Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

Orlando began rowing. He did it easily, by stretching his arms and drawing the oar handles smoothly to his chest, feathering the blades, and before they dripped slicing them into the current and making the boat glide without a lurch. We were headed downriver to the bridges and the basin. In midstream a breeze sprang up and wrinkled the water, puddling it with ripples.

“You warm enough?”

I nodded and said, “Ollie, I’ve missed you.”

“How’s the Cape?”

“If you came home once in a while you’d know.”

“What about your pictures?” he said, still solicitous. “People ask me about you all the time — you’re famous, Maude. Your hurricane pictures in the papers.”

“The Boston papers.”

“Boston’s the world, cookie.”

I said, “It isn’t either.”

“And you’re still snapping away.”

“I’m snapping.”

“Maude,” he said. “You look so damned sad.”

“I love you, Ollie.”

“I love you, too.”

I started to cry. I was glad we were far from the river banks, where no one would see us. My weeping surprised me like a stomach cramp and I blubbered out my pain, but after the first sobs I kept on, crying pleasurably, enjoying it. I could have stopped, but I realized that it would make what I was going to say more plausible. It was trickery, the tears running into my mouth.

Orlando still rowed. He said, “Look — geese.”

They were flying overhead in a honking lopsided chevron, like swimmers they moved so effortlessly, beating the air and keeping their necks outstretched, making for Florida. Orlando, I knew, had been trying to distract me, but I looked up and cried all the more when I saw the great confident letter they were carrying across the sky.

He said, “That would make a terrific picture.”

“No, no,” I said. “Too much sky — they’d look like a dish of gnats.” I blew my nose and hunched up some more sobs and said, “Have you seen Sandy?”

“Old Overalls? He’s at the Business School. I see him sailing now and then. What’s wrong?”

I was sniffing. “Did you ever hear of incest?”

Orlando pounced. “Sure I did! Little things, aren’t they? With six legs — they climb all over you.”

“Ollie!”

“Sorry,” he said, and feathered his oars.

“I’m serious and you’re making it awfully hard for me. Blanche told me all about it.”

“Look,” he said. “More geese.”

I could see them, high up, like a coat hanger creeping past the corner of my eye, trailing their far-off honks. But this time I didn’t look up. Orlando’s head was tilted back and his eyes followed the birds with a kind of longing. When they were gone he gave his oars a splash and trudged with them. I was sorry for confronting him like this, trapping him with my tears and making him listen.

“They were lovers — Sandy and Blanche.”

“Blanche?”

“Both of them.”

Amazingly, he missed a stroke, raked the air with one blade. For Orlando this was like stupefaction. We started to spin like the leaves around us. He worked the oars halfheartedly and leaned forward to examine my face.

I said, “Cross my heart.”

He pricked up his ears. I saw his scalp move: he was interested — more than interested — grave with scrutiny. “Blanche?”

I said, “They got it out of the Bible.”

“You’re a crazy thing,” he said.

“Listen, Ollie, it’s the truth. It was last year, when their parents were away. October, I think — the summer people had gone home. The staff was there, but you know what Blanche thinks of them, barely human. So Blanche and Sandy were all alone in the house. Alone, think about it — just the two of them, like in the Bible.”

“That’s not in the Bible.”

“It is, because after she told me I checked.” The boat slipped sideways, turning in circles down the river. “You know them — they’re very close, like us, and they don’t keep secrets from each other. One day Blanche was in their hay loft doing something with the bales, and she heard Sandy on the ladder. She told me she was afraid and she didn’t know why. They got to fooling around and before she knew what was happening Sandy lifted up her dress and said, ‘What have you got down there?’”

“He didn’t!”

“He sure did. But that wasn’t all. Instead of pushing him away she just laughed—”

“She never laughs.”

“This was different. Sandy was reaching and kissing her so hard Blanche said her teeth hurt. She felt him pulling her bloomers. After a while she told him to stop, which he did.”

“That’s only right,” said Orlando and thrashed with his oars.

“But neither of them—”

“There’s more of this?” He lifted his oars at me.

“Neither of them was really sorry, and after a day or so they were at it again, going to town in the hay loft, just the two of them. Blanche said it was funny — she had always dreamed about it happening like that, and she had sort of rehearsed it in her mind. So, once they started, they carried on, and she couldn’t stop it then even if she had wanted to, which she didn’t. He had a good grip on her and she closed her eyes and they did it.”

“Did what?” he said hoarsely.

“Jammed.”

“Maude, I’ve never heard you talk like this.”

“Like nobody’s business,” I said, nodding with approval.

“That damned girl.”

“She was glad — you can’t blame her,” I said. And I told him that Blanche was especially tickled that it had happened with Sandy, because love is knowledge and no one knows more than a brother and sister.

“Blanche?” he said. “Tickled?” We were under a bridge and Orlando’s voice leaped at us from the granite pillars and arches in a gulping echo. We were still drifting, nudged by the eddies at the pillars and losing our spin as we cleared the bridge.

“Of course she cried, but that was sheer happiness and gratitude. She wasn’t afraid anymore and she told me that as long as she lives she will never forget it and never love anyone as much as Sandy. Which I can understand. Can’t you?”

“And she told you this?”

“She showed me the bites and bruises. They were beautiful, like purple pansies stamped on her skin.”

He looked mystified. The oars rested limply in his hands and the blades dragged on the water.

I said, “I don’t hold it against her.”

“No,” he said wearily, “not if she loved him.”

“And I know how she feels.” I was hoping to extract a response from him, but none came. I said, “Do you know how she feels?”

He faced me. His answer made his eyes blaze and heated my face and dried my tears. He said, “Yes, I do!”

“Think of it,” I said. “Just the two of them together.”

“There’s no room for anyone else,” he said, turning cautious.

“Exactly — that’s the beauty of it.”

“What did their parents say?”

He wanted more reassurance, but I couldn’t give it. I said I didn’t know, but I told him my views on that, how at a certain age your parents exhaust themselves of knowledge: you outgrow them and have to begin raising them, keeping certain things from them.

He said, “I thought you were so proper.”

“Ollie, they’re just like us! What is more proper than a brother and sister in bed in their own house? It fits exactly. People go through life trying to find the perfect partner and never realize that that person is back home — the one they left. It’s their own flesh and blood. It’s so simple I don’t know why more people don’t do it.”

He said, “Because there’s a law against it, cookie.”

“The law hates lovers,” I said.

“Tell that to the judge,” he said. “Listen, even primitive societies are against it.”