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'Different flavors, surely,' I said.
'Long live the difference!' said Edith, who reached under Severin's apron for something and touched hands with Utch there.
I fed Edith an oyster; I fed Utch an oyster. I was wearing my shorts and Edith unzipped them; Utch pulled them down and said to her, 'Why are these men hiding themselves?'
'I'm the cook,' Severin said. 'Don't want to burn anything.'
'I'm opening oysters,' I said. 'One slip of the hand ...'
Edith hugged Utch, suddenly around her hips. 'You're so solid, Utch, I can't get over it!' she cried, and Utch hugged her back. 'It must seem like quite a handful after me,' Edith said to Severin.
He spattered and hissed at the stove; he flipped up his apron and fanned himself. Utch ran her square, broad hand down Edith's sloped stomach. 'You're so long,' she said admiringly; Edith laughed and drew Utch to her; the top of her head fitted against Edith's throat. Utch picked Edith up quickly, with astonishing strength. 'And you don't weigh anything at all!' she cried.
'Utch can pick me up, too,' I said. Edith looked suddenly alarmed as Utch picked me up with a low grunt.
'Heavens, Utch,' Edith said. Severin had taken off his apron and had wrapped himself in sausage links. He pressed himself against Edith, who squealed and jumped away from him, feeling the cool, slick sausage against her. 'My God, Severin--'
'Got a whole string of pricks for you, my dear,' he said as his paella fumed and conspired behind him.
When Severin and Utch went for another swim, Edith and I made love on the long corduroy L-shaped couch in the living room. We were lying there drowsily, after the act, when Severin and Utch came back cold-skinned and salt-tasting from the ocean; they were shivering. They made me feel like swimming too, but Edith wasn't interested. I leaped up from the couch and ran naked across the pale green lawn just as it was getting dark and on to the sand which was still warm from the sun. The water stung; I hollered as loud as I could, but there were only gulls and sandpipers to hear me. I sprinted back to the house where so much flesh awaited me.
When I came in through the French doors to the sunroom, I could hear that no one had actually missed me while I was gone. I could not see them in the living room, and I discreetly went into the kitchen and warmed myself over Severin's steaming paella until the three of them were finished. The three of them! Utch told me later that she and Severin, chilly and shaking, had curled up with Edith on the couch
because she had opened her arms to their shivering, or they were attracted to how warm and sticky she was. She covered Utch and kissed her, and Severin touched and rubbed them both, and suddenly Utch was pinned under them, with Severin kissing her mouth and Edith kissing her deeply, until Utch felt herself coming and wanted Severin inside her. Edith didn't mind and Severin came into her; Edith held Utch's head against Severin's shoulder; she was mouth-to-mouth with Edith, their tongues exchanging recipes, when Severin made her come. Utch said that Edith almost came then too. Then it was Edith's turn, because Severin had been holding out, and she held Edith's head while Severin came inside her; he came quickly and rolled away. But Edith had still not come, Utch knew, so Utch helped her. Edith was so light that Utch could easily manipulate her; she picked up Edith at the hips and drove her shoulders against Edith's slim buttocks and very lightly touched her tongue to Edith where she was wetter and saltier than the sea. When Edith screamed, Severin covered her mouth with his own. I heard just a short cry before the orchestra of the paella captured my attention again.
Then Severin was beside me in the kitchen smelling more distinctly than shellfish. He shoved me in the direction of the living room. 'Go on,' he said, 'you don't know anything about paella. Let me. Go keep the ladies ... happy,' he said, and gave me a bewildered roll of his eyes (the most honest, worried and intimate confession I believe he ever made to me). 'Go on, man,' he said, shoving me again. He dug a wooden spoon deep into the paella, brought up that unlikely and delicious mixture - chicken, pork, sausage, lobster, mussels and clams - and slid the steaming spoon into his mouth. A bright red tongue of pimento hung down his chin, and I found my way to the couch where Utch and Edith were drawn tight together, curled against each other; they were touching each other's breasts and hair, but when I came up they parted and let me fit snugly between them. I did not object to how they used me.
Then we felt like a swim and ran, all three, across the lawn, green-black now, and saw the lights on the channel buoys blinking out in the water. And we all three entered the sea and saw that startling figure alone against the lights from the sunroom's open doors. He sprinted down the lawn toward us and cleared the first long dune like a broadjumper. At a glance you would have picked him for a winner in a rare pentathlon - cooking, eating, drinking, wrestling and fucking. 'Here I come, you lovers!' he shouted. A wave rocked us and tilted the horizon, so that Severin momentarily disappeared, and then he burst through it and hugged the three of us; we were chest-deep in the ocean. 'The paella's ready, team,' he said, 'if we can stop screwing long enough to eat it.' A vulgar man.
But we stopped until after dinner, when I think we'd all had a long enough time to engage in the normal, relatively civilized process of eating, which we'd done together many times before, so that our awareness of how we'd behaved that afternoon had sunk in and left us all happy but shy.
Severin reviewed his paella, suspected the tenderness of the pork, cast aspersions on the age of the chicken, suggested shortcuts in the making of the Italian sweet sausage, allowed that clams were, usually, clams, that mussels were better than clams anyway, and that the lobster was the undefeated George James Bender of the sea.
'Don't make me lose my appetite,' Edith said. 'Show some restraint in your images.'
'This is a vacation from restraint,' Severin said. 'I don't see anyone else showing any restraint.' He flipped a lobster claw in my lap; I flipped it back; he laughed.
'This is no vacation,' I said. 'This is a beginning.' It was a toast. Edith stood up and drank down her wine the way I was used to seeing Utch drink hers.
But Severin said, 'No, it's just a holiday. It's like calling time out.'
Utch wasn't saying anything; I could tell she was a little drunk. Edith announced that she wanted to change her brand of cigarettes. 'I want non-filters,' she said, crumpling a full pack of mine; she'd been out of her own for hours. 'If this is just a time out,' she said, 'I'm going to enjoy myself.'
Severin said he'd go get her cigarettes. 'What's the worst cigarette? What's the strongest, vilest, most throat-rending, lung-gunking cigarette on sale? Because I'll get you a carton of them,' he told Edith, 'and we'll force-feed them to you all weekend. You can chainsmoke until they're all gone. Maybe that will cure you.'
'Go with him,' Edith said to me. 'He'll probably buy me a box of cigars.'
'You shouldn't smoke,' Utch said to Edith. 'You know it upsets him.' She had a fixed smile on her face, and I knew she wouldn't remember anything she said tomorrow. Her left hand lay in the salad as if it were comfortable there. Edith smiled at her and took her hand out of the salad. Utch winked at her and blew her a kiss.
In the car Severin said, 'Christ, we better hurry back or those women will go to bed without us.'
'Does it bother you?' I asked. 'It seems natural to me that they should have those feelings for each other. I don't know why, but it doesn't bother me.'
'I don't know what's natural,' Severin said, 'but, no, it doesn't bother me, either. I just don't want to get back and find us locked out of the bedrooms. I mean, I didn't come all this way to spend a weekend with you.' But he was joking; he wasn't really angry.
We had an argument about whether to buy Edith Lucky Strikes, Camels or Pall Malls. Severin insisted on the Pall Malls because they were longer and he thought they would burn her throat more. Riding back, I wanted to tell him how good I felt - how I couldn't believe that he'd suddenly relaxed here, and how optimistic I was about all of us. I wanted to say that I thought our future looked fine, but he said suddenly, 'We should be careful no one gets too excited.' It was like his saying that we were all on a holiday, and I didn't know what to make of it. 'Why does Utch drink so much?' he asked me. 'Why do you let her get so plastered?'
I said, 'You know, one kind of excitement leads to another.'
