We had a lot of silences, but we did a lot of talking too. General talk, spiced with old incident, about the shape of the world, the shape of the human heart, good places we had been, good and bad things we had done or had not quite done. We went up around Grand Bahama, down the eastern shore of Abaco, over to the Berry Is-lands, down to Andros, and at last, after fourteen days, over to New Providence, where we tied up at the Nassau Harbour Club.
She went alone to the bank and when she came back, she was very subdued and thoughtful. When I asked her if anything had gone wrong, she said that it had been quite a good deal more money than she had expected. She said that changed a few things and she would have to think about the future in a different way. We went out to dinner and when I got up the next morning, she was al-ready up, drinking coffee and looking at the Yachtsman’s Guide to the Bahamas.
She closed the book. “I suppose we should think about heading back,” she said. “I hate to.”
“Do you have a date to keep?” ~
“Not really. Somebody I have to see, eventually. A de-cision to make.”
“I’m in no hurry. Let’s look at some more places. Exumas. Ragged Islands too, maybe.” I explained to her how I take my retirement in small installments, whenever I can afford it, and if it was late August or early September when we got back, I wouldn’t mind at all. She was over-joyed.
So we sailed to Spanish Wells, then down the western shore of Eleuthera, and then began to work our way very slowly down the lovely empty chain of the Exumas, stay-ing over wherever we wanted to explore the beaches and the technicolor reefs. We did a lot of swimming and walking. I was suddenly aware that her mood was changing. She seemed remote for a few days, lost in thought, almost morose.
The day she suddenly cheered up I realized that she had begun to deliberately heighten my awareness of her. I had the feeling that it was a very conscious decision, something that she had made up her mind to during those days when she seemed lost in her own thoughts and memories. As she was a tasteful, mature, elegant, and sensitive woman, she was not obvious about it. She merely seemed to focus her physical self at me, enhancing my awareness through her increased awareness of me. In-evitably it would be the male who would make the overt pass. It baffled me. I could not believe she was childish enough or shallow enough to set about enticing a younger man merely to prove that she could. There was more sub-stance to her than that. She had begun something that would have to be finished in bed, because I did not think she would begin it without having recognized its inevita-ble destination. It was all so unlikely and so deliberate that I had to assume she had some compulsion to prove something or to disprove something. Or maybe it was merely a hunger that came from deprivation. So I stopped worrying myself with wondering about her. She was a de-sirable and exciting woman.
So when she provided the opportunity, I made the ex-pected pass. Her mouth was eager. When she murmured, “We shouldn’t,” it meant, “We shall.” Her trembling was not faked. She was overly nervous about it, for reasons I could not know until later.
The first time was just at dusk in her big wide double bunk in the master stateroom. Her body was lovely in the fading light, her eyes huge, her flesh still hot with the sun-heat of the long beach day, her shoulder tasting of the salt of the sea and the salt of perspiration. Because she was tense and anxious, I took a long gentling time with her, and then when finally, in full darkness, she was readied, I took her, in that ever-new, ever-the-same, long, sliding, startling moment of penetration and joining, which changes, at once and forever, the relationship of two people. Just as it was happening she pushed with all her might at my chest and tried to writhe away from me, calling out, “No! Oh, please! No!” in a harsh, ugly, gasp-ing voice. But she had been a moment late and it was done. She wrenched her head to the side and lay under me, slack and lifeless.