Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

The Perfect Beach by Jeff Williamson

“This story has been floating around in my mind for close to thirty years, ever since I vacationed in Martinique,” Jeff Williamson told EQMM. “All the physical details — the scenery, the water, the reef, the Atlantic — are as accurate as my memory can make them.” A New York ad man, he has a keen eye for his surroundings!

The beach was a perfect half-moon, lined with perfectly spaced palm trees, encircling a bay of perfect blue. Behind the beach, on three low hills, was the town, a jumble of perfect white buildings with tin roofs. And behind the town, a half-dozen miles distant, was the perfect green mountain that formed the spine of the island.

When Geri had first come upon the town, driving down the winding road that led over the mountains from the other side of the island, her reaction had been delight, quickly followed by suspicion and disbelief. In the three days she had been touring the island, following the road that wound up from the capital along the leeward coast, she had passed through many picturesque towns. But none of them had had a decent beach. One was thin and rocky. Another was spoiled by a giant cement dock for a tin-roofed factory that had appeared to have gone out of use. And three other otherwise acceptable beaches were fouled by the presence of large pipes that discharged raw sewage directly into the gentle waves that slid up onto the black, volcanic sand. The crabs that scuttled in between waves to feast on the ordure certainly appreciated it, and the island children that splashed fifty yards away didn’t seem to mind, but there was no way she could conceive of even taking a stroll along such water, much less going in. “It is a problem,” agreed a moustachioed official at one of the local post offices, where she had stopped to mail a postcard. “But you know, no one comes to this coast for the beaches. For the beaches you want the south coast. That’s where the Club Med is.”

Geri wrinkled her nose — the slim, vaguely aristocratic nose that had always seemed a little out of place in the placid oval of her face. She did want beaches. That was why she had come to the Caribbean. But she most definitely did not want Club Med. The organized activities, the enforced conviviality, the tanned, athletic, oppressively upbeat GOs — it was all so mindless and herdlike, and disturbingly like the small-town society she had fled eleven years ago when she had moved to New York.

There was an open-air market at the T intersection of the road from the mountains and the road along the coast. Geri stopped the car there and called out to a woman carrying a net marketing sack filled with green oranges:

“On peut nager la bas?”

The woman tilted her head and looked puzzled. Geri repeated the question. “One can swim, there, in the bay?”

The woman shrugged. “If you like.”

“There is no garbage in the water?”

“Garbage?” Again, the puzzled look.

Geri hesitated, partly out of concern for offending the woman, in whose town she was, after all, nothing but an intruder, and partly because of the slight difficulty of articulating her question in French.

“I’ve been touring the island,” she said. “Some of the other towns, the sewers are right in the middle of the beach.”

“What are you asking?” said the woman, sounding slightly impatient.

“Do you” — Geri felt her ears heating up with embarrassment over the directness and strangeness of the question — “is there a sewer here on the beach?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “The beach is clean,” she said coldly. “Cleaner than anything you’ll find in England.”

Geri let out a nervous laugh. “I’m not English. I’m American.”

“That explains a lot.”

The woman turned and walked away, leaving Geri feeling as if she had been hit in the stomach. She was so flustered that she pulled out right in front of a truck coming down the coast road from the north. With a blast on its air horn, the truck swerved just in time to miss Geri’s left front fender. In the process it hit one of the poles supporting the canvas canopy over the market. The canopy swayed and collapsed. There were screams and yells and the driver of the truck, a whippet-muscled man in a sleeveless T-shirt, jumped out of the cab, ran over to Geri’s car window, and began shouting at her.

A trio of vendors from the market joined in the truckdriver’s denunciation. And in front of Geri, regarding her through the windshield with a look of open contempt, was the woman who’d taken offense about her question regarding the beach.

“Je suis désolée,” said Geri. “Je suis désolée.”

And she began to cry.

Either because of her tears or the realization that no real damage had been done, the crowd’s anger dissipated quickly. Several vendors set about re-erecting the canopy, lashing the cracked pole back together with fishing line. Penitent after his outburst, the truckdriver produced a bottle of rum and a plastic tumbler, into which he poured several fingers and offered it to her “to soothe the nerves.” Under the circumstances, Geri felt it was impossible to refuse. With trembling hands she downed it like medicine, feeling it burn all the way down her throat. The truckdriver nodded approvingly, then proceeded to knock back a glass of his own.

“I should not have lost my temper before. I would like to apologize.” He extended his hand.

Geri took it, finding it firm and strong, although hardly bigger than her own hand. The truckdriver, she realized, was actually a rather small man, an inch or two shorter than herself.

“It’s past lunchtime,” said the truckdriver. “Would you like to eat? The food is not bad at a hotel down the road.”

She looked at him. Was he trying to pick her up? He wasn’t bad-looking — early thirties, maybe, fine-boned, light-skinned — but a truckdriver, in a sleeveless T-shirt...

She would not mind a little fling during the vacation. In fact, in planning the trip she had half-imagined that her solo expedition up the coast, away from the tourist hotels and the pier where the cruise ships docked, might lead to just such an adventure. It might be exactly what she needed to get her past the strange, stale little dead end she had wandered into — career-wise, relationship-wise, everything-wise. It had all been fairly vague, in her musings, how the affair would develop or what the man would look like, but one thing was certain: It involved neither a car accident nor a truckdriver.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, “but I have to be getting on.”

He shrugged good-naturedly. “Where are you going?”

“Oh,” she said vaguely, “that way.” She pointed south in the direction of the road that led along the beach.

“You have a long drive?”

His questions, and her responses, were trapping her. In spite of everything, she was still hoping to stay in this town. Now, to maintain the integrity of the story she had told to avoid his invitation, she was committing herself to moving on.

“Not all that far. But I do have to get going.”

He shrugged. “Okay. Have a nice stay.”

As she drove off, he smiled and waved.

She smiled back, working hard to make it appear sincere.

The road paralleled the beach. She drove it slowly, aching to pull over and walk barefoot across the powdery sand to the water. Up ahead on the right was a bright-blue building with yellow trim. A sign outside said: “Hotel-Restaurant de l’Anse.” As she approached, she was engulfed in a delicious spicy, lemony smell of cooking. A tree-shaded outdoor dining terrace was next to the hotel. They were doing a good lunch business. A perfect beach, a perfect hotel, and she was moving on. She banged the steering wheel in frustration.

A mile later, looking back from a hill at the perfect town and bay, she turned back.

Her truckdriver was seated, eating a salad, when she appeared in the entrance to the dining terrace. He saw her, smiled broadly, and motioned her over to his table. There were a dozen other diners, all islanders, predominantly men. She was conscious of their eyes upon her as she made her way across the cement floor.

“What happened?” he asked. “Another accident?”

She laughed — he really did have an appealing droll side. “No. I smelled the cooking when I drove past and I could not get it out of my mind.”

“You made it back just in time. Bébé stops serving at two.”

“Bébé?”

“The owner.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the back of the terrace.

There, at a large round table in the corner, sat a massive fat man with a huge moon face. His eyes, in contrast to his chocolatey skin, were a startling bright blue. It was clear how he had gotten the nickname: His limbs and body and head were eerily proportionate to that of a baby, albeit one blown up to three hundred pounds.

“Wine?” asked the truckdriver.

“Why not?”

The truckdriver flagged the waiter. Soon there was another salad and two steaming bowls of bouillabaisse before them. The stew was delicious, thick and spicy and lemony. The cold wine tasted marvelous with it. She drank one glass quickly, then another. He told her that he was from a town just outside the island capital, that he had worked for the trucking company for three years, and before that he had driven a taxi.

Not too much more was said, but it was okay, and not in the least awkward. She felt relaxed, loose, the first time she had felt that way all vacation. She called for another carafe of wine. The stew made her thirsty, made her sweat. The truckdriver was sweating, too. There were beads of perspiration above his upper lip. It was a finely shaped upper lip, she noticed, with the little divot under the nose very sharply defined. She allowed herself to imaging running her fingertips over that divot to brush the moisture away.

She smiled at him. He smiled back. Emboldened, she asked:

“Is it decent, this hotel?”

“One would imagine. Bébé is serious about what he does.”

“Serious is good, then?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Well, at work, it’s good to be serious. One should do things properly, with care.”

“As opposed to on vacation?”

“Yes.”

“When one should be improper, and not careful.” She smiled lazily and allowed her eyes to meet his. He could not fail to understand the innuendo. He smiled back.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m going to see if they have a room.”

They did have a room, a big one, in the front on the second floor, with painted wooden walls, showing slivers of daylight between the slats. Floor-to-ceiling windows — the louvered shutters drawn against the midday sun. A high, soft double bed, a sink in one corner, an inexpensive armoire in the other. The armoire had a mirrored front. She sat on the bed and saw that the mirror reflected her image. How French to have the mirror directed at the bed, she thought. She lay down, stretching out on her side, looking over her shoulder at the reflected hourglass of her waist and hips. She imagined the slim, muscled body of the truckdriver standing over her. Her heart raced deliciously. She was about to have an adventure. A little French island adventure.

Flushed and even more tipsy than before she had left, she returned to the table.

“Do you know what I haven’t asked you?” she said, giggling.

“What?”

“Your name.”

“Etienne Dalhousie.”

“Etienne Dalhousie.” She repeated the name, turning the syllables over in her mouth, tasting their lightness, their Frenchness.

“And your name?” he asked.

“Geri Kronhardt.”

“Geri. Is that not a male name?”

She shook her head. “Different spelling. It’s short for GeriAnn.”

“GeriAnn. That is pretty.”

“No, it’s not,” she said. She had never liked her name. It was so corn-fed, so everything she had wanted to escape when she had left Indiana. It was a name for women who married their high-school sweethearts and had children and put on impossible amounts of weight.

“Etienne Dalhousie,” she enthused, slurring the words just slightly, perhaps even charmingly, “now that’s a name!”

He laughed. “If you say so.”

“I do. In the United States it would be the name of—” She groped for something appropriate — “of an art gallery owner!”

“I don’t understand.”

“In the United States we name our truckdrivers Tony or Joe or Sam.”

“There are names for people in certain occupations?”

She laughed. “No, no, no! It just works out that way. You see, to Americans, Etienne is a very sophisticated name. It’s not the sort of name you would expect to find on someone who drives a truck.”

Etienne Dalhousie’s face stiffened.

She was drunk enough to be puzzled at his reaction. What was the problem? It seemed an ordinary enough observation...

And then she realized what she had said.

Her cheeks burning, she stammered, “I mean, it’s not a question of the value of one—” She groped for the word for “occupation,” but in the embarrassment of the moment, her French was abandoning her.

Etienne Dalhousie looked at her, his wide-set brown eyes flat and cool and appraising.

“I have to be going,” he said finally. “My wife’s sister is coming over for dinner and we’re going to take the kids to the carnival. I hope you enjoy your vacation.”

Humiliated, she took refuge in the room she had just rented — not even bothering to bring up her bags, just hurrying up the stairs and locking the door behind her and lying down on the bed. Through the louvered shutters she could heard the people talking on the dining terrace. She closed her eyes, but she had drunk too much, and the room seemed to turn; to avoid being sick she had to open them again. After a time, she fell asleep.

She awoke with a headache, drenched in her own perspiration. She staggered over to the window and pulled open the shutters, drinking in the ocean-scented air that puffed through. The sun was at a slant now, its light pink against the dozen or so puffy clouds that had appeared over the bay. If anything, the scene was more exquisite than ever. Suddenly she couldn’t bear to simply look at it any longer. She had to go in. She had to throw herself in that beautiful blue cleansing water.

She rushed out of the room and down the wooden stairs to the lobby. The clerk nodded to her as she walked past. When she got to her car she realized she had left it unlocked. Her luggage had been stolen.

The clerk was terribly sorry — shocked, actually. Nothing like this had ever happened before. But what was one to do, except report the theft to the police?

“I know how y’all feel,” said a voice behind her.

Geri turned and found herself facing a deeply tanned young man wearing a bathing suit and a cut-off football jersey that said in big block letters: “Prop. LSU Athletic Department.”

The young man smiled amiably. “When I got ripped off in Ocho Rios they cleaned me out good. Luggage, passport, traveler’s checks — the works. Only thing I had left was my spear-fishing stuff. ‘Course, spear fishing’s why I’m here. If y’all need clothes, I got a few things. Prob’ly fit you. Girl they belonged to was about your size. We kinda went our separate ways.”

He stuck out his hand. “Name’s Mike.”

She hesitated. “Justine,” she said.

“Enchanté, y’all.” He grinned.

His last name was Godchaux — “Godshaw,” he pronounced it. He was island-hopping his way down to South America. He was starting work as an oil-company geologist in Baton Rouge in May, his first job out of college. He told her this on the way up the stairs to his room, which, like hers, was on the second floor but in the back.

“How about you?” he asked, fitting the big, rusted skeleton key to the door.

“Me?”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a publicist at Bertram.”

“Bertram?”

“The publishing house?” Unintentionally, her answer came out with a sharp upward inflection, as if she could not conceive of anyone not being familiar with such a well-known name.

“Oh well, I’m not much of a reader, I guess. Y’all prob’ly from New York, then.”

“Yes,” she muttered, feeling a little shamed by the humility of his response.

He opened the door. His room was considerably smaller than hers. It was dim and stuffy. Leaning against one wall was an enormous frame backpack. He knelt down and unzipped a pouch near the bottom and pulled out a small packet of clothing. On the outside, folded so the logo was visible, was another LSU sweatshirt. Unwrapping it on the bed, he spread out the contents: a pair of denim cutoffs, bleached and frayed. A lime-green tube top. A white cotton sundress. Three bikini panties. And a navy-blue maillot swimsuit, the stretchy kind competitive swimmers wear.

“I really don’t think I could—”

“Y’all might as well use ‘em.”

Eyeing the clothes, she attempted an appreciative smile, which came out tight and condescending. To wear a sweatshirt identical to his... well, that felt uncomfortably like the first step toward a relationship that she definitely did not want to encourage. The cutoffs looked like they’d be tight in the hips, a struggle to zip up. The tube top was certainly not her style. The thought of putting on someone else’s underwear was vaguely nauseating. And the sundress was far too cutesy. The swimsuit might be okay, if it fit. She should never have allowed him to talk her into coming up and taking a look.

And yet, she wanted desperately to swim. To throw herself into the perfect blue water of the bay. To wash away the defeats and frustrations of the day.

Suddenly, spasmodically, she gathered up the clothes spread over the bed. “Thanks,” she said, retreating immediately toward the door.

He shrugged and smiled. “Hey, no problem. Y’know, if y’all can stand getting up early tomorrow morning, we’re going out past the reef for a little fishing. Bébé’s always got extra room on the boat.”

“Thanks again, but I don’t know the first thing about spear fishing.”

“You don’t have to fish. You can just paddle around. It’s pretty.”

She forced a smile. “Thanks.”

“Well, hey, if you change your mind, let me know tonight. I’ll be around the hotel somewhere.”

Geri felt the eyes of the desk clerk on her as she came down the stairs to the lobby wearing the swimsuit and carrying a white, slightly threadbare hotel towel that was too small to wrap around her waist.

“Mademoiselle—”

She raised a hand, not wanting to discuss the theft further. “I’ll be back in a while. We can talk then.”

She scuttled across the road, the asphalt burning hot under her bare feet, and onto the powdery soft sand of the beach. It was empty, even now in the late afternoon when the sun-wary generally ventured out, and as she looked down the curving scimitar of sand and the perfectly tilted palms she wondered why. But rather than dwell on it, she dropped her towel and strode directly into the water.

It was warm and clear and the sand beneath it was as white as the beach. It looked clean, beautifully clean, in fact, and alive with small schools of tiny bright fish that darted away from her footfalls. The fish were perfectly visible, for there were no waves, nothing more than ripplets. A half-mile distant was the reason why: The feathery line of surf where the big swells of the open Atlantic crashed against the barrier reef.

Her heart lifting, she began to splash ahead, running now, running as fast as she could, ready to throw herself into the water, ready to swim as long and hard as she could, as far as the barrier reef, if necessary, if that was what it would take to work the awful, airless, self-conscious paralysis out of her life.

But then there was a strange thing. She ran fifty feet and the water deepened only slightly, up to the middle of her calf. Another fifty feet and it was up to her knee. Another fifty feet and it was actually shallower. And around her she began to see patches of sea plants, dark brown against the white sand bottom. She found herself in a shallow sand-bottomed channel through what was now an expanse of sea vegetation.

Perspiring heavily, with the heat of the sun reflecting off the water rising up thickly around her, she made her way down the channel. It began to deepen and she felt a wild sense of relief. Then, without warning, the channel ended and her left foot fell in the midst of the slithery, clinging bottom grass. Shuddering with disgust, she pulled her foot out and staggered back. She laced her fingers together for an eyeshade and looked around her.

She was maybe two hundred yards from the shore and the perfect crescent of the beach, and the tilting perfectly spaced palm trees, and the perfect white jumble of the town with the emerald mountain rising behind. In the other direction, five or six hundred yards away, was the reef, the surf just barely audible now, a sandpapery rasping sound. She was all alone in the midst of the perfect turquoise bay.

All alone because everybody but her knew it was unswimmable.

She began to laugh and, letting her legs give way, sat down with a splash in the shallow water. Sat like a child with her bottom on the sand and her legs crooked in front of her. Laughing, then crying, hanging her head down and watching through blurry eyes as the tears dripped into the warm, clear water.

Skipping dinner, she went out on the narrow wood veranda outside her room and tried to write postcards.

Keep it light and tight, that was the trick. But somehow, when she was done, she had trouble making herself sign it. “Dear Gang” — as if she were writing a houseful of sorority sisters instead of the three women, one of whom she disliked intensely. “Missing you” — in truth, she did not miss them at all, not even Beth, with whom she had once been friends. The only verity in what she had written was about work. After eleven years in publishing, she was at a small, stale dead end: in a marketing group for a house that hadn’t had a hit in years.

Verna was the only one of her three sisters she kept in touch with. She lived in Columbus, Ohio, in a condominium she shared with her companion, Darlene. For years, her literal and her sister’s figurative distance from the mainstream Midwest had united them, but of late Geri had felt the bond dissolving as Verna and Darlene made plans to adopt a child and settled into a relationship and a lifestyle that, the issue of sexual orientation aside, was more stiflingly conventional than that of their own parents.

“Traveling again, this time in the Caribbean” — and the time before in the Yucatan, and the time before in Prague, and the time before in Spain, and the time before she was not sure, either Peru or Argentina. Traveling again...

She set the pen down and looked out over the bay, black now, the distant breakers invisible, the water indistinguishable from the sky except for the stars, thick and bright and unbearably distant. Feeling her eyes grow wet — would she never stop crying this day? — she fled the room. On the way down the stairs, she ran into Mike Godchaux.

“You coming with us tomorrow?” he asked.

His breath was sweetish. She realized he’d been drinking. “I don’t think I can.”

“Why not?”

He looked her up and down, very slowly, very frankly. “You look like you’re a good swimmer. Good shoulders. Strong legs. If you can swim, you can come.”

She felt herself flush. “I don’t know—”

“What, are you gonna spend the day wading in that damn puddle out there? All by yourself? What kinda vacation is that?”

She stiffened. “Thank you for the invitation,” she said, coolly. She turned away and added, “And thank you for the clothes.”

“ ‘Thank you for the invitation,’ ” he mimicked, holding his chin up high, “ ‘And thank you for the clothes.’ ”

Her head snapped back. “What did you say?”

A slow, satisfied smile spread across his face. “I knew there was a human being in there.”

She glared at him, furious, but unable to think of anything to say. Finally, she turned and walked down the remainder of the stairs.

“We watched you, y’know,” he called out after her as she crossed the lobby floor. “Bébé and me. Couldn’t figure out why you didn’t ask us why nobody was out in the water. Then we laid bets about how far you’d walk before you gave up. Gerard said a hundred meters. I said, hell no, she’s good for a lot more.”

She stopped just short of the door, unable to let the remark pass unchallenged.

“What makes you think you know the first thing about me?”

“What makes you think I don’t?” He smiled lazily.

“We haven’t exchanged more than two dozen words.”

“Oh, I think I’d put the count consider’bly higher.” His smile widened. “An’ climbin’ even as we speak.”

“You go to hell!”

She walked south along the shore road, following the same route she’d driven earlier in the day in her car before reaching the top of the point and turning back. Feeling trapped again, trapped by her own angry exit into a route she had no interest in taking. She clenched her teeth and balled up her fists like a little girl, then she was crying again, and thinking about fragile, stiff things: the yellowing bonsai in the window on the airshaft of her walk-up back in New York; her mother’s ormolu music box, and the sad, tinkly Chopin nocturne it played. Then the notes of the nocturne seemed to fall apart and become random and atonal and she realized she was hearing the squeak of bats, swooping in the blackness around her. She brought up her arms around her face and ran.

She went a little mad that night — that was what you would call it, she supposed with an odd sense of self-distance. She went back to the hotel but she never went to bed; instead she sat out on the veranda under the cold starlight, drifting in and out of sleep, struggling each time she awoke with the sensation that she was falling through space at an enormous speed, a sensation so vivid that she kept looking up at the Big Dipper, certain that its bright stars must have come closer, perhaps even close enough to resolve into suns, orbited by frozen, lifeless planets.

Sometime later, she had no real idea how long, she heard voices, indistinguishable, and then a laugh which she recognized as Mike Godchaux’s. The night had taken away her anger toward him, and the bay, perfect again in the morning light, beckoned once more.

“Wait!” she cried out from the veranda. “I’m coming along.”

The boat, a long, brightly painted dugout canoe, slid effortlessly across the shallow waters that she had waded in the day before. In the stern, Mike guided their progress, gripping the handle of a small outboard, following the bright sand channels through the dark masses of seaweed. At the last minute, Bébé had backed out, needing to prepare the hotel for a small busload of tourists unexpectedly coming in from the capital. Mike had smeared zinc oxide on his nose and every time she looked back he grinned broadly at her, his teeth the exact bright white shade of the sun protectant.

He looked a little like Tom Cruise, she decided — when the actor had been younger, of course.

As the reef neared, and the sound of the surf grew louder and resolved from a constant, low rumble to distinctly separate booms, Geri began to grow nervous.

“Is there a passage through the reef?”

Mike, grinning like a Cheshire cat, shook his head. “You wait for the swell,” he explained. “Just before it hits, you gun it. You’ve got a good three or four feet of water over the coral if you time it right.”

She nodded and bit her lip.

“Don’t worry. I’ve made this trip a dozen times.”

The reef was less than a hundred yards away now. The big, dark-blue rollers from the open Atlantic pounded the coral, shooting spray dozens of feet up into the air. Mike, from the stern, motioned for her to hold on to the gunwales of the boat. She gripped the worn wood convulsively, regretting that she had agreed to come along.

A wave loomed, blotting out part of the sky, and smashed before them, drenching Geri’s heated skin with spray. The boat slowed, almost stopped, then surged ahead directly into the next building wave. The bow pitched at a frightening angle, and Geri felt herself lifted upward, upward, so steeply she clutched the gunwales as tight as she could for fear of being thrown backward. Then, miraculously, they were on top of the wave and the deep blue Atlantic was spread out before her, all the way to the distant horizon, open water all the way to Africa, and then they were roller-coastering down so fast that Geri’s stomach got the fluttery elevator feeling. She shuddered with relief. They had made it past the reef.

When they had gone far enough that the sound of the surf was only a murmur, Mike threw a rusted, bowl-shaped anchor overboard. He handed Geri a pair of blue fins and a mask with a snorkel.

“You’re a good swimmer, right?”

“Pretty good,” she said, cautiously.

“You ever snorkel before?”

“Once.”

“Well, it’s great here. Whole mess of fish, especially by the reef. We jump in here then swim back.”

“By the reef?” There was no way she was going back anywhere near there.

“It’s calmer under water. If you’re a decent swimmer, you’ll be okay.”

“No, thanks. I’ll just stay here.”

“But you came all the way out—”

“No,” she said firmly. “I’ll be fine here.”

She watched him swim off. The boat rode higher, felt more skittish on the deep ocean swells with him gone. It rose and fell a good twelve feet with each wave. The water was a dazzling deep blue. In the troughs, the water obliterated half the sky. At the crests, the town, the beach, and the emerald mountain were arrayed in the distance more perfectly than ever. Geri took a deep breath, inhaling the fresh salt air. She felt herself loosening up. She felt less afraid. The roller-coaster ride was actually quite exhilarating. At the crest of one particularly big wave, she actually rose up a little way in the boat, still holding on to the gunwales, and let out a little yip of excitement. This was more like it. This was more of what she had gone on vacation for.

Unfortunately, after a few minutes of riding the swells, she began to get seasick. She was on the verge of vomiting when she remembered hearing somewhere that if you were in the water, motion sickness was not as much of a problem.

Had she been in a different state of mind, she might have found the trouble she had getting into the water comical. Every time she tried to step over the gunwale, the long, round-hulled boat threatened to capsize — or so it seemed. She tried going over at the bow, but it rose up too high. Same story in the stern, plus the outboard was in the way. There was the water, inches away, and she could not get into it. She clenched her teeth and closed her eyes, feeling the frustration that had dogged her since her arrival in the town. Feeling the hysteria lurking behind it. Wondering why her life seemed to have been diminished by her every choice, separated by each decision from other lives, reduced in momentum to the point where the foot-high side of a wooden boat could stop it cold.

At the top of the next wave, she pulled the mask down over her face, bit hard on the snorkel mouthpiece, and threw herself in.

She went under the surface a bit, then came up, blowing water out of the snorkel. The boat floated lightly next to her. The water was a marvelous temperature, warm but refreshing. Her nausea subsided almost immediately. She scissored her legs and felt the power of the fins push her shoulders out of the water. She bobbed there for a while, riding the swells up and down, feeling herself relax. Then she took a deep breath and put her face in the water.

It was not like anything she had experienced before.

She was floating over a field of tall sea grass anchored in a sandy bottom. The grass bent lazily over, each green blade drooping in the same direction. But as she watched, the grass began to straighten. She thought she might touch it, but felt herself being pulled away. Then she was accelerating upward, flying in the astonishingly clear water high above the reaching fingers of the grass. A moment’s pause, and she was plunging back down, racing toward the bottom, and the grass was drooping again, changing color as it flattened from a deep green to a silvery gray. Another wave came along and the cycle began all over again.

A school of small fish came along, silvery, like the flattened grass. They rose with the water, fell with it, hung motionless at the crests, never changing in their positions relative to each other, rigid in space, like some living crystal lattice. Geri kicked her fins and swam near. A simultaneous shiver passed through the fish, and the lattice translated itself — seemingly instantaneously — to a position several feet away. Geri kicked again, approached, and the school shivered out of reach. She kicked again. And again. Never spooking the fish. Never disturbing their precise order. But never getting closer than a constant distance — a little under three feet — either. She wondered if they were all following one fish, or one simultaneous impulse.

She was exhilarated and mesmerized, simultaneously. She felt something let go deep within herself. She allowed her arms and legs to float free, to go where buoyancy would take them. She felt her breathing slow down, the hollow whooshes of the snorkel tube coming easily now, a rhythm slower than her heart, faster than the waves, but in concert with them all.

She could see her shadow on the grass, cast with the clarity of a cloud’s shadow on dry land. And then she saw another shadow. And a hand touched the small of her back.

She surfaced with him. Smiling broadly — he really did look like Tom Cruise when he smiled — he held up out of the water four fat fish, a delicately pink color, their fins a deeper shade, almost red.

“Snapper,” he said. “We’re going to have one fine déjeuner this après-midi.”

“Mmmnh,” she said, imagining them sizzling fragrantly on the hotel stove. Then she imagined drinking wine with them and feeling a little drunk, and a warm, liquid feeling spread within her. And when Mike Godchaux threw the fish and his spear gun in the canoe and paddled back to her, she reached out and put her hands on his broad, muscled shoulders and allowed him to pull her, like a tugboat, back to the boat, into which they both threw their masks, snorkels, and fins. And as they floated in the warm water, she lifted the straps of the bathing suit he had given her from her own shoulders and allowed him to complete the job of pulling the stretchy maillot down off her body. And he shucked his trunks and they floated in the clear water, and she looked at his nakedness for a long, hungry moment before they fitted their bodies together.

They were both back in the boat and she was toweling her hair, when Mike said: “Well, you sure gave me a surprise.”

She twisted the towel around her hair and lifted her chin. “What do you mean?”

“Well, me and Bébé, when we saw you yesterday, we thought for sure you were trolling for dark meat.”

“Excuse me?” She frowned — impossible that she had heard what she thought she had heard.

“You know, a little dark island rhythm to liven up the old white clapboard house?”

He was smiling again, like Tom Cruise still, but with a cocked eyebrow. An insinuating, amused eyebrow.

Her back stiffened, and a hot pain shot up between her shoulder blades.

“Lotta girls do that, you know,” he said. “Want to try that devil’s food just once before they settle down to life with Mr. White Bread. When you had lunch with that trucker yesterday, I said to Bébé, watch if they don’t take a room. And when you did, I said to myself, ‘Well, there’s one girl who’s not going to be interested in this white Southern boy.’”

Her entire back was in spasm now, the pain shrilling through her muscles and bones. She imagined the fish that he had caught must have felt like this when the barbed end of the spear had slammed through their sides.

“Tell you the truth, I was pretty pleased when you had that little argument and he headed off. I’m glad it worked out like this. Aren’t you?”

It took Mike Godchaux five minutes to get the ancient, coverless outboard started. Staring at the tanned wedge of his back, watching him pull again and again on the cord, each time the muscles on the backs of his upper arms tensing into crisp ropes, she went a little mad for the second time. She saw herself back at the hotel, on the terrace where they dined, and all around people laughing at her. Bébé. Gerard. Mike Godchaux. Etienne Dalhousie. The woman to whom she’d addressed the question about sewage on the beach. The vendors whose awning she’d knocked over. Her coworkers back in New York, especially the poisonous Marta. Her sister and her sister’s lover. Her parents. All laughing, all amused at this woman who had reached thirty-three years of age without, evidently, learning anything about the basic process of connecting with other human beings.

Unbelievably, the spasm that had speared her back grew worse, the pain shrieking up to her neck and down to the bottoms of her legs, filling her eyes with tears, compressing her lips, turning the skin around them white. Unable to speak, nearly paralyzed, it took her forever to reach down and grab the cocked spear gun from the bottom of the canoe. She put the stock to her shoulder, touched her finger to the trigger, and aimed it at the center of Mike’s back.

The engine started and then almost died. Mike played with the throttle, twisting it back and forth, and coaxed it to life. When it was running smoothly, he turned around.

His instinctive reaction when he saw the spear gun pointed at him was to smile that Tom Cruise smile. At the joke she was surely playing. She realized then that there was no malice in him, no desire to humiliate her. He was an innocent, happy in his bright and easy world, totally ignorant of the hard and painful landscape of hers. The realization stopped her from sending the spear through his chest, splitting the breastbone, puncturing his heart. She lowered the gun several inches and pulled the trigger.

The spear passed through the flesh on the inside of his right thigh and buried itself in the wooden plank he was sitting on. He bellowed in shock and pain, doubling over and grabbing his leg.

Her back spasm disappeared. It was as if the spear had taken all her pain and transferred it to Mike.

She threw the spear gun overboard and put on her fins and her mask and snorkel.

“What are you doing?” he screamed. “What have you done?” There was a good deal of blood flowing from his leg, spreading out on the seat, and dripping onto the bottom of the canoe. A lot of blood, but it didn’t appear that any vital artery or vein had been cut.

“You’re crazy!” he screamed. “You’re insane! Help me get this thing out! I’m stuck! Can’t you see I’m pinned here?”

She could see, and she counted it as a piece of good luck. The only problem facing her now was the outboard. She solved that by pulling the rubber hose out of the orange gas tank that was under her seat in the bow. The engine sputtered and died. She lifted up the gas can and threw it overboard. He wouldn’t be following her now. Especially when she cut the anchor line and the boat began drifting toward the reef. He would have his hands full just getting himself free and stopping the advance of the boat. But there was a paddle on board, and he was strong. He would be okay.

“What are you doing?! What in Christ’s name are you doing? What is the matter with you? Are you crazy?”

His shout was the last thing she heard before she threw herself backward over the gunwale of the canoe.

She swam hard away from the boat, away from the direction of the reef, toward the open Atlantic. When she surfaced, sputtering, in the trough of a wave, she was unable to see the canoe, unable to see anything other than the steep blue hills of water on either side of her and the pale sky above. But when she rose up, she spotted the canoe. Already a hundred feet away and increasing in distance as she watched. Mike was still struggling in the stern — it was not clear whether he had freed himself yet. But he would. He was too competent to do otherwise.

She adjusted the straps of her face mask, straightened the snorkel tube, and then put her face down in the water and began swimming steadily away. After a while she slowed her pace and gave herself back to the waves and water. A vast, liquid relaxation spread through her, seemed almost to dissolve the boundary between her and the water in which she floated.

She felt free. She felt alive. She felt happy. She felt grateful that she had at last found contentment and she promised herself she would keep her heart and mind and all her senses open until the current dragged her back and the last beautiful soaring wave rose up high over the reef, revealing the perfect crescent of the beach, the perfect blue of the bay, the perfect white of the town and the emerald hills behind it — and then smashed her down on the sharp coral, bringing to all the lonely, clenched years of her existence the grace of a courageous end.

Copyright © 2006 Jeff Williamson