“You’re joking. Asleep?” He looked at his watch.
“You’ve got a burn too.”
The skin on his back was hot and drawn tightly on his shoulders.
“I can take a lot of sun,” he said.
“They all say that, but try sleeping tonight.”
“You going to show me around this evening?”
“Would you like me to?”
His manner became brusque and impatient.
“Listen, kid. I don’t ask people to do things if I’m not interested in them. I’m a big boy now. I’ve been through a sausage grinder, so don’t put on the coquette act. Either yes or no.”
“All right, take it easy.”
They drove back and crossed to the island in silence. Jay wondered if he had frightened her off. She made him feel awkward, and he could only conceal this by aggression. What he could not understand he tended to dominate, as though ignorance was a weapon rather than a weakness. The cool blue sky and the yawls tipping sideways, the islands with their concealed homes, were part of a design as fabled as anything he had seen in the movies when he was a boy. He wanted to belong to it all, but he didn’t see how he could fit in. Money had done little to alter the cringing insecurity at the back of his mind; before, he had been nothing, his existence a gray, legal fact, but he had had a set of roots, he belonged to an environment, a tradition. Now he was like a table without legs, an object that was functionless. He did not know how he could communicate his emotional barrenness to the girl, nor was he sure he should. As with all true sufferers, the pure malaise, the actual suffering, was something that defied classification or description. In its virulent, unisolated, unidentifiable state, it haunted Jay; although introspection terrified him, he realized that one day he must examine and face his nightmare.
“You look saturnine.”
Jay shrugged his shoulders.
“What do you mean?”
“Sort of sad and morose. You’ve got everything.”
“That’s the joke. I don’t know what I’ve got. Just a bunch of mistakes weighing me down. And I’m afraid to add one more to the load.”
She walked with him into his room and sat down on the terrace.
“Oh, it can’t be that bad.”
“Frankly, I’m dirt, and I don’t belong with decent people.”
“What brought that on?”
“Maybe we’d better forget about tonight. I don’t think your mother or for that matter your father would be crazy about us going out . . . Especially as I’m married, and you’ve got the doctor on ice.”
“That sounds very prudish,” she said with a hint of irony in her voice.
“No, just realistic.”
“Well, it’s up to you.”
“I wish it were, honey. I guess I’m tired as well, so put it down to that.”
He had insisted on having dinner alone in his room. He skimmed through a few magazines and then slipped into bed. His back felt raw, and he struggled to sleep on his side. The ringing telephone bell jarred him as he dozed fitfully.
“Sorry to disturb you, sir. But there’s a call from New York for you . . . your wife. “He recognized the butler’s voice.
“Put it through.”
“Whoa, very impressive, like you were king or something,” Rhoda said.
“Is that what you called to tell me?”
There was a silence, then he heard a rasping cry.
“Jay, we need you . . . Neal and me.”
The appeal sickened him because it was untrue.
“I thought you asked me to think about it.”
“Come home, please.”
“At the end of the week.”
“Tomorrow.”
“I just can’t walk out, Rhoda. I’m exhausted. I need a rest.”
“Neal’s impossible without you. I can’t control him. Jay, what’s gonna be with us? I’m here all by myself, and I’m cracking up.”
“Look, get a good night’s sleep and I’ll call you tomorrow and talk to Neal.” He didn’t wait for her to answer but abruptly said: “Good night,” and replaced the receiver. He climbed out of bed and strolled around the room, then flopped down in a chair on the terrace. The air was heavy and oppressive. He switched on an overhead light and flicked through a magazine, but he was unable to read; the page of print stared back at him, meaningless. He would have liked a drink; he remembered that he had bought a bottle of scotch at the airport before leaving and he fished through his bag for it He found a glass in the bathroom, let the cold water run a full five minutes, until an icy sweat formed on the faucet, and mixed himself a highball. He filled a second glass with iced water and carried it and the bottle of scotch out to the terrace. The drink made him even hotter, and his back throbbed violently; a million stinging nettles had entered his skin. The third drink made his head spin, and reduced the pain. Behind him, he heard breathing, and he jumped out of his chair. Terry stood at the entrance of the terrace with a questioning, slightly puzzled expression on her face.
“You frightened the life out of me.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to. I heard you talking on the phone, and then you turned the light on, so I thought you were having trouble sleeping.” She held out a bottle of colorless liquid. “Vinegar . . . it’s the best soother for a burn. It’ll take the sting out.” She opened the bottle. “Ugh. It smells, but believe me . . .” She lifted up his pajama top. “Looks painful. Best if you lie on your stomach so I can put some on.”
He went inside and stretched out on the bed. The harsh, acerbic smell reminded him of when his mother used to prepare pickling juice, and he had a vision of her stuffing nobbly cucumbers into a bottle and then pouring the vinegar and herbs in. Her lined face caught the light that came through the single window, a collage of filthy oilskin, rotting boards, and rusted nails. He could see the room with its chipped wooden table that teetered and had worn a lateral gash into the wall that supported it, the hissing potbellied stove never hot enough because there was never enough coal. He could smell the lime smell of the sweating walls, where a portrait of his paternal grandfather hung crookedly - the man black-bearded and glowering at a vernal scene in some nameless, forgotten Russian garden. His memory for smell was supernatural, and it was the wine-like smell of sweat commingled with atrophying slabs of salted Kubchunka that hung from a trestle in the larder that he remembered from that wet afternoon, and not the wood smoke or the trilling birds in the high grass as he had lain in the field. It had not been the Slivovitz he had drunk at the mill with Pyotr Markevitch that had made him vomit, but the odor of his room . . . and his mother’s hands soothing him, washing him down with the faint scent of bay leaf and tarragon clinging to her stained apron where she hurriedly dried her hands.
“Does it hurt?” Terry asked.
“Nothing hurts anymore.”
She had dampened a large piece of cotton that was still fluffy, and she skated gently over his blood-red back. He lifted his head and twisted it over his shoulder so that he could see her.
“Lie still, I haven’t finished.”
“It’s starting to cool off.”
The light from the terrace illuminated half her face and she seemed to resemble some half-mysterious goddess whose photograph he had once stumbled across in a magazine. Her tar-black hair was long and fine and straight and made a swishing sound as she moved her hand over his back. She patted him on the behind, and he rolled over on his side and supported his head in the hollow of his arm.
“I’m going to wash my hands.”
He lay on the bed and although his back felt as though it had been systematically lacerated, the sting of the burn had subsided. She came back, walking softly, and he did not realize she was there until the corner of the bed sagged under her weight.
“You’re a nice sweet kid,” Jay said.
“Praise from Jay is praise from Caesar. Are you going back to your wife?”
Her question startled him, and he became evasive, but she pursued him, until he
was forced to answer.
“I’m not sure.”
“I don’t think I want to be a doctor’s wife . . . or to go to Europe. I want to live!”
“Isn’t that good enough, exciting?”
“A deadly bore. It’ll be skipping through life singing ‘Alouette.’ People ought to trip over, get mud in their face.” She touched his hand.
“Is that what I can do for you? Terry, don’t act like a whore. It doesn’t suit you.”
“For years I’ve been hearing about you from my father and all sorts of people. No one has a kind remark to make about you, except my father.”
“We’ve made each other money . . . so we’ve got something in common.”
“You’re not as tough as you’d like people to believe.”
“Tougher. Years ago I used to go to the movies a lot - to learn how to behave in public, to educate myself. George Raft was my hero, and I thought I was him in real life, but I’ve learned different. I’m cast as the heavy . . . I’m not Raft, but the guy he socks.”
“You’re really a nice guy.”
“How would you know?”
“I do . . .”
“That’s the virgin talking. You want to stop wondering, and you think I’m the guy. Everyone who ever gets involved with me loses. Don’t throw yourself away.”
She eased herself onto the bed and lay opposite him, her arms parallel to his, her long brown legs slightly arched at the knees as though she were about to thrust herself forward. Under her dressing gown, she wore nothing, and the dressing gown fell open as she moved closer to him. Her skin was a copper brown, with the slippery smooth texture of satin. The soft bellies of her breasts were the flat milky color of Chinese white, and they seemed to be framed. He turned away, and she grasped his wrist, breaking the skin with her nails.
“Don’t turn me down.”
“I’m not turning you down. I’m trying to be decent for once. You’re a kid, and you’re about to waste yourself. For kicks,” he added.
“Not for kicks. It’s just that you’re the first man I’ve ever wanted to come near me.”
A small curtain hanging over the canopy drifted in the breeze that came from the bay, and there was the whirring noise of a speedboat in the distance that faded after a moment. Her hands were cold, and she gave short nervous little gasps when he touched her shoulder. Her eyes opened wide, and there was a look of such pure and innocent affection and trust in them that he shrank back, as though the act itself signified a betrayal, an element of deception, which would scar him. What he feared most was the aftermath, and the responsibility of yet another woman who had woven herself into the fabric of his life, because he realized that he was a man capable only of enthusiasms. He could not sustain the sinewy quality of love.
The mouth and lips of her body were moist, and he slid into her gently and without force like a man floating onto a wave. He rested inside her, on top of the small thin-skinned ball and she wrapped her legs around him increasing the pressure herself, until the ball inside broke and she gave a little groan of pain, and then he went into her harder, unyielding. She wrapped her arms tightly round his neck, and he withdrew just as he was about to come. It spurted on her stomach and dripped onto her navel, white and pellucid on her copper-brown skin. She held it against her stomach until he subsided and then still holding him she kissed him for the first time.
“I must be crazy,” he whispered. “What the hell have I done?”
“I thought recriminations were the virgin’s prerogative. This is a switch. Are you afraid we might fall in love? Is that what you’re worried about?” she asked in a youthfully earnest way, which touched him.
“You remind me of a rainy afternoon . . . a long time ago. It was like a dream. I was in love then.”
“For a full afternoon?” she said incredulously.
“You can carry one afternoon around with you all your life without even knowing that you are.”
“You’re going to leave your wife.”
“Sounds simple, like tying my shoelaces.”
“I was lying about never having seen you. Once when I was home from school - everything seems to happen to me when I’m home from school. My life at school is a long pause, like a sentence made up of a two-letter word and a hundred periods, stop, stop, stop.” She paused abruptly, and her hair rested on the pillow, the black thin strands spread out like a duenna’s fan, long, black, perpendicular to the cross-running brass bedstead that reflected them and that Jay, like a mesmerized cyclops, fixed his eye on. Her body was so wonderfully formed that it caused him physical pain to look at it. “The mud was thick and gummy with lumps of dirty gray clay sticking to my shoes - I had to throw them away because I broke a heel and I limped around like a horse that’s thrown a shoe. My father was very aggravated because of some - I don’t know what - sewer or something. I kept on imagining a long gray rat with white pointed teeth running around in a mad dance underneath us. It was drizzling, and you stood by a maroon colored Chevrolet, and your trousers were mud-spattered. I asked my father who you were, and he said: ‘The criminal who’s responsible for all this - a sewer rat who I made the mistake of helping once before I knew he carried the plague.’ I couldn’t equate my father’s opinion of you with your face because I thought you were the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. And then a red-headed woman came up, quite pretty in a loud sort of way, and she took your arm. You didn’t look at her, and you automatically unhooked yourself. Then she sat down on the running board of your car and stared at you as though you’d just stabbed her, literally . . . I watched her face change from that terrified hurt expression children get when they’re not wanted, to one of pure love. It was the most amazing transformation I’d ever witnessed . . . like you were Christ, and she was a nun. I was absolutely electrified - my father kept going on and on about sewers with a little man whose face and name I can’t remember. After a while she said something to you that I couldn’t hear and you fobbed her off by waving your hand in her face without even turning to her, and then you did turn your face and you smiled and she walked through the gates of heaven. For weeks, months, after I got back to school I kept dreaming of the two of you in bed . . . the expression on her face changing from pain to pleasure and back to pain. For some crazy reason I imagined you had a hammer in your hand and you always bashed her head in with it after you made love and then she’d become a spirit and after a while - when you commanded her - she’d assume human form. I had a fixation or something like that on you and I hoped that one day I’d feel about a man the way she did about you . . . that I’d be crushed, destroyed, and put together again and I wanted you to be the man, but I realized that that would be impossible.
“The whole thing with Mitch was a joke from beginning to end and I never took him seriously . . . I waited and hoped, and when my father casually mentioned that he was going to ask you down here for a week to discuss business, I decided to cut school. Isn’t it all a little crazy? For four years, from the age of sixteen, I’ve been running after you, and finally last week I flew two thousand miles because I knew that no matter what happened to me in the future I had to have a chance now to get what I’d dreamed about.” She gave a short husky laugh. “So at last, here we are, you with your bloody hammer. Jay, do you understand what I’ve been saying?”
“You’ve made it all up.”
She started to giggle, and he recognized the nervous schoolgirl underneath.
“Would it matter?” she said, extending a hand and rubbing his face. “Smile at me, please.”
He did as she asked, and she said: “Of course it’s true . . . Somehow a meeting was arranged for us on that horrible wet afternoon, and we’ve been unable to avoid it. Did you love the redhead?”
“It really isn’t any of your business. You got what you wanted.”
“You’re afraid . . . that’s why you won’t answer.”
“Afraid? Of what?” he demanded.
“Of what’s happening to you. Of me being stronger.�
��
“God, what a lot of crap you talk. Is that what they teach you in college? All this . . . You’ve got a line in bullshit that can’t be beat.”
“I don’t even mind your filthy mouth. Did you love her?” she insisted.
Jay pressed his hand to his forehead; he was sweating despite the fact that the night air was cool.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter now. For years, I was chained hand and foot without knowing it. I thought I loved Eva, and I did for a while, before her husband died. Then it dawned on me that I was being strangled by a dead man, and we were both sorry, and because he was dead I had a stronger feeling for him than I did for her. He committed suicide because of us, and I didn’t have the guts to drop her. He had to die for something. And just as he held us together, that’s how he kept us apart, I couldn’t even marry her.” He turned to Terry and saw that she was asleep, and he shrugged his shoulders, which sent a searing pain down his back.
He woke her at five in the morning and insisted that she return to her own room. With that exquisitely channeled balance of naïveté and belligerence and nascent power young women possess after their first turn in bed, she said: “But my father’ll have to find out.” She threw back her head triumphantly and a little too magnificently for five in the morning.
“Scram,” Jay said. “He’ll find out when I think he ought to, and not before.”
“Jay, you’re a bastard.”
“I could’ve told you that for nothing.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I want them to be as happy as I am . . . it isn’t defiance.”
“Well, for a little while longer let them be miserable.”
Not until he sat across from her at breakfast, which was served on a curved wrought-iron table facing the bay, did it occur to him that there could be any more between them than a fugitive one-night stand. The glimmer of her brown skin, and her black hair, which seemed like coal burning in the chalk-white stream of sunlight descending on them, held out a promise of grace and hope that had not been possible two days earlier. She had a freshness and sense of joy completely new to him, and even though only a few short hours before he had initiated her, establishing a certain intimacy in the darkness, he was now ill at ease and strangely embarrassed by her. She did nothing to suggest suspicious behavior, but underneath the courtesy smile she gave her mother and the innocuous small talk she engaged in with her father, there was an underlying knowledge of something secret and personal between them. He watched with amazement his own reactions to the mask of surface indifference she assumed for his benefit, and he had a deep nagging desire to touch her, to kiss her, to tell her that she was magnificent. Later when they were alone for a minute at the edge of the pier before going on the boat she whispered matter-of-factly: “It’ll be okay . . . you’ll see . . .” He put his hand on her breast, and she let it remain there until her mother appeared, and he lost his nerve and withdrew his hand. He resented having to share her all morning with her parents who had decided to give him a tour of the islands surrounding the beach in TERRY I. He sat in a cane chaise longue inattentively listening to the endless drone of facts about alligators, Seminoles, swamps, hotels, fishing, international millionaires, all at Denise’s fingertips. She continued in a monotone well on into the afternoon, and he could no longer fight against the sleepiness that had crept over him. Through his doze he heard Terry say: “Mother, can’t you see that you’ve bored the poor man to sleep.” Abashed, Denise swallowed her seventh martini and disappeared below. Terry touched his arm, and he propped himself up on an elbow.
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