The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  She intended to say no, and to the devil with him and all this trouble, but standing there, knowing he was waiting, she remembered with an ache that time on the beach outside Carmel when she and Joe had walked along the water. He had wanted to swim, too, and they had no suits, and he had said it did not matter because they were practically married. She had hidden behind the rock to undress, had unbuttoned her blouse, had been unable to move her fingers further, had rushed out to tell him and found him disrobed, and had run away from him and their marriage. She had done that! Oh hell, hell, hell, but then, how many people had a second chance to be unsick?

  “Very well,” she found another voice saying for her aloud. “I have something on underneath. But don’t look anyway. I—I’ll join you in the water.”

  He waved happily, trotted down to the water’s edge. She thought that he would go straight in, but instead he stopped, did something with his hands at his waist, and she saw the strap and white bag in his hand. He threw it over his shoulder, stood poised before the water, all one piece of beautiful statuary, and swiftly, he was off, a released Dionysus, charging and splashing into the water and into the darkness.

  Stolidly, a fraudulent Aphrodite, she unbuttoned her cotton blouse. This time no Carmel. She pulled it off and dropped it on the sand, and adjusted her deep-cupped brassiere to cover every inch of her too-obvious breasts. Slowly, she unhooked her skirt, ran the zipper down, lowered the skirt, and stepped out of it. Her white nylon panties felt abnormally tight about her boyish hips. Briefly, she wondered if the panties were transparent, but then realized she was clothed by the lateness of the hour.

  Standing there, more free than she had been in years, she enjoyed the curling breeze on her skin, and felt less feverish. Her chestnut hair was carefully set, and for no reason whatever, she suddenly ran one hand through it, tousling it, and she did not feel thirty-one and woman-with-a-career at all. She felt foolish-gay, and her mind thumbed its nose at Carmel and the old she, and with that private gesture, she ran through the heavy sand into the water.

  The first impact of the water jolted her, for it was colder than she had expected, but she kept going deeper, because she wanted the water to cover her underthings. As soon as she was in water to her waist, she fell forward, and began to swim, first striking out strongly, then letting up, going easily.

  In the self-indulgence of the water, the romp in it, she had almost forgotten that she had, somewhere in the darkness, a partner, sex opposite.

  “Here I am!” she heard Moreturi call, and she came off floating on her back and immersed herself to her shoulders, treading the water, until she caught sight of him stroking toward her. In seconds, he was only yards away, his black hair plastered across his head and forehead.

  A sea wave came unexpectedly, higher than those before, and she caught it in time, managing to rise above it, and sink down with it, but Moreturi was momentarily engulfed.

  “Here!” he shouted.

  She swung around in the water, and he was behind her, going up and down in the water like a happy idiot, and once when he shot up and revealed himself to his abdomen, she gasped, swallowing the salt water, praying that she would not see more. She turned away, swimming, wondering how she could get to the shore and dress without being observed, and how he would dress so that she would not have to see him naked.

  But then, as she swam, the apprehension became minor in the soothing pleasure of the sea. She swam round and round experimenting, trying side stroke, overhand, breast stroke, feeling marvelous as a marine creature, a mermaid, and she gave thanks to the drinks and the one who had brought her here.

  She would tell him she was pleased, she decided, he deserved that much for all of his trouble, and she began to turn in the water to tell him. As she did so, she heard a frantic shout, her name, from him, the first time he had called her by name, and then she met head-on the powering sheet of the great smashing comber. It hit her like a Gargantuan slap, and the liquid curve sent her reeling backwards and then down and down into the deep greenness of the sea. She was underwater interminably, no sensation of time, amid the shimmering formations beneath the ocean, where everything was an unfamiliar planet of slow motion.

  Then, she was kicking upwards, upwards, surfacing, and when she came out of the water, lungs exploding, she was choking for air, fighting off, desperately trying to rip aside the curtain of blackness. And all the while, from afar, thinly in the wind, she heard her name, and as her strength ebbed, the oaken arm came around her and held her out of the water. She looked up into Moreturi’s blurred film of face.

  “Are you hurt?” he was demanding. “It hit you with great force.”

  “Fine, fine,” she gasped, coughing.

  “I’ll help you.”

  “Yes, please, please—”

  He took a fist full of her hair, and thus keeping her face above the water, he swam sideways, using one arm, toward the shore. In a minute he stood up, and braced her upright, but her knees began to buckle, and he held her with both his hands. He lifted her out of the water, cradled her in his arms, one arm under her legs, the other supporting her shoulders, and he carried her to the sand.

  By the time he had come out of the sea with her, she had regained her senses. Her head was against his hard arm, and her left breast was under his hand. With surprise, she looked down at herself and saw that her breasts were entirely exposed. Dumbly, she tried to re-create what had happened, and then she knew that the violence of the breaker had slashed through the brassiere and torn it from her.

  “Oh, God,” she moaned.

  “What?”

  “Have I still got something on—my pants—?”

  “Yes, do not worry.”

  He would have been amazed, but she was not worried at all. She was pleased, since it was no act of her own, that her brassiere was gone. She wished, in an irrational way, her nylon panties had gone, too, since that might have solved everything.

  Gently, he was putting her down on her back on the warm sand, and she lay on her back, arms outstretched, knees partially drawn up, staring at the black ceiling of night above. She closed her eyes, wanting surrender to lassitude, but there was too much that was wound tightly beneath her skin. And the water had not cooled her, after all. She opened her eyes, to find him on his knees above her, and then, even in her daze, she was frightened, for she had forgotten that he would be entirely naked. He was entirely naked, and he was ready for love, and this was what frightened her the most.

  Yet, she did not move. The flesh across her body frame was so taut that she wanted to cry out, as Atetou had cried out the night before. Then it was that Rachel groaned. She was conscious of the groan, and hated it, for it had been beyond her restraint, an involuntary whimper that hung in the air above her like desire, as real and articulate as his love apparatus. She feared that she would groan again, for the nipples of her breasts had swollen and were as painful as two bruises, but with effort she held the sound in check.

  Lying there, she felt his large hands on the flanks of her legs, felt them on the wet, clinging nylon panties, felt the panties being drawn down her thighs, and then up and over her knees, and down the calves of her legs. Her defenses stirred, but she could not protest. Nor could she look at him. It had come this far, she told herself, and nothing more mattered. For once, for once, let what will happen—happen. This was the crossing, so long feared, and when you were there, it was nothing at all, really nothing at all. The worst death was in all the endless dyings that came before, but when you were there, at the crossing, it did not matter.

  As she felt his movement, she wondered that he had not kissed her lips or kissed away the pain of the bruises, but then the pain was everywhere, fanning out everywhere, as his fingers played across her skin. She knew that she could not endure this a second longer, that every organ in her was near bursting, and that if he did not cease, she would scream something, do something foolish.

  But then, an incredible thing happened, and it had never in her life ha
ppened this way before. She had hardly been aware that his bulk was between her legs, but now she was totally aware that his being was gradually entering into her being. The filling of herself with him was so continuous, so incessant, and so unexpected, that it petrified her brain and anesthetized all pain.

  When his motion began, it was, for her, as if the pain was shocked to life, and all brought down from the red bruises, from her ribs, all brought up from her calves, from her thighs, to where he had invaded her. For the first time, she was jarred out of helpless inertia, throbbing with the feeling that she was not being relieved at all but being harmed.

  In a surge of revulsion, she tried to escape. She placed the heels of her hands on his shoulders and attempted to push him off, to be divested of him. She failed, and these efforts only intensified his movement and the resultant pain. She dropped her arms to her sides, lips begging for freedom, but it was no use. She lay there, feeling like some marine thing that had flopped on the beach, out of its natural element, alien, afraid, gasping, but deeply speared and captured, no matter how much it tried to return to the old place and the old freedom.

  Minutes and minutes had passed, an eternity of infinite pain and humiliation, and she marshaled inside her, secretly, to surprise him, what was left of pride and reserve. Suddenly, her forces gathered, aligned, for the break to freedom, she opened her eyes, and snatched at his perspiring shoulders, tearing her nails across them to retaliate, to give him equal pain, and heaved her torso to throw him off. Then she knew that her efforts were misunderstood, for his broad tan features mocked her with grim appreciation.

  Wildly, she thrashed in the flying sand, but his thrusts sent her down and backwards, so that her shoulders, spine, buttocks made a deep groove in the white sand. And in this way, they squirmed out of the loose dry sand, until her flesh beneath felt the firmer wet sand of the water’s edge, and she realized that if she withdrew again, they would be in the water.

  Confused, emptied of strength, she ceased her resistance. She could feel the last of a receding wave of water slithering under her shoulder blades, and then more of the surf surrounding her backside and the soles of her naked feet. And then the gentle water was in her hair, sometimes washing over the red bruises, finally lapping over and enveloping their joining.

  It was odd, for her, what the water did. Inexplicably, it gave this wanted-unwanted union a kind of pagan ritual blessing and grace. Inexplicably, too, it cleansed her of civilization’s dirty wounds, cleansed her of shame, of guilt, of fear, and finally, finally, of restraint. The soft, cool water made this endless act of love natural and right, in this time and place, and gave her the crossing, and so she crossed.

  What had been painful became pleasurable, sent barbaric and voluptuous joy careening through the veins of her head, and the arteries of her heart, and the vessel below.

  Thus, in the unyielding, wet sand, applauded by the waves, she succumbed to a union hitherto unimagined in all that she had read, heard, dreamed. It is his life, she thought, his everything, and so no wonder, no wonder. Once, she thought of the other two she had had, and of what she had heard from the victims on the couch, poor things, poor us, with our rigidity, our clumsiness, our studiousness, our thinking—we, the barbarians, chaining and torturing this with our habitations, clothes, drinks, drugs, words, always words, destroying all that mattered, the primitive act of love itself, such as here and now and now and now, undiluted by anything but desire and fulfillment.

  All of her had quickened, with the miracle of the crossing. She gazed up blindly at him, as she might at some marvelous celestial creature seen in a shaft of heavenly light, and she had a vision that she had become one of the anointed few. The experience would set her life apart from all the other lives on earth. Instantly, she was sorry for every woman that she had ever known or ever treated in the faraway, dim, dim civilized world of long ago, the feeble mortals who would never know this extra dimension of pure happiness, those pitiful ones who would live and die and never know what she now knew, and it grieved her that she would not be able to impart this to them, to anyone, ever.

  Suddenly, she gave not a damn about anyone on all the earth but herself and this man. She embraced him, she possessed him, she was insane with him, and finally, she heard the cry in her throat, and at last she let it escape…to be certain that she had escaped, too.

  * * *

  In the village, it was quiet again, all muffled down under the quilt of late night. Even the last of the celebrants, strolling to their homes to sleep or into the hills to love, even these last stragglers spoke in whispers softer than the breeze.

  Inside the thatched hut so familiar to him, slightly above the compound, he had been sitting in the faint light of a single wavering candlenut for a long time. He had been waiting for the footsteps of her coming. He wondered if there would be one pair of footsteps or two pair, and if there were two pair, what he would do to explain his presence in her room.

  He had drunk more than his usual quota before coming here, four straight Scotches, no more, and they had not affected him in any way. Although perhaps it was only the drinks that had fortified him with the courage to come here at all, to risk what he must undertake, he would permit no liquor to dull him for the task to which he was dedicated.

  It was near midnight, he knew, and the festival sounds had disappeared a half-hour ago. Since then, there had been the unnerving silence, but now he thought that the silence was being intruded upon. He cocked his head, distending his aquiline nose, pursing his thin lips, listening hard. The slight noise was that of human feet padding on the turf, certainly footsteps, not two pair but one, and he guessed, from the light tread of the bare feet, that it was she, and that she was alone.

  He pushed himself up from his slouch against the wall, sat erect and intent, just as the cane door swung open. Tehura, covered only by the two strands of long black hair that fell down across her bosom and the short grass skirt, entered the room of her hut. She did not see him at first. She appeared lost in some thought, as she automatically closed the door. This done, she threw the strands of her hair back over her shoulders, and turned fully into the room. That was when she saw him.

  Her features displayed no surprise, only interest. “Marc,” she said. Then she said, “I wondered where you were tonight.”

  “I was here most of the evening,” he said. “I wanted to see you alone. I was worried you might return with Huatoro.”

  “No.”

  “Please sit down with me,” he said. “If—if you’re not too tired, there is something I want to discuss with you.”

  “I am not tired at all,” she said.

  She crossed the room, and came to rest on the matting a few feet from him.

  He did not look at her, but at the opposite wall, meditatively. “Yes, I was afraid you might bring Huatoro back with you. You had said you might favor the winner of the swim.”

  “I still might,” she said.

  “But not tonight. Why not?”

  “I do not know … He gave me his festival necklace.”

  “You do not wear it.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “He must have been angry.”

  “It is no concern of mine,” she said. “He will wait.”

  “Will you make love with him?”

  “If I knew, I would not tell you,” she said. “I do not know.” She paused. “He wishes me to be his wife.”

  “And you?”

  “I repeat, I am not in the mood for such decisions.” She reflected on this a moment. “He is strong, much admired. I am told he loves well. With the winning of the race, he has much mana.”

  Marc shifted uncomfortably. “I’m sorry about the way I behaved in the race, Tehura. I’ve pretended to everyone it was an accident. You know better.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted to win, no matter how, because I had told you that I could and would. That was all that counted.” He hesitated, and he added, “Sh
ould I tell you a crazy thing?”

  She waited, her expression impassive.

  “Tehura, all through that race I kept thinking of you. As I was going along, I kept looking at the cliff ahead and telling myself it was you. As I got nearer, it even began to resemble you. I mean it. There was a rounded overhang above, and that became your breasts. There was an indentation in the cliff side, and it became your navel. And then below, there was in that cliff, there was a kind of—” He stopped. “I told you it was crazy.”

  “It is not crazy.”

  “All I could think as I swam was that I’ve got to get to her first, before anyone else does, and if I do, if I reach her, ascend her, she is mine.” He caught his breath. “I almost made it.”

  “You swam well,” she said. “You need not be ashamed. I admired you.”

  He moved again, to be closer to her. “Then you’ve got to tell me this—do you admire me as much as Huatoro?”

  “I cannot speak of that. He is stronger than you. He is younger. You are weaker in our ways, and sometimes strange to me. But this I admire—you came to our ways because of me—you did everything, even the wrong, to show me you were worthy of us and me. This I admire. In your country, I know, you have great mana. Now, for me, you have it in my country, also.”

  “I can’t tell you how wonderful that makes me feel, Tehura.”

  “It is true,” she said simply. “You asked how I felt toward you beside Huatoro. To be honest, there is one more thing I must say.” She considered it, and after a moment she said it. “Huatoro loves me seriously,” she said. “This is important for a woman.”

  Impulsively, Marc took her hand. “For God’s sake, Tehura, you know I love you, too—why, yesterday—”

  “Yesterday,” she repeated, and withdrew her hand. “Yes, I will speak of yesterday. You tried to remove my skirt, to own my body with your body. I do not speak against that. It was all right, even though, when it happened, I had not yet the feeling for your body. What I speak of now is not that alone. Huatoro’s love is that, of course, but it is more, much more.”