Then suddenly Hugh began to scratch viciously at himself beneath the loose gray shorts, and Catherine moved. With a brief flashing sensation of regret, it occurred to me that she was about to climb heavily, angrily to her feet and leave. She too could hear that in the distance the children were beginning to quarrel, beginning to tease the dog. But I was wrong, and she merely drew herself slowly out of her supine state, raised her back and lifted up her long heavy legs and sat upright with her thighs pressed together on the black rocks and her knees bent and her strong calves crossed at the ankles.
And then Hugh spoke. Stopped scratching himself and spoke, while Catherine’s unreadable eyes met mine and I smiled, allowed my large right orange hand to lie comfortably where my upper thighs, which were about twice the girth of even Catherine’s thighs, joined in special harmony the inverted apex of my own magenta briefs for the beach.
“That’s it. All these years you’ve been castrating him!”
On this occasion it was hardly what I thought he would say. Was this the extent of the private thoughts I had been watching all this time in his black eyes? But then I laughed, because Hugh had been staring all this time at the bare breasts of my wife and because he was thin and because despite the ringlets of his beard and curls of black hair across his forehead was nonetheless wearing the long gray shapeless bathing trunks and the white cotton collarless shirt with the right sleeve pinned up with one of Catherine’s large steel safety pins. Perhaps he did not enjoy the sight of Fiona as much as I did, or would not admit that he did. Nonetheless, that he could lie in my shadow and stare at my wife as he was in fact staring at her, and then pronounce what he had just pronounced, aroused in me new admiration for so much craft, for so much comic design.
“Cyril is virile, baby. He really is.”
The absolute certainty of the soft voice which in timbre matched the curve of Fiona’s throat, the pleasing brevity of the assertion, the mild sex-message of the accompanying giggle, which was more than the giggle of a mere girl, the fact that Fiona still had not moved but lay back on her elbows with one slender leg raised at the knee and her breasts falling imperceptibly to either side — at that moment I could not have loved Fiona more or felt more affection for my courageous, self-betraying Saint Peter, as I had come to call Hugh mentally whenever our quaternion reached special intensity or special joy.
Suspension, suffusion, peace for the four of us on that black beach. But it was all beginning to pass, I knew, and still I waited, now hearing the older girl shouting at the smaller girls behind the funeral cypresses. Shifting a little, growing mildly impatient myself, I waited, wondering if this momentary idyl would pass before the rose and golden metallic threads could begin to spin our separate anatomies forever into the sunset scene, would come to a sudden conclusion, incomplete, unbalanced. What was the matter with Hugh? Why was he not holding up his end?
I could understand Hugh’s affected lack of gratitude, could enjoy his efforts to conceal his feelings on seeing Fiona without her bra. And of course Hugh could not possibly know that I was well aware of the fact that he had already seen Fiona’s naked breasts, had already held her breasts in his good hand, so that in taking off her halter I knew full well that I was violating no confidence and was merely extending naturally the pleasures of a treat already quite familiar to the two of us. And I realized also that Hugh did not know that already I was as familiar with Catherine’s naked breasts as he was with Fiona’s, so that the baring of Catherine’s breasts would be no surprise for me. Was he then thoughtless? Selfish? Without even the crudest idea of simple reciprocity? Certainly he must have known that it was up to him, not me, to unfasten Catherine’s overly modest halter and take it off. What was holding him back? Could he not see that Catherine herself was puzzled, uncomfortable? Could he deliberately mean to embarrass his wife and to tamper with the obviously intended symmetry of our little scene on the beach? Hugh was unmusical, but I had hoped I could count on him for at least a few signs of romantic temperament. After all, how could any man love my wife and yet fail to appreciate simple harmonious arrangements of flesh, shadow, voice, hair, which were as much the result of Fiona’s artistry as of mine. But perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps Hugh had no eye for the sex-tableau.
I yawned, glanced at the finely muscled music of Fiona’s breathing, began crushing another pile of shells. Back at the villas one of the smaller girls was now shrieking distantly in short monotonous bursts of pain.
And then, nearly too late, Catherine acted on her own behalf, brought herself to do what Hugh should have done, and out of feelings of exclusion or possibly pleasure or more likely irritable retaliation, managed to complete the picture that Hugh had almost destroyed. She frowned, tightened her lips, took a short breath and, crooking her elbows so that her bent arms became the rapidly moving wings of some large bird, reached behind her back and quickly, without help, unfastened her halter and pulled it off. It was an awkward, rapid, determined, self-sufficient gesture of compliance, and I was proud of her. And even though in that first moment of exposure she looked as if she wanted nothing more than to cross her arms and conceal beneath the flesh of her arms the flesh of her breasts, still she sat up straight and kept herself uncovered. I was proud of her.
And though I had already known what we would see when she finally bared herself, could visualize to the last detail the surfaces of Catherine’s nakedness, still it pleased me to see the round rising breasts and the nipples that resembled small dark rosebuds tightly furled, and to see all this, not at night in their villa, but here at sunset on the polished black stones born of the volcano’s chaotic fire.
How long would we manage to preserve this balance of nudity? For how long would we be allowed to appreciate the fact that the nude breathing torsos of these two very different women simply enhanced each other? I could not know. But here, at least, was the possibility of well-being, and though Catherine sat with eyes averted and arms straight and the large halter half-wadded, clutched, in one large hand in her lap, still at that moment I found myself tingling with the realization that Hugh’s wife had acted deliberately and in large part for me. And now, this instant, if Catherine had been able, say, to cup her breasts in her hands with Fiona’s thoughtless exhilaration, might not the sight of Catherine be as stimulating as that of Fiona? Then again, wasn’t the naturalness of Catherine’s slight lingering discomfort exactly as stimulating as the naturalness of my own wife’s erotic confidence? I smiled, I found that the ball of my right foot was pressed gently to the solid front of one of Catherine’s knees, I heard Fiona giggling and saw that Hugh’s blue-gray ankle was now trapped, so to speak, between both of Fiona’s energetic feet, and again I began to hope that I had not overestimated Hugh after all.
But rolling onto my hands and knees, getting to my feet with a cheerful groan, lumbering to cut off the oldest girl who was running toward us out of the cypresses and shouting for Catherine, and stopping her and displaying friendliness and knowing that when I turned to wave I would see distant gestures of busy hands fastening big and little halters once again into place — still I could only smile and do a few dancing bear steps for the angry child, because no sex-tableau was ever entirely abortive and because ahead of us lay an unlimited supply of dying suns and crescent moons which Fiona, and Catherine too, would know how to use.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,” whispered Meredith and shook off my hand. But after all, I told myself, her one poor sour note could never be any match for old Cyril’s song.