Night had brought no relief from the heat. The night was sweating. A mass of lightning-punctured clouds gathered on the horizon, promising rain but bringing only moisture and the rumbling of thunder.
It seemed to me—now acutely but only at times—that the island existed only for us, the three of us: no, the four of us. We would separate at times, only to come together again, as if powerfully drawn back. Stanty often disappeared into dark clusters of trees, under which, I imagined, he slept, stroked by shadows, imagining—what?
The gray couple drifted about as if they did not exist.
Paul and I sat on the back deck, drinking the chilled wine he had just opened. He had remarked cursorily that he had not seen me all day—he had just returned from the village, where, still, no electric fans were available. I told him Sonya and I had taken a walk on the island. I did not perceive that he was suspicious or angry at our being together; he seemed to welcome it. “Good,” he said. Of course, there was nothing to suspect.
He had returned to his account of the turbulence between him and Elizabeth, leaving Corina on display under a golden spill of light in the notorious club in Constantinople. It continued to be startling, the way he so easily delivered—and slipped into—the intimate aspects of his relationships. “Elizabeth was like a dog in heat,” he said. “Before we married, she was prim—pretending, of course; she claimed she was a virgin, she kept her legs crossed tightly even when we were at dinner. But she changed into a dog in heat. She devoured me—”
“And you—?”
“Loved it, of course, and devoured her back.” He was smoking—indulging in more puffs than usual; the smoke floated out gray toward the water.
“Dear Paul,” Sonya said, overhearing, “it’s you who fuck like a fantastic dog in heat, my beautiful beloved”—and she laughed.
Paul looked up at her, not laughing. In trunks as usual, he stretched his long, tanned legs out as if to display them.
I turned away from what seemed to me to be an exhibition. Shirtless, I tensed my body.
That was the first time I had heard Sonya even jokingly rebut Paul, although she had tempered her words—“a fantastic dog.” Perhaps, after our long talk on the grass when she had revealed her apprehensions, she had become emboldened to challenge him. Or to warn him with hyperbole—“beautiful beloved”—of her own capacity for anger. It pleased me to believe that I might have had something to do with her reaction.
She leaned back, her head tilted up, and—more like a wolf than a dog—“Is this how she sounded, Paul?” She brayed: “Awoooooo, awoooooo.”
“Stop that, bitch,” Paul said, “Stanty will think you’re calling him.”
I laughed at that; so did Sonya. Of course, Stanty might suspect the wolf’s call was a call to him. Paul had not laughed.
“What’s funny, beauty?” He turned to Sonya.
I answered for her and myself: “Stanty,” I said; “you calling him a wolf. I’d be careful if I were you, man—with his imagination he might start claiming to be one.” No laughter, best to leave it there. Still laughing, Sonya had gone back into the house.
And there he was, Stanty appearing on the deck asking whether he had missed the blue hour. (I chose not to ask whether the “wolf call” had summoned him.) “You did ask me, you know,” he addressed me. “You told me. Remember, John Rechy?” he said. “You told me to tell you when it was the blue hour.”
A few nights ago I had told him that. “Well, you already did.”
He leaned over the railing—a bluish darkness was creeping over the lake. He was determined to assert his assumed role as announcer. He whipped around. “You lied, John Rechy.”
Paul did not move, did not look up, remained impassive in his chair.
“How?” I said.
“When you said that the blue hour revealed the truth about lies. It hasn’t, it doesn’t. It’s just a damn silly story you told. Nothing different has happened.” Then, in the same strange pleading voice I had heard before, he said to Paul, softly: “Has it, Father?—just a silly story?” He waited, expectant.
I, too, waited for Paul to answer the urgent question—and to rebut the accusation that I had lied.
But all he said was, “Oh?”
Stanty stood in front of me, demanding an answer.
“I guess you have to wait for that to happen,” I said, to mollify him; “not right away, not every time, and you did come up with a game—I believe you called it ‘playing secrets.’”
“I saw you!” he said to me.
Paul sat up.
“Saw me what?” I asked Stanty.
“With Sonya! On the grass.” He turned to Paul. “They didn’t know I could see them. Father, he kept pushing himself against her, on the grass, he wouldn’t let her go, she kept pushing him away—and he kept on, and then he even—”
“You’re a fucken liar!” I stood in front of him. I looked at Paul to gauge his reaction.
He was smiling, amused! “And how did that make you feel, Stanty?”
Even Stanty seemed bewildered by the question. “It—I—”
“You know that isn’t true, Stanty.” It was Sonya—overhearing—and she had spoken to him gently, with nothing harsh in her tone. She walked over to him and touched him briefly on his arm.
“I wonder how it would feel, Stanty,” Paul said, reclining back in his chair, “to apologize to … John Rechy?”
Stanty smiled, a broad smile. “Just joshing with you, John Rechy. You knew that all along, didn’t you? You did, didn’t you, Father, know I was joshing, didn’t you, Father?”
“I did, yes, I did.”
“And I bet Sonya knew that, too.”
“Of course I did,” she said, smiling back.
“John Rechy, you knew that, too, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” he insisted.
I sat back in my chair, looking at him. He was smiling at me as if indeed he had been only “joshing,” and once again he was the playful kid. I did not answer him. I wondered how far his tales might take him, and at what point they might be believed.