She liked the way he told it, funny but without the mockery or resentment that many hard-knocks immigrants threw in. Then he said, “What about you? What’s your perfect Cuban sandwich?”
Lorna prides herself on being a good listener, a useful trait, considering the sort of men she has chosen to be around most of her life. One of the reasons she picked clinical psych was that people told you about their lives and did not wish very much to know about yours. So there is not a ready spate, her Cuban sandwich does not spring instantly to mind. He gets her resume therefore, together with the usual set-piece anecdotes about college and grad school and internship, but nothing deeper, and a number of the fibs she uses to ward off any efforts to dig. But she expresses her desire to find out what makes people tick, why they were so different, one from the other, and to learn if skilled interpretation of standard instruments can ferret out their secret pain. He listens. To her surprise, he asks informed questions, she warms to her subject. She began this outing with a number of expectations about what would transpire, but a lively discussion about the operational differences between nonparametric and parametric statistics was not one of them. She draws in the sand with a stick, the normal curve, the equations and tables that analyze variance….
There is at last a silence. “Getting hot,” he says. “Let’s have a swim.” He walks to the water, wades in, and dives below the surface with barely a splash. She pulls off her top and shorts. She has prepared herself with two beers, but this is always a sticky moment for her. She walks toward his head, now floating above the shimmering surface, slick and glistening like a seal’s. He watches her with an appreciative smile as she enters the water; she feels his gaze settle on her, and she hurries her steps to submerge her body. The water is tepid and has an oily feel, as if megagallons of bath oils have been added to Biscayne Bay.
They bob together, in chin-high water, touching briefly, then floating away like flotsam. She thinks it must be the beer, this voluptuous languor she now feels, she has not been out on the water since the breakup with Howie Kasdan, who now passes across her mind. If Howie were here, and he never would have come to so plebian a beach as Bear Cut, he would be swimming laps, making her swim laps too, coaching her, deprecating her style.
On the beach someone turns a radio up, music and a woman’s voice singing in Spanish. Paz turns to her and says, in a conversational tone, “She sang beyond the genius of the sea, the water never formed to mind or voice, like a body wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion made constant cry…”
For a moment Lorna thinks he is translating the lyrics of the radio’s song, but after a moment she doubts that the sentiment is one ordinarily expressed on Cuban AM’s Top 40.
“…caused constantly a cry, that was not ours although we understood, inhuman, of the veritable ocean.” A grin after this and a gesture to the Bay, its sky, its littoral.
“What’s that?” she asked after an astonished pause.
” ‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’ first stanza,” he replied, “by Wallace Stevens. A friend of mine always used to recite the whole thing whenever we were out on the tropic seas.”
An unexpected little stab of jealousy here. “So you weren’t an English major.”
“Nope.”
“Not psych?”
“Not anything.”
“Everyone has a major. Where did you go to school?”
“Archbishop Curley High.”
“I mean college.”
“I didn’t,” he said.
“Really? But…how come…I mean…”
“How come a dumbass high school graduate cop can converse about clinical psych and spout modernist poetry?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“You did, but I don’t take offense. I have smarts but no patience for sitting in a classroom or taking tests. I resent tests. I have a good memory for what I hear, and I’ve picked the brains of a lot of smart people, mainly women. I get books recommended. Sometimes I even read them. I use a dictionary for the big words. You could say that I went to the University of Girl. For example, before this afternoon I didn’t know what Wilcoxon’s signed rank test was, and now I do. But to be honest, I’m a mile wide and an inch deep. I don’t really know anything, alls I have are these bits and pieces, like one of those birds that collects shiny things, what d’y call ‘ems…?”
“Magpies.”
“Magpies, right. And that’s okay in a way because it turns out that knowing a little bit about a lot of stuff is handy if you’re a detective. Because there’s really only one thing I have absolutely got to know.”
“Which is?”
“How to read people,” says Paz and shifts slightly in the water so that he is facing her, with the sun at his back and the dazzle of it coming off the water and forming a bright nimbus about his head.
He says, “Can I ask you a personal question?”
She feels a pressure in her chest. An infarct? That Cuban sandwich? She takes a deep breath and another. “Sure,” she says.
“Why do you walk like you do?”
“What do you mean?” she asks, knowing very well.
“All slumped over with your shoulders rolled forward. Is this embarrassing? I mean you didn’t have some kind of tragic childhood disease?”
“No.” Floods of shame.
He slips behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders. His fingers probe, pull, gentle but insistent. “What is this in here, concrete?” he says. “Just relax, okay? Let me do this.” His left arm slides around the front of her and rests just above the line of her breasts and he pulls her into the pressure of his thumb, which now seems to be penetrating her body in a way that is both pleasant and slightly frightening. His hands move to the muscles around her neck. His thumbs press and move an inch, press and move on. It’s not at all sexy, but it’s not clinical either. She has been massaged before but nothing like this. She feels waves in her flesh. Control is slipping away, control she did not really know she was exerting. But now she exerts.
He feels the resistance and stops. She drifts a little away and says, “What was that?”
“Shiatsu. Your ki is blocked up big-time.”
“Thank you.” Coldly. “Did you learn that at the University of Girl?”
“I did.” Now she swims away from him, feeling anger. She is not sure she wants to join that faculty yet. She leaves the water and starts walking back to where they have left their blanket. She feels strange in her body, and at first she thinks it’s only because she’s been floating in salt water for so long, but then realizes that it’s not the usual heaviness and imbalance you get when you leave the support of the sea but its opposite. She feels lighter and more balanced on her feet. She is not slouching as much, her shoulders are back, her breasts seem to have filled with air.
They lie on the blanket at a respectable distance from each other. She has no idea what to say to him now. He is lying back with his eyes closed, a rolled towel behind his head.
“God, I’m really tired,” he says.
She starts to rub sunblock on her skin. “Take a nap,” she says. “Would you like me to put the handcuffs on you?”
“You’ve been dying to ask, right?”
“Busted.”
“The reason is because I’m a somnambulist.” He tells her about the egg-woman nightmare and his wanderings.
“Interesting. You’re being told that anonymous sex with eggheads is a room with no outlet. A closed hell.”
He laughs and says, “So no more sex with eggheads is the prescription for restful nights?”
“Oh, I think eggheads are fine. It’s the anonymity you have to watch.” Their eyes meet now and there is a silence that becomes uncomfortable. She looks away first.