We all stared after him. Mora sighed wistfully. “I should have been a man. You just don’t know how much I fantasize about certain… situations.”
“Well, my dear,” Vy said coldly. “We all have to learn the hard way.”
“I guess it’s something I want to learn,” Mora replied, unwilling to give Vy the last word. “Anyway, Charles says you’re a part of the world I want to learn about.”
The sharks might have envied Vy’s smile. “I keep myself entertained.”
The static between them made me decide to follow Charles into the surf. I crawled for a bit, felt silly, and walked the rest of the way. He was lying on his back, letting the sudsy foam wash over his body, decorating his hirsute chest and legs with green seaweed and fragments of sea shells. Looking at him lying there, I thought of the man in his story.
“Let the two of them work it out,” he said. “We’re just in the way.”
“I’m grateful that Mora’s found someone to talk to. She’s been in a funk.”
“Tell me about her.”
“What you see is Mora. She hides nothing. She’s an all-or-nothing type. Black or white, no grays.”
“Get out of her way when she decides what she wants.”
“Exactly. She wants my soul. She gets jealous if I talk with a bank clerk too long. I try to tell her that I’m not interested in anyone but her, but she sees what she wants to see. Marriage has done us in, I think.”
He shook his head sympathetically. “But before you got married – how were things?”
“God was in his heaven and all was right with the world… You know what it’s like.”
“So why did you do it?”
“Get married? I guess I’d have to plead insanity. I knew better, and I did it anyway.”
He snorted in recognition. “I’m sorry, but I think you’re taking it all too seriously, Richard. Loosen up.”
“How do I do that?”
“Stop arguing. Stop anticipating.”
“Is that what you learned in Europe?”
He laughed this time. His eyes lit up with mirth. There was a patch of wet sand on his cheek. “What do you know about me, Richard?”
“Not much. But I always thought you knew about women.”
“Then let me tell you something: Mora wants more than marriage can offer her right now. She wants to play, it’s as simple as that.”
“Simple?” I couldn’t swallow that.
“Look, you’re on vacation. Try something different.”
He winked amiably, walked into the water to clean the sand off, and sprinted up the beach. I knew what he meant because the idea had been lurking in the back of my mind since we’d met at Peaches; but I knew that I didn’t want anyone but me making love to Mora.
I knew she’d had lovers in the past, but they were shadows framed by shadows. Charles was sharp and immediate. Yet I had to admit to myself that the image of the four of us together on a bed heated my imagination – that perhaps my curiosity was stronger than my apprehension.
I wanted Vy, but I tried to shake my head clear of her as I walked back up the beach to our blue chintz island in the sand. Sleeping with other people when you’re married leads to trouble, I told myself.
I should have listened, but of course I didn’t.
Indelible image: Charles was standing in a half crouch, swimming briefs kicked aside, feet planted heavily in the sand, calves bulging, body glistening, while Vy’s blonde head bobbed vigorously between his thighs. Mora was leaning back, breasts free, snapping pictures with my Pentax. In her hands it was almost a sexual instrument. I threw up my hands in surprise and she swung around to take my picture. Far down the empty beach, a boy was throwing rocks into the surf, but he was a speck in the distance.
Snap. There are glimpses, in a late afternoon sun, of the future. They come unbidden, and they enter the heart and lodge there. The dark fuzz on Charles’s thighs; the shuddering in Vy’s back as she pulled him into her; Mora’s obvious arousal as she clicked the shutter. There was an excitement in the air – of people about to experiment with their lives – that wasn’t to be dissipated by the salt breeze.
“It feels right,” Mora said brightly when she handed me the camera.
“Does it?” I was doubtful. I had fists at the ends of my arms, fingers closed tightly into my palms. My tongue fluttered helplessly, like the tail of an animal I’d gotten stuck in my throat.
Vy leaned back from Charles, licked her lips delicately, and lighted a black Sobranie cigarette. She winked at me. Charles sat in the sand, looking seductive. I thought I could hear the wheels turning in his head.
“Why don’t we have dinner together? We can whip up something easy at Maurice’s, and let the evening take care of itself.”
THREE
Vy drove off in a blue Mercedes. She blew a kiss through the window and scrunched gravel as she left the beach parking lot. The gesture seemed to enlarge her: fingertips to her lips, the wide unexpected smile, the pressure of her foot on the gas pedal. We followed in Charles’s Clunker Deluxe. “ ‘The station car’,” he joked. “That’s what they call vintage Detroit iron out here. It’s what I can afford. Maurice watches that Mercedes like a hawk. I think he has the soul of a chauffeur.”
I shrugged. “Shoulders were made for burdens.”
I sat on the outside and Mora was squeezed between us. We dripped sand on the floor of the car and the hot vinyl seats stuck to our thighs. Despite the heat, Mora’s skin was cool and moist.
“You’re a Scorpio sandwich,” Charles said to her, reminding me that we shared our birthdays. Then he touched her.
We were heading down the Montauk Highway and had slowed on the outskirts of Amagansett, where a train had derailed. The road swarmed with police, gawkers, and dazed passengers. Charles lifted his hand from the steering wheel and pressed the back of it against Mora’s breasts. Lightly. It was the simplest, most casual of gestures, so natural I felt like I was stealing something from them because I stared. I looked quickly out the window, feeling embarrassed – and angry at myself for feeling that way.
Mora giggled and clapped a hand over her mouth. She put her left hand on Charles’s knee and her right hand on my thigh and stroked us both. Her face was red, even through her tan.
I don’t know how to explain it, but I was as shocked as if Charles had stroked my nipples. Those weren’t his breasts, they were mine. Mine. But I could tell by the way Mora was breathing that she didn’t agree that marriage had made me a man of property.
We passed dunes tufted with islands of waving sword grass, rows of beach cottages, the potato fields of July, and then I saw the windmill in East Hampton. We drove through the town’s sparkling center. In the late afternoon light it was still, unreal, a postcard.
“An extraordinary afternoon,” I said in the silence. There was more I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find the words. Mora’s fingers were having the desired effect on me.
I was confused by the male complicity I felt with Charles. When he touched Mora, she became a strange woman we’d picked up together. From then on, two plus one equaled more than three.
FOUR
However shocking or perhaps just plain perverse it may seem, when I saw Mora naked with Charles and Vy it wasn’t jealousy that I felt. It was lust that grew in my belly, like a sapling putting down roots. I knew the voyeur’s stunned delight in achieving erotic perspective. Our nakedness created the illusion that we had entered another dimension, a counter world of the id, where our apprehensions were removed with our clothes and past and future ceased to exist.
Vy’s bedroom was white, but by no means chaste. White walls, white sheepskin rugs on the parquet floor, huge antique mirrors, white vases filled with daisies, and a platform bed on which the three of them sat as if on a tongue sticking out of fluffy clouds, for the silk spread was white, but the sheets underneath were crimson. Satin.