Sunburn Page 2

  I had supposed at the time, since Kyra and novel-writing commenced simultaneously, that there had been some link between the two. From his descriptions, I had imagined her to be interested in art and artists. This was not the case, and though there must have been some connection between this new vocation and his life with Kyra, I couldn’t fathom it.

  She was a well-built woman and knew it, and whatever power she exerted over Sean I suspected lay in his adoration for her body. She exposed herself subtly but often to inflame him with jealousy, and he exploded into rage every two weeks or so. Once, he’d even gone so far as to throw her out of the house, though on that occasion she hadn’t even made it out of the courtyard when he’d called her back, begging forgiveness. As far as I knew, she’d been faithful to him since she’d moved in, which had been about six months before our arrival.

  When we’d left Los Angeles we had no idea of what Spain was like, or who peopled this paradise called Tossa. Lea had wanted to get out of the ad game, and I had thought, what the hell, maybe I’d write a novel. I had given up fiction after three years of poverty had been neither as romantic nor as fulfilling as I’d hoped it would be. The magazine articles I wrote had provided a good living, but I, too, had felt it would be good to have a change. I’d become bored putting words together as if I were macramé-ing something. This I say in retrospect. I hadn’t really noticed that I wasn’t content until Lea had put the bug in my ear. Since we’d arrived, I hadn’t written a word.

  Berta was standing by the kitchen door when I came inside. She had looked to me, at first, like every other Spanish woman older than a girl, always dressed in a black dress and black stockings. But as I’d come to know her, I realized that she was not so much unattractive as lacking in glamour. Her features were strong and her smile really wonderful. She probably wasn’t much beyond forty-five, and before too long, we’d become friends in broken English and Spanish.

  Now she leaned with a weary smile against the doorpost. “Muy loco,” she said, motioning outside.

  I laughed. “Sí. You want the chicken?”

  She took it and walked into the kitchen. Sitting on a stool near the table, she pulled over a can and began plucking, talking quietly to herself all the while.

  After a few moments of watching her, I went upstairs to where Lea was napping. She lay curled in the bed, her back to me, the solitary sheet down around her waist. When I opened the door, she turned over, half-awake, and yawned.

  “What was that awful noise?”

  I sat on the bed. “Puberty rites, I suppose. Sean had to prove his manhood to Kyra.”

  “What? Again?”

  “Again.”

  “What time is it?”

  “About six, I guess. You sleep well?”

  “Must have.” She put her head on my leg, and curled herself around me. She had the slender and, I thought, beautiful body of an underdeveloped girl of twenty, and she was nearly twice that. Still, I felt that lately she’d come into bloom. She’d never been shy about her body with me, but now she exuded a certain pride in its lines. Before we’d left, she’d stood one day in front of the mirror and looked at herself, naked. “I’m so glad I’ve never had big breasts,” she’d said. Then, later, “I’m beginning to feel like a beautiful woman. Should a woman my age feel that way?”

  “Douglas,” she said, “I’m not that way with you, am I? I don’t test you all the time?”

  I leaned over and kissed her. “If you do, I don’t notice.”

  “Because I think it’s terrible. If only poor Sean would see . . .”

  “But he does it himself. Even if he doesn’t see it, it must come out in other places we don’t know about.”

  “I wish she’d leave.”

  “Now, now . . .”

  “Well, he is my brother.”

  “And he is no kid.” I lay down beside her and kissed her again. “Basta, OK?”

  “OK.”

  We began making love. Downstairs we heard a car pull up and honk, and we stopped.

  “Not more guests,” she said.

  “No fun eating alone, you know.”

  She put her head back on the pillow, and sighed.

  “Are you glad we came?”

  “Sort of.”

  “It’s weird, though, isn’t it? Sean and I used to be so close, and now he’s distant even while he’s being the warm host. I can’t seem to approach him, though I feel like if he’d let himself slow down for a minute, it would be all right. But he’s—I don’t know—almost crazy to keep going. But not in any direction. Like maybe he’s afraid that if he stops he’ll stop for good.”

  “Maybe he is.”

  “Do you want to go away?”

  “No. Things might change. It’s only been six weeks, you know.”

  “I know. But I wonder . . .” She stopped.

  “What?”

  “Well, if it’ll get to us. I mean all this free time, so much time to think about life. I wonder if it’s a good thing, if Sean’s just keeping so busy to keep himself from thinking about himself. And Kyra’s just . . .”

  “And they’re neither of them anything like us,” I said. “We’re here for a vacation, remember? It’s what we wanted—some time to think things over.”

  “I know.” She put her arms back around me. “I know, but sometimes I just get afraid.”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure. I just don’t want things to change with us. And sometimes I think too much, and think I feel different.”

  “About us?”

  “No, or a little. I don’t know. Just tell me you love me,” she said, and rolled on top of me. “I love you, you know. I really do.”

  Objectively, if we had wanted to get away from California, we couldn’t have picked a worse spot than the Costa Brava. I’d never seen one landscape so closely resemble another. There were the same pine trees, the same slightly red earth, the same hills, even the same sky, though of course you could see it more clearly than you could around L.A.

  Tossa itself sits in a little cove near the most blue water imaginable, but we didn’t stay in the city. Actually, very few people lived in the town proper, especially between September and May. Sean’s house was back up in the hills behind the town, and with its white front and red tiled roof, it could have been transplanted whole from one of the canyons or Bev erly Hills. However, it was supposedly rich in tradition, having been a Basque stronghold during the Civil War. A few bullet holes testified to the truth of this legend, but they could have as easily been made by an imaginative real estate man. In all probability, the Realtor’s (and Sean’s) claims were true. God knows, the house looked the part.

  Driving up from the town, we passed several acres of cork trees and stubby vineyards, interspersed randomly. When we had arrived in late summer, the colors had been predominantly yellow, green, and red, with the sky a deep and constant blue. The road itself wound like an Indian trail—dip, weave, and bend, hopelessly banked—as it worked its way back from the coast. Our first trip up to the house, by taxi, had been harrowing, but Sean and Kyra had kept us laughing as we drove. We’d since made it a point, however, to drive ourselves whenever we’d wanted to go back down. It wasn’t much better, but it was better.

  Off the road, we turned into a rutted road of red clay, which ran between some vines, into a cork forest, and into a clearing, all in less than half a mile. The house was surrounded by a rock wall, not a fence, which was overgrown in places with ivy, but was mostly bare. The overwhelming impression, especially after coming out of the cork trees, was of a dazzling whiteness—a Spanish, blinding, pure white which seemed to transform heat into color, so that you felt rather than saw the harsh whiteness of the place. It was the white from which visions arose.

  The house was a U-shaped, two-story structure, made thick-walled for coolness against the Spanish summers. The bottom of the U faced the gate of the courtyard and contained two doors—one to the kitchen, the other to the living room. Behind t
he kitchen stretched a hall and Sean’s office. Our rooms were upstairs over the kitchen and office, and directly over Sean’s bedroom, on the other leg of the U, were Berta’s rooms. Downstairs, the living and dining rooms abutted the kitchen, and there was a small library down the hall beyond Sean’s bedroom. Alongside the library, outside the house, seemingly carved there, was a stone walkway to the roof. One of the beams here protruded several feet and, according to the legend, had been the site of many hangings. From the roof, the town of Tossa was just visible over the trees.

  There was also a back courtyard, which was mostly a flower garden. An old toolshed stood out beyond the cleared section, and chickens pecked here and there, but it was a pleasant enough spot in the early evenings when the sun had just settled into the foothills behind us.

  One of the peculiarities of the house was the acoustic quirk between Sean’s bedroom and ours. At certain times during the afternoon—just at dusk, most often—we could hear Sean humming or muttering to himself. We could in fact listen to anything he might be doing, all unwittingly. Sometimes, in that hour before dinner, the quiet would become so intense that it was palpable. We would hear his door opening and Kyra’s voice, and then a long, almost nervous silence, broken by a sigh, or by a shutter being hastily drawn.

  Two

  Denise Hanford grew up in West Orange, New Jersey. She went to a Catholic girls’ high school until she was sixteen, when she became pregnant. She wanted to have the child, not because she loved either the father or the idea of having it, but because she simply couldn’t imagine the alternative. Her parents, however, were more realistic, as they had put it, and the pregnancy was aborted in the third month. Later, Denise told the few friends who had known that she didn’t want to be bothered with the stretch marks.

  She transferred to a public school, then went to college in Maine, where she graduated in 1971. By March of the next year, she had saved enough for a flight to London, where she began calling herself Kyra.

  By degrees she worked her way south—three months as an au pair girl in Paris, four months teaching at Berlitz, again in Paris, a move to Corbière, her first job as a barmaid, a fight with the owner of the bar, who was also her lover, and finally her arrival in Tossa.

  A woman with her looks never had to be out of work or alone, but after Corbière and three years of working and saving, she craved a rest and some solitude. Tony was an attractive and, miraculously, intelligent man who had one night visited some friends at her pensión. Kyra—by now the name was her own—had been invited to share some wine, and had found herself talking to him most of the night. He hadn’t tried to sleep with her, and that had so impressed her that she decided to be his friend.

  In London and Paris she’d had countless lovers, often sleeping with two or three men in a single day. In Corbière, she’d settled down to one man, but it hadn’t lasted, and it had seemed only logical to her to have no one in Tossa. At least it would be worth a try. After meeting Tony, she moved into a different circle, and though she might have appeared promiscuous, she abstained.

  She found herself changing in other ways. Always before, she’d been constantly active, going from bar to party to work to sleep to party again. Now she could sit and do nothing, or read for hours at a time. As the winter ended, she went for long swims and sought deserted beaches.

  For all of Tony’s influence on her social life, they remained only friends. For her, it was an odd relationship, but she didn’t want it any other way. She needed a rest from men. When men had been her great concern, she’d been more strident, bitchy, narrow, and now she was feeling almost serene. She intimated to interested men—and there were several—that she had a lover who would be arriving soon.

  Though perhaps she felt serene, no one would have described her that way. With others around, she was rarely quiet. She painstakingly avoided giving the impression that she was ever introspective. Let them think I’m completely callous, she said to herself. That’s fine. Let them think there’s nothing inside me. She had all her moves down, alluring and aggressive, ready to take sex and take it lightly. Tony suspected that she wasn’t what she seemed, and asked her why she put on the act.

  “Everything I do is me,” she answered fiercely.

  Tony described her to Sean as the “sexiest virgin I’ve ever met.”

  For as long as she could remember, sex to her had been more a matter of power than of desire. She’d learned early that she would be abused if she did not use, and so use she did. She didn’t think that she hated men, but she would never let anyone near her. She’d slept around as much to keep herself from getting involved as to keep men aware of her independence. She’d slipped up in Corbière, almost caring about her lover, whom she had only used, after all, to get a job in the first place. But finally he had ignored her moment of vulnerability, and she hadn’t and wouldn’t forgive him for that. So she’d moved and again built up her facade of invincibility.

  Sean shattered that facade, without any effort, in one evening.

  He hadn’t planned to attend Tony’s party that night, but he’d written all day and felt bored and stir-crazy. He’d given Berta the day off, as he often did on Saturdays.

  When he entered the room, Kyra immediately noticed him. He was older than nearly everyone there, and evidently well-known, though she’d never seen him before. Before too long, she had Tony introduce them. She liked the way he walked, casually, with one hand always in his jacket pocket. She found herself hoping he wasn’t married. Isn’t that ridiculous? she thought. He was a big man, not handsome and not ugly. She wanted him.

  There was an aura about him that struck her so sympathetically that it scared her. He was funny without trying to be a comedian. He seemed to know exactly what he was, and to like it. His laugh, like hers, was a little too loud. He didn’t seem to take her at all seriously.

  “You see, my dear,” he said in a mock British accent, “I’m frightfully rich and it makes no sense at all to worry about anything, since I shouldn’t have a care in the world, what?”

  He drank immoderately, but didn’t get sloppy.

  “I can’t talk so well to people when I’m sober. I keep feeling I have to observe them if I’m to be a phenomenal writer. But when I drink, you see, I realize how absurd it is to want to be a phenomenal writer, and so I don’t observe at all, but have a hell of a lot better time.”

  “What do you write?” she asked.

  “Cookbooks. You?”

  They left the party to go for a walk. The early spring night had just a trace of chill. She realized that Sean was a bit tipsy, though he walked steadily. The air smelled of blossoms.

  “Did you ever think,” he asked, “that the fragrance of a night like this, wrapped up in the breeze, is like a string of flowers braided through a woman’s hair?” Then he laughed.

  But as they walked, he became quiet until suddenly he stopped and leaned against the side of a building.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What is it?”

  His face in the half-light seemed transformed. No longer was he the bon vivant or the comic. His features held no sign of either self-pity or of malice toward her, not a trace of a phony romantic look, nor any other of the cheap tricks she’d come to expect from men who desired her, and who didn’t want to wait.

  “I’m ridiculously sober, and I don’t talk good when I’m sober.”

  “What do you want to say?”

  He thought a moment. “Nothing, I guess. Nothing.” His tone was matter-of-fact. “It’s just words, anyway.”

  “You seem quite good with words.”

  “Oh, I am. So what?”

  “It’s just . . .”

  “Come here.”

  He put his hand behind her neck and drew her to him. They didn’t kiss. She stood passively, leaning slightly against him while he held an arm around her.

  “I think . . .”

  “Shut up,” he said gently. “You don’t want to say anything.”

  She realiz
ed that he was right. They remained, not quite embracing, for several minutes. Finally, she stepped away from him and looked at his face again. It was impassive yet tender. It looked like his natural expression, although she imagined it must have grown strange even to himself through lack of use. The muscles were relaxed. He looked at her not passionately but with interest, and she wondered if her own face reflected that same calm interest.

  She kissed him.

  As they walked back to the party, he began talking lightly again, and she was strangely relieved, as though she’d been let off the hook. She was on more solid ground with his insouciance. She was amazed at how vulnerable she had been for a moment there, and now she could be herself again, as he was. He was just another man and she wouldn’t go making an ass of herself for him. Her face once again adopted her smile, and she walked easily beside him, elated and relieved and grateful.

  But she knew that something odd, out of character for both of them, had happened, and that they’d retreated from it in the same way. There was an unsettling comfort in that.

  She put her arm through his.

  “Watch out for that arm. There’s no hand on it.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Perfectly.”

  His smile was completely natural. “You don’t think I became rich because of my talents? Here,” he said, “come around the other side and hold my hand.”

  Below the window, they heard the sounds of records and laughter.

  “Do you want to go up?”

  For a moment, she was terrified of staying another second with him. She knew that they wouldn’t go anywhere to talk. They would walk until he stopped again and then he would touch her and she would want him.

  “No. Let’s walk some more.”

  The next couple of months were hell. For the first time in her life, she desired someone. After that night when in fact they had made love in the backseat of Sean’s car, she hadn’t seen Sean again for two weeks. She even thought of leaving, going farther south, and forgetting this interlude.