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making her own millions modelling for Victoria’s Secret. I said I didn’t imagine Victoria’s Secret used pregnant, intravenous drug users to model their lingerie.
    â€œTrust me on this one, Grace is flying straight these days,” Vernal said , as he filled my water glass.
    I watched as he took a drink from his own, then slipped an ice cube onto his tongue, and crunched it between his teeth. I hadn’t seen ice since I’d left Tranquilandia. There it was generally believed that iced water must by definition be pure, regardless of its origins. At the Clínica Desaguadero it was offered to guests as a medicinal tonic, so clear and cold and western, so incompatible with the sticky cloying island heat. Buried in the ice cube, though, could be a germ that led to delirium and death. I learned quickly, because I had to: it’s the thing you trust that does you in.
    Vernal set his glass down, then reached for my hand. I could smell Grace’s scent, like baby powder, on his skin.

    The first time I’d slept with Vernal I swear I had to beg him to let me take his clothes off. He’d said he’d wanted time to think about it, to be quite sure, because he knew it would be more than just a casual undertaking. He actually used the word undertaking — as if I were a study in the dismal trade. And then when we finally did end up naked he told me to calm down.
    In all things related to love and sex, Vernal exercised caution. A cautious lover was not what I had been looking for. I wanted the dumb thrust of life, not a man who apologizes for making you come so hard it hurts.
    How could I have thought that marriage might be a solution? I was the one who proposed, though whenever Vernal told the story, he gave a different version. “I told her, this is for life. I want you to be my widow.”
    Vernal, I soon discovered, lacked a number of social graces. I blamed the private school he’d gone to, one where the future leaders of our country are sent to learn how to behave like gentlemen. Sex education, otherwise known as the facts of life, was reduced to a single scrap of advice: when you get to the trough, don’t act like pigs.
    Sex education in prison hadn’t been much more enlightened. Our care and treatment counsellor used a strip of masking tape stuck to her arm to describe the effects of multiple sex partners. The first time she used the tape it came away from her arm with bits of skin and hair attached. When she put the tape on someone else’s arm it didn’t stick as well and came away with their skin and hair, also. “Stick the tape to yet another person’s arm and you’ve got biological matter from three people and a tape that doesn’t bond very well.” People, she said, were like masking tape, too.
    Our cabin had two bunks — an upper and a lower. Vernal sat on the bottom one, and pulled off his hiking boots. He wanted my opinion: did I think Grace capable of being a good mother?
    â€œIn what way?” I asked.
    â€œI find other people interesting, that’s all. I didn’t mean to suggest anything duplicitous,” he said, defensively.
    I squeezed into the bathroom and sat on the toilet to let Vernal finish undressing in privacy, wondering what point he was trying to make. He said that if he was looking for a wife again he would expect her to make sacrifices and that he would have to be faithful, too.
    I remembered from living with Vernal that the more intense his feelings, the more likely he was to say the opposite of what he meant. He wanted, always, to maintain a high level of tension by keeping the dialogue evasive, filled with suppressed information and unstated emotions. Conversations with Vernal were like icebergs: most of their weight, their substance, was under the surface, where they could do their best harm.
    â€œAre you trying to tell me something,” I said, pushing the door open with my foot. “Because if you