Perry emerged from the bowels of the Rapscallion to greet the brilliant reds and oranges of the afternoon horizon, a bottle of '62 shiraz in his right hand and two long-stemmed glasses in his left. He'd won the vino early that morning, the spoils of his third-set tie-break victory over fellow derivatives trader and worthy tennis adversary Omar, avenging a recent clay-court trouncing at the hands of the spry Saudi.

Now, with the stimulant of athletic triumph still coursing through his system and the idyllic San Diegan nightlife beckoning, the time was nigh to sample the choice vintage.

As he sauntered along the deck of the ship, his locomotion slow and viscous like syrup, Perry inhaled the expanse of the harbor; he could feel the marine life swimming in his lungs, could taste the salt of the Pacific on the tip of his tongue. All was his now, and the seaport and his body became inextricably one, like a hand sheathed in a tailored glove.

When he found himself at the craft's stern, he carefully guided the opaque wine bottle into one of the unoccupied, triangular nooks of the wine rack he'd built into the port side of the ship, just one of the many customizations he'd personally designed for the vessel and built on her. He then plumbed the depths of the front-right pocket of his razor-creased linen slacks in search of a corkscrew and, after locating the fugitive instrument, retrieved the shiraz from its temporary nest.

As he burrowed the stainless steel of the corkscrew into the pliant stopper and uncorked the bottle with a loud pop!, Perry noticed his wife Lydia ascending the steps from the cabin below, materializing first as little more than a honey-colored ponytail but eventually as an entire long-limbed, Teutonic goddess. When she reached deck level Lydia instinctively turned stern-side and, upon her eyes meeting Perry's, mouthed a silent, sultry hello.

Perry smiled. Playful zephyrs continued to roll in off the water, the waves of his downy, chestnut beard mirroring those breaking against the shoreline. As Lydia traversed the ship he studied his wife's approach, the manner in which her hips rocked to and fro like a pendulum; he'd long joked with Lydia that hypnotherapy was her true vocation, that her serpentine gait could lull any man into a dream state. As she stood before him in a navy cocktail dress and pearls, he was grateful that he'd never become too vociferous in suggesting this career trajectory, as it would necessarily involve the sharing of his wife's undulations, unthinkable even in the most professional of contexts.

Having reached her husband, Lydia craned her neck to kiss him, her eyes sealed tight like coffins as she picked her high-heeled right foot up off the deck so that she stood like a flamingo. Ever the contortionist, Perry wrapped his arms around his wife's waist such that he still had ample room to pour the wine behind her back, measuring out a perfect amount with nary a globule wasted to the deck. When her eyelashes parted Lydia marveled at the shiraz in the glass, his sleight of hand the latest addition to his growing list of talents. Pleased by his own ingenuity, Perry emptied three fingers of the red into his own stemware before taking a seat on the cream-colored leather bench running the length of the stern, his back to the surf. He then kicked off his Topsiders, first the right, then the left, and set his bare feet on the glossy parquet of the ship's deck, still warm from a day of unobscured sunshine.

Grabbing her dress by the hem and inching it ever so slightly up her bronzed thigh, Lydia took a seat on her husband's lap. With the sun now just a hazy sliver embedded in the purple firmament, she raised her glass to her lips and imbibed of her husband's prize, the blackberry and pepper of the wine warming her insides. Lydia then wiped an errant drop that had escaped her lips with a finger, her gaze fixed upon an object seemingly miles and miles beyond the horizon.

"We've made it, haven't we darling?"

Perry drank of his wine, his wife's query floating in the summer air, carried off into the heavens.

"Yes, I suppose we have."

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