The Blood Oranges (12 page)

“We’ve been married a long time,” she said, and her words were like the wine from the bottle—slow, inflectionless, filled with a taste that pleased the mind as well as tongue. I approved of what she had said, heard the soft
breath that sustained the sentence, began to see the sweat and soiled years heaped up in the vague shadowy sockets of her eyes. Dull words, and yet enjoyable precisely because the three exhausted children and the now preoccupied one-armed husband could not be deduced from them. Her words alone, and they allowed me to choose between implied security or resignation or, finally, indignation at what she might have taken to be the first signs of betrayal. I put the wine into her fingers and made my choice.

“Married a long time?” I repeated slowly, turning her few words into mine and at the same time giving them back to her like low notes on a flute. “Fiona and I have also been married a long time. As a matter of fact, Fiona is a kind of priestess of marriage. Her most remarkable quality, I think, is suppleness. But it’s late. Are you sure you want to sit out here like this?”

“I like your voice in the darkness.”

“OK,” I said, preparing to shape my words carefully, resonantly, and putting down my half-empty glass between us, “but what about your husband? He’s probably worried about you, like Fiona and me. Wouldn’t it be better if you were in there sleeping with the children?”

“You needn’t worry. None of you.”

I waited, and beneath my two hands now clasped around one heavy knee, the camel-colored cloth of my trousers felt like combed linen while the knee itself felt like some living prehistoric bone full of solidity, aesthetic richness, latent athleticism. Imperceptibly I rocked on the warm stone and again glanced briefly at the embryonic stars in the grapes.

“We can hardly see each other. We don’t know each other. I’m a lot older than you think.”

She appeared to be listening, sitting and waiting with her hands in her lap and her fresh glass of wine untasted, listening and waiting with eyes now averted and her large distant body filled with thought. But just when it occurred to me that she had drifted into some new private solitude or had merely decided not to answer, she spoke, and between the slow golden roll of my own last words and the sudden inspired appearance of Fiona, whose hopes were rising, I heard her brief declaration and found myself wanting to retrieve the subdued and levelheaded sound of her voice from the grapes, the black leaves, the dark night.

“I’m forty-three.”

Was she more aware of herself than I had thought? Was she trying to change the subject or to confide in me? At least her statement of age deserved my attention, deserved the two of us sitting side by side. But then the air shook, the arbor shook, the scent of Fiona’s bath soap and jasmine sweetened the night, and my own investigative mood and Fiona’s springing bow collided, coalesced.

“Baby, you’re sharing secrets!”

“We’re just talking,” I murmured. “Join us?”

“I couldn’t sit still. Not tonight.”

She had come from nowhere, as she often did, and was breathing quickly. Once again I observed that Fiona’s obviously substantial bone structure was no impediment to her grace or to her abrupt and totally unexpected late-hour turns of mind. I nodded and allowed my face to reflect a faintly deeper shade of my composure, pleasure, good
humor. Fiona shifted her feet, glanced around the arbor with what I knew to be girlish delight and womanly detachment, leaned close to me and apparently without thinking slipped the bows of my spectacles from behind my ears and just as quickly slipped them into place again. Her feet were bare. And then she was suddenly on her knees and holding my companion tightly about the waist while I, rocking and humming to myself in silent song, could not help marveling a little more at Fiona’s transformational powers and sensual flights. I smelled Fiona’s jasmine and perspiration and waited, with growing possessiveness stared at the solid and yet agitated shapes of the one woman seated and the other kneeling in the blackness of the night. My companion seemed neither to resist nor welcome my wife’s embrace. But I thought she might be imperceptibly relaxing, if anything, into Fiona’s arms.

“I’m glad you’re here. I want you here. You and Hugh.”

The voice I never tired of hearing was both muffled and clear, soft and strident. There was love in her voice and yet she was speaking quickly and in another moment would leap to her feet, I knew, and disappear.

“Easy, Fiona,” I murmured. “Calm down.”

“Oh, Cyril, don’t be stuffy.”

I laughed, made my musing face in the darkness, lowered my voice. “At least Catherine doesn’t think I’m stuffy. Catherine and I were having a nice conversation until you came along.”

“Sharing secrets, baby. I know. Drinking wine.”

But again Fiona eclipsed the warm comforting sounds deep in my chest and before I could speak raised her face, reached up, seized the other woman’s large hardly
distinguishable head in both hands, waited, then dropped her arms. The gesture, I understood, was another intimation of a kiss between women, the kind of gesture Fiona allowed herself when she could not bear to merely kiss someone’s cheek but when passionate kissing was nonetheless inappropriate. I was unable to see either woman’s eyes, and yet I knew that they were looking at each other and that Fiona’s eyes were probably moist and luminous.

“Cyril’s different from other men. Do you like him? Do you like my Cyril?”

“Of course she likes me.”

“Baby, you ruin everything.”

But I was ready this time, and before she was able to relinquish my companion and regain her feet, slowly and deliberately I placed my hand on Fiona’s hip and confirmed to my own satisfaction that the elastic of her panties was still to be felt beneath the gauzy nylon of the short dress. I had merely grazed her lower hip with the tips of my fingers, and of course the panties were not of any great importance. But Fiona always perceived my motives, no matter how subtle, and now standing in the darkess she had understood immediately the nature of the curiosity that lay like a shadow behind the delicate, nearly instinctive movements of my right hand.

“OK,” she said, and for a moment became a flurry of swift purpose. “You asked for it. There they are.”

I laughed, leaned down and with my palm covered the small white perforated piece of intimate apparel where it had landed on the toe of my white tennis shoe, then stuffed it easily into my right-hand trouser pocket. Catherine had not comprehended this domestic incident, I thought, and
Fiona was gone. I wondered if she had satisfied her own curiosity while pouting at mine.

“Where were we,” I said and waited, adjusted the bows of the spectacles properly behind my ears, casually ran my fingers through my briefly disarrayed waves of hair, crossed my knees, struck up one of my slow-burning oval cigarettes. My wife and the one-armed stranger were everywhere and nowhere, the dark night was growing longer, deeper.

“Quiet, you two,” 1 called agreeably in the direction of the invisible well house, “you’ll wake the children.”

And then again drifting, so to speak, to my partner: “We were talking,” I murmured, “what about?”

“Ourselves.”

“Exactly. Telling each other heart-stoppers, as Fiona would say.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“Of course I’m not.”

“I don’t want to run around all night in the darkness.” “Nor do I.”

Pausing, moving one of her empty hands to the cool breadth of an upper arm, she spoke slowly out of the black shadows: “She said you’re different from other men. What did she mean?”

I waited, and then another length of golden thread went toward its mark in the darkness: “The real secret is that she likes to pinch my bottom. That’s all. But trust us,” I added. “Trust Fiona and me.”

And then quietly and without shrugging her shoulders: “Why not?”

I exhaled, nodded, began to feel at last that though we had not changed positions or touched each other even accidently,
nonetheless there was the decided possibility that my massive oral cavity and the vast dark sockets of her invisible eyes were now groping toward each other in some sort of sympathetic identification, some warm analogy of bone and shadow. “I’ve told you a secret,” I said. “Now tell me one.”

“All right.”

Did she take a breath? Was she turning her head in my direction? Had I heard the first welcome shades of laughter in her voice? I shifted knees, waited. And then she spoke softly, matter-of-factly: “Your wife really meant you’re the perfect man. I didn’t have to ask what she meant. I knew.” “Another heart-stopper,” I said as softly as I could, and heard the sweetness thickening. “Thanks for the heart-stopper. But how did you know?”

“I knew.”

A fresh surprise, more pauses, the low sound of her accent poised between invitation and resignation, a suggestion of despondency balancing the brief hint of pleasure. Could she have meant what she had said? Seen what she had claimed to see? At the very moment of wading from the absurd and dangerous canal had some vague recognition of the headless god lolling in the guise of my composure overcome her mortification and fear for her children? I could not be sure. But at least we were turning the pages at a swifter pace. And was I about to subject us to the test of the children? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Carefully I reached through our small wall of darkness and filled her glass.

“So you think you see me as Fiona sees me,” I said, and laughed. “The perfect man.”

“Yes. But it doesn’t have much to do with me.”

“Not even now?”

“Not yet.”

“There you go again. More disappointment.”

“Why should I be disappointed?”

“Of course Fiona exaggerates. I’m a lot more ordinary than she’d like you to believe.”

“You asked for a secret. I told you.”

“Good. Let’s have another.”

“No. It’s your turn. What’s in your pocket? What did she give you a moment ago?”

Wrong, I thought, I had been admirably wrong, and I allowed myself to shape one gigantic, tremorless ring of smoke and then set it free and watched it swell, widen, disintegrate heavily in our night of the untasted grapes. Apparently she had witnessed something of Fiona’s playful exchange after all, had been aroused by being in the presence of Fiona’s swift act of partially denuding herself. But did I wish to hazard a discussion of Fiona’s simple and private gesture, or resort to it? Might I not better keep at least this relatively insignificant example of Fiona’s sex-language to myself? Was the risk too great, the ploy too easy? I made my choice.

“Just Fiona’s panties,” I said under my breath. “They’re not important.”

“Why did she take them off?”

“Who knows? Do you really care?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Trust me.”

“You remind me of my father.”

“Listen,” I said then, as if our heads were inches apart, “listen a moment.” I waited, holding out my hand for
silence and knowing that it was in fact time to act, and then carefully I uncrossed my legs and stood up so that the hard cool globules of the lowest grapes spilled onto the top of my head and brushed my ears. I was relaxed. I was crowned with fruit. And then under my breath: “Listen. I knew they’d wake the children. Let’s go.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“We’d better look.”

She moved, she too must have felt the passing weight of the grapes. I led the way, she followed. I heard the sound of her breathing, strolled on. At the far side of the funeral cypresses I glanced at the dying eye of my cigarette and waited while the trailing woman slowly extricated herself from the thorns and brittle twigs that lined the opening through the tall black cypresses. Beneath the clothesline that I had rigged at dusk we paused among the silhouetted trousers, dress, miniature dresses, stockings, all greater than life size and still dripping with the waters of the black canal. As we approached the villa that Fiona had opened up for them, I noted the high silver grass, the broken tiles, the listing shutters stuffed with rags and impacted with the earthen ceramics of transient wasps, the small gothic niche near the doorway where birds had raised their young and no candle burned, no icon glowed. And entering the cold corridor, I in the lead and she following, I smiled at the sound of the snoring dog and at the feeling of wet stone beneath my hand and the smell of the old kerosene lantern that was smoking in one of the cell-like rooms ahead of us. Once again I knew that a ruined villa was even more appropriate to passion than was a silent grape arbor filled with stars.

“Come on,” I whispered, “let’s look at them.”

And then I was holding high the lantern by its rusty wire loop and we were standing shoulder to shoulder and peering down at the two large and almost identical heads lying side by side in the smoky orange light at our feet. The faces were square, the curls were tight and dark, the lips were thick. Could these be the faces of small girls? I could understand their size (the mother was large, the father now silently romping with my wife was large) but it was difficult to account for their expressions of sexless power.

“That’s Dolores,” I heard my companion whispering, “that’s Eveline.”

Dolores, Eveline. Together we studied the sleepers, Catherine and I, and even these children were beginning to make a difference, were already strengthening nameless bonds between us, as I had thought they might.

“And somewhere over there,” she whispered, so that I lifted the lantern and swung it loosely in the direction she appeared to be pointing toward with her restrained and contented voice, “is Meredith.”

Together we felt our way among the piles of clothing, piles of blankets provided by Fiona, suddenly bulky articles of luggage (opened and ransacked or still locked, bound tight with archaic leather straps, but each piece smelling of the polluted water), until our slow elbow-knocking search at last revealed the girl called Meredith curled in naked sleep on a hasty pallet of Fiona’s pink sheets spread on the cold stones on the floor.

“She doesn’t like me,” I whispered, and leaning closer saw that one of her thin fingers was in her mouth.

“Of course she does.”

“Fiona always wins the confidence of children. No such luck for me.”