“Was I long?”
“I didn’t mind waiting.”
Lifting my hand, leaning in her direction, knowing that she was as conscious as I was of my soft lips pressing together, parting and then pressing together again, slowly I slid up the bottom of her pajama jacket and exposed a few inches of her wide stomach and then withdrew my hand, leaving the soft broad belt of skin exposed. Her hardly audible vocal throb subsided, she did not move. I swung away and for a moment devoted precise fingers to the carefully tied laces of my tennis shoes.
“I wonder if they’re lying in bed together right now,” she whispered. “Like us.”
“Would it change anything?”
“It might explain what I’m doing here with you.”
“Do you think so?”
“No.”
I was standing barefooted beside the bed and untied the large bow I had made in the sash. “As a matter of fact,” I whispered, “they’re just sitting up to watch the sunrise. Is that better?”
“That makes it worse.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Seated once more on the edge of the bed and laughing: “I can give you clarity,” I whispered, “but not understanding.”
Only then did I remove my spectacles and for safekeeping put them inside my left tennis shoe beneath the edge of the bed.
“Don’t be prudish.”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t worry,” I whispered, “just relax.”
Eyes shut, mouth dissolving, oblivious to snoring dog and absent husband and little nearby unconscious witnesses but not to me, slowly she moved at last, waited, moved again. Her head had fallen to one side but she was listening to me, to all my voices, and watching me in the depths of her smothered eyes.
“Your shoulder’s cold,” I said, and covered it with a soothing hand. Murmuring, waiting, stroking her hair, smiling at the thought that her soft arms were hardly able to reach around my back and that her hands had not been able to preserve their desperate grip on my enormous tough rump — beyond all this I the white bull finally carried my now clamorous companion into a distant corner of the vast tapestry where only a little silvery spring lay waiting to restore virginity and quench thirst.
Later, and into my ear and softer, much softer than before: “I guess I wanted you all the time,” she whispered. “But I never thought we’d be in bed together.”
“Glad you were wrong?”
“Yes. I'm glad.”
The sunrise, as later I happened to see for myself, was brilliant.
STEADY WIND, HARD CLEAR LIGHT, THE FOUR OF US HOLDing hands on the rocks that faced the squat ominous remains of the fortress across the narrow crescent of dark water now harboring only four or five half-sunken wooden boats with high prows, broken oars, red chains. Moody, we were bound together by wind and light and hands. All eyes were on the ruined penitential structure just across the water that was apparently unchanged, unnourished by the sea crashing on three sides of us. All eyes were on the gutted shape of history, as if the clearly visible iron base and broken stones and streaks of lichen were portentous, related in some way to our own presently idyllic lives. But I for one was conscious of bodies, hands, squinting eyes, positions in line, was well aware that Fiona stood on my left and Catherine on my right and that Hugh was doomed forever to the extreme left and could never share my privilege of standing, so to speak, between two opposite and yet equally desirable women. Even on our promontory of sharp wet rocks it amused me to think that, thanks to Hugh, our sacred circle would remain forever metaphysical. Nothing more.
But what was he saying?
“That fort, boy … soon …”
“Good idea,” I shouted and, nodding my head up and down, again I was struck with the perception that he was black while I was gold. But a ruined fortress was not a safe place for a man like Hugh, and though I did not yet understand the basis for so much oblivious intensity, still I admired his courage and was beginning to share his eagerness to undertake the expedition to that unwholesome place of bone, charred wood, seaweed.
Suddenly I felt the pre-emptory childish tugging on my left hand and the cold lips against my ear. Fiona’s words seemed to lodge immediately and permanently in the still room of my brain.
“Do you know where we are, baby? Tell me quick.” Surprised at her sudden and atypical desperation, but laughing and aiming my mouth toward the hint of white cartilage buried like an arrow in the now violent cream- and sable-colored hair: “Sure,” I shouted, “we’re in Illyria. Like it?”
“I like you, baby. You.”
WAKING, WRINKLING MY NOSE, ROLLING OVER, I HEARD my hand slap accidently against my own thick mottled thigh and realized that despite our early agreement intended to safeguard children and husband alike, I had dozed off, so that now we were only a few hours from dawn. I was faced with precisely the situation we had thought it best to avoid. Slowly I climbed out of the bed and found the polka-dotted pajama bottoms and put them on, lit the lantern, yawned, made my way toward the cry that I had recognized as coming from the little tight-lipped mouth of Meredith. And then there was the battle of whispers, one side tormented, bitter, the other dismayed, calm as usual.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Your nose is bleeding.”
“It’s not.”
“Stop being a child.”
“I’m going to tell my father.”
“Let’s do something about this nosebleed.”
“He’ll probably kill you for coming here.”
“Hold still.”
Despite the eyes of the injured eaglet and her obvious efforts to escape the touch of my hand (cowering, hunching the thin white naked shoulders), she could no longer defend herself from my kindness because the blood was running into her mouth and down her little pointed chin. Her nostrils became dilated, the head drew back. But with the tip of Fiona’s pink sheet, which was already bloody between my fingers, slowly and carefully I wiped her face and pinched her nose until finally the gushing stopped and coagulation started. I cradled her damp head against my chest, waited, then by the light of the lantern satisfied myself that only a few dried streaks and stains now betrayed the lonely extravagance of Meredith’s nightmare bleeding.
“You can wash it all off in the morning,”I whispered. “Now go to sleep.”
In the immediate afterglow of the extinguished flame her face hung below me a moment like the small white mask of some sacrificial animal. But though the eyes were still fearful and unforgiving, the mouth, after all, was growing soft.
WE TURNED, STARTING UP THE HILL TOGETHER, CLIMBINGone of the high narrow twisting streets of the village without purpose, without destination, drawn upward together by the air, the light, the dusty steep grade of the little street, by the abrupt seasonal invasion of the wild flowers that had taken root, matured, bloomed all in a single night. The flowers lay in bright masses of wet color on walls, tiles, flat stones, or packed like some kind of floral mortar in cracks and fissures around slanting doorways and beneath crude window ledges. So the two of us were climbing together and admiring the flowers when suddenly the village street looped again and there above us, amidst priest and children and a crowd of barefoot men, stood the white boat.