Forth into Light

by Gordon Merrick

  “I feel bright,” she insisted, resolutely fresh and wholesome. “It’s going to be another scorcher.”

  Someday, he thought, I’ll probably kill her. There seemed no other imaginable solution. He moved into the shade of the grape arbor and slumped into a chair. The sawing of the cicadas was a thin rhythmic insistent celebration of heat, as nerve-racking as a fingernail drawn across slate. He pushed his hand through his hair. “You have that money I gave you last night, haven’t you?” he asked, instinctively phrasing it so that her responsibility was engaged.

  “Money? What money? Why should you give me money?” It was a quick decisive disclaimer, disclaiming in effect any possibility of sharing anything with him.

  “I’m talking about the money,” he said, no longer caring who scored against whom as he squarely, soberly, faced the appalling possibility of its loss. “Yesterday’s lot. All of it. I didn’t give it to you?”

  “No, of course not. You mean——” She began in her brisk unyielding manner, but her voice caught finally on a note of incredulity and alarm. He registered it with harsh satisfaction. She was engaged in this with him whether she liked it or not.

  “Are you sure I didn’t put it in your shopping basket?” he asked.

  “I haven’t looked. Oh, God, why did——?”

  “Where is it? The basket, I mean.” He was already off, moving toward the house.

  “It’s right there on the chair in the entrance.” Her words were breathless and he felt her following him. It gave him a welcome sense of power over her. He cut across the paved courtyard and entered the house and seized the woven-grass basket. It contained some odds and ends from yesterday’s mail, his swimming trunks, a towel, a tin of milk. He fumbled through the things and threw down the basket and stood irresolutely, running his fingers through his hair. He had to think. He had to remember. She stood watching him from the doorway, an accusing but attentive presence.

  “You can’t mean you’ve really lost it,” she said in a way that canceled out all hope of finding it.

  “Lost it?” he repeated angrily. “How do you mean, lost it? It might have been stolen for all I know. All I know is, it isn’t here.”

  “But what are we going to do? Oh, I know, I know. We’re not supposed to worry about money. That’s all very well when you have some, but that was every cent we could put our hands on.”

  “That’s putting it in a nutshell.” He curbed an impulse to soften the blow for her. It had been a function of his love to smooth things over for her, help her skirt issues, add a bright false color to a gloomy picture. Perhaps a head-on collision was what they needed. Perhaps the ghastly predicament which faced them would shake them out of their proud reticences.

  “I’m glad you can laugh off what amounts to criminal carelessness,” she said, offering battle.

  “If it’s gone, it’s gone. What am I supposed to do about it?” There was an unfamiliar mean sad pleasure in rubbing her nose in disaster and he hated it. He knew that to hold her in his arms even briefly would give him strength to face any eventuality and that this was true for her too; they needed each other’s support and sympathy, but an embrace could lead to more passionate contact and reveal what he had been hiding all these months. “It probably dropped out of my pocket at Lambraiki’s,” he said, adopting an optimistic tone in spite of himself. “Stavro will keep it for me.”

  “If you think there’s any chance of that, you’d better go right down there.” From her safe neutral position in the doorway, she felt the reverberations of longing passing between them and she steeled herself against them. He had shut himself off from her; he had condemned her to solitary guilt. It placed too great a burden on her nerves to respond to every slight lowering of his guard; the instant she did, the guards were raised higher. She permitted her eyes to linger briefly on the painfully open, vulnerable face and saw the torment in it. Her heart ached with rejected love. Accustomed by these last months to clutching at straws, she was almost inclined to welcome destitution as a promise of relief. They would be stripped to essentials, finally broken or reunited.

  “This means losing a whole morning’s work,” he complained, as if he could reduce the loss to a mere nuisance.

  “I don’t see—how could you have dropped it?” she asked.

  “Things have been known to drop out of pockets.”

  “But it’s so unlike you.”

  “Is it?” He rubbed his hand over his eyes, wiping away sweat. He supposed he was still, to her, a model of self-discipline and purpose and efficiency. He didn’t feel like a model of anything. Was this failure with her a symptom of a larger disintegration, an indication that he was running down generally, growing mentally and physically flabby, “going to seed,” as the transients put it when they were first frightened by the idyllic island atmosphere? “I don’t see how you can live here without just going to seed,” they said nervously, wishing probably that they had come without their wives or husbands.

  He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders to prove to himself that he was intact. “Well, I’d better get going. You might tell Jeff to pump.”

  “Oh, dear. I used a lot of water this morning. I needed a real bath.”

  “You needn’t make excuses for him. What if I’d wanted a shower? The tank’s supposed to be kept full.” He was seared by hate again, the sweeping hatred that embraced everybody and all of life, locking him in a vast cold solitude. He shoved his hands into his empty pockets and doubled them into fists, trying to regain the sanity of tolerance and compassion.

  “Perhaps you’d better speak to him,” Sarah was saying. “I don’t seem to get anywhere with him these days.”

  No, you don’t, he thought. He was here when you were panting after your pretty young man. What did he see then? What did Kate see? Hate seethed in him. “If I’m going to do something about the money, I haven’t time for Jeff,” he said. “Just tell him to pump.” He glanced at her as he started to turn away and stood transfixed, once more undone by her. Light enveloped her, striking golden reflections from her chestnut hair, burnishing her skin, caressing the swell of her breast, endowing all of her body with luminous grace. He thought of the way she felt in his arms, the way she folded herself against him, offering herself with passionate generosity, her eyes unguarded and brimming with desire, and he was almost stirred, almost confident that it could happen, but her eyes held him off and, abashed, he averted his own and turned from her. “I better put some decent clothes on,” he muttered as he left.

  She waited until his footsteps had receded into the upper part of the house and then fled through the dining room to the kitchen. Her private bottle of brandy stood on the sideboard in among the bottles of vinegar and olive oil and condiments. It wasn’t hidden. She simply kept it here for convenience where it wouldn’t be noticed. She poured herself a generous measure. Her hand shook (what a luxury to allow it to, after the struggle to pull herself together this morning) as she lifted the glass to her lips, but steadied as she drained it. Sweat broke out on her forehead and she shook her hair back and took a quick little gasping breath. Everything was going to be all right. He would find the money. She was free now to go lie on the rocks, where Pavlo was sure to be. Her mind erupted in a burst of erotic images of the young man—strong thigh, smooth chest, muscled stomach, taut heavy pouch of swimming trunks which seemed to swell and strain in her mind’s eye until her legs almost gave way beneath her.

  She hunched her shoulders and beat her belly with her fists as if there were something in her she could destroy. A whimpering moan broke from her. She thought of her mother, a sturdy Westerner who had taught school all her life and who had a stock lecture on self-indulgence. Self-indulgence? One didn’t indulge torment; one fought it. There was no pleasure in her thoughts of Pavlo, only compulsion and a debasing need.

  George’s doing. At times, she felt that he was intent on destroying her. Sex had never been a problem for her. She had never had any reason to think much about it; it
was only one aspect of the love that filled her life with George. Life had always been George. There had been a few intense awkward teenage affairs before him and then she was married to a struggling writer, whose struggle was made picturesque by his being able to take her for weekends to his parents’ great estate up on the Hudson, where there were not only servants but white servants. To a girl who had been brought up in a depression-ridden small town, it was quite dazzling—she had read about such establishments but hadn’t believed they still existed—and she was soon dazzled further to find herself the wife of the great literary lion of the day. It was the fulfillment of childhood dreams, dreams nurtured by and inherited from her father, himself an incurable romantic, a failed poet turned occasional journalist. Overnight, George had achieved for her all that her father could have hoped for—freedom from drudgery and routine, friendship with some of the important talents of her time, firsthand knowledge of the world she had read about, a certain reflected fame of her own of the sort poor foolish Zelda could have enjoyed through Scott if she hadn’t been determined to outshine him.

  That the dazzle had begun to dim in recent years was the only possible explanation for her having succumbed to Ronnie. Her faith in George hadn’t wavered but the world’s had, making her question perhaps, without even knowing it, her complete and exclusive commitment to him. Whatever the reason, Ronnie had made her feel young and at the same time stirred an acute consciousness of the swift passage of years. George had been away on business in New York, a rare separation, she had caught Ronnie looking at Jeff in a way that made her feel that, as a woman, she could play a crucial role in his life, but nothing altered the fact that she had taken him knowing that he could offer her nothing that George didn’t give her, except physical novelty.

  Was it as simple and degrading as that? Was Pavlo the logical next step? Had Ronnie’s rather ethereal romantic quality enabled her to disguise with sentiment what was in fact an animal hunger for new bodies? There was no fooling herself about Pavlo. She was obsessed, quite specifically, with his body, with the part of his body contained in his swimming trunks. His prick. His cock. His dick. She forced her mind to shape the words baldly in an attempt to exorcise its spell, but her lips parted and her breath quickened as she thought of seeing it naked, of holding it, of feeling it inside her, of surrendering to its massive power.

  She straightened with an effort and brushed the hair back from her forehead and carefully poured herself another drink. More of George’s work. He had been encouraging her to drink ever since he had found out about Ronnie. She couldn’t remember when they had last had a sober evening together. Drink helped. She lifted the glass to her lips and swallowed the neat brandy in one gulp. She waited as the floor rocked gently beneath her and then some spring within her seemed to snap and her thoughts became loose and remote.

  No, there wasn’t the slightest connection between Ronnie and Pavlo. She had been touched by Ronnie’s need and had responded as any woman might, offering herself to help him enter fully into his manhood. She couldn’t excuse her infidelity, but there had been nothing base about her motives. Her obsession with Pavlo was loathsome. She hated feeling like a sex-starved bitch in heat, but what normal healthy woman in her thirties wouldn’t be sex-starved if her husband denied her intercourse for a year? Normally, she might look at Pavlo and admire his superb body, as women ogled Charlie Mills-Martin’s impressive crotch, without wanting to fling herself on it. Sex on such a gross functional level had never had any meaning for her. Yet she could not check the beating of her heart when Pavlo presented himself for her inspection. That was what it amounted to, recognized by both of them almost from the first time he had appeared down on the rocks two weeks ago. He had apparently caught her eyes on him in an unguarded moment and had looked at her with a lazy, complacently knowing smile and thereafter had offered her a generous display of his person. When he climbed out of the sea, he had a habit of darting his hand into the front of his trunks to arrange himself. He soon took to seeking her eye simultaneously and when he caught it, his hand would linger a second longer, his sex would stand out more pronouncedly where he lifted it upright against his belly. When he squatted beside her to exchange some banality, his hand would stray to it, not reticently or for concealment but proudly, thumb and forefinger curved lovingly around stout columnar flesh to define its contours, his eyes willing hers to look. She resisted always, and always gave in, but permitted herself only the most fleeting glances.

  Yesterday, he had strolled over to her, the contemptuously knowing smile on his lips, holding a towel casually in front of himself. When he was standing over her, he had dropped the towel to his side and put a hand low on his hip so that the tips of his fingers just touched something she refused to look at and said something about the weather. She felt all the muscles of her face tightening, her head seemed to swim and she found herself staring open-mouthed at what he had revealed for her inspection. It was clearly outlined, partially or fully erect, held against his groin by the stretched confinement of the trunks and barely contained by them.

  Pavlo stood over her while she still stared, his remark about the weather unheeded, and swayed his hips slightly in cautious imitation of copulation. He had laughed and lifted the towel in front of him again and sauntered down to the sea.

  What had he expected her to do? Get up and ask him to take her somewhere? She took a deep breath and shook her head angrily and refilled her glass. This one would get her safely to lunch. She drank it more slowly, in measured sips. When she had finished it a little smile played about her lips. Thank heavens for the heat. It put one right off the whole idea of sex. He would probably be quite disgusting naked. All that great male paraphernalia. Grotesque. Anyway, he had shown her all that he had to show, short of dropping his drawers. Perhaps they would move on to a purely spiritual relationship. She giggled as she recorked her bottle and returned it to its place among the condiments.

  Up at the Mills-Martin house on the eastern promontory of the port, overlooking the whole town, the day began in cheerful tumult. The two adult male members of the household were, as was their wont, in bed together. Because of the heat, there was space between them but each held the other’s rigid sex in his hand, the grip firm and caressing when they drifted into consciousness, relaxing as they retreated once more into sleep. A sheet haphazardly covered their loins, their lean, smoothly muscled, heavily tanned torsos sprawled across the bed, tousled blond hair lay on the pillows, Peter’s golden, Charlie’s graying but streaked now with gold by the sun. They breathed deeply each other’s odors, to both of them the sweet odor of contentment and security and time-tested passion.

  They awoke with a start as the children erupted into the room. Charlie rolled quickly onto his stomach, prepared for the onslaught. Peter was gathering the sheet more securely around him as Little Pete charged him and began to drum on his hip with his fists.

  “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” the child shouted.

  A glancing blow struck Peter’s subsiding sex. “Hey. That’s Daddy, all right,” Peter protested with laughter. “Cut that out.”

  “Mummy says it’s time to get up,” Charlotte said.

  Charlie groaned. “As usual, Mummy’s probably right,” he said from the depths of his pillow. The girl leaned over him and found an ear to kiss. He stroked her pale hair as she did so.

  Little Petey had propped himself against his father’s slightly turned hip and dropped his arm over his thigh so that it rested near his crotch. Expecting this move, Peter had managed to tuck himself out of reach; the little boy had a way of exploring private areas, leaning against them, letting his hands stray to them. (“His father’s own son,” Peter had commented when the three parents had discussed it.) A small hand patted his stomach. “Where’s your toy now?” the child inquired secretly, conspiratorially, peering up from lowered brows.

  “It’s vanished. It has a way of doing that.” The toy had been invented when Little Pete’s hand had made unequivocal contact with his er
ection one morning; he had claimed to have a toy in bed with him.

  The wide inquiring eyes grew lively now in anticipation of a new game. Little Pete shook his head uncertainly, torn between skepticism and the will to believe, and smiled slyly. “No, it hasn’t. How can it?”

  “It just does. It comes and goes. I never know when it’s going to turn up.”

  Petey settled more of his weight on his father’s hip and plucked excitedly at the sheet. “That would be interesting. Why can’t I have one like it, Daddy? You said you’d give me one.”

  “Later. You have to be older to have any fun with it.”

  “Will you give Lottie one before me?”

  “No. A girl wouldn’t want one. It’s strictly for boys.”

  The bed began to shake with Charlie’s silent laughter. Petey threw his head back as he gazed adoringly at his father and heaved a great sigh as if he could scarcely contain his delight. Peter was constantly struck with wonder as he caught glimpses of himself in the lively eyes, the tilt of the nose, the generous mouth, the shape of the golden head. Everybody found his son beautiful.

  “He’s so dumb,” Charlotte said, coming around to the bed to kiss Peter on the cheek. She was a poised, grown-up young lady of nine. Peter put his arm around her and seated her on the edge of the bed beside him. Little Pete went racing off around the room making dreadful noises in his throat. He was a jet or a rocket or perhaps the hydrogen bomb.

  “Are you really going to be forty your next birthday?” the girl asked Peter.

  The doleful note in the question made Peter laugh. He lifted his hand to her face and let his fingers linger on her cheek near her eyes where she was unmistakably Charlie. “Somebody’s been giving away my secrets,” he said. “I have a whole month still to be thirty-nine.”

  Charlotte gazed at him with commiseration. “It sounds so old. I just can’t believe it.” Her incredulity was shared by everybody who knew them. They had taken good care of their bodies and could still wear clothes they had had for ten years; they kept a few serviceable museum pieces that dated back to when they had first met and fallen in love. Charlie was acquiring a slightly weathered look and his graying hair marked him with years, but in the right light Peter retained an unearthly youthfulness that made people’s mouths drop open when they learned his age.