Corrine asked the waiter about the big yacht anchored outside the harbor.

"That's J. P. Haddad's two-hundred-six-foot Feadship. Been anchored out there for two weeks. Never comes ashore."

"J. P. who," asked Russell. "You've heard of him," Corrine said. "He only owns about half the world."

"Hasn't touched dry land in three years," the waiter insisted. "Just cruises between the islands buying and selling companies over the radiophone. One of his men was in here a few nights ago, says he never leaves his cabin, ever. Got a crew of nineteen, not one of them's ever laid eyes on him. Weighs about eighty pounds, they say, and white as a corpse."

Over the following week they would hear more about Mr. J. P. Haddad, little of it probable or verifiable. The only thing that was certain about Haddad was what he owned-great chunks of corporate America. Corrine remembered hearing that his nautical seclusion had been reinforced by the arrest of Ivan Boesky, and that the feds had a warrant for him if he ever set foot in the States. On the island, it was said that he stole ashore at night in disguise. They heard that a very famous female movie star lived on board with him. A young gay couple they met on the beach one afternoon assured them that a very close male friend of theirs was his lover and that they had seen him in a gay bar in the port. Corrine nodded credulously, overearnestly, as one of these two naked strangers, a sort of perfect male android whom she recognized as a model, described Haddad as tall, muscular, sailorly. There was very little to worry about on the island, and the presence of J. P. Haddad's yacht provided a conversational theme with which to hail naked strangers.

Their first morning they awoke early to the dissonant music of testosterone-crazed roosters, with which the island was infested. They breakfasted on their terrace in the warm turquoise light, looking down on the sea, the salt air laced with floral essences. Lizards stirred the dry leaves in the garden, reminding Corrine of their honeymoon, when they'd found one in the bed. She had cried the first morning after the wedding, without really knowing why, poor Russell baffled and chagrined, asking what was wrong.

After breakfast they drove out to the beach. Corrine insisted that Russell not bring any manuscripts along, at least for the first day. Neither would she approve the two novels he'd brought along-both serious, New York Review of Books-approved-or a dense expose of CIA malfeasance, in galleys. "This is vacation," she said. "You should read something really trashy." They combed through the musty-smelling, swollen paperbacks and Reader's Digest Condensed novels on the living room shelves, the discards of a thousand vacations, compromising on a James M. Cain thriller for him and for her a fat best-seller that had been on all the beaches a few summers back, a tale of sisters screwing and clawing their way to great heights of power and glamour while secretly yearning for Mr. Right.

"You slut," Russell said, holding the book at a distance.

"I'll read you the wet parts."

"My wife reads S-and-F novels," he said mournfully.

She looked at him quizzically.

"Shopping and fucking," he explained.

Almost alone when they arrived at the crescent-shaped beach, they set out their towels and arranged their lotions, bottles of sunscreen numbered according to degree of protection, a tube of sunblock for nose and lips. Corrine, particularly fair and thin-skinned, spent ten minutes on her preparations for sun worship, calling for Russell's assistance on her back.

"Should I leave my top on," she asked.

Russell shrugged inconclusively; at times he seemed possessive on this score and at other times he seemed almost to want to show her off-as when he encouraged her to wear sleazy low-cut dresses in the city. Now she wondered if he was indifferent. Had he ceased to see her as a sexual creature? Maybe she hadn't been at her sexiest recently... She removed her top...

"Let's make it a really romantic vacation," she said.

Russell grunted, turning a page of his book.

She whispered in his ear: "I'm going to give you the blow job of your life when we get back to the house."

He looked up, appearing confused, and nodded sheepishly, then returned to his book, already absorbed. Replenishing her sunscreen, she examined her body against the evidence of those passing by. Sometimes she thought he used reading as an escape from her and her attentions.

"Do you think our being gone from New York has a tangible effect?" she said abruptly, in a tone Russell recognized as being devoted to loopy metaphysical speculation. "I mean, I was just thinking that the city's a huge system of infinitely complex relationships, even if it's too complex for us to figure out. Our not being there is part of the equation of what happens. For instance, if I were in New York right now, and if I happened to be standing on a sidewalk on my way to lunch, waiting for the light to change, and if a car happened to jump the curb, I might be struck dead. By not being there, I may have freed that space on the sidewalk for someone else who might be standing there and get run over. And in that event you might say that I'm partially responsible for that death. In a weak sense I'd be responsible at the end of a long causal chain. We're all linked by these causal chains to everyone around us. But especially in the city." She tried to visualize tangled skeins of fate and conspiracy raveling together and diverging like the network of pipes and tunnels and wires under the city, invisible yet linking them all.

"Pretty soon," Russell said, "we'll all be linked by AIDS."

"Not us," Corrine said quickly, feeling fortunate to be insulated inside the walls of marriage at the same time that she felt guilty for feeling safe while the plague raged outside. But maybe she wasn't safe at all; suddenly she wondered what had been behind Russell's remark. "Will we?"

"Maybe not." He continued to read, as he had throughout this exchange, and all at once the other women on the beach seemed potentially menacing.

Corrine searched in vain for a flaw in the shape of the bronzed body crossing in front of them. Suddenly, the body stopped and the blond head swiveled in their direction.

"'Allo."

"Uh, hi."

Corrine turned to look at her husband, wondering if the catch in his throat was guilt, and if so what kind.

"This is Corrine," Russell gurgled.

"I am Simone," the body said helpfully. "Did you just arrive," she asked, in what seemed to Corrine a condescending reference to her paleness.

Russell nodded. "Where are you staying?"

"With friends," she said. "Maybe I'll see you around."

The banality of this exchange seemed to Corrine indicative of acute sexual tension. She lifted her husband's sunglasses from his face.

"Just someone I met somewhere. She had an idea for a book."

"A book? You expect me to believe that?"

"Corrine, I barely know her."

"She seems very comfortable being naked around you."

"Corrine." He reached over to touch her as if to ground the negative charge building within her. She recoiled at his touch, jumped up and stormed off down the beach. Men were not to be trusted, not even Russell; her father had proved that. She would move into her own apartment, a little studio somewhere, with sad plants, sprung wicker furniture. She would have to give up her dream of children, but at least she wouldn't have to wonder anymore when he stayed out late, when he traveled on business. What she had seen in Russell's eyes was that, at the very least, he wanted that body. Some night after three margaritas he would betray her, and she didn't think she could stand it.

As if to escape these anxieties by ignoring them, she began hunting for shells in the rocks at the far end of the crescent of sand. She came upon a conch, still pink and opalescent inside, which she grudgingly allowed Russell to examine when he came to retrieve her.

Accustomed to the flash floods of Corrine's emotional landscape, Russell gave her a few minutes to calm down. While technically innocent, he was guilty in principle. He wanted to fuck Simone a hundred different ways, immediately. And yet he had been slightly abashed when Corrine talked about giving him head. Their sex life together marked the apogee of his experience and yet lately he found his lust directed toward strangers. Walking down the beach to fetch his wife, he decided it was just a phase.

After they had taken a swim Russell wanted to go snorkeling. They walked over to the edge of the beach where the reef started, and swam out, Corrine suppressing her fear, not of anything in particular but of something unknown in the depths. Suddenly they were surrounded by the brilliant, oddly shaped fish and she forgot to worry.

After a while she told him she was going in. He said he'd stay out a little longer. As she lay on the sand reading, a French guy tried to pick her up. Cute, very wiry and tan, muscles like knots, and a thin Gallic face. When he asked her where she was staying and whether he could see her, she laughed and told him she was married, her earlier jealousy almost forgotten.

"So are many people," he said, letting sand sift from a small opening in his fist as he squatted beside her.

"But some of us," she said, "are happy." Unfazed, he smiled and said he'd see her around.

"Who was that," Russell asked, tossing his wet snorkel and fins down beside her.

"One good Frog deserves another," she answered coolly.

"You should see your back," he said.

She could already feel the heat building under her skin, the burn rising up from within.

"I saw a shark," he said happily. It was important to him in some deep masculine way to imagine there was danger in the vicinity.

"I wanted the first night to be romantic," she complained, feeling the burn.

"Last night was our first night," Russell said.

"Not really. This is our first full day and night."

"Anyway, we've got seven more," he said.

"Only six," she corrected, sounding miserable.

The next morning Corrine was still a little sun sick, so they stayed around the house. Russell was sweet, spraying her with Solarcaine and reading to her from her smutty book, but she could see he was still in New York, part of him anyway.

"Did you ever ask Harold about the raise," she asked over lunch.

"He said we'd taken some heavy losses last year on big books that flopped, and pointed out that the company stock was way down, as if I didn't know. I own some of the shit."

"Your books did great," Corrine said. "Didn't you tell him that?" A lizard shot up the wall behind Russell's head. He was reading again, book flattened beside his plate. When he failed to answer she said, "Well, I don't know how the company's doing overall, but their price-to-earnings ratio looks great. I've been looking into it. I think they're way undervalued. In fact, Whitlock told me they were."

He looked up from his plate, having mutilated a piece of grouper. "When?"

"At my birthday party."

Nodding reflectively, he said, "Let's go to Gustavia."

In town, they bought T-shirts that said "Sorry, No Phone." Devotees of the island were proud of this technology gap, which kept away the worst people from Hollywood and Wall Street. Corning out of the T-shirt shop they ran into Simone, her body partially covered up for a change. She walked the street as if it had been family property for generations. There was also something proprietorial about the way she greeted Russell. She languidly introduced them to a friend, recommended a bar in town. Corrine didn't like her any better with her clothes.

"This place is getting a little too fashionable for me," Corrine observed later that night, after they'd been seated next to a very loud Neo-Expres-sionist painter and his entourage. But Russell failed to acknowledge her complaint. Proximity to the glamorous, it seemed to Corrine, confirmed in Russell some sense of his own entitlement.

"Russ? Why couldn't we-not right away but sometime-have, you know, a baby." She'd been waiting for an hour to find the moment to say this, and now, having blurted it out over dessert, when she received no immediate response from Russell, she wondered if she had once again only imagined saying it. He was studying the wine label and she couldn't even be sure he was listening. Finally he looked up at her.

"Just because Tom and Casey are having a baby-"

"Russell, this has nothing to do with Tom and Casey."

"They can afford a baby."

"You think only rich people have babies?"

"Where would we put it?"

"We'd put it in a cardboard box beside our bed. I don't know. What does that matter? Why are you always such a jerk about this? You always focus on these irrelevant side issues. Is it possible there are other apartments in New York besides ours-bigger apartments, for instance?"

"They cost more money."

"We could get a two-bedroom in a less fancy building. You're always saying you want to live downtown, we could look down there. Find a loft, maybe."

"I hate lofts."

"God, you're so-"

"You know how much I make, Corrine. Without your salary and with one extra mouth-"

"So we do without some things. It's a question of priorities. I thought you wanted children."

"I do. Just not... now."

"When, with your second wife?" Corrine seemed more startled than Russell by what she'd said. Looking at her, he could see what was happening in her mind; already her words were becoming fleshed in imagination-the dissolution of their marriage taking place, the lonely nights of the divorcee.

He grabbed both of her hands in his and shook her out of her reverie. "Listen, just let me think about it a little, okay? Maybe I'll go talk to Kleinfeld about the raise."

"I'm getting old, Russell," she said mournfully.

"You've still got a couple years before we have to shoot you."

Over the next few days they established a routine of beach and lunch, beach and dinner, which seemed by the end of the week, even to Russell, to be a birthright, along with the rented house and the brilliant weather and the rooster calls entwined with the thinner music of seldom seen birds which at moments brought them back, like certain songs, to the dawn of their marriage and filled them both with sudden desire. Later they would both look back on those few days with a sense of wonder and regret-timeless afternoons of long lunches and naps, dreaming and making love on chaises longues. Then, just as they had rediscovered the basic principles of pleasure, it was time to pack and go home.

12.

The inhabitants of Manhattan tended to become inured to street demonstrations. Blue police barricades would sprout overnight in front of embassies and corporate headquarters. Aggrieved Irish or union members, angry Arabs or Jews-marching, chanting slogans, waving placards- were a feature of the landscape, like the invisible homeless. Such an environment dictated a degree of willful obliviousness, and Russell Calloway could be even more oblivious than most in the course of moving about the city. He frequently navigated the crowded sidewalks reading a book or magazine, occasionally bumping into signposts or other pedestrians. When he returned from the islands, however, he was fleetingly sensitized to the peculiarities of urban life, briefly conscious of the fantastic web of mundane conventions composing this outlandishly complex organism: the system of signs whereby, for instance, he raised his arm toward an approaching yellow car on Second Avenue which then stopped beside him, or the interplay of signals regulating the dynamic mesh of human and vehicular traffic at rush hour as several million people flowed to or from places of work. Even the kamikaze bicycle messengers tracing anarchic paths through the grid were part of the design. These millions on their unconscious individual tracks through the maze-after a week of white sand and blue-green water, the density of humanity seemed overwhelming. Likewise Russell was intrigued by the chanting, picketing crowd on the street as he approached the office, though not quite so alert as to notice that these efforts were directed at his own employer.

Several dozen protesters, mostly black, marched within the police barricades on the sidewalk in front of his office building, carrying signs: Russell recognized the notorious black activist whose name he could never remember among them, his head an inversion of the average male's, his full beard ending right where the sideburns might normally begin, his head shaved smooth and shiny black. He dressed like a lawyer, which he was, an impeccable chesterfield on his back at the moment. Emoting fiercely into a reporter's outstretched microphone. The great sacramental pose of the era-a reverse image of the king knighting subject with his sword.

"Hold on," called a technician, "I need a level on sound."

"Why don't we change the battery while we're at it," said the reporter-a briskly attractive, demographically correct blonde.

Suddenly the protesters relaxed, like actors on a break, and Russell slipped into the building.

The receptionist appeared surprised when Russell stepped out of the elevator, as if the idea of a device that ascended a hundred feet in seconds and dispensed a human being into the eighth-floor reception area were entirely new to her.

"Maureen, I've only been gone ten days," he said.

"Your messages are on your desk," she answered, as though apologizing for not having them waiting on a silver salver.

So where else would they be? he thought. "What's going on outside?"

"A demonstration," she answered helpfully.

Donna's desk was unoccupied and inexplicably neat. It usually looked like a sidewalk on the Lower East Side, covered with scraps of paper, periodicals and empty beverage containers. Odd piles of books and correspondence had sprung up all over his own desk. He called upstairs and asked Kleinfeld's assistant if he could come up in ten minutes; after making him hold, she announced Kleinfeld would expect him at four-thirty. Unready to face the mail, Russell wandered off to the coffee station. An editorial assistant named Kate something-or-other seemed to recoil at his approach.

"What's been happening around here," he asked. They were between pots, Kate having started a new batch. "Who's sleeping with whom?"

"I guess, uh, you know about Donna," she said.

"Who's she sleeping with," he asked enthusiastically, watching the pot fill-the thin stream of brown water. "I mean about her. Maybe you didn't hear."