“I won’t be long.”
“No hurry, baby. I’m going to read.”
“Listen,” I murmured, “if he shows up …”
But before I could allude to the innumerable incidents that might have justified Fiona’s hopes, suddenly I felt her cold hand on my mouth and her thin fingers against my lips and could say no more. Was all Hugh’s excitement to come to nothing? Was Fiona to be denied?
“I told you, baby. I’m going to read.”
My hands were in the loose pockets of my maroon-colored silken dressing gown, Fiona’s long insistent fingers were still pressed to my lips. The day that was like no other day in our lives was ended, the night that was like no other night would soon be gone. And nodding, aware of the narrow featureless white face in the darkness and the white tufted robe which I could not bring myself to touch, for the first time I contemplated the possibility that Hugh might have managed to keep himself in ignorance of Catherine and me, as a matter of fact, might simply waste all his obvious devotion to Fiona and hence hers to him. Was it over? Was it never to begin?
“It’s just not going to happen, baby. I was wrong.”
I thought of all she refused to let me say, I thought of Hugh and Fiona listening to the nightingale, I heard them laugh. I saw Hugh catching her close among the silent trees. And now only the two of us with our perplexity, our depression, our separate thoughts? We had had our disappointments in the past, our reversals, but nothing like this. Nothing quite as simple and stark and final as this.
“You better go, baby. Come back when you want to.”
So the day had already struck the toneless note of the night’s silence before darkness fell, and already the mood of the woman I was leaving had telegraphed itself, it seemed to me, to the woman I was about to meet. If Fiona was beyond my reach, I decided, Catherine was perhaps no better off. If my wife was pensive, Hugh’s wife would be pensive too. Solitude did not bode well for amorous feeling. So even before I pushed my way through the funeral cypresses, moving slowly and more ruminative than ever, already I was anticipating the pauses that would precede companionship, the reluctance that would greet my tenderness. I too was moody. The night was a black heart. I misjudged the whereabouts of the rift in the funeral cypresses and was forced to retrace my steps and feel my way through the no longer familiar passage between the trees. Perhaps Catherine was sleeping. Perhaps she was not lying awake for me at all as Fiona had thought. And still there was no sign of Hugh and I did nothing to disguise the sounds of my slow approach, thinking that we lovers in fact were bound to suffer at the hands of the lovers in fancy.
But mistaken. Totally mistaken. Because as soon as I invaded Hugh’s dark villa and entered that cold room, I knew immediately that it was worse than I thought, that it was no mere question of blue moods or vague romantic numbness, but that something was wrong, something specifically and painfully wrong.
“Catherine? What’s the matter?”
The shutters were open, the low bed was empty. I waited. I listened for the sleeping children and sleeping dog, heard nothing. But there at the foot of the empty bed stood Catherine with her dark hair loose and arms at her sides and wearing the white translucent pajama top and pants. There she stood, immobile, opalescent, poignant, and suddenly I knew that she had been standing there for hours.
“Catherine. What’s wrong?”
I saw the turned-down bed, from somewhere in the darkness of this thick-walled room I detected the scent of the three large cream-colored roses which I had picked and brought with me the night before. Nothing and yet everything had changed. But why, I asked myself, what had happened? Why was Catherine breathing with such deep regularity and watching me with such willful silence, as if Hugh himself were hidden bolt upright in one of the other darkened corners of the room? Or had he instead departed? Simply packed up his cameras and disappeared? But Catherine and I were alone, safely though uncomfortably alone, and no matter how Hugh chose to treat his wife, surely nothing could induce him to abandon the garden in which Fiona flowered.
“Catherine, what’s happened? What’s wrong?”
Mere empty bed, mere silent woman, mere smell of the night, mere fading scent of the roses, mere smell of useless cologne on my naked chest. But this could not be all, I told myself, and again I was convinced that Catherine was now more than ever in need of my patience, my tenderness.
“Listen. There’s something you want me to know but don’t want to say. What is it?”
I moved close to Catherine and placed my firm hands on her sloping shoulders.
“Fiona’s not herself tonight,” I said gently. “Neither are you.”
“I wish you hadn’t come.”
“But you’ve been expecting me.”
“Yes. But you’d better go.”
“Is it Hugh?”
“It’s not Hugh.”
“Tell me. What’s he done?”
“Nothing.”
“Catherine, put your arms on my shoulders and your hands in my hair. Kiss me.”
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
“Well, I’m not going to leave you like this. You know I’m not.”
“But that’s what I want.”
And if I did what she asked? If suddenly I assumed that Catherine meant what she said and that this new temperamental turn of hers was an ordinary, insignificant, familiar condition of only a single night’s duration and nothing more? If I nodded, kissed her cheek, left quietly, retraced my steps? If I simply went back and shared the smoky glow of Fiona’s lamp and spent the rest of these dark hours listening to Fiona read aloud? Was this the answer? But what then of Fiona’s unhappy hunch? If I left this room, might not the import of Fiona’s hunch prove as true for Catherine and me as for Fiona and Hugh? And what of Hugh? Where was he? Even now Hugh’s absence was a sinuous presence in this cold room.
I withdrew my hands from Catherine’s shoulders, dropped my arms, turned, tightened my silken sash, and sat down on the edge of the bed. I thought of Hugh yearning for Fiona and punishing all four of us with the fervor of his deprivation. And I thought of Fiona robed in white and consoling herself with her book of poems and sipping wine. Nothing and yet everything had changed.
“Join me, Catherine,” I said. “You might as well.”
Slumped on the edge of Catherine’s bed, skirts of the dressing gown drawn prudently across my pajamaed knees, chin in hand, low-keyed invitation still unanswered — slowly I realized that Catherine was going to settle for docility. Without speaking, without argument, without emotion, as if all our former procedures preliminary to affection had never existed, Catherine accepted my invitation not by seating herself beside me in any kind of readiness to talk, but simply by stretching herself out behind me on that low bed. In another woman docility would have said only that sex was going to get us nowhere. But not in Catherine. In Catherine docility meant something else, something more. But what?
Carefully I moved, thinking of our mimosa tree bereft in the darkness, carefully I swung up my legs and crossed my ankles, lay back carefully and quietly beside the full length of Catherine’s body. What else could I do? How else could I be except placid, undemonstrative, leisurely, totally considerate of Catherine’s docile body next to mine? But if I could have been wrong, if I myself could have been mistaken about Fiona and Catherine and even Hugh? If Fiona had decided just for once on the necessity of deception, and had actually spent this day not inuring herself to loss but anticipating a secret assignation with Hugh? If terry-cloth robe and poems were a harmless ruse? If Fiona were now lying at last with her arms around Hugh on the rough and sloping floor of his darkened studio, and if what was wrong with Catherine depended only on her so interpreting Hugh’s absence — if all this could have been true, then Fiona’s pleasure would have been my pleasure while Catherine’s jealousy would have been no match for the heat of my love. But the night was long and dark and silent. And it was not true. None of it was true. Fiona had never felt the need to deceive me in the past, so why now? Catherine had felt no jealousy since Hugh first made plain his selfthwarted attraction for Fiona. Why now?