“Salt,” he explained as she drew back. “Well, I couldn’t get a job on a tanker, which was lucky for me. But I told them I was eighteen and I got taken on the Ile de France as a piano player. The first night in Le Havre there was a heavy mist and I just hung around on the streets and looked at things and said no to the whores and tried to imagine I was older and tougher and had a wife and a baby son waiting for me back in the States, but of course it was no good. I couldn’t begin to imagine how it really had been for my father.”

“God. That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”

He decided to take advantage of her sadness, moved in like a clumsy courting sea lion to reach for her mouth with his own. She started to pull away and then, changing her mind, placed her hands on his shoulders and her lips softly over his for a brief moment, a sea-tasting kiss with no passion but a great deal of tenderness.

“I can remember things lots sadder than that,” he said, reaching for her again, and she showed her fine teeth and placed both feet against his chest and pushed away from him, not really a kick but sufficient to cause him to go under and inhale ocean, and when he stopped coughing they both agreed it was time to leave the water.

They swam in and all was shivering and goosebumps and he offered to rub her warm with the towel and she refused. She ran along the beach to warm up and he quickly realized it was even better than following her when she walked. Too soon it was over and they returned to the blanket and she opened what he had thought was a knitting bag and shared a very good lunch with him. “But you still didn’t explain about learning to swim,” she said.

“Oh.” He swallowed tuna salad on rye. “I made the round trip all summer, Manhattan to Southampton to Le Havre, with a two-day layover and then back the way we came. It’s a classy boat and I was saving money, but all I was seeing was water. I was too scared even to take the night-boat into Paris. Then, right about this time of year, the ship tied up in Le Havre for a week-long overhaul.

“There was an assistant purser, a guy named Dusseault. His wife ran a suckers’ boutique in Cannes, and he offered me a lift if I’d help him drive his Peugeot. The trip took thirty hours. While he made it with his wife I sat on the beach every day and stared at bikinis. A gang of French teeny-boppers kind of adopted me. This one little girl taught me to swim in three days.”

“Did you make love to her?” she asked in a little while.