Excerpt from "Sea Note" from Transit of Venus
© 1995 Mark Seymour

Sea note

The two predators, the old one and the young one, sat on the high barstools and watched the herd pass.

"Did you ever, mon vieux..." The young one shook his head in awe. "Did you ever see so many in one place and time?"

"No." The old one shook his head, leonine curls brushing his salt-stained collar. "It looks like the Serengeti during the great migration." He sipped at his single malt and glared at the young one. "And if you must be cosmopolitan, at least use the local language."

"Very well, viejo." The young one nodded. "Though the other is my heritage."

The old one snorted. "Your grandfather may have gotten a French name during his sojourn in Paris, but you're still just a nice Jewish boy from New York."

They laughed, easy and long, as between old friends.

The Cafe Nouveaux sat on a corner of the long Art Deco strip of renovated hotels that overlooked South Miami Beach. The serried ranks of marble-topped tables that fronted it were jammed with slick-haired and open-shirted descendants of expatriates from Havana and yuppie executives from the new reflective glass highrises downtown in tropic-weight suits trying to look hard-eyed through reflective sunglasses and overly-hip model wannabes in laced-up leathers, watching and being watched by the sleek and tanned and elegant women in business suits and sarongs and skintight jeans with pierced-bellybutton-revealing tops and sheer summer dresses and next-to-nothing electric green tangas with matching elbow- and kneepads and rollerblades strolling the narrow band of sidewalk not covered by the tables.

...

They'd come up from a few weeks of diving in the Keys in what the old one always insisted on calling a 'silly big' boat. Sixty eight feet on the waterline and gleaming white, the MV Alonzo [named after some obscure Cuban revolutionary hero; the first revolution, before Teddy Roosevelt got into the act, not the one with the bearded guys in the hills], sat tee'd up to an expensive pier down at the marina, her sleek lines and jutting bow belying the fact that, in any sort of weather, she handled like a first-class sea-going bitch.

They'd come to Florida rather by accident. The young one had been working in construction; not the dirty-hands part of the job, exactly, but not up in the air conditioning either. The old one had been in computers, starting back when computers were big and slow. You wouldn't know it to look at them, because the young one was the leopard of the pair, built lean and taut as a tennis pro, with the carefully coiffed hair and impeccably tailored clothes and expensive white tennis shoes that went with the job. The old one was the lion of the two, built like an aging linebacker for a team that hadn't gone to the Super Bowl in a decade, with a face and hands and a wardrobe which looked as if he'd spent years working on diesels in aging fishing vessels.

Now they were working on a lifetime of gross indolence, due to the young one's skill at finding a previously unknown niche in the telecommunications industry and the old one's ability to move the resulting masses of money into offshore accounts. These accounts, of course, were with banks in countries that had no income tax and no interest in providing information on their account holders to the United States Treasury Department.

The leopard and lion descriptions had been echoed by any number of intelligent young women who'd found their way aboard the Alonzo in various ports along the southern coast of Florida, but had been been created when the old one explained the predator theory of human relations to the young one, back when they'd first started watching women, many years earlier: The scent is the giveaway, the old one had said. When the young one shook his head, just slightly bewildered, the old one sighed. We are predators. Our eyes tend to be closer together, and we smell like meat. They are prey. Their eyes are wideset, and they smell like grass.

Meat? the young one had wondered. Grass?

What are their perfumes? Garland of this and flowering that and spring meadow the other thing. Like prey. While men's perfumes are musk and jungle civit; dead animal smells. He'd smiled. Like predators.

Which was why they found themselves hunkered down on the high ground, satiated with one kind of meat but hungry for another, while the herds of young women, wide-eyed and starting at every quick movement and drenched with lilacs and roses and orchids, passed slowly along the low trail in front of them.

...

She looked down at herself, the inky blackness of her dress pulled tight under her chin, the tanned skin that showed on either side paler for the comparison. She looked up, the enigmatic expression he'd seen in the main cabin earlier back on her face. "I'd like you right here, please." He noted an almost imperceptible shudder before she dropped the dress over the edge of the bed onto the deck.

"Oh, my, yes." The old one slid to the soft carpet and walked to her on his knees. With her kneeling on the bed, his head came barely up to her chin. She bent down, cradling his head in her arms, and fastened those luscious lips to his. Coming up for air a long time later, he couldn't get the grin off his face. "That was delicious." He pulled his chin down, his lips grazing the tops of her breasts, forced upward by the coppery bra. When he looked up, the grin had been replaced by something more respectful. "As, my dear, are those."

She reached up under his chin and unlatched the bra, pulling it slowly away with both hands. "They're so..."

Lost in reverie, watching her pale flesh reveal itself as the copper covering eased away, he almost missed the flash of self-loathing on her face. He'd never known a woman to be far from that edge, whether over-endowed or flatchested as a piling. She probably thought them too big, too shapeless, too something. He thought they were magnificent, and high time to convince her of that. "Well, let's see..." He gently placed a palm on either side, hooking a thumb under each breast. Then, taking a deep breath through his nose, enjoying her subtle perfumes, both applied and self-generated, he buried his face softly between the mounded flesh. Growling low and fierce into her chest, he eased his face first to one side and then the other, his tongue visiting each fiery nipple in turn. With both hard as diamonds, evidence of her desire, he slid upwards to meet her quivering lips. When the deep, wet kiss was over, he smiled again, staring up into her eyes. "They seem to fit just fine."

With some primordial moan, she pulled him with her back onto the bed, her legs magically wrapping themselves around his waist, her arms around his neck. Crooning some sweet tune of lust to herself, she set about kissing every part of his face and his neck and, her fists pulling his shirt roughly aside, his shoulders as she could reach. Then, endangering all the buttons, she somehow got his shirt off and his shorts unbuttoned and urged toward his bare feet. Suddenly he was naked, and so was she, and she was hauling his buttocks toward her with both hands.