Tonight, Claire wanted none of this. The scene and setting were romantic, and Claire wanted the contentment of it to soak into her pores and not into her poor head. She wanted to escape from the technical talk of the team, from her own situation really, and this one night she was determined to make the flight, no matter how briefly.
She diverted her attention to the stage above, and to the activity around it.
A childhood carnival, she thought, a magical carnival for a time when you were too small, eyes too small, mind too small, to see the tawdry, the imperfections, the daily dyings. She remembered—she had not remembered it in years—the one on the Oak Street beach, in Chicago, on the magnificent lake shore, when she was little. Perhaps she had been five or six or seven. She remembered her father’s firm hand covering her hand, as they went down to the lake front from Michigan Boulevard. She remembered that everyone seemed to know him—“Hi, Alex” … “See you got a date, Alex”—even a pair who whispered as they passed, one saying, “Yes, Alex Emerson, the sports writer.”
Suddenly, she remembered, they were plowing through the warm sand, and there was the riot of sound and lights, and the rows of bazaar shops of wonderland. They had gone through the carousing people, stopping here and there, this booth and that, her father laughing and laughing, and lifting her up and putting her down. She remembered hot dogs, endless hot dogs, and gallons of lemonade, and a billion puffs of pink cotton candy, and she remembered popcorn as endless as grains of sand on the beach, and a zillion dolls and ceramic dogs and cats, and the wheelings of the merry-go-round and the ferris wheel and the whip, God, the whip, how she held him for dear life.
The imprint on memory faded, but clear still was the feeling of the night, the wondrous, immortal, hugging swell of the one emotion that she felt when she drowsed against his broad chest as he carried her up to the car—it was Being Loved she had felt, and she had not known it again, not once, in the heavy, slow, unpopulated, unfun years since.
She tried to evoke the old childhood carnival once more, overlay it upon the revelry here on the Sirens, but it was no use, for she was grown, and her veteran eyes saw behind booths, behind corners, behind masquerades. Feeling had given way to thinking. And besides, besides, where was Alex? Yet, objectively, all this before her, primitive and strange, had a grownup attraction of its own. The trouble was, she was apart from it, interested and bystander, not of it.
Also, she was alone. Maud did not count. Nor did Rachel count, nor did the disagreeable Orville Pence. She was married two years and one day, she was one-half of two who (by matrimonial mathematics) were supposed to be One, yet here sat she like a spinster woman, a half-person, alone. Where had the equation gone wrong? With the chalk of memory, she redid it on mind’s blackboard …
Marc was already there, in the rear room of the hut, when she had returned from the swimming contest. His trunks, still soggy, hung limply from a wall peg. He lay, shirtless and shoeless, but in washable slacks, upon the sleeping bag, soundly napping, breath exhaling in low honks as if from an exhausted canine. His excursion into juvenility—juvesenility was the observation she coined—had sapped him entirely. She was embarrassed for staring at him, unbeknownst to him, as he slept. It was unfair, for he was defenseless against judgment.
She had left him to occupy herself with the dinner. In celebration of the festival, there was an added supply of native food and drink: lobster, red bananas, sea cucumbers, turtle eggs, yams, taro in palm-frond baskets, coconut milk in one earthenware pitcher, and palm toddy in another pitcher. Beside these lay a new food-pounder, fashioned from the ribs of coconut leaves. Claire carried the baskets, pitchers, and pounder to the earth oven, and began her cooking. Shortly afterwards, she had heard Marc shuffling about. She called out that dinner was served.
Somehow, she had expected him to appear sheepish. That would have helped. This tone established, she could have teased him, and there would have been banter between them, and there might even be laughter. Instead, he was petulant. She knew that he watched her closely as she served, as if he were on guard against an obligatory jab about his performance. She withheld comment.
Once she was seated across from him, he had said, “I should’ve had him. In fact, I did have him until the damn climb. I wasn’t in shape for that. Hell, I entered a swimming meet, not a mountaineering contest. I beat him swimming.”
The immaturity of this had sickened her, and she’d replied dully, “Yes, you beat him swimming.”
“You know, I didn’t realize it was his ankle—I thought I had hold of the ledge—it took me a few seconds before I—”
“Mark, who gives a damn about that nonsense? You did your very best. Now eat.”
“I give a damn. Because I know you. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I made a fool of myself.”
“I didn’t say that. Now, please, Marc—”
“I didn’t say you said that. I said I know you well enough to know how your mind operates. I just wanted to straighten you out—”
“All right, Marc, all right.” She had had a spasm of choking on some food, and after she had recovered, she’d said, “Went down the wrong way. Let’s finish in peace.”
When they were through, and she was clearing the dining mat, he had puffed on his cigar and his eyes followed her through the blue smoke.
“You going to the festival tonight?” he had asked, suddenly.
She stopped. “Of course. Everyone is. Aren’t you?”
“No.”
“What does that mean?” she had wanted to know. “You’ve been invited like all of us. It’s one of the highlights, one of the reasons we were invited this time of the year. It’s why you’re here. You have your work—”
“My work,” he had repeated with a grunt. And then he’d added with an edge of sarcasm, “After all, you and Matty will be there.”
“Marc, you must—”
“I did my part for research this afternoon. I’m bushed, and I’ve got a splitting headache—”
She had examined him, and he had looked serene with his cigar. She doubted the headache.
“—and what’ll I miss?” he went on. “A bunch of naked broads, and that idiot Lisa, shaking their fat behinds. I can do better at any two-bit burlesque back home. No, thanks.”
“Well, I can’t force you.”
“That’s right.”
“Do as you please. I’m going to change.” She had taken several steps to the rear, slowed, and swung around toward him. “Marc, I—I just wish we—”
He had waited, as she hesitated, and he said, “What do you wish, wife?”
She had not liked his tone, or the wife, and so it was no use exhuming their marriage and old hopes. “Nothing,” she had said. “I’ve got to hurry.”
It had gone like that, exactly like that, Claire remembered, and on mind’s blackboard the equation was still incorrect, for one-half plus one-half added up tonight, every night, to one-half. Damn.
She shivered, and adjusted herself to her place in the first row of the festival audience. She was pleased to find Tom Courtney down on one knee to her right.
“Hello,” she said. “How long have you been here?”
“A few minutes. And you?”
“Mentally, I just arrived,” she said.
“I know. That’s why I didn’t want to break in. Mind if I stay here, or have you had about enough togetherness for one day?”
“Don’t waste amenities on me, Tom. You know I’d be pleased.” She indicated the platform. “When does the show begin?”
“Right after this Sirens version of the fanfare. Then Nurse Harriet, Queen of the Festival, appears to open the proceedings.”
“Nurse Harriet Unsheathed,” Claire stated, as if reading a headline. “Well, if she’s not embarrassed, I’m not. In fact, I can’t wait.”
“She’s not. I’ve seen her backstage, so to speak. The Sirens men are attached to her like barnacles.”
Claire suddenly smiled. “I just remembered ag
ain—who am I to talk?—after my strip-tease that first night here, Tehura and I at Paoti’s dinner.”
There was a flicker on Courtney’s face that was not pain so much as concern. He said resolutely, “As I told you before, the rite of friendship was natural, just as this will be.”
She was going to say, Tell Marc. Instead, she swallowed the words, withdrew, and pretended to concentrate on the platform before them.
There was activity on the platform. The music had ceased, but left no void of silence, for the babble of voices all around hummed and sang in the warm night. Two native boys, carrying a bench that resembled a high square coffee table, were climbing onto the platform. With great care, they centered the bench on the stage. Then, like twins crouching, they accepted from outstretched hands below a gigantic bowl, which they handled gingerly, for it was filled to the brim with liquid, and they placed this bowl on the middle of the bench.
As they hopped off the huge dais, two more natives ascended it, grown men, sleekly handsome, and one Claire recognized as the swimmer who had humbled Marc. And as they came to their full height, Claire realized that they had helped a young woman up on the stage between them, and the young woman was Harriet Bleaska, Queen of the Festival.
Apparently, Harriet had been rehearsed, for she moved with practiced assurance. When she advanced toward the bench, away from the ring of flame, and sat down, Claire was able to make her out plainly.
“My God,” murmured Claire.
Harriet’s cinnamon mouse bangs and long hair were festooned with a garland of tiara blossoms. Hung low from her bumpy hips, covering her from an inch or two below her navel, was a flaring green grass skirt no more than eighteen inches in length. What held Claire’s attention first was the unrelieved whiteness of her in this setting, and next, the oval of space between her thighs curving inward to knock-knees. Nothing on her body moved as she went in regally measured steps to the bench, and the reason that nothing moved was a preponderance of unfeminine flat planes in her figure and the lack of protuberant mammaries. If one strained, one could make out nipples that seemed pinned to her like brown clasps or broaches, and only when she half-turned to sit on the bench did one see the tentative swell of bosom. Nevertheless, such was the dignity of her bearing, the delight in her narrow gray eyes and wide mouth, that her unsightly features and physique seemed again to transmute into comeliness before the eye, and lo, Miss Hyde was Miss Jekyll.
Claire could hear the slit drums and the flute, and a kind of hurrahing all about, as the ceremony opening the festival began. The swimming champion, the sturdy humbler of Marc, had dipped a coconut half-shell into the bowl, and handed the spilling drink to Harriet. She accepted it like a love potion, rising with it and toasting the members of her team and the natives behind them. Then she drank. Next, she moved to another side of the square bench, sat, stood up, toasted the villagers on that side, and drank again. And so she went around the bench, toasting and drinking, to the accompanying roar of the entire adult Sirens population.
By the time Harriet had returned to her original place on the bench, Claire became conscious of a new and nearer activity. Older women of the village, in pairs, were hurrying up and down the aisles, one partner passing out clay cups, the other filling the cups with palm juice from a tureen.
Presently, everyone had been served, and Harriet was standing once more, flanked by her native escorts, surrounded by the animated musicians. Harriet held her coconut cup aloft, and revolved her long whiteness and brown broaches majestically to booming acclaim, and then she drank deeply.
Claire looked down to find Courtney touching his clay cup to her own. “With this drink,” she thought she heard him say, “the Saturnalia begins.”
Obediently, she did as he did, and drank. The liquid went down warmish and sweet, conjuring to mind the first night on the island when she had become inebriated on kava and this palm juice. Courtney winked at her and gulped again, and once more she did as he did, except this time the toddy was not warmish and sweet but smooth as an old whiskey. She continued to drink, until the clay cup was empty, and the effect upon her was incredibly swift. The effect of the liquid, as best she could comprehend, was to blot up and absorb from her head, especially behind the temples, and from her arms and chest, anxiety, apprehension, clotting memories of the past, be the past an hour ago or a year ago. What remained was the head-spinning present.
When she turned away from Courtney, she found the two older native women before her, one taking the cup from her hand, the other holding out the tureen. And then Claire had her cup back, again full to the top with the remarkable fluid.
Another drink, and she raised her head and pointed it to the stage. At first, she could not see clearly, and she realized that between her and the platform crouched Sam Karpowicz. His white shirt was pasted to his back by perspiration, his neck was pink, and his eye was fastened to a Leica.
She shifted her position closer to Courtney to see what Sam was shooting. What Sam saw through his view finder, she now saw: Harriet Bleaska, flower garland askew, grass skirt slipping precariously, waving her now unfilled coconut cup as she paraded, pranced really, before the alignment of male and female dancers, who beat their hands and stamped to her impromptu gyrations. Claire could make out Lisa Hackfeld, wearing bra and red pareu, among the dancers in the background. Lisa’s gray-streaked blond hair was in Medusa disarray, and her fleshy arms and shapely legs in constant animation.
The entire unrestrained scene, Claire thought, had the curiously old-fashioned quality of an early talking motion picture about errant daughters and boozing young blades of the roaring twenties. Or better, it all seemed a moment out of Tully’s A Bird of Paradise, circa 1911, with Laurette Taylor doing the hula dance. It is not to be believed, Claire thought. But there it was, it was, indeed.
A sudden altercation, almost lost in the noise, removed Claire’s attention from the platform. Sam Karpowicz, who had been before her, had crawled to his left, crouched low, going crabwise, to stamp better the half-nude Harriet Bleaska for posterity on his Leica film. His position, shooting upwards, was directly before Maud, Rachel DeJong, and Orville Pence. Unexpectedly, Orville, his partially bald cranium yellow in the torchlight, his shell-rimmed spectacles jumping on his sniffing clerical nose, had come to his feet, bounded forward, and roughly taken Sam Karpowicz by the shoulder, throwing the photographer off balance.
Sam looked up, his long face unnaturally livid. “What the hell! You made me lose the best shot—”
“I want to know what you are taking pictures of—of what are you taking pictures?” Orville was demanding, his words dragging themselves through palm juice.
“Chrissakes, Pence, what do you think I’m taking pictures of? I’m shooting the festival, the dance—”
“You’re shooting Miss Bleaska’s bosom, that is what you are doing. I say it is highly improper.”
Sam screamed incredulity. “What?”
“You are supposed to record the activities of the natives, not the shameful excesses of one of our own. What will people back home say when they see these pictures of an American girl exposing herself up there, without decency—”
“Chrissakes, now we got Anthony Comstock to deal with. Look, Pence, you attend to your knitting and let me do mine. Now, don’t bother me.”
He pulled away, determined to ignore Pence, and focused his Leica upon Harriet Bleaska once more. She loomed overhead, laughing and pounding her palms together, shaking her shoulders and brown broaches, grinding her hips, waving in response to the cheers breaking out of the semidarkness.
As Sam froze her to his film, Orville grasped the photographer’s shoulder a second time, in another effort to censor this obscene outrage.
“Cut it out!” Sam roared, and he lav his free hand against Orville’s profile and shoved him away. The push sent Orville reeling backwards and down, to land ludicrously on his haunches. He regained his feet, trembling, and might have started for the photographer again, had not Maud risen a
nd planted her authoritative mass in his path.
“Orville, please, please, Sam is only doing his job.”
For a moment, Orville tried to find words, found none, then gestured toward the stage, and the gesture was a fist. “It’s her—that disgraceful performance up there—”
“Please, Orville, all the villagers are—”
“I will not endure another minute of this—this revolting spectacle. I’m shocked that you condone it, Maud. I had better not say more. I bid you good night.”
With a snort, he yanked his tie into place, stuffed the tail of his shirt into his trousers, and marched off into the crowd. Maud was openly perturbed, when next Claire could see her face. Maud surveyed all of them, and, muttering “Some people should not drink,” sat down beside Rachel to try to enjoy the remainder of the dance.
For fleeting seconds, the altercation dwelt in Claire’s mind. Strange, strange, she thought, what our coming here seems to be doing to some of us. The island has a spell that accents our weakest and worst qualities: Orville, bloodless at home, heated with indignation here; Sam Karpowicz, amiable at home, furious here; Marc, serious and withdrawn at home, angry and cruel here. And me. Claire, so—well, whatever—at home, and so—well, dammit, enough of that, I’m going to drink—here.
She drank. She and Courtney drank. Everyone drank. Sometimes she saw the stage, and the undulating dancers, weaving and swaying, behind the torches. Sometimes Lisa Hackfeld dominated the stage, as gay. as abandoned as Nurse Harriet, who had disappeared with her entourage, Lisa of Omaha not Beverly Hills, Lisa of rediscovered youth exorcising the demons of matronage.
Claire knew not how much time had passed, nor how many pourings of palm juice had filled her cup, but faintly, she was hearing Courtney’s voice. She knew it beckoned her from above, for he was standing, and all around, others were standing, yet she remained seated. Then he was bending down, and lifting her as easily feather pillow to her feet.
“Everyone’s dancing,” he was saying in her ear. “Want to dance?”
Her bleary eyes gave consent, and she had his hand, and then some native man’s hand, and there was this circle of people, and in they went like red Indians whooping and kicking, and backwards they went shouting and laughing, and all around there were these circles. And now their circle broke into smaller ones, and Claire felt set free in the melee, throwing oft her sandals, letting her hair fly loose, allowing her hips to swing-a-ring-a-ding.
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