by Alex Austin
Whenever Mrs. Orlovski would be moved to speak of the captain, it was always Jean who would turn the conversation another way simply by making some sort of mention of Mr. Buvelo. Sometimes he would even go so far as to imitate the good gentleman. Jean would blow out his cheeks, get up and squat himself down just a bit to simulate a tiny fat man, which Mr. Buvelo was, and then he would imitate Mr. Buvelo’s voice with such amazing accuracy that Mrs. Orlovski would always rush one hand to her bosom and cry out, “Oh, dear God!”
Mrs. Orlovski always made a great show of protest whenever Jean or Sygen joked with her about Mr. Buvelo. But both her children knew perfectly well that she enjoyed this little game they played with her. She not only enjoyed it, as Sygen pointed out one day to her brother, she also looked forward to it.
“It gives her a chance to talk about him,” Sygen had said. And Jean had said, “He sounds like a man who must smile when he makes love.”
But now Jean was wobbling about and exclaiming, “Dear Mrs. Orlovski, how very fine you look today.”
Mrs. Orlovski blushed as she always did and said, “Jean, you sit down and finish your dinner.”
But Jean continued wobbling about the kitchen, never bumping into anything—a fact that always surprised strangers as soon as they realized he was blind; he could walk about the house with all the assurance of a man with eyes, never bumping into furniture and somehow always seeming to know exactly where he was in any room.
“Dear Mrs. Orlovski,” Jean continued in the voice of Mr. Buvelo, “you grow younger every single day. I tell you it’s a miracle. One summer I’ll come back and find you turned again into a girl of twenty. Yes, yes. . . .” And here he patted his stomach lightly with both palms in exactly the way Sygen had described the action to him.
Jean went on with his imitation, but as always, whenever Jean became Mr. Buvelo, Mrs. Orlovski would be carried back to memories of the real Mr. Buvelo and these memories were always kind moments in her heart.
Mr. Buvelo, as Jean had pointed out in his imitation, was a short fat man who sometimes looked more like a child’s toy than a man. He was a jolly fellow who always had something to laugh at, telling excellent stories in all sorts of dialects, even commenting with sharp good humor on the happenings of any day or the world news itself. In these comments, it became apparent that Mr. Buvelo thought of the world as a marvelous place that had been turned into the scene for a grand comedy with the outrageous coming of man. He loved people, but thought most of them to be fools and extremely dangerous when enough of them gathered together in the name of almost any particular cause. “Wouldn’t it have been lovely,” he had said once, “if man had conceived of God in the image of a swallow or goldfish, instead of trying to make him as small as we are.” Only last summer, Mr. Buvelo had said, when someone had started a very earnest discussion about the terrible integration issue in the South, “I believe very firmly in segregation.” Several guests in the room had gasped or stared up at him indignantly when he said this. But he was quick to pull their solemn beards with, “I think all us human beings should stick together.” With this, his solemn judges had laughed in embarrassment. And he had ended that evening by announcing to all present in the parlor that man had no real hope of survival until he became wise enough to elect real clowns into the highest offices of government.
Mr. Buvelo always dressed completely in white during the summertime. He wore a white straw hat, white suit and shirt and shoes, and on Sundays he even wore a white tie, though on weekdays his tie might be black or pale blue or green or almost any other color. He was the sort of moon-faced Italian one imagines singing under windows in Naples, but he had been born in the United States. His grandfather, however, would have fit the singing description perfectly, since he had been born in Naples and had been something of a singer, having aimed for opera as a youth and having settled fairly successfully for singing popular songs of the day in many of the better cafés of Naples and Rome.
Mr. Buvelo still talked bits and pieces of Italian, and his English bore faint traces of an accent. Having heard so many beautiful stories about his grandfather when he himself had been a boy, Mr. Buvelo often got up to sing an Italian song or two in the evenings, accompanying himself with heavy, monotonous chords on the upright in the recreation room.
Since Mr. Buvelo’s voice was very close to being absolutely atrocious, guests had often complained to Mrs. Orlovski about that little fat man’s simply terrible voice. But Mrs. Orlovski was always quick to defend Mr. Buvelo and point out to whoever had complained that the house was certainly big enough so that they did not have to listen to him anyway. When she rather liked a guest, she would not be so stern; she would say, “Well, we do like to see our guests express themselves. Perhaps you’d like to sing, Mrs. Novik. Or play something on the piano. . . .”
Now, sitting there, with some of her dinner still on her plate, Mrs. Orlovski was not recalling Mr. Buvelo’s singing or his white suit or the funny things he said in the parlor after dinner. Mrs. Orlovski was remembering how very gentle Mr. Buvelo was whenever she would go to his room late at night when all the other guests had retired and he would make love to her. Mrs. Orlovski had not had very much experience with men, but she could not imagine a gentler lover than Mr. Buvelo. In his arms she felt like a bird safe in her nest.
One night when they were finished making love, Mrs. Orlovski had said, “I’m almost glad for the winters, my dear. I can go over our summers slowly, so carefully that nothing is ever lost. I think people must lose so much—they never seem to have any time to remember what’s happened to them. But I remember our summers so completely, they seem to turn into years.”
Jean was just saying, “. . . a little song for you, Mrs. Orlovski.” And then he launched into a terribly offkey rendition of an Italian song about boats sailing on the grass, confusing as he usually did in his imitations the meanings of various Italian words he thought he remembered accurately.
As soon as Jean started singing, Mrs. Orlovski looked up, cleared her mind, and said, “All right now, young man. That’s quite enough. You sit down and finish your dinner.”
But Jean kept at it and Mrs. Orlovski could not help laughing softly at her son’s act. And even Sygen leaned back and laughed.
three
Jean heard the door open and knew even before she started walking into his room that it was Sygen.
He heard her close the door quietly, then cross slowly to his bed in her bare feet.
She whispered, “Jean . . . ?” as she often did to see whether or not he was asleep. He thought for an instant he would not answer, that he would lie there in silence, pretend he was asleep. He did not realize until later, the next day, waking to remember it like dreaming, that he had never before even thought to play such a trick on her.
“Jean . . . ?”
Then he said, “I didn’t hear you come in. I must have been dozing.”
“I’m sorry if I woke you,” she said.
He wondered why, after speaking, she did not come directly to him as she always did. He could tell from her voice that she was standing next to his bed, but she did not sit down, did not lie down beside him.
“No . . . I wasn’t really asleep yet,” he said. He moved over closer to the wall to make room for her, but still she stood there and for a time both of them were silent. He was not sure whether or not he was glad she had come to him this night. His body seemed to draw itself up inside him, like one reflected image merging into another that is to be seen in a still more distant mirror.
“Do you mind my coming in tonight?” Sygen asked him finally in a voice that sounded as if, for some odd reason, she was standing with her back to him.
Jean was surprised, even a little hurt and ashamed, by her question. She had never asked him this before and he had never heard the slightest semblance of fear in her voice. She would come in, remove her robe, then lie down beside him in the bed; it was always as simple as that.
“Jean . . . do you . . .”
“Mind?”
“Do you?”
“Of course not,” he said.
“I thought . . .”
“Why should I . . .” But before he could finish, he felt her sitting on the bed, settling beside him as gently as a gull’s feather settles down out of the wind upon rock or sand or the body of a sleeping man. She placed a finger to his lips. She said, “I wanted so very much to come in to you.”
Jean could not understand why Sygen was changed so on this night. It was as if a stranger were wearing the mask of her face, but did not know how the hands moved or what words to say. Their being together had always been a continuation of childhood games they had played. Their world was one in which skies were hung with shields and rich banners and wild gorgeous tales they told each other in the dark were always true. Theirs was a world of kingdoms like sea and night and the tide-filled moon and laughter that sprang forth out of them fresh as seasons blown by a swift wind. Of all things most dear, laughter had been the rule, their galaxy of wonders, the great law of their kingdom. They had always laughed so easily together. Jean had often thought, “Why I can make her laugh at anything.” And it was true. Whatever passion their bodies had come to learn, one from the other, had always grown so thoroughly and simply out of joy that neither one had ever had a single thought of anything unhappy ever happening to either of them, especially when they were together. The world they lived in was a world they made completely themselves, and they would not make shame or grief or guilt or loss or any other dark color of the moon a part of it. Their bodies, in those first years when they had discovered the sweet, limitless beginnings of passion, had been like toys that had done no more than replace kites and dolls and the grand castles they had built together in the sand. Their bodies had found each other as wild birds come to a single nest to share that resting place in high winds for the night to come. The first time Jean had taken her, Sygen had cried when they were done, and when he had asked her why she was crying, she had said, “Was I really crying?” And she had placed a hand to her eyes to feel her own tears as if they were the tears of another.
Jean heard the wind at his windows, the sound of the sea outside, coming to land again, old patient magician who knows it will take centuries to perform his last, most terrible and secret trick.
Sygen sat there a long time and did not speak. The dark grew thick with this silence, heavy, dangerous. One hand rested on Jean’s shoulder. Sygen thought of telling Jean how she had seen the old man on the beach. The wind smelled of seaweed: she recalled this even before the old man’s battered face. The image had remained with her for days, and she had not told him. The words were poised, but not spoken. She always said something else instead. Her silence disturbed her because she had always told Jean everything that ever happened to her, and he had (she knew) always done the same. Their lives were lived in common, one part of the sea and another, tides breaking in, rocks reaching through, rainbows of fish catching a thousand suns, yet one sea: it was that way. There were times she thought she could, with no more effort than breathing takes, easily turn herself into Jean if she so wished, their lives were that closely bound, one to the other. A true mirror would cast back but one face of them both. Always she had told him her most intimate secrets, often wishing she had a secret that was too unbearable to tell so she could tell it to him. And now she found herself reluctant, pausing so awkwardly, to even speak of a poor old wild man who sits on the beach, eating raw fish or sucking the insides out of blue shells.
“Shall I stay with you awhile?” she asked him finally. And Jean smiled in the dark, reaching to take hold of her hand, pressing it to his lips, and he said, “Why are you asking me a question like that?”
Sygen fell upon him, pressed her mouth down hard on his, fought tears she could feel burn at her eyes. She said, “Jean . . . I missed you so all day.”
He said, “Now stop being foolish.”
“Not foolish . . .”
“Yes, foolish,” he said. “Very foolish. Now come here,” he added.
Sygen smiled nervously, as with a new lover, against his mouth. Her body cried to feel his hands on her shoulders first, then her breasts as she rolled just a little away from him so he could touch her this way.
Without another word, she stood up, removed her woolen robe. She had nothing on underneath. She let the robe fall to the floor at her feet, and then she lay down beside Jean, pressing her naked body in slowly against him, arms first to touch, her breasts reaching out for his chest, her legs curved knowingly into his.
Jean found her mouth again, and when he did Sygen moaned deeply, a sea sound really, as if she were in pain. Her arms clutched him furiously and suddenly to her and then her mouth, searching without shame in the dark, reached for his body, found it in an instant of shock that stripped the very skin from her longing, and she loved him in a way she never had before, slowly, with great care and with more wonder and too, for the first time, with fear. She loved him with a strength like the sea’s own depth, like the wind spending itself over seas that can never be crossed.
Jean lay there, his body a tide of fire, his mind clutched by cold fear and a new nakedness in his heart. He had never known his sister to be like this. There was something about the way she loved him now that made him feel ashamed and sorry and he did not know why. It was as if she were trying to return something he had stolen. Something had fled the room, something that could have been what he imagined the light to be.
Sygen on this night found ways of loving him he had hardly even imagined before. Her passion was endless and so completely without shame, it became terrible in its hunger, desperate in the ways it sought to find some ending to the dark.
When they were finished, all life highly suspended for an instant, to come hurtling back down again into still flesh, she kissed his mouth gently, barely touching his lips, and then, silent as a figure crossing a ruin at dawn, she left the room. And though he could not hear her crying, Jean imagined tears in her eyes and he remembered how very different it had been only that afternoon when he and Miss Smith had been together on the beach.
four
Sygen, in her own bed, cried softly into her pillow. As with a virgin come for the first time from her lover, the world suddenly became no more than the dark about her head, the throbbing of her heart in this dark as if the night itself were the last living thing on earth. Sygen felt her body cold beneath fresh sheets, beneath blankets that had seen her grow and felt her flesh come slowly to life over the years. Sygen wondered what had become of all the laughter she had known. The wind blows one way, then the next, but always returns; now it seemed the wind had finally found a place to go and whatever was to be carried away in its grasp this night would not be blown back ever again.
Mrs. Orlovski, it must be said, snored quite loudly whenever she slept on her back and she snored this night, her mouth a little open so she looked a bit like a cawking parrot in the dark. But her dream was of many silver plates lined up on a long table and on every one of these special plates was a portion of her special chicken.
Pojo sat in the dark and by pale moonlight on the sand examined several of his cherished photographs.
A rat had come down to the beach from his home under the gray house and had found a newly laid terrapin egg. Sniffing and squeaking, the rat nimbly pierced the shell and sucked out the fresh yolk. The rat then saw one of the young terrapins heading for the edge of the sea and quickly seized the baby in its gleaming teeth and carried it back under the house where it would feast on the bleeding small creature in peace.
And Miss Smith slept soundly and had no dream.
five
Jean laughed loudly when Miss Smith told him about Captain Orlovski.
She stared at him in amazement. Careless gulls walked by close enough to touch. She could not understand why he should laugh at the memory of his father.
But finally, when he pulled the laughter back inside him, when it hung silent at the edge of his mouth, painted
there, he said, “So she’s been telling you her stories too.”
“You mean your mother?” Miss Smith asked. He confused her.
Jean said, “That’s her favorite, that my father was a bold”— with his voice taking a grand tone now—“bearded sea captain.” He smiled, then the laugh broke out of him, his face looking for an instant as if he had not expected to laugh, but it lasted a long time, during which she was more than confused, bewildered, even though she was trying to be amused herself.
Finally Jean said, through faint last bits of laughter, “You see, I come from a long, long line of kings.”
“Oh?”
“Of course.”
“I had no idea.”
“Why we’ve conquered lands that existed long before China,” he said.
“Then I feel honored.”
“But my father was a bank clerk,” Jean said, turning to her, letting his voice slow down as if to better feel the words as he said them.
“A bank clerk?” She seemed delighted by this surprising news.
Jean nodded. “My father was a bank clerk who died when he was bitten one fine Sunday morning by a dog whose name was Samuel. One of those very obscure and complicated infections set in. The doctor did all sorts of things, but none of them worked; and two weeks later, also on a Sunday morning, he died.”
Miss Smith did not know really whether to be amused or saddened by Jean’s story. It was a sad story, to be sure. But he told it with a comic flare that confused her.
“He was a tiny man whose suits were always too tight for him,” Jean said. “I think he had only one great moment in his entire life.” He paused here, rolled over so that he lay on his back, and his eyes were wide open as if they could stare for an endless time without closing into the cold light of the December sun.