Half of Paradise

“God, that’s strong,” she said.

He kissed her mouth and neck.

“I’m sorry. You’ve been waiting,” she said.

“I love you very much.”

“I’m so happy with you, Avery.”

He kissed her again and he felt the coolness of her arms around his neck and then it began to swell inside him and he held her very tight with his face in her hair and he felt it go through his body and his entire existence was concentrated in that one moment and he could feel the muscles in the back of his legs quiver and then he was quiet and relaxed inside, and they went to sleep.

* * *

They saw each other every evening, and sometimes they stayed in the apartment or checked into a hotel outside the Quarter or went dancing or went to the parties that one of her friends gave, and one time when the pipeline shut down for a couple of days because of rain and Avery was free they spent the night in a small guest house down by the beach and he rented some flounder gaffs and flashlights and they hunted along the edge of the surf for the flat-sided fish lying in the sand, he barefoot and in dungarees and stripped to the waist and she in toreador pants with a white blouse held closed by a knot tied at the stomach; and he cleaned the fish on the beach and built a fire from pieces of driftwood while she opened two bottles of beer from the cooler they had brought with them. He fixed the fish on sticks, and they baked them over the fire and peeled them off in strips to eat. They sat in the sand, still warm from the day’s sun, and drank another beer. There was no one else on the beach, and they put out the fire and undressed and went swimming. Later, they walked along the edge of the water and hunted for seashells with the surf rolling over their bare feet and the moon low on the horizon and the sky clouded from a thunderstorm that was building in the Gulf.

They went to a party one Saturday night and left early. It was like the other parties they had gone to. The rooms were crowded with people, and there was a progressive combo trying to play above the noise; the bass player passed out in the hallway, and Wally, the redheaded, blue-eyed Cambridge boy with a taste for Scotch, gave an imitation of a Baptist preacher. Someone opened the door of a bedroom at the wrong time and there was a scene and a girl began crying and left by herself since her date had been one of those in the bedroom. The people in the upstairs apartment knocked on the walls and floor, and Wally went out and came back with a bum he had found in Jackson Park and the bum got sick in the flower bed of the courtyard and Wally was told to leave by the hostess. The knocking on the walls and floor continued, and finally Avery and Suzanne left by the side door without saying good nigh

t to anyone and walked down the quiet cobblestone street in the dark and breathed the cool night air. They stopped in a bakery and bought some pastry and went to her apartment to make coffee.

She fixed café au lait in the kitchen and brought the coffeepot and the hot milk out on a tray and they drank it in the living room and ate the pastry.

“Did you mind leaving the party?” he said.

“Not if you wanted to go.”

“I like it better here.”

“I like it too,” she said.

“Who is Thomas Hardy?”

“He was an English writer.”

“Somebody asked me if I’d read him.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I didn’t keep up with professional baseball anymore,” Avery said.

She put her napkin to her mouth as she laughed.

“I know who asked you,” she said. “It was the little buglike fellow with the baggy trousers. He’s Wally’s roommate. He pays the rent for both of them. He thinks Wally is a talented writer.”

“Is he?”

“He never writes anything,” she said.

“What does the bug fellow do?”

“Reads Thomas Hardy, I suppose.”

She poured more milk and coffee into his cup.

“Could you ask Denise to go out for a while?” he said.

Denise was Suzanne’s roommate. She was a pleasant, intellectual girl, and she would have been attractive if she didn’t wear a wash-faded pair of slacks and an unpressed blouse stained with paint all the time.

“She’s painting in the back room now,” Suzanne said. “Some woman is paying her twenty-five dollars to paint a portrait from a photograph.”