The Blood Oranges (28 page)

“Well,” I whispered, “do you still want me to go? It’s up to you.”

As if there had been no belt, no doubts, no problem, no anguished Hugh, no reason at all for hesitation, Catherine merely stirred herself within the limits of my embrace and took off her already unbuttoned pajama jacket and stepped out of the soft phosphorescent heap of her pajama pants and with one foot pushed them aside.

“Kiss me, Cyril … kiss me …”

Together we moved, together we sank down at last on that lumpy and earthen-smelling mattress until in time the fish began to flow, the birds to fly, the twin heavenly nudes of Love to approach through the night.

Would it stop? Would it ever stop? Catherine could not expel her breath forever, my emissions were limited in length and frequency. We could not go on. True radiance
could only end in the dark. Then why was the tempest still exploring the storm? Why was I still bulging from head to foot? Why was Catherine still holding her breath, why hugging my buttocks more tightly than ever, why biting her own lower lip? Would it never end?

But of course at this very moment I found myself becoming aware of change, heard Catherine sigh, felt her two hands sliding away, knew that on either side of me her two feet were again flat on the bed, felt my shoulders sagging and knew with deep pleasurable regret that suddenly the naked twins of our invented constellation were gone. The bed was still.

“Listen,” I said at last, “remember that evening we saw the nightingale?”

“You’re so good to me … You’re so good to us all …”

“Or that time I spitted the lamb on the beach?”

“I love to hear your voice in the dark …”

“Tomorrow I guess we’ll have to get Hugh into the water.”

Later, much later, I awoke to the silence and bright light of the sun-filled room and sat up on the edge of the bed. I stood. I took my usual count of bottomless breaths of morning air. Smiling down at Catherine I decided to carry the pajamas but wear the old dressing gown. And then with chastity belt in hand and laces tied, eyeglasses adjusted, sash in place, pajamas carefully folded over my right arm, I left.

I paused in the open doorway of Hugh’s villa. I paused on our side of the funeral cypresses. I paused in the arbor which was empty. I found a safe hiding place for the belt. I took a few more long breaths of the sun. All of Illyria was
a chalky and yet verdant landscape drenched in champagne.

Within a half dozen paces of our narrow doorway framed in vines I found myself smiling into the gray-green steady eyes of my waiting wife. There stood Fiona in that doorway of white mortar and sprightly vines, Fiona wide-awake and up and around like me. I did not move, I drank her in, she watched me with familiar pleasure. Over her right arm she carried her folded terry-cloth robe, and except for the loosely folded robe was naked. How alike we were, I thought, knowing that for the moment at least neither one of us would speak and that Fiona was reading, as it were, the pajamas on my arm exactly as I was reading the robe on hers. Our two separate but similar nights were evident in our appearances, each of us was perfectly aware of the other’s thoughts. I was exhausted but as fresh as ever, she was tired but tense. She knew that I had enjoyed my night hours, I knew that she could not possibly look the way she looked if she had spent those same hours alone. Her bright eyes, her obviously sore muscles, the somehow roughened texture of her hard and slender body—what else could they mean?

“Baby,” she whispered, “come inside …”

I let fall the pajamas just as Fiona dropped her robe, quickly I seized Fiona’s proffered hand and followed her through our vine-beribboned doorway and down the cool corridor to the room that was ours. Her slim bare feet were light on the stone, her trim buttocks were filled with purpose. Hand in hand and thigh to thigh we stood in the entrance to our sun-drenched eonnubial room.

“Baby,” she whispered, “isn’t he beautiful?”

I brushed thick lips against her tight cheek, I stared
down at Fiona’s prize. What else could I do? Of course I had expected an empty bed, of course I wanted to hone the bones of our love. Even with her eyes on the naked man in our bed, Fiona was maneuvering our two hands so that the back of hers was caressing the shiny source of my song. But it was hopeless. It was out of the question. And yet wasn’t this precisely what we wanted? This sight of Hugh coiled up like a naked spring and covered with the lip-marks of Fiona’s kisses? Right now he was preventing Fiona and me from enjoying our version of what he and Fiona had so recently enjoyed. But at the same time he had proven my theories, completed Love’s natural structure, justified Catherine’s instincts, made Fiona happy when she had given up all her hopes for happiness. What more could I ask?

“Cyril …?”

“Fiona …?”

“I want you, baby. I want you now.”

“We love each other. Agreed?”

“But he’s going to wake up any minute and I have to be here. I love him very much. I really do.”

“There’s always tonight.”

“We’ll just have to see. OK?”

“Listen,” I murmured, and kissed her cheek, “he can’t catch up. But God knows we’ll let him try …”

She gave me one quick glance, I smiled, she turned in girlish haste to the bed while I retreated down the corridor to the bright morning which in unaccountable silence was rushing faster than ever along the path of the sun.

Later, much later, though before the hour of noon, the four of us met again for a new first time at Fiona’s small rickety breakfast table set up in the arbor, Hugh and Fiona
emerging from the narrow doorway framed in vines at the very moment that Catherine and I made our entrance through the wall of cypresses. Hugh and Fiona came out shoulder to shoulder and with their hands full of Fiona’s crockery, Catherine and I stepped forward with our arms about each other’s waists. Yes, openly and freshly we came together in the arbor which was sweet and shaded and bursting with hymeneal grapes, a quiet and appropriate place for our reunion. Catherine was wearing her white pajamas, I had all the clothing I needed or wanted in my comfortable old blood-colored dressing gown, Hugh had borrowed my red-and-white striped cotton shirt which he wore extravagantly and unashamedly with his own long gray undershorts. Fiona topped us all in one of her nearly mid-hip pale green transparent nighties. Yes, frankly, happily we sat around the perfect square of that small rickety table piled high with Fiona’s morning fare, sat smiling and eating and touching bare feet beneath the table. Catherine sighed and licked her fingers, Hugh coughed and put his hand on Fiona’s arm, Fiona shivered and caught my eye and stared at my bland contented features with a limpid smiling intensity she rarely displayed. Never had she looked more the faun, more the woman. Never had I loved her more or valued quite so highly this special hovering shyness now felt by us all. But the food, wasn’t there also something special about the food? Of course there was. How like Fiona on this morning of mornings to select from the garden of her imagination only those items which, according to superstition, were aphrodisiac. Just like Fiona to fuse in one stroke her feminine wisdom and my sensible view of sex.

“Well,” I said, lifting high my glass of cold white wine, “let’s drink to us.”

“To us, baby. To us …”

“H
E’S NOT THERE
.”

“What?”

“I mean it, baby. He’s gone.”

“Catherine too?”

“She’s still asleep. But he’s not with her. He’s gone. He’s just not there.”

“Well, look around. He can’t be far.”

“I’ve looked for him already. Everywhere. Something’s wrong.”

“Why don’t you come on back to bed awhile. OK?”

“All right, baby. I’ll go alone.”

So before I could pull on my frayed white ducks and reach for my old white woolen sweater (no time to search for underpants or shirt, no time for shoes), Fiona had already given me her quick hard sign of disapproval and summoned all her usual self-reliance and walked out of our room, disappeared into that loud dawn wind that almost never blew but was blowing now. Hard-faced, hair untended, barefooted, wearing her crumpled but sporty mid-thigh trench coat open over a short white modest sleeping gown, skin and eyes still bearing the marks of a recent dream—in all her fleeting vividness she too was gone, as if she had not roused me by my naked shoulder,
had not stood over me and spoken, had not given me a glimpse of what I took to be undue agitation, had not brought me this latest and, I thought, trivial news of Hugh.

First from our darkened room. First to abandon without a qualm our bed. First to find Hugh missing and not merely absent from Catherine’s side at the outset of the very day we planned to row the children to the chapel on our little nearby island. First to dart like a golden arrow into the clear and pointless energy of the high wind. That was Fiona, my all but clairvoyant wife, who now, I saw, was once more rushing out of sight through a rift in the wind-blown frieze of cypresses. But I was not far behind her, sleep-ridden and heavy and half dressed, and though I did not catch up with her until she stopped for a moment amidst the first chalky stones of that dead village.

“Don’t worry,” I shouted through cupped hands, “we’ll find him, wherever he is …”

For an instant longer I stood there squinting, rubbing my sleep-filled belly, fighting the wind, staring at the invisible spot where the trees and my wind-tossed wife had merged. Why wind? Where was it coming from? How could it blow with so much power and yet no direction? I swayed, I listened, I shaded my eyes, knowing that Catherine was indeed asleep and that Fiona’s haste was justified but futile and that the light itself had turned to wind or that the wind had somehow assumed the properties of the dawn light. We would make no joyous expedition to the island chapel, that much I knew. But if Catherine was still sleeping, at least her children were pathetically and ironically awake. Because with my first deliberate step in pursuit of Fiona, hands in pocket and breath hard won, I heard
their piping cries high on the wind—or thought I did. And what were they trying to tell me, those senseless cries, if not the worst?

There was no reason to hurry, no time to lose. Behind me I left the twin villas now equally desolate, though one was occupied and one was not. Ahead of me lay the white sea and the narrow beach heaped up with the ominous splendor of all those uncountable spears of light and drowned in the silent velocity of the wind’s voice. Instinctively I turned left toward the village, I who was never a partisan to disaster now preparing in full consciousness to share with Fiona all the simple practicalities of pure disaster. My feet did not bleed on those sharp rocks, I did not run. But I knew what was coming and moved forward quickly enough to be of what help I could to Fiona.

“Wait,” I shouted, catching sight of her and waving, “you can’t do him any good alone …”

Did she hear me? Did she read my lips or take into account the meaning of my upraised hand? Was she standing there restrained in flight against that white wall out of need for me, out of concern for me, or only to collect her amazing energies and indulge herself in one moment of distraction for the sake of her fear, her plan, her determination? I approached, she waited, I saw the skirts of the tan coat beaten flat to the wall and the white gown beaten between her thighs. There in the driving light and silent wind at the entrance to the village, she might have given me the briefest smile of welcome, recognition, affection. But she did not.

“Fiona,” I said clearly and gently, “I’m not to blame …”

“I’m not blaming you, baby. How could I?”

And then she jerked away her perfect shoulder, jerked away the features of her face baked hard in seriousness, took back the fragment of attention she had given me, turned and ran off abruptly toward the center of the village. And now I ran. Yes, I kept pace with Fiona below roofs of fungus-green or rouge-red tiles and past rows of crooked and tightly shuttered windows. We smelled the fetid smell of the black canal. The wind glazed the chunky white façade of the squat church. At least there were no short and robust leather-suited figures to point to our bare feet and curious attire and to shout
croak peonie
or
crespi fagag 
in the wake of our progress up that village street.

“Listen,” I said, “why don’t you wait down here? I think you should.”

Had she forgotten her many visits to that room above? Had she forgotten my own brief visit or two? Had she forfotten the rusty hinges, the knotholes, the formidable latch, the oddly polished surface of that rough wood? Was she oblivious to the significance of a closed door? But none of it meant anything to Fiona, who without listening or even hesitating merely used her shoulder against the sagging street-level wooden door and with one blow knocked it ajar.

I followed her into that brutal darkness. I was right behind her as she climbed. She stumbled, I heard her breath come back to me in short unhappy gasps. It was cold in the stair well, but we were safe at last from the wind.

“Hugh? I’m here, baby, I’m here …”

Yes, she was there. And I was there. And Hugh was hanging in the corner. Fiona, not I, yanked open that second and final low door of wide wooden planks. Fiona, not I, ran forward immediately into the filtered gray light of that
small sloping barren room and initiated Hugh’s abortive rescue, with both arms embraced his naked waist and attempted to raise him up and relieve the tension of the rope on his neck. We arrived together, entered that little cold sloping room together, faced together the stark and unavoidable sight of Hugh’s nude body hanging amidst all his photographs in the corner nearest the inevitably shuttered window on the canal side of the room. Yes, Fiona and I were competitors for Hugh’s life from the first moment we intruded upon the scene both of his art, as he called it, and his death. And I too was active, except that I saw in a glance that the rope was much too thick and much too tight for Fiona’s courageous efforts, no matter how sensible they were on the surface, and understood at once what Fiona in all her intensity and devotion could not perceive— that our only hope was to cut him down immediately. So rather than join her in the corner, where now she was making soft agonized sounds of comfort, I turned instead to Hugh’s enormous homemade worktable and with a single heave cleared it of pans, traps, labyrinthine pieces of equipment, glass-stoppered bottles. Quickly I dragged it into position beneath the great rusted hook which, like a beckoning iron finger, held the end of the rope. And noting the open eyes, the smile on the open mouth, the sweat still fresh on his pitted brow, the glossy photograph clenched in his good hand, the white feet side by side and suspended only a few inches from the floor, quickly I stood on the table and freed the rope and helped Fiona lower him gently, swiftly, to the bare floor that was now Hugh’s crude temporary bier. We needed light, so in passing I smashed my elbow through the frail slats of those rotted shutters
which Hugh in his love of darkness always kept closed. And when I withdrew my elbow and turned, still heavily in motion and using up no time, no time at all, I saw that that sudden long splintered shaft of light was falling directly on Hugh’s face and on Fiona’s swift hands already reaching for the rope at his throat.