The Blood Oranges: A Novel Page 8

  He was facing south, and the horizontal position and the density and frenzy of the low wind-whipped screen of nearly black grass made his long white body appear longer than it actually was. I watched, pulled at my chin, took a few more slow steps that placed me definitely beyond the safety of the trees and into his aura of bright colorless sun and the hot wind that clashed in the ears. Beneath my thonged and silver-studded sandals, the blanket of dead pine needles had given way to a strip of unclean gray sand. I could not hear the ocean but saw that it was thrashing with unusual and irregular fury up and down the length of our desolate private beach of black stones.

  Just as I had decided to return to the dark and echoing shelter of the pine trees, leaving the two of them to enjoy in peace whatever they had found together in that exposed and inhospitable spot amidst wind and sun, speculating to myself about the kind of passion that had driven them to strip off their clothes in all this shattering light and noise, suddenly it occurred to me that I could see nothing of Fiona’s brown arms and passionate hands which, even from this distance, should have been visible clasping Hugh’s thin white naked back or stony buttocks. I hesitated, turned again into the wind that now seemed to beat the motionless sunlight into my face, my hair, the depths of my yellow shirt. I took another look and, filled with a kind of voiceless compassion as well as a curiosity I had not known before, knew that Fiona’s invisibility was no longer a problem and that I could not retreat. Because Hugh was alone, I was convinced of it, and I could not abandon him there to sunstroke or aching muscles, certainly could not allow the reason for his lonely presence there on the empty beach to go unexplored.

  But what was he doing? Sunbathing? Embarking on some kind of freakish photographic experiment? Reading one of his faded erotic periodicals hidden from my sight in the crab grass? What?

  And then I stopped, leaning into the wind with legs apart, hands in pockets, head lowered, stood there frowning and trying to resist the temptation to lean down and shake him by the shoulder. He lay at my sandaled feet like a corpse, a long fish-colored corpse, or like some fallen stone figure sandblasted, so to speak, by centuries of cruel weather. Yes, an emaciated and mutilated corpse or statue, except that he in his oblivion was moving, while I, despite the compassionate concentration of all my analytical powers and alerted senses, had become immobile, only the immobile witness to this most florid and pathetic expression of Hugh’s reticence.

  Because he lay there on his stomach embracing not Fiona but only his clothes, the twisted black long-legged sailor pants, soiled jersey and white shorts. No magazine, no camera, no living partner. Only the white shorts beneath his head and the pants and shirt bunched and almost out of sight now beneath his chest, his hidden loins, his rigid outstretched white legs of the Christ.

  The motion in the pitted gray-white buttocks was intensifying, the shoulders were beginning to heave, the black grass was beating against his long meager thighs, the tight black curls on the back of his head were blowing, springing loose, were becoming drenched with black light. Was he moaning? Did he believe himself to be lying at midnight among our percale sheets a half mile away at my villa instead of sprawled out here in the grass with a few uninteresting broken sea shells and some large black ants that would soon be scurrying in aimless circles on his heaving back? I could not be sure.

  Yet waiting, towering above him, watching the naked flickering gestures of his lonely one-sided prostration, I could only nod because suddenly I recognized that I had already lived whatever dream Hugh might be dreaming but also that without my presence Hugh’s agony did not exist. And yet, if he mistook rough cloth and patches of sand for Fiona’s life, flesh, firmness, did not the final agony of this discrepancy belong to Fiona, though she remained unaware of it, rather than to Hugh or to me? I thought so. But Fiona could take care of herself, of course. She always had.

  Without a moment’s hesitation I decided to spare Fiona this sight of Hugh dreaming away their intimacy in the crab grass. Without hesitation I turned away from the now tightening and trembling white figure and waved, shouted back some cheerful greeting to the yet invisible woman (Fiona, my wife) who was now calling to me from within the gentle darkness of the long grove of pines. I reached her in time to keep her from stumbling on our sleeping and naked Saint Peter at the height of his pleasure.

  “What on earth were you doing out there on the beach, baby? I’ve been looking for you.” We laughed, touched lips, I felt her fingers inside my yellow shirt after all.

  “COME ON, BOY, HOW ABOUT SOME INDIAN WRESTLING?

  What do you say?”

  Why did I submit finally to the strained voice, the forced jocularity, the challenge only too evident in his eyes and little black pointed beard? There in the grape arbor, bathed in darkness and the light of Fiona’s candles, why did our two wives and even the children urge us on? When the two youngest girls began to clap their fat little star-shaped hands and even Meredith drew near and smiled her poignant introverted smile of spite and satisfaction at the contest she had already visualized as won inevitably and maliciously by her one-armed father, was there still not some way I might have evaded the ugly consequences of this abysmally classic situation?

  “Go on, baby, be a good sport.”

  But as soon as I felt his hand in mine, I knew that in this case I should not have listened, should not have allowed myself to inflict such pain on a man who was obviously determined to fill our idyllic days and nights with all the obscure tensions of his own unnecessary misery and impending doom.

  He began to squeeze, his hand was a claw. As if in some ancient combat his upraised arm was dripping with raw meat and bloody bone, at any moment he might open his mouth and shriek. And in the midst of it I reminded myself that Fiona knew full well that the physical exercise I had undertaken throughout our married life surely guaranteed the muscle development of my thick arms. We were both at fault.

  ITOO HAVE BEGUN TO HOLD THE LARGER OF THE TWO rabbits against my chest and in my lap. Silently we pass it back and forth, Catherine and I, pass it dangling from her arms to mine and from mine to hers. The pink succulents, the unhooked door of the cage, the powerful gently explosive smell of droppings and digested grass, the blue tiles turning into frosted metallic threads in the light of dawn— in all this it is apparent that both of the rabbits are female and that Catherine and I are equally attracted only to the larger, which has clear red eyes, crude musical notations on its long front legs (silent companion, I realize, to Love’s swooping birds) and big paws that sometimes find slow footing on my watch chain. I stroke the rabbit, glance at Catherine, smile. She looks away and brushes a piece of straw from the lip of the cage. But sooner or later she reaches out her arms and I hook my thumbs under the forelegs of the rabbit, whose trust is airy and limitless, and whose bones feel as if they are immersed in a limpid shape composed entirely of warm water, and lift, watch the amazing distension of the silken spine and totally relaxed rear legs, then swing her over to Catherine’s waiting hands.

  An excellent basis for sexless matrimony, I tell myself. It will not be long.

  FACE DOWN ON THE BLANKET, SMILING AT THE MUFFLED sound of my careless yet also stentorious whisper: “I am not opposed to domesticity,” I heard myself saying, “not at all.”

  No wind, no spray, no evidence of dead sea birds, no dissolving sun, nothing to distract us from this hour of attentiveness on the beach of black stones. It was another left-hand right-hand day, as I had come to call them, another one of those days when the four of us, and even the dog and the children, fit together like the shapely pieces of a perfectly understandable puzzle. Catherine on her side, Hugh on his knees, Fiona flat on her back and I face down on my stomach—we were holding each other in place, so to speak, on Fiona’s blanket and talking softly, listening. A few yards away the twins were silent for once, held in check by the magnetism of the old sleeping dog, while Meredith was standing ankle-deep in the water and waiting, I thought, to be embarrassed. In the silence that met my unpre
meditated remark I covered Catherine’s hand with mine and squeezed it, wondered how long we could fend off the inevitable nemesis.

  “What a beautiful thing to say, baby. Good for you.”

  Silence, more wine-flavored silence, and smiling into the hot blanket I saw distinctly our rigidly approaching nemesis (a small goat prancing out of a sacred wood) and knew that, despite the grip of my hand, Catherine was beginning to roll again under the weight of her fourteen years of motherhood.

  “You didn’t have children. That’s all.”

  Fiona’s turn, I thought, and wondered whether Catherine was actually aware of my tender grip or had in fact forgotten me, lost sight of me in the midst of thinking about Hugh’s little black pointed beard and her three deliveries. Though it was I, after all, who was once more touching flame to the idea of the family and lighting anew the possibilities of sex in the domestic landscape.

  “Oh, but we decided against children long ago. And now it’s too late anyway. Thank God. But we love your children, Catherine. Don’t we, Cyril?”

  I raised my head and nodded, then shifted my weight and lowered my head again so that my weathered cheek smothered beneath it Catherine’s fingers and now upturned palm. In nose and mouth and stomach I made the wordless contented sounds of an agreeable man settling down to sleep on a hot beach blanket, though in point of fact I had never been more crisp with attentiveness and lay listening to the epic inside Catherine’s lower abdomen. I was waiting for the parents to become lovers and the lovers parents.

  “What’s the matter, Eveline? Come over here to your old dad.”

  The little fists were in the eyes, the lips were turned down, the small fat body was naked except for the gray cotton panties riding well below the navel, the brown hair was filled with burrs which only moments before had been clinging to the black fur of the dog. Without moving or opening my eyes I saw it all, the upright and sunburned child midway between our blanket and the sleeping dog and stumbling toward us silently, unerringly, while Catherine frowned and Fiona caressed herself. I dozed on, watching, waiting, enjoying behind my patina of sun the sight of Hugh’s pebbly tight smile and the eyes that were glancing now at Eveline, now at Catherine and me, now at Fiona. It amused me to know that little Eveline was to be the lever with which her father would pry Catherine’s warm pillowing hand from beneath my cheek. How like him, I thought, to begrudge me Catherine’s hand in the middle of the afternoon and abandon her body to me throughout the night.

  “Maybe she just needs to urinate,” Hugh said. “Could that be it?”

  And then the soft toneless maternal voice beginning to withdraw at last from motherhood: “Of course she does. But it’s your turn, Hugh. I’m sun-bathing.”

  Once more I was proud of Catherine, who had managed to add another still note to our silence. Already Meredith was blushing at the edge of the sea. I waited for the prolonged and uneasy sound of Fiona’s giggling. And then the little invisible white goat landed among us and I rolled toward Catherine, who did not move, and propped myself on one elbow in time to see Hugh sit heavily and deliberately on Catherine’s haunch, as if on a convenient stone, and hold the baffled child between his knees and with his one hand pull down her panties swiftly, expertly. He was whistling and aiming his small fat daughter in the direction of the still sea where Meredith stood listening, blushing, shriveling.

  “Get off me, Hugh.”

  “Hang on there. She’s nearly done.”

  Would she throw him off? With a single heave would she dislodge him from his all-too-comfortable seat on her upraised hip? In some way would she appeal to me for help? But even as I wondered how long Hugh would be able to sustain this admittedly ingenious stroke of trivial revenge, wobbling happily on his wife’s prostrate body, I saw that Catherine’s eyes were open and that the small amber-colored pupils were fixed on my own in a long silent expression of love or indignation. I returned her secret stare and with slow pleasure began to realize that Catherine had chosen this moment to think of me and was quite oblivious to the weight on her hip.

  Yet Hugh himself was thinking not of the naked sunburned child squatting between his angular protective legs, not of Fiona, though now I heard the prolonged and uneasy sound of Fiona’s giggling, but was thinking rather of the woman he was sitting on, because even while I watched the arm and hand that Catherine could not possibly see (long arm and large versatile hand still fresh from the parental ritual of pulling down little Eveline’s pants and holding her, caring for her), Hugh swung back his arm, reached down, and without changing his position or turning his head, fumbled briefly until his hand leapt suddenly like the small invisible white goat and, in a gesture of love or viciousness, closed on Catherine’s heavy breast inside the madras halter. Did he know that I was watching? Or more likely, had he again managed to forget my presence and the immediate fact that I was now lolling only inches away from this reclining person who even at this moment was perhaps more my partner than his? Why could he not respect Catherine’s conventional but nonetheless powerful intimacy? When would he ever respond to my omniscience and Fiona’s style? But of course the wedding ring worn bizarrely, fiercely, on the third finger of Hugh’s right hand told me that I must never allow myself to be unduly critical of Hugh. Even that monstrous hand of his wore its sign of love.

  And then the nemesis of our brief respose became exactly the unpredictable display of cause and effect that I had anticipated, and Catherine struck away Hugh’s desperate hand, Hugh jumped to his feet. Fiona caught Hugh’s nearest thigh in her already waiting arms and squeezed slowly and yet for only an instant. There was no need to look and reassure myself that behind us Hugh was lapsing again into arrogance, was standing with his eyes shut, his stump upraised, his thin bare legs rigidly apart, his fingers driven into Fiona’s hair even while Fiona’s eager cheek lay pressed to his thigh. Would he never learn? I adjusted the faded strap of the halter, pushed my warm face into Catherine’s face and clothed her suddenly naked mouth with mine.

  “Look, baby. A little goat!”

  But was it possible? Had I heard her bright words correctly? Had Fiona actually spoken somewhere outside the no doubt pedestrian aura of the muttered sounds of contentment I must have been making while kissing Catherine? Was it dream, change, coincidence, or was my state of mind a menagerie of desire from which real animals might spring? Could it be that one of my speechless creatures of joy and sentiment had torn itself loose from the tapestry that only I could see? Was it now bearing down upon us with blue eyes and the wind in its hair? Was the little goat that had danced among us in my mind now going to leave its little hoofprints in the center of Fiona’s blanket or come rushing and butting between our legs? It did not seem possible. But of course it was.

  “Oh, baby, look, he’s wonderful!”

  We separated, climbed to our feet, stood apart, all four of us, and together stared in the direction indicated by Fiona’s outstretched arm and waving hand. And of course Fiona’s excitement was justified and the goat was real. But he was not white, as I had thought, but cream-colored, a small long-legged creamy animal splashed on the forelegs and masked around his eyes with brown. At first glance he was in the air, hung suspended at the height of his second leap from the gloomy pines, and even from where we stood we could see his bright blue eyes and the nubile horns embedded in soft down. At least I had been right about the color of his eyes, I thought, and smiled.

  Then he sprang, leapt, danced his soaring stiff-legged dance. And while Hugh romped with the goat and I squatted beside the distasteful Eveline, comforting her and helping her climb back into the discarded pants, I glanced up and saw that Meredith had stripped off her modest trunks and halter at last and with both thin arms raised above her head was leaping up and down in the black water. She had kept her back to us and now her thin body was slick and brown, her little white porcelain buttocks were winking at me through the sheaves of spray.

  “Meredith,” Catherine called over her shoulder, “come look at the b
aby goat.”

  But their oldest daughter danced on and it occurred to me that after all there was hope for Meredith and even for Hugh. And Fiona was still sharing my thoughts because suddenly there she was, kneeling where I squatted with the child, and Fiona’s whisper was filled with pleasure, confidence, elation, the smell of jasmine.

  “Isn’t he wonderful? I want him for my own, I really do.”

  “Goat or man?”

  “The man, baby. The man.”

  LAST NIGHT (ONLY LAST NIGHT) I LAY UNACCOUNTABLY awake on my narrow iron bed in my small vaulted room and listened to Rosella snoring in the darkness at the other end of the villa. I was amused at the sound and in passing decided that it could only be the latent old peasant woman already snoring inside Rosella and that the sound was no doubt comforting to their partially domesticated animals. But what of myself? Why was I, who was always a heavy sleeper, now lying awake?

  Slowly I raised my arms and clasped my large dry weathered hands behind my head. I had not been dreaming, there was no wind in the cypresses, the noises from Rosella’s little open mouth were distant, faint, and could not have awakened me. Why then my open eyes, my slow ordered speculations? What had become of my ponderous capacity for peaceful sleep? After all, I thought then with amusement and mild nostalgia, Fiona used to resort to little kicks and punches to wake me out of total darkness, used to thrust a lighted cigarette between my still sleeping lips, used to tug at my hair and pound my chest, in mock fury fight my pajama buttons before I managed to open my eyes and speak a few thick golden words of reassurance and with my own fingers pull what she used to call the rip cord of my pajama bottoms. How different I was from Fiona, how different I was from Hugh who claimed that he spent all the nights of his life in sleepless writhing.

  The bedstead trembled, I could hear its rust flaking onto the stone floor. At that moment I knew that even if I raised myself on one elbow and glanced at the window I would not be able to distinguish the blackness of the funeral cypresses from the blackness of the night. Lying in the very darkness in which Hugh and Fiona had suffered both together and separately, I admitted to myself that even while laving my memories of them in silent thought I could not blame my wakefulness on Fiona’s long leaps through the night or on Hugh’s torment. But was it even a question of blame? I thought not. And suddenly I knew with a kind of certainty that whatever in fact accounted for my wakefulness it was somehow pleasant—immediate, obvious, pleasant. Something had happened, something had changed, and I knew that in the thick neutral night of my middle age I had only to think, to wait another few moments in order to know why I was awake in this darkness of measured expectancy.