She told him of letters she had written him from boarding school that she had not sent. She asked forgiveness for getting pregnant before she was married, and forgetting his birthday in 1968, and being in Paris instead of home when he had a prostate operation in ‘69, and of course for not beating back immediately when he had his “cardiac” last year.

When she had finished her agenda, he gave no sign that he understood, but there was nothing new in that. It was a great purgative. Completed, it left nothing to do, except to help with bedpans and washings, and reading him Kipling, whom she remembered as the only poet her father had ever touched.

It was like reading to a corpse, but she persisted out of guilt for a week. Then she kissed him goodbye.

Tony and Nancy came to the airport: they were planning to marry in January. She hugged her brother, who still showed no signs of growing up, and his wife, and Justice Holmes, who after all the worry tolerated her but had obviously forgotten all about her. She said goodbye to Bernie, bought Mitch a Nikon for Christmas at the duty-free counter, and climbed on a Pan Am plane.

She found immediately that the copilot was Mahura’s new boyfriend. After Honolulu, he wandered back and sat with her. He was gorgeous and she found him bland and sexless as a eunuch. He was a very naive young man, or pretended to be. And puzzled. Mahura was tender and tough, funny and sad, flighty and constant. He liked her very much.

But if the Frenchman was gay, and really preferred mahoos, why did she yak so much about him?

Lindy only smiled. She felt strangely disembodied and free, in other hands, and disinclined to probe her own feelings, let alone Mahura’s. When he went back to the cockpit she dozed off, but the jingle of the cocktail cart awakened her. She had a martini and stared down at the infinite blue.

It was a wider, deeper ocean than the one she thought she knew. From here, it seemed a wasteland. Among the minute distant whitecaps, she searched for a sail, a freighter, a liner. There was nothing, so she simply imagined Linda Lee, rolling south.

One martini here was twenty-four hours below, a hundred miles of squall and sail-change, disaster and spilled soup, bruised shins, nausea, and joy. No one on the plane but she could measure a hundred miles; she knew the distance from San Francisco to Tahiti better than Mahura’s lover, who probably flew it once a week. She knew, and she dreaded the thousands still ahead to sail.

Tahiti International, after the cool, dry cabin, was sultry. It was jammed, as usual, with Polynesians meeting relatives garlanded in leis. French military, tourists, and bored Tahitian customs officers were everywhere. Hordes of Papeete onlookers wandered through the cool, clean galleries. Whole families were there to sip Fanta and to watch the planes.