“Yes,” I said slowly, “the belt.”
We swayed, we tottered. I released Hugh’s shoulders, I heard Hugh sink to my vacated place on the stone bench. And was it finished? Were we done? But to what end? Was Hugh relieved or only more silently inflamed than ever? Was Hugh’s poison draining or collecting? Who could tell?
With my usual care I fished for a cigarette, produced a flame, inhaled. And by the light of that little momentary point of flame I saw that Hugh’s seated figure was bent and slack but that his thin and stony face was turned up to mine. In the next instant it had disappeared, but not before I noted the expression on Hugh’s face, noted the upper teeth clamped over the lower lip and embedded in the blackness of the pointed beard. The flame died, the face disappeared.
“Listen,” I said, “anything you want me to say to Catherine?”
I waited. The cigarette hung down and glowed. In the darkness I heard Hugh’s breathing which had become no more than the timeless drift of air in and out of a small orifice cut in stone.
“It’s easy,” I murmured. “Give it a chance.”
I turned, withdrew deliberately from my dark and silent arbor where Hugh now sat alone repeating my arguments, pondering my advice. There was a sweetness on the night air that engulfed my cologne, Hugh was behind me, I had done my best for the four of us. After all, if dawn did not find Hugh with his head in Fiona’s lap or Fiona dozing with book and terry-cloth robe discarded and Hugh at her side, if dawn brought no harmony for the four of us to share, at least none of it would be my fault. I had done my best.
Dawn would tell. And already the seeds of dawn were planted in the night’s thigh. For a moment I thought of diverting my single-minded intention from Catherine to Fiona, for a moment considered changing my direction and looking in on Fiona who even now was no doubt lying amidst the little illusionary halos of her thin candles and concentrating on the book in her hands. But no, I told myself, it would be better to return to Fiona after rather than before the whole thing was settled, better for me to let Fiona wait and leave Hugh on his own and trust to the dawn. My place was with Catherine — for her sake and mine. Clarity had never been more essential. My next step was clear.
“Well, I’m back.”
“Where have you been?”
“With Hugh.”
“He hates the whole thing.”
“I talked with him. It’s not so bad.”
“We can’t go on.”
“Hugh’s coming around. He’s probably with Fiona right now.”
“Whatever he does, it’s over between you and me.”
“Listen,” I said slowly, “I told Hugh I’d never give you up. What you and I have together hasn’t changed.”
“We can’t have any more … sex. But we don’t need it, do we?”
“Of course we need it.”
“I’ve hurt Hugh as much as he’s hurt me. I can’t face it any longer.”
“You can forgive him for what he did tonight. So can I.”
“It’s over. That’s all I can say.”
“You know why I talked with Hugh. You know why I’m here.”
“Don’t touch me. Don’t ask me to move.”
“Catherine, I want you to stand up.”
“Hugh made me put it on. He’ll have to tell me to take it off.”
“I’m speaking for Hugh. For his good and yours and mine. Now stand up, Catherine. You’ll feel better.”
Had I persuaded Hugh only to lose Catherine? Was what Hugh had said about losing out all around now going to apply not to him but to me? Because I realized that never had it occurred to me that Hugh’s influence over Catherine might be as strong as mine, and now I could only admit my error since Catherine’s tone was suddenly Fiona’s tone and Catherine’s argument was Hugh’s. Apparently all the time I had been grappling with Hugh in the arbor Catherine had been aligning herself with her missing husband in this very room. Not from the start had Catherine ever pushed my hand away or allowed any thoughts of Hugh to come swimming into the picture of our nights together. Or not for long. Not seriously. And now? Was this the case?
Once again I removed my golden spectacles and deposited them in their usual place of safekeeping beneath the bed. Again I untied the silken sash and removed my decorous old dressing gown and shook it loose, draped it carefully across the front of the bed. Pajama top followed dressing gown, my chest was bare. I smelled the scent of the night dust and felt the warmth of the coming dawn already flowing in the walls around us and in the silent ranked overlapping tiles above our heads. Dry armpits, expansive chest, lingering acrid taste of the cigarette in my moistened mouth — here I stood, a mental and muscular presence prepared for love. Only this silent woman’s aging but youthful lover composed and half undressed and ready once again for love.
“Catherine,” I said in my clear low voice, “give me your hand.”
I groped for Catherine’s hand in the dark. And when at last I took hold of it, I understood all too well the limp fingers and unresponsive hand. I had expected no abrupt change of mind, no suddenly fierce grip. I understood her desire to be rid of the belt but also her reluctance to expose herself to the shame of it — even for me. No woman was less deserving of such abuse than Catherine, no woman less able to throw it off.
Yet I persisted and helped her up until she was on her feet and accepting if not returning my long embrace. I held her, again I smelled the faint smell of Catherine’s hair turning gray at the roots, I understood only too well the power of that invisible garment which was as ephemeral as Fiona’s panties but as forbidding as the cold fortress from which it had come. Bent as I was on removing that impediment to love, was I already the accomplice of he who had forced Catherine to put it on? Slowly and carefully I unbuttoned the phosphorescent top of Catherine’s pajamas.
“Now stand still a minute.”
Carefully and without urgency I pulled the tie-string of her pajamas and then sat down on the edge of the bed with my knees apart and Catherine rising tall and soft and passive between my spread knees. No emotionalism, I thought, no talking, no drama — only the open pajama jacket, the tie-string hanging loose, the pajama pants opened in front. The end of Hugh’s violence was only this brief and matter-of-fact procedure smoldering, so to speak, with eroticism.
“Stand still,” I whispered again. “Be patient. Trust me.”
There in Catherine’s room and seated on the edge of her bed in the heart of the night, aware of our breathing, our presence together, and smelling the bed linen which only yesterday or the day before I had helped Catherine hang on the line with Hugh’s wet sailor pants and Meredith’s sadly modest swimming suit, and conscious of myself as the quiet full-bodied lover who had made Catherine move a little more quickly through all this displaced banality, and conscious of the secreted dead remnant of Hugh’s hostility and of the fact that I had not touched my mouth to Catherine’s mouth all night — slowly I raised my hands, seized Catherine’s hips, inserted thick but tender fingers between the skin of her hips and the waistband of her pajama pants and drew them down until somewhere below the knees they fell of their own accord and dropped in a soft and useless heap around Catherine’s feet. But Hugh’s accomplice? Yes, I was Hugh’s accomplice. In all my strength and weight I was not so very different from Hugh after all. Because as soon as I pressed thumbs and fingers against the thin pitted surface of the iron band circling Catherine’s waist, I realized that Hugh’s despairing use of that iron belt must have occasioned a moment more genuinely erotic than any he had known with Catherine, with his nudes, or in his dreams of Fiona.
“But, Catherine, it’s tight, so unbearably tight …”
Now with my two arms around Catherine’s waist, and leaning forward so that my cheek was within inches of her bare stomach, slowly and deftly I gave that little brutal and rusted clasp the single expert twist that was all it took to pick the lock of Love and unfasten the belt. The belt came free, I peeled away the iron, I drew the short barbarous tongue from between Catherine’s legs. And now what on Catherine’s body had been Hugh’s chastity belt alive with tension and cruelly snug, in my two hands was only a pathetic dangling contraption withered and faintly rattling.