Among the Living (64 page)

Jimmy opened the wine. When it popped, there was a response from the guys on the boat across the way. Maybe, “Cheers!”

“I don’t know them,” Mary said. “They came in a few days ago, sailing down the coast, I think.”

Jimmy got that she was also saying,
I wouldn’t be here if I knew them.

But at least she seemed to have lost the anger. “You know what you said yesterday?” she said. “About how it was still so strong?”

He gave her a glass, found a place to stow the bottle, and sat beside her. He didn’t know if it was a question she meant for him to answer or not.

She seemed to finish her own thought by drinking half of the glass of wine. Punctuation.

She took his hand now. He brought their hands up and kissed the back of hers, something he never would have done if anyone could have seen. He was different when they were together. Always.

He tasted the wine. It was a rich Chianti.

“Are you cold?” she said.

“No.”

“People from L.A. are always cold up here, always talking about it.”

“I hate L.A.,” Jimmy said. He didn’t mean it.

“That’s not true.”

“I’m never going back.”

She surprised him by taking him seriously, like the girl she used to be. It was something else she used to do, something else that made her different from all the rest.

“You know, it never stopped for me,” he said.

The sailing-down-the-coast guys laughed loud and rough at something.

Mary moved away from him just enough for him to notice. He followed her eyes. She was looking at the dots of house lights out on the point, above the village, or maybe she was reacting to the intrusion of the guys on the other dock.

“Is the boat yours or his?”

“Mine. He never comes down. He bought it, but he forgets it’s even here.”

There was another laugh from the men across the way, as if her last line was the punch line to the one about the cardiologist and his restless young wife.

Jimmy stood. He put his wineglass in the teak holder next to the wheel and went forward.

Mary thought he was going to say something to the other sailors. “Jimmy,” she said.

But then she saw him kick off his slip-on shoes.

The
Queen Mary
, this
Queen Mary
, was stern-out, its back to the Bay. Jimmy stepped off the boat onto the dock with the balance of a dancer, already getting into the rhythm. He unhitched the bowline with a twirling figure eight, like a cowboy with a lariat. He stepped back onto the boat and curled the line in a circle on the deck, one-handed, another trick. He lifted the white fenders up and over the rail as he came aft and undid the second sheet and the stopper line. He put his foot against the dock and gave it a gentle push. The planks, the cap of the piling backed away.

Mary just watched him through all this. There seemed to be pleasure in it for her, whether it was because of a memory or just the pleasure for women that comes when men finally act. And become themselves, or at least what they think of as themselves. She took the key out of her sweater pocket, a single key on a chain with a fat marshmallow float. She held it out to him. He put it in the ignition and turned it over a click, but not enough to start the engine. He snapped on the nav lights.

He hoisted the main while the stern was still coming around, the boat sliding away from the dock, all from his one push. When she was around, with the sail still just coming up, it caught wind, and the boat started forward across the flat marina water splattered with reflected lights.

It was all pretty slick as moves go, slick and quiet, no engine, and when Jimmy sailed by the men aboard the Hunter on the other dock, they tapped their beer bottles against the rub rail in approval.

Mary went below. She was gone a minute. When she came back to the cockpit, she had on full weather gear, jacket and pants. Everything but a nor’wester hat.

Jimmy had gotten them out past the tip of Belevedere Island already, headed toward the Golden Gate, Sausalito off to the right.

“So, we’re making a passage,” he said, about her change of clothes. “Hawaii.”

“Catalina,” she said. That’s where they used to sail.

She settled back in beside him. He was standing behind the wheel, one hand down to steer. The sail began to luff a little. Without thinking about it, Mary leaned forward and pulled in the sheet looped around the winch and cleated it.

“Who’s sailing this boat?” Jimmy said.

“You are, sir,” she said.

And then they didn’t say anything for thirty minutes.

Not a word.

Not a memory, not a question.

Not a promise, not a hope, not a regret, though their heads must have been filled with all of those things.

Night sailing. Jimmy didn’t know anything like it, anything that combined the serenity, the mysticism, the calm, with that underlying sense of danger, that sense of things that
could
go bump in the night. There was the bright fire of the City to his left, the rust red arc of the bridge ahead, and, beyond it, a kind of darkness not duplicated anywhere else, only over water. There it was, all of it, wide-screen. The wind was light, but there was enough of it to raise some chop, to occasionally throw up a burst of spray, like a handful of confetti. Everything was warmer than Jimmy would have expected it to be. Maybe it was the tide, the famous tide that caught the Alcatraz escapees all those years ago. So the cops said, anyway. The Bay seemed empty. Maybe it was just a trick of the mind. Jimmy wondered when it was most crowded.

He also wondered what would happen if he just kept going.

He stayed on the same track until just shy of the Golden Gate when he came about. It was then that Mary came up beside him at the wheel. She reached across him, put her hands over his. He thought first that it was a tender gesture, but then he realized she wanted the helm. He pulled his hands out from under hers.

She changed his course. She changed his trim on the sail. The boat immediately picked up speed, moved more cleanly through the water. He found his Chianti and sat with his back to the cabin, sailing backward so he could look at her, with the lights behind her, almost like a corona. It was something else he remembered about her, the way she didn’t just sit there, even when she was just sitting there. She was always moving. It was like each moment made him replace some soft-focus sense of her from memory with the reality of her. Of Mary. Now what was before him was vivid and strong and undeniable. Here.

He wanted to give her whatever she wanted.

He had
that
feeling.

Jimmy followed her eyes, looked over his shoulder. Ahead there was a large fishing trawler, halfway across the Bay, heading out from Oakland probably, ablaze with deck lights, covered with fast-moving shapes, crew, draped with nets on cranes. It was still a half mile away but bearing down, an intersecting course, insistent enough, big enough, to stir something in the blood.

Mary kept her hand on the wheel as she dug in the cabinet under the seat and came out with a yellow-and-black battery lantern. She pointed it up at the sail, not turning it on until it was aimed away from their eyes, to preserve their night vision.

The sail sprang into whiteness, tall as a billboard.

“Let them see us,” she said.

Even from a third of a mile out, they heard the change in the pitch of the other’s engines. A big thing had yielded.

On the lee of Alcatraz, the wind slacked. Mary eased the boat up into it, to catch what she could. Jimmy tried to suss which cluster of lights ahead was Tiburon, the marina, the restaurants. He thought she was turning for home.

But he was wrong.

She reached forward and started the engine, waited to see that it caught, then started forward to drop the main. Jimmy reached over to steady the wheel, though it was steady enough on its own. He could tell that she was used to sailing alone, even a boat this big. She stood by the boom on the foredeck, atop the cabin, pleating the sail, left right left, as it collapsed onto itself, then looping and tying the stays when it was down. She came back to the helm, pushed the throttle forward a little.

She powered out from under the sweep of the light on Alcatraz, out of its reach, then across a sudden section of chop.

To Angel Island.

It was black, had a mountain in the center of it, was fifty times the size of Alcatraz. Mary steered to the windward side but cruised on past the cove where the overnighters were moored and the campers gone ashore.

She found their own blank section of water. She steered into the wind and cut the engine back to idle. The last of the momentum spent itself. The boat drifted its last foot. They stopped. She listened. They were alone.

“You want to drop an anchor?” Jimmy asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

He went forward and let down the anchor, hand over hand, because it was quieter than the electric winch.

She backed up the boat until the hook set. She shut off the engine.

When he came back to the cockpit, she was drinking the last of her glass of wine.

“You were smoking when I saw you in the park,” she said, so quiet he could hardly hear her, right next to her.

He sat beside her. She put her head back.

“I bought a pack of Lucky Strikes, on the road, on the way up here,” he said. “Something made me think of you. And Luckies. That first night on the Strip.”

He didn’t tell her about all the other times something made him think of her these last few days.

“I wondered what you would remember.”

“The house up above Altadena, in Angeles Forest,” he said.

“I would hope you’d remember better times,” she said.

Not the end of it,
Jimmy thought.
Everything before.

“That isn’t what I remembered about you and me on the way up here, but . . .” He stopped himself. “What do you remember?” he said.

“The way we were together,” Mary said. “What we were like. The way people always said we were exactly the same, just alike, and we weren’t at all, but there was something when we were together that made it seem that way. That made me better.”

“Do you want the rest of the wine?” he said.

She shook her head. Chianti. It was what they always drank. Then. His first night in San Francisco, his unnamed, unseen admirer had bought him a glass in the bar on Columbus. Another thing that sent him down this road, aimed him toward this. Could it have been her? Could she have seen him then? Why wouldn’t she say so now?

He leaned over her. He could feel the heat coming off of her. He remembered pulling the blanket up across her shoulders as she slept in the cabin above Altadena. The last seconds . . . The last seconds before it all changed, before she saw just enough of who he was, who he really was, to rend things.
Forever
, he thought,
until now
. He put his hand on the side of her neck. He could feel her carotid, her pulse. His wrist was against the cold knife of the tab of the zipper.

He pulled it down, the zipper. It made a sound like a murmur.

She lifted her back for him.

His hand moved across her breastbone, found another pulse. She wasn’t wearing anything under the weather gear.

They moved from the cockpit to the forward cabin. Inside. The physical part was as good as it had always been. Unthinking, natural, confident, unequivocal. The expected and the surprising at the same time. It had always been that way with them, even when they were on the run in L.A. and scared, up in the Angeles Forest, maybe especially then.

The intervening years, gone. At least in this.

When it was over, they talked, or Mary talked and Jimmy listened. He listened to her and studied her face in the indefinite light, while the boat rocked, like a car alone on a good night road. (Was it only the light of the City, coming across the water?) Her face. She’d changed more than he’d thought. How could it be otherwise? Years had passed. And she wasn’t like him. He had to keep reminding himself of that. Of course time would change her. The shape of her face was the same, but her eyes seemed stiffened, the line of her nose drawn straighter. He thought again she’d probably had some preemptive cutting and sewing, the kind doctors’ wives get. He wanted to reach out to touch her cheek but held back.

She was talkative. She seemed caught up in purpose. That was something new. Before, after sex, in the L.A. days, she’d been soft, conforming, quiet but not sullen, a perfect definition of
easy
. Making love then seemed to take her out of the world. Tonight it seemed to have set her up to want something more from it.

That, he didn’t understand.

“I want us to be together,” she said to him.

Mary left the cabin, went aft, naked.

She looked back at him. And then just stepped off the stern. It made the smallest of sounds, the water receiving her.

He couldn’t help but think about the suicides.

He stood looking down at her, standing on the aft deck.

“Come on,” she said. He was naked, too.

He knew why she’d gone into the water, that she had to wash the sex off of her before she went home, exchange its scent for some other, for something innocent. Salt for salt.

He had understood that much.