Away from Home (51 page)

His lips were warm and tasted of the salt water. He was very strong. She felt as if she were trying to destroy him, her lips, throbbing, could not let his go and within his parted lips she felt his bright animal teeth as if they were her own. She felt so dizzy and faint with want of him that she did not know how she suddenly discovered herself lying on the cool sand, feeling it on her skin and in her hair. The sand was gritty and damp, it was tangled in her hair, and when she moved her head from side to side her hair thrashed in the damp sand and became entangled in it more. She hardly noticed it. She smelled the sea and a gentle musk in his skin, and in her own, and the air above them was pure oxygen.

In the one instant that she had to be gentle to receive him she was suddenly aware of herself again. Margie felt all the wildness slipping away from her as she lay there, and the instant was long enough to think, Now it starts. She saw the black sky above Mort’s shoulder and the sea beside them. Her mind went blank with the agony of reality. Now, her mind thudded the words down, you can’t fail him. She had lost the feeling; it was all lost. She stiffened with fear and loss and could not move or even breathe. If I don’t breathe, Margie thought, despising herself, perhaps I will die this minute. She hardly noticed what he was doing to her, and yet, his touch was so gentle and persuasive that slowly she felt a new feeling—that it did not matter if she hated herself or not, if she responded or not, it only mattered that he not stop, never stop, no matter what happened.

She wanted to give … to give … love. She heard the words whispered on her own breath: I love you. She did not know if she really spoke them or if she only felt them. I love you. She wanted to be closer, to give, and, for the first time, to take. She strained against him and held him tightly and moved, and suddenly she was making love to him.

Afterward they lay together for a long time and neither of them spoke. Margie knew he knew everything she wanted to or could say, and anything he could say aloud would not sound the way he meant it. What kind of comment could either of them make? He had given her a miracle. Not just that sweet agony on the sand but much more; he had led her to himself and she knew him now. Margie wondered if that was why they used the word
knew
in the Bible—“he
knew
his wife.” She knew Mort and she knew herself. She felt as if they were already married.

Living in that beach house was like living in a doll’s house, it was so small and clean and always filled with little toy things like shells and bits of driftwood they had collected and which had meaning only to them. They were completely alone. The Indian, in the wonderful way of Brazilian servants, kept himself nearly invisible except when they needed food, and then the food appeared in an instant and he disappeared again. He never spoke; he might have been deaf, but he understood whatever they said to him.

Margie and Mort wore bathing suits all during the day, and nothing as soon as it was dark. They swam, they lay in the sun, they talked, they made love a great deal. Margie thought how surprising it was that although they had known each other for nearly three years there was so much about herself and her life she had never told him; she wanted to remember and tell him everything, so that by telling him she would forever make him a part of it, as if he had been there when it had happened to her.

“I never thought my life was interesting until I started telling it to you,” she said. They were lying on the sand in the sun.

“The Life Story. The oldest form of social communication. Every time people fall in love they tell the same story again—it’s always new.”

“Did you … tell it to all those girls?”

He smiled. “Selected excerpts.”

“I can imagine!” She laughed at him.

“This is the last time,” Mort said. “No more life stories to anyone. No more stories at all, not derring-do stories, not bedtime stories, nothing. Just us, nobody else, ever.”

“Nobody else,” Margie said.

He kissed her hands.

They drove to other beaches sometimes, along the edge of the arm of land, beaches that were at times as deserted as their own. If the wind ruffled the water of their cove so that it was not good for swimming there was always a peaceful cove at the other side. They went to one beach at night. It was long and wide and very white in the moonlight, and completely deserted. Mort told her that penguins had been seen there in winter, marching out of the sea. The sand dunes were as vast, high, and unmarked as temples made of marble. On the smooth sand ahead of them they saw their own shadows, huge, swaying and joined. The moonlight was so bright you could read by it. They wrote messages to each other on the sand with their fingers.

When the weekend came, Mort’s friend did not appear, so they stayed on, and stayed the following week. This is the first time in my life, Margie thought, that I have done exactly what I wanted to do without thinking what anyone else would think about it. It gave her such a feeling of freedom that she hardly recognized herself. There was still something in her of the girl on the beach all green from the phosphorescent water.

They made plans, because they knew they could not stay at the beach house forever. It seemed easy now to think of disposing of furniture, moving out of the apartment, going to the States for the divorce. She knew that when she walked into her apartment again it would not be so easy, there would always be too many memories, but at least now she did not feel dismantling them was destructive. She was not destroying her former life, she realized now; she was only moving it farther into the past so she could begin to build a new one. Mort was going to come with her to the States while she waited for her divorce, and then they would be married there and come back to Brazil to live as long as they wanted to stay. He wanted to travel, and she wanted whatever he did.

She wondered if she was going to become pregnant from that first night on the beach. Afterward, of course, she had been careful. In the old days she had hated all the paraphernalia of being safe; it had seemed as though it was all a messy invention to make going to bed at night even more to be dreaded. She had missed being single when she could just go to bed and go to sleep. But now none of it bothered her at all. She thought once that it would be ironic if at last, having learned to be grateful for the things, it was too late. She counted. The possibility was very remote, and yet, she felt a giddy delight. She had never wanted a baby so much. She felt neither ashamed nor frightened; all she felt was this joy that flickered within her as if it were already a formed and created life. She wanted to miss nothing that could bring her and Mort closer together, she wanted to miss nothing that there was to being a woman—and perhaps that was what this flickering was, not a specific life but the awareness of life itself.

CHAPTER 23

In the States, in the fall, Margie Haft Davidow was married to Mort Baker in Las Vegas, Nevada, by a Justice of the Peace who wore a thin leather thong for a tie. Her mother wept—whether tears of happiness or sadness, no one knew, least of all herself. Margie was so beautiful and vulnerable looking … thank God she and Neil had had no children … young people today were so smarty and independent … they could at least have had a rabbi.… Etta always cried at weddings. Margie’s father, who was still annoyed at his wife’s impetuous insistence that they fly down here at the last minute for this foolishness, choked back a few tears himself. Margie looked so dark, so sunburned, like a
shvartza
, and so many things had happened to her all alone in Brazil—the separation, this new boy, but she still looked so young it was as if this were her first wedding day six years ago. How small her hand was, he thought, as he pressed a folded check for a thousand dollars into Margie’s palm.

In Rio, newcomers came: Americans and Italians and Swiss and English and Germans and French; the traveling, the dispossessed, the wanderers, the hopeful, seeking excitement and their fortunes, seeking escape and peace, seeking familiar faces and the accent of home. Helen Sinclair sought out and met all the new Americans, most of them people as new and frightened and anxious to be liked as she had been long ago. They blundered, they complained, they admired, they asked questions, they were quick with answers, they mistrusted differences, they trusted too much what they took to be sameness. She saw it all as if she were watching her own self being played by another person.

She and Bert had been living in Brazil for nearly two years, and they probably had only another year here.
Only
another year! What a short time it seemed, and less than a year ago, at Christmas, she had been thinking two more years was an eternity. She loved it here, she didn’t want to go, but they were a moving family.

She had become used to new friends and to people leaving. Some of them went home and never came back, like Mil Burns. Some of them went home and came back quickly for a new life, like Margie and Mort. It seemed strange for a while to think of Margie-and-Mort instead of Margie-and-Neil, especially with Neil still here in Rio, but very soon Helen was used to it. And some of the people, like Neil Davidow, came here to stay, and changed. It was apparent by now that Neil was never going to marry his Brazilian girl; he hardly even saw her any more. He had discovered that he liked being free. Since his divorce Neil had become one of the town’s most determined bachelors, and one of the most popular.

“It’s ironic,” Helen said to Bert, once. “Neil always liked and admired Mort so much. It’s as if now he and Mort have sort of changed places. Now Neil is the big lover. And Mort is so faithful and happy to be good. I wonder if one of the reasons the two of them were such close friends is that each one really wanted to be more like the other than himself.”

As small as Rio was, some people managed to vanish without a trace. Helen had never seen Leila again. She had meant many times to call Leila, invite her for lunch, but so many things intervened. There were so many things to do, for the children, for the apartment, for herself, to return invitations, and you grew so lazy and apathetic.… She thought of Leila sometimes, and she wondered if Leila were thinking of her. The thought almost seemed to suffice as communication, or at least the good intention did. She knew they would run into each other someday soon, and it would be as if they had seen each other only a few days before.

Eventually you always saw everyone, even people you hoped you would never see. Helen had seen Sergio twice again, from a distance. Both times she had been with Bert. Once he had been walking into the Bon Gourmet for dinner as she was walking out. They brushed past each other and did not nod or speak. At first Helen thought Sergio did not see her. Until he was past them she had not even realized it was he. It all happened so fast. Sergio was with a woman and another couple, all of them laughing and talking and gesturing. She had never realized how much he gestured when he spoke. She was filled with emotions when she saw him: with surprise and shock and fear that he might turn back to speak to her, and with embarrassment, but not with love. She wished she could forget her affair with him, the words they had said to each other, she wished none of it had ever happened.

The second time she saw him was at Sacha’s. She was on the tiny dance floor with Bert, and it was, as usual, very dark and cool. She did not see Sergio until he was right next to her. He was dancing with a girl, a very young girl, perhaps eighteen at the most. The girl was wearing a white lace dress and she was bosomy and curvaceous to the point where in one more year she would probably be too full-blown. But right at this moment she had a wild prettiness. The girl and Sergio were kissing each other.

This second time when she saw him Helen felt a subtle wistfulness that was almost painful. She did not desire him, she did not love him, she had only contempt for him for so openly kissing a girl in the night club where all his wife’s friends liked to go. And yet, there was always some bond that lingered between a woman and a man who has kissed and touched her—for the woman, not for the man. Sergio looked full at her and pretended not to see her, and Helen looked away. She knew he had seen her. She was ashamed to feel this poignance about a man she did not want, while she was in the arms of the man she wanted for ever. What was it? Perhaps only that she had been freely herself with Sergio, and had let him look into her heart, so that now when he kissed a stranger there was something of herself lingering on his lips, so in effect she kissed that stranger too. The thought made her shudder. It must have been the same for Bert, she thought, but so much worse. And for the first time Helen knew how it had been.

It was spring here … fall—what was it? Sometimes Helen became confused. You wanted to give yourself over altogether to one kind of life and thinking, you wanted to give up the effort of comparing dates and seasons, the dual existence—and yet you kept going out of your way to keep your identity, your loyalties, the little things you suddenly remembered and missed and tried to duplicate here. But no matter what season it was, during the day the sun shone, and at night the stars shone, and there were lovers on the beach.

One night walking home from a dinner party at Margie’s, Helen stopped still on the mosaic sidewalk in the moonlight and looked at Bert. “Let’s walk on the sand,” she said.

He jumped off the high sidewalk to the beach and held out his hands to her. The sand was deep and soft where they walked in it, and the breeze ruffled Helen’s skirt. It was a lovely feeling to be walking along the beach in a party dress. She was holding hands with Bert and swinging her shoes from her other hand. She looked up at the apartment buildings across the street. A few blocks farther along was theirs, with the balcony where she had stood looking down at the lovers on the sand.

“Let’s stop for a minute,” Bert said. He looked at her questioningly, and at her chiffon dress, but she sank down immediately onto the sand, her skirt billowing all around her, and pulled him down too, and laughed.

“Look at them,” she whispered. “We won’t have to give the children a serious lecture in the library when they get a little older. We’ll just take them for a walk one night.”