“Not at all.”
“Well, good-night, then.”
In unconscious conformity to accepted ritual, she held out a hand, and he accepted it briefly, and she was aware again of the dry, hard inoffensiveness of his touch. Turning, she crossed the terrace and the lobby inside and went up in the elevator. In her room, she undressed and wished for another drink and thought that she would remember to buy a bottle to keep in the room tomorrow. Lying in bed, she could not see the bright sand and water below, but she could hear the roar of the surf, and the sound without the sight had a mood of its own and its own effect upon the mind, and after a while she thought of a phrase she must have read somewhere at some time: the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world. The words had the quality of poetry, and they repeated themselves in her mind, but she could not remember where they came from or who had written them, and eventually she went to sleep.
Section 3
Down the beach a fat woman was sitting in a canvas chair under a large umbrella. The chair and the umbrella were matching pieces with alternating stripes of crimson and yellow. The woman was reading a book through the dark lenses of a pair of sunglasses, and every once in a while she would look up from the book and lift the glasses a little and stare out under them at a small girl who was playing in the sand about fifteen feet away between her and the water. The child was a skinny little thing with an incredible number of points and sharp edges. She had sparse red hair, a very light shade of red, almost pink, and it had been curled to make it look thicker than it was, but the effect had been only to make it look frizzled and brittle and no thicker at all. She was building little mounds of sand to represent buildings and tracing a path among the mounds to represent a road, and she was obviously bored with it and wishing for something more exciting to do. Sometimes she would stop what she was doing and look down the slope of the beach to the water, and then she would turn and look up the slope of the beach to the woman, but every time she looked at the woman, the woman was reading, or pretending to read, and the child would return to the buildings and road. Her imagination could instill no reality in them. They simply bored her, and what she really wanted was to go swimming in the ocean.
After quite a while the child got to her feet and walked up the beach to the woman and stood looking at her. She had learned from experience that this was an almost infallible technique in securing attention, and that the person so stared at would eventually respond, though not always in a way to be desired. The woman continued to look at her book, obviously trying to ignore the child, but signs of irritation were quickly apparent in a tic-like twitching of one corner of her mouth and in a turning of pages much more rapidly than they could possibly have been read. Conceding defeat, she lay the book face down in her lap and lifted the dark sunglasses, staring back at the child. She had difficulty sometimes in believing that this thin, homely girl was actually her daughter, had actually been conceived and nourished and issued in and by her own lush body, and if it had not been for a memory of pain that she had vowed would never be repeated she would have discounted the possibility entirely. Was it possible, she often wondered, that they had mixed things up in the hospital nursery?
“Yes, darling?” she said.
Her voice was heavy with imposed patience. The impossible child stared at her solemnly and kicked sand. “May I go swimming now?” she said.
“No, darling. You know I won’t permit you to go swimming by yourself. You might be drowned.”
“You could come with me.”
“Not now, darling. Perhaps later.”
“That’s what you said a long time ago.”
“It wasn’t a long time ago. It only seems like it.”
“Well, that’s the same thing. It’s the way things seem that’s important.”
“Please, darling. Don’t argue.”
“I’d like very much to go swimming. I wouldn’t drown. I’d stay in the shallow water.”
“No, darling. You know how Mother worries.”
The woman lowered the sunglasses over her eyes and her eyes to the book. She stared at the open pages, comprehending nothing, conscious of the girl staring at her. After another minute, the girl turned and walked away, and the woman sighed with relief. The symbols on the pages resumed their assigned meaning, establishing relationship with one another, and she began to read.
The girl returned to the place where she had been, playing in the sand. Deliberately, with one naked foot, she leveled the buildings and obliterated the road. Turning, she looked up the beach at the man who was lying; there in the sun on his back with one arm bent up and over to protect his eyes. The man had come there about twenty minutes ago and had lain down and had been lying there without moving ever since. She wondered if he was asleep. If he went to sleep in the hot sun, he might be badly burned. He looked nice. He was not very young, but on the other hand neither was he very old, which was quite apparent in spite of the gray in his hair just over his ears. His body was slender and lightly tanned and didn’t have any ugly overlap of flesh at the belt of his swimming trunks. She wondered if he would be willing to talk with her if she were to go up and introduce herself. Quite apart from that, however, it was possibly her duty to go and see if he were actually asleep and in danger of being badly burned. She threw a look over her shoulder at her mother and then walked up to where the man was lying. She stood looking down at him, and she began to think that the technique was not going to work for once, that the man was actually asleep, because it took him such a very long time to respond.
Eventually, however, he did. He stirred and lowered his arm and opened his eyes and looked up at her, and she waited patiently to see if he was going to be annoyed or indifferent or friendly. As it turned out, he didn’t seem to be any of those things. He seemed merely curious.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she said. “My name is Eugenie.”
“Is it? Mine’s Avery.”
“Were you asleep?”
“No. I was just lying with my eyes closed.”
“I thought you might be asleep. You hadn’t moved for so long, I mean. It’s dangerous to sleep in the sun.”
“I know. It was kind of you to be worried about it.”
“Well, to tell the truth, I wasn’t. Not very, anyhow. I just thought you might be willing to talk with me.” He sat up, brushing the sand off his shoulders with one hand. Taking this as an invitation, or at least a kind of concession, she sat down in the sand facing him.
“Why do you want to talk?” he said.
“Because I’m bored.”
“Bored? I didn’t think girls your age ever got in than condition.”
“Well, you’re wrong. I’m very frequently bored.”
“That’s too bad. Can’t you find anything to do?”
“What I really want to do is go swimming.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
“Because my mother won’t let me. She’s a terrible coward about the water. She’s afraid I may be drowned.”
“That isn’t very likely if you stay in shallow water.”
“I know. That’s what I tell her, but it doesn’t do any good. She said she might go with me later, but she probably won’t. She always says that just to get me to stop asking, but she hardly ever does. She doesn’t like the water.”
“Is that your mother under the umbrella?”
“Yes. Reading the book.”
At that moment the woman looked up and lifted the sunglasses. Missing the girl, she sat up suddenly. “Eugenie,” she called.
The girl turned her head in the direction of the voice. “Here I am, Mother.”