"My father said you'd be coming. This is Mrs. Angstrom?" He means Pru, who has come instead of Janice, who after all that tramping around yesterday wanted to stay home and catch up on her errands and go to her aerobics class and bridge group and spend a little time with Nelson before he goes home. Harry is stunned that Ed's son could make this blunder but then thinks he must deal all the time with men in advanced middle age who have younger wives. And anyway Pru is no longer that young. Tall and fairskinned like he is, she might well be his.
"Thanks for the compliment, Gregg," Harry says, pretty smoothly, considering, "but this is my daughter-in-law, Teresa." Teresa, Pru – she is like him even in having two names, an inner and an outer. "And these are my two handsome grandchildren, Judy and Roy."
Gregg tells Judy, "So you're the one who wants to be a sailor girl."
Her eyes when she lifts them to Gregg's face flood here by the pools with a skyey light that washes out their green and makes her pupils small as pencil leads. "Sort of."
Moving and speaking in a relaxed thorough way that suggests his whole day could happily be devoted to them, Ed's son leads them back into the terrazzo corridors and arranges for locker keys for them with a boy at a desk – a young black with his hair shaved into one of those muffin-tops they do now, an ugly style, with bald sides – and then leads them to the locker-room doors, and tells them how to exit directly onto the beach, where he will meet them and manage the Sunfish rentals. "How much do I owe you for all this?" Harry asks, half-expecting it will be free, arranged for by Ed in compensation for the twenty Harry dropped to him at Wednesday's golf.
But Gregg sheds a little amiability and says, "The boats are exclusively for the use of hotel guests and get included in their charges, but I think about a hundred twenty for the four of you would cover it, with the lockers and beach access and two Sunfish for an hour each."
Pru speaks up. "We don't want two. I'd be terrified."
He looks her up and down and says with a new thrust in his voice, a little friendly lean in from a guy who deals with a lot of women in this job, "No need to be terrified, Teresa. They can't sink, and lifesavers are compulsory. Worst case and you feel you have no control, just let go of the sail and we'll come out for you in the launch."
"Thanks but no thanks," Pru says, a bit perkily Harry thinks, but, then, she and this guy are about the same age. Baby boomers. Rock and roll, dope, Leave It to Beaver, physical fitness. And wait till they discover they both come from Ohio.
Gregg Silvers turns to him and says, "Ninety should about do it, then."
The sum seems an invitation to tip him ten, but Harry wonders if this wouldn't be insulting, since he is here as a family friend, and waits for Gregg to fetch the bill from the muffin-topped boy at the desk. When Rabbit and Roy are alone in the locker room, he tells the child, "Jesus, Roy, that just about cleaned out poor old Grandpa's wallet!"
Roy looks up at him with frightened inky eyes. "Will they put us in jail?" he asks, his voice high and precise, like wind chimes.
Harry laughs. "Where'd you get that idea?"
"Daddy hates jail."
"Well who doesn't!" Harry says, wondering if the child is quite right in the head. Roy doesn't understand you should loosen the string of bathing trunks to pull them on, and while he fumbles and struggles his little penis sticks straight out, no longer than it is thick, cute as a button mushroom. He is circumcised. Rabbit wonders what his own life would have been like if he had been circumcised. The issue comes up now and then in the newspapers. Some say the foreskin is like an eyelid; without it the constantly exposed glans becomes less sensitive, it gets thick-skinned and dull rubbing against cloth all the time. A letter he once read in a skin magazine was from a guy who got circumcised in midwife and found his sexual pleasure and responsiveness went so far down his circumcised life was hardly worth living. If Harry had been less responsive he might have been a more dependable person. Getting a hard-on you can feel the foreskin sweetly tug back, like freezing cream lifting the paper cap on the old-time milk bottles. From the numb look of his prick Roy will be a solid citizen. His grandfather reaches down a hand to lead him out to the beach.
Harry and Janice after their first year or two in Florida, when in their excitement at being here they bought a telescope for the balcony and three or four times a week would drive the two miles to the Deleon public beach for a walk and picnic supper if not a swim, gradually stopped visiting the Gulf. So it hits him now as something fresh, unforeseen, this immensity of water, of air, of a surface of flux battered into a million oscillating dents. The raw glory of it all overpowers for a moment the nagging aches and worries in his chest and releases him into self-forgetfulness. Such light-struck and level grandeur is like nothing he knew in the Pennsylvania landscape, hemmed in by woods and hills and housetops, a land dingy with centuries of use, where even the wild patches, the quarries and second-growth woodland and abandoned factories and rnineshafts, had been processed by men and discarded. Here, all feels virgin, though in fact there is a history too, of Indians and conquistadores and barefoot mailmen who served the mosquito-plagued coastal settlements. On the right and left of the horizon are islands where the millionaires used to come by private railroad car for the tarpon fishing in April. Spanish and French pirates once hid among these islands. Gold is still buried in their sands. They are flat and seem very distant from where Harry and Roy stand on the beach wall. It is all so bright, so open, the world feels created anew, in synthetic elements. Sailboats, windsurfing rigs, those motorcycles that buzz along on top of the water, plastic paddleboats, and inflated rafts dot the near water with colors gaudy as a supermarket's. A distance down the beach, in front of another hotel, someone is flying a kite -a linked pair of box kites that dip and dive and climb again in unison, trailing glittering orange ribbons. For a mile in either direction, a twinkling party of tan flesh and cloth patches is assembling itself, grainlike live bodies laid on top of the beach of sand.
Pru and Judy come out of the hotel to join them and they descend concrete steps. The hour has passed ten o'clock, and at their backs the tall hotel, shaped like an S fifteen stories high, fringed at each story with balconies like fine-toothed red combs, still has its face in shadow, though its shadow has shrunk back to the innermost of its pools. The sand is freshly raked underfoot; yesterday's footprints and plastic glasses and emptied lotion bottles have been taken away and the wooden beach chaises stacked. Today's sunbathers are arranging themselves and their equipment, their towels and mystery novels (Ruth used to read those, and what she got out of them was another mystery) and various colorcoded numbers of sunscreen. Couples are greasing each other. Old smoothies already the color of leather are rubbing oil into their bald heads, the hair of their chests pure white. The smell of lotion rises to intertwine with the odor of salt air, of dead crab, of seaweed. As he leads his group across the sand Harry feels heads lift and eyes behind sunglasses slide; he feels proud and strange to be seen with this much younger woman and two small children. His second family. Or his third or fourth. Life moves through us family after family.