Forbidden Fruit (12 page)

Alone, on the ground, with a bull moving inquisitively toward me, I cried out to no one in particular, “Save me.”

When I dared to look, the bull had turned away.

I scrambled to my feet and walked slowly after Maureen. Once I turned a corner, I ran till I caught up to her.

When we reached the house, there was Eamonn.

“What happened to you?”

When I told him about the bull: “Sure ‘twould have done you no harm.”

My God, he was even an expert on bulls!

Eamonn had sent Maureen to a school to learn about hotel cooking and housekeeping. At dinner, she said:

“I like the dances.”

“Oh, really,” he said, suspiciously.

“I love it when they hold me tight.”

“Who,” he snapped, “holds you tight?”

“Boys. I love it when they kiss me.”

The eyes of Eamonn, guardian of morals, were like saucers.

“
Kiss
you?”

He went very red, showing his long-standing horror of sex. Unless, as with Helena, it was inside marriage and fertile.

Later, at bedtime, we all hugged each other. It hurt me to see how Eamonn pulled away from Maureen. I gave her a long hug
to try to compensate.

That night, he was able to come to me, after all, at around 1:30. We spoke and moved quietly in the bed. It was of horsehair
and solid, but Helena was in the next room. The whispers, the proximity of danger made the sexuality all the more intense.

At first, we giggled over Maureen but he thought her wanting kisses was wrong while I felt he was interfering with nature,
like belling a blackbird or painting a pheasant.

“But she
mustn’t
,” he said, hoarsely.

“
We
do.”

“We are not handicapped.”

“Anyway, if she gets pregnant you will be responsible.”

“Me?” he shrieked. Then, more quietly: “Me?”

“You don’t teach her about birth control.”

“God Al
mighty
, Annie, you say such terrible things.”

“More terrible than you suggesting she is not entitled to sex like us?”

“Nature,” he sighed, “can be very cruel.”

“If you pity her, why didn’t you give her a proper hug?”

“Her big bosoms, Annie, are suffocating.”

“Unlike mine.”

“Yours are just right.”

I flattened them against his chest as our fingers and toes interlaced.

“You have a lean, flat stomach, Annie. You’re long legged and you have beautiful eyes.”

He kissed and bit me and tickled me with his sensitive hands and probed my mouth with his tongue, then going below, he licked
me along ribs and hips as a mare licks a newborn foal.

Next, I felt his body go into spasm and I thought,
He has climaxed already
, then,
No, he’s laughing, but why
?

In fact, he was sneezing. Or, what is worse, trying desperately not to.

He came up heaving for air and gasping, “What have you dowsed yourself with down there? ‘Tis worse than pepper.”

I admitted to having poisoned his nosegay with perfume.

“God,” he coughed, “something really bad’s been done to you. Sex is beautiful. There is so much to heal in you.”

I said, “You are like the bull in the pasture.”

“Oh, so now ‘tis like an unlicensed bull you make me out.”

“You saved up pollywogs for years, millions of them. Keep having sex with me and you’ll get rid of some of them.”

After a stifled sneeze: “Going to exhaust me, are you?”

When his sneezing had eased, he entered his nest with, “Oh, how… I… like —”

He liked the feel of flesh on flesh but, best of all, he was caring of me. That was why I was able to respond to him and I
came myself after not too long a struggle.

We were mellowing into love.

To add spice to the evening, I said, “Are you sure you don’t want me to lock the door?”

“Not at all. Whoever tried it would know something was going on in here.”

“Between Annie and Uncle Eamonn.”

“With her brute strength, Maureen’d knock the door down.”

I blinked and jerked my head back on purpose.

Out of bed in a flash, he scampered low and naked into the bathroom, closed the door, and whispered, “Turn the bathroom light
out.”

“Why? Who would dream you’re in there naked?”

“Maureen might come in for a chat. You shouldn’t have been so nice to her.”

So that was why he had not given her a big hug earlier.

“If she comes,” he hissed, “she’ll probably want to use the bathroom. Sometimes she goes all night.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before, Eamonn? Instead of kissing her, I might have hit her on the head.”

“This is serious, Annie.”

“Then what’ll I do with your clothes?”

The bathroom door opened to let his head through.

“My pajamas, under the pillow, bathrobe, in the bed. No, Maureen might see the lumps. Bring ‘em here.”

“They’re safer under my pillow.”

“Do as you’re
told
. Quick, it’s cold in here.”

“Shut the window.”

“It won’t budge.”

“Only one solution. We’ll shower together.”

“Are you mad? It’s so rickety, the hot pipes would fall off the wall, burn our private parts, and scald us both to death.
Then the locals would take us both as we are, naked and copulating, to the funeral parlor.”

“In an ambulance, I hope.”

“Seated in the back of a jaunting car. Don’t laugh, Annie, I know these people. That woman who owns the bull would put me
naked in a car just to spite me.”

If he were ever found out, I felt, he would run from the country out of fear of compatriots like that.

“But,” he went on, “I’d crawl out of here if I were dead and dress myself in pontificals before the lying-in-state.”

I sounded a note of caution. “If you turned stiff you wouldn’t be able to dress yourself.”

“My guardian angel’d help me. I’ve prayed to him enough.”

I couldn’t stop laughing or loving this man with his childlike imagination.

“Stop it, Annie. I’m never again sleeping with you without wearing at least my pajama bottoms.”

“Why?”

“Because it’d be terrible for the Church if a bishop were to be caught dead with his pants down.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I have a heart attack, my backside will be too heavy for you to put them on me.”

“I’m not going to like you always wearing pants.”

“I’ll be naked at the appropriate moments.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Now, bring me my clothes.”

A hand appeared round the bathroom door. As he scrambled into his pajamas, he gave me orders.

“Switch the light off. Wait three minutes and if no one comes, tap on this door.”

I waited for at least ten minutes, giggling all the time, hearing him trying to stifle his own snorting laugh and muttering,
“I never did like this fecking bathroom. One of these days I’m going to tear it apart.”

Finally, there was a weak-voiced “Surely to God three minutes is up now.”

“How would I know what time it is with the light out?”

“Then turn it on and have a see.”

I switched on the light for a moment.

“Well?” he demanded.

“I don’t know what time it was when I switched it off.”

My bathroom door opened; footsteps approached the bed.

“Peep into the corridor, Annie, and check it’s safe.”

I prolonged the agony as long as I could but I eventually gave him the all-clear at about four. He went back to the spare
room after noisily using the corridor bathroom.

Heavens
, I thought,
he even tries to deceive people when he pees
.

I
N BETWEEN DOMESTIC CHORES, Helena and I chatted for hours at the breakfast table and over the fire in the living room.

She kept getting flashbacks to her years in America and these made her anxious. That was why Eamonn spent hours of the night
assuring her that everything would be well for her and her children.

On the third morning, Eamonn said he intended joining our beach party that day. At about eleven, he appeared in slacks and
an open-necked shirt. Surrounded by people who loved him, he was in his element.

Maureen was in a thin cotton dress. Helena was in a black one-piece swimsuit. I had not brought a bathing suit to Ireland
but the night before I had fished out a bikini top and a pair of jeans, the legs of which I had scissored off to the thighs.
My husband had made such fun of my legs I was scared to show them in public.

Eamonn whispered, “Why are you wearing
those
?” but I did not want to talk about it.

As soon as we reached the near-deserted beach, he stripped to his swimming trunks, white with blue stripes. ‘Tearing at his
hair, he said, “I just have to get in there.” He ran and barreled his way into the sea as if he wanted to swallow it up. After
a dip and a few strokes, he stood with water streaming off him and calling to us, in a thrilled voice:

“Come on in, ‘tis won-der-ful.”

I was toe-tickling the rills of spent waves on the sea’s edge and telling Helena, “We can’t go in, it’s cold as melted snow,”
while Eamonn was all the while hello-ing us and yelling, “The only way is to run right in.”

He stood there, his hair plastered to his head, his eyes wide open. When a big wave hit him, he merely laughed that loud velvety
laugh of his.

Helena’s daughter Jenny started to walk into the sea and was knocked over, which caused Eamonn to rush back and rescue her.
Putting her on his shoulder, he walked out until the water was up to his chest. Finally, he restored her smiling to her mother.

Helena nudged me. “I don’t know what sort of husband he would have made, but what a fantastic father.”

Yes, there was Eamonn, no longer the great god directing people’s destinies but the head of a family.

My mind went back to when my own family was on vacation at Rockaway Beach, New York. I was five or so. My mother was sober,
tanned, and beautiful, and all four of us kids were playing on the sands. Till Daddy, with me on his shoulders, went marching
into the sea on his stork-like legs. Waves crashed around us and over our heads. I spluttered, “Daddy, Daddy,” and pulled
on his circlet of hair and tugged on his ears. He reacted by stroking my leg. “It’s okay, sweetheart.” He swiveled me around
on his shoulders so I could look into his eyes. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.” I felt safe in his arms, as safe as Jenny
now felt in Eamonn’s. As safe as
I
wanted to be in Eamonn’s arms forever.

Helena’s doubt about Eamonn’s being a perfect husband challenged me. I looked out to sea and saw the sun transfiguring his
lovely face and the waves foaming about his neck and shoulders. He was everything I ever wanted. He was the man with the helium-filled
balloons that would help me fly.

All the things till now denied me could be given me through this man,
my
man. He was a wizard like my father.

As a kid I always looked on Daddy’s surgical skills as a kind of magic. He cut into your flesh and poked around inside you;
whereas anyone else would kill you, he healed you. He removed all the bad and sewed you up again so you were better than before.
He healed minds, too. He healed them with his humor, sometimes caustic when he refused to let patients yield to the sickness
of self-pity. Pain, he said, could be a healing force.

Used to the magic of life, I believed in the impossible.

Eamonn was a surgeon, too. He had taken on many sick people like Siobhan, Helena, and me and was presently challenging the
mighty sea. Would he be able to break away from the stationary, immovable earth of his past and come away with me to dreamland?
And if he would not do this for me, maybe he would for a child of his own? In my bed I had seen him as a man; on the beach
I saw him for the first time as a father.

I had always loved children but I hated my husband so much that the only baby I had carried, his, I failed to love. But I
could not fail to love Eamonn’s. He would love and cherish our child and our child would love and respect him. And even if
he rejected it as I rejected my first child, I would not. I’d still have a part of Eamonn to carry with me through life.

While the kids paddled in small pools and played with buckets and spades on the sand, I waved to Eamonn and shouted, “I’m
coming in.”

The sea, with rainbow colors shining on it, was our balloon, the element that buoyed us up and took us away from earth.

I swam right up to him and we went away together like a couple of fishes.

“You really can swim, Annie,” he puffed, admiringly.

To prove it, I went under and pulled his trunks down.

He dragged me up to the surface, hissing, “Stop it. If I emerge from this water naked, I’ll kill you.”

“Take it easy,” I said, laughing and making him laugh.

“I wish I’d never brought you out here. God Almighty, if I float on my back you’ll nip the trunks off me. You said you were
afraid of the water and you’re not, you deceitful witch.”

A big wave hit me, and crying, “Help, help,” I sank. And he came searching for me and lifted me up.

As our heads rose out of the waters we saw it at the self-same moment. Reflected off diamonded water was the land, with yellow
dunes, and children paddling and making sand castles. Sheep, lambs among them, and a single ram were grazing on the emerald
green and corn yellow slopes of the cliff, and above us was a motionless sky without a cloud. And we, the only bathers, companions
in peril, seemed to be apart from humankind, in our own magic bubble, our own watery birth sac, baptized with a real baptism
into our own new world of being. And the cold cold sea had turned kind and warm in us and bonded us as sex and laughter had
already done.

“The undertow can rip you, Annie. Don’t get overconfident.”

He was warning me not to get in over my head. He knew his limitations, but he was afraid that I did not.

“I might be able to save you, Annie, but drowning people sometimes beat the hell out of their rescuers.”

He was back fearing what people would make of scratches and bruises above the line of the clerical collar. The spell was broken.
But not entirely.