“Nice, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Mmm.” She might have been lying on a vast soft bed; her eyes were closed, and her arms and legs were spread wide, drifting lazily and weightlessly in the water.
When they returned to the beach Laura set out their lunch on a flat rock at the base of the cliff, while he retrieved the bottles of wine from the sea. They had platters of cold chicken, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and fresh rolls, and with that, the wine from the north, which was wonderfully cold and sharp on their tongues. They ate ravenously and finished the bottle of wine. Beecher lit cigarettes, and they stretched out on their backs in the full baking glare of the sun. They were stunned with the sea and the sun, the food and the wine. Neither of them bothered to talk. There was no strain between them now. They finished their cigarettes and flipped them away. Laura remembered something comical that had happened at Don Willie’s, and they laughed about that. There was a sense of drowsy, comfortable communion between them, and they talked in a rambling fashion about other beaches, other picnics, other bottles of wine.
“I’m going to turn over,” Laura murmured. “I’m falling asleep, I can’t help it. Would you do a Samaritan bit with the suntan lotion?” She unhooked her bra and lay face down on the hot sand, resting her cheek on her folded arms. “Use lots and lots of it,” she said sleepily. “It’s a new American brand. It prevents sunburn, refreshes tired blood, and you can get twenty miles to the gallon on it in an emergency.”
Beecher sat up and looked for the bottle of lotion. It was under her towel. The brand name was Astro-Nut-Brown. A bronzed young man on the label was diving into a galaxy of blazing stars, wearing nothing but a smile and brief swimming shorts. A nut all right, Beecher thought. He knelt beside Laura and rubbed the cool oil over her shoulders and down her back. The sun was hot on his neck, and a strand of his dark hair hung over his eyes. When he brushed it away he realized his hands were trembling. Her legs were like satin; the palms of his hands slid smoothly over the backs of her thighs and calves, and the oil gleamed like pale gold on her lightly tanned skin. He saw the sparkle of fine blonde hair in the sunlight, and felt the shape and tension of her slim muscles under his moving fingers. And he discovered that he could close his hand completely around her delicate ankles.
In a soft voice, she said, “Thank you, Mike. That’s fine.”
“You said to use lots and lots of it.”
“I know.” She turned her head to look at him, and he saw that her eyes were strangely clear and bright. “But you’re not playing with modeling clay,” she said, with a careful little smile. “I’m a real live girl.”
He felt a falling coldness in the pit of his stomach, as if he were dropping swiftly in an express elevator. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I didn’t mean that. I don’t know what I meant, I guess. Except that I don’t want...” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
Beecher put the bottle of lotion aside. He kissed her bare shoulder and stretched out a foot away from her, feeling as tense and nervous as if he were gambling his life on the turn of a card.
She opened her eyes and looked at him with a quiet smile. “Now that was nice,” she said. “Night, night.”
Beecher grinned and put an arm up to shield his eyes from the sun. He felt ridiculously excited and happy.
They swam again after resting for half an hour and drank the second bottle of wine sitting in the shade of the cliff. There was a delicate tension between them now, a sense of significance and urgency; it was the stimulating current of a new awareness, and it was curiously intensified by their deliberately casual conversation.
“I don’t see how you can bear to take Don Willie’s job,” she said, smiling at the calm sea. “Where else could you find a place like this?”
“It’s got its points.”
“Are you thinking about taking the job?”
“I told him I’d let him know Monday morning.” He scooped up sand and let it trickle over the backs of her legs. “I don’t know why I put it off. Laziness, maybe. But let’s don’t worry about it. As you said, where else will we find a spot like this?”
“Yes. Let’s don’t waste it.”
They ran into the water and played for fifteen or twenty minutes in the waves, letting themselves be tumbled about in the churning white froth until they were numb with cold, and stunned into a delicious languor by the weight of the rolling seas.
They rested again, panting with a satisfying exhaustion and laughing at one another for no reason at all.
“You looked so funny,” she said. “Your hair was like a fright wig.”
“But you were great. Like a Maidenform ad. I dreamed I got seaweed in my Maidenform bra.”
“In my Mer-Maidenform bra, please.”
“Cut it out.”
They dressed finally and went back the steep cliff to Beecher’s car, pulling themselves with weary contentment up the rocky, uneven pathway. At the first posada they stopped for tea and discovered that they were desperately hungry. The waiter brought buttered bread, and a platter of thin serrano ham which had been cured on snowy slopes in the mountains. It was pinkly transparent, and their plates were garnished with tiny sweet pickles.
Afterward they made quick stops at Laura’s hotel and Beecher’s villa to change, and then drove off for Málaga, following the high winding road that flanked the sea. The air was cool and dry.
“I want to show you the bull ring,” Beecher said.
“But I’ve seen it,” Laura said. “When did I get here? Last month? Last year?” She laughed. “It’s all mixed up. But the day I arrived a cab driver pointed it out to me.”
“The Beecher tour is special,” he said. “Wait and see.”
Beecher knew most of the caretakers at the ring. He parked on the palm-lined avenida which faced the docks of Málaga, and they walked a half block to the plaza de toros, a huge beige bowl in the soft afternoon sun, with entrance-ways brightened by brilliant posters of tomorrow’s fight. Beecher pounded on the tall wooden gates at the back of the ring, and an old man he recognized pulled them open and looked up at them. Beecher explained what he wanted and offered him a five-peseta note. This was refused at once with a stern headshake; refused a second time with a grave bow; and finally accepted with a shrug and a smile and an injunction to the Deity to protect Beecher and his dear ones from all harm and danger.
They visited the chapel first, which smelled of roses and cold marble, and then the infirmary, which was sterile and foreboding, and finally walked out onto the bright red sands of the bull ring. Several youngsters were playing with capes against a contraption similar to a wheelbarrow armed with horns. The boys ran up to them and spoke to Beecher. They were underfed and scrawny, with horny toes sticking out of tattered alpargatas, but the merry excitement in their faces was very appealing.
“They want to put on a show for us,” Beecher explained to Laura.
“Let them, please. Please, Mike.”
He smiled at her enthusiasm. “Of course.”
The boys performed with a flamboyant energy, shouting insolently as the bull’s horns were pushed past their bellies, and their capes swelling like sails in a high wind. They were charged with pride and full of charitable contempt for their one-wheeled adversary.
Beecher thanked them when they finished and gave them a handful of one-peseta notes. The shade was cutting across the sand now, but there was one more thing he wanted her to see. He led her up a flight of stairs to the linked walks which overlooked the sorting pens. A five-year-old bull with thick, in-curving horns became watchful as they stopped at the waist-high railing to look at him. He trotted forward slowly, weight balanced perfectly, and his small dull eyes watching for any movement within range of his horns. A gray cat came through a hole in the heavy fencing and stretched out on the sand, ignoring the pawing bull.