Downtown (33 page)

“She’s really something,” I said.

“Yeah, her last words as we left for lunch had to do with, ah, Smoky’s remarkable reproductive potential,” Brad smiled.

He watched his mother.

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Two hectic red spots appeared on her cheeks.

“It would be hard to miss that, wouldn’t it?” she said, and turned and walked down the hall. Brad’s father looked at us, shrugged helplessly, turned his red palms out, and trudged off after her.

Brad chuckled softly.

“That was rotten,” I said, leaning back against him. I could feel the soft, steady thrum of the lazy power in me, like a tiny engine. I thought that he could probably feel it too, under his blue blazer.

“Not nearly rotten enough,” he said, and I could feel him laugh softly. “She asks for it. Over and over, she asks for it.”

“Well, she gets it,” I said. “You ready?”

We decided to walk home down the beach. I went into the ladies’ room and took off my panty hose and put them in my purse, and Brad tossed a folded bill to the parking valet and asked him to garage his car, and we walked through the silent, torch-lit gardens over to the beach club and down the terrace steps and out onto the sand, to the edge of the water. Behind us, on the upper pool terrace, colored lights uplit the great oaks, and the strains of soft rock drifted gently, but the wind was off the sea, strong and fresh, and we could not hear the music clearly. We took off our shoes and walked in the edge of the surf. It was sun warm, birth-warm. After a few minutes the cluster of lights faded, and except for a few lone yellow-lit windows in the big, far-apart houses, the night was almost totally dark. There was no moon at all, and a faint silver peppering of stars hardly showed through the scrim of high cloud. The sea itself seemed to give off light, a spectral, colorless light that was more like the sea’s breath. I could hear the splash of Brad’s feet beside me, and feel the warmth of his hand on mine, and the soft exhalation of his body heat, but I could

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hardly make him out at all. The night was soft and thick and black and warm as velvet, silky on my skin, smelling of iodine and salt and crape myrtle and that ineffable, skin-prickling saline emanation that says “ocean” to me whenever I smell it, hundreds of miles inland. It always moves me close to tears, so visceral, so old and tidal is its pull. I have often thought that it is the first smell we know, the amniotic smell of our first, secret sea.

After a while, Brad said, “You’re handling the Hunt women awfully well. I’d say today and tonight were yours on knockouts.”

“Well, it strikes me that you could get a little tired of fighting after a while,” I said.

“You wouldn’t have to fight long. Grandma’s already on your side. Mother will be, too, when you’re…you know, part of her world. When she knows you’re a longterm thing. And you are, you know. If you want to be.”

“I think that your mother will be on my side about as soon as your grandmother was on hers,” I said. “I’m not saying it makes a lot of difference, not to me. I can live an astonishingly full life without your mother in it. But I think it would eventually make an enormous difference to you.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “I love my mother, I guess, but I don’t like her. What she thinks about my…woman is simply not a factor.”

“Brad,” I said, still wrapped in the languid, dreaming state in which I had left the hotel, “of course it’s a factor. What do you think all this stuff is about, anyway?”

He did not answer. He pulled me closer into the curve of his body and we walked slowly, kicking the glittering foam, our arms around each other’s waists. Languor wrapped me like warm water. Marylou Hunt simply did not matter. Very little did, but the sensations of this night.

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“Can you live with all this family business?” Brad said.

“I’ll try to keep it apart from us, but some of it will spill over.

We’re not an easy family, but I’d try to make us easier to take than we have been.”

“You haven’t seen a messed-up family until you’ve seen mine,” I said. “I’ve learned to live pretty close inside myself.

Families aren’t a major factor with me. I always thought I’d have my own family, and the rest of them could just…work it out.”

“So when will I meet yours, then?”

“There is a very good chance that you won’t,” I said, and stopped and turned to face him. “I told you when we first met what they’re like. That isn’t going to change. If we…if we should get together, it would not be a matter of rejoicing to them. On the contrary, the bitterness and resentment would just get thicker. I’ve seen it start to happen already. I don’t plan to go home again, Brad, unless somebody dies, and then it will be alone, and for as short a time as I can decently manage. One thing your mother will not have to contend with is a pack of wild shanty Irishmen.”

“It’s your call,” he said. “Although I’d give a lot to see my mother tackle your father. What you’ve told me of him anyway. We’ll be virtual orphans, then, if that’s what you want.”

I knew that he was speaking of marriage, speaking more directly of it than he ever had, and that very soon now I must throw off this delicious torpor, this tiny, effervescent fizzing in my blood, and answer him. Soon, I said to myself, drifting down the night beach in the circle of his arm. Soon. But not just this second.

Presently we were opposite the big pink house, and started across the beach up to the steps and the lawn. The tide was very far out, so that we walked for some time. At the dune line, just before the whispering stands 265 / DOWNTOWN

of sea oats and dune grass began, the sand was as damp and cold as the skin of a snake under my feet. We picked our way through matted sand spurs and small, broken shells to the path that led between the dunes, and then up the sandy marble steps and onto the stiff, dew-cold Bermuda grass of the lawn. When we drew even with the cabana that lay alongside the pool, Brad said, “Let’s sit out awhile. I think there’s some scotch in the cabana that I left there last year, and I’ll put on some music. You’re not ready to go in, are you?”

His voice was low and rough, as if it caught in his throat.

“No,” I said, around the breath that was soft and thick in my own throat. “I’m not.”

“Be right back.”

He disappeared into the little bougainvillea-clad cabana and I dropped down on a wrought iron chaise and stretched out. It was damp with dew, and my bare legs and feet re-coiled from the wet chill. I sat up again, wrapping my arms around my bare legs, and looked up at the house. No lights broke the great sweep of its facade. It was so dark that I could scarcely make out the line of the flat tiled roof against the sky. Even if Brad’s grandmother or her companion or Sarelle were awake and looking out, I thought, they could not see us. We might be the only two people on all the length of this beautiful beach. Alone under the sky, in the wind, beside the sea. I shivered. The entire inside of me, from my throat to the dark, secret core of me, began to tremble, such a small, silvery shivering that it made me think of the beating of hummingbird wings, of moths fluttering in the warm dark.

The smell of bougainvillea was heavy and sweet.

Brad came out of the cabana carrying a bottle, and inside, I heard the mechanism of a record player lift and ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 266

thump, rustily, and Frank Sinatra began to sing, softly, of April in Paris.

Brad handed me a glass and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and I took a long, burning swallow of scotch and felt it track its way down the tunnel inside me to where the trembling had settled.

He dropped down on the lounge beside me and pulled me against him. The hand that rested on my shoulder traced the line of it, down inside my red linen, to where the fresh sunburn felt as if it were glowing. I felt my skin flicker as if a fly had lit there.

“What are you thinking?” he said.

“I’m thinking…that I’ve forgotten all about Andre,” I said, surprising myself. “I have. I’ve lost him entirely—”

He kissed the top of my head.

“Smoky, you can have Andre and all this, too. Don’t you see that? You don’t have to lose Andre. Keep him, keep all your Andres and your…your YMOGs, and whatever else you want to keep. You can still have this. This house, this island, all of it. I’m not asking you to give anything up when you take this on.”

I took a deep breath and skewed around so that I could look at him. I could only see the glimmer of teeth, and the white of eyes.

“Brad, what are we talking about?” I said.

“You must know that we’re talking about getting married.

Do you want me to ask you formally, on my knees? I will.

I thought you understood that’s what I’ve been talking about all day.”

“So…when would you want to do it?” I said. My voice sounded as if it belonged to a stranger.

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I’d like to give you a ring at Christmas and get married in June. And I’d like to come down here for a couple of weeks. I didn’t think I was going to care about the 267 / DOWNTOWN

whens and wheres, but all of a sudden I do. That’s the way my crowd has always done it, and that’s the way I want to do it, too. Unless you want something else—”

“No, no…I don’t care. I mean, I never had any special plans about how I’d do it. I didn’t even know if I would—do you mean, stay here in the house with your grandmother?”

“Jesus, no,” he laughed. “One of the big cottage suites right on the water, breakfast in bed, lunch in bed, dinner in bed, fresh oysters and champagne at midnight—”

“Well,” I said, my ears ringing, “That sounds good to me.

Christmas sounds fine.”

We looked at each other, or at least, where each other should be, in the darkness.

“It sounds as if we’ve been negotiating a merger,” I said, laughing a little and hearing my voice break.

He got up from the chaise and pulled me up after him.

Behind us, in the cabana, I heard a record fall, and then the smoky voices of the Four Freshmen:
Angel eyes, that old devil-sent,
they glow unbearably bright….

Need I say, that my love’s misspent,
misspent with angel eyes tonight….

“Dance with me, Smoky,” Brad whispered, and I went wordlessly into his arms, and we swayed together on the dark apron of the still pool, its surface throwing back moon-scud and star-pricks, while that most sensuous and limbic of ballads spun out into the soft air. By the time it ended, we were standing still, bodies pressed so hard together that we seemed to be part of each other, and the kisses that had begun on the side of my face and my closed eyelids had turned into such long, deep, seeking, blinded things that I had no breath left,

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felt nothing but the heat and pressure of his body and his hands on mine, and the simple, crushing need to be separate from him no longer.

He jerked his head back and took deep, ragged breaths of air.

“I don’t know if I’m going to make it until Christmas,” he half-gasped, half-laughed. “Does this answer your question about negotiations?”

I stood still, blinded, body humming all over, as if every inch of me had been scorched that day by the sun.

“Let’s go swimming,” I said, and could scarcely make out the words in my own ears.

“Smokes—”

“Let’s do it,” I said, and stepped back hastily and reached behind me and unzipped my dress and let it fall to the concrete. I stepped out of it, and unfastened my bra and let it fall, and then the little nylon bikini panties that I had bought at J.P. Allen, with Peter Max whorls and stars on them. I stood naked in the dark, burning, shaking, looking at Brad, and then I went to the edge of the pool and let myself down into the dark water. It was like slipping into sun-hot silk, black and enveloping, lapping warm at my breasts and thighs, covering me, as warm as the blood inside me, as dark as the night outside.

I held up my arms to him.

“Come in.”

He made a small, strangled sound, and I heard his clothing rustle and fall, and then he was in front of me, holding me against him, the firm, rubbery feel of flesh against mine all the way down the length of me, nothing held back now, no barriers, cradled in the buoyant water as in other arms. I wrapped my arms and legs around him in the dark water, and held him close, and closed my eyes.

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He maneuvered us against the side, so that he had purchase on the bottom of the pool, holding me above the surface. If he had let go I would have gone completely under; he was inches taller than I. But he did not let go. He moved against me in the dark, warm water, murmuring things that I knew on my skin and in my mouth, instead of hearing with my ears, rocking gently, rocking.

“I shouldn’t,” he said into my wet hair. “I didn’t mean this yet—”

“Yes,” I said fiercely. “I want this now. I do, Brad—”

“How long has it been since…the last time, Smokes?” he whispered, not stopping the rocking. I was nearly mad with it.

“Never…I thought you knew that—”

“No, I mean…since your last period. I don’t have anything with me—”

“It’s okay,” I said, feeling my nails biting into his back.

“It’s okay. It was just a few days ago—”

“Ah, God!” he cried softly, and went into me.

At first I could not get a deep breath, and when I could, I thought that the pain would rob me of my voice. With the pain came a silent explosion of fear and despair so black and profound that it felt, simply, apocalyptic. When I could cry out, it sounded like the mewling of a kitten.

“Stop! Oh, Brad, stop—”

The pain stopped abruptly and he hung on the side of the pool beside me, gasping for breath.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry, Smoky! Jesus, I should have been gentler, I should have gone slower…. Are you hurt? Did I hurt you bad?”

“No, no, it’s all right,” I whispered, but even in the pool I could feel sweat pouring off my face, and the tingling around my mouth that meant the blood had drained away from it. I had never felt anything like it ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 270

before, neither the pain nor the blackness. I put my hands up to my face and began to cry.