That was it, Baxter thought, and if he could only adjust his flattery to what she believed herself to be, her scruples would dissolve. Did she think of herself as an actress, he wondered, a Channel swimmer, an heiress? The intimations of susceptibility that came from her in the summer night were so powerful, so heady, that they convinced Baxter that here was a woman whose chastity hung by a thread.
“I think I know the real you,” Baxter said.
“Oh no you don’t,” Clarissa said. “Nobody does.”
The radio played some lovelorn music from a Boston hotel. By the calendar, it was still early in the summer, but it seemed, from the stillness and the hugeness of the dark trees, to be much later. Baxter put his arms around Clarissa and planted a kiss on her lips.
She pushed him away violently and reached for the door. “Oh, now you’ve spoiled everything,” she said as she got out of the car. “Now you’ve spoiled everything. I know what you’ve been thinking. I know you’ve been thinking it all along.” She slammed the door and spoke to him across the window. “Well, you needn’t come around here any more, Baxter,” she said. “My girl friends are coming down from New York tomorrow on the morning plane and I’ll be too busy to see you for the rest of the summer. Good night.”
BAXTER WAS AWARE that he had only himself to blame; he had moved too quickly. He knew better. He went to bed feeling angry and sad, and slept poorly. He was depressed when he woke, and his depression was deepened by the noise of a sea rain, blowing in from the northeast. He lay in bed listening to the rain and the surf. The storm would metamorphose the island. The beaches would be empty. Drawers would stick. Suddenly he got out of bed, went to the telephone, called the airport. The New York plane had been unable to land, they told him, and no more planes were expected that day. The storm seemed to be playing directly into his hands. At noon, he drove in to the village and bought a Sunday paper and a box of candy. The candy was for Clarissa, but he was in no hurry to give it to her.
She would have stocked the icebox, put out the towels, and planned the picnic, but now the arrival of her friends had been postponed, and the lively day that she had anticipated had turned out to be rainy and idle. There were ways, of course, for her to overcome her disappointment, but on the evidence of the barn dance he felt that she was lost without her husband or her mother-in-law, and that there were few, if any, people on the island who would pay her a chance call or ask her over for a drink. It was likely that she would spend the day listening to the radio and the rain and that by the end of it she would be ready to welcome anyone, including Baxter. But as long as the forces of loneliness and idleness were working on his side, it was shrewder, Baxter knew, to wait. It would be best to come just before dark, and he waited until then. He drove to the Ryans’ with his box of candy. The windows were lighted. Clarissa opened the door.
“I wanted to welcome your friends to the island,” Baxter said. “I?”
“They didn’t come,” Clarissa said. “The plane couldn’t land. They went back to New York. They telephoned me. I had planned such a nice visit. Now everything’s changed.”
“I’m sorry, Clarissa, Baxter said. I’ve brought you a present.”
“Oh!” She took the box of candy. “What a beautiful box. What a lovely present! What?” Her face and her voice were, for a minute, ingenuous and yielding, and then he saw the force of resistance transform them. “You shouldn’t have done it,” she said.
“May I come in?” Baxter asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “You can’t come in if you’re just going to sit around.”
“We could play cards,” Baxter said.
“I don’t know how,” she said.
“I’ll teach you,” Baxter said.
“No,” she said. “No, Baxter, you’ll have to go. You just don’t understand the kind of a woman I am. I spent all day writing a letter to Bob. I wrote and told him that you kissed me last night. I can’t let you come in.” She closed the door.
From the look on Clarissa’s face when he gave her the box of candy, Baxter judged that she liked to get presents. An inexpensive gold bracelet or even a bunch of flowers might do it, he knew, but Baxter was an extremely stingy man, and while he saw the usefulness of a present, he could not bring himself to buy one. He decided to wait.
The storm blew all Monday and Tuesday. It cleared on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday afternoon the tennis courts were dry and Baxter played. He played until late. Then, when he had bathed and changed his clothes, he stopped at a cocktail party to pick up a drink. Here one of his neighbors, a married woman with four children, sat down beside him and began a general discussion of the nature of married love.
It was a conversation, with its glances and innuendoes, that Baxter had been through many times, and he knew roughly what it promised. His neighbor was one of the pretty mothers that Baxter had admired on the
