sleeping and naked Saint Peter at the height of his pleasure.
“What on earth were you doing out there on the beach, baby? I’ve been looking for you.” We laughed, touched lips, I felt her fingers inside my yellow shirt after all.
“C OME ON, BOY, HOW ABOUT SOME INDIAN WRESTLING?
What do you say?”
Why did I submit finally to the strained voice, the forced jocularity, the challenge only too evident in his eyes and little black pointed beard? There in the grape arbor, bathed in darkness and the light of Fiona’s candles, why did our two wives and even the children urge us on? When the two youngest girls began to clap their fat little star-shaped hands and even Meredith drew near and smiled her poignant introverted smile of spite and satisfaction at the contest she had already visualized as won inevitably and maliciously by her one-armed father, was there still not some way I might have evaded the ugly consequences of this abysmally classic situation?
“Go on, baby, be a good sport.”
But as soon as I felt his hand in mine, I knew that in this case I should not have listened, should not have allowed myself to inflict such pain on a man who was obviously determined to fill our idyllic days and nights with all the obscure tensions of his own unnecessary misery and impending doom.
He began to squeeze, his hand was a claw. As if in someancient combat his upraised arm was dripping with raw meat and bloody bone, at any moment he might open his mouth and shriek. And in the midst of it I reminded myself that Fiona knew full well that the physical exercise I had undertaken throughout our married life surely guaranteed the muscle development of my thick arms. We were both at fault.
I TOO HAVE BEGUN TO HOLD THE LARGER OF THE TWO rabbits against my chest and in my lap. Silently we pass it back and forth, Catherine and I, pass it dangling from her arms to mine and from mine to hers. The pink succulents, the unhooked door of the cage, the powerful gently explosive smell of droppings and digested grass, the blue tiles turning into frosted metallic threads in the light of dawn— in all this it is apparent that both of the rabbits are female and that Catherine and I are equally attracted only to the larger, which has clear red eyes, crude musical notations on its long front legs (silent companion, I realize, to Love’s swooping birds) and big paws that sometimes find slow footing on my watch chain. I stroke the rabbit, glance at Catherine, smile. She looks away and brushes a piece of straw from the lip of the cage. But sooner or later she reaches out her arms and I hook my thumbs under the forelegs of the rabbit, whose trust is airy and limitless, and whose bones feel as if they are immersed in a limpid shapecomposed entirely of warm water, and lift, watch the amazing distension of the silken spine and totally relaxed rear legs, then swing her over to Catherine’s waiting hands.
An excellent basis for sexless matrimony, I tell myself. It will not be long.
F ACE DOWN ON THE BLANKET, SMILING AT THE MUFFLED sound of my careless yet also stentorious whisper: “I am not opposed to domesticity,” I heard myself saying, “not at all.”
No wind, no spray, no evidence of dead sea birds, no dissolving sun, nothing to distract us from this hour of attentiveness on the beach of black stones. It was another left-hand right-hand day, as I had come to call them, another one of those days when the four of us, and even the dog and the children, fit together like the shapely pieces of a perfectly understandable puzzle. Catherine on her side, Hugh on his knees, Fiona flat on her back and I face down on my stomach—we were holding each other in place, so to speak, on Fiona’s blanket and talking softly, listening. A few yards away the twins were silent for once, held in check by the magnetism of the old sleeping dog, while Meredith was standing ankle-deep in the water and waiting, I thought, to be embarrassed. In the silence that met my
“What on earth were you doing out there on the beach, baby? I’ve been looking for you.” We laughed, touched lips, I felt her fingers inside my yellow shirt after all.
“C OME ON, BOY, HOW ABOUT SOME INDIAN WRESTLING?
What do you say?”
Why did I submit finally to the strained voice, the forced jocularity, the challenge only too evident in his eyes and little black pointed beard? There in the grape arbor, bathed in darkness and the light of Fiona’s candles, why did our two wives and even the children urge us on? When the two youngest girls began to clap their fat little star-shaped hands and even Meredith drew near and smiled her poignant introverted smile of spite and satisfaction at the contest she had already visualized as won inevitably and maliciously by her one-armed father, was there still not some way I might have evaded the ugly consequences of this abysmally classic situation?
“Go on, baby, be a good sport.”
But as soon as I felt his hand in mine, I knew that in this case I should not have listened, should not have allowed myself to inflict such pain on a man who was obviously determined to fill our idyllic days and nights with all the obscure tensions of his own unnecessary misery and impending doom.
He began to squeeze, his hand was a claw. As if in someancient combat his upraised arm was dripping with raw meat and bloody bone, at any moment he might open his mouth and shriek. And in the midst of it I reminded myself that Fiona knew full well that the physical exercise I had undertaken throughout our married life surely guaranteed the muscle development of my thick arms. We were both at fault.
I TOO HAVE BEGUN TO HOLD THE LARGER OF THE TWO rabbits against my chest and in my lap. Silently we pass it back and forth, Catherine and I, pass it dangling from her arms to mine and from mine to hers. The pink succulents, the unhooked door of the cage, the powerful gently explosive smell of droppings and digested grass, the blue tiles turning into frosted metallic threads in the light of dawn— in all this it is apparent that both of the rabbits are female and that Catherine and I are equally attracted only to the larger, which has clear red eyes, crude musical notations on its long front legs (silent companion, I realize, to Love’s swooping birds) and big paws that sometimes find slow footing on my watch chain. I stroke the rabbit, glance at Catherine, smile. She looks away and brushes a piece of straw from the lip of the cage. But sooner or later she reaches out her arms and I hook my thumbs under the forelegs of the rabbit, whose trust is airy and limitless, and whose bones feel as if they are immersed in a limpid shapecomposed entirely of warm water, and lift, watch the amazing distension of the silken spine and totally relaxed rear legs, then swing her over to Catherine’s waiting hands.
An excellent basis for sexless matrimony, I tell myself. It will not be long.
F ACE DOWN ON THE BLANKET, SMILING AT THE MUFFLED sound of my careless yet also stentorious whisper: “I am not opposed to domesticity,” I heard myself saying, “not at all.”
No wind, no spray, no evidence of dead sea birds, no dissolving sun, nothing to distract us from this hour of attentiveness on the beach of black stones. It was another left-hand right-hand day, as I had come to call them, another one of those days when the four of us, and even the dog and the children, fit together like the shapely pieces of a perfectly understandable puzzle. Catherine on her side, Hugh on his knees, Fiona flat on her back and I face down on my stomach—we were holding each other in place, so to speak, on Fiona’s blanket and talking softly, listening. A few yards away the twins were silent for once, held in check by the magnetism of the old sleeping dog, while Meredith was standing ankle-deep in the water and waiting, I thought, to be embarrassed. In the silence that met my
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