Perfect Freedom, page 54
“Why do you insist he’s rich?” the clerk demanded, gazing off after his departed guest. “If you’d seen him arrive yesterday, you wouldn’t have thought so. He was carrying his shoes in his hands, like a peasant. I almost asked him to pay in advance.”
“I understand the bus broke down again,” the big man said. His name was Ramiriz and he was the chief of police.
“Yes, but that’s no reason to walk seven kilometers in the afternoon sun. The rich never walk. He must be mad.”
“He is handsome,” Ramiriz mused.
“Handsome? Ai!” the clerk protested. “I didn’t know a man could be so handsome. What success he must have with the women!”
As he considered this, the police chief hoisted himself around so that he was leaning sideways against the desk and put one hand on his massive hip. He looked out at the tattered palm trees and the hard-packed dust of the square and grunted. “Yes, life is apparently lively where he is,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder why he comes here.”
Some half an hour later, the subject of this conversation was stretched out on the beach indicated by the hotel clerk. Prepared for something lurid, he found only a pretty, sheltered stretch of sand on the seaward side of the peninsula, populated by dark, silent children and a few middle-aged, adequately covered people whose features marked them as foreigners but who were all burned a native shade of brown. Lance felt pale and conspicuous. He lay on the sand and felt the sun sting into him. Now, if he could just keep his mind from wandering. The immediate present was the thing to think about. New surroundings must bring new thoughts. Otherwise, what would be the point of being here? Was it enough that in this remote corner of Central America he could hope that nobody knew who he was? After the last few weeks, it was a great deal to hope for.
Yesterday, passing over the crest of the coastal hills, he had been quite impressed by the panorama spread before him: the narrow plain confined between sea and hills, the ridged peninsula that flung a protective arm around the quiet bay, the pure white curve of the beach fringed with nodding palms. Even the village of tiled roofs huddled at the head of the bay had looked inviting from a distance.
“Why don’t you go to Puerto Veragua?” Andy had suggested the other day—Andy who had managed everything, without whom he could never have left New York and found some measure of forgetfulness in traveling. “D. H. Lawrence or somebody once lived there. It’d give you something to do while I’m sweating through these contracts.”
Because Lance was afraid of being a burden to his friend, who, after all, had work to do in the capital and couldn’t play nursemaid indefinitely, he had acted on the suggestion.
His thoughts hung in his mind limply, blending into each other in the merciless heat of the sun. He rolled over onto his stomach and couched his head in his arms. If only he could get rid of the feeling of guilt that seemed to have entered into his skin, making his body tight and sensitive. He might eventually come to terms with the loneliness and the sense of irreparable loss, but the guilt would gnaw on relentlessly—guilt now for being stretched out luxuriously in the sun, guilt for not knowing anything better to do, guilt for having run away.
The four years since the end of the war—all he could consider his adult life—was a record of failure. There was no running away from that: a wrecked marriage, the brilliant beginning of a career he had voluntarily abandoned, and now, finally, the disaster that had brought him here. He was oppressed by a sense of some obstacle in himself, some obstacle that hid him from himself. Everything he did seemed to turn him into something he wasn’t.
He jumped slightly when he heard a voice close to him say, “Aren’t you an American?”
He turned over and sat up, shielding his eyes from the sun with one hand. Squinting, he saw a trimly built middle-aged woman standing beside him. Her hair was gray and smartly arranged. A bold attempt had been made to compensate for age with cosmetics. A wide expanse of sagging, heavily tanned flesh separated the two pieces of her bathing suit. Her features were sharp and firm. As he looked up she smiled and cocked her head slightly on one side in a way that was utterly charming—intimate, coquettish.
“Yes, I am,” Lance said, warming to her with his quick friendliness, and almost simultaneously checking himself. He didn’t want to get involved with people, especially Americans.
“I thought so.” Her voice was soft but persistent. As she went on, she seemed to install herself without changing her position. “I noticed you when you walked down the beach. Something about the way you moved reminded me a little of Jack Barrymore. He was a dear friend of mine when I lived in Hollywood. Before the war, of course. I’m Flip Rawls. I usually know everybody who comes here. I’ve made a sort of hobby of Puerto Veragua.” Lance had risen and now he offered the woman a sandy hand.
“My name is Lance Vanderholden,” he said, slurring over it and watching her closely. She seemed to take it in her stride. She enclosed his hand in both of hers and looked up at him with her shyly childlike, irresistibly winning smile.
“How nice to meet you. Of course, I should’ve known.”
Lance’s hopes fled. The name demanded obeisance. If his family wasn’t the richest in America, it was certainly one of the richest, and this detail was insignificant in view of its age and prestige. One could follow the Vanderholdens back through generations, active, prolific, unexpectedly Roman Catholic, across an ocean to an exotic burst of minor titles, back to where history became obscure. Lance slowly brushed sand off his behind, wondering how much she knew, or rather, how much she thought she knew. Her smile didn’t change but her manner somehow sharpened and her voice became more assertive.
“Of course, I know all your family. The Junius Vanderholdens. Let me think. Lance. That’s right, you must be Marcus.”
“I was until I decided it didn’t sound like me. Sort of Roman and imperial. I prefer Lance.”
“Your Uncle Somers was a true friend of mine. He was a great friend of the Roosevelts. We had wonderful times together. Albany. The Governor’s Mansion. Franklin was governor then. I remember there was that English writer—not Huxley. I’ve never liked Huxley. He behaved so ridiculously because I wouldn’t receive him when I was living in London … What was I telling you?”
“About the other English writer,” Lance prompted hastily, scarcely daring to hope that his family had been so quickly bypassed. He smiled encouragingly.
“What lovely teeth you have. So important.” Mrs. Rawls leaned forward slightly as if to get a better look at them and then went on. “Yes, he wrote some terribly clever books. I don’t know what ever became of him. I’m sure you’d know him. I’m so terribly out of things down here. My friends don’t understand it—they think I should go back to London or Paris or New York, where my life has always been, you know. But it isn’t time yet. A place has a cycle in one’s life, don’t you think? You mustn’t break it. I’ll know when the time comes.” She pronounced the last with such conviction that even she seemed startled. She glanced around vaguely and then motioned graciously to the sand. “Sit down, Mr. Vanderholden, sit down. I didn’t mean to interrupt your sunbath. Tell me what brought you to Puerto Veragua.” Lance sat as he was told, like a guest in her drawing room. She remained standing.
“Oh, well …” he began with a shrug.
“It’s a fascinating place,” Flip Rawls continued, as if he had answered her question satisfactorily. “You’ll love it. Of course, you really have to become part of the native life. But that’s true anywhere, don’t you think? You must become part of the native life. Have you been in the water?”
“No, I haven’t. It looks—”
“It’s marvelous. It’s the only place in the world I can really swim. The Mediterranean doesn’t compare to it. You can stay in for hours. Do you like to swim?”
“Yes. Very much. I’m—”
“I thought so. You’ve got a swimmer’s build. Good heavens, your body is stunning. It’s so important—a good body. That’s one thing I don’t like about the States. They don’t pay enough attention to the body.” She regarded his with frank appreciation. It had been admired by others, but since he had made no effort over it, it seemed as alien to him as the rest of his discarded heritage. He would just as soon have been a hunchbacked dwarf.
There was an instant’s silence and then she lifted her hand to her hair, drawing her own body up, and chuckled youthfully. “Isn’t it dreadful we all have to get old? Of course, you wouldn’t know about that. Still—the Junius Vanderholdens. How old are you? Twenty-six or -seven?”
“Almost twenty-eight,” he put in, but she scarcely skipped a beat in her conversational flow.
“It’s never too soon to start taking care. I really think the Starnovsky method is the solution. Do you know it? I’ve made a study of it. Fascinating. I’ll have to teach you. Why don’t you have lunch with me? There’s nobody there so it won’t be very exciting but I find it’s such a relief to be alone for a change, don’t you? For me, it’s a real need—a spiritual need. Of course, I’ve had hordes of people in the house for months and more coming next week. I suppose I shouldn’t let them but I’ve never known how to refuse. I’ve always given so much of myself. Join me when you’ve had your swim. I’m over there at that blue cabana. This is really my working time. I’m doing a book on China and one simply must stick to a schedule. You’ll find that yourself. There’s no hurry. I don’t lunch till three.” She smiled her shy little smile and bowed graciously and was off down the beach before Lance could struggle to his feet.
He watched her until she was at a safe distance and then flopped back on the sand, stretched out full length, and laughed—really laughed, fully and satisfyingly, for the first time in weeks. It came from deep in his throat, thick and rich, so that one could almost hear in it the swelling of his neck muscles.
“You crazy lady,” he muttered. Then he realized he’d let himself in for a lunch party and the laughter died in him. He didn’t want to see people, especially here, especially someone who knew his family. All he wanted was a few days alone, a few days to get used to the idea of being alone again; then he would go back. It did no good to dwell on the fact that he had nothing to go back to.
The sun fell on him like some great weight. He felt as if his body were being pressed into the sand with the force of it. It drained him of all sense of identity, whoever he was. He wished he could lie here forever.
When he joined Flip Rawls, he found her sitting at a table under a blue tent, like a general conducting a desert campaign, confronted by a mass of untidy manuscript. She greeted him with disjointed delight.
“Come in. I’m so glad you could come. Oh—how silly of me. I get so absorbed I forget where I am. Carried right out of myself. Just let me finish this paragraph. The publishers have been after me to do this book for years and I’ve finally found time. It’s fascinating material. I’m just whipping it into shape.” She bent over her dog-eared papers once more, scratching at them distractedly with a pencil.
Lance stood in front of her, his legs spread and his toes dug into the hot sand and his arms folded across his chest, watching, feeling that it was all unreal—himself, his being here, this woman writing a book about China on a tropical beach, everything. After a few minutes, she put down her pencil and looked up at him as happily as a child being released from lessons.
“There. Now I think it’s time for a drink.” She began to gather up her things, handing odds and ends to Lance, retrieving them, replacing them with others.
Finally everything was packed up and she led him to the road, where a casually dressed young Indian was waiting beside a large, aging Buick. Dark, almost naked children materialized around her and she stopped, opened her bag, searched it elaborately with one eye on the watchful children, deliberately creating suspense, and then handed around coins with lingering solicitous attention to each recipient.
The great lady succoring her poor, Lance thought. An instant antagonism toward Mrs. Rawls tightened his muscles.
As he was following her reluctantly into the car, he hesitated, suddenly aware of his costume. Acting on the clerk’s words, he had changed into his brief swimming trunks at the hotel and had nothing else with him.
“Damn,” he exclaimed, not quite convincingly, for he was thinking now of escaping from her. “I haven’t got anything to wear.”
“Oh, get in, get in. It doesn’t matter in the least. I’ll give you something. Or you can go naked if you like. In Africa I got so used to seeing people wander around with nothing on that I don’t even notice it anymore. Nudism is so healthy, don’t you think? Except that most people are sinfully ugly. I once spent a weekend in a nudist colony in Germany but that was very different. Beautiful people. Beautiful. Like gods. All Nazis, I suppose, but they couldn’t help that. It gave me a completely new feeling about the human race.”
They drove up a winding road on the side of the Hill while Flip Rawls chatted on about China, India, Capri, with passing references to Noel Coward, Lady Mendl, Somerset Maugham, and a great many others whose names she couldn’t remember. It sounded to Lance terribly outmoded and prewar. Suddenly his loneliness became a new and piercing agony. As tears burned behind his eyes, he struggled to whip his attention back to the smooth flow of Flip Rawls’s self-congratulatory reminiscences.
In a few minutes they drew up in front of a blue wooden-door set in a mud-colored wall.
“Here we are,” she said complacently. “It’s a funny sort of house but I think it’s rather exciting. I designed it myself and practically had to build it, too. It cost a perfect fortune but I don’t regret a penny. That big architectural magazine—Architectural Something-or-Other—you know, it’s absolutely tops—they sent people down to take pictures of it. They said it was the finest example of tropical building they’d ever seen.”
On the other side of the blue door, they descended through a series of terraces of orange trees and great cacti and strange tropical plants. At every turn of the path there were vistas of sea with blue hills beyond, framed in fantastic patterns of myrtle and oleander and towering century plants. The air was heavy with the hot scent of flowers and herbs.
“This is the guest house,” Flip Rawls explained as they came upon a low pavilion around a bend in the path. “Use this first room. You’ll find plenty to wear—sarongs, fishermen’s things from St. Tropez, heaven knows what all. I really must go over these things someday. Some of them are priceless.” She flung open closets and drawers overflowing with brightly colored fabrics. “When you’re ready just follow this path down as far as it will take you. I’ll have a drink ready for you.”
Alone, Lance was tempted to look through the exotic clothes surrounding him but couldn’t dispel his mood, and kicking off his wet trunks, he snatched up the first thing that came to hand, a blue sarong shot with silver threads, and wrapped it awkwardly around himself.
He found his hostess mixing drinks on a long, curving, covered terrace that resembled the promenade deck of an ocean liner, an effect heightened by its being built on the edge of a sheer drop to the sea: all that was visible from its parapet was a limitless expanse of sky and water. It was strewn with low tables and overstuffed bamboo chaises longues.
“Perfect,” she announced, surveying him as she handed him a drink with the winning little tilt of her head. “You picked just the right one. I can see you have an eye for color. You must keep it. Here, I’ll show you how to wrap it.”
Before Lance could explain that he had nothing on under it, she had whipped it off and given it a vigorous shake. He had no time to react, however, for her hands were deftly adjusting the fabric around his waist, like a mother dressing her child, and for a moment he felt himself enveloped in a disarming human warmth.
“There. That makes all the difference,” she said, standing back from him and giving no sign that she had been aware of his nakedness. “You don’t want it all bunchy in the middle.”
They had several drinks and a meal of exotic dishes accompanied by appropriate French wines.
“How long are you staying in Puerto Veragua, Mr. Vanderholden?” she asked over coffee.
“Oh, just a day or two. I’ve—”
“Why so quick? You should stay. I’ll tell you what. You take the guest house for as long as you want it. I have some charming boys coming next week but I can just as well put them here. I have lots of room. That way, you’ll have it all to yourself. I feel you’re depressed and nervous. Have you suffered some unhappiness recently? I can tell those things. India, you know. I lived there several years. Uncanny. What was I saying?”
Lance’s heavy lids had dropped slightly, and the corner of his wide mouth twitched.
“You were talking about my staying here,” he said quietly. “It’s very kind—”
“Nonsense. It would give me pleasure. Of course, you might prefer to rent but there simply isn’t anything here. You can’t stay in that awful hotel. It’s no place for a person who’s been through a bad time.”
“No, really. I haven’t planned—”
“Well, there’s literally nothing else here,” she said with odd vehemence. “Anyway, they demand outrageous rents. Your name and being an American and all. You might not mind but it’s the natives I’m thinking about. So bad for them. I’ve really discouraged any sort of real-estate development here. If there were houses for rent, it would turn into just another resort.”
Her insistence intrigued him. Perversely, it occurred to him that it might make sense to take a house for a week or two, just to be completely on his own for a bit. The sun and the swim this morning had steadied his nerves, but he had no intention of being Flip Rawls’s houseguest and did his best to make this politely clear to her.
“Well, if you should change your mind—somehow I think you should—just bring your things out whenever you like,” she said in parting.
When her chauffeur had deposited him back in the village, he put on some clothes and wandered around looking for something to send her. He gave all his attention to the quest, eager to find something that would please her.
