Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

a moment, that others caught sight of them and assumed they were a couple. Yes: he was a party to this assumption, he welcomed it. Possibly they surmised he was some kind of businessman and Gretel was his trophy wife. Only for a moment of course, for a fraction of a second. As he felt her back under his hands, the swell of breasts on his front. Then the gazes passed over them and fastened elsewhere. But it was better than nothing.

Hans was tapping his shoulder officiously.

“Susan wishes to speak to you,” he said. “She is waiting on the telephone. But do not worry, I have the blood type. Fortunately, Mr. Stern is O-positive.”

Gretel stepped back from him and took Hans’s hand with a light, casual gesture, twirled herself around as she held it. Hans danced with her, stepping primly back and forth; plainly his heart was not in it. Hal’s own heart had been in it, very much so.

As he wandered listlessly toward the phone, which the maître d’ was holding out to him, he could not recall ever resenting Susan like this. Not when he had seen her in the office with the paralegal; not even when they were young and interrupted by Frenchmen.

“So it’s really happening,” she said, when he picked up the receiver. “You’re going to find him. I know you are.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Don’t get your hopes up, though.”

“Casey sends her love,” she said. “She’s here with me.”

He softened, feeling homesick.

“Can I talk to her?”

“Daddy.”

“Case. How are you, sweetheart?”

“An army? The Coast Guard or something?”

“Apparently.”

“You’re my hero.”

•

Later the cornboys came running in from ping-pong, the smaller one bleeding from the head. In a doubles game with two other kids the wooden edge of a paddle had cut him upside the eye socket. Hans and Gretel were not overly worried, but Hans plied a white linen napkin to the wound, filled it full of ice from a nearby table’s champagne bucket. He got the kid to hold the ice against his temple and then announced it was the boys’ bedtime. Putting his hands on their shoulders to steer them to the room, he looked back at Gretel, but she shook her head and grabbed Hal’s arm. She would be there in a few minutes, she said, but she was going to take a walk on the beach before bed, and Hal would escort her.

Hal was tired and ready for bed himself: he felt slack and let down. After the last drink he had turned a corner. There was an art to drinking and he had not mastered it. But Gretel was determined; she tugged at his hand, so he shrugged and agreed to go along. After all, due to the Germanness there would likely be a midnight swim, a shucking of clothes and plunging into the waves. It would not surprise him.

A vicarious thrill in it anyway, or at least a view of her naked ass. He could pretend there was more, that it was for his benefit.

“Leave your shoes,” she urged, when she took off her own. Obediently he discarded them, balled up the socks inside the shoes and left them beside her sandals underneath a hammock. She walked a few paces ahead of him.

There were few stars—no visible cloud cover, but still the stars were obscured and the moon was high but not bright. He followed her, hearing the wash of the tide as the small waves curled in and feeling the water on his feet. They passed a dock and left it behind, passed a row of canoes on the sand. His jeans got wet at the hems and he bent over and rolled them up. If Susan could see him, walking by moonlight with a lovely young woman. Along a seam of the Caribbean.

“Look out for jellyfish,” he said. “Washed up I mean. You wouldn’t see them.”

“I’m going to go swimming. It is so beautiful!” she cried, and idly he gave himself points for predicting.

“Of course,” he said.

“You have to come in with me!”

He was flatly opposed to this. He would be cold and wet. He had no interest in it.

“OK,” he said.

Wearily and without haste he took off his clothes. Who cared, after all, who would ever notice or give a shit? No one. Gretel herself wasn’t even looking. The air was black around them and the blackness gave them a loose kind of privacy. She stepped out of her own skirt as though it was nothing, pulled her shirt over her head and dropped it on the sand too. No brassiere. He had a glimpse of pertness, the sheen of skin.

She left the clothes in a pile without casting a glance at them, bounded forward into the surf and dove. Submerged.

He watched the water, holding his breath. Shivering. Now he had to go in after her. That was how he was with the Germans—he acceded to their demands and then he had to summon the wherewithal. When in fact he did not have it. He was afraid of dark things in the water, surging up from the deep.

Where was she? She should have resurfaced by now. He waded out, up to his knees, up to his waist. Where was she?

She came up with a splash, laughing and shaking the water off her head.

“I love it!” she cried.

“Nice,” he agreed, nodding, and dropped in up to his shoulders, dog-paddling. She went under again.

He remembered a scene from one of the British nature shows featuring famous, avuncular naturalists—wry, witty men who casually stepped down from helicopters in the African veldt and talked companionably to the camera in their Oxbridge accents as they walked through the tall, waving grass in their safari outfits. Such men were at home with the animals, picked them up and showed them to the camera as though there was no trick to it. They said this little fella as they described a mating behavior or trotted out a surprising factoid. But the scene he remembered had been part of