John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

Again he pointed, again he sucked tongue to teeth, filling the barn with that loud unmistakable sound of exaggerated negation, and then with amusing yet somehow admirable restraint he actually pantomimed the removal of his own slick boots and the removal of an imaginary cumbersome sheepskin coat. She watched. She listened.

And then he transposed himself from the girl to the alpine pack and knelt and thrust his hand inside the pack. The girl, without a glance at Hugh, slowly unfastened her scarred leather coat and removed it, leaned against the and slowly pulled off first one worn-out rubber boot and then the other. Hugh’s back was turned. But I was watching, waiting, and was close enough to take from her the discarded coat, close enough to wait until she dropped the boots and then to indicate with gentle fingers the familiar apron and the billowing and slackening skirt which, after only a brief moment of further incomprehension, she also took off and gave me.

Perhaps I should have known, as Hugh had known, that without the coat and skirt and boots she would be nude. Should have known, perhaps, and yet had not, so that standing now with the apron, coat and skirt still warm in my arms, I was both pleased and surprised at her apparent indifference to her own nakedness, and was amused to think that for this naked girl the world of underclothing was a world unknown.

Did I hear the camera? Had Hugh returned again to his work? Perhaps, perhaps. But I too could become absorbed in the act of assessment, appreciation, and now it seemed to me that the mild sag in the breasts of this girl might in her case be an aesthetic attribute. Through my polished gold-rimmed spectacles I stared at the nude girl, and it occurred to me that I was at last acquiring a more personal understanding of Hugh’s photographic collection. I realized that never before had I seen a young female body quite so aesthetically self-defeating as this one. I stared and smiled. She glanced at me. She scratched her right flank.

Yes, self-defeating, as perhaps are the bodies of most girls whose origins lie in historical darkness beyond the mountains. The breasts, for instance, had never given suck and yet already they sagged. And the thickness of the fat at the waist seemed to pull against the hardness of the belly, the muscles in the calves detracted from the solid but symmetrical thighs, the narrow but slumping shoulders somehow maimed the aesthetic reality of the full and rounded buttocks. Self-defeating, I thought, but harmonious too.

Unaccountably she took hold of one of her breasts, appeared to squeeze it, then dropped her hand. And with this gesture I found that I was witness not only to the girl’s patient nudity but also to that leave-taking scene which perhaps only an hour before Hugh had disdained to photograph. In the acrid and rose-tinted darkness, and transparently superimposed on the olive and white reality of the undressed girl, clearly I saw Hugh’s wife and mine standing within arm’s length of each other beneath the clothesline on Hugh’s side of the funeral cypresses and waving, watching us depart, and saw the dog in mid-air, the two fat smaller children holding hands but also waving at their lanky father, saw Meredith with her back to us and no doubt scowling at Catherine’s white cotton pajamas on the clothesline, and beyond it all the rocks and bright sun and silhouetted wreckage of the small coastal fort. How they complemented each other, this girl we had conducted into a near-empty barn and this prior vision, our suddenly present bird song of domesticity embedded in the flank of collapsing time. Deliberately I shut my eyes, as if the better to taste some offered drink, and thought of the wine I planned to share with Catherine when the night was again ours.

“Come on, Cyril, give her the rake. Let’s try the rake. And then you can give her the pants.”

At the sound of his choking voice the tableau of domestic multiplicity dissolved in an instant. And with the girl breathing methodically within arm’s length of my softly sweatered chest and now and again shifting the position of her feet or glancing into the darkness overhead, it was no longer possible to separate the photographs and the waiting girl. While smelling the girl I could not help looking at Hugh and saw him sprawled on his back with head and shoulders propped against the alpine pack and the camera once more substituting its cyclopian lens for his eyes and nose. Above the sound of Hugh’s voice and the girl’s breathing I heard the clearly and inexorably rapid sounds of the camera and knew that I had been hearing it all this time.

“Look,”I whispered, knowing that prone on the dung he could not possibly have seen what I had just seen, “look there. She’s grazed a cobweb. My god, her breasts tangled in a broken cobweb. Can you see it?”

And writhing, jerking the camera to and from his face, lying on his back and with his sharp heels and single elbow propelling himself about in crablike motions for the sake of angle, light, depth, expression: “Magnificent… It’ll all show up in the enlargements… I’ve spent more than a year on my collection, my catalogue of natural art photographs, my peasant nudes… My unmarried girls of barren countries… Each one’s better than the last… I’ve got them sitting in straw, standing in the black and empty doorways of ruined barns … And all nude or nearly nude … My peasant specimens… Each one gets a cheap little gift…”

He laughed, gave me a long look over the swiftly lowered camera, and then I stood up to my knees in the white pulpy straw in order to reach down the wooden rake, dragged a bottomless iron bucket from under the straw, and hauled from beneath the oxcart a great leather skein of primitive mildewed harness. And thanks to my own patient industry and quickening interest, and also to Hugh’s sweating inventiveness, we managed that day to photograph our smallish naked girl holding the rake, holding the bucket, managed to photograph her with the entire length and weight of the crusty black leather harness draped over one narrow shoulder so that, front and back, it hung down stiffly as far as the bare feet.

“The pants,” he whispered. “Give her the pants.”

The girl watched my every move, the small red eyes of the sheep were filled with ruby-colored supplication. And of course I found the cotton underpants lying in a heap beside the alpine pack. I picked them up, turned to the girl, and between thumb and first finger of both hands held out the underpants in a cheerful and magnanimous display. Her eyes tightened, the camera clicked.

But what was wrong?

Silence. The clicking had stopped, the agonized camera was silent. And then Hugh moaned.

“What’s wrong?”I whispered. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

At a glance it became apparent to me that Hugh lay there in the grip of something serious. He was not moaning in the throes of a pseudosexual climax resulting, say, from the many photographs he had taken of a girl who was, after all, young, naked and a stranger to us both. The hunching shoulders, the forgotten camera, the single hand driven against the center of his bony chest, the apparent sapping of that little color usually evident in the long thin granite face, the fact that he was frowning and that his usually crafty eyes were suddenly wide open and staring at what I was sure was nothing — all this told me that Catherine’s husband was sprawled motionless before me not in the aura of trivial physiological reaction, but in pain. He appeared to be thinking about some deeply unpleasant subject, the hand was trying to dig its way inside his chest.

I knelt beside him, I was concerned. But my life had not attuned me to medical emergencies and now, kneeling at Hugh’s side, large but at the same time trim with an excellent health I was unable to share, I did not know whether to touch him, to seize his gigantic deformed shoulders in my own enormous gentle hands, or leave him alone. Or should I shoot into his dry mouth a jet of the dark wine? Raise him to a sitting position? Go for help? Carry him in my two arms back to our wives?