Fred threw a distressed glance at Lillian, who was laughing. One girl was kissing the lobe of his ear, and the other slipping her hand inside his shirt.
“Lillian, help me.”
He could not extricate himself. He had seen them at the beach selling shells, fish, lace. He had sen them entering the church, with black veils over their hair.
Seeing the depth of his distress, Lillian said: “Let’s go swimming. It’s too hot to dance anymore.” It was true: their clothes were glued to their bodies, and their hair looked as if they had been swimming.
The girls clung to Fred: “You stay,” they said.
Lillian leaned over to them and said in Spanish: “Some other night. Tonight he feels he must stay with me.”
Their hands fell off his shoulders.
Now they were in a taxi, joggling over dirt roads.
Fred did not know that during the evening he had lost his identity in Lillian’s eyes and become Gerard, her first defeat at the hands of passivity. A Gerard whose paralysis she now recognized and no longer desired. One could not lust for a wall, an obstacle, an inert mass, yet she had once been seduced by just such gentleness and passivity. It had calmed her fears. She did not know then what she knew now: it had been an encounter with a fear greater than her own. She could desire him violently (Gerard) because she had an instinctive knowledge that he would not respond. She could desire him without restraint (and even admire her own spontaneity) because the restraint was safely prearranged within him. She was free to desire, knowing that she would not be swept away into any fusion. It seemed absurd to say that one would refuse a glass of water when one was thirsty, but if this glass of water also represented all the dangers of love? When Lillian was sixteen or seventeen, fulfillment itself was the danger, love itself was the danger, a shared passion was slavery. She would be at the mercy of another human being. (Just as Fred now feared to be at the mercy of a woman.) Whereas by desiring someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feeclass="underline" how alive I am! I am capable of desire. Poor Gerard, what a coward he is. He is afraid of life. It was not, as she thought, the pain of being alive she felt, but the pain of frustration.
How elated she was now not to have been seduced by Fred’s mute pleadings and his retractions. How grateful to have discovered not a failed love affair, but the secret of that failure to lie in the choice of partner, a choice which came out of fear. So it was fear which had designed her life, and not desire or love.
If they did not arrive too soon at the secret cove known only to Doctor Hernandez, she would have time to make inevitable deductions. She and Larry had selected each other and each had played the role which kept their fears from overwhelming them. How could they pass judgment on each other for playing the role they had assigned to each other? You, Larry, must not change, or move, must represent fixed, unalterable love. You, Lillian, must change and move for both to sustain the myth of freedom.
Fred was afraid of the night, afraid of Diana who was cooling her body by pulling her dress out away from her breasts, waving it before her like a fan. He was afraid of Lillian who was fanning her face with the edge of her cotton dress, exposing the lacy petticoat.
The taxi left them at the top of the hill, and >
Fred was afraid of the night, afraid his body would slip away from him, dissolve in that purple velvet with diamond eyes, the tropical night. The tropical night did not lie inert like a painted movie backdrop, but was filled with whisperings, and seemed to have arms like the foliage.
Beauty was a drug. The small beach shone like mercury at their feet. They undressed in the rocks which formed a cavern. The waves absorbed the words; one only heard the laughter, or a name. Diana, painted by the moonlight, walked like a phosphorescent Venus into the waves. The oil lamps on the fishermen’s small boats trembled like candlelight. The neon lights softened by the haze threw beams on the bay like miniature searchlights.
Fred was as troubled as if he had encountered the singing mermaids. He did not undress. Doctor Hernandez swam far out; he was familiar with every rock. Lillian and Edward stayed near the shore. The fatigue and the heat of the dance were washed away. The sea swung like a hammock. One could grow a new skin over the body. The undulations of the sea were like their breathing, as if the sea and the swimmers had but one lung.
Out of the full beauty of the tropical night, the full moon, the full bloom of the stars, the full velvet of the night, a full woman might be born. No more scattered fragments of herself living separate cellular lives, living at times in the temporary homes of others’ lives.
Fred stood further away, clinging to his locks and his clocks, to peripheries, islands, bridges. The taxi driver smoked a cigarette and was singing the melopee of love.
Fred’s immobility, sitting by the rock, not sharing in the baptismal immersion, gave birth to an image of Larry’s absence of mobility. But as the psyche changes, it recreates semantics, and the word “fixity” had once been considered a virtue. It was this fixity she had summoned, needed, loved, because in her chaos and confusions, fixity was the symbol of immutability, eternity. An unchanging love. How unjust to change its meaning when this unchanging love had been the hot house in which she had been born as a woman. Was it possible to begin one’s life anew with a knowledge of what lay behind the charades one had created? Would she circumvent the masks they had donned, those she had pinned upon the face of Larry? She now knew her responsibility in the symbolic drama of their marriage.
Lillian was journeying homeward. The detours of the labyrinth did not expose disillusion, but unexplored dimensions. Archeologists of the soul never returned empty-handed. Lillian had felt the existence of the labyrinth beneath her feet like the excavated passageways under Mexico City, but she had feared entering it and meeting the Minotaur who would devour her.
Yet now that she had come face to face with it, the Minotaur resembled someone she knew. It was not a monster. It was a reflection upon a mirror, a masked woman, Lillian herself, the hidden masked part of herself unknown to her, who had ruled her acts. She extended her hand toward this tyrant who could no longer harm her. It lay upon the mirror of the plane’s round portholes, traveling through the clouds, a fleeting face, her own, clear and definable only when darkness came on.
Even though the airplane was taking her back to White Plains after an engagement of three months in Golconda, a little girl of six running up and down the aisle of the plane carried her by a detour into the past, to a certain day in her childhood in Mexico, where her father, frustrated by enigmatic natives and elemental cataclysms, would come home to the one kingdom, at least, where his will was unquestioned. He would receive from the mother a report on the day. And no matter how mild she made this, how much she attenuated the children’s infractions, the father always found the cause enough to march them up to the top floor, an attic filled with dusty objects. And there, one by one, he spanked them.
As the rest of the time he did not talk to them, nor play with them nor cuddle them, nor sing to them, nor read to them, as he acted in fact as if they were not there, this moment in the attic produced in Lillian two distinct emotions: one of humiliation, the other the pleasure of intimacy. As there were no other moments of intimacy with her father, Lillian began to regard the attic as a place which was both the scene of spankings but also of the only rite shared with her father. For years, in telling of it, she only stressed the injustice, the ignominy of it. She stressed how there came a day when she openly rebelled and frightened her father into giving up this punishment.