by Tom DeMarco
“I have really only one dream, over and over, always the same dream.”
“No fun in that.”
“I am feeling so wretched, Claymore. Oh….” All at once the tears started rolling down her cheeks. Claymore stared at her, speechless. She didn’t move toward him. She stood with her hands at her sides, crying silently. Finally, he held out one arm slowly, almost mechanically, and gathered her in. Sonia pressed her face against the side of his face and his hair. She was shaking with sobs. Claymore looked up again into the rafters.
After a long while she was still again. Then she said, “In my dream there is an angel. The angel is crying. I don’t know exactly know why…”
“A girl angel?”
“I guess so. Do you believe in such things, Claymore? I need to know before I go on. Do you believe in God?”
“Oh, no.”
“You don’t?”
“Nope. But I believe in angels.”
“You believe in angels?”
“Oh, absolutely. Angels with wings.”
“A crying angel.”
“Sure, I could believe in a crying angel.”
“She is crying, but I don’t know exactly why. Only I sense that it is because of me somehow. That I have failed her. She is crying for me.”
“Sometimes I cry for you.”
“You do?” She stepped back to look at him. His eyes were unfocused, the eyes of a blind person.
“I cry for you because you are suffering. I can sense it. It comes away from you like the color blue, deep blue, or indigo, always around you, always wherever you are.”
“Only it’s not indigo. It’s black.”
“No, indigo.”
“Claymore, it’s blackest black, or at the very best, dark gray. And that is why she is crying, I think. She believed in me. She believed I would become pure, that I would rise above my evil, only I have not. Evil has gained control of me, my own wickedness from inside that was always there. And that is where the blackness comes from, from my wickedness.”
Outside was the sound of a lawnmower clattering across the green. Sonia was crying again, back in his arms. He could feel her tears on his neck. It was going to be a while before she stopped, he knew. Nothing to do now but wait it out. He turned to the consideration of (since she had brought the subject up) wickedness. So far, he had never encountered anything in his life that could qualify as wickedness. There had been stupidity and foolishness and willfulness, but never wickedness. He decided that for the word, which conveyed no meaning to him at all, he would substitute another one that had some meaning: pain. Perhaps that’s what she had meant. He inserted that word into Sonia’s phrases, and played them back to judge their effect: “…my own pain from inside that was always there… and that is where the blackness comes from, from my pain.”
Unlike wickedness, pain can be spoken of with precision and clarity. It has known characteristics. When she seemed at last ready to listen to him, he told her what he could conclude. “I can say this true thing about this distress,” he said. “In a short time it may be worse. In a longer time it will be better. And then in the longest time of all it won’t exist at all. It will be gone with all of us.”
He was not entirely satisfied with that formulation, though it was true as best he could see. There seemed to be no hole in the logic, therefore it had to be true. So it should have been some comfort. But Sonia just kept on crying.
Stacey had been reading the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber. The book was a bit too advanced for her; she knew that because it sometimes put her to sleep. She was nodding over it now on the beach under a palm tree where she had spread out her blanket in the afternoon free time. But in one section she came across a phrase that delighted her for its sense and for its marvelously awkward grammar: Buber’s concept of the Turning Toward. A Turning Toward, as best she could understand was an epiphany. (Stacey loved epiphanies; she’d been reading Joyce as well.) But Buber’s epiphany always involved sudden re-orientation toward another person, or better, the simultaneous turning of two people toward each other. The more she thought about it, the less clear it became what meaning for the phrase she had actually gotten from Buber and what from her own romantic musing. The concept was becoming as much hers as his. She imagined herself sitting across from Buber himself and discussing the Turning Toward. “Don’t you think, Dr. B.,” she would say, “that it is the essence of what the human creature really is, to turn toward his fellow, or her fellow for advice or for counsel, or just for comfort. It is a moment of intensest epiphany when you acknowledge this need, the need for a kind of epiphanious blending of the minds and souls.” “Rather perceptive for a 14-year old, Miss Hopkins. That is just exactly what I think.” “I thought it would be. And this kind of Turning Toward is, at once, the meaning of life and its most precious reward.” “Oh, both. There is no doubt of that. It must be both.”
Just at that moment, Kelly’s little brother Curtis came rushing by, spraying sand on the blanket and whooping. He turned around the blanket and passed again to spread sand on the other side. Stacey lunged for him and caught one ankle. Curtis went down flat.
“You wicked, wicked boy. You are going to get it.”
“Oh, no.”
“Do you know what you are going to get?”
“No no no no no no. Not that.” Curtis was squealing as Stacey tickled him, pulling him toward her. “No, no, no. No kisses!”
“Yes kisses.” She smacked him wetly on each cheek and on the top of his head and in the ticklish crevice of his neck. After she was done kissing him, Stacey held him pinned on the sand. “There,” she said. “You are well kissed. And you’ll get more of the same if you don’t show me the absolutest respect. I am going to kiss you and kiss you until you get old enough to like it. And then, I’m never going to kiss you again, no matter how you beg me.”
“Awwww.”
He looked so dejected that she kissed him one more time, as sweetly as she could. Curtis closed his eyes. Then she let him run off. She lay back on the sand, thinking of the Turning Toward.
There is something in the American psyche that makes us shy about Turning Toward our fellow creatures, shyer when the need is deeper. Loren with his Spanish upbringing, on the other hand, felt at ease with the concept. He had always looked to his sisters or to his aunt and uncle for advice and hugs. He had been easily confident these would be granted, just as he was ready to supply the same to those around him. In Baracoa Village he had a dozen people he could turn to to unburden himself or to receive a good dose of redirection. There was Homer or Edward for technical matters, D.D. Pease for almost anything, Maria and lately Proctor Pinkham for a host of people-related problems. And when something really mattered, there was Kelly.
When he saw her walking up from the beach in her white bathing suit, Loren ran after her. She turned at the sound of his steps and waited for him to catch up. “It’s so delicious, Loren, bathing in the sea. It makes me lose track of all the complicated reasons we came here in the first place. I think, why, we’re here for the swimming, of course. That’s why we’re here.”
“I need to talk to you, Kelly. Can I walk along?”
“Of course.” She had become brown in the months on the beach, always outdoors, always in the sun. Her hair had kept its color, like fat yellow corn, but now seemed lighter in the sunlight and against her tan skin. All this passed through Loren’s mind in only the most perfunctory way. He could have told you she was pretty, if you’d asked, but he was thinking at the moment only of Sonia.
He chose his words carefully: “Kelly, sometimes a person comes to realize that he…or she, I guess, has to take some action that, on the face of it, seems like it might be wrong. That does happen. And then, he has to think it out as carefully as possible. The wrongness of the action has to be balanced against the good that might come of it. If that good seems likely to happen, that is. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well take the m
atter of personal behavior, I mean how the person behaves with respect to himself and to those around him. How should he behave? There are some rules. So he follows those rules just as he has been taught to do. I was given my rules by my oldest sister, Asunción. She is the one who brought me up. And they are good rules, not too many and not severe. So I try my best to follow them.”
“Uh huh.”
“Only, I…or let’s take a hypothetical person, a person comes to believe that the rules may have created a blockage of things, and the greater good can only come after he has put the rules aside, just temporarily, to help things along.”
“Things.”
“Yes. Things that are important, but that the rules just seem to be getting in the way of….”
They had come to Kelly’s cottage. She stepped up onto the porch. Loren followed her. She seemed to be headed inside, so he stepped toward the entry himself. Kelly held out a hand to stop him. “I need to change, Loren.”
“Oh, sorry.”
She turned him around in the entrance and sat him down on the threshold. There was no door. “Eyes straight forward, Captain. Look out toward those trees.”
“Yes Ma’am.”
He listened idly to the sounds of her changing, as he considered just how to phrase what he wanted to say. When she came back out onto the porch, she had on a white sun dress, a surprise because she was almost always dressed in her jumpsuit uniform these days. She seemed to have applied something lustrous to her lips. Kelly sank into the little settee by his side. She had a long handled mirror in one hand and a comb in the other to even out her wet hair. When she was done, she put them down on the floor. She patted the seat beside her. Loren lifted himself up to sit at her side.
“So tell me,” she said, “about Things and Rules and Personal Behavior.”
“It’s about Sonia.”
She seemed to stiffen, or was it just his imagination? He plowed on. “I need to talk to someone about what’s happening, or what’s not happening.”
“Go ahead.”
“You probably think that we are going to bed together, making love. Everybody thinks that. But we’re not. We never have. Not even once.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have thought it was just taking its time. That we would marry and then it would be all right, or we would become lovers for a while and then marry, or just be lovers. But she is stopped. Stopped from marriage, stopped from lovemaking. I don’t think she can do it. She isn’t frigid, not at all. Her body is willing…”
“I don’t think I need to know the details.”
“No. But she is very sensual, very erotic. Only she can’t let herself go beyond…beyond a certain point, a detail, as you say.”
“And?”
“And I thought you could help me think about this thing. Because you are my friend. My best friend in some ways.”
“Oh, please.”
“I thought you could give me some advice, help me to figure out the right approach.”
“You want me to help you get into her pants.”
“No, Kelly, I want you to help me be what she needs.”
“Loren, you can’t ask this of me. Anything else, but not this.”
“But this is what I need, Kelly. There is something terribly wrong with what’s happening, something tragic that won’t let love live. That is my problem,” he said miserably. “And I bring it to you.”
“Oh, Loren. You don’t understand anything.”
“I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t understand Sonia. I thought that perhaps she might have told you things that it would help for me to know. Women confide in each other. They say things they could never say to a man.”
Kelly turned herself slightly away from him but didn’t respond.
“Has she confided in you at all?”
“Not Sonia.”
“She hasn’t told you how she feels about me and about love?”
“It’s the nature of our friendship. I tell her my every secret, or nearly, and she tells me almost nothing. I don’t know what she feels about anything. I know sometimes what she thinks, but not what she feels.”
“It isn’t normal what’s happening. The repressions have been lifted from our times. This is an age when people are supposed to be joyful about love, because all is allowed. All around us are Keeshas and Adjouans, drunk on love, being healthy and human. And why isn’t it happening for Sonia and me? Why can’t it happen?”
Kelly sat ramrod straight. “What do you want of me?”
“Sometimes I think, Kelly, that she is asking me to help her a little. I’ve never pushed, because of my rules, because I didn’t believe that was what should be done. I thought we should go hand in hand. By ‘go’ I mean…”
“Yes, I can guess.”
“So I never pushed. One time she said to me, ‘Loren, draw me as close as you can.’ I thought she meant to hug her, to draw her close to me in that sense. But maybe she meant something else. Maybe she was asking me to draw her close to the edge, to lovemaking. I need to know if that’s what a man is supposed to do.”
“Oh dear.” Kelly leaned her head back against the top of the settee and stared up into the distance.
“Sometimes I make her excited enough so that she is very close. And she stops herself only with a great effort. At that time, should I…”
Kelly sat up. Her mouth was set in a firm line, making her look, of all things, a little old. “You’re going to have to tell me about one of those times, if I am to help you, Loren. Please try not to be too graphic.”
“Yes.”
He told her about the beach at Punta Caleta. He told her as well about the most recent time, an evening swim and almost lovemaking only a few days before. When he was done, Kelly slumped back again into the settee. Her face now gave no clue at all of what she was thinking.
Finally she said: “Jesus. How did I get myself into this?” She turned back toward Loren. “Do you know when her period is?”
“What?”
“Period, damn it. Women have periods. Didn’t you know that?”
“Yes. In general.”
“But not in specific?”
“No.”
“Blind. Ignorant, blind, unthinking, uncaring, unnoticing men. How could you not know?”
“But I thought I was supposed not to notice. Would it make so much difference to know anyway? Would it be easier for her at a particular time?”
“Not for most women, certainly. But Sonia is so moody. Maybe it would make enough of a difference for her.”
“But I don’t know.”
“Back in Ithaca, Sonia and I were what the sociologists call coincident, because we were together so much. That means our cycles were lined up. They probably still are.” She looked distinctly pained, as though she had been unwilling to give away the confidence.
Kelly lifted herself up and stepped inside the little cottage. When she came out she had a pocket calendar in hand. She tossed it down on the seat beside him, open to the current month. One day near the end of the month had a circle around its number. Kelly leaned over him to put her finger on that day. “That is…the day you start counting from.” She counted backwards from it, her finger finally landing on the 21st, a day two weeks into the future. “Try her on the 21st, Loren. Maybe it will make a difference.”
“Thank you Kelly.”
“Right.”
“Kelly…”
She straightened up. “Loren, it’s time for you to go now. I’ve got tons of things to do.” She stepped back into the doorway and paused there with her back to him, waiting deliberately for him to leave. Loren stared at her back for a moment, then turned and left. Kelly listened to his footsteps going off the porch and down the stone walkway. Then she listened to the silence for a while. She listened, locked in the position of the Turning Away.
3
COINS OF TIME
If it was surprise to all of them that Candace Fournier Hopkins had found her true calling as a na
val officer, it was no more of a surprise than the strange turn of career that Loren had undergone. Just over a year ago in his annual birthday letter to himself, he had written that at last he felt he was headed on the path he would follow for the rest of his life, the life of a theoretical physicist. And now months would pass at a time in which he never gave a second thought to physics. He had found a far greater passion: War.
The battle of the Bahama Channel was never very far from Loren’s mind. Again and again he would feel the crash of Columbia’s bows into the helpless topsides of the white yawl, hear the cracking of timbers overhead as her rigging fell. He could sense the pounding of his heart as he leapt over the deck with a machete in his hand, hear the raucous sound of his own voice. Sometimes he would wake up in the midst of a battle dream full of crackling blue beams, gas-masked villains and blood. His mouth would be dry with fear, his pulse racing. And half of him would wish it would never happen again, while the other half was hoping it would never end. He was hooked. He had fought for his life and for his land and won. And now everything else paled by comparison.
The business of the rest of his life, he now knew, would be fighting. The adventure of Fort Belvoir had confirmed that if any confirmation had been necessary. His path was set from that point on. He would defend this island and the community as long as he lived.
Back in the States, his adversaries, Rupert Paule and the shadowy Reverend Gallant, Loren suspected, were discouraged but not defeated. He thought there would be another attack sometime in the not too distant future. This time, he knew, they would come from the south. That didn’t mean he could relax his guard in the Channel and along the coast to the west, but it did mean he had to shift his emphasis. The enemy fleet would pass well offshore to the east of Puerto Rico, perhaps even carrying on all the way around outside of the Windward Islands, and then make their attack with the trades directly behind them, approaching Cuba from the south or the southwest, depending on the season. He had evaluated that plan again and again from the enemy’s point of view, testing it against the thinking of Kelly and Candace and the Proctor. None of them had been able to come up with a better card for Paule to play. So they had to assume that is just what he planned to do.