He was monstrous! She wanted to shout denials! She hadn’t “slept around” so much, had she? But the truth was there. She would, given a chance, turn down no one. The thought struck her full in the face like a blow. Her heartbeat thickened; her breathing grew rapid. She wished she’d never seen him.

He was looking down at the sand, a grave expression on his face. For all his references to his sensibility, he didn’t take into account the way someone might feel being read like a book. She moved rapidly away from him.

“Come back,” he said mildly. She stood still. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “My saying something doesn’t make the reality more, or less. I like you. Doesn’t that please you? Are you luckier than the rest of us? Do many people really like you—knowing the way you are?”

“I’m not a whore!” she burst out.

“No. I know that. You just enjoy the income from being a victim. Give it up. Try! Look! The boy’s in the water. Call him out, can’t you? I’m a terrible swimmer. What if something happens? There are sharks in this ocean.”

“He’s a good swimmer,” she said coldly. “And you don’t care if he drowns. You just care how you’ll feel if he drowns.”

“Ann…that’s right. It’s right.” He sank down in the sand and she, after a moment’s hesitation, sat next to him.

She felt sticky, hot, ashamed. It was all too close. She felt as if she’d been forced into a closet with Ben for hours while outside the door that kept her prisoner the airy world raged with all its promise and freedom.

“Do you have a pencil with you and a piece of paper?”

Determined to do nothing to be agreeable, she glanced nevertheless at her pocketbook a few yards away where she’d left it. “Get it,” he said in a kindly voice.

She fetched him back a scrap of paper and a yellow pencil. He began to write, using his knee for a table. “A maniac said this, but it doesn’t make it less true. Nietzsche. Funny that I’m quoting him now, at this time in the world. I’m a perverse Jew.”

He handed her the paper. “Read it to me.”

She read: “The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have improved.”

He emitted a kind of hag’s chuckle as though he’d done her mischief.

“Do you know someone named St. Vincent?” she asked, eager to distract him from the subject of herself.