He met her his first night there, while drinking beer in a tourist bar on the beach. Or rather he was picked up by her, was delivered by silver tray a card with the name Mrs. John R. Cunningham, Atlanta, Georgia, beautifully printed on it but almost obscured by the scrawled imperative: Join me. Though she was almost twice his age, she was still trim and attractive in a quiet moneyed sort of way, and it developed that he spent the rest of his leave with her, at the plush Biltmore Hotel on the beach, in a suite of rooms that was never without ice and booze and almost instantaneous service. She introduced him, first to a world of elegance, fine restaurants and exotic food and drink, mostly seafood and wine, which gave him the stamina to handle the second and far more dazzling world she also presented him with, that of sex. In nine nights and days he learned more from her, he was confident, than a squad of sailors could have learned in a year of weekend passes spent with the whores of Long Beach and Tijuana. He also learned to love the lady, though that was something she did not want to hear about, she said, because she was old enough to be his mother, and in fact had children of her own, plus a husband, back in Atlanta. Nevertheless her eyes had filled when they said goodbye at the railroad station.

“What’s the matter?”

He had never seen or heard from her since, nor had he ever tried to contact her. She would have been in her sixties now, an old woman.

“What’s the matter, mister?” It was the girl, standing almost at the edge of his table. And Hook realized it was not the first time she had asked him the question.

Her mother reached over and pulled her back, scolding the child, asking her where her manners were.

Hook finished his drink, paid up, and left.

The flight to Santa Barbara was actually not much more than a takeoff and a landing, since the ninety-mile distance barely gave the United jet time to reach cruising altitude before it had to start coming down again. As they came over the city Hook checked his watch: the time was four-forty. Through the window across the aisle he could see the sun already flattening as it dropped toward the Pacific out beyond Point Conception, bathing the Channel Islands and, out his window, the sea cliffs and the Santa Ynez Mountains behind the city in a scarlet glaze. The city itself lay mostly in shadow, its pervasive orange tile roofs and pastel fake adobe buildings stretching up the valley away from the beach, which cut between the palm trees and the blue of the sea like a scimitar.

As the DC-9 landed and taxied to the terminal, Hook did not know where he would find the strength to move when the time came. He felt not just weak but weighted, as if his body had turned to lead. He stayed seated until everyone else was out before he struggled to his feet and followed them down the steel stairway, heading for the small terminal. To the north, in the foothills of the Goleta valley, he saw not the neat ranks of lemon groves that had been there when he was young but houses, stores, shopping centers. In the other direction, a mile distant, was a stand of high-rise buildings, the university, he figured, the home of the bank-burners.