“Would you care to dance?” he said.
“If you like. I’m not very good, though.”
“Neither am I. I can only manage the simplest steps. If the orchestra gets off on a mambo or anything like that, I’ll have to capitulate.”
They stood up and threaded their way among tables to the dance floor and began to dance. He held her loosely, their bodies brushing lightly, and she was grateful for this. Neither did he try to talk with her, and she was grateful for this too. She moved gracefully, following his lead with ease, but in her grace there was a kind of paradoxical rigidity, as if it developed from the movement of her body as a unit and not from a harmony of parts. When the music ended, they returned to the table and found Carl beginning on his salad.
“Thank you,” she said to Avery.
“Not at all. It was my pleasure.”
Which was not true. He had obviously not enjoyed the dance and had only asked her out of courtesy. She recognized this and was not in the least disturbed by it.
They sat down and began eating their own salad. After a while the waiter brought the pompanos on a little cart and boned them beside the table and poured melted butter over them. Carl had ordered a bottle of sauterne. The waiter poured the sauterne and served the pompanos and went away. The sauterne was mediocre, Lisa thought, but the pompano was very good. It worked, however, against the lift. As a kind of depressant. She was beginning to feel imperiled, her assurance slipping, and she wished for another drink. As a drink, the sauterne was unsatisfactory. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and wished for a strong daiquiri.
“Won’t you reconsider your condition?” Carl said. “About the check, I mean.”
Avery shook his head. “No. I insist on the terns of the agreement.”
In response to a signal, the waiter brought the check and left it on the table on a small tray. Avery picked up the check and examined it and put it back on the tray with a bill. He always tipped about fifteen percent and knew that the bill would just about cover it. His ability to compute rapidly in his head was something he was secretly proud of, and at the same time he was secretly ashamed of the pride. It was such a little thing, after all, to feel so strongly about.
“How about a drink on the terrace?” he said.
“No, thanks.” Carl pushed his chair back. “I’m pretty tired, really. Guess I’m not fully recovered from the pneumonia. I think I’ll go up to bed, if you’ll excuse me. Perhaps I’ll read for a while.”
He was clearly making no impromptu excuse. His tiredness was evident in the ravishments of his face, the ruts and shadows and gray flesh, and even in the quality of his voice, which had developed a soft windiness, each word expelled with an effort on a slight burst of breath. Standing, he brushed a hand over his thin, fair hair. Avery stood too and helped Lisa.
“Must you run off too?” he said. “Could I interest you in another daiquiri?”
She did not want to remain alone with him, but on the other hand she wanted the drink very badly. She said that she would stay because the drink and the company seemed in present circumstances to be concomitants.
“If it’s all right with you,” she said to Carl.
“Of course. I want you to enjoy yourself.”
He looked at her in a way that seemed to suggest a significance under the surface of his words that was vastly greater than their literal meaning, and she thought, after he had said good-night and was walking away, that he had meant to be subtly compelling, that he was actually urging a conversion from aberrance to orthodoxy. She wondered if he understood the enormity of such a conversion, the perils entailed, and she was sorry for him and frightened for herself, and again she was conscious of a dry inner weeping.
“I would like that drink very much,” she said.
They went into the bar and got the drinks and carried them out onto the terrace. The beach and the ocean were bright in the moon, and on the bright beach between her and the bright ocean were the appropriate bright people. Washed in moonlight, they were like characters in a phantasy. They were not real, she thought. They did things to one another and with one another and were very gay in their phantasy world, and they filled her, in spite of their quality of unreality, with fear and a conviction of proximate personal disaster. She had completely lost her recent assurance, and she wished suddenly and bitterly that she had stayed in Midland City with Bella. With Bella there was no security and no salvation, but there was at least the semi-peace of acceptance and submission.
She finished her daiquiri quickly and said, “I am tireder than I thought. I think I had better go upstairs after all.”
“Must you really?”
“I think I had better.”
“In that case, I’ll see you to the elevator.”
“No. Please don’t bother. I thank you very much for everything.”
“Not at all.”
“Well, good-night, then.”
In unconscious conformity to accepted ritual, she held out a hand, and he accepted it briefly, and she was aware again of the dry, hard inoffensiveness of his touch. Turning, she crossed the terrace and the lobby inside and went up in the elevator. In her room, she undressed and wished for another drink and thought that she would remember to buy a bottle to keep in the room tomorrow. Lying in bed, she could not see the bright sand and water below, but she could hear the roar of the surf, and the sound without the sight had a mood of its own and its own effect upon the mind, and after a while she thought of a phrase she must have read somewhere at some time: the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world. The words had the quality of poetry, and they repeated themselves in her mind, but she could not remember where they came from or who had written them, and eventually she went to sleep.
SECTION 3
Down the beach a fat woman was sitting in a canvas chair under a large umbrella. The chair and the umbrella were matching pieces with alternating stripes of crimson and yellow. The woman was reading a book through the dark lenses of a pair of sunglasses, and every once in a while she would look up from the book and lift the glasses a little and stare out under them at a small girl who was playing in the sand about fifteen feet away between her and the water. The child was a skinny little thing with an incredible number of points and sharp edges. She had sparse red hair, a very light shade of red, almost pink, and it had been curled to make it look thicker than it was, but the effect had been only to make it look frizzled and brittle and no thicker at all. She was building little mounds of sand to represent buildings and tracing a path among the mounds to represent a road, and she was obviously bored with it and wishing for something more exciting to do. Sometimes she would stop what she was doing and look down the slope of the beach to the water, and then she would turn and look up the slope of the beach to the woman, but every time she looked at the woman, the woman was reading, or pretending to read, and the child would return to the buildings and road. Her imagination could instill no reality in them. They simply bored her, and what she really wanted was to go swimming in the ocean.
After quite a while the child got to her feet and walked up the beach to the woman and stood looking at her. She had learned from experience that this was an almost infallible technique in securing attention, and that the person so stared at would eventually respond, though not always in a way to be desired. The woman continued to look at her book, obviously trying to ignore the child, but signs of irritation were quickly apparent in a tic-like twitching of one corner of her mouth and in a turning of pages much more rapidly than they could possibly have been read. Conceding defeat, she lay the book face down in her lap and lifted the dark sunglasses, staring back at the child. She had difficulty sometimes in believing that this thin, homely girl was actually her daughter, had actually been conceived and nourished and issued in and by her own lush body, and if it had not been for a memory of pain that she
had vowed would never be repeated she would have discounted the possibility entirely. Was it possible, she often wondered, that they had mixed things up in the hospital nursery?
“Yes, darling?” she said.
Her voice was heavy with imposed patience. The impossible child stared at her solemnly and kicked sand. “May I go swimming now?” she said.
“No, darling. You know I won’t permit you to go swimming by yourself. You might be drowned.”
“You could come with me.”
“Not now, darling. Perhaps later.”
“That’s what you said a long time ago.”
“It wasn’t a long time ago. It only seems like it.”
“Well, that’s the same thing. It’s the way things seem that’s important.”
“Please, darling. Don’t argue.”
“I’d like very much to go swimming. I wouldn’t drown. I’d stay in the shallow water.”
“No, darling. You know how Mother worries.”
The woman lowered the sunglasses over her eyes and her eyes to the book. She stared at the open pages, comprehending nothing, conscious of the girl staring at her. After another minute, the girl turned and walked away, and the woman sighed with relief. The symbols on the pages resumed their assigned meaning, establishing relationship with one another, and she began to read.
The girl returned to the place where she had been, playing in the sand. Deliberately, with one naked foot, she leveled the buildings and obliterated the road. Turning, she looked up the beach at the man who was lying; there in the sun on his back with one arm bent up and over to protect his eyes. The man had come there about twenty minutes ago and had lain down and had been lying there without moving ever since. She wondered if he was asleep. If he went to sleep in the hot sun, he might be badly burned. He looked nice. He was not very young, but on the other hand neither was he very old, which was quite apparent in spite of the gray in his hair just over his ears. His body was slender and lightly tanned and didn’t have any ugly overlap of flesh at the belt of his swimming trunks. She wondered if he would be willing to talk with her if she were to go up and introduce herself. Quite apart from that, however, it was possibly her duty to go and see if he were actually asleep and in danger of being badly burned. She threw a look over her shoulder at her mother and then walked up to where the man was lying. She stood looking down at him, and she began to think that the technique was not going to work for once, that the man was actually asleep, because it took him such a very long time to respond.
Eventually, however, he did. He stirred and lowered his arm and opened his eyes and looked up at her, and she waited patiently to see if he was going to be annoyed or indifferent or friendly. As it turned out, he didn’t seem to be any of those things. He seemed merely curious.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she said. “My name is Eugenie.”
“Is it? Mine’s Avery.”
“Were you asleep?”
“No. I was just lying with my eyes closed.”
“I thought you might be asleep. You hadn’t moved for so long, I mean. It’s dangerous to sleep in the sun.”
“I know. It was kind of you to be worried about it.”
“Well, to tell the truth, I wasn’t. Not very, anyhow. I just thought you might be willing to talk with me.” He sat up, brushing the sand off his shoulders with one hand. Taking this as an invitation, or at least a kind of concession, she sat down in the sand facing him.
“Why do you want to talk?” he said.
“Because I’m bored.”
“Bored? I didn’t think girls your age ever got in than condition.”
“Well, you’re wrong. I’m very frequently bored.”
“That’s too bad. Can’t you find anything to do?”
“What I really want to do is go swimming.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
“Because my mother won’t let me. She’s a terrible coward about the water. She’s afraid I may be drowned.”
“That isn’t very likely if you stay in shallow water.”
“I know. That’s what I tell her, but it doesn’t do any good. She said she might go with me later, but she probably won’t. She always says that just to get me to stop asking, but she hardly ever does. She doesn’t like the water.”
“Is that your mother under the umbrella?”
“Yes. Reading the book.”
At that moment the woman looked up and lifted the sunglasses. Missing the girl, she sat up suddenly. “Eugenie,” she called.
The girl turned her head in the direction of the voice. “Here I am, Mother.”
“You mustn’t bother the gentleman.”
“I’m not bothering. He said he would like to talk.” This wasn’t quite the truth, and she looked quickly at Avery from the corners of her eyes to see if he would support her in the small lie, and was relieved to see that he was looking at her mother and nodding his head.
“It’s quite all right,” he called.
Satisfied, the woman settled back in her chair again. She lowered the glasses and lifted the book. The girl turned back to Avery.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Not at all.”
“It wasn’t quite true, you know. You didn’t actually say you would like to talk.”
“Didn’t I? I want to, just the same. I guess I was getting bored myself.”
“Do you get bored frequently?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes.”
“I do. I get bored very frequently. Are you married?”
“No.”
“Neither is Mother.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“She was married once but isn’t any longer. She’s divorced.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Do you think so? I don’t. I live part time with her and part time with Father. It makes things a little more interesting. It’s not so boring when you change off.”
“Where does your father live?”
“In Baltimore. That’s in Maryland. My mother lives there too, but not with my father. They’re divorced.”
“I know. You told me that.”
“I have a bad habit of repeating myself. Mother says I do, and I guess it’s so. Why aren’t you married?”
“I guess I just never found a girl who would have me.”
She looked at him judicially, her head cocked to one side.
“I don’t believe that’s the reason at all. You’re very good-looking you know.”
“Well, I didn’t know, as a matter of fact. Thank you for telling me.”
“Do you intend to get married?”
He was quiet for a long time, looking beyond her and far out across the glittering water. She was afraid for a minute that she had offended him. Her mother often told her that she was far too inquisitive. She did not want to offend him because she would then have to go back to being bored, and she wished there were a way to retract the question, but of course it was too late, just as it was almost always too late to do anything about something you’d put your foot in. She was vastly relieved when he laughed quietly and did not seem to be offended after all.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said.
“When?”
“I really haven’t decided. I haven’t even asked anyone. Soon, perhaps.”
“I don’t ever expect to get married myself.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because I don’t suppose anyone will ever want me. I’m too plain.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, if you wouldn’t, it’s just because you’re kind. It’s true, however. I’m very plain, but I’ve learned to accept it. I’ve even learned to like it, rather. Bein
g plain has advantages, you know. People don’t expect so much of you.”
“How old are you?”
“Ten. Why?”
“I just wondered. To tell the truth, I think a great deal should be expected of you. For ten, you’re pretty precocious.”
“Precocious? What does that mean?”
“It means that you act older than your age.”
“Oh. My father has said the same thing, only he didn’t use that particular word. Would you care to go swimming?”
“I thought your mother wouldn’t let you go.”
“That was alone. I’m sure she’d allow it if you went too. Then she wouldn’t have to take me later, you see. She hates going into the water.”
“All right, then. You run over and ask, just to be certain.”
The girl got up and went over to her mother, and Avery stood and watched the sequence of small actions between the two of them, the girl standing and waiting for attention, the mother lifting her eyes and lowering her book and glancing quickly, after listening for a moment, in his direction. Finally, the short nod of her head that signified assent, the relieved retreat to the book.
The girl returned and said, “I told you. It’s perfectly all right.”
“Good. I’ll race you to the water.”
She turned and ran down across the sand on thin, stem-like legs, and he followed more slowly, letting her stay ahead. When she reached the water, she went straight in, throwing her negligible weight against massive fluid resistance, and he increased his speed, catching up with her when the water was already above her waist.
“Can you swim?” he said.
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