‘Well – places you’ve been to, people you’ve met. Situations you’ve been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that’s supposed to make you wise, in your later years.’
‘Let me tell you something, Kenny. For other people, I can’t speak – but, personally, I haven’t gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I’ve been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, here it is again. But that doesn’t seem to help me. In my opinion, I personally have gotten steadily sillier and sillier and sillier – and that’s a fact.’
‘No kidding, Sir? You can’t mean that! You mean, sillier than when you were young?’
‘Much, much sillier.’
‘I’ll be darned. . . . Then experience is no use at all? You’re saying it might just as well not have happened?’
‘No. I’m not saying that. I only mean, you can’t use it. But if you don’t try to – if you just realise it’s there and you’ve got it – then it can be kind of marvellous —’
‘Let’s go swimming,’ says Kenny abruptly, as if bored by the whole conversation.
‘All right.’
Kenny throws his head right back and laughs wildly. ‘Oh – that’s terrific!’
‘What’s terrific?’
‘It was a test. I thought you were bluffing, about being silly. So I said to myself, I’ll suggest doing something wild, and if he objects – if he even hesitates – then I’ll know it was all a bluff. . . . You don’t mind my telling you that, do you, Sir?’
‘Why should I?’
‘Oh, that’s terrific!’
‘Well, I’m not bluffing – so what are we waiting for? You weren’t bluffing, were you?’
‘Hell, no!’
They jump up, pay, run out of the bar and across the highway and Kenny vaults the railing and drops down, about eight feet, on to the beach. George, meanwhile, is clambering over the rail, a bit stiffly. Kenny looks up, his face still lit by the boardwalk lamps: ‘Put your feet on my shoulders, Sir.’ George does so, drunk-trustful, and Kenny, with the deftness of a ballet-dancer, supports him by ankles and calves, lowering him almost instantly to the sand. During the descent, their bodies rub against each other, briefly but roughly. The electric field of the dialogue is broken. Their relationship, whatever it now is, is no longer symbolic. They turn and begin to run toward the ocean.
Already, the lights seem far, far behind. They are bright but they cast no beams; perhaps they are shining on a layer of high fog. The waves ahead are barely visible. Their blackness is immensely cold and wet. Kenny is tearing off his clothes with wild whooping cries. The last remaining minim of George’s caution is aware of the lights and the possibility of cruise-cars and cops, but he doesn’t hesitate, he is no longer able to; this dash from the bar can only end in the water. He strips himself clumsily, tripping over his pants. Kenny, stark naked now, has plunged and is wading straight in, like a fearless native warrior, to attack the waves. The undertow is very strong. George flounders for a while in a surge of stones. As he finally struggles through and feels sand under his feet, Kenny comes body-surfing out of the night and shoots past him without a glance; a water-creature absorbed in its element.
As for George, these waves are much too big for him. They seem truly tremendous, towering up, blackness unrolling itself out of blackness, mysteriously and awfully sparkling, then curling over in a thundering slap of foam which is sparked with phosphorus. George has sparks of it all over his body, and he laughs with delight to find himself bejewelled. Laughing, gasping, choking, he is too drunk to be afraid; the salt water he swallows seems as intoxicating as whisky. From time to time, he catches tremendous glimpses of Kenny, arrowing down some toppling foam-precipice. Then, intent upon his own rites of purification, George staggers out once more, wide-open-armed, to receive the stunning baptism of the surf. Giving himself to it utterly, he washes away thought, speech, mood, desire, whole selves, entire lifetimes; again and again he returns, becoming always cleaner, freer, less. He is perfectly happy by himself; it’s enough to know that Kenny and he are the sole sharers of the element. The waves and the night and the noise exist only for their play. Meanwhile, no more than two hundred yards distant, the lights shine from the shore and the cars flick past up and down the highway, flashing their long beams. On the dark hillsides you can see lamps in the windows of dry homes, where the dry are going dryly to their dry beds. But George and Kenny are refugees from dryness; they have escaped across the border into the water-world, leaving their clothes behind them for a customs fee.
And now, suddenly, here is a great, an apocalyptically great wave, and George is way out, almost out of his depth, standing naked and tiny before its presence, under the lip of its roaring upheaval and the towering menace of its fall. He tries to dive through it – even now he feels no real fear – but instead he is caught and picked up, turned over and over and over, flapping and kicking toward a surface which may be either up or down or sideways, he no longer knows.
And now Kenny is dragging him out, groggy-legged. Kenny’s hands are under George’s armpits and he is laughing and saying like a Nanny, ‘That’s enough for now!’ And George, still water-drunk, gasps, ‘I’m all right,’ and wants to go straight back into the water. But Kenny says, ‘Well, I’m not – I’m cold,’ and Nanny-like he towels George, with his own shirt, not George’s, until George stops him because his back is sore. The Nanny-relationship is so convincing, at this moment, that George feels he could curl up and fall immediately asleep right here, shrunk to child-size within the safety of Kenny’s bigness. Kenny’s body seems to have grown gigantic since they left the water. Everything about him is larger than life; the white teeth of his grin, the wide dripping shoulders, the tall slim torso with its heavy-hung sex, and the long legs, now beginning to shiver.
‘Can we go back to your place, Sir?’ he asks.
‘Sure. Where else?’
‘Where else?’ Kenny repeats, seeming to find this very amusing. He picks up his clothes and turns, still naked, toward the highway and the lights.
‘Are you crazy?’ George shouts after him.
‘What’s the matter?’ Kenny looks back, grinning.
‘You’re going to walk home like that? Are you crazy? They’d call the cops!’
Kenny shrugs his shoulders good-humouredly. ‘Nobody would have seen us. We’re invisible – didn’t you know?’
But he gets into his clothes, now, and George does likewise. As they start up the beach again, Kenny puts his arm around George’s shoulder. ‘You know something, Sir? They ought not to let you out on your own, ever. You’re liable to get into real trouble.’
Their walk home sobers George quite a lot. By the time they reach the house, he no longer sees the two of them as wild water-creatures but as an elderly professor with wet hair bringing home an exceedingly wet student in the middle of the night. George becomes self-conscious and almost curt. ‘The bathroom’s upstairs. I’ll get you some towels —’
Kenny reacts to the formality at once. ‘Aren’t you taking a shower too, Sir?’ he asks, in a deferential, slightly disappointed tone.
‘I can do that later. . . . I wish I had some clothes your size to lend you. You’ll have to wrap up in a blanket, while we dry your things on the heater. It’s rather a slow process, I’m afraid, but that’s the best we can do —’
‘Look, Sir – I don’t want to be a nuisance. Why don’t I go now?’
‘Don’t be an idiot. You’d get pneumonia.’
‘My clothes’ll dry on me. I’ll be all right.’
‘Nonsense! Come on up and I’ll show you where everything is.’
George’s refusal to let him leave appears to have pleased Kenny. At any rate, he makes a terrific noise in the shower, not so much singing as a series of shouts. He is probably waking up the neighbours, George thinks, but who cares? George’s spirits are up again; he feels excited, amused, alive. In his bedroom, he undresses quickly, gets into his thick white terrycloth bathrobe, hurries downstairs again, puts on the kettle and fixes some tuna fish and tomato sandwiches on rye. They are all ready set out on a tray in the living-room when Kenny comes down, wearing the blanket awkwardly, saved-from-shipwreck style.
Kenny doesn’t want coffee or tea; he would rather have beer, he says. So George gets him a can from the icebox, and unwisely pours himself a biggish Scotch. He returns to find Kenny looking around the room as though it fascinates him.
‘You live here all by yourself, Sir?’
‘Yes,’ says George; and adds with a shade of irony, ‘Does that surprise you?’
‘No. One of the kids said he thought you did.’
‘As a matter of fact, I used to share this place with a friend.’
But Kenny shows no curiosity about the friend. ‘You don’t even have a cat or a dog or anything?’
‘You think I should?’ George asks, a bit aggressive. The poor old guy doesn’t have anything to love, he thinks Kenny is thinking.
‘Hell, no! Didn’t Baudelaire say they’re liable to turn into demons and take over your life?’
‘Something like that. . . . This friend of mine had lots of animals, though, and they didn’t seem to take us over. . . . Of course, it’s different when there’s two of you. We often used to agree that neither one of, us would want to keep on the animals if the other wasn’t there —’
No. Kenny is absolutely not curious about any of this. Indeed, he is concentrating on taking a huge bite out of his sandwich. So George asks him, ‘Is it all right?’
‘I’ll say!’ He grins at George with his mouth full, then swallows and adds, ‘You know something, Sir? I believe you’ve discovered the secret of the perfect life!’
‘I have?’ George has just gulped nearly a quarter of his Scotch, to drown out a spasm which started when he talked about Jim and the animals. Now he feels the alcohol coming back on him with a rush. It is exhilarating, but it is coming much too fast.
‘You don’t realise how many kids my age just dream about the kind of set-up you’ve got here. I mean, what more can you want? I mean, you don’t have to take orders from anybody. You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.’