The Starboard Sea: A Novel (17 page)

The anarchy of the day took my mind off of my parents and their troubles. I was grateful for this, happy to be raising hell with my friends. This was a raw physical kind of plea sure, the kind I hadn’t experienced in ages. Not since Cal and I had ripped up the golf course at Kensington with his stolen Triumph. The only thing that might have bothered me at that moment was if Aidan had seen me. Allowing myself to have a good time with these guys made me feel like I was betraying her somehow. I planned on keeping our scrimmage a secret.

After a particularly brutal hit from Kriffo, Yazid called it quits. His woolly hair a crown of wild spirals. Stuyvie had done a shitty job of keeping score and no one could agree on a winner.

“What should we do with the tractor?” Stuyvie asked.

“Just leave it. I’m sure someone will clean up the mess.” Yazid saluted us good-bye.
“But I never got my turn to drive one.” Stuyvie ran his hand along the tractor’s body, tracing the gold Arabic letters.
We watched Yazid walk off, his stolen jersey tossed over his shoulder.
“I don’t get it,” Tazewell said. “How do you make a fortune off of tractors? Are there like lots of farms in Saudi Arabia?”
I said, “There’s lots of sand and oil.”
“So?” said Kriffo.
“So,” I said, “you’ve got to move a lot of sand to get to that oil.” We weren’t sure what to do with the dirty jerseys and were going to abandon them on the field when Stuyvie offered to put them in his family’s wash and sneak them back into the trophy case. Stuyvie and I seemed to be the only two concerned about the broken glass in the Athletic Center, the messy pile of tree branches, and the torn-up asphalt in the parking lot.
Walking back to Whitehall, I asked Tazewell and Kriffo about Race’s party, whether it had been a memorable blowout.
“Not especially.” Taze stuck a finger in his ear and dug around. “It was kind of lame, if you want the truth. Not much of a turnout. A lot of kids went home yesterday. Guess their parents were worried about the storm.” He pulled his finger out of his ear wiped his nail on Kriffo’s arm.
Kriffo reacted quickly, smearing mud on Tazewell’s back. The two began to tussle, slapping each other. They’d perfected this kind of mock-violence, playful, almost friendly.
“Was Race pissed I didn’t come?”
“He definitely noticed you weren’t there.” Taze gave Kriffo one last slap.
“I had this family thing I had to do and it took longer than I expected.” I was disappointed but relieved that no one really seemed to care about my absence.
Kriffo asked, “Think we’ll have classes tomorrow?”
Stuyvie came scampering up behind us. “No way,” he said. “My dad told me we won’t have classes until the power comes back on and even then it will take awhile for things to get back to normal.”

The power wouldn’t be restored until early Thursday morning, but by Tuesday night phone ser vice was back and I waited in the hallway for a chance to dial my mother on the pay phone. I had zero interest in calling Dad, but I wanted Mom to know that I was all right. I needed to find out how she was handling the divorce. “Would you like me to come home?” I asked.

“Yes. Return to me so we can run away together.”
I played along. “Where should we escape to?”
“The islands. Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia,” Mom said. “You can sail us into Marigot Bay. Like Doctor Doolittle on his giant pink snail.”

“Dad will go crazy,” I said.

“Your father’s busy hiding his assets. Silly man. In St. Lucia, we can visit our cacao plantation.”
“We own a plantation?”
“
I
own a plantation. Don’t tell your father.” Mom described the rain forest in St. Lucia. The smell of cacao being roasted and ground into chocolate. “Real chocolate isn’t sweet. Most people don’t know that, but then again most people don’t know anything. My grandfather left me the farm. Among other trea sures.”
I asked Mom how Max was doing. “Max who?” she asked.
“Max, our doorman.”
“Which one is he? Is he the chubby one, or is that Freddy?”
My mother called all of the doormen in our building Freddy. None of the doormen in our building were named Freddy. “You like Max,” I said. “He’s your favorite. You should date Max and make Dad jealous.”
“You may be joking, but come Christmas, those doormen make a king’s ransom in tips. I’m sure Max could keep us all afloat.”
Mom and I plotted our escape to the Caribbean. She waxed on about the turquoise waters and coral beaches. We both preferred the pink sand to the rough black volcanic rocks. I told her a story about Cal. Once when we were sailing, Cal asked me why the water didn’t stay light blue when he cupped it in his hands. “It gets all clear. The blue just goes away.” It was the kind of question a child would ask. Cal must have been fifteen at the time, but he wasn’t embarrassed. He trusted me. Knew I wouldn’t make fun of him. I explained that it was the white sand reflecting the sunlight that gave the water its color, not the water itself. “But the sand’s not blue,” Cal said. “That can’t be right.”
“How funny,” Mom said. “Cal was such a sweet boy. It’s good to hear you talk about him. We should talk about him more often.”
Mom was still friends with Cal’s mother, Caroline, but she never mentioned her to me. We joked a little more about running away together and beginning a new life. To cheer my mother up, I gossiped about Ginger’s pregnancy, lied about Miriam’s appearance—“She looked sick”—and exaggerated the hard times that had befallen the Thatcher estate. I also mentioned that I was worried about Riegel. “He’s up to no good.”
“Spare me your brother’s details,” Mom insisted. “You need to learn that you shouldn’t tell your parents everything.”
We ended our phone call with my mother telling me that she wished my father would simply keel over. “I’d prefer to be a widow,” she said. “Widows are much more glamorous than divorcees. I suppose I shouldn’t say all of this to you, but I have no one else. You’re the only one who listens.”

Talking to my mom left me a little depressed, exhausted. I decided to sneak out of the dorm late that night and visit Aidan. We hadn’t seen each other since Saturday morning, and the passing days had made me less and less certain of where we stood. Maybe Nadia hadn’t bothered to convey my message, or perhaps Aidan was avoiding me. I’d gotten so antsy that I’d actually called the pay phone in Aidan’s hallway asking to speak with her. I didn’t recognize the voice that answered and the voice that answered checked and informed me that Aidan wasn’t in her room.

There was the slight possibility that Aidan had gone home with someone. Since the Academic Center was a mess and since so many parents had brought their kids home, Windsor had canceled classes for the week. We were free to stay on campus, but Windsor had joked, “Try not to catch Cholera.” I hadn’t seen Diana either and knew there was a chance the two of them had run off to New York together.

I’d wandered around campus on Monday and Tuesday just looking for Aidan, hoping she was hiding out in our library. When she wasn’t there, I worried that she was sick. I’d felt myself coming down with a cold and thought that maybe she was in bed nursing a fever. I sat in the library and played piano, amusing myself with my best Joe Cocker rendition of “You Are So Beautiful.” I realized that I’d never given Aidan any real compliment. Never told her she was beautiful, though she’d heard me call Cal beautiful. That night on the Swan we’d promised each other that we’d have some sort of romance. Something unprecedented. “We don’t have to be like other people,” she’d said, and I’d believed her.
Coach Tripp had handed out slender metal flashlights to all of the guys in the dorm, a practical keepsake commemorating the Great Blackout of ’87. I waited until after curfew before tucking my new flashlight into my belt and scaling quickly down the fire escape. When I hit the bottom of the fire escape, I paused in front of Coach Tripp’s window, wondering if he’d heard me. That afternoon I’d helped him squeegee water from the ground floor of Whitehall, and Coach had nearly cried over the lost Swan. “I loved that little yacht,” he said. “Completely irreplaceable.” He’d also extended another offer for me to sail in the spring. “No pressure,” he promised. “We’ll make it fun for you.” I told him I’d think about it.

Scuttling like a crab across the grounds and past the harbor, I noticed light shining from within the water. The storm had warmed the Atlantic, agitating a bloom of plankton. The entire bay lit up with phosphorescence, the water glowing from within, a blazing grand ballroom. With every lapping wave the light pulsed turquoise, then emerald. I loved this trick. Wanted to swim in the phosphorescence, even though I knew this par ticu lar type of plankton was toxic. By day the shore would be covered in a poisonous red tide. For the moment, though, it was as if the ocean had swallowed a swarm of fireflies. I felt Aidan’s kiss on my mouth.

Quietly, I inched up Aidan’s fire escape, realizing that I’d spent the better part of my adolescence sneaking in and out of windows. I feared Aidan might be asleep, that she might not hear me knock on the glass, but when I reached the top her window was open.

I stuck a leg inside the room and down onto her wood floor, nearly slipping and landing in a split. The floor was wet in places, as though she hadn’t bothered to clean up after the storm. Aidan wasn’t in her room. I figured she might be down the hall with Diana or off brushing her teeth, or maybe she’d sneaked out to Whitehall and was standing under my Star Child poster looking up at the photo of Cal. That would have been perfect.

I shone my flashlight around her walls. Aidan didn’t have any of the traditional prep school posters. No obligatory John Lennon peace signing by the Statue of Liberty. No golden kissing Klimt or Salvador Dalí dreamscape. No lame hippie tapestries. In addition to Fred Astaire’s tap shoes, she had a series of photographs of her own feet framed and hanging above her bed. Aidan had told me that she’d taken the pictures to mark all of her favorite memories: swinging from a tree house her grandfather had built, at the kitchen table in her mother’s Malibu home, barefoot on her backyard beach, standing on line waiting for a hot dog at a place called Pink’s. “I like to take pictures of my feet to remind myself of where I’ve been.” Her feet doing all the smiling for her.

The longer I waited, the more I felt like I was trespassing, but I decided just to relax. Aidan trusted me and I had to believe I could sit on her bed and wait for her. Aidan kept a pile of leather-bound books on her nightstand. I opened one and saw her loose, curly handwriting. Her journals. Flipping through the pages I caught fragments: “hurt myself,” “complete disappointment,” “end it all.” This wasn’t the Aidan I wanted to know. I closed the book. On a shelf, I found a photo album. I picked it up and began riffling through the heavy black pages wishing she were there to tell me who the different people were. The first pages were all sepia portraits of married couples. The album then shifted into faded Technicolor snapshots featuring girls in miniskirts and men on surfboards. I tried to pick out Aidan’s mother. I turned toward the back of the album and flipped open to a picture of a pregnant woman in a bikini sunbathing by a swimming pool. The woman looked like my fake cousin Ginger and not just because she was pregnant. It was more the way she stared out over her sunglasses defiant and seductive. I knew instantly that she was Aidan’s mother, and I suddenly understood how a pregnant woman could be the sexiest and most desirable thing a man could want. I couldn’t fathom my own mother allowing a photograph like that to be taken. Maybe that was why Dad had left her. Maybe he had his reasons.

On the opposite page was the picture I realized I’d been looking for: Aidan’s baby photo with Robert Mitchum. I hadn’t doubted the truthfulness of her story, but it made me tremble a little to see it confirmed. Aidan was just a chubby blanket and a blurred face. The actor himself almost unrecognizable in thick black glasses, but there was his signature swoop of hair and his rebel good looks. I knew that I was kidding myself into believing that I was a young Mitchum. Cal was the one who really bore a resemblance. Cal was the movie star. I was the stunt double. I felt the bridge of my nose where Cal had broken it. If she’d been given a choice, Aidan would have been wise to pick Cal over me. He would have thrilled in the curves of her body, the softness of her skin, would have loved her sharp tongue and quick wit.

Aidan had told me a story about Mitchum. Right after he was released from prison a reporter had asked him what being locked up was like. Mitchum claimed that prison was just like Palm Springs only without the riffraff.

“Bellingham’s like Palm Springs,” she’d said. “Full of riffraff.” “Yeah,” I said. “Prep schools might as well be jail.”
“Obviously,” she said, “you’ve never been to jail.”

I wondered about Aidan’s mug shot, the one Styuvie claimed to have seen. It occurred to me that Aidan and I could have fun sneaking into the dean’s file cabinet and performing our own background checks. Maybe I’d break in there myself and steal her file back for her. There were so many adventures I wanted to have with Aidan. We had the beginning of something I didn’t feel compelled to name. Maybe it would be a romance, maybe a friendship, but all I wanted was the plea sure of discovery, the joy of being swept up inside knowing her and allowing her to know me.

As the night passed, I began to worry about Aidan. I was blinking tired and poked my head down the empty hallway wondering if she’d fallen asleep in someone else’s room. Perhaps she was up counseling Diana, or maybe they really had run off together, skipping town until classes started up again. I felt a little jealous of their friendship and decided to leave Aidan a note asking her to meet me that afternoon at the beach. I tore a sheet of paper from a sketch pad and left my message on her desk. Casting my flashlight’s beam over Aidan’s tap shoes, I saw that one of them had writing on the insole. I was never any good at reading other people’s cursive handwriting, but I could clearly make out Fred Astaire’s autograph. Aidan didn’t have a father, but she had something better: a mythology of father figures.

On my way back to Whitehall, I passed the Swan still pinned upright, its mast mired in oily water. The Swan was one more casualty of my confusion. One more thing I’d touched only to see destroyed. That evening on the Swan, I’d joked with Aidan that having a girl on a boat was considered to bring the crew bad luck.