John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

ITOO HAVE BEGUN TO HOLD THE LARGER OF THE TWO rabbits against my chest and in my lap. Silently we pass it back and forth, Catherine and I, pass it dangling from her arms to mine and from mine to hers. The pink succulents, the unhooked door of the cage, the powerful gently explosive smell of droppings and digested grass, the blue tiles turning into frosted metallic threads in the light of dawn— in all this it is apparent that both of the rabbits are female and that Catherine and I are equally attracted only to the larger, which has clear red eyes, crude musical notations on its long front legs (silent companion, I realize, to Love’s swooping birds) and big paws that sometimes find slow footing on my watch chain. I stroke the rabbit, glance at Catherine, smile. She looks away and brushes a piece of straw from the lip of the cage. But sooner or later she reaches out her arms and I hook my thumbs under the forelegs of the rabbit, whose trust is airy and limitless, and whose bones feel as if they are immersed in a limpid shape composed entirely of warm water, and lift, watch the amazing distension of the silken spine and totally relaxed rear legs, then swing her over to Catherine’s waiting hands.

An excellent basis for sexless matrimony, I tell myself. It will not be long.

FACE DOWN ON THE BLANKET, SMILING AT THE MUFFLED sound of my careless yet also stentorious whisper: “I am not opposed to domesticity,” I heard myself saying, “not at all.”

No wind, no spray, no evidence of dead sea birds, no dissolving sun, nothing to distract us from this hour of attentiveness on the beach of black stones. It was another left-hand right-hand day, as I had come to call them, another one of those days when the four of us, and even the dog and the children, fit together like the shapely pieces of a perfectly understandable puzzle. Catherine on her side, Hugh on his knees, Fiona flat on her back and I face down on my stomach — we were holding each other in place, so to speak, on Fiona’s blanket and talking softly, listening. A few yards away the twins were silent for once, held in check by the magnetism of the old sleeping dog, while Meredith was standing ankle-deep in the water and waiting, I thought, to be embarrassed. In the silence that met my unpremeditated remark I covered Catherine’s hand with mine and squeezed it, wondered how long we could fend off the inevitable nemesis.

“What a beautiful thing to say, baby. Good for you.”

Silence, more wine-flavored silence, and smiling into the hot blanket I saw distinctly our rigidly approaching nemesis (a small goat prancing out of a sacred wood) and knew that, despite the grip of my hand, Catherine was beginning to roll again under the weight of her fourteen years of motherhood.

“You didn’t have children. That’s all.”

Fiona’s turn, I thought, and wondered whether Catherine was actually aware of my tender grip or had in fact forgotten me, lost sight of me in the midst of thinking about Hugh’s little black pointed beard and her three deliveries. Though it was I, after all, who was once more touching flame to the idea of the family and lighting anew the possibilities of sex in the domestic landscape.

“Oh, but we decided against children long ago. And now it’s too late anyway. Thank God. But we love your children, Catherine. Don’t we, Cyril?”

I raised my head and nodded, then shifted my weight and lowered my head again so that my weathered cheek smothered beneath it Catherine’s fingers and now upturned palm. In nose and mouth and stomach I made the wordless contented sounds of an agreeable man settling down to sleep on a hot beach blanket, though in point of fact I had never been more crisp with attentiveness and lay listening to the epic inside Catherine’s lower abdomen. I was waiting for the parents to become lovers and the lovers parents.

“What’s the matter, Eveline? Come over here to your old dad.”

The little fists were in the eyes, the lips were turned down, the small fat body was naked except for the gray cotton panties riding well below the navel, the brown hair was filled with burrs which only moments before had been clinging to the black fur of the dog. Without moving or opening my eyes I saw it all, the upright and sunburned child midway between our blanket and the sleeping dog and stumbling toward us silently, unerringly, while Catherine frowned and Fiona caressed herself. I dozed on, watching, waiting, enjoying behind my patina of sun the sight of Hugh’s pebbly tight smile and the eyes that were glancing now at Eveline, now at Catherine and me, now at Fiona. It amused me to know that little Eveline was to be the lever with which her father would pry Catherine’s warm pillowing hand from beneath my cheek. How like him, I thought, to begrudge me Catherine’s hand in the middle of the afternoon and abandon her body to me throughout the night.

“Maybe she just needs to urinate,” Hugh said. “Could that be it?”

And then the soft toneless maternal voice beginning to withdraw at last from motherhood: “Of course she does. But it’s your turn, Hugh. I’m sun-bathing.”

Once more I was proud of Catherine, who had managed to add another still note to our silence. Already Meredith was blushing at the edge of the sea. I waited for the prolonged and uneasy sound of Fiona’s giggling. And then the little invisible white goat landed among us and I rolled toward Catherine, who did not move, and propped myself on one elbow in time to see Hugh sit heavily and deliberately on Catherine’s haunch, as if on a convenient stone, and hold the baffled child between his knees and with his one hand pull down her panties swiftly, expertly. He was whistling and aiming his small fat daughter in the direction of the still sea where Meredith stood listening, blushing, shriveling.

“Get off me, Hugh.”

“Hang on there. She’s nearly done.”

Would she throw him off? With a single heave would she dislodge him from his all-too-comfortable seat on her upraised hip? In some way would she appeal to me for help? But even as I wondered how long Hugh would be able to sustain this admittedly ingenious stroke of trivial revenge, wobbling happily on his wife’s prostrate body, I saw that Catherine’s eyes were open and that the small amber-colored pupils were fixed on my own in a long silent expression of love or indignation. I returned her secret stare and with slow pleasure began to realize that Catherine had chosen this moment to think of me and was quite oblivious to the weight on her hip.

Yet Hugh himself was thinking not of the naked sunburned child squatting between his angular protective legs, not of Fiona, though now I heard the prolonged and uneasy sound of Fiona’s giggling, but was thinking rather of the woman he was sitting on, because even while I watched the arm and hand that Catherine could not possibly see (long arm and large versatile hand still fresh from the parental ritual of pulling down little Eveline’s pants and holding her, caring for her), Hugh swung back his arm, reached down, and without changing his position or turning his head, fumbled briefly until his hand leapt suddenly like the small invisible white goat and, in a gesture of love or viciousness, closed on Catherine’s heavy breast inside the madras halter. Did he know that I was watching? Or more likely, had he again managed to forget my presence and the immediate fact that I was now lolling only inches away from this reclining person who even at this moment was perhaps more my partner than his? Why could he not respect Catherine’s conventional but nonetheless powerful intimacy? When would he ever respond to my omniscience and Fiona’s style? But of course the wedding ring worn bizarrely, fiercely, on the third finger of Hugh’s right hand told me that I must never allow myself to be unduly critical of Hugh. Even that monstrous hand of his wore its sign of love.