Afterward she left for the car to change, and when she came back and stood before him Luis realized what a really beautiful creature Ester was. The lavender swimsuit both revealed and concealed. He stared at her and marveled at the shapeliness of her figure, her thighs, the high, pointed mold of her breast, and how elegantly she walked.
“You are undressing me!” she said, blushing. “Come, let us swim.”
He did not go with her. “I’ll watch,” he said. She threw him a kiss and ran down the beach. He watched her swim out, her arms rising and dipping into the water with even grace. One time she dived so long that he thought something disastrous had befallen her, then she bobbed up, nearer the shore, laughing. “It’s not so cold,” she shouted. She didn’t stay in the water long. She was panting when she returned, shaking off her hair the droplets that had seeped into her bathing cap. After taking a shower in one of the bathhouses near the main rest house, she joined Luis and spread their lunch on the plastic sheet that had covered the basket.
Marta had prepared the food well — roast beef left over from the party, Coke, omelet, ox tongue, oranges, and raisin bread. They ate slowly, and when they were through, Ester wrapped the leftovers neatly and placed them back in the basket. She took some magazines from the car, and they leafed through them and argued a bit. It was then that the fatigue of the previous night caught up with him. “You wouldn’t mind if I dozed?” he asked. He lay down, and she took his head on her lap. Before he closed his eyes he had one glimpse of her lovely face looking down at him.
It was late afternoon when he woke up. The surf had become a thunderous crash. Ester was beside him. He sat up. The beach was empty, and the slope of sand where the breakers rolled in a while ago had become a chasm, and the waves, massive and white, were collapsing with a roar.
“That was some sleep,” Ester said. “I’m glad you are rested.”
“You should have wakened me.”
“But you needed sleep,” she said. “Besides, you were talking in your sleep and it was great fun listening.”
“What did I say?”
“Your life story,” she told him gaily.
He stood up and stretched his arms. “Thank you for keeping watch,” he said. She gathered the magazines, helped fold the canvas sheet, and followed him to the car.
All the way back he drove slowly, although the traffic was not heavy, since there were few commuters from Cavite during the holidays. Dusk had descended upon Manila when they crossed over from Baclaran to Dewey. The bay was shrouded with the purple hues of sunset.
“Do come and cook supper, like you told me,” he said. They were on the boulevard, and the façades of restaurants and nightclubs were already ablaze with neon.
“It — it is not proper, Luis,” she said tentatively. “Papa—”
He pressed her hand and assuaged her doubts. “I’ll take you home after supper. I will say we have been out, that’s all. He won’t get angry.”
“But I also said I don’t know how to cook. I am handy with a can opener only—”
He pressed her hand again. As he swung the car to the right, up the driveway, he said, “We will have the house all to ourselves.”
She looked at him covertly and asked, “How long will your servants be away?”
“They are certainly not coming back tonight — or tomorrow.”
Holding hands, they went up the short flight of stairs. This is what I want, Luis thought as blood raced to the roots of his hair. He opened the door and switched on the lights in the hall, Ester close behind him. She switched on the lamp by the piano and went to the kitchen with the lunch basket. Although this was only her third time in the house, she knew it well.
“Shall I start cooking now?” she asked at the kitchen door.
“We have time for that,” Luis called from the bedroom, where he was washing up. When he went to the kitchen Ester was still there, studying the refrigerator. He dragged her away despite her feeble protests. His arm deftly around her waist, they glided past the kitchen light, which he turned off, and into the hall. They sat down on the couch near the azotea door.
“You are sure Papa won’t be looking for me? I think I should call just to let him know.” But there was no urgency in her voice.
“He wouldn’t care,” Luis murmured. Ester lay on her back, her feet resting on the floor. Her eyes were closed, and a dreamy peace suffused her face. “I’m tired.” She sighed. “I can go to sleep now and not wake up until tomorrow.”
He did not speak. He knelt on the floor, bent over her and kissed her. He felt the warm parting of her lips and tasted the salty sweetness of her mouth. As he fondled the front of her dress she tried to push his hand away and he could feel a tremor course through her. “No,” she said with feeling, “I am not ready for it, Luis.”
But he did not heed her.
“Louie …” her complaint — it if was one — died on her lips.
Long afterward, when he drove Ester home, they were silent most of the way, and although he tried to make small talk, he just could not make himself regard the night as a time of conquest. Even in the depths of his passion, he had not really been unconscious of another reality. She had made the proper motions of pain, of distress, before the final surrender, but a man knows — he can feel this in his bones — and Ester was acting out something that she had already done, although not with him. A man knows, just as Luis knew it with Trining. It was not fair, of course, for him to ask. He had, after all, gotten what he wanted. But why did she have to lie? It would not have mattered much, but what was important was the honesty of the relationship.
Seeing him brooding, she squeezed his hand and asked, “Luis, aren’t you happy? Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Yes,” he said without feeling. “I am the happiest man in the world.”
“I’m the happiest girl in the world,” she said, snuggling close.
CHAPTER 26
And so they piled high the hollow dreams and the senseless talk over many a ruffled moment. The relationship was intense. Although she was barely past twenty, Ester had refined sensibilities and an intelligence that sometimes surprised Luis with its depth and lucidity. She asked him questions that he was afraid to ask himself, needling questions that had to be answered honestly, for they were matters of conscience, and even if his answers often did not reveal his thoughts, to himself at least he was honest. Why did he write poetry — was it out of some deeply felt need to express what he could not express in prose, or was poetry a search for that basic truth without which men could not live with themselves? Why did he sound so private in some of his lines — speaking only to himself? Was his involvement with social justice based on what he perceived to be unjust, or was he obsessed with it because he himself had committed an injustice and was, in a sense, flagellating himself for his final atonement? At times, when he was pushed to a corner, squirming and shorn of defenses as his innermost privacy was gouged, he would be angry at her with a cold and persistent wrath and he would ask her the same question but rephrased — or buttressed, rather — with the sharpness of torture. Why did you surrender yourself to me? Is it because you think I would be some cheap and easy conquest? When we make love, is your orgasm real or make-believe? Suppose I tell you that I am your lover only because I’m interested in inheriting the Dantes publishing empire someday? Remembering all these sometimes filled him with remorse, and he would wonder how deeply he had hurt her, but then she always went back to him, like some masochist, and their quarrels, although pitched and bitter, always ended in a passionate reunion, which both of them hoped would not be marred anymore by the kind of disagreements that exposed their nerves raw to the wind. He failed to understand that in many ways Ester, too, was unsure of herself, that she was groping for something to hold on to, apart from the ready pattern that school, social position, and her father’s wealth had made for her. If she could not express this in poetry, the way Luis did, she could at least express it in her relationships — and the deepest, the most human, and the most touching of all was her commitment to him.