“Then why did you marry me? You knew what marriage was, didn’t you?”
“All day in the sunshine, I’m not afraid. You are my love. Then the night comes, a drum beats low, deep in my heart...”
“What is this fear? Love doesn’t hurt you.” He came back toward her and crouched down beside her, taking her hands in his.
“Doesn’t it?” she quavered uncertainly, like a child asking something of a teacher in school. “Then what — what does it do?”
He groped for words. “You can’t be told of it. You can only — live it.”
Her eyes were like two dark haunted pools.
“Where were you,” he asked her sadly, “that you never learned about love?”
“In that house there, where you found me.”
“Won’t you trust me?” he pleaded gently. “Can’t you look at me and see that I’d never hurt you? Won’t you — take a chance with me?”
She was still trembling. Slowly her arms opened. She drew them back in a gesture of passivity, of acceptance. A switch snapped, and the stateroom became a square of perfect darkness, a pall, an undeveloped photographic plate...
Then later, in the nothingness, her voice spoke, low, troubled.
“Have I displeased you?”
There was no answer.
The switch ticked once more, the light went on, and they were far apart. It was her hand that had touched it. He was across at the other side of the stateroom from her, standing near the dresser, his back turned her way. Sweat traced an erratic satiny track here and there down his face. A forelock of hair overhung his forehead like a scythe.
“Why do you leave me this way?”
On the floor, petals of a disintegrated gardenia had fallen, as though a storm had buffeted it. The gardenia that had been in her hair. One petal was clinging to his shoulder. He raised his hand and flicked it off impatiently.
“Please tell me. Please. What have I done?”
He didn’t answer. The hand that took up one of the black-filled Cuban cigarettes wasn’t steady.
“What is it, what did I do?”
His voice was husky. “Nothing. Don’t notice me. I had too many drinks ashore, maybe, at Sans Souci and Bajo la Luna.”
“You didn’t drink at all. I watched you. Only coffee.”
He sensed by way of the mirror, without seeing it, her intention to move, to join him. His arm gestured her back. “Stay there. For just a minute. For just a minute, let me stand away from you.”
“Won’t you tell me?”
“First I frightened you; now your passion has frightened me.” He opened one of the drawers, dredged up a bottle of straw-colored Cuban rum. He passed the back of his hand across his forehead, as if trying to erase or stifle some emotion churning within it. “It was like holding onto something that — that suddenly becomes a tigress in your arms. I don’t know how to say it. Not just a girl. Some jungle thing. That’s why I jumped away like that. Do you — know what you did just now?”
He brought his other hand out before him, eyed it, red threads of blood snaking across its back. He took a pocket handkerchief, saturated it in rum from the bottle, held it to it. And then to his cheek, where there was an angry red diagonal traced. Then finally he tied it around his hand.
“I couldn’t tell if it was love or hate. Only, it was too fierce for me.”
“It wasn’t hate. You named it for me. You named it love. So love is what it was.”
“To kiss is not to bite. To claw is not to caress. It was like a panther tearing me to pieces. Those strange words — what were they? They weren’t words at all. They weren’t English.”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t hear them.”
“You spoke them.”
Her voice was a whisper, scarcely heard. Her extended arms guided it toward him. “You said it was love. Come back to where it is. If it is love, then it is here inside my arms.”
His bandaged hand moved. With it he poured himself a drink. A great big fat one. He drank it down to the bottom without a hitch.
Chapter Four
Midnight over a tropic sea. Two cigarettes winking close together across a ship’s rail. Two faces ignited into incandescence by the hammered-silver sheen of the moonlit water below. Inside somewhere, the ship’s band was playing “Perfidia.” The song of treachery, the song whose very name spells faithlessness. Out here, two strangers standing side by side, two strangers joined in marriage, groping desperately toward the beginning of acquaintanceship, the beginnings of understanding.
“Why do you look at me like that? What do you see?”
“I’m trying to figure it out. There’s a sadness in your eyes. I wonder what it is. You’re a thousand years old, inside your eyes. You must have been born old, Mitty.”
She glanced at him with an odd little quirk of surprise. “It’s strange you should say that,” she answered slowly. “I was, in a way.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know, I can’t remember my childhood at all.”
“Darned few of us can. I can hardly remember my own. Just faded snapshots of a licking or two, of my first day at school.”
“No, but you’re speaking of infancy, early childhood; I mean even late childhood, the early teens—” She stopped to ask him, “You won’t be disturbed, Larry?”
“No, why should I be? What was it?”
“Illness, I think. Fever of some kind. Maybe even sleeping sickness. He never told me exactly what caused it. It wiped out all recollection of everything that had gone before. It was like starting all over again. I had to learn to talk, to read — why, I can even remember their teaching me how to walk.”
He whistled. “How old were you when this happened?”
He saw her stop and try to think. “I don’t know. They’ve never told me my exact age. This was about three or four years ago.”
He tried to compute it for her. “Well, if you’re eighteen now, and this was about three or four years ago—”
“I’m not sure that I am eighteen now. I’ve never been sure of my own age.”
“Well, didn’t he have to produce a birth certificate when he took out the adoption papers?”
“I don’t think there was one available. I’ve never known who my parents were. His face, Fredericks’, was the first thing I can remember, peering blurredly down at me, feeding me something with a dropper or giving me shots in the arm. I must have lain in a stupor for weeks and months.”
“That’s bad stuff, that sleeping sickness,” he agreed soberly.
“When it finally ended, I had to learn everything all over again. I’d even lost the use of language. I had to pick up words from him, one by one. He’d hand me something to drink and he’d say, ‘Water.’ Then when I wanted it again, I’d say, ‘Water,’ and he’d bring it to me. That was how I learned.”
“But you mean, in your own mind, you didn’t call it ‘water’ before you heard him call it that?”
“No. I knew what it was. But I must have had some symbol, some word of my own for it. Because the sound of the word was strange to me. I couldn’t even pronounce it correctly in the beginning. I had trouble with it on my tongue. Wa-wa, and then wa-ta. It was like a foreign word, a word in another language.”
She fell silent for a time, and he did too. His mind grappled with the enigma she had revealed to him, or rather presented; for the key that would have revealed it was still missing.
Suddenly she blurted out, “Larry, why were they that way to me?”
His eyes narrowed. “That’s something I’d like to know myself.”
“They always made me feel so queer, so different. As if there were some shadowy secret hanging over me.”