John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

THE SUN WAS SETTING, SINKING TO ITS PREDESTINED DEATH, and to the four of us, or at least to me, that enormous smoldering sun lay on the horizon like a dissolving orange suffused with blood. The tide was low, the smooth black oval stones beneath us were warm to the flesh, we could hear the distant sounds of the three girls playing with the dog behind the funeral cypresses. Fiona, wearing a pale lemon-colored bra and pale lemon-colored briefs for the beach, and I in my magenta trunks as sparse and thick and elastic as an athletic supporter, and Hugh in his long-sleeved cotton shirt and loose gray trunks like undershorts, and Catherine dressed in her faded madras halter and swimming skirt and shorts — together we sat with legs outstretched, soles of our feet touching or nearly touching, a four-pointed human starfish resting together in the last livid light of the day.

No one moved. Without calculation, almost without consciousness, Fiona lay propped on her elbows and with her head back, her eyes closed, her tense lips gently smiling. Even Catherine appeared to be sunk in a kind of worried slumber, aware somehow of the thick orange light on her knees. Prone bodies, silence hanging on the children’s voices and scattered barking of their old black dog, the empty wine bottles turning to gold. All of us felt the inertia, suspension, tranquility, though I found myself tapping out a silent expectant rhythm with one of my big toes while Hugh’s narrow black eyes were alert, unresting, I noticed, and to me revealed only too clearly his private thoughts. But the small black oval stones we lay on were for us much better than sand. Our beach, as we called it, was a glassy volcanic bed that made us draw closer together to touch toes, to dream. With one hand I was carelessly crushing a few thin navy-blue sea shells, making a small pile of crushed shell on my naked navel. And yet it was the sun, the sun alone that filled all our thoughts and was turning the exposed skin of all four bodies the same deepening color. The lower the sun fell the more it glowed.

I felt someone’s foot recoil from mine and then return. Even the tiny black ringlets in Hugh’s beard were turning orange. I could hear the powdery shells collecting in the well of my belly and I realized that all four of us were together on a black volcanic beach in the hour when fiercely illumined goats stand still and huddle and the moon prepares to pour its milk on the fire.

“Cyril. We don’t have to go back yet, do we?”

I glanced at Fiona, heard the matter-of-fact whisper and saw that her expression had not changed, that her lips had not moved. But rolling onto one hip, propping myself on one elbow, brushing away crushed shells with a hasty stroke of one hand, I saw also that there was movement in the curve of her throat and that the sun had saturated one of her broad white shoulders. And before I could answer, Fiona giggled. My sensible, stately, impatient, clear-bodied wife giggled, as if in a dream a small bird had alighted on her belly. Giggled for no reason apparently, she whose every impulsive gesture was informed with its own hidden sense, and at the sound Hugh became suddenly rigid, Catherine opened her eyes. I knew what to do.

In silence, while the sun flushed us most deeply and unrecognizably with orange light, I got to my knees beside Fiona, who did not move, and with a flick of my hand untied the silken strings of her pale lemon-colored halter, those thin silken cords knotted in a bow behind her bent neck and curving back, and then with a few more skillful movements removed altogether Fiona’s little lemon-colored bra. Then I folded this the briefest of all Fiona’s half-dozen bathing bras, stuck it for safekeeping inside one of my empty shoes, and flowed back slowly into my former position on the hot rocks.

Understandably perhaps, for the first few moments Catherine and even Hugh could not bear to look. I myself hardly dared to look. But then I heard a sound like a finger scratching inside Hugh’s throat and our three heads turned furtively, shyly, violently or calmly in my wife’s direction. And Fiona’s eyes, I saw, were open. We said nothing, Fiona was looking straight at the sun and smiling. But had she wanted me to expose her breasts, I wondered, for Hugh’s sake or mine? Or was the exposure purely my own idea and something that entered her consciousness and gave her pleasure only after I had touched her, untied the strings? I could not know. But I knew immediately that it was a good idea.

Fiona’s breasts were not large. Yet in the sun’s lurid effulgence they glistened, grew tight while the two nipples turned to liquid rings, bands, so that to me Fiona’s two firm breasts suddenly became the bursting irises of a young white owl’s wide-open eyes, and when in the next moment she giggled again, again apparently without reason, those bright naked eyes, breasts, recorded the little spasms of pleasure that, otherwise unseen, were traveling down Fiona’s chest and neck and arms.

“Baby, can’t we just stay like this forever?”

We heard the words, we watched the very motion of Fiona’s speech in her lips and breasts. In mouth and breasts my wife was singing, and despite the possibility of another unexpected giggle, which no doubt would be accompanied by another small eruption of rolling or bouncing in the lovely breasts as well as a slight twisting in the slope of the shoulders, despite all this or perhaps because of it the preciousness of what Fiona said maintained the silence, prevented the rest of us from talking. I could see the thin white edge of Fiona’s teeth between the slightly parted lips, the voice was soft and clear, the naked orange breasts were unimaginably free, her eyes were partially open. Even in the silence she was singing, and the rest of us were listening, watching.

Then suddenly Hugh began to scratch viciously at himself beneath the loose gray shorts, and Catherine moved. With a brief flashing sensation of regret, it occurred to me that she was about to climb heavily, angrily to her feet and leave. She too could hear that in the distance the children were beginning to quarrel, beginning to tease the dog. But I was wrong, and she merely drew herself slowly out of her supine state, raised her back and lifted up her long heavy legs and sat upright with her thighs pressed together on the black rocks and her knees bent and her strong calves crossed at the ankles.

And then Hugh spoke. Stopped scratching himself and spoke, while Catherine’s unreadable eyes met mine and I smiled, allowed my large right orange hand to lie comfortably where my upper thighs, which were about twice the girth of even Catherine’s thighs, joined in special harmony the inverted apex of my own magenta briefs for the beach.

“That’s it. All these years you’ve been castrating him!”

On this occasion it was hardly what I thought he would say. Was this the extent of the private thoughts I had been watching all this time in his black eyes? But then I laughed, because Hugh had been staring all this time at the bare breasts of my wife and because he was thin and because despite the ringlets of his beard and curls of black hair across his forehead was nonetheless wearing the long gray shapeless bathing trunks and the white cotton collarless shirt with the right sleeve pinned up with one of Catherine’s large steel safety pins. Perhaps he did not enjoy the sight of Fiona as much as I did, or would not admit that he did. Nonetheless, that he could lie in my shadow and stare at my wife as he was in fact staring at her, and then pronounce what he had just pronounced, aroused in me new admiration for so much craft, for so much comic design.

“Cyril is virile, baby. He really is.”

The absolute certainty of the soft voice which in timbre matched the curve of Fiona’s throat, the pleasing brevity of the assertion, the mild sex-message of the accompanying giggle, which was more than the giggle of a mere girl, the fact that Fiona still had not moved but lay back on her elbows with one slender leg raised at the knee and her breasts falling imperceptibly to either side — at that moment I could not have loved Fiona more or felt more affection for my courageous, self-betraying Saint Peter, as I had come to call Hugh mentally whenever our quaternion reached special intensity or special joy.