"Oh, no," I said. "No, it's not that—I'm glad you told me." I was, though I couldn't have said why, exactly; it was not a habit of mine to want that kind of intimacy from another person, because I didn't want to offer them any of mine. I said, "It's Val Michaelis."
She nodded. "He's in some kind of trouble? I thought it was strange that he'd bury himself here."
"Some kind," I agreed. "Or was. Maybe it's all over now." And then I made my decision. "I'd like to go see him."
"Oh," said Edna, "I don't know if he's still on the island."
"Why not?"
"He said he was leaving. He's been planning to for some time—he only stayed on to see us. What's this, Friday? The last time I saw him was Tuesday, and he was packing up then. He may be gone."
And he was. When Ildo deposited us at the Keytown dock and the taxi took us to the apartments where Michaelis had lived, the door of his place was unlocked. The rented furniture was there, but the closets were empty, and so were the bureau drawers, and of an occupant the only sign remaining was an envelope addressed to Edna:
I thought I'd better leave while Gerald was still wrestling with his conscience. If you see him, thank him for the use of his space—and I hope we'll meet again in a couple of years.
Edna looked up at me in puzzlement. "Do you know what that part about your space means?"
I gave the note back to her and watched her fold it up and put it in her bag. I thought of asking her to burn it, but that would just make it more important to her. I wanted her to forget it. I said, "No," which was somewhat true. I didn't know. And I surely didn't want to guess.
By the time we were back on the boat I was able to be cheerful again, at least on the surface. When we docked at our own hotel Edna went on ahead to change, while I sent Ildo happily off with a big tip. He was, Edna had said, a pretty sweet man. He was not alone in that; nearly everyone I'd met on the island was as kindly as the island claimed; and it hurt me to think of Val Michaelis going on with his work in this gentle place.
We had agreed to meet for a drink before dinner—we had taken it for granted that we were going to have dinner together—and when I came to Edna's room to pick her up she invited me in. "That Starlight Casino is pretty noisy, Jerry, and I've got this perfectly beautiful balcony to use up. Can you drink gin and tonic?"
"My very favorite," I said. That wasn't true. I didn't much like the taste of quinine water, or of gin, either, but sitting on a warm sunset balcony with Edna was a lot more attractive than listening to rockabilly music in the bar.
But I wasn't good company. Seeing Edna off by herself in the bay had set off one set of memories, Val Michaelis's note had triggered another. I didn't welcome either train of thought, because they were intruders; I was feeling almost happy, almost at peace—and those two old pains kept coming in to remind me of misery and fear. I did my best. Edna had set out glasses, bottles, a bucket of ice, a plate of things to nibble on, and the descending sun was perfect. "This is really nice, Marge," I said, accepting a refill of my glass…and only heard myself when I saw the look on her face.
"I mean Edna," I said.
She touched my hand when she gave the glass back to me. "I think that's a compliment, Jerry," she said sweetly.
I thought that over. "I guess it is," I said. "You know, I've never done that before. Called someone else by my wife's name, I mean. Of course, I haven't often been in the sort of situation where—" I stopped there, because it didn't seem right to define what I thought the present "situation" was.
She started to speak, hesitated, took a tiny sip of her drink, started again, stopped and finally laughed—at herself, I realized. "Jerry," she said, "you can tell me to mind my own business if you want to, because I know I ought to. But you told me your wife died eight years ago. Are you saying you've never had a private drink with a woman since then?"
"Well, no—it has happened now and then," I said, and then added honestly, "but not very often. You see—"
I stopped and swallowed. The expression on her face was changing, the smile softening. She reached out to touch my hand.
And then I found myself telling her the whole thing.
Not the whole whole thing. I did not tell her what the surfboard looked like, with the ragged half-moon gap in the side, and I didn't tell her what Marge's body had looked like—what was left of it—when at last they found it near the shore, eight days later. But I told her the rest. Turning in my retirement papers. The trip to California to see her folks. The boat. The surfboard. Marge paddling around in the swell, just before the breakers, while I watched from the boat. "I went down below for just a minute," I said, "and when I came back on deck she was gone. I could still see the surfboard, but she wasn't there. I hadn't heard a thing, although she must have—"
"Oh, Jerry," said Edna.
"It has to do with water temperatures," I explained, "and with the increase in the seal population. The great white shark didn't used to come up that far north along the coast, but the water's a little warmer, and there are more seals. That's what they live on. Seals, and other things. And from a shark's view underwater, you see, a person lying on a surfboard, with his arms and legs paddling over the side, looks a lot like a seal…"
I saw to my surprise that she was weeping. I shouldn't have been surprised. As I reached forward and put my arms around her, I discovered that I was weeping, too.
That was the biggest surprise of all. I'd done a lot of weeping in eight years, but never once in the presence of another human being, not even the shrinks I'd gone to see. And when the weeping stopped and the kissing began I found that it didn't seem wrong at all. It seemed very right, and a long, long time overdue.
IV
My remaining business with Dick Kavilan didn't take long. By the time Edna's tour group was scheduled to go home, I was ready, too.
The two of us decided not to wait for the bus to the airport. We went early, by taxi, beating the tours to the check-in desk. By the time the first of them arrived we were already sitting at the tiny bar, sipping farewell piña coladas. Only it was not going to be a farewell, not when I had discovered she lived only a few miles from the house I had kept all these years as home base.
When the tour buses began to arrive I could not resist preening my forethought a little. "That's going to be a really ugly scene, trying to check in all at once," I said wisely.
But really it wasn't. There were all the ingredients for a bad time, more than three hundred tired tourists trying to get seat assignments from a single airline clerk. But they didn't jostle. They didn't snarl, at her or each other. The tiny terminal was steamy with human bodies, but it almost seemed they didn't even sweat. They were singing and smiling—even Edna's sister and brother-in-law. They waved up at us, and it looked like their marriage had a good shot at lasting a while longer, after all.