Surrender to Love

“We have your old room ready for you. Wanted this night to bring back memories of younger, happier times, you know, if you’ll forgive an old man’s fancifulness!”

No, Alexa thought. No... It would be too much; I cannot... And then suddenly she saw the faces turned towards her, watching her, and she said nothing. Why not? Whispered in her mind, in her ears, on the sighing rustle of the coconut palms bending before each tiny breath of a sea breeze. And in her pulses—racing, racing until she could hear them in her temples. Why not? Why not? She had wished on the first star and perhaps there was magic at work tonight, and she'd never know if magic was real unless she let herself be swept along with the tide of the night itself—let herself float on a dark, star-specked barge with the moon at its helm. Why not? And then—yes!

“Once upon a time...” There had been a fairy tale she’d read very long ago about six princesses who carried their dainty dancing slippers in their hands and crept out at night, past the watchdogs and past the guards the king had set, to find their princes and dance with them all night. This too had happened before, as the magic tide took her on her bare feet with a thin cotton camboy that covered her from her breasts to just below her knees, her only garment. Only this time Menika led the way and then held back, her teeth white against her copper skin in the moonlight. She murmured some soft words in Sinhalese that Alexa could hardly catch, although she thought she understood them—enough to know there was no translating them into English in her mind. The cotton cloth fell away from her body, from the swelling breasts and the gently burgeoning, rounded belly that last year had been as flat as a young athlete’s. But it didn’t matter. Wasn’t that one of the things she had learned at last? She was herself, Alexa, inside. And when she dived into the moving, silver peaked blackness of the Governor’s pool she swam underwater for a while and became, for some seconds perhaps, a mermaid—a wild child of the ocean with a golden comb for her hair that hung down past her breasts, and a silver tail to reflect the moon by on a magic night like this one when all the boundaries between reality and unreality could be dissolved by only a thought in one’s mind—and if that was strong enough it became reality. Believe. No doubts. Know what is real! And at the last second and her last breath she felt the beating and the movement of the water around her as she shot to the surface and breathed air again while she treaded water and took her time about pushing the heavy strands of hair from over her eyes and her lips because she knew... she knew even before she felt his arms go about her and felt his salt-wet kiss taste the salt of her lips. And only then did she open her eyes to his voice saying huskily, “Oh God...oh God, my moonwitch, how much I have wanted you! And how much I want you now!” Not only her hungry eyes but her fingers traced the contours of his face and the feel of his wet black hair and felt him against her thighs and then between them until she heard him say in a voice that was half groan and half caress, “I don’t want to drown in your enchanted pool, mermaid, sea witch, sweet Alexa, with your eyes like night that trap the moon in them just as you trapped me that first night I saw you....”

The grass was soft and sweet smelling under them as the wildness of urgency gave way to touching and tasting and reexploring, and rose very slowly and very gradually until their longing for each other and the aching, agonizing need for each other became like a wind, like an ocean gathered into one wave, like dying and being reborn again. And they lay together there, he, on his side behind her, holding her so closely and yet so gently that it almost hurt being so happy, and she had to turn her head to make sure it was he, and he had not left her. And in the end she had to turn to face him and touch him and hold him and tell him in naked words what she had always felt for him and had fought with all her strength and could not help; because some people, as the ancient Greek legend had it, were but two halves of a single whole, separated by some jealous god and condemned to search the earth forever until they found, at last, the other half with whom, when joined together, they made the perfect whole. And some things were not to be questioned but only accepted gladly and joyfully, so that their resting here together with the child that would be theirs between them was like reaching a plateau at the top of a mountain they had had to climb with their hands and their knees and their feet until they had had to shed everything else but the one fact that they loved each other. “I love you, I love you, I love you!” Alexa said fiercely. “Oh Nicholas, why did you let me go? Why did you go away before I could take back all the horrible, ugly, lying things I said to hurt you? And oh if you hadn’t come...if you hadn’t come I would have come looking for you, you know! With our baby carried in a pack on my back, if I had to. It is our baby, you know. Bridget...oh, thank God for Bridget, because she kept count of certain dates even if I did not!”

He started to laugh then, and the laugh creases at the corners of his eyes and his mouth made him look younger and wiped from his face the hard and twisted look he used to wear most of the time before. “ Alexa, my sweet Alexa, did you think I would have cared? Do you, my love?” And when she looked at his face in the moonlight before shaking her head decisively, the last barrier fell and she leaned her face contentedly against his shoulder while he told her that it was Newbury of all people who had told him the truth in his bored, slightly jeering fashion.

‘“Oh, Nicholas! I can’t bear to think that I...” Alexa shuddered against him until he tilted up her chin and kissed her fiercely.

“It’s done. And I learned from what happened, strangely enough. Perhaps it taught me to think of what consequences my own selfish actions might have on other people.” He kissed her eyelids and the tip of her nose before his lips traveled very slowly to hers and brushed against them lightly as he whispered: “Especially a certain hot-tempered, reckless, sharp-tongued virago that I had fallen in love with in spite of myself. And do you know why? Because the first time I saw her the little witch of the sea put her invisible silver net about me, and I was trapped forever in the net of her enchantment until...”

“Go on. You’re not going to stop now, are you?”

“You have a bad habit of interrupting, my dearest love, which I might have to...” Holding his mouth teasingly a mere inch from hers, Nicholas whispered, “Until I bought a goddamned ship, which had better be a magic ship that flies many times from New York and Boston to China and back in the future, let me tell you, or I’ll be reduced to borrowing money from my rich heiress bride!”

“The story!”

“Well, I guess the story has a good witch in it like all such stories, and her name happens to be Harriet. So we plotted and planned with a considerable amount of help from high places, I might add, until at last when the night was just right and the moon and the tide and my wicked enchantress was swimming in her pool, I caught her in my own invisible net of gold. And you’re trapped forever, sweet witch, just as I am—so I suppose we might just as well make the best of it, don’t you think?”

“Why not?” Slipping from his reluctant arms, Alexa poised herself on the edge of the pool before turning back to him with one hand on her hip, just above the golden chain he had put on her once. “Will you come and swim with me in my enchanted pool once more, my darling? I’ve heard that two silver nets are much stronger than one, and I mean to keep you in my thrall forever and ever, you know!”