Love Among the Cannibals

by Wright Morris

  “This chick crazy, man,” he said, “you know what I mean?”

  “She likes to bolt,” I said. “We all like to, but she does it.”

  “Look—” said Mac, “you mean she’ll bolt with anybody?”

  “She bolted with me,” I replied. “That answer your question?” It did and it didn’t. “But if I were you,” I added, “I wouldn’t get my hopes too high.”

  “Man—” he said, “you gone and got yourself a call girl—”

  “Right,” I said, “a will-call girl. She will call it the Way she sees it. And she just did.”

  He saw I was temporarily out of my mind.

  “If she comes in while I’m gone,” I said, “don’t do anything Billie wouldn’t do,” then I got into the cab beside Señor Carrillo, and we drove off. As we curved along the shore I had a good view of the motor launch. It had turned so I could see that the flag it was flying was American.

  “A good day for glasses!” said Señor Carrillo.

  “Glasses?” I said, and thought he meant dark ones.

  He took his hands from the steering wheel, cupped them to his eyes, made a focusing adjustment.

  “Ahhhhhh—” I said understanding, and he exclaimed:

  “Many powers!” as if wishing me health.

  In my condition I needed a man like Señor Carrillo, one who knew before I spoke that I would be lying, and what I needed was a pair of strong glasses to increase my suffering. In love we all have the Latin temperament.

  “Where does one buy them?” I asked, but to need them was not the same as to buy them. He saw again that I did not know the value of money, and needed protection from myself.

  “The boat will come in soon,” he said; “it will be nearer,” meaning I would not have need of the glasses, and that my eyes, weak as they were, would be more than strong enough. He was right. The boat was on its way in by the time we had reached the wharf.

  Watching that boat come in—watching the movements on the deck, the young men in sailor pants that hugged their firm bottoms, the young women in middy blouses and white sailor hats—I had time to dump the Greek overboard, out of my life, then haul her back on deck again. The error of her ways, the error of my ways, the central error of our ways together I could see very clearly—I could see that it didn’t matter, that is.

  The launch was named the Sea Beast, the deck was covered with frogmen flippers, diving equipment, and large glass jars full of sea life and ooze that they had dredged up. A floating marine laboratory of some sort; the crew looked like vacationing football material, with a sprinkling of chicks noted for their mental development. The girls wore cameras, held small nets, and were plainly what Mac called the brainy type. The young men were tanned Gods. But they were too young for my Greek. She was not on the deck, nor anywhere in sight until they had the boat tied up, and the plank down, when she came up from below wearing one of the sailor hats and a middy blouse. The way she looked in that outfit you can imagine, but I was glad to see more on her, rather than less, and trailing her up the ladder was this bug-shaped oldster in the walking shorts. He was loaded with what I would estimate to be several thousand dollars’ worth of camera equipment, and he gazed up at me through the long-range half of his bifocals. A friendly, disarming, ladybug-shaped, ridiculous man. He wore a skipper’s hat trimmed with fishing flies, a UCLA track shirt, and a lifetime of sitting, or squatting, had left his knees permanently cocked. He was holding a jar, in which something floated, a fish line with weights for sounding the depths, and I seemed to recognize, at a glance, the Greek’s new line of development.

  Three or four of the boys ran the gangplank to the pier, and the girls came up first, my Greek waving, then she took my hand to offer it to Dr. Leggett, who gripped it eagerly. He wanted to apologize, he said, for depriving me of Miss Baum. They had drawn her from the sea, like a mermaid, and she had assured them all that she would not be missed until they put in at the pier, which they did soon enough. It was just one of the strangest things in the world to be anchored in the bay of Acapulco, and draw out of the water, like a fish, one of the UCLA alumni. There was nothing affected or suspicious in Dr. Leggett’s surprise. He was always turning up something unheard-of in the sea, and now he’d turned up this. I suppose she may have told him that I was her uncle, her guardian, or some such stooge, since she was Miss Baum and I was Mr. Horter right off the bat. He took us both by the arm and we went off to have a drink.

  We sat on the veranda of that seedy hotel that faces the wharf, with the fine view of the bay, drank Sidral, bottled water, and learned about the sea-ooze sources of life. Dr. Leggett was a marine biologist. In the jar he held before us was some of the primeval ooze of life. It made him stutter to contemplate it, and when he stuttered the Greek supplied him with the word he wanted.

  “Thank you, my child,” he would say, and place his freckled, sunburned hand on her own. Platonic. Absolutely. But what was it that disturbed the primeval ooze, what was it that got it to oozing, that is, if it was not a pair of deep-sea hands meeting like that? One platonic, the other pulsing with the juices of life. When I peered into that jar on the table, green and fermenting, what I saw was myself. If my sap was drained into such a bottle, it would look like that. Behave like that. And if the Greek’s hands were then cupped around it, it would ooze life.

  Along with the Sidral I had a bowl of peanuts, I held a hundred or more colored slides to the light, and I listened to a lecture on my own lovesick condition, which I did not understand. All of it mystifying, marvelous, primeval, underwater life. All of it exactly as I knew it to be in myself. Leggett was somewhere in his fifties, his teeth were not good, his breath was bad, his knees were bony, but strange things can lie in the path of a girl’s development. I had, for example. Nothing fished from the sea could be stranger than that.

  Did he arouse her desire? It hardly mattered. Something in her was aroused. If it was not her own desire, it was for his—his passion for a bottle of sea-green ooze. So much—I couldn’t help thinking—like the Greek herself. A solution of animal, vegetable, and mineral, in the process of becoming something else. Bolting, that is.

  Nor was it lost on me that the professor’s passion, however platonic in its intentions, had undergone a transformation in the magnetic field of the Greek. His passive ooze had picked up her charge, the percolating signal was being passed along the network, and one fine moment, placing his hand on hers, he would feel the spark. My child—he would say, and undergo a shattering development. The sea-green fermenting ooze would not be in his bottle, but in his blood.

  When he finally ran out of slides, and bottle water, I managed to put in that our party, back on the beach where we had left them, might be wondering about us. It brought him up a little short. It almost crossed his mind that all was not well. He had talked so much he had a froth on his lips like strips of meringue, which he kept licking off, and for one long moment he sat stiffly erect looking at the Greek. It was pitiful to see it. Here was a man who was known to have one losing his mind.

  “My, my, my—my—”

  “Child,” she added, and he placed his freckled hand on her own, then gazed at the table covered with all of his gadgets and spring-wind toys. His bottle of ooze, his metal case of slides, the notebook of sketches he had made underwater, and an oyster with a pearl in the process of formation. He pressed the oyster on her. He had lost his mind, but he still thought he had one, saying in a loud voice, to indicate he meant it, that he had taken the liberty of asking Miss Baum to join the group. There was room. The cabin for girls had one more bunk. He could not, in justice, give her full credit for the course, but for one who had come from the sea, as she had—

  “I’ll have to think it over, Dr. Leggett,” she replied, accepted the oyster, and got up from the table. When I stood up beside her she gave me her hand. One of the triumphs of my life was that moment; the other, of a similar nature, was when a cat who hated men had her kittens in my lap.

  “Be seeing you, Doc,”
I said, feeling friendly toward him, knowing how he felt ever better than he did. He sat there, with his toys, and watched us walk across the street to the cab. Señor Carrillo, still waiting for me, was even more relieved than I was, and we took seats in the rear of his cab and he drove us off. She took my hand and said:

  “Isn’t he wonderful?”

  So long as she was holding my hand I could admit it. I agreed, but I was also still human.

  “You just happen to meet out in the bay?” I said.

  “I looked up—” she said, looking up as if she saw him, “and there he was! He said, ‘Good heavens, a Siren!’ ”

  “A poet!” I said. “He should be a song writer.” She released my hand, and I went on, “We like to kill the ones we love, I suppose, but in my time we didn’t brag about it. I can see the times have changed. Any suggestions for burial?”

  Why did I talk like that? We might as well have turned the car around, at that point, and driven her back to Dr. Leggett sitting there with his ooze, his stutter, and his colored slides. But we didn’t, we drove on, along the streets where the palm shadows were crossing, and she suddenly said:

  “I was wondering why you didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Didn’t kill me,” she replied.

  “My God,” I said, “don’t talk like that.”

  “When you love me,” she said, “you know what I think? I think, if he would kill me now, I wouldn’t care. I would love it.”

  I took her head in my hands and turned her face toward me. She had said what she meant. I looked at her eyes, her lips, and the knowledge that one day they would be gone made me so ill that I dropped my head in her lap. She took it between her hands, like a child who is sick, kissed it to help it recover, then wiped from my face the film of sweat. Señor Carrillo had pulled over to the curb and stopped. He got out of the car and said:

  “I will go tell them you are here,” and he hurried off, almost trotting, then he turned and called, “but there is no rush. I say there is no rush.” I watched him hurry ahead, trailing his shadow, then go over the sea wall and drop out of sight. He did not reappear. I don’t know what he told them, but nobody appeared.

  “Come—” she said, and helped me out of the car, but we did not cross the empty lot to the sea wall. We crossed the road and went along the ditch to what was left of the car. During the day they had taken off the bumpers and the engine hood. The radiator and the top of the block would be gone when I saw it next. Somehow, that idea pleased me. I took off the shoes and the shirt I was wearing and tossed them into the car, what was left of it, the way the Greek had stripped down and tossed her clothes on the foot of the bed. I could see she liked that, and since she was still wearing the silly sailor hat and the middy blouse, she tossed in the hat, then peeled off the blouse and threw it in. We got to laughing, the way you will when something is stirring you can’t quite control, and I took off my pants and tossed them in, then the candy-striped shorts I was wearing, and she took off and threw into the seat her swimming shorts. Stripped down to the point where God had made us, such as we were, we walked up the slope. I held her hand—I mean I reached out and took it the way Adam would have held on to Eve—and then we went along the ditch where the water would flow, if and when the pipes were laid, and up the grade to the house where there would be light and power, any day now. We didn’t pass anybody going up the grade, nor were the Eroza kids, waiting for us in the yard, but Señora Eroza, dozing on the porch, rocked back her head to gaze in our direction, but what she saw seemed to be a natural part of the world of her dreams. In her dreams, that is, she too walked around holding hands. She smiled, not so much at what she saw as how pleased she was to see it, then her head rocked forward and when we walked past her she was asleep.

  I remember we went in through the hole in the wall, but we both stopped at the door to our room. What was wrong? The Greek stood smiling down at her feet. They were the color of the sand in the yard, but that was not it. They were almost as big as mine, but that was not it. She had come to the door, this time, with nothing more to kick off.

  Did that mean, I wondered, we were leaving the Garden—or entering it? I stood there, a troubled Adam, until my Eve took a grip on my hand, as if to reassure me, then she led me into the room.

  IV

  Leaving them alone like that was what did it. Alone on the beach. Leaving them with the sunset, the pounding surf, the cha-cha-cha, and the languid heat—there is nothing like heat, and the heat alone might have been enough. Why do we say that every bitch is in it, if it isn’t the heat? On top of that you have to put the bewitching night, and the way the Greek would whinny when we made love. One might argue that that did it. But one would be wrong. They didn’t do it in the hope of more of the same, but in the certainty it would be less for us. Some people can’t bear to see other people have so much fun.

  I was lying there pretty much as God made me, with a few minor alterations, when Billie Harcum came to our door and peered in. Radiant. All brides are radiant.

  “Mac an’ me have an announcement,” she said. She said have a nounsemunt the way you have a baby, a mortgage, a divorce.

  When I tried to reply the sound stuck in my throat. I would say her real triumph came at that point. Behind her pretty radiant little mask I could see her eyes flare up with a gemlike flame when she saw the effect on me.

  “Mac an’ me ah gonna hitch ah wagon to a stah an’ get married,” she said.

  You can’t improve on that, and I didn’t try to. I just lay there till the bed began to tap on the wall, and I knew that the Greek, sprawled on her face, was laughing. I sat up and put my feet on the floor to steady the bed.

  “What a great day this is!” I said, loud enough for Mac to hear it. “I can hardly wait to congratulate the lucky man.”

  The lucky man did not reply, and Billie said, “Ah nevuh seen a grown man look so relaxt. Ah’m wonderin’ if the preachuh’s gonna have to come heah to marry us.”

  I thought he might, but not because Mac was so relaxed. I dug around in my bag for a pair of shorts, then followed Billie to the door of their room. Irwin K. Macgregor lay out on the bed, a beach towel around his waist. The word for it was bushed, not relaxed. He had made his way from the car seats, and the beach chair, to the chambered heart of the boudoir. He had won the laurel, that is, but lost the fight. I had often told my colleague Macgregor that of all the men in the world he had the most to win, since he had the least to lose. But I was wrong. He had just lost something important to him. His Million-Dollar Baby was now his dime-store wife.

  I had come in to ridicule him, but I just stood there. He smiled like he was sick.

  “You feel all right, Mac?” I asked.

  “Man—” he said, hoarsely, “I feel great.”

  “We both wan a simple suhvus,” Billie said; “we wan a simple civil suhvus,” and the way Mac looked it would be a funeral service. From his back, he rolled over on his face. He was like a kid coming down with something, fearing the worst.

  “A simple civil suhvus,” Billie repeated. “All I wanna do is get it ovuh with.”

  “I know,” I said, and she saw that I did. She didn’t care. She could play her cards in the open now. She had been up for some time since all of her clothes, from the three bags she had salvaged, were spread out on the car seats, the beach chairs, or hooked to the wall screens.

  “Uhl, honey—” she said, “foh a reahly simple suhvus, what you suppose I should weah?”

  We had the happy bridal breakfast on the veranda, featuring sweet rolls and coffee, and since we had plenty of both I asked the Erozas to share it with us. The kids had rolls but no coffee. Señor Eroza described it as an expensive taste. Sensible children, like his own, would not acquire it. He went on to say—stimulated by the coffee—that although circumstance found him in Acapulco, his heart and soul were still in Yucatan. Hadn’t I remarked the difference in his speech? I replied that I had. I may have also observed, being an observant
man, that the true Yucatecan, a man like himself, had little in common besides the language with the Mexicans. Yucatecans were clean, thrifty, slow to anger, quick to right a wrong, generous and proud, with something of the blood of the old Mayans still in their veins. Mexicans were— excepting Señora Eroza, who was more of the Maya than of Mexico—Mexicans were like children. His own excepted, that is. In his home in Yucatan the lanterns would be lit, the ditches would be dug, the pipes would be laid, and the toilets would flush with a roar that would almost be frightening. If we went to Mérida we would see that for ourselves. The streets clean, the women lovely, the men cultured, the children quiet, the skies always sunny, but the sun giving much less heat.

  While Señor Eroza talked he crouched like an Indian, his chin between his knees. With his long hooked beak he resembled a bird, one of the buzzards with his crown balding, shifting his weight from claw to claw as he perched on his post. The coffee widened his eyes and set his tongue to wagging—but put his wife to sleep. Señora Eroza, a cigarette between her lips, her great bust strewn with ceremonial ashes, sat upright with the smallest of her brood wide-eyed in her lap. He had the Yucatecan nose, and would keep it clean, but his eyes came from the islands and would lead to trouble. While we sat there a car honked in our street, and Señor Carrillo, leaning out to wave, asked if by the purest chance we might be in need of his services? I replied that we were, and he lit a cigar while waiting for us.

  Marriage? A civil marriage? It took Señor Carrillo a moment to think. That was no marriage at all, of course, but one of the kind that were made north of the border. But what was made north of the border was also made in Acapulco. Made and unmade, that is. He was relieved when I explained that this thing was not for me, but for my friend, who looked sick. Mac sat between the girls, in the rear, his face sallow in the shadow of his helmet, like a missionary stuffed and dressed for the pot.