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 Ind
ies 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.
After dinner they danced, and it was the same thing there: he anticipated her every move, smoothly sweeping her around the open-air dance floor in a way that soon had everyone watching them. Denise was a good dancer, skilled at the tricky art of leading a man who thought he was leading her; but with Nicholas Holt the feedback was so complex that she had no idea who was leading whom. They danced as though they were one entity, moving with a single accord: the way people dance who have been dancing together for years. She had never known a man who danced like that.
On one swing around the floor she had a quick glimpse of Jeffrey Thompkins, dancing with a robust, red-haired woman half a head taller than he was. Thompkins was pushing her about with skill and determination but no grace at all, somewhat in the style of a rhinoceros who has had a thousand years of instruction at Arthur Murray. As he went thundering past he looked back at Denise and smiled an intricate smile that said a dozen different things. It acknowledged the fact that he was clumsy and his partner was coarse, that Holt was elegant and Denise was beautiful, that men like Holt always were able to take women like Denise away from men like Thompkins. But also the smile seemed to be telling her that Thompkins didn’t mind at all, that he accepted what had happened as the natural order of things, had in fact expected it with much the same sort of assurance as Holt had expected Number Five to win tonight’s first race. Denise realized that she had felt some guilt about sidestepping Thompkins and offering herself to Holt and that his smile just now had canceled it out; and then she wondered why she had felt the guilt in the first place. She owed nothing to Thompkins, after all. He was simply a stranger who had asked her to dinner last night. They were all strangers down here: nobody owed anything to anyone.
“My cottage is just beyond that little clump of bamboo,” Holt said, after they had had the obligatory beach-front stroll on the palm promenade. He said it as if they had already agreed to spend the night there. She offered no objections. This was what she had come here for, wasn’t it? Sunlight and warmth and tropical breezes and this.
As he had on the dance floor, so too in bed was he able to anticipate everything she wanted. She had barely thought of something but he was doing it; sometimes he did it even before she knew she wanted him to. It was so long since she had made love with anyone but Michael that Denise wasn’t sure who the last one before him had been; but she knew that she had never been to bed with anyone like this. She moved here, he was on his way there already. She did this, he did it too. This and that. Her hand, his hand. Her lips, his lips. It was all extremely weird: very thrilling and yet oddly hollow, like making love to your own reflection.
He must be able to read minds, she thought suddenly, as they lay side by side, resting for a while.
An eerie notion. It made her feel nakeder than naked: bare right down to her soul, utterly vulnerable, defenseless.
But the power to read minds, she realized after a moment, wouldn’t allow him to do that trick with the turtle races. That was prediction, not mind-reading. It was second sight.
Can he see into the future? Five minutes, ten minutes, half a day ahead? She thought back. He always seemed so unsurprised at everything. When she had told him she didn’t intend to do any betting, that first night, he had simply said, “Of course.” When his turtle had won the race he had shown no flicker of excitement or pleasure. When she had apologized tonight for not having acted on his tip, he had told her blandly that he hadn’t expected her to. The choice of wine—the dinner conversation—the dancing—the lovemaking—
Could he see everything that was about to happen? Everything?
On Wall Street, too? Then he must be worth a fortune.
But why did he always look so sad, then? His eyes so bleak and haunted, those little lines of grimness about his lips?
This is all crazy, Denise told herself. Nobody can see the future. The future isn’t a place you can look into, the way you can open a door and look into a room. The future doesn’t exist until it’s become the present.
She turned to him. But he was already opening his arms to her, bringing his head down to graze his lips across her breasts.
* * *
She left his cottage long before dawn, not because she really wanted to but because she was unwilling to have the maids and gardeners see her go traipsing back to her place in the morning still wearing her evening clothes, and hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door.
When she woke, the sun was blazing down through the bamboo slats of the cottage porch. She had slept through breakfast and lunch. Her throat felt raspy and there was the sensation of recent lovemaking between her legs, so that she automatically looked around for Michael and was surprised to find herself alone in the big bed; and then she remembered, first that she and Michael were all finished, then that she was here by herself, then that she had spent the night with Nicholas Holt.
Who can see the future. She laughed at her own silliness.
She didn’t feel ready to face the outside world, and called room service to bring her tea and a tray of fruit. They sent her mango, jackfruit, three tiny reddish bananas, and a slab of papaya. Later she suited up and went down to the beach. She didn’t see Holt anywhere around, neither out by the reef as he usually was in the afternoon, nor on the soft pink sand. A familiar stocky form was churning up the water with cannonball force, doing his laps, down to the cape and back, again, again, again. Thompkins. After a time he came stumping ashore. Not at all coy now, playing no strategic games, he went straight over to her.
“I see that your friend Mr. Holt’s in trouble with the hotel,” he said, sounding happy about it.
“He is? How so?”
“You weren’t at the turtle races after lunch, were you?”
“I never go to the afternoon ones.”
“That’s right, you don’t. Well, I was there. Holt won the first two races, the way he always does. Everybody bet the way he did. The odds were microscopic, naturally. But everybody won. And then two of the hotel managers—you know, Eubanks, the night man who has that enormous grin all the time, and the other one with the big yellow birthmark on his forehead?—came over to him and said, ‘Mr. Holt, sah, we would prefer dat you forego the pleasure of the turtle racing from this point onward.’ “The Chevrolet dealer’s imitation of the Jamaican accent was surprisingly accurate. “‘We recognize dat you must be an authority on turtle habits, sah,’ they said. ‘Your insight we find to be exceedingly uncanny. And derefore it strikes us dat it is quite unsporting for you to compete. Quite, sah!’”
“And what did he say?”
“That he doesn’t know a goddamned thing about turtles, that he’s simply on a roll, that it’s not his fault if the other guests are betting the same way he is. They asked him again not to play the turtles—’We implore you, sah, you are causing great losses for dis establishment’—and he kept saying he was a registered guest and entitled to all the privileges of a guest. So they canceled the races.”
“Canceled them?”
“They must have been losing a fucking fortune this week on those races, if you’ll excuse the French. You can’t run pari-mutuels where everybody bets the same nag and that nag always wins, you know? Wipes you out after a while. So they didn’t have races this afternoon and there won’t be any tonight unless he agrees not to play.” Thompkins smirked. “The guests are pretty pissed off, I got to tell you. The management is trying to talk him into changing hotels, that’s what someone just said. But he won’t do it. So no turtles. You ask
me, I still think he’s been fixing it somehow with the hotel boys, and the hotel must think so too, but they don’t dare say it. Man with a winning streak like that, there’s just no accounting for it any other way, is there?”
“No,” Denise said. “No accounting for it at all.”
* * *
It was cocktail time before she found him: the hour when the guests gathered on the garden patio where the turtle races were held to have a daiquiri or two before the tote counter opened for business. Denise drifted down there automatically, despite what Thompkins had told her about the cancellation of the races. Most of the other guests had done the same. She saw Holt’s lanky figure looming up out of a group of them. They had surrounded him; they were gesturing and waving their daiquiris around as they talked. It was easy enough to guess that they were trying to talk him into refraining from playing the turtles so that they could have their daily amusement back.
When she came closer she saw the message chalked across the tote board in an ornate Jamaican hand, all curlicues and flourishes:
TECHNICAL PROBLEM
NO RACES TODAY
YOUR KIND INDULGENCE IS ASKED
“Nicholas?” she called, as though they had a prearranged date.
He smiled at her gratefully. “Excuse me,” he said in his genteel way to the cluster of people around him, and moved smoothly through them to her side. “How lovely you look tonight, Denise.”
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 34