Away from Home (50 page)

Mort’s friend’s house was a white stucco box set in the middle of a sand dune. You could see the water from all its windows, and when you opened the gate beyond its tiny sand-choked garden you had to run only a few feet down to the edge of the surf. The wind banged all the shutters open and closed. Some flagstones had been set into the sand in the garden, making a terrace. There were white wooden chairs and a table with a red umbrella, seashells for ashtrays, and some old, curling society magazines weighted down by stones so they would not blow off the table. The house had a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms had a double bed.

He had been right; it was a romantic place. The nearest house was a fisherman’s shack far down at the other end of the beach. There was a cove with gray rocks for sunning yourself. It was three o’clock in the afternoon when they arrived, and hot. Mort put her suitcase in the bedroom with the double bed and dropped his suitcase on the floor of the bathroom. All he had brought with him was a dark-blue plastic Varig airlines bag. It was filled with bathing suits, men’s toilet articles, books and magazines. As soon as she had been in the house five minutes Margie realized that, as she always did when she went to the beach, she had brought too many clothes.

The door to her (their?) bedroom had an old-fashioned hook and catch. She locked it and put on her bathing suit very quickly, hoping that she would be all dressed and the door opened again before Mort had an opportunity to discover she had locked it. She felt very self-conscious and foolish for being so shy, and her hands shook so much she had trouble tying the knot of her bra.

They swam in the water that was cool but not too cold, and lay on the gray rocks in the sun. A Portuguese fisherman came by once in an old canoe with a little naked boy. The little boy jumped into the water from the canoe and paddled around like a puppy, his black hair streaming into his eyes.

“You never see the fishermen’s wives or daughters swimming here,” Mort said. “They aren’t allowed to wear bathing suits; it’s supposed to be shocking. But the children wear nothing.”

“You mean the girls can’t go swimming when they grow up?”

“Some do now. The city people came here and changed everything. A few years ago they would have been shocked to see you in what you have on. But by now they’re getting used to it.”

“How awful to live on the edge of the sea all your life and not to be able to enjoy it,” Margie said.

“The water doesn’t mean the same thing to them that it does to us. It’s just the places where they work.”

She had found a smooth rock, just long enough for her to lie on it, and she was lying on her back in the warm sun. She closed her eyes. So here we are, she thought, and the sunlight was not hot enough. That morning before they left a cablegram had arrived from her mother, who had just received her air-mail letter about separating from Neil.

YOU OLD ENOUGH MANAGE OWN LIFE
, the cable said, at a dollar a word.
DADDY AND I SORROWFUL BUT REALIZE MANY DETAILS UNWRITTEN
.
OLD SAYING EVERYTHING WORKS OUT FOR BEST
.
HURRY HOME
.
WE LOVE YOU
.
MOTHER
.

The cable was folded in her purse. It had made her feel homesick, but through all the rush of memories and pictures of her parents, her childhood home, the two people who would accept her back again and love her because she was their daughter, she did not want to go home. She wanted to be here. And here she was. It frightened her. Here she was, of her own choice, and it was her own gamble. She could imagine her mother’s horror, her father’s fury. Some men think that any divorced woman is fair prey, she remembered her mother saying indignantly about someone else, a forty-year-old woman, hardly an innocent child. Margie opened her eyes and glanced at Mort beside her on another rock, stretched out in the sun, his eyes closed, almost asleep. Fair prey? She felt such a wave of affection and attraction for him that she reached out and touched his bare chest. He opened his eyes immediately.

“You’re a lovely man,” Margie said.

But when they came back from the beach she took a shower with the bathroom door locked and dressed in the bathroom. He had warned her that there was a shortage of water, and of course no hot water at all, so she could not stand under the shower for long. The shower water was pleasantly cool and she rubbed all the sand off with soap quickly and rinsed the salt water out of her bathing suit. Even though during water shortages all water had to be brought from the town in huge metal tanks, there was a shiny new white porcelain bidet and a large white sink beside the stall shower. It was like a garden made of plastic flowers.

The beach house came supplied with an Indian servant, who slept somewhere behind the house in a garagelike shack and arrived at mealtimes to cook and serve. He was a thin, dark little man with a beaked nose and a very sweet look in his eyes. Mort had brought the food from Rio. There was filet of beef,
feijao
and rice, squares of boiled pumpkin with melted butter, salad, chilled Spanish wine, cold Brazilian beer, crackers with three kinds of cheese, tiny cups of strong black coffee, and brandy. There was too much wind to eat outdoors on the terrace so they ate in the living room beside the huge glass sliding doors that looked out over the beach and sea. It was still light.

“I want to take you to see something before the sun sets,” Mort told her, so after they ate nearly all of the food and drank all of the wine and beer, they took the bottle of brandy in the car with them and drove to the place where there was the hill with the church on it and you could see the sun set and the moon rise at the same time.

So here we are, Margie thought again, and she still could hardly believe it. On the hill, in the moonlight, she shivered. The fishermen’s voices were soft and rough, like the smoke that lifted softly into the leaves of the dark tree. She could no longer see the tree, but she saw how the smoke fanned out and separated into the blue-black sky. There were thousands of low, glittering stars. She could see the shape of the constellations but she did not know where one left off and the other began.

“There’s the Southern Cross,” Mort said. “You can’t see it in the States.”

“Where?”

“There, where I’m pointing. See the big star? And the next one?”

“I see it!” She felt excited, like a child seeing the mystery of the heavens for the first time. She had seen the stars and tried to trace the shapes they made many times before, at camp, on her honeymoon in St. Thomas, but they had never seemed so near or so brilliant. She could even see the little far ones, the pinpoint ones, scattered in between the large ones in hundreds of thousands. “You can’t
ever
see the Southern Cross in America? Never?”

“No. The curve of the earth gets in the way.”

“The curve of the earth.…”

He gave her the bottle of brandy and she drank some from the bottle. It burned her throat a little when she swallowed it, but it was very fine brandy and after she swallowed it the taste it left was good. It made her feel warmer.

“Let’s go back,” he said. “Otherwise we’ll break our necks going down the hill in the dark.”

The fishermen had taken their nets out of the troughs and spread them on the beach to dry. The sand was hard and smooth and the air was warm. Mort held Margie’s hand going down the rocky ledges from the hill and he kept holding it until they got to the car. She sat next to the window, far away from him. She felt such a combination of excitement and reticence, such a timid going forward and a panicked withdrawal, that she was completely without any words to say to him. If he had asked her at that moment such a simple and ridiculous question as what day it was or how much were one and two, she would have had to think stupidly for five minutes before she could answer him. She stared fixedly ahead through the windshield all the way back and did not look at him.

They drove over a rough road through a tiny community, only a group of boxlike houses really, with no streetlights and no glass in the windows. She could see people sitting inside their homes in the yellow light of the kerosene lamps: thin women with dark, lined faces and shapeless, faded cotton dresses, men in groups talking together, children dressed in scraps and shreds of clothing, more naked than not, playing with bits of wood for toys or standing staring out the window at the lights of their car, little girls with strange, beautiful faces, mulattoes with golden hair. With the concentration of the desperate, Margie saw every detail. She wanted to say something to Mort, something about these people, those children, but thoughts swirled inside her mind and disappeared deafeningly unsaid into her own brain. How loud her thoughts were, how meaningless! They seemed to scream back at her, like the cries of someone in a tunnel shouting and hearing his voice rocketing off the walls into his own ears. The only thing that meant anything was the thought she tried to put away, safely away, and she concentrated on the gibberish shrieking inside her mind with the fixed catatonic intensity of an insane person.

Their house was fluttering with shadows. The Indian had lighted a kerosene lamp in every room, turned the wicks low, and disappeared into his own dwelling. There was the bitter, smoky smell of kerosene, and through the opened shutters on their glassless windows the gentle sound of the surf.

“I want to go swimming,” Mort said. He seemed to have sensed her distress all through the car ride home, and he looked so pleased with the idea of swimming in the middle of the night that she felt slightly reassured. He knew, after all, everything about her. There were no secrets between them. He was not her husband: the disappointed, the teacher, the hurt and loving. He neither had to prove anything to her—nor take anything from her. The look he gave her was solicitous and affectionate. Margie wondered suddenly with a stab of jealously if he had gone swimming at night very often with other girls, and if afterward those girls had been accomplished and wild in bed. Without knowing any of them she hated them all.

“Yes, lets!” she said, and ran down to the beach in her clothes, without even bothering to take a bathing suit. She felt reckless there in the dark, free, and light on her feet in the softly blowing wind. She kicked off her shoes. The sand was as cool as water.

She saw him unbuttoning his shirt and she could not look away; then she pretended she wanted very much to run down the beach for the sheer joy of racing in the dark. When she saw his head appear in the water and heard him splashing she ran back to where he was. There was light glowing around him in the black water; wherever his hands or feet broke the surface there was a shower of greenish light.

“Look!” he called out to her, “It’s phosphorescent!”

The water was alight with tiny moving lights. The surf touched the shore with dully gleaming greenish bubbles. Where tiny fish moved out in the dark sea they left a swift, zigzag line of light. His upraised arm as he waved at her was green and glowing, like the arm of a pagan idol. He did not even seem human.

She unbuttoned her shirt and folded it neatly before she laid it on the sand in a dry place. She unzipped her slacks, stepped out of them, and folded them to keep the crease in place. It was so dark here in the moonlight that all she could see was the white of her bra and pants; the rest of her body was suntanned to invisibility. Instinctively she rolled her underwear into a tiny ball and put it under her slacks and shirt where it could not be seen. She looked out at the endless water and she felt chained, trapped by her own compulsive neatness. It seemed so ludicrous here, but it was the way she was, and she wondered if she could ever escape from herself.

She stepped into the edge of the surf. The water was at first cold, then warmer than the air. Phosphorescent greenish bubbles spumed around her ankle; her feet in the shallow water set tiny concentric circles of light shooting out around them. She ran a few steps and dived in.

Wherever she swam the lights moved with her; she seemed to control them. She laughed aloud with pleasure and swam to Mort; his leg when she touched it with her foot underneath the water seemed warm. They swam side by side creating whirlpools of fluorescent green. They splashed each other, laughing, like magicians throwing off sparks.

“Look what I can do!” she cried breathlessly. “Look! Look!”

In the deep water far out he swam in a circle around her, encircling her with a trail of light. It seemed to her at that moment that they were both supernatural, creating their own elements.

They swam to shallower water where they could stand. “
We
did it,” he said, moving his hand to send forth lights. “It’s ours.”

“Here,” Margie said, holding her arms apart to embrace the cool fire that had no feel, that disappeared and reappeared, to follow her as often as she created it. The water rocked her, moved her to and fro without will to resist. She brushed by him again under the water, or he brushed by her, she did not know which, his leg against her side. He was warm, he was all warm under the water, and for the first time they put their arms around each other and twined their bare legs together and kissed, moving and rocking in the motion of the water. Margie felt dizzy.

She could not breathe, she thought she might faint and drown there in the shoulder-high water, she could neither break away to save herself from the warmth of his body nor stay to lose herself to it. She gasped and he opened his arms and legs and she floated and swam away as if she had been released from the bottom of the ocean. She swam to the shore and ran onto the beach.

She was all a glowing, silvery green from throat to feet, covered with a veil of drops of light. She stared at herself, so shaken with surprise and joy that tears came into her eyes. Even the tips of her breasts, standing out in the cool air, were shimmering with this greenish light like the breasts of a statue. Now it was she who was the pagan idol; she had no name, no past, no identity beyond the miracle of this moment. She held out her arms to him and he ran to her across the sand, green like herself, alight and miraculous.