Dancing on Coral

by Glenda Adams

When they got there the sun was high overhead and slightly to the south. There were about twenty people on the beach, in the water, and diving from the rock face on the opposite bank.

  Jean-Claude and Tom ran straight to the water. When he was halfway down the beach Tom came running back and kissed Lark. “Sure you’re okay?” he asked, and then ran back to Jean-Claude in the water.

  Elizabeth fussed about setting things right for the baby. She spread a padded plastic sheet on the sand and on the sheet a white towel. She placed the child on his stomach on the towel, and then she fiddled with a parasol so that its shade fell over the baby’s body. Over the parasol she draped mosquito netting, which she anchored with shoes and bags and some stones at the edge of the plastic.

  She stood back and admired the construction. “That should keep him safe,” she said.

  Jean-Claude and Tom called her from the water. They splashed and ducked each other to show her how wonderful it was.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind staying with the baby?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But are you sure?” Elizabeth persisted. “It seems a shame.”

  “I’m happy to read.”

  “Well, all right, if you’re sure,” said Elizabeth, backing away toward the water. “If he cries, give him the juice in the bottle with the blue cap.”

  Lark watched Elizabeth run into the water, where Tom hoisted her on his shoulders. The wasps flew about, attracted to the garbage cans and to the people. To protect herself from them, Lark put on a sunhat and sunglasses and draped towels around her back and arms and knees. She drew her knees under her chin and sat hunched with her book before her. She felt like Donna Bird.

  Lark had only to move her eyes, without moving her head, to see the baby. He was asleep on the white towel. His back moved in and out as he breathed. One or two wasps alighted on the white netting and crawled about.

  One wasp was particularly methodical. She watched it crawl down from the highest point of the net tent and make its way along the edge of the netting at sand level. It crawled into the toe of Elizabeth’s sandal and upon emerging at the heel found that the edge of the netting had been caught up by the buckle. The wasp slipped through the gap and into the tent. She watched it walk across the towel toward the baby’s foot. Just before it reached the foot, she brought her book down on it and crushed it through the netting. The parasol and net construction collapsed, and the baby woke up crying. Elizabeth hurried from the water to comfort him, and when Tom and Jean-Claude came out and stood over her, dripping, Lark said, “Please, Tom, get me off this beach,” and back at the house she told Tom she wanted to leave France, because of the wasps.

  He laughed and gave her a hug. “Let’s go to Vienne and buy you a swimsuit, instead,” he said.

  In the store in Vienne, Tom stood outside the changing room reading a book while Lark tried on suits.

  Then they all went on to eat nine courses on the terrace of a three-star restaurant.

  “This is once-in-a-lifetime,” said Tom, patting his wallet in his pocket. “Let’s drink to grants that enable poor academics and thinkers to taste the good things.” Then suddenly Tom pulled a dark red scarf out of his coat pocket. It was not in any kind of wrapping, just loose. “A present for Lark,” he said. He held the scarf by one corner and dangled it in front of her.

  “When did you get that?” Lark asked.

  “It’s lovely,” said Elizabeth.

  “When you were trying on your swimsuit,” Tom said.

  Lark reached out for the scarf. Tom jerked it back, laughing. “Say please,” he said. And when she did not, he put the scarf back in his pocket. The red corner poked out, and it looked as if it were meant for him.

  Back at the house Lark lay awake. Tom’s coat, with the scarf in its pocket, was across the back of the chair.

  “You shoplifted the scarf, didn’t you?” Lark said to Tom.

  Tom laughed. He was furious. When he had finished laughing, he turned over and went to sleep.

  When Lark returned from the bakery, she heard Tom and Elizabeth talking. Elizabeth held a postcard in her hand. “My sister is coming,” she told Tom. “If you stay until next week, you’ll meet her.”

  “Is she as beautiful as you?” Tom asked.

  Elizabeth looked uncomfortable. “More beautiful,” she replied, and she looked to see where Lark was. “Tom, here’s Lark with the rolls.” Elizabeth ran over to Lark and led her to the table.

  Jean-Claude was walking around the terrace, inspecting the grapevines and smiling off into the blue sky. He stood on a small rock pile. When he stepped back off the stones, he kicked over one of the beer bottles.

  “Good grief,” he said. The bottle broke and several drowned wasps spilled onto the terrace. Then Jean-Claude went around the terrace collecting the other nine bottles. He lined them up in a row.

  “Who on earth had the smart idea to put these everywhere?” He was angry. They all knew that Lark had done it.

  “I wanted them to get into the bottles rather than have them bother us,” Lark said.

  “How stupid,” Jean-Claude said. “They’re attracting every wasp in the area, it’s like sending out invitations to a party.” He made a rude noise and emptied all the bottles and put them in the garbage can, shaking his head the whole time.

  “She meant well,” Elizabeth said. “It could even be argued that it was a good idea. Original.”

  Tom laughed. “You just have to learn to live with minor nuisances like wasps,” he told Lark.

  Lark handed over the rolls and went inside. She leant against the sink and watched them talking. Tom had broken his roll and was spreading it with butter and Elizabeth’s home-made fig jam.

  They started talking about the goodness of simple food.

  “Mussels, I love them, but I’m allergic,” Tom said.

  A wasp landed on the piece of bread he held in his hand. It stuck in the jam.

  “I ate them twice before I realized what they did to me.”

  Elizabeth smiled at her baby, nodding at Tom’s story. Jean-Claude was reading the paper.

  Tom gestured with his piece of bread. “I thought I was dying. I even wanted to die. Agony.”

  “I can’t wear wool next to my skin,” said Elizabeth.

  The wasp was thoroughly coated in jam and was no longer moving.

  “Maybe the mussels were rotten both times, and I’m not really allergic,” said Tom. “But I’m not game to try them again to find out.”

  He opened his mouth to eat his bread and jam, but decided to finish his story. “Every time we go to a restaurant, it’s moules this and moules that. Delicious. But I can’t eat ’em. It’s hard.”

  Lark leant forward over the sink. “Tom,” she said quietly, “you’ll die if you eat that piece of bread.”

  Tom laughed at her silliness and looked at Elizabeth for support. He put the slab of bread and butter and jam, with the wasp, in his mouth and chewed. Lark waited for him to notice the difference in texture and spit it all out. He swallowed. She waited for him to cry out and start to die.

  Nothing happened.

  Tom looked at her. “What’s the matter with you, Lark? If that’s your idea of a joke, it isn’t very funny.”

  “I don’t joke. There was a wasp in your jam. You ate it.” She was shouting at him.

  “Nonsense,” said Tom, frowning and shaking his head. He apologized to Elizabeth and Jean-Claude for her behavior.

  “It might interest you to know that I’m pregnant,” Lark shouted.

  Tom laughed. “Aha. So that’s it. That’s what’s the matter with you. Come here, Larkie, and gimme a kiss.”

  Lark stayed by the sink. Tom stayed sitting in his chair outside at the breakfast table, smiling and saying, “Well, well.”

  “And there’s something else I want to tell you,” Lark continued.

  Elizabeth went in to Lark and put her arms around her.

  “That’s wonderful news,” she said, and brought Lark out t
o Tom.

  A wasp that had been circling around the table seemed to be pushed off its course by the arrival of Elizabeth and Lark. It flew straight at Tom and landed on his collar. It crawled onto his neck. Lark screamed. Tom had felt the movement and clapped his hand to his neck. The wasp stung him.

  Tom’s neck and face swelled, and they rushed him to the doctor. The doctor told Tom he was allergic to the sting and the reaction would be much worse if he were stung again. He advised caution as far as wasps were concerned.

  Tom was unable to talk for several days. He stayed in bed and was terrified the whole time that he was going to die. Lark took care of him as if he were an invalid. After Tom had his voice back, he said that if Lark had not screamed, it would not have happened.

  Tom and Lark left France as soon as Tom felt he could travel, taking the train to the airport and leaving the car for Jean-Claude to return to Madame Comet. When the photographs Tom had taken arrived in New York bringing cathedral towers, the Romanesque doorway, the gargoyles, the village parade they had happened upon, Lark saw that neither she nor Tom was in any of them. There was no evidence that they had even been in France.

  V

  Lark and Tom were waiting for a reporter from The New York Times who was to interview them for an article on the alternative life styles being forged by the new generation. Their baby, a few months old, was asleep.

  “I don’t want to see a reporter,” said Lark. “It’s ridiculous, you and I talking about life styles. We can’t even talk to each other.”

  “Never give up a chance to use the press,” said Tom, having already agreed to the interview.

  After the interview he was going out to march against American involvement in Vietnam. “You ought to come, too.”

  Lark shook her head. “I’ll stay with the baby.”

  “It’d do you good,” said Tom. “All you do is brood. You take no action at all. It’s good for babies to march, too.”

  The doorbell rang and Lark brought the reporter in. She was a young woman, slight, possibly only five feet tall, with long, straight brown hair that fell over her face every time she leant forward. She wore a cotton skirt and a T-shirt and carried a backpack over one shoulder.

  Lark invited her to sit down. The reporter looked around and chose to perch on the edge of the armchair, resting her backpack at her feet. She crossed her tiny, thin ankles and smiled at them both. “I’m Greta.” She bent down to take a writing pad from her pack, her hair falling forward over half her face. With one finger she hooked her hair behind her ear. She took a fountain pen from her pocket, uncapped it, crossed one leg over the other, pad resting on her knee, pen poised. She could have been a high school student on assignment for the school newspaper. Lark thought that she must have looked like this Greta when she first met Tom.

  “Would you like tea, or beer?” Lark offered. “Of the latter we have Australian or Philippine, and of the former we have Darjeeling, Yerba Maté, or camomile.”

  The reporter chose Darjeeling, and while Lark was in the kitchen Greta noted the types of tea in her pad. “Tea is so complex,” she said to Tom. “Not many Americans appreciate that. They just give you a warm cup of water with any old tea bag beside it in the saucer.” She pulled a face. “Barbaric.”

  “That’s why I married someone who could brew a good cup of chah.” Tom’s voice was now jolly.

  “Traveling is a way of life for you both, I gather.”

  “We’ve been everywhere,” said Tom.

  “All I want to do is travel. I want to be a foreign correspondent. I can’t wait to get away.” As Greta spoke, she watched her reflection in the French doors, rather like Donna Bird contemplating herself in the reflecting surfaces on the Avis Maris. “Of course, I only do light articles like this for the money. I am really a political analyst, and on the weekends, an activist.”

  “The world needs people like you,” said Tom. Lark could hear that he sounded bored, that he was not in the mood for this encounter with the press, which sat there in the form of a very young woman in a T-shirt.

  Lark bore in the teapot covered by her mother’s tea cozy, and knelt down to set the tray on the coffee table, which, having legs the height of a coffee can, was extremely low. Then she sat cross-legged on the floor on a large cushion covered with an Indian fabric while she poured the tea.

  “Lovely touch,” said Greta, noting the tea cozy. She smiled at them both again.

  “It’s all very simple really,” said Lark, her voice high-pitched, almost a squeak. She was gripping the teapot with both hands, as if to throttle it.

  “We haven’t spent a lot of time or money decorating. We have kept everything very simple,” said Tom mechanically, without enthusiasm, rocking rather too vigorously in the bentwood rocker. “We value people over things. We trust our real friends to accept us like this.” He waved his arms around. “Most of our furniture is second-hand or else we devised it ourselves.”

  “I didn’t devise anything,” said Lark. “He did it all. He is particularly good with wood, anything wood he can handle.”

  Tom took the tray off the coffee table and placed it on the floor so that he could turn the table over to show how simply it had been made. “I saw the other day that the price of rocking chairs like this has doubled since we bought it, which means ours is a bargain, after all. It’s as good as second-hand.” Tom told the reporter that the rocker was Lark’s chair, which she sat in by the balcony to read, write, and feed the baby. “And just plain brood, eh, Lark?” He laughed and rocked back and forth. “The chair you’re sitting in, Greta, is actually my chair. We found it on the street and brought it up, gave it a clean and threw a sheet over it, and voilà.” He leant forward and punched the arm of the chair. Greta drew away from his pounding fist, still smiling and laughing a little. “And we’ll have to buy a few other things new, like flatware. But we’ll get it the next time we go to Europe, for half the price. We would have got it this last time, but our trip was cut short.” He paused. “Wasps.”

  “Wasps?” asked Greta.

  “Yup, they got me on the neck.”

  “What happened?”

  Lark saw that Tom was talking himself into this interview. The wasp incident was about to become another story, and Greta was going to ask all the right questions to bring the story forth.

  “I thought I was going to die. It was the second time in my life I thought I’d die. The first time was when I discovered I was allergic to mussels. Not too many people have been twice on the verge of death before they’re thirty.”

  “I certainly haven’t been,” said Greta. “But then, I still have several years to go, so there’s still time.”

  “And Larkie here was in the kitchen putting tea cozies on teapots, safe as houses. Tell her about the bookshelves, Larkie. Crude but comic. Go on, Lark, show her how the marble rolls.” Lark took the marble and let it roll across the floor of the living room. “Isn’t it comic,” said Tom, annoyed that Lark was not speaking, “the way the sloping floor of this dear old apartment makes the bookshelves, which I just hammered together, look as if they might keel right over?” Tom said they were much more interested in ideas than in possessions. He said the thing contained was much more important than the container. Those bookshelves could produce anything of current relevance in the three worlds. “Four worlds, rather,” he said. “Mustn’t forget the aboriginal and dispossessed persons of the planet. I’m on my way out to demonstrate against our involvement in Vietnam.” He went on to give his views on Vietnam, American policy in Latin America and the Caribbean, disarmament and nuclear proliferation, civil rights and education, and again Lark had to marvel at his fluency, at his quickness. He could present his views persuasively and intelligently.

  “There’s so much to read, to keep up with,” Tom was saying. “We took speed reading, to get through it all.”

  “That’s pretty bourgeois,” Greta asked. “Kennedy used speed reading.”

  Tom looked angry. He stood up and walked
to the window, his hands in his pockets.

  Lark leant forward and touched Greta’s sleeve. “I read The Secret Sharer using the speed-reading technique I paid a hundred and fifty dollars for, and only recently did I find out that its theme relates to Doppelgänger rather than swimming. You might like to know, also, that I hate marching and demonstrating. And I have a second-rate mind.”

  “That’s all nonsense,” said Tom, jovial again, coming alive as if he were making an entrance in a play. He walked over to Lark and plucked her from Greta’s arm.

  Greta nodded. “Tell me something about your life.”

  “I left home, traversed half the world, and have now settled down, with my baby. That is essential, the rest is episode.”

  “I’m always going to travel,” Greta said. “I never want to settle down and become a stodgy bourgeois.”

  “Some people think that it can take great courage not to keep moving and traveling, to stay still in one place for a while,” Lark said.

  Tom had fallen silent. He seemed not to be listening.

  “That won’t happen to me, I hope. There’s a whole world out there that has to be changed.”

  “Sometimes traveling can be a form of weakness,” Lark went on, to this young woman who would not hear her. “To put down some roots, and to make friends, that can be a brave thing to do, for some people.”

  “Don’t you care about the state of the world?” cried Greta. “Look at the Middle East, look at Latin America, look at what the rich hooligans running this country are doing to ordinary people.”

  “I know,” said Lark. “You are right.”

  “Don’t you want to do anything to save the world, to change things?”

  “Some people are able to do more than others,” said Lark. “Some can contribute more, often because of something in their past, some quirk of personality, and I am grateful to them. Tom is one.” Tom grunted from where he was standing. “I hope you are one of them, too.”

  Greta shook her head impatiently. “Everyone should be doing something. Do you realize that any day, any moment, someone, anyone, any odd group, could put together a nuclear bomb and carry it into Manhattan in a backpack?” She gave her own pack a kick. “As small as that. A suitcase. We’ve come a long way since Little Boy and Fat Boy and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cheapest, most effective delivery system you could think of—carry your own bomb in and put it where you want. That would be the end of the world, of any roots you might have put down.”