And now I lifted my head and looked at him, set face at an angle above the newspaper, thick bright lashes crowded round his narrowed eyes as he gave two quick blinks in succession, as though the print hurt them. The clean cheeks of a newly shaven blond man; a faint movement at the nostrils as he breathed deeply against the heat. The mouth. The thin mouth with the little uneven lift to the lip on the left side, the curious rim, like a raised line, outlining his lips which were the same color as his skin.
The same. Exactly the same. Just as he was yesterday, the day I arrived. He had all the mystery of a stranger, unimpaired. Now I looked at his hands. He must have sensed the silent movement of my eyes. Bending the spine of the newspaper, he looked up and said: “Want to go swimming?” I felt his smile rest on me. It seemed to me that the moment was too intimate for speech; whatever he said to me now was intimate to me, nothing could be casual or commonplace, because every word, every gesture, I deciphered in the knowledge of last night, that lay always in my hand like a key to a code. I only nodded, hard and surely. I could see him running, very fast, through the shallows to the breakers, cutting the water in a wake like mercurial wings at his ankles.
“Too hot for the beach?” said Ludi to his mother. She put down my egg. “This morning?” Her eyes rested vaguely here and there upon the table, looking for a decision. “I was supposed to help Mrs. Plaskett with her re-covering. … Certainly too hot to bend about pinning and sewing. I felt a little dizzy when I got up, as it is.” She was smiling weakly at me, reluctant, ready to be swayed. My heart beat so fast with anxiety that each mouthful presented an obstacle to my throat. I cut off great mouthfuls of egg and toast and forced them into my mouth. A smile of great shame and brightness was turned to her out of my anxiety. I said, terrified, “At least there’ll be a breeze on the beach.” She hesitated still. “You could sit under the funeral tree.”—It was a dark and mournful tree that hung unexpectedly over a dune—. Trembling with the guilt of my desire to prevent her, I could have gone on finding reasons for her to come. Ludi seemed to have lost interest. “Well, then, shall we risk it, dear?” she assented to him.
The mouthful of food passed from one side of my mouth to the other. I could not swallow it and did not know what to do with it. I wished they would go out of the room so that I could spit it out into my hand, chewed and distasteful. Tears of chagrin came up against the age of Mrs. Koch; the age and blindness — the waste! Old people to whom nothing matters anymore, so they do not know how, unknowingly and careless, they waste the precious time of the young. And she was waiting for me, looking at me fondly because it was settled we were all going to the beach together as we had done before. I found I was smiling back at her; a smile that came to my mouth like a blow.
And yet when we got to the beach I was suddenly happy again as I had been the previous evening at supper. On Ludi and me the sun flowed, pressed, crawled like the tickling feet of some hair-legged millipede where the salt water dried. When I lay in the water, attacked by long rough breakers I wanted the warmth of the sun, drawing me up through the surface of my streaming skin; when I lay in the sun, full of the sun as a ripening fruit, I wanted the dowse of the cool water. And so the whole morning, in and out, the sea and the sun, dark and glare, with a delight in the energy that powered me, a pleasure in the firm shudder of the tight burned flesh above my knees as I ran. I left my bathing cap in the sand and went into the sea without it. First the tips of my hair got wet and touched cold fingers on my shoulders. Then the swell, lightly rising up my back, passed over my head like the cool tongue of a great dog. The membrane of water split and parted on my knotted hair, running off; the thickness of it, near my scalp, was still dry. Then I sank myself head first into a towering breaker and the great cold hands of the sea thrust in beneath my hair and I came up shocked, gasping, blinded by the heavy bands of liquid hair that flowed down my face and clung round my neck.
Ludi said: “You’ll never get a comb through that when it’s dry.”
At once I was afraid he might think I was showing off. I said, with the self-conscious casualness of a lie, “I’ve done it often before. It’ll be all right after a shower.” Mrs. Koch had lain back with the paper over her face, and was not awake innocently to contradict me. A little later Ludi and I went into the sea together, and again I let my hair into the water, dipping and spreading it in a solitary game. He swam away out, only his head rising and lost, gone and there, out where the breakers ended and the sea really began, an element as solid in depth as the earth, a thick glassy blue earth. I played in the water and thought of Ludi swimming back to me: it seemed to me, as I imagined a woman in the complacency of marriage, that it was wonderful to think of him removed from me, simply because he would come back. I lay on the sand with my head sheltered in the darkness of my arms and imagined a life with Ludi, long dialogues between us, dialogues between myself and others about Ludi; Ludi talking to someone about me. And whether he was in the sea, beyond sight, or lying a foot away from me across the silence, and whether his mother was there, or if she had been left at home, it did not matter to me. Just as on a distant nod of acknowledgment there are people who can construct the history of a friendship, so that you are astonished to hear that so-and-so speaks of you by your Christian name, so I spun out of Ludi’s one gesture of recognition to me as a woman the entry into the whole adult world of relationships between men and women, as it existed in my imagination. In this world unbounded by time, commonplace, and the hazards of human behavior, with, in fact, the scope of innocence, Ludi existed for me in an exclusive, all-possessive love that made the Ludi suddenly seen as I opened my eyes — he was blowing the sea water out of his nose and his eyes above the handkerchief glistened with effort — unreal and momentarily unrecognizable, like meeting someone whose photograph you have long been accustomed to.
All day this dreamlike state of mind persisted, and with it a softening that seemed physical, a phenomenon in my warm sea-soaked body that made everything and everyone around me dear and sympathetic. All the angular reticences of adolescence were resolved in the simple fact that cannot be forewarned or explained: the discovery of love. With the irrational changeability of emotions which commanded me and took advantage of my inexperience, I felt a dramatic welling of tenderness toward Mrs. Koch; infinite patience with her elderliness (love was past for her, gone down like a sun that dazzles the eyes no more); the homely face and the curly gray hair, her freckled hands, even, had for me something of the fascination of a neglected shrine: she was Ludi’s mother. Excitement at the thought of the three of us, in the car, at table, could bring sudden tears to my eyes; the faint shine of sweat, like the glisten of a dusting of talcum, on the white inner skin of my elbow filled me with the swift, intoxicating thought of my being alive. In my room I studied my face, fixed my hair this way and that with fingers that trembled with eagerness for a result that might change me entirely — with the instinct that gives a flower the bright petals that invite the insect, chose clothes that showed my waist and the small shapes of my breasts. I took off shorts and put on a skirt because in the tight trousers the curve of my belly filled me with disgust. I made my own eyes heavy with the fumes of the perfume that was usually kept for special occasions, I wore a bracelet and painted my nails to please a man who never noticed clothes and intensely disliked the artificial. But he was a man and not a child, as I was, and I believe he saw not the pathetic little artifice of the means, but the complete naturalness of the end, which was the desire to please.