Chapter 2
Amy seemed dreamy, disconnected, appraising foam and seabirds with an inner eye, when later that afternoon we went for a swim. She said little, and even that little was hushed by the wind.
Our house, the last on the beach-in the direction of Kiawah-was far from neighbors, far out of range of prying eyes. Thus, without awkwardness, without sparking island scandal, we usually swam naked. But today, with no explanation, Amy elected not to expose herself. Not that it mattered. Amy was more sensual, penis-titillating, in her sheer, extreme cutaway swim-suits (worn without bosom constrictors) than when nude.
The water was warm, And the sea, for once, was quiet, a wet plateau at whose edge a few waves, from time to time, rose listlessly, then fell with an unconcerned thud. Baby porpoises sported offshore. An occasional pelican floated over us. On the beach a lone sandpiper ran a gleeful obbligato along the margins of a lapping wave.
I wanted to say something about "Pippa passes," but held back in fear of a spoonerism.
Afterward, under the shower, her long legs scissoring, her swimsuit underfoot, her sculptured breasts swinging, Amy extended her distance. She pulled back, sounded a slightly annoyed "Don't" in response to my customary reflex touching.
"No?" My hands were on her breasts, as they so often were. Not to have them so placed, in lust and affection, when Amy was undressed and close, would be a sin of omission, like not standing during the formal playing of the national anthem.
"Please don't." She brushed my hands away.
The rejection induced erection.
Life plagues us with such contradiction of opposites, the phallic translation of the Hegelian dialectic.
Amy leaned over to dry her legs (the shower had been stopped), and her breasts swung symmetrically, casually, full-firmed, inverted cones.
Behaving, now, like a sleepwalker, a pure spirit, a latter day Lady Clara Vere de Vere, Amy pretended not to see my extension, nor to feel it, when, even unavoidably, in the shower stall, it brushed against her. Certainly not to observe its sang de boeuf coloring. Nor to note that this tone matched the coloring of her unleavened nipples.
Abstractedly, mechanically, she dried her pubic hair (which had been high-styled, in Rome, at Cloris' insistence, by Vidal Sassoon). Abstractedly, mechanically, she walked up the stairs in front of me, from the ground-floor shower to the upstairs bedroom.
Her hips gyrated.
The tattoo danced.
"Do you miss Cloris?" she asked, en route, full naked.
The inference, I gathered, was that we were both aware that Cloris was always avid. Amy was not. She had moods, spells of withdrawal. She was not easily to be understood; nor did she, in full truth, understand herself.
A man always avid (she overrated me) would, after a long separation would, in time, miss an always-avid girl.
"No," I said. I did, of course, miss Cloris. But I am also an erotic realist. It has been shown in modern game theory (vide: Von Neumann and Morgenstern) that it is not possible to maximize advantages for two variables at the same time. I had chosen (at Cloris' urging) to come to Charleston to make love to Amy, to enjoy Amy, to write about Amy. But with that choice were realities, the realities that made Amy, au fond, an absorbing study. Cloris and I could share Amy. We were a body with three parts, like Caesar's Gaul. But Amy, ascendant, would not share me-at least, that was my belief. And she was now ascendant. We were together on a lonely island.Cloris was across the sea.
I slapped my erection and repeated the polite "no."
"No?"
"No."
"I do."
Amy was always surprising. Whenever I felt that I had at last gotten to know her, could write about her with the sharp insights Flaubert had of Madame Bo-vary, she surprised me. Madame Amy Dellmore was not like that, not what I thought she was-not exclusively proud, pristine; not exclusively Messalina. She was alternatingly mysterious and forthright, erotic and withdrawn.
She had, I gather, a certain fixed number of moods, a finite collection of personalities, just as Jupiter has a countable number of moons, each with its own orbit and timing A jaundiced astronomer could predict the precise location, at each moment, of each of Jupiter's satellites-and Galileo once suggested that we use such moons as a universal clock. But to me Amy's moods were not as predictable as Jupiter's moons. On chance encounter there was no telling what to expect.
In a woman less gifted with weaving beauty, such uncertainties would not be so acceptable. Nor so interesting. Beauty is a bribe.
This, at any rate, is the dictum of a penis sang de boeuf.
"You're tired," I said.
"Oh, God!"
"Hell," I said, with equal ambiguity. "You want me?"
I always wanted her, I assumed she assumed. "Why do you ask."
"Oh, God."
A fresh breeze swept in from the sea. It rattled the windows.
She threw herself facedown on the bed. The tattoo stared up at me.
"You want me ... even so."
"Yes," I said. I did not, in truth, want her quite that much. And I had been abundantly pleasured by her, as kissing kin, only a few hours before. But years of Machiavellian intrigue had taught me never to pass by the offer of a carnal gift. In such matters, consideration is seldom taken as a kindness, a beau geste. Consideration is taken as retreat, coldness, withering of heart. Better to risk burnings and chafings. Better to take what can be had when it can be had, even if one spills one's seed in an ear, a pulsing navel-or spurts it on a Chinese rug.
"You mean it?" The rhetorical question.
"Of course."
"Not 'of course.' Most men are not gluttons."
"Women?"
"Women?" She raised her buttocks. "Sometimes. Cloris was."
I nodded, even though I knew that with her face in the pillows she could not see me. I nodded to myself, to confirm memories. "In Rome ... I know."
"In Rome?" She laughed the little two-syllabled laugh of understatement. "In Rome. In Mantua, Perugia, Civitavecchia. She never had enough."
"And you?"
I sensed an unseen blush spreading obscenely across her face and draining into the pillow. Her hips twitched. "For God's sake, Bill ... take me and shut up."
Unlike Cloris, she did not assume that the virtue of hospitality stands midway between memory and ostentation.
I kissed the tattoo. This was my routine gesture of affection and passion, a salute to the posterior flag.
"Thank you," she said as my tongue languorously retraced the outlines of the lily's leaves.
She then used a verb which I was surprised to hear mumbled by her own legitimate lips, but which derives from references in French to the alleged practices of Bulgarians. (And which conjured in my mind images of the round-bottomed horses painted by Bouguereau.)
I tried to turn her over. Amy held firm, like a wrestler determined to resist the ultimate surrender, the touching of shoulders to the mat.
"No, Bill. ... No."
I suddenly remembered that my given name was Beauregard. Strange are the byways of association. Beauregard Benton. Given Verner's Law, Grimm's Law, time, and Gresham's Law (which holds that bad currency will drive out good), God knows how my name could erode. Bad puns came to mind; infantile-but my own.
"No what?"
She resisted the turning, flattened her front to the bed. "No."
"No."
"Not in front."
I contemplated, philosophically, the alabaster bottom, cleaved for pleasure. The future, like the past, has no destination. Yet here was a moment, Zen-perfect, that would never, could never, repeat itself. The poised buttocks, passive, serene; perversely parted. Amy's mood, combining withdrawal and impatience. The red glow of the sun as it set beyond the North Edisto, and now spending itself, in little wedges, on Amy's back.
"The little gate." She was explicit.
"It is so small," I said.
She raised her hips.
I was talking, I realized, much too much. I gazed lovingly at the dingle before me, and my private daimon suggested that I shut up.
"The little gate." She slithered a pointer finger around a sloped buttock. "There."
She moved her knees apart. The crevice widened.
All of this was so unlike Amy-a ninety-degree turn from Amy to which I had become accustomed. There had been the forays in Europe, of course, but these had been in the grand manner, like the Merry Widow's visit to Maxim's. Nor has she ever been the aggressor; always she was the sleeper waiting to be awakened.
Why, now, I asked myself, did she insist on holding back from me the loving, wedge-shaped hollow from which the sibyl speaks? In which freshets spring? Why this little gate?
My debate, of course, was inner monologue, the voice of the voyeur. It was also professional soliloquy. As a novelist, I was also Amy's biographer. Her thoughts were my grist. It was important for me to know, at least guess, why she did whatever she did, at the time and in the way she did it.
I am, I'm afraid, a collector of fantasies, of secret views, the muffled boom of distant drums. I remembered the time I had taken Cloris in obverse position, in London, in moonlight, in the tower of St. Paul's Cathedral. She had obligingly taken off her clothes, obligingly leaned forward over a brass telescope which was pointing at Bedlam. After polite climax, and still in forward recumbency, she had waved to the spires of nearby Wren churches.
I warned Amy-it was only polite: "It will hurt."
"You can write about it."
Posterior slopes are characteristically expressionless. Perhaps sarcasm was implied in her comment. Benevolence. Even an ultimate decadence. It was not easy to know.
"My writing about it would embarrass you."
"Nothing embarrasses me anymore. Nothing."
Perhaps this was Amy's way of revolting against the rigid forms set up by ancestors who threw away tea. Throwing tea is an aspect of revolt. And so, by the same token, is the stretching of sphincters.
I steadied myself, thrust, missed.
"You're too high." Her voice was steady, casual, untroubled, although I had presumably struck the coccyx. I thought back, with some skepticism, on Adam Smith's notion, that a man bent only on his own self-interest is guided, as it were, by an invisible hand.
Once more I tried, using furrow in the cupid's bow as a hindsight. And once again I missed. Perhaps, Amy suggested, I would prefer a little boy, fresh from the playing fields of Eton. And it came to me, of a sudden, that we who deplore the drabness of middleclass customs sometimes underrate the facility and cushioned comforts of the missionary position.
"Go to the bathroom," Amy said over her left shoulder. "Look in the cabinet."
Anatomical differences, cultural differences, the dark separation of poetry from common sense, left Amy indifferent to the fact that my problem was one of visibility, not friction. The adit is not to be seen. One obscures it by one's own frontal parts. And the greater one's avidity, the less accessible is the minuscule entrance. It is approached, as is a proton in a particle accelerator, only with high hopes and the spread-of-probability theory.
The wind stiffened, jostling the curtains. Amy sighed a special sigh, which I interpreted to mean sadness, resignation, and daring. So many of her gestures combined extremes. This, I think, was the crux of the fascination she had, in so many ways, for so many-man, woman, and hobbledehoy.
The sigh rose to muted fullness, crested, followed me to the bathroom. Whether or not friction was the problem, as she seemed to think, it would have been boorish of me to debate the suggestion. It was enough that she had been so thoughtful, unabashed, concerned. Again, the spell for me hung on the sudden change, the high fall, the nuance of a wish. And it pleased me to recall that buttock, like turbot and halibut, comes to us from the Old High German bozan, to beat.
I returned with what was required.
It is not wise, or kind, and scarcely gallant, to go into detail at this point. Suffice it to say that I made an odd discovery. Although friction had not been my initial problem, lubrication removed the problem. A soft, clinging film of Nivea cream converted the dell of the nether cheeks to the slopes of an amorous funnel. like Archimedes in his bath, I could then justifiably shout, "Eureka!"
Lubrication paced eroticism, eroticism constriction, constriction ekstasis. In a single, apocalyptic moment, I understood, savored, the yogic charms of peristalsis. There was union, as it were, with the ongoing, cradling, cosmic pulse.
I envied, for the moment, the Italian count to whom, her nephew maintained (Or was it Larrine?), Amy granted such favors, with Miss Wescott watching, in the Hotel Cipriano, in Venice-granted them without taking her eyes from the view of the Piazza San Marco, across the lagoon. Amy, perhaps, had become bored with me. The thought was not a happy one. A man's ego hinges on the opposite. He will admit to any vice, any failing, other than that of boring a woman. This is the ultimate illness, a violence to the machismo of spirit.
We pursue only what we do not have. I did not have Amy in the sense that Amy had me. I am, I believe, reasonably simple, in. spite of my wayfarings, curiosity, infidelities. There was thus little to hold Amy's interests over a long span, any more than did the pelicans that, in predictable patterns, glided past us in solemn rounds. Even now, I suspected, she was offering herself with oblique hospitality, chiefly, I think, to pique her own curiosity, to challenge herself, to lift herself out of herself.
It was then that the phone rang, rang in timed rhythm with the last spasms of wly sphincters. The odd coincidence of ring and constriction seemed to imply that there is an order in nature too subtle for the play of simple reason.
Amy reached for the phone without changing position, without ejecting me from my pleasure trove. There was even an ultimate conspicuous, caressing constriction, the gallant gesture of a flirtatious python. Such is the beau geste of an anointed lady.
She said her initial "hello" in a restrained way, as if greeting minor royalty from her box at Ascot. There was then an eloquent silence. She nodded her head several times. Once or twice she smiled. At long last, in a voice muted, slightly hoarse, she said, successively, "Yes ... yes ... of course ... of course not ... in a little while."
At this point, I extricated myself. It was, I thought, the proper thing; one does not overstay one's welcome.
Amy, unpinned, turned herself over. She looked up at me, not seeing me; and I report at this time that it is most disconcerting to be looked at but not seen. "I have to go somewhere." Her right hand instinctively cupped itself over the pubic center as if to protect it from the baleful glare of some evil eye. (I had seen this reflex once before, in Sicily, in the mountains, where every girl is in fear of l'iettatura. Carlotta, who first came to me in my room at the San Domenico Palace in Taormina-mistaking me for someone else-always, after lovemaking, gestured a sign of the cross over her uncrossed loins.)
"Now?"
"Right now. And don't ask me where."
Amy had a way of dressing that was more sensual by far than most women's undressing. Much stemmed from her expression-unsmiling, demure, sometimes sad. Much stemmed from her deliberateness. She dressed slowly. And she fondled herself as she dressed. Her hand moved slowly, as my hand might, as any other lover's might, over each roundness. Then, there was the mock show of modesty. She would turn her back to me, for example, as she slid into her panties, tugging at folds to offset tightness. Then, facing me, she would keep her breasts covered, not moving her arm until the bra was in place.
All of this, mind you, after maenad rites, after giving with abandon what she could not freely mention-in mixed company.
I watched her from the bed, curious, wondering.
I watched her as, in sequence, she put on stockings and high-heeled shoes, garter belt, lace panties. Then came skirt, bra, blouse. She sat for a moment in front of her dresser, applying eye shadow, lip rouge, perfume-surveying herself in the mirror and finding the image pleasing.
At the door she turned and blew me a kiss. "You can have the twins if you wish. I give them to you."
A half-minute later I heard the start of her car. There was the screech that comes when the starter is used after the motor is running. There was the screech that announces that the steering wheel has been turned too far.
After that there was only the thud of the surf, the wind in the pines, and the soft screams of circling gulls.
After Amy left, I poured myself half a tumbler of whiskey (Smith's Glenlivet), took a deep gulp, put paper in the typewriter.
A sober study of novels had taught me two things: (I) to write in detail about my love affairs (I learned this from d'Annunzio); (2) to write quickly, while the details were still hot. I learned the latter from Stendhal, whose Contessa Sanseverini so much reminded me of Amy.
I now wrote, quickly, truthfully, with love, with passion. Amy was an extraordinary subject, extraordinary study. Nor did she object to what I wrote about her. (Pehaps because she never read what I wrote about her. "Darling, write anything about me that you please. Anything. Just don't show it to me.")
Thus I had written about Amy's and my life in Italy (sometimes with Cloris), just as earlier I had written about Cloris-and Cloris' and my life together in Italy and London.
Life had become sweet, quite sweet; leisured, profitable, and sweet.
Amy had once been very establishment, professionally Charlestonian, extensively proper. Eventually, however, she was brought out, as they say. Enticed, unveiled, undone.
Cloris and I had a hand in this "bringing out." But we were not the first.
There had been Larrine Lamboll, this girl who looked much like Cloris (slim, a tennis player's long muscles, ridged cheekbones, radiant), and whom Cloris had met in Rome. Larrine had moved to Charleston, taken an imposing, colonnaded house on the East Battery. She was heiress to an East Lansing ball-bearing fortune, had made a name for herself, in New York and London, as a painter of abstractions. In Charleston, however, she entertained herself painting nudes of Amy. "And one thing," Amy once informed me, "soon led to another."
"With Amy so naked so much of the time, it seemed the most natural thing in the world." This was Larrine's version. But it was Amy, I later learned, who, to Larrine's surprise, made the overtures. They had gotten drunk together one night. Larrine had passed out. When she woke, she found herself naked and on the floor. Amy, also naked, was kissing her in unexpected ways. "T had been so afraid of shocking her ... and then ... there she was with her tongue inside me."
There had been Isabelle Wescott, Larrine's friend.
Miss Wescott owned the spectacular Berkeley Hall, a famous plantation, whose Georgian house overlooking the Ashley was recently named a national landmark. Miss Wescott stripped her and whipped her. And Amy had let her.
These stories came back to me as I wrote out my impressions of the day's happenings, as I tried to imagine where she might be at this moment-and what was the meaning of the odd call.
I thought, too. of the odd announcement: "You can have the twins if you like. I give them to you."
Was Amy at long last about to give me girls, as Cloris did? Giving them Indian fashion, giving and taking back, giving and sharing?
Or was this a cryptic good-bye? With these two girls I thee divorce.
I drank more Glenlivet goes down pleasantly, stirring memories, old lusts.
"On the first day of June..." I wrote:
... Amy and I moved out to the Seabrook shore; and on or about the first day 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 . ...
In the sweep of alcohol there is a richness of hopes. I saw Amy. Elza, and June joined together in friendship's garland. I saw the four of us, in a circular bed, linked amorously like the carbon atoms in the chemist Kekule's benzene ring.
There is also ingenuity. I saw on my middle finger the wonder-working ring of Hans Carver, the ring which kept all young wives constant. Hans Carver, it will be recalled, dreamed that this thaumaturgic band had been placed on his finger. On waking, he found it no more than love's laborae.
Was Amy now in alien hands? I did not object, basically; I was not possessive. I was curious. Was she at this moment undressed, about to be fondled? And, if so, sadly, in passive surrender? Or was she making an offering of herself, freely, gladly, while fluting little birdsongs?
I heard, in the distance, the restless heave of the surf, the hiss of the crested waves.
Then, in some way, I got myself to bed. What followed is not clear; alcohol dissolves memory as well as the superego.
When awareness came back to me, Amy's mouth was on mine. There was mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with a rich exchange of whiskey breaths.
"Take me," she said amiably, her voice throaty, low contralto, heavy with peach fuzz.
She had of a sudden put aside her Old Charleston restraint, her classic Below-Broad-Street reticence.
In a trice, or sooner, she was astride me. No "May I."
"Would you like...? " or "Please."
Nor did she hesitate to grasp my extension, grasp it, knead it, shake hands with it-ultimately taking it inside her as if sheathing a sword. She was quite sure of herself, enormously wet, surprisingly deft.
"Take me," she repeated in her well-ordered, maenadic voice. The order was verbose. It was also superfluous, for no other course was possible. Moreover, the act ordered was already in progress. Already there was a mighty churning, a hard grinding of loins.
Nerve ending spoke glowingly to nerve ending, flesh to flesh, and she made many primal, sibilant sounds.
Then she came. In viscid gushes, with tumult and abandon, a wild quivering, and a spread of hot honey.
I understood, then, how natural it was, how loving, for the Bacchae to tear Orpheus to pieces, that night of round revels, on a glossy hill in Thrace.
And I resolved in my next book to chant the praises of Amy's eloquent, oracular part. I would ring the cyclic changes, I would celebrate its slow unfoldings, its diluvial climax, its violent close.
"I must say," Amy eventually said, larding kisses on my eyelids, "this beats buggery all get-out."
We could conclude thus, I suppose, that Amy would ever be para-Bohemian; for the benchmark of Bohemianism is a tendency to use things for purposes to which they are not adapted. Such at least is the dictum of Mr. Max Beerbohm, of whose judgments I am always trustful. You are a Bohemian if you would gladly use a straight razor for buttering your toast at breakfast, and you aren't if you wouldn't. Amy, understandably, wouldn't
I was the first to wake the next morning. Amy lay next to me, face buried in the pillows, a thigh slung over me.
Outside, wood birds, in unison, sang their several hallelujahs-sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, grackles, and mourning doves. The air was already fragrant with honeysuckle, jasmine, sea salt. It was a balmy air, dampish, clinging.
I went to the bathroom to drain off tension. Then I went to the kitchen, poured orange juice for the two of us, put coffee and water in the Mr. Coffee machine. ("A perfect cup of coffee ... every time.")
I made toast, spread it with orange marmalade.
Then I took our two breakfasts back to the bedroom.
Amy was still asleep, breathing softly into the pillows, a picture for Good Housekeeping's cover. Innocence hung over her like Damocles' sword. Innocence was spelled out in the smile on her half-turned face, on the corners of her lips.
Slowly I pulled down the sheet. Voyeur that I am, I like to look at Amy's body whenever it is exposed, or can be exposed, and she is not aware of my looking.
The sheet descended.
Uncovered first were the white shoulders. Then the soft back with its pinched-in waist. On the sides were marks from my nails.
I pulled the sheet back to her ankles. She sighed, aware, even in sleep, that she was being uncovered.
Then came the astounding surprise: Amy's buttocks were crisscrossed with angry red whip marks. One mark, missing altogether the sensual crease, trailed apologetically down the slope of the right thigh.
We drove to town in my car later that morning. Amy had many things to do. She always had many things to do; this I had discovered soon after coming to live with her.
In daylight hours she was seldom the mysterious, dreamy beauty who had figured so vividly in my obsession with her, in my accounts of her. She was a practical, active woman, much concerned with Charleston political affairs, the preservation of Charleston's historical and architectural values. The present city, with its tourist attractions, its restorations, its frenzies of landscaping, the cult of the garden, owed much to her.
Yet she seldom spoke of such doings. I knew of most of them only from items I had read, stories people told me. Most of my time with Amy had been spent in Europe. I knew at first hand her talents as an actress, as the beauty who had starred in Monna Vanna, whose naked body and cryptic smile had first been savored at the motion-picture festival at Cannes.
Nor did Amy speak much this morning. She looked dreamily out of the car, dreamily at the marsh in which white herons, here and there, stood passively, philosophically, with Zen eyes, surveying mud.
The Low Country is a sensuous place. Everywhere are vivid colorings, shadow patterns, sounds of birds, trees, water. Fragrances blend in uncountable variations: pluff mud with sea salt; pine and honeysuckle with pluff mud and oysters. There are traces, at times, of magnolia aromas, of the persuasive tea olive. The blue of the sky, gray-green of creeks and lagoons, interspliced greens and browns of marsh grass, leap up at you, announce their missions, lapse back into the spreading background. If you let yourself go, you slip slowly into a miasma of floating images, in which no form long has sharpness and distinction. Nor do sharpness and distinction anymore seem to matter. And such was my feeling this morning, aside Amy, as we drove slowly along the island road, swept by a loveliness not outdone, in my brief wanderings, by the fashionings of any other place in this world.
"Pretty," Amy said, establishing our rapport in understatement. In Charleston one does not emphasize the obvious.
"Pretty," I said. I pointed to a meadow where gail-lardias were in bloom and a mongrel puppy played, unaware of its mixed ancestry.
She put her hand on my knee. "You didn't mind about last night?"
"I got a lot of writing done."
Mind? I minded very much. An emptiness comes over us when we are deserted. We become aware, quite suddenly, that our thoughts and feelings, our seriousness even, are like parts of an arch that hold together only because they press against a keystone. When the keystone is taken away, all tumble; what is left is only a vague recollection, an untrustworthy frame for a vacuum.
Moreover, I had acquired, these past weeks, an unholy sense of possessiveness about Amy. She was mine, more or less exclusively. Not that I wanted possession, any more than I would want a cloud, or the sea spray. It came.
I bypass the suddenness of her leaving, the odd call, the easy acquiescence. Nor will I speak of the marks on her body.
"You wrote about me? About us?"
"Yes." The statement had a masochistic ring. Amy had been out pleasuring herself, if being hurt can have such an ambivalent meaning. And no doubt taking pleasure in giving pleasure-all offstage to me.
The "yes" was enough. Nothing was to be had from talk with Amy about my various feelings, confessing my jealousy, admitting my curiosity about what had been done to her after she left me. Nor to ask who took part in the cabal. Amy was not Cloris, to whom admissions were flirtations, details aphrodisiac. Amy had to be approached with a delicate casualness, as you would approach a woman walking in her sleep along the edge of a cliff.
The simple "yes" was more than enough. Amy expected no answer. She was not listening. She put her hand to her cheek, stared straight ahead, straight into a tumble of tall pines and tunneled oaks.
"I was sad yesterday," she said dreamily. "I don't know why."
Nor do I believe she did. She had her Cherry Orchard moments. She expected them; she accepted them.
("Oh, my orchard!" I could hear Mme. Ranevskaya saying. "My sweet, beautiful orchard! My life, my youth, my happiness, good-bye! Good-bye!")
This Chekhovian sadness, this dreamy weariness, recurring like a hunter's moon, made her to me all the more stirring. High passion has much sadness in it.
"You hurt me yesterday." She smiled to herself the wan, sad smile of a woman examining herself critically in a mirror, who finds herself not quite the self she had expected to see.
"Not after you came back."
"My God." She clapped her hand over her mouth, as if closing her lips would hold within her mysteries not to be shown to many-nor described.
"God," I said, meaning good.
"I came a lot, didn't I?"
"A lot."
"It's not very lady-like, is it?" She was obviously pleased with herself. She dimpled her cheeks. "You soaked me."
"I don't want to talk about it," she said.
She looked straight ahead through the windshield. Two tall loblolly pines bowed gracefully in the morning wind, then embraced.
"It was good."
"Was it good, Bill? Really good? Good for you?"
She very much wanted to talk about it.
"Look at the heron," I said, with a suggestion of tact. A white heron (or was it an egret-egrets have a special tuft, and black legs?) swooped from the sky to the marsh on our right, landing on a mudbank.
With Amy, in the wide circles of morning, it was not expedient to dwell on sex. There was a change of ambience. There was the onset of discreet amnesia.
One spoke, instead, of songs of innocence; of skylarks and skinks, of the curvings of a rose leaf.
But this morning was an exception.
"What is it, Bill? Please. You know about such things. It's not really coming, is it? It's much, much more."
"It's the miasma," I said. And she informed me, sweetly, that I was a bastard.