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summering south of Margarite Port in the more fashionable Hurd’s Reach, invited him to dinner, he went, telling himself it would be rude not to.
    But it wasn’t that at all. He had just turned sixty and knew he had lost something. During the winter, he had begun to drink more—-out of boredom and, he told himself, to ward off the chill. By summer, he had seemed to himself to be a balloon at the end of an insecure tether, floating in an alcoholic ether. There was a terrible urge to escape, and a terrible panic that he might just do that, at long last. So he had asked to paint that silly wicked girl (who agreed out of depthless vanity), knowing that the habit of years would reassert itself; he would stay sober for as long as it took to do it right.
    And he had. But the summer, relentlessly hot, had turned hotter in the light of the humid young flesh he had masochistically displayed before him. He worked madly, with the scent of gin, like ice, in his nostrils.
    Young Dorothy had reclined half in and half out of a patch of shade in a hollow of sand, just out of sight of her bodyguards, lurking in a grove of pine trees where the sea breeze occasionally stirred. Stripped to a pair of baggy shorts, Sartoris had stood in full sun, the broad brim of his old hat shading his face, and the easel protected from the glare by a strange rigging of umbrellas. She had chitter-chattered like a monkey all the six weeks, and it was all clever and nasty, but at least she had kept her body still. He had never spoken to her; there was nothing they could not say to each other with their eyes.
    The afternoon it was finished she had held her tongue for once. Her eyes were busy, as always, speculative, and somehow furtive, and her tongue was forever peeking out between her lips, exposing itself. Her body was glossy, beaded with sweat, and her small greedy hands made a slicking sound as they passed over her breasts. He had watched, in a glaze of sweat, as she made love to herself. At the end, her body had arched, seeking its self-release, and she had laughed. It had been a child’s pleased hoot, and so much more sweet and rotten than the low-throated murmur of a woman’s pleasure.
    Suddenly the old man came to himself again, startled to find he was mildly tumescent. He laughed crudely, as if at some dirty joke, but he knew it was on himself. And he wished deeply he had someone to share it with. Not Ethelyn Blood, who had come to live with him on the island the winter after he had painted the little bitch, nor Nick, who was so often in his thoughts these days. It was Maggie he wanted to share it with, just this moment, and she would laugh. Nobody laughed like Maggie.
    He would find out if she were still alive and call her up. He must have her married name written down somewhere, the one he had never—probably for much too obvious reasons—been able to remember, and the telephone number.
    But no, he wouldn’t call Maggie Jeffries. That was history and he was done with that; he hadn’t any more time for history, for sitting around, mucking about in the long dead and gone. Nostalgia, a contemptible emotion; memory, so much dead skin, vestigial emotion. It wasn’t something he had the energy for anymore.
    There were too many possibilities to be realized in the way the sun struck that glass bit. The light on the sand. The light.
    . . . The only heir to Sartoris’s considerable pile is Nicholas Weiler, the director of the Dalton Institute in Washington, D.C., who, though he uses the last name he was legally bom under, is Sartoris’s natural son by English socialite Maggie Jeffries Weiler.
    Lady Eugenie Walters, known as Pinkie to her pals, reports in her memoirs of the period that her dear friend Maggie Jeffries never really loved anyone else but Sartoris. She continued her affair with him after her marriage to Lord Weiler, apparently with her husband’s consent. Still, it was a surprise when she had the baby that Sartoris promptly acknowledged as