The Three Sirens (65 page)

Claire could see Marc shaking his head, hard, like a gladiator risen from the arena floor, trying to unscramble his senses and make them signal his unsteady calves into motion. The next high ledge was near, and Marc attained it with hardly any help from his hands. As he reached it, Huatoro was already a full stride ahead in the climb. Desperately, Marc tried to keep up with the other. Higher they went, nearer the finish, pull, jump, stop, climb, crawl, stop, another, another, and then they were on the same small promontory, but not long side by side, for Huatoro was still moving, scrambling upwards, while Marc was wavering near collapse, going down to one knee, the gladiator fallen again, not by a blow but by weakness and loss of will.

Then it was that Claire once more became conscious of the thunderous cheers of the spectators, and heard Tehura screaming, shaking Courtney’s arm, screaming, “Look—look—oh, nooo—nooo—”

Claire turned back to see the finish, and found that Marc was upright, not climbing, but snatching for the ledge directly above which Huatoro had just scaled. But instead of grasping the ledge, Marc’s hand closed on Huatoro’s ankle. The native, starting to move, found himself one-legged, the other leg fastened down by his rival’s grip. Bewildered no doubt, perhaps angered (his features could not be clearly seen), Huatoro shouted something at Marc, and he shook his captured leg once, twice, and a third time hard, kicking free of Marc, as if kicking free of some small troublesome terrier.

Liberated, Huatoro climbed swiftly upwards to the very summit and his victory, while Marc remained where he had been kicked down by the other, down on both hands and both knees, immobilized, by fatigue and public humiliation. And it worsened, for as he stayed on his hands and knees, prostrated, Moreturi came vaulting up, glanced down at him, and then continued to work his way to the finish. Then came the others, the tenacious and robust young men, the first passing Marc to reach the summit third, and then another and another. Finally, finally, Marc rose, and shakily and all palsied, so slowly, he went up the last few ledges, ignoring outstretched hands, to lift himself to the summit. Huatoro and Moreturi, and one or two others also, approached him, evidently trying to speak to him, but he turned from them and, shoulders and chest heaving, went off alone, to one side, to recover his strength and his pride.

The shouting had dropped to a low babble of voices in the air. Claire twisted away from the scene, firmly put her back to it, only to find Courtney observing her.

She did not attempt to smile or shrug off her reaction. Quietly, on a pitch of irony, she quoted, ” ‘When the Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He writes not that you won or lost but how you played the game.’ “

Courtney frowned. “I don’t think so, Claire, I don’t think he really tried to hold Huatoro back. He was reaching for the ledge and by accident—he didn’t know what he was doing—he grabbed Huatoro’s ankle, just held on—instinct of self-preservation.”

“I don’t need that pill, Tom,” she said, suddenly angry. “I know the patient. He was a fool to enter this, and he was a double fool in the end. If a man’s got to prove himself, I know better means, and different means. No more sweeteners today, thank you, Tom.”

Tehura had come forward, a strange questioning look in her face as she confronted Claire. “Is that what you see, Mrs. Hayden? I see different.” She paused, and she said stiffly, “I think he did well.” With a nod, she departed.

Claire’s eyebrows shot up with puzzlement as she watched the native girl leave. Claire turned to Courtney, and she shrugged. “Well, when the Great Scorer comes, I guess he had better come to The Three Sirens first … Thanks for your company, Tom. I think I’d best get back to the hut, and put a bandage on my hero’s virility.” She blinked at his expressionless face, and she added, “We’ll need our strength. It’s going to be quite a festival.”

* * *

At several minutes after eight o’clock in the evening, the fringes of the village were darkened, and this served to accentuate the great decorative ball of light in the very center of the compound.

The ball of light was actually a blending of three rising rings of blazing torches surrounding the mammoth platform constructed in the early morning. The torches went up from the ground like candles surmounting a three-decker birthday cake. There was the wide ring of torches, broken in half only by the stream, planted in the earth itself, among the clustered villagers. The fingers of flame went straight up, without flickering or bending in the windless calm of night, as if the High Spirit was not panting or breathing heavily upon his children, but sitting serenely with them for an interlude of pleasure uninterrupted by work. The second circle of lights came from the torches attached to the wooden step built around the platform, two feet above the turf, two feet below the stage, and which was used as stairs by the performers. Upon the platform itself was the topmost circle of illumination, where the stubbier, wider, brighter torches resembled footlights on four curving sides.

Courtney had told the Hayden team that the oval platform was almost forty feet in length and twenty feet in width, and the planks were used over and over again, for every annual festival, so that the surface was worn smooth as carpeting by innumerable dancing bare feet.

At the moment, except for the seven native males who were the musicians—young, enthusiastic brown men, two beating hollowed tree trunks made into slit drums, one with a flute, two with bamboo rods they struck together, two with big hands clapping loudly—the stage was empty.

The members of the Hayden team had been given the seats of honor, places in the first row which began fifteen feet back from the front of the platform. They sat on the grass, with villagers seated row upon row behind them, until lost in the outer darkness.

Claire was at the end of their row, looking relaxed in her sleeveless white Dacron blouse and navy blue linen skirt that covered her knees. Her sandaled feet were discreetly crossed beneath the skirt. She sat quietly, hands folded in her lap. She heard Orville Pence, kneeling beside Rachel DeJong and Maud, who were next to her, saying, “—and the musicians insisted that even their instruments are ancient sex symbols; the hollow drum up there represents the female, and over there the wooden flute, obviously the male. All one more part of the festival theme. Then, if you consider—”

Claire closed her ears to the rest. She was bored with the Freudian patter. There would be this, and there would be Boas and Kroeber and Benedict, and always Malinowski, and most certainly Cora DuBois and the island of Alors, and inevitably the subject of Psychodynamics. For Claire, these would be the intruders, the unwanted guests, who analyzed, who explained, who took apart and put together, who peeled of! primitive beauty so that only the misshapen core was left in full disfigurement.

Tonight, Claire wanted none of this. The scene and setting were romantic, and Claire wanted the contentment of it to soak into her pores and not into her poor head. She wanted to escape from the technical talk of the team, from her own situation really, and this one night she was determined to make the flight, no matter how briefly.

She diverted her attention to the stage above, and to the activity around it.

A childhood carnival, she thought, a magical carnival for a time when you were too small, eyes too small, mind too small, to see the tawdry, the imperfections, the daily dyings. She remembered—she had not remembered it in years—the one on the Oak Street beach, in Chicago, on the magnificent lake shore, when she was little. Perhaps she had been five or six or seven. She remembered her father’s firm hand covering her hand, as they went down to the lake front from Michigan Boulevard. She remembered that everyone seemed to know him—“Hi, Alex” … “See you got a date, Alex”—even a pair who whispered as they passed, one saying, “Yes, Alex Emerson, the sports writer.”

Suddenly, she remembered, they were plowing through the warm sand, and there was the riot of sound and lights, and the rows of bazaar shops of wonderland. They had gone through the carousing people, stopping here and there, this booth and that, her father laughing and laughing, and lifting her up and putting her down. She remembered hot dogs, endless hot dogs, and gallons of lemonade, and a billion puffs of pink cotton candy, and she remembered popcorn as endless as grains of sand on the beach, and a zillion dolls and ceramic dogs and cats, and the wheelings of the merry-go-round and the ferris wheel and the whip, God, the whip, how she held him for dear life.

The imprint on memory faded, but clear still was the feeling of the night, the wondrous, immortal, hugging swell of the one emotion that she felt when she drowsed against his broad chest as he carried her up to the car—it was Being Loved she had felt, and she had not known it again, not once, in the heavy, slow, unpopulated, unfun years since.

She tried to evoke the old childhood carnival once more, overlay it upon the revelry here on the Sirens, but it was no use, for she was grown, and her veteran eyes saw behind booths, behind corners, behind masquerades. Feeling had given way to thinking. And besides, besides, where was Alex? Yet, objectively, all this before her, primitive and strange, had a grownup attraction of its own. The trouble was, she was apart from it, interested and bystander, not of it.

Also, she was alone. Maud did not count. Nor did Rachel count, nor did the disagreeable Orville Pence. She was married two years and one day, she was one-half of two who (by matrimonial mathematics) were supposed to be One, yet here sat she like a spinster woman, a half-person, alone. Where had the equation gone wrong? With the chalk of memory, she redid it on mind’s blackboard …

Marc was already there, in the rear room of the hut, when she had returned from the swimming contest. His trunks, still soggy, hung limply from a wall peg. He lay, shirtless and shoeless, but in washable slacks, upon the sleeping bag, soundly napping, breath exhaling in low honks as if from an exhausted canine. His excursion into juvenility—
juvesenility
was the observation she coined—had sapped him entirely. She was embarrassed for staring at him, unbeknownst to him, as he slept. It was unfair, for he was defenseless against judgment.

She had left him to occupy herself with the dinner. In celebration of the festival, there was an added supply of native food and drink: lobster, red bananas, sea cucumbers, turtle eggs, yams, taro in palm-frond baskets, coconut milk in one earthenware pitcher, and palm toddy in another pitcher. Beside these lay a new food-pounder, fashioned from the ribs of coconut leaves. Claire carried the baskets, pitchers, and pounder to the earth oven, and began her cooking. Shortly afterwards, she had heard Marc shuffling about. She called out that dinner was served.

Somehow, she had expected him to appear sheepish. That would have helped. This tone established, she could have teased him, and there would have been banter between them, and there might even be laughter. Instead, he was petulant. She knew that he watched her closely as she served, as if he were on guard against an obligatory jab about his performance. She withheld comment.

Once she was seated across from him, he had said, “I should’ve had him. In fact, I did have him until the damn climb. I wasn’t in shape for that. Hell, I entered a swimming meet, not a mountaineering contest. I beat him swimming.”

The immaturity of this had sickened her, and she’d replied dully, “Yes, you beat him swimming.”

“You know, I didn’t realize it was his ankle—I thought I had hold of the ledge—it took me a few seconds before I—”

“Mark, who gives a damn about that nonsense? You did your very best. Now eat.”

“I give a damn. Because I know you. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I made a fool of myself.”

“I didn’t say that. Now, please, Marc—”

“I didn’t say you said that. I said I know you well enough to know how your mind operates. I just wanted to straighten you out—”

“All right, Marc, all right.” She had had a spasm of choking on some food, and after she had recovered, she’d said, “Went down the wrong way. Let’s finish in peace.”

When they were through, and she was clearing the dining mat, he had puffed on his cigar and his eyes followed her through the blue smoke.

“You going to the festival tonight?” he had asked, suddenly.

She stopped. “Of course. Everyone is. Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“What does that mean?” she had wanted to know. “You’ve been invited like all of us. It’s one of the highlights, one of the reasons we were invited this time of the year. It’s why you’re here. You have your work—”

“My work,” he had repeated with a grunt. And then he’d added with an edge of sarcasm, “After all, you and Matty will be there.”

“Marc, you must—”

“I did my part for research this afternoon. I’m bushed, and I’ve got a splitting headache—”

She had examined him, and he had looked serene with his cigar. She doubted the headache.

“—and what’ll I miss?” he went on. “A bunch of naked broads, and that idiot Lisa, shaking their fat behinds. I can do better at any two-bit burlesque back home. No, thanks.”

“Well, I can’t force you.”

“That’s right.”

“Do as you please. I’m going to change.” She had taken several steps to the rear, slowed, and swung around toward him. “Marc, I—I just wish we—”

He had waited, as she hesitated, and he said, “What do you wish, wife?”

She had not liked his tone, or the wife, and so it was no use exhuming their marriage and old hopes. “Nothing,” she had said. “I’ve got to hurry.”

It had gone like that, exactly like that, Claire remembered, and on mind’s blackboard the equation was still incorrect, for one-half plus one-half added up tonight, every night, to one-half. Damn.

She shivered, and adjusted herself to her place in the first row of the festival audience. She was pleased to find Tom Courtney down on one knee to her right.

“Hello,” she said. “How long have you been here?”

“A few minutes. And you?”

“Mentally, I just arrived,” she said.

“I know. That’s why I didn’t want to break in. Mind if I stay here, or have you had about enough togetherness for one day?”