Robert Silverberg - A Tip on a Turtle

After dinner they danced, and it was the same thing there: he anticipated her every move, smoothly sweeping her around the open-air dance floor in a way that soon had everyone watching them. Denise was a good dancer, skilled at the tricky art of leading a man who thought he was leading her; but with Nicholas Holt the feedback was so complex that she had no idea who was leading whom. They danced as though they were one entity, moving with a single accord: the way people dance who have been dancing together for years. She had never known a man who danced like that.

On one swing around the floor she had a quick glimpse of Jeffrey Thompkins, dancing with a robust redhaired woman half a head taller than he was. Thompkins was pushing her about with skill and determination but no grace at all, somewhat in the style of a rhinoceros who has had a thousand hours of instruction at Arthur Murray. As he went thundering past he looked back at Denise and smiled an intricate smile that said a dozen different things. It acknowledged the fact that he was clumsy and his partner was coarse, that Holt was elegant and Denise was beautiful, that men like Holt always were able to take women like Denise away from men like Thompkins. But also the smile seemed to be telling her that Thompkins didn’t mind at all, that he accepted what had happened as the natural order of things, had in fact expected it with much the same sort of assurance as Holt had expected Number Five to win tonight’s first race. Denise realized that she had felt some guilt about sidestepping Thompkins and offering herself to Holt and that his smile just now had canceled it out; and then she wondered why she had felt the guilt in the first place. She owed nothing to Thompkins, after all. He was simply a stranger who had asked her to dinner last night. They were all strangers down here: nobody owed anything to anyone.

“My cottage is just beyond that little clump of bamboo,” Holt said, after they had had the obligatory beachfront stroll on the palm promenade. He said it as if they had already agreed to spend the night there. She offered no objections. This was what she had come here for, wasn’t it? Sunlight and warmth and tropical breezes and this.

As he had on the dance floor, so too in bed was he able to anticipate everything she wanted. She had barely thought of something but he was doing it; sometimes he did it even before she knew she wanted him to. It was so long since she had made love with anyone but Michael that Denise wasn’t sure who the last one before him had been; but she knew she had never been to bed with anyone like this. She moved here, he was on his way there already. She did this, he did it too. That and that. Her hand, his hand. Her lips, his lips. It was all extremely weird: very thrilling and yet oddly hollow, like making love to your own reflection.

He must be able to read minds, she thought suddenly, as they lay side by side, resting for a while.

An eerie notion. It made her feel nakeder than naked: bare right down to her soul, utterly vulnerable, defenseless.

But the power to read minds, she realized after a moment, wouldn’t allow him to do that trick with the turtle races. That was prediction, not mind-reading. It was second sight.

Can he see into the future? Five minutes, ten minutes, half a day ahead? She thought back. He always seemed so unsurprised at everything. When she had told him she didn’t intend to do any betting, that first night, he had simply said, “Of course.” When his turtle had won the race he had shown no flicker of excitement or pleasure. When she had apologized tonight for not having acted on his tip, he had told her blandly that he hadn’t expected her to. The choice of wine—the dinner conversation—the dancing—the lovemaking—Could he see everything that was about to happen? Everything?

On Wall Street, too? Then he must be worth a fortune.

But why did he always look so sad, then? His eyes so bleak and haunted, those little lines of grimness about his lips?

This is all crazy, Denise told herself. Nobody can see the future. The future isn’t a place you can look into, the way you can open a door and look into a room. The future doesn’t exist until it’s become the present.

She turned to him. But he was already opening his arms to her, bringing his head down to graze his lips across her breasts.

She left his cottage long before dawn, not because she really wanted to but because she was unwilling to have the maids and gardeners see her go traipsing back to her place in the morning still wearing her evening clothes, and hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door.

When she woke, the sun was blazing down through the bamboo slats of the cottage porch. She had slept through breakfast and lunch. Her throat felt raspy and there was the sensation of recent lovemaking between her legs, so that she automatically looked around for Michael and was surprised to find herself alone in the big bed; and then she remembered, first that she and Michael were all finished, then that she was here by herself, then that she had spent the night with Nicholas Holt.

Who can see the future. She laughed at her own silliness.

She didn’t feel ready to face the outside world, and called room service to bring her tea and a tray of fruit. They sent her mango, jackfruit, three tiny reddish bananas, and a slab of papaya. Later she suited up and went down to the beach. She didn’t see Holt anywhere around, neither out by the reef as he usually was in the afternoon, nor on the soft pink sand. A familiar stocky form was churning up the water with cannonball force, doing his laps, down to the cape and back, again, again, again. Thompkins. After a time he came stumping ashore. Not at all coy now, playing no strategic games, he went straight over to her.

“I see that your friend Mr. Holt’s in trouble with the hotel,” he said, sounding happy about it.

“He is? How so?”

“You weren’t at the turtle races after lunch, were you?”

“I never go to the afternoon ones.”

“That’s right, you don’t. Well, I was there. Holt won the first two races, the way he always does. Everybody bet the way he did. The odds were microscopic, naturally. But everybody won. And then two of the hotel managers—you know, Eubanks, the night man who has that enormous grin all the time, and the other one with the big yellow birthmark on his forehead?—came over to him and said, ‘Mr. Holt, sah, we would prefer dat you forego the pleasure of the turtle racing from this point onward.’” The Chevrolet dealer’s imitation of the Jamaican accent was surprisingly accurate. “‘We recognize dat you must be an authority on turtle habits, sah,’ they said. ‘Your insight we find to be exceedingly uncanny. And derefore it strikes us dat it is quite unsporting for you to compete. Quite, sah!’”

“And what did he say?”

“That he doesn’t know a goddamned thing about turtles, that he’s simply on a roll, that it’s not his fault if the other guests are betting the same way he is. They asked him again not to play the turtles—‘We implore you, sah, you are causing great losses for dis establishment’—and he kept saying he was a registered guest and entitled to all the privileges of a guest. So they canceled the races.”

“Canceled them?”

“They must have been losing a fucking fortune this week on those races, if you’ll excuse the French. You can’t run parimutuels where everybody bets the same nag and that nag always wins, you know? Wipes you out after a while. So they didn’t have races this afternoon and there won’t be any tonight unless he agrees not to play.” Thompkins smirked. “The guests are pretty pissed off, I got to tell you. The management is trying to talk him into changing hotels, that’s what someone just said. But he won’t do it. So no turtles. You ask me, I still think he’s been fixing it somehow with the hotel boys, and the hotel must think so too, but they don’t dare say it. Man with a winning streak like that, there’s just no accounting for it any other way, is there?”