Ghost Lights

5

He woke up in the morning with a splitting headache once again. Thankfully the drapes were closed and he was safe in dimness.

His bedside telephone was blinking, a red message light. He did not want to reach out and touch it so he lay there, long and heavy on the hotel bed. Susan and Casey had both visited him. He hadn’t dreamt much but he remembered them both spinning around him like tops or bottles, either angry or worried, with white and yellow ribbons streaming from their hands. Now he had the taste of peanut butter and iron in his mouth. . the peanut butter he could remember from yesterday, when Gretel had made him eat granola, but where did the iron come from?

When a woman like Gretel offered you a piece of something to eat, you took it. You put it in your mouth. You barely noticed what it was. Personally, he never chose to eat granola, in bars or other formats. He banished granola from his sphere. But when Gretel broke off a piece and handed it to him, he ate the granola. Readily.

He had almost no memory of lying down. It could be he’d put his mouth on the bathroom tap, though you were cautioned not to drink the water. That could account for the iron. Or blood. Had he bitten his tongue? He stuck a finger into his mouth but it did not come out red.

Was it Susan who had called the room? Probably. Few others had any interest in him. He lived a life that was neither broad nor open. Only a few days ago he had ascribed this narrowness to the committed pet lovers, but like all of his nitpicking criticisms it was, in reality, merely his own view of himself. Projection or whatever. You didn’t have to be a Sigmund Freud to see that.

He had believed, once, that somewhere outside in posterity was an impression of him — the collected opinion of the rest of the world, in a sense. The way he was seen by others was out there like a double, not his real self but a view of him that might have more truth, or more style at least, than his own. But now he knew there was nothing like that at all. You did not exist in the mind of the world as a whole person, there was nothing out there that represented you. There was no outside ambassador.

All you were to the rest of the human race was a flash or a glint, a passing moment in the field of the perceived. Parts of you struck them, parts of you did not; the parts formed no coherent image. People had few coherent images of anything. Even simple concepts, small words like dog or tree, were confusing to them: a thousand trees might pass through their memories in the split second of invocation — the white of birch or red maple or palms or small pines with golden angels holding Styrofoam trumpets.

Or all the dogs in the world. What room was there for you in this panoply?

People were like dogs and this was why they took pity on them — dogs alone all the hours of their days and always waiting. Always waiting for company. Dogs who, for all of their devotion, knew only the love of one or two or three people from the beginning of their lives till the end — dogs who, once those one or two had dwindled and vanished from the rooms they lived in, were never to be known again.

You passed like a dog through those empty houses, you passed through empty rooms. . there was always the possibility of companionship but rarely the real event. For most of the hours of your life no one knew or observed you at all. You did what you thought you had to; you went on eating, sleeping, raising your voice at intruders out of a sense of duty. But all the while you were hoping, faithfully but with no evidence, that it turned out, in the end, you were a prince among men.

•

Someone was knocking on the room door — knocking persistently. He had dozed off again, a glass of water on the nightstand beside him. The red light was still blinking. The knocking would not let up.

“Hold on. Hold your horses,” he struggled to say, resenting the interruption. “I’m coming, dammit.”

He stood at the door in his skivvies. He opened it, realizing in the same instant that he had powerful morning breath.

In front of him were Hans and Gretel in skimpy trunks and a flowery bikini, showing their tan, smooth bodies and cornflower-blue eyes as they smiled at him.

“I have contacted the Coast Guard,” said Hans proudly.

“Sure, right,” said Hal. “Right. Sure.”

“Good news!” said Gretel. “They will send a task force.”

“Very funny,” said Hal, and wondered if they would allow him to go brush his teeth. From the second he met them, he had basically been their captive. Even in his own room he could not get away from these eager Germans.

“No, but seriously,” said Hans. “The Coast Guard has a boat in these waters currently. I was put through to them. Also there are some local cadets they are helping, a mentoring exercise. The Americans are training them in search-and-rescue, so it will be like a practice.”

“I don’t. . give me a second, I have to splash some. .” He was mumbling as he retreated, but still they stepped into the room after him.

Gretel pulled open the drapes with a certain exuberance.

“You need some fresh air in here, Hal Lindley!” she said.

Probably to let out the morning breath.

Germans were not known for their sense of humor, he reflected as he brushed his teeth, the flimsy bathroom door shut carefully behind him. Their idea of a joke was not his own, that was all. Cultural barrier. Not uncommon. But he could have used another hour of sleep.

Let them stand there in all their terrible beauty. He was secure here in the bathroom, with a toothbrush and a tap and a clean toilet. In the end there was not much more a man truly needed.

But it could not last forever. Breath freshened, head aching, he stepped out again. There was no helping it.

“They will arrive tomorrow,” said Hans. “The Coast Guard and also the cadets. All of them.”

“Ha. . it isn’t that funny, though,” said Hal. He hoped the fly on his boxers was not gaping. Couldn’t risk a downward glance, however. He was already playing the buffoon in this particular comedy. Where were yesterday’s pants?

He bent down and grappled with the bedcovers.

“No, but really, really,” said Gretel, and smiled again. “It is a special task force! There will be approximately twenty persons.”

“That’s impossible,” said Hal flatly.

He felt around under the bed for the pants, found them collapsed in a heap.

“Hans was just talking to his friends,” said Gretel. “It’s not a problem.”

“Hans has friends in the Coast Guard?”

“Actually they are working for NATO,” said Hans, nodding. “The Supreme Allied Command Atlantic. In Virginia?”

“He consults for them on the avionics systems,” said Gretel.

“I called in a small favor,” said Hans.

Hal shuffled away from them to pull the pants on. When he zipped up and turned back, their heads were backlit by the window and their faces indistinct; he saw them for a second as leviathans. They might be slim and standing there in their G-string swimwear, which had an all-too-floral tendency and made them look far more naked, even, than him. But in the strength of their Teutonic conviction he put his finger on what it was about them.

They were machines of efficiency, purposeful. Even in the simple act of unwrapping a granola bar there was the sense of a necessary fueling.

•

“I’m afraid you may be drinking too much,” said Susan.

She had him paged in the dining room while he was eating his breakfast. Because the Germans were sitting at the table with him, believing him to be a family man who was close to his loving wife, he could hardly refuse to take the call. Reluctantly he had followed the waiter to a telephone at the end of the front desk.

“Not at all,” he said.

“What was that fax about, then?”

“It was accurate. There’s a task force involved. Something to do with NATO.”

“Come on, Hal. I don’t get how you’re acting, these last few days. I’m asking you please just to be serious.”

He had brought his coffee cup to the phone with him and took the opportunity to sip from it with a certain poised nonchalance, his telephone elbow braced on the high, polished wood of the counter.

Robert the Paralegal could not raise a task force. A Trojan perhaps, but not a task force. None.

“What can I say? I met Germans with connections. Germans who refuse to take no for an answer, I’m guessing.”

“See? This is what I mean, Hal. You just don’t make that much sense right now.”

“I’m telling you, Susan. Either there’s a twenty-man task force trained in search-and-rescue that’s arriving tomorrow to look for your friend Stern, or the Germans are conning me. It’s possible. As history has taught us, Germans are capable of anything.”

She was silent for a few static beats. He sipped his coffee again.

“Really, Hal? Honestly?”

“So they tell me. We’ll see.”

“But that’s amazing, Hal. Amazing!”

“The jury’s still out on it. OK? Keep you posted. I was right in the middle of a hot breakfast, though. Do you mind if I get back to it?”

More static. He had hurt her feelings.

“Not that I don’t want to talk. Just a rush here — hectic. Wreckage, repairs. Aftermath. Hurricane. You wouldn’t believe the scene.”

He gazed out over the tranquil dining room, where lilies stood in tall vases on the white tabletops. Hans waved out the window to the boys in the pool, and Gretel, her long, languid legs crossed, was peeling an orange and licking the juice off the tips of her elegantly tapered fingers.

“OK. But keep me informed, OK Hal? Tell me everything that happens.”

“I always do. We’ve always told each other everything, haven’t we?” He was feeling a pinch of malice. Speaking with a dangerous transparency. He told her goodbye, hung up and downed the tepid dregs of his coffee.

• • • • •

There was no reason, he found himself deciding, not to enjoy himself while he waited for the armed forces. The day was still young, he had hours to kill before the night came on, and Hans and Gretel had invited him to go scuba diving.

Fortunately the children of the corn were too young to qualify for the scuba course and had resigned themselves to playing ping-pong.

“For the whole boat trip? They’re going to play ping-pong for five straight hours?” he asked Hans, when he saw the boys hitting the ball back and forth at the table beside the pool. They were steadfast and tightly wound, their lips compressed, eyes darting only a fraction to the left or right with a predatory glint as they followed the bouncing ball.

“At least,” said Hans.

“One time they played for two days, stopping only to sleep,” said Gretel. “Of course it was a weekend.”

They said goodbye to the boys, who ignored them studiously. Then a resort employee led them down to the dive shop, a kind of bunker with wet sand and footprints crisscrossing the rough concrete floor. There were wetsuits hanging on a rack and fins and masks arrayed in wooden cubbies along the wall; the ceiling was low and the walls were painted a deep, gloomy blue inside, maybe to simulate the ocean. The divemaster shook their hands and welcomed them.

Before they went out they had to sit through a safety lecture. Hal tried to listen attentively but was distracted by the presence of half-naked Gretel in her bikini, smelling delicately of coconut oil, and also by the belated arrival of the young bohemian couple hailing presumably from lower Manhattan.

The bohemian couple appeared skeptical of the lecture by the divemaster, bored and skeptical despite the fact that they had never been diving before and, if their breakfast exchange of the previous day was any indication, were also hypochondriacs. When the lecture ended and the divemaster began to choose gear for each of them, asking shoe sizes and moving along the row of cubbyholes searching, the bohemians raised an objection.

“This says we don’t have the right to sue if we suffer injuries on the dive, up to and including death,” said the man.

“Yes,” said the divemaster politely. “It is a required legal waiver. I am very sorry but it is not possible to go out on the resort dive if you do not sign it.”

“I don’t know about this,” said the woman, shaking her head. “I don’t do waivers, normally.”

“It says you can’t go if you’ve ever had a lung collapse,” said the man.

“I’ve never had a lung collapse,” said the woman. “Have you had a lung collapse?”

“Not that I know of.”

“It’s something you would probably notice,” said Hal.

The bohemian man ignored him.

“I had bronchitis one time in college,” said the woman. “Is that a risk factor?”

“Or smoking. It says here you can’t be a smoker.”

“I did have that one clove cigarette at Dinty’s. At that New Year’s thing?”

“It was clove? Clove cigarettes are the equivalent of seven regular cigarettes.”

The rest of the group stood waiting for them to sign or not sign the waivers, gear slung over their shoulders, fins hanging by the heels off two crooked fingers.

Hal felt impatient. He was irked by the bohemians. Previously he had been irked by the Germans, now it was the bohemians who irked him. Although the Germans had become his allies. What if the bohemians fell into line also? Would the bohemians also befriend him?

No. A bohemian was not a German. Socially speaking a German turned outward, like a sunflower toward the sun; a bohemian turned inward like a rotting pumpkin.

“Why don’t the rest of you go ahead and get into your wetsuits,” said the divemaster, and smiled affably.

When they came out of the restrooms the bohemians were also wetsuited. All of them stuffed their clothes and shoes into cubbies and walked barefoot down the beach toward the dock, the bohemians broadcasting a sense of glum foreboding. Or perhaps it was terror. Hal hypothesized that one bohemian had blackmailed the other into the scuba diving excursion, possibly with threats of poisoning via Red Dye Number Three.

Hans and the divemaster walked at the head of the pack discussing reef fish and Hal listened to Gretel tell him about swimming with stingrays in the Grand Cayman, how she had gently stroked their soft pectoral wings. He nodded without saying much, smiling in what he hoped was a beatific fashion and meanwhile wondering if, in the black wetsuit, he in any way resembled Batman. Was his torso, for example, slightly triangular? Just slightly, he didn’t mean any big bodybuilder-type-deal. Did it descend just a bit from broad shoulders to a narrow waist, creating an impression of virility?

Squinting down at himself he noticed the wetsuit was in fact a very dark green. He was disappointed. In the shade of the dive shop he had thought it was black. Gretel’s was black, as was Hans’s. They gave the Germans the black wetsuits; him they gave the dark-green, the color of spinach slime. He suspected he most resembled the animated character Gumby, which as a child Casey had watched on TV with barely suppressed delight.

“Out at the caye,” the divemaster was telling Hans, “where we will stop between dives for a late lunch and snorkeling, you will see lemon sharks. Some people feed them, although it is technically forbidden. Small sharks. Pretty. They swim around at your feet.”

In the boat Gretel sat beside him and asked him about Stern.

“This is the man who is the boss of your wife?” she asked.

“The boss of my wife. Yes.”

“And he is a seller of real estate, you said before. Like a small Donald Trump.”

“Better hair, though.”

“That is very funny.”

“I notice you’re laughing hard.”

“But you must be very close to him, yes? To come all the way here looking. He is a friend of the family, maybe.”

He considered telling the truth but dismissed this as rash. And in fact Stern was a friend of his family, both his wife and his daughter, though not him personally.

“It’s difficult,” he said, but nodded.

She reached over and squeezed his wrist in sympathy. So easily misled.

•

He would not have come scuba diving if Gretel had not lured him with her kindness and beauty, he thought resentfully as he sat on the edge of the boat, his tank hanging heavily off his back, waiting to roll over backward into the ocean. He did not want to roll over backward into the ocean. Who was he? He was a middle-aged IRS employee, a father and a cuckold. He was an idiot.

He had let Hans and Gretel go before him so they would not witness his tomfoolery. He anticipated some kind of choking, spasming incident. But it was time. He had to follow Hans and Gretel, for they were his dive buddies. If he waited too long he might lose them. The pressure was on. This was it. The divemaster was staring at him expectantly. The neurotic bohemians were also watching. Their scrutiny was a grudging challenge.

He had hoped the neurotic bohemians would go before him, but they had found reasons to fiddle with valves and masks almost endlessly. Now there was no more excuse for delay. He could not see the expressions of the neurotic bohemians through their masks, but he imagined they were white-faced and trembling.

Middle-aged employee, or tax man? It was all in the wording. He was the tax man, by God.

He felt off slowly, even limply. He grappled. Then he was in. Sinking. For a second he panicked. Then: breathe only with the mouth. It was OK. He was doing it.

He heard his breath, the slow in-and-out like Darth Vader. There were white bubbles around him as he sank, a screen across everything, and then they cleared and it was light blue and placid. He looked down: beneath the black fins on his feet were rocks and yellow- and gray-striped small fish. He raised his head again and saw Gretel ahead of him, moving toward a wall of coral. She was lithe and graceful with her fins moving back and forth; her long hair floated behind her and caught the light, a stream of warmth in the cold water. It rippled.

Off to the right at a slight distance was Hans, at greater depth. He had announced on the boat that he had two goals: sea cucumbers and moray eels.

Hal did not share his goals.

The fins felt good, powerful. He propelled himself forward, hastening to get close to Gretel. It was nice down here, lovely. It was a cathedral of light and softness. Down here you probably couldn’t even tell the difference between a black wetsuit and a dark-green one.

The dive would last about a half-hour, they had told him. He would stay close by her. She would point at things.

As they held steady side by side about fifteen feet beneath the surface he found himself entranced, not only by her but by the corals and the fishes. Beneath them and around them — he had to be careful not to brush up against the coral, hit a sharp urchin or a stinging anemone — there were formations like brains and antlers, sponges and intestinal tubes and lace and leaves of lettuce. Among them the fish swam, some hunkering low and inside, others flittering lightly along edges. Gretel touched his shoulder and they looked down together at a speckled, dun-colored fish on the bottom half covered in sand, bloated and with spikes on it. Some kind of blowfish or puffer, he guessed. They ate them in Japan. Flat, tall fish that were a deep purple-blue with a line of bright yellow moved past him in stately elegance.

He thought how Casey would love all this. He would describe it to her when he got home. She had seen photographs, had watched Jacques Cousteau and the like, but she would never know how it felt to be here, the buoyancy. How everything seemed to move slower, with a silence that changed the world. Time, even. He felt a quick wrench of longing, worry and regret — what he always felt, when he recalled her and was not in her company. The guilt for not being there, actually, among other impulses. . not that she wanted him there. He was only a father.

When they were small you were everything to them, then they grew up and you dwindled into next to nothing. . she liked underwater scenes, had drawn them often when she was a little girl. He remembered her pictures in felt-tip pen: mermaids hovering beside straggly green seaweeds, mermaids with dots for breasts and large scales along their tails and yellow hair. She had believed that underwater was a kingdom where she would be welcome — where she could move like a fish, move like fluid itself.

She would have seen Gretel back then, when she was six years old, and thought she was beholding a mermaid.

Hans was also still in view, though just barely. He was always diving, scouting, always searching for something. Hans was not content to float and look, unlike Hal and Gretel.

Hal was watching a fish nibble at the coral, listening to the sound of many of them eating, like the pop-pop-pop of milk in rice cereal, all over in the background, when she suddenly grabbed him by the upper arm and turned him. They were surrounded by silver, or at least there was nothing but silver in front of them. It was a vast school, thousands. Small, moving in silver flickers, hundreds of them switching angles in the same pulse of motion, instantly. He was astonished by it, how hundreds or thousands moved in a flash, as one body. It seemed impossible.

Then he was startled, almost breathed through his nose feeling Gretel’s hand move over the arm of his wetsuit with something akin to tenderness — was there intent in the touch? He could almost believe it. But it was through the wetsuit. Most likely she had just forgotten to let go. Both of them gazed at the flanks of the fish — the gleaming, moving-as-one legions. He thought they could never be like this, people. Never. Was she thinking it too? With her hand on his arm. It was the two of them, suspended, the rest of the world far above and in the dryness of air — nothing like this below, these silver thousands.

Finally the school thinned and dispersed, left them gazing out into a fading blue abyss. At some point her hand was gone from his arm, which he also regretted. He felt cold despite the wetsuit.

It was not their place, after all. They were here only by the grace of machines.

He had forgotten to check his tank and lost track of his oxygen, but luckily she was on top of it. She showed him her gauge and made a thumbs-up signal, which he thought at first meant everything was OK. In fact it was the signal to return to the surface, which he recalled a second later from their safety lesson. She was already rising slowly, and he watched her for a while before he went up too.

•

On the island where they went to eat lunch there were too many tourists crowded onto a slight, barren finger of sand. Many small boats were anchored, wave-slapped and bobbing, on the windward side, while on the lee side all he could see was a field of snorkels sticking out of the shallow water, black and day-glo yellow and fluorescent pink. Seagulls had splattered white onto the rocks and benches all around; there were bathrooms and some low shelters over picnic tables. On one end of the island were a few tall, thin palms, scraping and flapping their dried fronds in the breeze.

The neurotic bohemians found the last empty picnic table in the shade, unwrapped the packed lunches the divemaster handed them from a plastic cooler, then talked in low voices about how there was nothing in them they could stand to eat. The woman was a vegetarian, the man was lactose-intolerant.

Hal sat at the other end of the table with Hans and Gretel. He was ravenous. He wanted to order the neurotic bohemians to hand over their portions; he wanted to tower over them and scoop up their sandwiches into his gaping maw. Instead he quietly ate his own ham-and-cheese and listened to Hans enthuse to the divemaster about a sea cucumber.

Apparently, when alarmed, they could extrude their intestines.

Gretel was impatient to see lemon sharks so after a minute Hal got up from the table, left the neurotic bohemians and Hans and the divemaster and followed her with the final crust of his sandwich in hand as she walked along the lapping edge of the water. You could walk from one end of the island to the other in five minutes and soon they found the sharks, circling again and again in less than a foot of water. They were small, just a couple of feet long, and being fed by tourists, who tossed in fragments from their own bagged lunches.

Gretel shook her head, worried.

“It is not natural,” she said.

Germans hated it when things were not natural. Hal remembered this from college philosophy. Heidegger or something.

“Sharks have strong stomachs,” he improvised, straining to recall any actual facts. Natural history was not a strong suit, despite his years of watching Nature with Casey. “Great whites have been found with oil barrels in their digestive tracts. Rusty engines. I doubt a few Fig Newtons are going to hurt them.”

“But these are not great whites,” said Gretel, and squatted down on her haunches to see them more closely. “Look! They are like little babies.”

A few paces away the divemaster was already gesturing at them: it was time to head back to the boat. Gretel left the so-called baby sharks reluctantly.

On the windward beach again, lagging behind the rest of the group, Hal looked out beyond the boats and saw a small skiff cruise by, a thin, bearded man standing in the front of the boat leaning into the wind with raised binoculars, one bent leg braced against the prow like a sea captain in books of yore. Hal tried to recall where in the hotel he’d run into him. Then the bohemian woman screeched. She was barefoot and had stepped on a bottle cap.

“You could get lockjaw,” said the bohemian man.

• • • • •

Back at the hotel the Germans pressed him into service for dinner also, as though he could not be trusted to be left on his own. Their two boys left the table in a rush once they had bolted their kiddie menus, running outside to continue the ping-pong tournament.

“We must get organized for tomorrow,” said Hans. “We have the map. I have made many copies. We have many copies also of the photograph of Mr. Stern. The hotel is having them laminated.”

“Nothing left for me to do then, really,” said Hal. “Is there.”

He had a cavalier attitude; he was drinking a margarita, which Gretel had encouraged him to order. She drank one also and her bright-blue eyes were shining.

“Does Mr. Stern have any medical conditions?” asked Hans.

“Not that I know of,” said Hal.

“You should find out the blood type, in case he is located and is injured and requires a transfusion. Also a medical history.”

“Huh,” said Hal, nodding vaguely. “My wife would probably know.” He had ordered the snapper, which was overcooked and too fishy. He decided to leave it mostly uneaten. The margarita tasted far better.

“Also, does his insurance cover helicopter evacuation,” Hans was saying.

Hal was already at the bottom of his glass, and at the far end of the dining room a band was setting up. He was thinking how pleasant it was to be drunk, that he had been missing out all these years in not being drunk far, far more often.

Couples gathered at the edge of a dance floor. There was a drum flourish, bah-da bum. A woman singer in an evening gown said something husky and incomprehensible into a microphone.

Lights sparkled. Yellow and golden in the dining room, now a ballroom. Beyond the large windows, the pool, the chairs, the deep-black sky, the ocean. A room full of people and golden lights, and outside the whole dark world.

Tequila, he thought, made him sad — was it sad, though? Anyway, melancholy. Youth had flown. It wasn’t all bad, though. You couldn’t move as well as you used to, you didn’t look as good, you had either forgotten the dreams of youth or resigned yourself to their disappointment.

But at least you could see more from your new position. You had a longer view.

“Come on, Hal. Why don’t we go dance a little?” asked Gretel, smiling, and cha-cha-cha’d her shoulders. Hans was pushing buttons on a calculator, which seemed to have appeared from nowhere. He waved them to go dance, got up and headed off. Hal watched him buttonhole the maître d’, nod briskly and start dialing the restaurant phone.

“He’s really taken this on, hasn’t he,” said Hal. “This whole search-and-rescue thing.”

“Hans does not like vacations,” said Gretel. “He gets bored. He always needs to have something to do. He’s some kind of genius, people tell me. With his electronics. You know, and he talks to me about his work? But actually I don’t understand it. But always he likes to keep busy.”

“I noticed,” said Hal.

“Dance with me,” said Gretel. It was cheerfully platonic, but he took what he was offered.

“With pleasure,” he said, and set down his margarita glass. The stem of the glass was green and in the shape of a large cactus, the kind you saw in cartoons and Arizona. A margarita was not a manly drink. But more so than a daiquiri.

Heading for the dance floor, he was recalled to reality — the reality that he was a flat-out embarrassing dancer. Among the worst. He had almost forgotten. He was a finger-snapper and a head-nodder. He had no other moves.

“Wait. Only if it’s a slow song,” he added, and hung back. “I’m really bad.”

“What’s important is to have fun,” said Gretel, taking him by the arm. “Express yourself.”

“You don’t want to see that, believe me,” said Hal, feeling the silkiness of her fingers. “Self-expression is a young man’s game.”

“Oh, come on,” she said.

They were on the dance floor, other people around them. She started to move, a couple of feet away. Lithe and elegant, as would be expected. He could not do anything. He was stuck. Then desperation washed over him. He had to cling to some self-respect. He reached out and grabbed her, clamped her to his person.

“Sorry,” he said into her ear. “This is all I can stand to do.”

She drew back, a bit confused, and then smiled. After a few seconds she balanced her arms on his shoulders and let him hold her and sway.

Leaning into her he let himself believe, for a moment, that others caught sight of them and assumed they were a couple. Yes: he was a party to this assumption, he welcomed it. Possibly they surmised he was some kind of businessman and Gretel was his trophy wife. Only for a moment of course, for a fraction of a second. As he felt her back under his hands, the swell of breasts on his front. Then the gazes passed over them and fastened elsewhere. But it was better than nothing.

Hans was tapping his shoulder officiously.

“Susan wishes to speak to you,” he said. “She is waiting on the telephone. But do not worry, I have the blood type. Fortunately, Mr. Stern is O-positive.”

Gretel stepped back from him and took Hans’s hand with a light, casual gesture, twirled herself around as she held it. Hans danced with her, stepping primly back and forth; plainly his heart was not in it. Hal’s own heart had been in it, very much so.

As he wandered listlessly toward the phone, which the maître d’ was holding out to him, he could not recall ever resenting Susan like this. Not when he had seen her in the office with the paralegal; not even when they were young and interrupted by Frenchmen.

“So it’s really happening,” she said, when he picked up the receiver. “You’re going to find him. I know you are.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Don’t get your hopes up, though.”

“Casey sends her love,” she said. “She’s here with me.”

He softened, feeling homesick.

“Can I talk to her?”

“Daddy.”

“Case. How are you, sweetheart?”

“An army? The Coast Guard or something?”

“Apparently.”

“You’re my hero.”

•

Later the cornboys came running in from ping-pong, the smaller one bleeding from the head. In a doubles game with two other kids the wooden edge of a paddle had cut him upside the eye socket. Hans and Gretel were not overly worried, but Hans plied a white linen napkin to the wound, filled it full of ice from a nearby table’s champagne bucket. He got the kid to hold the ice against his temple and then announced it was the boys’ bedtime. Putting his hands on their shoulders to steer them to the room, he looked back at Gretel, but she shook her head and grabbed Hal’s arm. She would be there in a few minutes, she said, but she was going to take a walk on the beach before bed, and Hal would escort her.

Hal was tired and ready for bed himself: he felt slack and let down. After the last drink he had turned a corner. There was an art to drinking and he had not mastered it. But Gretel was determined; she tugged at his hand, so he shrugged and agreed to go along. After all, due to the Germanness there would likely be a midnight swim, a shucking of clothes and plunging into the waves. It would not surprise him.

A vicarious thrill in it anyway, or at least a view of her naked ass. He could pretend there was more, that it was for his benefit.

“Leave your shoes,” she urged, when she took off her own. Obediently he discarded them, balled up the socks inside the shoes and left them beside her sandals underneath a hammock. She walked a few paces ahead of him.

There were few stars — no visible cloud cover, but still the stars were obscured and the moon was high but not bright. He followed her, hearing the wash of the tide as the small waves curled in and feeling the water on his feet. They passed a dock and left it behind, passed a row of canoes on the sand. His jeans got wet at the hems and he bent over and rolled them up. If Susan could see him, walking by moonlight with a lovely young woman. Along a seam of the Caribbean.

“Look out for jellyfish,” he said. “Washed up I mean. You wouldn’t see them.”

“I’m going to go swimming. It is so beautiful!” she cried, and idly he gave himself points for predicting.

“Of course,” he said.

“You have to come in with me!”

He was flatly opposed to this. He would be cold and wet. He had no interest in it.

“OK,” he said.

Wearily and without haste he took off his clothes. Who cared, after all, who would ever notice or give a shit? No one. Gretel herself wasn’t even looking. The air was black around them and the blackness gave them a loose kind of privacy. She stepped out of her own skirt as though it was nothing, pulled her shirt over her head and dropped it on the sand too. No brassiere. He had a glimpse of pertness, the sheen of skin.

She left the clothes in a pile without casting a glance at them, bounded forward into the surf and dove. Submerged.

He watched the water, holding his breath. Shivering. Now he had to go in after her. That was how he was with the Germans — he acceded to their demands and then he had to summon the wherewithal. When in fact he did not have it. He was afraid of dark things in the water, surging up from the deep.

Where was she? She should have resurfaced by now. He waded out, up to his knees, up to his waist. Where was she?

She came up with a splash, laughing and shaking the water off her head.

“I love it!” she cried.

“Nice,” he agreed, nodding, and dropped in up to his shoulders, dog-paddling. She went under again.

He remembered a scene from one of the British nature shows featuring famous, avuncular naturalists — wry, witty men who casually stepped down from helicopters in the African veldt and talked companionably to the camera in their Oxbridge accents as they walked through the tall, waving grass in their safari outfits. Such men were at home with the animals, picked them up and showed them to the camera as though there was no trick to it. They said this little fella as they described a mating behavior or trotted out a surprising factoid. But the scene he remembered had been part of an episode devoted to bioluminescence. They had shown deep-sea fishes that looked like spaceships, myriad lights rimming their graceful, pulsing bodies. Marine biologists had descended in a bathysphere like something out of Jules Verne. In the depths near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, in the bathysphere’s headlights, they caught luminous creatures undescribed by science.

Casey had cried when she saw that. But she hid it from him. She pretended she was crying for another reason, pain probably. She was embarrassed to be seen crying out of sheer emotion.

In the dark he saw mostly the glitter of the waves, Gretel, porpoise-like, diving and coming up again. For a few seconds she stood on her hands in the shallows, her legs and feet sticking out straight, toes pointed like a ballerina’s. There was a breeze across his chest and shoulders and he threw his weight backward and floated on his back, water skirting his bare chest. He could not help but think of sharks and other predators, sluggish and ominous beneath him. Awakening. Tendrils or tentacles or rows of sharp teeth. .

Above him he saw the moon, but not with clarity; just a blurred scoop of white. He closed his eyes. It was reassuring to have Gretel nearby. Nothing would befall her. No shark would dare. By extension he was also safer. Wasn’t he?

Something brushed against his back from beneath and at the same time he panicked and he knew it was her. Her sleek, wet head emerged beside his own and she was spitting seawater on him and laughing. He sank down a little, coughed and sputtered and righted himself, feet searching for the sandy bottom and sinking in.

Without warning she kissed him. Their bodies were touching all over, under the water and above it, solid and inflaming. Her nipples were against his chest. At once he was both frozen and pulsing with current. Even as it happened, and then continued to happen, it was completely impossible.

He would have to pay for this, he was thinking. And he would pay. He would pay. Gratefully.