On his single vacation trip to Florida with Diana they had both thought the state to be imponderably sleazy outside a few locations, say the Everglades, an afternoon in the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, and the ocean itself. So much of the trip had been unpleasant: on the charterboat the mate had clubbed the huge amberjack to death when Warlock wanted the fish released back to his watery home, and the captain was pissed when he wouldn’t pay to have the fish mounted—who wanted a big, dead fish in his house; even worse were the ghastly college kids on the beach in front of their Fort Lauderdale hotel. The boys would gather their blankets in an island around Diana’s, neglecting their own kind. Their jack-off leers repulsed Warlock and fueled his jealousy to the extent that he finally confined his wife to the hotel pool. The quarrel lasted for days—Diana preferred the ocean. He had felt so badly that he began to think that his divorce from Marilyn had been, career-wise, changing horses in midstream, an unthinkable act to even the most otiose cowboy. But then the cowboy wasn’t married to Marilyn with her nasty logic and vaunting social ambitions in East Lansing. Her inauguration into the local Junior League turned her into Princess Margaret; her accent changed and her clothing budget soared. A close quartered confrontation with Marilyn could be likened to being rolled up tightly in a cold, wet wool blanket; the heart and brain choking on their own grimly altered juices as the argument prolonged itself. Then the fated, foreordained meeting with Diana after his Economics Club speech: good sense disintegrated like shards of frozen manure in the face of the power of love at first sight. After their second, secretive date they had tried to go all the way in his modest compact car on a lover’s lane; her pearlish mellow laughter rang out in the June night air at his improbable maneuvers. She had suggested a motel for the next meeting, then had headed down on him with a voluptuous energy that left him at evening’s end with some kicked off radio and heater dials.