“Savoir-faire?” I said.
“You know.”
“I don’t know. I’m stupid.”
She made an impatient movement with her chin. “Survival skills. How to cope. How to avoid handcuffs. Like grad school except it’s strictly pass-fail. Anyway, you’re enrolled.”
Her voice trailed off. She kept fidgeting, tight and restless.
Presently she sighed.
“You’re right,” she said, “there’s always a price. But listen, you made the decision, you walked, so pretty soon you’ll have to get off your butt and start showing me some involvement. You do or you don’t.”
“A war,” I said.
“True enough.” She took off her sunglasses and looked at me. “Things change, William. All that pom-pom garbage, it’s history, I’m in this for keeps. I’m in. And what I mean is, I mean you have to grow up. Crawl out of your goddamn hidey-hole.”
“Black or white,” I said. “Sounds so simple.”
“It is simple. Pull your own weight or pull out. I need a commitment.”
For a moment she was silent, letting it hang, then she tapped the wallet.
“Commitment,” she said softly. “Know what it means?”
There was a subtle undercurrent. She shook out her hair and stood up and waded out into the Atlantic.
Commitment, I thought.
Two different value systems. She was out to change the world, I was out to survive it. I couldn’t summon the same moral resources.
I dozed off for a time, and when I looked up, Sarah was standing over me, toweling off, the sun directly behind her head.
“Who’s Bobbi?” she said.
Her face was all angles. She knelt down, opened the wallet, and pulled out Martian Travel.
“Found it this morning. Naïve Sarah. Went to reload your billfold. Switch papers—some switch. What do I find? I find this. All about airplanes and safe landings. Maybe I should read it out loud.”
“No,” I said, “don’t.”
But she went ahead anyway, in a soft, measured voice, and at the final line she nodded and placed the poem in my lap.
There was some stillness.
“Snazzy stuff,” she said shortly. “Mars and stars. Dah-dee-dah, et cetera. Nice metrics. Content-wise, it seems a little ambiguous, but I guess that’s literature for you.”
“Sarah, it’s not—”
She shook her head and laughed.
“Fidelity?” she said. “Offhand I can’t think of a decent rhyme. True? Blue? Shit.” Her eyes were closed. “I guess I’m just hypersensitive. The whole thing, it strikes me as—how do I say this?—a little cheesy. And there’s that cute P.S., too. Something about grass. The regular cow kind. She says it expresses her deepest feelings for you.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know.”
“Cheesy.”
“I know.”
After a time, Sarah put on her sunglasses and stretched out beside me.
The afternoon was hot. A fine clean sky, and for a long while nothing more was said. All whimsy, I thought. It wasn’t what it seemed. Out on the horizon a white cruise ship was toiling south, and we lay quietly until it disappeared over the rim of the world.
Sarah touched my arm.
“I’m not poetic, William. You and me. I thought we had something. Remember?”
“I remember.”
“Love. Rio and babies. That was the plan, I thought.”
“It still is. A good plan.”
She sat up.
“Fucking Martians,” she said. “Fucking grass. I don’t get it.”
“No meaning,” I said. “All air.”
“I love you.”
“Just air.”
“Love,” she said, then paused. “So who’s Bobbi?”
I gazed out at where the cruise ship had been, but there was just the thin, unbroken edge of things.
“Bobbi who?” I said.
9 
Underground Tests
NOVEMBER 6, 1968, A DISMAL DAY in paradise. Dark and drizzling and steamy hot. After breakfast Sarah dressed in mourning. She wore a black hat and a black bikini and a long black widow’s veil.
“Nixon’s the one,” she said. “Let’s walk it off.”
Outside, there was fog and thunder. We unfurled an umbrella and strolled past bait shops and boutiques, along the waterfront, down to a deserted beach at Land’s End. The rain was steady. Sarah lifted the veil and spat and said, “Not that it matters. We needed a classy new villain.”
She lay down and made angels in the sand, then stiffened and folded her arms.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Bury me.”
“Deep?”
“Use your judgment.”
I dug a shallow grave and rolled her in and tamped down the wet sand. At the end, only the hat and veil were visible.
She nodded.
“A prayer might be appropriate. Talk about my free spirit, how much you adored me.”
I knelt down and uttered a blessing.
“Beautiful,” she said.
There was gloom at Land’s End, and the day smelled of salt and mildew and troubled times.
Sarah’s eyes were dark behind the veil.
“Our beloved, misgoverned Republic,” she said. She attempted a smile. “And me, William? You do care?”
“A lot. Don’t be silly.”
“Silly me.”
“That’s right.”
“And Bobbi?”
“I explained that. Just this thing.”
Her head shifted slightly in the sand.
“Heavenly bodies,” she said.
It was a day for sobriety. I propped up the umbrella and leaned back and studied the rain. Things were pasty-gray. The ocean was part of the land and the sky was part of the ocean. Far off, there was lightning.
“The thing that gets me,” Sarah said, “is the broad’s guile. I’d give anything to watch her work a singles bar: ‘Hi, there, my name’s Bobbi. Here’s a delicious little poem I wrote just for you.’ A huckster, William. And you fall for it.”
“I didn’t fall.”
Sarah grunted. “Fall, flip, what’s the difference? I mean, Christ, I can knock out my own little beddy-bye rhymes. The grass, the grass! Bobbi, baby, kiss my ass!”
“Talent,” I said.
“Talent. You bet.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“No?”
“I told you, we barely even… Nothing.”
The rain was vast and undramatic. America had misstated itself—Nixon was the one—and at Land’s End there was only Real Politic.
Sarah made a clucking sound.
“Nothing,” she said. “Like Mother Goose. Now you see her, now you don’t.”
“Stop it.”
“The competition, man, it’s too celestial.”
“No competition. I’m here.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I am.”
She laughed.
“Half here, half there,” she said. “A little of both. The Martian Travel trick.”
Then she cried.
There was definite slippage. Along the surface of the grave I could see bits of brown flesh where the rain had made fissures in the sand. Sarah cried quietly, inside herself, then closed her eyes and lay still. “You never look at me,” she said. “Not really. When you love somebody, you keep looking, you can’t help it. But you never do that. You never look at me or ask questions about how I feel or… Just things. You know? I’m a real person.”
“You are,” I said.
I looked at her, then looked away.
She was not, I realized, beautiful. Hard and pretty but not beautiful. I pulled the veil up and kissed her and told her it was just circumstance. A random encounter, I said. Nothing to hold on to. A martini, a voice without language: I couldn’t remember words.