I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) by Jane Mendelsohn Page A

anything about it to Noonan. Shegoes on loving him, receiving him at night. She watches for him and waits. Neither of them will break their unspoken rule. Neither of them will talk about the future. But she has premonitions. She has nightmares.
    With love come the deepest fears of dying.
    At night, under the moon, the cool slippery water, the wet salty bodies, the famous silk scarf, and there they go, into an atmosphere of their own, where they splash each other, sing songs to each other, please each other, slowly, with all the time in the world, then on the raft, floating like a leaf on the water, then to the bed stuffed with feathers and leaves, their bodies leaving dark wet impressions behind them, and they’ll be there all night, with the Electra on the beach watching over their island in the darkness, unafraid for themselves as long as they are together, oblivious to the world they have left behind, reminded of it only in their dreams.
    It was late, almost morning, when he first saw the silver speck on the horizon, lit by the moon. She was asleep. Then dawn came, played tricks with his eyes. Then, with the sun, it flashed in and out of sight. He doesn’t dare wake her. But she will wake up. Later, by the time the birds have taken their midday naps, she will have made him so happy he will have forgotten all about the silver speck on the horizon.

Eleven
    O N THE OCCASION of their first anniversary on the island, they prepared a celebration for themselves, the climax of which was a gigantic shark the color of slate which turned on a spit over a roaring fire, some seven hours simmering in its own juices. Half the animals on the island gathered to express their wonderment. She and Noonan had spent the weeks beforehand plotting how to lure a shark into a trap of coconut and wire, and they were celebrating their catch as much as their anniversary. They had carried the beast from one end of the island to the other, and now they felt they knew it well enough to eat it. When they opened him up, they found a solid gold cigarette case in his stomach.
    Lost in the aroma of sizzling sharkskin which gained pungency as the day wore on, she felt herself in agreement with the world, whose calm pulse could be felt overthe din of the animals and the fire. Everything was perfect, or perfectly imperfect. The shark fell into the fire and its skin burned to a crisp. It was too rare. They ate very well. Noonan’s fin soup was a success, but the birds got most of the meat.
    After dinner he took out his harmonica and we made music, the way we had when we first landed on the island, familiar songs from our past, and radio hits that we remembered. We sang ballads and cowboy tunes, and advertising jingles, anything that we knew. There was a new sweetness to our singing, because the songs reminded us of a life we had lived a very long time ago, a life that we remembered but did not miss.
    We sang long after the arrival of the last few stars, thrown about in their lunatic patterns, each with a color and shape of its own, suspended in the clear black sky.
    We sang to the dark, mysterious ocean, whose silence reached us like a mystical vapor.
    We shared a smoke from Noonan’s tortoiseshell pipe.
    Excited by the lingering smell of the shark and by the singing, hundreds of fireflies electrified the beach, like Christmas lights dangling around invisible trees.
    An hour later we were lying in each other’s arms, on the edge of the foaming sea, and we made love almost as an afterthought on the broad, damp carpet of sand. The night insects were out in full force, with nothing to stopthem from devouring our unprotected limbs, the sand snaked its way into every conceivable crevice, and the hermit crabs scuttled through our tangled hair, which by now had grown so long it was remarkable that the rats hadn’t already nested in it. We both wanted to keep going till sunrise, we had never felt such a cascade of passion, but we had to stop abruptly because Noonan