The Blood Oranges (7 page)

W
ITHOUT PAIN? PERHAPS NOT EXACTLY WITHOUT PAIN
. After all, the artistic arbiter of all our lives—Love—is only too expert at depressing with one of her invisible fingers the lonely key, the sour note of pain, and most of us enjoy the occasional sound of pain, though it approaches agony. In fact, could any perfect marriage exist without hostile silences, without shadows, without sour notes? Obviously not. Throughout the many years of my sexually aesthetic
union with Fiona, for instance, there were the momentary but nonetheless bitter whispered confrontations over use of the bed in the master bedroom, brief spurts of anger about a sudden loss of form on the violet tennis court. And there were also instances of deeper and more prolonged periods of threatened harmony, such as the nearly disastrous days of my love for a small young woman whose husband was one of the few men whose spirit and personality and entire body (his lips, his eyes, his fat chest, his beard) Fiona found intolerable. Revulsion in my wife was rare, this woman whose very quickness of breath could liberate the lover buried inside the flesh of almost any ordinary man in undershorts. But despite his strength and crippling desperation, the husband of the small young woman was clearly doomed. I pleaded for him. Fiona tried. We failed. There were tears, locked doors, a wedding ring slipped like a cigar band around a rolled-up handwritten note of accusation. We failed. Then luckily enough, Love herself changed the metallic scene, shifted to some sweeter pitch our melodies.

I am a man of feeling. And in our more than eighteen years of dreams and actuality, Fiona and I knew hours of miserable silence, knew the shock of intimacy momentarily spurned, attended funerals, held hands in the whiteness of other weddings, tasted departure and the last liquid kiss, tried to console each other for each pair of friends who, weaker or less fortunate than ourselves, went down in flames. Once in anger Fiona snatched from my hand the brief silken panties she had only moments before slipped down and removed. Once I was graceless enough to lead Fiona nude from our dimly lit living room under the quiet
eyes of a naked man whose extended fingers were pressed together as if in prayer.

And more. The gradual discovery that most people detest a lover, no matter how modest. My unavoidable fist fight with an older wind-sucking man over the question of virginity in young girls. Fiona weeping through the wood with the sun running wild over her lovely buttocks. Hugh’s neck in his noose. All this and more we knew, all this we suffered.

Much of it must be described as pain, or at least as degrees of pain. But when I saw Fiona’s long fingers reaching inside somebody else’s heavily starched white shirt, or when I heard her voice receding, or when I listened with interest to one of her analytical and yet excited accounts of a night of love away from me, or smelled cigar smoke on her belly, or (to shift perspective) on all those occasions when I found myself alone for the last time with a weeping woman, when I tore myself away from the small sheep’s golden curls and gave back keys, turned off certain bedroom lights forever, understood that this small voice or that would never again lie coiled in my golden ear and that never again would I know this girl’s saliva, that woman’s passionate secretions, when an unhappy negative magic was actually transforming a real mistress into a mental mistress —was all this at least my true pain, my real agony?

Not at all. The nausea, the red eyes, the lips white in blind grief and silent hate, these may have been the externals of a pain that belonged to Hugh but never once to me. Hugh’s pain perhaps. Not mine. It is simply not in my character, my receptive spirit, to suffer sexual possessiveness, the shock of aesthetic greed, the bile that greases most
matrimonial bonds, the rage and fear that shrivels your ordinary man at the first hint of the obvious multiplicity of love. Once Hugh told me that some small question of sex or the mere beginnings of jealousy often produced in him the sensation that he was drawing fire into his large intestine through a straw. But this pain, at least, is a pain I have never known. Not for me the red threads around the neck, the pillow in the open mouth, the ruptured days, the nights of shouting, the nights of trembling on the toilet. Jealousy, for me, does not exist, while anything that lies in the palm of love is good.

Of course in his own way Hugh was also a sex-singer of sorts. But Hugh was tormented, tempestuous, unreasonable. He was capable of greed and shame and jealousy. When at last he allowed the true artistic nature of our design to seep into consciousness, for instance, he persecuted himself and begrudged me Catherine, tried to deny me Catherine at a time when I knew full well that, thanks to my unseen helping hand, he himself was finally about to lurch down his own peculiar road with Fiona. And yet Hugh was also a sex-singer of sorts. But in Hugh’s dry mouth our lovely song became a shriek.

“T
HERE SHE IS!”

Hugh clutched my arm with that hand that served as two, whispering and pointing his flipper into a nearby field: “There she is. See her? Perfect, perfect!”

His whisper was as dark and sparkling as the light in the black center of his narrow eyes. Hearing his curiously eager words and the three small black cameras knocking together on the ends of their straps, and seeing the white sun and sandy hills and the sweat that was already seeping from under the alpine pack Hugh carried high on his shoulders, of course I felt that his black sylvan whisper and all this hot rich ceramic desolation augured well for this our first photographic expedition together. And in sympathy if not complete understanding, my own whisper became as deep and eager as Hugh’s.

“Perfect,” I said, “let’s hunt her down.”

For a moment his fingers squeezed my arm in a fierce rippling peristaltic motion, and then his hand, that serpent’s head, drifted down to one of the cameras and rested. Together we stared at the field, I with one hand in a convenient pocket, Hugh with his curly black hair uncombed as usual and the long black sailor pants low on his hips. The mattock, wielded by our quarry in a nearby field, continued to rise and fall, to flash in that hot clear air, to ping on an occasional stone. The crumbling cottage, the crumbling stone lean-to, the haystack shrunken and propped in position with pieces of fossilized wood, the small well without visible rope or chain or bucket—at a glance the desolation of the farm was obvious, and already I knew that so much desolation aroused in Hugh at least a shade of my own crisp appreciation. It was all complete, down to the usual upright skeleton of a dog affixed to the tall stake driven through the center of the haystack. And shading my eyes with one dry hand and nudging Hugh, gesturing toward the white bones strung intact to the pole, I could not help
smiling at this poignant evidence of their archaic ways, could not help thinking that the bones of the dead dog might serve some greater purpose than the bones of the child Fiona had discovered that distant day in the church.

And nodding toward the field that looked like fired putty: “The haystack would make a pretty good picture. Don’t you think?”

He waited. “Hold on now,” he whispered. “When she’s warmed up a little, I’ll wave.”

Already I was beginning to see the afternoon through the eye of one of Hugh’s cameras. Sitting on a naturally sculpted boulder in the bend of our dirt road, smoking and clasping my knee, and with a certain mild intensity watching Catherine’s one-armed husband cross the field and in long cheerful strides approach the stooping figure, suddenly I began to smile at that total incongruity which must lie, I thought, at the center of what Hugh had several times referred to as his field trips into the old world of sex. At best a photograph could result in small satisfaction, I thought. Yet now even this small satisfaction was beginning to take shape in my mind, and for Hugh’s sake I welcomed it, breathed deeply of the scent of pepper on the hot air, made fish lips for myself and through them expelled a few thoughtful puffs of smoke, considered the artfulness my one-armed friend might yet display.

Certainly Hugh was artful even now. Watching them from my place of comfort on the large hot boulder, I could see that he was talking, though he could no more speak
croak peonie
than I could, was demonstrating his cameras and displaying the contents of his alpine sack, which by
now he had unslung from the enormous bony construction of his shoulders. Already the mattock lay abandoned in the deep brown furrow, already the tall man and short girl were standing face to face, obviously Hugh was trying to use his pinned-up flipper to fence his way through the darkness and sullenness of her suspicion. In the distance and in the shade of my hand they faced each other, and already I knew that today the lone girl would farm no more.

Hugh’s head was nodding. Once he squatted and reached his single all-purpose hand into the furrow and then extended that dark hand palm up to the girl. What lay cupped in the palm of his unquenchable hand? Was he admiring the soil? Was he admiring some scrap of root, some fibrous hooflike bulb that the girl had been attempting to cultivate with patience and the dull hand-crafted mattock? To myself I laughed at Hugh’s ingenuity, energy, determination to win the lone figure in the field for the probing unblushing gaze of his high-powered cameras.

I changed hands, squinted at Hugh’s distant, persuasive, perhaps even poetic use of sign language. The heat was intense, I realized, and yet my skin was dry.

And then all the glazed ceramic substance of that colorful and nearly lifeless panorama trembled, shivered, cracked and splintered into new and suddenly moving fragments of light, color, shards of earth, and side by side Hugh and his new photographic subject turned, began to walk together in the direction of the crumbling barn. Hugh’s one long powerful arm was in the air and waving.

We stood in the earthen darkness of that barn, the three of us, and I saw immediately that two urine-colored sheep
were trembling together in one heavily cobwebbed corner.

“My latest model is going to pose. These sullen types always end up compliant.”

“We’re in luck,” I said. “She looks beautifully indifferent. Anything I can do to help?”

Unleashing one of his small black cameras, Hugh frowned at the setting of its highly polished and unmerciful lens.

“In a minute. Right now just smile at her. Make her feel at ease.”

I had only to glance at the girl to see that she was in fact quite unafraid of Hugh, of me, of even the cold and completely foreign complexity of the cameras hanging in their black cases around Hugh’s neck. At once I saw that she was young, untutored, uninterested in anything except the clumsy mattock and challenge of the ceramic field. The dull rubber boots cut off at her bare knees, the dry knees that appeared to have been scoured with sand, the colorless apron tied around a long burlap skirt sewn no doubt by an old woman, and the leather coat—at once I saw that so many unappealing articles of dress might well conceal a body that would prove to be in absolute contrast to the clothes themselves. But would this girl actually pose for Hugh without her rubber boots and burlap skirt and stocky leather coat? I was unconvinced. Her mouth was small, her eyebrows were gently drawn. And yet her face was the color of green olives and made me suspect that the composition of her blood might have been determined at least in part by one of the barbaric strains. Perhaps she was strong. Perhaps her indifference was not at all the same as compliance. Perhaps the old woman who had sewn the skirt had also taught her some outlandish and hence all the more
crippling version of a moral code—though the girl’s small eyes were dark, and I had faith in Hugh.

I smiled at Hugh’s latest model. She did not smile back. But her eyes remained on mine and I began to wonder if she was aware of my large and closely shaven face, my slice of pure gold hair. And the barn was filled with a warm aura of suspension. There were the shadows, the dust, the floor that was a soft black pebbled carpet of sheep droppings, the smells and light that made me think of the inside of a dying rose. Hugh was squatting while the girl waited and the sheep peered over their shoulders at the three of us.

“Peasant Nudes,”
Hugh whispered, and simultaneously the girl and I glanced down at his camera which was now clicking. “That’s what I’m going to call my collection.
Peasant Nudes.”

He was taking photographs, for some time now had been taking photographs. Oddly squatting with one knee sharply bent and one long leg stretched out in a nearly horizontal position, eyes and nose buried inside the back of his camera, in this way he was crouching, inching to and fro at the girl’s feet, aiming up at us the enormous wide-open lens of that clicking camera.

“That’s it. That’s perfect. Now let’s just shove her over against the beam.”

Coming between us, pushing and inching with his dark blue contorted legs, suddenly rising to both knees so that the girl drew back, and clicking the shutter release and rewind lever and hissing eagerly between his lips which had become little more than a tight shadow, slowly Hugh approached us on his knees and then, with little more than his own intensity and the aim of the camera, moved her,
repositioned the small dark head against the dark worm-eaten flank of an upright beam.

“Easy. Easy. That’s perfect. See how she’s holding her head jammed against that old beam? Perfect. Most of the faces of these peasant nudes are just fat and happy. They’re all mothers, with or without children. But this one,” inching his knees across the carpet of sheep droppings, doing his one-handed sleight-of-hand tricks with two cameras and what I supposed was a light meter, “this face is skintight with the beauty of illiteracy. That’s what will show up in the pictures. Wait and see. The sullen face of an illiterate virgin.”

I waited, then heard my own low whisper: “I’ve been thinking the same thing. That she’s a virgin.”

“She’s got a few little brown hairs on her chin. She couldn’t be better.”

Yet now I was watching not the girl but Hugh. And Hugh remained on his knees, continued to walk about on his knees. His shoulders were struggling against the sudden unreasonable dictates of his dream, were working against impossible odds to maintain his balance. He was sweating. His thin cotton shirt had come free at the waist. But his arms, or rather that lurid combination of arm and partial arm, most held my attention. And in passing I noticed that the girl’s small dark expressionless eyes were fixed, like mine, on the excited and suddenly gesticulating remnant of his ruined arm.