The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  He had emerged from the bathroom, in his striped pajamas, and as she turned her head on the pillow, toward him, she could see from his expression, his movements, that he was ready. She lay waiting without tension, or expectation, for the steps were familiar. He would sit on the edge of the bed, kick off his slippers, slide under the blanket, put out the lamp, stretch out. His hand would reach for her, and suddenly, he would edge over to kiss her mouth, tearing down the thin straps, and then kiss her breasts, and then grab for the bottom of her nightgown, and that would be it, and in minutes she would be normal. It was worth anything to be normal and married, she told herself, and she waited.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off his slippers.

  “It was a good evening, darling,” she said. “I’m glad it went so well.”

  “Yes,” he said, except that something disapproving had crossed his features. “Just one thing—”

  He slipped under the blanket, but was still propped on an elbow.

  She showed that she was puzzled.

  “—just one thing that bothers me, Claire,” he said. “What gets into you, compels you to speak so loosely in front of utter strangers? All that silly stuff about approving of sex festivals, and wishing we had that sort of abandonment here. What can people think? It gives them a bad impression. They don’t know you, they don’t know you’re joking.”

  He reached up and turned out the lamp.

  “I wasn’t joking, Marc,” she said in the sudden darkness. “There is something to say for the way primitive people enjoy themselves. I only retracted because I saw you were getting angry.”

  Seconds before, his voice, although critical of her, had still been thick with desire for her. Now, suddenly, it changed, desire thinned out to displeasure. “What do you mean—I was getting angry? What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, nothing, Marc, please—”

  “No, I’m calling you on it—what does that mean?”

  “It means, whenever I happen to talk about sex—which is rare enough—you become annoyed with me. It always turns out this way—for some reason.”

  “For some reason, huh?”

  “Please, Marc, don’t make a federal case of it. I don’t know what I’m saying—I’m tired—”

  “You’re darn right you don’t know what you’re saying. I’d like to know what really goes on in that head of yours, but one thing I’ll tell you, sooner or later you’d better grow up, become a responsible married woman, not—not—”

  She felt weak with helplessness. “Not what, Marc?”

  “Look, let’s knock it off. I’m tired, too.”

  The bed shook as he sat up and shoved off the edge. He found his slippers, and once shod, he stood up in the darkness.

  “Marc, what’s the matter—where are you going?”

  “I’m going downstairs to have a drink,” he said gruffly. “I can’t sleep.”

  He stomped across the room, bumping into a chair, and then he was out of the door and down the stairs.

  Claire lay on her back, in the wasted white nightgown, unmoving. She was sorry, but it was not the first time this had happened, either. Strangely, these occasional flare-ups had a pattern, she could see. Whenever she repeated a story she had overheard, a joke or a bit of gossip, that involved sex, whenever she was frank, he would become annoyed with her. The last time had been two weeks ago, at just such a moment of intimacy as this. They had gone to the theater to see a film in which the hero was a prize fighter. Later, when she had commented on the brawny good looks and physique of the male star, and tried to analyze his appeal to women, Marc had chosen this remark as a reason for being disagreeable to her. Yes, somehow it seemed that each time Claire made some favorable reference to sex or any aspect of sexuality, Ala re took this as a personal affront, a subversion of his virility. At such times, almost in a flash, his kindness, his good humor, his solid adultness seemed to evaporate, leaving only tense and defensive petulance. Thank God, it did not happen often, but it happened. And then she was confused, as she was confused now. How ridiculous of him, she thought, and she worried. What can bother him at times like this? And then she wondered. Are such flare-ups common among all men?

  Sleepily, she reviewed her earliest dreams of love and marriage, when she was eleven and twelve in Chicago, when she was fifteen and sixteen in Berkeley, when she was eighteen and nineteen in Westwood, and when she was twenty-two and had met Marc. In some ways, she could correlate her dreams with the current reality. There was a certain coziness and security in marriage, especially during the day. At night, well, like tonight, the chasm between dream and reality was bottomless.

  He was downstairs drinking brandy, she knew. He would remain there, waiting for her to fall asleep before returning to bed.

  For an hour, she tried to sleep, and could not.

  When he returned to the bedroom at last, she pretended to be asleep. She wanted him to be happy …

  III

  LIKE THE colossal brown bird of Polynesian legend, the amphibian flying boat soared through the void of dark, preparing to give birth to the Beginning.

  There were many myths of the Creation in Oceania, but the one that Claire Hayden believed in tonight was this: in the boundless universe existed only the warm primeval sea, and above it flew a gigantic bird, and into the sea the bird dropped a mammoth egg, and when its shell broke there appeared the god, Taaroa, and he produced heaven and earth above and below the sea, and he produced the first breath of life.

  For Claire, drowsily caught between sleep and waking, it was not difficult to fancy Captain Ollie Rasmussen’s seaplane as the brown bird of Polynesian legend, soon to give birth on the Southern Sea to the Eden of The Three Sirens, which would be their only world.

  They had left Papeete in the night, and it was night still, Claire knew, but since she had slept fitfully, she had no idea where they were or how far they had flown. This mystery, she knew, had been Rasmussen’s intent from the start.

  Uncomfortable in the worn bucket seat, one of the ten that the copilot, Richard Hapai, had reinstalled—the main cabin had been used for cargo before their coming—Claire sat up, stretched her legs, and tried to accustom her eyes to the dim light of the battery-powered lamp. Trying not to disturb Maud, dozing in the seat to her right, or Marc, snoring softly across the way on her left, she groped below and then into the aisle for her spacious carry-all hand-bag with its shoulder strap, located it, and extracted cigarette and lighter.

  Once smoking, and fully awake, Claire twisted to survey the interior of the crowded main cabin. Besides the three of them, and excepting Rasmussen and Hapai in the pilots’ compartment, there were seven other members of the team present. In the unnatural light, she counted heads, unconsciously seeking another who was aroused and inwardly as filled with expectancy as herself.

  Slumped low beside Marc was Orville Pence, his ridiculous gray tropical helmet pulled down to cover his bald spot and his beady eyes. She could see that he had removed his shell-rimmed spectacles, and now he snored faintly, in duet with Marc. Despite the fact that she had found Pence more friendly, less sex-obsessed, than the time they had met in Denver, she could find no common bond with him, although evidently Marc had done so. Without the hovering specter of his mother, and away from his own surroundings, Pence was less repulsive, but physically no less ludicrous.

  Behind Pence and Marc sat Sam Karpowicz and his Mary, the father sleeping soundly, like one who had been through this wrenching transportation before, the daughter sleeping restlessly, like one (like Claire herself) apprehensive of the unknown. Observing the Karpowiczes now, including the mother, Estelle, sideways and asleep in the seat behind, Claire remembered feeling instant affection for them upon first meeting them. She had liked Sam, a skinny high pole of a person, a scholarly Ichabod Crane, with his fervent liberal views and his enthusiasm for his cameras and plant presses. She had liked Estelle, doughy and complacent, because she seemed dependable, the Earth Mother. The sixteen-year-old Mary
was temperamentally her father’s child, straightforward, bright, partisan, and keyed up. Her black Rebecca eyes, setting off her dawn-tinted faultless complexion, combined with her spring burgeoning figure to make her a decorative addition to the team.

  Next to Estelle Karpowicz, upright and wide-awake, slowly chewing on a gumdrop, sat Lisa Hackfeld. Like Orville Pence, who wore a necktie and starched shirt collar with his washable charcoal business suit, Lisa Hackfeld was incongruously attired. Her expensive, impractical Saks suit was of snowy white linen, fashionably correct at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs, but an impossibility on an anthropology field trip whose destination was a rugged Polynesian island. Already, one lapel of the white suit bore a grease smudge, and at the waist it had wrinkled in many places. Claire tried to catch Lisa’s eye, but failed, for Lisa was lost within herself, deep in some subterranean introspection.

  At the rear sat Rachel DeJong and Harriet Bleaska. With difficulty, Claire caught glimpses of them. They were either napping, or trying to rest. From their first meeting, Claire had been unsure of her feelings toward Rachel DeJong. Coupling Rachel’s profession of psychoanalyst with her cool, precise, formal bearing, Claire had found conversation with her laborious. What surprised Claire was that Rachel DeJong was both young and handsome. Yet the stiff, unyielding air about her made her seem considerably more than thirty-one, and hardened her chestnut-colored hair, quick eyes, classically regular features, long figure.

  Claire turned her attention to the nurse. Harriet Bleaska, she decided, was quite another matter. Once one recovered from the initial shock caused by her homeliness, it became possible to discern her excellent qualities. Harriet Bleaska was an extrovert, easygoing, kind, warm. She wanted to please, a trait that was in some persons strained and oppressive, but in Harriet natural and sincere. Somehow, you felt comfortable and glad to know her. In fact, these inner virtues were so dominant that, after a short time, they seemed to rise above and obscure their owner’s ill-favored countenance.

  Claire felt better about Harriet Bleaska now, and was pleased that Maud had been forced into taking her on the expedition. After the addition of Lisa Hackfeld to the team, and the necessity of taking along Sam Karpowicz’ family, Maud had been prepared to reject Harriet, nurse, as a substitute for Dr. Walter Zegner, physician and researcher. There had been one last familiar protest to Marc and herself. Maud had said, on that occasion, that the perfect field team was a team composed of one person, or at the most two or three, and that her original plan to take seven had been a concession to Hackfeld’s grandness, but seven was the absolute limit. With the presence of the Karpowicz women, Lisa Hackfeld, and Harriet Bleaska, the investigation might become a comic opera, its scientific approach dangerously impaired. If the Karpowiczes and Lisa were unavoidable expediencies, at least Harriet, a nurse unknown to her, could be left off the roster. Nine was more feasible than ten.

  “I know I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again,” Maud had protested, “but a big group of anthropologists dropped into a small culture might alter that culture and ruin it. There’s a classical example in recent years. There’s a known case where a team of twelve field workers, in two motor cars, arrived to study a native tribe, and they were stoned out of the village. They represented an invasion, not a few participants who might integrate. If we take ten of us to the Sirens, we’ll wind up an American colony in the middle of a bunch of natives, unable to melt into tribal life, become part of it, and we’ll end up studying each other.”

  Maud had gone to Cyrus Hackfeld with her roster of nine, and immediately Hackfeld had missed Zegner. Maud had pointed out that Dr. DeJong had completed medical training many years before, but Hackfeld had remained adamant, insisting upon Harriet Bleaska as a replacement for Zegner. He demanded a professional person who was familiar with the most recent medical techniques as a safeguard for his wife, since she had never before been to a primitive place or a tropical isle. Maud, not used to Waterloos and Appomattoxes, known for her willingness to fight beyond her means, had known when to surrender. And so here was Harriet, and here they were ten.

  The seaplane, lurching in and out of an air pocket, bounced and trembled, and then the twin engines whined higher, and it leveled again. Claire had been shaken in her seat, and quickly, she looked across at Marc, to see if the jolt had awakened him. It had not. He slept on, no longer snoring, but his breath a low rasp. Claire watched her husband in slumber. The tense face seemed more reposeful. In fact, except for his noisy exhaling and inhaling, he seemed as attractive as in the time before she had known him well, and he seemed—the crewcut did it—like a clean, healthy, aggressive young collegian. His garb added a dash to this picture. He wore a light denim jacket with six pockets, a washable thin plaid shirt, khaki trousers, and ungainly paratrooper boots.

  Trying to admire him, to be proud, she recollected several of their last conversations at home. Since Dr. Walter Scott Macintosh had assigned Maud a prominent place to deliver her Sirens paper at the autumn meeting of the American Anthropological League (and felt positive that she would overcome Rogerson for the post of executive editor of Culture), Marc had become absolutely ebullient about his own future. Once his mother left Raynor College, he would inherit her exalted chair in anthropology. Although he would have the position because of her, because of the family-name, he would be freed of Maud and Adley, and be on his own, with his own identity and his own sycophants. It was his one objective, to be on his own, to be Somebody. He had not put it to Claire exactly that way, but it was what she understood him to feel and mean when he spoke of the immediate future and the necessity for making the Sirens field trip a success.

  The heat of Claire’s cigarette had touched her nicotine-stained fingers, and she leaned forward, dropped it, and ground the butt out with the sole of one flat shoe. She sought a fresh cigarette, and after it was lighted, she lay back in the bucket seat, legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles, and considered the unreality of these moments. Until now, despite the background research, the end-goal of Polynesia and the place known as The Three Sirens had been a chimera, a holiday oasis that might resemble one of the fake Hawaiian restaurants that she and Marc occasionally visited in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Now that this ancient amphibian flying boat and the morning and the atoll destination were converging, she was mildly confused about what awaited her and what her life would be for six weeks. For reasons that she had not examined in depth, this trip and the place soon to be their temporary home had assumed some kind of milestone importance to her. It was as if she were readying to exchange the dulled knives of routine and habit and a certain unfulfillment for something razor-sharp, that would, in a stroke, cleave her from the past, and allow Marc and herself to enter on a new and happier level of life.

  Folded in her hard seat, she felt the tightness across her chest, which extended even to her arms beneath the pale blue sweater. Was it concern over what was unfamiliar, not before known, as she suspected it was with young Mary Karpowicz and Lisa Hack-field? Or was it simply a fatigue after the drive of building toward the climactic arrival these last days? She compromised. It was both, a little of each.

  Only five days before, they had all gathered as a team, for the first time, at the Hayden house in Santa Barbara, and President Loomis had graciously provided living accommodations on campus for the visitors. The ten of them had met and mingled, feeling one another out, trying out each other’s personalities, and there had been a series of briefings by Maud, as field director, and after that a series of informal question-and-answer sessions. There had also been a last-minute scurrying for supplies that had been forgotten, and much repacking, and then a luncheon tendered by Loomis and the senior faculty members.

  Late in the afternoon, in three limousines supplied by Cyrus Hackfeld (two for themselves, one for the luggage) they had been taken down to the Beverly Hilton Hotel at the edge of Beverly Hills. Hackfeld had reserved rooms for them—his own wife had refused to return with him to their Bel-Air mansion, and in s
pite of his opposition had stayed with the rest—and then there had been a press conference, expertly handled by Maud, followed by an early farewell dinner, planned by Hackfeld and several of the Board members of the Foundation.

  At eleven o’clock in the evening, they had been driven in the private limousines through waning traffic the long distance to the International Airport on Sepulveda Boulevard. In the vast modern terminal, where Maud had checked passports, visas, smallpox certificates, the list of luggage, they had all been pervaded by a sense of loneliness, as if standing huddled in a hospital corridor after bedtime. There had been no one but Cyrus Hackfeld to see them off. A telegram from Colorado Springs had arrived for Orville Pence, and Rachel DeJong had been paged for a telephone call from someone named Mr. Joseph Morgen. Otherwise, the strands of old ties were lying loose. It was as if they had been abandoned by the known world.

  At last, Flight Number 89 of TAI had been announced, and, with a cluster of other night-weary passengers, they had filed out of the terminal, and presently into the metal capsule of the DC8 jet aircraft of the Compagnie de Transports Aériens Intercontinentaux, which was scheduled to speed nonstop from Los Angeles to Papeete, Tahiti. Their accommodations had been economy class instead of first class—Maud had fought Hackfeld on this, and with Lisa’s support had won out—and this meant but little deprivation to realize a savings, round trip, of 2,500 dollars on tickets. In economy class, the soft fabric chairs had been three on one side of the aisle, and three on the other, so that they sat six in a row, and took up most of two rows. The rest of the second row had been filled in by an amiable Pomona dentist, off on a vacation, and a beefy, well-dressed, bearded youth, celebrating his graduation from college.

  At precisely one hour after midnight, their jet had begun to move, lumbering slowly, then picking up speed, finally roaring down the concrete runway, and soon they were airborne. Too quickly, the multitude of yellow dots of the metropolis below, and another patch of shimmering habitation, and yet one more, were left behind, and they were catapulted high above the Pacific Ocean into the inky blackness.