ME
(
looking at Margo
). Yes, he
is
wonderful. (
Long pause
.) I have some good news too. I just won an award.
MOM
For—
ME
The show. Jason and I got “Soap Couple of the Year.” I mean, I know it’s not a
Tony
or an
Emmy
or anything…(
Margo, at this, shaking her head violently, mouthing, “It’s great!”
)
MOM
Congratulations, dear.
ME
(
now subdued
). Plus, I have a movie audition. With Emile Balfour. My career is really
moving ahead
.
MOM
I think that’s wonderful.
ME
(
fighting strong urges to say terrible things
). Well, I think I hear Matt calling us for dinner. He’s a fabulous cook.
MOM
(
with as much enthusiasm as I have heard during the conversation
). Oh, what’s for dinner?
ME
Lobster.
MOM
Oh, lobster! Yummy! Bye-bye.
ME
Bye-bye.
Replacing the receiver, I looked into Margo’s eyes.
“Not exactly brimming with excitement, is she?” Margo asked dryly.
“We must have interrupted a really intense painting session.”
“Gee, I hope the good news didn’t wreck her concentration.”
Years of being her daughters had taught us not to dwell on it. Margo lifted the receiver and I dialed Lily’s number in New York.
“I really wish we had a speakerphone for this,” I said.
Ilsa answered, and Margo asked for Lily.
“Baby, here’s the scoop,” Margo said the instant she heard Lily’s voice. “Wedding bells are ringing for me and Matt!”
From four feet away I heard Lily’s howl. “When???” she yelled. Margo held the receiver away from her ear and shouted, “At Christmas! Talk loud ’cause Una’s here and she has to hear you.”
“Hi, Una!” Lily hollered.
“Hi, Lily!” I yelled back, leaning close to the telephone.
“Put Matt on!”
“He’s cooking lobsters in the kitchen!”
“I don’t give a shit if he’s catching lobsters in the ocean.
I want to talk to him!
”
I ran into the kitchen and found Matt and Sam drinking beers. “Your other future sister-in-law wants to say hi,” I told Matt. “Get ready to scream.”
Matt and Sam followed me in to Margo. Matt had a few private words with Lily, and then we all huddled close to the telephone, reinstituting the conference call.
“Una’s got great news too!” Margo bellowed.
“What cooks?”
“A movie audition—
plus
I won ‘Soap Couple of the Year’!” I yelled.
“
Zoap
couple of the
year
? You got an award ceremony or anything? You gonna need a new
zoot
?” Lily loved to replace
s
with
z
whenever possible.
“I don’t know yet—”
“She also has a movie audition,” Matt yelled.
“With Emile Balfour!!” Sam yelled.
“Who the hell’s voice is that?” Lily asked in a lower tone.
“That’s Sam Chamberlain,” Margo screeched. “Tell you about him
later
!”
“
I have some news of my own!!
” We heard Lily call. “
I’m
going to have a
baby
!!!”
Margo and I looked at each other. Suddenly Margo pressed the receiver tightly to her ear. There was no more shouting. The conference call was over. This was serious business; we were on the way to becoming aunts.
Margo, Matt, Sam, and I ate the lobsters on the inn’s front porch. All that was visible of the ocean was a white line of breakers. We took turns dipping lobster meat in the communal bowl of melted butter.
“My, what a shock,” Margo said after a while.
“I can’t get used to it—Lily with a baby.”
“So much for her resumed career.”
“But you can’t be dependent with a baby, can you?”
“She’d better have a girl.”
Matt and Sam waited patiently while Margo and I tried to control our wonder. Lily was four months pregnant; she had known for three, but she and Henk had wanted to savor the secret. At first they had planned to tell us at Thanksgiving, but Lily had been too bowled over by Margo’s and my news to wait.
“And you’re half of the year’s best soap couple,” Sam said after a while.
“What a riot,” I said, feeling gleeful.
“What do you think Chance meant about going to Europe?” Margo asked.
“Oh, I’m sure he means army bases. He’s convinced that lots of our fans marry army guys or join the army themselves, go overseas, and lose interest in the show. Then, when they come back, we lose them to different shows. He’s always wanted to send some of the actors to army bases in Europe, just to keep our loyal viewers loyal.”
“October in Europe,” Matt said. “Not too shabby.”
“Not too,” I agreed.
While we ate our dinner, I kept sneaking glances at Sam. I focused on his blue shirt, ragged around the collar, a condition I attributed to the coarseness of his beard. His face, clean-shaven this afternoon, was now handsomely shadowed with dark bristles. I imagined the rough hairs tearing the shirt’s fibers. When he finished eating his lobster, he held up the carapace and explained how each part functioned. I watched his long finger trace the red shell and listened to the professorial tone of his voice. The pleasure of the conference call remained with me, and I sank back into my chair, relaxed, waiting for the time to pass. The black zone of shore had told me what I wanted to know.
After dinner Sam admitted the possibility for seduction by saying he would love to see the turret room. We climbed the ladder-stairs. Naked bulbs lit the narrow staircase; the stark, whitewashed walls enclosed us; the original doors were now cracked with age. Young guests would be tempted to slip notes through the cracks. The turret itself had no trappings of luxury. I opened the door, and Sam walked straight to the east windows. I had not yet turned on the lamp; the black vista stretched from shore to shore, broken only by lines of rollers. We heard them crashing onto the rocks below.
I gazed at Sam’s narrow back. The folds of his blue shirt fell loosely; only his shoulders stretched the material.
“So,” he said, turning toward me and smiling. He had a wide, easy grin. “All three of you Cavan girls have happy news tonight.”
“You might even say monumental—a marriage and a baby.”
“Don’t forget the award.”
“Hardly in the same class,” I said, smiling back.
Still grinning, he drew me toward him and kissed me. His lips tasted like lobster.
“You taste like lobster,” I said.
“I’m an oceanographer,” he said.
We kissed again, and I ran my hands along his arm muscles. He began stroking my ass. A September breeze blew through the open windows. The bed loomed just beyond the limit of my peripheral vision. Our tongues touched. By now I knew we would go to bed, but I wanted to prolong the tingling sense of
not being sure
.
But even as we kissed, the thought snuck up on me: sure of what? Sure we were soulmates, made-for-each-other, or simply horny? What of the resolution I had passed in Newport last summer? Never to have another casual involvement—did the fact that this was my vacation make a tiny fling acceptable? Exploring Sam’s arms with my fingertips, I found a tiny threadbare patch above one elbow. It seemed touching. It bore a message, like the black zone of shore. It said to me: I am vulnerable too. Suddenly passion surged and I leaned against Sam’s chest. I gave myself totally to the kiss.
I wanted to press against him and not do anything else, but he rolled me onto my back and started to unbutton my shirt. His big hands were no longer careless; he kept one around my back and tenderly undid the buttons with the other. Even in the dark his eyes were bright, with gold flecks, staring into me. We relaxed, smiling at each other. Then he looked down at my breasts. He passed one hand across them, back and forth, and then we started kissing again. A chilly breeze came through the window; it made me want to get under the covers.
“Excuse me for a minute,” I whispered after a while, trying to remember whether my diaphragm was in the bathroom or still in my duffel bag.
“Hurry right back,” he said.
“I will,” I promised.
I rushed into the hall, into the tiny white-tiled bathroom. My diaphragm was not there. I went back to the bedroom, found Sam standing where I had left him. We smiled; I shrugged with embarrassment as I hauled my duffel bag out from under the bed. Struggling with the zipper, I finally unearthed the round plastic case from beneath a pile of sweaters. Palming it and the tube of jelly, I hurried out of the room.
In the bathroom’s bright glare I inserted the diaphragm and regarded my naked self in the spotty old mirror. My nightshirt (which, like my beach shirt, was one of John Luddington’s castoff dress shirts) hung on the back of the door. I slipped it on. I rolled up the sleeves. Not sexy, I thought, and took it off. Buried somewhere in my makeup bag was a tiny sample bottle of Ivoire, and I considered dabbing it between my breasts. But I never wear perfume, and it would have made me feel more self-conscious than ardent. So I returned unadorned to the turret room.
Sam had removed his blue shirt and was sitting on the edge of the bed. Black hair covered his tan chest. He opened his arms, and we hugged as though I had been gone for an hour. Then I unbuckled his belt, but we didn’t take off his pants right away. We leaned back on the white bedspread, kissing for a long time, holding each other close.
Sam stood up and undid his zipper, letting his pants drop to the floor. He stepped out of them, and I saw his tall erection as he walked toward the bed where I was already burrowing under the cool sheet and blanket. We pressed against each other. We hugged and tried to fit our bodies to each other, getting warm. Then he touched me, to see if I was wet, and he kept touching me, pressing against me. He looked serious, no longer smiling. I let myself float. Tension tugged my shoulder blades, my belly, my knees, but I concentrated on letting it flow out. Lying on my back, I watched Sam above me, touching me with gentle hands, never taking his eyes away from mine. He ran his fingers all along my ribs and breasts. And I arched my body toward him, stroking him the way he stroked me. Gently and not gently. Around, around, and then I had to stop touching him because he found a perfect rhythm, and I rolled my face toward his shoulder and kissed it while he moved me into crashing lines of waves. Then I looked up at his face, which was smiling again. He slid on top of me and we were zooming together, he wouldn’t let me worry about him; suddenly I was unconcerned about time.
We fell asleep embracing.
When I wakened, the morning air was cold and we were in the midst of another Karsky sunrise. I cuddled closer to Sam and realized that we were covered with an extra blanket. Deep in the night he had wakened, gone away from me, and covered us. I hadn’t even noticed. I tried to stay awake, but the bed’s warmth lulled me back to sleep.
“Did you sleep well?” Sam asked me, sounding polite and tentative when we wakened for good later that morning. Then he hugged me, proving that the tentativeness had been my own illusion. I traced swirly patterns on his skin. I wrote my name, then drew a pine tree. I waited to feel disconnected, the way I usually did in a romance’s early stages, but the feeling never hit. He brought his face close to mine and said, “Let’s not get up today.”
Of course we did get up, but not until we heard voices on the porch below, heralding the lunch hour. I realized that, for the first time, Margo had not delivered coffee to me in bed. Wise sister! How had she known? Sam and I dressed in bathing suits and walked down to the beach. Neither of us was hungry for lunch. We dove straight into the water.
Una, I told myself, swimming alongside Sam, this is love. Then: no, this is crazy. Maybe Sam is just a prop. Then Sam proved I
was
crazy, that he was no prop, by stopping short in the water, treading water as he kissed me with his salty lips. We sank below the surface. Our legs fluttered, and water went up my nose; I came up choking. Then I laughed, but I couldn’t help the salt tears that streamed from my eyes.
On the beach we lay on our backs and talked to each other, facing the sky. The cirrus clouds had moved closer; they washed across the sun, leaving us cold and shaded for short interludes. Then the sun would break through.
“You know, sea turtles are dying out in these waters,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because they live on a diet of jellyfish, and they keep eating plastic bags thrown overboard by sailors. They think it’s their dinner.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Yeah, it’s really bad.”
Gulls and terns yelped overhead. Sam said, “If you ever come across tern eggs on the beach, you’d better take off. Tern parents are wildly protective about their brood—they attack anything, even humans.”
What a riot, I thought tenderly. My own private professor. “What else?” I asked.
Sliding closer to me, he rolled onto his side and kissed my right eyebrow. “You swim like a dolphin. And dolphins are the most beautiful swimmers.”
Did he mean dolphins the mammals or dolphins the fish? Then I remembered my dream of the blue fish and realized the fish had been a
dolphin
, a blue-green tropical dolphin, the kind that would never be found in New England waters.
“Delilah?” a female voice asked.
Shading my eyes, I looked up. Two young women wearing terrycloth robes stood over me, their heads bent down for a closer look, to see if I really was Delilah. I nodded my head, and Sam struggled into a sitting position.
“We just watched your show!” one of them said. “Just fifteen minutes ago! They announced about your award. We both think you’re wonderful—you really deserve it. Don’t we, Callie?”
The other girl nodded. I smiled at them upside down. “Thank you,” I said. Sam leaned back on his elbows, taking the sun on his chest, watching me. I knew it, but I didn’t catch his eye.