The Starboard Sea: A Novel (29 page)

The air was cold and I was drunk, hearing suspicious noises. I swung around, checking behind myself. There didn’t seem to be another soul in the park, but I kept hearing footsteps and rustling.

It occurred to me that I could cross all the way over to the West Side and crash in on Tazewell. I didn’t even know for certain that he was in town, but I figured that maybe if we went out together a few beers might loosen him up. Maybe he’d tell me something about the night of the storm. It was still a long and even dangerous walk, but I was young and invincible. I stopped under a streetlight to finish a beer and noticed a man, the first person I’d seen in the park, standing a few feet away from me in the shadows. The man wore a black watch cap and pea coat. He lit a cigarette and I could see his face. “Want a smoke?” he asked.

The man held out his cigarette and I considered what would happen if I took it. He was a small guy, in his twenties. He stepped closer and I could see the razor stubble on his face. I imagined his rough skin abrasive against my cheek.

“It’s freezing.” He nudged even closer. “That’s a nice coat you’ve got. This cigarette’s the only thing keeping me warm.”
I knew I could take down this stranger, use my height and reach against him, crack the neck of the beer bottle on the ground and flash my weapon. But he wasn’t looking for that kind of trouble. Was this why I’d crept into the park? I wondered. Had I hoped to meet someone on this cold night? Would I bring him back to my empty apartment, pretend that he was Cal?
“A girl died here,” I said.
“I don’t know anything about that.” The man exhaled, a wall of smoke forming between us.
“Her name was Jennifer Levin,” I said. “She was only eighteen.”

My lungs heaved with wintry air as I ran back up Fifth Avenue. “Cruising,” I thought, that’s what they called it. I’d grown up across the street from this action but never thought it had anything to do with me. But it was something men did, looked for sex in dark places.

I was almost at my apartment when I heard someone call, “Jason.” A soft, motherly voice asked, “Why aren’t you wearing a scarf?”
Cal’s mother had aged, or maybe she’d simply stopped dyeing her hair. Though Caroline lived just a few blocks away, I hadn’t seen her since the funeral. She was coming out of my apartment building and I wondered whom it was she’d been visiting. I leaned down to kiss her on the cheek and was surprised when she pulled her face back. She could smell the beer on my breath.
“You look all flushed,” she said.
“Merry Christmas,” I said.
“Yes.” She smiled. “Merry Christmas.” She held up her gloved hand to brush away the snow on my shoulders. I saw a silver glint on her wrist. “I was actually just dropping off your mother’s fur coat. She let me borrow it.”
I invited Caroline upstairs, but she told me her husband was expecting her at home. We just stood there together in the snow. I could see Cal in the way she nodded and crossed her arms. She asked me how sailing had gone that fall and was distressed to hear that I’d quit.
“Oh, that’s not acceptable, Jason. What would Cal think? He’d be so mad at you. Promise me you’ll pick it up again. Get back out on the water.”
I saw that the Breitling, Cal’s watch, was still on her wrist. I had to bite my lip to keep from crying, from collapsing at her feet right there in the snow. “I miss him so much,” I said.
She opened her arms, and I fell into them. We both cried, not like we were hearing bad news for the first time or grieving soon after some tragic event. We cried like professional mourners, like people who had made it their business to grieve forever, to always be inconsolable.
“You must move on,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Caroline had left my mother’s sable coat with Max. He took one look at me, my face still flush from crying, and said, “Son, forgive me for saying this, but you look like hell.”

Despite all the time I’d spent relying on Max’s good company, I knew very little about him. “How many kids do you have Max?” I asked.
Max shook his head, “Jason, I don’t have any children. Thought you knew that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Max removed his cap and rubbed his bald head.
“It’s just that,” I said, “you’d make a pretty decent dad.”
“Get to bed, kid,” he said and called the elevator for me.
I brought the sable coat upstairs, the fur warm and soft in my arms. I laid the coat down on my bed and slept on top of it that night. What Caroline didn’t know was the very thing I’d been unable to confront. The horrible thing I’d done to Cal.

I awoke with mom’s sable coat wrapped around my waist. A faun, a half man. Though I wasn’t one for remembering my dreams, away from Bellingham I’d had the chance to dream of Aidan. Vivid images of her swimming, treading away from me, her head bobbing like a buoy, the viscous water, dragging her down. Aidan strained to stay afloat while I stood on the shore watching.

Aidan had said that the two most important things in life were knowing what you wanted and understanding what you were afraid of. “Fear and desire,” she said. “That’s the key.”

Though I resisted the thought, I knew it was possible that Aidan had killed herself. I wanted to believe that she hadn’t. I feared that she had. I wondered what sadness might have convinced her to walk into the water. Wondered if it was the same sadness that had compelled Cal. I couldn’t help but connect Cal’s and Aidan’s deaths. Together they were like a pair of binary stars, two lights so close and so bright they blended into one. Despite Caroline’s reassurances, I understood that I was responsible for my best friend ending his life. It was my fault that Cal had lost hope. Losing Aidan made me feel as though I hadn’t learned anything.

Just before New Year’s Eve, my fake cousin Ginger called and left a message on the answering machine inviting me to a party downtown. I rarely ventured below Central Park South but, for Ginger, I decided to make an exception. I had to replay the message several times to get the address of the bar. She claimed that the place was a kind of speakeasy. That I would need to press a buzzer and when asked to identify myself, say, “I am the prince of Paraguay.”

Ginger hadn’t mentioned her baby, but I figured she’d already given birth. I was excited for her. Glad she had something to celebrate.
The bar was in the West Village, uncharted territory for me. I braved the subway, then stumbled around before finding the place, an old brick carriage house. Aidan had asked me about certain nightclubs, Tunnel and the Limelight, and was stunned to learn that I almost never went downtown. “That’s another world,” I said. “Not my scene.”
Inside the speakeasy, boughs of pink and blue lights swung from the ceiling, low enough that I could reach up and touch the warm bulbs. I’d worn a jacket and tie, but most of the men were dressed in tuxedos with ironic glittery bow ties and matching cummerbunds. Women shimmied around the tight quarters in spangled cocktail gowns. It was an older postcollege crowd, and I was happy to be the youngest at the party. Making my way over to the mahogany bar, I saw Ginger swiveling on a stool and nodding at the bartender. Ginger wore a black beaded flapper dress with a silver slip underneath. When she saw me, she jumped off her stool, kissed me on both cheeks, and told everyone sitting at the bar that I was her Tiger. Her belly was gone and she toasted me with her champagne flute. I asked after her baby. “How’s your little lamb?”
Ginger handed me a bottle of Perrier-Jouët, ordering me to have a drink.
All around us people were dancing, toasting, locking lips, declaring their resolutions, and scheming to get laid. It was the wrong atmosphere for what Ginger had to tell me, precisely why she’d chosen it.
Three weeks before she was due to deliver, Ginger noticed that her baby had stopped kicking. “Everything inside of me went quiet and cold.”
She told me about the drive to the hospital, how Dill ran three red lights, how her mother, Miriam, claimed that losing the baby was for the best.
“The doctors couldn’t give me a reason. ‘Inexplicable.’ But I wonder”—Ginger leaned in close—“what if I’m poison? What if my baby never had a chance?”
Ginger’s face sparkled, the result of some cosmetic powder, but I told her that she was glowing and beautiful. “You’re not poisonous,” I said.
Ginger shielded her arms against her belly, still feeling the rupture, the missing life. There was nothing I could say to make her loss any easier to bear. “You’re going to be a beautiful mother.”
“You know they make you deliver the baby.” Ginger rubbed her eyes, smudging her mascara. “Stillborn. That’s what they call it.”
Without thinking, I said something stupid, something I immediately wanted to retract. “Was it a boy or a girl?”
Ginger patted my arm and excused herself. It was noisy in the bar and I hoped that she hadn’t heard my dumb question. She took her time and I grew anxious, but she returned with a fresh coat of pink lipstick and more of her shimmering gold powder. “Champers,” she said to the bartender. “We need more champagne.”
The bar filled with smoke and dancing bodies. Ginger knew everyone at the party. Men kept coming over to check on her and ask about me. Ginger told them that at the stroke of midnight she and I were going to board a catamaran and set sail out of New York Harbor. “Where are you headed?” one of the men asked. “Wherever the trade winds take us,” Ginger said. She kissed these men on their cheeks and waved them away. At one point in the night, she leaned over and whispered, “Tell me if you see anything you like.”
She wanted to hear how I was doing. I shrugged, said that I was okay, then surprised myself by telling Ginger, “I lost somebody.”
I described how Aidan and I had sneaked in and out of windows. How we swam at night. “I haven’t felt that close to anyone since Cal.” I told Ginger that Aidan reminded me of her. And it was true. They shared a similar beauty and eccentricity. Ginger smiled. It seemed unfair of me to tell Ginger of my loss while she was still reeling from her own, but my story energized her. She wanted to help me. When I said, “I’m the one who’s poisonous,” she disagreed, pushing me on, eager to hear my theories about what might have happened at Race’s. Ginger knew the type of guys I was talking about. “Reckless boys,” she said, “and their reckless ways.”
“You know,” I said, “when you’ve done something terrible, something you regret, it gives you this special insight, like you can detect other people’s bad behavior.”
“Like you can tell when someone’s guilty because you feel your own guilt.”
“Exactly. Every time I see Race, I recognize something in him, something I feel within myself. Something rotten.”
Ginger rubbed my shoulders. “We’re quite a festive duo. I think we need a few spins on the dance floor.”
We danced a little and drank a lot. Trying to forget the past year of our lives.
I was happy to hear that Ginger had left her mother’s house and rented an apartment in SoHo. She was thinking of taking classes at NYU. “Second chances, fresh starts. That’s what life keeps dealing me.”
The night had come to an end, our new year about to begin. There were no taxis outside the bar, and I insisted on walking Ginger back to her apartment. Despite conventional wisdom, Cal and I always believed that we could see the stars at night in Manhattan. Ginger pointed up and said, “Orion will guide us home.” Drunk and warm from champagne, we trundled along the icy sidewalks, the streets still filled with revelers. “I forgot to thank you,” Ginger said.
“For what?” I asked.
“For convincing me to do that deal with Riegel. It’s helping Dill. He’s working with that fellow Hiro, helping him amass his own art collection. Dill might even open up his own gallery.”
“So Riegel came through,” I said. “Go figure.”
“I’m not surprised. All your dear brother has ever wanted is to turn a profit. Once when we were kids, my dad offered Riegel twenty dollars to rake the seaweed off our beach. Riegel took the money, then paid some local kid four dollars to do the actual work.”
“Your dad must have loved that.”
“He roared with laughter, then hunted down the local kid and gave him a hundred bucks.”
I clutched Ginger’s arm. “I miss your dad.”
“We should take out his sloop this summer. Since he died, it’s how I feel close to him. When I’m on the water, I can hear Dad in the wind, yelling at me to luff the mainsail.”
The buildings were dark enough that I could see Vega, the brightest star in Lyra. I said, “I miss so many people.”
“It’s how we know we’re alive,” Ginger said. “We grieve the dead.”

FOURTEEN

My second week back at Bellingham, we had our first snow. Several white inches accumulated by midmorning with the promise of an even heavier storm to follow. After lunch, I stood outside Astor packing snowballs and targeting underclassmen. Kriffo and Stuyvie joined me, and together we watched as the girls in their dress code skirts slipped, slid, and fell on the icy paths. We called out numbers rating their wipeouts. “Nice long johns,” Kriffo joked. “Definite 8.5 on the Richter scale.” Tazewell joined us, and I asked if they were going to haze any of the sophomores that night. None of them had heard about the tradition of tying sophomores up to the columns in their pajamas after the first snow. They all liked the way it sounded. “We’ve been too easy on the underclassmen,” Tazewell said. “It’s time we exert some seniorprivileges.”

We made a loose plan to wake up early that morning and raid Wee House. “Do you think Race would be up for this?” I asked.
“Good call,” said Stuyvie. “It’s just his sort of thing.”

Earlier in the day, during Chapel, Windsor had announced that Mr. Guy would be retiring at the end of the school year. I was surprised. Figured that Mr. Guy would hold on to the bitter end. That he’d heart attack while delivering a lecture on the Potsdam Conference. It occurred to me that Mr. Guy was still pissed about Dean Warr undermining his authority. I would have been. After the announcement, Windsor encouraged Mr. Guy to say a few words, and all of us stood up and applauded as he made his hunched way up to the microphone. He thanked us for the ovation and said that after almost fifty years, he was finally ready to graduate from high school. It seemed like a terrible waste, to have spent an entire lifetime at Bellingham. What had he learned, I wondered, and what had the school given him for all of his trouble? When I first met him he had an almost invisible hearing aid. Now he wore bulky pink plugs that stuck out comically from both ears. The new hearing aids whistled as Mr. Guy returned to his seat.