through the open french windows. The rhythm and themes were haunting, that Central American sound, pipes and flutes, sweet melodies like an echo out of the mountains.
'What a place.' Brushy looked with yearning at the sea.
'I kind of think this is charming,' I said. 'Your following me.'
'Somebody had to do something,' she told me.
I was as ever dishonorable, and pretended to have no idea what she might mean. She peered into her drink.
'I thought a lot about that conversation. In your office yesterday? People are entitled to change, you know.' When she raised her eyes, she had that look again, all pluck and daring.
'Naturally.'
'And you're right about me. But I don't have to apologize for that. It's a natural thing. The older you get, the more you wonder about things that are — ' She faltered.
'What?'
'Enduring.'
I flinched. She saw me. She put a hand to her eyes.
'What am I doing?' she asked. Even with the candle guttering on the table, I could see she had flushed suddenly, maybe the liquor, maybe the heat adding to the effect of the strong emotion. 'God, what do I see in you?'
'I'm honest,' I told her.
'No, you're not. You're self-deprecating,' she said. 'There's a difference.' I gave her the point. 'You deserve better,' I told her.
'You're not kidding.'
i mean it.' I was as resolute as I could be. It was not, I swear, easy for me. But I was having one of those lucid moments when I could tell just how it would go. Brushy would always blame me for not being better and herself for not wanting more.
'Don't tell me what's good for me, okay? I hate when you do that, like you're Lazarus, who crawled out of his cave just to do Ann Landers's column for a week.'
'Jesus Christ,' I said. 'Ann Landers?'
You try to make people dislike you, Mack,' she told me. 'You lure them in, then drive them away. If that's supposed to be some form of winning Irish melancholy, I want you to know I don't find it charming. It's sick,' she said. 'It's nuts.' She threw her napkin in her plate and looked out to the sea to gather herself.
After some time she asked if it was too late to swim.
'Tide's out. It's shallow for a quarter of a mile. The water is 83 degrees year round.' I tried smiling.
She made a sound, then asked if I'd brought a suit. She held out a hand as she stood.
The path to the beach was carved through the high ragged weeds and Bermuda grasses and lit by little fixtures on stanchions at the point of each stair. Sunday night, even in Pico, was quiet. There was action on the beach, but that was closer to C. Luan, where the big hotels were clustered. Down here, where it was mostly condos, there was a deserted, summery air, except for the band that struck up periodically a few hundred yards off in the hotel bar. We swam a little, kissed a bit, and sat there while the water washed around us. Middle years and acting like eighteen. Every time I thought about it, I wanted to groan.
'Swim with me,' Brushy directed, and she splashed out a bit to a deeper point. Closer to shore the gathered shells were hard on the feet, but about fifty yards out the sand was soft and she stood lolling against me. The moon had been up for a while but was growing brighter, a blue neon glow spilling down like an apron beneath a few boats moored for the night. The hotel and its little outbuildings and the giraffe-like coconut palms hulked on shore, dark on darker.
'There are fish in these waters,' I told her. 'Gorgeous things. Stoplight parrot fish, and sergeant majors trimmed in yellow, and whole schools of indigo hamlets with colors more intense than you see in your dreams.' The thought of this great beauty, below, unseen, moved me.
She kissed me once, then placed her face on my chest and swayed to the band that had struck up again. The small swells rose and fell about us.
'Wanna dance?' she asked. 'I think they're playing our song.'
'Oh yeah? What's that?' 'The hokey-pokey.' 'No shit.'
'Sure,' she said, 'don't you hear it?'
She left her bikini top on, but she removed the bottom and then wrestled off my trunks. She held our suits in one hand and with the other grabbed hold of the horn of plenty.
'Salve work?' she asked.
'Miracle drug,' I said.
'And how do you do the hokey-pokey?' she asked. 'I forget.'
'You put your right foot in.' 'Right.'
'You put your right foot out.' 'Good.'
'You put your right foot in and you shake it all about.'
'Great. What's next?' she asked and kissed me sweetly. 'After the foot?' She boosted herself up on my shoulders and with the slow controlled grace of a gymnast parted herself in the dark water and settled upon me so that I was somehow reminded of a flower.
'I don't think this'll work.'
'It'll work,' said Brushy with all her familiar confidence in matters sexual.
So there we were, Brushy Bruccia and me, hokeying and pokeying, cruising through the tropical waters among the beautiful fish, with the silver of the moon spilled out like glory around us. In and out and shaking it all about.
Mon, it was something else.
TAPE 5
Dictated February 1, 1:00 a.m
Monday, January 30
XXII
A. Staying Alone
With a woman beside me, I suppose I should have slept well, but I was away from home and near the heart of darkness and I could not pass through the portal to my troubled dreams. A high-voltage anxiety coursed through me, like some grid from which the tortured lightning seems to leap. I sat on the edge of the bed with my face screwed up in the dark and begged myself not to do what I had a mind to, which was head to the bar, where the band was still tootling, to get one of those five-dollar shots of rye. It is not really an illusion that liquor makes you brave. It does, because it is so much harder to be hurt. I have a catalogue of significant injuries inflicted while I was crocked — second-degree burns from cigarettes and boiling liquids which went awry; twisted ankles; sprained knees; and some walloping insults from an angry wife that were hurled with the force of a cannonball. I survived them all with only a little Mercurochrome or an occasional trip to the emergency room. I had a right to think that was what I'd need.
I got up and, for comfort, like a child who fixes on a blanket or a teddy bear, went back across the veranda to my cabana, and found my Dictaphone. I spent an hour telling my story to myself, my voice hushed but still seeming to travel on the sweet evening wind so that I worried that Brushy might hear.
It was my father I thought about, my father and mother both, actually. I tried to figure how it settled with her, his being a thief. Many of the little treasures he carried off in his pockets were offered to her first. Perhaps I flatter her memory to say that she never seemed at ease. 'We don't need this stuff, Tim.' Encouraging him, I would
