"Yes. Joy. I never could make out the words. The laugh was the same. It was Joy and Howie talking and laughing. Much more of this?"

"Quite a lot, I think."

"Then we need another drink."

She brought the drinks back to the sofa in the living room. When she touched gla.s.ses, she touched a little too hard, spilling drinks from both our gla.s.ses. She giggled and mopped it up.

She said, "To answer the question you haven't asked, Yes, the son of a b.i.t.c.h was trying to run right over me with the Trepid."

"And you think he could see you?"

"Why not? It wasn't black night yet. And I didn't have any trouble seeing him."

"He handled the boat in such a way, he made you fall overboard?"

"No doubt about it."

"But he threw you a life ring."

"I think he just didn't have the guts to do it. I think he knocked me overboard and then panicked and threw the ring. While he was working his way around and back, he got his courage up again and decided to run me down, and then at the last minute he veered off and threw me a line. Like the rifle."

"He didn't mention that."

"I can see why he didn't."

"He said there was something else, and you should tell me about it."

"It's the rifle my father bought for sharks. It goes in an aluminum case he bolted to the side of the instrument panel in the wheelhouse, sort of in the corner, barrel up. The case has pressure clips and a rubber lip. It would even float. Anyway, he taught me to use it when I went with him the first time. It's a Remington seven hundred. I forget what it shoots."

"Probably three-oh-eight?"

"Right! Sometimes they get funny about a gun and you have to let the customs people keep it for you while you're in port, but in a small boat usually it's okay. Which you already know. We were a week from Honolulu, dead flat calm, grinding along at about six knots, which is the best for stingy, on automatic pilot. I was sitting on the roof, forward, reading and drying my hair. BAM! Out of nowhere! I spun around and he was in back of me, not eight feet away. He had the rifle and he had a couple of empty cans in the other hand. He had a dazed look on his face. He said he thought he had unloaded it. He didn't know how it went off. Anyway, it was pointed almost straight up when it went off, he said. But I know how that thing sounds when it's straight up or out to the side or pointing away from you. It's more like whack. Or smack. Not like BAM. This ear still isn't right. It rings a lot. Trav, I think that slug was inches from my head."

"How did he act?"

"Really shocked. Like... almost too shocked. He cried. He threw up. That was later. He'd been going to ask me to throw the cans off the bow, out as far as I could. Then he was going to try to plink them from the stern as we went by."

"And you decided right then to leave him as soon as you docked?"

"Not right then. No."

"Something else happened that last week?"

"Oh, no. I mean I think I'd sort of decided even without the rifle part. Maybe without falling overboard, or the voices, or the girl who wasn't there."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Neither do I. Oh, G.o.d, Trav, I'm drunk. I can't say words right. I'm seeing two of things. You got me drunk."

"You mean that it wasn't going so well, as a marriage."

"Please let me sleep!"

"Okay. You can have a nap. I'll wake you up."

"I mean really go to bed. Please. And you go away, huh?"

"Not until we get through all of it."

"What in h.e.l.l else can there be? You're turning me inside out on these things."

"You said you had to find out something. We're trying to find out."

"I've got to go wash my face and get out of these clothes. I get all sweaty thinking of how scared I got."

"Make it fast."

She came back in ten minutes with scrubbed face and brushed hair, wearing a shorae caftan in a big flower print. She was barefoot, and she was drugged and dazed by drink and weariness and strain.

She plumped down on a stool, fists between her knees, and swayed, yawned, and said, "Honest to G.o.d. Really McGee. I just...", "Did Joy have moles?"

"Huh? What?"

"Moles, marks, visible scars, insect bites, any kind of flaw when you looked at her through the finder?"

"N-no."

"The laughter you heard. They were both laughing at you. Right?"

"Yes. Yes, they were."

"And you're no d.a.m.ned good in bed."

She peered at me. "Huh? Whaddaya mean? I was pretty much okay with Scott. You could say I was a lot better than okay. Chee, you jump around so."

I remembered Scott was the boyfriend who flunked out when her father was killed. "But nowhere near okay with Howie."

She reached and got her gla.s.s. The ice was long melted, the drink still strong. She drank and made a face. She told it piecemeal, the first pieces the most difficult. Good old Uncle Travis.

She had wanted every part of the marriage to be great. Howie was a strange person. You wanted to know him. He was like a little house with a door in the front and a door in the back. One room. He'd let you in his house and it was fun. Chuckles and games. No pressure. So you wanted to know him better and so you went through the doorway into what was going to be the next room of his personal house, but you found yourself back out in the yard, and the little house looked just the same, back and front. One room.

"Me, I'm a personal person," she said. She'd finished her drink. She leaned toward me and put her palms against the side of my face, cupping the sockets of the jaw. She slid forward off the stool, round knees b.u.mping the rug; stood erect on her knees, and tugged at me until our noses were six inches apart, each of us well inside the other's living s.p.a.ce, each breathing into the other's domain. "Look inside of me," she said.

Well, so they were lady eyes, slightly inflamed, gray but so almost blue they would be blue at times, a tiny spangle of small pale tan dots in the left one, in the iris at seven and eight o'clock, close to the wet jet black of the pupil. They wobbled and then fixed full focus upon my eyes. They were lady eyes for ten heartbeats, and then something veered and dipped inside my head. There was a dizziness, then everything except her eyes seemed misted out of focus, and the eyes seemed larger. She became a special ident.i.ty to me. Linda Lewellen Brindle? There had been a kid named Pidge who had a terrible crush. There had been a bride in white called Linda by the Man with the Book. She was an ident.i.ty which had no name as yet, this new one. Pidge was a name suitable for the yacht-club porch at Bar Harbor, or doubles in Palm Springs.

"Hey Lewellen," I said, changing the last-name tempo, turning it into a half-whispered name of a suthrun gal. Lou Ellen. Somehow right.

It startled her. She sat back onto her heels and frowned up at me, shaking her hair back. "Who told you that? That was my grandpop's idea. They all said it was flaky. They all said you couldn't saddle a kid with such a weird name. Lou Ellen Lewellen. I didn't even know until I was maybe ten, and hated Pidge and hated Linda, and called myself Lou Ellen for... oh... a couple of years. I almost forgot until now."

"It just seemed to fit."

"Are you going to call me that?" The strangeness that had started working at six inches was now working just as well at a yard away.

"Probably. Okay with you?"

"Perfect with me. Travis. This eye thing. What I wanted to show you... well, you know. It works for us. For you and me. I'm a personal person. What I was trying to say about Howie, you could look into his eyes eight hours a day, eight days a week, and they're pretty brown gla.s.s. You bounce off. They look back at me the way my dollies used to."

She was wiggling loose. Inquisition requires a kind of domination, a control of tempo and intensity. I pulled away from all the invisible strands she had looped around me so quickly.

"And you know why the voices were laughing at you, right?"

It jolted her back off balance. "I don't want to talk... "

"Talk about anything that might be your fault, think about anything that might be your fault. You want to be perfect."

"W-why do you get so-so d.a.m.ned mean? What made you say that about being no good in bed?"

"Because it was a funny wedding, honey. No musk, no steam, no itch. A wedding of good buddies. A wedding of brother and sister. Remember the kiss after the p.r.o.nouncement? The kind of quick peck the long-married get at airports."

So she got down to the clinical details. She said at first it was all her fault, not being able to respond. And as she explained her incapacity to respond, the picture of the sensuality of Howie Brindle emerged. Beef and sweat, quickly stimulated, quickly satisfied. Some days early in the voyage, an almost insatiable gluttony, a dozen episodes a day, in a dozen places on the boat. Apparently very little tenderness, emotion, romance.

"Like those d.a.m.ned chocolate bars," she said.

"Like what?"

"He keeps a locker practically full. He says he's a chocoholic. Right in the middle of plotting a course, or working out a position from the tables, or fixing the trolling lines, he'll pop up and go peel a chocolate bar and chonk, chonk, chonk, it's gone. Wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, lick his fingers, wipe his hand on his pants, smack his lips, and back to whatever he was doing. When it was happening often enough, and I was trying hard, I could stay far enough up sometimes, in between times, to make it, but when you have to be worried about not making it, it isn't all that good when you do. And when you don't and you have to ask somebody to help you afterward, it's another kind of turnoff."

And by the time they had reached the Virgins, the edge was off his appet.i.te to the point where he would take her at those times when he was awakening her to take the watch, or she went below to shake him awake. But it was not ritual. It was now and again.

"My father was gone and Scott turned out to be a terrible mistake, and when I finally could lift my head and look around, there was Howie, taking care of things, taking charge. And it seemed as if that might be a good way for life to be. Sort of safe and steady."

"You began to have, very bad dreams?"

She c.o.c.ked her head. "How'd you know that? Very foul and very vivid. They'd cling in my mind for days. Something wrong with me, usually. Like in one I looked down and there were two smooth holes in my chest. Somehow I'd gotten my b.r.e.a.s.t.s on backwards and the nipples were way inside there someplace. I was frantic to keep people from knowing it. It was so shameful. I kept hunting for round things I could hold there with my bra, but they'd fall out."

"Numb places on your hands?"

"You know, you're a weird person, Travis? Right along here, on the edges of my hands and around the base of my thumb. And I would get numb around my mouth sometimes too."

"And diarrhea?"

"Where'd you graduate from, Doctor? Constantly!"

"Now think back. Was there ever a time in your life when you felt as if you were utterly without any value at all, completely worthless and contemptible?"

"Yes. After my mom died. It didn't make any sense, but I had the feeling it was my fault somehow, that if I hadn't been such a total nothing of a person, she wouldn't have gotten sick and died and left me. I sort of went down and down and down. I slept all the time, practically. Food tasted vile. I didn't want to leave the house. Daddy took me to a clinic, some kind of diagnostic thing, and they gave me every test known to man. Then they recommended some kind of special school. But my father got a prescription from them for something that made me feel edgy and jumpy. We had some terrible scenes. He yelled at me that I was letting him down, and I, by G.o.d, was going to learn navigation, small boat handling, marine engines, map reading, scuba diving. When he wasn't yelling at me, he was telling me what a wonderful person I was, how special I was. How smart and pretty and outgoing and all. And... I began to work hard, and I came out of it, and by the time we got to Florida, I was pretty much okay again."

"I've got one last question, Lou Ellen."

"Oh, it better be the last. My head is trying to fall asleep and my stomach is trying to throw up."

"Do you like yourself?"

"What the h.e.l.l kind of a question is that?"

"Do you, Linda Lewellen Brindle, like Linda Lewellen Brindle as a person."

"How can people like themselves anyway?"

"Do you like yourself?"

She shuddered. "You mean really?"

"Really"

"Oh, G.o.d. No. I just don't think about myself if I can help it. I'm such a wormy kind of sneak. I'm a nothing, pretending to be something. Can't you see me? Fat thighs and dumb lumpy b.r.e.a.s.t.s and nothing-colored hair and weird-looking teeth. People are always talking about things I don't understand. I like real square dumb things. I got through school, almost. I just can't... respond to life because I don't know what is really going on most of the time. Why are you doing this to me? I'm practically dead!"

"I'm no doctor. I can't shoot you with sodium Pentothal. I shot you with booze. This is a small group for group therapy. I've been pushing you. Lou Ellen, dear, you are, I think, an anxiety type. Sometimes I detect a whiff of it in myself. What is that bit about the neurotic? The psychotic says two and two are five and the neurotic knows two and two are four, and hates it."

"But I-"

"Listen for just a minute. Some of the cla.s.sic symptoms of anxiety neurosis. The numbness, vivid and ugly dreams of something being wrong with your body, diarrhea, depression, self-contempt. There are others. Double vision, incontinence, and being always too hot or too cold, night sweats..."

"There's another of mine."

I took her hands and pulled her onto the couch beside me and kept hold of her hands. "Listen, dear. Why shouldn't it happen to you? An only child. A lot of pressure on you to be the best child ever. Impossible goal, of course. Sense of failure at not making it. So your mother died when you were at peak vulnerability, and then your father died, and you never had a chance to prove to them you could hack it in this world."

"This is funny. I'm not really crying. It's just water running out of my eyes like this."

"So, out of a sense of being terribly alone, you marry a very large and sort of limited guy. Part of it was rebound from Scott. And revenge on Scott. And it was the pursuit of perfection. You have all the images and symbols working for you. Hold still! A great motor sailer, youth, money, time, honeymoon, tropic seas. But on board the Trepid we have two people who maybe can't make a marriage, can't make a honeymoon, can't make a future. Other people have all the excuses. Rotten jobs, cost of living, depressing neighborhood, meddling in-laws, babies too soon. What's the excuse when you can't hack it in paradise? So you lay it all on yourself, Pidge. Very heavy. And somewhere you start to make that funny little sidestep into another world, where it changes neurotic to psychotic, changes suspicion to paranoia."

She shook the mists out of her head, held my hands in a grip that dug her nails into me. Her eyes went wide and looked through me, looked back down the avenue of the months and months of cruising. I think she stopped breathing.

Suddenly she wrenched her hands free and left, running unsteadily, whamming the doorframe with a hip as she went into the connecting hallway to bedroom and bath. A door slammed. In the silence oi' predawn I heard her in there yawking and hawking and wheezing, and knew she was the sort who would rather break blood vessels than have her head held.

I leaned back, rubbed granular eyelids, then pushed the stud on the Pulsar. The red numerals glared up at me from the ruby screen on my wrist. 4:11. I held the stud down and the seconds appeared... 56... 57... 58... 59... 00. The 5 was constant, and the second figure changed to each subsequent figure in that odd, parts-saving method of digital design. I released it and pressed the.stud again for an instant, and 4:12 glared at me for the second and a quarter, the specified recognition interval. I had checked it with the shortwave time signal from Greenwich a week after a rich lady had given it to me. Gift of a toy in return for making the right contact for her which enabled her to buy back the stolen, uninsured black opal ring her deceased husband had given her on his last Christmas on earth. An easy salvage, too easy to warrant charging half the value. A good rule is to levy the standard charge or nothing at all. So it was nothing at all, and the watch was a grat.i.tude gift. And running two seconds fast.

Little red numbers to fit you back into time and place. Going on quarter after four on Friday morning, December 7th, in Hawaii-where they have had some remarkable December 7ths.

Meyer made one of his Meyerlike observations about the Pulsar. He said it was ironic that this s.p.a.ce-age, world-of-the future, computerized gadget was, in reality, a return to the easier and more relaxing and contemplative times of yesteryear. The wrist.w.a.tch with dial and hands keeps needling you every time you happen, by design or by accident, to look at your wrist. Get on with it, brother! Life is running out the bottom of the tube! In gentler eras, if a man wished to know the time, he took out his gold pocket watch and snapped it open and looked at the hands. If he did not want to know the time, it never intruded. Time served man. The Hamilton Pulsar does not intrude either, until you decide you want to know the time, and you push the stud, and it tells you, then keeps its peace until next time.

It is, the booklet said, guaranteed to withstand a force of 2500 G's. But can McGee, who wears it, endure having his body weight upped to two hundred and seventy-five tons? I would cover the area of a tennis court to a depth of a sixteenth of an inch, and there in the middle of me would be the sticky lump of the Pulsar, ready to glare red-numbered accuracy at the next fellow to push the little stud.

I snapped out of a smoky doze as she came floating out, in a different and floor-length caftan, looking fifteen pounds lighter, three inches shorter and five years younger. She sat shyly on the edge of the couch.

"I just imagined those things," she said. "I know that now. You're right. Oh, I got so G.o.d-awful close. to the edge. There's a funny thing about the edge. When you get close, somehow you... want to get closer. You want to look down. You might even want to fall over the edge."

"Has this past month been better?"