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.
Dear Gang, Scribbling at you from a beautiful turquoise hotel on a beautiful turquoise bay. Unswimmable, but beautiful. Had a near car wreck, luggage was stolen, but lunch was good. Tomorrow I move on, in search of love, adventure, and a decent beach! Missing you all but not missing work...
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.
Dear Verna, Traveling again, this time in the Caribbean...
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.