They passed through the revolving door. Caleb steered her toward a leather Chesterfield. “He told me something about it when I last saw him. It almost gives me hope, that Uncle Sam wants paintings.”
“You don’t mind? Sometimes I don’t tell people because I’m worried it seems unfair.”
“Fair and unfair—none of that means anything anymore.” He leaned toward her, his nearness lighting up her bones. “In the Med, I tried to never let myself wish to be anywhere else or even consider that anything else existed. It seemed for the best. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“But sometimes when I was waking up or falling asleep and had my guard down, I’d think of you. I’d put you out of my mind, but now…” He hesitated. The back of one long finger rested discreetly against her thigh.
“What?” she said. “Now what?”
“Now I have twenty-four hours left on a thirty-six-hour pass. I’d like to spend as many as I can with you.”
She wanted to climb into his lap. She wanted to strip him naked there in the Polygon’s lobby and press against his skin. She said, “Let me change and we’ll go for dinner.”
“Can I spend the night?” There was nothing sardonic about him, nothing teasing. He was almost pleading.
If she went to bed with him, Ruth would see it as a betrayal, be devastated if she found out, but Marian couldn’t summon any anticipatory shame. She hadn’t stopped loving Caleb because she fell in love with Ruth. The two loves were like two disparate species coexisting obliviously in the same landscape: an elk and a butterfly, a willow tree and a trout. Neither diminished the other. Ruth had brought her back to life; she had never been infatuated with Caleb like she had been with Ruth, yet he was more essential. He was as inherent to Marian as one of her organs. “There’s someone,” she said.
“Does that matter? It’s a genuine question. I’m not trying to be flip.”
“That’s what I’m asking myself.”
“I told you how I would pretend there was nothing else. That’s what I want tonight. Nothing else has to exist.”
“But other things—other people—do exist.” He waited. Lamely, wavering, she said, “I have to fly in the morning.”
“I’ll let you go in the morning. You know I will.”
“It’s as easy as that?”
“It doesn’t matter what’s easy,” he said. “There’s just what you do and what you don’t do.”
She stood in silence, galaxies of indecision whirling through her. Finally she said, “I can’t.”
He must have seen her anguish because he chucked her lightly on the shoulder. “Dinner, then. Good enough.”
South Pacific
August 1943
Three months earlier
At first Jamie had asked the names of the islands, but usually the answer was that he didn’t need to know. And, true, he didn’t strictly need to know where he was: He was there regardless. But for that reason—that he was already there—how could it be a secret? To whom could he blab? Only to other men on the same ship, who were already there, too, in the same unnamed spot.
But he had discovered that the names didn’t mean anything when he did manage to extract them, or didn’t even exist, so he stopped asking, labeled his drawings and paintings with nothing more specific than Solomon Islands.
Most were protrusions of limestone or basalt, densely jungled, barricaded by shark-patrolled reefs, beyond which lay mangrove swamps and crocodiles and tall grass as sharp as scalpels and more mosquitoes than you could shake a stick at. Occasionally he glimpsed villages, people paddling dugout canoes, children playing on the beach. Sometimes they sailed past wrecked warships, a superstructure sticking out of the water or a hulk lying on its side like the bloated corpse of an animal. Some islands were nothing more than sandbars barely breaching the surface, a palm or two clinging on. He painted one of those, a cliché of paradise, and tried to invest it with the saturating bleakness he felt, the vulnerability of these little rafts of land in so much water. The fronds of his palm tree resembled, at first glance, a man hanging by his neck, blowing in the wind like a tattered kite.
They hid one night against the blackness of a long-extinct volcanic cone, waiting for a group of Japanese destroyers. When they came into range, Jamie felt his ship jolt as the fish launched. The Japanese didn’t see the convoy, had no way of knowing torpedoes were speeding through the water until they hit. Jamie imagined a canvas, almost entirely black, the silhouette of a sinking destroyer lit by the yellow-white flash of exploding shells. But how to convey the hundreds of men in the water, their eerie silence? Almost all refused rescue, preferred to die. He saw their wet heads caught in the searchlights, some faces wild with silent fear, others defiantly blank.