What with one thing and another, it took them a year to arrange their honeymoon
They were scrupulous about not going anywhere they had been before, whether for business or for pleasure, whether separately or together. The wisdom about honeymoons was that nine out of ten were cruel disappointments. The fewer comparisions a honeymoon invited, therefore, the better. How it was that neither of them had been to Bali, either to shoot a documentary or lecture to visiting Australians at an arts festival or research the series it now seemed they were never going to make, they couldn’t explain, but Bali got their vote. Maybe it was an omen. The Island of Love had been under wraps, waiting for the hour of their arrival.
They needed a fillip. It had not been the best of years. Lily could not quite climb out of the depression into which her mother’s death had thrown her. She woke to an unlocated sadness that wasn’t wholly attributable to her mother’s wasted life. She suffered one health scare after another. And Sam’s low spirits bothered her. He had suffered a bad fall himself, put his shoulder out and lost two teeth, and was struggling to breathe life into a new play about a foul-mouthed old roué who addressed the audience from a hospital bed in four-letter words he coughed out from a hole in his throat. ‘It’s hard to imagine anyone liking this,’ the director of the theatre who’d commissioned it said.
‘Is liking a sine qua non suddenly?’
‘Let’s say it helps.’
‘Would you have said that to Shakespeare had he walked in here with Timon of Athens?’
‘Had Shakespeare walked in here with Timon of Athens I’d have fainted. But as per your point about liking, perhaps audiences were different in those days.’
‘Hamlet mentions seeing a play that pleased not the millions. But it was still staged.’
‘We could workshop it.’
Which sounded to Quaid too much like submitting it to an intimate massage.
‘You could do with a break,’ Lily said. ‘We both could.’
‘A break! It’s meant to be a fucking honeymoon.’
‘And what you most need a break from is your father’s influence. We owe ourselves a honeymoon. Let’s take it.’
Separately, they wondered if a glamorous location might just rekindle some of their old verve. She wanted not to go on thinking about her mother. He wanted not to go on thinking about fathers. Rekindling their old verve didn’t have to mean finding a way back to Taos or Capri. There was no way back. What they needed was a way forward.
‘Frangipani,’ Lily declares, as they enter their hotel.
Quaid tosses his head back like a wild animal, testing the air for danger. It’s an act. His sense of smell is poor. But he wants to show Lily that he smells what she smells and is equally overcome by it.
The feature of which the butler who shows them to their room is most proud is the outside shower, a simple bamboo spout protruding from the side of a rock on which orange and purple hibiscus grows and kaleidoscopic lizards take fright. Lemon-grass candles burn around the heart-shaped pool. ‘Totally private,’ the butler tells them with a smile, meaning they can swim here naked. Quaid kneels to feel the water. Warm, warm. Lily has a flower in her hair
‘God Almighty,’ Quaid thinks. ‘Do I have the capacity for satisfaction equal to this?’
Dinner is a beaten copper platter of aromas. The bay sighs, throwing back reflections of the stars. They kiss each other with mouths tasting of champagne. How many days is it since they first kissed? They agree there has not been a single one of those days they have regretted. But what if this is the hour of hours, the peak from which no more can be expected and all there is left to look forward to is decline? Each feels the other’s nervousness. They get up from the table to dance slowly, no matter that it isn’t dance music that the gamelan band is playing. Tightly, tightly, they cling to each other as on a boat that’s slowly sinking.
The bedroom door recognises their breath and opens automatically. There are rose petals on their pillows. Christ, Quaid thinks, has Amaryllis been here? No sooner do they lie down than they fall asleep. It’s been a long flight.
Over fourteen days they shower in the open, swim without clothes, inhale rare odours, dine on rare fragrances, sip sweet coconut milk, dance to music that isn’t designed to dance to, repeat the rhyme of their extreme good fortune at having met, retire to beds of the crispest linens, and fall asleep. For his part, Quaid marvels at the faerie spirits of his new wife: her floating golden on the perfumed pool like a princess from the Arabian Nights; her padding noiselessly through their marbled rooms like a faun; her sitting under the shower on the artfully arranged rocks, combing out her dripping mermaid’s hair – but the sight of her so engrosses his senses that he wants nothing more, seeks neither to possess her nor be possessed by her. And Lily, too, takes pleasure watching her new – all right, newish – husband crouching beneath the bamboo spout every hour that God sends, letting the water spill like stardust down his chest, then striding dripping into the bedroom like the dog he is never going to have – without asking for anything further. She has, of course, brought their accoutrements of desire, the corsets for him to lace her into and out of, the bordello spikes, the belt whose magic properties she must have discerned in New Mexico before being able to give them a name or understand their function, and whatever else might just, from one passing hour of experimentation and fantasy to the next, make both of them gasp anew. But she will not bring them out of her case; it would be a profanation to use them as the bellows to inflame a lust which, for whatever reason, and for however long, has cooled.
Has it?
Cooled, no. Wrong word. It matters what words you use. Words are like those ignes fatui that lure travellers into bogs and marshes. You have to interrogate every one. Check their papers. Make sure they have a right to be here. Cooled, never.
Ask another question then – Have the winds of your desire for Lily died down or just taken a different direction?
And the winds of hers for him?
Ask another question.
No, ask nothing.
Quaid is not sure, as their old patterns stubbornly refuse to return, how much trouble he’s in. Has the man in him finally given up the ghost as he has so often feared it would, or has it mutated into a new aesthetics of appreciation, loving Lily for herself, for the shape she makes in the world rather than for the dents, or whatever one wants to call them, she puts in him. He sees her at the end of a passage unaware of him, engrossed in some thought he cannot guess at, or descending a staircase with childlike concentration, or sitting at the dinner table, awaiting his return, looking out for him, ever so slightly anxious, as though afraid he never will return – and he is overwhelmed by his sensory dependence on her, not her company or even her presence but the never-ending astronomic fact of her, the starlit heavens he cannot now imagine ever looking up and not seeing her presiding over. Well, he is a strange man and these are strange times. Excesses in a man his age are to be forgiven.
‘You are no age,’ Lily is forever telling him.
Sometimes she’s right, sometimes she isn’t. But consciousness of ageing is a poison there’s no getting rid of once it’s entered the bloodstream. There are remissions but there’s no cure.
Their room is like a temple with a golden cupola for a ceiling. As he lies on his back, looking up into it, reliving every sight of her he’s enjoyed today, a new thought forms – Am I loving her for the first time?
He’s been alive too long to suppose that desire must always take the same form. He has waxed and waned a sufficient number of times never to be sure what manner of man he’s going to be when he rises from his pillows next, but this migration of ardour from his selfish generative parts to his self-renouncing, all-receptive senses is not like anything he has experienced before. At any moment, as he lies there, he imagines Lily rolling into his arms, and asking, ‘What is the matter? Have you stopped loving me?’ and he answering, ‘Stopped loving you? God, no. If anything, at this moment I love you more than I have ever loved you. More variously. More surprisingly. Less urgently perhaps, because I don’t hear the chariot of lawlessness at my back, but with a grander apprehension of all the world and time we have, all the changing relations to each other we can map.’
The coalescence of honeymoon and anniversary would always have worked some sea change in them both, and even more dramatically in Quaid for whom dates are a potent influence, but there is also the meeting with Lily’s wounded, wheezing father to take into account. Has Lily been handed over to him, as from one parent to another? It has detracted nothing from the sensual attention Lily has always lavished on him, that she is able, at any moment, to worry about him as a mother might. The mistress in her has never been at war with the mother. If anything, the more of every other role being a mistress has encompassed, the more being a mistress has become her. Is Quaid the lover now to encompass Quaid the father? Will he know where the father in him is to be found? Will he even know where to start to look?
Well, there’s one clue. He won’t be looking to the example of his own dear dad. But what if he has no choice? What if his father is a warning? Don’t even try it, Quaid. You won’t ever know how.
They have not stopped touching but they touch with an unaccustomed diffidence. Suddenly a touch is not a signal for something else to happen. Nor is it in all circumstances as appropriate as it was before. Should he be asking permission?
Quaid watches and waits.
Lily waits and watches.
He spends time under the outdoor shower because he can think there. He is not quite a stranger to himself but his body is behaving differently. Normally, water running down him is arousing. But he is not aroused. Does he have a different body now he has a wife?
Wife.
And here’s another thought – could he grow to like having a different body now he is a husband?
Husband. It’s as though the force of that has only just struck him. It has taken a honeymoon to bring home to him the fact of marriage.
Yesterday, or however long ago it was before things changed, Quaid moved within Lily’s electric field like so many charged particles, any one of which might, without warning and without any say in the matter, hiss, sizzle or even explode. I might as well be Frankenstein’s monster in its earliest stages of development, he told Lily, and while that wasn’t exactly a plea for her to turn off the power, he did on occasions wish he could escape from her electromagnetic influence just long enough to think about something else. I do have plays to write, he’d tell her. I know, and wonderful plays they are, she’d say, laying her cheek on his shoulder, whereupon his torso would light up like a pinball machine.
Queerly, his seeming impotence feels like a promise, though he doesn’t know of what. Independence, is it? Not from her but from the world and its expectations. This is who he is, this is what he does, this is what he doesn’t do. Anyone got an argument with that? It is not an independence that is in any way disparaging of his wife. He is, if anything, more aware of her than ever. He absorbs her with his eyes. He approves her with his heart. But if there is no further call on his manliness, does it matter?
Well to Lily it does, yes. She doesn’t need a warrior for a husband. She has never much cared for being an invaded country, anyway. So she can live with him sitting brooding in his tent; but she cannot live with not knowing how long he’s going to be in there or if he’s planning to make a dash for it under cover of darkness.
Honeymoons do strange things, she has no doubt. She came with no naive anticipations of rapture. And anniversaries do stranger things still. Twenty years, Sam says. Could he be right? He tells her he sees in her the girl he saw in Alburquerque. Age cannot you-know-what, he says, nor custom stale your whatsit. You continue to astound me. Though I sleep the sleep of an innocent child every night of our honeymoon, the fires still rage within me.
Lovely of him to say it. But it is one thing for a husband to feel this way about his wife, quite another for her to believe it. She looks after herself. Is careful what she eats. Dances for exercise. Creams her limbs each night from expensive pots and tubes – a ritual he loves to watch. Edgar Degas – Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub. But she wasn’t a girl when she met him and is many years further on from being a girl now. Infinitely flattering to be told she is a faun, a Nereid, a faerie princess, but how long will it be before he sees, or admits he sees, the ugly truth beneath this allegory of eternal beauty?
Floating on her back in the perfumed pool she wonders if her question is already out of date. What if, here in Bali, the man she loves in full knowledge of his faults, now sees only faults in her?
This much difference is there between a woman’s love and man’s – a man lacks the emotional intelligence to live with disenchantment.
Since Quaid does not know that this is what Lily is thinking, he cannot answer on his own behalf. But if he could, he would say that, yes, he was light in the emotional-intelligence department; yes, he lacked what people were starting to refer to as empathy, and lacked even more what people had always called curiosity; and that while this could be accounted a drawback in a playwright, it was not when he was writing plays that he was most himself. Who it was that took him over he couldn’t say. A better self? Someone else entirely? But as Lily’s lover – both as writer and as man – no, no, he was not disenchanted. He had crossed that river which all lovers must cross if they were not to fall out of love: Lily’s every fault now became her and in his eyes her every vice had become a virtue.
She will do nothing to break the becalmed mood. It’s part of Quaid’s idealisation of her to believe she holds the happiness of both of them in her hands, runs the carnival that has been their romance, and can effect any change simply by wishing it. But however much of that is true, it has been achieved by an attentiveness to Quaid’s wants and whims, his scares and susceptibilities – many unknown even to himself – that has been little short of superhuman. Right now – though this is not what holidays are supposed to do to you – she feels wrong-footed. She senses him eyeing her from his lounger as she climbs out of the pool. She would like to shake her hair in imitation of the sea nymph he has told her he sees, showering him with jewelled droplets like shooting stars, but wonders if the comedy of extravagant sensuality is the right note to strike today. She blows him an operatic kiss. The air is suddenly perfumed with sadness. What if she has not proved desirable enough for the island?