The Blood Oranges: A Novel

by Hawkes, John

  “Stop,” she said quietly and yet not so quietly. “I wish you’d stop.”

  But too late, I thought, too late. Because suddenly I felt beneath my hand the unmistakable presence of something hard, something foreign, something distinctly different from the soft malleable flesh of Catherine’s waist. It was too late to stop.

  “What,” I whispered, with hand arrested, mind leaping forward, voice giving way atypically to surprise, “what …?”

  No light in Catherine’s open eyes, no sounds of confession on Catherine’s lips, no effort on Catherine’s part to dissuade me, to disengage my heavy hand from where it lay on her waist. I paused, she waited. And suspended there in the darkness between my whispered exclamation and what I now knew with reasonable certainty to be its cause, slowly I felt a single cold drop of sweat trickling its telltale passage down my naked side. But was it possible? Was my hand touching what I thought it touched? One minute I was sweating for Catherine and the next I was sliding my hand beneath the edge of Catherine’s pajama top and with my bare hand touching the band of metal which now I knew beyond a doubt was girdling her waist. And just as methodically I thrust my fingers between Catherine’s unmoving thighs until beneath the mere breath of white cotton cloth I felt the little sharp pointed teeth of that elongated narrow tear of iron wedged tightly and unmistakably between her thighs.

  “Catherine, it can’t be true …”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want you to know.”

  “How could he do it? How could you let him …?”

  “He made me. That’s all.”

  “All night long you’ve been wearing this wretched thing… ”

  Bruise? Blemish? Specific source of Catherine’s pain? Her only answer was to disengage my hand at last. She did not speak, did not move, except to take hold of my hand and remove it slowly and gently from where it no longer belonged between her legs. I felt her hand, I smelled her hair, Hugh’s message could hardly have been more clear. And I understood that it was meant for me, that message, and suddenly I understood that Hugh was not at all idyling away those dark hours on the empty beach or brooding alone at the unshuttered window of his bare room above the black canal. I knew where he was. I knew exactly where to find him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. I’ll be back.”

  She made no objection. She asked for no explanation. And when I returned she would still be there, waiting in the darkness and making no effort to free herself from that iron web which Hugh had somehow brought himself to adjust to Catherine’s size and lock in place.

  “I won’t be long. Trust me.”

  Of course, I told myself, the wicker settee. Where else would he be if not stretched out even now in the darkness of the grape arbor? How like him to wait for me on the very piece of furniture from which I had watched Fiona resolving herself to so much unnecessary solitude. How like him to wait for darkness and then steal onto our side of the funeral cypresses and into my arbor, which was what he must have done, to usurp my place beneath the grapes he scorned, only to lie inactive, silent, within easy earshot of the plaintive voice of the very woman whose calm unhappiness was the result of what she took to be his absence, his unknown whereabouts. But all that time he had been there and must have listened to Fiona’s quiet declaration and heard all we said, quickened at the sound of Catherine’s name and writhed, as it were, at my own words that sealed the purpose of my departure. And to him it must have seemed too late to undo the damage he had done to Catherine, to all of us, no matter what he might have felt upon hearing the sad ring of Fiona’s voice. But perhaps our blue moods had meant nothing to Hugh. Perhaps they had only heightened his agonized elation over what he knew I was setting off to encounter in that dark villa of his. Love never had so fierce an antagonist, I thought, never had Fiona and I been so unfortunate.

  “That you, boy?”

  “You know it is.”

  “Well, I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Yes,” I murmured, “I guess you have.”

  From where I stood the glow of Fiona’s lamp was invisible. High overhead the night sky was packed and streaked with colonies and continents of stars that gave no light. And yet I knew where I was, had already heard and answered the voice that had spoken up suddenly inside the arbor. It was obviously the voice of a man reclining, a voice that had accosted me from behind a thick invisible wall of flat and matted leaves, a voice so close and soft-spoken and yet at the same time so screened and deeply buried that in the very instant of sound it transformed my gentle arbor into a cavern of black leaves. Hugh was lying inside that cavern and filling it with his distasteful eagerness and, I guessed, the pain of all the dark time he had spent rehearsing himself for my arrival.

  “Come on in, boy. I want to talk to you.”

  I felt the leaves in my hair, the leaves against the sides of my head, the leaves thick and black and suddenly meaningless against one silken shoulder. And now without answering Hugh’s pathetic effort to gain the upper hand I simply entered the arbor, noted in silence the darker elongated mass of shadow that was only Hugh deceptively at rest, and seated myself, as I had known I would, on our now cold and otherwise empty bench of stone. I crossed my heavy and loosely pajamaed legs, leaned forward, clasped together my two weathered hands, found myself regretting that this my trysting place had now become the scene of tribunal. We were alone. We would eat no grapes, drink no wine. Again I became aware of the smell of my cologne. Despite the darkness, I was sure that Hugh was dressed for the night chill in his old pea jacket. And was Hugh as conscious as I was of the scent of my cologne? And equally conscious that I, unlike himself, was dressed for love and sleep and was perfectly at home, so to speak, in the night temperature? No doubt he was. But while I felt only indifference for all my advantages, nonetheless I made no effort to subdue the formidable seriousness of my presence on this stone bench in my ruined arbor.

  “Why don’t you smoke, boy? It’ll be easier for you.”

  But I was resolute. I was sensible. I was silent. I let it pass. From where Hugh half lay, half sat in the darkness I heard the faint orchestrated sounds of the squeaking wicker, the dry fibrous sounds of Hugh’s suddenly uncontrollable agitation. He could not contain himself. He knew he was wrong. Even while waiting to laugh in my face he was already trying to eliminate the traces of black scum from the sound of his voice.

  “How’s Catherine?”

  “Feeling the way you do,” I said then, speaking more promptly and impersonally than I had intended, “you have no right to ask.”

  “How is she, boy?”

  “Let’s just hope Fiona doesn’t find out what you’ve done.”

  “Your little visit was pretty short. What’s wrong?”

  “You know what’s wrong.”

  “She say anything? Or did she just throw you out as I told her to?”

  “I got your message, Hugh, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You got my message. Well, it must have been quite a shock.”

  “Don’t you know what you’ve done?”

  “I know you’ve been sucking two eggs at once, that’s what I know. But it’s over. It’s finished.”

  “You haven’t felt this way before. Why now?”

  “Slow, boy, slow. But I found out. You understand?”

  “So tonight’s your night.”

  “Planned the whole thing beforehand, boy. And you fell right into it. I guess you just walked right in there and told my wife to strip on down as usual and then found out there’s one easy way to stop that sort of thing. I made it pretty plain. The lid’s on the jar. It’s all over. You’ve been trying to get into my wife ever since that damn bus went off the road. And now you can’t.”

  “Are you through?”

  “For some men one woman’s not enough. Some men would suck all the eggs in sight, if they could. But you’re finished. From now on you’re going to stick to just one woman, understand?”

  “Listen,” I
said quietly, and stood up in the darkness of our trembling arbor, “Catherine and I have been having perfectly normal relations since the first night we sat right here together on this very bench. Normal, ordinary, uninterrupted relations,” I said, hands in pockets, head in the leaves, “from that first night until a few moments ago. Why should they end?”

  “I’ve been waiting for this. Keep talking.”

  “And now you decide to come on the scene. You make up your mind. You imagine the whole thing as if it began last night or the night before. You decide you’re jealous. You decide to interfere. But you can’t interfere and everything you say is wrong.”

  “There’s nothing you can do about it. Not a damn thing.”

  “When I’m through with you I’m going back to Catherine. I’m going to take that thing off her as gently as I can. I’ll try to undo the harm you’ve done.”

  “So you won’t stop. You won’t leave her alone.”

  “If Catherine doesn’t want me to stop, as you put it, why should I?”

  “All right, sit down. Let’s have it out.”

  “I don’t feel like sitting down.”

  “Vomit, boy. Think I’m going to vomit …”

  “After what you’ve done to Catherine, you might as well.”

  “I can’t bear this business. Catherine can’t bear it either.”

  “Wrong again.”

  “She hates it, boy.”

  “You’ve hurt Catherine. You’ve hurt me. You’ve hurt Fiona. Catherine just hates your jealousy. All of us do.”

  “My villa . . my bed … my wife … with the children in the next room … and you in the nude and crawling all over my marriage …”

  “Listen,” I said then, tasting the night, feeling the dead sand beneath the soles of my tennis shoes, “there’s nothing wrong with your marriage, such as it is.”

  Would he retch as he promised? Would invisible Hugh lean over the side of Fiona’s settee and retch on the sand? Hugh tightly buttoned into his pea jacket and filling our cold cavern with the smell of his vomit? Hugh gagging and appealing to me for help? Yes, I thought, I would have welcomed even this most disagreeable act of Hugh’s discomfort. But it was not to be, as I might have known, and even the passing threat of Hugh’s nausea was already gone. And yet his next whispered words were so constricted, so sour, that he might well have coughed up the acidic spume of his agony in one silent heave while I waited, listened, heard nothing at all.

  “She took off her clothes. She lay on her back. She tongued you, boy. With Meredith lying there in the next room.”

  “Meredith’s mind is like her father’s. It’s time she grew up.”

  “Let me tell you something. You deserve that damn belt. Both of you …”

  “All right,” I said, quietly, slowly, “on your feet.”

  “At least it’s ingenious. You have to admit it’s pretty ingenious …”

  “Hugh,” I said again, “stand up.”

  “You think I’m afraid of last resorts? I thought the damn thing was going to come apart in my hands. But it didn’t. It fit, it worked. I found my own way to take care of the problem. And you can’t fight it …”

  “For the last time, Hugh, on your feet.”

  “I’m crafty, boy, crafty. And that damn belt’s a work of art …”

  But behind Hugh’s desperate whispering I heard the squeal of wicker, the expelled breath of exertion, all the slow begrudging sounds of Hugh pulling himself out of the settee and uncoiling, rising, standing half erect and wary in the darkness of dead grapes and forgotten leaves. Feet apart, single hand held before his face and ready, head averted, and waiting, licking his lips, listening—there he stood, invisible and yet to me defined by all I knew about him and by every furtive sound he tried to conceal. But did Hugh know that I was blocking the entrance to the arbor? And was he even now expecting to join Fiona’s always reasonable husband in some unthinkable scuffle here on the sand) floor of this same arbor where all four of us had burned our candles and drunk our wine? Yes, I thought, even now he was perhaps attempting to feel out the direction of the first blow, his or mine. How like him to so mistake my tone How like him to assume that I, for one moment, would ever allow him to fall back on his lanky aggression. How like him to assume that my wedding ring could ever spli the chin of Catherine’s husband and the man Fiona loved

  “Where are you, boy?”

  “Right here, Hugh. Don’t worry.”

  “Jockeying for position, is that it?”

  “I haven’t moved.”

  “Well, here I am. What next?”

  “If Catherine and Fiona could see us now,” I murmured, taking a step, pausing at the sudden eruption of defensive shuffling sounds in the sand, “what would they think? How would they feel?”

  “Maybe I ought to go off. I’ll leave. I’ll let you have her. Is that what you want? Maybe I’ll just go off with the dawn and be done with it. You don’t mind if I take the dog and just disappear—do you, boy?”

  “Fiona would mind.”

  “Fiona?”

  “Do you want to hurt her even more than you have?”

  “She’ll forget me, she’ll be all right …”

  “Listen,” I said then and shifted, heard Hugh bumping against the settee and angling off toward the other end of the arbor, “Fiona is not perfect. She’s made mistakes. She’s been accused before of husband-stealing. Wrongly, of course, but accused nonetheless.”

  “Don’t say it, boy.”

  “And do you think Fiona approves of everything I do? Well, she doesn’t. We’ve had our differences. If she knew how you really feel about Catherine and me, and if she thought you were right and I was to blame for the way you feel, Fiona would be the first to take your side. In that case there would be no argument. If Fiona told me to give Catherine up, I would give her up.”

  “You’re to blame. By God, you’re to blame …”

  “Fiona’s judicious. If you put it to Fiona, she would tell you immediately that without malice and without superiority I’m not to blame. She would say that since Catherine is not using me to revenge herself on you, and since I am not having sex with Catherine for malicious ends of my own, then your defeat, chagrin, antagonism—whatever you feel—is your responsibility, not mine.”

  “Anguish. Just anguish. The point of the pike in the scrotum …”

  “You need a little reassurance, Hugh. That’s all.”

  “Take my wife and give me reassurance … But it’s no good, boy, no good.”

  “Hugh,” I said and moved another few steps, “let me tick off the possibilities. OK?”

  “There’s nothing you can say. Nothing.”

  “First of all, if you insisted on having Fiona to yourself, at least for a while, she would agree. She wouldn’t like it, but she would be willing to go against her better judgment, if you insisted. And Catherine would understand. And so would I, despite the inconvenience and despite the fact that Catherine and I have already decided against that kind of indulgence for ourselves. That’s how it would be. It could happen, but it won’t. We both know it won’t.”

  “Don’t suggest it, boy. My God …”

  “Or suppose you were sentimental enough to disappear, as you put it. In that case you’d be deserting Catherine, the children would suffer, Fiona would send me off to bring you back. This isn’t going to happen either.”

  “So I don’t count. Don’t count at all.”

  “Or suppose we just continue on as we are, and Fiona’s right about the two of you. If it turns out she’s made a real mistake in you, she’ll get along. No one is more self-reliant than Fiona.”

  “I know that, boy.”

  “But if I changed my mind, if I told Catherine you’re hopelessly stubborn, vindictive and all the rest of it, and that from now on she and I wouldn’t be having any more little sex-songs, not even once in a while—what then?”

  “She’ll thank you. So will I.”

  “Think what would happen,” I said
quietly. “Catherine would never trust either one of us again. She would never forgive you. She would never forgive me. I’d never hear the end of it from Fiona. You’d never know when Catherine and I might let go of ourselves and start the whole thing over again. Catherine would never forget what you did to her tonight. Your own sex life would be destroyed. Fiona wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of you. Our wives would brood. You and I would always be embarrassed. We wouldn’t be able to explain ourselves. We wouldn’t be able to clear the air. You wouldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t sleep. The children wouldn’t understand our silence. How long could it last? But why? All because of a few words from you? Just because you can’t condone a little extra sweetness between Catherine and me?”

  “You’ve got your manhood … Let me have mine …”

  “It’s one thing to deny Fiona. Fiona is strong. But it’s something else again to try to tether your own wife the first time her natural instincts reach out to another man. Your rancid feelings are an affront to her harmless awakening. Do you think I’d ever treat Fiona the way you’re treating Catherine? Don’t you understand that Catherine won’t be able to forgive what you did tonight unless I’m able to persuade her to? Can’t you see that it will take the two of us, and Fiona as well? You need me. You need Fiona. But even if you had your own way, do you think it would help? Do you think you’d be able to forget the past? Catherine’s body, my body, as you imagine them? What you think you hate, already exists—in two forms, yours and mine. If I swore off Catherine, your idea of what we’ve done together would go on snagging your inventiveness forever. So what good would it do? Your only hope is to understand at least something of my version of what’s been happening. And if you can accept the past, and I think you can, then you won’t have any reason to destroy the present.”