44- Confidential secrets

The sea churned at the base as if struggling to drag back the sand into its depths, carrying a little away each time only to replace it at high tide in the form of geological designs, a static sea of crystallized sand waves.

There she stopped and took off her bathing suit to lie in the sun.Drifts of sand were lifted by the wind and deposited over her skin like muslin. She wondered whether if she stayed there long enough it would cover her, and would she disappear in a natural tomb. Immobility always brought this image to her, the image of death, and it was this which impelled her to rise and seek activity. Repose, to her, resembled death. her, resembled death. But here in this moment of warmth and light with her face towards the sky, the sea coiling and uncoiling violently at her feet, she did not fear the image of death. She lay still watching the wind forming sand drawings and felt a momentary suspense from anxiety and fever.

Happiness had been defined once as the absence of fever. Then what was it she possessed which was the opposite of fever? She was grateful that, hypnotized by the sun’s reassuring splendor and the sea’s incurable restlessness, her own nerves did not coil and spring within her to destroy this moment of repose.

It was at this moment that she heard a song. It was not a casual song anyone might sing walking along the beach. It was a powerful, developed voice with a firm core of gravity, accustomed to vast halls and a large public. Neither the sand nor wind nor sea nor space could attenuate it. It was flung out with assurance, in defiane of them all, a vital hymn of strength equal to the elements.

The man who appeared had a body which was a full match to his voice, a perfect case for this instrument. He had a strong neck, a large head with high brow, wide shoulders and long legs. A full strong box for the vocal cords, good for resonance, thought Serena, who had not moved, hoping he would walk by without seeing her and without interrupting this song from Tristan and Isolde.

As the song continued she found herself in the Black Forest of the German fairy tales which she had read so avidly in her childhood. Giant trees, castles, horsemen, all out of proportion in a child’s She wanted to rescue Morrison from a distortion she knew led to madness. She wanted to prove to him that his guilt was a distortion, that his vision of her and desire as bad, and of his hunger as bad, was a sickness.

The panic, the hunger and terror of his eyes had passed into her.She wished she had never looked into his eyes. She felt a desperate need to abolish his guilt, the need of rescuing him because for a reason she could not fathom, she had sunk with him into the guilt; she had to rescue him and herself. He had poisoned her, transmitted his doom to her. She would go mad with him if she did not rescue him and alter his vision.

If he had not tucked her in she might have rebelled against him, hated him, hated his blindness. But this act of tenderness had abolished all defenses: he was blind in error, frightened and tender, cruel and lost, and she was all these with him, by him, through him. She could not even mock at his obsession with flying. His airplanes were not different from her relationships, by which she sought other lands, strange faces, forgetfulness, the nfamiliar, the fantasy and the fairy tale.

She could not mock his rebellion against being grounded. She understood it, experienced it each time that, wounded, she flew back to Stefano. If only he had not tucked her in, not as a bad woman, but as the child, the child he was in a terrifying, confusing world. If only he had left brutally, projecting his shame on her as so often only he had left brutally, projecting his shame on her as so often woman bore the brunt of man’s shame, shame thrown at her in place of stones, for seducing and tempting. Then she could have hated him, and forgotten him, but because he had tucked her in, he would come back. He had not thrown his shame at her, he had not said: “You’re bad.” One does not tuck in a bad woman. But when they met accidentally, and he saw her walking besideStefano, at this moment, in the glance he threw at her, Serena saw that he had succeeded in shifting the shame and that now what he felt was: “You’re a bad woman,” and that he would never come back to her. Only the poison remained, without hope of the counterpoison.

Stefano left, and Serena stayed with the hope of seeing Morrison again. She sought him vainly at bars, restaurants, movie houses and at the beach. She inquired at the place where he rented his bicycle: they had not seen him but he still had his bicycle. In desperation she inquired at the house where he rented a room.

The room was paid for the next week, but he had not been there for three days and the woman was concerned because Morrison’s father had been telephoning every day. The last time he had been seen was at the bar, with a group of strangers who had driven away with him. Serena felt she should return to New York and forget him, but his eager face and the distress in his eyes made this act seem one of desertion.

At other moments the pleasure he had given her ignited her body like flowing warm mercury darting through the veins. The memory of it flowed through the waves when she swam, and the waves seemed like his hands, or the form of his body in her hands.

She fled from the waves and his hands. But when she lay on the warm sand, it was his body again on which she lay; it was his dry skin and his swift elusive movements slipping through her fingers, shifting beneath her breasts. She fled from the sand of his caresses. But when she bicycled home, she was racing him, she heard his merry challenges, faster—faster—faster in the wind, his face pursued her in flight or she pursued his face.

That night she raised her face to the moon, and the gesture awakened the pain, because to receive his kiss she had had to raise her face this way, but with the support of his two hands. Her mouth opened to receive his kiss once more but closed on emptiness. She almost shouted out with pain, shouted at the moon,the deaf, impassible goddess of desire shining down mockingly at an empty night, an empty bed.