“Screwing several men at a time—I don’t mean at a time—with that frequency. Well—it’s all right. Not all that big a deal. That comes through loud and clear. Isn’t that interesting? I’ve asked myself whether that would have been the case with just any men.” The tones of the academy had returned, inward-turned, reflective, as if making a serious study of the matters in which she was so intimately involved. “I don’t think so. So perhaps I’m giving the women too much credit. Perhaps it’s because it’s these men; men they’ve known such a long time; men they like.” That tone abruptly left behind, another, which I could only describe as an amused bawdiness, appearing. I felt myself being outdistanced, scarcely able to keep up. “Anyhow, they talk about how each man is different and they like very much talking about it. How they go on and on! How the fucking is different. One man from another. Some of it can be pretty funny, even to themselves. Sometimes I’ve wished you could be there to hear, Captain. I mean, hear them talk about fucking different men. What a pretty sky—those cloud-strips.”
I think by now I knew; even my own denseness as to the ways of women having its limits. Perhaps at first having the sliver of a stupid thought that this was all calculated to torment myself, realizing quickly that she would be the last person on earth to do just that—she would have been contemptuous of such an effort; aware that it was something else altogether. And I had actually considered as to how I might go about approaching her! Appalled at my imbecility, witlessness, seeming now little short of cretinism, at my forgetting the one thing at least I knew about women if patently I knew little else: They are in control, in these matters; they always are. Especially this one would be. Above all, overwhelmed with this one thought: What I had at first judged out of character for her: I could not have been more wrong. It was exactly what she would have done to get what she wanted; and if there was anything in character for her it was that: to get what she wanted. Having reached the point all along intended, she finished off.
“Of course, I get pretty randy myself sometimes listening to them. As a matter of fact . . .”
I had been looking rather fixedly at the sea, turned to say I knew not what, and realized she was no longer there. She had disappeared into the cave, into the darkness where I could not see her. I started to follow; waited. Had there been any doubt, I must have known then; known from the accelerated beat of my heart; from a trembling that seemed to go through all my body; from that anticipation, that annunciation, that is like no other, though long it had been since I had experienced it. Waited until from the cave, I heard from a person I could not see, the low words seeming to reach me as an echo pressed out from the cave walls. “Why don’t you come in, Captain?”
* * *
Her body struck as though a representation on canvas, achieving that richness of tangible alabastrine flesh seemingly known only to the brush of an extraordinary painter, more lifelike than life itself, where she sat back, spread-out dungarees and shirt her pallet, hands clasped around her drawn-up knees, all her whiteness unbroken from her wheat-light hair until it reached that other small analogous bouquet just visible in the curved-in position, one aware of firm hard breasts, with nipples mauve against the white, erect simply from herself being looked at that way (in the painting, by the painter). She spoke very quietly, a faint resonance from the cave walls.
“If we start this, we’ll never stop it,” she said. “We’ll never stop fucking.”
There was something clean and brutal about the words as she said them, and hopelessly truthful.
“You should have thought of that before you took your clothes off, Lieutenant. In fact, before you started talking about it. Don’t talk to me about stopping anything,” something in me desiring to give back that clean brutality of her own.
I took off my clothes and looked at her, as I was aware she was at me. A meticulous, almost dispassionate kind of scrutinizing one was aware of in her, hard and absolute in intent, one’s own not unlike, a sense of unrestrained ravishment seeming to fill the cave. A body made to have love made to it. My own body trembling slightly in a wave of lust. I was sticking straight out, even to myself seeming impossibly, almost comically huge, oversized. She brought a hand up and touched for a moment, response a quick jumping, the thing with an intent quite all its own, hand moving to mine and drawing me down alongside her, atop the dungarees and the shirt—the brassiere and, myself quickly noticing these almost fondly, our dwindling supplies in such items, the mended panties. Then only the unleashed ravenousness. Her lips, her hair, beneath her arms, very slowly all around her breasts, her nipples; everywhere; aware as from a distance of a long low keening beginning to come from her. How good she tasted! First the scent of fresh apples, then as arousal grew, the cunt smell, to me so identical to the smell of the sea, not just between her legs (the roseate lips, the astonishing wetness flowing from her, pubic hair, thighs all dampened), but from her mouth, from everywhere, the modulation from the one scent to the other wild and dizzying. The unwithheld availability of that body still a kind of disbelief, the compulsive, selfish single purpose of a starved man. Welcomed between her thighs, her hands clawing, pressing my head into her, the long continuing moans merging like counterpoint with the rhythm of the sea touching the rocks, where I felt I might never have stopped my rituals of gluttony had those hands not pulled me away almost violently; onto her, into her, the long deep everlasting plunging to another medley of now fiercer sounds until screams broke against the cave walls, fell out over an unhearing sea.
In her arms I wept, herself stroking my hair, my face. Tears of release from terrible burdens, impossible loneliness.
* * *
Which of the two of us it was that first spoke that simple truth, and how much later, I do not know. In the long, now unhurrying times before it, we had done many things with each other; made love over and again until at last the raptness of satiation arrived. Perhaps it was said simultaneously (as two conspirators with the absolutely identical purpose will instinctively arrive at the identical instant at the identical conclusion). At least it was known simultaneously. As a fact nonnegotiable. If there was risk—and I don’t believe either of us felt at first that there was that much, both of us confident of our own joint ingenuity to be able to hide it—the risk was one of those that come along in life that simply have to be accepted. This not all that difficult, a ship’s captain being accustomed to these, a temper of the will toward the taking of risks; she, I knew long since, possessed of this same quality.
And so it was, not just that we first made love, but that we knew at once that we would continue to do so. Even falling back, in extremis, on the possibility that if the others found out they would not only accept it, but understand it; less sure of this conclusion than of the other, that we could not in any case, whether understanding or something very different were to be forthcoming from them, go on without having each other.
* * *
It was around then that Lieutenant (jg) Rollins, our ASWO, disappeared. This time it was as though everything in the settlement came to an abrupt halt. Again we made a meticulous search of the island, all hands participating. Again nothing turned up. This time we thought hard and long, all of us. A distinct sense of alertness began to take hold of the settlement. Gathered in my cabin: Girard, the doc, the Jesuit, Selmon, Thurlow. Myself remembering a talk with her on a night by the lifeline in the Mediterranean: how she had given up ballet on realizing that she would never go to the absolute top; gone into the Navy both to be among the first women to go to sea and to escape (she had exceptional physical beauty) hassling about marriage, which, for a reason she had not disclosed, she wished never to have.
Girard: “I hadn’t noticed a thing. I think she’d been gone a couple days when we checked her cottage. She wasn’t seeing men—her period.”
Captain: “Father, I have to ask this. Rollins was a Catholic. Was she . . .”
The Jesuit anticipated the question. “Negative, sir. As to whether she had a problem dealing wi
th the situation, I’d say the answer was a categorical no. I may be out of line both with my Maker and everyone else here but I think I’d better say it: I’d say she rather enjoyed it.”
A kind of mild surprise not at this experience of a given woman but at the articulation of it, especially from that source.
Captain: “Doc?”
Doc: “Rollins? Nobody healthier, Skipper. Took quite a long swim every day as everyone knows. Probably the best swimmer we have.”
Captain: “Drowning possible? Overextending?”
Doc: “Outside chance. Still, even very good swimmers . . .”
Captain: “Anything to add, Mr. Selmon?”
Selmon: “Nothing much, sir. I think most of us felt she was rather introspective.” He gave a small laugh. “Not that that’s necessarily a negative quality. I’m introspective myself. But I did see her now and then taking those long walks of hers up along the cliffs. All alone.”
I looked once more around that circle of officers. We had got exactly nowhere. Yet something seemed to hang in the air that I could not put my finger on.
“That’s all for now. Oh, Miss Girard.”
“Sir?”
“For a starter, from now on I want you to have someone check every one of the women’s cottages every day, and report to me that it’s been done.”
“I’ll check them myself,” she said, a grimness in her tone.
I was about to break it up when Thurlow spoke. “I agree with Mr. Selmon about the introspection part. I think something was bothering her. What, I don’t have a clue.”
For some reason I gave the navigator an extra look. Something . . . maybe it was only that he was one of her lovers.
7
The Cave
Two calm conspirators we had become and in almost ruthless planning—her seeming more ruthless as to it than myself—set about weaving our cocoon of deception. We would meet at this same place once a week; we dared not risk more. At a time to be varied. Finding our way there separately. Returning separately, my waiting a half hour by my watch after she had gone, taking a different route. It was a great conspiracy. We flirted with immeasurable risk. There was no helping it. Once, afterward, my head lying in her lap, I voiced mildly a concern of discovery.
“If they find out?” I said. .
“Let them. We’ll simply tell them we decided to have what they have.”
“I’m not sure that explanation will go over very big. There’s a difference. One on one, I believe it’s called.”
“Don’t worry,” she dismissed that. “Nothing’s going to happen.” She seemed to be consoling, reassuring me, at the same time a tone of warning—not for myself, but for absent others—in her voice. “If it does, just let me handle it. If they make a problem of it, I’ll tell them they can’t have it anymore. I and the women: we’ll simply shut everything down. I promise you results.”
I burst out laughing.
“What in the world are you laughing at, Captain?” We now used these forms of address mockingly.
“You, Lieutenant. You know, I believe you would.”
She seemed astonished. “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all. Of course I would. I don’t like being messed with. Except by yourself. But why are we wasting all this time talking and fancifying when we should be fucking?”
She somehow made the words both comical and highly incitatory, and used them, not often, but as she pleased. The undiluted girlishness—the impudent, brazen womanness. Perhaps on my part something, too, of an amused delight in the unexpectedness of all this after our countless hours together in our naval relationship, where if I had heard one of those words in that other incarnation I so constantly dealt with, intimations in the slightest of such a great hidden female desire resident in her, I would probably have fainted dead away in shock; her also, I think, in that so precise knowingness which never missed a beat, entirely aware of all this in me; perhaps in part a consequent delight of her own in displaying these qualities. Above all, the lightness some secret wisdom of hers, the magic key, as if a somber undertaking was the last thing in the world lovemaking should be, that the fatal flaw of so much of it. Literally the first time in my life for this kind of prolonged physical relationship; I who had had no love save that of the sea; who had never given myself in this way to a woman: feeling myself launched now on some undiscovered and sweetest of all oceans, endless in the diversity of its delights, proceeding over ever-changing horizons, seeming to take possession of one’s heart, mind and soul, all one was; shuddering in a kind of terror-struckness that I might have gone through life never knowing this. Perhaps I was learning but the most banal things, nonetheless to myself all-astonishing. Most of all the mysterious transforming power of good lovemaking as to every part of one’s life: One sees the clouds in the sky differently, the very stars of night take on a new aspect. To be sure, a slavery of a kind, as I was well aware: judging myself quite independent as men go, now much dependent on her, reaching a point that I could not have imagined life without the times in the cave. Yet feeling it to be a fair exchange: lovemaking’s slave recipient of lovemaking’s gift available nowhere else; above all, a peace of a kind never known to me. Curious that peace’s wellspring should be the most abandoned giving of our bodies to each other; physical sensations so intense that I had not known even of their existence; once found in a given woman, I could readily understand why men killed for them. Learning, too, why women are not interchangeable, why if it is to be of the highest, it is to be of but one, the pure luck in finding her scary. The secret woman I had now discovered—the lightheadedness, the marvelous tenderness—and altogether the gloriously, avariciously wanton female . . . in her, none of this, I came to see, the least in conflict with that other shrewd, immensely proper, Navy-professional, rather fortressed woman I had known so long. Perhaps that is woman’s ultimate specialness: to be both, one to the world, the other, although also to him, not so much to a man as to herself alone.
“How can one so young know so much?”
“Just a born gift, I suppose,” she said airily. “Since I haven’t done it all that much. Not with that many men. And not as many times with any as this. With you.”
“How many?”
“How dare you ask such a thing. Actually . . .” Thinking. “One, two, three . . .” Thinking back. “Well, kind of three and a half. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Is that all?”
“All. Altogether, Captain. Do you want the details?” Then pertly, insistently, “How many for you?”
“You’d be surprised. I’ve been most of my life at sea. As you know—ships.”
“Yes, I know all about ships. What a con man you are. And I also know about ports.”
“Not for me. Very, very little. I was too much of a coward.”
“How many?” Very insistently. “You asked me and I told you. Fair’s fair. I won’t let you touch me there anymore unless you tell me. I won’t let you put your cock in me ever again unless you tell me. At once. You like my saying those things?”
“Approximately six,” I said.
“I’m certain you’re lying. If not . . . Only six! For a man of your age.”
“I’m aware of that great disparity. I very much regret that I’m not twenty years younger and that I have not had sixty women.”
“I suppose I have to work with what I have. I can’t really say why I’m so good at it,” she said blithely. “There is a saying you haven’t really fucked until you’ve done it with a North Carolina girl.”
“A saying I imagine invented by a North Carolina girl.”
“I have a saying of my own. Would you like to hear it? I don’t feel I’ve been fucked properly unless I’ve been sucked first.”
“In that case, as you were . . .”
We had long times in the cave. Sometimes after our lovemaking taking a nap, falling asleep with the scent of her hair against my face, waking to find her alongside, some priceless surprise gift, granting myself the lux
ury of studying her while she slept, as if to imprint her in me, almost as though should anything ever take her away I would have her remembered flesh; gazing on that exquisitely made body, its clean radiance heightened by lovemaking, its young freshness, slender and cool, now in sleep all languorous, innocent; incredulous that it should be there all accessible to me, her very skin luminous and gleaming, scented with itself; a great tide of desire returning, before bringing her awake by the gentlest touch, whatever might occur, lips brushing arising nipples, hand placed flat on her pubic hair—and then we were beginning all over again.
Never would I have imagined the intense sensuality that outward manner of her concealed; how little we know of others, especially, I would think, those of us who think we know so much. A cognate voracity, these rituals, anarchic, a species of lascivious adoration on both our parts, an elegance in her eroticism. A temper for exploration, finding corresponding preferences. For herself, the long and tantalizing devotion there until I felt I might go through the roof of the cave before came the engulfing, the explosion, the harvest of white entering her mouth, by no means finished, the greedy continuing. I was put in mind of a quite elegant cat. For my part, never so ravenous as when knelt between those white thighs with that wondrous adornment, commencing that prolonged homage, appropriation, that intemperance, tasting her inner thighs all dampish, that proximate and softest of all women’s flesh where wet stray hairs now clung, face buried exultantly in the fullness of her pubic hair, conscious throughout of the muted sounds, the soft writhing, of intense felt pleasure, not until the wetness flowed out in such sweet-tasting offertory actually letting my tongue first touch that place, that cunt, I had come to worship, bringing a spasm, a sound animallike from her, accompanied always by that gesture of her urging hands on my head, the prodigal liquescence with its sea smell filling my mouth, smearing my face, a substance so wonderful I would bring it to her mouth that she might know what it was that so drove me wild, my moistened fingers, having momentarily entered her for that purpose, now sucked avidly by her. I could never have enough of it, not leaving off until herself, able to stand no more, pulled me away for that other urgent conjunction, those complementary vibrations, that high paroxysm. Collapsing afterward into each other’s arms, our bodies endewed with all the various wetnesses of us both, with sweat, with her cunt, with the come from myself strewn like white filigree across her belly, over her face, from another time, perhaps an hour, a half hour before. Our bodies sticking against each other’s, the wonderful and pungent, long-lost smells of sex permeating the cave.
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