Rocks, The (26 page)

A
rabella Squibb crouched
on one foot on the lowermost rock ledge above the water, the other foot lifting the monoski in the air.

Luc gunned the engine and the speedboat leapt forward. Arabella tensed as the towline whipped up out of the fantail of foam behind the boat like something alive.

Yesterday, Arabella had spent the entire afternoon learning to let the towline pull her literally off her feet into midair to land on the rapidly deployed monoski without plunging face-first into the water. She could get up on one ski when pulled out of the water easily enough, but once she’d seen Lucy Valence plucked from a standstill off the rocks like a fly by the crack of a whip, Arabella was instantly determined to be able to do it. It was all about the little leap into the air you had to make at just the right moment. She’d got it, twice, yesterday, and then dreamt about it, that little push off into thin air, all night.

She pushed off—first time today—came down on the monoski, lurched forward from the waist before recovering and wobbling away across the water, precarious but upright, carving a trail of tight erratic curlicues on top of the boat’s wake.

“Well done, darling!” shouted Richard Squibb. He had come across the road to watch his wife do this new water-ski trick she’d told him he simply
had
to come and see. He wore a much-creased Panama and a tiny, red man-bikini beneath his sunburned potbelly. He puffed at a fat Romeo y Julieta Belicoso and watched a moment longer, wreathed in blue smoke in the still air, before he turned and walked back across the road to the Rocks.

As the ski chattered and bounced beneath her like a runaway horse, Arabella slowly straightened her back until she found the position of relative equipoise she already knew from being pulled up out of the water on one ski. But the thrill of going from nought to flying off the rocks in a single moment with barely a splash to race across the surface of the sea after the boat had reinvented the experience.

She leaned back and dug in her right, rearmost heel and swooped to the right, with thrilling acceleration, across the speedboat’s wake into the smooth water beyond. She heard a shout from ahead and looked up to see Luc turned in his seat looking back at her, his arm out, raising a thumb in the air, his sun-bleached hair flying about his head.

Darling Lukey. All of a sudden a
very
yummy sixteen. His father, an American whom nobody had ever seen who lived in Paris, had bought him the speedboat and engine so he could make some money for the summer. Five hundred pesetas a go, Lukey was charging the Rocks guests, and he’d been making thousands a day. Most of the guests were running a tab, but Arabella handed him the cash each time. Today she’d put a finger into his swimming costume and stuffed the bills into the waistband.

She zigzagged across the wake, leaning back and shooting off sideways and accelerating at what felt like incredible speed. Every time she turned and sped off in the other direction, Luc raised the Kodak Instamatic she’d given him to take pictures of her. Then he raised his thumb again and grinned. He made her feel that she was doing fabulously. Perhaps she was. At fleeting moments she felt graceful. She knew her body looked good. She skied for the camera—and for Luc.
Just for you, scrumptious darling.
He was looking at her the entire time through his sunglasses, glancing over his shoulder only now and then to see where they were headed. As the salt spray dried on her warm thighs and stomach and the thrumming vibration of the ski made itself felt in every muscle of her body, she felt tremendously sexy. She gazed steadily, despite the bumps, back at him.

Apart from the air on her face made by their skimming progress, the sea was mirror calm today, disturbed only by the surface-peeling wake of Luc’s motorboat dispersing slowly like skywriting. The sea was sky-blue, the sky azure. Arabella felt she could water-ski all the way to Africa. She saw herself in one of those Italian films: water-skiing on the Bay of Naples, or off Portofino. The louche, tightly muscled boat boy, the blond version, staring at her through his sunglasses while he steered the boat with one arm cradled over the wheel. In the film she was supposed to let him take her to a fisherman’s shack after water-skiing for a savage shagging, a classic symbiosis. Later her rich husband would tip the boy and thank him for giving his wife such a good time. Richard’s tip, however, wouldn’t be a good one. He was so awfully tight, despite being well-off. Poor Lukey, darling.

Abruptly she fell. When she came to the surface, Luc had turned the boat and was planing toward her. He throttled back and the boat slowed, settling lower into the sea, grumbling as it drew near. Luc bent overboard and picked up the floating monoski. Then he turned the wheel again, and the boat floated close to Arabella.

“You’ve lost your top,” Luc said, scanning the water for the missing tendril of garment.

Arabella looked around for a moment, revolving in the water. “Never mind,” she said.

Luc continued to peer intently into the water around the boat. The small ones, the sort Arabella had been wearing, made of cloth with no spongy filler, didn’t always float on the surface. They could sink slowly and wrap themselves around the propeller.

“Sweet of you to worry, Lukey darling, but I’ve got a suitcase full of them. Can I get in?”

“You don’t want to ski back?” He proffered the ski.

“I think I’ll get out actually, darling, and dry off.”

Luc hung the boarding ladder over the side and Arabella climbed up. She made no attempt to cover her breasts. She lowered her head, wrung out her hair with her hands, then threw her head up, arching her back with her chest pushed forward as she tossed her long, interesting if unnaturally dark hair back to splay out across her shoulders, splashing Luc’s hot skin with cool drops. He handed her a blue Rocks bathing towel while politely though not overtly aiming his eyes elsewhere, but he caught a jolting peripheral impression of very dark nipples at the center of the triangles of pale skin surrounded by her deep tan. He had imagined just such a mishap with her mishap-suggestive bathing costume, the top of which seemed designed to come readily adrift, offering just such a view of Arabella’s breasts, and they were better than he’d imagined. They were large, and though Arabella must be close to forty, he hadn’t expected such a statuesque retention of their harnessed shape.

She sat beside him on the white and turquoise vinyl-upholstered seat as they flew smoothly at what felt like a hundred miles an hour above the surface of the sea toward the shore.

“Marvelous!” shouted Arabella. “Go, baby!”

She leaned back against Luc’s arm, as if confusing it for the seat’s backrest, and opened the towel to expose her goose-pimpled breasts to the sun. She moved again, settling herself more comfortably against him. The top of her head was level with his shoulder and he looked down on her breasts and the mound of her belly and its noticeable stretch marks rising above the tiny remnant of her bikini.

A moment later she said something he didn’t catch.

“Sorry?”

“I said you’re so polite, darling.”

“Oh.” Luc tried to remember what he’d said that was so polite. “Thank you.”

They sped toward the shore. Luc felt every part of Arabella against him, almost a dead weight that heaved and lurched into him with the movement of the boat. Their thighs touched and bounced together, her skin was still cool from the water. He had a barely concealed erection and he hoped she would see it and touch it, but as far as he could tell, her eyes were closed. The boat tore on, jarred occasionally by an errant hillock of swell, and, for a moment, everything was in balance.

Luc recognized the tall figure waving at them from the rocks. “Dominick’s arrived,” he said.

Arabella sat up and looked ahead. “Dear Dominick. Such a silly old cunt. I can’t imagine who reads those dreadful novels he writes or how he lives.”

“Have you read them?” asked Luc. He was always meaning to but had been put off by their covers, which looked like dramatic renderings of the window displays of men’s and women’s fashions at Galeries Lafayette.

“I read part of one,” said Arabella, as if only just now remembering. “It was
killingly
bad. But I do love him.” She waved at Dominick.

“Hal-lo, dar-ling!”
Dominick shouted. “Luc, you must tell me where you caught such a Siren.”

Luc pulled the throttle to neutral and the boat wallowed closer to the shore.

“Darling, Dominick, how are you, silly old sausage?” Arabella said. She put a hand on Luc’s thigh, squeezed it, and dove off the boat. She swam to the steel ladder Lulu’d had cemented into the rocks and climbed gracefully out of the water to where Dominick stood at the top, grinning at her.

“Good
God
,” he said, staring at her breasts. “You come bearing gifts.”

They kissed. “Give me your towel, you leering bastard,” said Arabella.

She wrapped herself in the towel and turned toward Luc. “Thank you, Lukey, darling.” She walked across the road to the Rocks.

Dominick watched her for a moment. Then he turned toward Luc. “Catch of the day?”

Luc smiled. “Ha-ha.”

“Have you got time to take me out, or are you packing up now?”

“No, sure. Come on.”

“Fan-
tastic
!” said Dominick. He dove into the sea.

A
rabella was no different
from usual at dinner. But Luc understood now.

After the water-skiing and the sensational ride in the boat back to shore while she lay heavy and virtually naked against him, he was convinced that real, actual sex was in the offing. Arabella would give him some signal, arrange something, and it would finally happen. She’d always made him feel that she liked
him
particularly, that he alone understood her. For years, her eyes had swung to Luc’s to let him—just him—know with a droll expression what she thought as someone beside the pool or at dinner was waffling on about Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s ghastly teeth—“Why on
earth
doesn’t the man go to a fucking dentist? Must he be so
insistently
the common prole?”—or the rising London property market. Last summer she’d told Luc he was turning into a “complete sexpot.” From that day to reaching some sort of apotheosis this afternoon, he’d been engorged with fantasies of Arabella Squibb.

She bantered comfortably with Richard across the table, threw no more than normally conspiratorial looks at Luc, and at ten said she was tired, would forgo pudding and port, and stood up.

“I’m off to bed, my darlings,” she said as she pushed back her chair and stood up.

“Are you really?” said Richard, squinting and blowing a dense blue stream of Cuban smoke upward toward the leafy overhead trellis.

“Really and truly. Thank you
so much
, Lukey darling, for such a lovely water-ski.” She extended a hand toward him and moved her fingers as if caressing his cheek, though he was seven feet away.

“Anytime,” said Luc.

And off she went.

This was it!
A ruse—it had to be. Going to bed so early when Richard would stay up for hours more playing backgammon with either Cassian or Dominick now that he was here. Luc excused himself too, awkwardly, walking stiffly to his little toolshed along the wall.

He lit a candle and tidied his bed and then sat on it. He listened for noise without, and heard the chat of the diners still at the table, but no steps or rustlings along the path between his shed and the pool. After a few minutes he turned on the small, low-wattage electric lamp beside the bed and tried reading—he was on a Françoise Sagan jag, going through her little
livres de poche
in French, currently in the middle of
Les Merveilleux Nuages
, but he couldn’t get through a sentence. After twenty minutes he turned out his light, blew out the candle, and wandered down to the bar. Richard and Dominick were playing backgammon at a table. Other guests were drinking at the bar. His mother was sitting at a table with Cassian and Tom and Milly.

Arabella had gone to bed.

•   •   •

L
uc rode his Rieju motorcycle
into town, parked it on the street outside the Miravista, where the soft tones of Jackson Rale’s electric guitar were floating over the walls like a vapor. He walked through the archway entrance, along the short path, and stopped at the top step overlooking the open dance floor beneath the tall pines. He scanned the dancers and the people at the tables. He knew half of them. Aegina wasn’t there, unless she was in the loo.

Jackson Rale, a black American guitarist of indeterminate middle age, was playing “Bésame Mucho.” When he stopped and took a sip of his drink, Luc approached him.

“Hey, Jackson.” It was the way the American always greeted him, and Luc had started to say the same to Jackson.

“Hey, man,” said Jackson. “What’s cookin’?”

“Oh, nothing much,” said Luc. He understood that Jackson wasn’t really inquiring about anything, nor, probably, did he care what, if anything, was cooking, nor if there were a petroleum tanker fire blazing out on the street. Jackson exuded an immense if polite indifference to everything around him except his guitar and his Cuba libre. Mateo Pujols, the Miravista’s owner, had obtained his services for the months of July and August through a booking agent in Palma. Jackson was a large man, not fat, but like one of those padded American football players gone to seed. He sat in the Miravista’s patio under the pines beside the open-air dance floor and played short sets with his electric guitar. His technique didn’t call attention to itself. He didn’t play rock and roll or jazzy riffs, but steadily picked out an ancient repertoire of nightclub standards as soft filler between the longer and much louder sets of new and recent pop records that people came to the Miravista to dance to. Jackson’s fingers were the size of pork sausages and looked far too large for the guitar’s narrow fret board, yet he played smoothly and dependably, as if in his sleep. Luc particularly liked one song he played, a tune he’d heard before, maybe in a movie, but didn’t know the name of, and he’d asked Jackson, a couple of weeks ago, what it was called.

“‘Perfidia,’” said Jackson.

“I like it,” said Luc.

“Yeah, it works,” drawled Jackson. “Every time.”

“Per . . .”

“‘Perfidia,’” Jackson repeated. “An old Mexican song.”

“Is it a woman’s name?” asked Luc.

“Perfidia?” Jackson started to laugh, softly, rhythmically, a deep note of satisfaction, as he sat on a barstool beside his small amplifier under the trees, tuning his guitar, a dark-red-tinted Gretsch Chet Atkins Country Gentleman with considerable wear in the varnish below the strings. “It should be,” he said, “heh, heh.” He looked at Luc, his black face inscrutable and at the same time all-knowing. “It’s a word for what some woman do to a man.” Jackson looked away and raised his Cuba libre to his mouth.

In a second, Luc understood. “Oh. Yeah.” Then he was incredibly grateful to Jackson for his man-to-man confidence.
Perfidia:
Mexican for blow job? And a song named for that?
Putain
, those Mexicans.

That’s what he wanted from Arabella and had imagined until it ached: a
perfidia
out on his boat.

“Jackson, have you seen my friend Aegina? She’s a little younger—”

“I know who you mean. Your little Spanish-looking girlfriend—”

“Well, she’s not really my girlfriend, we’re just friends.”

“You better think that one through again,” said Jackson. “But I ain’t seen her, man. She ain’t been in. Not tonight, so far.”

“Okay, thanks.” Luc scanned the crowd again, irresolute. Then he turned to leave. “See you, then, Jackson.”

“Yep,” said Jackson, with the enthusiasm of a mailman confirming the inevitability of the next day’s visit. He put his drink down, returned his hand to his guitar. His thick fingers trembled lightly over the strings of the Gretsch and “Embraceable You” burbled out of his amplifier.

Luc walked back out to the street and started his motorcycle.