Lydia Millet - Ghost Lights

He had a cavalier attitude; he was drinking a margarita, which Gretel had encouraged him to order. She drank one also and her bright-blue eyes were shining.

“Does Mr. Stern have any medical conditions?” asked Hans.

“Not that I know of,” said Hal.

“You should find out the blood type, in case he is located and is injured and requires a transfusion. Also a medical history.”

“Huh,” said Hal, nodding vaguely. “My wife would probably know.” He had ordered the snapper, which was overcooked and too fishy. He decided to leave it mostly uneaten. The margarita tasted far better.

“Also, does his insurance cover helicopter evacuation,” Hans was saying.

Hal was already at the bottom of his glass, and at the far end of the dining room a band was setting up. He was thinking how pleasant it was to be drunk, that he had been missing out all these years in not being drunk far, far more often.

Couples gathered at the edge of a dance floor. There was a drum flourish, bah-da bum. A woman singer in an evening gown said something husky and incomprehensible into a microphone.

Lights sparkled. Yellow and golden in the dining room, now a ballroom. Beyond the large windows, the pool, the chairs, the deep-black sky, the ocean. A room full of people and golden lights, and outside the whole dark world.

Tequila, he thought, made him sad — was it sad, though? Anyway, melancholy. Youth had flown. It wasn’t all bad, though. You couldn’t move as well as you used to, you didn’t look as good, you had either forgotten the dreams of youth or resigned yourself to their disappointment.

But at least you could see more from your new position. You had a longer view.

“Come on, Hal. Why don’t we go dance a little?” asked Gretel, smiling, and cha-cha-cha’d her shoulders. Hans was pushing buttons on a calculator, which seemed to have appeared from nowhere. He waved them to go dance, got up and headed off. Hal watched him buttonhole the maître d’, nod briskly and start dialing the restaurant phone.

“He’s really taken this on, hasn’t he,” said Hal. “This whole search-and-rescue thing.”

“Hans does not like vacations,” said Gretel. “He gets bored. He always needs to have something to do. He’s some kind of genius, people tell me. With his electronics. You know, and he talks to me about his work? But actually I don’t understand it. But always he likes to keep busy.”

“I noticed,” said Hal.

“Dance with me,” said Gretel. It was cheerfully platonic, but he took what he was offered.

“With pleasure,” he said, and set down his margarita glass. The stem of the glass was green and in the shape of a large cactus, the kind you saw in cartoons and Arizona. A margarita was not a manly drink. But more so than a daiquiri.

Heading for the dance floor, he was recalled to reality — the reality that he was a flat-out embarrassing dancer. Among the worst. He had almost forgotten. He was a finger-snapper and a head-nodder. He had no other moves.

“Wait. Only if it’s a slow song,” he added, and hung back. “I’m really bad.”

“What’s important is to have fun,” said Gretel, taking him by the arm. “ Express yourself.”

“You don’t want to see that, believe me,” said Hal, feeling the silkiness of her fingers. “Self-expression is a young man’s game.”

“Oh, come on,” she said.

They were on the dance floor, other people around them. She started to move, a couple of feet away. Lithe and elegant, as would be expected. He could not do anything. He was stuck. Then desperation washed over him. He had to cling to some self-respect. He reached out and grabbed her, clamped her to his person.

“Sorry,” he said into her ear. “This is all I can stand to do.”

She drew back, a bit confused, and then smiled. After a few seconds she balanced her arms on his shoulders and let him hold her and sway.

Leaning into her he let himself believe, for 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.