by Rona Jaffe
The second time she saw him was at Sacha’s. She was on the tiny dance floor with Bert, and it was, as usual, very dark and cool. She did not see Sergio until he was right next to her. He was dancing with a girl, a very young girl, perhaps eighteen at the most. The girl was wearing a white lace dress and she was bosomy and curvaceous to the point where in one more year she would probably be too full-blown. But right at this moment she had a wild prettiness. The girl and Sergio were kissing each other.
This second time when she saw him Helen felt a subtle wistfulness that was almost painful. She did not desire him, she did not love him, she had only contempt for him for so openly kissing a girl in the night club where all his wife’s friends liked to go. And yet, there was always some bond that lingered between a woman and a man who has kissed and touched her—for the woman, not for the man. Sergio looked full at her and pretended not to see her, and Helen looked away. She knew he had seen her. She was ashamed to feel this poignance about a man she did not want, while she was in the arms of the man she wanted for ever. What was it? Perhaps only that she had been freely herself with Sergio, and had let him look into her heart, so that now when he kissed a stranger there was something of herself lingering on his lips, so in effect she kissed that stranger too. The thought made her shudder. It must have been the same for Bert, she thought, but so much worse. And for the first time Helen knew how it had been.
It was spring here … fall—what was it? Sometimes Helen became confused. You wanted to give yourself over altogether to one kind of life and thinking, you wanted to give up the effort of comparing dates and seasons, the dual existence—and yet you kept going out of your way to keep your identity, your loyalties, the little things you suddenly remembered and missed and tried to duplicate here. But no matter what season it was, during the day the sun shone, and at night the stars shone, and there were lovers on the beach.
One night walking home from a dinner party at Margie’s, Helen stopped still on the mosaic sidewalk in the moonlight and looked at Bert. “Let’s walk on the sand,” she said.
He jumped off the high sidewalk to the beach and held out his hands to her. The sand was deep and soft where they walked in it, and the breeze ruffled Helen’s skirt. It was a lovely feeling to be walking along the beach in a party dress. She was holding hands with Bert and swinging her shoes from her other hand. She looked up at the apartment buildings across the street. A few blocks farther along was theirs, with the balcony where she had stood looking down at the lovers on the sand.
“Let’s stop for a minute,” Bert said. He looked at her questioningly, and at her chiffon dress, but she sank down immediately onto the sand, her skirt billowing all around her, and pulled him down too, and laughed.
“Look at them,” she whispered. “We won’t have to give the children a serious lecture in the library when they get a little older. We’ll just take them for a walk one night.”
The couple twenty-five feet away from them, their privacy interrupted, got up and moved farther away down the beach. “Poor guy,” Bert said. “We shouldn’t have bothered them.”
“Serves them right.”
“Put your head back. The buildings are upside down.”
“It makes me dizzy.” She lay flat on the beach with her head on Bert’s shoulder. He put his arm around her. It was very comfortable and peaceful on the sand, cool, the sand very soft against her bare legs. Once in a while she heard a car drive by, but otherwise it was very still. “I used to watch them,” she said. “Those people. I wondered who they were. People with no homes? Kids running away from chaperones? Clods with no need for privacy or romance? Utter romanticists?”
“Two of each.”
A beggar, dressed in torn shapeless pants and a fluttering rag of a tan shirt, came shuffling along the beach looking about for someone who seemed rich. He was middle-aged, unshaven for a week, as thin as an old chicken, and slightly drunk. When he headed for them Helen stiffened with alarm. He stopped in front of Bert and looked down at them both.
“I only want some money,” the beggar said in Portuguese. He swayed above them. Helen had the sudden thought that he might do something violent—even kill them. She glanced at Bert.
Bert took some cruzeiros out of his pocket and handed them to the man. The man took them but he did not leave; he stood there swaying gently, looking at them.
“I only want some money,” the beggar said again, thickly. “It is very bad, the inflation.”
“Oh, Bert!”
Bert looked calm, even slightly friendly. “Go away,” he said in Portuguese. “I have no money, and we’re in love.”
A great black-toothed smile came over the beggar’s face. “In love?” he said. He hunched his thin shoulders, put his hands into his pockets, and reeled away quickly over the sand. He turned around once to look at them over his shoulder, and he still had that resigned and beneficent smile. “Okay,” he called back to them in English. “In love? Okay!” He disappeared into the darkness.
They laughed and lay back in each other’s arms. It was midnight in Rio, and ten P.M. in New York where Helen’s mother and father were, and nine P.M. in Chicago where Mil Burns was, and only seven in Hollywood, California, where Guillerme’s movie stars were living their celluloid lives. In the States, summer had ended; cities were coming to life again from the torpor of heat and hibernation; it was the first weeks of fall. In Brazil, winter had ended; spring was here and soon summer, soon again Carnival, the season of folly and liveliness. One continent cool, one hot; both newly stirring and aware of the new season; neither aware of the other—the curve of the earth got in the way.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1960 by Rona Jaffe
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0842-6
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