Rocks, The

by Peter Nichols

  Apart from the air on her face made by their skimming progress, the sea was mirror calm today, disturbed only by the surface-peeling wake of Luc’s motorboat dispersing slowly like skywriting. The sea was sky-blue, the sky azure. Arabella felt she could water-ski all the way to Africa. She saw herself in one of those Italian films: water-skiing on the Bay of Naples, or off Portofino. The louche, tightly muscled boat boy, the blond version, staring at her through his sunglasses while he steered the boat with one arm cradled over the wheel. In the film she was supposed to let him take her to a fisherman’s shack after water-skiing for a savage shagging, a classic symbiosis. Later her rich husband would tip the boy and thank him for giving his wife such a good time. Richard’s tip, however, wouldn’t be a good one. He was so awfully tight, despite being well-off. Poor Lukey, darling.

  Abruptly she fell. When she came to the surface, Luc had turned the boat and was planing toward her. He throttled back and the boat slowed, settling lower into the sea, grumbling as it drew near. Luc bent overboard and picked up the floating monoski. Then he turned the wheel again, and the boat floated close to Arabella.

  “You’ve lost your top,” Luc said, scanning the water for the missing tendril of garment.

  Arabella looked around for a moment, revolving in the water. “Never mind,” she said.

  Luc continued to peer intently into the water around the boat. The small ones, the sort Arabella had been wearing, made of cloth with no spongy filler, didn’t always float on the surface. They could sink slowly and wrap themselves around the propeller.

  “Sweet of you to worry, Lukey darling, but I’ve got a suitcase full of them. Can I get in?”

  “You don’t want to ski back?” He proffered the ski.

  “I think I’ll get out actually, darling, and dry off.”

  Luc hung the boarding ladder over the side and Arabella climbed up. She made no attempt to cover her breasts. She lowered her head, wrung out her hair with her hands, then threw her head up, arching her back with her chest pushed forward as she tossed her long, interesting if unnaturally dark hair back to splay out across her shoulders, splashing Luc’s hot skin with cool drops. He handed her a blue Rocks bathing towel while politely though not overtly aiming his eyes elsewhere, but he caught a jolting peripheral impression of very dark nipples at the center of the triangles of pale skin surrounded by her deep tan. He had imagined just such a mishap with her mishap-suggestive bathing costume, the top of which seemed designed to come readily adrift, offering just such a view of Arabella’s breasts, and they were better than he’d imagined. They were large, and though Arabella must be close to forty, he hadn’t expected such a statuesque retention of their harnessed shape.

  She sat beside him on the white and turquoise vinyl-upholstered seat as they flew smoothly at what felt like a hundred miles an hour above the surface of the sea toward the shore.

  “Marvelous!” shouted Arabella. “Go, baby!”

  She leaned back against Luc’s arm, as if confusing it for the seat’s backrest, and opened the towel to expose her goose-pimpled breasts to the sun. She moved again, settling herself more comfortably against him. The top of her head was level with his shoulder and he looked down on her breasts and the mound of her belly and its noticeable stretch marks rising above the tiny remnant of her bikini.

  A moment later she said something he didn’t catch.

  “Sorry?”

  “I said you’re so polite, darling.”

  “Oh.” Luc tried to remember what he’d said that was so polite. “Thank you.”

  They sped toward the shore. Luc felt every part of Arabella against him, almost a dead weight that heaved and lurched into him with the movement of the boat. Their thighs touched and bounced together, her skin was still cool from the water. He had a barely concealed erection and he hoped she would see it and touch it, but as far as he could tell, her eyes were closed. The boat tore on, jarred occasionally by an errant hillock of swell, and, for a moment, everything was in balance.

  Luc recognized the tall figure waving at them from the rocks. “Dominick’s arrived,” he said.

  Arabella sat up and looked ahead. “Dear Dominick. Such a silly old cunt. I can’t imagine who reads those dreadful novels he writes or how he lives.”

  “Have you read them?” asked Luc. He was always meaning to but had been put off by their covers, which looked like dramatic renderings of the window displays of men’s and women’s fashions at Galeries Lafayette.

  “I read part of one,” said Arabella, as if only just now remembering. “It was killingly bad. But I do love him.” She waved at Dominick.

  “Hal-lo, dar-ling!” Dominick shouted. “Luc, you must tell me where you caught such a Siren.”

  Luc pulled the throttle to neutral and the boat wallowed closer to the shore.

  “Darling, Dominick, how are you, silly old sausage?” Arabella said. She put a hand on Luc’s thigh, squeezed it, and dove off the boat. She swam to the steel ladder Lulu’d had cemented into the rocks and climbed gracefully out of the water to where Dominick stood at the top, grinning at her.

  “Good God,” he said, staring at her breasts. “You come bearing gifts.”

  They kissed. “Give me your towel, you leering bastard,” said Arabella.

  She wrapped herself in the towel and turned toward Luc. “Thank you, Lukey, darling.” She walked across the road to the Rocks.

  Dominick watched her for a moment. Then he turned toward Luc. “Catch of the day?”

  Luc smiled. “Ha-ha.”

  “Have you got time to take me out, or are you packing up now?”

  “No, sure. Come on.”

  “Fan-tastic!” said Dominick. He dove into the sea.

  Three

  Arabella was no different from usual at dinner. But Luc understood now.

  After the water-skiing and the sensational ride in the boat back to shore while she lay heavy and virtually naked against him, he was convinced that real, actual sex was in the offing. Arabella would give him some signal, arrange something, and it would finally happen. She’d always made him feel that she liked him particularly, that he alone understood her. For years, her eyes had swung to Luc’s to let him—just him—know with a droll expression what she thought as someone beside the pool or at dinner was waffling on about Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s ghastly teeth—“Why on earth doesn’t the man go to a fucking dentist? Must he be so insistently the common prole?”—or the rising London property market. Last summer she’d told Luc he was turning into a “complete sexpot.” From that day to reaching some sort of apotheosis this afternoon, he’d been engorged with fantasies of Arabella Squibb.

  She bantered comfortably with Richard across the table, threw no more than normally conspiratorial looks at Luc, and at ten said she was tired, would forgo pudding and port, and stood up.

  “I’m off to bed, my darlings,” she said as she pushed back her chair and stood up.

  “Are you really?” said Richard, squinting and blowing a dense blue stream of Cuban smoke upward toward the leafy overhead trellis.

  “Really and truly. Thank you so much, Lukey darling, for such a lovely water-ski.” She extended a hand toward him and moved her fingers as if caressing his cheek, though he was seven feet away.

  “Anytime,” said Luc.

  And off she went.

  This was it! A ruse—it had to be. Going to bed so early when Richard would stay up for hours more playing backgammon with either Cassian or Dominick now that he was here. Luc excused himself too, awkwardly, walking stiffly to his little toolshed along the wall.

  He lit a candle and tidied his bed and then sat on it. He listened for noise without, and heard the chat of the diners still at the table, but no steps or rustlings along the path between his shed and the pool. After a few minutes he turned on the small, low-wattage electric lamp beside the bed and tried reading—he w
as on a Françoise Sagan jag, going through her little livres de poche in French, currently in the middle of Les Merveilleux Nuages, but he couldn’t get through a sentence. After twenty minutes he turned out his light, blew out the candle, and wandered down to the bar. Richard and Dominick were playing backgammon at a table. Other guests were drinking at the bar. His mother was sitting at a table with Cassian and Tom and Milly.

  Arabella had gone to bed.

  • • •

  Luc rode his Rieju motorcycle into town, parked it on the street outside the Miravista, where the soft tones of Jackson Rale’s electric guitar were floating over the walls like a vapor. He walked through the archway entrance, along the short path, and stopped at the top step overlooking the open dance floor beneath the tall pines. He scanned the dancers and the people at the tables. He knew half of them. Aegina wasn’t there, unless she was in the loo.

  Jackson Rale, a black American guitarist of indeterminate middle age, was playing “Bésame Mucho.” When he stopped and took a sip of his drink, Luc approached him.

  “Hey, Jackson.” It was the way the American always greeted him, and Luc had started to say the same to Jackson.

  “Hey, man,” said Jackson. “What’s cookin’?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” said Luc. He understood that Jackson wasn’t really inquiring about anything, nor, probably, did he care what, if anything, was cooking, nor if there were a petroleum tanker fire blazing out on the street. Jackson exuded an immense if polite indifference to everything around him except his guitar and his Cuba libre. Mateo Pujols, the Miravista’s owner, had obtained his services for the months of July and August through a booking agent in Palma. Jackson was a large man, not fat, but like one of those padded American football players gone to seed. He sat in the Miravista’s patio under the pines beside the open-air dance floor and played short sets with his electric guitar. His technique didn’t call attention to itself. He didn’t play rock and roll or jazzy riffs, but steadily picked out an ancient repertoire of nightclub standards as soft filler between the longer and much louder sets of new and recent pop records that people came to the Miravista to dance to. Jackson’s fingers were the size of pork sausages and looked far too large for the guitar’s narrow fret board, yet he played smoothly and dependably, as if in his sleep. Luc particularly liked one song he played, a tune he’d heard before, maybe in a movie, but didn’t know the name of, and he’d asked Jackson, a couple of weeks ago, what it was called.

  “‘Perfidia,’” said Jackson.

  “I like it,” said Luc.

  “Yeah, it works,” drawled Jackson. “Every time.”

  “Per . . .”

  “‘Perfidia,’” Jackson repeated. “An old Mexican song.”

  “Is it a woman’s name?” asked Luc.

  “Perfidia?” Jackson started to laugh, softly, rhythmically, a deep note of satisfaction, as he sat on a barstool beside his small amplifier under the trees, tuning his guitar, a dark-red-tinted Gretsch Chet Atkins Country Gentleman with considerable wear in the varnish below the strings. “It should be,” he said, “heh, heh.” He looked at Luc, his black face inscrutable and at the same time all-knowing. “It’s a word for what some woman do to a man.” Jackson looked away and raised his Cuba libre to his mouth.

  In a second, Luc understood. “Oh. Yeah.” Then he was incredibly grateful to Jackson for his man-to-man confidence. Perfidia: Mexican for blow job? And a song named for that? Putain, those Mexicans.

  That’s what he wanted from Arabella and had imagined until it ached: a perfidia out on his boat.

  “Jackson, have you seen my friend Aegina? She’s a little younger—”

  “I know who you mean. Your little Spanish-looking girlfriend—”

  “Well, she’s not really my girlfriend, we’re just friends.”

  “You better think that one through again,” said Jackson. “But I ain’t seen her, man. She ain’t been in. Not tonight, so far.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Luc scanned the crowd again, irresolute. Then he turned to leave. “See you, then, Jackson.”

  “Yep,” said Jackson, with the enthusiasm of a mailman confirming the inevitability of the next day’s visit. He put his drink down, returned his hand to his guitar. His thick fingers trembled lightly over the strings of the Gretsch and “Embraceable You” burbled out of his amplifier.

  Luc walked back out to the street and started his motorcycle.

  Four

  Every evening at seven, a nun, Sor Victoria, came to Paloma’s room. She smiled at Gerald but said nothing to him, except on the first occasion, when she came in and asked, “¿Permiso?” And Gerald, momentarily alarmed to see a sister of God, but quickly grateful, had nodded and said yes. Sor Victoria always sat on the edge of the bed and took Paloma’s hand in her own and prayed quietly, raptly: “Dios, le ruego en el nombre de su hijo, Jesús Cristo . . .” When she was finished, she placed the limp hand over Paloma’s heart and, with only a nod toward Gerald, withdrew.

  After she was gone, Gerald usually turned off the noisy fan and opened the windows opposite Paloma’s bed. Then the katabatic winds dropping from the pine-forested Serra de Tramuntana after sunset blew across the fertile midplain of the island, carrying spores of citrus and smoke and manure off the small farms of Mallorca, and the cool earthy breeze filled the room and diluted the pervasive hospital smell. The organic sounds outside the hospital—cars straining through streets sized for donkeys, glasses being set down and cleared off tables in cafés, women calling to children at great distances above the rising buzz and fade of mopeds and scooters—entered the room to dampen the insistent metronomic whoosh of the ventilator that sometimes, when the window was closed, seemed to grow so loud in the room that Gerald thought it must have engaged another gear or be forcing air into Paloma with greater effort, until he realized he was playing tricks on himself and he got up and went outside for a cigarette.

  At eight, as Paloma’s intravenous monomeal continued to drip from bags into her arm, Gerald put aside the book he’d been trying to read and broke out his oval slab of floury bread, hard cheese, olives, figs, uncorked his wine, and ate his dinner. Sitting beside her for two days, he had tried to read but found it difficult to concentrate. At moments, he’d talked to Paloma, on the chance that she could hear him, but he wasn’t good at chatting inventively or cheerfully to her supine, vacant, huffing and puffing body. He was too aware of the magnitude of her absence, and he lapsed into grim, fidgety silences. He gave himself over completely to eating the food he’d brought with him. Like smoking, it gave him something distracting, physical, and ordinary to do. The small normal preparations and movements, even chewing and swallowing, comforted him. He’d heard on a BBC program that ants, suddenly exposed when a sheltering rock or rotting fallen tree limb is removed from above them, immediately stop to wash their faces, a familiar routine that reassures them against the stress and fear of sudden change. Gerald didn’t know if this was true, but he understood it. Smoking and eating and other mechanical daily tasks made him feel better.

  Billie appeared at nine. She was flustered.

  “She’s gone off and she didn’t come back. Gerald, do you really think it’s a good idea that she has a moped?”

  Gerald looked toward Paloma. “Paloma did. She bought it for her. She thought it would be good for Aegina to be more independent. Able to go off and see her friends.”

  “But she’s only fourteen. I mean, is it even legal? And she doesn’t wear a helmet. Aren’t you worried about her?”

  “Yes, of course I’m worried about her. I worry about her when she’s asleep in bed in the other room. I still get up in the middle of the night to see if she’s breathing—”

  “I mean about the moped.”

  “I know you do. It is legal, and nobody here wears a helmet. She wouldn’t if I insisted. But that’s the Spanish, they’re much more rough-and-tumble than we are. Paloma wo
uld let Aegina wander off all over town when she was quite young, seven and eight. She thought it was good for her. I always see the specter of disaster, I imagine the worst vividly, terrible things. But her mother”—he looked down at the figure in the bed—“always thinks everything will be all right.”

  Billie sat down and stared at Paloma. “Can she hear us, do you think?”

  “They say not. But”—Gerald swung his head and gazed at Paloma—“I don’t know.”

  Billie looked at her brother. “Tell me again what happened.”

  When he’d gone to the post office two days ago to call his sister, Gerald had been brief. “Paloma’s in the hospital, brain hemorrhage, she might not wake up,” he’d told her. Now he said, “She was in the kitchen, ironing. I was making a pot of tea. She suddenly got a very bad headache. She said she had to sit down for a moment. She stood beside the ironing board and sort of tottered. I took her into the bedroom and made her lie down. She closed her eyes. I went back into the kitchen and made the tea. I brought it into the bedroom on a tray and she was asleep. I thought that was good. Then I saw she wasn’t breathing properly. I tried to wake her and couldn’t. I carried her down to the car and brought her here. Aegina was off somewhere, good thing too.”

  “And what did they do to her, Gerald?” Billie looked fearfully at the bandages wrapped around Paloma’s head.

  Gerald looked at the bandages now too. “They opened her up and looked inside her brain for a hemorrhage. They found it and did whatever they do. It was big, they said. Then they said we must wait and see, but a doctor told me he thought it was unlikely she’d wake up.” He looked at Billie. “He thought she was more or less gone.”

  “Gerald . . . Gerald, I’m so . . . Oh, it sounds so absurd to say I’m sorry. Does Aegina know all this?”

  “Well, I’ve told her, more or less, but she doesn’t really want to hear it.”