John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

“Married a long time?” I repeated slowly, turning her few words into mine and at the same time giving them back to her like low notes on a flute. “Fiona and I have also been married a long time. As a matter of fact, Fiona is a kind of priestess of marriage. Her most remarkable quality, I think, is suppleness. But it’s late. Are you sure you want to sit out here like this?”

“I like your voice in the darkness.”

“OK,” I said, preparing to shape my words carefully, resonantly, and putting down my half-empty glass between us, “but what about your husband? He’s probably worried about you, like Fiona and me. Wouldn’t it be better if you were in there sleeping with the children?”

“You needn’t worry. None of you.”

I waited, and beneath my two hands now clasped around one heavy knee, the camel-colored cloth of my trousers felt like combed linen while the knee itself felt like some living prehistoric bone full of solidity, aesthetic richness, latent athleticism. Imperceptibly I rocked on the warm stone and again glanced briefly at the embryonic stars in the grapes.

“We can hardly see each other. We don’t know each other. I’m a lot older than you think.”

She appeared to be listening, sitting and waiting with her hands in her lap and her fresh glass of wine untasted, listening and waiting with eyes now averted and her large distant body filled with thought. But just when it occurred to me that she had drifted into some new private solitude or had merely decided not to answer, she spoke, and between the slow golden roll of my own last words and the sudden inspired appearance of Fiona, whose hopes were rising, I heard her brief declaration and found myself wanting to retrieve the subdued and levelheaded sound of her voice from the grapes, the black leaves, the dark night.

“I’m forty-three.”

Was she more aware of herself than I had thought? Was she trying to change the subject or to confide in me? At least her statement of age deserved my attention, deserved the two of us sitting side by side. But then the air shook, the arbor shook, the scent of Fiona’s bath soap and jasmine sweetened the night, and my own investigative mood and Fiona’s springing bow collided, coalesced.

“Baby, you’re sharing secrets!”

“We’re just talking,” I murmured. “Join us?”

“I couldn’t sit still. Not tonight.”

She had come from nowhere, as she often did, and was breathing quickly. Once again I observed that Fiona’s obviously substantial bone structure was no impediment to her grace or to her abrupt and totally unexpected late-hour turns of mind. I nodded and allowed my face to reflect a faintly deeper shade of my composure, pleasure, good humor. Fiona shifted her feet, glanced around the arbor with what I knew to be girlish delight and womanly detachment, leaned close to me and apparently without thinking slipped the bows of my spectacles from behind my ears and just as quickly slipped them into place again. Her feet were bare. And then she was suddenly on her knees and holding my companion tightly about the waist while I, rocking and humming to myself in silent song, could not help marveling a little more at Fiona’s transformational powers and sensual flights. I smelled Fiona’s jasmine and perspiration and waited, with growing possessiveness stared at the solid and yet agitated shapes of the one woman seated and the other kneeling in the blackness of the night. My companion seemed neither to resist nor welcome my wife’s embrace. But I thought she might be imperceptibly relaxing, if anything, into Fiona’s arms.

“I’m glad you’re here. I want you here. You and Hugh.”

The voice I never tired of hearing was both muffled and clear, soft and strident. There was love in her voice and yet she was speaking quickly and in another moment would leap to her feet, I knew, and disappear.

“Easy, Fiona,” I murmured. “Calm down.”

“Oh, Cyril, don’t be stuffy.”

I laughed, made my musing face in the darkness, lowered my voice. “At least Catherine doesn’t think I’m stuffy. Catherine and I were having a nice conversation until you came along.”

“Sharing secrets, baby. I know. Drinking wine.”

But again Fiona eclipsed the warm comforting sounds deep in my chest and before I could speak raised her face, reached up, seized the other woman’s large hardly distinguishable head in both hands, waited, then dropped her arms. The gesture, I understood, was another intimation of a kiss between women, the kind of gesture Fiona allowed herself when she could not bear to merely kiss someone’s cheek but when passionate kissing was nonetheless inappropriate. I was unable to see either woman’s eyes, and yet I knew that they were looking at each other and that Fiona’s eyes were probably moist and luminous.

“Cyril’s different from other men. Do you like him? Do you like my Cyril?”

“Of course she likes me.”

“Baby, you ruin everything.”

But I was ready this time, and before she was able to relinquish my companion and regain her feet, slowly and deliberately I placed my hand on Fiona’s hip and confirmed to my own satisfaction that the elastic of her panties was still to be felt beneath the gauzy nylon of the short dress. I had merely grazed her lower hip with the tips of my fingers, and of course the panties were not of any great importance. But Fiona always perceived my motives, no matter how subtle, and now standing in the darkess she had understood immediately the nature of the curiosity that lay like a shadow behind the delicate, nearly instinctive movements of my right hand.

“OK,” she said, and for a moment became a flurry of swift purpose. “You asked for it. There they are.”

I laughed, leaned down and with my palm covered the small white perforated piece of intimate apparel where it had landed on the toe of my white tennis shoe, then stuffed it easily into my right-hand trouser pocket. Catherine had not comprehended this domestic incident, I thought, and Fiona was gone. I wondered if she had satisfied her own curiosity while pouting at mine.

“Where were we,” I said and waited, adjusted the bows of the spectacles properly behind my ears, casually ran my fingers through my briefly disarrayed waves of hair, crossed my knees, struck up one of my slow-burning oval cigarettes. My wife and the one-armed stranger were everywhere and nowhere, the dark night was growing longer, deeper.

“Quiet, you two,” 1 called agreeably in the direction of the invisible well house, “you’ll wake the children.”

And then again drifting, so to speak, to my partner: “We were talking,” I murmured, “what about?”

“Ourselves.”

“Exactly. Telling each other heart-stoppers, as Fiona would say.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“Of course I’m not.”

“I don’t want to run around all night in the darkness.” “Nor do I.”

Pausing, moving one of her empty hands to the cool breadth of an upper arm, she spoke slowly out of the black shadows: “She said you’re different from other men. What did she mean?”

I waited, and then another length of golden thread went toward its mark in the darkness: “The real secret is that she likes to pinch my bottom. That’s all. But trust us,” I added. “Trust Fiona and me.”

And then quietly and without shrugging her shoulders: “Why not?”

I exhaled, nodded, began to feel at last that though we had not changed positions or touched each other even accidently, nonetheless there was the decided possibility that my massive oral cavity and the vast dark sockets of her invisible eyes were now groping toward each other in some sort of sympathetic identification, some warm analogy of bone and shadow. “I’ve told you a secret,” I said. “Now tell me one.”