The Three Sirens (69 page)

Her features displayed no surprise, only interest. “Marc,” she said. Then she said, “I wondered where you were tonight.”

“I was here most of the evening,” he said. “I wanted to see you alone. I was worried you might return with Huatoro.”

“No.”

“Please sit down with me,” he said. “If—if you’re not too tired, there is something I want to discuss with you.”

“I am not tired at all,” she said.

She crossed the room, and came to rest on the matting a few feet from him.

He did not look at her, but at the opposite wall, meditatively. “Yes, I was afraid you might bring Huatoro back with you. You had said you might favor the winner of the swim.”

“I still might,” she said.

“But not tonight. Why not?”

“I do not know … He gave me his festival necklace.”

“You do not wear it.”

“Not tonight.”

“He must have been angry.”

“It is no concern of mine,” she said. “He will wait.”

“Will you make love with him?”

“If I knew, I would not tell you,” she said. “I do not know.” She paused. “He wishes me to be his wife.”

“And you?”

“I repeat, I am not in the mood for such decisions.” She reflected on this a moment. “He is strong, much admired. I am told he loves well. With the winning of the race, he has much mana.”

Marc shifted uncomfortably. “I’m sorry about the way I behaved in the race, Tehura. I’ve pretended to everyone it was an accident. You know better.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted to win, no matter how, because I had told you that I could and would. That was all that counted.” He hesitated, and he added, “Should I tell you a crazy thing?”

She waited, her expression impassive.

“Tehura, all through that race I kept thinking of you. As I was going along, I kept looking at the cliff ahead and telling myself it was you. As I got nearer, it even began to resemble you. I mean it. There was a rounded overhang above, and that became your breasts. There was an indentation in the cliff side, and it became your navel. And then below, there was in that cliff, there was a kind of—” He stopped. “I told you it was crazy.”

“It is not crazy.”

“All I could think as I swam was that I’ve got to get to her first, before anyone else does, and if I do, if I reach her, ascend her, she is mine.” He caught his breath. “I almost made it.”

“You swam well,” she said. “You need not be ashamed. I admired you.”

He moved again, to be closer to her. “Then you’ve got to tell me this—do you admire me as much as Huatoro?”

“I cannot speak of that. He is stronger than you. He is younger. You are weaker in our ways, and sometimes strange to me. But this I admire—you came to our ways because of me—you did everything, even the wrong, to show me you were worthy of us and me. This I admire. In your country, I know, you have great mana. Now, for me, you have it in my country, also.”

“I can’t tell you how wonderful that makes me feel, Tehura.”

“It is true,” she said simply. “You asked how I felt toward you beside Huatoro. To be honest, there is one more thing I must say.” She considered it, and after a moment she said it. “Huatoro loves me seriously,” she said. “This is important for a woman.”

Impulsively, Marc took her hand. “For God’s sake, Tehura, you know I love you, too—why, yesterday—”

“Yesterday,” she repeated, and withdrew her hand. “Yes, I will speak of yesterday. You tried to remove my skirt, to own my body with your body. I do not speak against that. It was all right, even though, when it happened, I had not yet the feeling for your body. What I speak of now is not that alone. Huatoro’s love is that, of course, but it is more, much more.”

He had both hands on her arm now. “So is mine, Tehura, believe me, so is mine.”

“How can it be?” she demanded. “We are—what is your word?—yes, I have it—we are an unusual two people together. Sometimes, I am the insect that you study. Other times, I am the female you want for your passing appetite. Never am I more. I have not complained. I do not know. I understand your feelings, because you are already wealthy with your work and your woman. You have love, the great love, you have your beautiful wife, who is everything—”

“She is nothing!” he cried out.

The savagery of his disavowal of Claire gave Tehura pause. She stared at him with new interest, mouth set, waiting.

“That is the real reason I waited here for you tonight,” he went on in a rush. “To tell you that it is you I love, not Claire. Does that surprise you? Have you heard or seen any evidence of my love for her?”

“Men are different in their public ways.”

“My public actions are the same as my private ones. I met that girl, I courted her, I found her agreeable, and because I knew that I must marry someone—it was expected, part of the conformity of our society—I married her. Now I can truly say there was no love between us. I had no desire for her, no burning inside such as I feel for you. When I am with Claire, I can think of a million other things. When I am with you, I can only think of you. Do you believe me?”

She had watched him, wide liquid eyes shining. She said, “Why have you not left her before? Tom has said this is possible in your America.”

“I’ve always intended to, but—” He shrugged. “I was afraid. It would have been a social embarrassment. I worried what friends and family would say. So I went on, because it was easier to cause no eruption. Besides, there was nowhere else to go. I’ve gone on for two years, kept her satisfied physically, and in other ways, too, but myself have always been secretly dissatisfied. And then I came here. I met you. And now there is somewhere else to go, and I am no longer afraid.”

“I do not understand you,” Tehura said quietly.

“I’ll make myself clearer,” he said. He was up on his knees, fumbling one hand in the pocket of his sport shirt. “I know what ceremonial rites mean to you. I will now perform a rite, one of transferring my full love from the woman who was my wife to the woman who—” He had found what he wanted, and he held it out in the palm of his hand. “Here, Tehura, for you.”

Puzzled, she reached for what was in his palm, and took it, and let it dangle from her fingers. It was the dazzling diamond pendant set in white gold that hung from a delicate chain, the very one that Claire had worn the first night and that Tehura had admired so constantly.

With satisfaction, Marc could see that the gift had made her speechless. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted in awe, and the brown hand that held the jewel shook. She looked up from it at Marc, eyes brimming with gratefulness. “Oh, Marc—” she gasped.

“It is yours,” he said, “all yours, and there will be a thousand more evidences of my love in the days to come.”

“Marc, put it on me!” she exclaimed with childish glee.

She twisted about, on the matting, her naked back to him. His hands went over her shoulders, as he took the diamond pendant from her, and looped it around her neck, and fastened the clasp behind. As she bent her head to enjoy it, her fingers fondling the gleaming diamond, Marc’s hands caressed her shoulders, and glided down her arms. Shaken by the texture of her flesh, the imagined promise of it, his hands went to her pointed breasts. She did not seem to mind, as she concentrated on her bauble. Marc’s hands enveloped her breasts, and every limb and organ of his person was inflamed. Releasing one breast, his hand went to her skirt, pulled high on her thighs, and he massaged the inside of her thigh. Never, in his entire life, had he wanted possession of any object as much as he wanted her sexually.

“Tehura,” he said.

She glanced from the diamond to him, but did not touch either of his hands.

“Tehura, I want you forever. I am leaving Claire. I want you for my wife.”

For the first time, this night, her face was mesmerized by his every word. She said, “You want Tehura for your wife?”

“Yes.”

She spun around, to face him, pulling her breast and inner thigh from his caresses. “You want to marry me?” She saw his hands, and covered them with her own. “They will love me, Marc, but wait—I must know—”

“I want to marry you, as soon as possible.”

“How?”

He came down from his knees, trying to let his ardor subside. He told himself what she had just told him, that there was time for love, their love, and they would have it, but first he must explain himself to her. The crucial moment had come, was upon him, he knew, and if he could put aside this towering need to consume her with his lust, he could be rational and persuasive.

He had planned to propose to her, as he had written Garrity. The first necessity would be to ally her with his ambition. She was the only one here whom he could trust, who could make his dream come true. Without her help, anything further would be impossible. The offer of marriage, coldly calculated, would bring down her defenses, and make her a partner to his scheme. Yet, oddly, the offer of marriage had not been as business-measured as he had planned. It had become warm moist with his surging want of her, his grinding desire to split her asunder, to wrench her away from her haughty untouchability, to have her beneath him, below him, his dependent beggar of love. Out of this had burst his proposal, the very proposal that he had intended to make anyway, but now for the wrong reason, and he saw that he must redirect his motivation and manner, or he would accomplish nothing. He had made a gain with his earnestness, with the stupid pendant, with his offer of marriage. He must exploit it immediately. If she would not acquiesce to all that he had in mind, everything was lost.

He exhaled, and attempted to consider her with a new, Garrity-oriented objectivity. “How?” she had asked. She wanted to know how he could marry her. He would tell her how, and make his plan their plan.

“Tehura, I want to take you away from the Sirens, first to Tahiti, and after that to California,” he found himself saying. “The moment that we are in my country, I will divorce Claire, and the day the divorce is granted, I will marry you.”

“Why not do it here?” she inquired, with a hook of shrewdness that he had often suspected she possessed.

“You know that’s impossible, Tehura. You have no machinery for my divorce. Except the Hierarchy. They’d have to investigate Claire and myself. Suppose I allowed this—even if we extended our stay—then we would marry by your law, which would not be acceptable in my country. Whatever we do must be legal in the United States. For, there is where I want us to live our lives. From time to time we will come back to this island, so that you may see your own. But my life must become your life. This island is a lovely place, but so small, so inadequate, compared to what you will find and own in my great country. There you will be treated as an exotic beauty, worshiped by a million men, envied by a million women. You will possess not a hut but a house ten times the size of this hut, and servants, and the most expensive clothes, and a car—you know of these things from your learnings—and you will have precious stones like that diamond, as many as you wish.”

She had listened, it seemed, as a girl child listens to a fairy tale, yet she was not fully carried away. There was something older and more careful about her, the shrewdness again. “Everyone is not so rich in your country,” she said. “I have asked Tom. He says in your country you are not so rich.”

This was the opening. Marc entered it. “He is right in a way. I am rich when put alongside one such as Huatoro or others of your village. I am not the richest in my own land. I have enough, of course, much mana, as you know. Yet, you also know the value of that pendant. But I will be richer, very, very wealthy, Tehura. To become so, I must have your confidence in what I say next.”

She nodded. “It is between us.”

“There is enormous interest about places like The Three Sirens in my homeland. You are aware of that. Otherwise, why would we be here studying your people? In a month or two, when my mother brings the news of you to America, it will be scientific and make no one rich—do not ask me to explain this tonight, there is too much to explain—but it is so. On the other hand, if I were to leave here with you as soon as possible, taking with me information on the existence of this place, and offer the news in a popular way to the American public and the world, they would reward us with infinite wealth. Believe me, we would be rich beyond our imagination. I have the proof. I can show you letters. I have a man who will meet us in Tahiti. He has organized it. The three of us will go to the United States by airplane, such as the one Rasmussen owns, and we will tell the world of your remarkable island—”

“And break the tabu? It would overthrow and put to an end the Sirens.”

“No—no, Tehura, no more than my mother’s writings and speeches will end the Sirens. I promise you that we will keep its location secret. We will have proof enough of its existence in information I will bring—in—in the fact of you, my wife—”

“Me?” she said, slowly. “Your people will want to see me?”

“They’ll want to meet you, see you, hear you, love you. They will shower you with everything you wish. Do you know what is possible?”

“I have seen the pictures in Tom’s books.”

“Everything will be yours.”

Absently, she fiddled with her pendant. “I will be so far from here—I will be alone—”

He edged toward her, and placed his arm around her. “You will be my wife.”

“Yes, Marc.”

“I have promised, I will give you everything.”

She gazed at the matting, slowly lifted her head, sadness in her smile. “All right,” she said, almost inaudibly.

His heart skipped and jumped. “You’ll marry me? You’ll go with me?”

She nodded.

He wanted to leap and shout with joy. He had accomplished it! Garrity! “Tehura—Tehura—I love you—”

She nodded blankly, still overwhelmed by the enormity of her decision.

He was alive now, and efficient. He removed his arm from her. “Here is what must be done—first off, this must be an absolute secret between us—even that pendant, don’t wear it outside, Claire must not know—”

“Why must she not know?”

“She loves me. There would be terrible scenes. I just want to elope, go off with you, and afterwards I’ll write her through Rasmussen. And my mother must not know yet, none of them, for they’d try to stop us. They are greedy to have the gains of this island, the discovery of it, for themselves. They would not want us to have the riches the news can bring. And your people must not know either, not Paoti or Moreturi or Huatoro, absolutely no one must know. They might try to stop you, as my people might try to stop me, out of fear or envy. You will keep it secret?”