Benchley, Peter by The Deep [txt] Page B

two things: clothes and food. Their sex life had become routine and predictable. Gloria professed a fondness for sex, but she refused to discuss-let alone attempt-ways of making it more interesting. Sanders found himself, during love-making, fantasizing about movie stars, secretaries, and Billie Jean King.
    Soon his work began to bore him. He had proved to himself that he could make money in every kind of market, and he enjoyed both the making and the spending of money.
    But the challenge was gone. He grew restless and began to do careless things.
    He still dreamed, from time to time, of working with Cousteau.
    He kept himself in excellent physical condition, as if in anticipation of a phone call from Cousteau.
    But he was not satisfied with fine-tuning his body: he liked to test it. Once, he intentionally gained ten pounds, to see if,
    as he believed, a special diet he had concocted would strip off the poundage in three days. Another time, on a bet, he set out to run ten miles.
    He collapsed after six miles, but took consolation in a doctor-friend’s statement that-considering that Sanders hadn’t trained for the marathon-he should have collapsed after two or three miles. He saw a television show about hang-gliding-soaring through the air suspended from a giant kite-and determined to build himself a hang glider. He built it and intended to test it by jumping off an Adirondack cliff, until a hang-gliding expert convinced him that his kite was aerodynamically unsound: the wing struts were too weak and probably would have broken, causing the kite to fold up and Sanders to fall like a stone down the side of the mountain.
    There was only one week a year when he wasn’t bored, the week in winter when his children visited their grandparents, his wife went to an Arizona health spa, and he went diving at one of the Club Mediterranee resorts in the Caribbean.
    He met Gail at the Club Med on
    Guadalupe-or, rather, under the Club Med. They were on a guided diving tour of some coral gardens. The water was clear, and the sunlight brought out all the natural colors on the shallow reef. After a few minutes of following the meticulous guide, who stopped at every specimen of sea life and made sure each diver took a long look, Sanders left the group and let himself glide down the face of the reef toward the bottom. He was vaguely aware that he was not alone, but he paid no attention to the figure who followed him. He let himself float with the motion of the sea, turning in lazy circles.
    He swam along the base of the reef, peering in crannies. A small octopus darted across his path, squirting black fluid, and disappeared into the reef. Sanders swam to the hole the octopus had entered and was trying to coax it out of its den, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned and saw a woman’s face, white with fear, her eyes wide and bulging. She made the divers’ signal for “out of air,” a finger drawn across the throat in a slitting motion. He took a breath and handed her his mouthpiece. She breathed deeply twice and passed the mouthpiece back to him. Together they “buddy-breathed” to the surface.
    They reached the support boat and climbed aboard.
    “Thanks,” Gail said. “That’s an awful sensation-like sucking on an empty Coke bottle.”
    Sanders smiled and watched her as she dried herself with a towel.
    She was the most attractive woman he had ever seen-not classically beautiful, but vibrantly, viscerally appealing. Her hair was short and light brown, streak-bleached by the sun. She was almost as tall as Sanders, nearly six feet.
    Her skin was smooth and flawless, except for an appendectomy scar that showed above the bottom of her bikini. Her tan seemed impossibly even: the only patches of skin that were not honey-brown were between her toes, the palms of her hands, and the tips of her breasts, which Sanders saw as she leaned over to stuff the towel under the seat. Her legs and arms were long and lithe. When she stood, the