Sunburn (7 page)
“That’s beautiful,” said Marianne.
Lea was near tears. “Is that yours?” she asked softly.
He nodded.
“What do you call it?”
He looked uncomfortable, as if he didn’t want to answer. “Must I call it something?” Not belligerent, defensive.
“I think so,” Lea said.
“Yes,” he said. “To myself, I call it ‘A Prayer to No One.’ ”
“And is it to no one?” I asked.
“It certainly couldn’t be to God,” he answered with great bitterness. But then he smiled, as though he had caught himself at something. “Come on, it’s time we leave.”
We saw them to the door, Lea standing with her arm on my shoulder. She pressed her head against me. “God, I’m tired. I’m going right up.”
After she’d left, Sean and I stood at the door until long after the noise of Mike’s car had faded away.
“I could use a real drink,” he said finally.
“Me, too.”
We walked back in and sat down in the melody-haunted living room.
It’s hard to get American bourbon in Spain, but Sean had found an outlet and laid in a supply of Jack Daniel’s. We drank it neat in large tumblers. He sat on the corner of the couch under the one light we’d left on. He had a creased, rugged face under hair that was light red flecked with grey, going bald at the top. He let it grow a bit overlong on the sides. His body was big—broad shoulders, powerful arms, a slight paunch. His legs had once been muscular, and still looked it. Wearing a plain white shirt and brown slacks, with his stumped wrist tucked into the pocket of a brown checked sports coat, he looked the picture of the successful, middle-aged artist. Though we were both pushing fifty, he looked older than me.
He put his drink down on the end table, pulled a cigarette from a pack, and lit it with a Zippo lighter. I was always amazed by the way he could perform these little acts with his handicap. He took a drag, then leaned back and closed his eyes.
“I want to apologize for this afternoon,” he said wearily.
I waved it aside, but he went on.
“No. I don’t know why . . .” He stopped. “I don’t know what makes me act like that. Oh, I do know, really. If she would just cease with the taunting for a while. She teases all the time.” He took a sip of his drink.
“Well . . .”
“Oh, I know. You’re going to ask me why I take it, why I’m such a fool to let myself be bullied by her. And you should probably ask since you’re a friend of mine. But you’re lucky, you see, because of Lea, who’s not a hard woman. I’m not saying she’s not a good woman, or intelligent, but she’s just not a challenger, a ball-breaker like that bitch is. So you’re lucky, because it doesn’t much matter after you’re hooked if the woman’s a bitch. And Lea isn’t one. But believe me, if she was, you’d still be with her, taking it all . . .”
“You’re getting led around by your dick, is all, Sean.”
“We all get led around by our dicks.”
“I think not.”
“Oh, ho, we’ve got some learning to do here.”
He was getting drunk, and I probably should have said good night, but I was not the model of sobriety myself.
He went on. “You just better hope it doesn’t come down to the crunch, ’cause you’ll find I’m right, and you won’t like it.” He didn’t say all this with any venom, but with the quiet slur of drunken certainty, and all at once he calmed down. “But shit,” he continued, whispering, “shit, shit, shit.”
“Is it all so bad? Because if it is, maybe you should kick her out.”
“No. No, it’s great. I don’t just mean the sex, but she does something to me. I feel like I matter more or something. Why should it be her? I don’t know. Why anything? She came along and I changed, felt things I hadn’t let myself feel for years now. There are depths to her, but she hides from people, especially you. You intimidate the shit out of her.”
“Me? I’ve always been . . . I’ve always gone out of my way to be nice to her. Except for times like today, I mean.”
“And you don’t think she feels that? That you’re going out of your way?”
“I don’t much care. What’s the alternative? Be an out-and-out asshole to her?”
“But the condescension gets to her.”
“Well, her attitude gets to me. So what? That’s not the point either, you know. She makes you do things that aren’t you, that make you hate yourself. How good can that be?”
“But that’s not constant. It’s not even normal. She’s good to me, good for me.”
I didn’t buy that, but it wasn’t the right time to disagree. “Well, Sean, I just wish it didn’t have to hurt you.”
“It’s not all bad,” he repeated.
“I’m convinced.”
He sat silently. “Another drink?”
I shook my head no.
“Should I go away for a while, you think?” he asked.
“What for?”
“I don’t know. Sort things out.”
“I didn’t think things were that bad.”
“It’s not that things are so horrible. It’s that I feel I’m in over my head, like I’m not controlling anything between us. It’s all her. Sometimes I feel that her goal is to get me to love her, so that she will have all the power. And the hell of it is, Doug, that I’m powerless against her. I don’t want to fall so hard that I won’t have any choices left if she betrays me . . .”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that if I fall as hard as she wants me to, then I wouldn’t be able to live without her, and I mean that literally.”
“That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?”
He stopped and thought a minute. “It’s true as hell.” He paused. “But you know, I couldn’t live with her being unfaithful, either. I’d kill either her or myself.”
“Oh, Jesus, Sean. Don’t say that unless . . .”
“Unless I mean it? OK. Let’s just say I won’t retract it.” Suddenly he gave a halfhearted little laugh, and looking down, shook his head. “What’s got into me?”
He got up and poured himself another shot. “I think that . . . that thing with the chicken today really got to me. Maybe I am being made a fool of. She really is so young . . .”
“Maybe that’s why you should give her more time.”
“You think I should?”
He didn’t want the truth, and I didn’t give it to him. “Sure, talk to her. Tell her you feel like you’ve got to prove yourself constantly and it’s getting you down. If she’s understanding, she’ll let up for a while.”
“I don’t want to lose her.”
I wanted to ask him why, but instead stood up and yawned. “Bedtime.”
“OK. See you in the morning.”
I left him sitting there under the lamp. Upstairs, I stood at the window for a moment and looked outside across the courtyard. The quarter moon had come up, relieving the absolute darkness. As I undressed, a melody seemed to hang in the air, but by the time I had curled my body next to my wife’s in bed, it had vanished.
Six
You are sitting on the wall that borders the beach in Tossa, sipping a beer and enjoying the hot sun overhead, and you can hardly help noticing the two women walking together out from one of the shops and on down to the beach. You know they aren’t European, not so much from their dress as from the way they walk with each other. They don’t link their arms as they talk, but step lightly, independently, oblivious to the crowds shopping and going to the beach. They don’t notice you as they cross the street, even as they pass within a yard of you, sitting as you are by the entrance to the beach through the wall. Yes, even as they get closer, they are a stunning pair, more beautiful than they’d first appeared. There is no haughtiness about them, only the supreme self-confidence shared by attractive women. They talk casually, and you only hear a few words as they pass, but enough to tell you that they are Americans.
The thinner one is wearing a tangerine-colored shift that goes well with her complexion. She appears to be older than the other one, though not much. Look closer, though, and there are small wrinkles around her eyes. She might, in fact, be almost forty. Her skin is smooth and strangely light. Perhaps she hasn’t been long in Spain. Her hair, reaching to her shoulders, is almost perfectly straight, and a shining deep brown. Her legs are her best feature—very long and not too thin. The shift is tantalizingly short, and shows them off well. She is like a boy on top, but there is something distinctly sensual about her. Her whole demeanor is amused and, somehow, challenging, though not in a harsh way. When the other woman talks, she listens carefully, leaning forward toward her. She’s vulnerable, you think, though maybe it’s only the contrast.
The other one is a beauty. Possibly she is much younger than her friend. She wears white pants and a halter top that make her seem to glow in the bright sunlight. Her skin is dark, dark tan as though she’s spent the summer sunning herself, and her hair has started to bleach itself from the exposure. She laughs often, loudly. You can easily hear her after they’ve gone some ways down the beach, but the laugh is not shrill. On the contrary, it is inviting. Her nose is slightly too big but it gives her face the character it needs to keep it from being merely pretty. Her mouth is full, her eyes a kind of bright sultry—the youth has not quite worn off them. In a few years, her eyes will positively smoulder, but now they are almost schoolgirlish. Her body is large and slowly graceful, but her waist is fine. Nowhere has she begun to go to flab. Her pants sit low on her hips, and her exposed midriff is, well, perfect. You think you’ve never seen more attractive breasts. She turns around abruptly to see something and catches you staring after her, and winks, or do you imagine it? You finish your beer and get up to walk to the shade of the narrow streets between the glaring white buildings, and try to find a place to eat lunch.
Lea pulled the shift over her head, and placed it on the sand so that she could lie on it.
“Remind me not to get too much sun.”
When they had arranged themselves, Kyra asked, “You were saying?”
“Oh, about Sean. I know now it’s ridiculous to talk about him. In a lot of ways I don’t know him at all anymore. Certainly you know him better, but it’s funny. Though he’s so different from the brother I’ve known all my life, in many ways he reminds me of how he was when I was a little girl.
“There’s this part of him now that he’s either purposely kept hidden all these years or has truly repressed, and now it comes out. I really don’t quite know how to handle it, or rather my reaction to it. He’s—I don’t know—childlike almost, but that’s not really what I want to say either. He’s more like he was when he was younger.
“He was always the acknowledged leader in the family. Not so much because he tried to be, or even wanted to be, but he just always had so much enthusiasm. He was always planning, planning, planning, and getting things done. Even if they weren’t anything special if you looked at them objectively, he made them special for us. He always got so excited about things, and made it contagious. I remember he used to put on these neighborhood circuses, which were really just a bunch of kids walking a two-by-four stretched between two packing crates, or arranging five of us into a pyramid when none of us thought we could do it. But it’s funny. That’s the circus I remember. It was much more real to us than any real circus.
“The amazing thing to me now is that we never felt bulldozed. It always seemed the most natural thing in the world to do whatever Sean had planned, not only to us in the family, but to all the kids near our age. Our age? When I think of it, all of Sean’s friends were young teenagers when I became aware of all this, and still I felt somehow included, and my friends did, too. There was never any feeling that we were less because we were younger, but we just fit naturally into whatever plan we were carrying out. I suppose a lot of it was the stuff that none of the older kids wanted to do, but it was great for us because we were involved.
“God, I remember it so clearly now, thinking back on it. I don’t think I’ve thought of those times at all in twenty years.
“There were probably drawbacks I’m forgetting, but I was only a small kid who was thrilled that I was noticed at all. You know, I don’t think Sean was ever even aware that he might have been using people. It was just that everything was so much fun and of course his way was the best. He was always so surprised if somebody got mad at him or didn’t like him. He was always being called conceited by one kid or another, but I guess anyone with that strong a personality makes enemies. And he’d always react by backpedaling to get liked by whoever it was again. But pretty soon he’d get back to his old self. He didn’t feel comfortable when he wasn’t flamboyant. It was his natural style.
“But still, he was sensitive. Oh, I mean obviously he tended to be carefree—to act carefree, anyway. That’s the way we all were brought up. Why bother to make a big deal out of your problems? Problems pass. At least that’s what we were taught. He used to tell me that if you act happy, you’ll be happy, and it worked. I know, I know, bad psychology, denying your real self and all that, but it wasn’t so much that he denied it as refused to show it indiscriminately. He just thought it was bad form for him, personally. That wasn’t how the strong person acted, and that was always the main thing he identified with—strength. He didn’t want anyone pitying him. Anything he got involved in he could get himself out of.
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