Presence

by Arthur Miller

  “So it’s all gone.”

  “Seems so, yes.”

  They rode in silence for a while. Here and there a lone man could be seen standing in the open, staring in surprise at them going by, his face dust-covered. “It’s the end here, you know,” Peter said.

  Levin heard the depth of the loss in him, even though Peter’s tone was dry and controlled. “You think you’ll be staying on here indefinitely or . . . ?” He broke off, realizing that Peter must love this country, and why prick at the pain of leaving it?

  “I might go to the States, but I don’t really know. My girl wants to get married, but I just don’t know.”

  “I’m curious, Peter—what are your feelings about Douglas?”

  “I don’t know. He was a damned fool, I guess.”

  “Because?”

  “Well, he could have checked out the kind of pine he had here before he got that far into it. And Christ, not getting his technical information beforehand. That was stupid.” He thought for a moment. “But you’d have a hard time working with these people no matter what you did.”

  “Why, what’s wrong with them?”

  “Their heads are someplace else. They see things we don’t. Hear things we can’t.”

  “You have Haitian friends?”

  “Oh sure, I was raised here. But most of them just fuck up sooner or later.”

  “But they seem to have a sweetness,” Levin said, thinking of Octavus.

  “Oh yes. Some.” Then after a moment, “There’s some very bad people around now, and they’re armed. With CIA help, they say. Killings all the time.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I doubt they’ll bother me. If they did, probably because they’d want a cut of my business. I’d have to close down and get out if it’s too much.”

  They were passing the small huddled shacks, the tiny gardens again. Levin turned the question over in his mind for a few minutes, and finally said, “I thought the way you got that taxi going again was pretty terrific, Peter.”

  “I just tied the spring back on, that’s all.”

  “I have to admit I was surprised you stopped and did that for them.”

  Peter seemed not to like where this was going and frowned. “I knew that guy.”

  “The driver?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You didn’t seem to from the way you talked.”

  “He’s stupid. He shouldn’t even be driving. He’d never have got that car going, didn’t even know where to place the jack. He was trying to raise the car up instead of the spring, exactly the opposite of what he should have been doing. He’s an idiot. Worked for me for a while till I had to can him.”

  “I see,” Levin said. Then Peter had not been moved so much by some disinterested compassion or some knightly noblesse as by a kind of elegant impatience with the stupid driver and a pride in his own ability to make the repair? So the rescue was not as noble an act as he had imagined? Unless knights too had egos to massage. All Levin knew for sure was that he himself would probably not have stopped even if he’d known how to fix the taxi spring. Was it because he lacked Peter’s love for these people? Or did he lack the wish to be anyone’s seigneur?

  He grinned to himself, thinking, But if there’d been a piano out there on that waste I think I’d have been happy to sit and play for them while that driver bungled around and the people died of hunger and thirst waiting for someone to show up and save them. Chacun à son ego. But then he thought again of the still, the size of the great main tank and the labor it must have taken to drag it up from the port and through the forest, plus the welder and his generator, and then of Douglas’s frantic appeal to Vincent, his cracked and dirty eyeglasses crooked on his nose, and his outcry, “This country is dying, Vincent!”

  Peter left him off at the hotel saying he would come by to pick him up for dinner that evening, clearly pleased to have new company. Levin waved goodbye and went up to his room. After a shower he lay naked on the bed, perhaps the same one he had shared with Adele. A car horn drifted through the shutters, which he recalled Adele had admired, and then a voice on the street in the chirping baby-talk language, then a roaring motorbike. He thought again of the tank and how it still looked in good condition, only a little rust along the welds. It could probably last a thousand years out there. In some sense it was like a kind of work of art that transcended the pettiness of its maker, even his egotism and foolishness. He felt glad he had come back here. Not that it meant anything, but he had inadvertently paid some kind of homage to Douglas’s aspiration, an idea that he felt now had gone from the world, at least the world he knew. He loved Douglas and wished he could have been as careless with himself. He longed to play Schubert with Adele. He was falling asleep. There might be a piano in the hotel which he could imagine sharing with her beside him, he must ask the clerk. He could smell her scent. Odd, that she would never see the tank.

  Presence

  He wakes at quarter to six, sun in his face, still tight about being criticized for not doing enough for women, slips into walking shorts and sandals with a glance toward her exposed arm, and thirsty for the morning fog steps out into the chill, walks toward the beach road in the swirling mist, grateful even to the dimmed sun for its uncomplicated touch of warmth on his back. The row of sleeping beachfront houses and their dozing cars alongside the road, his sandals whispering, he searches for the public path down to the beach and at last finds it alongside the last house in the row. On the brow of the path before it descends he pauses for his first glimpse of the sterling ocean, his hallowed homewater from so long past in childhood, when it loved him and scared him into sparkling and foamy white on top and dark below with live things in its holy depths. Once he had nearly drowned, at six, seven. Another step now descending upon the tippy, blanched gray planks, and through the long spear grass alongside him a white body suddenly, a man in his black T-shirt seen from his overhead vantage, fucking. He halts to watch. Slowly back and forth, a young body, tight and tanned, on his knees in hard control, but the crouched woman all but hidden behind a hummock of sand and grass. Without deciding to he finds himself turning back up the path and halts witless beside the road. There is no other way to the beach, he will have to wait. He parades in his loose sandals past the beach houses not really too surprised that he is not aroused himself. Possibly because there is something mute and controlled and therefore remote about this lovemaking, or maybe it is his own repression. Whatever, it merely leaves him with the restraint of courtesy. Which is soon superseded by resentment at being barred from entering the beach; what an idea, to do it ten feet from the public pathway! On the other hand, they couldn’t have expected anyone to come by at this hour. Still, though, a few people must. Sure they must be finished, he returns to the path and starts down again, managing to utter a warning cough, certain they must be lying side by side this time, probably covered by a blanket. At the dune’s brow he halts, seeing the man below him still fucking but a little faster now, absolutely demanding, dominating, a Pan fucking earth itself for all one could tell. A feather of something like fear now at the sight, something sanctified in such power, the primordial exchange of domination for submission. The man was now lunging in quicker and longer and silently controlled strokes. He turned, his mind confused, and walked back toward the road before impending outcry, fearful of it now, not wishing to witness its absurdly sacred thunder, as though in watching it he would make it obscene, perhaps, or some challenge was there he would rather decline.

  Another stroll, longer this time, nearly the whole block to the house where he and his wife were guests, and finally turning back in a last attempt to enter the beach, he mounted the dune and descended. Fog had given way to pure Atlantic blue sky. Beside the path lay the form of the man buried like a larva inside a khaki sleeping bag, the woman gone. The ocean rolled softly, at peace with itself, the scalloped spume washing the gentle beige slope of p
acked sand. No one in the virgin water, but now, off to the right, a woman in black shorts and a white T-shirt, standing up to her ankles in the margins of the receding surf, bending over to thrash her open hands in the restlessly churning suds. From his distance he could not tell what she looked like excepting that her thighs were full and beautiful, but her hair seemed to stand up in stiff, wiry kinks. He watched her staring out to sea, saw her climbing up the incline and crossing to the soft sand. She saw him but did not let her gaze linger and trudged back to their dune and spread out a blanket and sat beside the hidden man curled up on his side. A space of a foot or two separated them. She turned to look at the pupa-like shape beside her. Then she looked at the sea again. She wiped her hands dry on the blanket, then seemed to sigh and lay down with her knees raised. After a few moments she turned on her side, her back to the sleeping bag.

  He walked to the edge of the sea, whose sibilant suck and push had, he realized, been the sounds he had heard through it all. Without a plan, he idled along the edge of the water away from the pair. The sheer thoughtfulness of the ocean depths stirred him; nothing in life was as dense with feeling, as wise and deceitfully pleasing with its soothing strokes, while its murderous temper was gathering hate. Breakfast hunger; starting back toward the path to the street, he was halted after a few steps by the sight of them lying there some hundred feet away, the pupa shell and the woman curled up with her back to it, and he sat on the sand and stared. Why did he assume, he wondered, that she must feel deserted and unhappy now? Why could the guy not have been a stud with whom she wanted nothing more to do? Perhaps she had hunted him down, landed him, and now lay there the victor, resting before her next conquest. Mute as apes, he thought. Two of them in a cage with their silence and surfeit. And the sun. The sea’s waves are the spin of the earth made visible. The young woman sat up, the man remaining inert in his shroud, having done what could be done with his earlier taunting of death. She was staring toward the sea, the length of beach still altogether empty. They must have slept the night there. It could have been their second fuck. She slowly turned now and looked across the light at him. He lowered his gaze deferentially, touched for some reason by guilt of his knowledge of her, then resolved to return her stare. She slid upward onto her feet and came walking over to him. As she approached, he saw the round of her hips and the bloom of her breasts. She was short. As she came closer he saw that her rigidly kinky hair had been only his illusion brought on somehow by mist and sunlight; she actually had heavy brown hair bobbed to the nape and round cheeks and dark-brown eyes. A widow’s peak and orange coral earrings the size of half dollars. A Band-Aid around her left thumb; maybe she spent a lot of time on the beach with its broken bottles and splintery wood. She halted, standing over him where he sat cross-legged.

  “Do you have the time?”

  “No, but it’s about half-past six.”

  “Thanks.”

  She glanced full of indecision out at the sea behind him. “Do you have a house here?”

  “No, I’m visiting for the weekend.”

  “Uh.” She nodded deeply several times like a philosopher, but pretentious or not he began to feel she included him in her vision of things, whatever that was. She seemed to accept as inevitable his sitting there, the only one on the beach besides her lover and herself. She stood at her ease, pressing a loose edge of her bandage down on her skin. Then she turned from her thumb to him, her head tilted down to inspect him, take him in, a soft and slack smile broadening her mouth as though expecting some admission to come from him. He felt he was blushing. Then she sighed peacefully and looked once more out at the water, her uplifted chin lending her a certain nobility. He recognized the absurdity of his thought now that it was she who was in charge of the beach.

  Something had happened. Uncomprehending, he realized with fear and unhappiness that he had made a link, was not alone, and resolved not to speak again unless to some purpose. Thirty years ago he had made love on this beach. There were fewer houses here then. It could have been in the grass on the same dune, although the one he remembered doing it on seemed higher. She was dead now, a skeleton by this time, he supposed. But they had not done it in absolute silence. And it had been in darkness, and he remembered the moon path shining on the water like a road, its light continuing into her black hair.

  Was she not going to speak? He tried to seem amused but fear was mixed in him as he looked up at her. A quick glance told him that the sack had not moved, as though her partner had left for another world. But she was not sleepy. She might still be throbbing. Thoughts crossed the screen of her brow, her lowered eyes. From his angle her planted legs were like pillars rising from the sand.

  “You watched us.”

  His breath caught but he clung to his right. “I had no idea you were there. . . .”

  “I know, I saw you.”

  “Really? I didn’t see you. You were hidden by the grass.”

  “I could see you, though. Did we look great?”

  “Pretty great.”

  She turned and glanced toward the sack, shaking her head as though marveling at something. But letting herself down on the sand, she looked back over her shoulder again, apparently to make sure that he would not yet stir. Then she pulled her ankle under her thigh and sat almost facing him in a half-lotus position, her back straight. Now she seemed to have an almost Eastern visage, with her round cheeks pressing up her eyes into a narrowed gaze. “You came back once, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I thought you’d be finished.”

  “I couldn’t actually see you, you know; but I felt you were there.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Some people have a presence.”

  Sitting in silence and staring at him, she seemed to be waiting for some agreed-upon thing to happen. He did not want to say or do something that might embarrass him or send him away. He turned out to the sea for a moment, pretending to relax with no necessity for them to speak because they were so secure in a shared silence. But she rose on oiled joints and walked yards into the water. He flushed with the beginnings of shame at losing her, then decided to follow and walked into the water behind her despite recalling the fine penknife in his pocket, his wife’s birthday gift, which would be ruined by salt water. She slipped under a soft wave. The water was repellently cold, but he let himself into it and swam beside her. They treaded water facing each other, then she floated closer to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. He drew her in by the waist and then felt her legs opening and forking him. A wave lapped over their heads and they coughed and laughed, and she grasped his hips and pulled him to her and kissed him, her lips cold, then she slipped off and swam away and walked out of the water onto the beach, continuing up toward her lover who had still not moved.

  Emerging, he reached into his pocket and drew out the penknife and opened the four blades, wiping them with his damp fingers and blowing moisture out of its nested interior, then sat on the sand. He had no towel but the sun was warming up. The fresh air in his lungs made him light-headed, and he threw his head back with his eyes closed to absorb everything in relaxation. There must be something he should do. He turned and looked up across the beach and found her staring at him where she sat on the blanket, and they held the stare like two ends of a long silken thread. Now he would lose her. Familiar aches were returning to his hips. Stretching out, he lay on his back with his small victory at having touched her body and somehow her spirit, and closed his eyes. Surprisingly, sleep’s fingers began to creep into the backs of his closed eyes; a swim in the sea sometimes left him as relaxed as after sex, and he felt he could doze off now if he wished. A dreamscape began to form but the sun was rapidly heating up and would burn him, so he sat up and, starting to his feet, he glanced once more across the beach toward her protective dune and his heart chilled. They had gone. The shock flew into his stomach, threatened vomit. How was it possible so quickly? They would have to have folded he
r blanket and the man’s sleeping bag and packed away some other things lying around. He hurried over to the dune where they had been but there was nothing, and the sand here was too loose to retain footsteps. A lump of fear swelled in his chest and turned him in all directions, but there was only the sea and the empty beach. He hurried over to the slatted path, hoping to reach the street before they disappeared, then halted, seeing a white T-shirt suspended on points of spear grass. Reaching down he took it in his hands and felt a very slight body warmth in the cotton. Or had it been forgotten by previous lovers and was only warmed now by the heat of the sun? A fear of having stepped over some restraining edge into utter loss. But at the same dark moment, a tremendous joy was flowing into him that was no longer connected to anything. He climbed the path to the street and turned up the road toward the house where he was staying. How strange, he thought, that it mattered so little whether or not they were actually here if what he had seen had left him so happy?

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