We’ve been living in episodes, though with players in common, each episode an entity in itself; and each episode disappears, undiscussed, pushed into silent limbo. Reminding myself of that is my way of sustaining the hope that the enormity of Elizabeth’s incursion, as harrowing as it was, will, in the same inexplicable way as other such events, be banished as if it never happened, leaving behind not even the faintest scent of its poison. (Is that possible for me? Can I ever forget the whirling water waiting to suck me in that fateful night?)
I get out of bed, realizing that I was so distracted last night that I can’t remember what I had intended to read. A book by Henry James lies on the floor beside the bed; it’s his story of exact ambiguity. The painting is covered with a towel that I placed over it last night. I’ll leave it covered, to shove away its threat.
WHWACK!!! WHWACK!!!
I recognize sounds of firing. Stanty practicing with Paul again. Or is he alone, learning? Has Sonya agreed to teach him?
I go to the drawer where I left the sheets I had been typing. These entries are an obvious narrative account of the events on this island from the beginning, Paul’s invitation. No, I will never write about this island. Its mysteries baffle me. How can I record what I don’t understand?
I head for the sundeck. Despite my conviction that nothing of last night’s chaos will be addressed, I feel trepidation when I see Stanty heading toward the boathouse. When he sees me, he stops, as I do—I’m sure for the same reason: we do not want to encounter each other, and have not done so since that turbulent time on the lake. My detestation of him is almost threatened by the unwelcome recollection of him clinging to Sonya in panic as Elizabeth hurled her calm revelations of hatred toward him, like soft curses. That image is not enough to temper my rage.
I don’t move, conflicted about what to do as he continues toward me. “Good morning, John Rechy,” he says, and I know that he is leaving the intended bloodying of last night dormant, like the attempted drowning on the lake.
I cannot answer him, cannot acknowledge him. I continue to the sundeck. There is no way that I saw what I think I saw in that flashing instant of encountering him. I could not have seen that his eyes were red, as if he’d been crying. Stanty crying? Totally my imagination, which I imposed on him. Besides, he had been wearing sunglasses when we crossed paths.
Paul and Sonya are lying on mats; but they have placed them under the shade of the tree whose overhanging shade falls daily onto the sundeck and then lengthens and shortens as the day passes and sunlight shifts.
With the usual words of greeting and cursory inquiry—and I’m still being attentive to even a nuance of last night’s emotional turbulence, and of any new knowledge of the events on the lake—I join the two at the edge of the shade, which makes our bodies appear even darker, gleaming with oil, a sensual sight that softens my anxiety.
As I lie on my pad, I notice that the shade has darkened earlier than I remember; it’s the first signal of summer’s waning. That thought saddens me, the ending of summer, and that arouses in me a sense of another ending, a powerful one, final, along with a sense of urgency, of incompleteness. This mixed feeling is so assertive that I am sure, for a disoriented moment during which the shade we’re lying on stretches even more, that the others are feeling it, too, and as powerfully. What the urgent incompleteness is, I don’t know. Through those bewildering thoughts courses a sense of sorrow.
“Man?”
I hadn’t noticed, during those odd seconds, that Paul had gotten up and is extending to me a tall Cuba libre.
“We got ahead of you,” Sonya says, sitting up exhibiting her own glass. She’s smiling, her most brilliant, loving smile. The smile is so tempting that I reach out to touch her lips. I stop just short of accomplishing that—and she laughs. I laugh with her, at nothing, really. Elizabeth’s assault, her prophecy of Paul’s abandoning her, has had no discernible effect.
“I’ll try to catch up,” I say to Paul, only because he seems to be waiting for some kind of agreement. He seems uncommonly exuberant.
He is lying next to Sonya in the sheltering shade, and we all three join in laughter at an unknown situation. With a start, I notice this: The sunlight, still harsh, is stretching afternoon shadows—longer, longer, longer—toward the white borders of the sundeck. The angle of the shadows has shifted, too, bringing this day to an earlier close.
Paul is smoking more than usual, now and then handing his cigarette over to Sonya for a brief puff. He seems especially edgy—even nervous—no, anxious—no, eager. All of that affirms my supposition that the feeling I have of an ending without completeness, asserted by the conspiracy of shadows preparing for summer’s end—hints, slight changes, and no diminishing of the heat—is shared by him.
He has just returned from the village. “I bought some new records, some especially for each of you,” he says. He speaks the rest like a prepared announcement, again suggesting to me his unfocused urgency: “We can listen to them tonight, what do you say, beauty?”
“If you want, yes,” Sonya says.
“Man?” he asks me.
“Yeah, great … man,” I wonder what record or records he may have selected based on his assumption about my taste, another aspect of his character: a firm belief in his assumptions. He seems eager for approval of his planned concert.
We go inside the house when the sun has declined, etching dark shadows on the sundeck.
The gray couple has prepared an appropriately cold dinner. It’s late evening, and the two have disappeared. During the glimpses I have caught of them, I have never seen them other than with their eyes cast down. They exist like wakened somnambulists.
Paul has chosen an “extra-special wine” for dinner, although we have not abandoned our unfinished Cuba libres.
“A toast to tonight’s concert,” he says as he opens the wine.
We retreat with our drinks to the deck. The night is suffused with a strange light, a mixture of the light of the moon, brighter than I have seen it, as it disentangles itself out of fragments of flimsy clouds. I wonder what Stanty might make of this moody, commanding illumination. But he’s not here. Will I ever again experience a “blue hour” like the one that has become a part of this island?
“Paul insisted Stanty retire early tonight; he looked tired,” Sonya informs me about Stanty’s absence. “He loves to sleep outside.”
I imagine him outside—as I found him that one day; imagine him searching for the darkest shadows to sleep under.
Paul is pouring more wine—“the very best!”—into our glasses. The glass in his hand tilts and falls, umber liquid spilling onto the floor; pieces of sharp-edged glass assumed a distorted shape. Staring down at the watery smirch, a liquid puzzle, Paul frowns and abruptly reminds us of his plan. We will all go down to the lower depth of the house, a floor that includes, but separately, the library and the smaller room with the large locked box with the gun. That thought—irrelevant, I know—strikes me with the impact of an actual shot.
Sonya is bending to gather the glassy jetsam off the floor, and for no reason laughs, infectious laughter that Paul joins in, and so do I.
“Oh!” she cries, putting her hand to her mouth, soothing a cut with her tongue. She exhibits her finger to Paul.
“Really, beauty, it’s nothing, just a nick,” Paul dismisses. “That didn’t even break the skin.”
Her next words erupt like lightning:
“God damn you, Paul!” she says. “Is it impossible for you to feel another’s fucking pain?”
It is as if she has spewed out a litany of obscenities, the words not hers. She stops soothing her finger; the cut is insignificant. In a soft, almost eerily loving voice, she addresses Paul: “Is it true, beautiful man, that you detest all women? Is it true that you detest—?”
—me, she doesn’t say; the word is suspended.
I walk to her, to be with her when the emotional tempest, the withheld word once spoken—inspired by Elizabeth’s prophecy of her imminent ending with Paul—will be set into motion. But the fatal word is blocked. Paul holds her hand and presses it against her mouth. Then he licks the wounded finger, sucking it deep into his mouth, soothing it.
As we stand at the mouth of the stairway, Paul releases her hand and pushes his body against hers; and then holding on to the open bottle of wine, spilling only drops, he lifts her in one swoop and carries her down the stairs.
“Come on, man,” he calls, glancing back at me.
I don’t move.
“Hey, man!” he urges from downstairs.