“Did you see it move?” he had asked.

“Yes, darling. I’ve always been a moon and cloud watcher. I always think of Baudelaire’s poem about clouds—

Le regard singulier d’une femme galante

Qui se glisse vers nous comme le rayon blanc

Que la lune onduleuse envoie au lac tremblant,

Quand elle y veut baigner sa beauté nonchalante.

“That’s wonderful.” He didn’t really understand a word of it but he was in that rare mood of the utterly untaught, who have a certain feeling that they can play the piano.

The number of their shared likes and dislikes was extraordinary. She was a food expert though they continued drinking through the dinner hour. Even more striking was her knowledge of and love for the great Gauguin. After Madeira she had graduated from Pratt Institute, then returned to New Orleans and jumping horses, convinced that her talent was insufficient to bear her girlish ambitions. He became maudlin when they turned to her injury, toward which she owned a biblical attitude: a cable on an exercise machine had snapped, stretching her unmercifully. There was still a long shot that she might partially recover; she would know within a month. He asked her for a definition of “central cord sparing” which she had used several times, along with “substantia gelatinosa.”

“It means”—she lit a citronella candle and laughed—“that I can still feel down here.” She lifted her nightie with a flick of her fingertips. The evening had been cool enough for her to wrap the afghan around her shoulders. “It’s the only place I can feel the weather.” The wobbling light was a mysterious beacon on her pubis. His knees shook as he knelt.

“It must be strange having the Bermuda Triangle right in your front yard.” His voice quavered with nervousness.

“What an odd thing to say. It’s all nonsense.” She exhaled, laughing as his fingers probed.

“This upper left-hand corner is Bermuda, and the other upper corner is the Bahamas. And right here we’re smack dab in Palm Beach.” O my kingdom for a half-foot tongue, he thought, I could levitate her. She made a particular noise as all women do, a signature: hers was a keening sound, as if a witch were caught under a fallen tree far out in some fog-shrouded forest and hadn’t yet mustered the magic to free herself, or himself.

“Pull me down a little bit, and turn me over,” she whispered.

“Carimba,” he whispered, back in his room in a dark tropical suit. “If this be adultery, so be it”—not comprehending that a man in a questionable moral situation is given to pompous stands. Downstairs he inquired of the night bellman where he might get a substantial late night snack. The man was black so Warlock mentioned a hankering after barbecue.

“Not sending you to a barbecue shack. Nosiree. Nobody from here goes to no barbecue shack. You get yourself in troubles.”