“Tell me,” he said. “Do you think I should get married?”
“Yes.” She gave him again her judicial stare. “Because you’re kind. Women like kind men. In the end it’s more important than anything else.”
The woman called sharply before he could answer, and the girl turned and started up the slope of the beach. Without stopping, she turned her head and said to him over her shoulder, “Good-by. I don’t suppose I’ll see you again,” and he stood and watched her go until she reached her mother, and continued to stand and watch as she and her mother, the fat woman and the thin child of points and edges, went away together. What had she called herself? Eugenie? Was it possible that the child really had such an inappropriate name? He wanted to laugh. Sustaining the sense of exhilaration and power that had risen within him as he emerged from the water, he felt uplifted and assured. Everything was so simple, really. All the complexities and distortions and doubts and fears were susceptible to dispersion by the answer of a child, and everything was, after all, so very, very simple.
He lay on the sand again and thought of Lisa. With this one, he thought, it would be possible. Because her flesh is pale and cool and quiet to the touch, devoid of fevers and hot adherence, it would be possible with her and time and resolution to establish and sustain an adequate relationship. One thing is certain. It must be done now and with this woman, or never and with no one. How I know this is not clear, but it is quite clear at any rate that it is true, and I even believe that this odd, ugly child Eugenie was sent this afternoon to establish it. Lisa. Lisa Sheridan. Lisa Sheridan Lawes. I can give her my name with a thought of intimacy and feel no more than the slightest revulsion. And even this will pass. Even this vestigial scar of early trauma and distortion will pass in time, and it will pass in the brick house above the river on High Street in the town of Corinth, in the place where trauma happened and distortion began and grew. It is all a matter of forgetting and learning, and it is not too late, though it would be too late after this last chance, and I am certain that it can be begun now and accomplished hereafter with this one woman with the pale, cool flesh.
But capacity? Diminishment and depletion of revulsion is one thing, a good thing but a negative thing, and capacity is quite another, because capacity is a positive rather than a negative, something that must be felt and done rather than simply not felt and not done. This is different. This is vastly more difficult. But it can be learned. I am sure that it is all a matter of learning, once you have unlearned all that formed the impediment to learning in the first place. One thing at a time. First one step and then the next. Like learning to walk. It will not do to consider all problems and perils together. One at a time. One after another as they are met. Who was it said that we would all be overwhelmed and terrified if we were conscious of all the deadly perils that threaten us every minute of every day in even the most commonplace affairs? It was Schopenhauer, I think. Yes, I am certain of it. It sounds just like him, the gloomy bastard, and I will not think any more about Schopenhauer, either, because he depresses me. I cannot at this moment think of anyone who ever lived who could possibly be worse for me to think about than Schopenhauer.
I will think, instead, about last night. She was quiet and remote in an aura of physical frailty, and it was not bad, it was not bad at all in the lounge and later on the terrace, the best of all the nights in the last two weeks of nights, each a little better in its turn, each in its turn holding a little more securely the quality of peace and rightness and growing ease. A lot can happen in two weeks. It is remarkable how much can happen. In two weeks of nights, nations can fall and families can break and a man can enter, after a fashion, into a new relationship with himself. A man can lie, after that much time, on the hot sand under the hot sun and consider dispassionately, as he was not able to consider before, the social and biological essentials involved in the procreation of his kind and the preservation of his name. He can think of a certain woman and decide definitely to marry her.
Hot. He was enveloped in heat that fell upon him from the sun and rose around him from the sand. It was time to move. If he did not move, he would be burned, as the girl with pink hair, the ugly little oracle Eugenie, had come to tell him quite some time ago. Getting to his feet, he walked up across the beach to the terrace of the hotel and saw Carl Sheridan sitting at a table with a tall cold glass in his hand. He went over and sat down at the table. Carl looked across the table at him and smiled and made a small tintinnabulation with glass and ice.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello. What’s that you’re drinking? It looks good.”
“Just a Tom Collins.”
“Gin. I never cared much for gin.”
“It’s all right when it’s hot. When the weather’s hot, I mean, not the gin. It’s refreshing.”
“I think I’ll try one.”
He started trying to catch the attention of a waiter. After a while he caught it and gave the order.
“Have you been swimming?” Carl said.
“Yes. I took a little girl out. Her name was Eugenie.”
“Someone you know?”
“No. She was on the beach with her mother. She cane over and started talking with me and asked me to take her out.”
“You look a little red, old boy.”
“Do I? I lay on the sand for a while. Too long, I guess.”
“You ought to be careful about that. You can get burned before you know it.”
The waiter brought the Tom Collins. Avery picked it up and drank some of it. The glass was cold in his hand, and the Collins was cold in his throat, and Carl was right about it. It was pretty refreshing.
“We’re leaving Saturday,” Carl said. “Has Lisa told you?”
“No. She hasn’t said anything about it.”
“Oh? I thought perhaps she had.”
“No, she hasn’t said anything.”
“Well, that’s right. Saturday.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Sorry to leave, for that matter. But all good things must end, as the saying goes. I want to get home before Christmas.”
“Are you feeling better now?”
“Oh, yes. Much. Quite thoroughly recovered.”
“Lisa will go back with you, of course.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Lisa and I have been together quite a lot since you introduced us. Every night, as a matter of fact.”
“I know. I’m sorry to break it up, old boy.”
“She’s very charming.”
“Do you think so? She’ll be pleased to hear it.”
“I have been thinking that I’d like to marry her. As her brother, would you object to that?”
“Not at all. Quite the contrary. I’m familiar with your background, of course. Your family and situation and all that. Have you asked her?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Have you definitely decided to do so?”
“Yes. I’m not returning to Corinth until spring. Plan to go on to Mexico City in a couple weeks or so. I’d like to take Lisa with me.”
“Marry her here, you mean?”
“That’s right. Before you go back north, naturally.”
“Well, it’s up to her, old boy.”
“I have your permission to ask her, then?”
“Certainly. And best of luck.”
“Thanks.”
Avery finished his Tom Collins and stood up.
“See you later,” he said.
He went inside and up in the elevator. So this is the way you do it, he thought. This is the way you refute the past and imperil the future. In a few minutes. In a few words. As if it were nothing at all.