“No,” she said immediately.
“Then... then what do you expect us to do, if you take off your top like that?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
“Because... because I didn’t think it would matter, one way or the other.”
“Well, it got me excited,” I said quickly, and turned away in embarrassment.
“Well, I don’t know what to do about that,” Sandy said.
“Well, I don’t know, either.”
“If you’re going to be thinking about my breasts all the goddamn time...”
“I don’t think about them all the goddamn time. I just happen to be thinking about them now.” In defense, I said, “That bikini’s hardly anything at all.”
“Well, then, I’ll just stop wearing bikinis, that’s all.”
“Everybody wears bikinis.”
“Then go think about them a little.”
“I never saw them without their tops.”
“And you won’t ever see me again, either!” she said angrily, and threw the shell into her beach bag.
“I thought you said...”
“Never mind what I said, the hell with what I said.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” She was silent for a long time. I kept wondering why she didn’t get up and walk away. I dreaded the thought of facing David. How could I possibly tell him about this?
“If only we could...” she started, and then shook her head. “I thought you understood,” she said.
“I do.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, and fell silent again. She was thoughtful for a long time. Then she sighed and put the magazine and the questionnaire and the pen into her beach bag. She rose, tugged at the bikini pants, adjusted the bikini top, brushed sand from her thighs, and held out her hand to me. For a moment she stood against the sun and was faceless.
I looked up at her and tried to see her eyes.
“Come,” she said.
I took her hand, and she pulled me to my feet. I felt very clumsy. I felt I should apologize to her. We began walking. We walked in silence, the beach bag hanging from her shoulder, thudding against her thigh with every step she took. The sun was hot. We were climbing up and away from the beach. The sound of the volleyball game was far behind us now. We continued to climb. I realized suddenly that we were heading toward the center of the island, where the fire had been.
“Listen,” I said, “let’s forget it.” Inexplicably, I had begun trembling.
“No,” she said.
“Sandy...”
“I want you to see me,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not.”
“Peter, you’re lying.”
“All right, I am afraid.”
“Of what?”
“That I’ll do something to you.”
“You won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I won’t let you.”
We were approaching the forest. The burnt pines were gnarled and black against the sky. I was trembling violently now.
“It’s too open,” I said, “they’ll see us.”
“Who?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I feel...”
“No one will see us,” she said.
We found a huge boulder, as black as the skeletal trees surrounding it. Still trembling, I sat with my back to it on the side away from the distant ocean. Sandy stood before me silently and solemnly, and reached behind her to unclasp the top of the suit. Her nipples looked exactly the way they had that day she’d rushed into the water, that day the icy water touched them.
She smiled and sat down beside me. Then she reached into the beach bag again, and began filling out the questionnaire, reading the questions and possible answers aloud to me.
Eventually, I stopped trembling.
The fire, of course, had taken place long before I was born. The way it was told to me, it had started in the only house on the edge of the forest, a modern structure with sliding screens and a wide deck that faced the rising sun. The man and woman living there had been having trouble for a good many years, constantly threatening divorce, even coming to blows one night in public at The Blue Grotto. On the night of the fire, they’d had a terrible argument, and the man had seized the nearest object at hand, a lighted kerosene lamp, and thrown it at his wife. Her nylon gown had gone up in flames. Shrieking in terror, she had raced outdoors, dropping tatters of fire into the adjacent brush. It had been a dry summer, and there was a high wind that night. The flames leaped from bush to bush, eventually reaching the forest itself, where the wilting pines supplied fresh fuel for the blaze. The summer people stood in panic on the beach, watching the flames billow up into the sky, a dense black cloud of smoke hanging over the forest, the strong wind and the flying sparks threatening to spread the fire everywhere. The only thing that saved the island was a sudden crosswind that turned the flames back upon themselves.
Before that day with Sandy, I could never think of that ancient fire without scaring myself. Whenever the wind was unusually high, I would look southward from the back porch of our house and visualize those billowing flames, that hanging black cloud, the slender woman rushing in terror through the brush. Oh yes, the islanders had since built a firehouse and supplied it with a shining engine and a siren that could be heard all the way over on the mainland. And yes, there was a volunteer fire department now, and everyone had been alerted to and understood the possible danger. But it had happened once, and my constant fear was that it might happen again — and this time no lucky crosswind would spring up to prevent a total holocaust. The fear was unrealistic, I guess, but that didn’t make it any less frightening. On particularly anxious days, I would find myself hating those long-ago people who had allowed such a thing to happen. Why did I have to tremble now for something they had been unable to prevent? Why did I even have to consider the possibility of another fire?
And then, the day Sandy sat beside me, everything seemed suddenly all right. Smiling encouragement, inviting me to look and admire, she forced from my mind all previous knowledge of that horrible place. There beside her, I was able to dismiss the evidence of devastation all around me and consider the fire a legend passed from generation to generation (Have you heard of the terrible fire of ’45, horrible, we hope and pray it will never happen here again), but only a legend. Besides, legend or not, we’d had nothing to do with that ancient fire — and so, guiltless, we could sit in the sunshine with the burnt and stunted trees all around us, secure in the knowledge that what we did now was also quite innocent: Sandy showed me her breasts. That was all. So, we concerned ourselves only with the present. The present was figuring out the answers to a questionnaire that would later be electronically computerized in an attempt to find the perfect date for Sandy. The present was Sandy herself sitting half-naked beside me in the ruins of the forest.
When David was finally sprung and we told him what had happened, he agreed with us that we’d done nothing wrong, and said he was only sorry he hadn’t been there. In fact, he said, hadn’t we all seen at least that much in the pages of Playboy? This was a point neither Sandy nor I had considered before. We agreed now that there was great validity to it, and immediately stopped arguing the morality of what had happened. In dismissal, Sandy mentioned that she’d also seen a picture of the highly respectable Countess Christina Paolozzi in Vogue, naked to the waist, “and she has even smaller breasts than mine, so there,” she said, and stuck out her tongue. We all laughed and said the hell with it.