Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“I wonder,” he said after a moment, “if you could let me have a nip of brandy to go with this.”

She rose immediately from the chair she had taken. Still shaky, her face almost blank, she brought him the miniature brandy bottle.

“I drink,” he explained.

“I know you do,” she said. “I can tell by your face. Where it’s soft.”

Holliwell drew back, amused and stung.

“Your face is hard and soft,” she informed him. “It looks hard and sort of mean but in some places it’s soft.”

He nodded warily.

“I know your face pretty well by now. I’ve been thinking about you.”

He wondered who it was she thought about. Who she thought she saw.

“I felt very close to you last night,” she said.

“You were.”

“I know. You have to understand that’s a rare feeling for me. And I don’t know how to handle it.”

He drank the fortified coffee. Oh, May, he thought, I’m not your lost Tiger. He was the Adversary. He would not let her go now, although it was within his power. Shown flesh, the Adversary eats; presented with inner space, he hastens to occupy it. The Adversary is a lover.

He drew up the ends of the soft net she had stepped into. He said: “I fell in love with you. That’s the only way I can put it.”

He put out his hand and touched her. Gratitude, joy, remorse struck him all together. There were two hungers and an illusion of fulfillment. He thought he understood hers better than his own.

She did not know the drill and this made it awkward for him but exciting as well. He told himself that he was not trifling with her but taking honorable comfort in a friendly place.

It was not one of those times when one forgot the forest for the trees. She was there, always. If he abandoned her she would intrude herself; her expectations were limitless and she pursued their satisfaction without shame. The satisfactions she pursued were innocent and had to do with her idea of earthly love. At times he thought of her as Eve.

Over and through it all was the beating of her heart. Holliwell felt it throbbing in his own body; he caressed her heartbeat as a sexual exercise. He studied its measure under the warmth of her silken skin; he wanted to hunt it down inside her, to be inside her, where its cadence ordered the scheme of her gut and bone as primum mobile. He wanted to be mastered by her heartbeat. He wanted her heart in his hands.

It was difficult to make it last, he was so inflamed. Her intrusions on his selfishness helped, and he was ready when the time came for the thing he had rather dreaded. The ram beat against the shuddering gate, echoing along the walls. Again, again. She did not hide, she was there.

He thought that he could share her pain. The stabbing aside of virginhood was as it should be — his extended flesh prodding after habitation, inching through blood and tissue after her quickening heart. They experienced it together, an enacted metaphor.

Once inside her he was free. For a moment he could make himself believe that the walls of self were melted and identity overthrown. It was all lyric for him, bloody, lubricious. Her heart kept beating faster and faster. They finished as a process of ocean.

Not for some minutes afterward did he realize that she had eluded him after all. He could not understand how it had happened. He turned to her on the mat beside him and saw that he had lost her. Her teeth were bared, biting into her upper lip. Her eyes were bright with tears. Of course he had expected too much of the act; it had been strangely naïve of him. They had both expected worlds too much.

Stupidly, he asked the tedious questions. Whether it had been all right, if she was hurting, whether she had, as he said, enjoyed it. He was pushing her away, he whose science was Other. Each tedious question, each polite reassurance put them farther apart.

He got up, drew water from the sink to wash himself and walked to one of the windows. She had closed all the shutters. He unfastened the one at the window where he stood and looked to the ocean again.

The sea on one hand, the woman on the other. Himself in between. All separate again in their loneliness and fixedness, illusions of union fled.

When he turned to face her she was sitting on the bed wrapped in the sheet. His eye fell on the bloodstains and he looked away. There was a strange smile on her face. When she spoke it was in a small somehow disembodied voice.

“A Wife — at Daybreak I shall be—” he heard her say. “Sunrise — Hast thou a flag for me?” She looked him in the eye with the cool despairing smile. “Nothing ever goes the way I think it will,” she said.

He turned back toward the ocean.

“I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“Oh no,” she said. She stood up with the sheet draped around her and came over to him. “Oh no. Please don’t misunderstand me. It was pleasurable. It was very pleasurable.”

When he turned his face to her, she stood on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek.

“Very nice, sir. Very nice and new.”

“It hurt,” he said. “It wasn’t what you expected.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said. “I just didn’t think it would happen like that.”

“Neither did I.” He clasped his hands round the nape of her neck and looked into her tears. “It didn’t happen. We did it.”

“Yes,” she said.

Her body was still when he held her. She delicately stroked his shoulder with three fingers as one might pet a cat. It was an odd hit.

“Wait for me,” she said, gathering the sheet round her. “I have to wash.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

He leaned in the window, smoking, watching the road. He could hear her crying in the shower.

She came out wearing an unadorned light blue dress and her hair was tucked up in a matching scarf. A nurse’s uniform — almost a habit.

“You really are in trouble,” Holliwell told her. “Very serious and dangerous trouble. You’re being watched by some very bad people.”

Justin was looking down at her warped reflection in the surface of a wheeled metal table.

“I know that.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“Sure. The Guardia Nacional and people who work for them.”

He was silent for a moment.

“There are others,” he told her. “Foreigners. They could be the local CIA station assets. They’re cowboys.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means no one much cares what they do. And they’re after you.”

She managed to smile. “Me specifically?”

“They think you’re a subversive element.”

“I am. But I’m not very good at it.”

“Well, you’ve attracted their notice. They want you.”

“Come on,” she said, “it’s not me they’re really after.”

He watched her slowly raise her fingers to her lips.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “It’s you.”

He would not be able to explain it to her. She had aroused an appetite in them as she had in him. He called his hunger love, what they called theirs he had no way of knowing. It was malice, shame — the desperado’s rage at innocence and grace, the villain’s abhorrence of love and life and goodness. Names and words were of no account; it was an old game, older than words.

He thought of her heart beating next to his and the notion came to him of that heartbeat pulsing across silence, its brave flutter sounding in the inward ear of those men like the lateral rhythms of a lost sea creature among the reefs. Of her heart as a magical beast bringing the hunt upon itself. A unicorn.

“Let them be after me,” she said, still staring at the tabletop. “While they’re after me, the people who are really doing something can take this country from under their noses.”

“Are they wrong about you then? Aren’t you involved in any real activity?”