“No,” Fiona whispered, “no …”
On the opposite side of the pediment from Hugh, I also raised one heavy leg, placed one mountain-climbing boot on the gray stone, rested my forearm across the breadth of my heavy thigh, allowed myself to lean down for a closer look. Our four heads were together, in our different ways we were scrutinizing the single tissue-thin contraption that had already revealed its purpose to Fiona and now, I suspected, was slowly suggesting itself to Catherine as something to wear.
“It looks like a belt,” I heard her saying. “But what are all those little teeth …”
I felt Fiona’s lips against my cheek, my upraised hand was wreathed in smoke, the delicate and time-pocked iron girdle was lying on the gray stone and, I saw in this hard light, was the brown and orange color of dried blood and the blue-green color of corrosion. I concentrated, we were all concentrating. Thinking of the blue sky and mustard-colored walls and brittle weeds and this bare stone, I studied Hugh’s destructive exhibition, studied the small and rusted hinge, the thumb-sized rusted lock, the rather large tear-shaped pucker of metal and smaller and perfectly round pucker of metal that had been hammered, shaped, wrought into the second loop and that were rimmed, as Catherine had just noted, with miniature pin-sharp teeth of iron — kept my eyes on this artful relic of fear and jealousy and puffed my cigarette, listened to Catherine’s heavy breathing, wondered which strapped and naked female body Hugh now had in mind.
“Anyway,” Catherine said, “it’s too small for me …”
“No,” I murmured, “it’s adjustable.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Hugh said. “Pick it up. Show us how it works.”
“Baby. Let’s go, baby. Please.”
“The only trouble is that we’ve only got one of these things instead of two.”
“Shut up, Hugh,” Catherine said, “for God’s sake.”
“But maybe one’s enough. What do you think?”
And relenting, changing her mind, Fiona reached out one bare energetic arm and suddenly cupped Hugh’s frozen jaw in her deliberate hand.
“Do you want me to try it on for you, baby,” she said. “Is that what you want?”
Later that day, much later, I knew that Hugh was by no means appeased. The hot coal of desolation was still lodged in his eye. For the first time he stripped to the waist, discarding his denim jacket on the beach not a hundred paces from the villas where the three children shrieked, for the first time he exposed to us the pink and pointed nakedness of his partial arm. But nonetheless he refused to strip off his denim pants and accompany our nude trio into the black-and-white undulations of that deep sea. And every time I came up for air, curving thick arms like the horns of a bull and sucking in broad belly muscles and shaking spray, looking around now for Fiona, now for Catherine, inevitably I saw Hugh stretched out on the black pebbles with one knee raised and his good hand beneath his head, the little black iron trinket clearly visible on his white chest.
“You haven’t seen the last of it,” he called out once, “believe me.”
But then Catherine came rolling toward me through the waves, over my shoulder I caught a glimpse of the dark and distant fortress, I felt a splash, and suddenly Fiona’s wet face was next to mine.
“Baby, baby, baby, what can we do?”
NEED I INSIST THAT THE ONLY ENEMY OF THE MATURE marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity (body upon body, voice on voice) is naïve? That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood?
What is marriage if not a vast and neutral forest in which our own sexual selves and those of our first partners wander until momentarily stopped in the clear actuality of encounter? Yes, the best of marriages are simply particular stands of pale trees sensuously stitched into the yet larger tapestry, which is not to say that our entire troup of sexual partners (other than wives or husbands) need necessarily be composed of women or men who are themselves in turn already committed to their own matrimonial partners. There are exceptions. Not every finger is ringed. But why voice what simply runs in the blood and fills the mind of any considerate man who has sat with another man’s wife on his lap or of any woman who has cast off prudery and tugged at cloth and moved out among the trees? Only, I suppose, in periodic answer to nagging detractors, only for the sake of those who detest my convictions, scoff at my theories, denounce my measured presence in the world of love. And only for the sake of those other detractors, that handful of the soulless young whose lives of privileged sexuality have conditioned them merely to deride my lyricism. But none of them, none of the bitter aged and none of that arrogant handful of the contemptuous young have tasted the love lunch, for instance, or know anything at all about the sexual properties of my golden wheels of ripe cheese. Old and wheezing detractors should curb their judgment of a man who knows, after all, what he is talking about. To young detractors I will say only that if orgasm is the pit of the fruit then lyricism is its flesh. Marriage, or at least the mature marriage, is the fold that gathers in all lovers nude and alone.
WHEN CATHERINE COLLAPSED THAT DAY ON THE COLDstone floor of the squat church and in the midst of Hugh’s meager yet highly emotional funeral service, it was Fiona who first thought of the three fatherless children, Fiona who made her immediate and selfless decision to take upon herself the responsibility of the children and carry them off.
To sum it up, as only last night I finally summed it up for Catherine, Hugh died and Catherine gave way to more than grief and Fiona departed with all three of those young and partially orphaned girls. Fiona and I knew exactly what was happening and what to do. Fiona knew her part and I knew mine. She went. I stayed. Fiona assumed management of the children as if they were hers, I undertook Catherine’s recovery as if she were my wife instead of Hugh’s. Fiona went off to impart womanhood to those three little growing girls, I stayed behind to explain Hugh’s death to Catherine, to account for her missing children, to convince her that I was not, as she thought, responsible for all her losses, to renew our love.
Last night I talked and Catherine listened. My voice grew thick and confidential in the darkness, she put her hand on mine, she asked questions, every now and then she suddenly raised her wineglass and quickly drank. Exhilaration in the palm of peace? A further step in the dark?
Last night we sat beneath the grapes, Catherine and I, sat together side by side at the little rickety table in the arbor and ate the soft flakes of fish and the grapes on our plates and the bread, the wedges of cheese, sat together comfortably and tasted the dark red acidic tang of the wine and talked together, lapsed into silence. Arm over the back of my chair, glass in hand, I insisted on the accidental nature of Hugh’s death, explained to Catherine that Hugh’s death was an accident inspired, so to speak, by his cameras, his peasant nudes, his ingesting of the sex-song itself. It was not our shared love that had triggered Hugh’s catastrophe. It was simply that his private interests, private moods, had run counter to the actualities of our foursome, so that his alien myth of privacy had established a psychic atmosphere conducive to an accident of that kind. Hugh’s death hinged only on himself. And yet for that death even he was not to blame.
“Hugh was not a suicide,” I murmured, “believe me.”
Last night I covered that ground with all the simplicity and delicacy I could muster and shifted back to Fiona’s motives in going off with the girls. My final low note of reassurance was that Fiona’s departure was not, like Hugh’s death, a finality. With or without the children, I said, Fiona herself would one day be coming back to us. At any moment, or at some time in the distant future, Fiona would simply come looking for us through the funeral cypresses. It was not a certainty, of course, but that had been the tenor of our farewell. Nothing was fixed.