Stolen Pleasures (30 page)

They were attired in pastel suits; their hair, also, was pastel, and clusters of gold and glass baubles hung from their slim wrists. One, he learned, was the wife of a dentist; the other, her sister, the wife of a storage company president. Since a few minutes were left before departure time, he ordered a round of drinks from a whitejacketed young man, and as he drank, now with a sister on each side, he laughed with them over their jaunt, enjoying their obligingly pliable voices, happy when called for and thoughtful when called for, enjoying their appreciation of his presence. At the loudspeaker's bilingual call he went out with them, still with a sister at each side, along the covered passageway and into the sunlight and, after them, up the steps and into the plane.

S
OMETIMES THE REALTOR'S listings book will fall open to the photographs of homes not within the means of the couple on the other side of the desk, and the wife will put out her hand, almost instinctively, to see what is beyond them. Of the several properties, the couple will pause longest over a particular house on the leeward side of the island. The woman will wish aloud that they could afford it, laughing, sighing, drooping, indecorous in a time that calls for reserve, while the husband will nod and agree robustly, even goddamning. They select, after the usual excursions with the realtor to several houses within the city and on its expanding edge, a house not much different from the one back home. The property that they coveted is shown only to those fortunate families for whom every hour is opportune. Persons who sometimes roam through houses they cannot afford in order to impress the realtor, or—though they have not met him before—vindictively waste his time, never venture onto the verdant grounds and across the threshold of that property. It is much too ideal to violate with one's lack of promise or even
with that vindictiveness against the realtor that asks no reason for itself. Whoever might have in mind to dare an excursion is deterred by what might be suspicion on the part of the realtor: although everything is amiable and potential as they sit around his desk, elbows almost touching, knees almost touching, hands touching over maps and matches, a gulf suddenly divides him and them.

The realtor unlocked the wrought-iron gate, swung it open and stepped aside, waiting until all the members of the family had passed into the garden. Following at a discreet distance in order not to interfere with their breathtaking entry into a domain certain to be theirs and free of intruders such as himself, he bowed his head to choose the next key from the green leather case in the palm of his hand—both case and keys given him by the owner. The father went first along the path, his index finger held by the youngest of the four children, a girl of two who was walking clumsily on her toes. They were followed by the two boys, one twelve, the other nine, both lean, both wearing tan knee shorts and white pullovers edged thinly with red. The eldest, a girl of sixteen, strolled behind the boys, the wide pleats of her short white skirt parting and closing. The mother, young in spite of the number of her children, was the last of the procession except for the realtor who was, respectfully, not a part of it, following the mother by a yard, observing as if against his will how the flowers in the cloth of her dress vibrated with the movements of her body and with their own disputing colors. In the center of the emerald dusk of fern and bamboo and flowering shrubs, the father paused and so the rest paused. The garden was filled with a humming that seemed to emanate from its own exuberance until it became apparent that the sound was the sea's constant humming
rising up through the density of mountain stone. Two myna birds flew up from a lichee tree in the garden, flapping over the road and settling in a breadfruit tree high on the upper slope.

The realtor unlocked the heavy teak door, found that it stuck, and pushed, his brow against it. The members of the family fanned out across the large room toward the wall of sliding glass that gave them an immense view of the sea. The realtor slid open one segment of the glass and they walked out across the terrace and over to the stone wall, and all, leaning there, gazed out on the masses of land to each side, tremendous green shoulders of earth that seemed to recede and swell in the hot light; gazed down on the vertical, winding stone stairs and, at its foot, far down, the cove. Black, volcanic rocks edged the cove, molding it onto the shape of a three-quarter moon. The sea broke on the barricading reef and, after heaving and swelling on the inward side of the reef, swept almost languidly across the cove, breaking again.

The realtor took the liberty of leaning his elbows on the wall, along with the rest of them. The soft, ascending wind pressed his shirt—so white it shone in the sun—against his chest. For a few moments the shirt beat against his chest as if stirred by the beat of his heart, then the wind continued up and his shirt hung loosely again, unstirring. He was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor lean, but this averageness was like a happy medium he had attained by his own efforts. The surface of his face was receptive of all reasonable requests; under the surface, as if it were a matter of modesty, lay a look of gratification for pleasures granted to past clients. In the eyes of the father, who was a shrewd man and who considered shrewdness a virtue, the realtor was a simple man, lacking in shrewdness.
The realtor was silent while they gazed down, musing and exclaiming, as if even one word might be an intrusion as intolerable as an uninvited guest down with them in that pricelessly private cove.

When they began to enter back into the house to inspect the rooms, the realtor walked by the side of the father, pointing out the stoutness of beams, the solidness of the teak floors, the lavish use of marble. Servants were no problem, he told them, although he would advise them not to inquire at the village. They might find someone there, but someone unreliable who would prefer to reside in the village and come to work in the morning, if that someone felt so inclined. In his office was a list of servants with references, and one couple—Japanese—he heartily recommended. The realtor did not accompany the father and older children down to the cove. He remained in the house, strolling from room to room with the mother and the little girl, and waiting with them in the garden for the others to climb up.

The father returned carrying the coat of his dark mainland suit over his shoulder. His tie hung over the other shoulder, blown back by the warm wind down in the cove. The two boys refused to sit down, though they were panting from the climb. They stood shifting weight from one foot to the other, excited, tossing their hair from their brows. Their tennis shoes and white socks were wet and sand laced their bare legs. Although, with other clients, the realtor, by habit, strained to hear low conversations going on across a room from him or in the back of his station wagon, in order, later, to contradict spontaneously as if he had not heard the criticism or adverse speculating, and although he often used a contemptuous indifference to jolt the obsequious into action and the hostile into a
recognition of the value of his time, with this family he was almost deaf, almost mute. While they were gathered again in the garden, the realtor thumbed through a black leather notebook, inquiring if they might care to see another house, closer to the city, with a pool and an acre of garden, or a large apartment, a condominium, with a spectacular view. The father, still exhilarated from the descent and his exploration of the cove, suspected that this reminding of other places was a strategy to rouse the family to a desperate desire for this one. He smiled tolerantly, clapped his elder son around the shoulders, and moved toward the gate. The realtor followed the family, swinging the gate closed and locking it while they stood by the road, gazing up at the rest of the land above or gazing out to sea, familiarizing themselves with the spot.

By early June the family had moved in. Canvas chairs and chaise longues colored the terrace and in the cove a small rowboat rigged with a yellow sail resembled a floating flower. Children called to one another up and down the stairs, their voices always on the verge of echoing, and sometimes a brightly colored garment or towel lay for a night and part of the next day on the steps or on the sand and, seen from above, the fallen cloth claimed that region for the family. The fragrance of plumeria and flowering ginger drifted down to the cove and the scent of the sea rose, permeating the rooms of the house. At certain times of the day, early morning and late evening, the water in the cove was like a giant, dark, narcissist's mirror overhung by the mingled scents. Four cousins, ranging in age from seven to eleven, came over by plane from the mainland in July. They came all together, although from two families, the older ones in charge of the two younger. They were met at
the island airport by the entire family. It was already early evening by the time the children got down into the cove. The sons and elder daughter of the host family ventured out farther toward the reef than their cousins who, adrift for the first time in the sea, were awed by the gradual loss of the others to the dusk and distance and by the eeriness of their containment in that large stone bowl that seemed to shrink when they dropped their heads back and gazed up at the great shoulders of earth and, far up yet only halfway up, the lighted house that hung in the green, darkening mass.

The realtor passed the house once, with him in his station wagon an executive of a hotel chain who was interested in acreage on the island. The client was talking incessantly, and the realtor did not glance out to find the foliage and the gate that marked the property until they had passed it by a mile.

On days that were oppressively warm, the damp heat, the metallic, lifeless shining of the waters, the steaming garden, and the land mass on which the house was perched, all seemed to comprise an initiation. They were more conscious than ever that they dwelled on an island. On more pleasant days it had begun to be as habitually under their feet as the continent they had been born to. Now the heat loosed the moorings of the island and of the memory, and the continent itself seemed to have been no more solidly in place than the island. The children swam in the morning and again in the afternoon, played cards and other games under the three large umbrellas on the sand, and indolently amused themselves in the house. The mother took her dips in the morning before anyone was up. The air was already warm and the sun bright, but a diffident presence was with her: a coolness that she was certain she would
not have found had her family accompanied her. The father swam in the afternoon with the children. Each parent had a time that favored him.

After his swim, the father lay prone on the sand, his feet toward the land, his head toward the sea. He closed his eyes, hearing the water, the barking of the small black poodle running back and forth in the shallows, and the voices of the smaller children under the umbrellas. He lifted his head from his arms to face the other way, glancing out to the figures borne high on the serene, incoming swell. Three were more or less in a row, the fourth, his elder son, was at a farther distance, treading water. He laid his head down again and did not see the boy tossed into the air. One of the younger boys on the sand saw and laughed at what he thought was his cousin's amazing antic. His son's scream came to the father in two ways: it came over the water and it came through the sand, reverberating against his body. The boy was in the same spot, his arms raised. A few yards from the boy a dark fin detached itself from the dark, swarming spots that plagued the father's vision in the intense light, circled the boy, and disappeared. The boy disappeared with it, lost like the fin in the glittering air and water.

Their excitement in the water deafened the rest of the children to the terror in the cry. The father running into the water was a common sight to them, and their abiding in the water for so many more hours of the day gave them, as usual, a secret sense of their superior adaptability. The great, dark body gliding past them and around and beneath them sent them to shore as clumsily and eccentrically as if they had never learned to swim. The children under the umbrellas huddled down on their haunches, facing the sea or
facing the cliffs, screaming the name of the creature. The father felt the shark pass under him and glimpsed it, and his own body seemed to dissolve, as if that languidly, monstrously gliding creature destroyed him without touching him. Way above the cove a child was climbing the steps, screaming up to the house the same word as the children below, and stumbling on the dog that ran up before him and stopped and ran up farther, barking all the way.

The daughter, with the help of the older boys, pushed the small dinghy across the sand and out into the water. Alone, to leave room in the boat for her father and brother, she rowed out to the place where her father was diving and waited there, the boat rocking and tugging away from her oars. She watched for the fin and for the large, dark body again, sighting neither within the great bowl of water, luminous, clear, except for the spreading and separating patch of blood a yard from the boat. The father rose and dove again, rose and clung to the side of the boat, and the sound of his breath was the sound of their terror as they drifted, rocked by the water and by the boat's own rocking. When he had rested for a few minutes he dove again and when he rose he lifted up to her the body of the boy. Her thin arms straining, she held to the body against the tug and drag of the water while her father swung himself up into the boat. Then together they drew the body up.