I am the weekend guest at a house with three rambunctious brats. They race around the living room after breakfast, screaming. “Pint-sized hooligans,” I mutter, making for the door. I head off down the steep bank in front of the house, towards the bay. Gaining the rocks of the narrow beach, I pause to catch my breath. I look back up at the house, at the tangle of overgrown bushes above which it sits.
Suddenly one of the kids pops out of the bushes. He comes flying towards me, hanging on to the bottom of a vine. His body is riddled with spears. He crashes down headfirst in front of me with a great clatter and starts writhing and gasping horribly. I stand over him, aghast. Suddenly he bounces up and wriggles his fingers in my face. He tears back towards the house, laughing his head off. “Lousy little trickster!” I scream. I heave a rock after him wildly.
I stalk off down the beach in a rage. “This was supposed to be a relaxing weekend,” I seethe. “I’ll be lucky to get out of here without a nervous breakdown!” I stumble along in this fashion, swearing to myself that if I ever had the misfortune to have kids, I shall immediately strangle them. “Right there in the maternity ward!” I cry, stopping in my tracks. “Right in front of the goddam nurse!” My hands feverishly twist and grapple in the air in pantomime — until I realize I’m getting totally out of control. “Take it easy, take it easy,” I tell myself, startled by my own violence. I look around sheepishly. I realize I’ve been walking for a long while without having paid the least attention to the scenery, which is supposed to be famous for its beauty — in fact was a big reason I was so looking forward to coming here. But those pestilential kids have ruined everything!
I seem to be near some sort of marina. A dock goes down into the water, a few small craft bob at tether. The place appears deserted as I wander up. Then I notice there is someone on one of the boats. I step closer, and my eyes grow huge in my head. An absolutely unbelievable girl is stretched out on her stomach on the floor of an outboard, sunbathing. The top of her bikini is untied; the oil glistens on the sun-kissed curve of her back, on the rise and fall of her flanks. A regular dream boat. She lifts her bare feet lazily behind her and scratches the heel of one with a brightly painted toe of the other: I take it all in, transfixed. Then she raises her honey-colored head and looks at me through large sunglasses. “Hullo,” she says. I gape at her idiotically. “Oh hi,” I reply.
Hard as it may be to believe, this isn’t the end of our conversation. In fact, it’s the beginning. In fact it’s the beginning of something altogether astonishing! “Say,” she says, pushing a honey-colored tumble out of her line of sight, “I was just about to go out in the bay and get some sun, but it’s so boring, you know — all alone. Wanna come along?”
“Why not?” I inquire, my entire glandular system pouring out onto the rocks around me.
So I manage to climb into the boat and she ties her bikini top together and yank-starts the engine and we go puttering out a ways and then she cuts the motor, and we drift. She turns on the transistor. At first I am reluctant to join her at her scale of undress, but finally I give in to her teasing and take off my shirt, exposing a mass of white flesh I laughingly pass off as my “lifetime supply of whale blubber, ha-ha.” With her help I lather it up with oils. Then she points a finger at my trousers. “Don’t be a prude” she insists.
What the hell! I get down to my skivvies and stretch out on a towel beside her. And for the first time in days I begin to feel alive and well. “This is what a weekend is supposed to be,” I think: “sun hot on your back, radio crooning, a lovely stranger at your side as the current takes you where it would.” Shading my eyes, chin on my arm, I look out at the sparkling waters with their distant, darting sails, at the shore with its charming cottages nesting in the woods. Then my eye happens to fall on one particular cottage, and once more a pall descends over my spirits. I brood, gnawing on my bottom lip. “I wonder what cute tricks those little savages are hatching now,” I meditate darkly.
“There’s something preying on your mind,” the girl says, through the brown crook of an arm. “Oh, it’s nothing, nothing,” I assure her.
Then I roll up onto an elbow and gaze into her sunglasses. “It’s just — have you ever — well have you ever —” and I can’t stop myself, I blurt out the whole wretched saga, all the torments that have been visited on me — the short-sheeted bed, the soap in the toothpaste, the 5 A.M. firecrackers, the faked monstrosities. “It’s going to drive me off the deep end!” I find myself braying. “Off the deep end!”
I realize that I’m shaking all over. The girl puts her hand out to me. “How awful for you,” she says. “But you know, I have a saying: Whenever things have got you down in the dumps, the one sure-fire pick-me-up that always works is a good, old-fashioned lay. So I was going to bring it up later anyway, but wouldn’t you like to do something really dirty with me? It’ll make you forget all about that other, stupid stuff. I guarantee!”
The silence that follows these remarks is like the aftermath of an immense detonation.
“Pardon me?” I whisper.
An hour later, as I lie panting back on my towel, I realize how right the girl is, about what she guaranteed. Passion has carried away all my worries in a seething tide of coconut oil and sweat and assorted bodily fluids: a carnal sauna for the anguished spirit. Now I lie here utterly emptied, lightheaded, bathed in relief, in a thoughtless sense of content. All I can do is shake my head and whisper midst the balmy sky and cool, stirring waters, “Jesus, lady, you are one special kind of angel. …”
This is greeted by a giggle. I turn my head towards her, smiling. “Hey, I really mean that,” I insist tenderly. This provokes more giggles. I keep on smiling, but quizzically: something odd is going on. “Hey, what’s so funny?” I ask, unable to keep a slight strain of uneasiness out of my voice. She doesn’t answer, she’s laughing unabashedly now. Because of the sunglasses I can’t tell anything about the look in her eyes. I sit up: suddenly there is a horrifying familiarity to her mirth. My stomach turns over. “What’s so funny! “I shout, grabbing her arm, in a panic. She wrenches free and clambers to her feet, yucking as if she were going to split. She reaches up to her sunglasses and yanks them off. Her face comes away with them. I let out a strangled gasp. “Fm going to tell mom and dad what you did!” the kid shrieks, delirious with delight. He tears off shreds of breast and buttock and plunges over the side and goes paddle-wheeling towards shore.
After an obscure interval of several seconds I find myself hanging halfway out of the boat, screeching across the waves: “Come back! Come back you little —” The last phrase is quite untransliteratable, being gnashed to foaming bits in my teeth. My voice box ruptures at this point anyway.
I heave around wildly in the bottom of the boat, flopping between the gunwales, broken noises issuing from my throat. Then I manage to recall that I am in a vehicle. I throw myself at the motor, visions of my quarry being hacked into chunks under my propeller leaping through my head. I tear at the starter cord. The motor blows up in my face with a terrific explosion. I grovel about on hands and knees in the boat bottom, hacking, gasping sulphur. “Stink bomb —” I wheeze.
That’s how the police launch finds me when it pulls alongside some time later — moaning and babbling and eating handfuls of fouled hair. Two marine corporals carry me on board. The captain comes into the cabin and eyes me disgustedly. Then all three of them shower me with toilet paper and burst out screaming with laughter.