To our delight, the interior was cooled by machinery. I sank into a wicker chair even while Cave was pumping my hand. Iris laughed, “Leave him alone, John. He’s smothered by the heat.”
“No hat,” said Cave solemnly after the first greeting which, in my relief, I’d not heard. “You’ll get sunstroke.”
Paul was now in charge. The heat which had enervated both Stokharin and me filled him with manic energy, like one of those reptiles which absorb vitality from the sun.
“What a great little place, John! Had no idea there were all the comforts of home down here, none at all. Don’t suppose you go out much?”
Cave, unlike Iris, was not tanned though he had, for him, a good color, a ruddiness of tone unlike his usual sallowness. “I don’t get too much sun,” he admitted. “We go fishing sometimes, early in the morning. Most of the time I just hang around the house and look at the letters, and read some.”
I noticed on the table beside me an enormous pile of travel magazines, tourist folders and atlases: this had obviously been Cave’s reading. I anticipated trouble.
Paul prowled restlessly about the modern living room with its shuttered sealed windows. Stokharin and I, like fish back in their own element after a brief excursion on land, gasped softly in our chairs while Iris told us of the keys, of their fishing trips. She was at her best here as she had been that other time in Spokane ... being out of doors, in Cave’s exclusive company, brought her to life in a way the exciting busyness of New York did not. In New York she seemed like an object through which an electric current passed; here on this island, in the sun’s glare, she had unfolded, petal after petal until the secret interior seemed almost exposed. I was conscious of her as a lovely woman and, without warning, I experienced desire: that sharp rare longing which, in me, can reach no climax. Always before she had been a friend, a companion whose company I had jealously valued: her attention alone had been enough to satisfy me, but on this day I saw her as a man entire might and I plummeted into despair while talking of Plato.
“The Symposium was the model, yes. There are other ways of casting dialogues such as introducing the celebrated dead brought together for a chat in Limbo. I thought, though, that I should keep the talk to only two. Cave and myself ... Socrates and Alcibiades.” Alcibiades was precisely the wrong parallel but I left it uncorrected, noticing how delicately the hollow at the base of her throat quivered with life’s blood and although I attempted, as I often had before with bitter success, to think of her as so much mortal flesh, the body and its beauty only pulp and bone, only beautiful to a human eye ... hideous, no doubt, to the eye of a geometric progression ... that afternoon I was lost and I could not become, even for a moment, an abstract intelligence again: I saw the bone; I saw the dust, yet I saw her existing, despite her nature and her fate, triumphant in the present. I cursed the flaw in my own flesh and hated life.
“We liked it very much,” she said, not divining my mood, unaware of my sudden passion and its attendant despair.
“You don’t think it’s too strong, do you? All morality, not to mention the churches, will be aligned against us.”