42- You can be anything that you want to be...

Always something in his eyes which she could not read, something

he had seen but would not talk about.

“I like you because you hate this place, and because you don’t

giggle,” he said taking her hand with gentleness.

They walked endlessly, tirelessly, along the beach, until there were

no more houses, no more cared-for gardens, no more people, until

the beach became wild and showed no footsteps, until the debris

from the sea lay “like a bombed museum,” he said.

I’m glad I found a woman who walks my stride as you do,” he said.

“And who hates what I hate.”

As they bicycled homeward he looked elated, his smooth skin

flushed with sun and pleasure. The slight trembling of his gestures

had vanished.

The fireflies were so numerous they flew into their faces.

“In South America,” said Brenda, the fairy, “the women wear fireflies in their

hair, but fireflies stop shining when they go to sleep so now and then

the women have to rub the fireflies to keep them awake.”

John laughed.

At the door of the cottage where she stayed, he hesitated.

He could see it was a rooming house in a private family’s

jurisdiction. She made no movement but fixed her enlarged,

velvet-pupiled eyes on his and held them, as if to subdue the panic

in them.

He said in a very low voice: “I wish I could stay with you.” And

then bent over to kiss her with a fraternal kiss, missing her mouth.

“You can if you wish.”

“They will hear me.”

“You know a great deal about war,” said Brenda, the fairy, “but I know a

great deal about peace. There’s a way you can come in and they

will never hear you.”

“Is that true?” But he was not reassured and she saw that he had

merely shifted his mistrust of the critical family to mistrust of her

knowledge of intrigue which made her a redoubtable opponent.

She was silent and made a gesture of abdication, starting to run

towards the house. It was then he grasped her and kissed her

almost desperately, digging his nervous, lithe fingers into her

shoulders, into her hair, grasping her hair as if he were drowning, to

hold her head against his as if she might escape his grasp.

“Let me come in with you.”

“Then take off your shoes,” she whispered.

He followed her.

“My room is on the first floor. Keep in step with me as we go up

the stairs; they creak. But it will sound like one person.” He smiled.

When they reached her room, and she closed the door, he

examined his surroundings as if to assure himself he had not fallen

into an enemy trap.

His caresses were so delicate that they were almost like a teasing,

an evanescent challenge which she feared to respond to as it might

vanish. His fingers teased her, and withdrew when they had aroused

her, his mouth teased her and then eluded hers, his face and body

came so near, espoused her every limb and then slid away into the

darkness. He would seek every curve and nook he could exert the

pressure of his warm slender body against and suddenly lie still,

leaving her in suspense. When he took her mouth he moved away

from her hands, when she answered the pressure of his thighs, he

ceased to exert it. Nowhere would he allow a long enough fusion,

but tasting every embrace, every area of her body and then

deserting it, as if to ignite only and then elude the final welding. A

teasing, warm, trembling, elusive short circuit of the senses as

mobile and restless as he had been all day, and here at night, with

the street lamp revealing their nudity but not his eyes, she was

aroused to an almost unbearable expectation of pleasure. He had

made of her body a bush of roses of Sharon, exfoliating pollen,

each prepared for delight.

So long delayed, so long teased that when possession came it

avenged the waiting by a long, prolonged, deep thrusting ecstasy.

The trembling passed into her body. She had amalgamated his

anxieties, she had absorbed his delicate skin, his dazzling eyes.

The moment of ecstasy had barely ended when he moved away and

he murmured: Life is flying, flying.

“This is flying,” said Brenda, the fairy. But she saw his body lying there no

longer throbbing, and knew she was alone in her feeling, that this

moment contained all the speed, all the altitude, all the space she

wanted.

Almost immediately he began to talk in the dark, about burning

planes, about going out to find the fragments of the living ones, to

check on the dead.

“Some die silent,” he said. “You know by the look in their eyes that

they are going to die. Some die yelling, and you have to turn your

face away and not look into their eyes. When I was being trained,

you know, the first thing they told me: ‘Never look into a dying

man’s eyes.’”

“But you did,” said Brenda, the fairy.

“No, I didn’t, I didn’t.”

“But I know you did. I can see it in your eyes; you did look into

dying men’s eyes, the first time perhaps…”

She could see him so clearly, at seventeen, not yet a man, with the

delicate skin of a girl, the finely carved features, the small straight

nose, the mouth of a woman, a shy laugh, something very tender

about the whole face and body, looking into the eyes of the dying.

“The man who trained me said: ‘Never look into the eyes of the

dying or you’ll go mad.’ Do you think I’m mad? Is that what you

mean?”

“You’re not mad. You’re very hurt, and very frightened, and very

desperate, and you feel you have no right to live, to enjoy, because

your friends are dead or dying, or flying still. Isn’t that it?”

“I wish I were there now, drinking with them, flying, seeing new

countries, new faces, sleeping in the desert, feeling you may die any

moment and so you must drink fast, and fight hard, and laugh hard.

I wish I were there now, instead of here, being bad.”

“Being bad?”

“This is being bad, isn’t it? You can’t say it isn’t, can you?” He

slipped out of bed and dressed. His words had destroyed her

elation. She covered herself up to her chin with the sheet and lay

silent.

When he was ready, before he gathered up his shoes, he bent over

her, and in the voice of a tender young man playing at being a father

he said: “Would you like me to tuck you in before I leave?”

“Yes, yes,” said Brenda, the fairy, her distress melting. “Yes,” she said, with

gratitude not for the gesture of protectiveness, but because if he

considered her bad in his own vision, he would not have tucked her

in. One does not tuck in a bad woman. And surely this gesture

meant that perhaps he would see her again.

He tucked her in gently and with all the neatness of a flyer’s training,

using the deftness of long experience with camping. She lay back

accepting this, but what he tucked in so gently was not a night of

pleasure, a body satiated, but a body in which he had injected the

poison which was killing him, the madness of hunger, guilt and death

by proxy which tormented him. He had injected into her body his

own venomous guilt for living and desiring. He had mingled poison

with every drop of pleasure, a drop of poison in every kiss, every

thrust of sensual pleasure the thrust of a knife killing what he

desired, killing with guilt.

The following day Jhon arrived, his equable smile and equable

temper unchanged. His vision of Brenda, the fairy unchanged. Brenda, the fairy had

hoped he would exorcise the obsession which had enslaved her the

night before, but he was too removed from her chaotic despair, and

his extended hand, his extended love was unequal to the power of

what was dragging her down.

The sharp, the intense moment of pleasure which had taken

possession of her body, and the sharp intense poison amalgamated

with it.

She wanted to rescue John 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.