Bay of Souls

by Robert Stone

  "She looks crazy," Michael said. It had not occurred to him before.

  "She is. And she makes other people crazy."

  "Phyllis Strom wants her on her thesis committee."

  "Well, man," Norman said, "this is a struggle for a young mind. See if you can keep her from biting Phyllis on the throat."

  That afternoon he suffered a breakdown in communication with his second class, an expository writing workshop. Led by an extroverted young woman athlete, the group undertook to address the personal problems of the characters in one four-page fictional narrative. The personal needs and available life choices of these thin conceits were examined as though they were guests on the kind of television talk show whose participants murdered each other.

  "For Christ's sake," Michael told them. "You're supposed to be replicating life here. This is like a drawing class—the characters aren't real until you make them real. It's not group therapy or social work or an uplift pep rally! How about a little more literary criticism and a little less mutual support?"

  The class sullenly dispersed ahead of schedule. He had failed to make himself clear. They had understood only that their youthful goodwill was being insulted. He had used abusive language. He had employed sarcasm. He had better watch it.

  Rattled, he went over to the pool for a swim. The steamy showers and liquefactious echoes were comforting on that raw winter day. He had the luxury of a lane to himself. He swam hard, trying to outrun the shadow inside him. Some kind of bill had come up for payment.

  He had, it seemed to him, done quite well by randomness. By the day at least, unless one insisted on pondering it all, randomness was no less cruel than some unlikely mysterious providence. He had always considered himself a lucky man.

  Buying himself a cold can of grapefruit juice from a machine in the lobby, he came upon Lara Purcell sipping bottled water beside it. She was wearing a black sleeveless leotard and there was a damp towel around her neck.

  "Doing your aerobics?" Michael asked.

  "Squash."

  "Where do you find opponents?"

  "Oh, there are some formidable women around. I play men too." She drained her plastic bottle and tossed it in the receptacle against the near wall, a rimless shot. "Do you play?"

  "What I play is racquetball."

  "Oh," Lara said. "I can play that."

  "Want to play tomorrow?"

  "What time?"

  "Three?"

  But three might bring him home suspiciously late, if they stopped for coffee. It would be dark by four. They agreed to play at two.

  "If you're good enough," Dr. Purcell said, "I'll teach you squash."

  Back at his office he called Norman Cevic.

  "So Lara Purcell," he told Norman, "invited me to play squash."

  There was a brief silence on the line. "So what can I tell you, Michael?"

  "Is that a pass?"

  "Gamboling half clothed in a sealed chamber? What do you think?"

  "I should say no way," Michael said. "I should decline."

  "Did you?"

  "I accepted. Racquetball, actually."

  "You know," Norman said, "some of our colleagues—I won't mention names—are real screwballs. Disasters in search of a victim. Who knows what games are being played out? I'm not talking about squash."

  "I'll call her," Michael said. "I'll make an excuse."

  "Well," Norman said, "you're a man of the world."

  Very funny, Michael thought. But it was not so. He was a tank-town schoolmarm's son, the grandson of farmhands on four quarterings, married out of high school. An overeducated hick.

  That night the PBS station presented a particularly absorbing documentary about convicted murderers awaiting execution on death row. It left the Ahearns in mild shock. What terror to fall into the hands of a system so cruel and arbitrary as the law, so surreal in its unconcern for any kind of responsibility. It was the kind of thing that made you want to pray.

  Kristin had not allowed Paul to watch because of the warning about graphic depictions. Michael, who would have preferred his son to see it, did not argue. Later he regretted it.

  In the morning, he read the class papers on Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Many students had not troubled to finish the reading. Several of these compared it to Madame Bovary, which was presumably the posted line on it in Cliffs Notes or somewhere. A few apologized for their inability to sympathize with the heroine, vaguely aware that sympathy was the attitude expected. The class feminists abandoned Edna as a flibbertigibbet. Eros and Thanatos were too quaint and reactionary, even embraced in a solitary act of personal liberation.

  It was hardly a surprising response. Solitary acts of personal liberation were what everyone must be spared or forbidden. They represented the failure of everything progressive. The courage to be yourself, a virtue much celebrated on campuses like theirs, lost its luster if you were selfish and boy-crazy and a bad mother, the way Edna was.

  It occurred to him that he had been preaching against literary vitalism all his career, mocking the pretensions of the antinomians, the self-conscious libertines. If what he thought and said mattered, he would have to reexamine everything now. By midmorning he was beginning to associate the insidiousness of literary vitalism with his afternoon game of racquetball. He skipped lunch and went over to the gym in plenty of time. Lara had reserved the court.

  They played for an hour. Professor Purcell wore latex shorts and a red club vest, her dark hair bound in a ponytail with black and yellow ribbon. She played facing the front wall, utterly focused, it seemed, on the game. She was fast and strong, not afraid of getting hit, not afraid of the ball. In two of their fifteen-point matches she beat him, and her game seemed to improve as they played. Their last game was the hardest for him; they exchanged advantage nearly a dozen times before he won it. It seemed to him he had never played a better woman athlete. When they finished the last game he had a quick vision of summer, of tennis and lemonade, a strange, happy anticipation of the sort he had not experienced for weeks.

  Surrendering to his final victory, she took her protective glasses off and wiped the sweat from her forehead and rested her right hand on his shoulder. He was intensely aware of her touch.

  "Oh," she said, "you're good."

  Michael had barely the breath to answer her.

  "Will you teach me squash?"

  She laughed and shook her head.

  They met, dressed, in the lobby, lined with its trophy cases and framed photographs of teams going back to the twenties.

  "Coffee?" Michael asked.

  She hesitated. "Honestly," she said, "I'm well and truly beat. You don't do massage, do you?"

  There was no way in which this could be other than a joke.

  "I'm afraid not."

  "Well, there's a Latvian lady I go to. I think I feel the need of her."

  "Good idea," Michael said. "If I had a Latvian lady I'd go too."

  "Oh," Lara said, "no, I feel selfish. Let's do something we can both do. What you like best."

  "I think my favorite thing would be to drink a beer."

  "Decadent, eh?"

  "Not at all," Michael said. "Wholesome. Agreeably provincial."

  They drove her Saab to a sports bar in a mall surrounded by dairy farms, whose silos and storage tanks loomed over the fake tiles and tin towers of the mall. A few students from campus and a tableful of off-duty FedEx drivers were half watching a British soccer game on the bar's giant screen. Sunderland against Manchester United. The screen commentary competed with Billy Joel.

  Lara was wearing an ankle-length fox coat. Hanging it for her, he could feel the warmth of her body against the coat's silk lining. He ran his fingers over the fur. The bar sold draft Harp lager by the pint.

  "I'll sleep tonight," Lara said with feline satisfaction. "I'm sure of that."

  "I hope I do."

  "Have trouble sleeping?"

  He nodded and shrugged.

  "Get the health service to give you something
."

  "Not my guy."

  "Nonsense. Insist."

  "Come on, you know how they are. He believes in valerian root. He believes fatigue makes the best pillow. He thinks people don't need sleep. He likes saying no."

  "You should sleep," she said. "I'll give you something."

  Her lips were inches away, and when he kissed her he thought he heard a little yahoo chorus rise from the bar. They sank back against the banquette. Michael was weak-kneed and dizzy.

  "Want to play tomorrow?" she asked. "I'll teach you squash."

  "I don't like all this losing-to-a-girl stuff," Michael said. "It's against religion."

  "I'm a good teacher. I'll have you beating me. We'll turn it into an opera."

  "Squash?" Michael asked.

  "Squash is fate's game. The ball game. You have to be ready to die. You have to know how to sing."

  "Maybe I can beat you," Michael said. "I get your clothes if I do. Isn't that right? I'll settle for that."

  "Nicey, nicey," she said. "I'll have you singing in chains. I'll have your soft heart on a dish."

  He kissed her again.

  That night when Paul had gone to bed, Kristin asked him, "Did you ever think of joining AA?"

  "Not for the merest instant," Michael said. "I think I might join Al-Anon."

  "Really? Getting bored nights? It's supposed to be a hot pickup spot."

  As usual, she left the sarcasm lying where it fell, immune. "I've been thinking about how out of contact you are sometimes. As though you're not there."

  They were on the second floor, tidying a spare room full of shelves they'd placed to accommodate an overflow of books.

  "But I am there, Kris." Dumb denial was the best he could do.

  She picked up an unjacketed book and looked at the spine. "I may be a dumb squarehead, fella, but I know when you're with me and when you're not."

  They went to bed. Michael turned out his bedside lamp and turned over, facing away from Kristin. She lay beside him stiff as starched laundry, reading or pretending to read. He fell asleep before she did.

  3

  HE MADE a racquetball date with Lara for the next day and served ace after ace. Time and again their bodies touched, so that their match was compounded for him of brief sensory impressions, each one leading him to anticipate the next: her breast against his arm, her wrist linked for a moment with his when she retrieved his racquet.

  "Call it yours," she said.

  "No, yours."

  In the shower he was inflamed, frightened and guilty. That morning he and Kristin had enjoyed a laugh together over the paper. Some droll, forgettable bit of buffoonery in an editorial. Their shared jokes had become infrequent; it had been heartening, a good omen. But no scalding water could wash away the shimmer of Lara's touch.

  "C'mon out," she said when they were showered and dressed. "Let's go."

  The assumption was that it was her house they were going out to. He climbed into her Saab. On the way, he ran his palm over the leather armrest. His eyes were on the warm turns of her thigh against the seat beside him. For God's sake, he thought, for once in your life, know the difference between what it is you want and what you don't. It had not been long ago since he had been reflecting on his capacity for happiness. Of course that had all been desperation.

  "What other sports do you like?" she asked him.

  "I like to swim. Every summer I dive wrecks up on Lake Superior. We've been through the Virginia Giles stem to stern."

  "Really. I dive as well. Have you ever been in tropical water?"

  "Once. On a charter to Bonaire."

  "Like it?"

  He shrugged. "There are no words for it. It's sublime. But the sunken vessels are what I really like. I went through the length of a German submarine off Block Island. I'll never forget it."

  "I prefer coral reefs," she said. "Too many ghosts in wrecks."

  It was a clear, nearly windless day. She parked beside the barn. He followed her and watched while she unbarred the doors. It was a six-stall horse barn and two of the stalls were occupied, one by a handsome chestnut, the other by a gray. Both of the horses had plain faded blankets. They turned at her touch, the gray snapping at her fingers until she withdrew her hand. The horse's breath vaporized in the freezing barn.

  "Do you tend them yourself?"

  "Mainly, but there's no shortage of farm girls at school if I need help."

  She took a brush from a peg and began to brush down the chestnut's coat. This time she had troubled only to throw a ski jacket over the spandex workout gear she had played in.

  "I exercise them in the morning. Are you an early riser? Come on out and watch."

  "In the morning I'm feeding my own small animals sugar crunchies."

  "Of course," she said. She walked into the next stall and brushed down the second horse. Then she hung up the brush and led him out of the barn and over to the main house.

  "Want a fire? The makings are there."

  While he was crumpling pages of L'Express and gathering shavings, she said, "I'll make one in the bedroom too."

  He lit the kindling. On the living room wall, over a sideboard, the senator's picture was in place. In the next room, Lara sang to herself in French, a simple, familiar tune he had heard before. Perhaps a children's song.

  He brushed the wood shavings off his hands and went into the bedroom, where she stood beside the stove and put his hands under her ski jacket and pulled him against her. She closed her eyes, smiling slightly. The feel of her body took his strength away gram by gram. The tan and white column of her throat, her strong firm breasts, the curve and cleft at the warm silky seat of that spandex under his palms' caress—blindness, vertigo. Mounds of earth, vault of sky, purity, corruption, incorruption. Heaven, the grave. Flesh as violation, bliss, freedom, offal, oblivion. Bury himself in her and fly, turn her into his own will. Her hair was damp and fragrant. It was all certainly what he wanted. Had wanted for so long.

  Everywhere he touched her inflamed him; he shivered in the heat. She disengaged his hands and held them at his sides; he was looking into her strange aloof smile. Then she bent his wrists behind him, like a prisoner, and stood on his feet so that she was an inch or so taller. She kissed him on the mouth. Releasing his hands, she ran hers over him, pushing her thumbs in his armpits, fondling his erection.

  "My dear," he said. It was an absurd thing to say, and quite properly she laughed at him.

  In bed, she laughed at him again when he asked her if she had come.

  "Several times, cheri. Yes, yes really," she insisted as though he doubted her. "Only tell me this," and she giggled softly. "This wife of yours, the Chaucerian, didn't she tell you where her clit is? Because"—she led his hand to the top of her vagina and brought his fingers to the button—"because it's here. Voilà, eh?"

  Michael felt a rush of humiliation for himself, for Kristin, whom he loved.

  "Or maybe she doesn't know, eh? This good and faithful one. When Mr. Norman Rockwell comes in the evening to paint you, ask him to show her where it is."

  "I don't like it," he said, "when you demean people I love. I don't mind your putting me down. I know I'm an idiot."

  "Ah, ah," said Lara, "I've been a bad person. I've insulted virtue, eh, which I wouldn't know if it hit me in the ass. So," she said, "punish me."

  He saw that she was holding a strap like a dog's collar in her hand. She had taken it from under the pillow or somewhere about the bed.

  "Go ahead. Punish me."

  It was an odd little instrument, the strap. It had no buckle and apparently no holes to insert a metal tongue. Lara handed him the thing and threw her head back on the bed so that her throat was rampant, her forehead bent back. She showed him the whites of her eyes and stretched her limbs out toward the four corners of the bed, turning her arms upside down at the elbow.

  "I've been bad, eh. I've insulted your little half-a-virgin of a wife." She put the strap around her own throat. "Go ahead, all-American boy, punish
me."

  He looked at the beautifully muscled structure of her throat, its strength, its perfect skin, and twisted the strap around it.

  She looked him in the eye and cursed him in a French of which he understood not a word, and he twisted the strap until she had to stop. Then he held it tight against her throat a few moments longer. Her eyes widened. All the while she held her four limbs drawn stiff toward the edges of the bed.

  There were red welts in the beautiful columns of her throat when he tossed the strap aside. She touched them with her fingers.

  "Like it?" she asked.

  He liked it. This time he had no trouble with her clitoris and they licked each other as if they were trying to dry off, thirsty, like dogs.

  They lay in silence a long time after.

  "Oh, God, baby," she said.

  It had got dark outside. It was dark in the room, except for the light of the fire she had made.

  "Oh, God, baby is right," Michael said.

  "It's late. You're late."

  "Fuck late."

  She sat up and slapped his shoulder.

  "Oh no! Don't be a child on me now."

  "No? I can't be a child on you?"

  "No. Uh-uh. You go and wash and go home to dinner and Mr. Rockwell." She moved across the bed and sat beside him and took his face in her hands and kissed him. "Or I'll have to send you away and you'll never come back and that will be that. Get me?" She nudged him hard in the ribs. "Get me, pal. Eh?"

  "That hurts."

  "Ooh," she cooed in mock solicitude, "poor bébé. Tough shit."

  He went into her bathroom, preparing for his shower. Could he have lived without what had just happened? Done without her? The answer was yes, he could have done without her fine. He might so easily, now in retrospect, have been a person of principle and never let it happen. Too late now. He stood under the force of the water. Washing, washing, washing all day long. Baptized into pleasure, he thought. Free again.

  She drove him back to campus to pick up his car. All the drive home, he pictured Kristin's suspicion and anger at his being late. It was nearly eight, too late for supper with the others, too late to help Paul with his homework.