Chapter 3 – Chapter 3

I stood at the top of the stairs and looked down into the foyer. Helena and Damien were fussing around getting their golf bags ready. I was about to tread on the stairs, to come down earlier than usual for breakfast, when I heard them and then saw them move into my line of sight. I pulled back into the shadow of the upper hall where they couldn't see me but I could see them and waited for them to leave.

I don't know why I waited. Perhaps because they looked so much the matched couple and both seemed to be happy. Helena hadn't seemed in such a good humor as this for years. And Damien—well, Damien always was bouncing around with the big smile and the boisterous voice. I didn't mean to think that they looked the part of a married couple better than Helena or I did—or Damien and Tish did—but it seemed true. Of course it was because of the familial resemblance, how they shared voice inflections and hand gestures and facial expressions—and how they prattled on in one long, continuous, comfortable line, the one picking up and finishing the other's thought.

Helena looked almost masculine, not that she couldn't be called a handsome woman. But perhaps because she could be called handsome rather than beautiful. And standing beside Damien as she now did, she could be seen in his light. Perhaps more a character of the 1940s—tweedy, big boned, solid, the look of the thick shoulder pads that actually were her shoulders. The three-quarter-length straight skirts with a kick pleat and the sensible shoes. The tightly curled jet-black hair, and the strong, angular facial features. Something now was giving her a radiant smile and a bounce that made her even more like her step-brother.

Maybe it was the golf—or that after that first disastrous night here we had fallen back into the "just brushing by" life we'd settled into in New York. The fumbled attempt that night obviously had brought forth the worry in her that our situation would be different here at the summer house than it had become in New York. But now it wasn't, and so that was all right. It was like some heavy weight was lifted off both of us when she moved into the other bedroom.

They'd played golf nearly every morning for two weeks. Helena had said that it refreshed her mind and toned her body to enable her to dive right into writing in the afternoon. The writing must be going well, or else she would grouse and pout and withdraw into herself and into snide comments on the people and world around her. She also would smoke and drink far more than she should. And as for Damien, he said he needed the afternoon light anyway to paint and he had to be doing something in the morning.

Damien too seemed to be walking on air this past week. But then I knew why that was. It had been a shock, but we all had adjusted.

First had been the rejection of Tish as his model. He had continued with the determination to experiment with the techniques of Rousseau and Gauguin, in turn, and hadn't been too long at that before exploding and declaring that Tish was too pale, too blonde, and too pencil thin for a proper model.

"You don't even have the proper tits for it," he had blustered. "And no ass. I gotta have a big ass."

He had ventured into the interior of the island and discovered the small Gullah community still in residence. An amalgam of English, Scottish, and West African ancestors, the Gullah were scattered in small enclaves like this all along the insular South Carolina island coast. Damien had found a buxom, berry-brown, and sensually aspected young woman with a big ass who suited his image of a Tahitian maiden perfectly—not that he'd ever been to Tahiti beyond the frames of Gauguin's paintings—and thus she was in as his model and Tish was out. From the way Damien was humming and grinning as he moved around the house, the young woman had evidently proved to be pliable and willing as well.

Tish had taken the ousting in her natural way. When Damien was close, she had pouted and they, like Helena and I, were sleeping in separate bedrooms now. But behind Damien's back she would give me a wink and would glide off to some corner of the house or island or other. It didn't take much imagination for me to decide what she was doing—and, in some cases, who she was doing it with. I had no doubt that she and the hunky young Gullah, Vandi LaRoche, had hooked up. And the captain of the twice-weekly tourist boat from Savannah, well-muscled and good looking, if approaching hard onto forty, had stopped by the last three trips with fresh milk and eggs for us. Although I couldn't imagine how Tish had hooked up with him, I was quite sure that eggs and milk were not his true interest at our house.

And then there was the liaison I was sure of. Four times in the past two weeks Tish had visited me in my bedroom after I had drifted off to sleep—three times in the afternoon when I was napping and Helena was deep in the web of her writing in the library and once in the morning after Helena and Damien had left for their golf game at the Haig Point Signature course. Each time she had rolled me on my back and mounted and ridden me in a languid fuck that was over and she gone before I even was fully awake. I had continued to take sleeping pills to give me at least some hours of legitimate separation from the world each day.

It never seemed important to her that it was me rather than any other man, and when I asked her why me, she simply laughed and said I had the biggest cock on the island. Whether or not that was true, I took it as a joke on Damien, who would have roared like a wounded lion at that suggestion. As an afterthought, she told me that, with me, there were no complications. She knew I couldn't move to deeper levels of complexity in a relationship with a woman.

I had no idea what she meant about that—or so I told myself and dismissed it from my mind as quickly and effectively as I could manage.