Perhaps there was a caretaker on the grounds now. Someone else? I caught myself; I was lending credence to Stanty’s fantasies. There was nothing living on that island. The condition of what had been verdure and remained—browning leaves, broken branches, bare trunks—indicated, even from afar, a desolation that precluded life. As to a window: Out of the mushy murk, only once had I even imagined—the impression had vanished instantly—the existence of a house, and that had been, I saw as I stared, just a skeletal outline amid collapsed, dark, rotting rubble, perhaps the remains of what was once a house. Stanty had invented a window in order to locate a threatening intruder, and he— Jesus Christ! Why was he now demanding to learn to fire a gun?
20
At the desk in my bedroom, I reached for the page I had typed before. What I had written sounded like an opening to a story about the island. I had no intention of writing such a thing. I have no idea how such an account, if written, would end; and I believe that an ending must have retrospective inevitability, everything leading to it along the way, fate found only in retrospect; and if I did ever write about this island—but I won’t, I know that—how would I fulfill my own requirement of inevitable fate? Dredge up Stanty’s hostility leading to …? Sonya: plant terrible hints that she may betray …? No, no, not her. Paul: the contradictions, the implicit championing of violence that would … All—everything—would have to conclude in an eruption of … quiet violence, explosive violence? And the mysterious island festering with …? All useless considerations. I will never write about this island.
In the library earlier, I had looked for, but not found, a collection that included Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Into the seeming banality of the early pages, she had woven intimations, in the very prose, of the inevitability of the violence. But where are events on this island moving? Everything evolves unexpectedly, and then is forgotten, ignored, relegated to silence.
Clouds are massing outside my window. They’re rent apart in the distance by flashing bolts of lightning followed by moans of thunder. The moisture in the air is thick; the heated lake adds its own moisture. The colors of the intrusive painting seem to swirl about the room.
I sit before the typewriter and write:
He was still gazing in the direction of the darkened island; quietly as if speaking out his thoughts, and almost—and this occurred to me quickly—as if quoting memorized words, he said: “What happens to evil when its flames are snuffed? Does it wait to spring out?” He had been gazing at the shadowed island when he said that.
I took the typed page out. About to rip it and the earlier page into pieces so no one else might read them, I stopped. I put them back in the drawer.
21
To allow an easier flow to the slightest breeze from the lake, I had left the door of my bedroom open. In my jockey shorts, I sit up in my bed, reading the book I took earlier from the library, an old favorite I first read in school, Don Quixote. The real battle, between the author and his character, continued to fascinate me: a modern novel written centuries ago; the author as antagonist.
I hear the footsteps that usually go past my door. They do not continue on. I see a distinct form where the door is ajar.
“May I come in?” It’s Paul.
“Sure, come in,” I said.
He’s in his undershorts—white jockeys, a bold contrast to his tanned body. I am intently aware of his near-nudity and conscious of my own. It’s so hot that the temperature demands the least clothing, and he probably just left Sonya’s bedroom. Not wanting to call attention to my action, I don’t raise the sheet over my body. When that would become less obvious, I will cover myself more fully, although—in these confused moments—I’m not sure about the reason for my reactions, since Paul and I lie on the deck sunning in trunks virtually every day.
He does not seem self-conscious, and I relax.
But I tense when, instead of sitting on one of the chairs in the room, he sits on my bed, easily, without a word. He lies beside me, head to feet.
Looking out the wide window, I see bolts of lightning stabbing the night. In sputtering instants of flashing light, the room is like one in an old black-and-white movie when the film breaks and light proceeds to snap.
“I hate women,” Paul announces; “I detest them. They’re fucken whores, bitches, cunts.”
“You don’t mean it,” I say quickly.
He seems not to have heard me.
“I just left Sonya. We fucked, I desire her, her body drives me crazy and I hate her for that and I wish I didn’t need her or her body. I desire—no, I need her—and hate her but more than anything else I need her for me to despise. I hate all the fucken bitches I’ve fucked, and I’ll continue to desire them and fuck them and hate them before I need them again, and that’s what keeps me theirs and drives me mad.”
My instinct is to rebut his hateful burst of words, to refuse to listen to him; but his rant causes me to wait to see how far it would go, whether it would retrench, disclaim itself. My feeling toward Sonya, a friendship that is becoming increasingly close, confuses me. At times I feel that I’m sexually attracted to her, but then I dismiss that thought. It has to do with the competition between me and Paul.
In my bedroom on this island, that fierce hot sweaty night—no breath of a lost breeze recurred—I had become keenly aware of Paul’s body next to mine. If he was attempting to display his body, then I would display my own. I won’t, as I had earlier determined to do, cover my own almost-nudity.
“I mean it, man,” he had just said. “I lust after women, love and hate them, I need to fuck them until they’re exhausted and I’m exhausted. It’s lust that drives me to them, man, and desire—needing them—lessens me. Need is humiliating.”
There was no detectable irony in his venomous declaration. He meant it all. There was evidence in the way he ordered Sonya to him—and in the violent connection that followed, a feral kiss.
“I’m surprised you even used the word ‘love,’ man,” I said, thinking that this might intercept the violent rush.
“Love is the same as hate,” he said.
“Come on, man, that’s a cliché, not good enough for you.” I wanted to introduce the possibility of rebuttal, add lightness to the uncomfortable declaration. “It sounds good, man, everybody says it, but it doesn’t make sense.”
“The same intensity, the same, the same”—thrusting out the next word with disgust—”need.”
“Love can fuck up desire, I’ll agree to that,” I said, and I believed that. If, on the occasions when someone I had sex with remained after orgasm, and an edge of friendship was being suggested to me—as, say, we might lie, though rarely, talking—if, then, at those times, all desire faded. The slightest intimation of affection ruled out the possibility of further sexual contact. I sought out strangers, strangers who would be defined only by the sexuality involved: no names exchanged; no possibility other than accidental contact, still anonymous, unrecognized, recurring perhaps in an alley; recognizing whoever I was with, if at all, only when we parted.
In the room with Paul, what remained of the light—I had pushed away the reading lamp—glowed only faintly. The air was stilled, a presence bearing down on our bodies.
“That bitch Corina”—Paul went on—”that lying hypocrite. Her life had been all girls’ schools with spectral nuns. With her family, she’d had private audiences with priests, bishops, cardinals—her family, equal hypocrites, bought them all, including a private audience with the fucken pope. Even after we were married, she went to Mass every Sunday; she would rush into whatever church she saw, kneel, praying. At times, I would go with her—you know why, man?—to watch her be ridiculous. I could belittle her more for that, and I did. I would have her kneel before me like she did in those churches, and I would make her beg to get fucked. Then she’d go to confession.
“‘What do you confess to?’ I asked her.
“‘Lust,’ she said; ‘lust is sinful.’
“She would say tha
t as she reached over to me, pushing her body against mine, unbuttoning my pants and raising her dress, pulling my cock out, shoving it into her.” His hand dropped to his groin, cupping it over the white shorts in recollection of those frenzied contacts. In a glance, I saw once again—but, this time, it was much more emphatic—the assertive mound between his legs, lingering, of course, from his contact earlier with Sonya.
I placed my own hand between my legs, over the sheet, matching him, and listening.
“And she was fucken frigid all that time,” he said.
He leaned over his side of the bed, where he had placed his cigarettes. He took one out and lit it, this time without sheltering it. Even the tip of flame seemed to add to the heat. A pause, while he inhaled, deep, holding the smoke, releasing it, a small swirl rising into the heat. Without puffing on it again, he ground the cigarette on the palm of his hand. He leaned back beside me.
“Man, I had to have her as an ally against her father, and I knew how. Listen:
“Outside Paris, there was an old church we had driven by before, one she said she loved. She had rushed in for penance, left some money, as she did at every goddamn church she went to. I suspected she was praying to the saints for an orgasm.” He paused to laugh. “The church was an ancient country church, the kind named after some saint or other who someone claimed performed some ridiculous miracle and, with vast humility, man”—he laughed at that—”asked for a church in his name. It was a church with gaudy statues, an array of goddamned anonymous saints, a tableau of bloody processions—and Jesus, naked on the cross.”
I knew what he was describing. Even as a child, I had been awed by the painted statues of saints and angels and suffering martyrs, especially Jesus on the cross, the nudity of the perfect, muscular body so startling among robed, kneeling mourners, and men enclosed in armor.
“Before we entered the church”—Paul was now leaning on his elbow, talking—”she paused, transfixed by this ancient church, just one of many that had helped to render her frigid, driven her frenzied needs and left her unfulfilled, demanding more and more, draining. Inside, she dipped her manicured fingers into the bowl of filthy water, and, kneeling, she crossed herself.”
And I was swept into the long-withheld, now vivid story. I imagined the scene. The mournful reverence in church, the spectacle of women depicted in paintings and statuary, always covered in gray or black, and always weeping glass tears. All amid the spectrum of colors, of stained-glass windows lit by the afternoon sun, creating dyed pools, filtered reflections of colors melting on the floor, candles radiating in stifled silence, an atmosphere of fear and mourning, and death—and smashed sexuality. All of it in tawdry Technicolor.
Lighting another cigarette, snuffing it out on his palm, Paul continued: “Scattered about were two—no, three—people, kneeling; two were women, their heads draped with black shawls, their busy fingers roaming over strung beads, muttering prayers, hurling them out like muted curses, and an old man with a cane, all worn bones, trying to kneel, head bowed before the golden altar.”
Beside me, Paul had lain back, his eyes closed as he painted the remembered scene.
“To one side of the church, inside, there was an alcove I had noticed the first time with her here, an alcove ruled by a large statue of Jesus on the cross, and of course naked except for that band of cloth, barely covering his groin, a long, long piece of cloth suggesting the size of what it hid. In the glow of flickering candles, the figure before us seemed to be breathing, a witness to Corina’s outrageous beauty, which she was displaying before the posing naked man in this old temple of repression and martyrdom and festering sex.”
Paul’s voice grew husky, his words rushed: “I grabbed Corina, I pushed her roughly down in front of the commanding naked figure, she needed no coaxing, she knelt, pleading wordlessly, I coaxed her down, pushing her to the floor, she sprawled there, she growled, a sound of stifled laughter, her mouth open in choked silence—all twisted and thrilling—and I laughed and I pulled at her clothes, tearing, welcoming the sound of violent ripping, and she laughed, her laughter thrust into the deadly silence, and she spread her naked legs open, I pushed my pants down, I mounted her, she thrust her body up to hasten and then to deepen the penetration, I pushed into her, hard, I fucked her hard, harder, hard, and we laughed, man.”
I closed my eyes, images of naked flesh exploding in blinding colors.
Paul’s voice thickened, deep, guttural: “I fucked her, and she was moaning, and her groans fought the silence, destroyed it. The scattering of people there looked around, alarmed. The old man attempted to get up from the pew he had leaned into; he moved forward toward where sounds were coming, his cane wobbled, and he fell not far from where we lay on the floor fucking, my cock buried in her cunt, throbbing, pushing deeper and out, deeper. The panting old man grasped his cane and tried to rise, succeeding finally and staggering toward us, his mouth open, making soundless gasps.
“‘What are—?’ the old man managed to utter. ‘Are you—?’ He was unable to finish. One of the women had followed him; her thick black shawl fell off her head, tangling at her feet. She grasped for it, chanting. ‘Dios mio, dios mio,’ she pleaded in Spanish. In Spanish, man, she pleaded in Spanish.”
I saw it all, the beautiful woman Corina, her white legs wide open, the man’s hands spreading them wider, his buttocks pumping down on her, and the statue of the naked Jesus, covered only with a cloth that dipped down low at his groin, that naked man straining in pain—oh, no, no, no—straining no longer in pain but in passion, released and straining in passion, staring down at them, as if about to descend to join the bodies exposed by the burned light of candles and sun-filtered colors bleeding on the floor.
Beside me on the bed, Paul laughed, trying to speak more words through gasps of laughter in this hot room, heat from our bodies coiling into it. He blurted: “I saw the pious man and the woman staring at us, I fucked the glorious naked body harder, moving our bodies sideways to expose them fully to the watchers, who stood unmoving. Within Corina’s moans, I heard the sound of two other congregants who had walked in and were rushing out, screaming, and the one woman watching resumed her chant: ‘Dios mio, dios mio!’ In Spanish, man! The two others were running out as if chased by the devil, screaming out their prayers crazily and loud as if to stifle our moans. Yes, screaming their prayers, ‘Madre de dios, madre de dios,’” Paul stuttered between bursts of laughter. “In Spanish,” he said. “Praying. In Spanish, man.”
It was now as if the laughter in that country church had joined the laughter in this room, and my own choking laughter, spurts of it, controlled, then rushing out beyond control at the lurid, impossible spectacle,
Paul groped his groin firmly. I felt my own cock responding to the daring sacrilege of his story, the spectacular sexual transgression.
“The old man continued to hobble toward us until he was almost over us, and Corina was coming, and staring up, coming for all the times she had not, looking up and screaming yes, yes, yes, in that ancient church, screaming, and she came and came, my lips on her lips, biting her until I tasted blood—” He stopped, catching his breath, stopped the laughter, only to allow more words; and then between gasps of resumed laughter, and sudden surprised silences—his and mine—he said, “And then, man, and then, man, oh, man, then there stood a priest, a young priest in his cassock, and I was holding myself back but not all the way and Corina pushed herself up in rhythmic thrusts and let herself go again and again on and on and she was coming, she was coming, and the young priest shouted something at us, about blasphemy, about police, about sin at the same time that his hands clasped his cassock at his groin and his breathing was loud, louder.” Paul shook with more spurts of laughter. “That young priest—his hands clasping his groin!
“And Corina said, man, that bitch with my cock pulsing in her cunt; she said, Corina said, ‘Don’t stop, fuck me deep, goddammit, don’t stop, fuck me, fuck me, let him see us, let him see us—’”
The young priest? The old man who lingered? Or the figure of Christ staring down over them within the anxious glow of mesmerized candles?
I was laughing now with Paul, laughing at the glorious excess.
“‘Don’t stop, fuck me, don’t stop,’ Corina gasped, and I didn’t, faster, coming, deeper, faster, and she came again, and the young priest gaping down at us said:
“‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’
“And Corina gasped:
“‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’”
After minutes of uncontrolled laughter, Paul fell back on the bed. Sweat and tears of laughter stung my eyes. The laughter fading, fading, faded, and we both stopped laughing. Paul turned over on his side, facing me as I faced him.
Then:
There remained in the room only an emptiness, as if all sound, all laughter, all words had coagulated into the heat, a silence louder than laughter, no sound, and then I heard the nervous rustling of trees outside, a gasp of wind shaking their leaves. I waited for the resultant breeze to glide into the room, and it did, brushing over our bodies. Then again only the soundless echo of our laughter.
Paul got up. He stood staring out the window. His silhouette was etched against the vague darkness. Lightning and thunder had brought no rain, had left only its distinct scent, moist, a fading scent.
He turned around to face me.
“I’ve tried to be a homosexual,” he said.
22
Still in bed, the sheet now cast away, I knew I had heard those words distinctly uttered by Paul, facing me.
“How did you do that, Paul?” I asked him.
He turned around, walked back to the edge of the bed. “What?” he asked as if orienting himself to his own words.