12-07-2026, 01:04 PM
Teller leaned back and picked up his pipe, made a display of lighting it and took in a deep draught of aromatic smoke before releasing it.
“I concede your point, Ms. Bascomb,” he said in a formal tone. “You are a terrible person. In other countries, you’d have the option of Hara-kiri or Seppuku, ritual suicide, to atone for your mistakes. We don’t do that here. But
pills and guns are always available. I believe you told me your husband left a handgun in your home.”
She looked at him, her eyes opened wide in surprise.
“Doctor Teller, are you insane? You’re suggesting I commit suicide because I cheated on my husband?”
He gave her a slight smile.
“No. You were starting to wallow in guilt about what you think you’ve learned and I was just trying to get you to look at the bigger picture. Assume that you have done a terrible thing, or things. There are only a certain number of ways to deal with that problem.
‘You could commit suicide, which would permanently remove your guilt. Of course it would leave your children minus one parent, devastate your family, and even saddle your ex-husband with a mountain of grief on top of the pain you’ve already dealt him.
“Or, you could go to your husband, confess what you’ve done and either beg him to take you back or to forgive you. From what you’ve told me, you don’t want to go back to him and confirming his suspicions of your unfaithfulness would help him to build a new life—exactly how?”
“Or, third option. You could keep your mouth shut, let this secret go with you to your grave. There would be no unpleasant memories for your children or family to live with, and your husband would not have to remember you as a woman who cheated throughout his marriage, instead of at the very end.
“You can do whatever you want, but if you take the third option, you have to live with the guilt of what you’ve done, without trying to unload it on others, be as good a mother and daughter and ex-wife and possibly a future wife, as you can be. You have to live your life and maybe, just maybe, learn from your mistakes. It won’t be as simple or easy as suicide, but it can be done.”
He looked at her and didn’t utter the thought running through his head. “You can live with almost any amount of guilt, if you have to. I know.”
I pointed out into the darkness.
It was dark enough that the horizon was only a faintly darker smudge against the night sky.
“Go about forty five hundred miles in that direction, heading northeast, and you’d be in sight of the French shoreline.”
She didn’t say anything but I knew we were both thinking. Beyond that horizon were her husband and son, her family and her life.
Far away near the horizon there were several moving lights, pinpoints in the darkness so close to the horizon it was difficult to distinguish them from stars hanging low in the night sky.
“Shrimpers,” I said as she followed my finger to gaze at the spot where the Atlantic merged with the sky.
“Maybe cruise ships, but more likely shrimpers coming back into St.
Augustine or maybe heading up to Mayport.”
She leaned back into me and tilted her head back to kiss me. I loved the taste of mint on her lips.
“You think they could be cruise ships?”
“Sometimes they sail this close to the coast, but usually this far north you don’t see them unless they’re heading just north of us back to Blount Island. And there are only a handful. Most of the ships cruise from ports south of us to the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico so you don’t see them often. Although there are some cruise ships that sail from northern ports.”
She turned in my arms and kissed me hard. I felt her nipples as hard little buttons pressing into my tee-shirt.
When she buried her head in the side of my neck, I said, “Do you miss it that much, Aline? Would you rather be out there in the darkness looking back at the shore lights?”
“Maybe,” she breathed heavily, “if you were out there with me.”
I held her in the night and it felt for a moment that the whole world was spinning around us. Nothing had seemed quite real since that moment yesterday when she had appeared as if by magic in my office and was kissing me.
I had known she was gone and never coming back. Her life was on the French cruise ship Bonne Chance which was a maritime gypsy circumnavigating the world. It had stopped in Jacksonville for a while, and then moved on to ports south. It would probably never be back and neither would she.
Which I had told myself over and over in the weeks before the Bonne Chance had finally sailed out for the last time, was a Good Thing. Because Aline des Jardins was a married woman, with a son, and her husband was a good man who had been a friend. Of course, he was also a cheating son of bitch who was screwing half the women in Paris while his wife worked at sea, but with the exception of that one little character flaw, he wasn’t a bad guy.
“Do you think Philippe might object to me becoming a permanent cruise sex buddy?”
She breathed into the side of my neck again. “He will never know. He can never know.”
“I thought you were going to tell him that I had given you the Fleur-de-Lis pendant. Tell him that I was a passenger and you saved my life, sort of. And you would wear the Fleur—de-Lis proudly for the rest of your life. How can you wear it if he can’t know who gave it to you?”
She separated herself from me and stepped a pace back. There was a cooling night wind whipping through the dunes and it caressed her heavy black bangs. The Fleur-de-Lis sat on her chest between her small, but delicious breasts bulging softly out from a light blouse. The moonlight glimmered off the diamond in its center.
“I thought I could tell him and he would never know the truth of what happened, even if he might guess. I thought that he wouldn’t mind, because he’s doing the same thing. But...”
“But what?”
“He’s not a stupid man. The opposite actually. He reminds me of you. He is very, very sharp and perceptive.”
“How can he-“
“You remember I told you that you were different?” “Yes.”
“I told you—the others were—just diversions. They never threatened....Philippe. And I think he knew that. I don’t think he’s ever had me watched. He could tell if...there was someone else...who mattered. But you. ”
“What about me?”
I said the words carefully, the way you’d move around a coiled rattlesnake that you’d discovered sitting on your dresser drawers one morning. This was the thing that had lurked behind every word we’d said to each other since the moment I’d looked up into her eyes yesterday afternoon. It was the elephant in the corner of the room that you couldn’t ignore, but couldn’t acknowledge.
“You want me to say it? To put it into words?”
“One of us has to. Every day after I walked away from you, every single day that I woke up, I had to fight the urge to call you, to go back to the Bonne Chance. Every fiber of my body wanted you. But I couldn’t, because I’d be breaking every rule that I’ve ever lived by, betraying everything I’ve ever believed in.
“But I’m weak willed. I couldn’t go to you, but I couldn’t push you away when you came to me. It doesn’t make it right, what we’re doing.”
She held my face in her hands and kissed me. I felt that same weird sensation of fear that caused the little hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. It wasn’t the night breeze. It was her kiss. It was fear. And now I knew what I was afraid of.
“I told you I felt something when I looked at you the first time, Bill. It was the same feeling, the same emotion, I had years ago when I first looked at Philippe across the room at that party. The night we wound up in his bed. The night he made me his. I am his. And so I can’t be feeling those same emotions now for you.”
She stared at me across a gulf of a few inches with those sea-green eyes that held the ocean in them.
“I can’t be head over heels in love with you. I’m a married woman. I love my husband. I love my son. I have a life and a family. And I shouldn’t be here tonight. So why am I here?”
“Because as I should have told Father Dunleavy, and he would have appreciated the joke, God has a cruel sense of humor. You love Philippe and you have a life you can’t let yourself lose. I don’t have a life anymore but I do have a woman that I shouldn’t love anymore, but I do.”
“You love her even though you don’t want to? What about me, Bill? What do you feel about me? You realize you’ve never put your feelings into words. I don’t really know what you think about me. Except that you like to have sex with me and ... you were grateful to me for helping you get over your cheating slut of a wife.”
There was an odd expression on her face and I tried to analyze it: fear and female pride and worry and something else inexpressible.
“We only known each other for a week. We really don’t know each other at all, Aline. We met in a dream and that’s all we have. But...
“I think...I....might be in love with you. I have feelings for you I haven’t had for anyone other than...Debbie... in 20 years. In the last week I’ve had sex with two women that I liked and it was great sex. But it didn’t mean anything. You meant something.”
I looked across the gulf at her invisible home an ocean away.
“What you are is the person that made me think that life just might be worth living again, that I might not be the total and complete loser that I felt like before I met you. She wrecked my life. You’ve caused me to question everything I’ve
ever believed in, caused me to question whether I’m the good guy I always thought I was.”
I looked back out at the ocean and saw the dark, sharp fangs jutting out from the white-capped tides as the ocean receded. To change the subject, I pointed to them and as she followed my finger, I told her, “They call this the Matanzas Inlet. Matanzas means slaughter. This was a bloody place once.
“ There’s a monument in a park not too far from here. I’ve always known this since I grew up around here and my friends and I used to come here or to St. Augustine in the summers.
“In 1565, the Spanish and French were not being real friendly and they both wanted this piece of real estate. The Spanish killed—slaughtered -- 250 French Huguenots to stake out their claim to the place. They even built a fort like the one at St. Augustine back in the 1700s. It’s gone, not like the Old Fort in St. Augustine, but your people were here a long time ago.”
I watched the rocks slide in and out of the moonlight and told her, “When I was a kid, we used to like to swim out to those rocks at high tide. They’re dangerous. You could get your hands and feet carved up on some of them and kids have banged their heads in a rough surf and gone under, but usually their friends are able to drag them out.”
I took her hand and run her fingers along the underside of the point of my jaw. She felt the scar and gave me a look.
“I was 15 when we came down here one day in July. As usual they had no swimming signs posted although the county would never cough up the money for lifeguards. Rough surf. I went out there and we were horsing around and a wave caught me and smashed me into the big rock the furthest to the right over there. It smashed my chin open. I was seeing stars and it’s a good thing no sharks were around because they tell me I was bleeding like a stuck pig.
“It wasn’t really that big. It only took five stitches to close it up, but it bled like hell. Kids are stupid though. I was out there again the next weekend.”
She leaned into me and kissed the underside of my jaw.
“Do you realize, that is the first time we’ve ever talked about your life—before. Your childhood?”
She had turned away from me and her body shook. I grabbed her from behind and held her to me tightly.
“And you have a life I don’t know anything about. And you are so much more than a shipboard romance.”
“Do you love me even a little bit, Bill? Do you love me even a little bit as much as you love her?”
When I didn’t answer she gave me a sad smile.
“That’s so mean, Bill. And I know it. But I feel mean. And frightened. On the Bonne Chance, I had you in my world. Now I’m in her world. I want to win. I want you to choose me over her.”
I pulled her forward, kissed her one more time, and then:
“You wouldn’t know what to do with me if you won, Aline. Would you leave Philippe for me? Don’t answer that. I already know the answer. What’s the point of waging a fight you can’t afford to win?”
“I concede your point, Ms. Bascomb,” he said in a formal tone. “You are a terrible person. In other countries, you’d have the option of Hara-kiri or Seppuku, ritual suicide, to atone for your mistakes. We don’t do that here. But
pills and guns are always available. I believe you told me your husband left a handgun in your home.”
She looked at him, her eyes opened wide in surprise.
“Doctor Teller, are you insane? You’re suggesting I commit suicide because I cheated on my husband?”
He gave her a slight smile.
“No. You were starting to wallow in guilt about what you think you’ve learned and I was just trying to get you to look at the bigger picture. Assume that you have done a terrible thing, or things. There are only a certain number of ways to deal with that problem.
‘You could commit suicide, which would permanently remove your guilt. Of course it would leave your children minus one parent, devastate your family, and even saddle your ex-husband with a mountain of grief on top of the pain you’ve already dealt him.
“Or, you could go to your husband, confess what you’ve done and either beg him to take you back or to forgive you. From what you’ve told me, you don’t want to go back to him and confirming his suspicions of your unfaithfulness would help him to build a new life—exactly how?”
“Or, third option. You could keep your mouth shut, let this secret go with you to your grave. There would be no unpleasant memories for your children or family to live with, and your husband would not have to remember you as a woman who cheated throughout his marriage, instead of at the very end.
“You can do whatever you want, but if you take the third option, you have to live with the guilt of what you’ve done, without trying to unload it on others, be as good a mother and daughter and ex-wife and possibly a future wife, as you can be. You have to live your life and maybe, just maybe, learn from your mistakes. It won’t be as simple or easy as suicide, but it can be done.”
He looked at her and didn’t utter the thought running through his head. “You can live with almost any amount of guilt, if you have to. I know.”
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2005 -- 9 P.M.
I stood in the dunes in the humid darkness, holding a soft, very sexy bundle of femininity against me, feeling her push the globes of her fantastic ass back against my dick and massage it gently. I nuzzled the back of her neck and drank in the odor of her hair and skin.I pointed out into the darkness.
It was dark enough that the horizon was only a faintly darker smudge against the night sky.
“Go about forty five hundred miles in that direction, heading northeast, and you’d be in sight of the French shoreline.”
She didn’t say anything but I knew we were both thinking. Beyond that horizon were her husband and son, her family and her life.
Far away near the horizon there were several moving lights, pinpoints in the darkness so close to the horizon it was difficult to distinguish them from stars hanging low in the night sky.
“Shrimpers,” I said as she followed my finger to gaze at the spot where the Atlantic merged with the sky.
“Maybe cruise ships, but more likely shrimpers coming back into St.
Augustine or maybe heading up to Mayport.”
She leaned back into me and tilted her head back to kiss me. I loved the taste of mint on her lips.
“You think they could be cruise ships?”
“Sometimes they sail this close to the coast, but usually this far north you don’t see them unless they’re heading just north of us back to Blount Island. And there are only a handful. Most of the ships cruise from ports south of us to the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico so you don’t see them often. Although there are some cruise ships that sail from northern ports.”
She turned in my arms and kissed me hard. I felt her nipples as hard little buttons pressing into my tee-shirt.
When she buried her head in the side of my neck, I said, “Do you miss it that much, Aline? Would you rather be out there in the darkness looking back at the shore lights?”
“Maybe,” she breathed heavily, “if you were out there with me.”
I held her in the night and it felt for a moment that the whole world was spinning around us. Nothing had seemed quite real since that moment yesterday when she had appeared as if by magic in my office and was kissing me.
I had known she was gone and never coming back. Her life was on the French cruise ship Bonne Chance which was a maritime gypsy circumnavigating the world. It had stopped in Jacksonville for a while, and then moved on to ports south. It would probably never be back and neither would she.
Which I had told myself over and over in the weeks before the Bonne Chance had finally sailed out for the last time, was a Good Thing. Because Aline des Jardins was a married woman, with a son, and her husband was a good man who had been a friend. Of course, he was also a cheating son of bitch who was screwing half the women in Paris while his wife worked at sea, but with the exception of that one little character flaw, he wasn’t a bad guy.
“Do you think Philippe might object to me becoming a permanent cruise sex buddy?”
She breathed into the side of my neck again. “He will never know. He can never know.”
“I thought you were going to tell him that I had given you the Fleur-de-Lis pendant. Tell him that I was a passenger and you saved my life, sort of. And you would wear the Fleur—de-Lis proudly for the rest of your life. How can you wear it if he can’t know who gave it to you?”
She separated herself from me and stepped a pace back. There was a cooling night wind whipping through the dunes and it caressed her heavy black bangs. The Fleur-de-Lis sat on her chest between her small, but delicious breasts bulging softly out from a light blouse. The moonlight glimmered off the diamond in its center.
“I thought I could tell him and he would never know the truth of what happened, even if he might guess. I thought that he wouldn’t mind, because he’s doing the same thing. But...”
“But what?”
“He’s not a stupid man. The opposite actually. He reminds me of you. He is very, very sharp and perceptive.”
“How can he-“
“You remember I told you that you were different?” “Yes.”
“I told you—the others were—just diversions. They never threatened....Philippe. And I think he knew that. I don’t think he’s ever had me watched. He could tell if...there was someone else...who mattered. But you. ”
“What about me?”
I said the words carefully, the way you’d move around a coiled rattlesnake that you’d discovered sitting on your dresser drawers one morning. This was the thing that had lurked behind every word we’d said to each other since the moment I’d looked up into her eyes yesterday afternoon. It was the elephant in the corner of the room that you couldn’t ignore, but couldn’t acknowledge.
“You want me to say it? To put it into words?”
“One of us has to. Every day after I walked away from you, every single day that I woke up, I had to fight the urge to call you, to go back to the Bonne Chance. Every fiber of my body wanted you. But I couldn’t, because I’d be breaking every rule that I’ve ever lived by, betraying everything I’ve ever believed in.
“But I’m weak willed. I couldn’t go to you, but I couldn’t push you away when you came to me. It doesn’t make it right, what we’re doing.”
She held my face in her hands and kissed me. I felt that same weird sensation of fear that caused the little hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. It wasn’t the night breeze. It was her kiss. It was fear. And now I knew what I was afraid of.
“I told you I felt something when I looked at you the first time, Bill. It was the same feeling, the same emotion, I had years ago when I first looked at Philippe across the room at that party. The night we wound up in his bed. The night he made me his. I am his. And so I can’t be feeling those same emotions now for you.”
She stared at me across a gulf of a few inches with those sea-green eyes that held the ocean in them.
“I can’t be head over heels in love with you. I’m a married woman. I love my husband. I love my son. I have a life and a family. And I shouldn’t be here tonight. So why am I here?”
“Because as I should have told Father Dunleavy, and he would have appreciated the joke, God has a cruel sense of humor. You love Philippe and you have a life you can’t let yourself lose. I don’t have a life anymore but I do have a woman that I shouldn’t love anymore, but I do.”
“You love her even though you don’t want to? What about me, Bill? What do you feel about me? You realize you’ve never put your feelings into words. I don’t really know what you think about me. Except that you like to have sex with me and ... you were grateful to me for helping you get over your cheating slut of a wife.”
There was an odd expression on her face and I tried to analyze it: fear and female pride and worry and something else inexpressible.
“We only known each other for a week. We really don’t know each other at all, Aline. We met in a dream and that’s all we have. But...
“I think...I....might be in love with you. I have feelings for you I haven’t had for anyone other than...Debbie... in 20 years. In the last week I’ve had sex with two women that I liked and it was great sex. But it didn’t mean anything. You meant something.”
“What does something mean?” “Now who’s playing attorney?”
She wasn’t smiling. She had a dead serious look on her face. “What am I to you, Bill?”
“I love her, Aline. I hate her, but I can’t tell you that I don’t still love her. There’s 20 years of memories and loving. Every day I see something or hear something and a memory of her flashes into my mind. Sometimes I still wake up, after all these months, and I think I’m in our bed at home and I expect to roll over and feel her lying next to me. And then I remember...”I looked across the gulf at her invisible home an ocean away.
“What you are is the person that made me think that life just might be worth living again, that I might not be the total and complete loser that I felt like before I met you. She wrecked my life. You’ve caused me to question everything I’ve
ever believed in, caused me to question whether I’m the good guy I always thought I was.”
I looked back out at the ocean and saw the dark, sharp fangs jutting out from the white-capped tides as the ocean receded. To change the subject, I pointed to them and as she followed my finger, I told her, “They call this the Matanzas Inlet. Matanzas means slaughter. This was a bloody place once.
“ There’s a monument in a park not too far from here. I’ve always known this since I grew up around here and my friends and I used to come here or to St. Augustine in the summers.
“In 1565, the Spanish and French were not being real friendly and they both wanted this piece of real estate. The Spanish killed—slaughtered -- 250 French Huguenots to stake out their claim to the place. They even built a fort like the one at St. Augustine back in the 1700s. It’s gone, not like the Old Fort in St. Augustine, but your people were here a long time ago.”
I watched the rocks slide in and out of the moonlight and told her, “When I was a kid, we used to like to swim out to those rocks at high tide. They’re dangerous. You could get your hands and feet carved up on some of them and kids have banged their heads in a rough surf and gone under, but usually their friends are able to drag them out.”
I took her hand and run her fingers along the underside of the point of my jaw. She felt the scar and gave me a look.
“I was 15 when we came down here one day in July. As usual they had no swimming signs posted although the county would never cough up the money for lifeguards. Rough surf. I went out there and we were horsing around and a wave caught me and smashed me into the big rock the furthest to the right over there. It smashed my chin open. I was seeing stars and it’s a good thing no sharks were around because they tell me I was bleeding like a stuck pig.
“It wasn’t really that big. It only took five stitches to close it up, but it bled like hell. Kids are stupid though. I was out there again the next weekend.”
She leaned into me and kissed the underside of my jaw.
“Do you realize, that is the first time we’ve ever talked about your life—before. Your childhood?”
“We didn’t do a lot of talking on the Bonne Chance, Aline, if you remember.” “No. I know about you and her, a condensed version. But you have a whole life, a childhood, a marriage, I don’t know anything about. She has a lot of those memories. She made them with you. I’m just some woman you had sex with for
a week on a cruise.”She had turned away from me and her body shook. I grabbed her from behind and held her to me tightly.
“And you have a life I don’t know anything about. And you are so much more than a shipboard romance.”
“Do you love me even a little bit, Bill? Do you love me even a little bit as much as you love her?”
When I didn’t answer she gave me a sad smile.
“That’s so mean, Bill. And I know it. But I feel mean. And frightened. On the Bonne Chance, I had you in my world. Now I’m in her world. I want to win. I want you to choose me over her.”
I pulled her forward, kissed her one more time, and then:
“You wouldn’t know what to do with me if you won, Aline. Would you leave Philippe for me? Don’t answer that. I already know the answer. What’s the point of waging a fight you can’t afford to win?”
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