The Starboard Sea: A Novel (35 page)

“None of the paintings are real.” Race stood behind me. “We own all of the originals, but Mom keeps most of them locked up in a vault.” Race pointed to the old man on the boat. “This one she lent out to a museum. Crazy tax break. She had some artist paint these copies just for show.”

“People do that?” I asked. “Own originals of something but then display copies?”
“Embarrassing, right?” Race blushed a little. “I’m honest about it, though. Since Dad died, Mom’s always afraid someone’s going to break in and steal everything.”
I didn’t see the point of having an original work of art if you kept it locked up. It was like not owning the original at all.
Race handed me a beer and a box of pizza. He’d ordered dozens of pizzas, some of them decadently covered with chunks of lobster. “My creation,” he said. Kriffo and Stuyvie came in from playing basketball and clicked on an enormous TV.
“Check this out,” Kriffo called to us.
He’d landed on a news show. I recognized Robert Chambers from the times I’d seen him at Dorrian’s. A reporter chattered on about a recent video he’d uncovered of Chambers partying with a group of girls dressed in lingerie. We sat on Race’s soft sofas and watched Chambers pretend to choke himself while the trashy girls giggled. He held up a Barbie doll, twisted the plastic head. “Oops,” he said. “I think I killed it.”
We laughed. All of us. Out of ner vousness, perhaps. Laughing made the acid from Race’s pizza rise up in the back of my throat. Styuvie picked up the remote control and turned the channel.
“It’s too bad,” Tazewell said. “Chambers was primed to get off. Now he’s fucked.”

By midnight the party was in full swing. The entire Bellingham campus had emptied out onto Race’s lawn. It was a Friday night, late enough in the semester that Dean Warr had eased up on monitoring weekend sign-outs. I was certain he knew about the party. His son was doing beer bongs a few feet away from me. There were also plenty of kids I didn’t recognize. In the summer, while everyone was away, Race probably hung out with his townie friends, dropping them all once the school year picked up again. A shitty thing to do. Tazewell played DJ, blasting reggae and passing joints. I stayed sober.

I worried about enjoying myself around these guys. Worried about turning into one of them. From a distance, I watched Skinner and James Hardy toss shiny beaded pillows and leather seat cushions through a window and out onto the back lawn. Race saw them too and didn’t seem to mind. A few weeks back, I’d bumped into Officer Hardy in the General Store. Heard him charge his groceries to Race’s mother. He didn’t notice me, though at one point, we were standing in the same aisle.

I left Race’s house and wound up back down at the dock where Race had parked the sloop
Spray,
the Chris-Craft, the Boston whaler, and a sleek red cigarette boat that looked like a fantasy, a cartoon of speed. Kriffo was sitting in the cigarette boat, smoking a cigar.

I waved and Kriffo invited me aboard, offered me one of his Montecristos. I took it and had him light it for me. The cinnamon smell of cigar smoke reminded me of sailing with my mother and Roland, but it also reminded me of those times in my childhood when my father had missed some important event only to stumble into my room late at night to wake me, kiss me on the forehead, and find out how things had gone. On those nights, Dad always smelled like cigars, like he’d been out enjoying himself.

“It’s nice here,” I said. “Race has a good setup.”

Kriffo agreed. “I’ll be sorry to graduate. There’s nothing like this in Syracuse.” Though Tazewell had been accepted early, Kriffo and I both had yet to hear any update from Princeton. He’d shown me the orange Princeton sweatshirt his mother had given him for Christmas. “My mother fucking cursed my luck.”

One of the things I’d noticed about Kriffo was his weakness for nostalgia. For the past month, every night in the dining hall he’d wax poetic about that evening’s dinner. “This is the last time we’ll have tacos,” he’s say. “The last time I scarf down this shepherd’s pie.” I’d come to think of Kriffo as an endearing giant even though I knew how easily he could crush or harm. Even though I understood how much he’d hurt Chester.

I said, “I’ve been taking a survey. What are you gonna miss most about this place?”
Over the spring, Kriffo had bulked up, expanding his already expanded girth. He looked uncomfortable in his body, like his muscles were a costume he’d put on wrong and couldn’t shed. He thought about my question and said that he’d miss his friends. “You guys, of course. I’ll miss knowing that there are all these great guys who one hundred percent have my back.”
I agreed. “We’ve taken good care of one another.”
“For a long time,” he said, “I was pissed at you for tackling me in front of everyone. But you turned out to be all right.”
Kriffo spat over the side of the boat. I couldn’t tell if he was drunk.
“Have you ever been out on this boat?” I asked. “These are real monsters.”
“Just that night of the storm,” Kriffo said. “You know, the thing with the girl.”
Kriffo had convinced himself that I was there for the hurricane party. That I was part of whatever they’d done. I said, “Yeah, that was pretty wild.”
“It was mostly an accident.” Kriffo nodded. “I mean when you look at it that way, it’s really nobody’s fault.”
“We did the best we could to save her. Right?”
“Maybe not the best.” Kriffo sucked on his cigar. “We had to cut her loose. We could have died out there.”
My shoulders began to shake. I made a fist to calm myself.
“I don’t know how you and Race charge around on the water.” Kriffo shook his head. “Those waves scared the hell out me.”

I left Kriffo with his cigar and his guilt and ran back up to the house to find Race. There was no way for me to ask Kriffo questions if he thought I was actually there that night. I would have already known the answers.

Race stood alone on the third-floor balcony, drinking beer, looking down at his guests, the smell of marijuana, a mixture of fresh shit and mown lawn wafting up from below. “My Piranha Brother,” he said and bumped my chest. “You have everything you need?”

I thanked him for the party.
“That trophy cup is yours, you know,” he said. “My mom had one made for each of us. I didn’t want to say anything in front of the guys. It’s not like we’re pussies, but I think it’s good to have a little hardware for our hard work.”
“I should start a bragging wall.”
It was a nice gesture. Filled with his mother’s kind thoughts. She’d been there that afternoon when we won, waiting on the shore for the results. It was hard to view a regatta even when you were out on the water yourself—even if you knew where to look. Beautiful to watch but not exactly a spectator’s sport. Race had more or less banned his mother from watching him sail. “She knows I don’t like it. Makes me ner vous.” But there she was, and when we emerged chilly and soaked after our celebratory water plunge, she greeted us with thick fluffy towels. She told Race how proud his father would have been.
Race and I looked down at his party together. Brizzey and Stuyvie were bobbing and weaving trying to dance to Peter Tosh. I asked Race, “Who looks good tonight? Who are you planning on celebrating with?”
We ranked the girls at the party from “unfuckable” to “fuck yeah.” Race was interested in a Junior named Carmen. A brunette with long feathered hair. “I like a girl with an overbite,” he said.
I said, “Aidan had just a hint of an overbite.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Race smiled.
“But I thought you said you hooked up with her.”
Like any bad liar, Race had forgotten his lie. “Oh, yeah. That’s right.”
“I was wondering if you could clear something up for me.” I rubbed my face. “See, that night of the storm, I thought Aidan came out here looking for me, but maybe she was still interested in you.”
Race was past the point of denying that Aidan had gone to the party. He’d given Leo a job to make this truth disappear. “What happened then?” I asked. “Kriffo said you took her out on your cigarette boat.”
“Let’s not do this,” Race said. “Things are good between us.”
“How did she drown?” I asked. “We won our trophies. Just tell me.”
“Why do you care? She was nothing.”
I pushed Race against the balcony. In one swift move, I raised my arm, gripping his throat in my hand. My heart lurched inside my chest as I imagined what might have happened to Aidan. “What did you do to her?” I demanded. “Why did you hurt her?”
I was choking Race so hard that he couldn’t answer. Race tried to push me off, but I used the full force of my body against him. After all our hours on the water together, all my self-control and determination to find the truth, and yet I still wound up with my hands around my enemy’s neck. As I felt myself ready to squeeze the life out of Race, I considered what had brought me to this moment, this confrontation. I understood that this moment wasn’t only about Aidan. My skin warmed. Flush with the memory of what I’d done to Cal.
“I get it, Race.” I loosened my hold. “We’re not so different. I did something awful once too.” I let go, releasing my grip.
Race sucked in air. I expected him to take a swing at me, but he didn’t. He just stared at me and breathed in heavily.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I know what you did. Certain I can guess.”

The night before Cal died, I came back to our room late, found Cal bare chested, his skin slick with sweat. He’d been lifting free weights in our room. His arms and chest muscles taut and sinewy. He had on gym shorts that I was certain belonged to me. The front of his hair was soaked with sweat, while my own hair was wet with rain. I was wearing a hand-me- down, my dad’s ancient green trench coat. The coat had epaulets and brass buttons and made me feel like a soldier in Napoleon’s army. I’d been spending as much time away from Cal as possible. Resisting temptation and punishing myself— for what, I didn’t dare admit.

That night I’d walked into town for a cheeseburger. After dinner, I went to a pharmacy to read magazines. I flipped through a bunch of sports and sailing magazines, and I probably would have left without buying anything, except this anemic kid behind the counter kept looking over at me. I stared back, then turned away. He approached me and asked if I needed any help. The kid was my age, but he didn’t look like anyone I knew. He was thin, with pale, bloodless skin, black spikes of hair, and thick, rubbery lips. His fingernails looked bruised at first, like he’d slammed his hand in a car door, until I realized that he’d painted his nails black. He smiled at me. “Find anything you like?” he asked. He wasn’t creepy. Not really. But up until that point, I’d thought that whatever existed between Cal and me was separate and distinct from the rest of the world. It hadn’t occurred to me that a stranger could sense and recognize something so private.

I asked the anemic kid if the store sold
Penthouse
. He bit his black nails and tilted his head. He told me that they carried
Playboy
and something that he thought was called
Big on Top
. The store kept both behind the counter. I asked to buy a copy of
Playboy,
paid for the magazine, and left.

I walked back to campus in the rain, went to the chemistry lab, and tried beating off to the
Playboy
in the bathroom of the Science Wing. The women in the issue all had frizzy, bleach-blond hair, small tits. I could get hard, but I couldn’t stay hard enough to come. When I returned to our room, I was pretty worked up.

Cal rubbed a towel across his chest and asked me to listen to him. He’d been doing a lot of careful thinking and had reached certain conclusions about our friendship. Mainly, he was confident that we hadn’t done anything wrong those times in the dark, wrestling on the floor and in bed. He shook his sweat-soaked bangs away from his eyes and forehead, then in a clear mea sured voice, he explained that he loved me as much as he ever expected to love anyone. More, even. We were young together. We’d always be young to each other no matter how fat, bald, and blow hearted we became to the rest of the world. He said, “It’s simple, really.” When I didn’t respond, didn’t clear my throat or blink, even, Cal reached his arm out and touched his hand to my shoulder. When I still didn’t respond, Cal turned away, nodding his head and saying again, “It’s simple, really.”

I thought of the kid at the pharmacy and the naked ladies in the magazine. I was sad, but I was also angry. I lunged at Cal. Hurled myself on top of his slick and sweaty body, razing him down onto the wood floor. I smashed my closed fists against his ribs. Cal tried to push me off at first but slowly made less and less of an effort to defend himself. He went limp. Maybe he thought I was playing a new version of our game. I punched his chin, slapped the sides of his face. When I couldn’t stand the sight of him any longer, I flipped him over. It
was
simple, really. There was something I could do to put an end to the matter. Something final. The violence aroused me. The close proximity of our bodies turned me on. It was nothing for me to force myself onto Cal. To keep him pinned down with my knees on his legs, my hand around his neck. I could fuck him knowing that he’d never want me again.

All of the lights in our room were on, the door unlocked. I was still wearing my trench coat and the material fanned out over us, covering our bodies. If someone had walked through our unlocked door, he might have had the mistaken impression that I was on my knees, praying for strength. With one determined blow, I destroyed everything that was beautiful in my life.

I rolled off of Cal and left him curled up on the floor. I cleared my throat, spat in a wastebasket, and told Cal that I was switching roommates, changing sailing partners. It was over between us. He didn’t move for a long time. I undressed and got ready for sleep. Finally, before turning off the light, Cal pushed himself up from the floor. I tried not to look at him. His face was red, swollen. He held his arms around his rib cage. Had I simply offered him a cold cloth or helped him to bed, I could have begun to make things right between us. He stood for a moment, not looking at me, then bent down and picked something up off the ground. “This yours?” The
Playboy
must have fallen out of the inside pocket of my coat.

I didn’t speak to Cal again. Before we went to sleep that night, Cal said, “Don’t worry, Jason. You can pass. No one need ever know. Your secret will end with me.”