Honeymoon

He woke to the trilling of an island bird in the traveler's palm outside their hotel room. The palm's outline shimmied in the morning sunlight against the aqua curtain. He was lustful and erect. He reached over to touch the young woman he had married.

Feeling his hand on her skin, she slid into his embrace.

"What is it?" she asked, laughing.

"It's me."

She laughed herself awake, leaned up on her elbow, her head back, blinking in the new light. The filtered glow of day gilded her fair, disordered hair. When she turned to him, her eyes were clear, guileless, happy.

"Not you, dope. The bird."

"In these islands," he said, "they call it a divi-divi bird."

"Divi-divi?" she repeated, in burlesqued Caribbean. "Divi-divi."

Then she bent to him. He could not stop marveling at the velvet quality of her skin.

Later, from the bathroom, she called, "And what's the language?"

"Papiamento."

She came out naked and drew the curtain back.

"Oh my God, it's heaven. Heavenly," she turned to tell him, already pulling on her bathing suit. "I'm going to the pool."

And she was gone, disappeared like a fragrance in motion, young magic. In the sad afterglow of his pleasure, he called his ex-wife.

"I can't believe you're calling me," she said.

"I'm on my honeymoon."

"Well," she said, "this time you get one."

"I can't do it," he told her. "I'm lonely to the bottom of my soul. I can't cope."

She began to cry. To cry for him. He wept himself.

"Scotty," she said, "I tried. I hated it. One thing after another. I let you."

"I want to come home," he said.

"I let you," she said. "One goddamn thing after another. I hated you drinking that way. I hated everything, but I never questioned you because I thought, Shit, he loves me. But you didn't."

"I swear," he said. "I do."

"And you finally did it, hurrah for you. And I said to myself, 'He's gone, I'll die, what will I live for?'"

"I'll come home."

"What will I live for. He's gone. Oh, poor little me. But now I think I'll live, Tiger. Fucking right," she said. "You wanted to be gone? Get gone. Have a great honeymoon."

"I'll come home," he said. But she had put the receiver down.

On their way to the reef, the dive boat cutting through the sparkling water, they saw flying fish.

"It's heaven," she said, and licked her lips. She was afraid, he saw. It was her first reef dive; she had only just taken up diving.

He thought she had never looked more beautiful. Golden-haired, tall and brave. Frightened, doing it to prove herself to him.

"You talked about diving in your class," she said. "The first one I took. And I swore to myself--one day I'll go diving with him. Isn't that awful?"

Maybe, he thought, she worried that God would punish her for adultery. She had been raised Catholic. The divemaster at the tiller looked at them in turn and smiled.

She was trembling as they got into their wet suits and struggled with the equipment. Then he saw the little vial of tablets in her hand. Valium. You saw it at every dive site, the Valium pills awash in the scuppers, the unsightly tubes dropped on the coral heads. Couples--one dived and the other sneaked Valium.

"Give me that," he said softly. "You won't need that. I'll be with you."

"Oh, shit," she said, "you caught me."

Neither of them wanted the divemaster to hear. When he was suited up, he slipped the vial into a utility pocket.

The light of day, the first hour after dawn. Pure as creation, he thought. She took his hand. He kept hearing the other woman's voice, the one whose skin was no longer so smooth, though it had been, 25 years before. You wanted to go. Be gone.

Helping her climb into the gear, her back to him, he raised the vial to his lips and took in as many of the tablets as he could. When her tank was in place, they each took a swallow of fresh water. She held his hand while the divemaster explained the currents. The morning sun found diamonds in the dun, quartz-veined rock around the bay.

It was a wall dive, and the wall was sublime. Elkhorn and rose coral. There were clouds of damselfish, angels and tang. The brilliant sunshine dappled it all and descended in great columns of light to the blue-gray deep.

He followed one and moved into the uncolored world of 15 fathoms. The weight of the air took him down the darkening wall. Slowly, deliberately, he took off his tank. It sank with him in a dream, a gala of bubbles. Beyond pain and shadow, her fair, desired, long-limbed form diminished against the sky.