VI

Restlessly, Marc Hayden moved about the lofty, flat precipice that hung, like an observation point, over the village of The Three Sirens far below.

Not since their arrival at this place, exactly two weeks ago, had he visited this rise, from which descended the path around the stone ledge to the rectangular community set deep in the long valley. Marching around the precipice, Marc had occasional glimpses of the shaggy miniature huts beneath the overhangs, of the gleaming ribbon of stream in the compound. By now, late morning, the compound was lightly populated, the usual animated brown dots of children, some women, no one else, for the men were off to their work, the adolescents in their school, the members of Matty’s team (not his team) sheltered with their pencils, tapes, and boasting informants.

If the view from the high and isolated vantage point was beautiful, Marc was unaware of it. The village was there, but it was no part of him. Since the night, he had separated his identity from it almost completely. It was as remote and unreal as a color photograph in the National Geographic Magazine.

For Marc, the village and its inhabitants were merely Things, accessories to aid him in his escape from an ancient and hated way of life. What was real, what was animate, what was even, beautiful, was that Magna Carta of the soul—his private Declaration of Independence—enclosed in the right-hand pocket of his gray Dacron trousers.

The letter in the right-hand pocket was only three pages long, and the pages and envelope were thin, yet they filled his pocket and body and mind with the displacement of—he tried to think of an accurate simile—of an Aladdin’s Lamp, ready to fulfill his Wish.

He had stayed up most of the night, in the front room of the hut, composing those three pages to Rex Garrity in New York City. Most of his time had been consumed not with writing, but with plotting what he must tell Garrity of his intentions. When he had finished, he had gone to sleep easily and slept well for the first time in months, with the feeling of one who has done a day’s work in a day and done it properly, and has no remorse and infinite high hopes, and so can accept good sleep as a reward. He had ignored Claire’s lumpy outline on the sleeping bag, set his alarm, and closed his eyes and slept.

When his alarm had awakened him, he had slept only three hours, and yet he was not tired at all. During breakfast, Claire had appeared, still wearing her night-before face. Her face was drawn and rigid, and her good morning curt and combative, while his own good morning was so slight and slurred as to hardly exist as a greeting. She moved about noisily, bumping, tramping, all obtrusive, demanding without speech but with an oppressive presence his attention and apology for his behavior of the night before. She had wanted to have it out and done with, the domestic band-aid of talk and more talk, to patch her wounds. She wanted him to mitigate his cursing and his rejection during the night hours, to save face by invoking the plea of drunkenness but yet to apologize, so that she could save face by agreeing it best be forgotten and their life together could hobble on.

Through this silent sparring, and waiting out, he had given no ground. He had eaten in silence, and avoided her, simply because this morning she no longer had existence for him. His disinterest was total. In the night, he had grown, become the man he had always known he would be (and therefore a stranger to this woman), and he wanted no part of an old contract that he no longer need honor.

He had fled his hut in haste—a great show of finding notebook and pen, to throw her off the scent, make her believe he was off to work—and with the letter to Garrity in his right-hand pocket, he had gone swiftly to the path that climbed out of the village and above it. He knew that he must not be late. His purpose had been to intercept Captain Rasmussen—it was Rasmussen day, mail day, supply day—before the old pirate got down into the village and to Matty. If there was a letter from Garrity, in reply to his own from Papeete, he did not want Matty to see it or know about it. He wanted the letter alone, early, for himself. Its contents would determine his final decision—to mail or not to mail to Garrity the statement of intentions in his pocket.

He had sat for over an hour in the shade of the dense acacia, mulberry and kukui trees, a few feet from the path Rasmussen must take, nervously awaiting the bearer of his fate. Rasmussen had not appeared in that time, and Marc had restlessly left the cool rows of trees to rove the baking cliff nearby.

Now, he had been moving about the precipice for twenty minutes, wondering if there would be a letter, if it would fulfill what he daydreamed, if he would have the nerve to reply with the letter in his pocket, until he realized that this exposure to the rising sun was unbearable.

Slowly, wiping his face and neck with his handkerchief, he retraced his steps up the trail to the trees. The sloping path that led to the sea was still devoid of Rasmussen’s figure. Momentarily, Marc worried whether he had miscalculated the day or, if he had not, whether Rasmussen had been delayed or had postponed his mercy flight. Then he decided that he was being unduly anxious. Of course, Rasmussen would appear.

Standing beside the path, Marc felt the bulk in his right trouser pocket. He extracted the unsealed envelope addressed to Garrity, and his spirits revived, and he slid the envelope back into its place. He squinted off once more—the path was still empty of life, except for two scrawny goats in the distance—and finally he walked back to the coolest cubicle of shade he could find and dropped to the grass. He took out a cigar, and was hardly aware of preparing it and lighting it, as his mind returned to Tehura and what he had written Garrity of her and of her possible role in the decisive days to come.

When next he looked at his wrist watch, it was nearly noon and he had been on his lookout for three hours. He lapsed back into his thoughts, and then into flabbier daydreaming, and had no idea how much more time had elapsed before he was aroused by the harsh, off-key sounds of someone whistling a seaman’s chanty.

Marc scrambled to his feet—his watch told him it was past twelve-fifteen—and ran into the path. Twenty yards away, approaching him, was the glorious visitation of Captain Ollie Rasmussen, marine hat tilted back from his warped, stubbled Göteborg face, attire consisting of open worn blue shirt, filthy denims, tennis shoes as shabby as ever, and the mail pouch slung over his left shoulder.

Drawing closer, Rasmussen recognized Marc, and waved his free hand. “Hiya, Doc. You the reception committee?”

“How are you, Captain?” Marc waited nervously until Rasmussen had come abreast, and then he added, “I was up here hiking, and I remembered you’d be along today, so I thought I’d hang around and get a quick peek at my mail. I’m expecting something important to my work.”

Rasmussen threw the pouch off his shoulder and dropped it to the path. “Sure somethin’s so important it can’t wait? Mail ain’t sorted.”

“Well, I just thought—”

“Never mind, there ain’t much to sort through anyways.” He dragged the pouch through the dirt to the grass, sat wide-legged on a coconut log, straightening the pouch between his knees. “Guess I could use a second’s breather.” He opened the pouch, as Marc hovered over it. Rasmussen sniffed and looked up. “You got another of them stogies, Doc?”

“Sure thing, absolutely.” Quickly, Marc extracted a fresh cigar from his shirt pocket, and handed it to Rasmussen, who accepted it with a belch, and placed it beside him on the log. While Marc watched fretfully, Rasmussen dug his horny hand into the pouch, and produced a packet of letters bound tightly by a leather strap. He unbuckled the strap, then, muttering Marc’s full name, he went through the mail.

At last, he proffered three envelopes. “That’s all there is, there ain’t no more for you, Doc—’cept maybe some of the bigger pieces—but you don’t want them now.”

“No, this’ll do,” said Marc quickly, accepting the envelopes. While Marc fanned open the envelopes, like a gin rummy hand, to note the return addresses, Rasmussen dropped his packet into the mail pouch, and concentrated on unwrapping and lighting the cigar. The first letter, Marc saw, was from a faculty colleague at Raynor College; the second, addressed to Claire and himself, was from married friends in San Diego; and the third was from “R.G., Busch Artist and Lyceum Bureau, Rockefeller Center, New York City.” The last was Rex Garrity writing from his lecture agency offices, and Marc tightened with anticipation. Yet, he was reluctant to open the envelope before Rasmussen. The Captain still remained seated, sucking the cigar, bleary, alcoholic eyes observing Marc.

“Get what you want, Doc?”

“Dammit, no,” Marc lied. “Only some personal letters. Maybe it’ll come your next mail day.”

“Hope so.” Rasmussen took a grip on the pouch, and came to his feet. “I better get crackin’. Wanna clean up an’ fill my belly an’ be sharp for the festival. Starts today for the comin’ week, you know.”

“What? Oh, yes, the festival, I’d forgotten—I guess it does start today.”

Rasmussen eyed Marc meditatively a moment. “Matter of fact, I’m rememberin’—Huatoro an’ some of the native lads met us down the beach when we come in—they’re cartin’ the supplies the short route—he said somethin’ about you—guess you’re the one—you enterin’ the swim competition today. Is that bull or the truth?”

The festival swimming match, scheduled for three o’clock, had been the farthest thought from Marc’s mind. He was surprised by this reminder of it.

“Yes, Captain, it’s true. I’ve promised to enter it.”

“Why?”

“Why? For the exercise, I guess,” said Marc lightly.

Rasmussen pulled the pouch over his shoulder. “Want an old-timer’s advice? You can get better exercise bangin’ some of those Sirens broads, Doc—meanin’ no disrespect to the Mrs., understand—but that’s the real fireworks of the festival. I’m givin’ you the advice in the interests of scientific research. Jus’ keep it in mind if one of the maidens hands you a festival shell.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s what unties the grass skirt, Doc.” He laughed in a hoarse bark, coughed, removed the cigar, choking, and stuffed the cigar back between his discolored teeth. “Yeh, that’s what does it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Captain,” Marc said weakly.

“You bet your life, that’s what does it,” said Rasmussen. He started into the path. “You comin’ down with me?”

“I—no, thanks, I think I’ll walk a little more.”

Rasmussen had started moving away. “Well, jus’ don’t wear yourself out before the swim an’ you know what.” He barked his laugh again, and went trudging off toward the precipice.

Briefly disconcerted by the Captain’s reference to the festival, Marc remained standing, looking after him. By the time Rasmussen had gone through the rows of acacia and kukui trees and reached the precipice, and then disappeared around the stone bend that led down into the village, Marc’s mind had returned to Garrity’s long, flimsy envelope.

Hurrying off the path, into the shade across the way, Marc folded two of the envelopes and stuffed them into his hip pocket. Uneasily, he turned the Garrity envelope around, picked at the glued flap, and almost reluctantly tore at it, slitting it open with his forefinger.

Carefully, he unfolded the four typewritten onionskin pages. With restraint, like a gourmet who would disdain bolting a long-awaited delicacy, he read the letter, word by word.

There was the informal salutation, “My dear Marc.” There was the pleased acknowledgement of Marc’s hasty inquiry from Papeete. Then, there was the business at hand. Before reading it, and learning what his future could or could not be, Marc closed his eyes and tried to fix in his mind a portrait of the letter’s author. Time and distance and wish diffused memory’s picture: Garrity, blond, tall, lean, with his refined patrician Phillips Exeter-Yale features, the youngest juvenile of fifty on earth, the doer, the idol, the succeeder, the glamorous man of action, the on-the-heels-of-Hannibal adventurer—he—the one—in some lofty tower of Rockefeller Center, at a golden typewriter, writing, “My dear Marc”!

Marc opened his eyes, and read Garrity’s definitive statement of the business at hand:

 

I want to remark straight off that I doubly appreciate hearing from you so promptly because I think I, alone, am attuned to your sensitivity, personality, and position. I know you are hobbled by innumerable restrictions. For one thing, your renowned mother, God bless her, who, for all her genius, has a narrow and pedantic view of the living, commercial world. Her rejection of me, her undoubted aversion to those of us in public communications and entertainment, is based on an outdated code of ethics. For another thing, you have been handicapped by being imprisoned so long in your mother’s world, the so-called “scientific” world of pedants. But you are of a new, more sophisticated generation, and, forgive me, Marc, but for such as you there is hope, nay not hope alone but vistas of glory. From my one private conversation with you at your home in Santa Barbara, for your championing of me before your mother and wife and the nearsighted Hackfeld, and, indeed, for your letter from Papeete that revives my faith in you and our relationship and future, for all of these reasons I see in you a New Hayden, a strong individual with his own ideas and ambitions, ready to go before the world and conquer it at last.

As best I can interpret your few careful paragraphs, you speculate on the propriety of putting before the vast, general public the information you are garnering on The Three Sirens. You wonder if the material might not be misused and oversensationalized in the wrong hands. You wonder if any scientists, or anthropologists, have ever presented their findings to the nation in “the Rex Garrity manner.” You wonder about the true economics of the lecture circuit today, and you say, somewhat skeptically, you are certain I was jesting at your house when I remarked that proper presentation of The Three Sirens investigation and adventure could earn both of us “a million dollars!”

After careful consideration of your letter, I have decided to take your interest seriously, absolutely seriously. I was doing a lecture in Pittsburgh when your letter was forwarded to me, and immediately I canceled an engagement in Scranton to hurry to New York and visit with my agents in Rockefeller Center. In confidence, I told them what little I knew of your current field trip, of the Sirens itself, and I asked them what all of this could add up to in practical terms, “the true economics” of it, as you put it, and after two days here, I have all the real answers. It is, believe me, Marc, with a sense of high excitement that I write you now. I hope my excitement will transmit itself to you in that incredible faraway place where now you work, wherever it is, exactly.

At the outset, let me allay any fears you may possess as to the propriety of communicating The Three Sirens adventure to the public. Also, any fears you may have that the material would be misused. I know your mother accused me of being a successful popularizer who might exploit the Sirens material in a way that would be damaging both to anthropology and the hidden islanders. Marc, your mother is wrong. Forgive me again, but she reflects the outmoded thinking of prewar social scientists, a closed group or cult who kept what was valuable to themselves. In fact, the reputation your mother and father built was based on their breaking out of this eggshell, somewhat, and presenting their books in a more popular way. But, I contend, they did not go far enough. Their findings, those of others in the field, have not really gone out to the masses, have not been valuable or beneficial to the millions who could profit most. If what you are seeing on The Three Sirens is useful to America, why should it not be disseminated widely to help Americans? If what you are seeing is of no value to anyone, only curious or different, what harm in showing your fellow countrymen how foolishly others live and how happy your countrymen should be with their own lots? Remember, the great movers of our time, Darwin, Marx, Freud, shook no worlds until their findings came into hands like yours and mine and were popularized. When you question me about propriety, I question you about the right of any group to withhold or censor information that will enrich minds. No, Marc, fear not, only good can come from putting this material into the hands of men who understand the masses of people.

And how could your material be misused or sensationalized? If we went ahead, it would be together, as collaborators. You would have control of editing and presenting the material with me. You know my work, my reputation of long standing which is based on good taste. Members of both sexes, of all ages, of varied social strata, have been my devoted followers for years. The sales of my books, the cities that have turned out to applaud me, the endless fan mail that flows across my desk, the huge sums I annually pay Internal Revenue, all are testaments to my conservatism, universality of judgment, and taste. Finally, we would serve under the auspices of the Busch Artist and Lyceum Bureau, founded in 1888, a firm of highest distinction that has had, variously, on its roster, such names as Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Henry George, Maxim Gorki, Carveth Wells, Sarah Bernhardt, Lily Langtry, Richard Halliburton, Gertrude Stein, Dr. Arthur Eddington, Dylan Thomas, Dr. William Bates, Count Alfred Korzybski, Wilson Mizner, Queen Marie of Rumania, Jim Thorpe—and, forgive me a third time, yours truly, Rex Garrity.

As to your concern about anthropologists going out before the lay public, put it aside. I have documentary evidence that dozens of your colleagues, from Robert Briffault to Margaret Mead, have done this, and have enhanced rather than harmed their professional standing.

So at last we come to my talks with the Busch people, and the “true economics” of what insiders call “the chicken à la king circuit.” I have analyzed the most successful platform artists, and the most successful were those who were Big Names (Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, etc.) or those who had something timely or unusual to say (Henry M. Stanley, General Chennault, etc.). The Busch people assure me that we could not fail, for between us we possess both elements of potential success. I have the reputation. You have at your fingertips the material that is both timely and unusual. Between us, we could make The Three Sirens a household name like Shangri-La—yes, the Shangri-La of love and marriage.

In return for arranging our bookings, transportation, hotels, meals, guidance, the Busch agency would take 33 percent of our gross earnings. That would leave each of us 33½ percent free and clear of expenses. If your findings are as electric as I promised them they would be, they believe it possible that in a ten-month period (lecturing combined with radio and television, exclusive of writings) our gross could be $750,000 minimum! Think of it, Marc, in ten months you could have a quarter of a million dollars free and clear, and a national reputation to boot!

The Busch people would require only one thing from you, besides your presence. They would need a single piece of corroborating evidence, that is, evidence that The Three Sirens exists and is what you say it is. In short, they want to suffer no Joan Lowells or Trader Horns. What could this evidence be? A color film showing the unique side of life on The Three Sirens, or color slides or a large collection of stills that could be projected, to accompany our appearances. Or even—as Captain Cook did on his return from his first visit to Tahiti—a native man or woman from the Sirens to appear side by side with us.

Perhaps I have gone too far in trying to perceive your thoughts and ambitions. I hope not. If you can find a way of joining me in this endeavor, you will not regret it. You will become, overnight, independently wealthy, and as famous, even more famous, than your mother.

Think of that, think of all I have related to you, not fancies but facts, and make your decision to strike out on your own. If you do, riches and glory await you. There is nothing more for me to add, except that the Busch people and I eagerly await your reply. If it is favorable, as I trust it will be, we will make any arrangement suit able to you. If you wish, I will fly posthaste to Tahiti to await your emergence, and we can return triumphantly to New York together to undertake Project Fame.

 

The close of the letter, signed with a Hancockian flourish, read, “Your friend and, I pray, future collaborator, Rex Garrity.”

When Marc had finished, he did not reread the letter. It was as if every word of it was chiseled deeply into his consciousness. He held it in one hand, sitting there on the grass, surrounded by the color and fragrance of the acacia grove, and stared off at the path.

He realized that, despite the heat of midday, there was a thin pimpled chill on his shoulders, arms, forearms. He was frightened by the prize, and the enormity of the step that he must make to reach and hold it.

But then, coming to his feet, he knew that his decision had been made. What lay ahead, Garrity’s way, was unknown and terrifying, for he did not know his strength, yet it was satisfying beyond any ambition he had ever held. What lay ahead, Matty’s way, Claire’s way, was known and horrific, for he knew his weakness, and it was more dismaying than any nightmare of being buried alive for eternity. So, the choice was clear.

He tried to think. The first step was to seal and mail the letter written to Garrity last night. It needed no amendment, no elaboration. It anticipated and responded to everything in the pages that he had just read. Yes, he would drop it into Rasmussen’s outgoing mail pouch. That was the first step. The second step was to learn if his plan was practical. Everything hinged upon that, and thus, everything hinged upon Tehura. He would see her after the swimming match, when her primitive heart would welcome him as conquering hero. As to Claire, to hell with Claire, she was now the small-town first wife who was out of place and would never belong. Well, not quite that, either, for maybe she could be made to belong later by being brought to her knees, no longer a reproach but a beggar for his touch and glance. Claire, well, he would see, he would see. She was the least of it now. Momentous events were in the offing, and they were all that mattered.

Marc folded Garrity’s letter, slipped it into his hip pocket, put a match to his cold cigar, and started for the path and the village. He felt like a quarter of a million dollars.

The classes in the school had been shortened this day, and had run straight through the lunch period. It was because of the festival, Mr. Manao had announced at the outset. School would be dismissed at two o’clock, and they would have an hour before the festival began with the annual swimming contest. “We will follow this schedule all of this week,” Mr. Manao had added, and this edict had imparted to the students an air of frolic and merrymaking.

Surrounding Mary Karpowicz, the others in the classroom, usually so attentive and restrained, punctuated Mr. Manao’s lectures with hushed but exhilarated whispering, poking, giggling, teasing, and tugging. Even Nihau, so solemn always, was less studious this day. He smiled more, and constantly met Mary’s gaze with a reassuring nod and grin. Part of his good cheer, she knew, was his pleasure in having convinced her to return to the classroom after yesterday’s upset. In fact, her sudden disappearance, during the recess that followed the study of faa hina’aro and the live anatomy lesson involving the buxom girl Poma and the manly Huatoro, had not gone unnoticed by the all-seeing Mr. Manao. When Mary had come into the room, determinedly early, the instructor had approached her and, out of hearing of the others, inquired if she was well. He had missed her, he said, for the last of the classes. Mary had spoken vaguely of a headache, of having to lie down, and the instructor had been satisfied.

Now, listening to the last of Mr. Manao’s lecture on the island’s history, Mary felt a hollowness in her stomach pit. She tried to attribute it to the missing of lunch—but knew it was not that at all, for there had been an extra recess with refreshments of fruit—and then she admitted to herself it was the apprehension of seeing the naked Poma and Huatoro again, soon, any minute, and her worry over what would be shown next.

Thinking about it, the hollowness in her stomach pit filled, and she was less conscious of it, as her confidence returned. She had seen the most of it, she reminded herself, and there would be nothing really new today. She was aware of Nihau shifting his position beside her—the history lecture was done—and she recollected his words yesterday in the cool clearing near the Sacred Hut. “What will spoil love is shame, is fear, is ignorance,” he had said. “Seeing what you did see, and learning what you will learn, will not spoil anything when your heart is truly in love.” This, Nihau had said, would make her ready for the One, when he came, and she would never know displeasure. The evident superiority she would wear, when again she faced the old gang in Albuquerque, suffused her, lifted her heart. She felt calm, and almost eager for the hour that lay ahead.

While Mr. Manao prepared for the last class, cleaning his spectacles with a portion of his loincloth, attaching them on his ears, then studying a single sheet of paper, and while the students in the room buzzed, Mary’s eyes wandered to the open windows to her right. She could see her father, still beside the Rolleiflex set on a tripod. Oddly, he was doing what Mr. Manao had just done, wiping his rimless glasses.

Mary had not seen her father at breakfast. He was, she learned, at an early meeting with Maud Hayden. Later, when she had arrived at the schoolyard, she was surprised to see him, loaded under equipment, crouching, jumping, circling, squatting, squaring his fingers like a frame before his eyes, trying to find sights to shoot.

She had sneaked up behind him, and tickled the back of his warm, moist neck. He had gasped, almost lost his balance while crouched, tipping sideways, holding himself up with one hand, as he turned. “Oh, it’s you, Mary—”

“Who did you think it was? Some sexy Siren?” Then, as he opened vertically, like an accordion, to his full height, she had asked, “What are you doing here anyway?”

“Maud wants a complete layout on the school, black and white, color, color slides.”

“What’s there to shoot here? It’s just like any old school anywhere.”

Sam Karpowicz had unslung his Rolleiflex. “You’re becoming jaded, Mary. It’s the one affliction every photographer has to watch out for. I mean, that the camera eye doesn’t get too old, too used to everything it sees. The camera eye must always remain young, fresh, aware of contrasts and curiosities, never taking anything for granted. Look at Steichen’s art. Always young.” He half-turned, and nodded toward the thatched bowl of the building. “No, there isn’t a school like that one in America or Europe, certainly no students dressed like those in your class, no teacher on earth like Mr. Manao. Maybe what you mean is that what you are learning is old hat, parallels your subjects at home.” He had halted, thoughtfully considering his daughter. “At least, from what you’ve been telling us every day, the subjects here, history, handicraft, all that, do seem similar to those in your high school.” He hesitated. “They are, aren’t they?”

The question had alarmed Mary, probing so near her omission, and her mind conjured up Poma and Huatoro as she had seen them in front of the class yesterday. Hastily, she had concealed them. She had swallowed. “Yes, Dad, I suppose that’s what I meant.” She had not wanted the conversation to go on, for there might be traps, and so she affected disinterest. “Well, I’d better get going,” she had said. “Happy time exposures.”

That had been several hours ago, and from time to time, she had caught glimpses of her father and his cameras through the various open windows. Looking again, she saw that the window no longer framed his presence, his Rolleiflex, his tripod. She supposed that he had finished his series of pictures. Mr. Manao was speaking once more, and her concentration was again on the instructor.

There would be no further discussion of the human organs today, she learned. She was relieved, but she wondered what would be discussed. In a few minutes, she knew, and her back arched alertly, and inquisitiveness overcame embarrassment.

Mr. Manao had promised that his discourse on arousal of a partner would be detailed, require several days, and be undertaken only after he had covered broad basic points. This afternoon, he would discuss, and have demonstrated, the major positions assumed in love-making. There were, he said, six basic ones, and the variations of these were perhaps thirty more.

“First, the major ones,” he announced, and hit his hands together in the manner of a magician saying “presto.” From the back room, Huatoro and Poma emerged, their expressions phlegmatic. While the muscular athlete retained his brief garment, the twenty-two-year-old widow, Poma, quickly undid her grass skirt and threw it aside.

Although Mary was in the rear of the class, she could see the demonstration clearly between the rows of students. To her surprise, there was no contact between the actors, only a kind of posturing. They performed with the grace and fluidity of a pair of disinterested tumblers, brought together by their spindly director’s narration.

Although mildly disappointed, Mary’s attention remained riveted on the players, following them as she might two trained amoebae tinder a microscope. In fact, so absorbed had she become, that she did not, even in the silence of the room, hear the angry shuffle and stir directly behind her.

Suddenly, Mary felt a hard hand on her shoulder, squeezing and pulling, so that she winced with pain.

“Mary, I want you to leave the room!”

The voice was her father’s voice, high-pitched in anger, and the sound of it pierced her eardrums and slashed through the room.

The demonstration before the class halted, Mr. Manao’s sentence hung suspended, all heads turned to the rear as one head, and, in shock, Mary twisted around. Sam Karpowicz was standing over her. She had never seen his face so contorted and livid before. All kindliness, all fatherliness, had succumbed to the outline of outrage.

“Mary,” he repeated loudly, “get up and get out of here at once!”

Paralyzed on the matting, mouth open in the confusion that precedes humilation, she remained as she had been. Her father’s hand left her shoulder, hooked under her armpit, and roughly hauled her from the floor.

Gasping, as she scrambled to her feet, full humilation fell upon her. All eyes, she knew, were on her back and this disruptive, rude old man who was breaking up the class. And Nihau, Nihau, he was seeing this, and thinking what—what was he thinking?

She tried to speak, working her mouth, but her lips quivered and her teeth chattered and her lungs were dry and strangling.

Sam Karpowicz was glaring at her. “You’ve been coming here every day, indulging in this filthy—filthy—this sporting house—and not telling us—”

Her words came out, at last, broken fragments tearing from her throat. “Pa—no—don’t—it’s not—it’s—don’t, please—” Her eyes had filled, and control became impossible.

Mr. Manao materialized between them, a perplexed spider. “Sir—sir—what is it—what is wrong?”

“Goddammit, dammit man,” Sam was sputtering, “if I hadn’t just come in here to shoot pictures of this goddam class—I was so busy these last five minutes setting up equipment I didn’t even look to see what was going on up front—but goddammit, how dare you expose a sixteen-year-old girl to a low-down sex circus? I’ve heard of this going on in Paris and Singapore, but you people are supposed to be advanced—”

Mr. Manao kept lifting a hand, to interrupt, to explain, the imploring hand shuddering as if attached to an epileptic. “Mr.—Dr.—Karpowicz—you do not understand—”

“I understand one thing, dammit—what my eyes see! I’m as progressive and liberal as anyone on earth, but when an immature child is made—when her head is stuck in the mud—when she’s forced to look at the two of them up there—look at them—that half-naked big lover up there, trying to excite these young people—and look at her, just look at her—with her—her—her ass flying in the breeze!”

It was then that Mary screamed. “Paaa! Stop it—shut up, will you—shut up—shut up—shut your mouth—”

He stared at her as if slapped, and she wheeled and faced the class, all of them, Nihau, his face wrenched by despair and anguish for her, and all the others, half-understanding, understanding, and the two up front, and she tried to say something to them all, some apology, but there was no voice. She stood before them, mute, tears pouring down her cheeks, until she could not see them, and then she stumbled, tripping once, toward the exit, and plunged outside.

She went blindly across the recess area, seeing nothing, wanting only a grave and to pull the earth over her blazing face and dying heart.

No one was following her, but she began to run. She ran all the way home, sobbing and sobbing and wildly hoping God would strike him dead, and her other parent, too, and make the hut an orphanage.

It was not yet three o’clock when Claire and Maud completed their climb to the point overlooking the sea where spectators were gathering to watch the opening event of the annual festival.

The throng was the largest and noisiest that Claire had seen since coming to The Three Sirens. One hundred, maybe closer to two hundred, brown torsos were gathered, as closely packed as the crowds on the Champs Elysees the morning of Bastille Day, all settled here along the curved rim of the ridge that dropped sharply down to the water. The members of the American group were almost all present, and had attached themselves to Chief Paoti and his wife, who sat cross-legged at the farthest brow of land in the choicest sightseeing area. During the short hike from the village, Claire had been oblivious both to the direction they took and the new scenery along the way, so intent was she on the inward film, passing through her mind, running in reverse, of her life with Marc. His insensitive, even brutal behavior of the night before, so loveless, even worse, so patently hateful and sick; that, and his horrid avoidance of her, of offering any softening, compromising apology or explanation this morning, these had generated the backwards unreeling of her past. What she saw, in the private projection room of her head, frightened her. For, while the past year, especially the past months, had been unsatisfying, somehow she had clung to the remembrance that the year before that, the first year, and the courting period before that, had been beautiful, or at least not unattractive, and she had clung to the belief that what had been enacted once could be lived again. That had been her hope.

In her walk behind Maud, as the film ran backwards, the images that were brought to mind, instead of being prettified by their distance in time, had remained as enlarged and candid as pictures of the present time. Perhaps, she had told herself, the present was discoloring the images of the past. But then she was not so sure of that, either. Her married past was as marred with daily life’s acne as the present, so that none of it was fresh or handsome. The picture of her honeymoon night in Laguna, even. After the first union of their nude bodies in bed, right afterwards, he had wept, unaccountably wept. It had seemed to her then an emotional reaction of such goodness and sweetness, that she had held him, cradled him with after-love, until he slept like a child in her arms. But now, now, the rerun of the old scene was less romantic, was not romantic at all, only ill and suspect and the entire connotation somewhat ugly.

However, the moment that Claire had reached their destination, joined the hubbub of the gallery, the film had run blank. What filled her sight and mind was the activities and drama of the moment, sans Marc, and she was distracted from her misery. She greeted Harriet Bleaska and Rachel DeJong, and waved to Lisa Hackfeld and Orville Pence.

When Sam Karpowicz, a heavy sixteen-millimeter motion-picture camera in hand, came by, Claire spoke a hello to him, too. He saw her, yet did not see her, rudely ignored her, his features oddly twisted as if by some partial paralysis. He did not seem the gentle botanist and amateur photographer she had known these weeks. With wonder, she cast about for Estelle and Mary Karpowicz, but they were nowhere to be seen.

Maud had come away from Paoti’s side, and Claire said to her, “What’s eating Sam Karpowicz?”

“What do you mean?”

“He simply went past me when I said hello. Look at him shoving over there. Something must be wrong.”

Maud dismissed it. “Nothing’s wrong. Sam’s never in a bad mood. He’s busy. He’s going to shoot the entire swimming race, and he’s always absent-minded when he has things to do.”

Claire rejected this explanation, knowing it came from the usual blind spot in Maud’s sensitivity about individuals. Then, as if to confirm her own suspicions, Claire watched Sam’s surprising bullying continue and knew that she was right. Bad, bad mood. But, she asked herself, why not? It was a democratic prerogative—every human being’s inalienable right under God, Country, and Freud—the privilege to be moody. Wasn’t her mood bad? Damn right. Except at least she was trying to observe the civilities.

“Come here, Claire,” she heard Maud calling. “Isn’t this a sight?” Maud stood at the edge of the drop—“like stout Cortez … with eagle eyes”—a proprietary arm flung toward the Pacific. Claire went to her and looked off. The midaftemoon view, the hot yellow of the sunrays softened and greened by the placid velvety carpet of water, was awesome. Her eyes roamed from the infinite expanse of ocean to what was directly below. She stood on the elevated center of a horseshoe of land, and this horseshoe cupped the ocean, a particle of it, into an enclosed pool of water beneath her. This pool, apparently, would be the arena for the race. To her right, the water seemed to graduate into a steep incline of rock that resembled, with its rising indented ridges, a natural stone stepladder. Past the stone stepladder could be seen a corner of one of the two small, uninhabited coral atolls that adjoined the main island of the Sirens. If one sailed on between that atoll and the shore, almost the full length of the main island, Claire guessed, one would arrive at the far beach where Rasmussen’s seaplane rested.

Claire half-turned toward the opposite cliff enclosing the pool below, and this was sheer perpendicular. Her eyes moved along it, and at the very top she saw the contestants bunched. They were perhaps one hundred yards off, not distinct, yet clear enough so that she was immediately able to separate the blocky frame of her husband. This was easy because he, alone, was pinkish white and hairy and wearing navy blue trunks in contrast to the two dozen men of the Sirens around him who were light tan to dark brown and hairless and attired in supporters. Seeing her husband thus, in an athletic contest, she thought not of participant observer but of second childhood. Anger entered her chest again like a terrible heartburn. Consciousness of the pain spoiled the beauty of the scene. Claire turned away.

Maud, she saw, had gone to Harriet Bleaska and Rachel DeJong, and then she saw that they were being joined by a rather short young-old native man with an intent face rather curiously Latin in profile. She recognized him as Vaiuri, the one who was the head of the hospital or clinic and Nurse Harriet’s collaborator.

Keeping her back to Marc’s afternoon idiocy, Claire wandered from the cliff, until she came to the fringe of the group that she had been observing. With little interest in what they might be discussing, she pretended interest and social absorption.

Vaiuri was addressing Harriet. Even in his loincloth, he seemed to have the solemn and wise manner of all the world’s physicians. He was saying,”—and because of our work together, Miss Bleaska, I was assigned to bring to you the word of the final voting. I am honored to inform you that you will be queen of the festival.”

He waited, like a practiced public speaker who pauses for the expected burst of applause, and he was not disappointed. Harriet’s hands clapped together, and then held together at her wide mouth in a pose of prayer fulfilled, and her eyes appeared to bulge. “Oh!” she had exclaimed, and then she said, “Me? I’m going to be queen—?”

“Yes—yes,” Vaiuri was assuring her, “it is voted in the morning by the adult males of our village. It is one of our great honors of the festival week.”

Harriet stared uncertainly at the others. “I’m overwhelmed. Can you imagine—me a queen?”

“It’s wonderful, wonderful,” Maud was saying.

“Congratulations,” said Rachel.

Harriet had faced Vaiuri again. “But why—why me?”

“It was inevitable,” he replied seriously. “The honor every year is for the most beautiful young woman in the village—”

“You’re embarrassing me,” Harriet interrupted with a nervous giggle. “Really, Vaiuri, I’m no—I know my assets and defects—there are a hundred really beautiful women—Claire here—the Chief’s niece—”

Claire realized that Vaiuri had nodded respectfully toward her, but addressed Harriet with gravity. “No disrespect to the many others, also deserving. I repeat. The men have voted you the most beautiful.”

Claire tried to see Harriet as these men saw her. Had she heard of such a thing when she had first met Harriet, Claire might have thought the award a mean mockery. Harriet’s plainness—no, truth—absolute homeliness, had often intruded upon Claire’s attentiveness to her. Since then, Claire realized, more and more the friendliness and gaiety of the nurse’s personality had married themselves to her features and made her features acceptable. In this crowning moment, Claire could see that the nurse’s joy in it, pride in it, had indeed made her almost physically fair.

“I’m still practically speechless,” Harriet was saying. “What am I supposed to do, I mean as queen?”

“You will open and close tonight’s dance,” said Vaiuri. “I shall teach you the words. There will be several other similar ceremonies in the week that you will preside over.”

Harriet turned to Maud. “Isn’t this something? Queen—” A feminine concern passed across her face. “Vaiuri, what does the queen wear, a robe and diamonds or what?”

Vaiuri seemed suddenly uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “No, no robe. You—you will sit on a bench on a platform above the others. Yes.”

Harriet bent toward him. “You haven’t answered me. What does your festival queen wear?”

“Well—in times past, in accordance with tradition—”

“Not times past. Last year, what did she wear?”

Vaiuri cleared his throat again. “Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing? You mean nothing?”

“As I attempted to explain, it is the tradition that since the queen is the reigning beauty of the village in the men’s hearts, her beauty must reign. On the special occasions she appears in disrobe—that is—divested of all garments.” He hastened to the next. “But I must say quickly, Miss Bleaska, in your case, since you are a foreigner, it was agreed that this old tradition may be modified. You may appear as you wish.”

Harriet had already assumed a monarch’s concern for her subjects. “What would you wish? What would please the village men most? I mean—honestly, now.”

The medical practitioner hesitated. All interest was concentrated upon him. He massaged his jaw with one hand. “I believe it would please everyone if you made your appearance in the—the day-by-day costume of our women.”

“You mean grass skirt and nothing else, period?”

“Well, as I said—”

“Is that what you mean?”

“Yes.”

Harriet grinned at Claire, then Maud and Rachel. “I’m not much in the balcony department, but anything once.” She winked at Vaiuri. “Tell the boys the Queen is grateful, and will be on hand in grass skirt and total decolletage. What a sight—but really, Vaiuri, I’m thrilled, I’m so thrilled.”

The medical practitioner, relieved and more composed, had turned to Rachel DeJong beside him. “Dr. DeJong, I have been entrusted with a gift for you.”

Rachel showed her surprise. “A gift? How very nice.”

Vaiuri dug into a fold of his loincloth, unknotted it, and handed a gold-colored object to Rachel. She examined the object with bewilderment, then held it up. It was a highly polished, porcelainlike shell that hung from a strand. “A necklace,” she said, half to herself.

“The festival necklace,” explained Vaiuri. “Most often they are mother-of-pearl, but sometimes they are cowries or terebras. This one is a golden cowrie.”

Rachel remained puzzled, but Maud had quickly reached out, touched the brilliant shell, and asked the practitioner, “Is this the famous shell that solicits a meeting?” Vaiuri inclined his head in assent, and Maud seemed delighted. “Rachel, you’ve made it,” she said. “Don’t you remember? For festival week, the men prepare these and present them to women they have high esteem for all year. Like the Mabuiang tribe’s grass bracelets, these are statements of admiration and invitations to—I suppose you might say invitations to secret rendezvous—and if, after receiving one, you wear it, you give consent. The next step is a meeting, and the next step is—well, you are on your own … Am I right, Vaiuri?”

“Absolutely, Dr. Hayden.”

Rachel frowned down at the bulbous shell. “I’m still not sure I understand. Who is it from?”

“Moreturi,” said the practitioner. “Now, if you will excuse me—”

Claire had watched the psychoanalyst through the last, and she could see that Rachel’s face had paled. Rachel looked up, caught Claire’s eye, and shook her head, her lips tight. “He’s untractable,” she said, with a trace of indignation. “Another act of hostility. He’s determined to fight me, embarrass me.”

“Aw, Rachel, cut it out.” It was Harriet’s happy voice. “They love us. What more can a woman ask for?”

Before Rachel DeJong could reply, Tom Courtney joined the group. “Hello, everyone—hello, Claire—better find your places. They’ll be off and splashing in a few minutes.”

Obediently, the group splintered in different directions, except for Claire, who remained where she had been. Prepared to leave, Courtney hung back, as if waiting for her. “Mind if we watch it together?” he asked.

“I’m not sure I want to watch it at all, but—oh, all right, yes, thank you.”

They went to the right, toward the brink of the cliff, past Rasmussen, who was leaning over a native girl, whispering to her, and he wagged his hand at them without looking up. They found a vacant area apart from the members of the team and the villagers.

Before sitting, Claire glanced past Courtney at the spectators. “Tom,” she said, “why all this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the festival. The whole week. I’ve heard Maud lecture us on it a dozen times. But still, I’m not sure—”

“Have you ever read Frazer’s The Golden Bough?”

“Much of it, yes, in college. And Maud’s always having me type quotations from it.”

“Maybe you’ll recognize this quotation.” He squinted up at the sky a moment, and recited it from memory, “‘We have seen that many peoples have been used to observe an annual period of license, when the customary restraints of law and morality are thrown aside, when the whole population give themselves up to extravagant mirth and jollity, and when the darker passions find a vent which would never be allowed them in the more staid and sober course of ordinary life. Of such periods of license the one which is best known and which in modern languages has given its name to the rest, is the Saturnalia.’” He paused. “There you are, Claire.”

“Umm, I remember,” she said. “I remember wondering, the very first time I heard about it, why we didn’t have something similar at home. I wondered it aloud, at a party, and I’m afraid I committed social heresy.” Then she added, “In Marc’s eyes, I mean. He believes the Fourth of July, Christmas, Flag Day fill all our needs.” She was unable to modify this with a smile. After a moment, she peered off and could see the brown bodies and the single white one, in the distance, beginning to line up on the cliff’s edge. “The race starts it off, I’m told. How do they race?”

Courtney followed the line of her vision. “The starter will blow a bamboo whistle. They’ll dive off into the water.”

“That’s a terrifying dive.”

“Sixty feet. They swim free-style, no rules, across the lagoon. It’s about one mile across, I think. I timed last year’s swim at twenty-three minutes. When they reach the opposite terraced slope, over there, they go scrambling the fifty feet to the top. First man on top is the winner, king of the hill.”

“What’s in it for the winner?”

“Considerable mana before the young ladies. The whole event is an important symbol of virility and quite appropriate for starting off the festival.”

“I see,” she said. “Now it begins to make sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just something private. I was thinking of my husband.”

“I hope he can swim.”

“Oh, he can swim, that’s one thing he can do.” Then, curtly, she said, “Let’s get off our feet.”

They sat down in the trampled grass, Courtney with his long legs folded high before him, encircled by his arms, and Claire with her arms hugging her bare knees.

She studied Courtney’s broken bronze profile, as he looked off at the contestants readying for the event. She said, “Tom—after this—what goes on tonight, every night? That quotation from Frazer keeps sticking in my mind. It conjures up a mighty unruly week.”

“Nothing like that at all. No need for a Saturnalia, Roman style. There is just more freedom, more license, no recriminations. It is the week of the year in which these people open the valve and let off steam, sanctioned and legalized steam. Everyone gets double rations from the communal storehouse, including fowl and pig, double amounts of intoxicants if desired, there are dances, beauty contests, all sorts of Polynesian games to watch or participate in, and there is the giving and taking of the festival shell—”

Claire thought of Rachel DeJong’s anger—real or feigned? probably real—at receiving a shell from Moreturi. Would she wear it? Participant observation, you know, unquote Maud Hayden. “Why that business of the shell?” she asked Courtney. “They have license all year with the Social Aid Hut.”

“Not quite,” said Courtney. “A native can use the Social Aid only if there is a real reason to use it. If challenged, he has to prove his need of it. During festival week, no one has to prove or explain anything. If a married woman has an eye on someone else’s husband, or some single man, she need only send him a polished shell to arrange an assignation. She can send out as many as she wishes. And the same goes for the men.”

“It sounds pretty dangerous to me.”

“It isn’t, Claire, not really, especially against the background of this culture. It is all discreet fun. If I’ve been married and had a secret crush on you all year, well, today or tomorrow I’d send you a shell. If you wore the necklace I’d made, we’d talk, arrange a meeting outside the village. This doesn’t mean that automatically you’d sleep with me. It means let’s meet and talk, drink and dance, and see what comes next.”

“What happens next week?”

“Well, my fictional wife wouldn’t be angry with me, and I’d have nothing against her. Life would resume its routine course. Sometimes, not frequently, after this week, there are readjustments. New love affairs burgeon, and then the Hierarchy steps in to mediate.”

“What about nine months later?” asked Claire. “What if an extramarital child is produced by one of these affairs?”

“It rarely happens. Great care is taken. Their precautions are effective. When an offspring does result, the mother has the option of keeping the infant or turning it over to the Hierarchy to dispose of to some barren couple.”

“They think of everything,” said Claire. “Okay, I’m still for it.”

“It wouldn’t work back home,” said Courtney. “I’ve thought about it often, but no. These people have had a couple of centuries of orientation to it. They are prepared by background and from birth. We’re not ready at home. Too bad, too. I think it’s so sad, at home, the way you grow up toward marriage not being able to meet many people you think you might love. I remember once, in Chicago, standing on the corner of State and Madison, and seeing a slender young brunette, so lovely, and for ten seconds I was in love, and I thought, if only I could speak to her, go out with her, see if she was for me, but then the green light changed and she disappeared in the crowd and I went my way and never saw her again. No shell necklace to pass, you see. Instead, I had to confine myself to artificially created and limited social groups and make my choice from these. I sometimes feel I was shortchanged. You know what I mean?”

“I know.”

“And after marriage, well, the anthropologists know this, there’s no extramarital freedom at home, both sexes chafe along on the same rails toward old age, scenery ignored, side trips not allowed. Church and State are kept happy. It is unrealistic, and if you stay on the rails, it’s a strain, and if you don’t, if you sneak in a few detours, it’s also a strain. I’ve been there, Claire, I know. Remember, I was a divorce attorney.”

“Yes,” said Claire. “I guess a number of us have had the same feelings, brought on by the purpose behind the festival. We just haven’t been able to articulate it, or maybe don’t want to. Although, come to think of it, Harriet Bleaska did tell me that when we first came here, Lisa Hackfeld mentioned to her an awareness of some of the same shortcomings at home, the confinement of being single or married, that you’ve been talking about.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Courtney. “My own years in the Midwest seem incredible to me since I’ve lived here—”

A piercing, reedy whistle sliced through Courtney’s sentence, and an immediate powerful chorus of cheering from off to the left ended his reflections completely. Courtney and Claire swiveled their heads in unison and they saw the faraway line of contestants plunge free of the earth and plummet through space. Some arched gracefully and some spun crazily, flopping through the ozone like so many Raggedy Andys. The bodies all seemed brown, and then, near the water, Claire saw the one that was white and hairy, arms forward like an arrowhead, body rigid as a plank of wood.

Marc was among the vanguard of a half-dozen to hit the water. Of them all, Marc alone did not actually hit the water, spatter it, but appeared to knife into it, cleanly, beautifully, and disappear from sight. Around him were splashes and geysers, and then heads bobbing afloat. And then, Marc slithered out of the water, five or ten yards ahead of his nearest competitor. Employing the Australian crawl, his white arms began to revolve, pulling at the water, head pillowed against the hospitable sea, legs opening and closing like scissors, leaving a trail of foam, as he sped ahead.

“Your husband’s got the early lead,” Courtney said, above the steady din of the spectators. “That’s Moreturi behind him, and right behind him Huatoro.”

Claire’s eyes shifted from Marc to the two brown figures thrashing in pursuit of him. Their swimming was choppier than Marc’s, more primitive and explosive. Both Moreturi and Huatoro were beating the water harder with their hands, rolling farther onto their sides to suck for air, kicking their legs more visibly. Minutes were passing, and yards behind the three leaders the other brown faces, brown shoulders, brown arms were beginning to string out.

Claire watched without emotion, quite detached here high and above, as if viewing the spectacle of small windup toys pitted against one another in a tub of water.

She became aware of Courtney’s watch, his finger touching the crystal. “Fifteen minutes and they’re at the half-mile,” he was saying. “Very good time. You were right. Your man can swim.”

My man, she thought, thinking at last, letting my man my man my man echo and reverberate in her brain chamber.

“Look at him open up that lead,” Courtney was saying.

She had been looking, but had not seen, so now she put mind’s sight into her eyes. It was true. There was open sea between Marc and the native pair, maybe a full twenty yards. She stared down at the white one, the great white lover, superior man, superior race, putting on his symbolic show of virility. Here again the persistently nagging questions: Do manly manners and manly feats make a manly man? Is Marc a man? Unless I know, how am I to know if I am a woman?

“You must be so very proud!” It was a thrilled young female voice addressing her, and Claire realized that the beautiful Tehura had come to kneel between Courtney and herself. The native girl’s eyes glistened and her white teeth shone. Claire gave some kind of dumb nodding assent, and Courtney said teasingly to the girl, “Your friend Huatoro is not used to looking at another’s feet.”

“I have no favorite,” said Tehura primly. “Huatoro is my friend, but Moreturi is my cousin, and Marc Hayden is my—” She hesitated, groping in her limited word cupboard, and then concluding, “—he is my mentor from far away.” She pointed below. “Look, Tom, Huatoro is passing poor Moreturi!”

Ignoring the race, Claire stared wonderingly at the native girl. She had always regarded her as just one more attractive female of the village, a special female since Tehura had stood beside her at the first night’s rite of acceptance, but still one more member of a tribe being studied. Yet, for the first time, she realized that the girl had a closer relationship to Marc and herself. Marc was her “mentor.” She was Marc’s “informant.” For a good part of two weeks, Marc had spent long hours of days with her. This girl had probably seen more of Marc, in this time, than had Claire. What did she think of Marc, that strange, sullen, almost middle-aged man from California? Did she think of him as a man at all? How could she, who knew so much, think so, if Claire, who knew so little, was not sure? But these questions were fruitless. Tehura did not know Marc at all. She knew an anthropologist asking questions and making notes. She knew a muscular white man swimming ahead of her fellow villagers. She did not know the Puritan Father who had insulted the grass skirt, Tehura’s own, that Claire had worn in love last night.

Claire saw that Courtney and Tehura, and everyone behind them, were absorbed in the contest below. She sighed and leaned forward. Since she had last looked, the design on the green water, formed by the swimmers, had altered. Minutes before, she had thought that they resembled a long rope of foam, with knots strung out along the rope, the knots being the heads and shoulders of the competitors. The foam rope was gone. Instead, the design on the water was that of a tight triangle moving toward the stone shore beneath her. The front point of the triangle was still Marc, his wet, chalky arms moving out of the water and over and stroking down, like paddles of a Mississippi gambling boat. Diagonally behind, to his left, quite near Marc it seemed, was the broad- shouldered one called Huatoro. Diagonally, to the right, further back, was Moreturi. Then, closer than they had been before, the rest of the triangle formed by the other brown swimmers, with their relentless flaying arms, fluttering kicks, rollings, exhalings, inhalings.

She heard Courtney’s voice announcing to Tehura, “They’re closing in on him in the stretch. Look, there’s Huatoro. I didn’t think he’d have that much left—”

“He is strong,” said Tehura.

Claire was conscious of the swelling clamor of the spectators, and then it burst into pandemonium. As if lifted by the detonation of two hundred throats crying out as one stentorian bellow, Courtney and Tehura leaped to their feet.

“Look at them—look at them!” Courtney shouted. He half-turned, “Claire, you must see the finish—”

Unwillingly, Claire responded. The contestants, a portion of the front ones, had been briefly out of her vision, but when she came up next to Courtney and Tehura, she could see them all.

Marc had just touched the foot of the great benched cliff, and he was hauling himself out of the ocean like a soggy albino seal. He was upright, the first on land, and as he shook free of the film of water, he glanced over his shoulder in time to see the broad, powerful frame of Huatoro hoisting itself ashore.

Spurred by the closeness of the other, Marc started up the incline, with a five-yard lead over his rival. The banks of the cliff were craggy and steep. There was no worn path. One did not merely walk up it or march up it. Rather, one snatched it, each indentation above, did a pull-up, and caught one’s breath, climbing when the ladder rungs of stone were closer, but gripping and rising by force when they were separated. In this manner, Marc ascended the terraced slope, with Huatpro steadily behind him, as a swarm of others just touched the rocky shore.

Marc and Huatoro were halfway toward their summit finish, the judges on their knees above, waving, beckoning, encouraging, and then they were two-thirds toward the final height, and then Claire could see that Marc was faltering. As he reached each small bluff, and pulled himself erect, he took an increasingly longer time to propel himself to the next precipice above. Until these seconds, he had been as regular as a machine, but now it was as if the machine had become clogged and was slowing. Marc’s ascent became slow-motion, painful to behold. His pauses were longer and longer, as if the last of his strength had seeped out of him.

Fifteen feet from the top, on a narrow ledge, he stopped, staggering on rubbery legs, whiter than before, almost deformed by fatigue. And here it was that Huatoro caught him, clambering onto a parallel ledge no more than three feet to one side. For the first time, Claire, who had been concentrating upon her husband, could plainly see his rival. Huatoro came up, side by side with Marc, with the vigor of a young, plunging bull. He hesitated only a split second to look across at his opponent, and then he reached one muscular arm upwards, and the other, and followed his arms with his rippling shoulders and torso.

Claire could see Marc shaking his head, hard, like a gladiator risen from the arena floor, trying to unscramble his senses and make them signal his unsteady calves into motion. The next high ledge was near, and Marc attained it with hardly any help from his hands. As he reached it, Huatoro was already a full stride ahead in the climb. Desperately, Marc tried to keep up with the other. Higher they went, nearer the finish, pull, jump, stop, climb, crawl, stop, another, another, and then they were on the same small promontory, but not long side by side, for Huatoro was still moving, scrambling upwards, while Marc was wavering near collapse, going down to one knee, the gladiator fallen again, not by a blow but by weakness and loss of will.

Then it was that Claire once more became conscious of the thunderous cheers of the spectators, and heard Tehura screaming, shaking Courtney’s arm, screaming, “Look—look—oh, nooo—nooo—”

Claire turned back to see the finish, and found that Marc was upright, not climbing, but snatching for the ledge directly above which Huatoro had just scaled. But instead of grasping the ledge, Marc’s hand closed on Huatoro’s ankle. The native, starting to move, found himself one-legged, the other leg fastened down by his rival’s grip. Bewildered no doubt, perhaps angered (his features could not be clearly seen), Huatoro shouted something at Marc, and he shook his captured leg once, twice, and a third time hard, kicking free of Marc, as if kicking free of some small troublesome terrier.

Liberated, Huatoro climbed swiftly upwards to the very summit and his victory, while Marc remained where he had been kicked down by the other, down on both hands and both knees, immobilized, by fatigue and public humiliation. And it worsened, for as he stayed on his hands and knees, prostrated, Moreturi came vaulting up, glanced down at him, and then continued to work his way to the finish. Then came the others, the tenacious and robust young men, the first passing Marc to reach the summit third, and then another and another. Finally, finally, Marc rose, and shakily and all palsied, so slowly, he went up the last few ledges, ignoring outstretched hands, to lift himself to the summit. Huatoro and Moreturi, and one or two others also, approached him, evidently trying to speak to him, but he turned from them and, shoulders and chest heaving, went off alone, to one side, to recover his strength and his pride.

The shouting had dropped to a low babble of voices in the air. Claire twisted away from the scene, firmly put her back to it, only to find Courtney observing her.

She did not attempt to smile or shrug off her reaction. Quietly, on a pitch of irony, she quoted, “‘When the Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He writes not that you won or lost but how you played the game.’”

Courtney frowned. “I don’t think so, Claire, I don’t think he really tried to hold Huatoro back. He was reaching for the ledge and by accident—he didn’t know what he was doing—he grabbed Huatoro’s ankle, just held on—instinct of self-preservation.”

“I don’t need that pill, Tom,” she said, suddenly angry. “I know the patient. He was a fool to enter this, and he was a double fool in the end. If a man’s got to prove himself, I know better means, and different means. No more sweeteners today, thank you, Tom.”

Tehura had come forward, a strange questioning look in her face as she confronted Claire. “Is that what you see, Mrs. Hayden? I see different.” She paused, and she said stiffly, “I think he did well.” With a nod, she departed.

Claire’s eyebrows shot up with puzzlement as she watched the native girl leave. Claire turned to Courtney, and she shrugged. “Well, when the Great Scorer comes, I guess he had better come to The Three Sirens first … Thanks for your company, Tom. I think I’d best get back to the hut, and put a bandage on my hero’s virility.” She blinked at his expressionless face, and she added, “We’ll need our strength. It’s going to be quite a festival.”

At several minutes after eight o’clock in the evening, the fringes of the village were darkened, and this served to accentuate the great decorative ball of light in the very center of the compound.

The ball of light was actually a blending of three rising rings of blazing torches surrounding the mammoth platform constructed in the early morning. The torches went up from the ground like candles surmounting a three-decker birthday cake. There was the wide ring of torches, broken in half only by the stream, planted in the earth itself, among the clustered villagers. The fingers of flame went straight up, without flickering or bending in the windless calm of night, as if the High Spirit was not panting or breathing heavily upon his children, but sitting serenely with them for an interlude of pleasure uninterrupted by work. The second circle of lights came from the torches attached to the wooden step built around the platform, two feet above the turf, two feet below the stage, and which was used as stairs by the performers. Upon the platform itself was the topmost circle of illumination, where the stubbier, wider, brighter torches resembled footlights on four curving sides.

Courtney had told the Hayden team that the oval platform was almost forty feet in length and twenty feet in width, and the planks were used over and over again, for every annual festival, so that the surface was worn smooth as carpeting by innumerable dancing bare feet.

At the moment, except for the seven native males who were the musicians—young, enthusiastic brown men, two beating hollowed tree trunks made into slit drums, one with a flute, two with bamboo rods they struck together, two with big hands clapping loudly—the stage was empty.

The members of the Hayden team had been given the seats of honor, places in the first row which began fifteen feet back from the front of the platform. They sat on the grass, with villagers seated row upon row behind them, until lost in the outer darkness.

Claire was at the end of their row, looking relaxed in her sleeveless white Dacron blouse and navy blue linen skirt that covered her knees. Her sandaled feet were discreetly crossed beneath the skirt. She sat quietly, hands folded in her lap. She heard Orville Pence, kneeling beside Rachel DeJong and Maud, who were next to her, saying, “—and the musicians insisted that even their instruments are ancient sex symbols; the hollow drum up there represents the female, and over there the wooden flute, obviously the male. All one more part of the festival theme. Then, if you consider—”

Claire closed her ears to the rest. She was bored with the Freudian patter. There would be this, and there would be Boas and Kroeber and Benedict, and always Malinowski, and most certainly Cora DuBois and the island of Alors, and inevitably the subject of Psychodynamics. For Claire, these would be the intruders, the unwanted guests, who analyzed, who explained, who took apart and put together, who peeled off primitive beauty so that only the misshapen core was left in full disfigurement.

Tonight, Claire wanted none of this. The scene and setting were romantic, and Claire wanted the contentment of it to soak into her pores and not into her poor head. She wanted to escape from the technical talk of the team, from her own situation really, and this one night she was determined to make the flight, no matter how briefly.

She diverted her attention to the stage above, and to the activity around it.

A childhood carnival, she thought, a magical carnival for a time when you were too small, eyes too small, mind too small, to see the tawdry, the imperfections, the daily dyings. She remembered—she had not remembered it in years—the one on the Oak Street beach, in Chicago, on the magnificent lake shore, when she was little. Perhaps she had been five or six or seven. She remembered her father’s firm hand covering her hand, as they went down to the lake front from Michigan Boulevard. She remembered that everyone seemed to know him—”Hi, Alex” … “See you got a date, Alex”—even a pair who whispered as they passed, one saying, “Yes, Alex Emerson, the sports writer.”

Suddenly, she remembered, they were plowing through the warm sand, and there was the riot of sound and lights, and the rows of bazaar shops of wonderland. They had gone through the carousing people, stopping here and there, this booth and that, her father laughing and laughing, and lifting her up and putting her down. She remembered hot dogs, endless hot dogs, and gallons of lemonade, and a billion puffs of pink cotton candy, and she remembered popcorn as endless as grains of sand on the beach, and a zillion dolls and ceramic dogs and cats, and the wheelings of the merry-go- round and the ferris wheel and the whip, God, the whip, how she held him for dear life.

The imprint on memory faded, but clear still was the feeling of the night, the wondrous, immortal, hugging swell of the one emotion that she felt when she drowsed against his broad chest as he carried her up to the car—it was Being Loved she had felt, and she had not known it again, not once, in the heavy, slow, unpopulated, unfun years since.

She tried to evoke the old childhood carnival once more, overlay it upon the revelry here on the Sirens, but it was no use, for she was grown, and her veteran eyes saw behind booths, behind corners, behind masquerades. Feeling had given way to thinking. And besides, besides, where was Alex? Yet, objectively, all this before her, primitive and strange, had a grown-up attraction of its own. The trouble was, she was apart from it, interested and bystander, not of it.

Also, she was alone. Maud did not count. Nor did Rachel count, nor did the disagreeable Orville Pence. She was married two years and one day, she was one-half of two who (by matrimonial mathematics) were supposed to be One, yet here sat she like a spinster woman, a half-person, alone. Where had the equation gone wrong? With the chalk of memory, she redid it on mind’s blackboard …

Marc was already there, in the rear room of the hut, when she had returned from the swimming contest. His trunks, still soggy, hung limply from a wall peg. He lay, shirtless and shoeless, but in washable slacks, upon the sleeping bag, soundly napping, breath exhaling in low honks as if from an exhausted canine. His excursion into juvenility—juvesenility was the observation she coined—had sapped him entirely. She was embarrassed for staring at him, unbeknownst to him, as he slept. It was unfair, for he was defenseless against judgment.

She had left him to occupy herself with the dinner. In celebration of the festival, there was an added supply of native food and drink: lobster, red bananas, sea cucumbers, turtle eggs, yams, taro in palm-frond baskets, coconut milk in one earthenware pitcher, and palm toddy in another pitcher. Beside these lay a new food- pounder, fashioned from the ribs of coconut leaves. Claire carried the baskets, pitchers, and pounder to the earth oven, and began her cooking. Shortly afterwards, she had heard Marc shuffling about. She called out that dinner was served. Somehow, she had expected him to appear sheepish. That would have helped. This tone established, she could have teased him, and there would have been banter between them, and there might even be laughter. Instead, he was petulant. She knew that he watched her closely as she served, as if he were on guard against an obligatory jab about his performance. She withheld comment.

Once she was seated across from him, he had said, “I should’ve had him. In fact, I did have him until the damn climb. I wasn’t in shape for that. Hell, I entered a swimming meet, not a mountaineering contest. I beat him swimming.”

The immaturity of this had sickened her, and she’d replied dully, “Yes, you beat him swimming.”

“You know, I didn’t realize it was his ankle—I thought I had hold of the ledge—it took me a few seconds before I—”

“Marc, who gives a damn about that nonsense? You did your very best. Now eat.”

“I give a damn. Because I know you. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I made a fool of myself.”

“I didn’t say that. Now, please, Marc—”

“I didn’t say you said that. I said I know you well enough to know how your mind operates. I just wanted to straighten you out—”

“All right, Marc, all right” She had had a spasm of choking on some food, and after she had recovered, she’d said, “Went down the wrong way. Let’s finish in peace.”

When they were through, and she was clearing the dining mat, he had puffed on his cigar and his eyes followed her through the blue smoke.

“You going to the festival tonight?” he had asked, suddenly.

She stopped. “Of course. Everyone is. Aren’t you?”

“No.”

‘What does that mean?” she had wanted to know. “You’ve been invited like all of us. It’s one of the highlights, one of the reasons we were invited this time of the year. It’s why you’re here. You have your work—”

“My work,” he had repeated with a grunt. And then he’d added with an edge of sarcasm, “After all, you and Matty will be there.”

“Marc, you must—”

“I did my part for research this afternoon. I’m bushed, and I’ve got a splitting headache—”

She had examined him, and he had looked serene with his cigar. She doubted the headache.

“—and what’ll I miss?” he went on. “A bunch of naked broads, and that idiot Lisa, shaking their fat behinds. I can do better at any two-bit burlesque back home. No, thanks.”

“Well, I can’t force you.”

“That’s right.”

“Do as you please. I’m going to change.” She had taken several steps to the rear, slowed, and swung around toward him. “Marc, I—I just wish we—”

He had waited, as she hesitated, and he said, “What do you wish, wife?”

She had not liked his tone, or the wife, and so it was no use exhuming their marriage and old hopes. “Nothing,” she had said. “I’ve got to hurry.”

It had gone like that, exactly like that, Claire remembered, and on mind’s blackboard the equation was still incorrect, for one-half plus one-half added up tonight, every night, to one-half. Damn.

She shivered, and adjusted herself to her place in the first row of the festival audience. She was pleased to find Tom Courtney down on one knee to her right.

“Hello,” she said. “How long have you been here?”

“A few minutes. And you?”

“Mentally, I just arrived,” she said.

“I know. That’s why I didn’t want to break in. Mind if I stay here, or have you had about enough togetherness for one day?”

“Don’t waste amenities on me, Tom. You know I’d be pleased.” She indicated the platform. “When does the show begin?”

“Right after this Sirens version of the fanfare. Then Nurse Harriet, Queen of the Festival, appears to open the proceedings.”

“Nurse Harriet Unsheathed,” Claire stated, as if reading a headline. “Well, if she’s not embarrassed, I’m not. In fact, I can’t wait.”

“She’s not. I’ve seen her backstage, so to speak. The Sirens men are attached to her like barnacles.”

Claire suddenly smiled. “I just remembered again—who am I to talk?—after my strip-tease that first night here, Tehura and I at Paoti’s dinner.”

There was a flicker on Courtney’s face that was not pain so much as concern. He said resolutely, “As I told you before, the rite of friendship was natural, just as this will be.”

She was going to say, Tell Marc. Instead, she swallowed the words, withdrew, and pretended to concentrate on the platform before them.

There was activity on the platform. The music had ceased, but left no void of silence, for the babble of voices all around hummed and sang in the warm night. Two native boys, carrying a bench that resembled a high square coffee table, were climbing onto the platform. With great care, they centered the bench on the stage. Then, like twins crouching, they accepted from outstretched hands below a gigantic bowl, which they handled gingerly, for it was filled to the brim with liquid, and they placed this bowl on the middle of the bench.

As they hopped off the huge dais, two more natives ascended it, grown men, sleekly handsome, and one Claire recognized as the swimmer who had humbled Marc. And as they came to their full height, Claire realized that they had helped a young woman up on the stage between them, and the young woman was Harriet Bleaska, Queen of the Festival.

Apparently, Harriet had been rehearsed, for she moved with practiced assurance. When she advanced toward the bench, away from the ring of flame, and sat down, Claire was able to make her out plainly.

“My God,” murmured Claire.

Harriet’s cinnamon mouse bangs and long hair were festooned with a garland of tiara blossoms. Hung low from her bumpy hips, covering her from an inch or two below her navel, was a flaring green grass skirt no more than eighteen inches in length. What held Claire’s attention first was the unrelieved whiteness of her in this setting, and next, the oval of space between her thighs curving inward to knock-knees. Nothing on her body moved as she went in regally measured steps to the bench, and the reason that nothing moved was a preponderance of unfeminine flat planes in her figure and the lack of protuberant mammaries. If one strained, one could make out nipples that seemed pinned to her like brown clasps or broaches, and only when she half-turned to sit on the bench did one see the tentative swell of bosom. Nevertheless, such was the dignity of her bearing, the delight in her narrow gray eyes and wide mouth, that her unsightly features and physique seemed again to transmute into comeliness before the eye, and lo, Miss Hyde was Miss Jekyll.

Claire could hear the slit drums and the flute, and a kind of hurrahing all about, as the ceremony opening the festival began. The swimming champion, the sturdy humbler of Marc, had dipped a coconut half-shell into the bowl, and handed the spilling drink to Harriet. She accepted it like a love potion, rising with it and toasting the members of her team and the natives behind them. Then she drank. Next, she moved to another side of the square bench, sat, stood up, toasted the villagers on that side, and drank again. And so she went around the bench, toasting and drinking, to the accompanying roar of the entire adult Sirens population.

By the time Harriet had returned to her original place on the bench, Claire became conscious of a new and nearer activity. Older women of the village, in pairs, were hurrying up and down the aisles, one partner passing out clay cups, the other filling the cups with palm juice from a tureen.

Presently, everyone had been served, and Harriet was standing once more, flanked by her native escorts, surrounded by the animated musicians. Harriet held her coconut cup aloft, and revolved her long whiteness and brown broaches majestically to booming acclaim, and then she drank deeply.

Claire looked down to find Courtney touching his clay cup to her own. “With this drink,” she thought she heard him say, “the Saturnalia begins.”

Obediently, she did as he did, and drank. The liquid went down warmish and sweet, conjuring to mind the first night on the island when she had become inebriated on kava and this palm juice. Courtney winked at her and gulped again, and once more she did as he did, except this time the toddy was not warmish and sweet but smooth as an old whiskey. She continued to drink, until the clay cup was empty, and the effect upon her was incredibly swift. The effect of the liquid, as best she could comprehend, was to blot up and absorb from her head, especially behind the temples, and from her arms and chest, anxiety, apprehension, clotting memories of the past, be the past an hour ago or a year ago. What remained was the head-spinning present.

When she turned away from Courtney, she found the two older native women before her, one taking the cup from her hand, the other holding out the tureen. And then Claire had her cup back, again full to the top with the remarkable fluid.

Another drink, and she raised her head and pointed it to the stage. At first, she could not see clearly, and she realized that between her and the platform crouched Sam Karpowicz. His white shirt was pasted to his back by perspiration, his neck was pink, and his eye was fastened to a Leica.

She shifted her position closer to Courtney to see what Sam was shooting. What Sam saw through his view finder, she now saw: Harriet Bleaska, flower garland askew, grass skirt slipping precariously, waving her now unfilled coconut cup as she paraded, pranced really, before the alignment of male and female dancers, who beat their hands and stamped to her impromptu gyrations. Claire could make out Lisa Hackfeld, wearing bra and red pareu, among the dancers in the background. Lisa’s gray-streaked blond hair was in Medusa disarray, and her fleshy arms and shapely legs in constant animation.

The entire unrestrained scene, Claire thought, had the curiously old-fashioned quality of an early talking motion picture about errant daughters and boozing young blades of the roaring twenties. Or better, it all seemed a moment out of Tully’s A Bird of Paradise, circa 1911, with Laurette Taylor doing the hula dance. It is not to be believed, Claire thought. But there it was, it was, indeed.

A sudden altercation, almost lost in the noise, removed Claire’s attention from the platform. Sam Karpowicz, who had been before her, had crawled to his left, crouched low, going crabwise, to stamp better the half-nude Harriet Bleaska for posterity on his Leica film. His position, shooting upwards, was directly before Maud, Rachel DeJong, and Orville Pence. Unexpectedly, Orville, his partially bald cranium yellow in the torchlight, his shell-rimmed spectacles jumping on his sniffing clerical nose, had come to his feet, bounded forward, and roughly taken Sam Karpowicz by the shoulder, throwing the photographer off balance.

Sam looked up, his long face unnaturally livid. “What the hell! You made me lose the best shot—”

“I want to know what you are taking pictures of—of what are you taking pictures?” Orville was demanding, his words dragging themselves through palm juice.

“Chrissakes, Pence, what do you think I’m taking pictures of? I’m shooting the festival, the dance—”

“You’re shooting Miss Bleaska’s bosom, that is what you are doing. I say it is highly improper.”

Sam screamed incredulity. “What?”

“You are supposed to record the activities of the natives, not the shameful excesses of one of our own. What will people back home say when they see these pictures of an American girl exposing herself up there, without decency—”

“Chrissakes, now we got Anthony Comstock to deal with. Look, Pence, you attend to your knitting and let me do mine. Now, don’t bother me.”

He pulled away, determined to ignore Pence, and focused his Leica upon Harriet Bleaska once more. She loomed overhead, laughing and pounding her palms together, shaking her shoulders and brown broaches, grinding her hips, waving in response to the cheers breaking out of the semidarkness.

As Sam froze her to his film, Orville grasped the photographer’s shoulder a second time, in another effort to censor this obscene outrage.

“Cut it out!” Sam roared, and he lay his free hand against Orville’s profile and shoved him away. The push sent Orville reeling backwards and down, to land ludicrously on his haunches. He regained his feet, trembling, and might have started for the photographer again, had not Maud risen and planted her authoritative mass in his path.

“Orville, please, please, Sam is only doing his job.”

For a moment, Orville tried to find words, found none, then gestured toward the stage, and the gesture was a fist. “It’s her—that disgraceful performance up there—”

“Please, Orville, all the villagers are—”

“I will not endure another minute of this—this revolting spectacle. I’m shocked that you condone it, Maud. I had better not say more. I bid you good night.”

With a snort, he yanked his tie into place, stuffed the tail of his shirt into his trousers, and marched off into the crowd. Maud was openly perturbed, when next Claire could see her face. Maud surveyed all of them, and, muttering “Some people should not drink,” sat down beside Rachel to try to enjoy the remainder of the dance.

For fleeting seconds, the altercation dwelt in Claire’s mind. Strange, strange, she thought, what our coming here seems to be doing to some of us. The island has a spell that accents our weakest and worst qualities: Orville, bloodless at home, heated with indignation here; Sam Karpowicz, amiable at home, furious here; Marc, serious and withdrawn at home, angry and cruel here. And me, Claire, so—well, whatever—at home, and so—well, dammit, enough of that, I’m going to drink—here.

She drank. She and Courtney drank. Everyone drank. Sometimes she saw the stage, and the undulating dancers, weaving and swaying, behind the torches. Sometimes Lisa Hackfeld dominated the stage, as gay, as abandoned as Nurse Harriet, who had disappeared with her entourage, Lisa of Omaha not Beverly Hills, Lisa of rediscovered youth exorcising the demons of matronage.

Claire knew not how much time had passed, nor how many pourings of palm juice had filled her cup, but faintly she was hearing Courtney’s voice. She knew it beckoned her from above, for he was standing, and all around others were standing, yet she remained seated. Then he was bending down, and lifting her as easily as a feather pillow to her feet.

“Everyone’s dancing,” he was saying in her ear. “Want to dance?”

Her bleary eyes gave consent, and she had his hand, and then some native man’s hand, and there was this circle of people, and in they went like red Indians whooping and kicking, and backwards they went shouting and laughing, and all around there were these circles. And now their circle broke into smaller ones, and Claire felt set free in the melee, throwing off her sandals, letting her hair fly loose, allowing her hips to swing-a-ring-a-ding.

Then there was no more circle at all, only Tom Courtney, and the torches were further away, and the music, too. She could not find Maud or Sam. Briefly she had a glimpse of Rachel DeJong walking with some native, and here and there she could see, as she clung to Courtney, spun round and round with him, she could see native couples dancing, everyone dancing everywhere.

Her legs were jelly, she knew, and even though Courtney held her, she stumbled, and lurched deeply into his arms. She was caught by his arms, and lay her head, panting and exhausted, against his chest … and then it was almost like that other time, coming up from the lake front in Chicago, in Alex’s arms, drowsing against his chest … yet now it was different, hearing as she did the pounding of Courtney’s heart, and listening to the pounding of her own, and not knowing about his, but knowing about hers, knowing the hammering came not from the exertion of the dance … yes, it was different, for Alex’s chest meant Being Loved, which was safety, and this strange tall man’s chest meant … something else, something unknown, and what was unknown was dangerous.

She managed to extricate herself, tear herself away. She did not look up at him. She said, “I’ve been overmatched, like my husband.” Then she said, “Thanks for a good time, Tom. Please take me home.”

Only when they were in the narrow canoe, and he was thrusting the paddle rhythmically into the silver sheen covering the black water, sliding them through the hushed channel a world away from the populated large island and closer to the nearer coral atoll, did Rachel DeJong sober ever so slightly. She considered ordering him to stop, to stop and turn around, to stop and turn around and take her back to her civilized friends and civilization.

She had meant to verbalize her change of mind, but seeing Moreturi’s smiling face in the semidarkness, and the bulging and easing of his biceps as he sank the paddle into the channel waters, she knew that she could not speak what she felt. Her instinct told her that her voice would be the sound of fear. She recalled: you did not show fear to an animal; any weakness gave the beast ascendancy over you. She was still Rachel DeJong, M.D., trained into superiority, master of human destiny, hers, his, and forever in control of any situation. And so she maintained her silence in collaboration with that of the night.

Once more, she realized that she was deeply seated in the hollow of a canoe, legs stretched before her. She had never in her life been in a canoe before. She wondered why not. She reasoned that it was because canoes were so fragile—what kept them afloat? what kept an airplane aloft?—and she always imagined that they rolled over, and you went to a watery grave like that poor thing in the Dreiser book—yes, Roberta Alden—but that had been a rowboat, had it not?—and Clyde had hit her with his camera. Well, this was a canoe and she could see that Moreturi was born in one. His canoes would never tip over.

She tried to relax in the sliver of hollowed log that held her between the sweet night air and the cool water. What did one do in a canoe? One played a guitar, banjo—heavens, how that dated her—so, what else? One trailed one’s hand in the water. Rachel DeJong lifted a limp hand and dropped it over the low side into the swiftly passing water. The water was sensuous, and seemed to enter her pores, course upwards through her arm and across her shoulders and around her heart cavity. She could see Moreturi peering at her, as he worked the paddle, and she feared that his observation of her well-being might give him another view of weakness, and so she closed her eyes, so that he could not read anything in them.

Thus cradled and lulled by the motion of the sliding canoe, she let her mind off its leash and permitted it to run its own way.

She must have been drunk, she decided, to have come along even this far. Rachel DeJong did not drink, never drank. Occasionally, at a party, she might have something candyish, like an Alexander maybe, that kind, and then lots of hors d’oeuvres. She did not drink because she saw how drink made people behave, and it was not proper and orderly, and she believed one should always be one’s self. The Maker gave each person a self, and drink cut you off from that self. Or were there granted really two selves per person, one public, and one that floated up out of that recess of privacy on a drink? Of course this was so, and she knew it, for she was a psychoanalyst, and she avoided drink because one self was all that she could really cope with. When you kept one self, it was your good ship. Drink, on the other hand, was firewater that burned the ship behind you. Then you had no ship at all except the one that swam up with the drink, and the new craft was not dependable at all.

Lord, what crazy, incoherent fancies. She had consumed several of those palm-juice toddies because they tasted like Alexanders, rather pink and sugary and harmless like something at one of her niece’s birthday parties. Yet their childish smile was deceptive. They paralyzed the senses, burned the ship, and you had to take any foreign craft offered, a canoe, for example. Which brought her to Moreturi.

When the dance on the stage had finished, she thought the evening ended. She had meant to leave with Maud, but Maud had gone off with Paoti and his wife. After that, she had searched for Claire, but Claire was having herself a barefooted whirl with a bunch of natives and Courtney. Rachel had started for her hut reluctantly—reluctantly because there was so much life and hilarity wheeling about her, and she hated to shut a door on it, and felt good, wanting to be with someone, not necessarily Joe Morgen, although that would have been good, but someone, anyone who was not a solemn one.

Feeling very apart from the merrymakers, she had squirmed through the writhing groups, noting that Claire appeared quite drunk, in fact everyone did, but not being critical of them, for her own feet seemed inches off the ground as if she were walking on a trampolin. When she emerged from the revel, almost out of reach of the torchlight, and was alone, she had sensed someone approaching her. She slowed down, turning, and was pleased and distressed that it was Moreturi who had found her.

“I was hunting everywhere for you,” he had said, and he did not say “Miss Doctor,” and his tone was without derision.

“I was in the front row,” she replied.

“I know. I meant after—I went there—you were gone.”

She had hoped for an accidental encounter with him tonight, and dreaded it, refusing to define for herself her dread. Except for her early-morning meeting with Maud, to report on her performance with the voyeurs of the Hierarchy the night before, she had forced out of her mind the occurrences of the night. With Moreturi’s presence before her, everything returned. She had hated his nakedness. He wore his pubic bag, it was true, but he might have seemed less exposed without it. He was all tan muscle, the most naked male in the compound, and his proximity disconcerted her. While she willed herself to suffocate the memory of what she had seen of him last night, the sight of him when he had gone into his wife’s bedroom, she could not. The exact pitch of Atetou’s wail and moan still reverberated against her eardrums and stabbed against her heart. Instantly, she had wanted nothing but escape and isolation.

“I was tired,” she had said. “I was just on my way to my hut to sleep.”

He had studied her speculatively. “You have not the look of the tired.”

“Well, I am.” He had stared at her throat, and her hand went to it. He said, “I sent you the festival necklace. I see you do not wear it.”

“Of course not,” she had said indignantly, remembering that and knowing it was in the pocket of her skirt.

“You speak as if I insulted you,” he had said, troubled. “Such a gift is a compliment here.”

“How many did you send out as gifts?” she had asked sharply.

“One.”

The way that he had said one, simply, seriously, shamed her. She had been forcing unnatural anger into her voice and manner, against the drugging of the palm juice, because she was unnerved by him. She began to let the anger recede, but held to one more shaft of it.

“Maybe I should be grateful then,” she had said, “but I wonder if your wife is grateful for your generosity with necklaces?”

His eyes showed that he was puzzled. “All wives know of this. They send necklaces, too. It is our custom, and this is the festival week.”

Rachel had felt all wrong, and she wanted to soften herself for him. “I—I guess I keep forgetting the custom.”

“Besides,” he was saying, “I have been your patient, and Atetou, too, and you know how it is between us.”

She had thought, Yes, damn you, I know how it is between you and Atetou, I saw some of it, heard some of it, through the open leaves of your side wall last night. She had said, “That has nothing to do with my wearing your necklace. It is your custom to give such things. It is not our custom to accept them.”

“My father tells it that you are here to learn our ways, and live as we live.”

“Of course, Moreturi, but there are restrictions. I am an analyst. You know all about that. You are my analysand. You know about that, too. I mean, we can’t have clandestine meetings—”

He had appeared to comprehend some of this, for he interrupted, “If you could wear it, would you want to?”

Her arms, face, neck had felt prickly hot, and she cursed the drinks. She had the perfect reply, she knew, and the reply might put a stop to this uncomfortable talk. She could say that she was in love with another, one of her own people, back home. She could inform him of Joseph E. Morgen. That would raise the glass wall between them. She had meant to evoke Joe, and end Moreturi, and yet she had not. Unaccountably, the night was young, near midnight still young, and she had not wanted to be alone. “I—I really don’t know if—under different circumstances—I’d wear it. Perhaps, if our relationship were different, if I knew you better, I might.”

His face had turned on bright as an electric bulb. “Yes!” he had exclaimed. “That is it, we must become friends. I will go with you to your hut and we will talk—”

“No—no, I couldn’t—”

“Then let us sit somewhere in the grass, and rest, and talk.”

“I’d like to, Moreturi, but it’s late.”

His hands were on his hips. He had smiled down at her, and for the first time he was smiling that too-familiar cocky smile. “You are afraid of me, Miss Doctor.”

She had been furious, but her voice was uncertain. “Don’t be utterly ridiculous. Don’t bait me.”

“You are afraid,” he had repeated. “I know the truth. This morning you spoke to your Dr. Hayden, and she spoke to my mother, and my mother has told me. You have made a special request to end our work, to have me no more in your hut.”

“Yes, I thought we should terminate the analysis. I decided I was doing you no good, wasting your time, and so I asked that your case be returned to the Hierarchy.”

“You have not wasted my time. I have looked forward to the meetings.”

“Only so you can ridicule me.”

“No, that is not true. I ridicule to hide my feelings. I have learned much from you.”

She had hesitated. “Well, I—I’ve made my decision. You’ll manage without me.”

“If I cannot see you again, it is more reason to see you tonight.”

“Another time.”

“Tonight is the main night. There is no one I shall see but you. I want to explain myself.”

“Please, Moreturi, you’re wearing me out—”

Once more, he had smiled. “Maybe that is for the good. Maybe you will become more of a woman. You are used to commanding men, to advising them, to telling them this and that, to be above them. You are afraid to be with a man you cannot treat as a sick one. I am normal. I look at you not as Miss Doctor but as a female like Atetou, except you are more, far more. This is what makes you afraid.”

It was really, she remembered, that little speech that had done it. It reached into the pit of her fears, and she would not have him know so much and possess this dominance over her. He had made it impossible for her to go to her hut alone, to try to sleep with his damn speech and Atetou’s outcry of last night haunting her in this far reach of the Pacific. The palm juices inside her were fermenting, and they had soaked and washed away her last prop of superiority, so that she was ready to meet him and defy him by showing him she was unafraid, as a woman would, as a psychoanalyst would not.

She had not argued with him. She continued conversing, until they arrived at those words that made it possible for her to agree, without loss of face or any sign of surrender, that she was prepared to go with him where the others were not. She had agreed that, for a short time anyway, they would talk. When she strolled off with him, in the direction of the Sacred Hut, past it, but in that direction, she had been secretly pleased at her strength.

They had climbed a hill, and gone past the cliff where the swimming meet had been held, and she had gripped his hand tightly as he preceded her and guided her down a steep footpath to a small rocky harbor she had not seen before.

Once, she had asked, “Where are you taking me? I hope it is not too far. I told you, I can’t stay out long.”

He had replied, “There are three Sirens, and you have seen only one. I will take you to another.”

“But where—?”

“Just minutes across the channel. We can sit in the sand, and talk with no disturbance. You will have a memory the others do not of the beauty of our place. I go there often when I want to be by myself. There is nothing but the sand and grass and coconut palm trees, and the water all around. When you wish to return, I will bring you back.”

He had found the canoe in the darkness, and shoved it into the water, and then balanced himself in it and waited.

She must have held back, for he called out, “If you are still afraid of me—”

“Don’t be silly.”

She allowed him to help her into the canoe, and now in the canoe she still was, eyes closed, hand trailing in the water, his unseen, fluid presence somewhere before her, gracefully dipping the paddle.

She felt a bump beneath her, and heard him say, “Here we are, the little atoll that is the second Siren.”

She opened her eyes and sat up.

“Take off your shoes,” he said. “You can leave them in the canoe.”

Obediently, she removed her sandals. He was already in the water. She tried to step out of the canoe by herself, but he reached out and lifted her as if he were lifting a palm frond, and lowered her into a foot of water.

He pointed off. “Go to the beach.”

She waded through the water, across ridges of the sand bottom, until she was on the shore. When she turned, she saw that he was pulling the canoe out of the water, and wedging it between rocks.

After he joined her, he took her by the arm and led her through a vast cluster of palm trees, their mop heads lost in the high darkness, past a shallow lagoon, to a grass clearing, and then down a gradual slope to a tiny beach of thick sand that seemed to sparkle like starlight.

“The ocean side of the atoll,” said Moreturi.

Where the water in the enclosed lagoon behind them had been level and still as glass, the surf on the ocean side was turbulent and alive. Here they stood before thousands of miles of winds and tides, and watched as the combers with their margins of whitecaps rolled in toward the islet, and broke, and tumbled down, and washed high onto the sand. The sea was lost in night, without horizon or end, it seemed, and the foamy heads of the waves came toward them like the charge of a white brigade, unhorsed and brought to earth by the beach.

“It’s magnificent,” Rachel whispered. “I am glad you brought me here.”

Moreturi dropped to the sand of the sea beach, and stretched his tan body, and then lay flat with the back of his head in his locked hands. She sat beside him, knees up, skirt pulled down over them, but a mild breeze stole under it and moved gently over her legs and thighs.

For a long time neither one of them spoke, and there was no need to speak. But when she found his eyes upon her, she was prompted to shatter the intimacy of the quiet. She asked him to tell her something of his early life, and he conjured up remembrances of his early youth. She hardly listened to him, but rather heard the waves pouring out of the dark and lathering the sand, and she marveled at how the sound of them was keyed to the sound of Atetou’s outcry of love last night. Insensibly, she was tempted to mention last night, what her eyes had witnessed. She fought the impulse, conceived by palm juice, and instead, recalling some fragment of their analytic sessions, she asked him about one festival week of several years ago, when he had possessed twelve married women in seven days and nights. He discussed his enjoyment of them, their differences, and all the while she was summoning up her own barren and shoddy love life, the bumbling college boy from Minnesota, the three times with the remote married professor on Catalina, the teasings with Joe.

Suddenly, she said, “Did you ever bring any of them here?” Moreturi seemed surprised. “What?”

“Did you ever bring any of your women to this coral atoll and—and make love to them?”

He lifted himself to an elbow. “Yes, a few.”

She felt curiously feverish, her forehead, the nape of her neck, her wrists. She fanned herself with one hand.

“Are you all right?” he wanted to know.

“I’m all right. I just feel a little warm.”

“Let’s swim then—”

“Swim?”

“Of course. The water is wonderful at night. It will make you feel better than you have ever felt.” He came to his feet, and took her hand and pulled her upright.

“I—I don’t have my swimming suit,” she said, feeling embarrassed to have to say it.

“Go without your suit.” He waited, then smiled nicely. “This is not America. Besides, I promise not to look.”

She intended to say no, and to the devil with him and all this trouble, but standing there, knowing he was waiting, she remembered with an ache that time on the beach outside Carmel when she and Joe had walked along the water. He had wanted to swim, too, and they had no suits, and he had said it did not matter because they were practically married. She had hidden behind the rock to undress, had unbuttoned her blouse, had been unable to move her fingers further, had rushed out to tell him and found him disrobed, and had run away from him and their marriage. She had done that! Oh hell, hell, hell, but then, how many people had a second chance to be unsick?

“Very well,” she found another voice saying for her aloud. “I have something on underneath. But don’t look anyway. I—I’ll join you in the water.”

He waved happily, trotted down to the water’s edge. She thought that he would go straight in, but instead he stopped, did something with his hands at his waist, and she saw the strap and white bag in his hand. He threw it over his shoulder, stood poised before the water, all one piece of beautiful statuary, and swiftly he was off, a released Dionysus, charging and splashing into the water and into the darkness.

Stolidly, a fraudulent Aphrodite, she unbuttoned her cotton blouse. This time no Carmel. She pulled it off and dropped it on the sand, and adjusted her deep-cupped brassiere to cover every inch of her too-obvious breasts. Slowly, she unhooked her skirt, ran the zipper down, lowered the skirt, and stepped out of it. Her white nylon panties felt abnormally tight about her boyish hips. Briefly, she wondered if the panties were transparent, but then realized she was clothed by the lateness of the hour.

Standing there, more free than she had been in years, she enjoyed the curling breeze on her skin, and felt less feverish. Her chestnut hair was carefully set, and for no reason whatever, she suddenly ran one hand through it, tousling it, and she did not feel thirty-one and woman-with-a-career at all. She felt foolish-gay, and her mind thumbed its nose at Carmel and the old she, and with that private gesture, she ran through the heavy sand into the water.

The first impact of the water jolted her, for it was colder than she had expected, but she kept going deeper, because she wanted the water to cover her underthings. As soon as she was in water to her waist, she fell forward, and began to swim, first striking out strongly, then letting up, going easily.

In the self-indulgence of the water, the romp in it, she had almost forgotten that she had, somewhere in the darkness, a partner, sex opposite.

“Here I am!” she heard Moreturi call, and she came off floating on her back and immersed herself to her shoulders, treading the water, until she caught sight of him stroking toward her. In seconds, he was only yards away, his black hair plastered across his head and forehead.

A sea wave came unexpectedly, higher than those before, and she caught it in time, managing to rise above it, and sink down with it, but Moreturi was momentarily engulfed.

“Here!” he shouted.

She swung around in the water, and he was behind her, going up and down in the water like a happy idiot, and once when he shot up and revealed himself to his abdomen, she gasped, swallowing the salt water, praying that she would not see more. She turned away, swimming, wondering how she could get to the shore and dress without being observed, and how he would dress so that she would not have to see him naked.

But then, as she swam, the apprehension became minor in the soothing pleasure of the sea. She swam round and round experimenting, trying side stroke, overhand, breast stroke, feeling marvelous as a marine creature, a mermaid, and she gave thanks to the drinks and the one who had brought her here.

She would tell him she was pleased, she decided, he deserved that much for all of his trouble, and she began to turn in the water to tell him. As she did so, she heard a frantic shout, her name, from him, the first time he had called her by name, and then she met head-on the powering sheet of the great smashing comber. It hit her like a Gargantuan slap, and the liquid curve sent her reeling backwards and then down and down into the deep greenness of the sea. She was underwater interminably, no sensation of time, amid the shimmering formations beneath the ocean, where everything was an unfamiliar planet of slow motion.

Then, she was kicking upwards, upwards, surfacing, and when she came out of the water, lungs exploding, she was choking for air, fighting off, desperately trying to rip aside the curtain of blackness. And all the while, from afar, thinly in the wind, she heard her name, and as her strength ebbed, the oaken arm came around her and held her out of the water. She looked up into Moreturi’s blurred film of face.

“Are you hurt?” he was demanding. “It hit you with great force.”

“Fine, fine,” she gasped, coughing.

“I’ll help you.”

“Yes, please, please—”

He took a fist full of her hair, and thus keeping her face above the water, he swam sideways, using one arm, toward the shore. In a minute he stood up, and braced her upright, but her knees began to buckle, and he held her with both his hands. He lifted her out of the water, cradled her in his arms, one arm under her legs, the other supporting her shoulders, and he carried her to the sand.

By the time he had come out of the sea with her, she had regained her senses. Her head was against his hard arm, and her left breast was under his hand. With surprise, she looked down at herself and saw that her breasts were entirely exposed. Dumbly, she tried to re-create what had happened, and then she knew that the violence of the breaker had slashed through the brassiere and torn it from her.

“Oh, God,” she moaned.

“What?”

“Have I still got something on—my pants—?”

“Yes, do not worry.”

He would have been amazed, but she was not worried at all. She was pleased, since it was no act of her own, that her brassiere was gone. She wished, in an irrational way, her nylon panties had gone, too, since that might have solved everything.

Gently, he was putting her down on her back on the warm sand, and she lay on her back, arms outstretched, knees partially drawn up, staring at the black ceiling of night above. She closed her eyes, wanting surrender to lassitude, but there was too much that was wound tightly beneath her skin. And the water had not cooled her, after all. She opened her eyes, to find him on his knees above her, and then, even in her daze, she was frightened, for she had forgotten that he would be entirely naked. He was entirely naked, and he was ready for love, and this was what frightened her the most.

Yet, she did not move. The flesh across her body frame was so taut that she wanted to cry out, as Atetou had cried out the night before. Then it was that Rachel groaned. She was conscious of the groan, and hated it, for it had been beyond her restraint, an involuntary whimper that hung in the air above her like desire, as real and articulate as his love apparatus. She feared that she would groan again, for the nipples of her breasts had swollen and were as painful as two bruises, but with effort she held the sound in check.

Lying there, she felt his large hands on the flanks of her legs, felt them on the wet, clinging nylon panties, felt the panties being drawn down her thighs, and then up and over her knees, and down the calves of her legs. Her defenses stirred, but she could not protest. Nor could she look at him. It had come this far, she told herself, and nothing more mattered. For once, for once, let what will happen—happen. This was the crossing, so long feared, and when you were there, it was nothing at all, really nothing at all. The worst death was in all the endless dyings that came before, but when you were there, at the crossing, it did not matter.

As she felt his movement, she wondered that he had not kissed her lips or kissed away the pain of the bruises, but then the pain was everywhere, fanning out everywhere, as his fingers played across her skin. She knew that she could not endure this a second longer, that every organ in her was near bursting, and that if he did not cease, she would scream something, do something foolish.

But then, an incredible thing happened, and it had never in her life happened this way before. She had hardly been aware that his bulk was between her legs, but now she was totally aware that his being was gradually entering into her being. The filling of herself with him was so continuous, so incessant, and so unexpected, that it petrified her brain and anesthetized all pain.

When his motion began, it was, for her, as if the pain was shocked to life, and all brought down from the red bruises, from her ribs, all brought up from her calves, from her thighs, to where he had invaded her. For the first time, she was jarred out of helpless inertia, throbbing with the feeling that she was not being relieved at all but being harmed.

In a surge of revulsion, she tried to escape. She placed the heels of her hands on his shoulders and attempted to push him off, to be divested of him. She failed, and these efforts only intensified his movement and the resultant pain. She dropped her arms to her sides, lips begging for freedom, but it was no use. She lay there, feeling like some marine thing that had flopped on the beach, out of its natural element, alien, afraid, gasping, but deeply speared and captured, no matter how much it tried to return to the old place and the old freedom. Minutes and minutes had passed, an eternity of infinite pain and humiliation, and she marshaled inside her, secretly, to surprise him, what was left of pride and reserve. Suddenly, her forces gathered, aligned, for the break to freedom, she opened her eyes, and snatched at his perspiring shoulders, tearing her nails across them to retaliate, to give him equal pain, and heaved her torso to throw him off. Then she knew that her efforts were misunderstood, for his broad tan features mocked her with grim appreciation.

Wildly, she thrashed in the flying sand, but his thrusts sent her down and backwards, so that her shoulders, spine, buttocks made a deep groove in the white sand. And in this way, they squirmed out of the loose dry sand, until her flesh beneath felt the firmer wet sand of the water’s edge, and she realized that if she withdrew again, they would be in the water.

Confused, emptied of strength, she ceased her resistance. She could feel the last of a receding wave of water slithering under her shoulder blades, and then more of the surf surrounding her backside and the soles of her naked feet. And then the gentle water was in her hair, sometimes washing over the red bruises, finally lapping over and enveloping their joining.

It was odd, for her, what the water did. Inexplicably, it gave this wanted-unwanted union a kind of pagan ritual blessing and grace. Inexplicably, too, it cleansed her of civilization’s dirty wounds, cleansed her of shame, of guilt, of fear, and finally, finally, of restraint. The soft, cool water made this endless act of love natural and right, in this time and place, and gave her the crossing, and so she crossed.

What had been painful became pleasurable, sent barbaric and voluptuous joy careening through the veins of her head, and the arteries of her heart, and the vessel below.

Thus, in the unyielding, wet sand, applauded by the waves, she succumbed to a union hitherto unimagined in all that she had read, heard, dreamed. It is his life, she thought, his everything, and so no wonder, no wonder. Once, she thought of the other two she had had, and of what she had heard from the victims on the couch, poor things, poor us, with our rigidity, our clumsiness, our studiousness, our thinking—we, the barbarians, chaining and torturing this with our habitations, clothes, drinks, drugs, words, always words, destroying all that mattered, the primitive act of love itself, such as here and now and now and now, undiluted by anything but desire and fulfillment.

All of her had quickened, with the miracle of the crossing. She gazed up blindly at him, as she might at some marvelous celestial creature seen in a shaft of heavenly light, and she had a vision that she had become one of the anointed few. The experience would set her life apart from all the other lives on earth. Instantly, she was sorry for every woman that she had ever known or ever treated in the faraway, dim, dim civilized world of long ago, the feeble mortals who would never know this extra dimension of pure happiness, those pitiful ones who would live and die and never know what she now knew, and it grieved her that she would not be able to impart this to them, to anyone, ever.

Suddenly, she gave not a damn about anyone on all the earth but herself and this man. She embraced him, she possessed him, she was insane with him, and finally she heard the cry in her throat, and at last she let it escape … to be certain that she had escaped, too.

In the village, it was quiet again, all muffled down under the quilt of late night. Even the last of the celebrants, strolling to their homes to sleep or into the hills to love, even these last stragglers spoke in whispers softer than the breeze.

Inside the thatched hut so familiar to him, slightly above the compound, he had been sitting in the faint light of a single wavering candlenut for a long time. He had been waiting for the footsteps of her coming. He wondered if there would be one pair of footsteps or two pair, and if there were two pair, what he would do to explain his presence in her room.

He had drunk more than his usual quota before coming here, four straight Scotches, no more, and they had not affected him in any way. Although perhaps it was only the drinks that had fortified him with the courage to come here at all, to risk what he must undertake, he would permit no liquor to dull him for the task to which he was dedicated.

It was near midnight, he knew, and the festival sounds had disappeared a half-hour ago. Since then, there had been the unnerving silence, but now he thought that the silence was being intruded upon. He cocked his head, distending his aquiline nose, pursing his thin lips, listening hard. The slight noise was that of human feet padding on the turf, certainly footsteps, not two pair but one, and he guessed, from the light tread of the bare feet, that it was she, and that she was alone.

He pushed himself up from his slouch against the wall, sat erect and intent, just as the cane door swung open. Tehura, covered only by the two strands of long black hair that fell down across her bosom and the short grass skirt, entered the room of her hut. She did not see him at first. She appeared lost in some thought, as she automatically closed the door. This done, she threw the strands of her hair back over her shoulders, and turned fully into the room. That was when she saw him.

Her features displayed no surprise, only interest. “Marc,” she said. Then she said, “I wondered where you were tonight.”

“I was here most of the evening,” he said. “I wanted to see you alone. I was worried you might return with Huatoro.”

“No.”

“Please sit down with me,” he said. “If—if you’re not too tired, there is something I want to discuss with you.”

“I am not tired at all,” she said.

She crossed the room, and came to rest on the matting a few feet from him.

He did not look at her, but at the opposite wall, meditatively. “Yes, I was afraid you might bring Huatoro back with you. You had said you might favor the winner of the swim.”

“I still might,” she said.

“But not tonight. Why not?”

“I do not know … He gave me his festival necklace.”

“You do not wear it.”

“Not tonight.”

“He must have been angry.”

“It is no concern of mine,” she said. “He will wait.”

“Will you make love with him?”

“If I knew, I would not tell you,” she said. “I do not know.” She paused. “He wishes me to be his wife.”

“And you?”

“I repeat, I am not in the mood for such decisions.” She reflected on this a moment. “He is strong, much admired. I am told he loves well. With the winning of the race, he has much mana.”

Marc shifted uncomfortably. “I’m sorry about the way I behaved in the race, Tehura. I’ve pretended to everyone it was an accident. You know better.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted to win, no matter how, because I had told you that I could and would. That was all that counted.” He hesitated, and he added, “Should I tell you a crazy thing?”

She waited, her expression impassive.

“Tehura, all through that race I kept thinking of you. As I was going along, I kept looking at the cliff ahead and telling myself it was you. As I got nearer, it even began to resemble you. I mean it. There was a rounded overhang above, and that became your breasts. There was an indentation in the cliff side, and it became your navel. And then below, there was in that cliff, there was a kind of—” He stopped. “I told you it was crazy.”

“It is not crazy.”

“All I could think as I swam was that I’ve got to get to her first, before anyone else does, and if I do, if I reach her, ascend her, she is mine.” He caught his breath. “I almost made it.”

“You swam well,” she said. “You need not be ashamed. I admired you.”

He moved again, to be closer to her. “Then you’ve got to tell me this—do you admire me as much as Huatoro?”

“I cannot speak of that. He is stronger than you. He is younger. You are weaker in our ways, and sometimes strange to me. But this I admire—you came to our ways because of me—you did everything, even the wrong, to show me you were worthy of us and me. This I admire. In your country, I know, you have great mana. Now, for me, you have it in my country, also.”

“I can’t tell you how wonderful that makes me feel, Tehura.”

“It is true,” she said simply. “You asked how I felt toward you beside Huatoro. To be honest, there is one more thing I must say.” She considered it, and after a moment she said it. “Huatoro loves me seriously,” she said. “This is important for a woman.”

Impulsively, Marc took her hand. “For God’s sake, Tehura, you know I love you, too—why, yesterday—”

“Yesterday,” she repeated, and withdrew her hand. “Yes, I will speak of yesterday. You tried to remove my skirt, to own my body with your body. I do not speak against that. It was all right, even though, when it happened, I had not yet the feeling for your body. What I speak of now is not that alone. Huatoro’s love is that, of course, but it is more, much more.”

He had both hands on her arm now. “So is mine, Tehura, believe me, so is mine.”

“How can it be?” she demanded. “We are—what is your word?—yes, I have it—we are an unusual two people together. Sometimes, I am the insect that you study. Other times, I am the female you want for your passing appetite. Never am I more. I have not complained. I do not know. I understand your feelings, because you are already wealthy with your work and your woman. You have love, the great love, you have your beautiful wife, who is everything—”

“She is nothing!” he cried out.

The savagery of his disavowal of Claire gave Tehura pause. She stared at him with new interest, mouth set, waiting.

“That is the real reason I waited here for you tonight,” he went on in a rush. “To tell you that it is you I love, not Claire. Does that surprise you? Have you heard or seen any evidence of my love for her?”

“Men are different in their public ways.”

“My public actions are the same as my private ones. I met that girl, I courted her, I found her agreeable, and because I knew that I must marry someone—it was expected, part of the conformity of our society—I married her. Now I can truly say there was no love between us. I had no desire for her, no burning inside such as I feel for you. When I am with Claire, I can think of a million other things. When I am with you, I can only think of you. Do you believe me?”

She had watched him, wide liquid eyes shining. She said, “Why have you not left her before? Tom has said this is possible in your America.”

“I’ve always intended to, but—” He shrugged. “I was afraid. It would have been a social embarrassment. I worried what friends and family would say. So I went on, because it was easier to cause no eruption. Besides, there was nowhere else to go. I’ve gone on for two years, kept her satisfied physically, and in other ways, too, but myself have always been secretly dissatisfied. And then I came here. I met you. And now there is somewhere else to go, and I am no longer afraid.”

“I do not understand you,” Tehura said quietly.

“I’ll make myself clearer,” he said. He was up on his knees, fumbling one hand in the pocket of his sport shirt. “I know what ceremonial rites mean to you. I will now perform a rite, one of transferring my full love from the woman who was my wife to the woman who—” He had found what he wanted, and he held it out in the palm of his hand. “Here, Tehura, for you.”

Puzzled, she reached for what was in his palm, and took it, and let it dangle from her fingers. It was the dazzling diamond pendant set in white gold that hung from a delicate chain, the very one that Claire had worn the first night and that Tehura had admired so constantly.

With satisfaction, Marc could see that the gift had made her speechless. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted in awe, and the brown hand that held the jewel shook. She looked up from it at Marc, eyes brimming with gratefulness. “Oh, Marc—” she gasped.

“It is yours,” he said, “all yours, and there will be a thousand more evidences of my love in the days to come.”

“Marc, put it on me!” she exclaimed with childish glee.

She twisted about, on the matting, her naked back to him. His hands went over her shoulders, as he took the diamond pendant from her, and looped it around her neck, and fastened the clasp behind. As she bent her head to enjoy it, her fingers fondling the gleaming diamond, Marc’s hands caressed her shoulders, and glided down her arms. Shaken by the texture of her flesh, the imagined promise of it, his hands went to her pointed breasts. She did not seem to mind, as she concentrated on her bauble. Marc’s hands enveloped her breasts, and every limb and organ of his person was inflamed. Releasing one breast, his hand went to her skirt, pulled high on her thighs, and he massaged the inside of her thigh. Never, in his entire life, had he wanted possession of any object as much as he wanted her sexually.

“Tehura,” he said.

She glanced from the diamond to him, but did not touch either of his hands.

“Tehura, I want you forever. I am leaving Claire. I want you for my wife.”

For the first time, this night, her face was mesmerized by his every word. She said, “You want Tehura for your wife?”

“Yes.”

She spun around, to face him, pulling her breast and inner thigh from his caresses. “You want to marry me?” She saw his hands, and covered them with her own. “They will love me, Marc, but wait—I must know—”

“I want to marry you, as soon as possible.”

“How?”

He came down from his knees, trying to let his ardor subside. He told himself what she had just told him, that there was time for love, their love, and they would have it, but first he must explain himself to her. The crucial moment had come, was upon him, he knew, and if he could put aside this towering need to consume her with his lust, he could be rational and persuasive.

He had planned to propose to her, as he had written Garrity. The first necessity would be to ally her with his ambition. She was the only one here whom he could trust, who could make his dream come true. Without her help, anything further would be impossible. The offer of marriage, coldly calculated, would bring down her defenses, and make her a partner to his scheme. Yet, oddly, the offer of marriage had not been as business-measured as he had planned. It had become warm moist with his surging want of her, his grinding desire to split her asunder, to wrench her away from her haughty untouchability, to have her beneath him, below him, his dependent beggar of love. Out of this had burst his proposal, the very proposal that he had intended to make anyway, but now for the wrong reason, and he saw that he must redirect his motivation and manner, or he would accomplish nothing. He had made a gain with his earnestness, with the stupid pendant, with his offer of marriage. He must exploit it immediately. If she would not acquiesce to all that he had in mind, everything was lost.

He exhaled, and attempted to consider her with a new, Garrity-oriented objectivity. “How?” she had asked. She wanted to know how he could marry her. He would tell her how, and make his plan their plan.

“Tehura, I want to take you away from the Sirens, first to Tahiti, and after that to California,” he found himself saying. “The moment that we are in my country, I will divorce Claire, and the day the divorce is granted, I will marry you.”

“Why not do it here?” she inquired, with a hook of shrewdness that he had often suspected she possessed.

“You know that’s impossible, Tehura. You have no machinery for my divorce. Except the Hierarchy. They’d have to investigate Claire and myself. Suppose I allowed this—even if we extended our stay—then we would marry by your law, which would not be acceptable in my country. Whatever we do must be legal in the United States. For, there is where I want us to live our lives. From time to time we will come back to this island, so that you may see your own. But my life must become your life. This island is a lovely place, but so small, so inadequate, compared to what you will find and own in my great country. There you will be treated as an exotic beauty, worshiped by a million men, envied by a million women. You will possess not a hut but a house ten times the size of this hut, and servants, and the most expensive clothes, and a car—you know of these things from your learnings—and you will have precious stones like that diamond, as many as you wish.”

She had listened, it seemed, as a girl child listens to a fairy tale, yet she was not fully carried away. There was something older and more careful about her, the shrewdness again. “Everyone is not so rich in your country,” she said. “I have asked Tom. He says in your country you are not so rich.”

This was the opening. Marc entered it. “He is right in a way. I am rich when put alongside one such as Huatoro or others of your village. I am not the richest in my own land. I have enough, of course, much mana, as you know. Yet, you also know the value of that pendant. But I will be richer, very, very wealthy, Tehura. To become so, I must have your confidence in what I say next.”

She nodded. “It is between us.”

“There is enormous interest about places like The Three Sirens in my homeland. You are aware of that. Otherwise, why would we be here studying your people? In a month or two, when my mother brings the news of you to America, it will be scientific and make no one rich—do not ask me to explain this tonight, there is too much to explain—but it is so. On the other hand, if I were to leave here with you as soon as possible, taking with me information on the existence of this place, and offer the news in a popular way to the American public and the world, they would reward us with infinite wealth. Believe me, we would be rich beyond our imagination. I have the proof. I can show you letters. I have a man who will meet us in Tahiti. He has organized it. The three of us will go to the United States by airplane, such as the one Rasmussen owns, and we will tell the world of your remarkable island—”

“And break the tabu? It would overthrow and put to an end the Sirens.”

“No—no, Tehura, no more than my mother’s writings and speeches will end the Sirens. I promise you that we will keep its location secret. We will have proof enough of its existence in information I will bring—in—in the fact of you, my wife—”

“Me?” she said, slowly. “Your people will want to see me?”

“They’ll want to meet you, see you, hear you, love you. They will shower you with everything you wish. Do you know what is possible?”

“I have seen the pictures in Tom’s books.”

“Everything will be yours.”

Absently, she fiddled with her pendant. “I will be so far from here—I will be alone”

He edged toward her, and placed his arm around her. “You will be my wife.”

“Yes, Marc.”

“I have promised, I will give you everything.”

She gazed at the matting, slowly lifted her head, sadness in her smile. “All right,” she said, almost inaudibly.

His heart skipped and jumped. “You’ll marry me? You’ll go with me?”

She nodded.

He wanted to leap and shout with joy. He had accomplished it! Garrity! “Tehura—Tehura—I love you—”

She nodded blankly, still overwhelmed by the enormity of her decision.

He was alive now, and efficient. He removed his arm from her. “Here is what must be done—first off, this must be an absolute secret between us—even that pendant, don’t wear it outside, Claire must not know—”

“Why must she not know?”

“She loves me. There would be terrible scenes. I just want to elope, go off with you, and afterwards I’ll write her through Rasmussen. And my mother must not know yet, none of them, for they’d try to stop us. They are greedy to have the gains of this island, the discovery of it, for themselves. They would not want us to have the riches the news can bring. And your people must not know either, not Paoti or Moreturi or Huatoro, absolutely no one must know. They might try to stop you, as my people might try to stop me, out of fear or envy. You will keep it secret?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” His head reeled with visions of the potential booty of his victory, and he clambered to his feet, and walked the room. “Here is what we will do. I have thought it out. I am told that from time to time some of your braver young men take canoes or sailing vessels to other islands—”

She nodded. “They are good with the sea.”

“We need one of them, Tehura, one we can trust. Are there any such?”

“Maybe.”

“We can offer him anything he wants, anything I possess. We would have to slip out of here at night, both of us, and meet with the friend of yours who has a sailing vessel. He would take us to the nearest island where we can obtain a ship or flying boat to Tahiti or can find passage to another island where we can get transportation to Tahiti. After that we would be safe. Can this be done?”

“It would be bad for the one who helped us.”

“When he returned, he could tell Paoti I forced him—I had a weapon—I forced him to do it. That would absolve him. Or maybe he would not have to return. I could give him enough to remain on the outside. Surely, there must be someone.”

“There might be. I cannot be sure.”

“Do you want to undertake finding someone?”

“Yes.”

He stood over her, beaming down at her. “I knew you would. It is for both of us. How long will it take—to arrange everything?”

“I do not know.”

“Can you guess?”

“A short time. A few days. A week. No more.” She hesitated. “If it is possible at all.”

“You will have to be careful, Tehura.”

“I know.”

He bent, and brought her up to her feet, so light, so pliable in his arms. “And you know I love you, Tehura.” She nodded against his shirt.

“I must teach you to kiss. It is part of our way. I want to seal this, Tehura—love you—kiss you—”

She brought her head up, full lips parted, and he put his mouth to them and his hands to her breasts. Throughout the last hour, his inner ego and outer being had grown, expanded, enlarged with his achievement, his first knowledge of independence and achievement, so that he felt almost full-grown into manhood. There was only this one unfinished thing left, to impart his new manhood to her, so that he might be certain he had it himself.

“Tehura—” he whispered.

She disengaged herself completely, and stepped back, arms at her side, entirely poised.

“There has been enough tonight, Marc,” she said. “We will know each other the night we leave.”

“You promise?”

“I do.”

“I’ll go then, Tehura.” He went to the cane door. “We will continue our meetings every day, anthropologist and informant, pretend to work. There must be no hint of any change. When you have made the arrangement, you will tell me. I will need but a few hours’ notice.”

“I will tell you.”

“Good night, darling.”

“Good night, Marc.”

Once outside, and making his way toward the village compound, he decided to write Rex Garrity a second brief airmail letter. The first one, dropped into Rasmussen’s outgoing mail bag in the afternoon, had outlined his intentions. The second letter, the postscript, would announce his triumphant progress, and would request Garrity to meet them in Tahiti. He thanked God that Rasmussen had stayed over an extra day for the festival, and he could post the later news at daybreak.

By the time he had arrived at the stream, and traversed the bridge, his mind was again on Tehura. A speculation teased his mind. How ingenuous was she? How clever? Everything had gone exactly according to his plan, yet it made him uneasy to think that perhaps everything had also gone according to her plan. This was no reason to feel uneasy, since their goals were one and the same. Yet, a sudden suspicion that she might be as smart as he, not inferior but equal to him, even superior to him, was disconcerting. It was probably not true; still, it was possible. He felt less completely in control, and therefore less his own man. Damn these introverted speculations. Somehow, he felt a shade less happy than before … damn all women, damn everyone …