“Well, a tape, actually. I’ll play it for you some night.”
“Here? With you?”
“No, no. Actually, it’s in the lawyer’s office. Strictly X-rated, not for the kiddies. Doug’s Delicious Dick, starring nineteen-year-old Felicity Cooperman in the role she made famous, delivering the unforgettable line, ‘I just adore sucking your gweat big dick, golly gee, I can just come heaps sucking that big bee-yoo-ti-ful dick of yours,’ the little bitch!” Heather said, and flicked angrily at a sand fly. “I could kill them both,” she said. “With a hatchet!”
“Don’t tell that to Michael when he gets here.”
“When will that be, anyway?”
“As soon as he can get away. Something important came up.”
This was the twenty-eighth of December. Sarah had taken Mollie down on the day after Christmas. Michael was still up north; apparently some sort of big meeting was to take place today, and the DA had insisted he stay in town for it. Heather hadn’t yet told her parents that she and Doug were separated. Wait till she dropped that bombshell. Little Dougie? Sweet little Dougie? Yes, Mom, sweet little Dougie with the big bee-yoo-ti-ful dick little Felicity just adores sucking. They were in London at the moment, at Claridge’s, where they went every year at this time. Stay as long as you like, darlings. We won’t be back till the middle of January.
“And when he does get here...”
“Yeah?”
“Put on your top.”
“Mom?”
Twelve-year-old Mollie, standing on the verandah looking as sleepy-eyed as an eight-year-old and wearing only white cotton panties in possible emulation of her aunt. Brown as a pudding after only two days in the Caribbean sun, she blinked into the glare and said, “Can I go in the water now?”
“Come on down, sweetie,” Sarah called.
Her sister shot her a look. She wasn’t yet finished with her one-sided conversation, and she didn’t need a child intruding. Impatiently, silently scowling, she watched as Sarah hugged her daughter close and asked if she’d had a good nap, and why didn’t she ask Yolande to give her some cookies and milk, and then she could put on her bathing suit and maybe Mommy and Aunt Heather would go in the water with her. Aunt Heather sat frowning through all of this. There were more important conversations than those with a twelve-year-old child. Besides, why did Sarah persist on calling herself Mommy and talking virtual baby talk to a twelve-year-old with perceptibly budding breasts? All this was on Heather’s face as Mollie walked flat-footed back into the house.
“I wanted to go to bed with every man in sight,” Heather said. “Have you ever felt that way?”
“No,” Sarah said.
“Kill him first, then go to bed with every construction worker in New York,” Heather said.
Sarah glanced toward the verandah. Her daughter had already gone into the house.
“I mean, this was a violent need for revenge. This wasn’t your garden-variety urge to stray — which I never did, by the way, fool that I was, and more’s the pity. Have you ever?”
“Ever what?” Sarah asked.
“Strayed.”
“Cheat on Michael, do you mean?”
“Well, who else would you cheat on? He’s your husband, isn’t he?”
“I’ve never cheated on him, no.”
“I’ve gone to bed with sixteen men since I found out about Doug. That was on the day after Halloween, less than two months ago. Sixteen men in less than two months, that comes to a different man every four days, give or take a few percentage points. If my lawyer knew, he’d kill me.”
“I think you ought to be careful,” Sarah said.
“Not with that tape in our hands.”
“I’m not talking about a divorce settlement. I’m talking about...”
“Fuck safe sex, I don’t care anymore,” Heather said. “Was Michael your first one?”
“No,” Sarah said.
“Who was?”
“A boy at Duke.”
“You never told me.”
“I feel funny telling you now.”
“I was a virgin when I married Doug,” Heather said, and suddenly her voice broke. “Shit!” she said, and reached for her handbag, and yanked a lace-edged handkerchief from it just as the tears welled in her eyes. “I hate that bastard,” she said, “I really hate him. I can forgive her, she’s just a dumb impressionable... no, goddamn it, I hate them both!” she said, and covered her face with the handkerchief and began sobbing uncontrollably into it.
“Did you see that?” Andrew asked.
“Very healthy girl,” Willie said.
They were walking up the beach together, back toward where Andrew had parked the VW. Half an hour earlier, there hadn’t been anyone on the beach here in front of the big house, just the blanket and the striped umbrella and a paperback novel lying open on a towel. Andrew noticed details like that. The paperback novel. A romance novel. He’d wondered at the time who was reading it. Now he wondered which of the two blondes the book belonged to. The topless one who was crying, or the one trying to comfort her. He wondered if they were sisters. He wondered if they lived together in the house there.
“I meant did you notice she was crying?” he said.
“No. Who?”
“The one without the top.”
“No, I didn’t notice. If you want my opinion, they’re asking for it when they parade around naked like that. Even if that’s the custom with the French here.”
“Those two weren’t French,” Andrew said.
“How do you know?”
“The book was in English. I saw the title.”
“What book?”
“The one on the towel.”
When Andrew was a child, he’d been as blond as either of the two women they’d just passed. His hair had turned first a muddy blond and then the sort of chestnut brown it now was. His eyes, too, were a darker blue than they’d been when he was a boy, and whereas his ears were still a bit large for his face, they were not quite as prominent as they’d been then. He’d eventually grown into them, all kids with big ears do, but he still wore his hair somewhat long, perhaps as a reminder that he’d once worn it that way deliberately, to hide the big ears.
The beach ahead of them was empty now. The striped umbrella was some hundred yards behind them. It was a good half-mile to the car, perhaps a bit more than that. Their conversation turned to business again.
“How much are they asking?” Andrew said.
“You have to understand these people are amateurs,” Willie said.
“Worst kind of people to deal with. Did you explain the exchange to them?”
“They understand all that. Andrew, let me tell you something,” Willie said, and looked around to make sure they weren’t being overheard, even though the beach ahead and behind was empty.
Andrew admired the way Willie looked. He had to be at least sixty, some thirty years older than Andrew, but he had the well-toned, tanned appearance of a man who spent a lot of time swimming and sunning in the Caribbean. Andrew figured they were about the same height and weight — six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, give or take — but Willie seemed in much better shape. Both men were wearing swimming briefs. Andrew was still relatively white; he’d flown down only yesterday.
“They don’t care,” Willie said. “They just don’t have the vision. They think what they’ve got going’ll last forever, the demand’ll never dry up. What they’re saying is they don’t need what we can provide, they’re doing fine, they’ll keep on doing fine. If nothing’s broken, why fix it, you follow? So they just aren’t interested. I told them we’d be doing all the work, we’d do the spadework with the Chinese, we’d provide the ships, load and unload on both ends, this doesn’t matter to them. Since they don’t think they need us, the swap doesn’t interest them. They’re dumb amateurs, they can’t see the beauty of this thing.”