In Sunlight and in Shadow (32 page)

I
N BLAZING SUN
at eleven o’clock on a weekday in August, when few people had come out from the city and the beaches were empty, Catherine and Harry had walked a few miles up the road to Amagansett and turned toward the sea. Following a deep sand track churned by the jeeps of fishermen and the Coast Guard, they passed through juniper and shoulder-level laurel across the sand until they reached an opening that led to the beach. Windless and concave, with the dunes reflecting the high summer sun upon a reflective floor, the route was unbearably hot until the breach gave out to the sea, where the temperature dropped by forty degrees or more.

Halfway there, she in her satin-tight, two-piece suit that had knocked the breath out of him when she had dropped her robe, and still did, and he in khaki naval swim trunks, they began to feel the heat to the point of distress. In a totally windless bowl, pinned by rays of sun, the temperature was close to 130 degrees and the radiative heat could be endured for only a few minutes. Covered with sunscreen that made them as glossy as the sand, they began to sweat until the water ran off them in droplets and the scent of Catherine’s perfume mixed with the salt and juniper that pervaded the air.

Tramping about the sand in canvas boat shoes was strenuous, and she walked in front so as to set a slower pace. He watched her through the glare. Deeply tanned for someone of light coloring, her skin was smooth and flawless, as much rose as brown, pulsing with life and color. The gloss of the sunscreen made her shine with light, and golden flecks of sand had gathered in random places like glitter. Clear droplets sparkled and grew until they plunged in rivulets that soaked the small of her back.

On the previous trip, they had walked from the house to Accabonac, swum to Cartwright Island, and thence across a chain of sandbars and shoals to Gardiners Island, five miles of swimming all told and twelve miles of walking: more than a full day of sun, wind, and water. When they returned they played tennis before dinner, and Catherine won. She was very good. He couldn’t drive from his mind how the wind that evening had carried braided within it dance music from the Georgica Club, sometimes faint, sometimes swelling. He couldn’t drive from his mind her burnished hair, made full by the salt air, sunlit and shining. As they made their way to the ocean, his knowledge of her, his sense of what she was and what she would be, was overlaid upon the woman who walked before him, the sea wind carrying back steady seductive traces of scent.

Following the path she made through the waving air, he increased his pace. After a step or two, he caught her elbow. She turned, with the expression and stance appropriate to someone who was about to be drawn to something practical or of interest, such as an alternate route or a bird gliding above. But as soon as he closed upon her she relaxed every muscle and felt in every cell an upwelling of expectation and a lightness that separated her from the world. Clear perspiration, sparkling in the sun, rolled over her upper lip. She tasted the salt, and knew that in a moment he would too.

“Not here,” she said, “we’ll die of the heat,” but as soon as he began to kiss her they fell into a gravityless, hallucinatory state they did not want to leave. Dropping to their knees in the hot sand so as to be pressed together without effort, they entered into competition with the sun for domination of the flats and dunes that surrounded them. And if the power of love and adoration can outshine light, for a few moments it did.

When he had said that he would court her, he meant it. He recoiled at the thought of what Victor had done, and though now she was not thirteen but twenty-three, and had been through ten years of an apprenticeship that had fully acquainted her with any and every part of sexual mechanics, they held back.

Once, on a quiet evening when time was unusually slow even for New York in summer, they had lain together, alone, eleven floors above Central Park West. A warm breeze came through the open windows and brought the sounds of evening. They were tangled in their disheveled clothes, wet, and engorged everywhere appropriate. Her breasts were turgid, her nipples taut, and she throbbed. And yet, as difficult as it was, they went no further.

“Why?” she asked, as if drugged, although she knew exactly why.

“To go back to where you started with Victor, and do what people are supposed to do, but to be brought along slowly,” he said.

“I would have thought it would be impossible to erase what happened,” she said, “that it was indelible.”

“Is it working?” he asked.

“It’s working.”

“You see?”

“But we will?” she asked.

“Of course we will. Have you noticed”—he propped himself up on his elbows—“that we can make love for hours, and we just want more? Every time we touch, it’s more intense. Have you ever felt this strongly?”

“No, but my friends in the theater would think we were prudes.”

“Your friends in the theater fuck like a bunch of rabbits playing musical chairs. They go from one person to another because no one is sufficient. You should throw Victor into the pot. He’d probably be very happy there.”

“He had me pretend to be other women.”

“I’d feel cheated if you were another woman.”

“So would I,” she said.

“Did you used to go into three-hour-long trances with Victor?”

She laughed cruelly.

“How long did it take before he finished and turned to the business pages, ten minutes?”

“That would have been a world’s record.”

“So when he had sex with you it wasn’t as if you were dancing, was it?”

“No.”

“And it wasn’t a conversation, right?”

“Right.”

“It was a lecture.”

“A short lecture,” she added. “
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo.
”

“Did you tell him that?”

“No.”

“You should have.”

“I couldn’t. He was the lecturer. I was the audience. But,” she asked, sweetly, “Harry, when we finally, completely, totally . . . fuck . . . will all this quite wonderful preface have gone to waste?”

“What do you think?”

“I think maybe not,” she said, her eyes slightly glazed, and then they fell back into one another and lost track of time.

They were astounded whenever they came into one another’s presence, and amazed when they touched. When they did—a kiss slightly slower than custom would countenance, or with fingers entwined as they went down the stairs of the subway, or when he brushed her hair from her eyes, or touched her lightly through her suit or her dress, even once when he touched the aquamarine brooch pinned to her linen jacket—the touch was as exciting as if they were falling through the air, a sensation Harry knew well.

Now, on the shadowed slope of a dune that was the last wall of land to face the sea, on silken cold sand, they sat together, thinking that the way they felt would last forever. Far out on the water, a distant sail glided silently, true to the speed of the wind and heading into the horizon. Tranquil, remote, and, above all, silent, it moved toward a great open space. “If that’s death,” Harry said, “then I look forward to it. I confess that when I see a sail shining in white, moving in the distance toward the shadows as if to go from this world to the next, I want to follow.”

“Harry,” she said, intent upon bringing him back, “it’s a sailboat. It’s not death. Don’t follow. Just stay with me as long as you can.”

“You don’t always have a choice in the matter,” he said, remembering.

“I know. But . . . just drop it. We have a sailboat, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“We do, and you can go on it far beyond the horizon and you don’t die, you come back. It’s at our house in Maine. It’s fifty-four feet—what the man who built it called ‘a bonny yacht,’ and more than seaworthy. You can sail all over the world in it.”

“I didn’t know you had a house in Maine.”

“We have a cabin, sort of, on Mount Desert Island. We keep the boat there in summer. In October after hurricane season it goes to Florida.”

“You have a house in Florida?”

She nodded.

“Where don’t you have a house?”

“That’s not fair. We have houses,” she counted on her fingers, “only in New York, Florida, Maine, and London. Like an isosceles triangle.”

“A triangle with four angles.”

“
Like
an isosceles triangle.”

“What’s the name of the boat?”

“The
Crispin.
”

“It is a lot of money,” he said, “isn’t it.”

“It’s a very lot of money.”

“I don’t want any of it.”

“I’m the only child.”

“I know.”

“If you marry me, you’re going to have to learn to live with it. That’s a job in itself—although most people don’t know it—because it can easily ruin you. Are you going to let it ride?”

“Let what ride?”

“That my parents don’t know you’re Jewish.”

“No, but I’m overwhelmed now. . . . It’s more of a problem that my business is almost insolvent.”

“It is?”

“It is.”

A minute passed, until Catherine said, “My father could take care of that with the stroke of a pen. Eventually, I’ll be able to take care of it with the stroke of a pen. Actually, I think I can now. I’m not really sure. But you won’t allow that.”

“If I did, you’d be marrying nothing.”

“When that horrid Rufus said what he said, and I foolishly went along with the tenor of it, why didn’t you protest? Why didn’t you defend yourself? Are you ashamed?”

“Not ashamed, fatigued.”

“At not even thirty-two?”

“At not even thirty-two. And I won’t let people like him dictate my focus, take me from the ability to live my life as I please. Some people think it’s their responsibility to fight every fight, and it becomes their lives. I want to live otherwise. At the moment I don’t feel that I have to take up every challenge. Anyway, it would be impossible. And then there was the matter of mercy. Rufus has an appointment to keep in the very near term. I have no desire to disturb the little peace he may have left.”

“So you let it go.”

“I let it go.”

“And with my parents?”

“Will they object? You tell me.”

“I don’t know what they’ll do.”

“What would you like me to do, Catherine, announce it over the lobster course? ‘Oh, by the way, I’m a Jew, how do you do?’”

“You might think of a more graceful and considerate way.”

“I don’t feel apologetic.”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean that they come from a different era, and they don’t love you. They’re my parents, and I love them. What if you had told your father and your mother that you were going to marry a Christian?”

“My father would have been at sea: the line of five thousand years coming to an end—I don’t know what he would have done. But it wouldn’t have mattered.”

“We have a line, too.”

“I know that. But before I do this difficult thing I would like at least not to be bankrupt. I may never be rich, especially as it has never been my ambition, but it’s one thing for a Jew to ask the hand of Catherine Thomas Hale, and another for a bankrupt Jew.”

“How long until that might be settled?”

“At this point it seems like eternity, but if there’s no way out it won’t last for much more than a year, possibly a lot less.”

“That’s too long. I want to marry you sooner: today would be fine with me. And anyway, in a year they’d find out somehow and think we were keeping it from them. You’re going to have to find a way to fight two fights at the same time.”

B
ILLY AND EVELYN
usually came out early on Fridays, but an engagement in New York had delayed their arrival until Saturday evening, when a cold supper would await them in a quiet house. That afternoon the remnant of a southern gale had raised the waves to ten feet or more, and in bright sun they struck the shore like hammers. Since childhood Catherine had called these the hurtful waves, for they hit as if with a lifelong grudge. They turned the ocean into an enemy, and made swimming in it a combat in which life could be taken. Though Europeans did not swim in waves like this, Americans did.

She had gone into the breakers with Harry, holding out her hands to him when she sighted what looked like a particularly vicious wave coming at great speed, which is what she had done in milder conditions when her father had first taught her how to maneuver in the surf. She was not embarrassed in violent waters to hold out her hands for protection, because she was no more reluctant to rely upon him than she was to give herself to him entirely.

After half an hour of tense fighting, she sat on the beach, a towel draped around her, and there she regained her balance and sense of gravity as she watched him duel with the swells. At a disadvantage when he was looking out for her and lost in calculations of when a front of water would strike, or whether to advise diving into it or riding over it, now he merely fought. Huge masses would loom over him, and he would either dive into their momentarily gelatinous walls or stand his ground and disappear for a full minute in a hell of foam as he was tumbled head over heels and banged against the hard sand floor.

Sometimes he was smacked from behind by a wave curving unexpectedly and snapping like a whip. Sometimes he punched back, as if the ocean could feel. And sometimes he swam hard to catch a wave at its crest before it broke, launching himself into the empty air behind it and dropping six feet or more, as if he had leapt from a rock. She knew from watching him in the water that he was not only the kind of man she wanted but the very one; that though, because she loved him, she would marry him even were he weak and unable to endure, he had great resources. He had what her heart cried out for, and strength that was bred in the bone.

When they came in from the beach she went to wash her hair and to dress. He dived into the pool to rinse off the salt, combed his hair, and put on shirt and shoes. Sitting in his customary khaki shorts as they dried, on a teak bench in the garden by the pool, he heard the patter of her shower. After an hour—first of cascading foam; then dressing in clean, pressed clothes; the application of light makeup; and choosing of jewelry (she was now free to wear her beautifully worked diamonds, sapphires, and gold)—she would have come as far from the sea as possible while it was yet close. Eventually she would appear in the garden, so graceful, civilized, and powerful that he imagined that the Atlantic, still striking beyond the wall of dunes, might be held at bay.