Outerbridge Reach (11 page)

On Browne's left, the hulks lay scattered in a geometry of shadows. The busy sheer and curve of their shapes and the perfect stillness of the water made them appear held fast in some phantom disaster. Across the Kill, bulbous storage tanks, generators and floodlit power lines stretched to the end of darkness. The place was marked on the charts as Outerbridge Reach.

In the week after their wedding, Anne had brought him to the place as a joke. “This is what comes with me,” she had said. “This is the family estate.”

“Well,” he had said. “We need a picture.” So they had taken a picture of Anne's brother Aidan in his racing coracle among the hulks. Sheltering from the wind against the pilothouse bulkhead, Browne remembered the afternoon as though it were the day before. He laughed at finding himself there again. The tape ended and the marshes of Outerbridge Reach received the soiled tide.

He remembered scraps of the place's history. Thousands of immigrants had died there, in shanties, of cholera, in winter far from home. It had been a place of loneliness, violence and terrible labor. It seemed to Browne that there was something about the channel he recognized but could not call to mind. On the dark shore, the junkyard hound kept barking as though it would go on forever.

W
HEN
a few weeks passed without any further word from Hylan, Strickland began to brood. He had no other project in reserve. He passed the time cutting his Central American documentary with Hersey.

One day he and Hersey spent twelve straight hours splicing footage of foreign volunteers,
internacionalistas
who had gone south to assist the revolution. Among the internationalists Strickland had two particular favorites.

His favorite male internationalist was a man from Oklahoma, a tall, sepulchral Methodist minister with a nasal drone and a wandering Adam's apple. His favorite female was Charlotte, Biaggio's freckled, buck-toothed German girlfriend, the one who had been an au pair in Saddle River. Charlotte had a wide, unvarying smile and bobbed her head from side to side as she spoke to the camera. To specify footage he and Hersey had given some internationalists nicknames. They called the earnest minister “Homer.” Hersey referred to Charlotte as “the Daughter of the Regiment,” abbreviated to “the DR.” She was so earnest and fatuous that the sight of her tempted Strickland to the obvious. He had to resist the impulse to intercut her merry palatal observations with corpses, parrots and amputees. Hersey imitated her relentlessly in Dutch-comedy German.

“
Up
tight! Ich bin
up
tight! Sie ist
up
tight! Wir sind
up
tight!”

“Saddle River is right,” Strickland told him. “That little broad went down on the whole Sandinista army. She went crazy for T-shirts. She has like five hundred T-shirts with slogans on them and each one represents a d . . different blow job.”

“Don't be uptight!” Hersey said. He clenched his teeth in a demented grin and batted his eyes and rolled his head from side to side. Finally, Strickland sent him home.

Later he called Pamela, who arrived with a bag of take-out salad from the corner Korean. They discussed the Hylan project.

“I swear,” Strickland said, “the whole thing's fixed. I think it's being staged for Hylan.”

Pamela ate cole slaw with her fingers and laughed at him.

“You're so sordid, Strickland. How can you think that! I mean, those people are so pure!”

“Yeah?”

“Hey, I know all about boats,” Pamela insisted. “I used to sail.” The next day Strickland's partner and business manager called him in. His partner was a woman named Freya Blume, whose offices were on the fourth floor of the Brill building, a five-minute walk from his studio.

When he arrived at the office, Freya came out and kissed him. She was a tall handsome woman a few years older than he. Her gray hair was short and attractively styled.

“Beautiful as ever,” Strickland told her.

Freya put a hand to her heart.

“Why, how flattering!” she said archly. Her voice had a trace of old Europe. “How nice.”

He saw that she had put on some weight. She dressed very carefully. Freya and Strickland had been lovers many years before. Almost all the attractive women Strickland knew had been to bed with him.

“Everything's signed,” Freya told him. “Apparently Hylan's in Finland working on his boat. Can you go over there?”

“Christ,” Strickland said. “That was sudden.”

Freya shrugged.

“I thought they had forgotten about it,” Strickland said.

“Yes? Well they haven't. Been to Finland?”

“Never.”

“Lovely country. Forest and sky, lakes and sea.”

“I have yet to set eyes on this guy, Freya. He won't give me the time of day.”

She put the contract down in front of him.

“You have better than the time of day. You have his signature.”

Strickland had a look at the last page. A signature had indeed been scrawled under the name of Matthew Hylan.

“I haven't even finished cutting the Nicaraguan stuff.”

“You're lazy,” Freya told him.

“Think so?”

“Yes. Very talented but very lazy.” She gave him a quick fond smile.

“I have two questions,” Strickland said. “One is: what about budget? Two is: do they have to approve a final cut?”

“We'll have to submit an itemized budget. It won't be a problem because I happen to know they'll go to a million.”

“What if they don't like what they see?”

“They're not paying you a fee. So they have no control.”

“Is this on paper?”

“No. But that's the way it works.”

“V-very generous,” Strickland said. “Very easygoing. What if they're not satisfied?”

“You mean what if Hylan and his company come out looking like assholes?”

“Yeah,” Strickland said. “Something like that.”

Freya laughed. “But Hylan likes you. He liked
Under the Life.
He loved
LZ Bravo.”

LZ Bravo
was a film Strickland had made during the Vietnam War. During the filming bad things had happened to him, and although it contained some of his best work he did not care to be reminded of it. He stood up and walked to the window and looked down at the mid-morning
paseo
on Broadway.

“I really won't know if this is possible until I meet the guy,” he told Freya. On the street below, the wayward individual to whom he had given his cordobas and lempiras was attempting to beg from a Greek hot dog vendor. The vendor showed his teeth. Two Sisters of Charity in knit sweaters and saris walked by. “I have to rely on Hylan himself to shoot the footage at sea.”

“That should be good,” Freya said.

“Yes,” Strickland said. “If he's the man I take him for, it should be good.”

They looked at each other and laughed.

“I think you can count on him,” Freya said. “I've met him. He's a young putz.”

“So I hear,” Strickland said. “Pretentious and self-promoting. Which is how I like them.”

Freya shook her head in fond reproach.

“But the shore stuff is important too,” he added. “The corporate creeps.”

“He makes no bones, this fellow,” Freya said. She was speaking of Strickland. “You make no bones of your perspective.”

“No bones whatsoever,” Strickland said.

That evening he got out his Olympus and took Pamela on the town. They started with a drink at the Lion's Head and then went on to Fran's, a club below Houston Street on the Lower East Side. Fran's was no longer in vogue and required a seven-dollar entrance fee but Pamela favored it because she could buy cocaine at wholesale prices there. Strickland took care of it all. He had no use for cocaine himself, but the price of admission and the cocaine together were cheaper than dinner at one of the stately French restaurants Pamela favored.

They went down to the basement where there was a small bar and, in an adjoining space, a dance floor. When Pamela had scored from the dreadlocked Martiniquais barkeep, she wanted to dance.

“Go ahead and dance,” Strickland told her. “You don't need me.”

That night, a smooth Los Angeles band called Low Density Babylon was performing and the band had brought some of the regulars back to Fran's. Strickland took his camera out as Pamela kicked into her solo. He had really come to watch her dance. After the first few numbers, she withdrew into the ladies', only to emerge renewed. Presently she had a would-be partner, a small French magazine correspondent with a balding pate and shoulder-length hair. In general, she ignored him.

Strickland could hardly take his eyes off Pamela as she hot-cha'd it across the floor. She was a fine dancer with true animal grace and an agreeably eccentric style. The Frenchman could not get with her. Pamela had seemed to thrive on the street. She had advanced her station from that of runaway waif to star ho-dom to virtual courtesanship, leaving ruin and wreckage in her train. She was only beginning to run out of energy.

He sat drinking beer and watched her. Her face was long and keen; she had a fey expression and huge green eyes. Panic was the word for her, panic from the Greek, a crazy smile, sudden fear in lonely places. Her eyes were a caution, warning away the faint of loin, the troubled and the poor. She looked capable of anything, at the point of becoming either the perpetrator of a major felony or the victim of one. Looking into the future, Strickland saw the Tower ahead, blood and flaming curtains, slaughter.

Low Density Babylon ground on; the dancers splayed their hands and boogied. It was a weeknight and the weeknight crowd had turned out: a few blacks who could dance, a few of Hersey's fellow students, a contingent of English media scum. The English imagined themselves and their schemes invisible and danced with abandon, looking goatish and soiled. For some reason, Strickland had observed, they were always the best dancers in the place. Lights played on their toothy faces.

Strickland raised his camera and clicked away. Like the English in the room, Pamela thought nobody saw her tinker's shuffle. But I do, Strickland thought, and he did. The reflection afforded him poor comfort. He had to wonder what good it did him.

What good does it do me, Strickland asked himself as he peered through the lens, that I see and understand so thoroughly? That my camera never lies? If I'm so smart, why am I not richer, in works, in wisdom, whatever? He had little to learn about the field of folk and its bellyaching and its feeble strategies. He supposed he lacked the will to enjoy it all in solitary splendor. To understand so well had got to be enjoyed for its own sake. Otherwise it was its own punishment.

Fran's that night suggested the end of the century, the cunning of dice play, the destruction of someone's world. He raised his camera. In its eye, he framed the dancers. Horrible instrument, he thought, it never lied.

Someone grabbed the camera from him. He slid off the stool and turned angrily to face a skinny bouncer with a shaved head and a dangling earring.

“We don't need no insurance,” the bouncer explained.

“Don't put your dirty fingers on that lens,” Strickland told him.

The bartender with the dreadlocks came around to join the bouncer.

“No pictures in here, mon.”

Strickland stepped back and raised his open palms as though someone were pointing a gun at him. It was the stance he always assumed, anywhere in the world, when confronted.

Over the bouncer's shoulder, he saw Billie Bayliss, the club's proprietor, rushing toward him. Billie was a short cockney woman whose pancake makeup tinged her face the color of lemon peel. Costumed in a red hunting jacket and an antique hobble skirt, she approached in short angry steps.

“Oy!” she shouted.

Billie was panting and puffy-eyed. In her perturbation she resembled a fat youth done up for drag comedy in the school play. Her left arm was in a sling.

“People get all funny about cameras, darlin',” she told Strickland.

Strickland noticed for the first time that there was a scar that ran along her jawbone, disappeared beneath her jowly chin and emerged on the side of her neck. The flashing lights from above the dance floor caught it.

“How about telling your waiters to give me my camera back,” Strickland said to Billie.

“Paparazzos don't make it, motherfucker,” the young man with his camera said.

“Do take it easy, will you, Ron?” Billie said to Strickland. “These lads are too young to know who you are.”

Strickland had gotten to know Billie Bayliss a few years earlier when he was researching
Under the Life,
and the sight of him, camera in hand, would have annoyed her in the best of times. The best of times, for Billie and her club, were over.

“They don't,” she told him, “go to films at the museum.”

“So tell them to give me back my c . . c . . .” Having said so much, Strickland failed of the next word. Billie Bayless watched with satisfaction as he struggled to complete his sentence. A dirty smile lit her thick features.

“Give him his camera back, Leon,” she told the bouncer.

Pamela had spied the encounter from the dance floor and hurried over in a state.

“How can you think he's a paparazzo?” she nearly shrieked. “He's only the greatest fucking film maker of our time!”

“Course he is,” cooed smiling Billie.

Leon shoved Strickland's camera back at him.

“If you're going to come here,” Billie said sweetly, “go ahead and come here. But don't bring a camera, there's a good lad.” She waved a hand toward Pamela without looking at her. “And don't bring her, will you?”

In the taxi on the way uptown Strickland told Pamela he was going to Finland. The news seemed to make her unhappy. When they were up in the studio, she was still pouting. Finally she said, “Oh, Ronnie, I would love to go to Finland.”