The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  During the next fifteen minutes, chewing at the colored straws in the lemonade, she tried to concentrate on the bridge game, tried to match the pleasure and disgust of the players over an unexpected small slam, but was conscious only of someone’s eyes upon her. Casting a sidelong glance toward the wall, she thought she could see the more attractive of the two advertising men staring at her. She enjoyed a chill of excitement, and, without being too obvious about it, she lifted her head higher to improve her neckline, and straightened in the chair to define her bust, and crossed her legs (her best points) to show off a slim calf. She felt like the girl in Omaha, and the feeling was very good, indeed. She became gayer, making comments, small jokes, to the other women about their play. She still felt his eyes upon her, and risked another sidelong glance. Yes, he was staring at her with his deep-set dark eyes and amused mouth and square jaw. She felt a flush of daring, and decided, recklessly, to stare back and see what would happen. She looked at him, and frankly stared, but there was no reaction from him. In that instant, she perceived their stares were not meeting. With sinking heart, she pivoted, trying to follow the line of his gaze, knowing that it missed her by an inch or two, and then she saw the bar. On a stool at the bar, where she had not been before, sat the young girl, twenty-five., no more, who had been on the tennis court. She appeared ruddy and Swedish, and the thin material of her white blouse strained against her breasts, and the tight white shorts set off her muscular limbs. She drank from her highball, then met the stare of the man across the room with a teasing smile, and bent again to her drink.

  Lisa felt shame along with the squeeze of hurt in her chest: she was a fool, a young-old fool, barred from participation, henceforth spectator as well as intruder. Her stupid misunderstanding made her blush, and, in this day of flight, she once more desired only escape. Moments later, she left the Tennis Club, as whipped as any one of Napoleon’s grenadiers in retreat from Moscow.

  At the discreet cough, she sat up, and realized with bewilderment that she was on the yellow sofa of her own living room, emerging from recent past into present, and that the impeccable Averil was before her with a second double Martini dry.

  The cocktail glass in her hand was empty. Morosely, she exchanged it for the filled one. “Thank you, Averil. That’ll be all for now.”

  After Averil had gone, she drank, but without result. There was no floating euphoria. Instead, the Martini made her feel pulpy, soggy, sodden, like a soaked, crumpled newspaper.

  She was distracted by the sound of a key working into the frontdoor keyhole. The door opened, and seconds later, yanking off his overcoat, Cyrus materialized in the living room. He was still business-brisk and alive with the day he had beaten, and he propelled his huge bulk toward her with vigor, stooped and kissed her forehead.

  “How are you, dear?” he was asking. “Surprised to find you still down here. Expected you’d be dressing by now.”

  Dressing, she thought, sure, dressing in my pleated shroud. “Dressing? What for?”

  “What for?” Cyrus looked stern. “For Santa Barbara. We’re driving up to have dinner with Maud Hayden.”

  “We are?” she said stupidly. “I don’t remember—”

  “What the devil, Lisa, you’ve known for two weeks. I’ve mentioned it several times the last couple of days.”

  “I guess I forgot. My mind’s been on other things.”

  “Well, let’s hustle. Rex Garrity insisted on coming along, and I saw no harm in it. He’ll keep us entertained in the few hours on the road. He’ll be here in thirty or forty minutes. And we’re expected for dinner at eight.”

  “Cyrus, must we? I don’t feel much like it. I’m beginning to have a headache.”

  “It’ll go away, your headache. Take something for it. What you need is to get out a little more. Being antisocial isn’t going to make you feel better. This is a very special evening.”

  “What’s so damn special about it?”

  “Look, honey, I can’t stand up Maud Hayden. She’s one of the top anthropologists in the world. She’s made a big fuss about having us to her home. It’s sort of a celebration. She’s discovered some tropical islands—remember, I told you a few weeks ago? The Three Sirens, they’re called—down in the South Pacific. She’s taking an all-star team there, and our foundation is backing her with a grant. It’ll be a feather in my cap when she gives the paper before the American Anthropological League. Make those Ford and Carnegie people sit up and take notice of Hackfeld. And the book she does is a cinch bestseller and that, too—”

  “Cyrus, please, I’m still not up to—”

  Averil had come in with a bourbon and soda, and Cyrus was gulping it like water, swallowing, choking, coughing, and trying to speak between coughs. “Besides, I’ve been looking forward to this evening more than anything in recent weeks. Maud’s a great wordsmith. Makes Scheherazade look like a shy, stuttering bore. I thought you’d be as interested as I am in The Three Sirens tribe, with all that crazy sex stuff—like the Social Aid Hut, that’s supposed to have some trick way of solving all sex problems for married people—and the wide-open annual festival week in late June when—”

  Lisa found herself sitting up. “What?” she said. “What are you talking about? Did you make all this up?”

  “Lisa, for Chrissakes, I gave you Maud’s prospectus, her outline of that culture down there and their customs, I gave it to you to read, those typed pages. Didn’t you even look at them?”

  “I—I don’t know. I guess I didn’t. I didn’t think it was anything, only one of those dull sociological tracts.”

  “Dull? Wow. What those half-white, half-Polynesian natives are probably doing down there makes the House of All Nations look as staid as Buckingham Palace.”

  “Is it true—what you are saying—about that Social Aid ?”

  “Maud thinks it is true. Her source is a good one. Now she’s taking a team down there for six weeks in June and July to see for herself. We’re going to talk about the whole thing tonight. That’s the idea of the dinner.” He rubbed his small florid face. “I’d better shave and get ready.” He started to maneuver his dirigible of a body around, to leave, when suddenly, he swung back to his wife. “Honey, if you’ve really got a lousy headache, then, hell, I’m not going to insist—”

  But Lisa was standing, quite as energetic as her husband. “No—don’t worry—I’m beginning to feel better. It would be a crime to miss an evening with Maud Hayden. You’re so right. I’ll go up and bathe, and be dressed in a jiffy.”

  Cyrus Hackfeld grinned. “Swell. Good girl.”

  Lisa crooked her arm in his, to thank him for the “good girl,” and then she wondered how old forty was on The Three Sirens, and with her husband she went upstairs to prepare for her last young evening… .

  * * *

  Dinner at the Haydens had been served at nine-fifteen, and now Claire noted, as Suzu doled out individual cherry tart desserts, it was almost twenty to eleven.

  The meal had gone wonderfully well, Claire felt. The Chinese egg drop soup had been consumed to the last spoonful. The Chicken Teriyaki surrounded by rice, Chinese peas with water chestnuts, and melon balls, and supplemented by warm sake in miniature white cups, had been well received, and everyone but the Loomises had accepted second helpings. Even Rex Garrity, who regarded himself as an international gourmet, had complimented Maud on the dishes, admitting he had not enjoyed a blending of Chinese and Japanese food so much since he had visited Shanghai in 1940, when nationals of both nations occupied the city.

  The conversation, too, had been admirable in every way, friendly and amazingly stimulating, and Claire had enjoyed all of it as if it were new. Early in the evening, during the predinner drinking and hors d’oeuvres—Suzu had made Rumaki, cheese puffs, and laid out a hot crabmeat dip—there had been a brief, sharp skirmish, a verbal jousting, between Garrity and Maud. The two were the most widely traveled in the group, both full of experience and facts, both used to being listened to, and they had vied
for dominance of the evening, sparring, hitting out, defending, countering. It had been a fascinating bout. Garrity had seemed eager to impress both Hackfeld and Maud with his worldliness and importance. Maud had been determined to make this a Hayden evening and make Hackfeld proud that he was supporting the expedition to The Three Sirens. By the time Suzu had announced dinner, Garrity, filled with liquor, muddled by Maud’s anthropological terminology, sensing that the guests were more interested in her than in himself, had dropped his lance and pulled back from combat.

  Through the dinner, Maud had the field to herself, and her handling of this victory and her presentation of her new exhibit had been engrossing. Except for salvaging his pride by confirming, one authority to another, some of Maud’s digressive travel observations, Garrity had devoted himself to his food. Two or three times, in an undertone, he had engaged Marc, privately, and Marc had seemed absorbed by him.

  It pleased Claire that Garrity was exactly what she had expected, except for being even more pathetic and foolish, and there was no surprise in him. For Claire, the real surprise of the evening had been Lisa Hackfeld. Except for her attire, there had been nothing frivolous about Lisa. She had been easy, nice, unassuming, and curious. She had come prepared to sit at Maud’s feet, and so she had come to Maud without any guard of pretense. She knew little about anthropology, about field work, about Polynesia, and she admitted it, but she wanted to know more, know everything all at once, consume gobs of information. Throughout the dinner she had questioned Maud steadily, especially about The Three Sirens, to Maud’s utter delight and Hackfeld’s relaxed pleasure.

  Now, picking at her dessert—she had been too nervous all the evening to eat properly—Claire covertly studied the guests. When she had made out the place cards in the afternoon, Claire had wondered whether or not the arrangement should be female-male-female, but Maud would have none of it. She had wanted the guests seated to the best political advantage. Maud sat at the head of the table, with Cyrus Hackfeld at her right, and Lisa Hackfeld at her left, and at this moment she was prophesying what living conditions would be like in the field when the team settled on The Three Sirens.

  Next to Lisa, cutting his cherry tart, sat President Loomis of Raynor, resembling somewhat the ailing President Woodrow Wilson, and across from him, cutting her cherry tart, sat Mrs. Loomis, resembling no one. Once, during the time of the second drink, and again, during the soup, Loomis had tried to set forth his views on the contrast between higher education in America and the U.S.S.R., this apropos of nothing, and he had found that no one except Claire was attentive and had retired into the attitude of wise listener, as did his mate. Now they remained silent, masticating their desserts, two distinguished pillars of salt. Across the table from Garrity, Claire was seated beside President Loomis, and on her other side, at the foot of the table, Marc leaned toward the travel writer, nodding as he heard him out, the words an indistinct hum to Claire.

  With everyone occupied, Claire examined Rex Garrity more closely. She had guessed a little about him before this evening, but now she felt that she knew considerably more, perhaps all that there was to know. Watching him, intently bent toward Marc, she could see that he must have once been a beautiful man, like an ancient Greek poet who was also a hero of the Olympics. In his prime, a quarter of a century before, he must have been a graceful, slender young man, with wavy blond hair, a thin and angular face, a curiously effeminate manner overlaid on a strong, wiry body. Time had been his worst enemy, and in more ways than one, Claire suspected. His hair was still blond, still wavy, but it appeared stiff as straw and artificial as a toupee. The face had fought a thousand dietary battles, so that it had probably been fatter and thinner many times, and now it was so ravaged by vanities and drink that the flesh hung loosely and the skin was red-blotched and veiny. As to the body, it was a desperate remnant of the old Yale slenderness, the old bestseller and on-the-heels-of-Hannibal and in-the-footsteps-of-Marco-Polo slenderness, the shoulders wide and hips narrow but the belly oddly protruding, as if it were the only anatomical part of him to surrender to time.

  Claire examined him ruthlessly, and estimated to herself that he was between forty-eight and fifty-two. And she understood, as positively as she knew about herself, that these were his bad years. Shortly after his arrival, she had overheard a light bantering between Garrity and Cyrus Hackfeld. It had told her that Garrity had gone to Hackfeld this day to request a grant from the Foundation for some kind of travel stunt, and Hackfeld had turned him down, explaining that the Board would spare no funds for unscientific, carnival endeavors. Claire suspected that the worst of it, for Garrity, was that the world had gone on past him, and he had stood still with his same old repertory, and the world was no longer interested in the performer it had left behind.

  During the decade of the thirties, there had been an audience for Garrity. It was a time between big wars, and there was still some hangover from the crazy twenties, and there was the Great Depression from which men wanted to escape by assuming other identities. Garrity had provided them with a romantic identity for just such an escape. He had embodied, in his person, all dreams and yearnings for faraway places and exotic adventures. He followed the trails of legendary heroes, avoiding death, saving damsels in distress, discovering hidden ruins, scaling lofty mountains, musing in the shadows and moonlight of the earth’s Taj Mahals, and he wrote about these juvenile escapades and he lectured about then v and millions paid to leave their skulls and skins and vicariously gel away from it all with him.

  It was the forties that had damaged Garrity, and the fifties that had destroyed him. In the forties, the sons of his audience had been forced to leave their insular existence and go out into the world, to the aged cities of France and Italy and Germany, to the sands of Africa, to the jungles of the Pacific, and they had seen these places with the hard cynical eyes of reality. They had been where Garrity had been, and they knew his romantic adventures were lies. They knew more than he did about the faraway places and the truth of them, and they had no patience with Garrity, despite the permanent credulity of their parents who did not know better. By the fifties, the old audience was slipping away and the new audience was not his own. The new audience, and its heirs, had no inclination to read about adventures, presuming there were any left, when in the time it took to read a Garrity book they could visit, in person, via jet transportation, the ruins of Angkor and the Isle of Rhodes and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The world was suddenly too small, all of it too accessible, for interest in secondhand travel romance. When you could see for yourself inside the magician’s box, as he sawed the girl in half, there was no more wonder in seeing the magician. An international war and the turbo jet were Garrity’s graveyard.

  Claire’s musings gave her almost a sense of pity for this relic. He still published, but almost no one bought. He continued to lecture, but too few came to hear. He still traded on his name, but not many under fifty remembered or cared. The matinee idol had been forsaken, but would not believe it. He carried his past with him every waking minute, and kept it alive with liquor and fanciful projects. He was gesturing now, as he whispered to Marc, and these gestures were even more effeminate than earlier. In a sudden revelation, Claire saw what had been concealed so long but was now, from uncontrollable anxiety over failure, exposed often. He was a homosexual, had always been one, but before this, his virile paper romances had provided camouflage. Tonight, without this camouflage, the truth could be seen nakedly.

  Promptly, Claire sorted her own judgments of Garrity-as-homosexual. Claire had no negative feelings about deviates. The few that she had encountered, in her short life, she had found wittier, more clever and sensitive, than normal males. Also, she supposed, she felt easier with them because they were nonthreatening. No, definitely, it was not Garrity’s obvious deviation that was making Claire relinquish distaste for him and replace it with pity. It was his pretense that made her want to commiserate with him.

  Observing him across the table once more, sh
e abandoned understanding for her original emotion of disapproval. She sat back, touching her napkin to her lips, wondering again how Marc could be so absorbed in this bluff half-man, held erect by no more than yellowed press notices and remembered compliments.

  She turned her head and looked up the table as the dessert plates were being removed, and she caught Maud’s eye. Almost imperceptibly, Maud nodded to her, and Claire dipped her head in acknowledgment.

  “Well,” Maud called out, “I think we’d all be much more comfortable in the living room. Claire, would—”

  Claire, with a fumbling gesture of assistance from President Loomis, had already risen. “Yes, I think that’s a good idea. Mrs. Hackfeld—Mrs. Loomis—and Marc, forgive me, Marc, I hate to interrupt, but if you’d get the liqueurs … ?”

  There had been a general rising of all guests. Like a social director in the Adirondacks, Claire was at the archway, herding the Loomises into the living room, and then Garrity and Marc. As she took Lisa Hackfeld’s arm, she saw, over her shoulder, that Cyrus Hackfeld was about to start for the living room, too. But Maud, who had been addressing him, added something more, and Hackfeld eyed her questioningly, nodded, and moved with her to the far dining room window. The moment of truth, Claire thought, and she crossed mental fingers, and went with Lisa Hackfeld into the living room to play diversion.

  While Marc doled out slivers of apricot liqueur and of Cointreau, and droplets of Armagnac and of Benedictine and Brandy, the guests aligned themselves uncertainly around the broad living room. It was, Claire told herself, so much like the opening of a play before the main actors appear, when the telephone rings and the maid answers it, and the supporting players, marking time, cross the stage with their banalities. Desperately, one wanted the stars to generate excitement. Nevertheless, Claire had her duty and was determined to perform.