A beautiful afternoon on the beach at Lissadell, near the family mansion of Con Markiewicz, with a beautiful charmer named … what was his name? Terrible liar, but it hadn’t mattered that day. The sky pale blue, the beach warm, they lay in reeds behind a dune that hid them from the hill behind them. Shane, yes. He had asked her to be faithful to him, for that night at least. She had howled with laughter. Ah, but what a smile he had!
Yes, and two days in Venice with an Italian seaman whose name was forever lost, but she remembered the day at Lido with him, and dinner with his friends, he so proud of his American accomplishment, and proud that she loved his city. Evenings they walked along the narrow streets, stopping on the little bridges to kiss or talk, walked towards the Grand Canal and watched the sunset and the lights. They got into a gondola and sailed away from twilight over the harbor. He said: It is so good is like first time, no, Dolores? Closed his eyes and pretended she was a virgin. She was amused, she said
yes
, she had not let that interfere.
Ah, and the afternoon in Zmigrod with Adam, seeing at firsthand the Polish farms, the peasants, real peasants, not movie ones. They were short and bent, even the young ones, from hard labor. They were stained like potatoes, brown and mottled, and had no teeth and were illiterate and they looked at you as you passed as if you were of another race. Smell of manure in the sitting room, hay in the kitchen. A cross on the wall and a plastic model of the Vatican with an electric light in it that they could plug in: the only luxuries in the sparse house. And Adam, of another race in his beige suit, beautiful and poised and polite, bowing, speaking to everyone with respect and kindness, saying
Pan
and
Pane
even to the janitor of his building. He disregarded class in this extremely class-conscious society of Poland. And she loved him for his manners, but he made love like a machine.
And the morning at Bandelier, watching the sun rise over the high cliffs that guarded this valley, then climbing up and walking carefully along the narrow paths that bordered the cave dwellings, the air like spring water, clear and crisp and crystalline, the pueblos silent and empty as they had been for hundreds of years now. Standing there looking out, imagining how they had stood, those hundreds of years ago, training their eyes on the cliffs, on the pass, wary of enemies. Looked down below and saw the ruins of their working places, where they had cooked and grown and sat, imagining them there, brown and bending, working, rising, staring out with stoic backs, firm faces. And turned and saw Morgan standing there staring at her and felt full of love because she knew he saw too, saw as she did, and when their friends moved on, she and Morgan fell together in line, naturally, as if they were old friends.
But he couldn’t make love at all, no.
And a day at Walden with Jack, alone for a change, the kids off somewhere, walking, talking about Thoreau, bright day. She’d swum nude and delighted him, and he dived in after her. Standing beside the stones that were all that was left of Thoreau’s hut, looking out at the lake, wondering what he saw, back then before there was anybody there but him. Jack enthusiastic, bubbling over, his energy and joy making up for all of what he did not yet know.
Yes. There was much to be found in imperfection.
And others too, many others. Nancy and she in Assisi, she glued to the Giottos in the cathedral, Nancy bored and restless, the two of them together in their immaculate two-dollar-a-night hotel room, Nancy plump and giggling, showing her a tap dance and disappearing at the foot of the bed, simply vanishing, slipped and sliding on the polished floor, unable to get up she was laughing so hard.
And alone at Delphi in April, at Athena’s overgrown temple, no one there, the grass brilliant with yellow wild flowers, bees humming all around her. And her first time in Paris, walking in the Tuileries towards the Orangerie, going to see the Monet water lilies only because they were there, not having then much respect for Monet Music was playing in the park that day, Beethoven. She didn’t know where it came from, but she walked with it, followed its light and solemn rhythms, the third movement of the Eroica. And then had entered the Orangerie and saw them, my god! She had let herself down slowly onto a bench, her mouth gaping, my god, my god, such beauty!
And her first sight of the Baptistery doors in Florence, feeling holy, saved, full of gratitude that she’d been lucky enough, oh, more than lucky, to be able to come here, to see this, those doors she’d dreamed of seeing for years and years. And examined them for days, tracing every detail in her mind. And a pigeon had come and perched on her shoulder.
And when the guard was in another room of the Bargello, she had reached out her hand and stroked Donatello’s David. Lust, she felt, the hell with aesthetic distance.
And boating up the Navua River in Fiji, the hills rising on either side, the treacherous, rocky, shallow, swift river winding past villages perched in the mountains above them. The children swimming, splashing you, a lone woman far off washing clothes on a rock, beautiful and brown and round in a brilliant red-flowered pukasheela.
Moments enough, yes, and more. Moments of such beauty that even remembering them made her life shine, made her glow with gratitude for having been allowed to see them, for having been spared.
Sometimes they were tainted, those moments, by later events. The night walking on the beach in Puerto Rico with Marsh, taking off her shoes and walking in the surf, his watching her and the electricity between them. The night on the scaffolding with Anthony, the day they rode the Pocono trails and his horse wouldn’t move.
What would happen to this year with Victor, to the flat in Oxford where so little and so much had happened, the flat in London, the bike rides along the Cherwell, walks along the Seine in evening?
Would she occasionally recall his face and forget his name?
Terrible.
But what was the alternative? Even if they could have taken each other home, tried to pack such exotic food into the neat slices of their everyday lives, what then? Let’s break your leg, Dolores, let’s put you in my pumpkin shell. And she
would
try to change him completely, make him see the world as she did. And he would not be better for that, she’d seen that with Jack. It would be a graft, and would not take gracefully.
No. There was no way.
Was love always like that, do you suppose? Clamping down on the beloved and crushing them like the bound feet of a Chinese girl-child? How could you work it out, the togetherness, the distance? The old way had been to turn the woman into the man’s creature: one will, one mind, one flesh: his. But there was no new way, was there.
But even in the old days, it had been impossible, except then, only the women suffered. Impossible. Woman and man. Woman and woman. Man and man. Love is the word we use. The fig is rich and juicy and nourishing, but at its very core, unyielding and indigestible, was the hard pit from which and only from which new figs come.
T
HEY DROVE TO DEVON
along the motorway so Victor could get there quickly and fulfill his obligations. They would take the coast roads out of Plymouth and meander around until their time was spent. While Victor met his appointments, Dolores wandered along the docks of Plymouth, the old city that was one beginning of America. There was little left of the old city. Dolores was astonished, felt provincial at her ignorance. For she’d always thought of the blitz as the battle of London. She had not known that the southern, shipbuilding coast had been bombarded savagely, had been leveled, really. Plymouth, the seaport, sometimes resting place of Sir Francis Drake and his cronies, departure point of the
Mayflower
, Plymouth had been nearly demolished. A few old streets, a few old houses were all that was left. The rest was high-rise warehouse, American style.
The old places there were beautiful, low-ceilinged, wood-beamed, walls yellowed with smoke. An old pub where Sir Francis used to hang out in the days when they didn’t say hang out or hang in or hang down or hang up or hang around or hang loose or hang tight or hang a left but did say hang by the neck until dead. So quaint the old seemed, you could forget that human cruelty is not a new invention.
The sea looked cold here, grey-blue and rough. There were ruins of a fort over beyond the rocks. You could not tell the one from the other—the stones of the fortress, the stones of the sea. They weren’t, in fact, so different: one merged into the other naturally, as naturally as life moves into death. Perhaps Elspeth was now a different kind of rock.
When Victor was finished in Plymouth, they drove to Exmoor because Dolores wanted to see the moors. They drove for hours along winding roads through forests. There was a little church at Exmoor, a village which some pop song had transformed into another Gatlinburg, but British style, with a church that was apart and left alone by the tourists. It held a stone plaque describing a terrible and odd thunderstorm that had hit the church centuries ago. The lightning had struck the church directly; it had killed some people and left others unharmed. It had fried the clothes off some people, but not their bodies. It was, of course, taken as a sign, and the plaque was duly engraved and erected. It offered thanks, thanks, thanks to the merciful Lord. Merciful Lord! Of course, since He saved those who had erected the plaque. Thanks be to God.
They stopped at Looe, a beautiful little village piled high on rocks, overlooking the sea. The tiny circle of town that was at sea level was a mass of shops and pubs, blue water, boats, and blue sky. Made its living, it seemed, from tourists, but a rough place it must have been to live back then before there were tourists and telephones. They climbed up, trying to reach a peak where they could see the whole, but never found such a place. The climb down was almost as difficult.
They went to St. Michael’s Mount, where Dolores did pop sociology on the differences between the English and the French. For St Michael’s Mount, the British equivalent of Mont-St.-Michel, is also a castle that is surrounded by water when the tide is high, and by sand when it is low. They walked out to the castle, which was small and neat and clean and efficient and guarded by military people. It had been turned into a military museum. Everything was proper and in order, there were lots of lists of commanding officers and portraits of same, lots of weapons, shields, mention of victories. Whereas the French castle is large and sprawly, and the top stories still house a religious order of monks who maintain beautiful austere salons and peaceful gardens from which you can gaze down a frightening distance to the white water splashing at the base of the rock. And the lower stories have been given over to the hungry, to masses of tiny shops selling junk souvenirs and crepes and postcards and even hamburgers; they bustle with humans and smells of a hundred different foods.
She described all this to Victor with exuberance, crowing with joy about differences, differences! How wonderful!
“And what do you think those differences mean?”
“To me they’re just fun. But I suppose an Englishman could raise an eyebrow and drawl between tight lips some comment on French vulgarity and the insidious Roman Catholic Church. And a Frenchman could curl a lip and sneer at the uptight pompous British. But to me, they’re both wonderful, I love them both!”
“Do you love Niagara Falls? The American side? With its souvenir shops and its tourists?”
“No. But it stinks. It has stunk for thirty years, maybe longer. The smell hits you even before you come into town.”
“I think people can tolerate differences only at a distance.”
“But life is so dull without them! It’s a diminishment of experience to encounter the same Howard Johnson’s or Carvel stand or McDonald’s wherever you go. You never know where you are.”
“Even you and I can tolerate differences only at a distance.”
Dolores was silent
They drove along the gorgeous Cornwall coast and ate mussels and pork pies and Devon cream.
And Dolores talked about images, and how we never seem to be able to get beyond them. “Even
we
don’t, you know. If I probe down into my psyche, I see you as glamorous and handsome and powerful and intelligent and, well, invulnerable, I guess. It isn’t true. It probably has little to do with what you feel when you wake up some morning with a hangover, smelly because you were too tired to take a shower the night before, and your teeth ache.”
He smiled. “Well, my image of you is accurate.”
“Hah!”
“You’re beautiful and exotic and full of mysterious knowledge and the power to glide into a room and see through faces and eyes. And you’re a priestess of pain, too, that’s what you are.”
She groaned. “Circe still! My knowledge isn’t in the least mysterious!”
He smiled.
“Ah, well, you
would
want to break my legs,” she sighed. “And I’d keep breaking the back of your book, and giving you a new one.”
“
The Anatomy of Melancholy
,” he said. “You already did.”
T
HEY WERE LYING ON
the beach at St. Ives and Dolores was feeling foolish because she was tremulous and because everything around her rose into the air wavy with sunlight and heat and all of this was because she was lying on the same sand that Virginia Woolf once walked on, and she kept imagining the little girl running along, skinny, her long dark hair streaming behind her, shouting about her find, a bare dead white sheep’s skull, being told that young ladies do not shout.
And she was telling Victor about it, and about Woolf and who she was and what she did.
But he was glum today, who knew why? The sun was high, the water lapped gently, and there were children all over the beach. Even if the Stephens’ garden was now an asphalt parking lot, the Stephens’ house hedged up tight and owned by a motelkeeper. Better, she thought, to have your cottage swept out to sea. And then thought how unpleasant most of the alternatives were, to anything.
She lay down on the blanket, she gazed at the sky.