“How? We have friends in common?”
“No. Years ago—fifteen years ago maybe—you had a motorcycle. For many summers. Right? I used to see you everywhere on that motorcycle. You looked incredible. Like Easy Rider, you know? So American—you are American or English?”
“American.”
“I thought so. Or I wanted to think so. You were my dream guy. Sometimes you had girls on the back of your bike, and oh, my God, I wanted to be on the back of your motorcycle with you. You have no idea.”
“I don’t remember seeing you—”
“No, of course not. I was ten years old, twelve, thirteen. And ugly—aie! I was just an ugly little girl, and you were this cool American guy on a motorcycle.” Incredibly, she reached up and touched his hair at the side of his head, pulling it gently. “Your hair was long then. Oh, I was so in love with you!” She laughed again, looking at him with such dumbfounding pleasure.
He stopped himself from kissing her—he wanted to feel those teeth with his lips and tongue so badly—but he’d wait, he’d prolong this sublime moment just a little longer. He grinned back at her. “If you were ever ugly, that’s not the case now.”
“Well, now it’s not so bad as it was. And you’re older, but still the cool-looking guy. More European I think now, no? It’s interesting, after all this time, to talk with you.”
“I could talk with you for . . .” He looked at her wide, beautiful mouth, the dark gums, the white teeth, her amused eyes. So beautiful, and now so ready—
Headlights from the road lit them both, not directly, but Luc saw her eyes going to the car. She stood up.
A black BMW 318i, stopped. Montserrat smiled at the car, then turned to Luc, leaned forward, and kissed both his cheeks with amused affection. “See you later, Easy Rider,” she said. She got into the car. Luc caught a glimpse of a young man, Spanish, masses of black hair, white teeth, lean planes of face. He and Montserrat threw their heads together for a more than perfunctory kiss, and she slammed the door and the car drove off. A cloud of dirt rose and swirled behind it, smearing the lights of the port.
• • •
He had no idea how long he sat there. After a while he heard the sea breaking on the rocks below, withdrawing in long heartfelt sighs, breaking again.
He stood up and walked back across the road. The music was quieter. Several couples were still dancing. The whole album of Revolver was playing. Some woman was making John Lennon feel like he’d never been born. Luc knew how he felt.
He went into the garage and stamped on the kick-starter of his old Rieju motorcycle. “Thank you, Vicente, hombre,” he said when it started up on the second kick. His mother’s gardener always filled the tank and cleaned the carburetor and plugs when Luc was expected for a visit.
He tore out of town. The warm night air blew his shirt open and felt cool on his chest, a sensation he remembered from so many long ago nights in Mallorca, on his way to where he believed some answer might be found—as now.
They would hear the whine getting louder, so he only drove halfway up the long drive. He got off and laid the bike against a carob tree. But the house was dark as he approached. There was no car. He could see from below that the doors to the terrace were closed. He walked up the steps. Still no sound or light. He tried the kitchen door and it was locked. But Charlie was here; she must be too.
He knocked.
Then he called. “Aegina?”
He walked through the scrub around the house looking up at the closed windows.
“Aegina!” he yelled up at the empty house. “Aeginaahhhh! I’m sorry!”
• • •
After parking the motorcycle back in the garage, Luc walked around the house and across the patio to the bar. It was deserted, no Sally. While he helped himself to a bottle of Perrier from the fridge, he became aware of a woman grunting, straining, as if pushing a boulder up a hill or having a despairingly difficult bowel movement . . . then a man sounding as if he was urging on a reluctant horse . . . Fucking. It wasn’t loud, but it was oddly clear. Luc couldn’t make out where it was coming from. Not the barracks, too far away; not the house. Then he remembered that Bronwyn was always saying there was this strange St. Paul’s Cathedral effect: from her room she could hear everything that was being said in the bar at a conversational tone. The fucking was coming from Bronwyn’s room, along the wall, up by the pool. “Come on! Come on!” the man was exhorting now. Luc recognized Dominick’s voice. It made perfect sense. Solace where you find it. Or as Somerset Maugham had written about impromptu sex: you can dine every night if you’re willing to eat turnips.
He took the bottle of Perrier and went up to his room. April was lying with her back on the floor, her feet raised against the wall above her, toes aimed at the ceiling.
“Where have you been?” she complained, in perfect counterpoint to her balanced pose. “I looked everywhere for you.”
“I went for a ride on my motorcycle. Are you okay?”
She didn’t answer.
“What?” said Luc.
“I just got off the phone with Aaron.”
“Ah.”
“He really wants me back.”
“He always did, didn’t he? I thought it was you who broke up with him.”
“It was.”
“But now you’re going back to him.”
With exquisite yogic abdominal muscle control, April lowered her legs, swiveled on her buttocks, then rose into an erect-backed lotus position, pulling her feet onto her thighs.
“You see, the way you say that,” she said, “I don’t think you care about me at all. I mean, like, I get the feeling if I said that—I’m going back to Aaron—you’d just say okay. I don’t think you’d even want to talk about it. I think you’d prefer to just go to bed and read a book.”
Luc sat down on the bed, stretched his legs out, and looked at April. “But you did just say that, didn’t you?”
• • •
Charlie and Bianca had danced too. They revolved slowly on the dance floor, their bodies pushed closely together. When he changed the records, she came into the music room with him and they kissed.
At midnight, she said, “I’ve got to go.” They kissed again, as if they hadn’t been doing it all night.
“I should probably stay until Lulu says I can go,” said Charlie. He was staying at Bianca’s house while his mother and grandfather were in London. “See you later . . . well”—he grinned—“in the morning anyway.” And Bianca left for the short walk home.
Twenty minutes later, Lulu came into the music room and said: “Leave that on, and come with me. I have something else for you.”
She held Charlie’s hand and led him back across the patio into the house, through the living room, around a corner, down a hall, into her bedroom. Charlie had often been in the house, but never here. The first thing he noticed was the large portrait of Lulu over the bed. She was reclining full-length in a red dress. Charlie knew right away it was a bad painting. His mother’s portraits always looked right. Not absolutely correct, like a photograph, but strokes of paint, loosely arranged, that ended up looking just like the person you knew, but better than any photograph could possibly represent that person. It was probably the time it took to paint a portrait. A photo caught less than a second of someone, whereas he’d seen how people came to his mother’s studio to sit for days and weeks, and she got to know them during that time, the way they laughed, the things they thought and talked about with her as she worked. All that, the whole person, somehow came through in his mother’s portraits. He’d always supposed all portraits were like that, so he’d been surprised when he went to see her pictures hung at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters show, at how bad the other exhibited paintings were: minutely detailed with expert techniques, their subjects looking stiff, unnatural, the hands in at least half of them looking like a mannequin�
��s. He didn’t know the people in the portraits, but he knew the paintings were badly done and the people didn’t really look like that at all. This was what he thought of Lulu’s portrait now. The face was recognizably hers but not right. She was sort of staring, unfocused, looking slightly off to one side. Her neck was too long and bent at the wrong angle. The colors were too bright. The body showed beneath the dress as though the material was thinner than it must have really been, but it wasn’t her body at all.
“I want to pay you, sweetheart. Five thousand pesetas we said, right?”
“Yes, Lulu. Thanks so much. I hope you had a lovely birthday.”
“I did, dear Charlie. It’s been marvelous.”
She went to her dressing table, opened a drawer, and took out her wallet. She counted out five large beautiful bills and gave them to him. Charlie stuffed them into his jeans pocket.
“Look,” said Lulu. She put her hands on his waist and turned him until he faced the full-length mirror lying against a wall at a slight angle. Its gold-painted frame was peeling, the silvering splotched and corroded, and Charlie knew that it was beautiful. He saw the pitted image of them both, like a couple in an old black-and-white photograph. He was black, his hair, jeans, the Moroccan shirt, dark complexion, and Lulu, her hair and clothes, all white.
She pulled him toward her and lifted her face to his. She was as close to him as he’d been with Bianca for much of the night. He saw what he had never noticed before: the white line of a small scar at the bottom of Lulu’s chin. “Now do me a little favor before you go, will you?”
“Sure,” said Charlie. He felt terribly grateful for the job, the shirt, Lulu’s kindness to him. He’d do anything for her. He thought she might want a crate moved in the kitchen.
She sat down on a leather-topped brass stool. She reached for a bottle of lotion, handed it to Charlie and swiveled on the stool until her back was presented to him. “Be a dear and rub some of this into my neck and shoulders. They ache so.” She reached back and pulled her braided ponytail over her shoulder. Then she shrugged her shoulders on each side in a swaying motion and her gauzy shirt slipped off and dropped to her waist.
Charlie looked in the mirror and immediately looked away. He’d seen lots of women’s breasts because everybody went topless at the beaches and swimming pools in Mallorca. He might have seen Lulu’s breasts too at some point, but he didn’t remember. He hadn’t thought about her like that, as he had about some of his mum’s friends when he’d seen them on the beach.
He squeezed some lotion onto his hands and rubbed. The skin was smooth and tight and warm, so that the lotion became immediately viscous and slippery.
“That’s lovely, darling,” Lulu said. “Do keep going.”
Charlie was so pleased that she liked it. Lulu really liked him.
Her head dropped. Now Charlie glanced in the mirror. Her forearms were lightly crossed. He saw her small breasts either side of the cord of white hair that she held against the middle of her chest. They were very small, like a girl’s breasts, but they had pronounced dark nipples that were as thick as his fingertips. His erection, sustained for much of the night by pressing into Bianca, now revived, achingly.
“Mmm. . . .” Lulu hummed.
Charlie felt heat rise off her skin. He felt it on his chest and stomach through the black shirt. Lulu was breathing deeply now, through her nose, the way he’d seen women breathe while doing yoga on the patio at the Rocks. He wondered if Lulu was falling asleep and he made a small noise in his throat. Her hand rose to his on her shoulder and she patted it. He thought she meant that was enough, fine thank you so much Charlie, time for him to go, but she held on to Charlie’s hand and stood and turned and pulled the hem of his Moroccan shirt up to his chest and hugged him. He felt her nipples against his stomach.
“You don’t mind, do you, darling?”
“No.”
“Do you want to hug me?”
“Sure,” he said affably. It was her birthday, after all. He put his arms around her, his palms on her warm back between her shoulder blades. She was half the volume of Bianca, sinewy, yet soft and warm.
Lulu began to move against him. Her head nuzzled into his chest. Her groin pressed into his, and it was impossible to conceal himself. Her hands playing across his back moved down inside his jeans onto his buttocks.
“Charlie,” she crooned softly. “You have such lovely, lovely smooth skin. Come.”
She released him, but held his hands firmly and led him to the bed and pushed him down on his back. She knelt over him, running her hands across his stomach.
“Such lovely, lovely smooth skin.” She lowered her head and brushed her mouth back and forth across Charlie’s stomach. He felt her hands on his jeans undoing the button, the fly.
“You don’t mind, do you, darling?”
The nerves across his stomach twitched like a horse’s flank. “No,” he said.
Then he felt her hands on him, pulling him right out of his jeans and underpants, squeezing gently.
Lulu’s head lifted and she looked into his face. “Are you a virgin, Charlie?”
“Yes.” He wondered if he should have lied. Maybe she would stop now.
“Then this will be a beautiful birthday present for both of us. You’re sure you don’t mind?”
He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. And he didn’t want her to stop. “No. It’s all right. Happy birthday, Lulu.”
She laughed. Then she kissed him on the mouth. Her lips were thinner than Bianca’s, her tongue more confident. Then she moved her head down across his stomach again.
Charlie thought he knew what she was going to do now. He looked up at the dark beams on the ceiling.
He was right.
Six
Gerald had brightened and become restless in the car as they drove the last few kilometers into Cala Marsopa. He was looking at the trees.
“We need rain,” he said.
From the car window, Gerald caught intermittent glimpses of the landscape: the drooping, desiccated, midsummer carob pods; the flaring red, orange, and yellow blush of Indian fig prickly pears. Lemon trees, almond trees, olive trees, interspersed with scattershot Doppler echoes of their car flashing past beige stone walls, beige stone houses. He was impatient to see his own olive and lemon trees—what was left of them. He pictured himself among them on the slope above the house in the light of late afternoon. If he turned, there, in his mind’s eye, he would see the contours and ridgelines of surrounding hills which were imprinted in his brain as much as the lines in Aegina’s paintings on the walls in his house. Through his olive trees, he saw the blue sea he had sailed over, and then he rose and flew over the sea and saw, in small scale, the whole of the Mediterranean, and Alexandria and the dust of Egypt in the war, and the books he had read then and afterward and the history he had come to know through them, the line threading through all these pictures to the present time and place.
Then, as the road descended toward the sea, Gerald’s eyes fixed on Los Olivos, the clustered development of townhomes that bulked on the hill above his property.
Aegina could feel her father tensing.
“Abomination,” grumbled Gerald. “Christ, why couldn’t I have got this book money years ago? Then I wouldn’t have sold my olive groves to that—” He stopped abruptly.
“Because things don’t happen like that, Papa, when we want them to. You’re lucky it’s all happened the way it has. Even that—” She stabbed a finger at the gaudy, stuccoed, arched entrance and paved road to Los Olivos rising up the hillside. “It wasn’t what we wanted, but it helped—didn’t it?” She shot him a look. “Everything could have been a lot worse, you know. If you were living in England, who knows what sort of life you’d’ve had. You could be an old-age pensioner in some council flat, shuffling off to the high street supermarket with a string bag and nearly run down by a double-decker b
us every time you wanted to cross the street. I mean, look where you live, Papa. The way you live. What you’ve managed to do. And what’s just happened. It’s not too shabby, is it?”
“Well . . .”
Aegina glanced at her father again and saw his eyes raised, looking out the window now for the first sight of C’an Cabrer.
“I’m very proud of you, Papa. Charlie will be too. He’ll read your book someday, and he’ll become curious about you. He’ll ask me questions, like I’ve asked you, and I’ll be able to tell him what an unusual life his grandfather lived.”
Gerald snorted.
“I’m still not sure, though, why you didn’t go off to Greece when you could have, why you stayed in Mallorca.”
“Well, I met your mother.”
“But that’s not true, is it? The timing’s off. You met her after you’d been here for three years. Come on, why didn’t you go before that? You can tell me.”
“I lost Nereid. You know that.”
“That was three years before you met Mama. You still could have gone to Greece. It was probably cheaper to live there than in Spain. You could have got another boat when you published your book the first time. You decided to stay.”
“Oh, it’s all ancient history,” said Gerald, striving for vagueness. “I can’t remember what happened when. I met your mother, that was the reason. Lucky for you.”
She let it go. “Yes.” Aegina grabbed her father’s hand and squeezed it. “I’m glad you did.”
• • •
Two days later, Aegina climbed the stairs to the “tower,” Charlie’s room on the second floor of C’an Cabrer. It had once been a feed loft. Years ago, Aegina had paid to have it expanded and a bathroom added. She didn’t come up the stairs often. She heard music on the other side of the door. She knocked.
“Yeah?” came Charlie’s voice through the door.
“Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
He was lying on the floor beside what appeared to be a woman’s small red leatherette vanity case. It was open, the two halves held together by small hinges; a turntable in one half, a speaker in the other. Old LPs and 45s were scattered on the carpet.
The Rocks Page 7
