Outerbridge Reach (48 page)

On this ocean, Browne thought, goodbye to almanacs and hope in Stella Maris and the small rain down. This is a game beyond me. A diver, he felt as though he were breathing from an emptying tank. His windpipe contracted in its greed for the thin stream. His gasps went unrewarded. He knelt down on the floor of the house. He felt the suspension of hope and wished for it back. He regretted lying.

For a moment he thought he might undo the deception. I'll go home, he thought, before I take a crab's nest for a wife. Before a thin ghost is all the wife I require. Then he was certain it was too late for that. He was a new man with a new fortune.

T
HERE WERE
daffodils on the lawn of the Southchester Yacht Club as Strickland made his way to Captain Riggs-Bowen's office. Songbirds were tootling in the locust trees. Inside, he recalled the perfumed booze and hornpipe ambience that had informed the place the previous autumn.

The captain brewed Typhoo tea on a hot plate. He wore a white Irish fisherman's sweater and a maroon and gold ascot, the first ascot Strickland had seen in years. On his desk were tiny flags, the Stars and Stripes and the white ensign of the Royal Navy. Framed on the wall behind his desk was a document displaying the harps and anchors of the equally Royal Irish Yacht Club.

Captain Riggs-Bowen took his tea with evaporated milk. Strickland had lemon.

“Well,” the captain said heartily, “he's out in front, your man. You must be pleased.”

“We are,” Strickland said. “We're pleased. We hoped you might comment on the race. For our cameras.”

“I'm tempted,” Riggs-Bowen said. “But I won't as yet.”

“How do you think he's doing it?”

“Interesting question. I
do
wonder.”

“His boat must be better than you thought.”

“Umm,” said the captain.

“Wouldn't it be that?”

“I'm confounded, Strickland. At a loss. We'll have to find the answer in his logs. We'll want to look closely at those.”

“Why?”

Riggs-Bowen looked innocently out at the spring day.

“Well, because there we'll find the secret of his success.” He turned to Strickland with a confident smile. “Won't we?”

“When it's over—will you appear for us?”

“When it's over, yes. You may have a more sensational film than you imagine.”

“You're behaving like a man with a secret.”

“You're wrong. I don't know anything you don't.”

“Well, you've seen the reports he's been sending. Can you sort of piece things together?”

“His reports are rather colorless,” Riggs-Bowen said. “Lacking in detail. His speeds are erratic. It's hard to tell what's going on.”

“I wonder why. When he's so articulate.”

“I do too,” Riggs-Bowen said.

Strickland watched him, waiting for more.

“I don't think he enjoys life,” the captain continued. “I don't think he even enjoys sailing. Some of them, you know, they go out there to suffer.”

“I guess he's sort of a philosopher.”

Riggs-Bowen laughed. “Is that his wife's opinion?”

Strickland kept his eyes on the tea.

“She worships him,” he told the captain. “Thinks the sun rises and sets on the guy.”

“Lucky man,” said Riggs-Bowen.

Walking back across the club lot to his car, Strickland felt oppressed by the sweet spring weather. Driving to Anne's, he had an attack of despair. It seemed clear to him that no reasonable person would care remotely about the race that Matty Hylan had conceived or about the pilgrim, Owen Browne.

He parked discreetly downhill from the house, hiked up and let himself in through the kitchen. She was upstairs in the bedroom, dressing.

“Ron?”

“Right.”

He poured himself a shot of Scotch and went into the living room. On the mantel was a picture of Owen as a newly commissioned ensign, virtually draped in Old Glory. Somewhere along the line, Strickland realized, he would have to do something with flags and navies.

“Where did you park?” she asked from upstairs.

“Miles away,” he said. “Not that anyone around here cares.”

He took his drink up. She was lying on the bed in jeans with a folded newspaper beside her. He thought she seemed preoccupied and tense. For the first time in days he stammered in her presence and, just for a moment, thought he detected her impatience.

“I . . . went to see Riggs-Bowen. Thought I might get him to go on for us.”

“Will he?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” she said.

“It is too bad. He's a real package. He's got this happy-to-be-a-prick attitude.”

“That you admire?”

“I think it's unbecoming in a man who doesn't drink.”

There was a Winslow Homer show at the Metropolitan Museum and Strickland decided they should go to see it. Running up the museum steps with him made her feel briefly like a schoolgirl with a day in town. She was amused to find he was a member of the Metropolitan.

As they made their way to the gallery in which the Homers were on exhibit, he held her hand. His grip felt somehow fateful. The moment she saw the seascapes on the wall, she drew her own hand away in surprise.

“How about this stuff?” Strickland asked her.

The oils in the first room depicted the ocean crashing ashore at Prouts Neck.

“Well,” she said, “at least I can tell what it is.”

“Kindly don't play the philistine.”

“Want to give me a lecture?”

“Sure,” Strickland said. He took her by the elbow and marched her to the largest painting. It showed four female figures standing on rocks beside a swollen sea. “The ocean is in its place. The force of nature barely contained. The women are frozen by its power. Late nineteenth century, Eros and Thanatos, the Red Universe. Full of subverted morality. See it there?”

“I guess so,” she said.

In fact, she found herself quite able to see what he said was there. She was an old intimate of the ocean.

“Look at the women,” he said. “They're out of equilibrium. Facing in different directions, as though they're hearing different voices.”

“Is that really there?”

He began to stammer again. “Of c . . course it's there. It's in the composition.” A well-dressed Latin American couple in front of the next picture glanced at them.

“Are you angry?”

Strickland laughed in frustration. “Of course not,” he said.

“You're right,” she said, studying the picture. “I see it.”

By the time they had done all six rooms, the ocean was crashing behind her eyes. The muted Maine colors belonged to a world now lost to her. She felt herself wrapped in a shawl like the women in the first painting, standing stricken beside the water.

Afterward, she made him take her to the cafeteria for wine. They sat in the glass-covered atrium, listening to the fountain. Strickland looked displeased.

“I liked the pictures,” she pointed out. “I saw what you wanted me to see. What's the problem?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Successful work annoys me.”

“Winslow Homer probably had a very unhappy life, Ron. Look at the bright side.”

“It's no good,” Strickland said. “He had a long and satisfactory life. He died rich in honors. Having done what he set out to do. It's enough to make you fucking weep.”

“Aren't you successful enough?”

“Nah,” Strickland said.

Anne finished her bad Chablis.

“What gets me,” Strickland said, “is how he can take something as boring as water and make it swing that way.”

“Water isn't boring, Ron. The ocean is not boring.” She glanced about the museum café, still half afraid of being seen by some friend or acquaintance of theirs. “What's the Red Universe?”

“Oh,” he said, “you know. Nature. Red in tooth and claw. Christ!” he said savagely. “A turn of line. A shade of light. And he does it. So close to nothing at all.”

She watched him give his wrist an elegant turn. The sudden curve of his forearm, the thrust of his strong graceful hand in a checkered cuff, aroused and repelled her.

“Ron,” she said, “you do the same. Your films do.”

“Ah,” he said, “but I'm saddled with people and their silly bullshit. If only I could eliminate the human factor.”

It struck her as wonderfully funny. She took his hand and pressed her pursed lips against his knuckles.

That evening, in his loft, they smoked marijuana and it was pleasant for a while. During the night she awoke in desperation. She had been dreaming of Owen; her sense of him was intense and immediate. She was suddenly panic-stricken at the presence of the impossible man beside her. The confusion made her feel as though she were losing not only consciousness but identity. Her mind drifted over landscapes of desire and memory. She experienced flashes of shame and absurdity, laughed and cried. In the gray morning light, she felt herself exhausted, thirsty, lustful, pursued by more notions than her mind could safely contain. She thought it must be the drug.

Seeing Strickland awake, she said, “He's coming back, Ron. I've got to prepare.”

He turned over in bed.

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

He put his arms around her. She lay still.

“Look, that's the past,” he said. “It's over.”

She was touched at his urgency. At the same time, she realized she would be far freer with Owen than ever with him. He was really out of the question.

“You have to stop saying that,” he commanded her. “You have to stop thinking it. You've wasted enough of your life on that guy.”

He was far too much work, she thought. Too much hassle. She was too old for it, and there was Maggie.

“We have to go on living,” Strickland said. “Remember that.”

She agreed absolutely. Somehow, she thought, he failed to understand that this was the problem. She rested against him, giving him her body as comfort for the moment, wondering what he thought he wanted. Did he really believe in hope, this sufferer? In happiness?

D
URING THE WEEKS
sailing north, he applied himself to his logs. The false one he filled with suitable reflections. In the true one, he described what he had seen ashore. Sometimes he thought of himself as headed for the Azores. He had periods of great elation. Northward, the weather was superb and he spent each evening out on deck watching the stars. Meteorites illumined the black subtropical sky. In imagination, he continued to work himself around the world, keeping his businesslike false log, sending position reports through Mad Max.

Max tried to keep him entertained in Morse:

“HEAR ABOUT NUCLEAR PHYSICIST WHO HAD TOO MANY IONS IN THE FIRE? SWALLOWED URANIUM AND GOT AN ATOMIC ACHE!!”

“HL,” Browne radioed.

Presences addressed him over the sound of the wind and the luffing of the sails. The voices they employed were all vaguely familiar. Most of the time he knew no one was there.

“Monitor your thoughts,” he would instruct himself. The words were on the wind: “Remember everything.”

Sometimes he thought it might be possible to explain it all away. Any excuse might be accepted if he did not claim to have won. Then he might go back to the life he had left. The problem was that the life he had left seemed more and more unsatisfactory. There was no passage in it.

One day he found himself a few hundred miles east of Tristan de Cunha, crossing the fortieth parallel. His reported location was far away, in the central Pacific. In his doctored log, he entered the weather he was experiencing because it was so pleasant. The ocean was a deep dark blue and the sky a few shades lighter. There were flying fish in dozens. A stand of towering cumulus clouds lay to westward, in the direction of the island.

In the warm sun again, he felt an overpowering nostalgia for innocence and the truth. It was hard to believe that they were lost for good. In the evening he saw a petrel. That night he listened in on the missionary station.

“Therefore snares are set round about thee,” the English lady informed her listeners, “and sudden fear troubleth thee.

“Or darkness that thou canst not see and abundance of water cover thee.

“Is not God in the height of heaven? And behold the height of the stars, how high they are!

“And thou sayest, How doth God know? Can He judge through the dark cloud?

“Thick clouds are a covering to Him that He seeth not; and He walketh in the circuit of heaven.”

So Browne knew that things had found him out, down to the deepest level of his dreams. He thought of the shadowless beach, skuas descending out of the sun. The snares were like land crabs whose bustling caused hallucination. The fear was the loss of reality, never quite retrievable once your share in it was put aside. The appearance of stars was a deception.

Max sent more HLs.

“SI SI SAID THE BLIND PERUVIAN WHEN HE REALLY COULDNT SEE AT ALL.”

Copying the message, Browne experienced a sudden insight. He called for a voice rendezvous on 29.871 megahertz.

“Whiskey Zulu Zulu one Mike eight seven three, Whiskey Zulu Zulu one Mike eight seven three, this is Zulu Romeo Alpha one Juliet five six three, over. Yowsa yowsa.” Max was in his carnival barker's mode.

“Zulu Romeo Alpha one Juliet five six three,” Browne said, “Whiskey Zulu Zulu one Mike eight seven three. I have a question, Max. I'm going to make a guess, over.”

“Go ahead, over.”

“I'm guessing you're blind. Am I correct? Over.”

“Affirmative,” the youth said.

“I knew it!” Browne said triumphantly.

“Thanks very much I'm sure. How? Over.”

“I know more than I know,” Browne explained. Then he felt badly about sounding so enthusiastic. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” Max said, “over.”