I got up early today, choosing to be alone for at least a portion of the day; so early that the moon, lingering past night, remained, pale in the darkened sky.
I wandered about the island, a section of which in its verdure resembled a jungle. Then, as I stood and listened, I thought I heard a murmur winding into the silence. I realized only then that I had been aware of it before and dismissed it: a muffled rumbling like the sound that precedes the shaking of an earthquake; and that quiet murmur seemed to come from beyond the lake, from the devastated island—I had shifted my position to locate it—and from the tangled shadows; and that silent murmur was floating like a dark cloud toward this island.
The sun was out, the strange impression evaporated, created by the foggy lifting twilight, and—
Stanty!
I was startled to come upon him—asleep, I thought—under a cluster of trees. Muffling my footsteps, I started to walk away. “Are you looking for me, John Rechy?” he said.
“Are you lost?”
“Naw,” he said, “just sleeping.” In a soft voice like a whisper, he said: “I sleep out here sometimes, you know, when I’m—”
I waited for him to finish. His voice had been wistful, a tone I had heard once before when he had stood on the deck staring out at the lake; he had sighed a vague wish.
“—when it’s too hot in the house,” he finished in a changed voice, as if only now fully awake and sitting up.
“I’m sorry I interrupted you.” I continued to walk away—slowly so that he wouldn’t think I was walking away from him. I stopped when I heard him behind me.
He hurried ahead to stand before me, facing me.
“You want to know what happened on that island you keep looking toward?” he said.
“What did happen?” I had reacted impulsively, taking him seriously; it was too late to pull back. “How do you know that?”
“I read about it. Inside a book.”
Though strange, it was possible that something terrible had occurred on that island; but that would mean whatever had happened would have occurred a long time ago. The Origin of Evil—the book that had disappeared—entered my mind; but, no, that was a collection of essays about spurious theories about evil.
“There was—were—a lot of people on the island when it happened,” he said, now an excited storyteller.
I anticipated one of his fantastic tales, but I didn’t move away. “And—?”
He shook his head as if at the enormity of what he was about to describe. “What happened was … horri”—he paused to choose his word—”horrendous, there was a huge fire, people in flames rushed to the lake, it was too late, everything burned, even the trees—everything, nothing left.”
He had trapped me into attention—and had trapped himself. “What about the man you said you saw at a window?”
“That was on the other side of the island, not the one that burned,” he said easily.
I started to walk away from him, from his outrageous, quick adjustment of his lie.
He called out after me, shifting subjects, like Paul.
“John Rechy, do you love Sonya?”
“I like her a lot.” I was guarded, not knowing where he was going.
“I love her,” he said. “Do you like my father?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
“Yeah,” he laughed. “That was a silly question, wasn’t it?” Again the wistful sad voice: “I love my father more than anything in the world, and he loves me a lot.” He had said that so sadly that I thought of Sonya’s words about him, about how sad and confused he was.
He dashed away. “I’m going swimming now!” he called back exuberantly.
I meet Sonya in the library; she’s returning a copy of Wuthering Heights—”my favorite book,” she informs me. “One of mine, too,” I say, wanting to assert a closeness.
“Do you suppose Catherine and Heathcliff found each other—ever?” she asks me.
I remember her wistful hope that the guillotined French queen might be saved in another iteration of her story. “Yes,” I say, “especially since they agreed—at least Catherine did—that they would prefer being together even if that was in hell.” I think she frowned at that; and so I add: “Of course I don’t think it had to be hell.”
She laughs, an acknowledgement that she understood my soothing interjection. “Thank you, my dear John; you’ve rescued both the French queen and Catherine, just for me.”
I join in her laughter, appreciating her unique test of my loyalty to her sentiments, and glad that I expressed it.
“Let’s go rowing, shall we?” she says. “Paul’s gone to the village and Stanty’s with him. So we’ll be alone on the beautiful lake, just you and I.”
On the lake: I’m rowing smoothly, facing her. She has “taught” me how to row, as easy as I had anticipated. We’re both in our bathing suits, augmenting for me a sense of closeness. I tell her about my unexpectedly mellow interlude with Stanty.
“I’m glad. He wants friends. He never speaks about friends even at school. That’s why he keeps asking if one is his friend.”
“I felt friendly with him for the first time. He even told me what occurred on the neighboring island.”
She looks surprised.
“He said he read about it in a book,” I tell her, and realize: No, he said he’d read about it “inside a book”—another of his odd expressions I had noted at the time.
“It’s a game he plays, how far he can go and be believed,” she says in the tender tone she uses when speaking to him or about him.
“He told me he loves you.”
“He’s told me that. I love him, too. He’s hurt that you won’t go rowing with him. It would delight him if you did.”
“Would that please you?” I knew the answer.
“Yes, because that would make him happy.”
“He also told me he loves Paul more than anyone else in the world.”
“I don’t know what would happen to him if anything or anyone separated them.”
“I don’t think anything could,” I say.
There followed then, between us, a sense of peacefulness, together, rowing on the lake. At least I felt it and hoped she did too. During the silence that followed, I was aware of the sound of the water lapping at the oars.
She removes the wide hat she often wears. She shakes her head, loosening her hair, an extravagant gesture I cherish, even wait for; hers. She leans back, looking up at the graying sky.
I have rowed absently, allowing the boat to drift. Ahead is the deserted island, the closest I’ve seen the tangle of twisted, dried branches choking their trunks—yellow fragments of leaves on the parched ground. What might have been flowers are scorched, their petals decayed chips amid rubble. There is no sign of life, none.
I turn the boat away from the dying island. I imagined it devoured by flames, people rushing to escape.
Impulsively, I say: “If I ever write about you, I’ll describe you as a woman who, if things were otherwise, I—”
“If you didn’t prefer men?” she asks. “Do you, entirely?”
“Yes, and yes,” I tell her.
“Then, if otherwise, what?”
“Then, if otherwise, I would describe you as a gloriously beautiful and intelligent woman with whom I would fall in love.”
“Please kiss me.”
Letting the boat drift, I move over to her, and I kiss her on the lips. I feel desire as my body connects with hers. Our lips remain pressed against each other’s, her arms curl about me, mine drew her closer, increasing the intensity, the sense of arousal. I ease away from her bronzed body. I return to the oars.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I understand.”
But she can’t understand, nor will I tell her that my response to kissing her came from the fact that I was kissing her the way Paul kissed her, the way his body pressed roughly against hers, the way—and that was when I withdrew—the way in his lustful kiss he might draw blood.
As we rowed back, reaching the deck, the heat burst with lightning that punctured blackened clouds, releasing torrents of rain. But it stopped as quickly as it had begun, leaving behind only more heat and a sky overcast with dark clouds and sporadic bursts of thunder. Flashes of lightning in the far distance illuminated the dead island as if it was struggling out of the darkness to reemerge.