“Linda, we planned to have a good time down here.”
“Yes?”
“You and Jeff are spoiling it for the four of us, Stell is miserable.”
“That’s a bitter shame.”
“Last night you two were gone for three hours. Not a word of excuse or explanation or anything. It’s so... ruthless.”
“Poor Paul.”
“Haven’t you got any sense of decency? Are you having an affair with him?”
“Why don’t you run along and catch some nice fish again?”
“I can’t get any pleasure out of anything I do, the way you’re acting. I just don’t understand it. What am I supposed to do? What’s going to become of us? How can we go back and live the way we did before?”
“Do we have to, dear? Goodness, what a fate!”
It wasn’t like her, not to get angry and shout and stamp her feet. She was... opaque. I think that is the only possible word. It was acute torture for me. I felt helpless. There seemed to be a cold precision about what they were doing that baffled me. Sometimes I felt the way you do when you walk into a movie in the middle of a very complicated feature picture. The story is incomprehensible to you. You seek a clue in the actors’ words and actions, but what they do serves only to baffle you the more.
One morning I watched Jeff and Linda on the beach directly in front of our cottage. He had a carton of empty beer cans. He had the .22 and he would throw a beer can out as far as he could. He would shoot and then instruct Linda. He put his arm around her bare shoulders to get her into the proper position. I could hear the snapping of the shots over the sea sound, and once I heard their laughter. I sat and watched them and felt ill. When Linda wandered down the beach and Jeff stayed there, shooting, I went down to him. It was the first time I had been alone with him since it had started. When he looked at me his face was very still. “Hi, Paul. Want to try a shot?”
“No thanks. I want to talk to you.”
He looked uncomfortable. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead.”
It made me feel as though I were in a badly written play. “I guess you know what I want to talk to you about.”
“I can’t say that I do.”
He was making it as difficult for me as he could. “It’s about you and Linda, Jeff. What are you trying to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“The four of us never do anything together. You and Linda swim together, go off walking together. You’re making it damn awkward for your wife and for me.”
He seemed to gain confidence. “Have you talked to Linda about this?”
“Yes, I have.”
“What does she say, old man?”
“Don’t call me old man. She doesn’t say much of anything. She won’t explain or apologize. It seems to me like the most thoughtless piece of selfishness I’ve ever seen. It’s spoiling everything. My God, if you want to break up both marriages, at least put your cards on the table.”
He even smiled at me, though his eyes were still uneasy. “Paul, old man, a vacation is where you do as you please. I’m doing as I please. I guess Linda is too. So don’t get so steamed up. Relax. Enjoy yourself.”
He sneered a little as he said the last few words. I didn’t have any tiny fragment of liking for him left. I hated him and what he was doing. Linda’s personal promises had been no good. She hadn’t let me touch her since we’d gotten to Florida.
I was hurt and angry. My hands and arms are hard and tough. I sprang at Jeff and hit him in the mouth. He went over onto the sand and the rifle went flying. He looked at me with complete shock which changed at once to anger as he scrambled up. I was a fool to hit him. He had the advantage in youth, in weight, height, reach and condition. The last fight I had been in had been in a schoolyard — and I had lost.
Jeff charged me with such fury that he knocked me down without actually punching me. I got up and he hit me in the chest and knocked me down again. As I got up, Stella came running between us. Instead of calling out to her husband she said to me, “No, Paul! No.”
Jeff picked up the sandy rifle and stared at me and stalked toward their cabin. I saw at once what Stella meant. It didn’t do any good. It couldn’t do any good. Fighting over Linda was purposeless.
Back on the porch of their cottage, Jeff dismantled the rifle on spread newspapers and cleaned the sand from it with an oily rag. He was as opaque as Linda. It was a game, and neither Stella nor I knew the rules. They were both stronger people, and we did not know what to do about the strange situation. People should not act that way. They were not taunting Stella and me. They were not precisely goading me. They gave us no obvious evidence of infidelity, which would have forced it to an issue. They merely went their own casual way, as though we had changed marriage partners during the day, only to be sorted out again each night, quite late.
Stella and I were stuck with the marketing. Linda would give me a list. I would drive to Hooker and Stella would come along. Forsaking all pride, she had tried to talk to Linda. She had not wanted to weep, but she did, and hated herself for her weakness. Linda had been just as casual and noncommittal with her as Jeff had with me. It made a nightmare of what both Stella and I had hoped would be a good and happy time.
Because it was the two of us who did the shopping, the people in Hooker, as I found out later, were understandably confused as to who was married to whom. And much was later made of the fifth of November. That was the day when, as we were about to leave, Jeff asked me to get the car greased and get an oil change.
We rode to town, not talking much, both of us thinking about the two we had left behind us. It was a curious situation. We could not, in all pride, guard them and spy upon them. We left the car at a service station and walked down the hot street to a small air-conditioned bar. I suppose, as was later said, we did have our heads together, and we did talk earnestly in low voices to each other. And Stella did cry at one point, but very briefly.
When we got back they were both swimming about two hundred yards offshore.
It was on Sunday, the seventh, that Stella and I went for our walk. That was the day another distorted facet was added to our relationship. I did not know where Linda and Jeff were. Linda had just washed the lunch dishes and gone. I was on the porch when Stella came over, a strained look about her eyes. “Want to walk with me, Paul?”
“Sure.” We headed south, walking briskly. “Did they go this way?” I asked.
“No. They took the boat and went north up the bay,” she said. “Jeff took his tackle. I just... want to walk, Paul, and I didn’t want to be alone.”
She set a fast pace. The sun was hot on my shoulders, but neither of us had to be so wary of the sun any more. We were both barefoot, and she wore a strapless dark blue bathing suit which clung to her body. It had white ruffles at the hips and at the bodice. Her pale hair was fastened back with a silver clip and she wore the massive dark glasses. As I have said before, Stella is not a pretty woman. Her brows and lashes are too pale, her nose too prominent, her mouth too wide in her thin face.
I can quite truthfully say that until that walk I had never looked at her as a woman, as a woman to be desired. I had been as unconscious of her body as if she had been a younger sister. I do not think that is due to any lack in me. It is because I had gotten to know her as Stella, fully clothed, in her living room at home and in mine. Even after the transition to brief bathing suit, it was as though I still saw her in the rather quiet clothes she preferred, without provocative habits of walk or posture, with only her own subdued and quiet grace.
My vision of her changed without warning, and it happened this way. We went further down the beach than I had ever gone. We came to a place where a groyne had been built of heavy stones to forestall erosion. The sea had smashed it into a jagged barrier across our path.