I tried to look like a man who had no memory—who regarded the earth as if it were a big flower. "Hot," I agreed. "But I'm one of those unbearable souls who likes it that way."
"Me, too," said Marcia. "Two winters ago, I went to Miami. I was crazy about it—"
It was a defiant thing to say. For that was where I'd seen her—with Dave Berne, one morning when I'd stopped at his hotel, early, to take him fishing.
"A young lady left over from last night," he said.
Miss Somebody-or-other, he had said. Marcia breakfasting in his bed. She exposed a nude shoulder to wave at me from the other room. Dave paid her and we went away.
He caught his first sailfish that day.
I supposed, now, that Marcia was offering me the opportunity to ask if I hadn't seen her in Miami; I supposed she had pointed out the hurt to let me, if I wished, open it up. Paul had crushed his napkin. He was sitting beside her and across from me—wondering, probably, how to turn the conversation away from the heat wave, the weather, to a less self-conscious, more profitable subject.
"Workin'?" he asked.
"Miami," I said to Marcia, "is quite a place." Then I said to Paul, "Yeah."