The next day was pleasant enough, as far as Bobby Putnam could remember. They spent the morning looking around, taking a walk on the beach, and lunched at a little striped restaurant overlooking the reef. In the afternoon, he’d gone to try the golf course. He supposed he shouldn’t have left her alone, but how was he to know? He got into a foursome. It was a scruffy course but the greens were well kept and the holes were arranged around bodies of water. The game lasted a long time. When he got back to the hotel it was nearly dark, and Irene was outside their cottage at a table with no light on, having a drink. She had already had a few. The wind had picked up — they got the Atlantic winds on the east side — and the waves were crashing close by. The palm fronds blew around like rattling venetian blinds. She was wearing a pale yellow dress — Bobby rubbed his eyes behind his butterscotch glasses as he told the story, exhausted by the thought. Her figure in the dark was luminous, without a head or limbs.

After dinner they went to a little bar to dance, a green place with nets and colored beads, down the hill from the hotel. They were on vacation, so was it so unusual they’d had a lot to drink? The couple their age from the Blue Ruin dining room nodded hello and asked the Putnams to join them. They’d passed each other in the lobby and now properly introduced themselves. He was English and his wife was, too, though she looked Persian or Lebanese and spoke with a slight accent. Very attractive, said Bobby Putnam, and educated. The husband was an archaeologist or anthropologist — Bobby Putnam could never keep it straight. Irene was friendly and curious, the way she got after a few drinks, and to keep herself steady was leaning against the Englishman as she asked him questions. He didn’t mind, but the wife did. Bobby Putnam took it upon himself to distract the wife, you know, and pulled her up to dance, and in no time she had forgotten what her husband was doing. How long they danced he wasn’t sure — with calypso music one song bangs on into another — but it hadn’t been too short a time.