The Last Ship (69 page)

“Sexual quotient? An interesting phrase. If I understand it, I am glad to hear they possess it. It must help. But I would be out of my depth to express an opinion, Lieutenant.”

“You don’t mind if I express one?” she said, the first faint touch of tartness, so I felt, in her voice, almost of impatience with such a dull conversationalist. “Everybody, of course, has a sexual quotient, quite like everyone has an intelligence quotient.”

“You educate me, Lieutenant.”

She wriggled around on the rock, changing position, coming to rest cross-legged.

“I think my theory has a certain validity. These women particularly seem to me distinctly to enjoy it.”

This statement constituted such a quantum step beyond anything we had ever got near as to snap my wits all alert, looking within myself and closely pondering. Her tone itself seemed to change at least to a nuance, now in it something like a wry, faintly mocking gaiety, if I were any judge of speech tones. But I remained baffled, in my uncertainty continuing to take refuge in commonplaces.

“Again we are fortunate,” I said. “Beyond words.”

“Do you like Conrad?”

“Love him.”

“Conrad is what made me go to sea as much as almost anything. It was his doing. I probably wouldn’t be sitting here otherwise. He has a line somewhere, one I always considered very funny and I’m sure he didn’t. ‘Women have always been a sailor’s chief distraction.’ I remember bursting into laughter when I first read that. So nice, clean, unequivocal. A model of a simple declarative sentence. I wondered then why he used the word ‘sailor.’ I was still a landsman. I understand now.” She spoke with a certain sportiveness, and as if intent on pursuing this rather recondite subject whether I so wished or not, indeed almost as though spurred on by my reluctance. “I wonder if it could be turned around now. ‘Sailors have always been a woman’s chief distraction.’ These women seem not to have any problem dealing with what normally would be judged an oversupply. Wouldn’t you think so, Captain?”

“About the women not having a problem?”

“No, dummy. About there being what would normally be considered an oversupply.”

The appellation slipped right by me. “The fact would be unarguable, Lieutenant.”

She had never remotely talked so much, or so specifically, about the women, come anywhere so near to their emotions and their feelings as to the task that had been set before them. And she had not finished.

“Women are a lot more explicit than men in these matters,” she said. She tossed her hair again, a rather pert, self-delighting gesture; it put me in mind of the best colt I had ever had, as a boy, who loved doing that with its mane; he very much knew his own mind; maybe the gesture went with the quality. “I think most men would be shocked to hear women talk among themselves. Learn a thing or two.”

I was suddenly aware of a new, tangible aura to her; some instinctive, sassy, lofty, unabashed yet curiously soft air of femininity and confidence; an air of total assurance, as if she knew who she was and what she had.

“Again you educate me, Lieutenant.”

I watched the sea. It seemed to be making up a bit, my nose detecting the approach of wind. I was wondering how far the water entered the cave on the high tide. I had the impression that my silence, or the brevity of my replies, my lack of questions, my absence of at least expressed curiosity, irritated, almost exasperated, her and that she had made up her mind, by God, to do something about it.

“Screwing several men at a time—I don’t mean
at a time
—with that frequency. Well—it’s all right. Not all that big a deal. That comes through loud and clear. Isn’t that interesting? I’ve asked myself whether that would have been the case with just any men.” The tones of the academy had returned, inward-turned, reflective, as if making a serious study of the matters in which she was so intimately involved. “I don’t think so. So perhaps I’m giving the women too much credit. Perhaps it’s because it’s these men; men they’ve known such a long time; men they
like.
” That tone abruptly left behind, another, which I could only describe as an amused bawdiness, appearing. I felt myself being outdistanced, scarcely able to keep up. “Anyhow, they
talk
about how each man is different and they
like
very much talking about it. How they go on and on! How the fucking is different. One man from another. Some of it can be pretty funny, even to themselves. Sometimes I’ve wished you could be there to hear, Captain. I mean, hear them talk about fucking different men. What a pretty sky—those cloud-strips.”

I think by now I knew; even my own denseness as to the ways of women having its limits. Perhaps at first having the sliver of a stupid thought that this was all calculated to torment myself, realizing quickly that she would be the last person on earth to do just that—she would have been contemptuous of such an effort; aware that it was something else altogether. And I had actually considered as to how I might go about approaching her! Appalled at my imbecility, witlessness, seeming now little short of cretinism, at my forgetting the one thing at least I knew about women if patently I knew little else: They are in control, in these matters; they always are. Especially this one would be. Above all, overwhelmed with this one thought: What I had at first judged out of character for her: I could not have been more wrong. It was exactly what she would have done to get what she wanted; and if there was anything in character for her it was that: to get what she wanted. Having reached the point all along intended, she finished off.

“Of course, I get pretty randy myself sometimes listening to them. As a matter of fact . . .”

I had been looking rather fixedly at the sea, turned to say I knew not what, and realized she was no longer there. She had disappeared into the cave, into the darkness where I could not see her. I started to follow; waited. Had there been any doubt, I must have known then; known from the accelerated beat of my heart; from a trembling that seemed to go through all my body; from that anticipation, that annunciation, that is like no other, though long it had been since I had experienced it. Waited until from the cave, I heard from a person I could not see, the low words seeming to reach me as an echo pressed out from the cave walls. “Why don’t you come in, Captain?”

 *  *  * 

Her body struck as though a representation on canvas, achieving that richness of tangible alabastrine flesh seemingly known only to the brush of an extraordinary painter, more lifelike than life itself, where she sat back, spread-out dungarees and shirt her pallet, hands clasped around her drawn-up knees, all her whiteness unbroken from her wheat-light hair until it reached that other small analogous bouquet just visible in the curved-in position, one aware of firm hard breasts, with nipples mauve against the white, erect simply from herself being looked at that way (in the painting, by the painter). She spoke very quietly, a faint resonance from the cave walls.

“If we start this, we’ll never stop it,” she said. “We’ll never stop fucking.”

There was something clean and brutal about the words as she said them, and hopelessly truthful.

“You should have thought of that before you took your clothes off, Lieutenant. In fact, before you started talking about it. Don’t talk to me about stopping anything,” something in me desiring to give back that clean brutality of her own.

I took off my clothes and looked at her, as I was aware she was at me. A meticulous, almost dispassionate kind of scrutinizing one was aware of in her, hard and absolute in intent, one’s own not unlike, a sense of unrestrained ravishment seeming to fill the cave. A body made to have love made to it. My own body trembling slightly in a wave of lust. I was sticking straight out, even to myself seeming impossibly, almost comically huge, oversized. She brought a hand up and touched for a moment, response a quick jumping, the thing with an intent quite all its own, hand moving to mine and drawing me down alongside her, atop the dungarees and the shirt—the brassiere and, myself quickly noticing these almost fondly, our dwindling supplies in such items, the mended panties. Then only the unleashed ravenousness. Her lips, her hair, beneath her arms, very slowly all around her breasts, her nipples; everywhere; aware as from a distance of a long low keening beginning to come from her. How good she tasted! First the scent of fresh apples, then as arousal grew, the cunt smell, to me so identical to the smell of the sea, not just between her legs (the roseate lips, the astonishing wetness flowing from her, pubic hair, thighs all dampened), but from her mouth, from everywhere, the modulation from the one scent to the other wild and dizzying. The unwithheld availability of that body still a kind of disbelief, the compulsive, selfish single purpose of a starved man. Welcomed between her thighs, her hands clawing, pressing my head into her, the long continuing moans merging like counterpoint with the rhythm of the sea touching the rocks, where I felt I might never have stopped my rituals of gluttony had those hands not pulled me away almost violently; onto her, into her, the long deep everlasting plunging to another medley of now fiercer sounds until screams broke against the cave walls, fell out over an unhearing sea.

In her arms I wept, herself stroking my hair, my face. Tears of release from terrible burdens, impossible loneliness.

 *  *  * 

Which of the two of us it was that first spoke that simple truth, and how much later, I do not know. In the long, now unhurrying times before it, we had done many things with each other; made love over and again until at last the raptness of satiation arrived. Perhaps it was said simultaneously (as two conspirators with the absolutely identical purpose will instinctively arrive at the identical instant at the identical conclusion). At least it was known simultaneously. As a fact nonnegotiable. If there was risk—and I don’t believe either of us felt at first that there was that much, both of us confident of our own joint ingenuity to be able to hide it—the risk was one of those that come along in life that simply have to be accepted. This not all that difficult, a ship’s captain being accustomed to these, a temper of the will toward the taking of risks; she, I knew long since, possessed of this same quality.

And so it was, not just that we first made love, but that we knew at once that we would continue to do so. Even falling back, in extremis, on the possibility that if the others found out they would not only accept it, but understand it; less sure of this conclusion than of the other, that we could not in any case, whether understanding or something very different were to be forthcoming from them, go on without having each other.

 *  *  * 

It was around then that Lieutenant (jg) Rollins, our ASWO, disappeared. This time it was as though everything in the settlement came to an abrupt halt. Again we made a meticulous search of the island, all hands participating. Again nothing turned up. This time we thought hard and long, all of us. A distinct sense of alertness began to take hold of the settlement. Gathered in my cabin: Girard, the doc, the Jesuit, Selmon, Thurlow. Myself remembering a talk with her on a night by the lifeline in the Mediterranean: how she had given up ballet on realizing that she would never go to the absolute top; gone into the Navy both to be among the first women to go to sea and to escape (she had exceptional physical beauty) hassling about marriage, which, for a reason she had not disclosed, she wished never to have.

Girard: “I hadn’t noticed a thing. I think she’d been gone a couple days when we checked her cottage. She wasn’t seeing men—her period.”

Captain: “Father, I have to ask this. Rollins was a Catholic. Was she . . .”

The Jesuit anticipated the question. “Negative, sir. As to whether she had a problem dealing with the situation, I’d say the answer was a categorical no. I may be out of line both with my Maker and everyone else here but I think I’d better say it: I’d say she rather enjoyed it.”

A kind of mild surprise not at this experience of a given woman but at the articulation of it, especially from that source.

Captain: “Doc?”

Doc: “Rollins? Nobody healthier, Skipper. Took quite a long swim every day as everyone knows. Probably the best swimmer we have.”

Captain: “Drowning possible? Overextending?”

Doc: “Outside chance. Still, even very good swimmers . . .”

Captain: “Anything to add, Mr. Selmon?”

Selmon: “Nothing much, sir. I think most of us felt she was rather introspective.” He gave a small laugh. “Not that that’s necessarily a negative quality. I’m introspective myself. But I did see her now and then taking those long walks of hers up along the cliffs. All alone.”

I looked once more around that circle of officers. We had got exactly nowhere. Yet something seemed to hang in the air that I could not put my finger on.

“That’s all for now. Oh, Miss Girard.”

“Sir?”

“For a starter, from now on I want you to have someone check every one of the women’s cottages every day, and report to me that it’s been done.”

“I’ll check them myself,” she said, a grimness in her tone.

I was about to break it up when Thurlow spoke. “I agree with Mr. Selmon about the introspection part. I think something was bothering her. What, I don’t have a clue.”

For some reason I gave the navigator an extra look. Something . . . maybe it was only that he was one of her lovers.

T
wo calm conspirators we had become and in almost ruthless planning—her seeming more ruthless as to it than myself—set about weaving our cocoon of deception. We would meet at this same place once a week; we dared not risk more. At a time to be varied. Finding our way there separately. Returning separately, my waiting a half hour by my watch after she had gone, taking a different route. It was a great conspiracy. We flirted with immeasurable risk. There was no helping it. Once, afterward, my head lying in her lap, I voiced mildly a concern of discovery.

“If they find out?” I said. .

“Let them. We’ll simply tell them we decided to have what they have.”

“I’m not sure that explanation will go over very big. There’s a difference. One on one, I believe it’s called.”

“Don’t worry,” she dismissed that. “Nothing’s going to happen.” She seemed to be consoling, reassuring me, at the same time a tone of warning—not for myself, but for absent others—in her voice. “If it does, just let me handle it. If they make a problem of it, I’ll tell them they can’t have it anymore. I and the women: we’ll simply shut everything down. I promise you results.”

I burst out laughing.

“What in the world are you laughing at, Captain?” We now used these forms of address mockingly.

“You, Lieutenant. You know, I believe you would.”

She seemed astonished. “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all. Of course I would. I don’t like being messed with. Except by yourself. But why are we wasting all this time talking and fancifying when we should be fucking?”

She somehow made the words both comical and highly incitatory, and used them, not often, but as she pleased. The undiluted girlishness—the impudent, brazen womanness. Perhaps on my part something, too, of an amused delight in the unexpectedness of all this after our countless hours together in our naval relationship, where if I had heard one of those words in that other incarnation I so constantly dealt with, intimations in the slightest of such a great hidden female desire resident in her, I would probably have fainted dead away in shock; her also, I think, in that so precise knowingness which never missed a beat, entirely aware of all this in me; perhaps in part a consequent delight of her own in displaying these qualities. Above all, the lightness some secret wisdom of hers, the magic key, as if a somber undertaking was the last thing in the world lovemaking should be, that the fatal flaw of so much of it. Literally the first time in my life for this kind of prolonged physical relationship; I who had had no love save that of the sea; who had never given myself in this way to a woman: feeling myself launched now on some undiscovered and sweetest of all oceans, endless in the diversity of its delights, proceeding over ever-changing horizons, seeming to take possession of one’s heart, mind and soul, all one was; shuddering in a kind of terror-struckness that I might have gone through life never knowing this. Perhaps I was learning but the most banal things, nonetheless to myself all-astonishing. Most of all the mysterious transforming power of good lovemaking as to every part of one’s life: One sees the clouds in the sky differently, the very stars of night take on a new aspect. To be sure, a slavery of a kind, as I was well aware: judging myself quite independent as men go, now much dependent on her, reaching a point that I could not have imagined life without the times in the cave. Yet feeling it to be a fair exchange: lovemaking’s slave recipient of lovemaking’s gift available nowhere else; above all, a peace of a kind never known to me. Curious that peace’s wellspring should be the most abandoned giving of our bodies to each other; physical sensations so intense that I had not known even of their existence; once found in a given woman, I could readily understand why men killed for them. Learning, too, why women are not interchangeable, why if it is to be of the highest, it is to be of but one, the pure luck in finding her scary. The secret woman I had now discovered—the lightheadedness, the marvelous tenderness—and altogether the gloriously, avariciously wanton female . . . in her, none of this, I came to see, the least in conflict with that other shrewd, immensely proper, Navy-professional, rather fortressed woman I had known so long. Perhaps that is woman’s ultimate specialness: to be both, one to the world, the other, although also to him, not so much to a man as to herself alone.

“How can one so young know so much?”

“Just a born gift, I suppose,” she said airily. “Since I haven’t done it all that much. Not with that many men. And not as many
times
with any as this. With you.”

“How many?”

“How dare you ask such a thing. Actually . . .” Thinking. “One, two, three . . .” Thinking back. “Well, kind of three and a half. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Is that all?”

“All. Altogether, Captain. Do you want the details?” Then pertly, insistently, “How many for you?”

“You’d be surprised. I’ve been most of my life at sea. As you know—ships.”

“Yes, I know all about ships. What a con man you are. And I also know about ports.”

“Not for me. Very, very little. I was too much of a coward.”

“How
many?”
Very insistently. “You asked me and I told you. Fair’s fair. I won’t let you touch me there anymore unless you tell me. I won’t let you put your cock in me ever again unless you tell me. At once. You like my saying those things?”

“Approximately six,” I said.

“I’m certain you’re lying. If not . . . Only six! For a man of your age.”

“I’m aware of that great disparity. I very much regret that I’m not twenty years younger and that I have not had sixty women.”

“I suppose I have to work with what I have. I can’t really say why I’m so good at it,” she said blithely. “There is a saying you haven’t really fucked until you’ve done it with a North Carolina girl.”

“A saying I imagine invented by a North Carolina girl.”

“I have a saying of my own. Would you like to hear it? I don’t feel I’ve been fucked properly unless I’ve been sucked first.”

“In that case, as you were . . .”

We had long times in the cave. Sometimes after our lovemaking taking a nap, falling asleep with the scent of her hair against my face, waking to find her alongside, some priceless surprise gift, granting myself the luxury of studying her while she slept, as if to imprint her in me, almost as though should anything ever take her away I would have her remembered flesh; gazing on that exquisitely made body, its clean radiance heightened by lovemaking, its young freshness, slender and cool, now in sleep all languorous, innocent; incredulous that it should be there all accessible to me, her very skin luminous and gleaming, scented with itself; a great tide of desire returning, before bringing her awake by the gentlest touch, whatever might occur, lips brushing arising nipples, hand placed flat on her pubic hair—and then we were beginning all over again.

Never would I have imagined the intense sensuality that outward manner of her concealed; how little we know of others, especially, I would think, those of us who think we know so much. A cognate voracity, these rituals, anarchic, a species of lascivious adoration on both our parts, an elegance in her eroticism. A temper for exploration, finding corresponding preferences. For herself, the long and tantalizing devotion there until I felt I might go through the roof of the cave before came the engulfing, the explosion, the harvest of white entering her mouth, by no means finished, the greedy continuing. I was put in mind of a quite elegant cat. For my part, never so ravenous as when knelt between those white thighs with that wondrous adornment, commencing that prolonged homage, appropriation, that intemperance, tasting her inner thighs all dampish, that proximate and softest of all women’s flesh where wet stray hairs now clung, face buried exultantly in the fullness of her pubic hair, conscious throughout of the muted sounds, the soft writhing, of intense felt pleasure, not until the wetness flowed out in such sweet-tasting offertory actually letting my tongue first touch that place, that cunt, I had come to worship, bringing a spasm, a sound animallike from her, accompanied always by that gesture of her urging hands on my head, the prodigal liquescence with its sea smell filling my mouth, smearing my face, a substance so wonderful I would bring it to her mouth that she might know what it was that so drove me wild, my moistened fingers, having momentarily entered her for that purpose, now sucked avidly by her. I could never have enough of it, not leaving off until herself, able to stand no more, pulled me away for that other urgent conjunction, those complementary vibrations, that high paroxysm. Collapsing afterward into each other’s arms, our bodies endewed with all the various wetnesses of us both, with sweat, with her cunt, with the come from myself strewn like white filigree across her belly, over her face, from another time, perhaps an hour, a half hour before. Our bodies sticking against each other’s, the wonderful and pungent, long-lost smells of sex permeating the cave.

Always afterward she held to me as tightly as it seemed one could, clutching at me, a ferocity of clinging, sometimes drawing slivers of blood; then, more softly, all quietened, nestling into me like a child or some young animal seeking refuge, myself holding her close, close as could be, as if to furnish all the shelter and reassurance she might ever need from whatever it was she might fear. Fear of loneliness surely, fear of uncertain years ahead on this distant shore, fear that if we let go of each, the other might somehow slip away; for all of these I, too, felt for myself, holding all that warmth of her, all loneliness, all restiveness, all despair, ceasing as I did.

All the while we had been unfolding to each other and it was at times like this I began to realize not just physically; some species of emotion I had never known: an overwhelming compulsion toward all of her; a tenderness in which lust came to be alloyed with a feeling almost spiritual of tremendous protectiveness toward her; a determination to see that no pain, no hurt should reach her. I thought then how much I liked her as a person; her mind as free of sophistry as a mind could be, garnished with a fine mischievousness; capable of cunning but not of meanness; perhaps overimpatient with rank stupidity, yet as caring a person as I had known through all our travails, sailors calmed by her very presence; her tough courageous grace; myself overtaken with that old and great apotheosis that truth and beauty were somehow indivisible, one; suddenly aware that I had never been as happy as I was at that moment. Awakening her then in some chosen way to make love again. This time . . . Only the sounds of the sea reaching us from outside the cave; our lovemaking conducted to the most widely varying accompaniments; sometimes the lowest of murmurings; sometimes, the sea making up, a wild crashing of the waves on the rocks below the ledge. Always followed, too, that lightness she had, perhaps to slide off from the intensity of what we had just done, a lightness for me as well as for herself.

“My Jesus. What did we ever do before this. I’m like an animal in heat. But every time.”

“A very elevated sexual quotient. You may require several men. Perhaps you should join the Arrangement.”

“I regret that my elevated position forbids that.”

“Your position is not very elevated right now.”

And like a young girl talking of lollipops: “What a nice way to be awakened. Are you permitted to keep a secret?”

“Anything said in this cave.”

“That time—through the dark and the cold—the women. Starting at Bombay . . . down through the Sunda Sea. Stopped just like that, when we came out of it into the Indian Ocean, into the sunlight . . .”

“Well, I’ll be damned. I once suspected. Thought I was a damned fool. All of the women?”

“All of them. I don’t believe a single one of us had ever done it before.”

“Yourself, too, then?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Meyer, Bixby, Garber . . .”

“All. Every one.” She waited a moment, a faintly poignant tone: “It was a comfort. Pulled us through.”

“I’m very glad of it,” I said.

“It wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t this.”

 *  *  * 

The secret life established, back in the settlement our relationship was as it had always been. As in nothing else one has great faith, sometimes excessively so, in one’s ability to dissimulate in these matters; even so, I felt that no other knew. We had one scare. Once Silva’s fishing detail approached more northerly than I had ever known it to do, still a couple of miles away across the water, a dot resting on the ocean; we retreated into our cave. Soon the whaleboat came about, started southerly again. We did not again see it make any visible incursion that far. I never believed that she believed the reassurance she had expressed, that it would go anything like that easy for us if discovered. One of our conversations—she had given that rather self-mocking laugh she had—making mention of the Jesuit.

“Would you believe it? He had the nerve to suggest to me his unhappiness that I was not participating in the arrangement. Even made a comment about my having such a healthy young body.”

I took a look along her. “He was right about that.”

“If I hadn’t been taught differently about those people when I was a child I’d have told him I would join the Arrangement when he did.”

“I’ll explain to him that it is not entirely going to waste.”

She was more somber. “I’ll be honest. If the women found out . . .” She took a deep breath. “They’d have such a case against me . . . well, I simply have no idea where I’d stand with them any longer.”

I could see now real concern—deep, true concern. For myself I refused to think about it. One takes the risk: then to worry about it, one should never have taken it in the first place.

Great sex. Yes, just that, and that enough. And equally it came to be, the simple holding quite as good as anything else, perhaps the best part of all. Saying nothing for long times. Then a curiosity each of the other, as to details, particulars in the other’s life, breaking quietly through; her head in the curve of my shoulder.

“What would you have done if it had never happened. And you’d never read Conrad?”