The End of the Night

At the moment he was incapable of looking at me, and I knew I could not endure it if he were to look at me. I ran to the chair, took my damp swimming trunks that hung from the back of it, and yanked them on.

“Don’t leave me now, darling!” she called, projecting with full dramatic volume and timbre. “Don’t leave me like this, lover!” And, crouched there on the rumpled bed, her silvery hair in wild disarray, her face venomous, she began to scream with laughter.

As I tried to go by him he straightened up, eyes streaming, and reached a heavy arm toward me. I do not know what he was trying to do or express. In pure panic I swung and hit him, heavily, blindly, I know not where, and heard him fall behind me as I went through the door. Rosalinda was standing at the far end of the corridor, her eyes huge, brown fists pressed to her belly. As I raced by her I saw her cross herself.

There was no place in the world I could go. And I could never go fast enough to run away from memory. In my touching innocence I thought I was the owner of the world’s most vivid and most distressing memory. The world is seldom charitable to fools.

I hesitated, then went out through the front of the house, across the the terrace and down the steps to the beach. The tide was almost high, and there was a medium sea rolling in. I lay on the platform. The sea slid under me and smashed the rocks and threw spray high. I rolled over onto my back and the spray fell onto my face. On my lips it tasted as salty as tears. For a long time I thought I was going to be sick. But the feeling finally went away.

I was eye to eye with a contradiction, one many men have faced. If my love was capable of doing what she had done, then I had never known her at all. If I did not know her at all, then our love had been an indelicate farce. Are not all young men incurably romantic? The world cures the uncurable, however. And so in a lonely way, wrapped in the roar of the sea, I celebrated the death of love, or of illusion. Because I still loved the imaginary woman who could not have used me to strike such a deadly blow at the heart of her husband. But she had never existed.

This, I told myself, was no way for a sophisticate to behave. I ordered myself to put it all into proper perspective. A fading actress had dared play an ingénue role because her audience, her naïve intrigant, had been so very uncritical. I had been handy and healthy when she had desired fun and games. I counted her flaws: the almost invisible crescent scars at her temples from the cosmetic operation that had tautened the skin of her face into a semblance of youth; the beautiful teeth — expensively capped; the hair roots that were causing her much less trouble now that they were growing out gray; the crenelations of the flesh on the insides of her thighs; the deflated sag of her small breasts when she forgot to keep her shoulders well back; the ugly toes, crumpled by years of shoes too small; the peasant thickness and stubbiness of her hands and feet; the frank and blatant indelicacy with which she referred to all matters physiological.

But even her flaws were unbearably precious.

I knew exactly what a true sophisticate would do, and by God, I would do it. I would stay as inconspicuous as possible until they finished their battling and John Pinelli went back to the city. Their fights in the car had ended quickly. Her little hobbies couldn’t actually mean very much to him. So I would stick around and we’d continue the same pleasant routine.

Everything, I told myself, would be exactly as before. And I wondered why I started to feel sick again. She would sparkle for me, and we would divert each other with all our little games and devices and love words and private jokes. There would be but one small difference. This time I would know it didn’t really mean anything — to either of us. I hung my head over the edge of the sun platform and vomited into the sudsy green sea.

When it was over, I wondered how long I had been there. A long time. At least two hours. Possibly more. I squinted at the sun and estimated that it was six of its own diameters above the edge of the sea.

I heard a faint sound over the roaring of the waves. I looked up. A man stood on the cantilevered steps, fifteen feet above the plaform, calling my name. I stared up at him, raising my eyebrows, pointing at myself. He made that strange Mexican beckoning gesture which looks as if they are waving you away rather than summoning you. He stood just beyond the reach of the spray.