“We could have waited for the helicopter to return for us,” said Karen, the woman who faced the island. Her skin was so fair, so delicate that although she wore a wide hat she shielded her face with a hand. She had the frail, translucent beauty of women produced incestuously by generations of inbred kings and queens. Her eyes seemed still to be colored. There was a whisper of doom about her beauty.
“She would have left the odor of her rancid perfume,” said Bravo. “She’s a snake.”
“More deadly than that,” said the woman facing away from the island. She stared fiercely at the sea they left behind them, as if seeking something lost irretrievably within the mysterious depths each farther inch they advanced toward the house. This woman’s beauty combined the vibrant sensuality of a whore with the cool elegance of a queen. In contrast to Karen, she—Tarah—exuded a ferocious, though cold, energy. “She’s one of the most diabolical women in the world.”
“Those youngmen she collects each season—why?” Karen asked.
“To torture Albert,” Tarah said tersely.
“That pitiful man always with her,” Karen understood. “And what happens to the others when the season ends?”
Bravo listened attentively as if plotting an assault.
The looming house. It was already a presence—even to Tarah, who had not yet faced it. Their words seemed at least in part meant to thwart their awareness of the island’s approach.
“There’s talk that she dazes them with drugs, pills—anything,” Tarah said. “That she scorches their souls until they accompany her like zombies. When she’s through, they just disappear.”
Still forming words to diminish the awareness of the nearing island, Karen said, “Does Albert really support her? Why does he stay with her?”
“He’s certainly not her lover,” Bravo laughed derisively. “Malissa is sexless.”
“Her black powers,” Tarah said wryly.
“Bullshit!” Bravo spat. “All that Satanic crap—it’s just her thing, man!”
“Some day they’ll confront each other, Richard and Malissa—over the wreckage of the others,” Karen said as if to herself.
“Maybe one of them won’t be around for the confrontation,” Bravo lashed.
Quickly, Tarah faced the island. The house. Like a mosque, looming. A bright apparition over trees mottled by patches of thick colored blossoms, its high dome crushed by the island’s brooding verdure. Richard’s house, his island: floating on the sea like a green shimmering oasis. “After so many years, I’m coming back,” she sighed to herself.
“How many?” Karen asked, making Tarah realize only then that she had spoken the words aloud.
“Eighteen,” Tarah said. “Though I’ve seen Richard in other places— . . . I was married to him for one year.”
“The usual space of time,” said Karen. “So was I.” Then: “Why have you come back?” she asked abruptly.
“He invited me,” Tarah said hurriedly. Yes, he had written her, asking her to come to the island again—that was true; but: “I’m not sure why,” she said. “Perhaps that’s the reason: To find out why.” To define the void he carved! her mind cried, the void she tried to fill with youngmen: always with resignation like that of a person with an incurable malady, hoping for, but not rationally expecting, a miracle. The illness only manifested itself more deadly after each shadowy encounter. “And you—why have you come back?” she asked Karen.
“Because it’s over,” Karen said quickly. She spoke to Bravo’s rigid back. “Because I’m free, now I can finally face him again.” On his island, where he brought me to life only to “kill” me, she thought. (And remembered: “There is your purity!” And: Two naked bodies groveling in a crushed bed. Faces astonished by the pouncing light. “Baby!” “I hate you!” “I’ll kill— . . .!”)
“And you, Bravo?” Tarah asked.
Bravo clutched her whip fiercely, a weapon. (Two kneeling figures. The whip about their necks.) “To be with Karen,” she said.
The sound of the motor only emphasized the heavy silence demanding to be filled with the unasked question between the two wives: Why did he send for us?
“Will Gable be here?” Karen thwarted the silent question.
“My son? No!” Tarah blurted; it was a shout of protest. “I would kill him before I let Richard see him again!”
The boat had reached the shore. Bravo jumped out onto a sandy pierlike projection of the island. With untypical gentleness, she held her hand out carefully to Karen.
Tarah studied the island. Under the glaring sun it blazed with iridescent colors. Tropical trees and vines shrugged heavy with flowers. “Sometimes it seems alive,” she said.
“Hello,” Mark greeted them casually. He was moving along the shore toward them. Hearing the motorboat’s approach, he had left the others in the house. “You’re my two stepmothers,” he said to Tarah and Karen. It was the first time he had seen them.
He was so much like his father they had recognized him immediately. “Mark,” Karen said. Both women moved to touch him in greeting.
But he went quickly to the boat, fastening it easily to the dock. He smiled back at them. “My father’s not here right now—he had to go to the mainland,” he explained. “I’ll send for your bags.”
Bravo’s eyes assaulted the boy—the son of the man, not yet met, whom she loathed.
Tarah was staring nakedly at the boy’s body covered only briefly by the trunks. Quickly, she lifted dark sunglasses to her eyes.
The three women followed Mark along the path, thickly overlaid with luxurious nets of vines, veils of delicate lilac flowers shrouding arched trees. The path was inlaid with colored stones forming intricate designs—like all the others leading to the house: circuitously, to display the paradisiacal beauty of the island.
“There’s a scorpion!” Mark said suddenly.
Karen stifled a scream.
Bravo raised her whip swiftly.
“They’re fatal,” Mark said. “But they strike only when they’re taunted. You’ve got to force them to sting.” He glanced at Bravo’s whip, ready to lash at the scorpion on a thick overhanging vine. “Can you really hit something that small with your whip?” he asked her.
“I’m an expert,” Bravo said coldly.
“That vine,” Mark indicated the one on which the scorpion was poised. “It’s called la malaspina.” Its leaves were shaped like long hearts, yellowish green where they faced the sun—their unexposed sides were orange-veined, dark. Red flowers burned on it like dots of fire. “The black people on the mainland use it in their voodoo rites. It’s supposed to be a powerful hallucinogen. They say it also induces confessions.”
“What kind of confessions?” Bravo said abruptly.
Tarah frowned, a black memory smearing her mind: Nameless bodies.
“Whatever there is to confess,” Mark said. “But it’s just a legend.”
Tarah paused before the house she had fled so long ago. (A howling night. With Gable, a child.)
Mark waited, as if for her decision whether to enter.
Quickly she walked up the white stairs, into the rotunda of columns.
“Some of the other guests are already here,” Mark said. “An actress—Joja.”
The two wives reacted tensely in recognition of the name. And so Joja too would be here.
A smile barely touched Mark’s lips. “And Blue,” he continued. “And Malissa and her companions. And a priest. And Savannah.” He turned swiftly to Bravo for a reaction, as he had turned toward the others when he had mentioned Joja.
“Savannah!” Bravo said.
“You know her?” Mark asked slowly.
Bravo met his challenging look. “Yeah.”
Clear, black-rimmed green eyes moving from one to the other, Mark faced the three women. Fully now, he smiled, a slow, sensual smile. “There will be other guests, of course,” he said.
“Will your mother be here, too, Mark?” Tarah asked abruptly.
Mark moved
into the house. Without looking back, he answered: “Lianne’s in an insane asylum.”
Captured by Mark’s radiating sensuality, Tarah knew: I came back to kill Richard.
Joja leaned over the body beside her. The black sheet barely covered it. “Hey!” She allowed her nipples to brush his shoulder.
He opened dark, dark blue eyes.
Joja pushed her hair from her face. “Who are you? . . . No—wait! What are you? I dig . . . types.” Her hand curled the dark brown hair on his chest. (There was something she must stifle: a fact to avoid facing.)
Without apparent source in any emotion, the smile on his face seemed attached. He lay back lazily, hands under his head: the gesture of a man used to being desired.
“You’re— . . .” Her fingers floated down along the hair on his flat stomach, toward the thick triangle barely exposed by the sheet. (The insistent, avoided thought pulled at her mind, unwelcome. She thrust it away by focusing her total attention on the blond youngman:) “An awol marine!” She made love to the words with her full red lips. Her hair cascaded, orange, like an implied promise over his chest. Her hand paused in its exploration of his body.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice a slow, lazy, deliberate drawl—a put-on. “And my name is—uh . . . Mac! Yeah. And diggit: I’m an awol marine, a busted sergeant, man.”
She threw her head back laughing, the red gorgeous mane of her hair cascading over her face. He was playing a role for her. (A role. The curtain dropping like a symbol between her and the shouting audience: “Louder!’’) “With that long beautiful hair of yours you must have been awol for years!”
He threw his straight hair back with a careless toss of his head, a half-smile on his face, just slightly surly in the assurance of his desirability. He stretched his long legs so that the sheet fell away. He was obviously exhibiting himself to her. The hair on his body dark brown, it was thick on his chest, diminished to a thin trickle to his navel, then flared heavily again into a furry, inverted “V” at his groin. Only the tattooed ankle remained covered by the sheet now.
“Whatever you are, you’re delicious. Ummm!” To prove it (and to cancel the ravenous thoughts gnawing even more insistently now at her mind to remember why she was with him), she licked his nipples. Then her head rose quickly, her mouth hovered over his, her breasts touched his chest. Now her left leg curled over his thighs, almost mounting him. Her lips opened wide, sucking his. Simultaneously her hand reached up, back, pulling at a remembered cord dangling to one side of the bed. Soundlessly, two round panels on the ceiling parted in a circle, revealing a mirror like a silver eye over the bed. It stared down at the two beautiful bodies doubly naked on the blackness of the sheets.
“You’re not even hard!” Joja blurted. Instantly she slid off the youngman. Contemptuously, on his thigh, she dropped his cock, not even hardening.
The youngman sat up immediately. His deep-blue eyes darkened violently on the woman. (A face. It invaded his mind. He saw: A dark youngman. Heard: “You’re not hard!” You’re not hard you’re not hard you’re not hard! Remembered: Scarlet rage like an exploding flower. Blood!)
“And you couldn’t make it last night either!” Joja accused him. “You had a hard time getting into that weird blue rubber!”
His hand moved out menacingly as if to hit her; but, more, it was a motion of thrusting away a scarlet memory. Then the hand retreated, and he lay back: both bodies on the black sheet like corpses.
Suddenly Joja’s anger funneled on Richard, and she allowed herself to face this: Richard had not met her last night at the airport. Now she tried to reshape the rest of last night. A complicated jigsaw puzzle, only the edges formed: Disappointment, indignation, rage. As the time of Richard’s arrival stretched, she tried to wipe out the growing anxiety with liquor and pills, pills taken blindly, arbitrarily—“roulette,” she called it—from small bottles always with her: the tiny powerful props of her barbiturate, amphetamine life. It was then that she picked up this blond youngman, also waiting for Richard. Why did I come back? To flee the city! Yes, already summer had threatened to collapse like a decaying body over the giant city. To flee that. And the memory of: A child gasping— . . . But even more— . . . To be with Richard again. After so many years: On a symbolic death row, she had learned of a reprieve—his invitation to return. An invitation. Yet she had felt . . . summoned. And then he didn’t meet her at the airport, sent his mute pilot: tacitly allowing her and this beautiful, strange youngman— . . . The jagged pieces fitted, unwelcome, into an almost total recollection of last night: to the point of their arrival on the island: The warring pills had finally slaughtered her into momentary oblivion.
If he didn’t want me, why did he send for me? The menacing question finally formed. “Did Richard— . . . Did he put us in the same room last night?” she verbalized the only remaining, harsh doubt. “Was Richard waiting for us?” she asked bluntly.
“I don’t know Richard,” the youngman said. He formed words: His mind still hovered on: Naked bodies wallowing in blood. A woman’s blue-painted body covered with feathers like squirming worms. Her voice trapped in a glassy trance: “A human sacrifice, a new king— . . .”
“Then why are you here?” Joja asked him dully.
“He saw my picture— . . . He wrote me.” (His mind exploded with the memory of headlines: “MURDER!”) “My name is Blue,” he asserted softly, as if that would explain everything about him.
The door opened.
Mark stood there.
Suddenly under the glass dome the youngman and girl studying the house were caught in the whirling vortex of the floor’s black and white patterns. Gleaming vitreously, it created a reflected, inverted world of somber tapestries and dark paintings, of arches, pillars, icy chandeliers, gossamer halos about them.
The girl had an instant sensation of vertigo. To stop it, she reached for her brother’s arm.
Eighteen, with dark brown hair, they were twins, remarkably alike except that what in her was feminine, delicate, lovely—she resembled a beautiful serene madonna—in him was masculine, strong, handsome. Only the dark eyes, too fierce, appeared incongruous on their faces.
“Look.” Valerie pointed to an adjoining room.
“It’s a theater,” Paul said incredulously.
“Or an altar,” Valerie said in astonishment.
They had moved from the domed hall and into a lavish room of gold, lofty arches, white paneled walls. Against one side was a round carpeted platform like a stage. On it were two black-draped forms—one large, elevated—it might have been a shrouded throne; the other tall, slender: props, perhaps, to be uncovered at the proper time. And an exposed, full-length mirror like a crystal trap. . . . Again, paneled paintings lined the walls: waiting figures; they conveyed the unfocused threat contained in tense dreams. About the large room, gilded divans, rococo chairs waited for an audience. One wall of the gold and white room was glass, allowing the island’s torn spectrum of colors to invade its pristine harmony—but only within the invisible boundary of glass.
“Daniel mentioned Richard’s elaborate entertainments. Maybe he’s going to stage a play.” Sensing his sister’s sudden apprehension, Paul attempted to still it with mention of their father, whom they spoke of by his first name. He himself felt no threat. No: only an acute interest.
“I believe Richard will stage a play.” The words had been spoken by Malissa. She was moving quickly toward Paul and Valerie, as if otherwise they might Escape. The blue-glassed stare enclosed them. Even now, without the shading hat, she appeared ageless. “You’re the twins,” she said. “You’re very beautiful. Of course. Like all the people Richard— . . . Collects? Invites?”
Valerie averted the woman’s blue gaze. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“I’m not responsible for your beauty,” Malissa rejected. At the entrance—somber silent figures like those depicted in the ubiquitous paintings along the walls—Tor, la Duquesa, Rev, Topaze waited. Albert lurked behind them. Valerie felt
suddenly that they were blocking the door. She felt trapped within the woman’s blue gaze. Now boldly, the plumed cavalier hat dashingly on his head, Topaze advanced into the room, inspecting the draped props on the stage.
“Your father,” said Malissa, knowing immediately who they were. “Is he free?”
“Free? From—of what?” Valerie said tensely.
Malissa’s jeweled hand made an arc before her, clearing invisible, obtrusive shapes between her and the girl. “From whatever!” she laughed. “It was just a question. One should always ask it. Free! So many are bound by something or other. Do you agree? . . . Your zodiacal signs!” she said peremptorily. Her hands indulged an arcane language of their own: They thrust, they parried, they sliced, gestures defined by flashing rubied arcs and lines, slashing. “Gemini is too obvious,” she said. Her eyes adjusting carefully to their total intensity, she studied the twins closely like objects under a powerful microscope.
“We were born under different signs,” Paul told the woman, apprehensive that she might guess it herself.
“Of course,” Malissa said. “You’re Virgo!” she tossed an ambiguous accusation at Valerie. “And you— . . .” Her finger was a jeweled stiletto pointed at Paul. “You’re Leo.” She did not wait for them to acknowledge her uncanny accuracy. Now she wove words hypnotically. Her mouth hardly moved. It was her hands, her eyes which seemed to speak: “Planets tossing through the sea of space—air, water, fire, earth. Planets rising and descending, choosing the shape of destiny: And yours!—separated by a mere speck of time in eternity. But a vast chasm between you, and a violent— . . .”
“You’re wrong about violence,” Valerie did not allow the woman to finish.
“Indeed.” The stretched skin of Malissa’s face eased into a smile.
On the elevated stage, Topaze was looking curiously at the tall, lean upright prop draped in black.
“Will he be here, your father?” Malissa interrogated Paul and Valerie.