“It’s like Coney Island, for Christ’s sake.”
Rhoda nodded. Sandy and David plunged through a rolling breaker, disappeared from sight, surfaced some five feet beyond and began swimming toward the deeper water. I watched them. The light glaring from the water was intense. I shielded my eyes with one hand, and then was suddenly aware that Rhoda was staring at me. I turned to look at her. Her face was still closed tight against the sun.
“I’m sorry about last night,” I said.
She nodded, but did not answer.
“Rhoda, I’m sorry. I’m really very sorry.”
“Peter,” she said, “why did you get him drunk?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I asked you to stop...”
“I know you did.”
“... I begged you to stop.”
“I can’t explain it, I really can’t.”
“Peter,” she said, “do you know that I love you?”
“I... I guess I know it,” I said. I was suddenly frightened. All at once, I wanted to get off that blanket and shove my way through the teeming noisy humanity everywhere around us, and splash into the water to where Sandy and David were swimming. I did not want to hear anything else Rhoda had to say. I had the feeling that whatever else she said from this point on would be painful, more painful than the nightmare had been, more painful than the headache, more painful than throwing up in the toilet. I wanted her to stop at once, to leave things exactly where they stood, accept my apology graciously, and merely shut the hell up.
Tilting her head to one side, squinting at me, she began pounding me with words instead, her mouth in constant motion, the metal bands bunking accompanying semaphore as they intermittently caught sunlight. A bead of perspiration slid from my armpit to my ribs, trailed across my chest and ran down over my abdomen. Rhoda’s voice rose and fell, and with it the sounds of the beach, reverberating on the air, muffled, indistinct. There was laughter in counterpoint, sporadic laughter that seemed continuous even though it came from separate sources at different times. The ocean roared, but seemed curiously overwhelmed by the hovering buzz and the laughter and Rhoda’s insistent voice. I felt suddenly apart, as though I had been paralyzed in mid-motion and then gilded with sunshine while everyone around me continued to move and breathe and sweat and make noise. Rhoda’s lips were still in action, her bands blinking. I sat still and silent on the blanket at the water’s edge, a stunned nucleus at the center of incessant turmoil.
She had lain awake all night frying to understand my behavior, she said. She loved me so much, she said, and that was why she couldn’t understand. I had been so gentle in the forest that day, so sweet and loving and gentle, and yet last night I seemed to join the others in their malicious conspiracy to intoxicate Aníbal. What was it between the three of us, what was the secret that seemed to generate such unanimous enthusiasm for the unerringly wrong idea? It had been wrong to go out with Aníbal to begin with, she should never have allowed us to talk her into it, but when the three of us got together that way, we made all the right things seem shameful and square. Oh, Peter, she said, I don’t want to be square, I want so much to understand you, but what can I think when you deliberately conspire to get a poor man drunk? Did you do it for fun, did you enjoy watching him make a fool of himself, the way you watched those poor unfortunate perverts that day (Lower your voice, I warned) on Violet’s island, why did you do it, Peter? Peter, was it square to find something appealing in Aníbal Gomez, to want to hear him out even when he went on and on about his grandfather, so terribly square to want to grant him the respect of listening? (I don’t need this, Rhoda, I thought, I don’t need you for a conscience!)
So why did you do it, that’s what I’m trying to understand? You knew I didn’t want you to, I tried to stop you often enough, I pleaded with you to stop, and yet you went right ahead with it, getting him so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing, and then pitting him against those three hoodlums, who were those three boys, anyway?
“Some boys,” I said.
“Who?”
“Just some boys.”
Peter, she said, this is just what frightens me, this is just what I was trying to tell you about, this loss of feeling for anything that’s real. Aníbal was real, Peter, he was a very real person, and you got him drunk just for kicks, and then threw him up against those boys without a thought, almost as if he were made of plastic. Peter, we’re not made of plastic yet, we don’t have plastic hearts and livers and lungs, we don’t run around on plastic wheels, we don’t have plastic tapes inside us telling us what to love or hate, not yet we don’t.
“Nobody said we did,” I answered.
“Peter, don’t I matter to you at all?” she asked.
“Rhoda,” I said, “I don’t know if you realize how serious the situation was last night.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” she said.
“Those guys weren’t fooling around,” I said. “If they’d have caught us...”
“Then why didn’t you try to stop them? Why’d you send Annabelle?”
“I didn’t send anybody.”
“Sandy did. She sent a skinny little...”
“He wasn’t skinny.”
“He was skinny, and he was drunk.”
“Well, he shouldn’t have got drunk,” I said, and sighed and looked out over the water. I felt intimately but mistakenly involved with her, as though everyone around us wrongly assumed we’d been whispering lovers’ secrets to each other, as though even our silence now blatantly advertised a relationship that didn’t really exist. I had not asked her to love me. I had not even asked her to understand me. I felt suddenly trapped. Anxiously, I searched the water, looking beyond the crashing surf to the choppy waves hoping that David and Sandy would come out to join me. I thought again that I should get up and leave Rhoda, plunge into the ocean, let the cold water shock me back to life, wash off the sunshine gilt that was paralyzing me. I didn’t want her to start crying again, though; I couldn’t bear the thought of her crying again. At the same time, I didn’t want anymore of this crap, either.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t find this conversation very pleasant.”
“Neither do I.”
“So let’s talk about something else.”
“No, let’s talk about what you did last night.”
“Oh, Rhoda, for Christ’s sake, get off it!” I had raised my voice, and I turned swiftly now to see if I’d attracted anyone’s attention. The couple on the next blanket were soul-kissing. A tidal wave could have moved in from Hawaii to inundate California, the Middle Western states and the entire Eastern seaboard without disturbing them. I looked back at Rhoda and whispered, “What the hell did I do that was so awful, would you mind telling me?”
“You behaved like a coward,” she said.
“Oh, thanks.”
“You ran.”
“That doesn’t make me a coward.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“I didn’t want my skull bashed in. Also, Rhoda, I came back for you. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that I came back for you.”
“No, I haven’t forgotten that. Why’d you come back, Peter?”
“Because you were in danger.”
“Then why didn’t you stay and help Annabelle?”
“Because Annabelle means nothing to me.”
“Do I?”
“I don’t know, Rhoda.”
“All right,” she said.
“And that’s the truth.”
“All right,” she said again.