the circulating waiters were invisible, and the trays of champagne glasses seemed to float above the crowd on their own. Overnight markets, I heard. Inflation hedges. Interest-rate arbitrage. British accents, German, Spanish, French. Then I remembered the sign in the lobby: an international economics conference.
They were all around me, sweeping in all at once from some forum just ending. I was almost overcome by the scents of aftershave and powder in the tropical heat. Their hands were flying in the exchange of ideas. Their faces were flashing like lightning bugs. I can’t tell you how jealous I was. I thought: These are the sort of people I belong with.
Then there was Charlotte’s nasty voice again: Pigs!
And I asked myself: Were they pigs?
And then this probably ugly thought came to me: the new Jews.
I tried to stamp it out, but you can’t take back a thought. And the idea finished itself in my mind despite my attempt to stop it: There was a time when only Jews did my sort of work—protected the treasures of kings and pashas and sheiks. When only Jews minded the fruits of taxes, allegiances, tributes, raids, robberies, wars, sieges, rapes, murders. And I suddenly saw myself in the long history of money: successor to the millennia of Hebrews who had handled filthy lucre to keep “clean” the consciences of pashas and popes.
The patient laughed.
So maybe it’s right that I’m a Jew. Maybe I’ve been training to be a Jew my whole life.
It got late, she went on. The couple at the end of the bar left. The wind picked up. Dead palm fronds scraped the paving stones. I intended to drink, lose myself in a few martinis, like Mother. Why not? There is some glamour, some easing of life, that can come from sitting at a good bar with a well-made drink. The martini, for instance. The bartender made it just as I’d been trained to do: a little ice slick, clear and light, resting on the surface in a dead man’s float.
But then the barman stretched and yawned. Yawned. And any hope of glamour vanished into the maw of that yawn. Now I could see there was only the empty patio, a man behind the bar wanting to go home, another man sweeping, a maid shining the leaves of a rubber plant. At the reception desk across the patio: a single person, a man, his head on his chin.
The patient settled her bill and walked down to the sea, first along a lighted path, then through a phony “jungle,” then past a phony “lagoon,” and finally came to the real sand.
The beach was empty; there was no moon. She removed her shift and stood still, wearing only her underpants. The breeze was colder than she’d expected. Goosebumps came up on her arms. Her nipples hardened. She took her breasts in her hands and softly kneaded them, for the warmth, she told herself. But then for the pleasure. Without moonlight, the sand was barely paler than the sea, which was at low tide, drained, unable to lift itself to lap at the shore. She walked out thirty paces before the water got to her knees. She wouldn’t get to a good swimming depth until she’d walked a hundred yards out to sea.
Then she remembered what Dr. Schussler had told her. Be careful with yourself, the doctor had said. And she turned back.
The pool was lit with soft green underwater lights, the patient noticed as she walked back to her room. She wasn’t ready to sleep, she realized as soon as she had closed the door behind her. She put on a bathing suit, then went back to the pool, where she found a low diving board. She performed a swan dive, then surfaced and tried to sprint in the too-warm water. But the pool’s curving walls made any serious swimming impossible, and she was aware, anyhow, that her aggressive splashes echoed too loudly against the hotel facade in the quiet night.
She stretched out on the surface, trying to be as light and clear as the wisp of ice on her last martini, to be nothing, a slick held up by water.
When suddenly something skimmed the underside of her body, like a large fish—
She jumped upright.
Laughter came from the dark side of the pool. Then a woman’s voice saying, I’m sorry. It is only that I cannot sleep.
The patient paddled toward the voice, which had spoken with a soft accent the patient couldn’t identify. In the shadows