Objects of Desire

by Roberta Latow

  ‘How lucky you are, Page. It seems to me I’ve been chasing after the right man all my life. After a while it gets demeaning. Would that I could have been more like you,’ said Sally.

  ‘For me it was different. That chasing after a man for love happened only when I saw Robert and wanted him. I never stopped running after him even after he had married me. Sally’s right, it is demeaning, only I was so stupid in love I never realised it. Sorry for the interruption, Page, do go on.’

  ‘One early-September, I suppose, just about the time you were having babies, Anoushka, and you, Sally, were probably just an innocent Lancashire adolescent, I felt a real need to get away from it all. The glamorous New York, London, Paris life that I would flit in and out of to work on floral commissions, the fun of those cities, my sex life, had somehow slipped into high gear and I needed to distance myself from it all, get back to some basics. I was desperate to be alone, go off by myself and lie down somewhere in the sun. To look at the sea, steep myself in it, swim naked for long distances, do nothing more than empty my mind.

  ‘It was rather a matter of: is this all there is, what my life is always going to be like? As good as it was, as great as it was, I somehow felt that I was missing something, that there had to be more. My world seemed too narrow, small. I knew a Dutch broker for the best pure white tulips you can imagine, and I remember he told me that once he ran away to Greece and the place healed him. He had not known he was sick until he had been healed by the simple life he lived there. It was the best holiday of his life. I called him and he arranged for me to rent a house, one he had seen just a few days before he was leaving the area. He said, it had magic.

  ‘I rented it. It was a primitive little white house with bright blue shutters and a porch with a reed roof for shade. Two rooms, a bed, two chairs, a table. No electricity, oil lamps, the bare bones of a kitchen, set all by itself in the centre of a cove on a white sand beach about twenty feet from the water. A sea that glossy posters promise, clear and clean, and the colour sometimes of emeralds, other times of sapphires twinkling under a hot, hot sun.

  ‘You could reach it only by boat or by scrambling down some steep hills thick with scrubby bushes and covered with olive trees, a few peach trees, several lemon and orange trees all heavy with fruit at the back of the house. The scent of the place was glorious. It smelled of the sea and the sun, wet sand, ripe fruit: lemons and peaches, oranges and figs, olives. A little Eden, and yes there was a kind of magic to the place. It was remote, a very special and secret place. It was on the mainland, the Peloponnesos. If you were to sail a direct line across the water you would arrive at the island of Hydra. It was, however, too far to see with the naked eye.

  ‘It was not an easy climb from the back of the house to the top of the hill and then you had to walk for some distance through more olive groves to the tarmac road that took you to the nearest village large enough to have shops where you could buy supplies. It was still the Greece of old, for the romantics of this world not the cheap package tourist. The owner of my hideaway lived in a larger house about a mile up the beach. He kept a small sailboat anchored two coves from the house, which I had access to.

  ‘I never wore any clothes except at night, when the sun was down and cooler air moved in, and then nothing but a thin cotton batiste sarong. I used to spend hours in the sea, floating with my face up into the sun, swimming out as far as I could and back, diving to the bottom and swimming underwater then up again to float and rest until my energy returned. On to the sand to bake in the sun and then back again to cool off in the water. It was that kind of holiday, simple, without artifice.

  ‘I had been there for about six days. It was unusually hot for that time of year, well into the nineties. I was walking naked out of the sea when I saw him. He was on some rocks several feet above the sand on the promontory that formed one side of the cove. He too was in the nude. I should have been surprised but somehow I wasn’t. His hair was very blond, streaked white in places from the sun. At first sight I thought he was a young boy in his early teens. He had such a young and vulnerable face, incredible brown, soulful eyes. He was lying on his side watching me. Then I saw his was not the body of a young boy. It was the mature body of a virile, exciting man. He had broad, broad shoulders and was very slim. Not at all a muscular body except for his thighs, which looked strong. He had wonderful arms, so strong, and large hands with slender fingers. He looked sensitive, and though not beautiful or particularly handsome he had a male charisma that was almost mesmerising. I thought him a romantic poet, a writer of some sort, a painter. It was the face, so young and bright and yet boyish, innocent even. Or if he wasn’t he wanted to be.

  ‘There was no towel on the beach for me, no robe or shirt to cover myself with. I felt no embarrassment and neither did he. You could see that from the way in which he was looking at me. Instead of walking away from him to the house, I walked towards him and the rocks. It was instinctive. He raised himself first to a sitting position and then stood up. Without haste, he scrambled down. I remember thinking he had fortitude. Those rocks were burning hot under his bare feet and on the sand it was hardly better. He walked towards me. Oh, his smile – slightly crooked, it warmed my heart and was somehow exciting and full of promise.

  ‘I loved his body, found it incredibly sexy. And the way he moved: a walk with a slight rolling gait. I found it difficult to direct my eyes away from his penis. It was flaccid and even in that state large by any standards. He was circumcised and I was transfixed by its beauty. It was incredibly erotic the way it swayed slightly from side to side as he walked, revealing at times a beautiful scrotum. He was like a young god cast down upon the earth, come to play with me. He was thrilling in the same way you would find an early Grecian statue of a young man carved from the finest piece of white marble exciting. So perfect, so god-like, yet innocent.

  ‘I wanted him before he even said hello. And I knew that he wanted me. His eyes were devouring me. I had never seen a man hunger for me in the way this man did. I could imagine him sucking on my nipples, caressing my breasts. He licked his lips and smiled broadly. He was close enough to take my hand in his. He did, and raised it to his lips and kissed it. Still holding it in his, he turned me round to face the water and together we walked into the sea.’

  There was a catch in Page’s voice as she told of her first sight of Oscar, and she had to wipe the corner of one eye. The tears were there but they were not sad tears, merely a mask of immense emotion which was not wasted on her girlfriends. Anoushka reached over and handed her a glass of water. Page took no more than a sip. She could not have stopped telling her story even if she wanted to. Years of silence now ended, it spilled forth like a glorious waterfall.

  ‘The sun burned us from above, the sea cooled us from below, the water caressed us. I remember thinking fancifully that I was being baptised, blessed by something beyond reason or mere faith. He never let go of my hand, not even when the water was over our head. We began to swim, each of us only using one arm. Then finally he released me and we continued to swim together far out from the shore. When we stopped swimming we floated on our backs until we were rested and then he pulled me into his arms. The water was up to our chins. He placed his lips to mine and his kiss was the most gentle I have ever known. His hands caressed my breasts, my hips, my bottom, and he drew me close to him and impaled me on him.

  ‘I was drowning but not in the water – in sexual bliss as he moved me on and off him. He floated on his back with me on top straddling him, he was fucking me by raising and lowering me on and off his rock-hard penis. He was throbbing inside me, holding me very still with one hand while the Aegean waves rolled over us and caressed my breasts, my back, and bottom. Then he spoke to me for the first time.

  ‘ “You’re a gift from God. I’ve been waiting all my life for you.”

  ‘And you know, I knew it was true. And although I didn’t know it before, I knew at that moment that I had all my life been waiting for him to find me. We cam
e together and I had never known sexual intercourse like that ever. That was when the bell tolled for us. Alone in the sea, swimming in our own come, in that remote place we found ourselves. We had left everything behind. Our personae, our lives as we had been living them, even our clothes. All thought of yesterday or tomorrow.

  ‘We stayed together there in that little house, that secret place, for five days and five nights. I had brought some books with me: the Greek Myths, Robert Graves, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Marcel Proust. We read to each other and swam in the sea and ate from the orchard and all of the little food I had in the house. We fished from his caique, that he had sailed from Hydra in and had anchored in the next bay.’

  ‘That same caique that you still have in Hydra?’ asked Sally.

  ‘Yes, the very same one. We sailed along the coast in it and fished for our dinner. We almost never wore clothes, wanting always to take each other whenever sex took our fancy. The more we fucked, the better it got for us. An erotic world opened up for us. We were wholly besotted with one another. The erotic extreme became the norm for us. It was unbelievably physical.’

  At this point Page interrupted herself and asked, ‘This doesn’t embarrass you, my talking so frankly about the sexual impact we had upon each other? If it does I can stop, but there’s no other way I can explain our story.’

  Sex had never been a taboo subject between the women. They had many times talked about it between them, but up to now never as explicitly and always in guarded terms. Now that they had come so far together, they told Page to speak frankly, assuring her they had all at one time or another wanted to be more explicit when confiding in each other.

  So Page did continue. ‘As I said, the physical aspect of our coming together was overwhelming. He had only to look at me and he was lost. You could actually see it in not only his face but every fibre of his body, sense it in his soul. I was all that he could ever want, I excited him beyond all reason. If you think it was any different for me, you’re mistaken.

  ‘Just to look at him at any given moment was to make my heart beat fast. I would look away from him to try and break the spell. Impossible. I would have to look back at him. There was something more than the sensual about him, there was a passionate nature that drew me to him. It was something beatific, a youthful innocence. I fell in love, at once and forever. I’m telling you about our beginnings and what we meant to each other now because I feel exactly the same way about him all these years later.

  ‘Finally we ran out of all supplies in the little house. We put on some clothes. He had a pair of old worn chinos and a white batiste shirt, a pair of leather sandals. We sailed up the coast to the village, dropped anchor and walked from the beach the short distance into the old town. Even with clothes on he had a special kind of charisma that was inexplicable. Men would talk to him, follow us, offer us gifts of food, any help they could. We picked up a trail of children and the women, normally reticent with strangers, would speak to me and ask about him. His Greek was perfect, a joy to hear spoken, a scholar’s Greek, not your average man in the street’s Greek such as I spoke.

  ‘Several days after we had returned from our trip to the village, he told me, “I’ve never loved a woman as I love you. I will never love any other woman as I will love you.” I knew that he was telling me the truth. “Tell me all about you. I want to know everything: what you were like when you were a little girl, how and where you grew up. Your first love, your first sexual experience, the men you loved, the men who loved you. I know there have been many, and I want to know why you never loved them as you love me. I wish that I had been with you from the moment that you were born. I would have liked to have been a part of your skin then as I have become now.”

  ‘I told him my story, he told me his. Incredibly I was neither shocked nor disturbed to find that he was a Roman Catholic priest. It’s difficult to explain how that could be. It was probably because it didn’t affect how we were living together, the way we felt about each other. Whether there was going to be a future for us together or there wasn’t didn’t come into it. We just knew that something had happened to us called love and that we were together and that it would work out. Whatever way it worked out, we were richer and better, more alive for having been together. He told me he had no anxiety about breaking his vow, about loving a woman more than Jesus Christ.

  ‘But having no anxiety about breaking his vow of celibacy does not mean that he did not have many conflicts with himself and his role in the church. By then I knew who he was. His name and what he represented were familiar to me. He did have, at the time we met, some celebrity as a result of his writing but not nearly the fame he does now. Who and what he was didn’t seem to divide us in any way. We continued our life exactly as it had been before we revealed ourselves to each other.

  ‘Another week passed and he took me home to Hydra. We sailed away from our cove and the Peloponnesos. Were we leaving behind this romantic idyll, the erotic world we’d created for ourselves, this earthly but not quite earthly place? Were we sad to leave it? Not a bit, we knew we were taking it with us. We were excited about the future, about landing in Hydra and living together on the island in the romantic ruin he had bought. It never occurred to me to be concerned that I was living with a priest.

  ‘It was as wonderful living with him in Hydra as it had been in that little hidden cove and the white house with blue shutters. We never lost the magic. We wore clothes more often, that was the greatest difference. We saw people and spoke to them, not hiding the love that we had for each other from them. Some knew he was a man of the church, others didn’t. It didn’t stop us taking the caique out, shedding our clothes and diving into the sea on the far side of the island where we had our privacy. Nor did it stop our nights and days of unbridled sex in his ruin of a house overlooking the port. His house had become our house. We planned its future rather than our own.

  ‘The ghost visited us one night when we were way out over the top sexually. Actually it was at that moment just after we had come together in a powerful and long orgasm that stole every vestige of control from us, leaving us to scream into the night for help so that we might not linger too long in that moment of little death and be unable to revive ourselves. He wrapped himself round us and wept with joy and we imagined we heard the words: “You’ve come home.” I never saw the captain’s ghost again after that night.

  ‘Eventually you always have to leave the island of your dreams. And we did, together. I for my Park Avenue shop in New York, he for a monastery in central America. That year we were together whenever it was possible, and the following year, and our love grew stronger. Our sexual hunger for each other never diminished. Every meeting, every sexual encounter, was a confirmation of the strength we had to be true to ourselves. For our second anniversary he gave me the deeds to the house in Hydra.

  ‘The following year we had two months together. Fame was taking him over. Christ and his work had been his life until I had come along, and we both knew that I too was part of his life now. I could live with his devotion to the church but the church could not live with his devotion to me. Oscar and I gave each other our freedom to live our lives outside the one we lived together because we loved each other and could never make light of each other’s needs. That only drew us closer together. Each of us knew we had to work out our life for ourself and that ultimately that was what would determine our future.

  ‘Finally we came to a decision to part. Not see each other at all nor communicate for a given length of time was the plan. He wanted to return to the church alone, without being influenced by his love for me, to make his decision to remain in the priesthood or to leave it once and forever because he could not in truth and heart be the man of the cloth that Roman Catholicism demanded he be. We gave ourselves seven years to get on with life without each other. If at any time during those seven years he came to terms with leaving the church, he would return to the house in Hydra and to me.

  ‘We both knew that he had an enormo
usly important work to complete, a church to obey, and unless he accomplished those things to the best of his ability, all would be lost for us. We made a pact. I would be in the house in Hydra for three weeks, those same three weeks every year. During that time, if he had resolved his conflicts, he would return to claim me and his house. I could wait. But he wouldn’t allow me to promise that. The only promise he would allow me to make was that I should be in the Hydra house during those three weeks. If during his absence I were to find someone to love more than him, I was to send word through his publisher that I would not be in Hydra. If that were to happen he wanted the house to be mine. This is my fifth return to Hydra for my vigil.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll be there?’ asked Sally.

  ‘I have never asked myself that question. I just go there and enjoy myself and think about him, sometimes pretending that he’s there with me. Crazy? Well, love is crazy, I can attest to that.’

  ‘Hence your rush to get back to Hydra,’ said Anoushka.

  Page began to laugh. ‘As if one day would make a difference! Who’s to know, maybe it will.’

  Chapter 17

  The speed boat inched itself away from the dock. With a thrust of the motors it rose up in the water to cut a wide arc and aim towards the Black Orchid anchored about a quarter of a mile offshore. Anoushka, Page and Sally were standing aft, gripping tight the cross bar, all eyes on their greatest adventure yet, the boat they would sail across the Atlantic. They exchanged looks with each other, smiling broadly. The speed of the boat, the spray of the sea shooting past them, the black schooner with terracotta-coloured sails tied to three masts. It was all very exciting. Here was the beginning of their challenge of a lifetime.