John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

“Kiss me, Cyril … kiss me …”

Together we moved, together we sank down at last on that lumpy and earthen-smelling mattress until in time the fish began to flow, the birds to fly, the twin heavenly nudes of Love to approach through the night.

Would it stop? Would it ever stop? Catherine could not expel her breath forever, my emissions were limited in length and frequency. We could not go on. True radiance could only end in the dark. Then why was the tempest still exploring the storm? Why was I still bulging from head to foot? Why was Catherine still holding her breath, why hugging my buttocks more tightly than ever, why biting her own lower lip? Would it never end?

But of course at this very moment I found myself becoming aware of change, heard Catherine sigh, felt her two hands sliding away, knew that on either side of me her two feet were again flat on the bed, felt my shoulders sagging and knew with deep pleasurable regret that suddenly the naked twins of our invented constellation were gone. The bed was still.

“Listen,” I said at last, “remember that evening we saw the nightingale?”

“You’re so good to me … You’re so good to us all …”

“Or that time I spitted the lamb on the beach?”

“I love to hear your voice in the dark …”

“Tomorrow I guess we’ll have to get Hugh into the water.”

Later, much later, I awoke to the silence and bright light of the sun-filled room and sat up on the edge of the bed. I stood. I took my usual count of bottomless breaths of morning air. Smiling down at Catherine I decided to carry the pajamas but wear the old dressing gown. And then with chastity belt in hand and laces tied, eyeglasses adjusted, sash in place, pajamas carefully folded over my right arm, I left.

I paused in the open doorway of Hugh’s villa. I paused on our side of the funeral cypresses. I paused in the arbor which was empty. I found a safe hiding place for the belt. I took a few more long breaths of the sun. All of Illyria was a chalky and yet verdant landscape drenched in champagne.

Within a half dozen paces of our narrow doorway framed in vines I found myself smiling into the gray-green steady eyes of my waiting wife. There stood Fiona in that doorway of white mortar and sprightly vines, Fiona wide-awake and up and around like me. I did not move, I drank her in, she watched me with familiar pleasure. Over her right arm she carried her folded terry-cloth robe, and except for the loosely folded robe was naked. How alike we were, I thought, knowing that for the moment at least neither one of us would speak and that Fiona was reading, as it were, the pajamas on my arm exactly as I was reading the robe on hers. Our two separate but similar nights were evident in our appearances, each of us was perfectly aware of the other’s thoughts. I was exhausted but as fresh as ever, she was tired but tense. She knew that I had enjoyed my night hours, I knew that she could not possibly look the way she looked if she had spent those same hours alone. Her bright eyes, her obviously sore muscles, the somehow roughened texture of her hard and slender body — what else could they mean?

“Baby,” she whispered, “come inside …”

I let fall the pajamas just as Fiona dropped her robe, quickly I seized Fiona’s proffered hand and followed her through our vine-beribboned doorway and down the cool corridor to the room that was ours. Her slim bare feet were light on the stone, her trim buttocks were filled with purpose. Hand in hand and thigh to thigh we stood in the entrance to our sun-drenched eonnubial room.

“Baby,” she whispered, “isn’t he beautiful?”

I brushed thick lips against her tight cheek, I stared down at Fiona’s prize. What else could I do? Of course I had expected an empty bed, of course I wanted to hone the bones of our love. Even with her eyes on the naked man in our bed, Fiona was maneuvering our two hands so that the back of hers was caressing the shiny source of my song. But it was hopeless. It was out of the question. And yet wasn’t this precisely what we wanted? This sight of Hugh coiled up like a naked spring and covered with the lip-marks of Fiona’s kisses? Right now he was preventing Fiona and me from enjoying our version of what he and Fiona had so recently enjoyed. But at the same time he had proven my theories, completed Love’s natural structure, justified Catherine’s instincts, made Fiona happy when she had given up all her hopes for happiness. What more could I ask?

“Cyril …?”

“Fiona …?”

“I want you, baby. I want you now.”

“We love each other. Agreed?”

“But he’s going to wake up any minute and I have to be here. I love him very much. I really do.”

“There’s always tonight.”

“We’ll just have to see. OK?”

“Listen,” I murmured, and kissed her cheek, “he can’t catch up. But God knows we’ll let him try …”

She gave me one quick glance, I smiled, she turned in girlish haste to the bed while I retreated down the corridor to the bright morning which in unaccountable silence was rushing faster than ever along the path of the sun.

Later, much later, though before the hour of noon, the four of us met again for a new first time at Fiona’s small rickety breakfast table set up in the arbor, Hugh and Fiona emerging from the narrow doorway framed in vines at the very moment that Catherine and I made our entrance through the wall of cypresses. Hugh and Fiona came out shoulder to shoulder and with their hands full of Fiona’s crockery, Catherine and I stepped forward with our arms about each other’s waists. Yes, openly and freshly we came together in the arbor which was sweet and shaded and bursting with hymeneal grapes, a quiet and appropriate place for our reunion. Catherine was wearing her white pajamas, I had all the clothing I needed or wanted in my comfortable old blood-colored dressing gown, Hugh had borrowed my red-and-white striped cotton shirt which he wore extravagantly and unashamedly with his own long gray undershorts. Fiona topped us all in one of her nearly mid-hip pale green transparent nighties. Yes, frankly, happily we sat around the perfect square of that small rickety table piled high with Fiona’s morning fare, sat smiling and eating and touching bare feet beneath the table. Catherine sighed and licked her fingers, Hugh coughed and put his hand on Fiona’s arm, Fiona shivered and caught my eye and stared at my bland contented features with a limpid smiling intensity she rarely displayed. Never had she looked more the faun, more the woman. Never had I loved her more or valued quite so highly this special hovering shyness now felt by us all. But the food, wasn’t there also something special about the food? Of course there was. How like Fiona on this morning of mornings to select from the garden of her imagination only those items which, according to superstition, were aphrodisiac. Just like Fiona to fuse in one stroke her feminine wisdom and my sensible view of sex.

“Well,” I said, lifting high my glass of cold white wine, “let’s drink to us.”

“To us, baby. To us …”

“HE’S NOT THERE.”

“What?”

“I mean it, baby. He’s gone.”

“Catherine too?”

“She’s still asleep. But he’s not with her. He’s gone. He’s just not there.”

“Well, look around. He can’t be far.”

“I’ve looked for him already. Everywhere. Something’s wrong.”

“Why don’t you come on back to bed awhile. OK?”

“All right, baby. I’ll go alone.”

So before I could pull on my frayed white ducks and reach for my old white woolen sweater (no time to search for underpants or shirt, no time for shoes), Fiona had already given me her quick hard sign of disapproval and summoned all her usual self-reliance and walked out of our room, disappeared into that loud dawn wind that almost never blew but was blowing now. Hard-faced, hair untended, barefooted, wearing her crumpled but sporty mid-thigh trench coat open over a short white modest sleeping gown, skin and eyes still bearing the marks of a recent dream — in all her fleeting vividness she too was gone, as if she had not roused me by my naked shoulder, had not stood over me and spoken, had not given me a glimpse of what I took to be undue agitation, had not brought me this latest and, I thought, trivial news of Hugh.