Stroked my chin, leaned down, frowned a little and got some intensity into my large brown eyes, until suddenly I caught him there knee-deep in the excremental waters, from all the chaos of dog and children and large unsmiling wife was able to isolate his grinning face and for a moment to hold him still, so to speak, for appraisal.
She was right. As usual Fiona had made another good aesthetic judgment. Because the tall black-haired man stooping in the bus window was dressed, I could see, in a powdery blue tweed jacket and black turtleneck shirt which was a combination that had always been one of Fiona’s favorites. More important, perhaps, he had a well-weathered face, a face not tanned and darkened in the wind and sun like mine, for instance, but so weathered and pebbled, so grained in darkness and cold rain that it resembled stone. Gray stone. I knew I had never before seen the thin lips, narrow bright boyish eyes, high sandblasted cheekbones, pointed ears, black hair curling across his forehead and curling in a few odd ringlets in what appeared to be a beard newly grown. Yet I recognized his face immediately because its exact replica, an image of Saint Peter that was perfect except for the broken ears, had been chiseled along with the head of Saint Paul into the granite arch of the entrance to the squat church where one candle, I knew, was still burning. Saint Peter in stone. No wonder Fiona called his striking features to my attention. Any woman would have found Saint Peter attractive. And in the case of my wife, how could Fiona help but appreciate a face whose exact replica we had seen and admired during every one of our rambling visits to the squat church? On every one of our visits the stone face, with its strength and malice, had invariably caused Fiona to hold her breasts while standing perfectly still and gazing up at it. Now of course she was busily waving at the frightened child.
But then the tall figure with the saintly goatish face was grinning, not to himself, not at Fiona, but directly at me, and in that instant I recognized that we were friends already and, seeing the empty powdery blue sleeve bent double and fastened with a large safety pin just below the shoulder, realized that for some reason Fiona had failed to comment on his obvious deformity, which to me was the most interesting thing about him, and realized that it was in my power to lead them both to the exact spot where his missing arm was hidden.
“He’s great, Fiona. But did you notice his arm?”
I would have liked to see her face at that moment, but she went on waving. And then it was too late. Because suddenly the hatless driver and stunted members of the fire brigade began to cooperate, made large gestures with hairy hands, splashed into the water, manipulated the ladders tied together with wire and thongs, found the escape hatch in the roof of the bus, pushed and pulled and cried croak peonie beneath the slow wheeling of the pigeons, cut loose the baggage on the roof and mingled together inside the bus and then again waist-deep in the canal, bumped and struggled together until at last the empty motorbus was abandoned altogether to the smell of time.
The eyes of the rescuers were concealed, of course, beneath the thick curving brims of leather helmets. And yet as by a begrudging and prearranged signal, and somehow understanding that the man and woman in the bus were as tall as the man and woman on the embankment, and that there was in fact some similarity between yellow suede coat, white pullover, blue jacket, and pea-green slacks (which was what the woman in the bus was wearing), each struggling member of the fire brigade deposited one by one his burden of dog, child, suitcase in my own waiting arms or at my feet. I was picked out of the crowd, so to speak, as the man with the authority to receive survivors.
“Oh, baby, you’re doing beautifully,” came Fiona’s cold milky voice ringing with pleasure, and holding the dog by the long wet fur and folds of skin at its throat, holding one of the little girls by an elbow bundled into the sleeve of a sweater the color of her father’s coat, noticing that the laces of all three children’s blunt brown shoes were untied and dangling, and that the older girl had hair the color of ginger, and waiting now for the woman and the man himself to climb dripping to our embankment and repossess their dog, their girls, their wet luggage — during all these first moments of their rescue and their arrival I was grateful for the laughter in Fiona’s voice, took a curious pleasure in the smell and feeling of the large quantity of canal water that my pullover and beige-colored trousers had already absorbed from the clothes of the children and the black hair of the dog.
I was squatting down on a knee and a foot, one of the smaller girls was climbing onto my back, the luggage was piling up around us. I saw the round-faced woman in Fiona’s immediate embrace, watched the woman’s one-armed husband pushing toward us unassisted and with leather cases dangling from straps held high in his single hand. But it was not for us to see the future, not for me to know that the large woman trembling in the arms of my wife was soon to be my own last mistress, while the man with the face of Saint Peter and who was now climbing the shaky ladder into our midst was soon to use his one good hand to explore the cool white skin of Fiona’s life.
When at last he stood among us, grinning and dripping, smelling of the canal and dangling the leather cases of all his cameras against the wet knees of what I saw were long-legged navy-blue bell-bottom trousers, and when Fiona dropped her arms, turned quickly with aimless hands and bright eyes that appeared not to see flying pigeons or squatting husband or distant embarrassed driver of the motorbus, and then laughed and took a step and suddenly kissed the gaunt stony cheek of this tall hero who had come to us over the same mountains once crossed by the barbarians, certainly I knew then that we were due for some kind of new adventure, Fiona and I. What else could it be?
AM I EMBRACING AIR? COULD THAT BE ALL? IS THAT WHAT it feels like to discover with absolute certainty that you yourself have simply disappeared from the filmy field? When Love withdraws her breath from your body, and as with the tip of a long green tail flicks the very spot where you stood or thought you stood in the upper right or lower left-hand corner of the endless tapestry, is that what it is like? Embracing air?
Fiona’s mouth kissed dozens of aching mouths, including mine, and my own large mouth kissed at least an equal number of smaller mouths, including Fiona’s, and though her lips were small, Fiona’s mouth could in the proper light and proper mood become quite as hard and voracious as my own and nearly as large, and time after time we kissed so that bone struck bone and teeth lay against teeth, each of us struggling, maneuvering, to eat the other’s mouth, to catch the other’s jaw between the rows of his own hard teeth. Time after time I ate the darkness that Fiona pumped from her throbbing throat into her open mouth, time after time Fiona took from my own lips and tongue and teeth a taste much stronger than cigarettes or wine. For my part no flavor discovered in a kiss ever aroused my oral greed as did the special flavor I always found in Fiona’s mouth, a special taste of mint tinged with that faint suggestion of decay which I drew each time from the very roots of her perfect teeth.
Is it then mere pompous lyricism to talk, to chew, to blow smoke rings, to breathe when I am no longer able to look at Fiona or talk with her or run my finger along the curve of her smallest rib or put my mouth to hers? Are memory and clairvoyance mere twin languorous drafts of rose-tinted air? Or to notice Rosella’s raw hips beneath her mangy skirt and then not even to seize them for a moment in friendly hands, or to allow Rosella to sleep alone at the far end of my villa without so much as one clandestine visit from a man who was once master of the clandestine visit, or to do no more than smile at a few of Hugh’s now-faded photographs of naked girls, or to explain to Rosella in a language she cannot understand exactly what pleasures await us when the veil of dormancy dissolves — are all these further instances of mere wind feathering endlessly through hands, fingers, empty arms? Should I be feeling some kind of loss, some hollow pain? Or am I dying? Already dead?