“OK,” she said, and for a moment became a flurry of swift purpose. “You asked for it. There they are.”
I laughed, leaned down and with my palm covered the small white perforated piece of intimate apparel where it had landed on the toe of my white tennis shoe, then stuffed it easily into my right-hand trouser pocket. Catherine had not comprehended this domestic incident, I thought, and Fiona was gone. I wondered if she had satisfied her own curiosity while pouting at mine.
“Where were we,” I said and waited, adjusted the bows of the spectacles properly behind my ears, casually ran my fingers through my briefly disarrayed waves of hair, crossed my knees, struck up one of my slow-burning oval cigarettes. My wife and the one-armed stranger were everywhere and nowhere, the dark night was growing longer, deeper.
“Quiet, you two,” 1 called agreeably in the direction of the invisible well house, “you’ll wake the children.”
And then again drifting, so to speak, to my partner: “We were talking,” I murmured, “what about?”
“Ourselves.”
“Exactly. Telling each other heart-stoppers, as Fiona would say.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“Of course I’m not.”
“I don’t want to run around all night in the darkness.” “Nor do I.”
Pausing, moving one of her empty hands to the cool breadth of an upper arm, she spoke slowly out of the black shadows: “She said you’re different from other men. What did she mean?”
I waited, and then another length of golden thread went toward its mark in the darkness: “The real secret is that she likes to pinch my bottom. That’s all. But trust us,” I added. “Trust Fiona and me.”
And then quietly and without shrugging her shoulders: “Why not?”
I exhaled, nodded, began to feel at last that though we had not changed positions or touched each other even accidently, nonetheless there was the decided possibility that my massive oral cavity and the vast dark sockets of her invisible eyes were now groping toward each other in some sort of sympathetic identification, some warm analogy of bone and shadow. “I’ve told you a secret,” I said. “Now tell me one.”
“All right.”
Did she take a breath? Was she turning her head in my direction? Had I heard the first welcome shades of laughter in her voice? I shifted knees, waited. And then she spoke softly, matter-of-factly: “Your wife really meant you’re the perfect man. I didn’t have to ask what she meant. I knew.” “Another heart-stopper,” I said as softly as I could, and heard the sweetness thickening. “Thanks for the heart-stopper. But how did you know?”
“I knew.”
A fresh surprise, more pauses, the low sound of her accent poised between invitation and resignation, a suggestion of despondency balancing the brief hint of pleasure. Could she have meant what she had said? Seen what she had claimed to see? At the very moment of wading from the absurd and dangerous canal had some vague recognition of the headless god lolling in the guise of my composure overcome her mortification and fear for her children? I could not be sure. But at least we were turning the pages at a swifter pace. And was I about to subject us to the test of the children? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Carefully I reached through our small wall of darkness and filled her glass.
“So you think you see me as Fiona sees me,” I said, and laughed. “The perfect man.”
“Yes. But it doesn’t have much to do with me.”
“Not even now?”
“Not yet.”
“There you go again. More disappointment.”
“Why should I be disappointed?”
“Of course Fiona exaggerates. I’m a lot more ordinary than she’d like you to believe.”
“You asked for a secret. I told you.”
“Good. Let’s have another.”
“No. It’s your turn. What’s in your pocket? What did she give you a moment ago?”
Wrong, I thought, I had been admirably wrong, and I allowed myself to shape one gigantic, tremorless ring of smoke and then set it free and watched it swell, widen, disintegrate heavily in our night of the untasted grapes. Apparently she had witnessed something of Fiona’s playful exchange after all, had been aroused by being in the presence of Fiona’s swift act of partially denuding herself. But did I wish to hazard a discussion of Fiona’s simple and private gesture, or resort to it? Might I not better keep at least this relatively insignificant example of Fiona’s sex-language to myself? Was the risk too great, the ploy too easy? I made my choice.
“Just Fiona’s panties,” I said under my breath. “They’re not important.”
“Why did she take them off?”
“Who knows? Do you really care?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Trust me.”
“You remind me of my father.”
“Listen,” I said then, as if our heads were inches apart, “listen a moment.” I waited, holding out my hand for silence and knowing that it was in fact time to act, and then carefully I uncrossed my legs and stood up so that the hard cool globules of the lowest grapes spilled onto the top of my head and brushed my ears. I was relaxed. I was crowned with fruit. And then under my breath: “Listen. I knew they’d wake the children. Let’s go.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“We’d better look.”
She moved, she too must have felt the passing weight of the grapes. I led the way, she followed. I heard the sound of her breathing, strolled on. At the far side of the funeral cypresses I glanced at the dying eye of my cigarette and waited while the trailing woman slowly extricated herself from the thorns and brittle twigs that lined the opening through the tall black cypresses. Beneath the clothesline that I had rigged at dusk we paused among the silhouetted trousers, dress, miniature dresses, stockings, all greater than life size and still dripping with the waters of the black canal. As we approached the villa that Fiona had opened up for them, I noted the high silver grass, the broken tiles, the listing shutters stuffed with rags and impacted with the earthen ceramics of transient wasps, the small gothic niche near the doorway where birds had raised their young and no candle burned, no icon glowed. And entering the cold corridor, I in the lead and she following, I smiled at the sound of the snoring dog and at the feeling of wet stone beneath my hand and the smell of the old kerosene lantern that was smoking in one of the cell-like rooms ahead of us. Once again I knew that a ruined villa was even more appropriate to passion than was a silent grape arbor filled with stars.
“Come on,” I whispered, “let’s look at them.”
And then I was holding high the lantern by its rusty wire loop and we were standing shoulder to shoulder and peering down at the two large and almost identical heads lying side by side in the smoky orange light at our feet. The faces were square, the curls were tight and dark, the lips were thick. Could these be the faces of small girls? I could understand their size (the mother was large, the father now silently romping with my wife was large) but it was difficult to account for their expressions of sexless power.
“That’s Dolores,” I heard my companion whispering, “that’s Eveline.”
Dolores, Eveline. Together we studied the sleepers, Catherine and I, and even these children were beginning to make a difference, were already strengthening nameless bonds between us, as I had thought they might.
“And somewhere over there,” she whispered, so that I lifted the lantern and swung it loosely in the direction she appeared to be pointing toward with her restrained and contented voice, “is Meredith.”