“Leighton will get your clothes. There are very few pickpockets on our beaches. I’m Laura. You have this strange accent. May I guess rural Indiana?” She pressed a buzzer on a wicker table beside her, and patted the longue for him to sit down.

“Johnny, Michigan.” He offered his hand then started to withdraw it.

“It’s everything below my breasts. I had an accident a few months ago.” A black man in a waiter’s coat appeared and she ordered drinks. The children and maid appeared as if by magic with his clothes. The old black woman was still distraught and Laura kissed her hand and dismissed them all. “That’s okay, honey, nobody’s at fault.” They wandered off and Laura whispered in an aside, “She’s been with me since I was born. She’s totally incompetent but then so is everyone else on earth.”

“I’m very sorry about your injury,” Warlock said in a hoarse whisper. Outside of Diana she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and about the same age. Her husky southern accent hit him hard below the waist for some reason and there was a little shame in this sexual attraction to paralysis. How could he? The evidence coiled and moved in his bathing suit, as if some hibernating reptile were feeling in a dark lair the first rays of spring sunshine. She had rearranged the afghan in an expansive swipe of her hand to the point that he felt compelled to concentrate on her face, with only a flicker or two below. The butler trundled up with a drink cart similar to those used on airplanes.

“My husband is interested in the machinery of alcohol. Help yourself. I’ll have a gin and tonic, heavy on the gin.”

“Will there be anything else, Mrs. Fardel?” The butler backed away slowly, missing by years of experience the edge of the swimming pool.

The name Fardel lit up like a forty watt bulb as he made the drinks, then exploded in the manner of an unpunctured baked potato in a hot oven. Oh my god! His mind raced back to the coincidences found in Dr. Zhivago that last spring of graduate school; the palms became linden trees, the lowering tropical sun shown on the Baltic outside St. Petersburg, rather than the Atlantic off Palm Beach. Laura looked like Julie Christie, only better.

“You’re off in dreamland. What do you do?”

“I’m an artist … in a way,” he stuttered. There was the temptation to continue the Russian theme, fall on his knees and weep that he was sent here to spy upon her.

“Must be a small way. There aren’t any artists around here. I knew one real well but he went and jumped off this old bridge in New Orleans when I wouldn’t be his mistress. There must have been extenuating circumstances, don’t you think? No one commits suicide for love.”