Chapter One
In the time it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune?s
Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to
the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she
learns about desire. Desire that slows the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in
the midst of uttering a sentence, that focuses the gaze absolutely on the progress of
naked feet walking toward the water. This first brief awareness of desire—and of
being the object of desire, a state of which she has had no previous hint—comes to
her as a kind of slow seizure, as of air compressing itself all around her, and
causes what seems to be the first faint shudder of her adult life.
She touches the linen brim of her hat, as she would not have done a summer earlier,
nor even a day earlier. Perhaps she fingers the hat?s long tulle sash as well. Around
her and behind her, there are men in bathing costumes or in white shirts and
waistcoats; and if she lifts her eyes, she can see their faces: pale, wintry visages
that seem to breathe in the ocean air as if it were smelling salts, relieving the
pinched torpor of long months shut indoors. The men are older or younger, some ... read full excerpt from Fortune's Rocks ebook
