They neared the top and were faced with a barbed-wire fence on which red rags were hanging.
“Danger, no trespassing,” she said.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go on,” he said. “It might be dangerous up there.”
“It looks all right to me. Come on.”
“It might be against the law or something.”
But she had stepped past him over the fence, leaving him no choice. She ran up the path and flung herself prone on the sand at the top with the pale sea wheat blowing around her. She saw his shoes beside her, the foolish suede shoes coated with sand.
“I feel like a spy,” she said, cupping her hands over her eyes like binoculars. “I can see everything from here.”
The whole blue semicircle of the bay with its tan shoreline was visible, broken only by the cheerful angularity of the hotel. Behind them the village was jumbled and colorful like a postcard. She could see the fishermen’s shacks and a woman by one of them hanging out washing on the line. On the shore she saw the fountaining sea gulls and the table where the fishermen were still working. She rolled over on her back and looked straight up into the heart of the sky.
“This is pretty,” Fred said. “I ought to be able to get some fine shots from here.”
She nestled her head close to his feet and looked up at him, a towering triangle against the sky, his head cocked to sight the camera. She ran her hand along his leg.
“Hey!” he said. “You’ll ruin the focus.”
She sat up, hugging her knees, and watched him finish taking pictures. He put the camera carefully in its leather case and sat down beside her, facing her.
“What would you do,” Anne said, “if I took the camera and threw it into the bay?”
“I don’t know what I’d do,” he said. “I’d be pretty mad I guess.”
“Let’s see.”
She snatched the camera and started to crawl toward the edge of the cliff. He jumped after her, seizing her arm, but she tore free and he had a wrestle with her. They rolled in the sand and he tried to get the camera from her hands. She felt the animal strength of her body surge in response to his. His hands gripped hard on her shoulders, forcing her down and she twisted and tried to bite his arms, but his weight slowly forced her flat on her back. He put his knees on her shoulders to hold her down. He was wide-eyed, panting into her face and she saw the sweat glistening on his cheeks. His breath was warm in her face and she thought she could gasp suddenly and swallow up all the breath in his lungs as they said cats could do when you were asleep. When you were a little girl asleep. Remembering it, she laughed.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Are you crazy? We could have rolled off of here and been killed. What the hell is so funny?”
“You’re so funny,” she said. “I bet you haven’t ever wrestled with a girl before.”
He smiled. “No,” he said, “I don’t make a habit of it.”
She felt the weight of his knees on her shoulders cutting harshly, but she didn’t care, she felt relaxed, as if she were floating.
“Do you give up?”
She nodded.
“Give me the camera.”
“Make me.”
He gripped her wrist, bending it back, forcing the camera out of her hands. She spat at him.
“That’s not fair,” he said.
“Do you want to know a secret?” she said. “When we got up this morning, I dressed in such a hurry that I forgot to put on my underwear. Did you notice?”
“What?”
“My pants, silly,” she said, giggling. “I don’t have any panties on.”
“Jesus,” he said, “you mean we’ve been walking all over the beach with all those people around? What if the breeze had blown your skirt up?”
“Wouldn’t it have been awful?” she said. “Scandalous!”
“I swear,” he said, shaking his head solemnly. “Sometimes I can’t figure you out.”
“Don’t be so pompous,” she said. “Half the women you see walking around don’t have them on.”
“Is that true?”
“Fred,” she said. “Take off your clothes. Let’s make love right now. Let’s make love on top of a cliff.”
He looked around, distractedly.
“Here?” he said. “Oh no, we couldn’t do it here. Somebody might see us.”
“I don’t care if somebody sees us. I don’t care.”
“Be sensible,” he said. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”
“I don’t want to go back to the stupid hotel.”
“Be reasonable, Anne. That’s a crazy idea. We could come back here tonight.”
“I don’t want to come back here tonight. I want you to make love to me now, right here in broad daylight.”
“Use your common sense, dear. Get a hold of yourself.”
“Do you care?” she whispered fiercely. “Do you really care that much about somebody seeing us?”
“Yes.”
He stood up slowly, brushed the sand off of his clothes, picked up the camera and slung it by its strap over his shoulder. He wouldn’t look at her. He looked out to the bay. She felt abruptly ashamed, confused. It had been a strange thing, not at all like her, not at all like the nice well-groomed, well-brought-up girl he had married. It had seemed important. It had been joyous and important and she had not stopped to think how he must feel. Now she felt cheated but she knew that it was a childish feeling and it made her angry with herself. Now he was ashamed of himself. The old sad weight of complexity settled within her. She stood up and brushed the sand off her skirt and straightened her hair.
“Shall we go down?” he asked.
She followed him down the steep path heavily, full of bitter thoughts.
In the evening after dinner, he brought out the chess set. He had brought a little traveling set along with him. He was teaching her how to play in the evenings. They went into the writing room just off the lobby and cleared a desk. Fred puffed on a cigar and set up the chessmen on the board.
“I like you when you smoke a cigar,” she said. “Daddy used to smoke a cigar once in a while and I always loved the smell of it.”
“It makes me look like a fight promoter or a tycoon in the movies.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It makes you kind of distinguished.”
“That’s nice,” he said. “Somebody ought to tell the advertising men about it. Shall we play?”
She played badly. She had quickly grasped the idea of the game, but she could not force herself to think ahead or to plan moves in advance. She mistrusted systems of implacable logic. She felt as if she were denying herself if she concentrated a small, dry intellectual light on the checkered board and its strict wooden people with all their limitations and hierarchies. She played spontaneously, trusting an instinctive immediate judgment and vaguely hoping for a series of happy accidents. She had no reason to doubt this method. She had been lucky. She had even beaten him before. An observer would hardly have guessed that her mind was altogether elsewhere. While some part of her awareness, like a single lamp in a dark room, focused on the small area, the strict geometry of the game, while the clock on the wall solemnly, silently, performed its services, she was far and vague away. There had been saints. She remembered them from childhood. They knelt in the burning sands of remote desert places until, all torment and confusion vanishing, they knew a bright and lonely vacuum of contemplation. Still, there were shapes and contours from another way, another kind of pilgrimage. Rich and improbable, there was a kind of jungle like a landscape by Rousseau where, castled in the full glory of the flesh, she could find herself. There was a strange vocation of the blood. There were miracles of ripeness too. But she knew that she must choose one way or the other, or let it be chosen for her. To have neither, she thought, would be a kind of death.
“Well,” Fred said. “You can’t win them all. You’re learning, though.”
“Oh yes,” she replied. “I’m learning all the time, but I have s
uch a long way to go.”
He looked up at the clock, its second hand whirling like a lean sword.
“Better turn in early,” he said. “We’ve got a long drive ahead.”
“All right,” she said. “I think we both need a good night’s sleep.”
When she undressed and slipped into the cool sheets beside him, Anne felt overwhelmingly tired. She felt as if she were about to fall asleep for years and years. She’d lie there between the crisp sheets with her eyes closed and the light dust would settle on her face and cobwebs would form in the room; the flowers in the vase would wilt away and the drip, drip, drip of the faucet in the bathroom would go on forever and ever. She did not think anyone would ever arrive to kiss the dust off her lips.
The next night they were in the luxury hotel at Quebec. There were American tourists and the familiar bustle and rhythm of a great hotel. Fred had changed into a suit and tie for the city. Businesslike, he handled the arrangements efficiently, and, once they were alone in the commercial elegance and seclusion of their room, she felt, for the first time in days, secure. From the window she could see the famous lighted boardwalk where people strolled, and from somewhere not far she heard the music of a military band.
“Would you like to go out somewhere?”
“I feel a little tired,” she said. “I don’t feel much like going anywhere.”
“Good,” he said. “I feel the same way. Let’s have them send dinner up to us.”
“That’s so extravagant.”
While he telephoned and ordered the dinner, she went into the bathroom to bathe. She lay in the tub for a long time with the water so hot she could hardly stand it, drowsy, luxuriant. Already, she thought, her flesh was strange to her. She looked at her body with a critic’s eye, with, she thought, the eyes of a good butcher, wondering how it would change and how her flesh would appear to her in years. She had an odd desire to be fat, grossly fat, almost immobile, to fill up the space of the tub with her flesh. She imagined herself so fat she would get stuck in the tub. She felt very sleepy. After a while there was a knock on the door.
“Hurry up,” Fred called. “Dinner’s getting cold.”
She was extravagantly hungry. She couldn’t remember ever being so hungry. She ate everything hurriedly until she felt almost stupefied with satiety. And there was champagne. She drank eagerly until the room began to reel and tilt.
“It’s all gone,” she said. “Isn’t it a shame. Can’t you order some more?”
“It’s too expensive,” Fred said. “I still have a bottle of bourbon in my suitcase.”
“Let’s drink it.”
“Don’t get sick, now.”
She drank until she felt a marvelous numbness like a fever. Fred’s face, apprehensive, curious, blurred and returned and blurred again.
“You’re out of focus,” she said. “You’re all out of focus.”
She fell on the bed. It tossed and turned under her like a boat in choppy water. She closed her eyes, listening to the sound of the military band, the steady rhythm of the bass drum, dreamy, contented, indifferent to Fred’s awkward hands as he struggled with buttons and snaps, trying to undress her. Nothing bad could happen to her now. No matter what happened it could not be bad or good either, she felt so safe and sound.
In the morning they went on a guided tour of the city. Fred apologized for the idea; but after all, it was the easiest way to see the city and find out what they wanted to see later by themselves. She had a splitting headache and she didn’t care what they did. They sat in the back and she pressed her face against the cool glass, barely aware of the city or the people on the bus or the tired jokes of the guide crackling on the loudspeaker. From time to time they stopped for pictures and Fred, excusing himself, went out with the crowd to photograph a monument, a building, a vista, from all angles. “We will want to have something to remember,” he said.
At the last stop of the tour they had to get out. They were to be conducted through the convent of a missionary and teaching order of nuns.
“Can’t I just stay on the bus?”
“No,” he said. “This bus is going to leave. We may not end up on the same bus.”
“Well, I’ll meet you back at the hotel then.”
“Come on,” he said. “A hangover isn’t that bad. Walking around will do you good.”
They were taken through the convent and led to some large rooms containing objects from the distant outposts of the order, reasonably chaste African wood carvings, East Indian baskets and pottery and rich strange cloths. They were for sale. The rooms had a close antiseptic odor like an empty schoolroom. She looked at the things listlessly while the guide talked and made his jokes. So many sad things from so far away, tossed up here like driftwood on the beach.
“Do you see anything you want?”
“Don’t buy anything,” she said. “What would we ever do with it?”
The party moved on to the entrance of a little chapel.
“I can’t go in,” she said. “I haven’t got a hat on.”
“Anything will do. Use your scarf.”
It took a moment for her eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. The chapel was dark and damply cool as a cave, though there were candles on the altar. Then she saw the two nuns in the white summer robes of the order kneeling motionless before the altar. They knelt on the stone floor in prayer, and the flames from the tall candles troubled their figures with swift light and shadow. She had never seen anything so white as the robes of those nuns. She thought of the cleanest, coldest surf, immaculate foam, tossed by the huge waves of the open ocean. She saw herself as a girl, kneeling, dreamy, during the long ritual.
“There are two of them here always, the guide says,” Fred said. “They take turns.”
She felt a light-headed total passivity, a chill languor, watching the fixed shapes of the kneeling nuns. She felt as if all her life she had been drowning and here in this cave was the bottom of the sea that she had feared and fought so much. In the dark looking at the tall candles and the breathless whiteness, she felt that she saw herself kneeling, not as a girl now, but as a woman, one chosen out of many, like Leda for whom there was the tumult of the swan. At least Leda had known the shudder of divinity, though the god came in disguise. Now she would be kneeling there forever in white and when she left the chapel she would be leaving herself behind and she would always be lost. She would never find herself again.
They walked out, and as they came into the sunlight she felt her eyes brimming. They walked toward the bus where the grinning guide beckoned and beckoned, and she could feel the tears rolling down her cheeks.
“What’s the matter, Anne?” Fred was saying. “Is anything wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” she replied. “I’ll be perfectly all right in a moment.”
THE WITNESS
(A Cartoon Strip)
MISS A. THOUGHT she saw a crime committed, but she couldn’t be sure. It happened when Miss A., who was a middle-aged trained nurse, was returning home from work in the early hours of the morning. She took the subway. The only other people on the car were three men, two who were sitting together and seemed to be arguing about something, and another at the other end of the car who was reading a newspaper. She didn’t pay much attention to them. She whiled away the time reading advertising placards. Shortly before she got off at Ninety-sixth Street she noticed that one of the two men who had been talking crossed over and approached the man who was reading a newspaper. He seemed to be asking him a question. The man lowered the newspaper until just his eyes showed over the edge. His eyes were dark and perplexed and pained like the eyes of a man who has been caught telling a lie or in a shameful act. They were pitiable eyes, but they did not ask for pity, she thought. This may have been because all she could see were his forehead and eyes. She could not see the line of his lips, but she imagined that to fit the expression in his eyes they must be turned down and drawn in a tight line like the lips of a child not quite ready to take a dos
e of bad-tasting medicine.
She was naturally shy of making direct encounters with strangers, especially men, and she stopped thinking about him and went back to looking at the advertisements. The man who had spoken to the man with the newspaper walked back and sat down beside his companion, but he didn’t say anything to him. The two men sat very still, and she saw out of the corner of her eyes that they were looking at the bright-colored placards too. The other man was not reading the newspaper now, but he had slumped down in his seat with the newspaper lying across his face.
When she started to get off at Ninety-sixth Street, when she stood waiting at the sliding door and holding on tight to her pocketbook, she knew that the man had put aside his newspaper and was looking at her. She also knew without looking that the other two men were looking at him. She decided to risk returning his glance, and she saw that he was a round-faced, soft-jawed man with beautiful eyes like a girl’s. He looked at her, she thought, imploringly, with the desperate resignation of someone about to be wheeled away to an operating room. He was asking for more than compassion, but he knew he would not get that much. Just then the subway stopped and she stepped off quickly. She didn’t want to look back, but she thought she ought to. She waited until she heard the door close and then she turned around to look. The subway had begun to move, and in the noise it was like standing under a waterfall or within the center of a crashing wave. She saw the man who had been reading the newspaper standing at the door, beating against it with his fists and with his face pressed out of shape against the glass. His face was wet with tears and his lips were moving though she could not hear him. She saw as the subway flashed forward into the dark tunnel that the two men were standing beside him and looking at him. She could not see their faces but she could tell by the tight rigidity of their bodies that they were about to do something sudden. They managed while they were standing straight to look as if they were crouched to jump.
Evening Performance Page 8
