Perfect Freedom (78 page)

“You know of him? What did I tell you? You'll have a lovely time together. I understand he's a spectacular lover. Of course, I've known him since he was a child. So beautiful.”

Lance forced laughter. “You're getting things a bit mixed up, aren't you, Flip? I'm living with Luisa.”

“Good heavens, a man of imagination and cultivated tastes—surely you don't make such trivial distinctions.”

Genuine laughter swelled in his throat. Her absurdity was rather endearing.

She introduced him to everybody with a proud and proprietary air. It was a largely middle-aged gathering although Flip had a quartet of good-looking men about his age staying with her. From the way she introduced them, Lance gathered that they were two established couples. This was new to him. He didn't know that homosexuals attempted permanent unions, or if they did, that they expected to be accepted socially. Another mark in Flip's favor, as well as Puerto Veragua's. Maybe in a place like this he could be accepted on his own terms. Maybe he should have insisted on Luisa's staying. He talked with a plump Frenchwoman named Madame Fournier who cheerfully volunteered bits of gossip about the other guests.

“That is Monica Freeman,” she explained as a frail, haggard blond woman drifted past down the long sweep of the terrace. “They say she murdered her husband. I do not know. I remember when I came here, the first party I went to, I was introduced to her and I spilled my drink all over her dress. I said, ‘Oh, I am so sorry. You will want to kill me.' It caused the most awful
scandale
. Of course, I didn't know about her husband.”

She pointed out a German couple who had been there since before the war and a middle-aged man in a wheelchair propelled by a good-looking native boy (“They say it is only his legs that are paralyzed,” Mme Fournier said) and a pretty young woman called Mrs. Stroud who smoked, according to his informant, “more opium than is really good for her.”

“And that is my husband,” she went on, indicating a short, sharp-featured man whose black hair looked as if it were painted on his skull. “He couldn't make up his mind who he was for during the war, poor dear, so now we rest here. It's not France but it's not a bad life. And what about you? Have you murdered someone? Do you take dope? I believe Flip told me that you are very celebrated but I'm not good at names. You look to me like a most attractive and most healthy young man. You're surely not here alone?”

“Not exactly,” Lance said with a smile. “I'm not even exactly sure I'm here.”

“You came and talked to Flip and found yourself taking a house? Yes, that is the way it usually happens. She is wonderful—so enthusiastic and so generous. Puerto Veragua would not exist without her. She has a curious gift. She makes things happen when people are determined that they shouldn't. I've seen her do it and yet I do not understand. She is—what do you say?—the fly in the ointment. Perhaps we need her. She gives us something to come up against.” She spoke detachedly between sips of her dry martini, making them all seem very remote, the place itself remote in the soft luxurious night.

Flip Rawls's arrangement of terraces and gardens was ideally suited to the evening's purpose. There was plenty of room to move around in; there were quantities of inviting chaises longues in which to loll. The food and drink were excellent. Somewhere in the garden a group of native musicians twanged out haunting Latin refrains. The lights flashed on and off intermittently due to some failure of the current but there were candles in mirrored brackets hung all along the terrace, the flames rising stiff and straight in the motionless air, so it didn't matter.

It was late enough for Lance to be thinking about leaving when he noticed a crowd gathering along the edge of the parapet and wandered over to see what was going on. Far below, a light flickered among the rocks. As Lance joined the others, he saw M. Fournier lift a glass and hurl it into the night. There was a moment's silence and then the faint tinkle of shattered glass. The flame darted up, caught by some breath off the shifting sea. There was general laughter, some disparaging comments on M. Fournier's marksmanship, and another glass was hurled. Flip Rawls appeared from somewhere at Lance's side.

“Have you tried your hand at our local sport?” she asked, tilting her head up at him beguilingly.

“What's the point? You going to let them break all your glasses?”

“They always do. The light down there is the target. They try to knock it out and then the party's over. Of course, they always miss but the point is throwing something. It's a reaction against the peace and tranquility. I must say I rather enjoy it myself. Try it. You'll see. It's very soothing.” Lance looked at his glass and smiled, thinking of her as the fly in the ointment.

“Let me finish my drink,” he said.

There was another burst of laughter from the glass-throwing group. He stepped forward to the parapet, took careless aim and let fly with his glass. There was the instant of silence and then almost simultaneously glass tinkled and the light winked out. There were cries of approval as Lance turned away, smiling to himself. Whether he wanted it or not, he had made a place for himself in the community.

When he got home he found Luisa waiting for him, still wearing her little housewife's dress and sitting primly in the pool of hissing light. She rose as he approached. He looked at her and shook his head ruefully and touched the top of her dress. “Not here,” he said with a fond smile. “Never this dress here.”

She loved the dress. It was her wedding dress. By presenting her in public to Señora Rawls, he had made her his wife in the foreigners' eyes and offered her a foreigner's liberty. Her father and brothers would disown her if she lived sinfully with one of their own people but to live with a rich foreigner would be a lesser sin that they could overlook. “Did you have a good time?” She had learned from films that foreign girls asked questions that the men she had grown up with would consider impudent.

“Pleasant. I wished you there. I meet the people here. Slowly, you will think it is natural to meet them, too.”

Slowly? There is going to be time, she thought. He had said it. He would stay, especially if she gave him babies. Her heart was beating lightly and rapidly with anticipation of his being inside her and starting a baby. It would be more thrilling than anything she had guessed could happen to her.

They drifted along the terrace toward the bedroom while Lance tried to tell her about the people he'd met, discarding his clothes as he went. Naked, he lighted the candle at the washbasin and sponged himself down. It had been a sweaty walk home. When he turned to the bed, she was in it with a sheet over her. He lay down beside her and threw it back.

She had nothing on. He looked at her with astonishment and slowly ran a hand down from her breasts over her belly. He felt her body being shaken by little convulsions as he moved it between her legs. She had only a sparse fringe of pubic hair. He caressed it. Suddenly all the hurt and shock and bitter loss of the last weeks seemed to gather into a great knot that threatened to burst his chest. He felt as if he would drown in tears.

Tensions mounted in him that he felt would tear him apart. Something seemed to snap in his mind. It was an almost physical sensation, a crumbling, a disintegration opening fissures in his soul through which a ray of joy penetrated. He uttered a strange sound, part sob, part groan, and all his muscles went slack. His body accepted the commitment that her young body at last invited. She had waited long enough for him to feel that she must have weighed the consequences of offering herself to him.

“You wear nothing, little one,” he said gently, to give her time to reconsider.

“There's no need now.”

“I take you truly?”

“Yes. I went to the party as your wife. You said so. You have the right.”

“But not real wife. My real wife is in New York.”

“That's very far. I'm your wife here.”

“This way we make babies. You understand?”

“It's my wish.” Her hand slid to his erection and pressed it. “This will put many babies into me.”

“We not know how long I stay.”

“I will do everything I can to keep you here.”

“Fair warning,” he muttered in English, smiling as he lifted himself over her. Joy spread, his body's simple joy, robbing doubts and questions of their urgency. It had been a long time since a girl had given herself to him. Her desire for him to enter her made him forget her virginity. The question of whether he wanted her to give him a child was answered as he felt the generous opening of her body to him and saw her eyes light up with rapture and her lips part ecstatically. He had made no promises but once she was pregnant, he would want to stay. Other questions would be answered as he went along. She was little more than a child herself but now that she had gone beyond their childlike games and was learning for the first time the adult joys of their bodies, she became within moments a woman whom he could love as a potential mother, if not with all the passion that he knew was in him.

She lay back and felt him filling her and her breath stopped. He felt so beautiful entering her, wanting to put all the great hard length of him inside her and make her his woman. She would never belong to any other man. He was inside her, mastering her. He was planting his image in her. She would give him a son. She was sure she was in love.

He was moving in her in a way that filled her head with rainbows of bright colors and turned her body to liquid gold. Strange waves of indescribable bliss kept surging up from her depths and breaking over her, washing her in celestial balm. She was sure that nobody had ever felt anything like it; only he could make her feel it. She swore a great oath with her blood that only death would take him from her.

The next day, Lance found that everything about his being here had changed. The way he looked at the place had changed; he saw all the improvements he could make for greater comfort. When he looked at Luisa, he saw in her a mother, a gently compliant mate, and was almost reconciled for the loss of the intensity of passion that had blazed in him for a year. The prospect of paternity made him feel more like a father than all the expensive mumbo jumbo surrounding Angela's birth had permitted him to feel. He wanted to defy his heritage by bringing Vanderholdens into the world who wouldn't be burdened by his name. Children of the sun.

The sense of growing into his own skin was sharply heightened and he finally understood it. He was faced with a total break, not just from his very special background but from the urban civilization that had always been his natural habitat. Perhaps whatever there was in him that was essentially his would be freed if life were stripped to its essentials.

He still hadn't learned to worry seriously about money. The money he had set aside for his summer's travels would last for a year or more at the rate he was spending. He had plenty of time to find out if he could do anything to make a living here. He wondered if he could be a gardener. Several of the foreigners last night had marveled at Flip's garden and complained of not being able to find anybody who could make something of theirs. He'd like being a gardener.

He went into town before lunch and paid another three months' rent and came back with a hand pump and some lengths of pipe. A tank was following. If Luisa became pregnant she couldn't go on drawing water from the well indefinitely. He also ordered some utilitarian furniture—a couple of tables, a few chairs, some lamps that shed a softer light than the hisser, a cot that would serve as a sofa on the terrace. Several vague invitations had been extended to him last night. If he started going out, he would have to have people here. Luisa would get used to foreigners on home territory.

That evening she asked if she could wear the dress to go see her family. “I want them to see that I'm being well taken care of,” she explained.

He supposed it was natural for her to want to reestablish contact with her family after what had happened but was surprised when it turned out that she intended to stay the night. Nights could still be bad. All in all, he supposed it was good for her to feel free to go. He didn't want her to cling to him. He had to start thinking in terms of the future.

Luisa thought of the visit as a sort of official confirmation of her new position. Without the blessing of the Church, she had only the men in her family to protect her from the misfortunes a woman could suffer from a man—his betrayal of her with another woman or his neglecting his duties as a father. Her family would tell her what was acceptable and how to defend herself if he went too far. She didn't expect her father to make trouble when he understood that she had become the foreigner's woman so long as the house agent continued to pay her wages to him. Later, if she became pregnant, she hoped that her man would understand that her family would expect a present of money to compensate for its shame. If it was a big present, they might not make her marry another man.

She was proudly wearing her little dress after supper when Lance kissed her good-night and saw her off into the dark. The lamp hissed. It stitched the silence in close around him. A pang of loneliness threatened second thoughts about the months to come, thoughts that he struggled to suppress. Flip Rawls's expatriates might turn out to be fun. He thought of Robi the painter. He should prove a momentary diversion. If people like him came down here, there must be something to be said for the place. For the rest, he was going to have to find work to keep him busy. Boredom was as great a danger as loneliness.

The next day, the letter that he had been waiting for arrived. He tore it open in high excitement, only to learn that Andy wasn't coming. There was no arguing with his explanation—complications had arisen in his legal business that required him to return to Washington immediately—but it was a bitter blow. He wrote that he had sent Lance's luggage on in care of the hotel and wanted to know as soon as possible what his plans were.