by Ron Irwin
“I’ve been working as a freelancer.” I half smiled, tried to be ingratiating.
“What line of work?”
“Television. Documentary films.”
He just looked at me, professionally blank. I added, “You know. Video. TV.”
He glanced at the passport and the clearance material again, like he was looking at a bad poker hand. Then he pushed it back to me. “Make sure you clear your baggage, especially any electronic goods. Welcome home.”
And with that I was through to baggage collection, where I picked up my overweight bags that had been vomited onto the carousel. Including my carry-on, I had four heavy Pelicans and a duffel. I pushed it all on two trollies to a makeshift table where two customs agents, a man and a woman, both in white gloves like old-time traffic cops, first opened my carry-on case to reveal my shoot tapes lined up in a row, each one of them plastic wrapped. The inspectors examined all of the Beta tapes and mini-DV tapes, then the separate Beta SP camera and the Canon XL. Everything else was locked up in Cape Town—all the lights, the boom, the zeppelin, the fuzzies and the small edit suite. And a cage full of diving gear that took up the entire front room of the apartment.
“Haven’t seen a Betamax tape in a while,” the woman agent commented.
“They’re for professional playback.”
“Yeah, that’s right, uh-huh?” She had stout, no-nonsense forearms and she was carrying a Beretta 9 mm high on her hip, clear and accessible. “What would I see on these tapes?”
“Sea life.”
“Do you have journalist credentials?”
“Do you need to see them?”
“I would appreciate that, sir.”
I showed her what I had. It wasn’t much, just a manila folder with a few printed e-mails, an ID and a fax from Washington. They could call National Geographic if they wanted to and confirm who I was if my work rang any alarm bells. She went over each paper, running down the lines with her finger, her lips pursed. “What exactly were you filming?”
“Sharks and game fish.”
“Nothing that might be politically sensitive or inflammatory?”
Not unless one of those Zambezi sharks had a thing against Americans, I thought, but shook my head. I was too tired to get into an argument about freedom of speech and artistic expression. I had interviews in there with some people making fairly general negative statements about the propensity of rich American tourists to come to South Africa and Kenya wanting to fish a threatened species like the black marlin. The woman, who was obviously in charge, looked over the papers and then back at the tapes again as if she was considering opening up a few, then thought better of it. She thanked me and the duo moved on their way, leaving me to rewrap everything and lock up the cases.
I pushed one trolley ahead of me and pulled the other along behind me and came out through the customs tunnel into the drab receiving area, to be put on display for the inspection of the people crowded against metal barriers waiting for passengers. Families. A tour group leader in a loud yellow shirt hanging over his black trousers. Two skulking limo drivers in tight mortician garb doing some scavenging. I scanned the faces because maybe Carolyn would be out there. I told myself it was possible she could have fired up the Jeep and come out to greet me. She’d be in the waiting throng somewhere, ready to put her arms around me.
But I didn’t waste too much time looking.
Instead, I made my way out to the taxi ranks alone, chose a yellow and green station wagon that I managed to fill and sat in the back waiting to see that butchered skyline as the car chugged out of the rank. The driver was rotund, slack jawed and ashen, wearing a black turban. He had slapped a bumper sticker on the dash that read, “I AM A SIKH, GOD BLESS AMERICA.”
New York was its mammoth self, dark and grimy. The roads to its innards were packed with American cars and Americans on the way to work. American billboards glowered down at me. As we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge the city loomed up as we circled onto the roadway, the bridge bigger than almost anything in Africa, built on a huge scale like the city itself, like the country.
Looking out over the water I felt a rush of vertigo before we plunged into the Lower East Side, toward the loft on Broome Street. By the time we got there, I was nodding off. It was early summer, already hot and steamy, and the wide street in front of the building was clogged with people. The driver and I unloaded my luggage in front of the cavernous door to the warehouse where Carolyn and I lived.
“You travel heavy,” the driver puffed accusingly, his round face wet with sweat.
“Just wait a second while I make sure somebody’s home, okay?”
“We wait too long I turn back on the meter.”
I pressed the buzzer and Carolyn’s voice crackled though the intercom instantly. “Rob?”
Maybe she had been looking out the window, watching the traffic, anticipating my taxi, I thought. “I’m back.” My voice sounded thick and strange.
“Hang on.” An exasperated sigh.
I handed the driver a fifty and watched him heave open the door to the station wagon and churn the window down. He whipped the car into the surly, crawling traffic and acrid smoke burped out of the exhaust when he mashed the gas. Then the freight elevator doors groaned open—a steel wall of graffiti sliding into the building—and I horsed the bags in, scraped the plastic cases on the hot cement and pushed myself in on top of it all.
The loft was on the fifth floor of a warehouse that had been partially renovated. Below us we had a real, honest-to-God sweatshop; illegal Asian immigrants working sewing machines twenty-four hours a day, all with a wonderful view of Teddy Roosevelt’s old police station. I could hear the machinery and the shouts in there as the elevator lumbered upward to the wooden barn doors that opened into her apartment, Carolyn waiting there with her tentative hug and her diplomatic smile. She stepped halfway into the elevator and picked up the tape case, left the rest for me. “You look like death,” she said, sighing, and gently touching my wrist, as if trying to steady me. You look exhausted, I thought, but still so beautiful. She kissed me, a formal touch of her lips against mine. There was the brief press of her hipbone against my leg and then she was away before I could pull her to me. She stood against the elevator doors while I slid everything else onto the wooden floors, the silence of the apartment an unexpected relief.
“I made coffee,” she announced. “And bought croissants and the New York Times, if you want to read.” She pointed to the wide kitchen area where a bowl of daisies, surely from Confucius Flowers down the street, was bursting into color. She was wearing a white oxford shirt that hugged her too tightly to be mine, cargo pants and one of the malachite necklaces she’d bought when we first went to South Africa. Her rhinestone ring matched it, and her blond hair was pulled back from her face. She seemed smaller. Carolyn pushed five ten in her socks, and she was almost my height in heels. She’d obviously been up for a few hours; the loft smelled of coffee and the cigarette she’d smoked to prepare herself for my grand entrance. She had her contacts in, which possibly was a good sign, although when I thought of her I pictured her wearing her new, wire-rimmed glasses that made her look older and wiser than she was. She’d lost weight while I was away. It didn’t suit her. It was weight loss from being up too late and not eating. She looked me over as if I was a paying guest. She seemed ready to kick me out right away if I decided to pick up where we had left off six weeks before, already irritated by the mess I had made in the living room. “Do you want to sleep?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“I thought you would. Was the flight bad?”
“Just long. Not crowded.”
“I wondered if they would hassle you at customs again.”
“They definitely considered it. It’s a new world.”
She looked me up and down one last time. I should have reached for her then. She would have let me. But I hesitated, and the moment was gone. “Have a shower and get some sleep. Give me the tapes and I can s
tart digitizing them. Have you done anything with the shoot tapes?”
“They’re in the black Pelican, in pretty much the same order the customs woman left them.”
“How many hours?”
“Twenty, I think.” I flipped open the case and pulled out the tapes, brought them over to her editing table, the Mac already on, the Beta player humming in the tower.
“We don’t have much time. It may be a day lost to jet lag for you but it’s another day at the office for me. Go on. Take a shower.” She hadn’t moved from the door. “Change your clothes. Have something to eat and go to bed.” She waved at the partition under the fogged, warehouse windows. Behind it lay the sleeping area, you couldn’t call it a bedroom. “Take my bed, okay? We’ll figure everything out later. I don’t want to tiptoe around you all morning while I do this.”
“It’s your bed now?”
“Mine when you moved in, mine when you move out. Are we doing this now?”
I raised my palms in surrender.
She helped me lug all of my things to the section of the studio where we used to sleep together. I removed my leather shaving kit from my briefcase and went to the industrial sliding door of the bathroom. “I’ll help you sort through the tapes later.”
“Did you number them?”
“You know I numbered them, Car.”
“I’ll get into it now. Go. Seriously. You stink.”
She’d laid out a freshly laundered, folded towel on the toilet lid. Hers hung primly in the middle of the long rail we had once both shared. She’d put down a bath mat, but that was not hospitality, that was prudence. I stepped into the cavernous shower that had been built for two by the previous owner—we’d found that convenient, once—and showered in lonely silence. The hot water streaming down my back felt obscenely luxurious, and I had to hold on to the brushed metal handle over the soap alcove to stop my knees from buckling. I cranked the heat up as hard as it would go and felt dizzy in the furious gush, then shut off the water. I stepped out into the haze of steam. I shaved and wrapped my towel around my waist and padded back out into the studio, where she was already busy across the room at the computer, her back to me, watching the screen as the machine digitized six weeks of work.
“I have the shot list in my briefcase,” I said, stoned from the humidity in the bathroom.
“That would help. Do you have the time codes of the interviews?”
“Yeah, yeah. Printed. I have them on the flash disk, too. Hang on.” I sat on the bed, lost the towel and slipped on some shorts. I ruffled through the case, found a sheaf of notes, then lay back on the pillow and started pawing through them. And fell fast asleep.
* * *
It was dark out when I opened my eyes. Carolyn was covering me with the duvet when I woke up. She, who had slept beside me in this bed naked or close to it for five years was wearing a baggy white T-shirt and white boxers. My boxers, yet another piece of clothing she’d colonized, along with my cashmere coat, numerous hats, sweaters and a pair of mirrored sunglasses.
“What time is it?”
“It’s eleven at night. Your body clock’s going to be a mess.”
“You should have woken me up.”
“I tried. You were a ton of bricks.”
I lay there listening to somebody downstairs moving something heavy and metal across the floor. A television was on somewhere; a buzz of noise, a pause, a buzz.
She lay down beside me. “The tapes are good. What I’ve seen. I skipped around. The footage is really … yeah … top notch.”
“I hope they think so at the channel.”
“They will.”
I rolled over on my side and looked at her, reached out and touched her face and she blinked. She took my hand and held it between us in a neutral soul brother handshake. “The water was cloudy in some of the shark sequences but I’ve already seen the shots we can use. It’s better than we could have hoped for. Really.”
I pulled myself closer to her and she didn’t move away. I went to kiss her and she put her hands up, shielded herself. “No, Rob. Don’t.”
She rolled over in the bed and turned off the light, plunged us into the cold, blue glow of the sleepy city, the sounds of the cars and the trucks outside new and unfamiliar and invasive after weeks on the Durban coast. I looked at the outline of her neck in the dark, and then came closer, pressed myself against her and rested my hand on her waist. She shifted slightly, quickly, claimed her half of the bed, more than her half of the quilt. “You get to sleep here just for tonight. Tomorrow you’re couching it. We have things we need to talk about, Rob. So keep that hand where it is.”
Silence reigned.
Then she exhaled heavily. “If you do that again you’ll be on the couch right now. I’m not kidding. You are so not getting laid tonight.”
I rolled over on my back and looked up into the darkness. I closed my eyes and willed sleep to return. I listened to the sounds of the loft. The push-out window creaked, and the faucet dripped. Water slushed through the pipes in the wall. The dishwasher whirred and hummed in the kitchen. The fridge kicked on, kicked off. A siren began to whine a block away. These city sounds. These American sounds.
She yawned and then said, “You were talking in your sleep, by the way.”
“What was I saying?”
“Something about rowing.”
“What about it?”
“I don’t know.” She rocked back and forth, claimed yet more of the duvet from me. “You were going on about somebody named Channing. Who’s he?”
I smiled in the dark. Then I thought about Perry and his letter and stopped smiling. “It’s a long story, Car. Go to sleep.”
4.
The boathouse looked like a barn with an elongated top floor. It stood back from the river and was built to appear intimidating. The heavy outside sliding doors opened to the boats and the oars and you walked by them to get to another set of sliding doors that led to the tanks—two stagnant troughs of water with sliding seats and outriggers next to them. Here was where a rower’s form was hammered into him, where unforgiving mirrors reflected back every weakness in a place that smelled of dankness and mold and waterborne rot. There was only one window, high up and filthy, that barely let in any light. The way up to the attic rooms was easy to miss, just a simple wooden door, like a cabinet door, that opened to a narrow set of stairs.
I arrived early, before the others, to the first meeting of FSBC to get my bearings and not look like such a newcomer. At first I thought that the ergometers and weight machines would be up here, but soon figured out they were in the basement, a sequestered hell I would come to know all too well. The top floor consisted of the meeting room, such as it was, and Channing’s office. His real office. He had a carrel in the English department, but this was where he existed. The office looked over the river, and it was the kind of functional room you’d find in an army HQ. A wooden desk. A longer table near the desk. A computer that Channing obviously never turned on, steel filing cabinets. Pictures of the English Henley, banners, posters of races gone by and a crimson and white wooden oar suspended in the darkness—Channing’s captain’s oar from Harvard. The pictures and trophies in one of the cabinets looked neglected. He had one entire shelf just for tools. And above and around that, books. Hundreds of them. Huddled black paperbacks, waterlogged leather-bound classics, yellowing cloth-bounds, worn hardcovers. The wisdom of the ages moldering away.
I looked, but didn’t dare step inside. Amazingly, his office door just hung open. I had come from a school where everything was locked against the students; offices were protected by steel-clad doors and teachers walked the hallways with keys around their necks. Feared and hated as he was, it probably never occurred to Channing that a student might be insane enough to invade his personal space.
Nothing in his office, aside from the books and that oar, said anything about Channing himself or indicated he had a life outside the school. There were plenty of rumors. One was that he had been a criminal
lawyer before Fenton and had quit for any of a thousand reasons: a client had committed suicide, he had insulted his boss, he’d been sued, he’d been disbarred. He lived off campus in an old white farmhouse—that was a fact—and his wife from the scumbag lawyer days was long gone. That was another fact. He had inhabited that office for thirty years and had either never thought to, or purposefully declined to, put anything personal in there.
* * *
The meeting room was all raw timber and rising damp and had the distinct feel of a fortress about it. It seemed intentionally stripped of any extravagance and was the kind of room that was always hot and close in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. Uncomfortable by design, it had been built using the same architectural philosophy that went into constructing a monastery, or an interrogation room.
John Perry, Chris Wadsworth, Ruth Anderson and Connor came stomping up the stairs for the inaugural meeting. No one said anything to me, but Connor lifted his chin in acknowledgment when he saw me. His mouth was still swollen from our fall and his torn ear looked crusty and painful. I unconsciously touched my bruised ribs. They were followed by the returning JV four and about a dozen more kids who were going to try to make the team in the spring—sophomores and hopeful juniors from the club boats who only rowed at a recreational level, not competitively against other schools. Other students wanted to be here, but Channing was only interested in the contenders for the JV and Varsity boats. Mid-September and he was already calling us together for a sport that wouldn’t start officially until March. For top-level rowers, there was no off-season. Crew was always a reality.
When Channing stalked in, rumpled, mistrustful and radiating contempt, the room quieted down immediately. He looked like something that had stood up to the elements too long and was starting to fall apart. He was the best coach at Fenton. And the most despised. The way he looked at you, you knew he wasn’t missing anything. He was tall, still limber and easy in his movements for his age, which must have been early sixties. He taught a vicious AP English class and was a master of the pop quiz and the brutal exam.