Myself, I was freezing from without. Breakfast was eaten in a large tile-and-plaster-and-Formica combination kitchen-dining room equipped with its own chill-breathing air-conditioner, and my wet robe was just getting clammier and clammier no matter how much hot food I put in my stomach. Halfway through the meal I started to sneeze.
It apparently gave Eileen an excuse to look at me. “What’s the matter? You’re shivering!”
“My robe’s a little wet,” I admitted. “From the walk.”
“Neal,” she said, “find something for him to wear, until we can get to the store.”
“Sure,” he said, and turned his friendly look toward me. “Now?”
“Finish breakfast first,” I told him. “It’s not that bad.” Though it was. I was feeling queasy and light-headed, and I wasn’t sure if that meant I was in love or had the flu. The symptoms seemed to be the same.
All of McGadgett’s clothing was too large and lumpish. I had become very self-conscious about my appearance all at once, so I spent a long time testing different items of clothing in front of the dresser mirror before finally settling on a pair of red boxer-style swimming trunks and a white pullover shirt that didn’t look too bad in its billowy fashion. Then I dawdled in the bedroom another two or three minutes, hesitant to show myself.
But there was no point stalling any longer. Reluctant, awkward, self-conscious, I took my nearly naked body out of the bedroom and into the living room, where Sheila Foney, wearing an astonishing pink string bikini, was irritably on the telephone, saying, “You don’t seem to realize you have certain responsibilities.” Seeing me, she told the phone, “Hold on a minute,” capped the mouthpiece with her palm, and said to me, “They’re at the beach.”
“Thank you,” I said, and hurried outside, not wanting to hear any more of her conversation.
McGadgett was out at the pocket beach in front of the house, supine beneath the sun, wearing a multicolored cousin of the swimming trunks he’d loaned me. Great dark glasses covered his eyes and much of the rest of his face, and his pinkish flesh gleamed with either suntan lotion or perspiration. Out in the water, Eileen floated on her back in the easy swell, her body trisected by narrow lavender bands of bathing suit.
The heat and humidity seemed much worse now that I’d grown used to air-conditioning. Plowing barefoot across the sand, I felt myself growing soggy again, and was already anticipating the chill the next time I would go inside. Why did people treat themselves in such a way?
McGadgett lifted his head slightly at my arrival, grinning his overly familiar grin. “Welcome to civilian life,” he said.
“Thank you. I guess I’ll...” And I gestured vaguely toward the ocean and Eileen.
“Be my guest.” And he lowered his smiling head to his beach towel again.
I removed the pullover shirt and ran into the water, which was cold but refreshing. I hadn’t swum in years, but the movements came effortlessly back to me, and I stroked steadily out to where Eileen was now treading water and watching my progress with a dubious expression on her face. “You look like everybody else,” she said, when I got there.
I couldn’t help laughing. “You mean you only love me in my uniform?”
“Maybe so,” she said, and swam away from me.
I didn’t know how to take that — I didn’t know how to take anything — so I didn’t follow her. Instead, I floated awhile as she had been doing, my closed eyes toward the sun and my mind just starting to pick experimentally at the scab of my recent experiences. Who was I now, and what was I going to do with myself?
“Listen, you.”
I opened my eyes, and she was back. Lowering my legs so I could tread water, I said, “Mm?”
She was squinting determinedly in the sunlight, as though she’d come to a firm decision to take charge. “Are you really going to hang around here with me?”
“If you want me,” I said.
“Don’t put it on me, you son of a bitch,” she said.
I said, “I mean I want to stay with you, but if you tell me to go away I’ll go away.”
That disgusted her, for some reason. “Oh, go away,” she said, and turned about as though to swim to some other part of the ocean.
“No,” I said.
She swam in a circle and came back to me, frowning. “I thought you said you’d go away if I told you to go away.”
“Only if you meant it,” I explained. “Only if you really don’t want me. Bad temper doesn’t count.”
She paddled about for a minute, thinking that one over, then came back and said, “I’m bad-tempered most of the time.”
“Why?”
She glared at me. “If you’re going to be my boyfriend,” she said, “you’d better stop talking to me like some wise old priest.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t feel like any wise old anything.”
“And that’s something else,” she said. “I’ll be darned if I’m going to call you Brother Benedict.”
“I agree.”
“So, what then? Ben? Benny?”
“My real name,” I said, the whole sentence being cumbersome in my mouth, “is Charles. Uh, Rowbottom.”
“Charles. What did they used to call you? Chuck? Charley?”
“Charlie,” I said.
“Which one? IE Charlie or EY Charley?”
I thought back, surprised at the question and trying to remember. Nicknames are mostly spoken, but from time to time there’d be notes... “IE,” I decided.
“Good,” she said.
“What’s the difference?”
“EY Charleys are irresponsible,” she stated, then said, “I’m getting tired out here. Let’s go in for a while.”
McGadgett had disappeared, taking his beach towel with him, leaving behind the pullover shirt and one other beach towel. “I’ll get you a towel,” Eileen said.
“I’ll get one,” I said, and started for the house, but she held up a hand like a traffic cop and said, “Wait there, I know where they are. Besides, they might be screwing in there and we don’t want to bring you along too fast.”
So she went for the towel, and I stood on the beach and thought about screwing. I had not entered the monastery at age twenty-four completely inexperienced, but ten years is a long time, and now I stood before the concept of screwing the way a small child stands before the star-filled night sky, feeling its vast mystery and its close fascination in tiny tremors behind the knees.
By the time she came back I was a flustered wreck, unable to look her in the eye and certainly unable to look at any other part of her. But she didn’t notice, or at least gave no sign that she’d noticed. “You better not stay out here too long,” she said, handing me a folded-up towel. “It’s your first day in the sun.”
“That it is,” I said. The towel, unfolded, showed a smiling couple with their arms around one another in a sailboat. I sat on them, and Eileen sat near me on her own towel, and for a while we remained like that in companionable silence.
Then Eileen said, “I think you’ve had enough sun. We’ll take the car and go get you some clothes.”
“I don’t see how,” I said.
“What? I don’t follow.”
“Well,” I said, “I spent the monastery’s money to get here. I can’t do that anymore, and I don’t have any money of my own.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said.
“But I have to worry about it. You need money to live in this world.”
“Look, Buh—” She shook her head, in mock annoyance at herself, and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get there. Charlie. Look, Charlie.”
I smiled at her; she delighted me. “I’ll answer to any name you want to use,” I said.