The Blood Oranges

But I was resolute. I was sensible. I was silent. I let it pass. From where Hugh half lay, half sat in the darkness I heard the faint orchestrated sounds of the squeaking wicker, the dry fibrous sounds of Hugh’s suddenly uncontrollable agitation. He could not contain himself. He knew he was wrong. Even while waiting to laugh in my face he was already trying to eliminate the traces of black scum from the sound of his voice.

“How’s Catherine?”

“Feeling the way you do,” I said then, speaking more promptly and impersonally than I had intended, “you have no right to ask.”

“How is she, boy?”

“Let’s just hope Fiona doesn’t find out what you’ve done.”

“Your little visit was pretty short. What’s wrong?”

“You know what’s wrong.”

“She say anything? Or did she just throw you out as I told her to?”

“I got your message, Hugh, if that’s what you mean.”

“You got my message. Well, it must have been quite a shock.”

“Don’t you know what you’ve done?”

“I know you’ve been sucking two eggs at once, that’s what I know. But it’s over. It’s finished.”

“You haven’t felt this way before. Why now?”

“Slow, boy, slow. But I found out. You understand?”

“So tonight’s your night.”

“Planned the whole thing beforehand, boy. And you fell right into it. I guess you just walked right in there and told my wife to strip on down as usual and then found out there’s one easy way to stop that sort of thing. I made it pretty plain. The lid’s on the jar. It’s all over. You’ve been trying to get into my wife ever since that damn bus went off the road. And now you can’t.”

“Are you through?”

“For some men one woman’s not enough. Some men would suck all the eggs in sight, if they could. But you’re finished. From now on you’re going to stick to just one woman, understand?”

“Listen,” I said quietly, and stood up in the darkness of our trembling arbor, “Catherine and I have been having perfectly normal relations since the first night we sat right here together on this very bench. Normal, ordinary, uninterrupted relations,” I said, hands in pockets, head in the leaves, “from that first night until a few moments ago. Why should they end?”

“I’ve been waiting for this. Keep talking.”

“And now you decide to come on the scene. You make up your mind. You imagine the whole thing as if it began last night or the night before. You decide you’re jealous. You decide to interfere. But you can’t interfere and everything you say is wrong.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it. Not a damn thing.”

“When I’m through with you I’m going back to Catherine. I’m going to take that thing off her as gently as I can. I’ll try to undo the harm you’ve done.”

“So you won’t stop. You won’t leave her alone.”

“If Catherine doesn’t want me to stop, as you put it, why should I?”

“All right, sit down. Let’s have it out.”

“I don’t feel like sitting down.”

“Vomit, boy. Think I’m going to vomit …”

“After what you’ve done to Catherine, you might as well.”

“I can’t bear this business. Catherine can’t bear it either.”

“Wrong again.”

“She hates it, boy.”

“You’ve hurt Catherine. You’ve hurt me. You’ve hurt Fiona. Catherine just hates your jealousy. All of us do.”

“My villa. my bed … my wife … with the children in the next room … and you in the nude and crawling all over my marriage …”

“Listen,” I said then, tasting the night, feeling the dead sand beneath the soles of my tennis shoes, “there’s nothing wrong with your marriage, such as it is.”

Would he retch as he promised? Would invisible Hugh lean over the side of Fiona’s settee and retch on the sand? Hugh tightly buttoned into his pea jacket and filling our cold cavern with the smell of his vomit? Hugh gagging and appealing to me for help? Yes, I thought, I would have welcomed even this most disagreeable act of Hugh’s discomfort. But it was not to be, as I might have known, and even the passing threat of Hugh’s nausea was already gone. And yet his next whispered words were so constricted, so sour, that he might well have coughed up the acidic spume of his agony in one silent heave while I waited, listened, heard nothing at all.

“She took off her clothes. She lay on her back. She tongued you, boy. With Meredith lying there in the next room.”

“Meredith’s mind is like her father’s. It’s time she grew up.”

“Let me tell you something. You deserve that damn belt. Both of you …”

“All right,” I said, quietly, slowly, “on your feet.”

“At least it’s ingenious. You have to admit it’s pretty ingenious …”

“Hugh,” I said again, “stand up.”

“You think I’m afraid of last resorts? I thought the damn thing was going to come apart in my hands. But it didn’t. It fit, it worked. I found my own way to take care of the problem. And you can’t fight it …”

“For the last time, Hugh, on your feet.”

“I’m crafty, boy, crafty. And that damn belt’s a work of art …”

But behind Hugh’s desperate whispering I heard the squeal of wicker, the expelled breath of exertion, all the slow begrudging sounds of Hugh pulling himself out of the settee and uncoiling, rising, standing half erect and wary in the darkness of dead grapes and forgotten leaves. Feet apart, single hand held before his face and ready, head averted, and waiting, licking his lips, listening — there he stood, invisible and yet to me defined by all I knew about him and by every furtive sound he tried to conceal. But did Hugh know that I was blocking the entrance to the arbor? And was he even now expecting to join Fiona’s always reasonable husband in some unthinkable scuffle here on the sand) floor of this same arbor where all four of us had burned our candles and drunk our wine? Yes, I thought, even now he was perhaps attempting to feel out the direction of the first blow, his or mine. How like him to so mistake my tone How like him to assume that I, for one moment, would ever allow him to fall back on his lanky aggression. How like him to assume that my wedding ring could ever spli the chin of Catherine’s husband and the man Fiona loved

“Where are you, boy?”

“Right here, Hugh. Don’t worry.”

“Jockeying for position, is that it?”

“I haven’t moved.”

“Well, here I am. What next?”

“If Catherine and Fiona could see us now,” I murmured, taking a step, pausing at the sudden eruption of defensive shuffling sounds in the sand, “what would they think? How would they feel?”

“Maybe I ought to go off. I’ll leave. I’ll let you have her. Is that what you want? Maybe I’ll just go off with the dawn and be done with it. You don’t mind if I take the dog and just disappear — do you, boy?”

“Fiona would mind.”

“Fiona?”

“Do you want to hurt her even more than you have?”

“She’ll forget me, she’ll be all right …”

“Listen,” I said then and shifted, heard Hugh bumping against the settee and angling off toward the other end of the arbor, “Fiona is not perfect. She’s made mistakes. She’s been accused before of husband-stealing. Wrongly, of course, but accused nonetheless.”

“Don’t say it, boy.”

“And do you think Fiona approves of everything I do? Well, she doesn’t. We’ve had our differences. If she knew how you really feel about Catherine and me, and if she thought you were right and I was to blame for the way you feel, Fiona would be the first to take your side. In that case there would be no argument. If Fiona told me to give Catherine up, I would give her up.”

“You’re to blame. By God, you’re to blame …”

“Fiona’s judicious. If you put it to Fiona, she would tell you immediately that without malice and without superiority I’m not to blame. She would say that since Catherine is not using me to revenge herself on you, and since I am not having sex with Catherine for malicious ends of my own, then your defeat, chagrin, antagonism — whatever you feel — is your responsibility, not mine.”

“Anguish. Just anguish. The point of the pike in the scrotum …”

“You need a little reassurance, Hugh. That’s all.”

“Take my wife and give me reassurance … But it’s no good, boy, no good.”

“Hugh,” I said and moved another few steps, “let me tick off the possibilities. OK?”

“There’s nothing you can say. Nothing.”

“First of all, if you insisted on having Fiona to yourself, at least for a while, she would agree. She wouldn’t like it, but she would be willing to go against her better judgment, if you insisted. And Catherine would understand. And so would I, despite the inconvenience and despite the fact that Catherine and I have already decided against that kind of indulgence for ourselves. That’s how it would be. It could happen, but it won’t. We both know it won’t.”

“Don’t suggest it, boy. My God …”

“Or suppose you were sentimental enough to disappear, as you put it. In that case you’d be deserting Catherine, the children would suffer, Fiona would send me off to bring you back. This isn’t going to happen either.”

“So I don’t count. Don’t count at all.”

“Or suppose we just continue on as we are, and Fiona’s right about the two of you. If it turns out she’s made a real mistake in you, she’ll get along. No one is more self-reliant than Fiona.”

“I know that, boy.”

“But if I changed my mind, if I told Catherine you’re hopelessly stubborn, vindictive and all the rest of it, and that from now on she and I wouldn’t be having any more little sex-songs, not even once in a while — what then?”

“She’ll thank you. So will I.”

“Think what would happen,” I said quietly. “Catherine would never trust either one of us again. She would never forgive you. She would never forgive me. I’d never hear the end of it from Fiona. You’d never know when Catherine and I might let go of ourselves and start the whole thing over again. Catherine would never forget what you did to her tonight. Your own sex life would be destroyed. Fiona wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of you. Our wives would brood. You and I would always be embarrassed. We wouldn’t be able to explain ourselves. We wouldn’t be able to clear the air. You wouldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t sleep. The children wouldn’t understand our silence. How long could it last? But why? All because of a few words from you? Just because you can’t condone a little extra sweetness between Catherine and me?”

“You’ve got your manhood … Let me have mine …”

“It’s one thing to deny Fiona. Fiona is strong. But it’s something else again to try to tether your own wife the first time her natural instincts reach out to another man. Your rancid feelings are an affront to her harmless awakening. Do you think I’d ever treat Fiona the way you’re treating Catherine? Don’t you understand that Catherine won’t be able to forgive what you did tonight unless I’m able to persuade her to? Can’t you see that it will take the two of us, and Fiona as well? You need me. You need Fiona. But even if you had your own way, do you think it would help? Do you think you’d be able to forget the past? Catherine’s body, my body, as you imagine them? What you think you hate, already exists — in two forms, yours and mine. If I swore off Catherine, your idea of what we’ve done together would go on snagging your inventiveness forever. So what good would it do? Your only hope is to understand at least something of my version of what’s been happening. And if you can accept the past, and I think you can, then you won’t have any reason to destroy the present.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking, boy. You couldn’t.”

“Besides,” I said slowly, “I’m not going to let you destroy it.”

Within arm’s length of each other? Trapped at last? Hugh listening to reason? Wiping wet beard and wet head of hair with the back of his hand? The empty bench, the empty settee, the darkness in which we faced each other, the sand like powdered bone, the clusters of invisible and uneaten grapes, the nearby sea, the silent villas, our two wives waiting for something or nothing out there in the night — standing quietly in front of Hugh I was aware of it all and of how little I was asking and how much it meant Catherine accepting a few roses, Fiona smiling, Hugh rid of his unhappy load, I spared any further need to talk us out of our blue moods and free, disinterested, enjoying myself — why not? Why shouldn’t it be? But Hugh was no longer dodging me and gulping air. Hugh was as close to me as I was to him. Perhaps there was already no further need to talk.

“If you think I don’t know what you’re feeling,” I said, “you’re wrong.”

“Don’t touch me. Keep your hands to yourself.”

“Of course Fiona can be hurt like anyone else.”

“What does Catherine sec in you anyway?”

“What’s Fiona see in you?”

“I’m not worth it, boy. Not worth it.”

“Fiona feels otherwise, that’s all.”

“Maybe I’m too damn idealistic. What do you think?”

“Fiona’s idealistic. She’s just as idealistic as you are. That’s why this impasse of yours is so unfortunate.”

“I’m losing out all around, don’t you see?”

“Fiona’s idealism isn’t prohibitive. It’s receptive. It doesn’t preclude sexual affection. It starts with it. That’s the difference. Everything she feels for you is genuine. She has a lot more to regret than you do.”

“I’ve deprived myself of the wife of a man who’s already taken mine. That’s plenty to regret. Plenty.”

“Shout if you want to. But stop hissing at me, Hugh. You don’t need to hiss.”

“Your lust is fulfilled. My lust isn’t. And between your lust and mine I’m going up in smoke, burning away.”

“You don’t feel any lust for Fiona. The idea’s ridiculous.”

“How do you know what I feel, boy? How?”

“I’ve seen the way you look at her. I’ve heard you laugh. I’ve seen her hand on your knee. I’ve seen your exhilaration. You’ve been pretty good to Fiona, as far as you’ve gone.”

“She’s on my mind. You and Catherine are on my mind.”

“Anyway, I have never experienced simple lust. You haven’t either. But of course there’s nothing wrong with lust if there’s nothing else. Fiona has known a few purely lustful men. But you’re not one of them, Hugh. Believe me. As a matter of fact, if it turned out you were, she might be pleased. But you don’t even feel any real lust for your peasant nudes.”

“Listen, you’re trying to force me into your bed so you can stay in mine.”

“If you manage to benefit from this discussion,” I said slowly, “the four of us will be better off. I won’t deny it. On the other hand, if you don’t learn anything from this talk of ours, if you can’t free yourself from these crippling fantasies, naturally your dissatisfaction is going to rub off on the rest of us. I won’t deny that either. Your clenched teeth would spoil anybody’s idyls. Darkness can come to Illyria. It’s possible. But even so, Catherine and I will continue to meet alone together just as frequently as we’ve been meeting until now. We will continue because of the clear emotional basis of our relationship. We will not stop because of the reasons I’ve already given you. Harmony is something all four of us can enjoy. I’d like to see Fiona happy. But that’s your affair. Catherine’s fondness for me is mine. It can’t be changed.”

“There’s always the belt. There’s always that damn chastity belt …”

“Yes,” I said slowly, “the belt.”

We swayed, we tottered. I released Hugh’s shoulders, I heard Hugh sink to my vacated place on the stone bench. And was it finished? Were we done? But to what end? Was Hugh relieved or only more silently inflamed than ever? Was Hugh’s poison draining or collecting? Who could tell?

With my usual care I fished for a cigarette, produced a flame, inhaled. And by the light of that little momentary point of flame I saw that Hugh’s seated figure was bent and slack but that his thin and stony face was turned up to mine. In the next instant it had disappeared, but not before I noted the expression on Hugh’s face, noted the upper teeth clamped over the lower lip and embedded in the blackness of the pointed beard. The flame died, the face disappeared.

“Listen,” I said, “anything you want me to say to Catherine?”

I waited. The cigarette hung down and glowed. In the darkness I heard Hugh’s breathing which had become no more than the timeless drift of air in and out of a small orifice cut in stone.

“It’s easy,” I murmured. “Give it a chance.”

I turned, withdrew deliberately from my dark and silent arbor where Hugh now sat alone repeating my arguments, pondering my advice. There was a sweetness on the night air that engulfed my cologne, Hugh was behind me, I had done my best for the four of us. After all, if dawn did not find Hugh with his head in Fiona’s lap or Fiona dozing with book and terry-cloth robe discarded and Hugh at her side, if dawn brought no harmony for the four of us to share, at least none of it would be my fault. I had done my best.

Dawn would tell. And already the seeds of dawn were planted in the night’s thigh. For a moment I thought of diverting my single-minded intention from Catherine to Fiona, for a moment considered changing my direction and looking in on Fiona who even now was no doubt lying amidst the little illusionary halos of her thin candles and concentrating on the book in her hands. But no, I told myself, it would be better to return to Fiona after rather than before the whole thing was settled, better for me to let Fiona wait and leave Hugh on his own and trust to the dawn. My place was with Catherine — for her sake and mine. Clarity had never been more essential. My next step was clear.

“Well, I’m back.”

“Where have you been?”

“With Hugh.”

“He hates the whole thing.”

“I talked with him. It’s not so bad.”

“We can’t go on.”

“Hugh’s coming around. He’s probably with Fiona right now.”

“Whatever he does, it’s over between you and me.”

“Listen,” I said slowly, “I told Hugh I’d never give you up. What you and I have together hasn’t changed.”

“We can’t have any more … sex. But we don’t need it, do we?”

“Of course we need it.”

“I’ve hurt Hugh as much as he’s hurt me. I can’t face it any longer.”

“You can forgive him for what he did tonight. So can I.”

“It’s over. That’s all I can say.”

“You know why I talked with Hugh. You know why I’m here.”

“Don’t touch me. Don’t ask me to move.”

“Catherine, I want you to stand up.”

“Hugh made me put it on. He’ll have to tell me to take it off.”

“I’m speaking for Hugh. For his good and yours and mine. Now stand up, Catherine. You’ll feel better.”

Had I persuaded Hugh only to lose Catherine? Was what Hugh had said about losing out all around now going to apply not to him but to me? Because I realized that never had it occurred to me that Hugh’s influence over Catherine might be as strong as mine, and now I could only admit my error since Catherine’s tone was suddenly Fiona’s tone and Catherine’s argument was Hugh’s. Apparently all the time I had been grappling with Hugh in the arbor Catherine had been aligning herself with her missing husband in this very room. Not from the start had Catherine ever pushed my hand away or allowed any thoughts of Hugh to come swimming into the picture of our nights together. Or not for long. Not seriously. And now? Was this the case?

Once again I removed my golden spectacles and deposited them in their usual place of safekeeping beneath the bed. Again I untied the silken sash and removed my decorous old dressing gown and shook it loose, draped it carefully across the front of the bed. Pajama top followed dressing gown, my chest was bare. I smelled the scent of the night dust and felt the warmth of the coming dawn already flowing in the walls around us and in the silent ranked overlapping tiles above our heads. Dry armpits, expansive chest, lingering acrid taste of the cigarette in my moistened mouth — here I stood, a mental and muscular presence prepared for love. Only this silent woman’s aging but youthful lover composed and half undressed and ready once again for love.

“Catherine,” I said in my clear low voice, “give me your hand.”

I groped for Catherine’s hand in the dark. And when at last I took hold of it, I understood all too well the limp fingers and unresponsive hand. I had expected no abrupt change of mind, no suddenly fierce grip. I understood her desire to be rid of the belt but also her reluctance to expose herself to the shame of it — even for me. No woman was less deserving of such abuse than Catherine, no woman less able to throw it off.

Yet I persisted and helped her up until she was on her feet and accepting if not returning my long embrace. I held her, again I smelled the faint smell of Catherine’s hair turning gray at the roots, I understood only too well the power of that invisible garment which was as ephemeral as Fiona’s panties but as forbidding as the cold fortress from which it had come. Bent as I was on removing that impediment to love, was I already the accomplice of he who had forced Catherine to put it on? Slowly and carefully I unbuttoned the phosphorescent top of Catherine’s pajamas.

“Now stand still a minute.”

Carefully and without urgency I pulled the tie-string of her pajamas and then sat down on the edge of the bed with my knees apart and Catherine rising tall and soft and passive between my spread knees. No emotionalism, I thought, no talking, no drama — only the open pajama jacket, the tie-string hanging loose, the pajama pants opened in front. The end of Hugh’s violence was only this brief and matter-of-fact procedure smoldering, so to speak, with eroticism.

“Stand still,” I whispered again. “Be patient. Trust me.”

There in Catherine’s room and seated on the edge of her bed in the heart of the night, aware of our breathing, our presence together, and smelling the bed linen which only yesterday or the day before I had helped Catherine hang on the line with Hugh’s wet sailor pants and Meredith’s sadly modest swimming suit, and conscious of myself as the quiet full-bodied lover who had made Catherine move a little more quickly through all this displaced banality, and conscious of the secreted dead remnant of Hugh’s hostility and of the fact that I had not touched my mouth to Catherine’s mouth all night — slowly I raised my hands, seized Catherine’s hips, inserted thick but tender fingers between the skin of her hips and the waistband of her pajama pants and drew them down until somewhere below the knees they fell of their own accord and dropped in a soft and useless heap around Catherine’s feet. But Hugh’s accomplice? Yes, I was Hugh’s accomplice. In all my strength and weight I was not so very different from Hugh after all. Because as soon as I pressed thumbs and fingers against the thin pitted surface of the iron band circling Catherine’s waist, I realized that Hugh’s despairing use of that iron belt must have occasioned a moment more genuinely erotic than any he had known with Catherine, with his nudes, or in his dreams of Fiona.

“But, Catherine, it’s tight, so unbearably tight …”

Now with my two arms around Catherine’s waist, and leaning forward so that my cheek was within inches of her bare stomach, slowly and deftly I gave that little brutal and rusted clasp the single expert twist that was all it took to pick the lock of Love and unfasten the belt. The belt came free, I peeled away the iron, I drew the short barbarous tongue from between Catherine’s legs. And now what on Catherine’s body had been Hugh’s chastity belt alive with tension and cruelly snug, in my two hands was only a pathetic dangling contraption withered and faintly rattling.

“Well,” I whispered, “do you still want me to go? It’s up to you.”

As if there had been no belt, no doubts, no problem, no anguished Hugh, no reason at all for hesitation, Catherine merely stirred herself within the limits of my embrace and took off her already unbuttoned pajama jacket and stepped out of the soft phosphorescent heap of her pajama pants and with one foot pushed them aside.

“Kiss me, Cyril … kiss me …”

Together we moved, together we sank down at last on that lumpy and earthen-smelling mattress until in time the fish began to flow, the birds to fly, the twin heavenly nudes of Love to approach through the night.

Would it stop? Would it ever stop? Catherine could not expel her breath forever, my emissions were limited in length and frequency. We could not go on. True radiance could only end in the dark. Then why was the tempest still exploring the storm? Why was I still bulging from head to foot? Why was Catherine still holding her breath, why hugging my buttocks more tightly than ever, why biting her own lower lip? Would it never end?

But of course at this very moment I found myself becoming aware of change, heard Catherine sigh, felt her two hands sliding away, knew that on either side of me her two feet were again flat on the bed, felt my shoulders sagging and knew with deep pleasurable regret that suddenly the naked twins of our invented constellation were gone. The bed was still.

“Listen,” I said at last, “remember that evening we saw the nightingale?”

“You’re so good to me … You’re so good to us all …”

“Or that time I spitted the lamb on the beach?”

“I love to hear your voice in the dark …”

“Tomorrow I guess we’ll have to get Hugh into the water.”

Later, much later, I awoke to the silence and bright light of the sun-filled room and sat up on the edge of the bed. I stood. I took my usual count of bottomless breaths of morning air. Smiling down at Catherine I decided to carry the pajamas but wear the old dressing gown. And then with chastity belt in hand and laces tied, eyeglasses adjusted, sash in place, pajamas carefully folded over my right arm, I left.

I paused in the open doorway of Hugh’s villa. I paused on our side of the funeral cypresses. I paused in the arbor which was empty. I found a safe hiding place for the belt. I took a few more long breaths of the sun. All of Illyria was a chalky and yet verdant landscape drenched in champagne.

Within a half dozen paces of our narrow doorway framed in vines I found myself smiling into the gray-green steady eyes of my waiting wife. There stood Fiona in that doorway of white mortar and sprightly vines, Fiona wide-awake and up and around like me. I did not move, I drank her in, she watched me with familiar pleasure. Over her right arm she carried her folded terry-cloth robe, and except for the loosely folded robe was naked. How alike we were, I thought, knowing that for the moment at least neither one of us would speak and that Fiona was reading, as it were, the pajamas on my arm exactly as I was reading the robe on hers. Our two separate but similar nights were evident in our appearances, each of us was perfectly aware of the other’s thoughts. I was exhausted but as fresh as ever, she was tired but tense. She knew that I had enjoyed my night hours, I knew that she could not possibly look the way she looked if she had spent those same hours alone. Her bright eyes, her obviously sore muscles, the somehow roughened texture of her hard and slender body — what else could they mean?

“Baby,” she whispered, “come inside …”

I let fall the pajamas just as Fiona dropped her robe, quickly I seized Fiona’s proffered hand and followed her through our vine-beribboned doorway and down the cool corridor to the room that was ours. Her slim bare feet were light on the stone, her trim buttocks were filled with purpose. Hand in hand and thigh to thigh we stood in the entrance to our sun-drenched eonnubial room.

“Baby,” she whispered, “isn’t he beautiful?”

I brushed thick lips against her tight cheek, I stared down at Fiona’s prize. What else could I do? Of course I had expected an empty bed, of course I wanted to hone the bones of our love. Even with her eyes on the naked man in our bed, Fiona was maneuvering our two hands so that the back of hers was caressing the shiny source of my song. But it was hopeless. It was out of the question. And yet wasn’t this precisely what we wanted? This sight of Hugh coiled up like a naked spring and covered with the lip-marks of Fiona’s kisses? Right now he was preventing Fiona and me from enjoying our version of what he and Fiona had so recently enjoyed. But at the same time he had proven my theories, completed Love’s natural structure, justified Catherine’s instincts, made Fiona happy when she had given up all her hopes for happiness. What more could I ask?

“Cyril …?”

“Fiona …?”

“I want you, baby. I want you now.”

“We love each other. Agreed?”

“But he’s going to wake up any minute and I have to be here. I love him very much. I really do.”

“There’s always tonight.”

“We’ll just have to see. OK?”

“Listen,” I murmured, and kissed her cheek, “he can’t catch up. But God knows we’ll let him try …”

She gave me one quick glance, I smiled, she turned in girlish haste to the bed while I retreated down the corridor to the bright morning which in unaccountable silence was rushing faster than ever along the path of the sun.

Later, much later, though before the hour of noon, the four of us met again for a new first time at Fiona’s small rickety breakfast table set up in the arbor, Hugh and Fiona emerging from the narrow doorway framed in vines at the very moment that Catherine and I made our entrance through the wall of cypresses. Hugh and Fiona came out shoulder to shoulder and with their hands full of Fiona’s crockery, Catherine and I stepped forward with our arms about each other’s waists. Yes, openly and freshly we came together in the arbor which was sweet and shaded and bursting with hymeneal grapes, a quiet and appropriate place for our reunion. Catherine was wearing her white pajamas, I had all the clothing I needed or wanted in my comfortable old blood-colored dressing gown, Hugh had borrowed my red-and-white striped cotton shirt which he wore extravagantly and unashamedly with his own long gray undershorts. Fiona topped us all in one of her nearly mid-hip pale green transparent nighties. Yes, frankly, happily we sat around the perfect square of that small rickety table piled high with Fiona’s morning fare, sat smiling and eating and touching bare feet beneath the table. Catherine sighed and licked her fingers, Hugh coughed and put his hand on Fiona’s arm, Fiona shivered and caught my eye and stared at my bland contented features with a limpid smiling intensity she rarely displayed. Never had she looked more the faun, more the woman. Never had I loved her more or valued quite so highly this special hovering shyness now felt by us all. But the food, wasn’t there also something special about the food? Of course there was. How like Fiona on this morning of mornings to select from the garden of her imagination only those items which, according to superstition, were aphrodisiac. Just like Fiona to fuse in one stroke her feminine wisdom and my sensible view of sex.

“Well,” I said, lifting high my glass of cold white wine, “let’s drink to us.”

“To us, baby. To us …”

“HE’S NOT THERE.”

“What?”

“I mean it, baby. He’s gone.”

“Catherine too?”

“She’s still asleep. But he’s not with her. He’s gone. He’s just not there.”

“Well, look around. He can’t be far.”

“I’ve looked for him already. Everywhere. Something’s wrong.”

“Why don’t you come on back to bed awhile. OK?”

“All right, baby. I’ll go alone.”

So before I could pull on my frayed white ducks and reach for my old white woolen sweater (no time to search for underpants or shirt, no time for shoes), Fiona had already given me her quick hard sign of disapproval and summoned all her usual self-reliance and walked out of our room, disappeared into that loud dawn wind that almost never blew but was blowing now. Hard-faced, hair untended, barefooted, wearing her crumpled but sporty mid-thigh trench coat open over a short white modest sleeping gown, skin and eyes still bearing the marks of a recent dream — in all her fleeting vividness she too was gone, as if she had not roused me by my naked shoulder, had not stood over me and spoken, had not given me a glimpse of what I took to be undue agitation, had not brought me this latest and, I thought, trivial news of Hugh.

First from our darkened room. First to abandon without a qualm our bed. First to find Hugh missing and not merely absent from Catherine’s side at the outset of the very day we planned to row the children to the chapel on our little nearby island. First to dart like a golden arrow into the clear and pointless energy of the high wind. That was Fiona, my all but clairvoyant wife, who now, I saw, was once more rushing out of sight through a rift in the wind-blown frieze of cypresses. But I was not far behind her, sleep-ridden and heavy and half dressed, and though I did not catch up with her until she stopped for a moment amidst the first chalky stones of that dead village.

“Don’t worry,” I shouted through cupped hands, “we’ll find him, wherever he is …”

For an instant longer I stood there squinting, rubbing my sleep-filled belly, fighting the wind, staring at the invisible spot where the trees and my wind-tossed wife had merged. Why wind? Where was it coming from? How could it blow with so much power and yet no direction? I swayed, I listened, I shaded my eyes, knowing that Catherine was indeed asleep and that Fiona’s haste was justified but futile and that the light itself had turned to wind or that the wind had somehow assumed the properties of the dawn light. We would make no joyous expedition to the island chapel, that much I knew. But if Catherine was still sleeping, at least her children were pathetically and ironically awake. Because with my first deliberate step in pursuit of Fiona, hands in pocket and breath hard won, I heard their piping cries high on the wind — or thought I did. And what were they trying to tell me, those senseless cries, if not the worst?

There was no reason to hurry, no time to lose. Behind me I left the twin villas now equally desolate, though one was occupied and one was not. Ahead of me lay the white sea and the narrow beach heaped up with the ominous splendor of all those uncountable spears of light and drowned in the silent velocity of the wind’s voice. Instinctively I turned left toward the village, I who was never a partisan to disaster now preparing in full consciousness to share with Fiona all the simple practicalities of pure disaster. My feet did not bleed on those sharp rocks, I did not run. But I knew what was coming and moved forward quickly enough to be of what help I could to Fiona.

“Wait,” I shouted, catching sight of her and waving, “you can’t do him any good alone …”

Did she hear me? Did she read my lips or take into account the meaning of my upraised hand? Was she standing there restrained in flight against that white wall out of need for me, out of concern for me, or only to collect her amazing energies and indulge herself in one moment of distraction for the sake of her fear, her plan, her determination? I approached, she waited, I saw the skirts of the tan coat beaten flat to the wall and the white gown beaten between her thighs. There in the driving light and silent wind at the entrance to the village, she might have given me the briefest smile of welcome, recognition, affection. But she did not.

“Fiona,” I said clearly and gently, “I’m not to blame …”

“I’m not blaming you, baby. How could I?”

And then she jerked away her perfect shoulder, jerked away the features of her face baked hard in seriousness, took back the fragment of attention she had given me, turned and ran off abruptly toward the center of the village. And now I ran. Yes, I kept pace with Fiona below roofs of fungus-green or rouge-red tiles and past rows of crooked and tightly shuttered windows. We smelled the fetid smell of the black canal. The wind glazed the chunky white façade of the squat church. At least there were no short and robust leather-suited figures to point to our bare feet and curious attire and to shout croak peonie or crespi fagag in the wake of our progress up that village street.

“Listen,” I said, “why don’t you wait down here? I think you should.”

Had she forgotten her many visits to that room above? Had she forgotten my own brief visit or two? Had she forfotten the rusty hinges, the knotholes, the formidable latch, the oddly polished surface of that rough wood? Was she oblivious to the significance of a closed door? But none of it meant anything to Fiona, who without listening or even hesitating merely used her shoulder against the sagging street-level wooden door and with one blow knocked it ajar.

I followed her into that brutal darkness. I was right behind her as she climbed. She stumbled, I heard her breath come back to me in short unhappy gasps. It was cold in the stair well, but we were safe at last from the wind.

“Hugh? I’m here, baby, I’m here …”

Yes, she was there. And I was there. And Hugh was hanging in the corner. Fiona, not I, yanked open that second and final low door of wide wooden planks. Fiona, not I, ran forward immediately into the filtered gray light of that small sloping barren room and initiated Hugh’s abortive rescue, with both arms embraced his naked waist and attempted to raise him up and relieve the tension of the rope on his neck. We arrived together, entered that little cold sloping room together, faced together the stark and unavoidable sight of Hugh’s nude body hanging amidst all his photographs in the corner nearest the inevitably shuttered window on the canal side of the room. Yes, Fiona and I were competitors for Hugh’s life from the first moment we intruded upon the scene both of his art, as he called it, and his death. And I too was active, except that I saw in a glance that the rope was much too thick and much too tight for Fiona’s courageous efforts, no matter how sensible they were on the surface, and understood at once what Fiona in all her intensity and devotion could not perceive— that our only hope was to cut him down immediately. So rather than join her in the corner, where now she was making soft agonized sounds of comfort, I turned instead to Hugh’s enormous homemade worktable and with a single heave cleared it of pans, traps, labyrinthine pieces of equipment, glass-stoppered bottles. Quickly I dragged it into position beneath the great rusted hook which, like a beckoning iron finger, held the end of the rope. And noting the open eyes, the smile on the open mouth, the sweat still fresh on his pitted brow, the glossy photograph clenched in his good hand, the white feet side by side and suspended only a few inches from the floor, quickly I stood on the table and freed the rope and helped Fiona lower him gently, swiftly, to the bare floor that was now Hugh’s crude temporary bier. We needed light, so in passing I smashed my elbow through the frail slats of those rotted shutters which Hugh in his love of darkness always kept closed. And when I withdrew my elbow and turned, still heavily in motion and using up no time, no time at all, I saw that that sudden long splintered shaft of light was falling directly on Hugh’s face and on Fiona’s swift hands already reaching for the rope at his throat.

Together we knelt at either shoulder, Fiona and I, together and in silence did all we could. But Fiona’s fingers, not mine, broke the spell of the noose, though I raised Hugh’s head so that Fiona was able to remove forever the hairy loop of that rope which was thicker than my two thumbs. And Fiona, not me, attempted without respite to blow life into that strangled man. Her face was low, her left hand was pillowing the back of Hugh’s head, her right hand was lightly braced against his chest, she was trying to breathe both for herself and Hugh. But here? Now? This confined space? These thick walls? This cell so bleak and at the same time so lurid? This broken light? This wreckage? This white body stretching as if from one end of the room to the other and welted with thin tendons that would never again relax? Was it possible? Was this the same Hugh who had danced one night for his children and taken his pictures and smiled at Fiona and carried Catherine into Illyria and thanked me solemnly for the song of the nightingale? Could even Hugh have made this miscalculation and closed all our doors? Fiona was not a woman to waste herself, or to expect senseless occurrences to make sense, or to blind herself to what she did not wish to know or punish herself for what she could not have. She was hardly a woman to display grief or to attempt to restore what had already been destroyed. But for once Fiona, still kneeling at what she knew full well was not even a final kiss, was behaving out of character, and I was glad. Until she spoke, which in the next instant she did, and even when she spoke, obviously Fiona was grieving, remembering, flying once more down the whole long road of eccentricity with Hugh. Before she pulled her mouth from his, before she sat back on her heels and looked at me, before she could notice what I was doing, quickly I plucked that cracked and shiny photograph from Hugh’s rigid grasp and thrust it from sight.

“It’s no good, baby. He’s dead.”

“At least it was an accident. At least he wasn’t trying to kill himself …”

“For God’s sake, I understand.”

“It was bound to happen. If not now then later.”

“Listen, baby, I’m going to Catherine. You can do the rest.”

“AND VIRGINITY? THE ADOLESCENCE OF THE VIRGIN? THE stiff pictographic story of downcast eyes, clear water, empty hands, light the color of cut wheat? Is all this mere chaff in the wind of the practical lover? Mere fading sickness of men like Hugh? Unreal? Perhaps. But sex-singing is hardly possible without the presence of the frail yet indestructible little two- or three-note theme of innocence, and though I am anything but insensitive to boring technicalities and dangerous by-products (religious inventions, martyrs amputating their own breasts with stolen swords, and so forth), nonetheless I have always defended the idea if not the fact of purity and have always felt warmly inclined toward the sight of narrow beds and young girls carrying clay pots to massive fountains. Fiona understood what I meant Did Catherine? Does she now? After all, there was a time when all our days were only memories of hours that had not yet passed and each one of us was in some way virginal. Lounging on all that remains of Fiona’s old settee, I wonder if I could put the adolescence of the Virgin into words for Catherine. In the twilight should I lead her back again to the chapel of the wooden arm and let her look for herself? Tomorrow, I tell myself, smiling through my own thick smoke, or the day after.

But virginal? Four large virginal human beings? The suggestion is not that I myself ever experienced the slightest preference for virginal over nonvirginal girls or women. The suggestion is not that my wife or Hugh’s could ever suffer significantly by comparison with the young and half-naked shepherdess chasing across the sunburnt field after her shaggy goats. No, one body does not diminish beneath another, there is no amorous oil to lose, the woman bathing in her blue pool renews not her flesh but her readiness.

Yet even now I see once more the adolescence of the Virgin herself, those few still scenes discovered only toward the end of our idyl and in that very chapel where Catherine collapsed in grief on those cold stones.

Look up there, Fiona. Proof enough?

Sketches. Only a half dozen or so crude sketches of innocence joining the thick wall to the vaulted darkness, small panels of hazy paint invisible except when, once a day and thanks to some cosmic situation and the faulty construction of the squat church, the sun at last becomes a thin blade that slips beneath each of my brief glimpses of the Virgin and for a moment illuminates the three hooded attendants and their rigid and yet somehow submissive charge.

At first glance the wordless story is simply barren, undecipherable, says nothing. And yet to the patient viewer the colors begin to speak, the plaster glows. That yellow stroke? Her gown. And the purple pear? A vessel filled to the lip with water undoubtedly. As for the large dark object held with apparent effort by the attendant bound and hooded in the ocher-colored robe, it is a hairbrush, obviously, though the yellow figure of our young Virgin has no hair while the brush itself resembles nothing so much as a crude, gigantic iron key for a medieval lock. But the color is the important thing, the yellow that dominates each scene— now blond, now sandalwood, now gold, now the yellow that flows in cream, now the color carried in the furry sacs of unmoving bees. The skin of the tree is yellow, the stiff gown is yellow, the bare feet, one of which is missing in the third frame, are pale variants of the small female lemons that once hung from a white branch but now hang from nothing. Is it the color of truth and adolescence? The color of youth removed from the context of age? Simply the color of innocence? The Virgin hue? I suppose it is. And so one figure supports the shoulders and one holds the feet while the yellow but now horizontal girl remains as stiff as ever: she is rising. But the third attendant, ocher-colored, robed and hooded, is sitting on the end of the bed with his wide back to the day’s first event. Or the Virgin stands upright and faceless in a large receptacle of ancient wood: she bathes. But nonetheless she is still clothed in the yellow gown, no water flows from what must have once been a bucket tilted above her head. Or among leafless trees she walks with hands held as if for some illuminated book: she prays. Yet trees, book, attendants are now invisible. And in this frame our yellow Virgin has suffered the same decay as the surrounding plaster and is all but gone.

Yellow was Fiona’s favorite color. I have seen Hugh’s narrow eyes downcast in the midst of his craving. Catherine’s face did not betray her longing. Even at night the four of us walked in that light the color of cut wheat.

THE SUN CASTS ORANGE DISCS ON THE SEA, OUR NIGHTS ARE cool. From three adjacent wooden pegs on my white wall hang a dried-out flower crown, a large and sagging pair of shorts, the iron belt — and is it any coincidence that all my relics are circular? Who can tell? Everything coheres, moves forward. I listen for footsteps.

In Illyria there are no seasons.