The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  Then there was no more circle at all, only Tom Courtney, and the torches were further away, and the music, too. She could not find .Maud or Sam. Briefly, she had a glimpse of Rachel DeJong walking with some native, and here and there she could see, as she clung to Courtney, spun round and round with him, she could see native couples dancing, everyone dancing everywhere.

  Her legs were jelly, she knew, and even though Courtney held her, she stumbled, and lurched deeply into his arms. She was caught by his arms, and lay her head, panting and exhausted, against his chest … and then it was almost like that other time, coming up from the lake front in Chicago, in Alex’s arms, drowsing against his chest … yet now it was different, hearing as she did the pounding of Courtney’s heart, and listening to the pounding of her own, and not knowing about his, but knowing about hers, knowing the hammering came not from the exertion of the dance … yes, it was different, for Alex’s chest meant Being Loved, which was safety, and this strange tall man’s chest meant … something else, something unknown, and what was unknown was dangerous.

  She managed to extricate herself, tear herself away. She did not look up at him. She said, “I’ve been overmatched, like my husband.” Then she said, “Thanks for a good time, Tom. Please take me home.”

  * * *

  Only when they were in the narrow canoe, and he was thrusting the paddle rhythmically into the silver sheen covering the black water, sliding them through the hushed channel a world away from the populated large island and closer to the nearer coral atoll, did Rachel DeJong sober ever so slightly. She considered ordering him to stop, to stop and turn around, to stop and turn around and take her back to her civilized friends and civilization.

  She had meant to verbalize her change of mind, but seeing Moreturi’s smiling face in the semidarkness, and the bulging and easing of his biceps as he sank the paddle into the channel waters, she knew that she could not speak what she felt. Her instinct told her that her voice would be the sound of fear. She recalled: you did not show fear to an animal; any weakness gave the beast ascendancy over you. She was still Rachel DeJong, M.D., trained into superiority, master of human destiny, hers, his, and forever in control of any situation. And so she maintained her silence in collaboration with that of the night.

  Once more, she realized that she was deeply seated in the hollow of a canoe, legs stretched before her. She had never in her life been in a canoe before. She wondered why not. She reasoned that it was because canoes were so fragile—what kept them afloat? what kept an airplane aloft?—and she always imagined that they rolled over, and you went to a watery grave like that poor thing in the Dreiser book—yes, Roberta Alden—but that had been a rowboat, had it not?—and Clyde had hit her with his camera. Well, this was a canoe and she could see that Moreturi was born in one. His canoes would never tip over.

  She tried to relax in the sliver of hollowed log that held her between the sweet night air and the cool water. What did one do in a canoe? One played a guitar, banjo—heavens, how that dated her—so, what else? One trailed one’s hand in the water. Rachel DeJong lifted a limp hand and dropped it over the low side into the swiftly passing water. The water was sensuous, and seemed to enter her pores, course upwards through her arm and across her shoulders and around her heart cavity. She could see Moreturi peering at her, as he worked the paddle, and she feared that his observation of her well-being might give him another view of weakness, and so she closed her eyes, so that he could not read anything in them.

  Thus cradled and lulled by the motion of the sliding canoe, she let her mind off its leash and permitted it to run its own way.

  She must have been drunk, she decided, to have come along even this far. Rachel DeJong did not drink, never drank. Occasionally, at a party, she might have something candyish, like an Alexander maybe, that kind, and then lots of hors d’oeuvres. She did not drink because she saw how drink made people behave, and it was not proper and orderly, and she believed one should always be one’s self. The Maker gave each person a self, and drink cut you off from that self. Or were there granted really two selves per person, one public, and one that floated up out of that recess of privacy on a drink? Of course, this was so, and she knew it, for she was a psychoanalyst, and she avoided drink because one self was all that she could really cope with. When you kept one self, it was your good ship. Drink, on the other hand, was firewater that burned the ship behind you. Then you had no ship at all except the one that swam up with the drink, and the new craft was not dependable at all.

  Lord, what crazy, incoherent fancies. She had consumed several of those palm-juice toddies because they tasted like Alexanders, rather pink and sugary and harmless like something at one of her niece’s birthday parties. Yet their childish smile was deceptive. They paralyzed the senses, burned the ship, and you had to take any foreign craft offered, a canoe, for example. Which brought her to Moreturi.

  When the dance on the stage had finished, she thought the evening ended. She had meant to leave with Maud, but Maud had gone off with Paoti and his wife. After that, she had searched for Claire, but Claire was having herself a barefooted whirl with a bunch of natives and Courtney. Rachel had started for her hut reluctantly—reluctantly because there was so much life and hilarity wheeling about her, and she hated to shut a door on it, and felt good, wanting to be with someone, not necessarily Joe Morgen, although that would have been good, but someone, anyone who was not a solemn one.

  Feeling very apart from the merrymakers, she had squirmed through the writhing groups, noting that Claire appeared quite drunk, in fact everyone did, but not being critical of them, for her own feet seemed inches off the ground as if she were walking on a trampoline. When she emerged from the revel, almost out of reach of the torchlight, and was alone, she had sensed someone approaching her. She slowed down, turning, and was pleased and distressed that it was Moreturi who had found her.

  “I was hunting everywhere for you,” he had said, and he did not say “Miss Doctor,” and his tone was without derision.

  “I was in the front row,” she replied.

  “I know. I meant after—I went there—you were gone.”

  She had hoped for an accidental encounter with him tonight, and dreaded it, refusing to define for herself her dread. Except for her early-morning meeting with Maud, to report on her performance with the voyeurs of the Hierarchy the night before, she had forced out of her mind the occurrences of the night. With Moreturi’s presence before her, everything returned. She had hated his nakedness. He wore his pubic bag, it was true, but he might have seemed less exposed without it. He was all tan muscle, the most naked male in the compound, and his proximity disconcerted her. While she willed herself to suffocate the memory of what she had seen of him last night, the sight of him when he had gone into his wife’s bedroom, she could not. The exact pitch of Atetou’s wail and moan still reverberated against her eardrums and stabbed against her heart. Instantly, she had wanted nothing but escape and isolation.

  “I was tired,” she had said. “I was just on my way to my hut to sleep.”

  He had studied her speculatively. “You have not the look of the tired.”

  “Well, I am.”

  He had stared at her throat, and her hand went to it. He said, “I sent you the festival necklace. I see you do not wear it.”

  Of course not,” she had said indignantly, remembering that and knowing it was in the pocket of her skirt.

  “You speak as if I insulted you,” he had said, troubled. “Such a gift is a compliment here.”

  “How many did you send out as gifts?” she had asked sharply.

  “One.”

  The way that he had said one, simply, seriously, shamed her. She had been forcing unnatural anger into her voice and manner, against the drugging of the palm juice, because she was unnerved by him. She began to let the anger recede, but held to one more shaft of it.

  “Maybe I should be grateful then,” she had said, “but I wonder if your wife is grateful for your genero
sity with necklaces?”

  His eyes showed that he was puzzled. “All wives know of this. They send necklaces, too. It is our custom, and this is the festival week.”

  Rachel had felt all wrong, and she wanted to soften herself for him. “I—I guess I keep forgetting the custom.”

  “Besides,” he was saying, “I have been your patient, and Atetou, too, and you know how it is between us.”

  She had thought, Yes, damn you, I know how it is between you and Atetou, I saw some of it, heard some of it, through the open leaves of your side wall last night. She had said, “That has nothing to do with my wearing your necklace. It is your custom to give such things. It is not our custom to accept them.”

  “My father tells it that you are here to learn our ways, and live as we live.”

  “Of course, Moreturi, but there are restrictions. I am an analyst. You know all about that. You are my analysand. You know about that, too. I mean, we can’t have clandestine meetings—”

  He had appeared to comprehend some of this, for he interrupted, “If you could wear it, would you want to?”

  Her arms, face, neck had felt prickly hot, and she cursed the drinks. She had the perfect reply, she knew, and the reply might put a stop to this uncomfortable talk. She could say that she was in love with another, one of her own people, back home. She could inform him of Joseph E. Morgen. That would raise the glass wall between them. She had meant to evoke Joe, and end Moreturi, and yet she had not. Unaccountably, the night was young, near midnight still young, and she had not wanted to be alone. “I—I really don’t know if—under different circumstances—I’d wear it. Perhaps, if our relationship were different, if I knew you better, I might.”

  His face had turned on bright as an electric bulb. “Yes!” he had exclaimed. “That is it, we must become friends. I will go with you to your hut and we will talk—”

  “No—no, I couldn’t—”

  “Then let us sit somewhere in the grass, and rest, and talk.”

  “I’d like to, Moreturi, but it’s late.”

  His hands were on his hips. He had smiled down at her, and for the first time he was smiling that too-familiar cocky smile. “You are afraid of me, Miss Doctor.”

  She had been furious, but her voice was uncertain. “Don’t be utterly ridiculous. Don’t bait me.”

  “You are afraid,” he had repeated. “I know the truth. This morning you spoke to your Dr. Hayden, and she spoke to my mother, and my mother has told me. You have made a special request to end our work, to have me no more in your hut.”

  “Yes, I thought we should terminate the analysis. I decided I was doing you no good, wasting your time, and so I asked that your case be returned to the Hierarchy.”

  “You have not wasted my time. I have looked forward to the meetings.”

  “Only so you can ridicule me.”

  “No, that is not true. I ridicule to hide my feelings. I have learned much from you.”

  She had hesitated. “Well, I—I’ve made my decision. You’ll manage without me.”

  “If I cannot see you again, it is more reason to see you tonight.”

  “Another time.”

  “Tonight is the main night. There is no one I shall see but you. I want to explain myself.”

  “Please, Moreturi, you’re wearing me out—”

  Once more, he had smiled. “Maybe that is for the good. Maybe you will become more of a woman. You are used to commanding men, to advising them, to telling them this and that, to be above them. You are afraid to be with a man you cannot treat as a sick one. I am normal. I look at you not as Miss Doctor but as a female like Atetou, except you are more, far more. This is what makes you afraid.”

  It was really, she remembered, that little speech that had done it. It reached into the pit of her fears, and she would not have him know so much and possess this dominance over her. He had made it impossible for her to go to her hut alone, to try to sleep with his damn speech and Atetou’s outcry of last night haunting her in this far reach of the Pacific. The palm juices inside her were fermenting, and they had soaked and washed away her last prop of superiority, so that she was ready to meet him and defy him by showing him she was unafraid, as a woman would, as a psychoanalyst would not.

  She had not argued with him. She continued conversing, until they arrived at those words that made it possible for her to agree, without loss of face or any sign of surrender, that she was prepared to go with him where the others were not. She had agreed that, for a short time anyway, they would talk. When she strolled off with him, in the direction of the Sacred Hut, past it, but in that direction, she had been secretly pleased at her strength.

  They had climbed a hill, and gone past the cliff where the swimming meet had been held, and she had gripped his hand tightly as he preceded her and guided her down a steep footpath to a small rocky harbor she had not seen before.

  Once, she had asked, “Where are you taking me? I hope it is not too far. I told you, I can’t stay out long.”

  He had replied, “There are three Sirens, and you have seen only one. I will take you to another.”

  “But where—?”

  “Just minutes across the channel. We can sit in the sand, and talk with no disturbance. You will have a memory the others do not of the beauty of our place. I go there often when I want to be by myself. There is nothing but the sand and grass and coconut palm trees, and the water all around. When you wish to return, I will bring you back.”

  He had found the canoe in the darkness, and shoved it into the water, and then balanced himself in it and waited.

  She must have held back, for he called out, “If you are still afraid of me—”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  She allowed him to help her into the canoe, and now in the canoe she still was, eyes closed, hand trailing in the water, his unseen, fluid presence somewhere before her, gracefully dipping the paddle.

  She felt a bump beneath her, and heard him say, “Here we are, the little atoll that is the second Siren.”

  She opened her eyes and sat up.

  “Take off your shoes,” he said. “You can leave them in the canoe.”

  Obediently, she removed her sandals. He was already in the water. She tried to step out of the canoe by herself, but he reached out and lifted her as if he were lifting a palm frond, and lowered her into a foot of water.

  He pointed off. “Go to the beach.”

  She waded through the water, across ridges of the sand bottom, until she was on the shore. When she turned, she saw that he was pulling the canoe out of the water, and wedging it between rocks.

  After he joined her, he took her by the arm and led her through a vast cluster of palm trees, their mop heads lost in the high darkness, past a shallow lagoon, to a grass clearing, and then down a gradual slope to a tiny beach of thick sand that seemed to sparkle like starlight.

  “The ocean side of the atoll,” said Moreturi.

  Where the water in the enclosed lagoon behind them had been level and still as glass, the surf on the ocean side was turbulent and alive. Here they stood before thousands of miles of winds and tides, and watched as the combers with their margins of whitecaps rolled in toward the islet, and broke, and tumbled down, and washed high onto the sand. The sea was lost in night, without horizon or end, it seemed, and the foamy heads of the waves came toward them like the charge of a white brigade, unhorsed and brought to earth by the beach.

  “It’s magnificent,” Rachel whispered. “I am glad you brought me here.”

  Moreturi dropped to the sand of the sea beach, and stretched his tan body, and then lav flat with the back of his head in his locked hands. She sat beside him, knees up, skirt pulled down over them, but a mild breeze stole under it and moved gently over her legs and thighs.

  For a long time neither one of them spoke, and there was no need to speak. But when she found his eyes upon her, she was prompted to shatter the intimacy of the quiet. She asked him to tell her something of his early life, an
d he conjured up remembrances of his early youth. She hardly listened to him, but rather heard the waves pouring out of the dark and lathering the sand, and she marveled at how the sound of them was keyed to the sound of Atetou’s outcry of love last night. Insensibly, she was tempted to mention last night, what her eyes had witnessed. She fought the impulse, conceived by palm juice, and instead, recalling some fragment of their analytic sessions, she asked him about one festival week of several years ago, when he had possessed twelve married women in seven days and nights. He discussed his enjoyment of them, their differences, and all the while she was summoning up her own barren and shoddy love life, the bumbling college boy from Minnesota, the three times with the remote married professor on Catalina, the teasings with Joe.

  Suddenly, she said, “Did you ever bring any of them here?”

  Moreturi seemed surprised. “What?”

  “Did you ever bring any of your women to this coral atoll and—and make love to them?”

  He lifted himself to an elbow. “Yes, a few.”

  She felt curiously feverish, her forehead, the nape of her neck, her wrists. She fanned herself with one hand.

  “Are you all right?” he wanted to know.

  “I’m all right. I just feel a little warm.”

  “Let’s swim then—”

  “Swim?”

  “Of course. The water is wonderful at night. It will make you feel better than you have ever felt.” He came to his feet, and took her hand and pulled her upright.

  “I—I don’t have my swimming suit,” she said, feeling embarrassed to have to say it.

  “Go without your suit.” He waited, then smiled nicely. “This is not America. Besides, I promise not to look.”