Children of Light by Robert Stone

Author:Robert Stone [Stone, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary
ISBN: 9780307814173
Publisher: Deutsch
Published: 1986-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Joe Ricutti had set up shop under a beach umbrella beside the bathhouse. He sponged and powdered Lu Anne’s face and gave her a neck rub. Josette worked on her hair, no more sulkily distant than was usual. The gaffer and best boy were winding cable for an arc. Lu Anne had a look at the sun and picked up her worn copy of Kate Chopin’s novel. The wording was a solo Liebestodt, death as liberation.

Edna had found her old bathing suit still hanging, faded upon its accustomed peg, Chopin had written.

When Josette finished with her hair, Lu Anne stood up.

“I’m going to walk it through,” she told Ricutti, and reading as she walked, set out for the bathhouse.

She put it on, leaving her clothing in the bathhouse. But when she was beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant prickling garments from her, and for the first time in her life, she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited it.

“Clear the set, please,” Eric Hueffer intoned through his megaphone. “If you’re not working, we don’t want you on the set. Clear the set, everybody, please.” The Peruvian continuity girl made the announcement in Spanish, for the Mexicans.

Lu Anne leaned her head against the side of the bathhouse and thought of Edna naked in the open air for the first time. How sad it was, she thought. There was no way to film it. She had never thought of herself like Edna, but some things, she thought, they’re the same for everyone. A little Edna in all of us.

Naked for the first time, the open air. In the heat of the day it should be. A beach on the Gulf, midday, the water just cool, the sun hot on your body, the wind so still you can smell your own skin.

She finds out who she is and it’s too much and she dies. Yes, Lu Anne thought, I know about that. I can do that, me.

Too bad about the sunset, because it was clichéd and banal. Low-rent theatrics. Middle-income. Middlebrow theatrics.

She strolled at the water’s edge, reading. No one had called for quiet but the gaffer and the best boy spoke in low voices.

How strange and awful it seemed to stand under the sky! how delicious. She felt like some newborn creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that she had never known.

The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body, in its soft close embrace.

The cosmic fuck. Well, Lu Anne thought, who better than me? But the drowned people she had seen in the church hall after the hurricane down home had not looked particularly fulfilled.

She read the line again aloud: “The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body, in its soft close embrace.” She looked out to sea. That’s how it would seem to Edna. Something out there for me. Life more abundant. You let it go and you lie back and you let it happen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.