“How’s Catherine?”
“Feeling the way you do,” I said then, speaking more promptly and impersonally than I had intended, “you have no right to ask.”
“How is she, boy?”
“Let’s just hope Fiona doesn’t find out what you’ve done.”
“Your little visit was pretty short. What’s wrong?”
“You know what’s wrong.”
“She say anything? Or did she just throw you out as I told her to?”
“I got your message, Hugh, if that’s what you mean.”
“You got my message. Well, it must have been quite a shock.”
“Don’t you know what you’ve done?”
“I know you’ve been sucking two eggs at once, that’s what I know. But it’s over. It’s finished.”
“You haven’t felt this way before. Why now?”
“Slow, boy, slow. But I found out. You understand?”
“So tonight’s your night.”
“Planned the whole thing beforehand, boy. And you fell right into it. I guess you just walked right in there and told my wife to strip on down as usual and then found out there’s one easy way to stop that sort of thing. I made it pretty plain. The lid’s on the jar. It’s all over. You’ve been trying to get into my wife ever since that damn bus went off the road. And now you can’t.”
“Are you through?”
“For some men one woman’s not enough. Some men would suck all the eggs in sight, if they could. But you’re finished. From now on you’re going to stick to just one woman, understand?”
“Listen,” I said quietly, and stood up in the darkness of our trembling arbor, “Catherine and I have been having perfectly normal relations since the first night we sat right here together on this very bench. Normal, ordinary, uninterrupted relations,” I said, hands in pockets, head in the leaves, “from that first night until a few moments ago. Why should they end?”
“I’ve been waiting for this. Keep talking.”
“And now you decide to come on the scene. You make up your mind. You imagine the whole thing as if it began last night or the night before. You decide you’re jealous. You decide to interfere. But you can’t interfere and everything you say is wrong.”
“There’s nothing you can do about it. Not a damn thing.”
“When I’m through with you I’m going back to Catherine. I’m going to take that thing off her as gently as I can. I’ll try to undo the harm you’ve done.”
“So you won’t stop. You won’t leave her alone.”
“If Catherine doesn’t want me to stop, as you put it, why should I?”
“All right, sit down. Let’s have it out.”
“I don’t feel like sitting down.”
“Vomit, boy. Think I’m going to vomit …”
“After what you’ve done to Catherine, you might as well.”
“I can’t bear this business. Catherine can’t bear it either.”
“Wrong again.”
“She hates it, boy.”
“You’ve hurt Catherine. You’ve hurt me. You’ve hurt Fiona. Catherine just hates your jealousy. All of us do.”
“My villa. my bed … my wife … with the children in the next room … and you in the nude and crawling all over my marriage …”
“Listen,” I said then, tasting the night, feeling the dead sand beneath the soles of my tennis shoes, “there’s nothing wrong with your marriage, such as it is.”
Would he retch as he promised? Would invisible Hugh lean over the side of Fiona’s settee and retch on the sand? Hugh tightly buttoned into his pea jacket and filling our cold cavern with the smell of his vomit? Hugh gagging and appealing to me for help? Yes, I thought, I would have welcomed even this most disagreeable act of Hugh’s discomfort. But it was not to be, as I might have known, and even the passing threat of Hugh’s nausea was already gone. And yet his next whispered words were so constricted, so sour, that he might well have coughed up the acidic spume of his agony in one silent heave while I waited, listened, heard nothing at all.
“She took off her clothes. She lay on her back. She tongued you, boy. With Meredith lying there in the next room.”
“Meredith’s mind is like her father’s. It’s time she grew up.”
“Let me tell you something. You deserve that damn belt. Both of you …”
“All right,” I said, quietly, slowly, “on your feet.”
“At least it’s ingenious. You have to admit it’s pretty ingenious …”
“Hugh,” I said again, “stand up.”
“You think I’m afraid of last resorts? I thought the damn thing was going to come apart in my hands. But it didn’t. It fit, it worked. I found my own way to take care of the problem. And you can’t fight it …”
“For the last time, Hugh, on your feet.”
“I’m crafty, boy, crafty. And that damn belt’s a work of art …”
But behind Hugh’s desperate whispering I heard the squeal of wicker, the expelled breath of exertion, all the slow begrudging sounds of Hugh pulling himself out of the settee and uncoiling, rising, standing half erect and wary in the darkness of dead grapes and forgotten leaves. Feet apart, single hand held before his face and ready, head averted, and waiting, licking his lips, listening — there he stood, invisible and yet to me defined by all I knew about him and by every furtive sound he tried to conceal. But did Hugh know that I was blocking the entrance to the arbor? And was he even now expecting to join Fiona’s always reasonable husband in some unthinkable scuffle here on the sand) floor of this same arbor where all four of us had burned our candles and drunk our wine? Yes, I thought, even now he was perhaps attempting to feel out the direction of the first blow, his or mine. How like him to so mistake my tone How like him to assume that I, for one moment, would ever allow him to fall back on his lanky aggression. How like him to assume that my wedding ring could ever spli the chin of Catherine’s husband and the man Fiona loved
“Where are you, boy?”
“Right here, Hugh. Don’t worry.”
“Jockeying for position, is that it?”
“I haven’t moved.”
“Well, here I am. What next?”
“If Catherine and Fiona could see us now,” I murmured, taking a step, pausing at the sudden eruption of defensive shuffling sounds in the sand, “what would they think? How would they feel?”
“Maybe I ought to go off. I’ll leave. I’ll let you have her. Is that what you want? Maybe I’ll just go off with the dawn and be done with it. You don’t mind if I take the dog and just disappear — do you, boy?”
“Fiona would mind.”
“Fiona?”
“Do you want to hurt her even more than you have?”
“She’ll forget me, she’ll be all right …”
“Listen,” I said then and shifted, heard Hugh bumping against the settee and angling off toward the other end of the arbor, “Fiona is not perfect. She’s made mistakes. She’s been accused before of husband-stealing. Wrongly, of course, but accused nonetheless.”
“Don’t say it, boy.”
“And do you think Fiona approves of everything I do? Well, she doesn’t. We’ve had our differences. If she knew how you really feel about Catherine and me, and if she thought you were right and I was to blame for the way you feel, Fiona would be the first to take your side. In that case there would be no argument. If Fiona told me to give Catherine up, I would give her up.”
“You’re to blame. By God, you’re to blame …”
“Fiona’s judicious. If you put it to Fiona, she would tell you immediately that without malice and without superiority I’m not to blame. She would say that since Catherine is not using me to revenge herself on you, and since I am not having sex with Catherine for malicious ends of my own, then your defeat, chagrin, antagonism — whatever you feel — is your responsibility, not mine.”