Flat Water Tuesday

by Ron Irwin

  He nodded, his eyes flickering at my mention of the Warwick Race. “Yes. Exactly right.”

  “I’m starting to think this isn’t just strange. It’s insane, that’s what it is.”

  “Rowing is a pastime for people who enjoy winning at all costs. You are among this cohort, or you would not be here.” He hummed to himself, checked his watch again. “And, Carrey, the others won’t despise you. They might begin to hate you, at least as much as you seem to hate them, but they won’t despise you. Maybe you could settle for a mutual disdain.”

  I ran the sandpaper over the door frame and it tore. It was getting hard to see what I was supposed to be doing.

  “Tomorrow you can clean this place up. And finish sanding.”

  “I’ll be here at 3:30 P.M.”

  “Don’t let yourself be delayed.”

  “I won’t.”

  7.

  Walking back down River Road to school I felt the temperature drop the minute the sun fell behind the mountain. Winter was lurking, you could feel it in the air, just under the warmth. I thought about what my father and Channing had said to me. I had taken enough time to get my bearings, figure out where I stood. You always had to know where you stood, or so my sister Wendy—three years dead now—once told me. I reckoned my position was pretty clear.

  I arrived back at North Dorm too late to change for dinner. They made you wear a coat and tie and I was in my work clothes. Anyway, I liked the quiet. Everyone was in the dining hall and I had the place to myself. I sat on one of the benches outside and figured I’d get some candy bars now and hit the snack bar after study hall. I was burning calories like a machine and I could eat anything. I went down the battered steps into the rec room, which always smelled like dust and rotten fruit. It was a pit, with a twenty-year-old TV and furniture that looked like it had been caged with wild animals. The place was littered with junk: book bags, sports equipment, books, old magazines that had been eviscerated, a Nerf football in shreds, as if it had been rescued from the jaws of a particularly vicious dog. I went to the vending machines along the far wall and started feeding in dollar bills from the wad my father had given me, watched the candy bars and chips fall from the racks inside to the trough below.

  That’s when I heard Ruth’s voice. She was furious, yelling at someone to go to hell. I walked back across the rec room to the stairwell and peeked out, saw her in the dark phone booth—the bulb long dead—her hair pushed back and two anger marks on her cheeks. Her knuckles were sharp outlines where she gripped the phone. She was looking right at me but I’m not sure she saw me, or if she did, she found it easy to pretend that she did not.

  Ruth had an aura of another place about her, like Fenton hadn’t managed to touch her in the whole three years she’d been here. We shared a chemistry class and we had definitely noticed each other. At least twice that I was aware of, when we were supposed to be learning how to balance equations, I had sensed her watching me. When I glanced at her the second time she didn’t look away. Her eyes were so intense and clear—green as a tiger’s—that I couldn’t hold her gaze. But I gave it a second before looking down. She seemed fragile and tough at the same time—she had to be. Ruth had steered the God Four to victory after victory last year and then been denied the Warwick Race. She was intriguing.

  The other chicks in the school hated her, of course; too good looking, too confident, too indifferent. From what I could tell, the guys on the team tolerated her. And feared her because she had to know them at the most elemental level. It was the coxswain who called out the final strokes of the race, who set the training, who raised the rating until you ran into a wall of exhaustion. Every time I looked over at her, I remembered that there was something almost satanic about every good coxswain. She was friendless like me and she didn’t care.

  And I’d die before I gave her the satisfaction of saying hello first.

  “I’m asking you if I can come home for one weekend. One.” The person answered, a long answer that she didn’t like. “Mom, you promised me you would not do this. We had an agreement.”

  Another answer, and you could tell from the way Ruth set her mouth it was pretty feeble. “I have to go. No. I have to go.” She slammed down the receiver and stood up in the cramped space. She picked up her bag. It wasn’t a student’s backpack—a scuffed, torn nylon job like mine with the names of doomed rock bands scrawled across the bottom and a dope blossom drawn across the logo—but a leather satchel, a mail pouch. She flipped it open. Her books were carefully lined up in the first section and she had another pocket in there with a brush and a bag of chick stuff.

  She rummaged around until she found a hard pack of Marlboro Reds, tweezed one out with her fingernails and mashed her lips around it hard enough to flatten the filter. She felt inside the bag for a lighter and had to almost tear the thing apart again. She finally found it and flicked it twice, lit the end of the cigarette and frowned, got two puffs in, holding the cigarette away from her face, blinking and swallowing hard.

  “What are you looking at, Rob Carrey?”

  “Is that your first cigarette?”

  “Were you listening to me on the phone? Don’t you have anything else to do other than eavesdrop on people’s conversations?” She took a deep breath, looked around, checked her watch, fanned the air. “Better stand back, I wouldn’t want to ruin your crew jock lungs, Rob.”

  “Give me that pack.” I was right, it was the first cigarette she’d taken from the pack, you could see them all still bunched together in there. I flipped it over, gave it a tap and a cigarette popped out. I took the lighter from her hand, her fingers cold in mine for a millisecond when she handed it over. I torched the Marlboro and gave the lighter back to her. I sifted a Coke can out of the garbage and held it out between us. “Go on. Ash in this or you’re going to burn the building down.”

  She managed to push about half the burning end in the opening and smeared cinders down the side of the can when she pulled it away.

  “This cigarette is stale.”

  “Well, my goodness, that’s gratitude.”

  “It tastes like you’ve had it in the bottom of a drawer for a year. Feels cool to be holding, doesn’t it? Except who is ever going to suspect you of anything?”

  She looked at me, softened for a second and then recalled how pissed off she was. “Since when do rowers smoke? You should be paranoid about your health.” She was doing better with it now, taking smaller puffs and not looking like she was going to choke to death after.

  “I’m almost a pack a day at home, if you count secondary smoke as smoking. All the best science says you should. If they catch us doing this, it’s twenty hours of work. A black mark on your perfect record, Ruth.”

  “My record isn’t perfect. Please stop saying that.” But she flushed and looked away and I knew I’d scored a point.

  “So you want to take up smoking? That’s the best rule you can break?”

  “I’ve been giving some thought to taking up a lot of things.” She tried to inhale and then coughed on it. You had to feel sorry for her but I wasn’t going to put mine out and give her an excuse to bag hers as well. She held the cigarette away from her face, straight up, like she’d seen on TV. She let it burn. “I’ve seen you on the water a few times.” She looked away from me. The hallway was dark and close, too warm and humid from the ancient heaters. I heard banging in the walls, heat struggling upward. “Can I say something to you? And you won’t be offended or take it the wrong way?”

  “Half of what people say to me I take the wrong way and I wind up in trouble.”

  “When I heard you were the PG rower I didn’t believe it, not at first. I really didn’t. You seem so different. I think you are, anyway. You were supposed to be in Channing’s English class but he transferred you out. He can’t stand rowers in his class. Everyone knows that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because rowers usually aren’t smart. They’re idiots. He’s the rowing coach, he should know.”


  “Who was on the phone?”

  She waved her cigarette at the pay phone and the ash fell onto the little steel writing ridge where she rubbed it in with her finger. “My mother. She’s supposed to live in this country. She should be here now but decided to go to England when I wanted to see her for a weekend.” She threw her hair back and changed the subject. “So, you’re from Niccalsetti, New York. Upstate New York. The Black Rock Rowing Club, right?”

  “You’re the first person I’ve met here who knows about it.”

  She looked at me evenly, like she was inspecting me. “You’ll make the team if you want to—Paul Wendt’s place from last year, the number three seat. I didn’t think you stood a chance at first. I do now.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because you’re not arrogant enough. You’re something else, but not arrogant. You need to be arrogant to make the team.”

  “Are you arrogant?”

  “I’m the first female to coxswain the God Four in the history of the school. When they elected me to the team, twenty of the rowing alumni sent back their colors.”

  “Did you keep them?”

  “Channing gave me their ties and I used them to stuff two throw pillows.”

  “Don’t exhale like that.”

  “Excuse me? Like what?”

  “Like you’re blowing a fly away from your face, out the side of your mouth. If you’re going to smoke, do it right.”

  “Like this?”

  “Now you’re not inhaling.”

  She just went on as if she hadn’t heard me. She regarded me through all the smoke. “I want you to be a good rower. I’m hoping you’ll help us beat Warwick. It was dumb to stand there in front of everyone and tell Channing you weren’t going to try out, that you only want to row in the single.”

  “I’m really not psyched to be rowing on a team.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Just get over your hang-up, get on the team and start rowing—and winning. We can’t lose the Warwick Race again, we just can’t. The dumb alumni will blame me and say it’s because I couldn’t steer. Paul was good last year. But you have to be better. You can’t just be this cocky boy from upstate New York. You have to rock.”

  “I’ve never had to rely on others to win. Never had to trust somebody else to steer a boat I was in. I mean, seriously, the whole idea around a coxswain is … what? So you steer, and…? You’re really sort of the coach’s spy, right?”

  She flushed again. “That’s not true! I’m a member of the God Four. I hate Channing as much as you guys do.”

  “But it’s not like he’s ever going to cut you. And if you’re so important to the team why isn’t it called the God Five?” I was winding her up because I liked the way her eyes looked when she was mad but I could see I had gone too far.

  “That’s just the sort of sexist crap I have to put up with all the time. You guys can’t see where you’re going when you go down that course. I can. I steer you. I can see the other boat. I’m the one who pushes you through them. You? What do you do, genius? You look at the back of the guy in front of you. I have to see everything, judge if the other team is dying and when we make a move. I’m the brain of the boat. Without me, you guys wouldn’t even get the boat down to the water. I give the command for hands on, to lift it, to lower it to the water and hold. I get you out there so you can do one thing: row. At the rating I tell you. And until I tell you to stop.” She was pretty riled up.

  “Yeah? And what about the seven months of daily training we have to put in?” I thought I might as well go for broke.

  “What about it? You don’t need to drop almost a fifth of your body weight and half starve yourself to do it, Carrey. And still be able to run with you guys in the freezing cold. You try running those miles on an empty stomach. You don’t need to keep track of the training schedules for a dozen rowers, or organize every session in the rowing tanks, or monitor everyone’s erg scores and weights records. You just have to show up.”

  “Okay, okay. Channing just gave me the big teamwork lecture.”

  “It’s not about teamwork. It’s about something else that’s like it.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “Why do I do what?”

  “Why be a cox for some retro guy’s rowing team? I mean, what’s the point if you think it’s so awful?”

  “Oh, God. What’s the point in anything? I’m good at it, I guess.”

  We had to get out of there sooner or later. But she was on a roll. She looked at me sideways, as if she was aiming her words. “Why do you row?”

  I waited a second and it was my turn to change the subject. “I was getting tired of seeing you in class and wondering what you’re like.”

  “Am I what you expected?”

  “Put the cigarette in the can and let’s get out of here before they bust us.”

  “Let them.”

  “Do you really want to finish that? You don’t.” I held out the can.

  She took one last drag, slid the rest into the can. I heard it fizz when it hit bottom. She waved away the smoke between us, as if she was waving at me, trying to get my attention and also saying good-bye. She turned and started walking away. She knew I was watching her go, too, watching her walk the whole hall until she disappeared through the door to the stairs. I couldn’t drop my cigarette fast enough into the can with hers. I felt like choking. You had to wonder what people were thinking, smoking those things.

  * * *

  Carolyn thought this might be the best work I had ever done for the channel. It consisted mostly of underwater footage I had snagged with pan-cams over the course of eight dives with some of the locals. I had also gone into the cage with a digital camera in plastic waterproof housing and stayed there as long as I could each day. The Durban water was warmer than the water near Gans Baai, where everyone went to film the Great Whites—there was so much Great White footage among the filmers in South Africa that we all traded it like baseball cards. But the Zambezi sharks look nearly as fearsome—and the tens of thousands of sardines in the water made the sea look frenzied—especially as they ripped into the tiny silver fish that swarmed around them. Each night back at the hotel I’d go over the day’s footage with the divers. They’d be pumped up, fast forwarding to the sharks. They had named some of the bigger ones that looked suitably menacing on camera: Bugsy, Mugsy and Bart. Carolyn told me that it seemed incredible that a little over a week before I had been underwater in that carnage. It may have looked exciting but I had felt at peace in the cage, panning the area for Bugsy’s next appearance or Mugsy barreling out of the dark like a jet fighter and banking around me. For every one minute of shark footage I recovered, there must have been an hour of less interesting sardine footage. And eighty percent of the shark footage was unsellable because of the light or a camera jump or the ambient sound of the edge of the camera lens hitting the side of the metal cage. Carolyn’s major job was finding the minutes of wheat in the hours of chaff.

  The two of us ate in front of the computer, separating segments of the video into smaller chunks we could mix and match with the interviews and the scenery shots. By the time we were finished consuming the goodies from the SoHo House of Thai and Asian Cuisine I was bushed again. I managed to stay up until nine and then I took a shower and went to bed, fell into the dreamless slumber of a deep-sea animal.

  I woke up with a jolt about three hours later and for a heartbeat had the terrible feeling I was in a hotel. I lay on my side and looked at the heavy sliding door to the bathroom in the dark, letting my eyes adjust, hoping as I did I was really back home and not in the Heathrow Hilton or a windowless hotel room in Schiphol Airport or in a Holiday Inn in Botswana. When I made out the familiar outlines of the room and the dim line of light from under the shades, I swung to my feet. Carolyn wasn’t in bed. I heard somebody shout something ugly and drunken far down below on the street. I felt my heart writhing in my chest and walked out, barefoot, into the living area, then to the suite. Carolyn’s chair was
empty; the plastic pods of food were abandoned. I called her name a few times. The shot where she had downed tools was a cutaway I had snagged on the last day of filming of a mother and baby at the beach, the mother holding the baby closely and protectively, the kid squinting into the sun, pointing out at the water, a blue beach hat flopping over her chubby face. It was a close-up shot.

  I felt my heart plunge inside me.

  I threw on my sweatshirt and jeans, found my leather jacket in the closet and pulled on my sneakers. I went out the kitchen door into the narrow service hall and took the concrete factory steps up to the heavy door leading out to the roof. I pushed the door hard and it groaned open. The night air was cool on my face. The old police station was lit up, displaying all the yuppie apartments with incongruous dormer windows and skylights poking through the chateaulike exterior. I walked around the roof, and finally found her sitting on one of the air-conditioning units, smoking a cigarette. She had a big scotch in an insulated plastic #1 Yankees Fan tumbler next to her, straight up, with ice, and was already halfway through it.

  “What are you doing up?” she asked. The minute she said it I figured she was working on drink number two or three. There’d be a bottle up here somewhere.

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I’m taking a break. Is that okay? It’s midnight. I like looking at the lights out here.”

  “Maybe you should drink downstairs.”

  “I’m sick of downstairs. I spend my whole life in that place. God, do you snore. I always forget.”

  I sat next to her, carefully, hoping she wouldn’t get up or start pacing or maybe throw something, like that heavy plastic highball we had gotten on a rare afternoon out to Yankee Stadium shortly after I moved to the city and was in the mood for the touristy attractions. That cheesy souvenir was proof that we once had shared carefree times. Carolyn hugged herself, her breasts pushed together as she shivered. She drank from the cup and set it down. “Once I thought about jumping off this roof. Right down onto Broome Street.” She was speaking to her feet, as if in confession.