It gives the man who can do it a disturbing flavor of competence. Disturbing to me. I sat up in the bunk and watched him when he first started moving around on his boat with that light. I didn’t know he was back. Nobody knew when he was coming back, and I couldn’t make a point of asking directly. At a house party, they said, over on the other coast. In Naples. Rigsby is quite a man for house parties, they told me. I should have known from the picture the agency got for me that he would look the way he does. The light reflected on him off the whiteness of the deck, and I saw the hard blunt bones in his face, the taut bulge of his shoulders, the muscular thickness of a forearm. I told myself the picture had been taken a long time ago, and that now he would be softer, older, more vulnerable—not so hard and fit. Were I objective enough, I would know perhaps how childish I am being. Shoveling those tons and tons of sand to bring the muscles back and slim away the executive belly. Buying a boat and learning how to handle it.
