The Blood Oranges (22 page)

Beyond the suddenly visible bulk of Catherine’s shadow, I saw the white dress pulled up to the loins, the lifted knees, the slender face, the cavern floor, Hugh’s crouching shape, the circle of dim light. We were below sea level and now we were crowding together in a small wet space hollowed out from stone and thick with echoes.

“What happened?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

“I slipped, baby. Me! I went down about twenty steps.”

“Well,” I said, laughing, fumbling with the rucksack, finding the sweater, “let’s see if you can walk.”

“I hope you’re satisfied, Hugh,” Catherine said. “Fiona might have broken her ankle.”

“Climb into this sweater,” I murmured quickly and calmly, “and then we’ll check you out.”

But was she indeed hurt? Catherine was kneeling beside Fiona, Hugh was crouching, in his one hand gripped the now dying torch. Fiona herself was still prostrate on the cold stone. For a moment I had the decided impression that Hugh had bolted into these ruins and dragged us into these wet depths of vaulted darkness for the sole purpose of discovering nothing more than Fiona herself lying flat on her back in the faint eye of the torch like the remains of some lady saint stretched head to toe on her tomb. The expression on Fiona’s face seemed to bear me out, since her head was turned to the sound of my voice and since the slender construction of Fiona’s face and the willful eyes and thin half-smiling lips were raised to me in something more than mere personal concern for the immediate situation of unlikely accident. What else could that expression mean if not that she understood what I was thinking and was momentarily aware of her own body and expressly erotic temperament as the very objects of Hugh’s subterranean design? How else account for Fiona’s expression of puzzlement and appeal if not by knowing suddenly that Hugh was quite capable of attempting to transform my faunlike wife into a lifeless and sainted fixture in his mental museum?

“Give me your hand, baby. Help me up.”

But still no word from Hugh? No hint of his usually exaggerated concern for Fiona’s interests, pleasure, well-being, safety? Not even taking advantage of the darkness to thrust himself against Fiona who was now holding my hand and
scrambling to her feet and was nothing if not responsive to Hugh’s slightest touch? But it was true, all too true. He must have known that today there would be no hugging and kissing, as Fiona had put it, long before Fiona had voiced that sad little conviction of hers, long before he had had his dream, long before he had banged his head on the rotted shutter.

There was nothing to do, I thought, except to hold wide the neck of the sweater and help Fiona, however clumsily, to pop her head through the opening and feel her way into the sleeves so absurdly long and tangling. And then, quite simply, I would demand the torch from Hugh and lead us calmly back up to the limitless pastel light of the burned court.

“As long as we’re here,” Fiona said then, “let’s look around.”

“OK,” I said, once more changing my mind, shifting my stance. “There’s nothing to see. But we’ll take a quick look anyway.”

I realized immediately that there was more to come, that Hugh had not yet shot his bolt of poison and that Fiona was not going to comply with my helpfulness and had already refused the possibility of wearing the sweater. But at least I managed to drape Hugh’s sweater across her shoulders and loop the long sleeves around her throat. In due time Hugh, not I, would lead us back up to the courtyard. Agreed.

“There’s no way out,” Hugh said. “We’re at the bottom.”

“Buried, you mean. Buried alive.”

To hear Catherine’s determined voice, to hear Hugh’s silence in response to it, to know that Fiona was once again
looking for Hugh in the wet darkness, to be aware of this cold timeless space hollowed from the very roots of the sea —suddenly I wished again that Hugh’s poor torch would discover a real effigy with a stone cowl, stone feet, stone hands pressed together and pointed in prayer. Or would discover a real row of iron-headed pikes along one of the vaulted walls. Or a steel glove, the blade of an ax, a gold cup, anything to justify all this shadowy suspension of our lives of love. Surely this empty place should offer up some little crusty memento to justify my separation from sun and sea and grass, to justify the unspeakable content of Hugh’s dream. But then the memento, as it were, did in fact appear.

“Now, boy—how do you like it?”

“If I were you,” I said softly, slowly, “I’d leave that thing here where you found it. That’s my advice.”

“Leave it,” Catherine said quickly. “I don’t want to know what it is. I don’t want to see it.”

“Old Cyril knows what it is. Don’t you, boy?”

“Yes,” I murmured, “of course I do.”

“Tell us, baby. Tell us!”

“No, Fiona, it’s up to Hugh.”

“Damn right it is!”

And I who had never exposed Fiona to discomfort of any kind, I who had taken the exact same care of Catherine, I whose handsome and bespectacled face had always stood for sensuous rationality among the bright leaves, I the singer who spent my life quietly deciphering the crucial signs of sex, I who only moments before had decided that Hugh would discover nothing, nothing at all—now it was I, I alone, who shared with Hugh clear knowledge of the
precise nature of what Hugh was dangling from the neck of the torch, as if I myself had sought it and found it and inflicted it on all four of us, silly and pathetic and yet monstrous memento of Hugh’s true attitude toward all of our well-intended loves.

“It’s a bad omen, Hugh,” I said. “Leave it behind.”

“My God, boy. Where’s your sense of humor?”

The voices echoed in the waxen blackness. Three figures squatted around Hugh’s pit, and Hugh himself stood waist-deep in this very pit which had emerged from beneath the beam of his torch only moments before. The cavern was empty, its wet walls and floor were empty, as I had thought. But the pit was not. Suddenly Hugh had found this small rectangular hole in the cavern floor and had leapt up to his knees in the refuse of coagulated fishing nets, broken clay pots and charred ribs of wood. In the midst of this pulpy refuse, he had poked with the torch itself until we heard the dull yet tinny sound of metal on metal, had thrust down the head of the torch and hooked what he was looking for and slowly, in rigid triumph, had raised the unmistakable object of his lonely search.

“I knew it was here. It had to be.”

“OK,” I murmured, “you found it. Now put it back.”

“Not a chance, boy not a chance …”

Then we were climbing, and in unchanged order (from top to bottom, from first to last), Hugh was perspiring in the lead, Fiona had obviously forgotten the effects of her fall and was pacing Hugh with renewed agility and fresh anticipation, Catherine was treading on Fiona’s heels, while I went chugging upward with my concentration
divided between the gloom of the coming moment, as I envisioned it, and the pleasure of the daylight burning somewhere above our heads. Yes, I thought, Hugh’s exhibition in the courtyard was unavoidable. But after, after the silence, the disbelief, the dismay, perhaps then we would move on to long naked strokes in the bright sea or to a rendezvous of sorts with the small earthen-colored nightingale whose secret song I had recently heard not far from the villas. Or would the strains of this day dog us into the future, disrupt our embraces, diminish the peaceful intensity of all those simple idyls I still had in mind?

We stopped, we slipped, we climbed on.

“Thank God, baby. We’re safe!”

Fiona with the empty sweater clinging to her back like the cast-off skin of some long-forgotten lover, Catherine with her eyes tight shut and hair awry and broad cheeks brightly skimmed with tears, I shading my face and easing off the uncomfortable and partially opened rucksack, Hugh holding aloft his prize and leaping through the weeds to a fallen pediment, Hugh turning and facing us with the little copper rivets dancing on his penitential denims and his mouth torn open comically, painfully, as if by an invisible hand—suddenly the four of us were there, separated, disheveled, blinking, and yet reunited in this overgrown and empty quadrangle that now was filled with hard light and the sweet and salty scent of endless day. I dropped the rucksack, squinted, fished for a fat cigarette. Fiona caught hold of the sleeves of the sweater at the wrists and pulled the long empty sleeves wide and high in a gesture meant only for the far-off sun. Catherine sat on a small white
chunk of stone and held her head in her hands, Hugh tipped his prize onto the altar of the fallen pediment and flung aside the torch, reared back, and waited.

“But is that all, baby? It doesn’t look like much.”

“Take a better look,” I said quietly. “You’ll change your mind.”

I filled my mouth and lungs with the acrid smoke, I squinted at Hugh, at Fiona, at Catherine. We ached with darkness, our eyes were burning with the familiar yet unfamiliar return to light, as lovers we were exhausted but not exhilarated. Hugh lifted his right leg and cocked his foot on the fallen pediment and rested his right forearm on the upraised thigh.

Catherine sighed and climbed to her feet. Fiona approached the cracked and fluted pediment, slowly Catherine and I moved into position so that all four of us were grouped around Hugh’s improvised altar upon which lay what appeared to be only a thin circlet of pitted iron— frail, ancient, oval in shape, menacing. I looked at Fiona, she looked at me, all four of us stared down at the pliant and yet indestructible thin loop of iron that was large enough to encircle a human waist and was dissected by a second and shorter loop or half circle of iron wrought into a deliberate and dimly functional design.

“No,” Fiona whispered, “no …”

On the opposite side of the pediment from Hugh, I also raised one heavy leg, placed one mountain-climbing boot on the gray stone, rested my forearm across the breadth of my heavy thigh, allowed myself to lean down for a closer look. Our four heads were together, in our different ways we were scrutinizing the single tissue-thin contraption that
had already revealed its purpose to Fiona and now, I suspected, was slowly suggesting itself to Catherine as something to wear.

“It looks like a belt,” I heard her saying. “But what are all those little teeth …”

I felt Fiona’s lips against my cheek, my upraised hand was wreathed in smoke, the delicate and time-pocked iron girdle was lying on the gray stone and, I saw in this hard light, was the brown and orange color of dried blood and the blue-green color of corrosion. I concentrated, we were all concentrating. Thinking of the blue sky and mustard-colored walls and brittle weeds and this bare stone, I studied Hugh’s destructive exhibition, studied the small and rusted hinge, the thumb-sized rusted lock, the rather large tear-shaped pucker of metal and smaller and perfectly round pucker of metal that had been hammered, shaped, wrought into the second loop and that were rimmed, as Catherine had just noted, with miniature pin-sharp teeth of iron—kept my eyes on this artful relic of fear and jealousy and puffed my cigarette, listened to Catherine’s heavy breathing, wondered which strapped and naked female body Hugh now had in mind.

“Anyway,” Catherine said, “it’s too small for me …”

“No,” I murmured, “it’s adjustable.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Hugh said. “Pick it up. Show us how it works.”

“Baby. Let’s go, baby. Please.”

“The only trouble is that we’ve only got one of these things instead of two.”

“Shut up, Hugh,” Catherine said, “for God’s sake.”

“But maybe one’s enough. What do you think?”

And relenting, changing her mind, Fiona reached out one bare energetic arm and suddenly cupped Hugh’s frozen jaw in her deliberate hand.

“Do you want me to try it on for you, baby,” she said. “Is that what you want?”

Later that day, much later, I knew that Hugh was by no means appeased. The hot coal of desolation was still lodged in his eye. For the first time he stripped to the waist, discarding his denim jacket on the beach not a hundred paces from the villas where the three children shrieked, for the first time he exposed to us the pink and pointed nakedness of his partial arm. But nonetheless he refused to strip off his denim pants and accompany our nude trio into the black-and-white undulations of that deep sea. And every time I came up for air, curving thick arms like the horns of a bull and sucking in broad belly muscles and shaking spray, looking around now for Fiona, now for Catherine, inevitably I saw Hugh stretched out on the black pebbles with one knee raised and his good hand beneath his head, the little black iron trinket clearly visible on his white chest.

“You haven’t seen the last of it,” he called out once, “believe me.”

But then Catherine came rolling toward me through the waves, over my shoulder I caught a glimpse of the dark and distant fortress, I felt a splash, and suddenly Fiona’s wet face was next to mine.

“Baby, baby, baby, what can we do?”

N
EED I INSIST THAT THE ONLY ENEMY OF THE MATURE
marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity (body upon body, voice on voice) is naïve? That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood?

What is marriage if not a vast and neutral forest in which our own sexual selves and those of our first partners wander until momentarily stopped in the clear actuality of encounter? Yes, the best of marriages are simply particular stands of pale trees sensuously stitched into the yet larger tapestry, which is not to say that our entire troup of sexual partners (other than wives or husbands) need necessarily be composed of women or men who are themselves in turn already committed to their own matrimonial partners. There are exceptions. Not every finger is ringed. But why voice what simply runs in the blood and fills the mind of any considerate man who has sat with another man’s wife on his lap or of any woman who has cast off prudery and tugged at cloth and moved out among the trees? Only, I suppose, in periodic answer to nagging detractors, only for the sake of those who detest my convictions, scoff at my theories, denounce my measured presence in the world of love. And only for the sake of those other detractors, that handful of the soulless young whose lives of privileged sexuality have conditioned them merely to deride my lyricism. But none of them, none of the bitter aged and none of that arrogant handful of the contemptuous young have tasted the love
lunch, for instance, or know anything at all about the sexual properties of my golden wheels of ripe cheese. Old and wheezing detractors should curb their judgment of a man who knows, after all, what he is talking about. To young detractors I will say only that if orgasm is the pit of the fruit then lyricism is its flesh. Marriage, or at least the mature marriage, is the fold that gathers in all lovers nude and alone.