I locked the office and got out of there fast. Three newspaper guys I knew had rented a shack on the Long Island shore. Ants, roaches, linen that had been dirty when the last of the Mohicans abandoned it and hadn’t been washed since, dishes in the sink from one leap year to the next. And no Maria Dijulio, no Agnes Freud, no worldly little barmaid. Just a couple of fifths of Jack Daniels, a little sun, and I was my clean, wholesome old self again.

The newspaper guys drove back into the city late Sunday evening, but I decided to give it another night. I sat around for a couple of hours, disciplining myself by not opening the next bottle until I could manage it without defacing the tax stamp, and trying to make sense out of something called The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot which was the only book in the joint. About midnight I decided I’d take a stroll on the beach.

I did not have anything in mind. The tide was out and I went along the edge of the wet sand. I walked for twenty minutes and used up a couple of cigarettes and then I decided it might fill my later years with fond memories if I left my clothes on some rocks and went in.

The water was fine. I took my bearings on a tank tower behind some dunes and swam easily for about ten minutes, going straight out from the shore. When I checked the tower I had not veered off much. I lay there and rode the swells for a while, thinking about original sin and the fallibility of the human intellect and what the Red Sox would do for base hits when Ted Williams finally quit, and then just to impress myself I sprinted back.

I touched bottom with the water up to my chest and stood there waiting for my lungs to straggle on home. That was when it came to me that I was never really going to amount to anything in life. Here I was with an audience, and I hadn’t even had the foresight to print up tickets.

She was at the edge of the water. I could not see her face but in the dim light her hair looked the color of Palmolive soap. She was wearing a light-colored blouse and a dark skirt and no shoes, and she was standing with her feet wide apart. The wash went in and churned around her ankles and buried them as it slipped back. She had a cigarette in her hand.

I was still twenty yards out and she spoke quietly but I had no trouble hearing her over the surf. She had a deep, throaty voice and she seemed amused. “The cigarette’s yours,” she said. “I didn’t go through your pockets. I just sort of felt around the outside for the pack.”

“I’m glad,” I told her. “None of the rest of that stuff is supposed to be opened before Christmas.”

“I guess I can wait. But we can have a tree, can’t we?”

“I’ll tell you what. You turn your back for half a minute and I could maybe get started trimming it right now.”

“Don’t tell me!”

She was laughing. She walked forward a few short steps, so that the water swirled around her calves. Her hair was tinted more yellow than green now, but her face still might have been Jolson’s just after they’d painted him up to do Mammy.

She had edged forward even more. When it swelled inward now the water was almost to the level of her skirt.

“Suppose I don’t turn?” she said. “Suppose I just camp right here?”

“You’ll get a little damp when the tide comes in,” I told her. “Me, I’ll be home by the fire. I’m coming out just about now.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t come out.”

“Oh, now look, I know it was probably a dumb stunt, but I just drained out all my anti-freeze last month. If you don’t turn your back I’m going to—”

“Turn yours.” She was laughing again. And then her hands were at her blouse.

“For crying out loud—”

I decided my only hope was to start swimming around to my clothes the back way, via the Oriental trade routes. I went perhaps a dozen lazy overhand strokes, hearing nothing, and then she came up ahead of me. She took a deep breath and grinned after it and her face caught the light now. I saw the way her hair was flat along her skull and the way her eyes sparkled. I saw how beautiful she was.

“Hello, Harry Fannin,” she told me.

We were treading water. “I know you. You’re the trustworthy girl who didn’t go through my pockets.”

“Wouldn’t you? If you found someone’s clothes on the sand?”

“No doubt about it.”

“I thought all sorts of things. Foul play, mayhem, drunk and disorderly conduct—”

“Death by water. The fire sermon—”

“I know that poem. Eliot. And I thought all detectives were illiterate. Anyhow I was all set to rush off screaming. You ruined it all.”

“I’m sorry. I would have squandered my savings on a heavy meal first if I’d known.”

She laughed again, a rich, husky laugh that had nothing false about it. It was as real as the way she’d let her hair get wet like that. Hell, it was as real as her being there. She splashed water at me and then slipped away, going under so that I saw the flash of her back arching just beneath the surface and then the gleam of her long legs, and then coming up ten yards off and swimming out. She did a crawl well, moving with sharp clean strokes and heading off” at an angle against the current. I’d decided she wasn’t tight after all. I watched her for a minute and then I went in and walked back up the beach to where my clothes were.

I was smoking when she came out. Her own things were scattered along the sand and she stood there at the edge of the water for a long minute before she started to put them on, brushing water from her body and bending over to wring out her hair. Her hair was chopped fairly short. She did not look at me but she did not turn away either. She had a lovely body, with the long legs that I had seen and good hips and breasts that were high and round when she turned into profile against the water.

I think that was when it happened. She was standing there with her legs wide apart and her back half toward me, and she was wearing nothing but her panties. The line of her thighs was turned beautifully and I watched it as she moved. She wrung out her hair again but did it by leaning backward this time, arching her body the way a diver might at the height of a back dive and holding it that way with her arms lifted back and all of her being fluid and lovely in the moonlight, and I felt the tightening along my jaw. Because she was not doing it for my benefit. She had decided she could be just as batty as the next guy, and now she was getting dressed the best way she could without a towel and it was as simple as that.

Sure, simple. So why not run and fetch your zither, Fannin, strum us a little mood music? Come off it, huh? Probably she’d turn out to be an untouched little Bryn Mawr sorority president who’d never had a night in bed worth remembering since the time she’d snuggled up with a hot copy of Studs Lonigan. I chucked my smoke into the sand and started walking down the beach away from her.

And then I decided I was nuts altogether. A screwball dame comes prancing into the locker room and offers it to me all wrapped up with a red ribbon and I start acting like some bashful adolescent too mixed up by puberty to kiss his own mother good night. For crying out loud, Fannin.

I stopped when she caught up with me. She’d had to run and she was out of breath. Her breasts were rising and her blouse was tight across them where it had gotten wet. I reached out and touched the wet ends of her hair.

“I tell you you’re the prettiest nitwit I’ve met in months?”

She laughed. “And I haven’t had a drink since the V-8 juice at breakfast, that’s the silly part of it. I think you’re probably pretty nice, Harry Fannin.”

We were near the dunes. She was lovely, all right. So make up your mind, I told myself.

“You’re staring at me.”

“The way you stare at four aces,” I told her.

“Because you always think you’ve misread the hand?”