(She has changed to a two-piece black bathing suit, and, when she comes up from below, she touches his shoulder briefly, the distant tenderness so intense. When I look back she sits across his lap, the two entwined at first difficult to discriminate. The long slow dance of an afternoon on a white boat.)
As their embraces increase and lapse and the sun resumes, I find myself longing for them to go below and out of sight. Looking to the opposite South Shore I think of the houses back in the hollers beyond this bluff, how there eroticism is unknown or known differently, wordless, hard and insistent, often incestuous. A function of class? The ability to sustain the dance in sunlight and distance. Her touch shines on his shoulder at a distance like oil on water or the sheen of fat on crumpled foil.