Chapter 1
On the first of June Amy and I moved out to the Sea-brook shore; and on or about the first of June a strange change occurred in our entwinement.
Looking back, I am not sure which came first, the onset of Amy's odd unease or the arrival on set of blonde, bronzed June Poltergrue and her blonde, bronzed twin.
The sun and moon were then in conjunction, and vast, venal tides assaulted the dunes, sweeping off sea oats and slashing the myrtles.
It was then, from nowhere, without preamble or hint, that Amy made her startling pronouncement: "You want to see me made love to by another man."
"What?"
"You want to undress me first, don't you? Before an audience? Then watch...."
"Scarcely," I said, countering exaggeration with an understatement.
"I think you're beginning to get bored with me." She said this absently, her eyes on the sea.
"Do you get tired of the ocean?" Amy had great beauty, great grace, a combination of sudden passion and unpredictability. She could be exhausting, never tiring.
"You want to, don't you?" There was this suggestion by repetition. She pronounced her words with luminous precision, with care, drama, pride.
Had Amy lived some generations earlier, you would have expected her to maintain one of the great salons of Charleston, to have entertained the distinguished Marquis de Lafayette on the occasion of his visit of state; to have entertained Washington. And you would have expected her to say, with the words of another Charleston hostess and historian, "If Washington symbolized to me Strength and Virtue, so La Fayette personified chivalric Generosity, Honor, and Romance." And here she was suggesting, no matter how covertly, that it would please me to see her made love to by another man; implying, as sooner or later she would state openly, that I was to secure the other man, undress her, present her. As if I were Lord Hamilton, and Lord Nelson were to be my invited houseguest. ("Lord Nelson, may I call your attention to the exquisite fleur-de-lis on Emma's left buttock?")
"Why?" I launched an exploratory syllable.
"Because..." There was the polite hesitation. A lady, on the verge of a daring suggestion, always hesitates, as in the first steps of a minuet.
"Because what?"
"Because it would please you." She was sibylline, suggesting, cajoling the future. Then she added, "I enjoy pleasing you."
"How do you know it will please me?"
She smiled her special, cryptic way, dimpling her cheeks. "I know."
"What man?"
"Any man you choose. It really doesn't matter."
"You'd do it?" The proposition seemed absurd. It was not in character. Amy was eminently proper, reserved, a throwback to the traditions of azaleas and camellias, Low Country interpretations of Sir Walter
Scott. My Lady of the Camellias did not open herself wantonly to errant men.
"Of course ... if you watched."
"You want me to watch?"
"I want you to watch." She stroked her middle, as if in anticipation Her white shorts were tight. "You'd be inhibited."
"I'm inhibited as it is." She looked at me for confirmation. "I've never been free this way, have I?"
Her right hand, asserting itself, undid the top buttons of her shorts, slid inside to savor the pubic terrain. The gesture, I gathered, was unconscious-a classic case of the eloquence of body language.
"Sometimes yes. And sometimes no." Amy for the most part was reserved, as a Charleston lady is assumed to be reserved. She made no direct references to erotic acts, initiated no advances. Her long, sensuous legs, swelling breasts, were denied by her choice of words, her innocent references, by the fact that she did not often reach out in reflex to touch you. Not ordinarily. But there had been exceptional moments. There had been times when events quite out of the ordinary had set her free-when her naked bottom exposed to a selected audience, the tattooed emblem on the left buttock quivering, a livid streak, newly imposed, flaming across the milk-white skin, she had turned maenad.
"I don't like to talk about sexual intercourse."
A second after she said this she realized how stilted her words were. "Oh, fuck," she added, laughed, blushed, jerked her hand back from under her shorts.
I went over to her and eased down her shorts. She was stretched out on a chaise, facing the ocean. She lifted her hips cooperatively. "That was not an invitation."
"Of course not." I slid the shorts down over her ankles, tossed them to the chaise I had abandoned. She put her hand, fingers wide apart, over the trim but very black copse of pubic hair.
("Sometimes yes. And sometimes no." We had our private phrases, Amy and I. Only a short space back, in Mantua, in the Labyrinth Room of the Palazzo Ducale, Amy, warming to her role of the Duchessa Giovanna, so soon to be traduced, was fascinated by the inscription on the ceiling: Forse che si, forse che no. Her eyes had feasted on it when, later, she lay naked on the massive Gonzagan bed, surveyed by carved, lurid cupids-her own curves blending so aptly with the Renaissance flutings. Forse means perhaps. "Forse che si, forse che no." Amy would roll these syllables around her tongue whenever she chose to make herself more than usually alluring to me, hissing the sibillant s's, trilling r's in the repeated forse.)
"It's just the middle of the day."
"The Revolution will begin exactly at twelve-seven-teen." This was our private joke. The failure of the German Revolution. Too much orderliness. And Amy, brought up in the tradition of Adam symmetry and formal gardens, sometimes, from habit and instinct, struggled to keep lovemaking orderly. There is a time for cotillions and a time for bed. One does not waltz on a four-poster bed; neither does one writhe on the ballroom floor.
"You really want me?"
"Really. Really." Repetition establishes reality. ("What I tell you three times is true.") It also establishes the fact that the preceding question was heard.
"Really?" Dimples appeared. She was banal and brief.
"Scout's oath." I was equally banal, almost as brief. "You're impossible." Meaning incorrigible, insatiable, and flattering. The maternal nuances flowed, in folded no-nos, down to the precocious, demanding child. In honeyed, chiding words, full of birdsong, she informed me that I was a little boy. "Spoiled. Spoiled rotten."
Amy continued on for a reasonable and parliamentary stretch of time. A lady does not give herself lightly, at high noon. Then she undid her bra.
Thus were exposed spectacular breasts with aureoles exactly centered, breasts Cloris and I presented to the cinema world in the motion picture Monna Vanna. They were now a part of legend, a component of glory. They had been shown full-flowered in Paris Match, Oggi, Epoca, Der Stern. With slight retouching, pictures of them had appeared in Time and Newsweek.
"And you?" I asked. The fantasy, I suspected, was more stirring to Amy than to me; but Amy would never volunteer fantasies, never on her own voice such private, arcane urges.
Amy was, I repeat, too much of the old Charleston/Waverley-novels tradition to speak up on such matters. Hers was steadily the passive role; speak not of such until spoken to. But she was never impolite. Asked a question, she would not ignore it.
"And I? I what?"
"Bothered?"
"About another man?"
"I would take him, if you asked me to-if that's what you mean."
The pattern was clear; and not without interest-certainly to me as a writer. She would excite herself by imagining herself exciting me ... with the thought that she wanted me to think that she wanted me to excite her by undressing her and giving her to another man. Any man. Preferably a stranger. She would have no guilt; she would not be being unfaithful. Far from it; she would be more than faithful. All this would be shogun honor; the faithful mistress, giving her body, at her lover's request, to a visiting diplomat, for reasons of higher honor.
"Forse." Again the long, trilled r, the hissed s.
"I must ask you?" I thought it useful to wring from her a clear statement of program. She might be talking in full, dead seriousness; as possibly, she. might not. Forse che si, forse che no. The motto was coined for Amy. In that Labyrinth Room, she could well have been the Isabella d'Este who once trod lightly on the room's marquetry; and Isabella, I suppose, could as well have lain naked, proud, sacrificial, on that same bed, before our camera, staring dreamily at the ceiling.
Amy walked her fingers around the apex of her thighs, walked them in a gesture of thoughtfulness. "You've never seen me made love to by another man."
She was, I thought, unnecessarily biographical.
"A little boy," I said. I referred to little Randy, a youngster we had exported from Charleston to Mantua, Cloris and I, to make love to Amy on camera. (We had discovered that although Amy had qualms about modesty on camera in scenes with adult males, she was nonchalant, even avid, when the actors were boys.)
"A little boy doesn't count." Her tongue slithered around her lips, a mannerism she had acquired from Cloris.
"Other women."
"Women don't count."
"I was not counting."
"Cloris, perhaps." She was thoughtful. "But then, Cloris is you ... the Orlando switch."
I said nothing. Amy was in a confessional mood.
One does not interrupt confessions-all the less I, who had books to write.
"I have had in my life only two men. Really."
(This was the beginning of a theme that was later to become excessive in Amy. It dramatizes the omnipotence of thought; and perhaps the magic force of binary arithmetic.)
"Only two?" My accounting had a different tally.
"I mean had-capital H. John and you ... and John was my nephew."
"Jeff?"
"Jeff was my husband. Husbands don't count, do they?" Her smile curled as gracefully as petals of a magnolia bloom; she knew I knew what she knew, shared her pleasures, crested on her assets.
Amy had two great functional assets: her position in society, solid and unassailable; and the fact that her husband was a nonentity. Jeff Dellmore in no way interfered with her behavior; nor was there any reason for her to divorce him, no more than for Lady Hamilton, in her time, to divorce the convenient owner of the Portland Vase-now in the British Museum. Moreover, Jeff Dellmore had his fine uses. As factotum to the aging Senator Ashmead, sometimes his political manager, Dellmore could occasionally promote appointments, persuade obligated committee chairmen to allocate funds for unseemly causes.
Jeff shared Amy's background. The fact that he was a nonentity in no way diminished his standing. Position in Charleston is determined by ancestry, not achievement; and freshness in outlook is often taken as a sign of instability of character. like Amy, he had been conscientious and romantic, believing that marriage was intolerable without love, and love unthinkable without marriage. Since his inclinations, covertly and overtly, were bisexual, his course of action was considerably confused.
"I married young. You know that."
"Eighteen?"
"Nineteen. But it isn't the age that matters. I wasn't then quite awake."
"Jeff?"
"Jeff was never awake ... that is, with me. He actually preferred boys. But at that time I didn't know. Perhaps he didn't either."
"Yet...."
"Of course. It was expected of me. I was always a good wife."
"I would expect that."
"Just as I'm a good mistress." She moved her hand from the pubic bosk to her breasts, as if asking her breasts for confirmation. "And I am a good mistress ... aren't I?"
"I don't use the word." Mistress, today, is as passi as fainting. Language, however, has its genetic lags, and we English-users have as yet found no nimble substitute. We have a ready and proper argot for gadgets and trends, but our tongue is slow in coining moot words for erotic wayfarings.
"Don't I give you everything you want?"
"Everything." Amy did not try to excite me by getting me other girls, as did Cloris-Cloris, Lady Cholmondeley. But Amy was so handsome, loving, voluptuous, unstinting, that I scarcely had interest in other girls. Not that there were not occasionally vestigial stirrings.
"Of course I don't get you other girls, as Cloris did." She had a way of reading my mind.
"I don't need other women." This was the thing to say, even if, for the moment, it was reasonably true.
"You want me now?"
"Yes." I always wanted her, except at times when I was physically exhausted. And I had learned in Rome, when we were last there together, that when push came to shove she had vastly more staying power than I. She was, when totally aroused, literally insatiable. She could engulf me, as Vesuvius once engulfed Herculaneum and Pompeii. But then there was Cloris with us ... to stir, slither, command. "Even if its one-sided."
"Even one-sided."
"Show me."
I stood up, dropped my swim trunks. There was the engorgement. Ambulant, aggressive, impatient, bobbing slightly, an avid bowsprit.
"My, my," said Amy politely. A natural sweetness impelled her always to comment on my routine risings.
"Naturally," I said. "Come closer."
I went over to the chaise. She leaned forward and cradled my erection between her breasts. The fat light of noon clung to her skin. Her perfume, mixing with the tart salt of the sea breeze, spoke of soft pleasures. "Good," she said, and her nipples rose-those eloquent nipples which rose, on occasion, like prune-toned obelisks. ("It's so embarrassing," she sometimes lied, stroking them for emphasis. The prune tone would turn salmon, then red, and I would expect them, at any moment, to spurt lactic jets.)
"Good," I echoed.
She pressed the nipples into me, creating a kind of triple-penis configuration. Meanwhile she looked up at me, her face radiant with the innocence it acquired whenever her other parts asserted themselves in unabashed rut. The more demanding her passion, the more her face spoke of beatitudes-the more it glowed with the sweetness of a sly Madonna.
Since she had played nude in Monna Vanna, the motion picture we made in Italy, Amy had become almost exhibitionistic about her breasts. They had been much admired, fondled, photographed. They had drawn high praise In a country whose women almost all have praiseworthy breasts; whose men, weaned on such niceties, are aficionados of the full-blown bosom.
Nor were the reviewers of the picture any less appreciative of Amy's physical charms, lucent glories. Her excessive Charleston modesty was thus quickly eroded. Unconsciously she paraded the fact that what most women call modesty is little more than fear of the unpleased eye. As conscience is the fear of abuse.
Bit by bit, with little awareness of what she was doing, she made more and more of herself visible. The openings of her blouses grew wider. Her skirts rose higher. She found more and more occasions to dispense with bras; and often, when she seemed to be daydreaming, I observed her hand checking out the contours of her bosom, of her bottom; or tracing the minute separations at the apex of her thighs.
All this I recalled. I thought of the spread of Hogarth engravings showing stages in the undoing of a splendid young woman.
"Before I knew you, I could never do this," Amy said, inventing for herself a shining, virginal biography. She smiled a Madonna smile, turned innocent, glowing eyes to the horizon, as if reviewing, in sadness, her unfulfilled youth. Then, audaciously, she tongued the orifice of my extended device.
I was tempted to think of myself as a gifted teacher, dedicated to higher tasks. I was akin to the great Dr. Arnold, who, to promote higher learning, introduced discriminate flogging in the English public schools.
(The reader is referred to Tom Brown's Schooldays, the motion picture Cloris and I made in England and Spain, with the young-boy-bottomed Jennifer Digby, Sir Kenelm Digby's daughter, playing the part of Tom Brown.)
The waves lapped listlessly at the Seabrook sands. Seagulls, circling, made shrill, circling sounds. We, Amy and I, had before us a lyric world creased with sweetness.
Amy ran her tongue along the great artery of my erection, playing on it, like an accomplished flautist appeasing long-forgotten wars. Then, with aplomb, expertise, affection, she engorged her swollen toy, her lips pursing, slithering.
My ardor acquired pressure, pulsed, spurted three times in cataclysmic pride.
Amy, eyes glowing, smiled, sighed, swallowed. Then she dabbed at my adit with the back of her hand. Horrendous to the neat housewife is the spell of a dripping faucet.
"There," she said, her voice sweet and maternal. "There."
I was the little boy whose little nose needed wiping. Amy was the handsome mother, hand-hewn for incest. "Thank you."
"You're very welcome." She was quite pleased with herself.
She eyed my softening member, than pumped it slightly, to see if craft and concern could extract from it a final viscid drop.
"Put this in your next book." She had been pleased, not bothered, that I had written so baldly about her in my last book; and that we were now living quite pleasantly on royalties linked to my descriptions of the fine uses of her body. She pretended not to have read the book-to know it only from reports and innuendo and invaginating quips. ("I don't want to inhibit you.") Nor did she know how difficult it is to write aptly about small crevices.
Heightened nipples, the softened eye, the sly curvings at the corners of her mouth, all conspired to tell me that inside Amy the bright sap was rising. Perhaps she was about to tell me this herself, tell it to me in polite, ambiguous phrases culled from Walter Raleigh, Walter Scott, and Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.
We were, however, interrupted. George Pollexfen rattled the door, the erudite Pollexfen, author of The Least Known Poems of Llywarch-Ludd and Understanding Uclidrwldrydd-both privately published.
"I hope I am not interrupting anything important," he said, with a scholar's cheery insensitivity. "Just happened to be passing by."
Without flutter, Amy covered her breasts. Her free hand sequestered the pubic furze. She covered herself, in short, with grace and modesty, as became an anointed lady.
"We were just passing by," Pollexfen continued, as if a passing detail in autobiography justified an inexcusable intrusion.
"Then you must come in," Amy said sweetly.
Pollexfen, I might add, is tall, thin, balding, wiry-a scholar gypsy altogether unaccustomed, I would assume, to seeing beauty bare. Much less Amy bare. Amy. he once told me, was for him a symbol of detached beauty, crystalline, sibylline, plangent, and grave. And that one day he intended to write about her, much as Dante wrote about Beatrice, Petrarch about Laura.
Here, now, was Amy in full, apocalyptic nakedness, gloriously real. Scholars when discomforted talk to themselves.
They become bardic, recite. And Pollexfen was a congenital scholar. "I am reminded, somehow, of the immortal lines of the great Celt Seaan Mor Clumhain. To wit: 'Oh, the slow cows with their full udders from the lands of the great plain of Tuam ... great Tuam.'"
He chanted, I must say, with ardor and solemnity, as would befit a less awkward occasion.
I heard a titter behind him as I disappeared in search of a beach robe.
Through a window opening on the porch I saw two blonde girls. They were young, slim, with long hair that shimmered in the sunlight.
"These are my nieces," Pollexfen said. "Elza and June. Twins."
I wondered if they were identical, if they had the same erotic fantasies, had their periods on the same days. And what kind of fantasies might they have? Standard American, I supposed: much kissing of quarterbacks in bright moonlight; eventually light intercourse in the strict missionary position-then babies and upside-down layer cakes.
There was not much promise there for me. Nor would Amy be of any help. Amy was not Cloris.
I shampooed and dried my middle, put on the terry-cloth robe, meditated on my postorgasmic emptiness. Aprks une debauche, on se sent toujours plus seul, plus abandonni. After a debauch, one always feels more alone, more abandoned. (This, of course, is not true. Baudelaire, for all his absinth-tinged shouting, was a Victorian romanticist; and a romanticist has a congenital need to feel himself frustrated. More, thus, becomes less; excess, a deprivation.)
Amy's voice floated to me through the open window. "Sunbathing is so terribly relaxing, isn't it?"
She had, indeed, the nonchalance of the Below-
Broad-Street lady. (I refer to the old quarter, where manners are as indigenous as Spanish moss, where custom is made, not followed.) She was still naked on her chaise. And obviously not in the sun.
"You have a tattoo," one of the girls announced with little tact Young people nowadays assume that whatever is visible is public domain. . "A fleur-de-lis," Amy said.
Since she was naked except where her hands gave cover, it would have been absurd to pretend that the tattoo did not exist, or that, once existing, it had migrated elsewhere.
"Wow."
"A crest."
"Wow," said the other girl, face to face, as it were, with a heraldic device so daintily positioned.
I tried to imagine her position. The tattoo obviously was visible; it had become a conversation piece. She had probably drawn up her knees, thus shielding her center, exposing the join of thigh and rump. As a writer, schooled in the rigors of Flaubert, I was inured, now, to the search for detail. Every moment differs from every other only in the configuration of detail; the way a shadow falls, the way a smile is formed.
To my surprise, I found that again I had an erection. Such recovery might be expected of an eighteen-year-old boy steeped in adolescent juices. Not in one twice that age. Amy, perhaps, had more insight than I would admit; there was a fitful stirring in me at the thought of exposing her. Such thoughts do not translate readily. Why should there be stirrings in me in the image of what I was not, myself, to receive?
"What does it mean? You know what I mean ... the tattoo?" One of the girls must be pointing.
I went back to the doorway. One of the girls was pointing. Amy was considerably naked.
"It means," said Amy, "that I am allergic to extremely young girls."
I went back to the bedroom, picked up a patchwork quilt which had been lying on the bed. I took it to Amy, draped her.
"Thanks," she said, smiling at me, pleased, apparently, that I should have concern for her modesty. "Now I can use my hands." She reached for a pack of cigarettes, put a Multifilter between her lips. Before I could reach over to her, she had located her own lighter, flicked her own flame, inhaled deep, with insouciance, aplomb, and a slight trace of boredom.
Pollexfen introduced me to his nieces. Elza was studying psychology and wanted to be an actress. June was studying acting and wanted to be a psychologist. June had the fuller bosom, Elza the longer legs; otherwise their parts were interchangeable, like the parts of finalists in the Miss Teenage America contests.
What struck me was their blondeness, their youth, their sly vitality. They would not be as yet as mystically moody as I had discovered Amy to be. They were still naive, I gathered; thus they promised all the pleasures that might be had from disrupting innocence.
"Bill is a writer," Pollexfen said, nodding toward me. The acknowledgment was courteous, even if empty, for Pollexfen, I knew well, had never read anything I had written. To him nothing was worth reading unless deserving of footnotes. Literature calls for lexicons, concordants, explanations.
"And a professional cocksman," Amy added, reading my fantasies and expressing no wish to be helpful.
"Coxman?" Elza's eyes brightened, bosom heightened. "We love sailing."
"Sailing..." June echoed, bosom swelling. "Sailing ... and surfing ... and light necking."
Amy had used both hands to light her cigarette, one to hold the lighter, the other to shield lighter and cigarette-which is to say, the flame-from the splay of the wind. Her covering, unattended, slid down the white slopes of her breasts. Cleavage widened. The faint rim of aureoles rose, almost imperceptibly, over the fabric horizon.
Pollexfen's eyes sipped the honey of revelation. They widened. His brows arched in reflex. "I wonder, after all, what do we mean when we ask: What is the meaning of life?" He said this reflectively, slowly, as if giving the question profound thought. He had the scholar's love for irrelevance.
I, on the other hand, stared at the adolescent centers of the two girls. Both wore identical light blue shorts, laced, along a wide, open space, upon the thighs. Through the fretted margin was an ample spread of golden flesh. The gold was uniform, implying that the sun had played freely on their open bodies.
I found myself talking nonsense, as if drunkenness had suddenly come on me. "Life," I said, "is a small egg, in golden gimbals, hung high in an eyrie in Ecuador."
Sudden excitement sometimes unstrings my reason. I saw before me the two girls, writhing, radiant, totally delighted, en brochette. Ossa would lie on Pelion, I atop Ossa. The ultimate positioning would not be exactly what the dictionary would define as en brochette. More would it be successive broaching. But in the fine spread of passion there is room for a twist in semantics.
"Of course." Pollexfen nodded in agreement. "That obviously is what life is. But what is life's meaning?
"The unexamined life,' as Socrates, away from his wife, once said, 'is not worth the living.'"
His eyes, turned to me for the moment, drifted back to Amy. Suddenly I grasped his train of thoughts-I could come up with unexpected pronouncements, as did Sherlock Holmes in the acrid smoke of Baker Street. This was the inference of Hamlet's soliloquy. To be ... or not to be? And I remembered that Pollexfen once had told me that Amy, while at Vassar, had once played Hamlet. ("And a splendid Hamlet she must have been, with those long, tapering legs, sheathed in sheer black tights.") And here, these past moments, he had been staring at those same splendid legs, escaped now, totally escaped, from the sheer black tights. There was even an added fillip-the tattoo.
Amy suggested that I make us all drinks. "Your special." I went to the kitchen, dumped half a dozen pina-colada packets into the Mixmaster, added a pint of rum, powdered sugar, ice cubes. The rum, I saw to it, was a triple portion.
The mixer whirred. The waves slapped ceaselessly at the waiting beach. The seabirds sounded their casual notes. I felt the sap rising, once again, in my middle.
A slight excursus, at this point, might be useful. I had been in Sicily, with the Countess of Liechtenstein, while Cloris and Amy made the last parts of Monna Vanna, in Mantua. ("You must not inhibit her.") We were all to meet in Rome. But Amy, in the interim, for secret reasons, strange, mood-ridden, had returned to Charleston. I followed her, found her, alone, not happy, in her beach house on Edisto Island, which is a jungle-swept barrier island south of Seabrook, north of Hilton Head. Edisto, with its ghosts, its entwined sadness, its palmettos and chigoes, is an hour's drive from Charleston. Edisto, in short, was too remote for my purposes: and Amy's house, a century and a half old, of unpainted cypress, was without telephone. A happy alternative was Seabrook Island, equally beautiful, half the distance newly developed. I leased for the summer the splendid beach house on whose front porch, overlooking the surf, Amy, in spectacular undress, was now ensconced.
Seabrook is a wild island of enlaced magnolias, palmettos, live oaks, scrub and loblolly pines, sand dunes, salt marsh, wax myrtles. Deer leap across the roads, as do the cottontail rabbits, the latter in more precipitous, staccato leaps. Everywhere are the free, wild sounds of birds-wood birds, field birds, marsh birds, seabirds. Everywhere are the invisible gnats, gnawing at your pores.
To reach our cottage, which was flanked by dunes, you drove from Johns Island to Seabrook, stopped at a security gate, stated your business to a Pinkerton guard, then drove another three miles along a winding road, dodging islands of trees, skirting marsh lagoons-eventually a golf course (where, I was later to learn, the twins often played) and the Seabrook Club (where the twins habitually lunched and exchanged teenage speculations about the physical endowments of the club's male members).
"Spectacular," Amy called the island. "A tropical paradise. But after a few months, let's face it, a soupgon monotonous." Her thesis was that ocean waves tell you about all they have to tell you in three or four weeks; after that, they repeat themselves.
The drinks, and their replacements, were downed rapidly, as are most drinks at midday in summer in and near Charleston. Charlestonians are inveterate drinkers, immoderate talkers; and each activity, talking and drinking, spurs, implements, consummates the other. And I, no enemy to either, added to each fresh round of pina coladas more rum than was in the round preceding.
Pollexfen spoke of the book he was writing: the definitive study of an obscure Welsh bard named Crymnwhylggh, which he pronounced "crunch."
"Incantation. Pure incantation. You must, of course, not know what it means. If you know what it means, it slips away from you."
Amy loyally discussed my last book, the book about her. "Obscene," she announced. "So beautifully obscene."
The girls thought this exceedingly funny. Their bare navels leaped up in synchronized glee. "Wow," said June. "Ditto," said her sister.
This book, unhappily titled Between Cloris and Amy, was not well received in Charleston, as might have been expected. For in this sea-lapped city, where DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen once sang odes to wayward beauty, every family, behind the screenings of high brick spiked garden walls, cherishes its perfumed privacies; cherishes the intimacy it enjoys with incestuous camellias. And here social distinction is inseparable from the absence of publicity.
And I, in my insensitive way, had said too much, too soon. Charleston was not, as yet, ready to embrace Amy as Paris embraced George Sand; or London, my Cloris, Lady Cholmondeley. The conservative Charleston Mercury, in a reluctant review, had this to say:
To write adequately of a personality as rich, abundant, talented as Mrs. Dellmore, whose husband is one of the chief political influences in this state, and whose ancestors (Mrs. Dellmore's) include two signers of the Declaration of Independence, were a task demanding no small share of sympathy and wisdom. Unhappily, these qualities are conspicuously absent from Mr. Benton's book. This fictionalized biography, with its slipshod writing, its inexcusable invasion of the boudoir, its utter lack of taste and purpose, is a fair specimen of the kind of biographical work which seems to give so much satisfaction to such a large share of the sensation-seeking public. Indeed, the book would be entirely worthless, and undeserving of comment, were it not for the first 125 pages, which contain some rather colorful descriptions of the Low Country wildlife.
"I have always intended to read you," Pollexfen said, and I was reminded, somehow, of that delightful woman in Rome who read the future in the veinings around the nipple. "But the days, even with daylight saving, are always too short."
"You have read him?" Amy looked at June.
"Wow," June said.
"Wow," said her sister.
In my jaundiced mind's eye I saw the two of them, facedown, bodies parallel, on some convenient couch. From behind I would plunge into the parallel tunnels, each in turn. And each girl, in her own way, as I passed through the adit, would squeal the appreciative "Wow."
"Wow, indeed," Amy said, her dimples deepening.
"So I understand." Pollexfen tapped his chin to signal the onset of scholarly reflection. "Rather racy, I hear."
I looked beyond him to the beach. There was the glancing green of the wild dune grasses. A lone grackle, tail high, stalked the snaking beach foam, snipping errant bits of lamprey, bits of whelk, from the wet sand.
Pollexfen stroked an imaginary beard and hummed:
Where you get dat pongee shirt? I get 'em from Mull ally. Where Mullally keep he store? King and Bottle Alley.
like most Charlestonians, he had consummate tact In Charleston, distinction comes not from wealth, or fame, or naked power, but from the grace notes of gesture and talk.
Amy flashed, appreciatively, her strong white teeth. The courtesy was not unnoticed. Even as liberated as she now was-or seemed to be-she did not savor discussion of herself; certainly not in print.
Perhaps it would be more to the point to say that she was not as free in Charleston as in Rome, in Mantua, or spread-eagled on the terrace of the Contessa Borromini's villa at Civitavecchia.
"Are you still virgins?" she asked June.
"We are twins," June said.
"That is not what I asked you."
"Yes." Elza strummed on her treasure. "We're still pretty young."
Amy would not have spoken out about virginity, certainly not asked about it directly, when I first knew her. Europe, the motion picture, experiment, had loosened her tongue, quickened her curiosity. The change, I thought, enlarged her charm. Propriety and a certain daring go well together, each complementing the other.
(I fantasized June prone, on Amy's bed, saying, "One inch only, please. Ah ... that's it ... bastal" Elza would then fasten a plastic flange to my extension, at that point-to celebrate entrance but defy penetration.)
"We should do something about all this," Amy said, with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. It was not in character for Amy to promote my erotic entertainments. In this she was quite unlike Cloris. But, as a proper Charlestonian, Amy was never at loss for a polite sentiment.
"Virginity?" June lifted an eyebrow.
"Virginity."
Pollexfen was reminded of an old joke. "Oh, Mesopotamia, that beautiful word!"
"We like it," Elza announced, stretching her legs and staring down at the presumed residence of her jewel.
I was disappointed. I could see little hope of lasting friendship arising from the Law of the Excluded Middle. (Except as a warning, a negative maxim. In logic as in lechery, the Middle must be distributed.)
All about us the noon birds sang their several songs: the sparrows, "sweet, sweet"; the cardinals, "pretty, pretty, pretty" and "boreeta, boreeta, boreeta."
I stared stoically at the foam-flecked sea. There seemed little else to do.