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well-to-do ladies. By the time Ali had got the tanks and regulators loaded in the car, Bonham had ordered them one more round of drinks. Then Grant paid and they left.
    Grant hadn’t minded the drinking, or even the paying. He was a good boozer himself, and he suspected Bonham was short of cash. But he was still high with elation over his dive, and he wanted to remain up there with it. It was all very strange, and quite hard to explain, and the only way he could word it was that it made him somehow feel more manly. More manly than he had felt in quite a long time. And he wanted Bonham to himself to talk about it. Not about that part of it, but about the dive itself, and about diving in general.
    “I didn’t know you had any kids,” he said across Ali in the car, in an oblique reference to the PTA. “How many have you got?”
    Bonham appeared suddenly to have become somewhat somnambulant, out in the air and the dark. “Aint got any,” he said, very shortly. “Wife teaches school,” and he motioned vaguely upward with his head toward what appeared to be the left front corner of the car roof, but which was in fact the mountainside along which they were driving and upon which, high up, Grant knew there nestled a school. A ritzy one.
    “I didn’t know you were married,” he said.
    Bonham did not answer right away. “Well, I am,” he said finally.
    Grant hesitated delicately, then made his voice cheery. “Your wife’s Jamaican?”
    “Yeah,” Bonham said immediately and without reservations. “But she’s very light.” He drove on a way before he added, “She’s Jewish axly. Mostly.” Then after a moment he again added: “Columbus gave most of Jamaica to his relatives. So it was mainly them, the Jewish, who were the first settlers.”
    “I’d like to meet her someday,” Grant said.
    Bonham visibly seemed to settle stolidly into some protected interior of his nigh-immovable bulk. From it he spoke calmly. But it, his marriage, was plainly something he didn’t like to talk about, or even think about, apparently. “Sure. You will. Someday. She’s a great girl.”
    “I’m sure,” Grant said. “You know, I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with those two guys at the bar about buying that boat. The Matthews. I don’t mean to stick my nose in. But can you afford—”
    Bonham snorted. “Shit, no. Wish I could. But I wouldn’t buy that boat if I could.”
    “But then why did you—”
    “Because you got to put on that kinda act, that’s why.”
    “But surely those other two g—”
    “Course they did,” Bonham rumbled slowly. “They know exactly how much I’m worth. Just like I know exactly how much they’re worth. And they know I’m not worth that kinda money.” Then his grammar and diction suddenly got precise and educated again. “But that’s the game. I pretend I can. Because that’s the way they all act. That’s the way they function. And when I act the same, it proves to them that I’m like them. I’m normal. Then they’ll accept me. Why do you think I joined that damned PTA? Hell, I joined the Rotary, and the Kiwanis, and the Chamber of Commerce. If you want to be a part of any social group, you have to join in their little rituals.”
    “I’m not at all sure it’s all that easy,” Grant murmured. “I wish it were,” he added sadly.
    But they had reached the shop. Bonham had already stopped the car in the middle of Grant’s two sentences and gotten out, though pausing outside to listen to the end of it, and then began giving Ali his orders without answering Grant: everything was to be hosed down, fresh water, the regulators were to be laid out on the workbench and stripped completely down and washed (Bonham always tore his regulators down after every sea dive and checked them he said, especially the ones used by clients), Ali was to be there at eight in the morning because they had a young couple wanted a pool checkout at the Royal Loggerhead. Under the necessity