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She had given it to him the night of the moonlight swim, as he liked to call it now, grinningly. She had given it to him, without him even asking for it, almost as soon as he had climbed into the car. It was, he thought, almost as if she felt it was expected of her.

She had picked him out a good one, showing her as it did in a white bathing suit that was startling against the black-tanned flesh, reclining on a GI blanket in the sun before one of those pineappley palmtrees in her front yard, he recognized the tree, and wearing sun glasses and reading, and with one leg up a little showing perfectly the long full lines of thigh and calf converging delicately at the narrowness of knee. All the womanness of her shown in it, reached out demanding male attention, as a crowded street of long legged, tanned, high breasted women will catch your eye and pull your head around without your having even thought about it. If that was all there was, he thought again, for the fifteenth time today, just that womanness of this picture done in breathing flesh, it would be all right. But the picture didnt show it all. And he was not, he realized, a boy who is so rapt by the solemn religious joy of his first female flesh that he is blinded to the existence of the woman wearing it, does not even know or need to know that she exists. It would be fine if you were that, he thought, but you are not, and have not been for some time now, nor will you ever be again. You cant ignore the woman and keep all the rest, even for the first two weeks, though perhaps that would have been the best, if you could have done it.

She had picked him up, he remembered, going over it once again, downtown in Honolulu at the Kau Kau Korner drive-in where the tourists hung out in their rented cars, and where they had decided there was the least chance of being seen by anyone they knew. He had wanted to drive them out, since he knew the way, to the secret little beach out near the Blowhole that he had seen so often riding past in trucks and had thought how it would be such a wonderful place for a man to take a woman, that he had finally climbed down to it once. But she had been afraid to let him drive this car belonging to her husband. He had given her the directions and she had driven, taking wrong turnings twice and getting very nervous, before she got from Kau Kau Korner to Kaimuki and Waialae Avenue that became the Kalanianaole Highway to the Blowhole. Maybe that was what had started it, begun the killing of it, and the way he’d pictured it would be. She’d been two totally different women that day at the house and now this time she seemed to be a third one, unrelated to the other two. They had parked the car up near the Blowhole at a little parkway where there was a concrete marker that said you could see Molokai from here on a clear day, and walked back down. She was, she said, with a kind of frantic effort, “very pleased and happy.” It was all there, the full moon, the small mild surf showing white, the pale sands of the tiny beach set down among the rocks and glowing weirdly in the moonlight, the low wind surfing through the kiawe trees across the highway, and he had brought a bottle and there was a thermos full of coffee and the sandwiches she had brought, and even blankets. It was really all there and very fine, he’d thought, just like he pictured it. She had slipped climbing down the rocks and skinned her arm, and after they had got down she tore her dress, one of her best ones she said, on a snag. They had waded, nude, out into the water, hand in hand, making, he remembered, a fine picture in the moonlight with the water that seemed to run uphill from the beach breathing heavily around their knees. She had gotten chilled and had to go back and wrap up in a blanket. It was then he had given it up altogether, deciding it had been a damn fool thing, his mistake, in the first place. And he had gone back with her, even in the painfulness of feeling so damned foolish, still eager, burning, not feeling any cold at all, and wanting it badly, needing it