Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,83

daughter is lovely.”

“How nice of you to say so,” I said.

“She’s in college?”

I explained about her transferring to the University of Florida and the summer class she’d taken, how she would be a regular student there in the fall. The fall, as it were, started in a week. Summer was almost finished. As for the tennis team, there were only four weeks left, but I was leaning toward rejoining. During the year the teams traveled and played in tournaments against other country club teams: Delray Beach, Bal Harbor, South Miami, and as far north as Naples, West Palm Beach, even Sarasota.

“I went to UF,” she said. “Where’s she living?”

We’d reached the court and were standing at the net. She was balancing a ball on her racket strings, bouncing it evenly.

“Off campus,” I said.

She cocked her head at me. “For her first year there?”

“Are you ready?” I said.

She turned toward her baseline. “Right, not my business.”

I regretted immediately the tone I’d taken. “It’s just that there are so many little battles,” I said.

She nodded. “Want to serve?”

She won the set 6–4, and when we finished I found Dennis and Margo in the lounge—they’d wandered away mid-game—drinking iced teas at a table in a corner.

“We can see you from here,” said Margo. “You lost?”

“I never get more than a few games off her,” I said.

“Your coach said to tell him before you leave,” Margo said. I thought I noticed a look on Dennis’s face—slightly peeved—but it vanished. I looked around—Jack wasn’t in the lounge, though he might have ducked into his little office. “I’m going to clean up,” I said. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

I showered quickly in the ladies’ locker room. Despite my loss to Jane, I felt a sense of calm pleasure. It was a feeling that often came after exercise, a feeling that I existed in a bubble of peace and leisure, and there was much good ahead. In the hallway outside the locker room, I ran into Jack. From where we stood, all that was visible of the lounge was one side of the bar, where the bartender sat on a stool reading a book. I could not see Dennis and Margo, who were presumably still seated in the far corner of the room.

Jack had changed from his whites into a navy polo shirt, open at the collar. He was a man I could imagine wearing a gold chain, though on most men I found jewelry unseemly. “Nice work,” he said.

“I only won four games,” I said.

“You’re getting there.”

He had a way of staring that glued me in place. “You’re interested in the Thursday night team, right?” he said.

“Probably. I’d like to play some doubles.” The Thursday night team, I knew, assigned doubles partners, and then the players split time between doubles and singles. Every team played on Saturdays, too, but each was known by the evening when they met during the week. There was a Tuesday night team, which was for little old ladies—this was Jack’s assessment—and a Friday night team, which was more or less composed of young moms.

“It’s a good choice for you,” he said.

I took a small step to my right, the start of a move to end the conversation, but he shifted almost imperceptibly to his left, and though he wasn’t blocking me by any stretch, I paused. I said, “We’re off to the Everglades. Margo wants to try frogs’ legs.”

He nodded distractedly. Then he did something that I thought—even in the moment I thought this—was incautious and at the same time uncertain: he reached up and brushed a lock of hair from my shoulder, and then his hand trailed down my arm, and with a look that was both sad and very sexy, he stepped away, through the door of the men’s locker room. There, standing several feet behind where Jack had been, was Margo. Our eyes met. She spoke immediately, which was good because for a split second I feared neither of us would speak. She said, “Are you ready?” and I smiled my most easygoing smile—that smile was, in the end, one of the most duplicitous acts of my marriage—and said, “Yes! This is going to be fun.”

We took an airboat ride through the swamps of Coopertown, population eight, and stopped to watch a family of alligators sunning in the shallows. Water lapped quietly at the tin edges of the boat—it was a flat-bottomed, lightweight vessel with a cage over the propeller, which I knew was standard at least in part