John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

The answer was mine even before this last question was fully formulated, because suddenly and with total relief I remembered living through precisely this same perplexing night once before when, several hours after I had carried Fiona to the fountain, I rolled onto my back and discovered that I was awake and that my mind was as clear as usual but that something had changed, and that whatever had awakened me was immediate, obvious, yet in this instant unidentifiable. But I had overcome Psyche’s little dramatic ruse and had thought my way backward to the sudden fact of marriage and forward to the gift of Fiona, to the sudden recognition that I was lying in the conjugal darkness with my wife. And now Catherine, of course. My logical associations abruptly flowered, giving me not Fiona but Catherine, not the fact of marriage but the promise of sexless matrimony, not the bottle of champagne embedded in a basket of flowers but the rabbit waiting out this sleepless night in his new cage between the well house and the overgrown remains of my ruined bicycle. Not the couch of love but my single bed. Not wife but former mistress on her narrow iron bed like mine in the small white room next to mine. The waving matron, Rosella’s sullen greeting, my decision against touching Catherine’s elbow in the door to her room, Catherine staring at the empty villa through the funeral cypresses — lying there in the darkness I at last reviewed all the details of Catherine’s sunset arrival and thought that the two nights were oddly similar and that I was now as grateful to Catherine for coming to share my speculations on the painted bones of Love as I had once been to Fiona for feasting with me on the marrow.

On the night I had remembered Fiona in a shower of mental fireworks, so to speak, I had fallen again into the peace of my brandy-soaked sleep immediately. And now, remembering Catherine and knowing that I had only to grope my way along a few feet of whitewashed stone to confirm that this was in fact the first night of Catherine’s muted presence on the other side of my crude bedroom wall, I did the same and relaxed my feet, withdrew both hands from behind my head, rolled over and immediately fell into the bemused contentment of deep sleep.

THE NIGHT WAS GOING TO BE A LONG ONE, I DECIDED, AND began to feel that the kiss Fiona had impetuously planted on the cheek of our one-armed hero was infusing the darkness with even greater expectancy than Fiona herself had hoped for. The strangers were saved, the old motorbus was only hours into its first invasion by the curious water rats and but a few hours into what would surely be its long life of deterioration in the black canal, the unattractive children were sleeping at last, the adventure was more clearly defined and further along than I had thought it would be by the middle of what was only our first night together. The darkness was like a warm liquid poured from the throat of an enormous bird, and above our heads and within easy reach of our mouths vast clusters of stars and tumultuous bunches of black grapes were merging. Each grape contained its bright star, each star its grape. My mouth was brazen with the long slow taste of white wine.

“Cyril, baby, are you all right?”

“Sure,” I called softly toward the two figures momentarily visible among the lemon trees, “we’re fine.”

But already they had moved away from us once more, already the clear voice had lapsed again into a laughing, preoccupied frosty whisper, again we heard the playful confusion of footsteps and then the silence that told me that Fiona’s happiness was dripping between the lemon trees again like dew. The surprise of the second kiss was drawing near, I thought. Or was it the third?

In the darkness I groped for another bottle, pulled the cork and filled our two small invisible glasses. The stone bench we sat on was chalky and warm, overhead the grape arbor was a sagging foot-thick blanket of hanging grapes and climbing roses. I sipped, listened to the breathing of the large woman seated within easy reach of my hip, my knee, the toe of my bone-white tennis shoe. I cleared my throat and smiled to think that it was like Fiona, exactly like Fiona, to set the first stage of her impending adventure in nothing less than a small lemon grove where she could run at will, and exactly like myself to settle for an unobtrusive niche in a grape arbor. Fiona always spent first nights giving literal chase to her dreams, whereas I, of course, preferred to muse on approaching possibilities and to wait, to listen, to sit out the preliminaries in quiet thought. Again I cleared my throat and glanced at the woman beside me who, in the darkness, was audible rather than visible, a large soft black-and-white image blurred at the edges and rustling with bodily sounds that expressed not meaning but presence. She was breathing, swallowing, twisting to peer over her shoulder. Was she sighing also? Perhaps. I waited and knew that like the stone bench I too was warm to the touch, seemed to be giving off broad waves of pleasing heat.

“You’re not shivering, are you,” I said, stirring the embers, allowing my voice to drift again toward lower, more reassuring registers. “My wife thinks you must be exhausted. She’s worried about you.”

Beyond the arbor and through the funeral cypresses I could see traces of the light from the old kerosene lantern they had left burning for their children. Beside me the woman was sitting quietly in remoteness, loneliness, indecision. A lemon struck the ground behind us and I thought I caught sight of Fiona’s white hand waving at me from a slit in the darkness.

I sipped my wine and thought that the shoulder of the woman beside me was broad, soft, unknown. Unknown yet oddly familiar too. A warm shoulder, I thought, that was growing cool. Would the woman beside me manage unwittingly to earn my attention and find out for herself that she needed it? Had Love determined that this woman’s shadow was to cross the white path of my capability? Or were we to separate forever at our very moment of meeting? At least these questions presented themselves. At least we could continue turning the pages together for a while longer.

“My wife admires your courage,”I murmured. “Fiona’s character judgments are always right.”

The grape arbor and lemon grove were complementary, of course, and now our momentary silence in the arbor was equaled, exceeded by the silence that was again saturating the grove of twisted trees. I listened, began to dip my hand toward the wicker wine basket somewhere at my feet. It was a question of pantomime as opposed to orchestration, I thought, and waited patiently while out there the second or perhaps third kiss grew into a reality of held breaths. The very fact that we heard nothing determined the kiss. Did my companion know what was happening? Was she also able to enjoy the invisible kiss which we, seated open-eyed as we were in the darkness, might have been dreaming? But perhaps for now her appreciation of that kiss was too much to ask, because suddenly I knew that she was looking at me directly, silently, while I continued to stare down at the moldy cork I could not see. And then her husband laughed once and stumbled, called out Fiona’s name, again was looping his way among the trees.

“We’ve been married a long time,” she said, and her words were like the wine from the bottle — slow, inflectionless, filled with a taste that pleased the mind as well as tongue. I approved of what she had said, heard the soft breath that sustained the sentence, began to see the sweat and soiled years heaped up in the vague shadowy sockets of her eyes. Dull words, and yet enjoyable precisely because the three exhausted children and the now preoccupied one-armed husband could not be deduced from them. Her words alone, and they allowed me to choose between implied security or resignation or, finally, indignation at what she might have taken to be the first signs of betrayal. I put the wine into her fingers and made my choice.