"You know that's not the way I feel about you."

"No, I don't. I don't know anything of the sort, Dave. But you're a friend, and I wouldn't turn away from you. I just don't want you to lie about it."

She turned off the light and undressed. Her breasts were round and soft against me, her skin tan and smooth in the dark. She hooked one leg in mine, ran her hands over my back, kissed my cheek and breathed in my ear and made love to me as she might to an emotional child. But I didn't care. I was used up, finished, as dead inside as I was the day they slid Annie's casket inside the crypt. The street light made shadows on the banyan and banana trees outside the window. Inside my head was a sound like the roar of the ocean in a conch shell.

The next morning the early light was gray in the streets, then the sun came up red on the eastern horizon, and the banana leaves clicking against the screen window were beaded with humidity. I filled a quart jar with tap water, drank it down, then threw up in the toilet. My hands shook, the backs of my legs quivered, flashes of color popped like lesions behind my eyes. I stood in my underwear in front of the washbasin, cupped water into my face, brushed my teeth with toothpaste and my finger, then threw up again and went into a series of stomach spasms so severe that finally my saliva was pink with blood in the bottom of the basin. My eyes were watering uncontrollably, my face cold and twitching; there was a pressure band across one side of my head as though I had been slapped with a thick book, and my breath was sour and trembled in my throat each time I tried to breathe.

I wiped the sweat and water off my face with a towel and headed for the icebox.

"No help there, hon," Robin said from the stove, where she was soft-boiling eggs. "I poured the beer out at four this morning."

"Have you got any ups?"

"I told you mommy's clean." She was barefoot and wearing a pair of black shorts and a denim shirt that was unbuttoned over her bra.

"Some of those PMS pills. Come on, Robin. I'm not a junkie. I've just got a hangover."

"You shouldn't try to run a shuck on another juicer. I took your wallet, too. You got rolled, Lieutenant."

It was going to be a long morning. And she was right about trying to con a pro. Normally an alcoholic can jerk just about anybody around except another drunk. And Robin knew every ploy that I might use to get another drink.

"Get in the shower, Dave," she said. "I'll have breakfast ready when you come out. You like bacon with soft-boiled eggs?"

I turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, pointed my face with my mouth open into the shower head, washed the cigarette smoke from the bar out of my hair, scrubbed my skin until it was red. Then I turned on the cold water full blast, propped my arms against the tin walls of the stall, and held on while I counted slowly to sixty.

"The bacon's kind of crisp, I guess," she said after I had dressed and we were sitting at the table.

The bacon looked like strips torn out of a rubber tire. And she had hard-boiled the eggs and mashed them up with a spoon.

"You don't have to eat it," she said.

"No, it's really good, Robin."

"Do you feel a lot of remorse this morning? That's what your AA buddies call it, don't they?"

"No, I don't feel remorse." But my eyes went away from her face.

"I was turning tricks when I was seventeen. So you got a free one. Deal me out of your guilt, Dave."

"Don't talk about yourself like that."

"I don't like morning-after bullshit."

"You listen to me, Robin. I came to you last night because I felt more alone than I've ever felt in my life."

She drank from her coffee and set the cup in her saucer.

"You're a sweet guy, but I've got too much experience at it. It's all right."

"Why don't you give yourself some credit? I don't know another person in the world who would have taken me in the way you did last night."

She put the dishes in the sink, then walked up behind me and kissed my hair.

"Just get through your hangover, Streak. Mommy's been fighting her own dragons for a long time," she said.

It wasn't simply a hangover, however. This slip had blown a year of sobriety for me, and in that year of health and sunshine and lifting weights and jogging for miles in the late evening, my system had lost all its tolerance for alcohol. It was similar to pouring a five-pound bag of sugar in an automobile gas tank and opening up the engine full-bore. In a short time your rings and valves are reduced to slag.

"Can I have my wallet?" I said.

"It's under the cushion on the couch."

I found it and put it in my back pocket, then slipped on my loafers.

"You headed for a beer joint?" she said.

"It's a thought."

"You're on your own, then. I'm not going to help you mess yourself up anymore."

"That's because you're the best, Robin."

"Save the baby oil for yourself. I don't need it."

"You've got it wrong, kiddo. I'm going to buy a bathing suit and we're going down to the beach. Then I'm going to take you out to lunch."

"It sounds like a good way to ease yourself back into the bar and keep mommy along."

"No bars. I promise."

Her eyes searched mine, and I saw her face brighten.

"I can fix food for us here. You don't have to spend your money," she said.

I smiled at her.

"I would really like to take you to lunch," I said.

It was a morning of abstinence in which I tried to think in terms of five minutes at a time. I felt like a piece of cracked ceramic. In the clothing store my hands were still trembling, and I saw the salesman step back from my breath. In an open-air food stand on the beach, I drank a glass of iced coffee and ate four aspirins. I squinted upward at the sunlight shining through the branches of the palm tree overhead. I would have swallowed a razor blade for a shuddering rush of Jim Beam through my system.

The snakes were out of their baskets, but I hoped they would have only a light meal and be on their way. I paid a Cuban kid a dollar to borrow his mask and snorkel, then I waded through the warm waves of the lagoon and swam out to open deep water over a coral reef. The water was as clear as green Jell-O, and thirty feet down I could see the fire coral in the reef, schools of clown fish, bluepoint crabs drifting across the sand, a nurse shark as motionless as a log in the reef's shadow, gossamer plants that bent with the current, black sea urchins whose spikes could go all the way through your foot. I held my breath and dove as deep as I could, dropping into a layer of cold water where a barracuda looked directly into my mask with his bony, hooked snout, then zipped past my ear like a silver arrow fired from an archer's bow.

I felt better when I swam back in and walked up on the sand where Robin was lying on a towel among a stand of coconut palms. Also, I had already invested too much of the day in my own misery. It was time to go to work again, although I knew she wasn't going to like it.

"The New Orleans cops think Jerry's in the Islands," I said.

She unsnapped her purse, took out a cigarette and lit it. She pulled her leg up in front of her and brushed sand off her knee.

"Come on, Robin," I said.

"I closed the door on all those dipshits."

"No, I'm going to close the door on them. And like we used to say in the First District, 'weld it shut and burn their birth certificates.'"

"You're a barrel of laughs, Dave."

"Where is he?" I smiled at her and ticked some grains of sand off her knee with my fingernail.

"I don't know. Forget the Islands, though. He used to have a mulatto chick in Bimini. That was the only reason he went over there. Then he got stoned on ganja and dropped her baby on its head. On concrete. He said they've got a coral-rock jail over there that's so black it'd turn a nigger into a white man."