“Turn back?” I asked.
“Let’s go on.” She picked her way cautiously, over the barrier. I was behind her. Her small firm hips were round under the ruffled suit. I saw the long delicacy of her legs, and the blue track of veins in the backs of her knees. Her waist was slender, her back straight. The lines of her shoulders and throat were clear and clean. When we were across and I walked beside her again I looked almost furtively at her high small breasts, the flex and lift of her thighs as she walked. I had taken her for granted, never quite looking at her, believing her body to be gaunt, bony.
Now that I was aware of her, I made inevitable comparisons. Linda was flamboyantly noticeable. Stella was subtle in the way that a Japanese print is subtle. Only after a study of the restrained delicacy of the print can you begin to see the strength and discipline and vitality of it. Linda was a portrait in heavy oils.
Do not think from this that I had begun to walk beside her drooling like a schoolboy. It was just that I noticed her for the first time and saw what she was and was saddened by it. For if Linda chose to hurt me, an action I could halfway understand through critical appraisal of myself, Jeff, in denying this woman, was doing something less understandable and more brutal. Perhaps there is always a deeper and more bitter significance when a woman is hurt. Traditionally, a man can turn to other arms, salving his ego. A woman can only wonder why the gift of herself is found not to be enough.
A half-mile beyond the rock barrier we found an old house. It had once been impressive. The flat roof had fallen in and storms had shifted plaster walls, exposing the old brick underneath. Sand had covered most of the shattered cement sea wall. Stella walked up the slope of the beach and sat on a tilted section of the sea wall. I sat beside her. Far offshore a school of bait danced and spattered in the sun as torpedo hunger smashed upward at it from deep water.
“I guess I give up, Paul,” she said tonelessly.
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Stop trying, for one thing. You and Linda have your reservations for next Saturday, don’t you?”
“That’s right.”
She gave me a crooked smile. “I’ll use the week getting some more sun and doing some thinking. I... I never ran into anything like this. I’ll let him drive me back. Maybe once they’re apart he’ll talk about it. Even if he was abject about it, I don’t think I could stay. Not after this... special kind of humiliation.”
She paused, then started talking very fast, not looking at me. “One summer when I was little they sent me to a very smart and exclusive camp for girls. At the camp everybody was assigned to a group of six. I arrived late. The group was all formed. I guess I was pretty discouraging to them. You see, the groups of six were in competition. Swimming and riding and so on. There I was, a wan, shy little bug-eyed thing, looking as I was made of pipe cleaners, and had a mouth full of metal and springs. They had a whole series of secrets they kept from me. They even had a special language. I had a hell of a summer. This keeps reminding me of it. I didn’t know I was still so vulnerable.”
I knew exactly what she meant. It surprised me because I had thought that money was always the perfect insulation against that kind of aloneness.
“Couldn’t you have asked your people to take you out and send you to some other place?”
“I could have. They would have. But I didn’t want to be humiliated in their eyes, either. I didn’t want to seem inadequate. They both were drowned two years later, off Bimini in their boat in a storm. They were always adequate. Big brown laughing people, with white white teeth. Daddy called me the white mouse. He meant it affectionately, but it always hurt a little. Now I guess that Jeff has — has turned me back into the white...” She put her face in her hands. She cried silently.
I put my arm around her sun-hot shoulders, moved closer to her. I held her for a long time and when she lifted her face toward me, I kissed her, tasting salt. I took my arm away awkwardly and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. They threw us together. We’re on the outside. We can comfort each other, I guess. Anyway, Paul, I’m glad you kissed me. It makes me feel... well, more competent, I guess. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I haven’t got enough pride. I keep thinking this will blow over. Maybe it won’t be precisely the same again, but it will be enough for me. I don’t demand much, I guess. Or maybe merit much.”
“Don’t low rate yourself.”
“I’m not. I’m being honest. I’m still surprised Linda married me. I guess I’m still grateful, in a sense.”
She frowned and looked away from me. “Ever since I became what they coyly called marriageable, I’ve had a different problem. There were always plenty of them. Nice, polite, handsome, muscular young men. The thing was to decide whether it was me or the money.”
“It there that much?”
“Bushels. An obscene amount. I guess I’ve demanded that we live simply as a sort of continuing test of Jeff. Now I wonder if that was wrong. Maybe if I’d decided it was really me he wanted, and begun to live the way we can, he wouldn’t have done this. No, that wouldn’t be any good either. And there’s no sense in saying if I’d done this or if I’d done that. It’s done now. It’s over.”
“Are you going to leave him?”
“Yes. And then indulge myself for a while. Play hard. Financial bandages for the bruised ego. You know, Paul, we ought to take off together. Give them back some of their own coin. Acapulco, Rome, the Virgin Islands, the south of France. A tour of the playgrounds. God, how they’d writhe!”
I looked at her. “But we can’t, of course.”
Her eyes were somber. “No. We can’t.” She stood up and tried to smile. “Back to the wars, Cowley.”
We walked back to our strange war. Toward the callousness of two people who would not explain or desist. They conducted some strange campaign against us and we were helpless because we did not understand. Two white mice, perhaps. Two blind mice.
Wednesday, the tenth of November, was the hottest day of all. Though the sky was a deep and intense blue, the water was oddly gray, the swells oily, the horizon misted. There was a feel of change in the air. The day was very still, but from time to time gusts of superheated air would spin down the beach, plucking the sand up into small spirals that would die quickly as the gust faded away. A solemn army of billions of minnows moved steadily northward a few feet off the beach. Small sandpipers ran in flocks, pecking and then trotting up and away from the lap of waves, like groups of spry, stooped little men in tailcoats with their hands locked behind them.
There had been no change in either Jeff or Linda. If there was any change at all in Linda that morning, it was a slight irritability hitherto lacking, yet familiar to me, and I wondered if it foretold the beginning of the end of her strange actions. I went out onto the beach at about ten. Stella came out about fifteen minutes later, wearing a trim yellow suit. She spread her huge towel beside my blanket, went out and swam and then came back, taking her rubber cap off, shaking out her pale hair, smiling at me. She stretched out beside me and we surrendered ourselves to the hard pulse of the sun.
I heard a sharp, snapping sound and without opening my eyes I knew it was the rifle. I propped myself up on one elbow and watched Jeff shooting at the empty cans. I noticed that his eye was off. The day and the sea were so still that once I heard the skree of a ricochet when a slug skipped off the water.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Linda coming down from our cottage. She wore, for the first time, a new swim suit which she had bought just before we left. I wondered why she had saved it until now. I wondered why she had bought it. It certainly did not become her. It was dark green, and so conservative that it looked as though she had rented it. Compared to her favorite, a wispy Bikini which seemed to be supported only by faith, this green one was practically funereal. She stood close to Jeff. He stopped shooting, bent his head a bit to listen to her. Secrets. It made me think of the white mouse in that girls’ camp.