadow was to cross the white path of my capability? Or were we to separate forever at our very moment of meeting? At least these questions presented themselves. At least we could continue turning the pages together for a while longer.
“My wife admires your courage,”I murmured. “Fiona’s character judgments are always right.”
The grape arbor and lemon grove were complementary, of course, and now our momentary silence in the arbor was equaled, exceeded by the silence that was again saturating the grove of twisted trees. I listened, began to dip my hand toward the wicker wine basket somewhere at my feet. It was a question of pantomime as opposed to orchestration, I thought, and waited patiently while out there the second or perhaps third kiss grew into a reality of held breaths. The very fact that we heard nothing determined the kiss. Did my companion know what was happening? Was she also able to enjoy the invisible kiss which we, seated open-eyed as we were in the darkness, might have been dreaming? But perhaps for now her appreciation of that kiss was too much to ask, because suddenly I knew that she was looking at me directly, silently, while I continued to stare down at the moldy cork I could not see. And then her husband laughed once and stumbled, called out Fiona’s name, again was looping his way among the trees.
“We’ve been married a long time,” she said, and her words were like the wine from the bottle — slow, inflectionless, filled with a taste that pleased the mind as well as tongue. I approved of what she had said, heard the soft breath that sustained the sentence, began to see the sweat and soiled years heaped up in the vague shadowy sockets of her eyes. Dull words, and yet enjoyable precisely because the three exhausted children and the now preoccupied one-armed husband could not be deduced from them. Her words alone, and they allowed me to choose between implied security or resignation or, finally, indignation at what she might have taken to be the first signs of betrayal. I put the wine into her fingers and made my choice.
“Married a long time?” I repeated slowly, turning her few words into mine and at the same time giving them back to her like low notes on a flute. “Fiona and I have also been married a long time. As a matter of fact, Fiona is a kind of priestess of marriage. Her most remarkable quality, I think, is suppleness. But it’s late. Are you sure you want to sit out here like this?”
“I like your voice in the darkness.”
“OK,” I said, preparing to shape my words carefully, resonantly, and putting down my half-empty glass between us, “but what about your husband? He’s probably worried about you, like Fiona and me. Wouldn’t it be better if you were in there sleeping with the children?”
“You needn’t worry. None of you.”
I waited, and beneath my two hands now clasped around one heavy knee, the camel-colored cloth of my trousers felt like combed linen while the knee itself felt like some living prehistoric bone full of solidity, aesthetic richness, latent athleticism. Imperceptibly I rocked on the warm stone and again glanced briefly at the embryonic stars in the grapes.
“We can hardly see each other. We don’t know each other. I’m a lot older than you think.”
She appeared to be listening, sitting and waiting with her hands in her lap and her fresh glass of wine untasted, listening and waiting with eyes now averted and her large distant body filled with thought. But just when it occurred to me that she had drifted into some new private solitude or had merely decided not to answer, she spoke, and between the slow golden roll of my own last words and the sudden inspired appearance of Fiona, whose hopes were rising, I heard her brief declaration and found myself wanting to retrieve the subdued and levelheaded sound of her voice from the grapes, the black leaves, the dark night.
“I’m forty-three.”
Was she more aware of herself than I had thought? Was she trying to change the subject or to confide in me? At least her statement of age deserved my attention, deserved the two of us sitting side by side. But then the air shook, the arbor shook, the scent of Fiona’s bath soap and jasmine sweetened the night, and my own investigative mood and Fiona’s springing bow collided, coalesced.
“Baby, you’re sharing secrets!”
“We’re just talking,” I murmured. “Join us?”
“I couldn’t sit still. Not tonight.”
She had come from nowhere, as she often did, and was breathing quickly. Once again I observed that Fiona’s obviously substantial bone structure was no impediment to her grace or to her abrupt and totally unexpected late-hour turns of mind. I nodded and allowed my face to reflect a faintly deeper shade of my composure, pleasure, good humor. Fiona shifted her feet, glanced around the arbor with what I knew to be girlish delight and womanly detachment, leaned close to me and apparently without thinking slipped the bows of my spectacles from behind my ears and just as quickly slipped them into place again. Her feet were bare. And then she was suddenly on her knees and holding my companion tightly about the waist while I, rocking and humming to myself in silent song, could not help marveling a little more at Fiona’s transformational powers and sensual flights. I smelled Fiona’s jasmine and perspiration and waited, with growing possessiveness stared at the solid and yet agitated shapes of the one woman seated and the other kneeling in the blackness of the night. My companion seemed neither to resist nor welcome my wife’s embrace. But I thought she might be imperceptibly relaxing, if anything, into Fiona’s arms.
“I’m glad you’re here. I want you here. You and Hugh.”
The voice I never tired of hearing was both muffled and clear, soft and strident. There was love in her voice and yet she was speaking quickly and in another moment would leap to her feet, I knew, and disappear.
“Easy, Fiona,” I murmured. “Calm down.”
“Oh, Cyril, don’t be stuffy.”
I laughed, made my musing face in the darkness, lowered my voice. “At least Catherine doesn’t think I’m stuffy. Catherine and I were having a nice conversation until you came along.”
“Sharing secrets, baby. I know. Drinking wine.”
But again Fiona eclipsed the warm comforting sounds deep in my chest and before I could speak raised her face, reached up, seized the other woman’s large hardly distinguishable head in both hands, waited, then dropped her arms. The gesture, I understood, was another intimation of a kiss between women, the kind of gesture Fiona allowed herself when she could not bear to merely kiss someone’s cheek but when passionate kissing was nonetheless inappropriate. I was unable to see either woman’s eyes, and yet I knew that they were looking at each other and that Fiona’s eyes were probably moist and luminous.
“Cyril’s different from other men. Do you like him? Do you like my Cyril?”
“Of course she likes me.”
“Baby, you ruin everything.”
But I was ready this time, and before she was able to relinquish my companion and regain her feet, slowly and deliberately I placed my hand on Fiona’s hip and confirmed to my own satisfaction that the elastic of her panties was still to be felt beneath the gauzy nylon of the short dress. I had merely grazed her lower hip with the tips of my fingers, and of course the panties were not of any great importance. But Fiona always perceived my motives, no matter how subtle, and now standing in the darkess she had understood immediately the nature of the curiosity that lay like a shadow behind the delicate, nearly instinctive movements of my right hand.
“OK,” she said, and for a moment became a flurry of swift purpose. “You asked for it. There they are.”
I laughed, leaned down and with my palm covered the small white perforated piece of intimate apparel where it had landed on the toe of my white tennis shoe, then stuffed it easily into my right-hand trouser pocket. Catherine had not comprehended this domestic incident, I thought, and Fiona was gone. I wondered if she had satisfied her own curiosity while pouting at mine.
“Where were we,” I said and waited, adjusted the bows of the spectacles properly behind my ears, casually ran my fingers through my briefly disarrayed waves of hair, crossed my knees, struck up one of my slow-burning oval cigarettes. My wife and the one-armed stranger were everywhere and nowhere, the dark night was growing longer, deeper.
“Quiet, you two,” 1 called agreeably in the direction of the invisible well house, “you’ll wake the children.”
And then again drifting, so to speak, to my partner: “We were talking,” I murmured, “what about?”
“Ourselves.”
“Exactly. Telling each other heart-stoppers, as Fiona would say.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“Of course I’m not.”
“I don’t want to run around all night in the darkness.” “Nor do I.”
Pausing, moving one of her empty hands to the cool breadth of an upper arm, she spoke slowly out of the black shadows: “She said you’re different from other men. What did she mean?”
I waited, and then another length of golden thread went toward its mark in the darkness: “The real secret is that she likes to pinch my bottom. That’s all. But trust us,” I added. “Trust Fiona and me.”
And then quietly and without shrugging her shoulders: “Why not?”
I exhaled, nodded, began to feel at last that though we had not changed positions or touched each other even accidently, nonetheless there was the decided possibility that my massive oral cavity and the vast dark sockets of her invisible eyes were now groping toward each other in some sort of sympathetic identification, some warm analogy of bone and shadow. “I’ve told you a secret,” I said. “Now tell me one.”
“All right.”
Did she take a breath? Was she turning her head in my direction? Had I heard the first welcome shades of laughter in her voice? I shifted knees, waited. And then she spoke softly, matter-of-factly: “Your wife really meant you’re the perfect man. I didn’t have to ask what she meant. I knew.” “Another heart-stopper,” I said as softly as I could, and heard the sweetness thickening. “Thanks for the heart-stopper. But how did you know?”
“I knew.”
A fresh surprise, more pauses, the low sound of her accent poised between invitation and resignation, a suggestion of despondency balancing the brief hint of pleasure. Could she have meant what she had said? Seen what she had claimed to see? At the very moment of wading from the absurd and dangerous canal had some vague recognition of the headless god lolling in the guise of my composure overcome her mortification and fear for her children? I could not be sure. But at least we were turning the pages at a swifter pace. And was I about to subject us to the test of the children? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Carefully I reached through our small wall of darkness and filled her glass.
“So you think you see me as Fiona sees me,” I said, and laughed. “The perfect man.”
“Yes. But it doesn’t have much to do with me.”
“Not even now?”
“Not yet.”
“There you go again. More disappointment.”
“Why should I be disappointed?”
“Of course Fiona exaggerates. I’m a lot more ordinary than she’d like you to believe.”
“You asked for a secret. I told you.”
“Good. Let’s have another.”
“No. It’s your turn. What’s in your pocket? What did she give you a moment ago?”
Wrong, I thought, I had been admirably wrong, and I allowed myself to shape one gigantic, tremorless ring of smoke and then set it free and watched it swell, widen, disintegrate heavily in our night of the untasted grapes. Apparently she had witnessed something of Fiona’s playful exchange after all, had been aroused by being in the presence of Fiona’s swift act of partially denuding herself. But did I wish to hazard a discussion of Fiona’s simple and private gesture, or resort to it? Might I not better keep at least this relatively insignificant example of Fiona’s sex-language to myself? Was the risk too great, the ploy too easy? I made my choice.
“Just Fiona’s panties,” I said under my breath. “They’re not important.”
“Why did she take them off?”
“Who knows? Do you really care?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Trust me.”
“You remind me of my father.”
“Listen,” I said then, as if our heads were inches apart, “listen a moment.” I waited, holding out my hand for silence and knowing that it was in fact time to act, and then carefully I uncrossed my legs and stood up so that the hard cool globules of the lowest grapes spilled onto the top of my head and brushed my ears. I was relaxed. I was crowned with fruit. And then under my breath: “Listen. I knew they’d wake the children. Let’s go.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“We’d better look.”
She moved, she too must have felt the passing weight of the grapes. I led the way, she followed. I heard the sound of her breathing, strolled on. At the far side of the funeral cypresses I glanced at the dying eye of my cigarette and waited while the trailing woman slowly extricated herself from the thorns and brittle twigs that lined the opening through the tall black cypresses. Beneath the clothesline that I had rigged at dusk we paused among the silhouetted trousers, dress, miniature dresses, stockings, all greater than life size and still dripping with the waters of the black canal. As we approached the villa that Fiona had opened up for them, I noted the high silver grass, the broken tiles, the listing shutters stuffed with rags and impacted with the earthen ceramics of transient wasps, the small gothic niche near the doorway where birds had raised their young and no candle burned, no icon glowed. And entering the cold corridor, I in the lead and she following, I smiled at the sound of the snoring dog and at the feeling of wet stone beneath my hand and the smell of the old kerosene lantern that was smoking in one of the cell-like rooms ahead of us. Once again I knew that a ruined villa was even more appropriate to passion than was a silent grape arbor filled with stars.
“Come on,” I whispered, “let’s look at them.”
And then I was holding high the lantern by its rusty wire loop and we were standing shoulder to shoulder and peering down at the two large and almost identical heads lying side by side in the smoky orange light at our feet. The faces were square, the curls were tight and dark, the lips were thick. Could these be the faces of small girls? I could understand their size (the mother was large, the father now silently romping with my wife was large) but it was difficult to account for their expressions of sexless power.
“That’s Dolores,” I heard my companion whispering, “that’s Eveline.”
Dolores, Eveline. Together we studied the sleepers, Catherine and I, and even these children were beginning to make a difference, were already strengthening nameless bonds between us, as I had thought they might.
“And somewhere over there,” she whispered, so that I lifted the lantern and swung it loosely in the direction she appeared to be pointing toward with her restrained and contented voice, “is Meredith.”
Together we felt our way among the piles of clothing, piles of blankets provided by Fiona, suddenly bulky articles of luggage (opened and ransacked or still locked, bound tight with archaic leather straps, but each piece smelling of the polluted water), until our slow elbow-knocking search at last revealed the girl called Meredith curled in naked sleep on a hasty pallet of Fiona’s pink sheets spread on the cold stones on the floor.
“She doesn’t like me,” I whispered, and leaning closer saw that one of her thin fingers was in her mouth.
“Of course she does.”
“Fiona always wins the confidence of children. No such luck for me.”
And slowly, again attempting to point through the darkness with her whispering voice: “We’re going to sleep in there. Hugh and I.”
We waited, she made no further comment. It looked to me as if Meredith wanted to cry out in frail anger, but thanks to the sleep of children was unable to move, to make even the smallest sound. The hair across her brow was wet, one little sharply pointed ear was white.
“They’re all safe,” I said. “No nightmares.”
“No. They won’t wake up.”
“Fiona and that noisy husband of yours may do their best,” I whispered as if I myself were rolling over casually on a soft bed in the darkness. “But I’m glad we looked.”
“So am I.”
Already I was groping behind me with my free hand while probing forward with the hot lantern toward the room they had chosen for themselves. Already we were moving forward together into the darkness empty and silent except for the dismal snoring of their old dog. Even by then I knew that the poor wretched animal was deaf, and both of us knew that otherwise the room was empty and that there was no longer any danger of stepping on an unsuspecting child. And yet our breathing was becoming shallow, in unspoken accord we were wary, both of us, of stumbling against an alpine pack or one of their swollen leather bags.
“The lantern’s smoking,” I whispered. “Can you see?”
“You know I can.”
Once more I swung my arm solemnly and it all leapt to view — the dog, the scattered shoes, a tall medieval chest that smelled of iron spikes, the broad and sagging wooden bed whose tight percale sheets and a little hasty bouquet of hyacinths again revealed my wife’s impulsiveness. At the foot of the bed and on his scrap of dark blue carpet, the dog was sleeping on his back with his paws in the air. Carefully I lowered the lantern, the smoke rose between us, side by side we were standing in the midst of their transient lives.
“You’re thinking of your children.”
“Yes. My children.”
“Tomorrow,” I whispered, “we’ll teach you and Hugh to play the grape-tasting game.”
“All right.”
She did not move, together we waited. And I knew again that it was time to act and slowly, distinctly, and gesturing about the room with my upraised chin: “In all this confusion,” I whispered, “can you find your pajamas?”
“Yes.”
“Put them on. I’ll be back in about twenty minutes.”
“All right.”
Elation? Tenderness? Guilt? Had I, who did not believe in trivial, tedious seduction, maneuvered her after all into a kind of uneasy submission? It was possible that hers was a troubled or low-pitched acquiescence or even worse a defensive gesture motivated more by the lyrical sex-play in the lemon grove than by her internal needs and the attention I was interested in giving her. By dawn would she feel nothing but distaste? Or would I return to find her deep in sleep? But no, I told myself (walking with careful step and heavy purpose past the grape arbor and on toward our own dark villa) no, I could not have been so very wrong, could not have so underestimated the flesh of her womanhood or so mistaken the sound of her voice. Small fears, perhaps, but no disappointment. No unfortunate deception or painful aftermath. Could anything be more unquestionable than love undertaken in the presence of her sleeping children? She had passed the test of the children, I told myself, surely had forgotten the cries coming from the lemon grove even before we had strolled away from the grapes.
Yes, I told myself (abruptly detecting Fiona’s absence from the now familiar darkness of this room we ordinarily shared together) and emptying my pockets, putting aside Fiona’s helpful talisman, removing my large white tennis shoes, undressing once again though not for sleep — yes, of course I had read the cues and inferences correctly because now I recognized once more those first sensations of inevitability, certainty, slow emotional assent that had characterized the early hours of my most vivid relationships throughout the years. And my companion? Was my soft and unexplored companion now pacing me on the other side of the funeral cypresses, I wondered (climbing into my cerulean pajama bottoms and adjusting the ties, buttoning the top) or was she already waiting for my return and the approval guaranteed in the slowness of my embrace? Waiting already, I decided (thrusting first one arm and then the other into the cool loose sleeves of my maroon-colored dressing gown) but selflessly, patiently, since this was our first time and even now she must know that my lengthy preparations were all for her. Tying the sash, tugging at the silken lapels of my dressing gown, feeling about for handkerchief, black cigarettes, tortoise-shell brush and comb, and brushing my hair and then rinsing my mouth at the round mouth of a small earthenware vessel that tasted of Fiona’s lipstick and timeless clay — in all this I found myself pleasurably confirming once again my own modest belief in the theory that, whenever possible, it was always best to make the gift of love intentional.
At the last moment I decided that it was easiest to wear the tennis shoes on my naked feet as protection against the thorns that were bound to lie embedded in the dark path between the villas, and so took a little extra time and put them on.
“Cyril? Is it you?”
The sleepy voice was coming not from the lemon grove but from the grape arbor, though I could see nothing and did not know if they were sitting on the stone bench so recently vacated or on the ground with their knees drawn up.
“I know it’s you, baby. Stop hiding.”
I paused, allowed the cigarette to hang between my lips, and smiled at the sleepy quality in Fiona’s voice which meant more than that she was tired of running and that her feeling for the one-armed man was lapsing predictably but only momentarily into girlish grief. Fiona habitually imagined the death or departure of a potential lover within the first few hours of any unexpected passion. But generally such moodiness was short-lived.
“It’s me,” I called softly and laughed. “You know it is. How are the grapes?”
And then clear, sleepy, fading: “We’re going to sit up and watch the sunrise, baby. OK?”
“Great idea, Fiona. Great.”
I heard nothing more, no sighing, not even the solace of a deliberately noisy kiss, and I shook loose the skirts of the dressing gown, walked on. To me the sunset was always preferable to the sunrise, but there was no way I could help them back there in the arbor and of course Fiona was too good a woman, inside or outside of marriage, to brook any interference with her romantic views. It would have to be the sunrise then. But at least in a sense I had given her the secluded arbor, since apparently the lemon grove, like the night itself, was not enough.
“Is it you?”
“Of course it is.”
“I’m over here.”
The lantern was out but I had followed the sounds of the dog and in my absence she, my waiting partner, had forced open the rotten shutters so that now the same faint light that Fiona no doubt was noticing in the grapes was also turning my partner’s orderly white pajamas into a beckoning yet somehow modest concentration of mute phosphorescence. The old dog lay as before, still dreaming his way toward death, and still the villa was filled with the pleasing chaos of scattered children, scattered signs of temporary life. Carefully I nudged aside what appeared to be one of her husband’s shoes and half facing the head on the pillow, sat down slowly on the edge of the bed. Her eyes were turned toward mine, her legs were heavy, her arms were at her sides. With gentle fingers I discovered that in her nearest hand she was holding the stems of Fiona’s impulsive little gift of flowers.
“Was I long?”
“I didn’t mind waiting.”
Lifting my hand, leaning in her direction, knowing that she was as conscious as I was of my soft lips pressing together, parting and then pressing together again, slowly I slid up the bottom of her pajama jacket and exposed a few inches of her wide stomach and then withdrew my hand, leaving the soft broad belt of skin exposed. Her hardly audible vocal throb subsided, she did not move. I swung away and for a moment devoted precise fingers to the carefully tied laces of my tennis shoes.
“I wonder if they’re lying in bed together right now,” she whispered. “Like us.”
“Would it change anything?”
“It might explain what I’m doing here with you.”
“Do you think so?”
“No.”
I was standing barefooted beside the bed and untied the large bow I had made in the sash. “As a matter of fact,” I whispered, “they’re just sitting up to watch the sunrise. Is that better?”
“That makes it worse.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Seated once more on the edge of the bed and laughing: “I can give you clarity,” I whispered, “but not understanding.”
Only then did I remove my spectacles and for safekeeping put them inside my left tennis shoe beneath the edge of the bed.
“Don’t be prudish.”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t worry,” I whispered, “just relax.”
Eyes shut, mouth dissolving, oblivious to snoring dog and absent husband and little nearby unconscious witnesses but not to me, slowly she moved at last, waited, moved again. Her head had fallen to one side but she was listening to me, to all my voices, and watching me in the depths of her smothered eyes.
“Your shoulder’s cold,” I said, and covered it with a soothing hand. Murmuring, waiting, stroking her hair, smiling at the thought that her soft arms were hardly able to reach around my back and that her hands had not been able to preserve their desperate grip on my enormous tough rump — beyond all this I the white bull finally carried my now clamorous companion into a distant corner of the vast tapestry where only a little silvery spring lay waiting to restore virginity and quench thirst.
Later, and into my ear and softer, much softer than before: “I guess I wanted you all the time,” she whispered. “But I never thought we’d be in bed together.”
“Glad you were wrong?”
“Yes. I'm glad.”
The sunrise, as later I happened to see for myself, was brilliant.
STEADY WIND, HARD CLEAR LIGHT, THE FOUR OF US HOLDing hands on the rocks that faced the squat ominous remains of the fortress across the narrow crescent of dark water now harboring only four or five half-sunken wooden boats with high prows, broken oars, red chains. Moody, we were bound together by wind and light and hands. All eyes were on the ruined penitential structure just across the water that was apparently unchanged, unnourished by the sea crashing on three sides of us. All eyes were on the gutted shape of history, as if the clearly visible iron base and broken stones and streaks of lichen were portentous, related in some way to our own presently idyllic lives. But I for one was conscious of bodies, hands, squinting eyes, positions in line, was well aware that Fiona stood on my left and Catherine on my right and that Hugh was doomed forever to the extreme left and could never share my privilege of standing, so to speak, between two opposite and yet equally desirable women. Even on our promontory of sharp wet rocks it amused me to think that, thanks to Hugh, our sacred circle would remain forever metaphysical. Nothing more.
But what was he saying?
“That fort, boy … soon …”
“Good idea,” I shouted and, nodding my head up and down, again I was struck with the perception that he was black while I was gold. But a ruined fortress was not a safe place for a man like Hugh, and though I did not yet understand the basis for so much oblivious intensity, still I admired his courage and was beginning to share his eagerness to undertake the expedition to that unwholesome place of bone, charred wood, seaweed.
Suddenly I felt the pre-emptory childish tugging on my left hand and the cold lips against my ear. Fiona’s words seemed to lodge immediately and permanently in the still room of my brain.
“Do you know where we are, baby? Tell me quick.” Surprised at her sudden and atypical desperation, but laughing and aiming my mouth toward the hint of white cartilage buried like an arrow in the now violent cream- and sable-colored hair: “Sure,” I shouted, “we’re in Illyria. Like it?”
“I like you, baby. You.”
WAKING, WRINKLING MY NOSE, ROLLING OVER, I HEARD my hand slap accidently against my own thick mottled thigh and realized that despite our early agreement intended to safeguard children and husband alike, I had dozed off, so that now we were only a few hours from dawn. I was faced with precisely the situation we had thought it best to avoid. Slowly I climbed out of the bed and found the polka-dotted pajama bottoms and put them on, lit the lantern, yawned, made my way toward the cry that I had recognized as coming from the little tight-lipped mouth of Meredith. And then there was the battle of whispers, one side tormented, bitter, the other dismayed, calm as usual.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Your nose is bleeding.”
“It’s not.”
“Stop being a child.”
“I’m going to tell my father.”
“Let’s do something about this nosebleed.”
“He’ll probably kill you for coming here.”
“Hold still.”
Despite the eyes of the injured eaglet and her obvious efforts to escape the touch of my hand (cowering, hunching the thin white naked shoulders), she could no longer defend herself from my kindness because the blood was running into her mouth and down her little pointed chin. Her nostrils became dilated, the head drew back. But with the tip of Fiona’s pink sheet, which was already bloody between my fingers, slowly and carefully I wiped her face and pinched her nose until finally the gushing stopped and coagulation started. I cradled her damp head against my chest, waited, then by the light of the lantern satisfied myself that only a few dried streaks and stains now betrayed the lonely extravagance of Meredith’s nightmare bleeding.
“You can wash it all off in the morning,”I whispered. “Now go to sleep.”
In the immediate afterglow of the extinguished flame her face hung below me a moment like the small white mask of some sacrificial animal. But though the eyes were still fearful and unforgiving, the mouth, after all, was growing soft.
WE TURNED, STARTING UP THE HILL TOGETHER, CLIMBINGone of the high narrow twisting streets of the village without purpose, without destination, drawn upward together by the air, the light, the dusty steep grade of the little street, by the abrupt seasonal invasion of the wild flowers that had taken root, matured, bloomed all in a single night. The flowers lay in bright masses of wet color on walls, tiles, flat stones, or packed like some kind of floral mortar in cracks and fissures around slanting doorways and beneath crude window ledges. So the two of us were climbing together and admiring the flowers when suddenly the village street looped again and there above us, amidst priest and children and a crowd of barefoot men, stood the white boat.