An Emergence of Green (14 page)

For the next two days, no longer feeling a compulsion to initiate activity, she luxuriated in the beach sun, sitting on their patio reading novels she had picked up from a bookshelf in the front office. With Paul off playing golf at the Cotton Bay Club, she would stroll the grounds of Winding Bay and talk with the Bahamian known as the dive master, the club’s resident expert on the island’s waters. Soft spoken but gregarious, he showed her perfect specimens of the myriad shells taken from the hundreds of miles of island beaches and talked about the history of Eleuthera from the days of Columbus.

As she began to relate this new knowledge enthusiastically to Paul, he commented, “Do be careful who you talk to when you’re here alone.”

“Oh Paul,” she said reproachfully, “this place, these people aren’t anything like where we come from. We have yet to see a policeman on this entire island!” He did not argue further, but she stopped telling him about her conversations with the dive master; she did not want him disturbed. Soon the vacation would be over. She was happy.

In the morning two days before they were to return home, as they lay in bed, Paul slid down and lifted her gown and with great solicitude examined her.

“It looks pink and pretty again.” He patted very gently with a fingertip. “How does that feel?”

“Much better. Fine,” she insisted, feeling ridiculous with him peering between her legs. “I’m just fine, honey.”

He came to her then and she took him in her arms. Soon he unfastened his pajamas.

She moved away from him. She murmured, “Instead, why don’t we kiss each other…here.” She stroked his firm penis.

When he stared at her without speaking she said awkwardly, with embarrassed defensiveness, “You told me once you wished I’d initiate things once in a while. I’m initiating. I think we could be a little more venturesome, don’t you?”

“I don’t want you doing that to me.” He smiled then, and propped himself on an elbow and caressed down over her stomach. “But I’d do anything in the world you think you might like…”

He felt, she decided a few minutes later, like he was poking at her with a stick. She stole a glance down at him. He lay rigid, his eyes squeezed shut, his face a rictus of distaste, his tongue a poker-stiff extension to her.

Frozen with shame, she grasped his hair to pull him away. “That was lovely,” she whispered.

He climbed out of bed pawing at his mouth. “A hair,” he rasped, and went into the bathroom. Over the running water she heard him brushing his teeth, gargling.

Getting back into bed he asked, “Try it again?”

Shamed, pierced by his willingness to please her, she said, “No honey, you were sweet and nice.”

He took her into his arms. She tasted toothpaste on his lips. Emptying her mind of thought, she concentrated on pleasing him.

Just as in the early days of their courtship, laying siege to her had worked once more. Twelve days together and only one mention of Val Hunter—and that by him. With tomorrow the last day before the flight home, she hadn’t even bought the Hunter woman a gift.

I’ve won. Even before I bring out the heavy artillery, I’ve won.

Maybe all this time he’d basically misjudged the situation, the Hunter woman’s influence. Maybe it was actually the boy who claimed Carolyn’s affections. If not totally understandable, it was possible—and so tonight’s heavy artillery would be that much more potent. Women’s notions about things were often beyond him; that’s what made them so baffling, so mysterious and maddening and wonderful...

He lay in bed dozing, complacent, hearing Carolyn moving about the bathroom. Sex half an hour ago had been an effort that drained him, but the orgasm—so intense he’d lost awareness of everything but the clasping velvet of her ..

Carolyn came into the room. He said drowsily, “Princess, why don’t we take it easy today, work on our tans?”

“Fine, honey. But I want to see the dive master, maybe you’d like to come with me. He has a special shell to show me; he’s been cleaning it. I think I might want to buy it.”

He shrugged. “Sure.” He watched her with pleasure, breathing deeply as he remembered. “It was good.”

She turned around and unsmilingly regarded him. “Do I really make you happy?”

“After the vacation we’ve had you’re asking that?” He was bewildered by the question.

She turned and smiled at him in the mirror as she began vigorous brushing of her hair.

“Women!” he exclaimed humorously. “So help me God I’ll never understand women.” He watched her brush tangles efficiently out of the curling ends of her hair. “When are you going to cut that hair?”

Her eyes drifted to him, then away. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice vague and distant. “Sometime…”

After lunch Carolyn glimpsed the dive master outside the gift shop. Beckoning to her, he unlocked a door next to the gift shop and entered. As she and Paul walked down, the Bahamian emerged, his massive hands filled.

Paul glanced at the shell’s outer coat of lustrous pinkish white ridges, unimpressed. Smiling, his fine teeth very white in his dark face, the Bahamian turned the shell over and held it out to Carolyn. Paul stared, surprised.

The flared, fan-shaped edge was glowing salmon-brown, darkening into sable-brown ridges deeply etched as if they had been made by the teeth of a comb, deepening in richness that spoke tantalizingly of even greater richness within the inner spiral of the shell.

“It’s stunning,” Carolyn breathed. “It’s just wonderful…”

“Take it, touch it,” the Bahamian said in his lilting accent. “It is one of our finest, a glorious shell.”

Carolyn received the shell reverently in both hands, her fingertips caressing the deeply etched grooves curving into the inner chamber. Her eyes never leaving the shell, she said to Paul, “It’s referred to as Queen of the Sea…Mr. Cartwright told me all about it…or tried to…”

She looked up at the Bahamian, whose muscular arms were folded across the pale green print shirt of the Winding Bay Club, and returned his smile. “I want it,” she said.

“Ninety-five dollars, Mrs. Blake,” the Bahamian said softly.

Carolyn nodded. “I want it,” she repeated.

“Wait a minute, Carolyn,” Paul said. “I agree it’s unusual. But shouldn’t we talk about this? I mean, it’s—Where would it go in the house?”

“Queen of the Sea, how perfect,” Carolyn murmured, her eyes distant. “I want it for Val,” she said.

“Ninety-five dollars,” Paul repeated with a touch of vertigo. “A shell, I don’t know that a shell is worth—”

“It is,” Carolyn stated. “Mr. Cartwright has been telling me quite a lot about shells. He’s been very generous with his time.” She extracted her traveler’s checks from her shoulder bag, then turned her green eyes on Paul. “There really isn’t a problem, is there?”

“I’m sure it’s cheap at the price,” he managed to say. Again there was the sensation of vertigo, so pronounced that he reached to the side of the building for support.

The champagne, he thought. Too much champagne for their end-of-vacation dinner. His sexual excitement built but would not peak; his body broke out in heavy perspiration. Climax when it happened was more merciful than ecstatic, a bludgeoning reminder of the insatiable Rita of his first marriage.

“You’ve never been like this before,” Carolyn murmured, dabbing with a pillowcase at the pool of moisture between his shoulder blades and in the small of his back.

“I’ll shower,” he said, breathing with effort.

“You will not. You’re fine.”

After all his exertion she seemed only slightly short of breath. But then, he was rarely awake for this long afterward.

“You’re fine,” she said again.

“Darling?” He rolled over onto his back, pulled her on top of him and took her face in his hands. After all the glorious intimacy of their vacation, the intimacy they had just shared, this was the moment.

“Darling, I’ve been thinking for some time about this, I’m convinced this is the right time for us to have our baby. Now. I want a baby with you. A girl. With green eyes, like yours.”

Carolyn’s eyes looked unwaveringly into his. “Not yet, Paul.”

She took his face into her own hands; he released her and closed his eyes. He felt her cool fingers caress his cheeks as she spoke. “You’re only thirty-six—I realize now how young that really is. You’re younger to me now than you’ve ever been. We have plenty of time.” She said softly, soothingly, “And I’m just twenty-six. Only twenty-six, honey. I want my career, I want the chance to get more established so I can do things later if I want to, not have to begin all over again like when we left Chicago. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“Mmhmm,” he uttered, looking away from her to adjust the pillow under his head.

She rolled off him and took his hand, held it in both hers, pressing it into her breasts. “It’s all right then? It seems best right now.”

“Mmhmm.” He lay quietly.

“Paul?”

Breathing deeply, feigning sleep, he did not answer. He felt her slip out of bed, moments later heard water running in the bathroom. He lay with his fists clenched at his side. Hotness stung his eyelids. She had said:
It seems best right now.
That was what his mother had claimed. His mother had stated: THIS IS BEST.

She had been attentive, physically affectionate with Paul all day. Uncomfortable with public displays of affection, she nevertheless snuggled her head into his shoulder and held his hand from the time the Cessna took off to return them to Miami. She knew very well she had hurt him badly, that he had feigned sleep for hours; his breathing patterns were too familiar to her.

She had been more wakeful than he. She knew that if he had wanted a child any earlier—anytime before she had met Val—she would have acquiesced. It was from Val and the difficulties of Val’s life that she had learned how circumscribed her life would be for years to come with the responsibility of a child. Yet Paul was nearing forty; it was his right to be a father. But her life and her career would be limited—not his. The options in her life would drastically narrow, just as they had for Val.

Val had told her, “I’m at my best as a regional painter, but I would have spent at least a year in Europe.” There had been a hunger in her face. “And I wouldn’t have spent so many years discovering what I wanted to paint and how to study my craft.”

Carolyn had asked, “If you had to do it over, would you have had a baby?”

“Oh God, yes. But if I could have waited till I was closer to thirty.”

They landed in Miami. An hour later, on their nonstop flight to Los Angeles, Paul stared fixedly out the window of the jet. Knowing how transparent her efforts were to please, she said again, “I had such a lovely time, it was all so very beautiful.”

He looked at her then, and smiled, and lifted her hand to his lips. “I love you, Princess. More than anything.”

She pulled his head to her, kissed him.

Everything will be fine,
she reassured herself.
He’ll come around to understanding that another year or two won’t make that much difference.

By early evening she had finished unpacking; her gifts for Neal and Val were piled on her dressing table. She called Val from the bedroom extension, realizing that she had never spoken with her on the phone.

The sound of Val’s low resonant voice struck her into sudden shyness. “Hi,” she stuttered, “uh, hello—”

“Carrie, welcome home. I was hoping you’d call. Neal wants to say hello, then I’ll ask you about—”

“Listen,” she said, gazing at the stack of gifts, the carefully packaged Queen of the Sea. “Why don’t I come over for maybe fifteen minutes? I brought back a few things…”

She came into the living room, the gifts in her arms. “Honey, I’ll be right back. They’re leaving for the weekend,” she lied, “otherwise I won’t see Neal till next week—”

He glanced up, then continued to sort through his mail. “I’m tired. Probably jet lag.”

“Lie down for a while, honey,” she said sympathetically. He smiled, pulled two issues of
BusinessWeek
out of the stack of mail.

Neal was running around in his new shark T-shirt singing, “I’m the king of the for-r-r-est…”

“The sea, you dummy,” Val said affectionately. She was looking at the glowing shell in her hands. “Carrie, it’s so incredible, so extraordinary. It would have been so easy for you to give me something I need. I’m so happy to have this wonderful treasure…”

“I have to get right back.” She was flushed with joy at the pleasure she had given.

“Hey, I haven’t even told you about the Olympics!” Neal shouted. “You can’t
go!
”

“Stay just a little longer, Carrie,” Val coaxed. “After all, he’s had you for two weeks.”

Only slightly stooped by his sixty-seven years, his white hair still full and thick, Jerry Robinson was comfortably retired, spending much of his time fishing at Lake Piru or playing pool with his cronies at this Lankershim Boulevard beer bar—icy cold this night from its aggressive air-conditioning—where he had brought Paul.

After considerable forced jollity with the bar habitues Jerry introduced him to, and after buying Jerry four beers, Paul judged him sufficiently relaxed, and led him to a corner table.