"No man knoweth the sea until he hath ventured the western sea, the Pacific. The fat Spanish ships travel it, but I tell you the route they follow is a single thread stretched over a Sahara. I have sailed it too, a very little of it, above and below the Line, in a whaler, once, and I young with no wisdom in me but with open eyes—and I was, say, like an insect crossing the continent of Europe, but I'm a wise insect, sir—Mother of God, I know the meaning of horizons! Pacific nights—deep as any night of the soul, and will you be telling me of a deeper dark than that? Out there only the sea is truth, only the sea, and this is a part of the truth: there be many islands."
"Continents perhaps," said John Kenny, agreeing but somehow without enthusiasm, and Shawn sat back to study him, the blue eyes clouded windows closing away some of the lightning of inner storm.
"What's the Atlantic?—a gray mad stormy puddle. Sea of the Caribbees?—a small hot lagoon, green lumps of land like a lady's emerald necklace on a blue gown—oh, steady as she goes! I'll grant you her breast can heave and toss. If the wind's coming dark and fast down there in the Caribbees I'll strip canvas quick as any man and remember I was brought up religious, for men and ships are small things. But out there on the far side of the world, have I not seen an empty island open to the west, where the high rollers came down and down forever with all the blind leagues of the sea behind them, down and down as heavy and slow and sure as the years beating on a man's youth? Have I not seen Pacific moonrise where no land is, and the gray and silver piled higher than the North Star Polaris?"
Ben woke on Thursday before dawn, disoriented in time, noticing how the days and nights of being in love run together like those disquieted by simpler fevers. He recalled it was a Monday afternoon when he watched Artemis sail home, therefore a Monday evening when he went to bed undeniably drunk, therefore a gray Tuesday morning when Mr. Hibbs, red-eyed and taciturn, gave him and Reuben an assignment of one hundred and twenty lines of the Tristia of Ovid, to be absorbed by Wednesday afternoon, plus (as atonement for Tuesday morning's inattention and general sinfulness) a demand for five copies per boy, in a fair firm hand with no nonsense, no margin of error, of the entire conjugation of the verb [Greek: kephalalgeô], which means to have a headache. So Tuesday and Wednesday coalesced to one inky-dark billow of time, and now before dawn the young apple tree out there that Reuben had spoken of was stirring in a new pale softness. As Ben watched, the sky awoke beyond Dorchester Neck, and the truth of full bloom was confirmed. He thought: I'll see her today.
She was lying touched by the pallor of the morning as he knelt at the window, a breeze on his shoulders mild as a woman's fingers. She was sleeping—in a garden maybe, or under that same apple tree's white foam, her gold-brown hair tumbled over the grass, a curl of it on her forehead above the flush of damask rose. The blue vague garment betrayed her in sleep—no, rather his own daring hand drew it down, leaving bare one breast and the red flower of it. From that, the fantasy moved with reluctance, sluggishly, oppressed by the sense of a thing contrived: sweet yet false. Nevertheless for a moment she shone quite naked, turning in her sleep away from him, a swell of flesh pliant under his hand and hiding the dark desired triangle, the other flower of red. But then she was no longer Faith; she was any woman, with a face unknown.
Reuben stirred and yawned. "Behold the nympholept! Benjamin, what of the night?"
"It a'n't night, Muttonhead."
"Do you attempt to assert that the difference between night and dawn can be detected by the dull besotted perception of the peasantry?"
"I love you too," said Ben.