by Hawkes, John
“I’m afraid of him,” Catherine whispered.
“No need to be,” I murmured, and brushed the sand from the hair on my chest, felt little Dolores encircling my tight and heavy thigh with a stealthy arm.
Bare foot raised to the edge of the black and pitted blade, coat open, chest and belly now and again exposed in both a poverty and pride of nakedness, broad and crooked shoulders twisting suddenly to the thrust of the long arm and invulnerable bare foot—all this was observed in silence as slowly the pile of sand went down and the shadows lengthened and the light of the afternoon grew still more pale. In this physical act of covering up forever what he assumed to be the small body of an infant dressed for death, the shepherd was providing Meredith with a performance which I, had it been me, would surely not have attempted. But even now I suspected that Meredith, so seldom treated to anything she herself desired, had probably forgotten the reason we were waiting at the edge of this grave. And yet if Meredith was having a little excitement, I thought, what did it matter if momentarily she had forgotten her old dog? After all, I thought, the afternoon really belonged to Hugh.
“Oh, baby, a flute …”
From a pocket in his open coat the shepherd had produced a short wooden pipe on which he now played his reedy tune for Meredith. The light faded, the rising wind blew through the open coat, his unfocused eyes were fixed on Meredith, the bony fingers rose and fell on the holes of the crude pipe. Had he known all along that he would stand here playing his shepherd’s pipe? Was this why he had joined us and taken up the shovel? Only to pipe his endless frail tune into the approaching night? At least Meredith would never forget those sounds, I told myself. Nor, for that matter, would Hugh.
He was still playing when I retrieved the shovel, still playing when once again we straggled back into the wall of trees. And still playing when from the darkness ahead, where Hugh and Fiona were quite invisible, I heard against the wind and that faint piping the clear tones of Fiona’s voice.
“He was attractive, baby. But not as attractive as you.”
IT IS ANOTHER ONE OF OUR MURMUROUS NONSEQUENTIAL midafternoons in Illyria. Together we lounge around the small white female donkey which only this morning Hugh discovered stock-still in the lemon grove. Hugh holds the donkey’s rope. Catherine ties back her hair, Fiona smiles, all four of us have taken turns at the makeshift shower.
“Listen,” Hugh says, “we can either pack the baskets on the donkey and walk. Or Cyril can carry the baskets and Fiona can ride the donkey. What do you say, boy, shall Fiona ride?”
“Sure,” I say, admiring the little trim white body and pearl-colored hoofs, “let Fiona ride.”
“Help me up, baby. OK?”
We face each other, we kiss, we look into each other’s eyes. I put my heavy hands on Fiona’s waist and lift and seat Fiona sidesaddle (though there is no saddle) on the donkey’s rump. I step away, Hugh gives the end of the rope to Fiona and puts his quick hand against the small of her back.
“I’ll hold her on, boy. Don’t worry.”
Fiona waves. Off they go at a fast walk through the lemon trees which soon give way to orange trees white with blossoms.
“Wait,” Catherine whispers, “they’ll see.”
“Can’t wait,” I say, and pull her into another full-length embrace, mouth to mouth with Catherine’s hands in my hair and my own two weathered hands pressing the warm flesh beneath the blouse and beneath the wide waistband of Catherine’s skirt. We hold each other, we erupt into a few choppy kisses, again we hold each other—Catherine and I who are too heavy to ride on donkeys, too large in each other’s arms to move.
And yet I lift my head, Catherine lifts her head, for a moment we see that all this while Fiona has been riding back and forth between the trees, Fiona with her bare legs thrust out for balance and steadied at the same time by her smiling Hugh. They wave, the air is sweet, the small white distant donkey carries its laughing and weightless burden through the orange trees.
“Baby,” Fiona calls, “we can do whatever we want to do. We really can.”
Remember?
OR IN THE SEA AND SWIMMING, ALL FOUR OF US SIDE BY side in an undulating line of naked bathers peaceful, untiring, synchronized, stroking our slow way out from the pebbly shore behind us and forward toward the little island rising ahead. And today Hugh is as naked as the rest of us. Today he lies in the low waves beside Fiona and his body rolls, his tufts and patches of black hair shine in the foam, his thin legs are cutting imaginary paper, his stump is pink, his good arm is doing double duty.
“Think we’ll make it, boy?”
“Sure we will. Only a few hundred yards or so to go. Nothing to it.”
Porpoises. Four large human porpoises similarly disposed and holding formation, laughing, stroking the waves, and Fiona is swimming on her side, like Hugh, while Catherine and I are riding heads down and on our bellies, though now and again we swing together and bump and touch. With every breath we see each other through pink spray and across green foam.
“Baby, it’s so beautiful. I could swim forever.”
It is Fiona’s idea, of course, these naked watery idyls to the little island that slopes up from the sea and gently turns like the bare brown sinuous shoulder of a young girl. And the idea corresponds somehow to Fiona herself and to the experience—in the idea as in the sea itself we snort, kick, float, swim on as if the less familiar shore will never rise to our feet or as if the freshening depths will never give way to the warm shallows.
But it ends. We drift against the island, and Fiona is out and running, and silvery wet-ribbed Hugh is gasping for the breath of paradise but giving chase. Sea to sand, obviously it is another moment of metamorphosis which Catherine and I, still dripping, still knee-deep in the pale tide, share at a glance. Her hair is plastered to cheek, neck, upper chest, and down her left arm. Her small amber-colored eyes are fixed on mine. She is large but I am larger, and side by side we climb from the pooling sea and walk together across the few remaining feet of dry sand to the privacy of the nearest convenient rocks behind which I draw Catherine into another full-length embrace. And suddenly Catherine is all mouth, all stomach, all thighs and hands, all salt and skin and hair, Catherine sliding between my heavy legs and I between hers until later, much later, our knees can spread no wider and the brass voice resounding in the oracle of Catherine’s sex and mine can sing no more. We extricate ourselves. We kiss. We smile. I strip the wet and partially graying hair from Catherine’s cheek. Hand in hand we walk back to the clear green shallows for a rinse and then strike off across the sand for our usual cool rendezvous with thin Hugh and slender Fiona in the little abandoned seaside chapel at the eastern edge of this small timeless island.
Hugh and Fiona are already inside when we arrive, their sandy footprints already shine on the stone floor when we join them within the whitewashed wall of the little chapel. There is a cross of sorts on the roof but no windows, no altar, no iron bell, no icons, no religious furniture, as if the chapel itself had once been drowned in the depths of our green sea and then hauled to the surface and left to dry out forever. We enter, Catherine and I, knowing that Hugh and Fiona are already there. In silence we greet each other with eyes and fingers, we who are now four naked figures instead of two. There is light in the narrow doorway, the white and shadowed eruptions of this room reflect the nudity of our four tall bodies congregating, so to speak, in reunion. And if we are all comparing notes, as it were, Fiona smiling at Catherine and squeezing my arm, Hugh glancing slowly in my direction, Catherine watching the movement of Fiona’s legs and thinking of me, I catching a glimpse of Hugh in Fiona’s steady eyes—still we are all unpaired selfless lovers agreeably reunited in the island chapel.
“Baby,” Fiona whispers, “I like us all bare together, don’t you?”
I smile, Hugh tucks the tip of his injured arm against Fiona’s ribs. We linger on.
Remember?
“YOU’RE WEARING YOUR NICE OLD DRESSING GOWN,” Fiona was saying
. “Have fun, baby.”
“I could stick around here tonight just as well, Fiona. What do you think?”
“You’re feeling amorous, baby, and she’s expecting you. I can tell.”
“This blue mood’s not like you, Fiona. I’ll stay.”
“No baby. Go ahead. Please.”
Yes, I was feeling amorous, as Fiona said. All day long I had sat outside our villa and watched Fiona’s mounting silence, had sat with elbows propped on heavy thighs and blown halfhearted, stillborn, unappreciated smoke rings and watched Fiona walking back and forth with her head down and her two strong hands on her buttocks. We had stared at each other over the flashing rims of our wineglasses, we had had one of our love lunches, as Fiona called them, but had made no love. She had smiled, she had looked wan, she had made no move to walk beyond the villa. And all day long there had been no sign of Hugh. So now in the darkness there was no mistaking the message of Fiona’s hand on my silken sleeve, no use arguing against Fiona’s mood. She was determined that I go, that she stay behind, that she wait alone either for my return or Hugh’s unlikely arrival. But Fiona was wearing her white and tightly belted terry-cloth robe instead of her lisle negligee, which suggested that she would spend the night with neither one of us.
“I won’t be long.”
“No hurry, baby. I’m going to read.”
“Listen,” I murmured, “if he shows up …”
But before I could allude to the innumerable incidents that might have justified Fiona’s hopes, suddenly I felt her cold hand on my mouth and her thin fingers against my lips and could say no more. Was all Hugh’s excitement to come to nothing? Was Fiona to be denied?
“I told you, baby. I’m going to read.”
My hands were in the loose pockets of my maroon-colored silken dressing gown, Fiona’s long insistent fingers were still pressed to my lips. The day that was like no other day in our lives was ended, the night that was like no other night would soon be gone. And nodding, aware of the narrow featureless white face in the darkness and the white tufted robe which I could not bring myself to touch, for the first time I contemplated the possibility that Hugh might have managed to keep himself in ignorance of Catherine and me, as a matter of fact, might simply waste all his obvious devotion to Fiona and hence hers to him. Was it over? Was it never to begin?
“It’s just not going to happen, baby. I was wrong.”
I thought of all she refused to let me say, I thought of Hugh and Fiona listening to the nightingale, I heard them laugh. I saw Hugh catching her close among the silent trees. And now only the two of us with our perplexity, our depression, our separate thoughts? We had had our disappointments in the past, our reversals, but nothing like this. Nothing quite as simple and stark and final as this.
“You better go, baby. Come back when you want to.”
So the day had already struck the toneless note of the night’s silence before darkness fell, and already the mood of the woman I was leaving had telegraphed itself, it seemed to me, to the woman I was about to meet. If Fiona was beyond my reach, I decided, Catherine was perhaps no better off. If my wife was pensive, Hugh’s wife would be pensive too. Solitude did not bode well for amorous feeling. So even before I pushed my way through the funeral cypresses, moving slowly and more ruminative than ever, already I was anticipating the pauses that would precede companionship, the reluctance that would greet my tenderness. I too was moody. The night was a black heart. I misjudged the whereabouts of the rift in the funeral cypresses and was forced to retrace my steps and feel my way through the no longer familiar passage between the trees. Perhaps Catherine was sleeping. Perhaps she was not lying awake for me at all as Fiona had thought. And still there was no sign of Hugh and I did nothing to disguise the sounds of my slow approach, thinking that we lovers in fact were bound to suffer at the hands of the lovers in fancy.
But mistaken. Totally mistaken. Because as soon as I invaded Hugh’s dark villa and entered that cold room, I knew immediately that it was worse than I thought, that it was no mere question of blue moods or vague romantic numbness, but that something was wrong, something specifically and painfully wrong.
“Catherine? What’s the matter?”
The shutters were open, the low bed was empty. I waited. I listened for the sleeping children and sleeping dog, heard nothing. But there at the foot of the empty bed stood Catherine with her dark hair loose and arms at her sides and wearing the white translucent pajama top and pants. There she stood, immobile, opalescent, poignant, and suddenly I knew that she had been standing there for hours.
“Catherine. What’s wrong?”
I saw the turned-down bed, from somewhere in the darkness of this thick-walled room I detected the scent of the three large cream-colored roses which I had picked and brought with me the night before. Nothing and yet everything had changed. But why, I asked myself, what had happened? Why was Catherine breathing with such deep regularity and watching me with such willful silence, as if Hugh himself were hidden bolt upright in one of the other darkened corners of the room? Or had he instead departed? Simply packed up his cameras and disappeared? But Catherine and I were alone, safely though uncomfortably alone, and no matter how Hugh chose to treat his wife, surely nothing could induce him to abandon the garden in which Fiona flowered.
“Catherine, what’s happened? What’s wrong?”
Mere empty bed, mere silent woman, mere smell of the night, mere fading scent of the roses, mere smell of useless cologne on my naked chest. But this could not be all, I told myself, and again I was convinced that Catherine was now more than ever in need of my patience, my tenderness.
“Listen. There’s something you want me to know but don’t want to say. What is it?”
I moved close to Catherine and placed my firm hands on her sloping shoulders.
“Fiona’s not herself tonight,” I said gently. “Neither are you.”
“I wish you hadn’t come.”
“But you’ve been expecting me.”
“Yes. But you’d better go.”
“Is it Hugh?”
“It’s not Hugh.”
“Tell me. What’s he done?”
“Nothing.”
“Catherine, put your arms on my shoulders and your hands in my hair. Kiss me.”
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
“Well, I’m not going to leave you like this. You know I’m not.”
“But that’s what I want.”
And if I did what she asked? If suddenly I assumed that Catherine meant what she said and that this new temperamental turn of hers was an ordinary, insignificant, familiar condition of only a single night’s duration and nothing more? If I nodded, kissed her cheek, left quietly, retraced my steps? If I simply went back and shared the smoky glow of Fiona’s lamp and spent the rest of these dark hours listening to Fiona read aloud? Was this the answer? But what then of Fiona’s unhappy hunch? If I left this room, might not the import of Fiona’s hunch prove as true for Catherine and me as for Fiona and Hugh? And what of Hugh? Where was he? Even now Hugh’s absence was a sinuous presence in this cold room.
I withdrew my hands from Catherine’s shoulders, dropped my arms, turned, tightened my silken sash, and sat down on the edge of the bed. I thought of Hugh yearning for Fiona and punishing all four of us with the fervor of his deprivation. And I thought of Fiona robed in white and consoling herself with her book of poems and sipping wine. Nothing and yet everything had changed.
“Join me, Catherine,” I said. “You might as well.”
Slumped on the edge of Catherine’s bed, skirts of the dressing gown drawn prudently across my pajamaed knees, chin in hand, low-keyed invitation still unanswered—slowly I realized that Catherine was going to settle for docility. Without speaking, without argument, without emotion, as if all our former procedures preliminary to affection had never existed, Catherine accepted my invitation not by seating herself beside me in any kind of readiness to talk, but simply by stretching herself out behind
me on that low bed. In another woman docility would have said only that sex was going to get us nowhere. But not in Catherine. In Catherine docility meant something else, something more. But what?
Carefully I moved, thinking of our mimosa tree bereft in the darkness, carefully I swung up my legs and crossed my ankles, lay back carefully and quietly beside the full length of Catherine’s body. What else could I do? How else could I be except placid, undemonstrative, leisurely, totally considerate of Catherine’s docile body next to mine? But if I could have been wrong, if I myself could have been mistaken about Fiona and Catherine and even Hugh? If Fiona had decided just for once on the necessity of deception, and had actually spent this day not inuring herself to loss but anticipating a secret assignation with Hugh? If terry-cloth robe and poems were a harmless ruse? If Fiona were now lying at last with her arms around Hugh on the rough and sloping floor of his darkened studio, and if what was wrong with Catherine depended only on her so interpreting Hugh’s absence—if all this could have been true, then Fiona’s pleasure would have been my pleasure while Catherine’s jealousy would have been no match for the heat of my love. But the night was long and dark and silent. And it was not true. None of it was true. Fiona had never felt the need to deceive me in the past, so why now? Catherine had felt no jealousy since Hugh first made plain his selfthwarted attraction for Fiona. Why now?
“Confide in me, Catherine. What else can you do?”
She said nothing. She did not move. She remained flat on her back in her own way determined to acquiesce, if that’s what I demanded, but equally determined to offer me no encouragement, no help. So I shifted, rolled onto my left side, raised myself, stared down at what I could see of Catherine’s shadowed face. Slowly but firmly I placed my free hand on Catherine’s body. All this I did, not with any interest in arousing Catherine against her will but only as a matter of course, a tactile act of comfort. The movement of my hand was personal but not exploratory. I meant to convey the sensation of the palm of my large hand, not the fingers. But apparently even this, to Catherine, was more than she wanted. Apparently she was not as determined to acquiesce as I had thought.
