After the snorkeling came a shower, a little time spent reading on the porch, then the outdoor buffet lunch. Afterwards a nap, a stroll in the hotel’s flamboyant garden, and by mid-afternoon down to the beach again, not for a swim this time, but just to bake in the blessed tropical sun. She’d worry about the possibility of skin damage some other time; right now what she needed was that warm caress, that torrid all-enfolding embrace. Two hours dozing in the sun, then back to the room, shower again, read, dress for dinner. And off to the turtle races. Denise never bothered with the ones after lunch—they were strictly for the real addicts—but she had gone every evening to the pre-dinner ones.
A calm, mindless schedule. Exactly the ticket, after the grim, exhausting domestic storms of October and November and the sudden final cataclysm of December. Even though in the end she had been the one who had forced the breakup, it had still come as a shock and a jolt: she too was getting divorced, just another pathetic casualty of the marital wars, despite all the high hopes of the beginning, the grand plans she and Michael liked to make, the glowing dream. Everything dissolving now into property squabbles, bitter recriminations, horrifying legal fees. How sad: how boring, really. And how destructive to her peace of mind, her self-esteem, her sense of order, her this, her that, her everything. For which there was no cure, she knew, other than to lie here on this placid Caribbean beach under this perfect winter sky and let the healing slowly happen.
Jeffrey Thompkins had the tact—or the good strategic sense—to leave her alone during the day. She saw him 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 someone while she was down here. But a Chevrolet dealer from Long Island? Shorter than she was, with thick hairy shoulders? Somehow she couldn’t. She just couldn’t, not her first fling after the separation. He seemed to sense it too, and didn’t bother her at the beach, even had his lunch at the indoor dining room instead of the buffet terrace. But she suspected she’d encounter him again at evening turtle-race time.
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.