were the only two people on the beach that day. A storm was building at sea, the westerly wind increasing, the beach slowly dissolving in the gray mass before them. Yet she was picking up shells as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Hector had been walking aimlessly, pensive and solitary, as was his habit, occasionally tossing an errant shell into the froth. He found himself at her side. Rising from her shell-hunting she did not seem at all surprised to find him so close. She put her hands on her hips and looked out to sea.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said without turning. He was looking at her intently; two warm fingers seemed to touch the cool stone that had once been a living heart. He registered the feeling with a sense of startling unfamiliarity. And a flame of both joy and terror shot through his being.
“Yes,” he said, also without turning. They talked of innocuous, disparate things – common things. And somehow they had connected.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” He asked with trepidation and surprise. It was getting dark as the first intermittent drops of rain began to fall hard about them, leaving pock-marks in the sand.
“That would be nice,” she responded with a scrutinizing look, and took his hand with a kind of natural sweetness that touched him deeply; as if in that single gesture she had discovered who he really was. For such a lonely man it was a uniquely strange sensation, like waking from a long coma to find oneself in one’s favorite chair.
They sat in a dark café beside the wild and desperate sea, sipping steaming coffee. And to Hector’s amazement she appeared to be flirting with him. She was all smiles and warm deference; at one point reaching over and patting the tops of his weathered hands which lay stiffly upon the table, a coy smile upon her lips.
“Do you live nearby?” she asked sweetly.
“In this town,” he replied with a soft chuckle, “everything is nearby.” She laughed recklessly, again patting his hands.
Hector had been slightly embarrassed. He felt awkward and unsure of himself. He’d never married, and all the women of his life could be counted on the fingers of one hand with fingers to spare. She was dark, full-figured and impulsive. She had nervous eyes that possessed an uncanny depth and penetration; an untamed quality that attracted Hector more than any halo.
But her seemingly sincere attentions hopped from one object to another, making it impossible to be sure just where her true interests lay.
In truth, the appearance of depth was merely apparent, colored by her relentless beauty. She bored easily and hadn’t the patience to go deeply into a subject. Her response to life was tactile; she lived by her senses, casting about for ever new sensations. Not to say that she was unintelligent. She possessed a generous amount of animal cunning. But her craftiness, relying almost exclusively on the senses of the moment, did not and could not satisfy her secret needs; and so, she largely ignored it. The light cast by her great energies, coming from such a beautiful package, may have easily hypnotized a better man; but Hector had lived and so found it difficult to forgive himself for being such an easy mark.
Thus there was something frivolous about her. Or, perhaps, to be fair, it may have been the residue of past defeats and humiliations, an impulsiveness based on a blind faith in the odds. For she was indeed a gambler. And gamblers are first and foremost losers wagering everything on an aberration, a powerful, unreasonable fascination with Chance.
No doubt she possessed an enigmatic and direct manner; this gave her an air of mystery, and, in Hector’s estimation, the status of someone wonderfully uncommon – like an alien fragrance, made sweeter by the quality of its strangeness. He had fallen under a spell. Besides it had been a long time since he had been invited into a woman’s bed, and she was most definitely a woman.
She found, to her surprise, that she genuinely liked him. He was primitive in an unfamiliar way, primitive in a way that implied honesty – straight and sincere. But she sensed something else in him – something nebulous and inexplicable. A complex man in hiding – this feeling vaguely frightened her. A man, she sensed, whose scars were covered and would always remain so, as he went about his days in a perfect mask, one might say, a death mask; or, rather, a mask that fit him perfectly. Secretly insecure, she sensed in terror that she was wrestling with a storm and the feeling left her feeling ill at ease. Yet she was intrigued – theirs was an unlikely marriage, fascinating and doomed.
He imagined great things in her and foolishly believed what he imagined. For example, her playfulness he took for generosity of spirit; her passion for depth of feeling; her warm deference for respect and affection. In truth, she was fickle, carnal, and mocking...
For her it may be fairly stated that she took Hector just as he was – she suffered no illusions: a nice man, quiet, sincere, honest, certainly. Why clutter things with sentiment? She had simply wished to investigate the type. She’d had little trade with nice men. She was on a kind of vacation.
But one could not expect her to remain on vacation indefinitely. Nor for her to abandon her true nature. Once her investigations were ended, then what? Life would provide. Invariably she would return to her habitual patterns of self-destruction and immolation, and hook up with the most dangerous man she could find. This was her accepted Fate, her destiny to which she had long ago surrendered in the brutality of black eyes and bloody lips.
Hector proposed after three ecstatic weeks, and, to his great surprise, she had accepted – with a gay laugh and coquettish toss of her shiny ropes of hair. Soon thereafter they were wed by the local Methodist pastor in a quiet ceremony, attended and witnessed solely by Hector’s reluctant and puzzled sister. Hector hadn’t a clue. Her powerful attraction overwhelmed every warning. His personal assessment was that he had found his luck at last. Why should he throw it away?
Sara had known for some time that she was pregnant. At first this had given her pause, an incipient desperation that grew side by side with her unsuspecting child. Abortion was never even considered – she had her reasons and her personal sense of morality. However, she imagined her gypsy life ending in a dull, domestic anonymity. It was during the early stages of her pregnancy that Hector first suspected her true feelings. After the child was born she abandoned all pretense, and Hector withdrew into himself like a wounded animal.
Why, he wondered, couldn’t he simply send her packing? But she had touched his imagination deeply. A once sealed door, behind which lay his dead blood-brother in a jungle of blood, a repressed childhood, an unwanted solitude, and now the realization that he’d never lived the life he’d wished for all those useless years; a once sealed door that had been opened in foolish emptiness could not be allowed to close behind him for his ideal images to die all over again – images, as perfect as God himself, of enduring love and the courage to bear the loss this implied. He had nursed these ideals bitterly, the merest shred of hope mocking him in his ever-expanding withdrawal from life. His undying romanticism and idiotic idealism made him gag – his entire life stood against him as proof that he was a singular fool.
In his more reflective moods he was aware of the terrible game he was playing. Hope for what? She was utterly gone! He admitted that he had never really known her. But do we ever really know anyone? He asked the shadows of his thoughts to no avail. At last he faced things squarely, with an indignation approaching wrath.
Four months after the baby, David, was born, she left town with some guy she met at a bar. A narcissist, a gypsy wanton! He thought bitterly, like a general perusing (on a forced march) the articles of his surrender. Look under fool in the dictionary, he hissed, and you will find my stupid, stricken face.
Upon much reflection Martha believed she had discovered the reason for this unlikely union: the woman had inspired his compassion! To her Hector was a man of self-sacrifice, an innocent. But his lack of warmth towards
