by Jane Rule
“Let’s swim.”
More carefully each one of us went over the side, and then we swam rather self-consciously together to the island. Peter stayed out beyond the boat for a while, but then he came over to us and very deliberately offered the equipment to me. I felt unreasonably angry with him, as critical as I might have been, perhaps was, of myself. I accepted the gun, the mask, the fins, each with careful politeness. I suppose I was responsible for the competitive mood that developed. I was the strongest swimmer of the four, but I knew nothing about spearfishing. It is so easy to misjudge distance and size in the reflecting clarity of that water. More or less by accident I caught the first fish. You did not want to be bested, were always willing to test yourself against whatever I had achieved, but you expected to lose, and losing always increased your admiration of your opponent rather than your uncertainty about yourself. Peter, on the other hand, needed to put me in my place, and he could not. When Andrew snagged a small octopus by mistake and brought it to me with mock ceremony, he was content, but Peter went down again and again until his lips were gray. It was time for lunch, but he would not stop.
“Pete, come on,” Andrew shouted.
“I’m not hungry,” he answered. “Go on in if you want to.”
It did not seem sensible to leave him, but after a few minutes we swam back to the boat to wait. Finally Andrew decided we must go into lunch. We had not eaten in five hours, and breakfast had been the usual tea and toast. Andrew shouted again and got no answer; so he pulled on the anchor. It was snagged in coral, thirty feet below. Each of us had a turn, but it would not budge.
“Pete, could you come give us a hand?” you called, and for you he came.
After we had all pulled together, the anchor seemed more firmly lodged than ever.
“We’d better go down the rope,” I said.
“It’s too deep,” Andrew said.
“Why don’t I try?” I said.
“I’ll go down,” Peter said and disappeared before anyone could protest.
He surfaced once, gasping, and went down again. We could see him, working his way down hand over hand on the rope. It was hard to judge whether he had reached the anchor or simply paused a few feet above it.
“I think he’s in trouble,” I said.
Andrew went down ahead of me, but he had not waited for breath and let go at twenty feet, Peter hanging in the water just five feet below him. I kept to the rope and, gripping it with one hand, reached an arm around Peter’s waist. Then you were there, helping, and Andrew again. When we surfaced, Andrew rolled into the boat; and, while we lifted from the water, he pulled. Then Andrew had his mouth against Peter’s, breathing his breath into Peter’s lungs. I cut the anchor rope, and we were moving toward shore.
Peter began to breathe almost at once and was conscious and able to stand by the time we reached the shore. We took him down to his room, wrapped him in blankets and gave him some brandy. He slept most of the afternoon while we sat, Andrew reading with determination, you sketching, I trying to reason myself out of rage. I did not want to suffer either for or with Peter. I wanted to get out.
“Cocktail time,” Peter said, standing at the top of the steps looking not much grayer than he always did.
We all turned to look at the vine that grew up over the wall and onto the roof of the hotel. The first moon flower was open. The second trembled suddenly; then the petals sprang wide and white. As each flower opened, giant hummingbird moths came across the terrace to hover about them. A moment later the owner of the hotel appeared with a tray of cocktails. It was a ritual we were now familiar with. As we sat drinking, the darkness closed in. There was no moon.
“How can I love you all?” Peter asked with quiet drama. “But I do… even you, Kate.”
“We’re going to eat the octopus,” you said.
Andrew and I said nothing. I wondered if he felt as tempted to crude retort as I did, but I did not want to be even that curious.
I was reluctant the next morning when Andrew suggested that he and I walk into San Telmo for cigarettes. I was tired and wanted to be alone. But, if I had stayed, you would have kept me company.
Andrew and I started out briskly but we hadn’t reached the top of the first hill before he suggested a rest. We climbed onto a rock from which we could look down onto the bay and the hotel. We could even see you and Peter, sitting on the terrace.
“Kate, there are things I ought to explain,” Andrew began.
“I don’t much like explanations,” I said.
“Why?”
“They diminish things so.”
“There’s nothing to diminish,” he insisted. “There’s nothing between Peter and me, at least as far as I’m concerned.”
“How unfortunate for Peter,” I said.
“And for me,” he said. “I don’t enjoy it. I didn’t realize it until this trip. I didn’t know him very well. We were drinking one night in Paris and just decided to go—very casually. It wasn’t until the first night… I should have pulled out right then, but I didn’t want to hurt him. Now, I don’t know what to do. Sometimes it seems to be perfectly all right with him. Then it’s just terrible. I get fed up. I think I’ll leave, and then I’m afraid to leave him.”
“So you asked us to join you.”
“Yes, but not just because—”
“It’s reason enough,” I said.
“You don’t like to be involved, do you?”
“I don’t like being on the edgy edge of things like this, no.”
“And Esther doesn’t even know what’s going on. She doesn’t even see that Pete’s indifferent to her.”
“He’s not, in the way she cares about,” I said.
“But why would a woman…?”
“Are you a little jealous?” I asked.
“Don’t be silly,” he said too quickly.
“All right, but let’s go,” I said, getting up.
“Wait a minute, Kate. Why do you always run away?”
“To keep from hurting people who aren’t bright enough to protect themselves. I’m not interested—in the way you care about. It’s a ridiculous situation for you, isn’t it? But why do you choose two people like Peter and me?”
“Peter and you?” he asked. “You’re not—you and Esther aren’t—”
“No, Esther has nothing to do with it, except that she seems to have your talent for picking the wrong companions.”
“I wish we could talk. I wish we could talk until I understood. I always pretend to, but I don’t. It’s as if I’m always into a conversation at the place where it ends. In two weeks I know practically nothing about you, and you don’t know very much about me, either. We’re a couple of strangers marooned with an issue. Why don’t we ever really talk, Kate?”
But we didn’t talk. He talked, first about his father, the kind of self-made man who must then make other people in his own image. Andrew was his only son, whose interests he both indulged and raged about. Languages, social anthropology, and painting were all so much bullock shitting nonsense. Andrew should be in engineering or at least in business school if he hadn’t any real aptitude. In another five years he would be expected to take over the family millions.
“It’s just my luck not to have a younger brother—better still to be a younger brother. Then I could be given to charity.”
“Second sons go into the Army,” I said.
“A third son then, assigned to killing off dragons in Alberta.”
Andrew could not help sometimes suspecting his own rebellion, for it did not include giving up the family millions. He saw himself as something of a scholar, a traveler, a collector. He could live simply enough, as he did now and as he had when he stayed for a time in a monastery in India, but he could not have endured such a life if it were not a free choice. He wanted the freedom of money, and he wanted the power of money.
“There’s something weak about a poor man, something distasteful.”
In the next sentence he began to sp
eak of Peter, at first with kindness but gradually with impatience.
“Will a man like that ever really paint, really accomplish anything? He’s beginning to talk about leaving Paris, moving down here where it’s really cheap to live. There are hundreds of people like him. They move from Paris to Spain. Pretty soon they run out of money even in Spain, go on to North Africa for a while to work on construction jobs, drift back to Spain again. Why does anyone choose to live like a victim? Why does a man want another man on top of him, Kate? I don’t want to be a prude. I want to understand, but I just don’t. I had a friend once in the Army. He wasn’t anything like Pete. He was tough. There was nothing too tough for him, but he’d go down on his belly for any pansy he could find. He wanted to be humiliated. And that’s what Pete wants. I can’t stand it. It’s different for a woman. It doesn’t seem to me the same thing at all. Physical things are different.”
“ ‘Jill goes down on her back,’ ” I said, but he didn’t hear me.
He was discovering how he felt as he talked, and he was fascinated by his acceptance of natural inferiority. The sun was very hot, the floury dust too soft and deep for easy walking. Don’t blame the Indian at the bootlegger’s, the Negro with the switchblade, the Jew in his brother’s pocket, the woman in her sister’s bed. Morality is a luxury which only the Anglo-Saxon male can afford. Being able to afford it, he must buy it, judge others who can and don’t, excuse the rest of the world with condescending kindness. But Andrew neither was nor felt that safe. The rich are also a persecuted minority, and the moral burden was heavy. The more difficult it grew to interrupt his monologue, the harder he found it to tolerate my silence. I could feel his growing frustration, but there was nothing I could say. I had to protect myself. It takes confidence to exchange confidences. Before the morning was over, it seemed to us both that it would never end.
Could all these remembered fragments explain to you now why it was that I left you there? I made no attempt to explain at the time.
“I want to go back to England in the morning.”
“All right,” you said.
“You want to go on to Madrid with the boys.”
“You mean… without you?”
“With them,” I said.
“All right.”
“I have to go, E.”
“Then you must.”
And that was all. You were not a letter writer. I did not know how you were or where you were for the rest of the summer, but, when we met in the fall, nothing in your behavior ever suggested that I had done anything reprehensible. “People shouldn’t have to explain anything. They should accept each other.”
It was a bad winter for me, that last winter at college. I had lost my enthusiasm for philosophy, for the history of myth, for poetry. I wanted to go on studying, but I wanted to be involved in the present, to learn something useful about politics, economics. The system did not allow for so radical a change of mind. I had to go on discovering biblical footnotes for Donne’s poems, Doppelganger images from Zoroaster to Eliot, arguments for various transcendent realities which now seemed to me dully unreal.
If you hadn’t begun to go to chapel with me that fall, I might not have gone myself. I wore that kind of piety with more and more discomfort. I didn’t mind explaining the ritual to you, but discussions about the nature of belief troubled me. I wanted to turn away from all that, but it was as awkward to change one’s Sunday habits as one’s major in the last year at college. The chaplain often asked me to read, and the chaplain’s wife expected me to help with coffee because I always had. When I was asked to give the student sermon that spring, I could think of no easy way to refuse.
“There’s no point in being a nominal Christian,” I said as we walked to class one morning after breakfast.
“No,” you said, “but I suppose it’s very hard to be more than that. It’s a hard faith.”
“Do you think so?” I was somehow surprised to hear you say it. “Are you going to join the Church, E.?”
“Someday I hope so.”
“I’ve been asked to give the student sermon just after spring vacation. I’d like you to be my reader.”
“Could I?”
The word of God is certainly safer with you than with me, I wanted to answer, but I didn’t. It would only have prompted admiring protests which were increasingly difficult to tolerate. Or was it simply having an audience to them that made me impatient? Monk was your almost constant companion that winter, and she found your devotion even more tedious than I did, perhaps because it was not directed at her. I did not particularly like Monk in those days. She seemed to me silly; yet often one of her quick remarks was either very shrewd or accidentally frightening. Even after all these years I am sometimes not sure with Monk. Then I never was. She would chatter about her professor, her social worker, and the lesser men in her life until you and I were so tired of that we could even welcome her taunting us about our own conversations.
“Let’s have a little something pithy on the nature of existence, Kate,” she’d suggest.
“That’s a big question, Monk,” you’d answer, protective of me or of her.
“And that’s a big answer!” Monk would say. “Come on. Put your minds to it. You see, I don’t really believe this place really exists. It’s just a series of slogans about education for womanhood or catastrophe or life, all of which amount to the same thing. But where’s the world to live in? It’s not here, is it?”
“It’s not supposed to be,” you said.
“Then what is it supposed to be?”
“A retreat, a place for study… whatever you make of it.”
“A vacuum, but maybe a vacuum’s real. You can’t make anything out of it, but it can do something to you. It’s done something to you, Kate, hasn’t it?”
“Probably,” I said, not about to be drawn into the conversation, but remembering “all is void, lucid, and self-illuminating.”
“It’s a nothing place with no answers. Am I going to wear a girdle tonight or not? Now what good is any education if it doesn’t help a girl decide that?”
“You mean… as a chastity belt?” you asked.
“Isn’t she quaint? And that’s the truth; a quaint vocabulary so out of date it can’t deal with moral problems past the fifteenth century How can I talk about my ‘virtue’?”
“How, indeed,” I said.
“You’re such a prude, Kate. Well, give me some prudish advice. Tell me what to wear tonight.”
Before I could answer her flippancy in kind, I had to censor a sudden obscenity, and you, as usual, answered the question for me.
“Your girdle,” you said. “After all, he’s a married man with three children.”
“But that’s the barrel I’m over,” she protested. “He can always just go home—” She must have caught my impatience because she shifted quickly “And Whitehead doesn’t talk about that. Plato does, of course, but he was a fairy, wasn’t he?”
“Wear your diaphragm,” I said.
“That’s another thing I haven’t got. They ought to be handed out like free milk at recess, but no—textbooks on all the positions, instead. Are you teasing me, Kate?”
“No. I think you ought to sleep with him because your not is beginning to be a bore.”
“But, Kate, I thought you thought—” you began, but I had hailed another friend and was excusing myself.
“Isn’t Kate a virgin, then?” I heard Monk ask as I walked away.
I should have been sympathetic with Monk’s restlessness, suffering so badly from it myself. The rigid division I had made was breaking down, perhaps because I had had so little of the summer for myself, perhaps because I had so little to give to the work there was to be done. Often, as we sat together over coffee at the shop, I would lose track of the conversation between you and Monk and find myself watching two or three students who had not elected my careful circumspection. They were not attractive to me; neither was my need. I indulged it only in my imagination, hoping I was relat
ively safe, unrecognizable.
Watching, I was aware long before you were of the interest Sandra Mentchen (called “Honorable” occasionally, more often Sandy) had begun to take in you. It was casual enough at first, a nod, a brief exchange of conversation at our table before she moved to her own. She was a small, slight, intense girl, a musician who disciplined her talent and nothing else. In the first two years at college she was always in some kind of trouble, staying out all night or drinking in her room or failing her required English courses. And from the beginning there were rumors about sexual peculiarities. We had no reason to know her well because she took none of the courses we did and lived in another dormitory, but everyone knew her a little. Because you admired anyone with real gifts, you were flattered by the small attentions. Perhaps it was only part of the general tendency of seniors to be more of a group in their last spring. We all shared the pressure of comprehensive examinations and almost too immediate futures.
“Everybody’s going to Europe,” Monk said glumly.
“Everybody?”
“Well, aren’t you? Isn’t Esther?”
“Mother hasn’t okayed Slade yet,” you said, “and I haven’t been accepted, anyway.”
“But you will be, and Kate will get a Fulbright for the London School of Economics. It isn’t fair. You ought to have brains or talent or money and leave something for me.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to go,” I said.
“Everybody wants to go. Not everybody can be as casual about it as you are. I suppose you’re going over for Easter as well.”
“No,” I said. “Mother’s going to London to be with Doris and Frank, though, so I’m going to stay on campus. I did that last year, too.”
“Oh yes, it was Christmas in Rome, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“All three of us will be here for Easter vacation,” you said. “I think lots of the seniors will be around.”
“Too bad,” I said. “It was so beautifully quiet last year. Not a soul around. If being a nun were like that, I’d be tempted.”
“Wouldn’t it be something like that?” you asked.
