TERRY

     If the second volume of my memoir, Callie’s Ragbag, ends with a true story that I patched a fictitious ending onto, the third volume begins with the factual ending to that story. In the previous volume, my alter-ego, Seely, after spending the night with Eben in a stone shelter, is heading back to Cadaques when she suddenly decides to turn around and leave the satchel with her manuscript behind on Eben’s hearth. But I didn’t turn back. And the following is what really happened:

     Among the newcomers on the beach days later was a boyish Englishman, Terry, who was vacationing in Cadaques with friends—a couple and their little daughter. 

      Younger than she, Terry was almost too handsome, Seely thought as she studied him—as he talked about himself and flirted with her with a combination of bravado and gallantry. He had curly light brown hair, a pretty, slightly flat nose, and sensually swelling lips, his white teeth so even along the bottom edge they looked like they had been filed down. The only flaw in his beauty was one of proportion, she decided: his forehead wasn’t high enough to balance the length of the rest of his face. He also had, she couldn’t help noticing, powerfully muscular legs covered with downy blond hair.

     He announced that he was a stage actor and had studied at the British Royal Academy, then entertained her and the others in the British/American “gang” with a variety of accents, including an American accent that sounded as authentic as her own. Evenings, he recounted, he and his traveling companions had been making the round of little bars, playing guitars and singing, and were invited to entertain painter Salvador Dali at his nearby villa—with its phallus-shaped pool, surrounded by huge stuffed animals. Later he invited Seely to dinner, but she told him she’d already promised to cook for Jean-Michel and a visiting friend of his.

     The next morning when she came across him at the weekly market, where he was buying spices, he talked her into helping him make a Tandoori chicken dinner for the gang. That afternoon they hiked with the others to the Flat Rocks, stopping on the way to buy him plastic sandals to protect his feet from sea urchins on the ocean floor. Just below the lighthouse, everyone stripped and spread themselves out on the great warm slabs of rock, everyone but Seely. She removed her top, knowing that her small white breasts were nicely shaped, but modestly left on her bathing suit bottom. Terry was assiduous and antic in his attentions—half delighting and half embarrassing her. He lathered her with suntan lotion, carried her down to a jumping off point and leapt into the water with her, fitted her with his mask and snorkel while they both treaded water, and, holding his breath, dragged her down into the green depths. Later the two of them climbed the cliff and stopped in a little roadside café and had sardines and bread. When he left her off at her house in the late afternoon, she thought she’d never felt so physically wonderful in her life; her body, exercised to what should have been exhaustion, felt so lithe and light, she practically floated up the tortuously cobbled street.

     In the mirror she applied lipstick for the first time all summer, her cheeks a warmer color now and her freckles darker than before.

     That evening they had dinner at a restaurant. His friends’ little girl came and sat on his lap and, while he ate, he showed her coin tricks and treated her so tenderly that Seely began to long to change places with her. Afterwards they walked along the shore, admiring the reflections of light in the water. When they got to the point, she led him up the stairs to her favorite lookout. Sitting on the landing, he drew her long hair aside and kissed her neck. She kissed him back, feeling fierce and reckless, but when he asked her to go home with him, she refused.