Shipwreck

by Louis Begley

  The call from Lydia came moments after that conversation ended. She was thanking me for those four days and once again predicting the success of my book. I was thanking her. Small wonder if, once again, my voice didn’t seem to me to be my own. As always, she worried whether there were provisions in the refrigerator and the pantry for my dinner, or was I planning to go out? This gave me the opening to tell her that it looked to me as though the good weather would probably hold, so I would sail over to Nantucket that evening. With the new moon, every star would be out. I would call her from the yacht club in Nantucket, as soon as I went ashore. Then you’ve told Richard you are coming? she asked, Richard being my old Nantucket friend. No, I haven’t, I said, I don’t want him and Susan to start making dinner plans and God knows what, I’d rather surprise them. In fact, I may get some sleep onboard, go out for a sail, and only show up at their door in the evening. This was an idea that had just come into my head. That way she wouldn’t call me at the house during the evening or night while Léa was there, or at Richard’s to ask whether I had already arrived. When I did call in the morning, I would say I was calling from Nantucket, even though in reality I would be just about to leave.

  Had Léa changed? That was the question I asked myself as I examined and reexamined her body, searching for shaming traces of the most recent great love who had so mistreated her and Lord knows how many others whom she might not have wished to mention. There weren’t any. The scars had been absorbed into her perfect smooth skin, the marks of bruises had faded, the thighs and buttocks under me, the breasts I pressed as though by brute force I would possess them differently, her mouth—they were no stranger or more familiar than ever. I entered her, and as always it was she who at once set the rhythm of our engagement and its term. I knew I had lost my head. There was no holding back, no remission, and no escape. At least I had not taken her to Lydia’s bed. We were in the smaller bedroom upstairs, the one my uncle had used until the end, disliking the larger room that he thought too connubial, in the four-poster bed that nothing could rock, reflected in the Chippendale mirror just over my uncle’s chest of drawers. That this fine family antique of which he was so proud someday might give his heir the first opportunity to observe his rod plunge into the buttocks of the French savage astride him and, have it joined, as the pumping continued, by the furious savage’s fingers alternating their service between the rod and the orifice that received it—what would he have thought had the image come before his eyes? I don’t know; men who live out their lives alone are fundamentally perverse, and he and I were alike in more ways than one. It might have been very much to his taste. There was no doubt about me: I determined before we reached the climax to move that mirror to face the bed Lydia and I shared, to revive the same show with a new leading lady. When we finished, at the point I had become exhausted, I said I had feared she would look like a battered wife, marked on her body, if not her face. She made a little grimace and said, Oh, that guy! He was just a little harder on me than you. He didn’t wait for me to offer to do what I knew he wanted, he tried to make me do it. I only told you he was brutal because I know you love me and that would make you pay attention. I couldn’t stand him because he was so cheap. He made me pay for my train ticket, and on the Ile de Ré when we all went to a restaurant he would say it was going to be a la romana,and split the check with the friend we were staying with. The big deal about a la romanawas that he split it down the middle, instead of adding up to the last cent the price of each dish any one of us ate. The guy is cheap and rich!

  There! said North abruptly. At last you have seen me fuck. I bet you wondered whether I would resist telling. Believe me, I have tried.

  I didn’t think North expected me to answer. He seemed distracted, lost somewhere in his memories. He shook his head finally, as though he were chasing away a headache, and said: I realized that if I wanted to give her a chance to have a swim I should do it then, before the sun had sunk too low and there was a chill in the air. I asked whether she preferred the pool, which was just beyond the garden, surrounded by a hedge of rhododendron and mountain laurel, or the beach. The beach, she said, she wanted to see my beach, the one that I had talked about so beautifully. I took a wine cooler and a bottle of champagne from the fridge and glasses, four towels so we could wrap ourselves from top to toe after swimming, a sheet to lie on, and some grapes and peaches. We drove to West Beach, the beach that’s chained off from the world that I have already described to you. I was completely serene. I looked forward to showing it to Léa so she would know a really fine beach, so unlike the ones she was accustomed to in Europe, overrun by tourists and in so many places with ten-story hotels set practically at water’s edge. There wasn’t a chance of meeting anyone there at that hour during the week. If I happened to be wrong, I thought I had an answer that would do. This is a French journalist who had the good sense to want to see the island on a September day. I am showing her the best we’ve got. That was what I was going to say, and there was nothing in it to worry about, because it wasn’t the sort of thing that anyone would bother to rush to telephone Lydia about or would remember well enough to bring up in some conversation over drinks when we were next on the island. In fact, I was quite aware that my fear of being seen with Léa was absurd, because there was no one on the Vineyard who was intimate enough with Lydia to undertake such a call. And on our next visit we would surely avoid locals, just as this time.

  It had been another very hot day, and despite the hour and the ocean breeze, it was still very warm at the beach. The ocean was an astonishing Prussian blue, with little curly wrinkles crisscrossing it, as in a child’s watercolor. As I had expected, we were alone, and, with the pride of an owner showing off his estate, I pointed out to Léa the beauties of the view. She let out a yelp of satisfaction, ran to the water, tested it with her foot, and reported it was perfect. I thought we would swim right away, but she remembered the champagne and said we should drink it while it was still very cold. Besides, she wasn’t against giving her tan another half hour in the sun. That was all right with me. I felt good—that sense of physical well-being that sometimes infuses all one’s bones, to the tips of one’s fingers and toes—and I think I would have been equally content swimming, turning cartwheels on the smooth, hard sand, running along the waterline, or lying immobile with only my head protruding from the sand, as I used to, so many years ago, on this very beach, during the summer when Ellen discovered the ineffable thrill of burying boys and patting down the sand over them and practiced this new art every day on her little brother. I spread out the brick-red sheet, shed my shorts, and worked the cork out of the bottle. Léa had stripped off her bikini the moment we arrived. We began to drink, and soon we were very silly. Léa would fill her mouth with it and spray me; I was washing the sand off the inside of her thighs and the valley between her buttocks and tugging on her hairs sometimes with my fingers and sometimes with my teeth. The bottle was almost empty by the time we made love.

  I have told you that I felt exhausted when we finished in the house. She had, indeed, emptied me, and as I kept driving into her on that red sheet I realized that no matter how many times we changed positions, no matter how she used her mouth and hands, no matter what extreme edges of pleasure I reached, so far as I was concerned time stood still. There had once been a beginning to what we were doing but it was so long ago I wasn’t able to remember it, and I believed there need not be an end. Perhaps there couldn’t be one. At some point she started to shriek: a sort of sustained and unearthly Ahh, ahh, a series of notes that started high and descended, which I heard and did not hear, although I remember stroking her cheek and whispering over and over, It’s all right, as though she needed to be consoled, and felt my hand become wet. She was weeping. An end did come, said North. It took me by surprise and shook us. I think we fell asleep almost immediately.

  I don’t know how long I slept. Léa shook me out of a bad dream, said North. I had been at the point of executing an increasingly difficult maneuve
r. It was all about the painting by Léa that was hanging in my office. The ceiling of that room had become unreasonably high, and the painting had been moved. It was now at a height on the wall that I could not possibly reach without a ladder, and I had to reach it because Léa for a reason that never became clear wanted me to take it out of the frame and off its stretcher. Fortunately, there was a ladder somewhere about the office, one of those ladders that makes an isosceles triangle when you open it. I brought it into the room and set it up and was about to climb it to get the painting when I realized it was no longer where it had been. It was now on the wall of a building across the street, still considerably higher than the level at which Léa and I stood, and oddly enough my room had become very open with only a sort of parapet between it and the street, so that it seemed that a very long ladder could be leaned against the parapet on my side and against the outside wall of that building on the other side of the street, just below the painting, and I could, if I was careful—particularly if someone steadied the ladder—cross over on all fours and very gently recover the painting. An aluminum extension ladder could also be found in the office. It made a terrible clanking noise as I lugged it into the room. Right away, I started feeding it out over the street. It reached the other side, but it did not seem possible that at the angle that was required the ladder could support the weight of a large man. I thought that when I got out on it I would freeze from fear and be unable to advance or get back. In fact, my forearms were already becoming very weak. I had great difficulty controlling the enormous ladder, which I had made even longer by extending it, and couldn’t understand why Léa was totally indifferent to the extreme danger. Still partly within the dream, I waded knee-deep into the ocean, stuck my head in the water, and finally came to.

  Let’s swim, I said. But she remembered that I had also brought peaches in my cooler. We ate them, sitting up side by side. I was quiet, trying to make sure the nightmare was completely behind me, but as it sometimes happens, I kept returning to it, looking for solutions to the problem I could not solve before. That is when she startled me so that the dream might as well have never happened. All of a sudden, North told me, without any sort of preface, she said, I am so happy I will be living in New York. I have never had a lover like you, I have never had so much pleasure. I took her by the shoulder, North continued, and asked what in the world she was talking about, hadn’t she told me just a few hours earlier that she had declined the New York offer and was going back to Paris tomorrow? In reply, she shook her head, and told me I was silly. She had only said that so I wouldn’t be furious, so I would be nice to her. And it had worked! She put her face against mine and nuzzled me. Then she looked up and told me, I will be your own whore on Seventy-eighth Street! I will be there whenever you want me. On your way home from your office. If you wake up in the night and are scared and want me. Just make love to me the way you did today. Perhaps because I had just slept, said North, I was quite lucid. I understood that there was nothing to be gained from a discussion. In fact, I thought I could only make the situation worse, because if I complained or threatened, she would laugh, and I couldn’t tell what I would do then. So I just said, I see, and sat there waiting.

  I suppose she too had slept, because she was again full of energy. You are right, let’s swim, she cried out, we should start right now. If I thought she was good in the water in Spetsai, she told me, she would show me how she had improved, practicing every day in the surf on the Ile de Ré, where there were real breakers and not the little wavelets that we seemed to have here. With that she dashed to the water, dove in without looking back, and, doing her beautiful, elongated, totally efficient crawl, set course for the horizon. There was a short while, during which I was unable to decide what to do. Then I followed. By waiting, I had given her—not that she needed it in the least— a good handicap. I thought that I could catch her, if I made a real effort, but I didn’t try. There was no point; I had nothing to say to her, no caress to offer. She was swimming extremely fast, sprinting from the start, which is not what I usually do in the open ocean, and I had quite enough to do trying to keep up and perhaps slowly gain on her. I now realized that what I had thought was equanimity in the face of her treachery was in reality a sort of contained rage, filling my lungs to capacity, pouring reserves of strength into legs, shoulders, and arms. I too was swimming well in this race that wasn’t one, ready, I thought, to keep on until the last drop of her strength was drained, however long it took. Perhaps my state had mysteriously communicated itself to her—the correct explanation I believe is simpler: Her craziness was the ugly side of the high intelligence and eerie sensitivity that made her able to see through me at a glance—because the longer we swam, never turning away from the horizon, the more our effort resembled an undisguised chase. I don’t know how much time had passed, I don’t swim with a watch, but the beach had become really quite distant when, looking up, I saw that she was no longer swimming; she was treading water. Without slowing down, I closed in until perhaps fewer than one hundred feet separated us. Thereupon, I too stopped. Almost right away, I heard her cry my name. Not like someone in distress, but loud, wanting to be heard. Here I am, I called back and waved my right arm. Right here. I can’t see you, she cried. Please come nearer. Of course, this was like the bay in Spetsai, across from Spetsopoulos. She could not see me, although her face was turned right in my direction and I had kept on waving my arm. All right, I called back, coming! I swam maybe another sixty or seventy feet in her direction and, rising in the water, waved both arms. She still couldn’t see me. That meant she was even blinder than I had thought. Here I am, I called again, right beside you. John, she cried, don’t make fun of me, I don’t know where you are, I don’t know where I am, you’ve got to come close and lead me. All right, I answered, just wait a moment, I have a bad cramp in my foot and I have to get rid of it first.

  This was, of course, a lie, said North. I needed to delay because my mind had given birth to a thought of extraordinary hideousness that I thought I must resist. I can tell by the expression on your face that you guessed it at once. You are right; it had become clear to me that all I had to do to purge my life of this demon, to save Lydia and myself from shame and worse, was to get away without another word. I had not enticed her to my lair on the island, I had not tricked her into this mad attempt on the ocean; she had done it all herself. Let her now sink or swim. And I saw with the same clarity that absent some weird mischance no one would know about my involvement in her disappearance. She had stayed at a hotel and she had checked out telling the cashier that she was taking the ferry to New Bedford; who was to say whether she took it or didn’t or what happened after she got off the ferry if she ever got on? I could look deeper too, at the permutations of various outcomes, and still see no danger that constrained me to make my way to that monster and nurse her back to shore. Perhaps you think that this was too much thinking to do while I was supposedly massaging the cramp. If you do, you are wrong, all of it and much more was instantly present in my mind. It may be that a plan had been forming while, quickening the pace, stroke by stroke I followed inexorably in Léa’s wake. I knew what to do: I filled my lungs, dove, and swam underwater away from the girl, not yet toward the shore but parallel to it. Ever since I was a boy, I have been able to swim underwater longer than anyone I know. When I surfaced and looked toward Léa I saw that now it was she who was waving frantically. If she was still calling my name, I could not hear it. It did not seem necessary to do so, but I dove once again and swam farther along the shore. This time when I came up and looked I could not see her. Were there shapes to be made out where she had been, and one of Léa? I was uncertain. If she had been waving still, I would have seen the white against the water that had turned black, but there was nothing like it.

  And suddenly, said North, just as the hideous design had earlier crowded all other thoughts out of my mind, horror at what I had done and pity for this girl, for this body over which I had writhed with pleasure, possessed
me equally, and I began to yell her name with all the force I had over and over and over. Then, although I knew it was useless, I began to swim to where I thought I had left her, doing that horribly tiring stroke, which is freestyle with your head out of the water so you can keep looking and looking, and I kept this up until the stars came out burning in the sky but I couldn’t find her. I then realized that if I didn’t go for the shore while I still thought I knew where it was it would soon be too late. As it was, even if I started immediately, it was not impossible that I too would drown. There was apparently a reserve of strength in me though. I staggered out of the water almost exactly where Léa and I had gone in. Crickets were making an insane noise in the dune. They and the waves were the only sound. There was no other human figure. My teeth were chattering. I dried myself, drank what remained of the champagne, and packed up the stuff. It seemed best to take the bikini with me. I left two towels. If she made it to shore, which I doubted, because fog was coming in, they would be much more useful to her than those two scraps of cloth. Then I went home.