John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

Catherine will have to learn to do the same.

WHAT WAS HE DOING? SUNBATHING? OR WAS HE LYING in naked embrace with my equally naked wife at last? He was there, I knew, a prone white emaciated figure just visible through a low, dark green fringe of crab grass agitated by a sultry midday wind, a long low sheet of green flame burning at the edge of the bed of black rocks about twenty feet from where I stood in the shadows cast by the thick growth of pine. Hands in pockets, freshly bathed, wearing my yellow shirt in the hopes of meeting Fiona on this dark seaside path, a path she often took alone, here I stood in the darkness on a blanket of dead pine needles, stroking my chin and wondering if I had indeed discovered Fiona but worn the yellow shirt in vain.

With my usual presence of mind I had awakened from my dreamless midafternoon sleep, had rolled over, found Fiona missing, had assumed that I would meet her on the ocean path. And fresh from immersion and scrubbing in the clear water of my ancient stone bathing tank, scented, externalizing my mood in the special color of my bright shirt, slowly I had strolled past the second villa, had paused to listen, had drifted on, assuming that Hugh and Catherine and all their distracting daughters lay just beyond those tight shutters and thick white walls drugged in the heat. On both counts had I been wrong? Taking a soft step forward and catching another glimpse of his naked movements out there in the crab grass, it appeared that I had indeed been wrong. But those movements, of course, were what Fiona wanted, so that my trivial mistakes were righted, so to speak, by the richness of the vision and what I took to be the abrupt fulfillment of Fiona’s latest dream.

He was facing south, and the horizontal position and the density and frenzy of the low wind-whipped screen of nearly black grass made his long white body appear longer than it actually was. I watched, pulled at my chin, took a few more slow steps that placed me definitely beyond the safety of the trees and into his aura of bright colorless sun and the hot wind that clashed in the ears. Beneath my thonged and silver-studded sandals, the blanket of dead pine needles had given way to a strip of unclean gray sand. I could not hear the ocean but saw that it was thrashing with unusual and irregular fury up and down the length of our desolate private beach of black stones.

Just as I had decided to return to the dark and echoing shelter of the pine trees, leaving the two of them to enjoy in peace whatever they had found together in that exposed and inhospitable spot amidst wind and sun, speculating to myself about the kind of passion that had driven them to strip off their clothes in all this shattering light and noise, suddenly it occurred to me that I could see nothing of Fiona’s brown arms and passionate hands which, even from this distance, should have been visible clasping Hugh’s thin white naked back or stony buttocks. I hesitated, turned again into the wind that now seemed to beat the motionless sunlight into my face, my hair, the depths of my yellow shirt. I took another look and, filled with a kind of voiceless compassion as well as a curiosity I had not known before, knew that Fiona’s invisibility was no longer a problem and that I could not retreat. Because Hugh was alone, I was convinced of it, and I could not abandon him there to sunstroke or aching muscles, certainly could not allow the reason for his lonely presence there on the empty beach to go unexplored.

But what was he doing? Sunbathing? Embarking on some kind of freakish photographic experiment? Reading one of his faded erotic periodicals hidden from my sight in the crab grass? What?

And then I stopped, leaning into the wind with legs apart, hands in pockets, head lowered, stood there frowning and trying to resist the temptation to lean down and shake him by the shoulder. He lay at my sandaled feet like a corpse, a long fish-colored corpse, or like some fallen stone figure sandblasted, so to speak, by centuries of cruel weather. Yes, an emaciated and mutilated corpse or statue, except that he in his oblivion was moving, while I, despite the compassionate concentration of all my analytical powers and alerted senses, had become immobile, only the immobile witness to this most florid and pathetic expression of Hugh’s reticence.

Because he lay there on his stomach embracing not Fiona but only his clothes, the twisted black long-legged sailor pants, soiled jersey and white shorts. No magazine, no camera, no living partner. Only the white shorts beneath his head and the pants and shirt bunched and almost out of sight now beneath his chest, his hidden loins, his rigid outstretched white legs of the Christ.

The motion in the pitted gray-white buttocks was intensifying, the shoulders were beginning to heave, the black grass was beating against his long meager thighs, the tight black curls on the back of his head were blowing, springing loose, were becoming drenched with black light. Was he moaning? Did he believe himself to be lying at midnight among our percale sheets a half mile away at my villa instead of sprawled out here in the grass with a few uninteresting broken sea shells and some large black ants that would soon be scurrying in aimless circles on his heaving back? I could not be sure.

Yet waiting, towering above him, watching the naked flickering gestures of his lonely one-sided prostration, I could only nod because suddenly I recognized that I had already lived whatever dream Hugh might be dreaming but also that without my presence Hugh’s agony did not exist. And yet, if he mistook rough cloth and patches of sand for Fiona’s life, flesh, firmness, did not the final agony of this discrepancy belong to Fiona, though she remained unaware of it, rather than to Hugh or to me? I thought so. But Fiona could take care of herself, of course. She always had.

Without a moment’s hesitation I decided to spare Fiona this sight of Hugh dreaming away their intimacy in the crab grass. Without hesitation I turned away from the now tightening and trembling white figure and waved, shouted back some cheerful greeting to the yet invisible woman (Fiona, my wife) who was now calling to me from within the gentle darkness of the long grove of pines. I reached her in time to keep her from stumbling on our sleeping and naked Saint Peter at the height of his pleasure.

“What on earth were you doing out there on the beach, baby? I’ve been looking for you.” We laughed, touched lips, I felt her fingers inside my yellow shirt after all.

“COME ON, BOY, HOW ABOUT SOME INDIAN WRESTLING?

What do you say?”

Why did I submit finally to the strained voice, the forced jocularity, the challenge only too evident in his eyes and little black pointed beard? There in the grape arbor, bathed in darkness and the light of Fiona’s candles, why did our two wives and even the children urge us on? When the two youngest girls began to clap their fat little star-shaped hands and even Meredith drew near and smiled her poignant introverted smile of spite and satisfaction at the contest she had already visualized as won inevitably and maliciously by her one-armed father, was there still not some way I might have evaded the ugly consequences of this abysmally classic situation?

“Go on, baby, be a good sport.”

But as soon as I felt his hand in mine, I knew that in this case I should not have listened, should not have allowed myself to inflict such pain on a man who was obviously determined to fill our idyllic days and nights with all the obscure tensions of his own unnecessary misery and impending doom.

He began to squeeze, his hand was a claw. As if in some ancient combat his upraised arm was dripping with raw meat and bloody bone, at any moment he might open his mouth and shriek. And in the midst of it I reminded myself that Fiona knew full well that the physical exercise I had undertaken throughout our married life surely guaranteed the muscle development of my thick arms. We were both at fault.