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comment on the New York theatre did not seem, for the moment, quite the most brilliant form of male display.
     
     
Soon afterward the steel-band music began, and they went to the terrace that faced the beach. Part of this terrace was the bar, the rest an open red-tiled space where many couples were dancing. Barefoot lean black boys, in ruffled red-and-yellow shirts and old slacks, stood in one corner, shuffling and hopping as they beat out strange music with sticks on old fuel-oil drums, hacked short, brightly painted, and hung around their necks on straps. The shallowest drums, cut to pans, produced treble notes; the larger ones rang in lower octaves, and on three whole drums one boy was pounding bass rhythm. Paperman couldn't understand how these chopped-off oil containers produced melody, but the music was real enough: mournful, monotonous, a few minor-key phrases pounded over and over and over. This insistent syncopated monotony was disturbing and sweet: Boum-di-boum bourn, tim tim tim, boum-di-boum bourn-The dancing couples rocked their hips in a step that wasn't the rumba, or the samba, or any dance he knew. Negroes were dancing together, so were whites, and there were black men with white girls, and white men with black girls. Paperman had seen this kind of mixing in gloomy dives in Paris and New York, but the striking thing about this scene was the respectable look of the dancers, black and white alike. The Negro men all wore suits and ties, and the girls bright dance frocks. Only some whites were dressed in shorts and sandals. There were older couples too; one enormous black woman in brown satin was twirling and swaying with elephantine grace, and her partner was a grayheaded white man who might have been a minister on vacation.
     
     
Iris Tramm at his elbow said, "Something different, isn't it?"
     
     
"God, yes."
     
     
"Well, you go and join His Excellency. Bob and I will have one dance, and then we'll be along."
     
     
"Can you do that dance?" Paperman said to Corm. "It looks so complicated."
     
     
"It's in the knee action. Watch."
     
     
Cohn took Iris easily in his arms and the two of them rocked away, Mrs. Tramm's hips tracing a sinuous curve across the floor.
     
     
Reena Sanders welcomed Norman with a warm smile as he approached the round table in the bar, where the governor's party had returned. "Hello, there. Sit next to me. Alton, this is Mr. Paperman."
     
     
The governor stood, and gave him the strong quick handshake of an American. Sanders had a white man's face, long-jawed and lean, with a small mustache, and two deep vertical creases on either side of his thin mouth. But his skin was lemon yellow, and his grizzled hair was woolly, "I hope you're enjoying our little island," he said with a dour grin.
     
     
"I'm falling in love with it."
     
     
"That's what we like to hear. I'm sorry your partner isn't with you tonight." The governor lit a cigarette with skinny stained fingers.
     
     
"Well, I daresay Lester'll show up."
     
     
Mrs. Ball, sitting straight in a chair next to the governor's, said through a toothy smile-she was heavily painted, but it was not unbecoming-"Mr. Atlas has boundless energy. I called a cab for him about five. He was going to explore the island."
     
     
Paperman said, "I understand there's a rumor that Lester's going to put up a huge hotel here. There's really nothing to it, Governor. I'm interested in buying this club. Lester's a friend of mine, and he came along to advise me on the money end. That's all."
     
     
"We like financiers visiting us, for whatever reason," the governor said.
     
     
Paperman was soon drawn into the conversation with the Africans. He knew French better than he had admitted; he had whiled away a year in Paris, in his early twenties. He found it piquant that the black men in barbaric robes spoke this cultured tongue so well. One was a doctor, the other an engineer, and they were both United Nations delegates. At the moment they were