The Whore's Child

towels and suntan lotion, his wallet, her purse. She didn’t even point out that she’d cautioned him against taking these particular chairs—bulky and old-fashioned, with heavy wooden frames—instead of the lighter aluminum ones. These had looked flimsy and chintzy to Snow, who’d thought they should recline in good sturdy beach chairs and sleep in an elegant inn.
    At the end of the boardwalk, the beach was relatively crowded with bathers, but by trekking a bit farther they could have a stretch of sand more or less to themselves. “By all means,” June agreed. “In this suit I want to be as far away from people as I can get.”
    It looked to be about three hundred yards to the rocky point, with the red clay cliffs rising gently along the way. They’d gone not quite a third of the way when June dropped their chairs in the sand and said, “This is as far as I go, buddy boy. Look up and you’ll see why.”
    Snow, more tired than he cared to admit, had been slogging through the sand with his head down. “What?” he said.
    Further up the beach, directly beneath the tallest cliffs, was another smaller cluster of bathers, which caused him to wonder if there’d been a different path that led more directly down to the beach.
    â€œThose people are naked,” his wife said.
    Snow squinted, salty perspiration stinging his eyes. “Are you certain?” While recognizably human, the figures down the beach were too far away to be, as his replacement might put it, “gender specific.”
    â€œYou need glasses,” June told him, setting up her chair.
    He dropped their bag in the sand. “I need
binoculars.
”
    Overheated, they went for a swim. The September water was still wonderfully warm, and Snow, who as a young man had loved to swim, dove into the surf and swam out beyond the breaking waves where he did a leisurely crawl before letting the surf bear him back in. June was not the sort of woman who plunged right into anything, much less the Atlantic, and he was not surprised to see that she was still feeling her way out. She had always been a graceful woman, and now, in her midfifties, still had a way of meeting the swells that seemed to him the very essence of womanhood. The waves never broke over her, never knocked her back. Rather, at the last moment, she rose with the water, right up to the crest, and then went gently down again. How long, he tried to recall, since they had made love?
    Perhaps his wife was thinking the same thing, because as he swam toward her, her smile in greeting contained not a single reservation, though its cause may have been merely the joy of water, the thrill of buoyancy. “Oh, this is grand,” she said, water beading in her hair and lashes. When they embraced, she whispered urgently into his ear, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a pill.”
    Such a pill. As Snow embraced his wife, it occurred to him that the last time she’d used this phrase, she’d been a young woman, and their love for each other had been so effortless that whatever had momentarily come between them could be effectively banished with this benign phrase. What it conveyed now was not just a sudden and powerful resurgence of affection and trust, but also promise that the difficulties of their marriage over the last decade might even now be swept aside by a mutual act of will. They could be their old, younger selves again. They would be in love.
    Later, as they stood in the warm sand toweling themselves dry, June looked down at herself and said, “Thank heavens it’s just us.” The bathing suit that when dry had caused her so much anxiety proved, now that it was wet, somewhat less than opaque, and her nipples showed through clearly, as did the dark triangle of her pubic hair. And to Snow’s surprise, she seemed less upset than she’d been when she emerged from their bathroom at the Captain Clement, insisting that the suit was too young, that she looked foolish.
    â€œLet’s move our chairs up under the bank,” she suggested with a mischievous glint in her eye, a thing he hadn’t witnessed in a long, long while.
    â€œWhy?”
    But she was already carting a chair and the beach bag toward the bank. Tired, happy and suspicious, he folded up the remaining chair and followed. The tides had eroded the cliff irregularly, of course, and the spot where June set up her chair was semiprivate. Still,