Benchley, Peter (7 page)

as he believed, a special diet he had concocted would strip off the poundage in three days. Another time, on a bet, he set out to run ten miles.

He collapsed after six miles, but took consolation in a doctor-friend’s statement that-considering that Sanders hadn’t trained for the marathon-he should have collapsed after two or three miles. He saw a television show about hang-gliding-soaring through the air suspended from a giant kite-and determined to build himself a hang glider. He built it and intended to test it by jumping off an Adirondack cliff, until a hang-gliding expert convinced him that his kite was aerodynamically unsound: the wing struts were too weak and probably would have broken, causing the kite to fold up and Sanders to fall like a stone down the side of the mountain.

There was only one week a year when he wasn’t bored, the week in winter when his children visited their grandparents, his wife went to an Arizona health spa, and he went diving at one of the Club Mediterranee resorts in the Caribbean.

He met Gail at the Club Med on

Guadalupe-or, rather, under the Club Med. They were on a guided diving tour of some coral gardens. The water was clear, and the sunlight brought out all the natural colors on the shallow reef. After a few minutes of following the meticulous guide, who stopped at every specimen of sea life and made sure each diver took a long look, Sanders left the group and let himself glide down the face of the reef toward the bottom. He was vaguely aware that he was not alone, but he paid no attention to the figure who followed him. He let himself float with the motion of the sea, turning in lazy circles.

He swam along the base of the reef, peering in crannies. A small octopus darted across his path, squirting black fluid, and disappeared into the reef. Sanders swam to the hole the octopus had entered and was trying to coax it out of its den, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned and saw a woman’s face, white with fear, her eyes wide and bulging. She made the divers’ signal for “out of air,” a finger drawn across the throat in a slitting motion. He took a breath and handed her his mouthpiece. She breathed deeply twice and passed the mouthpiece back to him. Together they “buddy-breathed” to the surface.

They reached the support boat and climbed aboard.

“Thanks,” Gail said. “That’s an awful sensation-like sucking on an empty Coke bottle.”

Sanders smiled and watched her as she dried herself with a towel.

She was the most attractive woman he had ever seen-not classically beautiful, but vibrantly, viscerally appealing. Her hair was short and light brown, streak-bleached by the sun. She was almost as tall as Sanders, nearly six feet.

Her skin was smooth and flawless, except for an appendectomy scar that showed above the bottom of her bikini. Her tan seemed impossibly even: the only patches of skin that were not honey-brown were between her toes, the palms of her hands, and the tips of her breasts, which Sanders saw as she leaned over to stuff the towel under the seat. Her legs and arms were long and lithe. When she stood, the sinews in her calves and thighs moved as if her skin were paper. Her eyes were deep, brilliant blue.

Gail saw him staring at her, and she smiled. “You deserve a reward,” she said. The tone of her voice was not extraordinary, but the way she spoke-with a breezy confidence-gave her words authority. “After all, you saved my life.”

Sanders laughed. “You weren’t in any real trouble.

If I hadn’t been there, you probably could’ve made it to the surface okay. There was only about fifty feet of water.”

“Not me,” she said. “I would’ve panicked. Held my breath or something. I don’t dive enough to know how to handle trouble. Anyway, I’ll buy you lunch. A deal?”

Sanders suddenly felt nervous. Never, not in high school or college or the years since, had a woman asked him for a date. He didn’t know what to say, so he said, “Sure.”

Her full name was Gail Sears. She was twenty-five, and she worked as an assistant editor at a small, prestigious New York publishing house that specialized in nonfiction books about social, economic, and political affairs.

She was a member of Common Cause and Zero Population Growth. For the first year after her graduation from college she had shared an apartment with a friend, but now she lived alone. She described herself as a private person-“I suppose you could say selfish.”

After lunch, they played tennis, and if Sanders hadn’t been at the top of his serve-and-volley game, she would have beaten him. She stood at the base line and slugged long, low ground strokes that landed deep in the corners. After tennis, they swam, had dinner, went for a walk on the beach, and then-as naturally as if the act were the next event in the day’s athletic schedule-made noisy, sweaty love in Gail’s bungalow.

When they had finished, that first time, Sanders raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. She smiled at him. Beads of perspiration glued strands of hair to her forehead. “I’m glad you saved my life,”

she said.

“So am I.” Then he added, without really knowing why, “Are you married?”

She frowned. “What kind of dumb question is that?”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to know.”

She said nothing for a long moment. “I almost was. But I came to my senses, thank God.”

“Why “thank God”?”

“I would have been a disaster as a wife. He wanted kids; I don’t, at least not yet. I’d resent them for strangling my life.”

Two days after he returned to New York, Sanders moved out of his apartment and filed for separation from his wife. He knew he would miss his children, and he did, but, gradually, his guilt faded and he was able to enjoy his afternoons with them without suffering such painful regret that they no longer lived with him.

He had neither sought nor been offered a commitment of any land from Gail. Though he knew he was in love with her, he also knew that to pursue her like a heartsick adolescent was to invite rejection. He took her to dinner twice before telling her he had left his wife, and when finally he did tell her, she didn’t ask why. All she wanted to know was how Gloria had taken the news. He said she had taken it well: after a short, teary scene, she had acknowledged knowing that Sanders was unhappy and that the marriage was a shell. In fact, once her lawyer had convinced her that Sanders’ offer of a one-time settlement was as generous as he had claimed-so generous that it left him without a single stock or bond-she hadn’t seemed upset at all.

For the next several months, Sanders saw Gail as often as she would permit. He knew she was seeing other men, and he tortured himself with wild fantasies about what she was doing with them. But he was careful never to ask her about them, and she never volunteered any information. Though he and Gail talked about the future, about things they wanted to do together, places they wanted to go, they never discussed marriage. Practically, there was little point: Sanders was still legally married. Emotionally, he was afraid to talk about marriage, afraid that to suggest limiting Gail’s freedom might make her regard him as a threat to that freedom.

Sanders had always thought of himself as a normally sensual person, but in those first months with Gail he discovered a reserve of raw lust so enormous that he occasionally wondered if he might be certified as a sex maniac.

To Gail, sex was a vehicle for expressing everything-delight, anger, hunger, love, frustration, annoyance, even outrage. As an alcoholic can find any excuse for a drink, so Gail could make anything, from the first fallen leaf of autumn to the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation, a reason for making love.

The day Sanders’ divorce became final, he decided to ask Gail to marry him. He had examined his motives, and they seemed logical, if old-fashioned: he adored her; he wanted to live with her; and he needed the assurance-however symbolic-that she loved him enough to commit herself to him.

But behind the curtain of logic there also lurked a shadow of challenge. She was young, widely courted, and, by her own admission, averse to marriage. If he proposed and she accepted, he would have achieved a certain conquest.

He was terrified of, but prepared for, rejection, and he wanted to phrase his proposal in such a way that she couldn’t take it as an all-or-nothing request. He wanted her to know that if she declined marriage, he would rather continue their current arrangement than stop seeing her. He intended to remind her of their several areas of compatibility. He compiled a list of twelve points, ending with the undeniable fact that it made financial sense for them to live in one apartment instead of two.

He never got a chance to present his brief. They were having dinner at an Italian restaurant on Third Avenue, and after they had ordered, Sanders took the divorce papers from his pocket and held them up to Gail.

“These came today,” he said. He picked an anchovy from the antipasto plate.

“Wonderful!” she said. “Let’s get married.”

Stunned, Sanders dropped the anchovy into his glass of wine. “What?”

“Let’s get married. You’re free. I’m free. I’ve gotten everyone else out of my system. We love each other. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Sure, yeah,” Sanders stammered. “It’s just that…”

“I know. You’re too old for me. You think I’m a sex fiend and that you’ll never be able to keep up with me.

You don’t have any money any more. But I have a job. We’ll make out.” She paused. “Well, what do you say?”

They decided on Bermuda for their honeymoon because neither had been there and because it had good tennis courts, good swimming, and good scuba diving.

The lifeguard stood at the water’s edge, holding the Boston Whaler on its dolly. “Going after more forks and knives?” he said as the Sanderses approached.

“Sure,” said David, “and we’ll look for some of those artillery shells you mentioned.”

“You get a pretty good price for the brass. But be careful. From what I hear, they’re still live.”

They slipped the boat into the water, loaded their gear, and shoved off. As they cruised toward the reef, Sanders asked Gail to take the wheel. He took a small flashlight from his pocket and sat on the forward seat.

“What’s that for?” Gail asked.

“To see in the cave where that ampule was.”

“It’s not waterproof. It’ll short out in a second.”

“Watch.” Sanders took a plastic sandwich bag from another pocket, put the light into the bag, made a knot in the open end, and pulled it tight, then touched a switch on the light. It blinked on. “That should last.”

“Genius,” Gail said. “Crude, but genius.”

They found a niche in the reef, guided the boat through, and backed around until the bow faced the shore.

Gail stood on the forward seat, ready to throw the anchor overboard, and sighted along her arms, reassuring herself that they had returned to the correct spot.

As soon as the anchor had caught in the rocks, they put on their equipment and went overboard.

They swam to a patch of clear sand several yards seaward of the reef, sat on the bottom and peered at the rocks and coral, looking for the cave where the ampule had been found. The sun was almost directly overhead, and its light cut vertical rainbow shafts through the water. Shadows shifted, appearing and disappearing as spots of darkness in the reef. Sanders moved to the right. At the end of his vision, where the blue water darkened and the shapes of rocks grew fuzzy, he saw a shadow that seemed to remain constant. He tapped Gail and pointed to the shadow. She took the flashlight from her weight belt and pressed the switch. A beam of yellow light flashed on the sand.

The cave was much farther to the right than they had thought, but now, clinging to the coral overhang and looking around, they recognized several pieces of wreckage.

They crowded together at the mouth of the dark hole.

Gail swept the flashlight’s beam from left to right.

The cave was only a few feet deep, and it was empty, carpeted with smooth sand. Sanders looked at Gail and shook his head, saying: Nothing here.

Gail handed him the flashlight and pointed to a spot in the sand. There was nothing visible, but as Sanders held the light for her, she waved her hand over the sand, fanning it into a cloud that cut visibility to six inches. She kept fanning in the pool of light, and soon she had made a depression two or three inches deep. She fanned again, and there-at the bottom of the dent in the sand-was a glimmer.

Sanders put his face into the depression andwiththe tips of his fingers brushed sand away from the glint. It was an ampule, filled with a colorless liquid. It might have been empty, except that when he moved it, a bubble shifted within. Gently, he pried it from the sand, passed it to Gail, and backed away from the hole he had made. He pushed sand into the hole until it was level once again, and then placed a rock marker on the spot.

They left the cave and swam along the base of the reef. Now and then, Gail would stop by a rock or timber and flash the light beneath it or fan away the sand beside it. They found nothing.

Gail moved farther along, then stopped to look for Sanders. He was behind her, digging at something in the reef. She swam to him and saw that he was using a rock to break off pieces of coral. Every few seconds he would stop hammering with the rock and would try to fit his hand into a hole. Finally, he managed to squeeze three fingers

into the hole and, using them as tongs, picked out a piece of yellow metal. It was bent and dented, roughly the size of a fifty-cent piece. But as Sanders held it up for Gail to examine with the flashlight, he saw that it was not a coin: there was a concave lip around one edge, as if something had once been held inside. At four points on the lip there were empty pockets, each perhaps a quarter of an inch in diameter. The metal shone brightly, evidently undamaged by corrosion or marine growth.

Sanders turned it over, and in the beam of light he saw the etched letters “E.f.” Holding the ampule in one hand and the piece of metal in the other, he started for the surface.

When they were back in the boat, Sanders said, “I thought for a minute we might have found a gold doubloon.”