When she came close to the island, she began to feel Somehow accompanied, which was not wholly unexpected, but still it made her flush with sensitivity, as though she had fur and it had been brushed to crackling.
The island wasn’t really an island, or not quite one; it was teardrop-shaped, and the long tail of it reached up into the stream which fed the lake. Coming to it here, where the stream at its narrowest swept around the teardrop’s tail to swell and ripple the lake, she easily found a way to step from rock to rock that the water rushed over making silken water-pillows where it seemed she could lay her heated cheek.
She came onto the island, beneath the gazebo which stood abstracted, looking the other way.
Yes, they were around her in numbers now, their purpose, she couldn’t help but think, like hers: just to know or see or be sure. But their reasons surely must be different. She had no reasons that she could name, and perhaps their reasons had no names that could be spoken either, though she seemed to hear—doubtless only the stream and the blood sounding in her ears—a lot of voices speaking nothing. She went with care and great silence around the gazebo, hearing a voice, a human voice, Alice’s, but not what it said; and a laugh, and she thought she knew what it must be saying. Why had she come? Already she began to feel a horrid blind dark pressure at her heart, a wall of great weight building, but she went on and came to a higher place shielded by glossy bushes and a cold stone bench; there she knelt without a sound.
The last green light of evening went out. The gazebo, as though it had been waiting and watching for it, saw the gibbous moon pull itself above the trees and spill its light over the wrinkled water and through the pillars and onto the couple there.
Daily Alice had hung her white gown on the hands of a bush, and now and again its sleeve or hem would move in the breeze which began when the sun set; seeing it with a corner of his vision Smoky would think there was someone else near the gazebo where they lay. There were these lights then: darkening sky, fireflies, phosphorescent blossoms that seemed to shine not by reflection but by some mild inward light of their own. By them he could sense more than see her long geography beside him on the cushions.
“I’m really very innocent,” he said. “In lots of ways.”
“Innocent!” she said with false surprise (false because of course it was for that innocence that he was here now, and she with him). “You don’t act innocent.” She laughed, and so did he; it was the laugh Sophie heard. “Shameless.”
“Yes, that too. The same thing, I think. Nobody ever told me what to be ashamed of. Afraid of—they don’t have to teach that. But I got over that.” With you, he might have said. “I’ve had a sheltered life.”
“Me too,”
Smoky thought that his life had been not sheltered at all, not when Daily Alice could say the same thing about hers. If hers were sheltered, his was naked—and that’s how it felt to him. “I never had a childhood… not like you had. In a way I never was a child. I mean I was a kid, but not a child…”
“Well,” she said, “you can have mine then. If you want it.”
“Thank you,” he said; and he did want it, all of it, no second left ungarnered. “Thank you.”
The moon rose, and by its sudden light he saw her rise too, stretch herself as though after labor, and go to lean against a pillar, stroking herself absently and looking across to the massed darkness of the trees across the lake. Her long thews were silvered and insubstantial (though they were not insubstantial; no; he was still trembling slightly from their pressure). Her arm up along the pillar drew up her breast and the blade of her shoulder. She rested her weight on one long leg, locked back tensely; the other bent. The twin fullnesses of her nates were thus set and balanced like a theorem. All this Smoky noted with an intense precision, not as though his senses took it in, but as though they rushed toward it endlessly.
“My earliest memory,” she said, as though in down payment on the gift she had offered him, or maybe thinking of something else entirely (though he took it anyway), “my earliest memory is of a face in my bedroom window. It was night, in summer. The window was open. A yellow face, round and glowing. It had a wide smile and sort of penetrating eyes. It was looking at me with great interest. I laughed, I remember, because it was sinister but it was smiling, and made me want to laugh. Then there were hands on the sill, and it seemed the face, I mean the owner of it, was coming in the window. I still wasn’t scared, I heard laughter and I laughed too. Just then my father came in the room, and I turned away, and when I looked again the face wasn’t there. Later on when I reminded Daddy about it, he said that the face was the moon in the window; and the hands on the sill were the curtains moving in the breeze; and that when I looked back a cloud had covered the moon.”
“Probably.”
“It’s what he saw.”
“I mean probably…”
“Whose childhood,” she said turning to him, her hair afire with moonlight and her face matte and blue and for a moment frighteningly not hers, “is it that you want to have?”
“I want to have yours. Now.”
“Now?”
“Come here.”
She laughed, and came to kneel with him on the cushions, her flesh cooled now by moonlight but no less wholly her flesh for that.
As Quietly As She Had Come
Sophie saw them coupling. She felt with intense certainty what moods Smoky made come and go in her sister, though they were not the moods she had known Daily Alice to feel before. She saw clearly what it was to make her sister’s brown eyes grow dense and inward, or leap to light: saw it all. It was as though Daily Alice were made of some dark glass which had always been partly opaque, but now, held up before the bright lamp of Smoky’s love, became wholly transparent, so that no detail of Alice could be hidden from her as she watched them. She heard them speak—a few words only, directions, triumphs—and each word rang like a crystal bell. She breathed her sister’s breath, and at each quickening of it Alice was fired further with distinctness. Strange way to possess her, and Sophie couldn’t tell if the breath-robbing heat she felt at it were pain, or daring, or shame, or what. She knew that no force could make her look away; and that if she did she would still see, and just as clearly.
And yet all this time Sophie was asleep.
It was the sort of sleep (she knew every kind, but had no name for any one) in which it seems your eyelids have grown transparent, and you look through them at the scene you saw befcre they closed. The same scene, but not the same. She had, before her eyes closed, known or felt anyway that there were others around come also to spy on this marriage. Now in her dream they were quite concrete; they looked over her shoulders and her head, they crept with cunning to be near the gazebo, they lifted atomies of children above the myrtle leaves to see the wonder of it. They hung in the air on panting wings, wings panting in the same exaltation as that which they witnessed. Their murmuring didn’t disturb Sophie, for their interest, as intense as hers, was in nothing else like it; while she felt herself braving deeps, not certain she would not drown in contrary tides of wonder, passion, shame, suffocating love, she knew that those around her were urging those two—no, cheering them on— to one thing only, and that thing was Generation.