The Confessions of Edward Day (3 page)

“His plays are awful,” she said. “He’s writing a play about Simón Bolívar, for God’s sake.”

Madeleine was beautiful, she made me laugh, and she was evidently available: I was rhapsodic. My quandary was how to get her away from the others. The sleeping arrangements weren’t ideal, she and Mindy had chosen adjoining rooms, and I wasn’t entirely clear about the etiquette of house parties. I didn’t want to do anything that would offend Teddy, but fortunately he was absorbed in entertaining Mindy, who had a laugh like a braying mule. She was curvy and blowsy, crude, I thought, and given to bursts of Broadway tunes, as if she saw a producer lurking in the rhododendrons pressing against the screen. Madeleine smiled at me through the wistful refrain of “Send in the Clowns.” “I want to swim,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

“Of course,” I said.

My feelings were mixed. It was a chance to be alone with her in a romantic setting, which was enticing to say the least. The famous still of Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in a clutch on the beach in
From Here to Eternity
flashed before my eyes, but that was in Hawaii and in broad daylight (or was it what is called in film “day for night”?). The waters in Jersey were rumored to contain jellyfish—would they be worse at night? Then there was the matter of the unflattering swimming trunks, and the sad fact that my swimming skills were much inferior to Burt’s. But none of this weighed more than a feather in a balance that contained Madeleine in a swimsuit at night on a beach under the moon. “I’ll change,” she said, leaping up from her chair. “I’ll just be a minute.” As she passed through the doors to the dining room I noticed a wobble in her step; she pressed her shoulder against the frame and pushed on. Was she drunk? Was I? In answer to the second question I got to my feet. No, I was exhilarated, on the up not the down side of inebriation, and a stroll in the night air might be just the thing. I hastened to my room, changed into a T-shirt and the trunks, grabbed a towel from the stack on the dresser, and went out to the hall, where I found Madeleine floating toward me in a fetching costume, a two-piece suit with a tie-dyed shawl fastened at the waist to make a loose, fluttering skirt. “This is great,” she said. “I love swimming at night.”

“Me too,” I lied. I followed her down the stairs to the front porch where we culled our sandals from the herd along the rail and flapped out to the sidewalk. The voices of our friends
drifted to us, punctuated with laughter. The house next door, blazing light from every window, gave off a mouthwatering aroma of grilling meat. Overhead the sky was clear and black; the air vibrated with the salty exhalations of the ocean. “It’s nice here,” Madeleine said. “I’m glad I came. The city is a furnace.”

“I’m glad you came too,” I said. We reached the corner, crossed the empty street, and there was the sea, black roiling under black, restless and ceaseless, combing the shore. We clattered down the wooden steps and sloughed off our sandals in the sand. Madeleine untied her skirt, dropping it over the shoes, careless in her excitement. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “And there’s no one here.” She rushed away from me to the water’s edge. I tossed my towel and shirt on the pile and followed. The half-moon cast a cool light that was reflected from the sand, but the dark waves sucked it up and gave back nothing. Madeleine was already waist deep in the surf, walking steadily away from me. I pounded across the sand and into the water, which was cold against my hot skin, a startling, welcome embrace. She turned to me and, as I drew closer, batted the surface of the water gleefully. “Look,” she said. “It’s magic.”

And it was. Strips of green light darted away from her fingertips like bright snakes, and the harder she slapped the water the more there were. “It’s phosphorescence,” I said.

“No, no,” she protested. “It’s magic.” Just then the cosmic magician called up a wave, banishing the snakes and tipping Madeleine into my arms. “You’re right,” I said, pulling her up against my chest. We kissed.

How many kisses do you remember all your life? Four or five, I think, not many. Even at that moment I knew this was one I wouldn’t forget, and I was right.

We swam and kissed and swam again, enchanted by the green light attendant on our every movement. Madeleine was at ease in the water and completely fearless, a much better swimmer than I was. She swam underneath me and came up ahead of me. We floated on our backs holding hands, letting the waves carry us to shore. We embraced in the sand, then struck back out in tandem. It was foreplay with ocean, and we extended it as long as we could bear it. We treaded water while kissing, and she wrapped her legs around my waist. At some point her suit top slipped down. To her amusement my erection strained the confines of the trunks. We spoke very little until, at last, by some visceral agreement, we scrambled onto the shore and raced back to the staircase, beneath which we laid out the towel and her skirt, stripped off our minimal coverings, and amid sighs and cries muffled by the steady rumbling of the tide, finished what we had started.

When it was over I rolled off of Madeleine, light-headed, my heart churning in my chest. She chuckled softly and rested her hand on my sandy thigh. “So, you’re Edward Day,” she said.

“Am I?” I replied. “Are you sure?”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” she said. She was feeling about for her suit. “I don’t like to think of some of the places I’ve got sand in,” she said. We took one last dip in the surf to rinse off. Then she shook out her wrap and tied it at her waist. I pulled on my T-shirt; we slipped on our sandals and climbed the stairs
to the dimly lit street. A car passed; we could hear voices from the balconies facing the shore, but they were soft now; it was late. I took Madeleine’s hand as we crossed the street, and she slipped her arm beneath mine, leaning against me. “It’s as if we’d been in another world,” she said.

“It is,” I agreed.

“Will we go there again?”

“God, I hope so,” I said.

“At any rate, we’ll never forget it.”

We had reached Teddy’s house. Some of the lights in the upstairs bedrooms were on. A flicker of candlelight and more soft humming of voices came from the side porch, but no one was in the darkened foyer. “Should we join them?” I asked. She pressed her lips together and raised her eyebrows. We said “No” together. “I’m too tired,” she added. “I know I’m going to sleep well tonight. There’s no exercise like swimming, don’t you agree.” I laughed. She rose up on her toes to kiss me. “Good night, Edward,” she said.

“You can call me Ed,” I said.

“I like Edward better.” With that she left me, climbing the stairs with one hand on the rail, her shoulders drooping like a weary child. I watched her go up, but, certain I wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon, I didn’t follow.

I know the cliché.
Post coitum omne animal triste est
. The man rolls over and falls asleep, the woman lies awake wondering why he won’t marry her if he hasn’t already or if he has, whether she should divorce him. Maybe it was like that for the Romans, but I’ve never been able to fall asleep after sex. I was elated by our adventure and restless. From the porch I could
hear the idle chatter of our friends, doubtless smoking pot and gossiping about Madeleine and me. I heard Teddy’s hearty guffaw, joined by a thin, mirthless laugh I didn’t recognize; Peter Davis and his luckless friend must have arrived. I was in no mood to meet anyone, especially an actor with a laugh like that. I slipped back onto the front porch, careful to close the screen soundlessly, picked up my sandals and carried them with me to the sidewalk. Madeleine and I had seen a fishing pier on our walk earlier in the day, the entrance flanked by an ice-cream truck and a bike-rental concession. It had been crowded with bathers and children strolling about and shouting for the sheer joy of having escaped the city and arrived at the shore. By now, I thought, it would be quiet and empty; a good place for a late-night stroll and one last colloquy with the sea and stars before attempting sleep in the single bed down the hall from the dreaming Madeleine. Would she dream of me? How would it be in the morning when we met in the kitchen with the others; would she want too much from me by way of acknowledgment, or too little? Would our comrades have marked our absence and tease us, or would they be indifferent, distracted by their own erotic campaigns? Had I seduced Madeleine, or had she taken advantage of me because I was the most attractive, available male? Wasn’t there, beneath my enthusiasm and satisfaction about what had happened on the beach, a glimmer of contempt for her? I certainly wanted to have sex with her again, but the desire I felt for her had already lost its edge. A comfortable, familiar smugness took its place. As I walked though the eerily quiet town, with its closed-up shops shedding blobs of unnatural fluorescent light onto the
sidewalk, I delved into every nuance of my emotions, ambling about in search of the conjunction between the mental and the physical. An actor’s emotions are his textbook. I perceived that my forehead was tight, my upper lip stretched down and pursed slightly over my lower lip. Who am I? I asked. I cast my eyes to the right and left, letting my head follow. I practiced Brando, that slow, overheated appraisal of the scene he’s about to disrupt, following his prick, the wolf on the prowl for a mate.

I had reached the street ending at the pier. To my disappointment, a man and a woman lingered near the bike rental, deep in conversation. As I approached, they moved off, not touching, still talking. She walked, like royalty, ahead of him. I slowed my pace, waiting until I couldn’t hear their footsteps. When I got to the corner, they were gone.

There was a lamp near the stairs to the pier, but its light didn’t reach past the first few planks, and as I stepped outside its influence I had the sensation that the volume on the ocean soundtrack had been turned up. The tide was high; the water broke more forcefully against the lumber of the pier than it had against the shore, with a steady thwack and suck that sounded like slow-motion sex. I thought it might be pleasant to smoke a cigarette—get in on the sucking action. I’d left a pack on the side porch which had promptly become public property and was, by now, surely empty. I thought of my friends—I didn’t know any of them well, even Teddy was something of a mystery to me, but our shared passion for the theater, for a life illuminated by floodlights, enacted for the benefit of strangers, made us not a family but a tribe. If we were successful the ordinary
world would be closed to us, and if we failed, well, it would still be closed, but in a less agreeable way. So we watched one another, affably enough, to see who would make his way and who fall by the wayside. I had a good feeling about Madeleine; I thought she would succeed, and I knew it was largely this apprehension that made her attractive to me. “Madeleine,” I said to the saturated air. I sniffed my fingers, but there was no trace of her; the sea had washed her scent away.

I had come to the end of the pier, high above the swirling waters. It struck me that a fisherman would need a great deal of line just to get his hook down to fish level. The sky was overcast now; the moon obscured by a moving curtain of clouds.
The inconstant moon
. Madeleine would make a stunning Juliet.
O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb
. I blessed Shakespeare, ever apt to the moment, whether it be for passion or reflection, and always sensitive to the bluster the petty human summons against the capricious cruelty of nature’s boundless dominion.

Dreaminess settled upon me. The muscles in my shoulders and legs were vibrating from fatigue. It had been a long and eventful day. I stretched my arms over my head—yes, I, too, would sleep well—and brought my elbows to rest on the rail before me. There was a sharp crack; for a nanosecond I believed it was a shot fired behind me and I ducked my head. My elbows were moving forward and down, following the wooden rail as it slid away beneath them. Because I am tall, the lower rail struck just below my knees, serving to shove my feet out from under me. I struggled to wrench my upper body back from the edge but it was futile; gravity had the measure of me,
and the only way open was down. I knew this with the physical clarity that short-circuits reason and redirects every atom toward survival. As I fell, I arched away from the pier, seeking to enter the water as far as possible from the great mass of wood that held it aloft. It was a fall into blackness. My eyes were useless, my ears weren’t even listening. The distance from the pier to the water was perhaps twenty feet, plenty of time, a lifetime, of falling. My arms stretched before me, my body straightened, approximating the proper diver’s position. I tensed for the moment of entry when I would have to hold my breath. Clever calculations filled the time. I should angle in shallowly—the water might not be deep and less of it could be more dangerous than more. If it was deep I could tuck in my head and roll back up, minimizing the risk of colliding with the pier. The tide would carry me in; I need only give in to it. Was one of my sandals still dangling from my toes? At last, WHAM, there it was: an icy clutch, sudden and absolutely silent, as if a bank vault had closed over me.

The water was deep and oddly still. I executed my roll, kicked up to the surface, and took a quick swallow of air before I was clubbed back down by a crashing wave. I came up again, caught my breath, and treading furiously, tried to make out the pier or the light from shore. I couldn’t see a thing. Even the green snakes had abandoned me. It was all a swirling darkness above and below. I sensed that the current was behind me and struck out before it, but I had taken only a few strokes when, abruptly, as if I had collided with a truck on some aquatic highway, I was shoved sidelong and swept in the opposite direction. I went back to treading, trying to revolve in place to get my
bearings, but no sooner had my feet stretched below my knees then they were swept firmly out from under me and my body forced to follow, slipped beneath the surface. I fought my way back up and stretched out flat, gobbling air. I was being whisked along with such dispatch I expected momentarily to be slapped into the shallows, but oddly there were no swells. Then, in the near distance, I spotted the white crest of a wave curling elegantly into its trough, a sight that filled me with such wonder and panic that a shout escaped my lips, for just as there could be no doubt that the wave was rolling into shore, it was equally irrefutable that I was being carried with overwhelming force in the opposite direction.