"I'd like to live, if that's okay with you."

"Oh, Sal," he said, still laughing. "Oh, honey."

The boat guy reneged and charged us the price of a full afternoon.

"What the fuck?" Mel asked him.

"It's the stannard rate," the boat guy said, not looking at us. He was chewing gum, a kid, about the same height as Mel but thinner.

"We had an agreement," Mel said reasonably, but with a trace of threat, a tone I'd noticed that men used often and women almost never.

"You took out a Hobie Cat. That's thirty-five."

"You said eighteen, you little prick."

I was digging in the pocket of my shorts. "Just pay him," I whispered. "He's a jerk, but what can we do? We're not even supposed to be on this beach anyway." I passed him a ten and at first I thought he was going to bat it away but then, with an effort it seemed, he opened up his fist.

"Thanks, honey."

The boat guy smirked. Mel threw the money at him.

"You're still seven dollars short."

"So sue me."

As we walked away toward the Don Ce Sar I could hear the boat guy swearing at us and I had to exert pressure on Mel's arm so he wouldn't run back and pummel the punk's head into the sand.

Before we hit the road we stopped at a Dairy Queen and bought synthetic-looking sundaes in plastic cups. I offered Mel a taste of mine, which was chocolate on chocolate. He took a bite from my spoon and winced. "Jesus, that's sweet."

"Something I think you might need," I said. He was still mad at the boat guy.

"I hate that you had to pay."

"You don't have to be so macho. You paid for the ice cream."

"Uh-huh," he said, sounding crabby, but when I looked at him he was grinning.

It turned out he was staying at a friend of his mother's, who was away visiting her family up north. Her place was more than an hour awaya"actually closer to Ft. Myers than to St. Pete. Mel kept punching the radio buttons impatiently. "Christ. What do people listen to here? Isn't there a college station or something?" Finally we settled on classical: Aaron Copland, Appalachian Spring, which suited me fine. In fact, I was so warm and relaxed I slept most of the way.

The friend lived in a development of condominiums with an old glassy lagoon out front where canoes and little power boats were moored. It seemed no one was around but us. It was stuffy inside the house, and Mel went around opening windows. "Sorry about the mess. I just dumped my stuff here and headed up to your relatives'. I didn't even stop to take a shower."

Sitting on the sofa, we drank the Cokes in glass bottles we'd bought for an unheard-of fifteen cents each from a rattling machine at the gas station down the road. The Cokes were so small that we'd gotten three apiece. Mel propped his bony shins up on the coffee table. His legs were impossibly lean, the mahogany color of sunburned skin beginning to tan, covered with dark hairs, darker than Carey's. I couldn't stop staring at them. He had his arm around me and I didn't dare look at his face: the sharp angles, the narrow chin, the deep-set watchful eyes. A face that was hard to memorize, probably excruciating to draw, because it changed drastically with every passing mood. Of course I knew what was going to happen, had known the moment he got out of the car in my aunt's driveway.

I felt his fingers tickling the back of my neck, undoing the few bobby pins that were left. My hair fell down in a damp salt-smelling mass, and he pushed it back over my shoulders and away from my face. Then he slipped off my earrings one at a time and studied them cupped in his palm. They were my favorite, silver dangling fans from Carey, each pleat carved with a character in Persian. "Beautiful," he whispered, and laid them carefully on the coffee table, where they made a sweet little clack.

When he started to kiss me I thought: this is what's responsible for the propagation of the species, there's no way in hell of resisting this. He felt for my tongue with his, but slowly, without urgency. Then he stopped, pulled back, looked in my eyes.

"You like that, honey?"

"What do you think?"

"I like to hear it."

He slid his hand up my T-shirt and encountered my bathing suit, but that didn't faze him, he didn't rush, just stroked my nipples through the damp fabric. I shivered, although it was about 110 degrees in there. It had been way too long and I was feeling clumsy, like I might make a mistake, but we proceeded so slowly this was not a possibility. Every time he did anything new he'd ask, "Is this okay?" "Does this feel good, Sally?" It wasn't only the way his breath smelled, it was his skin, pungent and sweet, still adolescent.

When I reached down to touch him he trapped my wrist against his thigh, the most erotic gesture of the afternoon so far. "No. Not this time."

I was naked before he was. "You're lovely," he said. What did that mean? Was it part of his routine, what he said to all his girls the first time?

His fingertips brushed up on the inside of my thigh and then he slid himself down. I'd heard that there were some men who preferred this beyond all other acts of the flesh, and I was sure Mel was one of them, the way he slipped his hands under my ass and pressed his lips, his tongue to my other mouth with such expertise but also with an unexpected gentleness, almost a politeness. Getting to know you. Carey had done this rarely, and I didn't know enough to ask.

So much pleasure, like so much pain, is hard to bear. My mind did a little hop-skip, like someone was changing the reels, and I began noticing outside things, like how the couch smelled of decrepit dog, the dust motes swirling like atoms in the tunnel of late-afternoon sun coming in through a small window at the end of the room.

"Sally, are you still with me? Say something."

"Mmmhmm."

"Come on."

"I can't talk."

"I want you to talk. Tell me what you're feeling. At least if you like what I'm doing."

"You know I like it."

"Yeah"a"working me harder with his tonguea""but I want to hear it. Say it, Sally. Do you like this?"

"Yes."

This is what I was thinking: never in a million years would I have believed him capable of such patience, restless old Mel, pacing the dayroom, jumping up and down on the sidelines in rec therapy when the therapist wouldn't let him play because he showed off.

"Okay," he said. "Now what do you want?"

"You know."

"Say it."

"I can't."

He pressed into me, so I could feel everything.

I was swimming with the seals, I was a seal, no one could see me.

"I want you inside," I said.

Still on top of me, he struggled out of his trunks, shimmied them down, kicked them off. And then there I was, lying back on the scratchy cushions, the insides of my thighs already aching from clutching the pontoon and now from holding him. I was making noise, I couldn't remember ever having made noise before. He was opening me up, more and more.

"What are you thinking of, honey?"

"You," I said.

"If you knew how much I wanteda"" he said. "How I waiteda"" He pushed all those tangled strands of seaweedy hair back from my forehead.

I was gagging, trying not to.

"What's the matter?"

I couldn't answer.

"You're scaring me," he said. "Don'ta"" And then he began to come.

I am swimming with the seals, I thought, and just let it happen.

21.

And after. The room was still, golden, each object stood out with great clarity. The late-afternoon sun through the blinds striping the green and brown rag rug, a purple and white yarn god's eye on the wall, framed photographs of babies and children propped in the bookcases. Mel beside me, eyes closed. His head was turned so that the sapphire caught a gleam. I could barely see his chest move.

"You asleep?"

"Nah," he whispered. He opened his eyes and pulled me to him. "You're a wild one. My wild wild baby."

"We sure made a mess of this sofa. I hope your mother's friend doesn't have a cow."

"She's an old hippie, it's cool. Say, honey, are you okay? What was that, anyway, at the end?"

"I don't know. It's never happened before. I guess I'm retarded, or something."

His eyes narrowed. "You're not retarded." Then, more gently, "Did you come?"

"Yes."

The hair under his arms was sparse and ginger colored and I touched there, lightly, to see if he was ticklish. He wasn't. In response, he picked up my left arm and slowly licked every single stripe, one by one. "Connect-the-dots," he said. "I shouldn't encourage you, but I've always found these awfully sexy."

"You wanted me at Willowridge?" I asked.

"Are you kidding?"

"Where could we have done it?"

"In the upstairs bathroom, you know, the one with the rug."

"Mmmhmm. Where else?"

"By the lake."

"I like by the lake."

"I knew you'd have beautiful skin."

"Why didn't you do anything?" I asked him. "Say anything?"

"I thought maybe you had a thing with Lillith. I wasn't sure."

"I wasn't sure either." Then I asked, "Am I your first Asian woman?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"You've just had white?"

"There was a black girl for a while, before Bethie."

"I always had white guys." Like two counted as always. Plus Daddy, but did he count? I didn't know.

When Mel dropped me off a little before midnight my aunt was waiting up. She said Uncle Richard had had chest pains all evening and the doctor had told him to take it very easy.

For the next four days, this was the routine: mornings, I kept my uncle company. We played gin rummy, watched TV, or I just sat in the rocking chair and read while he nodded off on the couch. Sometimes, asleep, he'd cry out, single syllables in Cantonese, startling me. "What were you dreaming?" I asked him later, and he shook his head. "Who knows? You remember your dreams, Niece?"

At lunchtime my aunt would take over. I'd pack a beach bag and go sit on the front curb to wait for Mel. The second time we'd snuck into the Don Ce Sar they'd really given us the hairy eyeball, so we'd started going to the public beach farther down the coast. We'd sun for an hour or two and then hightail it to the condo, grabbing a bite on the waya"Denny's, McDonald's, Taco Bell, it didn't matter to usa"and spend the afternoon in bed. Each time I came it was like a little of Monkey King was blotted away. Something that had never happened with Carey. "What was it like with your husband?" Mel asked me, and I had to answer: "He was rough."

"No wonder," Mel said.

"I wasn't really there," I said.

Mel was very good at me, but I did my own studying. The first time I made him come in my mouth his fingernails on my wrist drew blood. The feeling of power this gave me was unexpected, and I was careful with it, as I would have been with any new responsibility.

At dusk we'd get up to take the friend's canoe out on the lagoon. There were alligator warnings posted, and though it seemed to me that they must be more day creatures than night, I avoided trailing my fingers in the still water. Worse than possible alligators was the real presence of gnats and mosquitoes, which had mutated to monster proportions in this climate, as well as those strange squishy bugs I'd noticed when I was mowing the lawn. At the Cumberland Farms next to the gas station we purchased Deep Woods Off! and rubbed it all over each other's exposed parts.

Mel and I took turns steering. It was easy to catch a paddle in the murky weeds, or run aground in unexpected shallows, especially when dark had fallen completely and we were traveling only by starlight and moonlight, but we weren't headed anywhere in particular, and since there was no current, there was no danger. Mostly we just drifted, drinking the bottled Cokes we'd gotten addicted toa"I could swear Coke was sweeter in the Southa"and talk and smoke. Sometimes we'd mix rum in with the Coke.

"You have the sexiest fingers," Mel said once, when we were passing the bottle.

"My piano teacher used to say I had the widest hand span of any child she'd ever taught."

"I didn't know you played the piano."

"Badly."

I told him about the after-dinner recitals where Mimi sang Chinese love songs in a piercing falsetto. Xiao Lu, who was studying the violin, had a repertoire of fancy pieces, starting with "The Flight of the Bumblebee," which I suspected he played much more slowly than he was supposed to, so he would be sure not to make any mistakes. A lot of the music was modern, so that it was hard to tell if he was making a mistake at all if you didn't watch Aunty Winnie's face.

I never played as well as I did when I was alone, and I didn't dare look up for fear of meeting the frozen polite expressions of the guests. What were they really thinking? Unlike Xiao Lu, I played faster than I was supposed to, to get it over with. Afterward there was always a surprised silence, as if the audience hadn't really expected it to end. "So good, so good," the grown-ups would murmur, and my mother's voice would rise over them alla""Oh, no, she's terrible, really."

After me came my sister, the comic relief. She'd announce her piecea""Indian War Dance"a"and then pound it out as forcefully as possible. The applause for her was more enthusiastic. "She doesn't practice" was my mother's only comment on Marty, as if that were the only reason she wasn't a musical genius.

The only guest who seemed to prefer my playing to Marty's was Mr. Lin, a friend of Daddy's who lived by himself in the top floor of a rickety house in a bad neighborhood downtown. Mr. Lin was an artist who had been chased out by the Communists. Ma said he was too sad to paint anymore.