“What?” her father says, missing nothing.
The waitress, who is busy rubbing her father’s sunscreen into her arms, pipes in, “He’s a terrible sailor. And part of it is why he’s in the mess he’s in. I think it’s trauma.”
Her father picks up his sunglasses from the table and puts them on, apparently so he can immediately remove them to strengthen his look of surprise.
“I’m not asking him to captain, Porcospino. I’m asking him not to fall off the side.” To Z, he says, “There’ll be excellent food and excellent service. And I’ve made a reservation at my favorite restaurant in the world for tonight. The only way to get there is by the water.”
He then takes out his wallet and hands a credit card to Z.
“Why don’t you both run down and get some bathing suits and whatever else you need. My daughter says you’re traveling a bit light.”
Z takes the credit card and stares at it. He tries to smile, and it comes out a sort of pained smirk.
“What?” her father says. “I took it for granted that you were a natural at signing other people’s names. Please,” he says, leaning in, “do it for me. Let’s put the intrigue aside and have a lovely day.”
“It’s just the calls,” Z says, trying not to plead. “If something comes through. Shouldn’t we stay here where we can better be reached?”
The waitress’s father reaches down and pulls a coral-colored sweater off a daypack sitting by his feet. With no shortage of fanfare, he fishes out a very impressive-looking satellite phone. “If we lose cell service, Sputnik will find us. I never ski without a beacon, and I never sail without one of these. You, James Bond, might as well relax.”
“He hates those kinds of jokes,” says the waitress, rubbing lotion into the tops of her ears.
“So you told me. But I don’t care. It’s a father’s prerogative. I get to torture any boy you bring home.”
They sail the day away on a massive schooner. They eat and drink at a long wooden table. It’s truly a decadent lunch. They swim off an island Rudolf Nureyev used to own, and the waitress’s father, looking drunk, yells orders up at the crew from the water with a sort of happy gusto. For Z, he sometimes switches to English, as he does when they set sail again, to say things like, “I’ve told them to show us what this boat can really do.”
The crew listens, for they pick up quite a bit of speed, and quite a bit of wind, and the waitress drags Z away from her father and over to a mattress on the bow, where she hugs him, under a blanket, while the boat bucks.
Z’s bare feet turn cold, sticking out from under, while the rest of him feels snug, curled against the waitress, his face buried in her hair.
As if following the pace of the day, they slow as the sun dips, changing course—the waitress’s father explains—for the restaurant. “You’ll go wild for it,” he says, standing over them, with yet another whiskey in his hand. “It’s a private cove, with a private beach. It’s the only thing there.”
“It’s too shallow for a boat like this,” the waitress says. “We moor ourselves, and they send out a skiff to fetch us.”
“Before you even have your napkins in your lap, they bring out plates of sea urchins, still squirming from the lemon juice in their shells.”
“It’s Prince Charles’s favorite,” the waitress says.
“It is,” her father confirms. “But who knows if he has any taste at all.”
It’s good to be rich, is what Z thinks. And good to be powerful. And, without liking her father even a whit more, he is beginning to think that a man this confident and horrible can indeed get him that one seat on that one private plane, where scrutiny will come second to comfort.
This is what he is mulling, when he breaks free of the waitress’s loving arms and heads over to the port side, to try to spot the restaurant.
Z can already hear the engine of the boat coming for them. He can see its light shining, and beyond it, only darkness. The restaurant and its cove seem very far away.
Her father sidles up, and Z says, “It looks like a long ride to dinner. I can’t see the shore from here.”
“That’s why it’s a cove,” her father says. “It’s tucked into the coast. You’ll see it when we get around the bend. Also, sailor, you must know it’s not easy to see straight across water. If you want to see far, look up. The moon, I promise, is distant from here.” As he says this, his face is lit by the light of the approaching craft, and Z sees that he holds the satphone in his hand. “Go get your girlfriend,” he says. “Our lift is here.”
One of the crew turns up with a huge flashlight, which he aims out into the night. Z can see the black tubes of the gunwale gliding their way.
A line is thrown, and the ladder is lowered.
As ordered, Z goes over to the waitress, who is wearing jeans over her bathing suit and, in her bikini top, has that blanket wrapped around her shoulders against the chill.
They stand together, his arm slipped under the blanket and pressed to her bare back, as they watch her father reach down a hand to help pull up the man sent to shuttle them.
It is strange, Z observes, for this man to board when they should be climbing down to join him. It is stranger still how much that very large man, in his windbreaker, looks like the waiter from the restaurant in Paris. As if every burly employee in the service industry had one single face.
As Z makes terrible sense of what he’s seeing, he feels he wants to say something to the waitress, who stands beside him, the blanket already dropped to the deck.
Before he speaks, he sees that she is holding a wet-looking burlap sack, itchy and worn. He wonders where she suddenly got it from and imagines it might have been right there the whole trip, tucked under a coil of rope.
He looks toward the giant Huguenot, who is speaking to the waitress’s father in Hebrew and gripping a fistful of zip ties.
“You see?” Z says to the waitress, and now Z is speaking in Hebrew too, for he knows his beloved must speak particularly well. “I told you. I’m a professional. I spotted that one right off. Even with your father—I thought, he looks too young, and the way he stares at you. This guy, something is off. I don’t miss a thing.”
“But you missed me,” the waitress says.
“Maybe I wanted to miss you.”
“That’s sweet. Very romantic. But still, a fashla of fashlot. In the end, you fucked up good.”
“Don’t I get any credit for picking this one out in Paris?” he says, pointing with his chin.
“Don’t you think you were maybe supposed to?”
The waitress gives Z time to consider. The Huguenot, looking over, points to his watch, and the man who is not her father says, “Nu, Shira!” hurrying the waitress along.