The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  Paoti turned back to Marc. “A clever boy, the son of a cousin. He will remember. He will explain everything to Tehura, and she will decide for herself. Now he will take you to her. She is of this house, but finds it crowded, and has wheedled her own place out of me. I am weak with my brother’s daughter. She has always had her way with me.” He waved his veiny hand in dismissal. “You may go to her. The boy will lead you.”

  Marc pushed himself to his feet. “I’m most grateful—”

  “If she is uncooperative today or in the future, return to me. I will find you another.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The boy was holding the door open, and Marc went through it into the sunlight. With a leap, the boy was ahead of him, showing the way. For the first time, Marc entered the far end of the village. As it had been yesterday morning before the midday meal, the compound was virtually deserted. A group of naked children cavorted in and around the stream. Two old women, carrying fruit heaped in bowls, waddled along in the shade. Three men, weighted under cane shafts, trudged over a wooden bridge.

  Approaching the enormous Social Aid Hut, the boy suddenly veered to his left, crossed a bridge, and beckoned Marc to follow. He scampered ahead to the row of large huts, and up a grade to the second row of dwellings set more deeply beneath the stone overhang.

  At the door of a narrow hut, he waited. When Marc reached him, he said, “Tehura is here. You stay. I go speak Paoti’s words.”

  “All right.”

  He rapped on the cane door, put his ear to it, heard a muffled female voice, nodded happily to Marc, and ducked inside.

  Marc waited in the sun, wondering what the boy had been ordered to tell her, wondering what she would say to it. The idea of using Tehura as an informant had come to him on the spur of the moment, a decision born of impulse. As an anthropologist, he had acted hastily. She might prove too young, too shallow, to contribute information of any value. Logically, he should have felt his way around, taken more time, met more potential informants, waited until he found that marginal person—perhaps one at odds with the tribe—who had ideas and liked to talk. Logically, too, he should have sought out a man, preferably one close to his own age. With a man, rapport might more easily be established. With a woman, and so young a one, rapport might be harder to achieve, for women did not often speak frankly to men. Yet, Tehura had been frank enough last night, too frank. Recollecting her little speech, he was now sure that she had exaggerated for effect. In short, she had an excess of vanity and a streak of dishonesty, and these made her even more unlikely to be a reliable informant. Then why had he requested her? Without hesitation, he knew. He did not give a damn about his role as anthropologist. All he cared about was his role as man. This was his revolt, the first overturning. This was anti-Adley, anti-Matty, anti-Claire.

  He saw the boy emerge wearing a broad smile.

  “She says yes, she is happy very to help,” said Vata.

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “She says to wait. She comes soon. I will tell the Chief.”

  The boy departed in a trot and was soon out of sight among the huts below. Marc continued to stare at the route the boy had taken. He felt the good feeling of elation. He was having it his way, and it pleased him that he did not even have his notebook and pencil along. He wondered what he could ask of this girl, but then there were so many things. He was inquisitive about her morals, her handling of men, the prowess she had boasted of last night. Would she be so candid in the day, unsupported by kava and palm juice?

  Behind him, the reedy door shook open and banged shut, and he spun around. She was coming toward him, and he was astounded. He had completely forgotten her beauty. He had also forgotten how the native women dressed. She wore nothing, no cover, no ornament, nothing except the unnerving short grass skirt, rising and falling against the tops of her thighs. Seeing her like this was like seeing a ballerina appear on the stage in the tutu or high puff skirt, without a brassiere above or tights below. Desperately, he tried to ignore her breasts, shimmying gently as she walked, but he could not ignore them.

  “Hello,” she said. “I did not know which one of you waited for me. Now I see. It is the one who does not believe in our love.”

  “That’s not exactly what I was saying last night—”

  “It makes no difference,” she said. “My uncle wishes me to answer your questions.”

  “Only if you want to,” Marc said stiffly.

  She shrugged her shoulders, indifferently. “I have no feeling about this. I have a feeling to make my uncle pleased.” Her eyes met Marc’s, and she asked, “What will you do with my words? Will you tell many people in America what Tehura tells you?”

  “Thousands of people. They’ll read about you in my—in Dr. Hayden’s book. When it is published, I’ll send one to Captain Rasmussen to give to you.”

  “Do not bother,” she said. “I cannot read. Only a few can read—Paoti, Manao, who is the teacher, some students—and Tom, who has a high hill of books. It is a waste. I think to learn to read is a wasted time.”

  Marc tried to judge if she was teasing him, but her expression was intent. He prepared to defend literacy and National Book Week. “I can’t say I—”

  “If you read to yourself it is like making love to yourself,” she went on. “It keeps you away from talking and listening with another. That is more pleasure … You want to talk and listen with me?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I have not so much time today. In the next days, if I am interested, I will make more time.” She peered up at the sky visible between the openings in the ledge, shading her eyes. “It is too hot in the sun. You look like a cooked fish in the fire.”

  “I feel like one.”

  “Take your clothes off, then. You will feel better.”

  “Well—”

  “Never mind,” she said. “I know you cannot. Tom told me about Americans.”

  Marc felt a surge of anger at her, at them. “What did he tell you?”

  Again, she shrugged her shoulders. “It is not important … Come, we will go where it is cooler.”

  She had turned to the left, preceding him on a sunken path between the huts, going parallel to the compound, until they were some distance beyond the end of the ledge and behind the Social Aid Hut. Here the path swung into the hills. Tehura bounded ahead, climbing, and Marc stayed doggedly at her heels. Twice, as she went over impeding rocks, her grass skirt flapped high, and Marc plainly saw the twin curves of her exposed rump. Although she had irritated him minutes before, he again began to find her a desirable object.

  They had come to the summit of the rise, and just off the path was a rich green dell, the thick grass floor encircled by breadfruit sentries whose broad leaves made up a sheltering canopy.

  “Here,” said Tehura.

  She went toward the trunk of the most substantial tree, and sat on the grass, legs folded sideways under her skirt. Marc had followed her, and he dropped down across from her, persistently conscious of her semi-nudity.

  “Ask me your questions,” she said regally.

  “To be honest with you, I have no—no formal questions yet. As I learn more, I’ll have many things to ask of you. Today, I intended only to become acquainted, just casually talk.”

  “You talk. I will listen.” She gazed up at the wide fan of breadfruit leaves.

  Marc was taken aback. She was not the gay and open person of the feast in Paoti’s hut. He was puzzled by the transformation in her personality. Marc knew that if he did not solve it without delay, their relationship would be a brief one. “Tehura,” he said, “I find it difficult to speak to you. You seem to be deliberately unfriendly. Why are you so antagonistic?”

  This brought her gaze down abruptly. She regarded him with more respect. “I feel you are not sympathetic to us,” she said. “I feel you disapprove of everything.”

  His perception had won her respect, and now her perception of an inner attitude that he had not yet def
ined won his respect. Until this moment, in his eyes, she had been an empty-headed, naked chippy, a promiscuous sex vessel and nothing more. But there evidently was more, much more, and she would be a worthy opponent.

  “You’re wrong about that,” he said carefully. “I’m sorry if I gave that impression. I’ve been overtired, and last night I was drunk and combative. Of course, your culture is odd to me, as mine must be to you. However, I’m not here to change it or you, or pass any judgment. I’m here to learn—that’s all—learn. If you give me half a chance, you’ll find me agreeable.”

  She was smiling for the first time. “I like you better.”

  Marc felt the coiled springs of tension released inside his chest, and his distress was mitigated. He sought in his pocket for the thin cigar, made soggy by perspiration. He thought: “Words, words, words,” so Hamlet had spoken to Polonius, Act II, Scene II. He thought: no male weapon, not physique, not skill, not anything, can seduce a female so easily, so thoroughly as words. He had just proved it. He must remember it from this moment on.

  “I’m pleased,” he said, “because I want you to like me. Not alone to help my work. Simply, because I want to be liked by you.”

  “You will be liked if you are sympathetic.”

  “I am and will be,” he promised. He was uncertain what he should say next. He held aloft the soggy cigar. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Go ahead. We are used to it. The old Wright brought the habit here. Our men grow black tobacco and roll it in banana leaves to smoke. I like most the pipe. Tom Courtney has a pipe.”

  He had his best cue yet, and he responded to it. “This Courtney,” he said, “he’s still a mystery to me. What made him come here?”

  “You ask him,” she said. “Tom speaks for himself. Tehura speaks for herself.”

  “But you spoke freely of him last night—”

  “Not of him, but of us. That is different.”

  “I was impressed the way you spoke of your—your—”

  “Our love?”

  “Yes, that’s right. If you don’t mind my asking, was it of long—?”

  “Two years,” said Tehura promptly. “It was my life for two years.”

  He considered what was in his mind, and determined to test her candor. “I remember something else you said last night. You said Courtney had goodness, but was not good at love. What did you mean?”

  “I meant it was not enjoyment for me at first. He had strength but no—no—” She pinched her brow, seeking the correct description, and then found it. “Strength but no finesse. You understand? Here love flows from the first gift of the tiara flowers to the dance to the touch to the full naked embrace. It is natural, so natural, so simple. Then, because the embrace has been taught and practiced and become an art, it is good—it is one with the dance—the man sways within you, and you, the woman, freely join his dance with your waist, hips, legs—many positions in the one embrace, not one, but many—”

  As she went on, Marc felt suffocated with heat, and he knew that it could not be the sun. There was a trembling beneath his skin, a passion for what he had never known. He had ceased meeting her eyes, and had pretended—assuming the all-knowing, nodding pedagogue’s mien of impersonal attentiveness—to be staring past her, past her shoulders. Yet, in the rim of focus were her moving breasts aimed at him, and he did not know how long he could endure not reaching out. He chewed the cigar, and lifted his mind to her speech.

  “—but Tom was so different,” she was saying. “He made the love embrace so important, like it was something outside of living. He made me feel he owed me something for having given me the love. And always, he tried too hard. He had strength, yes, but more is wanted. Americans are not taught sex love, he told me, they learn as they go along, they follow their instincts. It was wrong, I told him, it was something that must be learned, an art, and instincts are not enough. He would do it only one way, maybe two, and that was wrong. He would do foolish things like press his lips on mine and touch my breasts and other wasted things we do not do. To desire is enough preparation, and once the embrace, the dance is enough.” She paused, lingering over some memory, and then she said, “He has learned our way of love, and it has helped him with all other parts of his life, too.”

  Down deep, Marc detested Courtney for his learning and experiences. He tried to keep his voice even. “What you’re saying is that eventually, he learned to satisfy you—physically, I mean.”

  Tehura shook her head vigorously. “No, no, no. That was not the main thing. On The Three Sirens, all women come to such giving and release very easily. That is because certain body preparations are made during childhood. The main thing is not this physical satisfying, but that Tom learned to be more spontaneous and more relaxed, like most of us. He learned when you love a woman, you owe her nothing, you have done nothing wrong or forbidden, but only performed the way the High Spirit prepared you.”

  Now that he had her talking, Marc speculated on how far he dared draw her out. He chanced it. “Tehura, you seem to have implied there were some men before Courtney. Were there many?”

  “I have not counted them. Does one count the breadfruit eaten or the times one has swum or danced?”

  Marc blinked, and he thought to himself: Dr. Kinsey would have come away from here with his pencil points intact, and Dr. Chapman would have had no report at all. Clearly, the Sirens Islands offered nothing for the statisticians of repressed love. But then, Marc told himself, he was no statistician, and he would do better. Observing Tehura, he saw her youth and freshness, and sensed some unused quality about her that contradicted her implication that she had known countless men. He had to be sure that he had not misunderstood her.

  “Tehura, when did you first have sexual intercourse with a man?”

  “Body love?”

  “Yes, I guess that’s what you call it.”

  She did not hesitate. “We all have it the first time at the same age. It is the age of sixteen. Those who wish can continue to visit the school for Other subjects until the age eighteen, but by sixteen they have been taught all about the love-making. Up to then, it is explaining and Showing. The last step before growing up is to do.”

  “To do? I see. In other words, after sixteen there are no virgins.”

  “Virgins?” Tehura was genuinely horrified. “To be a virgin after sixteen would be a disgrace. It would be a sickness below as sonic have above, in the head. A girl cannot grow, become a woman, if she is a virgin. She would always be a girl. Men would despise her.”

  Marc thought of his friends on the staff at Raynor College, and his friends down in Los Angeles, and how they would enjoy this information. His mind leaped beyond California, to New York, to the nation between the two, and how vast audiences would enjoy every word he repeated. Overnight, he might become—and then, coldly, he pricked the bubble of his fantasy, knowing he would become nothing with this information. For Matty would have it, too, from other sources, and Matty would be the first to reveal it to the nation, and she would be the center. He would remain what he had always been, her assistant, echo, the one in her shadow.

  Then this was all hopeless. Yet, aside from its audience value, there were elements that intrigued him personally. “Tehura, what happened to you at sixteen?”

  “The usual ceremony,” she said. “I was taken to the Sacred Hut. A special physical examination was performed on me by an elder woman of the Marriage Hierarchy. I was pronounced ready to enter the Social Aid Hut, and I was asked to select my first partner from among the older, experienced, unmarried men. I had always been attracted to one, a handsome athlete of twenty-five, and I pointed to him. We were led to the Sacred Hut and left together for a day and a night. We came out only to visit the lavatory and take in our food and drink. I had been taught all about love, and had no fears to practice it. We made body love six or seven times, I do not remember, but I was limp, and the next day I was a grown woman.”

  “And you were free to make love with anyone after t
hat?”

  “No, no—not anyone. The unwed girl can only have pleasure with the unwed man—the married man is tabu, except one week in the year or when he has need of the Social Aid Hut—I do not have the time to tell you all of that today—another time I will. But I answer your question. I was free to make love with anyone I desired who was not married. Do not have the wrong idea about this. Tom had the wrong idea in the beginning, but then learned the truth. Tom taught me the word promiscuous, and later the word selective. We are not promiscuous. We are selective. I have never lay down with a man I did not want.”

  “Have you ever been married?”

  “No. It will happen. One day I will wish it, and it will happen. Now it is better this way. I am happy.”

  She smoothed out the wide grass of her skirt, and drew her long hair back over her shoulders, preparatory to rising and returning to the village.

  Marc cast aside his cigar butt. “I wish we had more time. I have so many questions—”

  “You will ask them next time.” She came to her feet lightly, then, legs apart, arms lifted high, so that her breasts flattened and widened, she stretched like a cat. Dropping her arms to her sides, she considered Marc a moment. “I have one question to make to you.”

  Marc was standing, dusting his trousers. He looked up with surprise. “A question? Go ahead.”

  “Last night, you were angry with your wife when she came with me and showed her breasts. Why were you angry?”

  “Well …” Tehura’s breasts were before his eyes, and Claire’s behind his eyes, and he must be careful to explain one without insulting the other. “You know by now, Tehura, that customs in my country are much different than those in your village. In my country, for many reasons—historical religious strictures, morals, the climate—women almost always, except when they are dancers or such, almost always cover their bosoms in public.”

  “That is so? Then something else is strange. Tom once showed me American book magazines with pictures—the way your women wear so much on their bodies except in the front the garments are cut down to show some of their breasts—”