Lighting a cigarette now, he studied the massive rusted old ship anchor hanging above the mirror behind the bar, and then as his gaze drifted downwards he found himself looking into the eyes of one of the two girls at the other end of the bar. She smiled warmly, in open invitation. Beyond her, Hook saw the other girl on the phone near the door, and he knew suddenly that it was not a date she was making but an appointment. They were professionals. Looking back at the first girl—by way of the mirror still, for the fat man was sitting between them—Hook returned a fraction of her smile. Then he told the bartender to give her another drink—this even though he was not sure what his motives were yet, whether he just wanted to talk with her and get her whore’s lowdown on Santa Barbara high life or whether he actually wanted her, wanted sex.

Whichever it was, he apparently was about to find out very soon, for when the bartender served her drink, a bloody mary, she smiled again and got up, bringing the drink and her purse down the bar with her. Hook stood as she joined him. She thanked him for the drink and said her name was Rita. He suggested that they move to a table, and followed her to one next to the pool window. Pulling the chair out for her, seeing her close up, he estimated her age at around nineteen or twenty. She was totally Latin, dark, sexy, unfashionably voluptuous, the kind of girl he would have once described to Kate as “fat by thirty,” a private joke between them. During the first summer of their marriage a girl across the hall from their Greenwich Village apartment had called on Hook to open a stuck window for her while Kate was away at work, and when he related the incident to her later, trying to minimize it, he described the girl as the type that would be fat by thirty, which as Kate later discovered meant someone who was very attractive and sexy now, at twenty.

Across the room the second girl hung up the phone and, putting on her coat, waved to Rita and left. Rita gestured out the window at the family frolicking in the distant shallow end of the pool. “They look creepy, don’t they? They never go under. You just see their bodies. Never their heads.”

Hook agreed that they looked odd. “My name’s David Hook,” he added.

She was pleased to meet him, she said. Then she leaned toward him confidentially, smiling in happy embarrassment. “Would you believe I skinny-dipped in there one night? Well, I did. Me and this other girl. Some guy took over the whole bar for a party, and Jules there, the bartender, he hired us to put on a little show. Just swim around, you know.”

“I wish I’d been here,” Hook said.

It was not much, but it pleased her. She smiled hesitantly at him, almost timidly. “At the bar,” she said, “before you saw me, I watched you. You looked so kind of—oh, not sad, I guess—but tense, you know? I mean, like—well, like you’re not exactly having a ball, you know?”