in the water, not snorkeling around peering at the reef but simply chugging back and forth like a blocky little machine, head down, arms windmilling, swimming parallel to the hotel’s enormous ocean frontage until he had reached the cape just to the north, then coming back the other way. He was a formidable swimmer with enough energy for six men. Quite probably he was like that in bed, too, but Denise had decided somewhere between the white wine and the red at dinner last night that she didn’t intend to find out. She liked him, yes. And she intended to have an adventure of some sort with
Yes: there he was. Grinning hopefully at her from the far side of the turtle pool, but plainly waiting to pick up some sort of affirmative signal from her before coming toward her.
There was the tall dark-haired man with the tiny bald spot, too. Without the lady from Connecticut. Denise had seen him snorkeling on the reef that afternoon, alone, and here he was alone again, which meant, most likely, that last night had been Mme. Connecticut’s final night at the hotel. Denise was startled to realize how much relief that conclusion afforded her.
Carefully not looking in Jeffrey Thompkins’s direction, she went unhesitatingly toward the tall man.
He was wearing a dark cotton suit and, despite the warmth, a narrow black tie flecked with gold, and he looked very, very attractive. She couldn’t understand how she had come to think of him as sexless the night before: some inexplicable flickering of her own troubled moods, no doubt. Certainly he didn’t seem that way now. He smiled down at her. He seemed actually pleased to see her, though she sensed behind the smile a puzzling mixture of other emotions—aloofness, sadness, regret? That curious tragic air of his: not a pose, she began to think, but the external manifestation of some deep and genuine wound.
“I wish I had listened to you last night,” she said. “You knew what you were talking about when you told me to bet Number Four.”
He shrugged almost imperceptibly. “I didn’t really think you’d take my advice. But I thought I’d make the gesture all the same.”
“That was very kind of you,” she said, leaning inward and upward toward him. “I’m sorry I was so skeptical.” She flashed her warmest smile. “I’m going to be very shameless. I want a second chance. If you’ve got any tips to offer on tonight’s races, please tell me. I promise not to be such a skeptic this time.”
“Number Five in this one,” he replied at once. “Nicholas Holt, by the way.”
“Denise Carpenter. From Clifton, New Jer—” She cut herself off, reddening. He hadn’t told her where he was from. She wasn’t from Clifton any longer anyway; and what difference did it make where she might live up north? This island resort was intended as a refuge from all that, a place outside time, outside familiar realities. “Shall we place our bets?” she said briskly.
Women didn’t usually buy tickets themselves here. Men seemed to expect to do that for them. She handed him a fifty, making sure as she did so that her fingers were extended to let him see that she wore no wedding band. But Holt didn’t make any attempt to look. His own fingers were just as bare.
She caught sight of Jeffrey Thompkins at a distance, frowning at her but not in any very troubled way; and she realized after a moment that he evidently was undisturbed by her defection to the tall man’s side and simply wanted to know which turtle Holt was backing. She held up her hand, five fingers outspread. He nodded and went scurrying up to the tote counter.
Number Five won easily. The payoff was seven to three. Denise looked at Holt with amazement.
“How do you do it?” she asked.
“Concentration,” he said. “Some people have the knack.”
He seemed very distant, suddenly.
“Are you concentrating on the next race, now?”
“It’ll be Number One,” he told her, as though telling her that the weather tomorrow would be warm and fair.
Thompkins stared at her out of the crowd. Denise flashed one finger at him.
She felt suddenly ill at ease. Nicholas Holt’s knack, or whatever it was, bothered her. He was too confident, too coolly certain of what was going to happen. There was something annoying and almost intimidating about such confidence. Although she had bet fifty Jamaican dollars on Number One, she found herself wishing perversely that the turtle would lose.
Number One it was, though, all the same. The payoff was trifling; it seemed as if almost everyone in the place had followed Holt’s lead, and as a result the odds had been short ones. Since the races, as Denise was coming to see, were truly random—the turtles didn’t give a damn and were about equal in speed—the only thing governing the patterns of oddsmaking was the way the guests happened to bet, and that depended entirely on whatever irrational set of theories the bettors had fastened on. But the theory Nicholas Holt was working from didn’t appear to be irrational.
“And in the third race?” she said.
“I never bet more than the first two. It gets very dull for me after that. Shall we have dinner?”
He said it as if her acceptance were a foregone conclusion, which would have offended her, except that he was right.
The main course that night was island venison. “What would you say to a bottle of Merlot?”
“It’s my favorite wine.”
How did he do it? Was everything simply an open book to him?
He let her do most of the talking at dinner. She told him about the gallery where she worked, about her new little apartment in the city, about her marriage, about what had happened to her marriage. A couple of times she felt herself beginning to babble—the wine, she thought, it was the wine— and she reined herself in. But he showed no sign of disapproval, even when she realized she had been going on about Michael much too long. He listened gravely and quietly to everything she said, interjecting a bland comment now and then, essentially just a little prompt to urge her to continue: “Yes, I see,” or “Of course,” or “I quite understand.” He told her practically nothing about himself, only that he lived in New York—where?—and that he did something on Wall Street—unspecified—and that he spent two weeks in the West Indies every February but had never been to Jamaica before. He volunteered no more than that: she had no idea where he had grown up— surely not in New York, from the way he spoke—or whether he had ever been married, or what his interests might be. But she thought it would be gauche to be too inquisitive, and probably unproductive. He was very well defended, polite and calm and remote, the most opaque man she had ever known. He played his part in the dinner conversation with the tranquil, self-possessed air of someone who was following a very familiar script.
After dinner they danced, and it was the same thing there: he anticipated her every move, smoothly sweeping her around the open-air dance floor in a way that soon had everyone watching them. Denise was a good dancer, skilled at the tricky art of leading a man who thought he was leading her; but with Nicholas Holt the feedback was so complex that she had no idea who was leading whom. They danced as though they were one entity, moving with a single accord: the way people dance who have been dancing together for years. She had never known a man who danced like that.
On one swing around the floor she had a quick glimpse of Jeffrey Thompkins, dancing with a robust, red- haired woman half a head taller than he was. Thompkins was pushing her about with skill and determination but no grace at all, somewhat in the style of a rhinoceros who has had a thousand years of instruction at Arthur Murray. As he went thundering past he looked back at Denise and smiled an intricate smile that said a dozen different things. It acknowledged the fact that he was clumsy and his partner was coarse, that Holt was elegant and Denise was beautiful, that men like Holt always were able to take women like Denise away from men like Thompkins. But also the smile seemed to be telling her that Thompkins didn’t mind at all, that he accepted what had happened as the natural order of things, had in fact expected it with much the same sort of assurance as Holt had expected Number Five to win tonight’s first race. Denise realized that she had felt some guilt about sidestepping Thompkins and offering herself to Holt and that his smile just now had canceled it out; and then she wondered why she had felt the guilt in the first place. She owed nothing to Thompkins, after all. He was simply a stranger who had asked her to dinner last night. They were all strangers down here: nobody owed anything to anyone.
“My cottage is just beyond that little clump of bamboo,” Holt said, after they had had the obligatory beach-
