A Bay Change

That's The Way It Was early that Sunday, the morning haze burning off and the summer sun laying itself hard on the water off the Pines at Fire Island.

Morgan and other weekend guests were prowling around in the bay like scavengers because their host wanted to serve for lunch his famous version of clams cassino. The host was not with them, having the good sense to remain at home to grapple with the crossword puzzle in the Sunday Times, but Morgan had gone along with the others with no protest because he had never before had the opportunity to hunt down the elusive hard-shell bivalves.

That was where he was, clawing at the cluttered bay bed in murky water that scarcely reached above his knees, though he was more (continued on page 204)Bay Change(continued from page 164) than a quarter of a mile offshore, occasionally uncovering his quarry, which he dutifully dropped into the communal pail floating around in its Styrofoam collar, when the two women came wading out.

The woman in front was tall, almost six feet, Morgan would have guessed, and she was built with carefree splendor. She strode through the water with a power and fierceness that pleasantly enlivened the sleepy air. She wore a string suit the same color as her tanned body. She might have been, Morgan thought with awe, some pagan goddess who had shouldered her way through the clam beds of the Great South Bay into the sunshine of the world.

The woman who followed in her wake moved more slowly, feeling her way delicately. She was smaller--though what woman of ordinary size would not be?--and she had pale blonde hair and her body was white, which on Fire Island in the summer was very near to felony.

The first woman joined the resolute clammers in a clatter of splashing water, casting around a dazzling smile as though she were bestowing benefactions. She was in her late 30s and although she was not one of the covey of weekenders, she seemed to know almost everyone. She called around greetings and then marched over to Morgan. She extended a hand and pronounced herself Terry Welles. Her grip was firm and her eyes sparkled and she made everyone else look weary.

She was just returning Morgan's hand when the other woman joined them and Terry Welles introduced her as Anne. She did not supply a surname for Anne, who seemed about 25. Anne's face was shaped like a heart and was clefted in the chin. She wore a tight, one-piece bathing suit. She had the lean body of a high-board diver.

Terry Welles surveyed Morgan. "I've never seen you around here before."

"I've never been here before."

"What do you do?"

(Geoffrey Wallace, Morgan's host, a Londoner in beatific exile, had remarked once to Morgan that he could never understand why Americans could not be in the company of a stranger for more than a couple of minutes before demanding to be informed what that stranger did to justify his visit on earth. "Why do you chaps have to categorize immediately?" Wallace had asked. "You're all like the bloody Japs, trying to establish relative status.")

"What do you do when you're not digging clams?" Terry asked.

"I'm a newspaperman." Morgan's'eyes lingered on Anne.

"A written-word newspaperman?" Terry asked.

Morgan nodded. He wondered who Anne was. She might have been Terry's younger sister.

Having extracted Morgan's identification, Terry turned to Anne. "Better start collecting some clams, Annie, if you expect your share of chow later." As Anne walked off obediently, Terry asked Morgan, "Do you consider this fun?"

"Nothing I'd rather do first thing in the morning." He kept watching Anne. "I'm just not very good at it."

"Is this your first time clamming as well?" Terry asked.

"For hard-shells." He thought how much simpler it was to gather in the soft-shelled clams in Maine. One walked along a beach with a hod at low tide and looked for air holes in the sand. "What do you do, Terry?" he asked, joining Terry in proving Wallace's observation, excusing himself lamely to himself on the ground that it might lead to more information about Anne, who now was bent over in her searching and whose body was a single lovely line that might have won the approval of George Balanchine.

"I'm an interior decorator," Terry said. She saw that Anne was now wandering purposelessly toward shore. "Annie, the clams are under your feet, not on the land." She kept her eyes on Anne until the younger woman again took up the quest. "Lazy, lazy, lazy."

Morgan had come to understand in the few minutes he had known Terry Welles that in her lexicon, laziness was close to blasphemy. He saw that Terry now was making a final inspection of him, fixing him into some filing cabinet in her mind, and then she swept away to contribute her own labors.

They all continued through the morning as the sun got hotter. There were techniques, Morgan learned. Some of the diggers bent over all the time, as he did, groping in the sand with their hands. Others, apparently more experienced, or adept, moved about erect, dreamily, as though sleepwalking, searching with their toes, coming to life when the toes encountered game, bending down quickly and snaring it. Morgan waited for someone to come up with a clam between the toes, but that never happened.

After a little while, Morgan straightened his back, which ached, and to forget that twinge, he sought out Anne. Anne was putting her hands into the water now and again, but her mind seemed not to be on clamming. He wondered what it was on. He would have liked to ask her.

He looked at Terry. Terry moved with flaring panache, part of the time using the toe method, at other times scooping with her fingers. Either way, she showed style. When she worked her feet in a kind of underwater ballet, it did handsome things for her hips and belly and large breasts. When she bent over, her rump was a cause for celebration. She was the kind of woman who ordinarily would have had an enormous attraction for Morgan, and he wondered why his thoughts, rather explicit thoughts, centered on Anne instead.

He noticed something else as he moved about, using his toes now, faking a pursuit for sustenance. He saw that Terry was solicitous of Anne. Terry stayed fairly close to her, as though they were all on the other side of Fire Island, prey to ocean crosscurrents and rip tides, instead of here in the placid bay where one could almost walk across to the mainland and where sailing boats of even small draft had to be careful not to run aground.

He sauntered over, not directly to the two of them. Terry was coming up with a handful of clams, more than he had found all morning. She made her way to the pail, dropped them in, walked back.

"Do you have a place out here?" Morgan asked Terry.

"Yes, we live in that little yellow house just down the street from Geoffrey," Terry said.

We. ... Did that mean a Mr. Welles?

"Anne, I think perhaps you've had enough. Better go back now."

"Do I have to?" Anne asked.

"You'll scratch your hands too much," Terry said. "You know how chafed they get. I don't like you to have rough fingers, you know that."

"But I'm just beginning to enjoy myself," Anne said.

"And I told you to wear your big straw hat," Terry said. "You know what a mess the sun makes of your face."

Morgan, who had been prevailed upon by his host to wear just such a hat, took it off. "She can wear mine."

"Please don't interfere," Terry said pleasantly.

"I want to stay a little longer," Anne said.

"You will do as I say." Terry still smiled.

Morgan sensed that Terry was aware that Anne was looking to him for more support.

"But I'm having fun," Anne said. "You said this morning that this was going to be a good day and I could have fun." Her chin trembled. She looked 15.

A quietness passed over Terry's comely face. "You will leave now. You will go over to Geoffrey's house and wait for the rest of us to come in. If you continue to be stubborn, I will make you go home and you will remain there the rest of the day and I will punish you. You know how you will be punished."

Anne raised her eyes to Morgan and, not finding the backing she never truly expected, she looked down again and Morgan thought she was going to cry and he wanted to take her in his arms and console her. He knew he must, of all things now, do nothing and say nothing.

After a moment, Anne slumped and turned and started her way back to shore. She walked very slowly, as though hoping against hope that Terry would relent and summon her back. She finally climbed onto the narrow, sandy beach and then up the boardwalk leading to Geoffrey Wallace's home.

Morgan looked at Terry. She was standing erect, arms akimbo, watching Anne vanish among the trees. Terry finally turned to him. Her eyes were luminous. She sighed softly and rubbed the sides of her breasts.

"She's such a child," Terry said.

"Is she your sister?" Morgan asked.

Terry brightened the morning with her smile. "Anne is my wife."

•

"I'm alone a great deal," Anne said to Morgan. "That's how I get to read so much. That's how I know about Reich."

"I suppose I should not be surprised," Morgan said.

"That I'm alone a lot or that I know about Wilhelm Reich?"

"Isn't he rather heavy going?"

"I'm not stupid," Anne said.

The guests were still in their bathing suits, sitting around Geoffrey Wallace's pool. The clams had been brought in and delivered to the purveyor of meals and lodging. The Englishman, a gentle and rather smallish man, had cleaned them, diced them, mixed them with a variety of spices the identities of which he would not reveal, had returned the mixture to the shells and had baked them. They had been consumed with much cold wine and the morning's chore had justified itself.

"It's always such a pleasure to eat food one has collected oneself," Geoffrey said. He was an engaging man in his 40s who managed to look British even in swim trunks. "There is something marvelously atavistic about it."

"You collected none of it," Terry said, glancing over to where Morgan and Anne were seated. "You never got off your British butt."

"I take your point, old girl," Geoffrey said. "But there is something basic here, making old lady nature supply one's wants. It is good for the soul, I must say."

"I have given my soul over to Terry," Marge Rawlinson said. "And she won't give it back."

Marge Rawlinson had arrived for lunch. She was a middle-aged divorcee who was spending the summer on her yacht tied up in the Pines' harbor. She had a purring voice and a jet-set air.

Terry Welles broke into laughter. "You'd better explain that, Marge. People might get peculiar ideas."

Marge looked puzzled and then she, too, laughed.

"What Marge means," Terry said, "is that I am decorating her Sutton Place apartment. And I damned well will not return her precious soul until I have everything there precisely as I want it to be."

"The naughty woman won't even allow me to have Haitian cotton," Marge said.

"Haitian cotton was out before it was in," Terry said in an authoritative, quiet voice that precluded gainsaying.

"Do you believe in Reich's theory that neuroses come from what he called orgone energy that's all around us?" Anne asked Morgan.

"I don't know. You know, Anne, I once interviewed Reich before they put him in jail."

Anne's eyes widened. They were a shade of blue Morgan had seen nowhere except when gazing on a sunny day at the Mediterranean. "What was he like?"

"I was very young then," Morgan said. "Just starting in. I didn't know very much. I wish I had the chance to do it over now."

"I believe in so many of the things he wrote," Anne said, leaning closer to the man who once had interviewed Wilhelm Reich. "I can feel it when I lie on the sand, that special sense of well-being he describes." She was silent for a moment. "Terry doesn't allow me to spend too much time in the sun. She says she likes my skin to stay smooth and soft."

Ever since that moment when Terry had informed him that she and Anne were lovers, more, in their eyes married as were conventional couples, Morgan had tried to adjust himself to that simple state of affairs. But he found himself caught short when Anne spoke of her skin and how Terry wanted it to be and he was aware, as were all male chauvinists, of the specific pleasures given and taken by the two of them.

He was aware, too, that despite his knowledge of Anne's preference, he was still drawn to her, and more and more. He knew that there were women who were fascinated by male homosexuals, taking them as a challenge to their own powers, looking at their inclination as an aberration they could set to right. Did (continued on page 239)Bay Change(continued from page 206) that kind of mindless arrogance enter into his feeling for Anne?

"I like to slip-cover everything," Terry said in a voice that demanded attention from all within earshot, an extended area.

Marge Rawlinson chortled. "Would you believe she made me buy brand-new club chairs and then she had slip covers made for them?" Marge delivered this intelligence with a kind of martyred pride. "But not with Haitian cotton."

"Why on earth would one buy new chairs simply to recover them?" Geoffrey Wallace asked. "Strikes me as a bit odd."

"Ever since Billy Baldwin started that, it is considered chic." Marge was careful to pronounce the word as it is spelled, showing her international sophistication.

"But then, this Baldwin chap must have been dealing with old wrecks he had to disguise," Wallace said.

Morgan looked at Terry. Her eyes were fastened on Marge Rawlinson, who was still chuckling to herself and shaking her head. Morgan sensed that an explosion was imminent.

Instead, without raising her voice, Terry said, "Annie."

"Yes," Anne said.

"Pour me some wine, dear," Terry said.

"In a moment," Anne said. "Morgan is telling me something about Wilhelm Reich. Can you imagine, he once interviewed him."

"I'd like some wine now," Terry said. Of Marge, she asked, almost casually, "Are you implying that I imitate Billy Baldwin?"

"I didn't mean that," Marge said.

"If you prefer Billy Baldwin, you are perfectly free to change over to him, or anybody else, for that matter."

"Now, Terry, you know better than that," Marge said. "Nobody has your dash."

"Anne, where the hell is that wine?" Terry asked.

Anne jumped as though stung. "I'm getting it."

"And you're taking the whole fucking day!"

Anne ran over to Terry and took her empty glass. She hurried to the bar. Morgan saw Terry fix her eye on him. It flashed through his mind that some years before, at a party in Southampton, he had danced with a young woman he had never before met. There was a sudden commotion behind him and he turned to see the young woman's lesbian lover descending on him with a kitchen knife. It took two men to hold her back.

When Anne brought over the refilled glass, Terry made room for her on the chaise. Anne sat down. Terry drew her closer and kissed her on the lips. She ran her fingers lightly over Anne's face and neck and then cupped one of Anne's small breasts.

Lighting a cigarette, Terry announced she would in her work deal with nothing but primary colors. "I consider pastels no colors at all."

Anne snuggled against her like a kitten.

•

"I quit smoking," Morgan said.

"This isn't the same thing," Terry said.

"I know it isn't the same thing." He looked around at the green-and-orange deck on Marge Rawlinson's yacht. "Primary colors."

"Go to hell," Terry said cheerfully.

It was late afternoon now and the tea dance on the terrace of the waterfront hotel was under way. The music could be felt as well as heard. Psychedelic constructions lit and unlit faces.

All of Geoffrey Wallace's guests, fully dressed now, were lounging on the out-sized deck. It was cool. An offshore wind had risen and plastic curtains had been lowered, cutting down just a trifle on the crashing music and allowing the captive air to thicken with the sweet smell of pot.

"Get loose, Morgan," Terry said, holding out a joint.

Morgan took the skinny stump from which three or four persons had already sucked their hopes of miracles in this life and passed it untouched by him to Anne, who was seated on his other side. Anne, denying herself bliss as well, handed it to Geoffrey Wallace.

"What's the matter with you?" Terry asked Anne.

"I don't want to get stoned tonight."

"You don't have to get stoned."

"I don't even want to get high. I want to try to remember some of the things Morgan has been telling me." Anne turned to Morgan. "Was he a lion of a man? Reich looks like that in his picture."

"He was," Morgan said. "What first interested you in Reich?"

"The orgasm," Anne said.

"It was that simple," Terry said.

"That sex was for the orgasm itself and how the orgasm benefits human beings and how procreation is only secondary," Anne said. She was wearing Levis and a T-shirt that had The Fines printed on it in large letters. Her hair was plaited in two braids that hung over her shoulders. She looked like a schoolgirl. "It turned everything around. It was so great."

"Especially if you're burdened with that smidgen of guilt," Terry said. "Would you like some pâté, Annie?"

"No, thank you."

The pounding and the surging of the music seemed to have worn down the feeble resistance of the plastic curtains and now charged freely around the deck. The terrace of the hotel was jammed. There were men drinking and women drinking but not with each other. Men danced with men and women danced with women. In the midst of that mandatory polarization, moving with the wariness of wanderers lost in an alien forest, a few straights held to each other and their archaic habits.

On the pier just outside the deck, a young bearded man kissed another young man and shivered with pleasure. Morgan glanced at Terry. She grinned. Terry, it was patent, was altogether free of that small encumbrance of guilt.

A young man who was supplying Marge Rawlinson with her comfort these days climbed aboard and kissed Marge all over her face and neck and announced that he had brought with him marijuana that was the finest he had ever smoked. A little while after that, it was wholly unnecessary to suck on joints passed around with such love and comradeship and trust. The air itself, Morgan knew, had only to be breathed.

Geoffrey Wallace got up to talk to someone in the group and Terry immediately took his seat next to Anne. She cradled Anne's face in her hands and kissed her. She held her lips against Anne's for a long time.

"I think I'll take a little walk," Morgan said to no one in particular, wondering whether he were ceding ground in some battle he had never sought, whether there were a battle. Marge Rawlinson, who had been stoned when they all arrived, nodded imperial permission. Morgan climbed down. The music hit him with an additional blow and the lights seemed to be blinking inside his skull.

"I'll go with you," Anne called out in a stronger voice than she had used all day. She was on her feet and off the deck before Terry, who was embarked on a lecture about Persian rugs, could interrupt herself quickly enough to stop her.

•

Morgan, feeling a peculiar diffidence, as though he were a youth on his first date, walked along the pier with Anne past the dancers. The women who were dancing with each other appeared to him to be more constrained than the men who were dancing with other men. There was an obscure observation that crossed Morgan's mind, but he realized that Anne was not the woman to share it with.

He had, as his senses lived with an expectancy that was at the same time unknown and impossible, to keep reminding himself that he was not walking with a plain, ordinary garden-variety girl. He would have given much if she were, because she brought about in him the right feelings in the right places. Oddly enough, in quite another way, she moved him in a realm of compassion. There were questions he would have liked to put to her, but he knew he never would.

They reached the end of the jetty. The bay lay out before them and flickered gently against the pillars of the pier. Across the water, the lights of the mainland shimmered weakly, like stars too feeble to make it up into the sky. The music from the dance could hardly be heard and was much improved.

"How long do you and Terry remain out here?" he asked. He wanted, in a foolhardy challenge of instinct, to know where she and Terry lived in the city.

"Most of the summer," Anne said.

She gazed across the water and Morgan allowed himself to fancy that she was in some way imprisoned and was looking toward a liberty, and he knew what a conceited, outrageous male concept that was. Her profile could have been chiseled by a master and that, he knew, was no dreamy trick of his mind.

"Terry arranges her work so that she can come out here on Thursdays, during the summer, and she goes back to the city on Mondays," Anne said. "Did I hear you say that this is your first visit to Fire Island?"

"Yes."

"How do you like it?"

"I like it."

"But you wouldn't want to remain out here too long, not at the Pines, anyway."

"I don't know."

"Because of people like us?"

Morgan would have liked to understand why that last question came along as a small blow. Of course, it was because he was always forgetting, or because he wanted to keep forgetting, or, ultimate male vainglory, because a part of him refused in the face of everything to believe.

"I haven't worked that out," he said.

"You've worked it out with male gays," Anne said, and she did not seem quite so young now. "You didn't have to work that out. You had that built in. But you don't feel the same way about us. Most straight men don't."

Morgan remembered an old Hemingway story about a woman who was leaving a man she had loved to begin an affair with another woman and how the man felt. He couldn't feel that way, because there was nothing more than a few hours between Anne and himself, but he felt something and he was shaken by that.

"You must not judge Terry by the way she speaks to me sometimes," Anne said.

"I have no right to judge her at all." Wasn't this the classic corny moment, here at the edge of lapping water in yellow moonlight?

"She loves me," Anne said.

"Yes."

"She loves me very much."

Morgan nodded.

"She's very good to me."

"I believe that."

"I could never love anyone but her," Anne said.

She looked up at him and the moon gave her face an unbearable wash and he lifted her chin and kissed her. It was a silly thing to do, effecting the final spoilation; it was like kissing a pane of glass and he released her chin, feeling foolish and embarrassed, when he felt her stir and he felt her mouth open to him and he felt her body press against him and he felt through the T-shirt her small, hard breasts.

When she drew away, she said, "It's different when Terry kisses me. When she kisses me, I feel it down to my toes." She smiled. It was the smile of an ever-so-slightly tarnished angel. "But I enjoyed it with you. It was funny, but it was good."

He didn't say anything. He wondered why he was feeling such a sharp pain. He wondered why he was feeling pain at all.

"She keeps me on a short rein," Anne said, pulling down her T-shirt, moving her plaits from back to front. "She really doesn't have to, but she does."

"Do you resent that?" It had happened so quickly, the swift response from her body, that he was almost certain now he had only imagined it. The swaying of the jetty, probably.

"Most of the time, I like it. I think I need it. I'm wayward."

"What do you mean by that? How are you wayward?"

"Oh, I've never done anything serious and I never would, not so long as I love Terry and she loves me," Anne said. "I've always been faithful to her. There were other women before I met Terry, but since we have been living together, I have never cheated, really cheated."

"By cheating, you mean with another woman," he said, unable, despite his awareness of the fatuousness, not to say it.

"Of course. How else? Still, Terry says I'm wayward and says she has to watch me."

"And you like that most of the time." The ache now was all in a ball in his belly.

Anne nodded. "She loves me. She's jealous. Sometimes she smothers me."

"There you are," Terry said.

She was standing a dozen feet away. Her hands were on her hips and in her blue jump suit, she looked like a policeman.

"Let's go to the dance," Terry said to Anne.

"Will you come, too?" Anne asked Morgan.

"I'll catch up," he said.

Terry closed her arm around Anne's waist and led her away and Morgan remained at the edge of the jetty and thought this would be a good time to have a cigarette if he were having cigarettes. He had a rushing vision of Anne and Terry in bed and while he normally found that scene exciting, he was shaken by how it disturbed him now. And he wondered if he would have called up that picture so quickly if Anne were any old girl taken away to a dance by her boyfriend.

He wondered how long Terry had been standing there. He wondered if she had seen them kiss. He remembered Terry's threat of punishment earlier that day. He wondered how Terry punished her wife. In any case, that kiss was nothing Anne had felt down to her toes.

Shit!

He walked back to the dance, tossing away the cigarette he had never held. He saw that some of the dancers were popping pills under their nostrils as they clung to each other.

He saw Terry dancing with Anne. Terry held Anne gently and led her around with obvious, loving grace. Morgan started to walk on, the edgeless pain still rummaging around in his stomach. He heard Anne call his name. He turned to see the two women looking down at him from the low terrace.

"Would you like to dance with me, Morgan?" Anne asked.

"Thanks," he said. "But I have two left feet when it comes to dancing."

Terry made a move to get Anne back onto the dance floor, but Anne would not budge. "Do you live in the city?"

"When I'm around."

"Would you like to have lunch with me sometime?" Anne asked.

Morgan looked at Terry. Her face had on it the bleak lifelessness of a marble statue. "Sometime, perhaps," he said.

"The number is listed in Terry's name. She spells her last name with an E. W-E-L-L-E-S."

Morgan nodded. The music suddenly exploded, but he was glad of that now.

"When will you call?" Anne asked. "We'll be back in the city right after Labor Day. I'm free almost every day. Terry goes off and I'm alone. There are so many things I want to ask you."

Morgan brought his eyes to Terry again. The lights were flashing on and off again, playing havoc with her features, but against lopsided odds, her face, still set, had a curious dignity. Her magnificent body was straight. Her carriage was erect. She could have worn the uniform of a Prussian officer without showing a wrinkle. There might have been something in her eyes, but that could have been put there by the manic, batting glare.

"I'm afraid that can't be for some time, Anne," he said. "In a couple of days, I'm off on an assignment in India." He could not have said whether he rued or welcomed that simple truth.

"But you will come back one clay," Anne said.

He nodded.

Terry moved again to lead Anne back to the dance floor.

Anne shrugged her off. "I think I'll go home."

"But it's so early, love," Terry said.

Anne leaned down and kissed Morgan on the cheek and walked away, the braids swinging back and forth.

"Anne!" Terry called out. Her voice was swallowed by an upsurge of music. She looked like a huge mime, mouthing without sound.

Anne pushed her way through the people on the terrace.

"Anne!" Terry called again.

Morgan watched Anne disappear into the crowd on the pier. He raised his eyes to Terry. She looked larger than life, silhouetted against the persevering lights. She looked to Morgan as though she might topple, like a felled tree. She did not. She lifted a hand to Morgan in a kind of bewildered farewell, and then it was borne fully upon her that something had happened and she started after Anne. She walked slowly, heavily, through the mob, her back now sagged, her head lowered. When she was clear of the terrace, she moved faster, and then she began to run.

Morgan watched her for a moment, and then he started to run after her. He had no sense of what made him chase her. He pushed people to one side and the other, and then he was stopped as abruptly as if he had run into a brick wall, and he was astonished to see that what had stopped him was the slender arm of Geoffrey Wallace.

"Where do you think you're going, old boy?" Wallace asked.

"You know where I'm going."

"Yes, true. But I don't know why."

"Who knows what she'll do to her?"

"What who will do to whom?"

"For Christ sake, Geff!" Morgan tried to brush aside Wallace's arm. He was astounded by the strength that lay in it. He cocked his arm to swing.

"Don't be a damned fool," Wallace said.

"You saw her."

"I saw a very unhappy woman." Wallace dropped his arm. "You're my guest, old man. Please don't forget that. And as it happens, I rather fancy Terry Welles."

"She's been threatening to punish her all day."

"You are a bloody ass, you know," Wallace said. "You're such a clever journalist and such a blasted idiot." When Morgan would reply, Wallace said quietly, "Morgan, those two are married. Married. Can you get that through your thick head? Married. You may think it abnormal, but I assure you they look upon us as abnormal. Married. Like any married couple. Quarrels. Flirtations. On little Anne's part. That angel face. First-class bitch, in actual fact. Let me put it to you: The pier. The moonlight. A kiss. Tongue in your mouth after a moment. Body thrust against you. Later makes a date for lunch in town. And all the time ready to throw up, I promise you. She does this to Terry all the time. And if she thinks she's laid enough on Terry for that day, she'll let her make love to her."

Morgan took a deep breath. The pain was gone now, but there was another kind of pain and he couldn't zero in on that right away and he thought perhaps it would be some time before he could.

Wallace kept him on the pier for a little while longer, and then they started back to Wallace's house. They passed the little yellow cottage. One room was lit dimly. Morgan heard Terry's voice, low, and then he heard Anne giggle, and then he heard Anne catch her breath with a gasp.

Wallace took Morgan by the arm and propelled him on. Morgan felt chilled on that warm summer night and tired and old and he knew he had to catch the first ferry back to the mainland in the morning.

"She might have been some pagan goddess who had shouldered her way through the clam beds."

"He turned to see the young woman's lesbian lover descending on him with a kitchen knife."