up. The boat sits up on its plane like a well-trained dog, and they are off on the sparkling blue bay, headed south, and a weight she didn’t know she was carrying lifts off her.
They fly under the causeway, and he veers left and cuts the motor to a burble and steers into the shallows. They coast, and when they are in two feet of water he heaves the motor back and tosses out an anchor. They float off a little beach backed by a line of mangroves and Australian pines waving and casting moving shadows on the sands. As it is a weekday, there are only a few blankets laid, Cuban matrons sitting and the tan children dashing about, their shrill calls like those of seabirds.
They wade ashore with their beach burdens. They spread their blanket, Paz’s blanket, none too clean unfortunately, but while she can detect no absolutely shameful stains, she cannot help wondering how many on this very blanket. He removes his garments and proves to be wearing a minuscule black French bathing suit. She forces her greedy eyes away from that zone and focuses instead on his chest. There’s that crucifix and that walnut-size brown lump on its thong. Before this, she has never consciously socialized with a man who wore a crucifix, although she has seen boys in high school who did. They usually spent a lot of time in shop. To distract herself from this memory, she asks, “What’s that around your neck?”
He touches the crucifix. “This? It’s a symbol of Christianity. You see, many centuries ago, God came down from heaven, and by the power of the Holy Spirit…”
Laughing at her. “I mean that other thing.”
“Oh, that! That’s anenkangue. A charm in Santeria. You know what Santeria is, right?”
“Vaguely. What does it charm?”
“It wards off zombies, among other things.”
“Have you been much troubled by zombies?” she asks archly.
“Not that much, recently,” he says, “but when I got it they were pretty thick on the ground.”
He does not seem to be joking, but he has to be; maybe there is something Cuban that she isn’t getting. Looking around, she says, “I can’t see any. It must be working.”
“QED,” he says and smiles at her.
They eat their sandwiches and drink cold Miller twelves. Paz takes out his cell and makes a call but gets no answer. Lorna doesn’t ask whom he’s calling, but hopes it is not another woman. She realizes she knows nothing about this man, that he might, in fact, be the kind who would be capable of lining up a date while on a date. If this is a date. She becomes by degrees a little depressed, and this makes her desire food. Ordinarily she doesn’t care much for Cuban fare, finding it fatty and crudely spiced, but when she bites into this sandwich she experiences deliciousness. The roll is absolutely fresh, the two meats succulent and tasting of the grill, fresh pepper, and anise, the cheese is real unprocessed Swiss, the pickles add just the right astringency, without that awful sweat-making rush.
She makes a spontaneous mmm of pleasure.
“Good sandwich?”
“Incredible!” she says around a wad of it.
He tells her about the sandwich, how it is the best Cuban sandwich in continental North America and why, how his mother found Manny Fernandez in his little shop years ago, how she encouraged his instincts toward perfection, how this sandwich became the featured item on the lunch truck she had before the restaurants, how her reputation spread, how Cubano construction and landscaping workers would drive miles to where she was parked and bring dozens of sandwiches back to the job site, how they prospered enough to buy their first little place.
She liked the way he told it, funny but without the mockery or resentment that many hard-knocks immigrants threw in. Then he said, “What about you? What’s your perfect Cuban sandwich?”
Lorna prides herself on being a good listener, a useful trait, considering the sort of men she has chosen to be around most of her life. One of the reasons she picked clinical psych was that people told you about their lives and did not wish very much to know about yours. So there is not a ready spate, her Cuban sandwich does not spring instantly to mind. He gets her resume therefore, together with the usual set-piece anecdotes about college and grad school and internship, but nothing deeper, and a number of the fibs she uses to ward off any efforts to dig. But she expresses her desire to find out what makes people tick, why they were so different, one from the other, and to learn if skilled interpretation of standard instruments can ferret out their secret pain. He listens. To her surprise, he asks informed questions, she warms to her subject. She began this outing with a number of expectations about what would transpire, but a lively discussion about the operational differences between nonparametric and parametric statistics was not one of them. She draws in the sand with a stick, the normal curve, the equations and tables that analyze variance….
There is at last a silence. “Getting hot,” he says. “Let’s have a swim.” He walks to the water, wades in, and dives below the surface with barely a splash. She pulls off her top and shorts. She has prepared herself with two beers, but this is always a sticky moment for her. She walks toward his head, now floating above the shimmering surface, slick and glistening like a seal’s. He watches her with an appreciative smile as she enters the water; she feels his gaze settle on her, and she hurries her steps to submerge her body. The water is tepid and has an oily feel, as if megagallons of bath oils have been added to Biscayne Bay.
They bob together, in chin-high water, touching briefly, then floating away like flotsam. She thinks it must be the beer, this voluptuous languor she now feels, she has not been out on the water since the breakup with Howie Kasdan, who now passes across her mind. If Howie were here, and he never would have come to so plebian a beach as Bear Cut, he would be swimming laps, making her swim laps too, coaching her, deprecating her style.
On the beach someone turns a radio up, music and a woman’s voice singing in Spanish. Paz turns to her and says, in a conversational tone, “She sang beyond the genius of the sea, the water never formed to mind or voice, like a body wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion made constant cry…”
For a moment Lorna thinks he is translating the lyrics of the radio’s song, but after a moment she doubts that the sentiment is one ordinarily expressed on Cuban AM’s Top 40.
“…caused constantly a cry, that was not ours although we understood, inhuman, of the veritable ocean.” A grin after this and a gesture to the Bay, its sky, its littoral.
“What’s that?” she asked after an astonished pause.
” ‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’ first stanza,” he replied, “by Wallace Stevens. A friend of mine always used to recite the whole thing whenever we were out on the tropic seas.”
An unexpected little stab of jealousy here. “So you weren’t an English major.”
“Nope.”
“Not psych?”
“Not anything.”
“Everyone has a major. Where did you go to school?”
“Archbishop Curley High.”
“I mean college.”
“I didn’t,” he said.
“Really? But…how come…I mean…”
“How come a dumbass high school graduate cop can converse about clinical psych and spout modernist poetry?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“You did, but I don’t take offense. I have smarts but no patience for sitting in a classroom or taking tests. I resent tests. I have a good memory for what I hear, and I’ve picked the brains of a lot of smart people, mainly women. I get books recommended. Sometimes I even read them. I use a dictionary for the big words. You could say that I went to the University of Girl. For example, before this afternoon I didn’t know what Wilcoxon’s signed rank test was, and now I do. But to be honest, I’m a mile wide and an inch deep. I don’t really know anything, alls I have are these bits and pieces, like one of those birds that collects shiny things, what d’y call ‘ems…?”
“Magpies.”
“Magpies, right. And that’s okay in a way because it turns out that knowing a little bit about a lot of stuff is handy if you’re a detective. Because there’s really only one thing I have absolutely got to know.”
“Which is?”
“How to read people,” says Paz and shifts slightly in the water so that he is facing her, with the sun at his
