by Alex Austin
The beach stretched on to an end she could not see, standing safe by the window there, but in this terrible danger that was like the dark. He was beyond the choppy waters where you could see whitecaps break up splendidly into sunlight, almost in flight, as if they were made of trapped wings of fallen gulls. Her eyes went to the beach, to that endless sand, a place of waste, desolate as the earth would be were it to become forgotten. The sand stretching to the sea and beyond it was like that. And by the window, she thought: How young we once were. The words were dead leaves turned golden falling through her.
Where he swam now the water seemed to be so very calm, not like an ocean at all, but like some inland sea or lake where there are no tides, where somehow everything is as still as a secret that never has to be told.
On the beach they sat a long time in silence. She was afraid first that there was no more love. But then she thought: Will we ever forget so much love?
“He’ll be a child in this same place where we were children,” Jean said.
Sygen nodded, felt the wind, the sea spray, without speaking, on this old beach.
“But we’re no longer children.”
“No.”
“Nor even lovers really.”
“Not that either.”
“But we do love.”
She said, “Yes.” But she thought for the first time how women must say yes. She thought this and said the word again as if she were trying to learn it because children never had to say yes, it was what they were.
By the window, gazing down, she admired her brother’s strength. If he so wished, it seemed he could swim right out across the sea. They had often joked about this. But then they had been children, and the yes she said now was what time had stolen from them.
They played a game where he, Jean, was the great sea captain setting out to discover lands no other man had ever seen. But since they had no ship, he would say that his own body was all the ship he needed. Then he would swim out beyond the breakers, beyond white caps of waves, swim to an impossible distance, remain there a long time, then return to shore, and when he came running up out of the sea, it was always to a new land he came and together they named these strange lands as they would name children or only a child.
“She’s going to tell them my husband——”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I know. She told me too.”
“You didn’t laugh.”
“No.”
“Let her tell it that way.”
He said, “Why not? Let it be Africa if that’s what she wants.”
“Jean, you’ll teach him to swim as you do,” she said. “You’ll take him out there with you.”
“Because we’ll always be here now,” he said. “You know that. We both do. Once we were here because there was no other place. Now we’ll be here because there is that place, that other place.”
He was too far out now and still swimming. She told him gently to turn around. But her words did not reach past the glass of the window.
She said, “Jean . . .” She said, “Come back.”
The first time he came to her, after that night in the rain, after telling about the child, he had come in the dark. She heard the door open and close. She heard his footsteps. They came slowly, not slowly as a blind man must walk, but slow in the way of a man who finds himself suddenly in a place he had not truly expected to come to.
She lay in the bed under the fresh sheet and the worn blanket. She had on a white nightgown. She always slept naked. Her mother laid out the gown every night across the bed. Sygen put it on to go out into the hall or sometimes, if she came early to her room, to sit by the window, to walk about setting things to order, searching absently in drawers whose contents she knew as well as the sight of her own face in the mirror. But before climbing into bed, she’d take off the nightgown, throw it over a chair so carelessly that more often than not in the morning she’d find it on the floor.
But this night she wore the gown in bed, felt it drawn up, tangled a little around her knees.
He stood by the bed for several moments and did not speak. She only waited, not knowing really what she felt because she felt fear and never before having known fear with him, she had no real name with which to define and so know what she felt.
Then he came to the bed, came to where she felt first his thighs against it. He was standing still. Neither spoke. The nightgown now seemed tangled like strangling all the way up her body to her throat where the white button was fastened. She unfastened it. She reached out to find his hand. He still had on all his clothes, and this surprised her. He let her take his hand, let her draw it across the worn blanket to the edge of white sheet in the dark.
Then she pushed the blanket down. She removed the nightgown clumsily since it was a task she was not accustomed to. “She’s told me,” he said.
She said only, “Come here.”
He did. The nightgown lay crumpled on the floor. His clothes lay on top of it, sleeve arms twisted like broken marionette shadows, the trouser legs in an attitude of dancing.
He lay down beside her and their bodies touched. But they did not come together. She was terrified first. A huge emptiness in her body seemed to be growing as if all that she was, had ever been, was suddenly falling back away into that emptiness that was without end, that nothing could fill any more. Slowly, he found her mouth. His kiss was much harder than it had ever been. His hands on her breasts felt like stone. His thighs grasped at her legs as if to keep the rest of him from falling from a great height. His kisses became harder and harder against her mouth, then her neck and breasts. But it was not any of this that struck terror in her heart. It was him lying back suddenly dead away from her, as if he had become the very personification of the emptiness in her body; his flesh was stiff, helpless, still warm as it had ever been, but she had the idea that at any instant it was going to turn ice cold, colder than any corpse could be.
She lay there terrified first with no words to say, with nothing to do, for she had never really imagined such a thing could happen.
It seemed an endless time, but it was not.
She’s told me. The words came to her. She said, Come here.
It took only that long.
And then she turned her mouth and body to him with a gentleness that made him more than lover to her.
And he did not turn cold beside her. Lasting only that long, it lasted forever, but it was over the way darkness is over even though we know darkness never ends.
Her mouth found his mouth. She offered the ebbing emptiness in her body to him as one might offer a holy sacrifice that even the gods forbid. And then his body came back to her, alive, and what they did was fierce and full of the dark now, no longer the sunlight. It nearly tore them both open the way pale anemones would break open great rocks at the sea’s edge, and they were lovers again as if they had stood in a high place and suddenly the earth itself had dropped from under them.
He came to her again even before that night was over. The morning burned slowly like a procession across the windows of her room with them still together, so he had to rush barefooted back to his own room. She put the nightgown on as she never had before and slept only a short time with the cotton tangled around her body from knees to the white button at her throat.
She walked back from the window. Nights had become so long and still, days came more quickly than ever before. The sun was becoming warm again.
She told him that at breakfast the morning after that night. But it was her mother who answered, “Yes. And soon the guests will be here,” she said.
They talked and finished breakfast. She helped her mother with the dishes while he had his second cup of coffee. Her mother started talking about how exciting it would be to have all the summer guests back again.
She turned to look at her brother. But he was gone. She continued with the dishes. Her mother rambled and laughed and let the water splash merrily as if children were playing in it.
Then she heard a crashing so
und from the parlor. Both she and her mother stopped what they were doing and rushed to the kitchen door.
In the parlor they saw Jean feeling his way about, his right hand out cautiously in front of him, fingers stiff, reaching for tables and chairs to mark his path, and when Sygen saw this her heart fell dead inside her, she felt tears push at her eyes, grow, flowing over the long distance of what she was as waves come in to find the shore. The dish towel fell from her hand to the floor.
Mrs. Orlovski wiped her hands down on her apron and set about picking up pieces of the vase Jean had knocked from the round table. “Oh dear,” she muttered. “You’ve broken the red vase.”
Jean stopped where he was. Sygen could see the frightened look of his empty eyes as he turned first one way, then the other.
“You’ve changed the furniture about,” he said by way of embarrassed apology to his mother.
Mrs. Orlovski, on her hands and knees, sighed and said, “Why, nothing’s been changed, dear.”
Sygen stared down in absolute horror at her mother when she realized that she had no idea as to what had happened to her own son.
Then Sygen turned to Jean and in an old teasing voice they both knew so well, she said, “Clumsy oaf.”
But this time Jean did not smile as he always did when she teased him this way. He said, “Show me where a chair is.”
“Sygen,” Mrs. Orlovski said, looking up.
Sygen went quickly to her brother. She took his arm, led him to the sofa, where he sat down.
“It was such a pretty vase,” Mrs. Orlovski said sadly, surveying the broken pieces in her cupped palms.
Sygen stood back and stared at her brother. She was horrified. She had never really seen him as a blind man before this moment.
Mrs. Orlovski, with the broken pieces collected in her apron, went out into the kitchen to dump them into the garbage. Sygen could hear them clattering into the empty can.
“I’m all right,” Jean said.
Sygen smiled quickly, awkwardly. “I’ve got to finish the dishes,” she said.
He did not answer.
She backed slowly toward the kitchen. He was seated stiffly on the sofa, like a boy waiting for his first date.
“I think there are some vases in the attic,” Mrs. Orlovski said when Sygen picked up a dish from the sink board and started slowly to dry it.
But now, as she stood by her window gazing out on this golden head in the green waves, there was no attic, no house, not even time of day or night, but time that could be present, this now made heavy by past and blind by future and rich by how we juggle the two against the brilliant sky; and there was the sea and whatever clouds touched it and the golden head and the fear that caught at her heart like the vague beginning of the dark when, dreaming in a. familiar room, we suddenly look up and are aware that night has come.
“We’ll hide him away from the summer just as we’ve always hidden from it,” she said.
He said, “And now knowing why we did hide or why we’ll hide him.”
Love, once numberless, had finally been given a number. She knew this too.
“And he’ll know one day too,” she said.
“Yes. He’ll know.”
The words sounded like part of the sea as she heard them, not words spoken by mere mouths.
She dressed quickly. She kept hearing the words as she drew silk over her naked body. She heard them over and over, and she could no longer be sure who had said them. Everything had become part of a story too fantastic to believe when it had happened, but settling with time into the shape of truth, the way the very earth itself once fell out of all emptiness to find its proper orbit amid the vast jungle of stars.
Dressed, she ran down to the beach, ran past her mother’s cry to “Be careful, dear”; knowing her mother would not follow her even to save her from whatever danger the cry had been for.
Sygen stood on the white sand, legs firmly apart, something of earth in her. She watched the golden head and knew from the horror and grief of her own heart how far her brother might be going and so she called to him over the breaking waves to come back, but knew he could not hear her. She called again, but waves broke in their eternal whispering that was louder than any cry of earth could ever be.
“Jean . . .” she cried out. She lifted her hand and waved to him, waving him back, telling him this way. But then she drew her hand down quickly, shocked, as if she were afraid he would see she had forgotten that he was blind.
She stood there a long time and could not see him. The wind, still edged with winter, but mainly a summer wind now at its core, blew in off the sea, pressed her blue cotton skirt in against her legs. Waves kept pushing up wearily onto the beach, white foam glistaning in the sun, sperm of the universe, then turning gray and filthy as the tide ran out. Gulls flew in slow circles overhead, strutted across the beach, cried, screamed, seemed to come down out of fat clouds, flying right for her eyes.
She could feel life inside her, a heavy sense of it like carrying clouds or sea in the belly, feeling sometimes as when a great stone plunges into the sea. And still that sea, empty and green only to her eyes, seemed to be sucking it out of her flesh with each moment as she stood there and waited and he did not come.
All winters had been alike and then this one had come, and now no winter would ever be the same as any other ever again. Each would become a dream or even only the hunger of a dream preying incessantly on life.
She stood there waiting, as if this were all she had ever done. The sun had a hard glare to it shining off the sea. It made her turn away, a veil having been torn from her eyes, a nerve exposed and raw, whose agony was no more than a question that could not be answered simply because the question itself was an answer spoken softly in her blood like corruption and love and the name of god said by one who does not know there can be a god.
She stood there, walked down to the water’s edge, backed up slowly, moved farther down the shore on gray sand, and then she saw the golden head again. It glittered wildly in the sun as if some ancient treasure had been rocked out of the deep. She felt her face smile even before she knew it was a smile and she called his name, but softly this time, with joy, not with the fear devouring her words even before she spoke them. And she ran past the edge of the sea, broken ends of waves first at her ankles, then unbroken at her knees, soaking the blue cloth, cold, but fresh with life, this new sea.
She watched him come drifting in on the tide, rising, falling, the sun on him like a mark of rank. He did not swim. He lay on his back, let the sea carry him. He looked as if he could very well have been a corpse the tide was bearing back from some other shore. A corpse or a king. Clouds overhead moved slowly in the slow wind.
He drifted in and she walked out even farther. The water reached to her waist. He rolled over and stood up, a tall wave pounding over him, knocking him backward into a somersault, pushing her back too. But she laughed at his turning over in the tide, a green acrobat. She laughed and ran across ends of breakers to him, took his arm, clutching it to her, leaned her face against his shoulder as they walked up in silence to where the dunes began and there they lay down in the sand.
They were silent a long time. She could hear the hard sound of his breathing until it became still and easy.
She spoke first. She said, “You went out so far today.”
He smiled briefly in an exhausted way as if his face had grown old quite suddenly, without his having time to learn how to smile in another way, as old men smile.
“And you got yourself soaking wet,” he said.
“I’ve never seen you out that far,” she said.
“I swam until I thought I had no more strength left,” he said.
“Jean . . .” She pressed her head down tenderly against his wet chest.
“And then . . . then I turned around,” he went on. “I came back.”
“Yes . . .” She flopped over onto her back to watch the sky change around slow clouds. “I’d be much too afraid to go out that
far,” she said.
“I began one summer,” he said. “They were all crowded up in the shallow water.”
“They splash about like elephants trying to swim.”
“I kept knocking against them.”
“So you swam out to where they wouldn’t go. Yes. I remember. I watched you that day too. I stood up on the dunes. They were crowded up on the beach too. So I went back to the dunes and I watched you.”
“Little fish,” he said. “Little fish . . .”
But now we’ll be old, she thought, as he called her this name from such far-off days. Little fish. And she had never before imagined herself old, even becoming old. Not herself or him.
“But they come only for the summer,” he said. “We should be grateful at least for that. Then they always have somewhere else to go.”
“And we belong here,” she said. “You and I. The way the sea and rocks and sand do.”
Jean took her hand without fumbling for it, knowing it lay like a torn flower on the sand beside him.
“How difficult it is to believe things really change as they do,” he said.
But not the sea, she thought, only hearing it now.
“The way we’ve changed,” he said.
Not the sea, she said to herself, as if to find comfort in this, even refuge. And then: It will become a slow horror to us, life, it will; he cannot know yet, but he will know. A slow horror, an enduring agony; and yet still life as the sea is life and the color of gulls against the sky and this wind and being even that much life, alive, it could be hope too and if not hope, then life itself was enough, had to be enough.
She wanted now to give herself to him. She’d never thought of it before. It was like thinking about having to breathe, each movement to be made suddenly part of a long ritual, a savage surrender to gods who cannot be known for a peace that is not even wanted.