“If you say so.” His wife headed for the kitchen. “I’m having a drink. Want one?”

Boyd Shreave stood at the window and watched the neighbor’s tiny Jack Russell take a mastiff-sized dump on his lawn.

Lily returned with two strawberry daiquiris and thrusted one at him. “Might as well get into the tropical spirit.”

Shreave raised the glass and said, “To Dr. Garfield.”

“Ha! To hell with that quack,” Lily said. “I bet I can cure you quicker.”

Her mischievous tone caused Shreave to hack out a nervous chuckle. He had not forgotten the aborted bagel-shop blow job, or the attempted red-thong seduction on the couch.

“Sit down,” she said, motioning toward a wingback chair. “Sit and enjoy.”

“Lily, this isn’t a game.”

“Oh relax. I promise not to lay a hand on you.”

“You better not.”

“I swear on Daddy’s grave.”

What grave? Shreave thought. The man was cremated and scattered over a golf course designed by Fuzzy Zoeller.

“Boyd, sit,” said his wife.

He surrendered his daiquiri and sat.

“Excellent. Now shut your eyes,” she instructed.

“What for?”

Lily put down the two glasses and said, “You want the cure, or not?”

Shreave squeezed his eyelids closed, half-expecting her to latch onto his crotch. He decided to stage a fainting episode if that happened-complete with convulsions and flecks of spittle.

“Clear your mind of every distraction, every random thought,” his wife said, “except for one. I want you to focus all your concentration and energy on this simple image until it fills your whole consciousness, until you can’t possibly think about anything else even when you try.”

“Okay, Lily.” Shreave assumed that she was cribbing from Deepak Chopra or some other flake.

She said, “Boyd, I want you to focus on the fact that I’m not wearing any panties.”

That’s original, he thought.

“Think about the tight jeans I’m wearing. Think about what you could see if you really tried,” Lily said, “but don’t you dare peek.”

That’s what Boyd Shreave was tempted to do. Despite his determination to remain unaroused, he found himself imagining in all its velvet detail the very thing that his wife wanted him to imagine. How she loved tight pants! “Smuggling the yo-yo,” she called it.

“What’s the point of this?” he asked somewhat shrilly.

“Hush.”

He heard a zipping noise and then the unmistakable sliding of fabric on skin as she pulled off the jeans.

“Come on, Lily, don’t.”

“Just take a deep breath. Let yourself go.”

“You don’t understand. This is an irrational fear that’s out of my control.” He was quoting from the unofficial aphenphosmphobia Web site. “Are you trying to humiliate me, or what?”

“Boyd, open your eyes,” his wife said, “and look down.”

He did.

“Now, tell me you don’t want to be touched,” she said. “Tell me that’s not a happy, sociable cock.”

It was hard to argue the point. As Boyd Shreave assessed the telltale tent pole in his pants, he began to reconsider his staunchly monogamous commitment to Eugenie Fonda. The sole reason he’d been deflecting Lily’s advances was to avoid the rigors and inconvenience of maintaining two sexual relationships simultaneously. However, Shreave’s domestic agenda recently had changed, as had his outlook. Tomorrow he was jetting off to start a thrilling new chapter of an otherwise drab and forgettable life; what possible harm could come from a quick good-bye fuck with his wife?

“Boyd?” said Lily.

He looked up and saw her stretch like a sleepy lioness on the Persian carpet. He noted approvingly that she’d been truthful about her lack of underwear. Her blouse and heels lay in a pile with the blue jeans.

He said, “Okay. You win.”

“What do you mean?”

Shreave rose and briskly began to unbuckle his belt. Lily studied him curiously.

“Go to town,” he said, dropping his pants.

She sat up and drew her knees together, blocking her husband’s view of the shadowy treasure.

By now he was nearly levitating with lust. “It’s okay, honest,” he said. “Grab all you want.”

Lily’s brow furrowed unpromisingly. “That’s not how this therapy goes. The first stage is look but don’t touch.”

“Excuse me?”

“Like you said, Boyd, this is a very serious disorder. I’d never forgive myself if you had a coronary or something while I was sucking you off.”

“I’m willing to take that chance,” Shreave declared with a desperate stoicism. “I feel good, Lily-in fact, I feel terrific. It’s what they call a breakthrough!”

“No, let’s wait to see what the experts at Garfield say. We shouldn’t try anything too wild until we’re sure it’s safe.”

“But I’m fine,” he squeaked, watching sadly as his wife wiggled into her clothes.

“We definitely made progress tonight,” she added brightly. “I can’t wait till you get back from Florida-we’ll do it all night long, if the shrinks say it’s okay. We’ll touch our brains out.”

“Yeah. All night long,” he said.

Lily blew a kiss and vanished down the hallway.

Boyd Shreave tugged up his pants, sat down and, during detumescence, polished off the slushy dregs of his daiquiri. He was not one who appreciated irony, so at that moment all he experienced was a loutish sense of deprivation.

Because he had no intention of coming back from Florida. He would never again see his wife naked on the carpet.

Dismal Key is a crab-shaped island located on the Gulf side of Santina Bay, between Goodland and Everglades City. Local records list the first owner as a Key West barkeep named Stillman, who planted lime groves on Dismal and shipped the fruit to market on a schooner called the Oriental. Stillman died in either 1882 or 1883, and thereafter the mangrove island was purchased by a hardy South Carolinian named Newell, who took residence with his wife and their four children. They stayed until 1895, no small feat of endurance.

After the turn of the century, Dismal Key became a way station for itinerant fishermen and a home for a series of self-styled loners, the last of whom was a whimsical soul named Al Seely. A surveyor and machinist, Seely was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 1969 and informed that he’d be dead in six months. With a dog named Digger, he took a small boat to Dismal Key and occupied an abandoned two-room house with its own cistern. There he began writing an autobiography that would eventually fill 270 typed double-spaced pages. For a hermit, Seely was uncommonly gregarious, providing a guest book for visitors to sign. Still very much alive in 1980, he welcomed a group of local high schoolers who were working on a research project. To them he confessed that he’d moved to the Ten Thousand Islands with the notion of killing wild game for food but had found he didn’t have the heart for it. He lived off a small veteran’s pension and the occasional sale of one of his paintings.

“People often ask how Dismal Key got its lugubrious name. I wish I knew,” Seely wrote in his journal, discovered years after he vacated the island. “But since I haven’t as yet turned up even a clue, I suggest that they visit me during July or August when the heat, the mosquitoes, and the sand flies are at their rip-roaring best and they will at least discover why it’s not called Paradise Key.”

On the January morning when Sammy Tigertail beached his stolen canoe on Dismal Key, the temperature was sixty-nine degrees, the wind was northerly at thirteen knots and insects were not a factor. Gillian was, however.

“I’m starving,” she announced.

Sammy Tigertail tossed her a granola bar and hurriedly began unpacking.

“Is this supposed to be breakfast?” she asked.

“And lunch,” he said. “For dinner I’ll catch some fish.” He worked fast, expecting at any moment to hear the ranger helicopter that patrolled Everglades National Park. That he was two miles outside the park boundary would have been pleasing news to Sammy Tigertail, who knew neither the name of the island nor the route that had led him there.