The Three Sirens (60 page)

Wondrous, wondrous Matty, Marc thought, and he felt puny, disabled, and felt incredulous that a mountain had loins that had produced a molehill.

Fragment three.

The last drink had been served. The guests prepared to leave. Claire thanked both Paoti and Hutia for the use of their servant, Aimata, the most efficient housekeeper she had ever known, even counting Suzu back in long-ago Santa Barbara.

“Oh, she is not our servant,” Hutia Wright said. “She is the slave of another family. We borrowed her for you.”

“Did I hear you correctly?” asked Claire. “Aimata is a slave?”

“But yes—for her crime …”

The perplexity on Claire’s face made Maud quickly intercede. “It is something that Easterday touched on in his letter, but which has not yet been fully explained to you or the others,” she said. “There is, at least we would consider it so, a unique system of punishment of crime on The Three Sirens. There is no capital punishment here. In fact, there is much to be said for the system. It is both humane and practical. In the United States if a person commits wilful murder, we most often deliberately execute him by rope, electric chair, poison gas, firing squad. While this eliminates the possibility of his killing again, such vengeful retribution by society neither gainfully serves the community nor recompenses the bereft family of the victim. Here on the Sirens, if a person commits murder, he is sentenced to slavery, to serve the family of his victim for the number of years of life the victim has probably lost.” She gestured to Paoti. “Perhaps you can relate this principle or law to the person of Aimata.”

“Yes,” said Paoti to Claire. “It is simple. Aimata was thirty-two, her husband thirty-five, when she decided to murder him. She pushed him off a cliff. He was killed instantly. There was no trial before me, for Aimata confessed. Our criminal custom states that the average person should live seventy years on this island. Therefore, Aimata had deprived her husband of thirty-five years of life. By murdering him, she had also deprived his other kin of help, support, and attention. Therefore, Aimata was sentenced to replace the one she had murdered, for those thirty-five years. She is the slave of the victim’s blood kin for that period, without privileges; she cannot marry, enjoy love, enjoy recreation, and must eat only the scraps of their meals and wear the garments they discard.”

Claire’s hand had gone to her mouth. “I’ve never heard anything like that. It’s terrifying—”

Paoti smiled sympathetically. “It is effective, Mrs. Hayden. We have had only three murders in the village in thirty years.”

“There are systems and systems in this world,” Maud added to Claire. “There is a tribe in West Africa, the Habe they are called, who also never hang a murderer. They consider that a waste, as here. They send a murderer into exile for two years. Then they bring him back from exile, and make him live and copulate with a relative of the murdered person until a child is born to replace the victim. Odd, but it has a justice of its own, like this system here. I’m not so certain we in the West have better ways of dealing with crime.” She turned. “Mr. Courtney, you are the lawyer—what do you say?”

“I say aye,” said Courtney, “and now I say thank you and good night.”

The fragments had dissolved.

Marc found himself seated still on the stoop, his shoulders and chest somewhat cooled, but his mouth and tongue hot and raw from all the whiskey and the half-finished cigar in his fingers.

It was then that he heard Claire’s muffled voice from the rear room. “Marc—it’s so late—”

He did not reply.

Claire’s voice again. “Marc, aren’t you coming to bed? I have a surprise for you.”

Surprise, surprise. He knew the surprise for their anniversary, and he knew that he had been sitting here, alone, avoiding it. She was going to offer her tiresome body. It was a gift he did not desire. Two years of her had wearied him of that body. But then, assessing the two years, a vague computing, he realized that he had not possessed that body intimately as many times as he imagined. It was just that the body was there, always there, always around, always irritatingly available, and what went with it, the rebuke of her person, that made her seem so used.

He realized that he had not slept with her in a month or two. Now he was being drafted for an Occasion. He hated the duty. He did not want her. He wanted the brown one, with her arrogance about sex, and bare breasts, and beautiful thighs hidden by nothing but grass. He remembered the incident earlier in the day, how he had almost possessed Tehura, and was certain he would possess her yet. The imagined passion of fulfillment with Tehura coursed through his frame and awakened him. He wanted her now, but he could not have her, and so he decided to waste the passion on duty.

He rose, throwing his cigar into the compound. “Be right with you,” he called to Claire. He shoved the door closed and fastened it.

He crossed to the corridor, went through it, and entered the dimly lighted bedroom. The room seemed empty. He could not find Claire on the sleeping bag or in the shadows. He heard a movement parallel to him, to his right, and then she emerged from the shadowed wall toward the candle and wheeled in its circle of yellow to show herself to him.

He blinked dumbly.

“Surprise on our second, darling,” she said.

In his amazement at her appearance, he thought for an instant that by some trick this was Tehura, but his sobering sensibilities told him it was Claire. She was garmented exactly as Tehura was garmented, as all the women of The Three Sirens were dressed. There was an outrageous flower in her hair. The diamond pendant hung between her bold white breasts with their indecent brown nipples. The slash of her navel contracted and expanded above the band of the too-short grass skirt. The thighs, legs, feet were bare.

Rage bolted through him. He wanted to crush her, brand her with a shout, brand her as a harlot, strumpet, doxy, bawd. That she would dare to mock him with the wanton undress of this tropical whorehouse! That she would insult him with this evidence that she was one of these village animals, a sex animal, and he was less!

“Well, Marc,” she said happily. “Say something.”

Say something! “Where in the hell did you get that goddam getup anyway?”

Her smile fell away. “Why, I thought I’d surprise you—I asked Tehura to loan me one of her—”

Tehura! “Take that goddam idiotic costume off and burn it, dammit.”

“Marc, what’s got into you—I thought you’d—”

“I said get rid of it. What in the devil do you think you’re doing? What are you turning into? I’ve seen it from the first day—first night—when you couldn’t show them your tits fast enough—and going around with that Courtney—talking sex, seeing sex, thinking sex—wiggling your ass at him and all the rest of them—asking for it—trying to behave like—”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “Shut up, shut up, and damn you—I’m sick to the bones of you—of your prissiness, your prudery—sick of keeping it to myself—sick of being alone, untouched by human hands—sick of being unloved by my great big genius, my big athlete—I tell you—I—I—”

She was breathless like someone struck. She stared at him, panting, hands turned into claws, wanting to tear at the humiliation of him, wanting to kill him and kill herself, wanting to cry and cry like an orphan child.

She covered her eyes, and fought the sob. “Get away—go away from me—go away and grow up,” she said brokenly.

He was shaking uncontrollably from her unexpected retaliation. “Damn right I’ll go away,” he said in a floundering voice. “I’ll come back when you’re yourself again, when you remember who you are and behave that way … Christ, I wish you could see yourself in that costume. If that’s your idea how to hold a husband—”

“Get out!”

Instantly, he left her, chased by her wrenching sobs all the way to the door. He stumbled into the compound, and, striding as fast as he could, he fled the shame of her.

He did not know how long he walked in the semidarkness. Presently, he found himself near the Social Aid Hut, which was unlighted, and he coughed and expectorated in its direction, and then retraced his steps.

Long later, he sat by a waning torch, across the stream from his hut, satisfied that he was too exhausted to be angry any longer. He sat and wondered what this hell-hole was doing to her and to him, and what would happen to them, and, more important, what would happen to him. He thought of the authentic Tehura, and he thought of his future, and as he so often had lately, he thought of the admirable Rex Garrity.

Finally, he reached into the hip pocket of his slacks and drew out the soiled one-page letter he’d received two weeks ago. Garrity had sent it to him, care of General Delivery, Papeete. In a flamboyant hand, Garrity had reminded him that the visit to The Three Sirens could be the one chance of a lifetime. If Marc would consider selling some of the material that his mother did not need, Garrity would pay a large sum of money for it. Or, if Marc could think of something else, suggest some other arrangement, Garrity would cooperate in any way and be receptive to any proposition. “Marc, old boy, this is an opportunity to grab the gold ring, to join the celebrity circle, to escape the role of scholar peasant with frayed cuffs,” Garrity had written. “Keep in touch, and tell me what you think or ask me anything you like.” Within an hour of reading the letter in Papeete, Marc had replied to it in haste, but at length, with Matty-imposed restraint, but with many questions.

He returned Garrity’s letter, the one magic scroll on earth that could obliterate Adley, Matty, Claire, and Nonentity, to his hip pocket.

He stood up and inhaled the night air, and felt stronger. Claire would be drugged asleep by now. He would go to the front room, and begin a letter to Rex Garrity. Tomorrow was mail day. If Rasmussen brought in some further word from Garrity, the answers to the questions, then Marc would finish what he would begin writing tonight. He would finish it, and mail it, and do what he must do, and nothing would ever be the same again.

He stared up at the vast sky above. Shake your goddam head, Adley, he thought, but I can’t see you, can’t hear you, don’t need you any more, because you’re dead forever and I’ll soon be alive.

He started for the hut, already writing the savior letter in his mind.

VI

RESTLESSLY,
Marc Hayden moved about the lofty, flat precipice that hung, like an observation point, over the village of The Three Sirens far below.

Not since their arrival at this place, exactly two weeks ago, had he visited this rise, from which descended the path around the stone ledge to the rectangular community set deep in the long valley. Marching around the precipice, Marc had occasional glimpses of the shaggy miniature huts beneath the overhangs, of the gleaming ribbon of stream in the compound. By now, late morning, the compound was lightly populated, the usual animated brown dots of children, some women, no one else, for the men were off to their work, the adolescents in their school, the members of Matty’s team (not his team) sheltered with their pencils, tapes, and boasting informants.

If the view from the high and isolated vantage point was beautiful, Marc was unaware of it. The village was there, but it was no part of him. Since the night, he had separated his identity from it almost completely. It was as remote and unreal as a color photograph in the
National Geographic Magazine
.

For Marc, the village and its inhabitants were merely Things, accessories to aid him in his escape from an ancient and hated way of life. What was real, what was animate, what was even beautiful, was that Magna Carta of the soul—his private Declaration of Independence—enclosed in the right-hand pocket of his gray Dacron trousers.

The letter in the right-hand pocket was only three pages long, and the pages and envelope were thin, yet they filled his pocket and body and mind with the displacement of—he tried to think of an accurate simile—of an Aladdin’s Lamp, ready to fulfill his Wish.

He had stayed up most of the night, in the front room of the hut, composing those three pages to Rex Garrity in New York City. Most of his time had been consumed not with writing, but with plotting what he must tell Garrity of his intentions. When he had finished, he had gone to sleep easily and slept well for the first time in months, with the feeling of one who has done a day’s work in a day and done it properly, and has no remorse and infinite high hopes, and so can accept good sleep as a reward. He had ignored Claire’s lumpy outline on the sleeping bag, set his alarm, and closed his eyes and slept.

When his alarm had awakened him, he had slept only three hours, and yet he was not tired at all. During breakfast, Claire had appeared, still wearing her night-before face. Her face was drawn and rigid, and her good morning curt and combative, while his own good morning was so slight and slurred as to hardly exist as a greeting. She moved about noisily, bumping, tramping, all obtrusive, demanding without speech but with an oppressive presence his attention and apology for his behavior of the night before. She had wanted to have it out and done with, the domestic band-aid of talk and more talk, to patch her wounds. She wanted him to mitigate his cursing and his rejection during the night hours, to save face by invoking the plea of drunkenness but yet to apologize, so that she could save face by agreeing it best be forgotten and their life together could hobble on.

Through this silent sparring, and waiting out, he had given no ground. He had eaten in silence, and avoided her, simply because this morning she no longer had existence for him. His disinterest was total. In the night, he had grown, become the man he had always known he would be (and therefore a stranger to this woman), and he wanted no part of an old contract that he no longer need honor.

He had fled his hut in haste—a great show of finding notebook and pen, to throw her off the scent, make her believe he was off to work—and with the letter to Garrity in his right-hand pocket, he had gone swiftly to the path that climbed out of the village and above it. He knew that he must not be late. His purpose had been to intercept Captain Rasmussen—it was Rasmussen day, mail day, supply day—before the old pirate got down into the village and to Matty. If there was a letter from Garrity, in reply to his own from Papeete, he did not want Matty to see it or know about it. He wanted the letter alone, early, for himself. Its contents would determine his final decision—to mail or not to mail to Garrity the statement of intentions in his pocket.