When we faced each other, the morning after the sweaty night—which had yielded to a warm coolness this morning—what would either of us say? Would we try to avoid each other? Was there need for embarrassment? It had been the graphic eroticism of his narrative—it was that which had threatened to arouse us both.
Still in bed, I could hear the sounds of Stanty in the water. I got up and looked out the window and saw him bobbing up and down, splashing. With him was Paul, just as exuberant. That meant Sonya would be alone.
Shifting my sight, I saw her through the window. She was walking slowly along the edge of the lake. Her head was lifted slightly back, slightly defiant, I thought.
I put on my pants over my bathing trunks. I hurried to the front of the house. Through the wide window in the living room, I located her as she wound about the lake. Her filmy azure caftan wrapped itself about her body as she walked, and then it drifted away, a misty veil. From this distance, she looked like a specter, pensive, or lost. No longer defiant—sad.
I walked out, hurrying to catch up with her on the lawn.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to interrupt your walk.” I pretended to be moving away, hoping she would respond as she did:
“My darling John, you are not intruding. Join me.” Smiling her entrancing smile, she put her arm through mine. A feeling of warmth coursed through me—no, not the heat already conquering the day, the warmth of her flesh.
We walked along the path, silently, until she said:
“I think Paul is going to leave me.”
“Sonya.” I uttered her name softly, an assurance of trust for whatever she might say. “Why do you think that?”
She looked away from me, as if what she wanted to say might embarrass her. “Paul has always been very—oh, sexual and demanding,” she continued. “He likes to ‘play games,’ as he says. I want to tell you, but—” A long pause, as if she was determining whether to go on.
I thought she might stop, and I believe I hoped so, not wanting to hear what I suspected might be coming.
She weighed her words: “Even when his games became—excessive—even then I knew I could control them, and he allowed that. But, recently, here on the island, the pretense of hostility—yes, that’s it—the pretense seems, but only at times, only at times, it seems to be turning real. As if—what?—as if it angers him to desire me, but he does desire me.” She added emphatically, “I don’t doubt that.”
I was sure she would not go on. Instead, as if she had gathered all her determination to speak, she rushed her words: “At times now it’s as if he wants to devour me, not stop, to the point of hurting me, frightening me. At times it’s as if he wants to become me, banish me so that he can feel twice, what he feels, himself, what I feel—and then what only he feels, needs, wants—and not stopping, not stopping.”
What she had been saying—as she slid sideways seeking the edge of a shadow and closer to me as we lay on the lawn, under a fresh shadow, the way Stanty had seen us that earlier time, and I hoped he would see us again—about his need for women, his detestation of that need—it confirmed what he had said to me. I had continued to harbor the possibility that she might be an exception. As I voiced the words, I heard their inadequacy: “But the way he kisses you, in front of everyone”—in front of me, drawing her to him, pushing his body against hers as if there, then, he would take her; but all that affirmed what she had said. I had wanted only to assuage her feelings of abandonment. “And he—”
“As a lover—strictly as a lover,” she emphasized, “he remains … sensational.”
“—calls you ‘beauty.’” I was fumbling.
She threw her head back with a laugh. “‘Beauty!’ He began calling me that soon after we met—because he couldn’t remember my name.” Her laughter almost drowned her words: “After the summer, he’s going back to Paris. Always before, he’s told me where we’re going, even seeming to consult with me. Not now, not this time. Just that he’s going. Shall we sit here?” she said after we stood up to avoid the encroaching sun and were passing a bench under the spill of a large shadow. The sun had gained heat, negating the coolish moment, and it had begun to erase the shadow we had found.
WHWACKK!
A shot rang out in the distance.
WHWACKK! WHWACKK! Another, another.
I stood up, looking in the direction of the deserted island.
Sonya had remained calm. “It’s Paul and Stanty,” she said, raising a hand to me to rejoin her on the bench. “He’s showing him how to shoot because I wouldn’t do it.”
“Is the gun available to him?”
“Paul keeps it locked up,” she assured me.
Still nervous at the violent intrusion of gunshots, I sat down close to her, listening to the fading sounds of the fired gun until they died.
“If Paul does attempt to discard me,” she rushed her words, “I would—” Her face twisted in anger.
Would she say what I thought was forming in her mind?—an intimation of violence aroused by the sound of the fired gun? This extremity of angered love, from this woman whose serenity I had come to admire, and whom, yes, I was coming to love—yes, possibly to love—was it possible that she was capable of what I was sure she had been about to confess?
I would—?
We remained for a longer time under the cooling clutch of low branches we had moved to, away from the pursuit of the sun.
“Island! Island!”
It was Stanty’s voice.
“They’re celebrating with their intimate signal,” Sonya said, then: “Stanty’s a sad child.”
“I haven’t seen that,” I said. “He seems overly confident.” Yet there had been that haunting moment when he had whispered into the void of the lake:
I wish …
“He’s frightened—and confused.”
The moment seemed right to ask: “Is Corina Stanty’s mother?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure Stanty knows either.”
“How the hell is that possible?” Incomprehensible even for what was unwinding on this island.
“He refers to each by her name—the rare times when he mentions them—often with hatred, at times gasped with what might be longing. He seems so unsettled each time that occurs that I have never questioned him. I asked Paul, only once; and he was furious, demanding that I never bring that up—my ‘filthy curiosity,’ he dismissed it.”
“Impossible,” I whispered, more to myself. Like the heat rising after deceptive moments of cloudy respite, the ambiguity about Stanty’s mother added to the tension that the island itself seemed to conspire to sustain.
“Would you like to have sex with Paul?”
I looked away from her to dismiss her question.
“Would you have sex with me?” she said.
I stared at her beside me, her startling beauty, Paul’s mistress. A fleeting image: the body of the man who had lain beside me that sweaty night, him—that supremely confident and arrogant man—and she, Sonya, their naked bodies entangled … Compete? Affront him? Would I? Sonya as a prize? No, not her, not Sonya, no. Confused, I blurred my answer: “If so, what would Paul—?”
“Paul?” she said as if the name conjured an enigma, and she glided past her question: “Once he demanded I go out with him, wearing a sheer dress, nothing under it, and beautiful shoes he chose for me, and dazzling earrings. He took me to a famous restaurant where he was greeted like a king. He told me he wanted to remain aroused throughout. Paul. His games.”