It got darker, and the lights created a kind of lawn party atmosphere, a lighted space with the slight mystery of the encroaching darkness held back. The tapedeck floated Frank Sinatra’s “Nancy” over the various grasses and the trees. The geese, what few were left, quietly honked in response to Frank’s singing. The owner of the nearby Exxon station and his wife, who took a lighthouse drive each evening, saw the activity and stopped and joined in. They were excellent dancers, and their turns on the green were admired by all.
There was a chipping contest. Sammy talked about the whales and saving them and handed out a few bumper-stickers. Chip talked to a few men about various green-maintenance techniques that he had learned in school. Melda Bando talked to the women about Texas chili. Manny Corea told the story of the mussel find. The Chair’s poses and gestures were subtle and abbreviated and unobtrusive. He felt calm and peaceful. His wife came, and he danced with her. They did a simple two-step. Chief Wingfoot came over and sat in the shadows above the green, beyond the play, and watched. Sammy brought him a bowl of quahogs.
Eddie Costa sang an old Portuguese fishing song. They all loved hearing it, but he refused to translate it, saying that that would not do at all. The women gave Melda Bando recipes for kale soup.
It was a clear night, and the lighthouse was dark and silent; no warnings were necessary. Out beyond its softened whiteness, the lights of a few boats glimmered on the sea, a mile away. The surf washed almost inaudibly on the sand, sparks of phosphorous in its gentle wake. The last of the day retired, and the stars came out. Frank Sinatra sang his songs again into the night. The people moved in loose and changing clusters, talking, laughing softly, and listening. The party continued, sweetly, until after twelve. Sammy took the last dance with Melda Bando. The two drifted formally across the green. Everyone became silent and watched them. When the song ended, a light applause rose up. The dancers bowed and smiled. When the party ended, they all went home knowing they would sleep peacefully when they got there. Once they were gone, Chief Wingfoot rose from the grass and stretched. Then he followed the throb of the underground river, Tashmuit, heading home in the dark. A light mist developed out over the sea, and the lighthouse began its sweep, its beam touching the tops of the trees and the roof caps of the clubhouse. The air was perfectly still. The course, under the warning beam, was safe in darkness. And it was quiet at Seaview, there on the edge of America.
Three
The Hive
HE WOKE TO DISCOVER HE WAS STANDING AT THE EDGE of a cliff, looking at something. In the lingering tail-end rush of the cocaine, there had been two women in his head, one silver and one gold, and both severely battered. They were tall and pubescent and very thin, and he had shaved the head of the silver one and driven a slightly domed thumbtack through the flesh in the side of her nose. The head of the tack was black lacquer, and where she reclined, naked like the other, she had been placed with cheek on biceps, her arm extended with palm open, face tilted to keep the tack’s placement, lest it should fall away. He had left the hair on the gold one. In places it was matted and twisted from perspiration; where it was dry it was strawlike, black at its roots and heavily peroxided. He had placed a ring of barbed wire in an anklet above her foot. This he saw as a kind of taming that had something to do with animals and America. It had been the first time for both of them, but he had known that they had the experience in their monads, and he had cracked them like geodes, with his instruments opening the hollow crystal cores to the dark. A bicycle chain, a small surgical bone saw, a diamond-head needleholder, a blunt sand wedge, four atraumatic needles, a shackle, a pair of pliers, his wet towel, four dilators, blunt and sharp curettes.
Except for the velvet-covered platform on which they lay, the room itself was not dark. It was the center of a glowing hive with a chamber at the core. The chamber was like the inside of a geodesic dome or a massive, hollow golf ball. Extending up from the platform on the circular floor, the walls to the apex were a grid of small, square openings, the mouths of narrow ducts through which women were trying to enter. He stood next to the dark platform, watching them. In various places, and in a kind of swelling and receding rhythmic pattern, their heads darted into the chamber or came in slowly through the squares, thrusting for entrance. But the squares were too small to allow their shoulders to pass, and they thudded and bounced back, then darted and moved in, trying again and again. In one place a woman had managed to thrust her arm through an opening; her shoulder pressed against her agonized head at the ear, her sharp earring slicing her flesh; her arm was extended like a battering ram, in the position of a body surfer on the crest of a wave, her fingers snapping and waving and beckoning to him, her red mouth contorted, black eyes blazing. In other places the women had given up and took their lust and ambition in looking. Their heads pushed in as far as they could get them, they craned their necks and strained hard to see him and the two on the dark platform. They avoided the eyes in the heads of those in the other openings across the chamber.
He had a device with buttons in his hand, and the buttons controlled the sliding doors that could close off the glowing hive openings individually. He had ways of making his selection, and he would push buttons to activate the slow sliding, and the heads would reluctantly recede from the openings as the doors came down from above. At times the adamant would not give it up easily. The doors would press their necks like soft, slow guillotines, and only when the pressure was convincing enough would they wiggle their heads free and recede as the doors closed down. With these adamant ones he would only open the doors again when he judged that the pounding of the heads against them had caused sufficient pain and frustration. At the heart of his pleasure was the knowing that what the women desired was less the activity on the dark platform than the culmination and stasis of what he had done there. The gold one was patterned with silver cuts that were pink lipped, and with hot silver stripes. The silver one had the shapes of small copper cymbals ringing on her shoulders, her back, and her thighs. The two were unconscious and slightly entwined on the purple surface. He felt peace in their posture. If one lifted any part of her body, he would put her to rest again.
She was in the car in the parking lot at the foot of the thick shaft of the lighthouse, where he had told her to wait for him. She was neither silver nor gold, and there were no spaces on her body that he could think of as virginal, nothing for him to touch into that way; it was scars over scar tissue, a surfeit of a kind of knowledge. He did not bring her with him, and when he reached near the cliff edge, he turned away from it and watched the shadows darken and cut cavities into the fairways and the slopes of rough as the sun left them. Clear across the course, before the sun finished, he saw a hard glinting off large white objects, three of them in a cluster on the far side. Turning back, it was the feminine moon he woke to, half axed away and the color of tarnished brass, to see it moving into a black cloud, and the stars that looked to him like pulsing tattoo needles, puncturing through the skin of the dark sky. He stood erect and singular, totally unaware of the limiting romance of his perceptions and the melodrama of his visions. If there were things going on at the lighthouse or down the beach below him where a small fire flickered, he was apart from it. If the action of the moon had been a slow camera shutter, closing, he was not the one involved in the activity photographed but was standing to the side, looking into the lens. He wore a Western leather vest, tight Levi’s, and black leather tennis shoes. His pendant was a thick gold chain with a large coinlike object at the end of it. On the face of the object was an etched figure of small wires and rods that formed a rough circle, a complex matrix. His shoulder brushed the wood of the barricade that kept him back from the cliff ’s lip, an erosion-control device. He kicked the wood firmly, and bits of sand fell away at the edge.