“You love her?” Elizabeth asked Stanty. “Yes, I see that, and she will be allowed to love you, until Paul is through with her—is he yet?—and then you will hate her, too. Like Paul. No women will be allowed.” She smiled, a slash of pale color across the perfect whiteness of her face. “All that is over. I’m here to save Stanty from all that.”
Stanty fired at her: “You go away, leave me alone, leave my father alone, go away, Elizabeth, I hate you as much as you hate me, go away, leave me alone. Father!”—pleading for help. “Island!” he shouted in panic. “Island!”
“He won’t go with you, ever,” Paul said.
“I will fight you, Paul,” Elizabeth threatened.
“You won’t.”
Elizabeth sighed—a long sigh—and then she said: “It would be scandalous to reveal everything publicly, but if necessary, so be it. Of course, you do know that if that occurred, Corina’s powerful father”—she paused, as if considering deeply—“or even mine, would kill you. Both despise you.”
“Why do you want Stanty now, after all those years, after all that hatred even before he was born?” Sonya’s voice, the determined firmness with which she was questioning Elizabeth, surprised me.
Elizabeth separated herself from everyone. She faced us all. “Because,” she said—
She will break now, the composure will crash—
“—I want finally to be … a good mother. I want my son to be with me.”
Time stopped; all sound had stopped. Through the open glass doors, fierce, hot darkness invaded in slapping waves.
Then:
“I want,” Elizabeth said, “to undo the horror of it all, to undo—”
And then:
“To undo?” Paul threw his head back and laughed, a loud, harsh laugh. Slowly at first, then rapidly, he brought the palm of one hand against the other, then again, fast, again, faster, louder—applauding and laughing at the same time. “What a fucken performance, Elizabeth! Goddamn if you didn’t almost—I say, almost—have me!”
“I’ve done what I had to do.” It was an announcement that she had finished her delivery, precise, clear, steely.
“You’ve done what your lunatic psychiatrist told you to do, his stupid assignment,” Paul said, “stupidly to try to undo rancid years that we—yes, you and I—formed together. And you want to undo your guilt with this fucken reckless act? What a fucken performance!” He shook his head as if genuinely disappointed in her.
“Yes, of course, to everything, yes, yes, yes—and it’s all done,” Elizabeth said, and her voice had not changed. “I’ve undone it all, yes, and I’m leaving now,” she said. “I told the two zombies you employ to wait for me, to take me to the shore, to my car.”
Had this performance truly happened? Over now, it seemed impossible. But there was Paul, trying now to control his laughter, and there was Sonya with tears dampening her face, and there was Stanty looking pale, angry. On this island of extremes—an island that seemed to have the power of manipulation, as if it had created and allowed all that had occurred, and more that surely might occur—on this island, Elizabeth’s contrivance had assumed its place, one more heinous event to add to the others.
Elizabeth walked over to Sonya.
I thought: She’s preparing her exit, a part of her staged, redemptive scene, to restore—I almost laughed aloud—balance to the “universe.”
“You’re the most beautiful of Paul’s women,” she said to Sonya. “When Paul is through with you—he may already be—is he, my lovely, is he?”
Sonya seemed to freeze, as if she had stopped breathing.
I thought: Is Elizabeth right?—is that already happening?—what Sonya had suspected, and now Elizabeth had added her knowledge of his detestation of women; had Sonya ever heard that before? Had Paul gone that far? From her sudden look of bewildered anger at Paul, I knew Sonya was hearing those words of Paul’s total hatred for the first time—Elizabeth had struck expertly.
“—when that happens,” Elizabeth continued addressing Sonya, “perhaps you will look me up.” Holding her tightly as Sonya attempted to resist, Elizabeth kissed her on the lips, a long hungry kiss.
Sonya twisted forcefully away, rubbing the kiss off with her hand, then holding her palm open, staring down at it as if in shock, then wiping her hand furiously against her body.
As we heard the roar of the motorboat outside, Elizabeth walked to the door. She stood with her back to us. Then she turned to face us—
—and I saw this:
Her facade remained composed, she remained composed; but—
I saw this:
Her hands clenched into tight, angry fists that she held against her body as if to control them; and she said:
“I am not to blame. I have no guilt. I have reversed it all.”
30
We’ve been living in episodes, though with players in common, each episode an entity in itself; and each episode disappears, undiscussed, pushed into silent limbo. Reminding myself of that is my way of sustaining the hope that the enormity of Elizabeth’s incursion, as harrowing as it was, will, in the same inexplicable way as other such events, be banished as if it never happened, leaving behind not even the faintest scent of its poison. (Is that possible for me? Can I ever forget the whirling water waiting to suck me in that fateful night?)
I get out of bed, realizing that I was so distracted last night that I can’t remember what I had intended to read. A book by Henry James lies on the floor beside the bed; it’s his story of exact ambiguity. The painting is covered with a towel that I placed over it last night. I’ll leave it covered, to shove away its threat.
WHWACK!!! WHWACK!!!
I recognize sounds of firing. Stanty practicing with Paul again. Or is he alone, learning? Has Sonya agreed to teach him?
I go to the drawer where I left the sheets I had been typing. These entries are an obvious narrative account of the events on this island from the beginning, Paul’s invitation. No, I will never write about this island. Its mysteries baffle me. How can I record what I don’t understand?
I head for the sundeck. Despite my conviction that nothing of last night’s chaos will be addressed, I feel trepidation when I see Stanty heading toward the boathouse. When he sees me, he stops, as I do—I’m sure for the same reason: we do not want to encounter each other, and have not done so since that turbulent time on the lake. My detestation of him is almost threatened by the unwelcome recollection of him clinging to Sonya in panic as Elizabeth hurled her calm revelations of hatred toward him, like soft curses. That image is not enough to temper my rage.
I don’t move, conflicted about what to do as he continues toward me. “Good morning, John Rechy,” he says, and I know that he is leaving the intended bloodying of last night dormant, like the attempted drowning on the lake.
I cannot answer him, cannot acknowledge him. I continue to the sundeck. There is no way that I saw what I think I saw in that flashing instant of encountering him. I could not have seen that his eyes were red, as if he’d been crying. Stanty crying? Totally my imagination, which I imposed on him. Besides, he had been wearing sunglasses when we crossed paths.
Paul and Sonya are lying on mats; but they have placed them under the shade of the tree whose overhanging shade falls daily onto the sundeck and then lengthens and shortens as the day passes and sunlight shifts.
With the usual words of greeting and cursory inquiry—and I’m still being attentive to even a nuance of last night’s emotional turbulence, and of any new knowledge of the events on the lake—I join the two at the edge of the shade, which makes our bodies appear even darker, gleaming with oil, a sensual sight that softens my anxiety.
As I lie on my pad, I notice that the shade has darkened earlier than I remember; it’s the first signal of summer’s waning. That thought saddens me, the ending of summer, and that arouses in me a sense of another ending, a powerful one, final, along with a sense of urgency, of incompleteness. This mixed feeling is so assertive that I am
sure, for a disoriented moment during which the shade we’re lying on stretches even more, that the others are feeling it, too, and as powerfully. What the urgent incompleteness is, I don’t know. Through those bewildering thoughts courses a sense of sorrow.
“Man?”
I hadn’t noticed, during those odd seconds, that Paul had gotten up and is extending to me a tall Cuba libre.
“We got ahead of you,” Sonya says, sitting up exhibiting her own glass. She’s smiling, her most brilliant, loving smile. The smile is so tempting that I reach out to touch her lips. I stop just short of accomplishing that—and she laughs. I laugh with her, at nothing, really. Elizabeth’s assault, her prophecy of Paul’s abandoning her, has had no discernible effect.
“I’ll try to catch up,” I say to Paul, only because he seems to be waiting for some kind of agreement. He seems uncommonly exuberant.
He is lying next to Sonya in the sheltering shade, and we all three join in laughter at an unknown situation. With a start, I notice this: The sunlight, still harsh, is stretching afternoon shadows—longer, longer, longer—toward the white borders of the sundeck. The angle of the shadows has shifted, too, bringing this day to an earlier close.
Paul is smoking more than usual, now and then handing his cigarette over to Sonya for a brief puff. He seems especially edgy—even nervous—no, anxious—no, eager. All of that affirms my supposition that the feeling I have of an ending without completeness, asserted by the conspiracy of shadows preparing for summer’s end—hints, slight changes, and no diminishing of the heat—is shared by him.
He has just returned from the village. “I bought some new records, some especially for each of you,” he says. He speaks the rest like a prepared announcement, again suggesting to me his unfocused urgency: “We can listen to them tonight, what do you say, beauty?”
“If you want, yes,” Sonya says.
“Man?” he asks me.
“Yeah, great … man,” I wonder what record or records he may have selected based on his assumption about my taste, another aspect of his character: a firm belief in his assumptions. He seems eager for approval of his planned concert.
We go inside the house when the sun has declined, etching dark shadows on the sundeck.
The gray couple has prepared an appropriately cold dinner. It’s late evening, and the two have disappeared. During the glimpses I have caught of them, I have never seen them other than with their eyes cast down. They exist like wakened somnambulists.
Paul has chosen an “extra-special wine” for dinner, although we have not abandoned our unfinished Cuba libres.
“A toast to tonight’s concert,” he says as he opens the wine.
We retreat with our drinks to the deck. The night is suffused with a strange light, a mixture of the light of the moon, brighter than I have seen it, as it disentangles itself out of fragments of flimsy clouds. I wonder what Stanty might make of this moody, commanding illumination. But he’s not here. Will I ever again experience a “blue hour” like the one that has become a part of this island?
“Paul insisted Stanty retire early tonight; he looked tired,” Sonya informs me about Stanty’s absence. “He loves to sleep outside.”
I imagine him outside—as I found him that one day; imagine him searching for the darkest shadows to sleep under.
Paul is pouring more wine—“the very best!”—into our glasses. The glass in his hand tilts and falls, umber liquid spilling onto the floor; pieces of sharp-edged glass assumed a distorted shape. Staring down at the watery smirch, a liquid puzzle, Paul frowns and abruptly reminds us of his plan. We will all go down to the lower depth of the house, a floor that includes, but separately, the library and the smaller room with the large locked box with the gun. That thought—irrelevant, I know—strikes me with the impact of an actual shot.
Sonya is bending to gather the glassy jetsam off the floor, and for no reason laughs, infectious laughter that Paul joins in, and so do I.
“Oh!” she cries, putting her hand to her mouth, soothing a cut with her tongue. She exhibits her finger to Paul.
“Really, beauty, it’s nothing, just a nick,” Paul dismisses. “That didn’t even break the skin.”
Her next words erupt like lightning:
“God damn you, Paul!” she says. “Is it impossible for you to feel another’s fucking pain?”
It is as if she has spewed out a litany of obscenities, the words not hers. She stops soothing her finger; the cut is insignificant. In a soft, almost eerily loving voice, she addresses Paul: “Is it true, beautiful man, that you detest all women? Is it true that you detest—?”
—me, she doesn’t say; the word is suspended.
I walk to her, to be with her when the emotional tempest, the withheld word once spoken—inspired by Elizabeth’s prophecy of her imminent ending with Paul—will be set into motion. But the fatal word is blocked. Paul holds her hand and presses it against her mouth. Then he licks the wounded finger, sucking it deep into his mouth, soothing it.
As we stand at the mouth of the stairway, Paul releases her hand and pushes his body against hers; and then holding on to the open bottle of wine, spilling only drops, he lifts her in one swoop and carries her down the stairs.
“Come on, man,” he calls, glancing back at me.
I don’t move.
“Hey, man!” he urges from downstairs.
31
As I descend to the lowest floor, our desultory laughter recurs, all three of us laughing in spurts as if we’ve been seeking an evasive object of humor.
In this large room that I have not seen before, the floor is covered with carpeting so soft, so deep that I feel I’m gliding. Through wide windows, blades of moonlight slice the room. A stereo with all its electrical enhancements—Paul has punched buttons on a panel, releasing the sounds—pounds out the violent notes of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin rushing to its sacrificial ending. He purchased that record for me; I notice next to it Pachelbel’s Canon, for Sonya.
Paul lays her on the floor. She stretches, a long, sensual stretch. He sprawls beside her, one of his arms under her head. Her head nestles against him.
“Hey, man,” he calls, and nods toward their bodies.
As we do on the sundeck, we’ll lie intimately on the carpet to listen to Paul’s concert. I move to join them.
I halt.
Paul has removed his trunks—a sudden shock, his nudity while Sonya remains, even if briefly, clothed.
Kneeling over her, he eases off her clothes. She raises her legs to help his movements. She lies naked like an offering. Paul rests on his side next to her, propped slightly toward her. I stare at the two naked bodies. If I add my own to the bared flesh, where will I lie?
The dissonance of Bartók ends, throttled like the mandarin himself.
“Man!” Another invitation from Paul, and a glance up at me. Sonya leans her head back and sideways; her hair tosses in strands over her face—she looks like a gypsy. Paul rolls over her, his legs embracing her body. He kisses her untypically lightly, then harder, hungrily. She responds, eager.
The silence that the violent music has left is replaced by the sound of heat—I hear the heat pulsing. Electric air from the fan placed here earlier slices over my body. I shiver, although the night’s heat swallows the relief the fan tries to provide.
“Man!”
He wants me to witness his performance, the way he’s exhibited his life. I won’t be an audience for his sexual prowess. I begin to walk away.
“What the fuck, man?”
I turn back.
He looks up at me, holding me in his gaze, leading it back to him. Then he grasps the open bottle of wine and holds it out to me. Bending, I swig from it, return it to him; he drinks from the bottle. He pours a stream of the wine over Sonya’s body. “The best wine, beauty, the very best, almost worthy of your body.” His voice is deep, husky, a growled toast, a moan. The liquid flows in a thin streak along her flesh. She shivers. His mouth and tongue—an
d he looks at me fleetingly to ascertain that I’m watching—follow the jagged course of the wine, over her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. His motions quicken, he slides up to her breasts. A film of oil from the earlier sunning tints their bodies. His tongue glides from one breast to the other. He holds each like an offering. His tongue draws circles around one, slips to the other. The circles narrow on her nipples. He bites them—she winces, then sighs. He keeps the lush flesh in his mouth. He whispers growling words—they sound dirty—into her ears, and he glances up at me. She responds to his words, a low sensual whisper as she dabs at his ear with her tongue.
He takes another swallow of the wine—and I wonder whether it’s retained the taste of mine—and from his mouth he drips it between her bronzed legs. His tongue probes and licks there.
I haven’t moved.
Her breasts, moistened by the wine and Paul’s tongue, are sculpted by the moonlight that darkens behind shreds of clouds, then resurges, brighter.
Sonya’s hands roam over Paul’s flesh. It gleams with amber moisture. Dots of liquid shine within drifting light. Her hands on his chest coax him back. She bends over him, kissing his chest, gliding over the film of light hairs, lingering with her tongue on his nipples, slipping down to his hardened cock, sucking its head into her mouth, sucking it deeper. She leans back, her body laid out in full display in a glare of light. Tossing, twisting, switching over, back, over, around, up, down, lips pasted, the two bodies morph into one.
Paul pushes her back. His cock slides along her wine-tinged body and down to its opening, not entering. She raises herself, urging to be entered. He whispers more words from deep in his throat.
The small triangle between Sonya’s legs is so much lighter than the rest of her darkened body that the difference renders her even more naked. The flesh about Paul’s groin and buttocks—as his body writhes in shafts of light—is as startling a contrast with the dark brown of his chest, his legs. As he arches his body over her, I see his large engorged cock about to enter her. He looks back at me, smiling a strange smile I can’t interpret.