The Blood Oranges: A Novel Read online

  I listened, I concentrated all my receptivity on the nearly invisible crude contours of my low stone vaulted ceiling. Beyond the wall of funeral cypresses the black inhospitable sea was unaccountably silent. Out there beyond the other darkened villa my pair of little owls was sleeping. My solid bed was just large enough for one, its lumpy mildewed mattress was a denial of love, my weight was extracting some kind of faint lonely music from its rows of archaic rusty springs. And then I realized that I had lain awake once before in exactly this same state of suspended lucidity. Rarely a dreamer, blind forever to the possibilities of insomnia, nonethless I had somewhere, sometime spent another night lying awake in the presence of some unidentifiable delight. But where? When? The narrow bed, the springs, my unrumpled pajamas, the absence of sheet or blanket—all these, I thought, were clues.

  In the darkness I made fish lips, frowned. Why was I, with my memory, my self-understanding, my ability to expose the logic sewn into the seams of almost all of our precious sequences of love and friendship, now at a loss to locate two separate but similar sources of warmth, surprise, pleasure? What bed could I be trying to recall? What night?

  The marriage bed, of course, the couch of love, the first formal gift of conjugal darkness. For a moment I felt a sensation of relief and shades of triumph, and told myself once more that Psyche was on my side and that given time and thought I could always count on myself for answers. At least I was now recalling exactly what I had been attempting to recall: the sight of the mid-thigh silver wedding dress, the white stockings, the hot medicinal taste of the brandy I drank rather foolishly perhaps from her silver shoe, the late moment when finally I unzipped the metallic dress and helped her strip off the stockings and then carried her nude to the edge of the warm dark fountain amidst the appreciative sounds of our most loyal friends.

  Don’t bother being a husband, baby. Just be a sex-singer. OK?

  Were those her words, her magic words? Again I heard them, again the stark ceremonial details returned, though lying there in the center of my night of analytical revery, I was amused to realize that as a matter of fact I could not remember the last time I had thought about this occasion, the exact identification of which would remain forever buried on the inside surface of the ring that served as its reminder. Then why now?

  The answer was mine even before this last question was fully formulated, because suddenly and with total relief I remembered living through precisely this same perplexing night once before when, several hours after I had carried Fiona to the fountain, I rolled onto my back and discovered that I was awake and that my mind was as clear as usual but that something had changed, and that whatever had awakened me was immediate, obvious, yet in this instant unidentifiable. But I had overcome Psyche’s little dramatic ruse and had thought my way backward to the sudden fact of marriage and forward to the gift of Fiona, to the sudden recognition that I was lying in the conjugal darkness with my wife. And now Catherine, of course. My logical associations abruptly flowered, giving me not Fiona but Catherine, not the fact of marriage but the promise of sexless matrimony, not the bottle of champagne embedded in a basket of flowers but the rabbit waiting out this sleepless night in his new cage between the well house and the overgrown remains of my ruined bicycle. Not the couch of love but my single bed. Not wife but former mistress on her narrow iron bed like mine in the small white room next to mine. The waving matron, Rosella’s sullen greeting, my decision against touching Catherine’s elbow in the door to her room, Catherine staring at the empty villa through the funeral cypresses—lying there in the darkness I at last reviewed all the details of Catherine’s sunset arrival and thought that the two nights were oddly similar and that I was now as grateful to Catherine for coming to share my speculations on the painted bones of Love as I had once been to Fiona for feasting with me on the marrow.

  On the night I had remembered Fiona in a shower of mental fireworks, so to speak, I had fallen again into the peace of my brandy-soaked sleep immediately. And now, remembering Catherine and knowing that I had only to grope my way along a few feet of whitewashed stone to confirm that this was in fact the first night of Catherine’s muted presence on the other side of my crude bedroom wall, I did the same and relaxed my feet, withdrew both hands from behind my head, rolled over and immediately fell into the bemused contentment of deep sleep.

  THE NIGHT WAS GOING TO BE A LONG ONE, I DECIDED, AND began to feel that the kiss Fiona had impetuously planted on the cheek of our one-armed hero was infusing the darkness with even greater expectancy than Fiona herself had hoped for. The strangers were saved, the old motorbus was only hours into its first invasion by the curious water rats and but a few hours into what would surely be its long life of deterioration in the black canal, the unattractive children were sleeping at last, the adventure was more clearly defined and further along than I had thought it would be by the middle of what was only our first night together. The darkness was like a warm liquid poured from the throat of an enormous bird, and above our heads and within easy reach of our mouths vast clusters of stars and tumultuous bunches of black grapes were merging. Each grape contained its bright star, each star its grape. My mouth was brazen with the long slow taste of white wine.

  “Cyril, baby, are you all right?”

  “Sure,” I called softly toward the two figures momentarily visible among the lemon trees, “we’re fine.”

  But already they had moved away from us once more, already the clear voice had lapsed again into a laughing, preoccupied frosty whisper, again we heard the playful confusion of footsteps and then the silence that told me that Fiona’s happiness was dripping between the lemon trees again like dew. The surprise of the second kiss was drawing near, I thought. Or was it the third?

  In the darkness I groped for another bottle, pulled the cork and filled our two small invisible glasses. The stone bench we sat on was chalky and warm, overhead the grape arbor was a sagging foot-thick blanket of hanging grapes and climbing roses. I sipped, listened to the breathing of the large woman seated within easy reach of my hip, my knee, the toe of my bone-white tennis shoe. I cleared my throat and smiled to think that it was like Fiona, exactly like Fiona, to set the first stage of her impending adventure in nothing less than a small lemon grove where she could run at will, and exactly like myself to settle for an unobtrusive niche in a grape arbor. Fiona always spent first nights giving literal chase to her dreams, whereas I, of course, preferred to muse on approaching possibilities and to wait, to listen, to sit out the preliminaries in quiet thought. Again I cleared my throat and glanced at the woman beside me who, in the darkness, was audible rather than visible, a large soft black-and-white image blurred at the edges and rustling with bodily sounds that expressed not meaning but presence. She was breathing, swallowing, twisting to peer over her shoulder. Was she sighing also? Perhaps. I waited and knew that like the stone bench I too was warm to the touch, seemed to be giving off broad waves of pleasing heat.

  “You’re not shivering, are you,” I said, stirring the embers, allowing my voice to drift again toward lower, more reassuring registers. “My wife thinks you must be exhausted. She’s worried about you.”

  Beyond the arbor and through the funeral cypresses I could see traces of the light from the old kerosene lantern they had left burning for their children. Beside me the woman was sitting quietly in remoteness, loneliness, indecision. A lemon struck the ground behind us and I thought I caught sight of Fiona’s white hand waving at me from a slit in the darkness.

  I sipped my wine and thought that the shoulder of the woman beside me was broad, soft, unknown. Unknown yet oddly familiar too. A warm shoulder, I thought, that was growing cool. Would the woman beside me manage unwittingly to earn my attention and find out for herself that she needed it? Had Love determined that this woman’s shadow was to cross the white path of my capability? Or were we to separate forever at our very moment of meeting? At least these questions presented themselves. At least we could continue turning the pages togethe
r for a while longer.

  “My wife admires your courage,”I murmured. “Fiona’s character judgments are always right.”

  The grape arbor and lemon grove were complementary, of course, and now our momentary silence in the arbor was equaled, exceeded by the silence that was again saturating the grove of twisted trees. I listened, began to dip my hand toward the wicker wine basket somewhere at my feet. It was a question of pantomime as opposed to orchestration, I thought, and waited patiently while out there the second or perhaps third kiss grew into a reality of held breaths. The very fact that we heard nothing determined the kiss. Did my companion know what was happening? Was she also able to enjoy the invisible kiss which we, seated open-eyed as we were in the darkness, might have been dreaming? But perhaps for now her appreciation of that kiss was too much to ask, because suddenly I knew that she was looking at me directly, silently, while I continued to stare down at the moldy cork I could not see. And then her husband laughed once and stumbled, called out Fiona’s name, again was looping his way among the trees.

  “We’ve been married a long time,” she said, and her words were like the wine from the bottle—slow, inflectionless, filled with a taste that pleased the mind as well as tongue. I approved of what she had said, heard the soft breath that sustained the sentence, began to see the sweat and soiled years heaped up in the vague shadowy sockets of her eyes. Dull words, and yet enjoyable precisely because the three exhausted children and the now preoccupied one-armed husband could not be deduced from them. Her words alone, and they allowed me to choose between implied security or resignation or, finally, indignation at what she might have taken to be the first signs of betrayal. I put the wine into her fingers and made my choice.

  “Married a long time?” I repeated slowly, turning her few words into mine and at the same time giving them back to her like low notes on a flute. “Fiona and I have also been married a long time. As a matter of fact, Fiona is a kind of priestess of marriage. Her most remarkable quality, I think, is suppleness. But it’s late. Are you sure you want to sit out here like this?”

  “I like your voice in the darkness.”

  “OK,” I said, preparing to shape my words carefully, resonantly, and putting down my half-empty glass between us, “but what about your husband? He’s probably worried about you, like Fiona and me. Wouldn’t it be better if you were in there sleeping with the children?”

  “You needn’t worry. None of you.”

  I waited, and beneath my two hands now clasped around one heavy knee, the camel-colored cloth of my trousers felt like combed linen while the knee itself felt like some living prehistoric bone full of solidity, aesthetic richness, latent athleticism. Imperceptibly I rocked on the warm stone and again glanced briefly at the embryonic stars in the grapes.

  “We can hardly see each other. We don’t know each other. I’m a lot older than you think.”

  She appeared to be listening, sitting and waiting with her hands in her lap and her fresh glass of wine untasted, listening and waiting with eyes now averted and her large distant body filled with thought. But just when it occurred to me that she had drifted into some new private solitude or had merely decided not to answer, she spoke, and between the slow golden roll of my own last words and the sudden inspired appearance of Fiona, whose hopes were rising, I heard her brief declaration and found myself wanting to retrieve the subdued and levelheaded sound of her voice from the grapes, the black leaves, the dark night.

  “I’m forty-three.”

  Was she more aware of herself than I had thought? Was she trying to change the subject or to confide in me? At least her statement of age deserved my attention, deserved the two of us sitting side by side. But then the air shook, the arbor shook, the scent of Fiona’s bath soap and jasmine sweetened the night, and my own investigative mood and Fiona’s springing bow collided, coalesced.

  “Baby, you’re sharing secrets!”

  “We’re just talking,” I murmured. “Join us?”

  “I couldn’t sit still. Not tonight.”

  She had come from nowhere, as she often did, and was breathing quickly. Once again I observed that Fiona’s obviously substantial bone structure was no impediment to her grace or to her abrupt and totally unexpected late-hour turns of mind. I nodded and allowed my face to reflect a faintly deeper shade of my composure, pleasure, good humor. Fiona shifted her feet, glanced around the arbor with what I knew to be girlish delight and womanly detachment, leaned close to me and apparently without thinking slipped the bows of my spectacles from behind my ears and just as quickly slipped them into place again. Her feet were bare. And then she was suddenly on her knees and holding my companion tightly about the waist while I, rocking and humming to myself in silent song, could not help marveling a little more at Fiona’s transformational powers and sensual flights. I smelled Fiona’s jasmine and perspiration and waited, with growing possessiveness stared at the solid and yet agitated shapes of the one woman seated and the other kneeling in the blackness of the night. My companion seemed neither to resist nor welcome my wife’s embrace. But I thought she might be imperceptibly relaxing, if anything, into Fiona’s arms.

  “I’m glad you’re here. I want you here. You and Hugh.”

  The voice I never tired of hearing was both muffled and clear, soft and strident. There was love in her voice and yet she was speaking quickly and in another moment would leap to her feet, I knew, and disappear.

  “Easy, Fiona,” I murmured. “Calm down.”

  “Oh, Cyril, don’t be stuffy.”

  I laughed, made my musing face in the darkness, lowered my voice. “At least Catherine doesn’t think I’m stuffy. Catherine and I were having a nice conversation until you came along.”

  “Sharing secrets, baby. I know. Drinking wine.”

  But again Fiona eclipsed the warm comforting sounds deep in my chest and before I could speak raised her face, reached up, seized the other woman’s large hardly distinguishable head in both hands, waited, then dropped her arms. The gesture, I understood, was another intimation of a kiss between women, the kind of gesture Fiona allowed herself when she could not bear to merely kiss someone’s cheek but when passionate kissing was nonetheless inappropriate. I was unable to see either woman’s eyes, and yet I knew that they were looking at each other and that Fiona’s eyes were probably moist and luminous.

  “Cyril’s different from other men. Do you like him? Do you like my Cyril?”

  “Of course she likes me.”

  “Baby, you ruin everything.”

  But I was ready this time, and before she was able to relinquish my companion and regain her feet, slowly and deliberately I placed my hand on Fiona’s hip and confirmed to my own satisfaction that the elastic of her panties was still to be felt beneath the gauzy nylon of the short dress. I had merely grazed her lower hip with the tips of my fingers, and of course the panties were not of any great importance. But Fiona always perceived my motives, no matter how subtle, and now standing in the darkess she had understood immediately the nature of the curiosity that lay like a shadow behind the delicate, nearly instinctive movements of my right hand.

  “OK,” she said, and for a moment became a flurry of swift purpose. “You asked for it. There they are.”

  I laughed, leaned down and with my palm covered the small white perforated piece of intimate apparel where it had landed on the toe of my white tennis shoe, then stuffed it easily into my right-hand trouser pocket. Catherine had not comprehended this domestic incident, I thought, and Fiona was gone. I wondered if she had satisfied her own curiosity while pouting at mine.

  “Where were we,” I said and waited, adjusted the bows of the spectacles properly behind my ears, casually ran my fingers through my briefly disarrayed waves of hair, crossed my knees, struck up one of my slow-burning oval cigarettes. My wife and the one-armed stranger were everywhere and nowhere, the dark night was growing longer, deeper.

  “Quiet, you two,” 1 called agreeably in the direction of the invisi
ble well house, “you’ll wake the children.”

  And then again drifting, so to speak, to my partner: “We were talking,” I murmured, “what about?”

  “Ourselves.”

  “Exactly. Telling each other heart-stoppers, as Fiona would say.”

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “Of course I’m not.”

  “I don’t want to run around all night in the darkness.” “Nor do I.”

  Pausing, moving one of her empty hands to the cool breadth of an upper arm, she spoke slowly out of the black shadows: “She said you’re different from other men. What did she mean?”

  I waited, and then another length of golden thread went toward its mark in the darkness: “The real secret is that she likes to pinch my bottom. That’s all. But trust us,” I added. “Trust Fiona and me.”

  And then quietly and without shrugging her shoulders: “Why not?”

  I exhaled, nodded, began to feel at last that though we had not changed positions or touched each other even accidently, nonetheless there was the decided possibility that my massive oral cavity and the vast dark sockets of her invisible eyes were now groping toward each other in some sort of sympathetic identification, some warm analogy of bone and shadow. “I’ve told you a secret,” I said. “Now tell me one.”