John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

“Heart attack,” I whispered. “Is it a heart attack?”

He moaned, licked the small wispy wings of his mustache with the tip of his tongue, finally glanced up at me. “Hand of death inside my chest, that’s all. But it doesn’t last…”

He winked, I felt relieved, already the shadows were massing in interesting patterns once more down the length of his rock-colored grainy face. He sighed, pushed himself up with his good arm. And yet for all my relief, and even as I was helping myself to a long curving drink from the wineskin, I could not help thinking that my preoccupied friend was dangerously ill and that this kind of collapse, along with his collection of “peasant nudes,” probably did not bode well for Fiona. If mere photographs had led in some devious way to this kind of prostration, what would happen to him when Fiona finally managed to gather him into her lovely arms? And did Fiona know already what she was up against? It would be my lot, I knew, to warn her.

When, blinded and laughing, Hugh and I stumbled out of the barn together, Hugh’s good arm resting powerfully and in unadmitted necessity on my own broad shoulders, and the straps of all three cameras and the alpine pack held firmly in my own left hand, I noticed that the girl was once more fully clothed and at work in the field. I knew that I would see her again, but also knew more immediately that in only a matter of minutes Hugh’s black flapping dog would race out yapping to welcome us back to villas, children, wives already involved in the pursuit of nudity, passion, love.

But when I finally did return alone to the little ceramic farm and to Rosella (for of course it was she), I returned only to procure for myself a silent companion willing to cook my meals and clean my cold villa. Thanks to Hugh, Rosella became mine, so to speak, along with the best of the photographs. And Hugh? Better for Hugh had he died at a blow of his black fist or whatever it was. Much better.

IN THE MIDDAY BRIGHTNESS, LYING NEAR OUR LITTLE WELL house on an old settee over which she had tossed one of her white percale sheets, and with her feet bare and her torso also bare, dressed only in her sky-blue slacks that she pulled on like a pair of dancing tights, and looking up at me with one long finger marking her place in the slender book and her other hand thrust into the open slacks — in this attitude she appealed to me with somber eyes, low voice, unhappy smile: “Baby, he says I’m Circe all over again and that he’s the only man left in the world who can resist my charms. What’ll I do?”

“I warned you a long time ago. Remember?”

“I remember.”

Hands in pockets, standing over her, smiling down at Fiona stretched out in one of her rare half-hours devoted to a kind of personal cessation that came as close as she was capable of coming to inertia, suddenly and with my lips so much thicker than hers I made a few silent kisses and sat down on the edge of the settee so that our hips rolled together and I could smell her breath. On the other side of the cypresses all was even more quiet than usual at this time of day, and I wondered what Hugh had done to muzzle the dog, the twins, the constantly accusing and complaining Meredith. I heard the little desolate rustling sound of the book landing beside the settee.

“Cyril is virile. Remember when I told him, baby?”

I nodded, slowly removed my eyeglasses and folded them, stuck them under the settee for safekeeping.

“And it’s so true. Oh, it’s so true.”

One of her rare half-hours of self-surrender. And yet the casualness of bare feet and partially unzipped slacks, the personal disregard expressed in the naked breasts, stomach, arms, the thoughtless and candid position of the hand thrust into the little blue open mouth of the slacks — all of this was rare and yet characteristic too, almost as characteristic as the familiar sight of Fionda smothering or sculpting her breasts in hands whose supple grip and long white fingers never failed to excite my admiration.

“You're wearing your magic pants again,” I whispered, and her body rippled against me. She bent her outside leg at the knee and allowed her tight blue knee, bent leg, to list away from me slightly in the direction taken by the now disregarded book. With two long fingers of her free hand she began to stroke the white naked heel that she had just drawn into sensitive proximity to those hard blue buttocks which at the moment I could not see but only imagine. She pursed her lips and, despite the still considerable space between us, began to blow a deliberate breath up toward my weathered bland expectant face.

“And you’re wearing your magic pants too, baby, aren’t you,” she said in that willowy voice which, no matter how soft, suggestive or dreamlike, never allowed for contradiction.

“Sure,” I murmured. “Of course I am.”

“Maybe I’ll steal your magic pants. For him. OK?”

The shadow of the thin Byzantine cross of rusted iron on top of the conical well house now lay directly in the center of her naked chest, and it amused me to think that sometime within the next half-hour the cross would lie not on Fiona’s chest but in the middle of my broad back. All around us the little orange marguerites had never been more profuse, more deeply orange, more innocent.

I patted her raised knee and leaned down, untied my fresh white espadrilles and pulled them off. When I straightened I saw the lower lip caught gently between her teeth and the long first finger of her left hand tracing firm lines up and down the inside of her shining thigh. I laughed. Because she was right, of course, and I knew as well as she did that my own elasticized underpants and Fiona’s sky-blue slacks were in fact magical, as she had said. My shorts, for instance, were like the bulging marble skin of a headless god. But Fiona’s sky-blue slacks, which she never wore except when alone, or with me, or with some privileged lover, certainly that garment clinging low on her hips and riding high on her ankles was matched for magic only by Fiona’s own total and angular nudity. The little masculine gold-plated zipper in front, the slanted pockets, the blue webbing that left an attractive pink welt around her squarish hips and lower belly and the soft eyes of her buttocks were all the true signs of a woman’s sex-suit, Fiona said. And in her moods of self-surrender, when she felt like wearing the blue slacks and nothing more, these were the details that enabled her to lie reasonably still and smile and enjoy the magical vacancy at her finger tips. And at the moment, the zipper was halfway down and the welt was pink.

“I want to see your magic pants. Right now.”

I obeyed, of course, and with languor and pleasure stood up beside my prostrate wife and, smiling down into her open eyes, which made me think of two doves frozen in the hard light of expectation, slowly pulled off my shirt and trousers and, glancing at the empty heavens, for a moment enjoyed the statuesque weight of myself contained and molded, so to speak, in my brief but extra-large white magical underpants. I could feel that my broad sloping shoulders were a little soft. Some tiny living creature splashed in the depths of the nearby well.

“Come on,” she whispered. “Submit.”

I sat down again slowly and carefully. With her free hand, the hand with which she had been stroking her upraised thigh, she now suddenly began pulling at some of the long soft brown hairs on my own mammoth thigh. Then her hand slipped, a finger grazed the broad sloping front of my elasticized white shorts, and in mid-air the hand began to tremble while her breathing, suddenly, changed pitch.

“Kiss me, Cyril. Kiss me.”

Even while smelling the sweetness of Fiona’s breath and tasting the taste of her mouth, sucking on the marrow of Fiona’s life, and biting her teeth, her small lips, her tongue, and while feeling the sun sealing us once more together, it occurred to me that this particular kiss was unusually cannibalistic, even for us. It is not easy to force a pair of heavy lips into an expression of mock disapproval while involved in such a kiss, and so when I became aware that our time was dissolving, and that we were indeed struggling to devour each other’s mouths, jaws, cheeks, I simply raised my head, pulled loose, stopped, listened. As usual Fiona’s preliminary humming was food for us both.