Outerbridge Reach (25 page)

“Better than them. The public.”

“But there aren't really any heroes.”

Duffy shook his head. “You gotta have heroes, Owen.” After a moment he stood up and looked toward the soiled clouds over the Jersey marshes. “Know whom I'm thinking about?”

“Lindbergh?”

“No, man. Vince Lombardi.”

“A great man,” Browne said. “What about him?”

“Wrong,” Duffy said. “Vince Lombardi was not a great man. Vince Lombardi nearly destroyed this country. A first-generation guy, right? Ex—Fordham football player. Not a great man at all.”

“I happen to disagree,” Browne said. “I think he was a great coach and a great sportsman. A good example for the kids.”

“He was a fucking monster,” Duffy declared. “He caused the Vietnam War.”

When he got home that night, Browne told Anne about Duffy's carryings on. She laughed.

“Duffy adores you,” she told him.

“Really?”

“Oh, but absolutely,” she said. She had been drinking a bit. “We all do.”

T
HAT NIGHT,
in Hell's Kitchen, Strickland, Hersey and Pamela smoked dope and watched the footage Fanelli had taken of
Nona
's maiden voyage. On the screen, Browne, gasping for breath in the Sound, commenced his rowing backstroke.

“What's he doing in the water?” Hersey asked. “Is he supposed to be there?”

“I don't think you're supposed to be in the water, Hersey. I think that's why you have the boat.”

“You mean he like
fell off?”
Pamela asked.

“So it would seem,” Strickland said.

There was a sequence in which Browne stood somewhat heroically at the helm. Strickland played the tape of Fanelli and Crawford's conversation behind it and the effect was supremely funny. Hersey grinned. Pamela was undone. She tilted over backward in the lotus position until her knees were pointed at the ceiling. Her screechy laughter filled the studio.

“So you like that,” Strickland asked, “do you, Pamela?”

“Oh God,” she said, panting.

“Great stuff, boss,” Hersey said.

“It's time,” Strickland told them, “to consider the framework here. He may win. He may not. He may die out there. We have different possible outcomes and we should be ready to cover all of them.”

“You lose some of the humor if he dies,” Hersey said.

Strickland regarded him with injured innocence.

“Why?”

Hersey's grin grew brighter.

“Things don't lose their humor, Hersey, just because somebody dies. Humor goes on and on. So do things. But if he does—if he actually sinks with my priceless Sony Betacam—we'll have to go with what we've taken here and offshore.”

“Can you make a picture out of that?”

“I'm sure I can,” Strickland said. “If he makes it we'll have a mix of tape and film which could be interesting. Intimacy matched against articulation. If he sinks we'll do a sort of
Riders to the Sea.
”

“Och, aye,” Hersey declaimed in a keening proto-Celtic lament, “the sea, the sea, ochone. The cruel grave o' the sea.” Pamela started to cry.

“I don't want him to die,” she said, sniffing. “I want him to win.”

Strickland turned to her.

“Right,” he said. “It sort of figures that you would.”

“Don't you want him to win?” Hersey asked Strickland. “I mean, he's
ours.
”

“I want the picture,” Strickland said. “That's all I want.”

“Anyway,” Hersey said, “you should worry. You got him fucked regardless.”

Strickland abruptly turned off the projector and stood up. He turned on the overhead light, one that was hardly ever used.

“I'm t . . tired of it!” he shouted at Hersey. He paused and closed his eyes until he could say the rest of it. “I am fucking tired of you suggesting that I'm fucking him in some crazy way. I don't think it's funny anymore.”

Hersey and Pamela regarded him with dread.

“I'm after the truth about this guy,” Strickland said. “Maybe he thinks I'm his personal fucking press agent but I'm not. There's a way things are. There's a way he is. This guy, this family, they say something about how it is now. That's what I'm after. I don't give a shit about his feelings or your feelings or anybody's. Understand me?”

“Sure,” Hersey said.

“That's enough for tonight,” Strickland said. “Let's break it up. We have a lot of work tomorrow.”

Pamela was having trouble in her life which required a considered absence from her suite at the Paramount. Strickland let her camp in his studio. When Hersey was gone and Pamela out of the way, he started running the film again. Browne coming aft over the hatches, ducking the boom. Browne in the galley making soup, glancing morosely at the camera. Browne asleep. Fanelli had a nice instinct for the right shot.

Strickland watched Browne squint into dawn—haggard, sensitive, Browne agonistes, representative of man the measure. Pamela had cried for him but it was Pamela she mourned for. If Duffy were any good at his job, Strickland thought, he would have been selling Browne to the masses. The polite yachtsman, out there for the insulted and injured, the losers and the lost. They could track him in their atlases day by day, the disappointed, the misled, the self-sacrificers, as he bore their wounds away and washed them in salt. They should all feel for Browne, Strickland thought, the soft, wet people of the world. They should all honor and admire him, the Handsome Sailor, their charioteer.

You could play a clever game of inside and out, Strickland thought, and divide humanity between those who were of Browne's constituency and those who were not.

Do I understand him as well as I think? Strickland asked himself. And if I do, why? It was a question he scarcely dared consider. He smoked a joint and had a drink and a Halcion and lay in bed awake until his thoughts were scattered.

T
HE NIGHT
before sailing, Browne stood in his garden watching the lights go on in the terraces of the town below his house. Along the shore, the illuminated cars of an Amtrak train raced by. It was a clear cold evening. Venus, forty degrees over Long Island, was the evening star.

For a while he lingered among the blanched grapevines in the arbor, looking at his own house. His daughter was in her room, studying to Megadeth. Anne was in the kitchen sipping wine as she cooked dinner.
All Things Considered
was on the radio. Maggie's room and the kitchen showed the only lighted windows. The homely comforts which the sight of his house suggested made Browne feel somewhat forlorn. Before going in, he took a quick look at the sky that would be waiting for him.

For the first time in many weeks, the downstairs rooms and hallways were clear of his supplies. Everything had been put aboard
Nona.
He found Anne at the kitchen table.

“How are you?” she asked. The red bandana she had worn around her hair when they were loading
Nona
was folded on the table beside her.

“A little restless,” Browne said.

A difficult silence descended on them. He cleared his throat. They had been straining every nerve to avoid portents.

“I have a feeling,” he said, “that I'm going to appreciate things a lot more when I get back.”

“Yes,” she said, “it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

They laughed.

“I think this is the way to live,” he told her. “Taking hold of it.”

Somehow he could not quite succeed in saying what he meant.

For months they had talked about a night-before-sailing celebration. In the event, they had simply let the idea drop. Anne and Owen had steak and salad at the kitchen table. Neither of them ate much. Maggie had a sandwich in her room under the pretext of finishing the book she was reading for school. She had come home with special permission because of his departure. After dinner, he decided to go up to her.

On his way upstairs, he kept thinking that he owed them both some kind of further explanation. He was haunted by a sense of estrangement not only from his wife and daughter but even from the familiar house in which he found himself. Things had a peculiar novelty that was both invigorating and unsettling.

He knocked on Maggie's door and went in. She was sitting on the window seat among her stuffed animals, looking out at the darkness. Her tuna fish sandwich was uneaten on its plate right in the middle of her bed. Beside it was the book she was supposedly hastening to finish,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

“For God's sake,” he said, “do you want your bed full of tuna fish?”

She jumped to get it and put it on her night table.

“Sorry, Daddy.”

“Listen, my young friend,” he said. He wanted to touch her but he could not quite bring himself to do it. “This isn't goodbye, because we'll be seeing each other tomorrow. But tomorrow is going to be sort of chaotic.”

She sat on the side of the bed and looked at the floor.

“There are some things I'll need you to do for me,” Browne said. “Help your mother as best you can. Keep yourself out of trouble and study hard. I'm relying on you.”

She nodded and cleared her throat.

“I don't think I'll come to the boat,” she said. “I have tons to read. I'll be up really late.”

The fact was that he preferred her not to come. He knew it would make things easier for both of them. Nevertheless he felt compelled to stand up for convention.

“But you came home to see me off.”

She gave him a trapped look.

“You're right,” he said. “So be good.”

A quick frightened smile crossed her face and she picked up the book, fleeing the moment. He had always found her physical resemblance to him an impenetrable mystery. Someday, he thought, the two of us will be able to speak. He bent to kiss her and she froze as she had done since the age of twelve or so, went rigid in the presence of his affection. Touching her cheek with his lips, he could feel the tremors that beset her. Outside her door, he was struck by a wave of regret.

All that evening, he prowled the house like a stranger. Odd old things turned up: his dress sword, a record of the Blackwatch Pipe Band that he had bought in his last year at the Academy and taken with him to Vietnam. He found an album that had pictures of their wedding at the Academy chapel and Maggie's baby pictures and pictures he had taken during the war. One showed the officers of Tactical Air Control Squadron Nine in their tin cylindrical officers' club. Another was of sunrise over the A Shau valley, the mists and mountains like the pattern on a Chinese screen. The sight of his youthful self preserved made Browne uneasy. It made him feel, he thought, a little like his own ghost.

On an impulse, he put his bagpipe music on the phonograph in the study. The skirling made him smile. It was his oldest record, part of the process he had developed to raise his spirits in times of danger, along with night-before-battle scenes from Shakespeare and cavalier poetry.

 

Now thrive the armorers and honor's thought

Reigns solely in the breast of every man.

 

It was all completely adolescent; still, it helped.

Anne came in laughing, drawn by the pipe music. “God,” she said. “How long since you played that?”

“A long time,” he said.

She sat down in the study's worn leather chair, took up the album and began to leaf through it.

“I often think of those times, Owen. The war. Do you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Lately.”

“Those were not bad times,” she said. She had been drinking again; wine sometimes made her seem cool and dispassionate, mysterious. “I shouldn't say it.”

“Say it,” Browne said. “We had some of our best times then. We knew the difference.”

Later, she prepared herself for him, did herself up in the perfumes and lingerie he favored. His feeling of estrangement persisted and somehow it increased his desire and gave her a certain intriguing unfamiliarity. They made love for a long time and finished wet and exhausted. Like swimmers, Browne thought. By the standards of his sexual haruspication, it augured well. He woke briefly, thinking he had heard her in tears. She appeared asleep. He thought it must have been a dream.

He could not sleep for long. He woke up again in the dead of night, a little after two. There were more dreams of salt water, the ocean and tears, full of anxieties he could deny in the light. He found himself lying awake and trying to remember the way in which he had dealt with fear during the war. It was as though he had known some special system then and since forgotten it.

As he lay trying to summon up his youthful courage, a thought came to him, suddenly and with a dreadful clarity. The thought had the shape of an insight and its core was the message that he was not sailor enough to make the trip. That he lacked the experience, the patience, the temperament, the qualifications entirely. As an insight it was very convincing.

In the wake of this reflection, a long-rejected possibility occurred to him. In spite of everything, he thought, he did not have to go. It would be quite possible for him to simply not do it. There were any number of sound reasons to claim: his health, the boat, considerations of family. There were a thousand alibis.

Thinking of the boat made him recall the electronic equipment uncertainly assembled in the cabin, the snaking lines and turnbuckles, the stiff, store-new canvas in his sail bags. He felt helpless at the prospect of it all. It was more than he could handle.

Lying in the dark, he wanted more than anything not to go, wanted it with an intensity that made him feel like weeping. His heart raced. Anne stirred beside him and he was tempted, in his black panic, to awaken her. Then he realized she was awake. She reached out a hand and touched his forehead.