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I stopped. I had to search for words.
"If you acknowledge it...." our English friend repeated.
"I don't think we do really know what happens when mankind acknowledges love, because it has never truly happened before," I replied.
He nodded and became quiet.
I felt that he understood what I meant.
Someone else also understood what I meant. This someone was Heather. When we came back to our hotel that evening, Heather said to me on our balcony as we looked down onto the city to observe the last glow of the sunset, that she was going to have a bath and wondered if I wouldn't mind washing her back.
I was awe struck. What movement had begun here, which in one single easy stroke could bridge those dozen or more dormant years that lay between the SandCastle and this evening in Caracas? I remembered, while standing there on the balcony, that those words that she had used were the very words with which our intimate affair had begun the very next night after Elizabeth City. That night Tony had been watching the Super-Bowl finals, that he enjoyed and didn't want to miss. For this reason, Heather and I had spent much of the evening together by ourselves, at the swimming pool. The lighting in the pool had created the same deep blue glow that was now unfolding over the mountains behind the city of Caracas, above the receding glow of the sunset.
I remembered that when we had come to her room later that night in Elizabeth City, while Tony was still occupied with his Super-Bowl game, Heather had asked the same question that she asked now. I remembered answering her that I would be delighted to wash her back. I remembered that I felt greatly honored by the invitation. Consequently I used the same words again to reply to her, as far as I could remember them.
I recalled that after I had washed her back that day, taking great care not to transgress beyond the boundaries of her back, she had handed the soap back to me, asking, "Would you like to wash my birthday suite, too, all of it?"
I had replied that this would be the greatest delight. Indeed, this delight had come true that night. It had opened a whole world of delights that had unfolded over may days out of the deep recesses of life itself that was stirred into being by our daring to live at the leading edge of it.
"And what about washing your birthday suite?" I asked while we were still standing on the balcony in Caracas, enjoying the mood of the evening.
"Of course!" she replied with a big grin on her face and nudged me, "a person needs to be cleansed all over from the webs of time." I even noticed a tear as she smiled.
I answered with a gentle hug and a kiss in honor of this tremendous promise for a renewal of our adventures into inner space for which we had once joined hands so long ago. But why had we waited all these years to continue? The circumstances hadn't changed. In fact, our entire 'family' was on the balcony together with us, just as we had often been at home. Ross stood on the balcony right next to Heather when she made her request and I answered her. Sylvia, too, was close by. Both had heard my reply. Both had to acknowledge that nothing was hushed or wrapped in secrecy. And why should this be hushed if it was the most natural thing in the world to celebrate the reemergence of love?
Still, it would have seemed impossibly daring just a few months ago, do anything like that, which appeared totally natural all of a sudden. Except, why should it have seemed unnatural, ever? Had we not spend countless hours on our private beach with each other so many years ago, in the early days, naked as we were born, all of us together. Why should it have appeared as something hopelessly daring and inappropriate for us to continue what had already been achieved previously, and to continue it openly?
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