Connected

Fifteen minutes before sunset, a catamaran deposited wedding guests onto sand the white of fine china. Gary remained on the sailboat beside Melissa, whose gray-black locks hung loose in the tropical humidity. Seven months pregnant, she leaned into him, smelling of the avocado shampoo with which the maid service stocked their bathroom and something else, citrusy, lulling. Gary wondered if she'd purchased perfume from one of the hotel gift shops that afternoon while he'd been zipping around in a borrowed speedboat with Maurice and Maurice's six groomsmen. In his twenties, Elaine's fiancé liked to tell people, he had apprenticed under the best chefs on Saint Thomas, and in getting married on a secluded beach of Saint John he was realizing a lifelong dream. For days he'd wanted to show his Chicago buddies and anyone else who would come along a sunken sport-fishing launch only the locals knew about. It would take two hours, he kept telling people, to get to where a crow's nest stuck up out of the sea like "a lifeguard's chair," and Gary had been on the verge of bowing out when his sister phoned his hotel room to tell him how much it would hurt Maurice, and her, if he did.

"I know you're thinking about it," Elaine said. "I know you. That's why I'm calling."

"I drank too much Brugal Anejo at the rehearsal dinner," he told her. "Mel's in the bathroom throwing up. And you want me to go with your fiancé on a boat trip?"

"Uh-huh," she said.

Though he could barely read, Maurice claimed he had never been lost, that taken anywhere in the world he could find his way home without benefit of a map, compass, or even money. He was an explorer, an adventurer, a citizen of the world, as comfortable, according to Elaine, taking a friend's Formula One on a trial run as he was talking to diplomats, or men playing chess in the park, on their own turf and in their own language, which he acquired at a conversational level after no more than a half hour's exposure.

"It's astonishing," she had testified to Gary during a break from the Modern Language Association's annual conference, having witnessed with her own eyes and ears Maurice, born and raised in Jefferson Park twenty minutes from O'Hare, carrying on with Cretan farmers at the ruined palace of Cnossus about Marxist politics, with champagne producers in Epernay about Chirac's foreign and domestic policies, with Alexandrians honeymooning at the pyramids about Israel's occupation of the West Bank.

"Maurice believes in a universal language. According to him, the less one knows about any single tongue the more open one is to speech in all its forms. Frankly, I've never seen anything like it, Gair. His mind's a steel trap. Everything he hears stays there. It doesn't matter what language it's spoken in. It's as if he's able to extrapolate all the rules of grammar from a few snippets of overheard speech."

Gary and she had taken a cab to a French seafood restaurant in Georgetown. They were sitting in a booth by a window that looked onto Wisconsin Avenue. "And he's illiterate?"

"He reads 'Peanuts' at breakfast. It takes him minutes but he reads the entire strip. Then he asks me to quiz him on it."

Gary laughed. They were English professors, he at the University of Minnesota, she at De Paul, with a devilishly witty mother who'd instilled a love of tropes in them each before she'd died. As Elaine told him about her plans for a January wedding a little over a year away, the corners of her mouth turned up forming adorable quotation marks on her cheeks. He hadn't seen her this animated since before their mother's funeral. She and Maurice had returned from a five-day "reconnaissance mission" to Saint Thomas, and the sun and humidity had imbued her skin with a lush radiance. With her wheat-colored hair knotted loosely...