Flat Water Tuesday

by Ron Irwin

  Part of me was desperately adrift but another part was satisfied. Her pregnancy made me feel possessive of her, and protective. That talk, that agreement at the kitchen table (sealed with yet more sex in the adjoining bedroom after she had gone online, naked, at the computer, to make sure sex was kosher when you were about four weeks and a day pregnant, we were that ignorant) was the most important agreement I have ever made.

  In the following months we did things newly pregnant couples do. We read the books. We shopped for pregnancy clothes for Carolyn, most of which she despised and returned. We looked at pastel-colored Lilliputian table and chair sets, sleigh-shaped cribs, changing tables with outboard rubber bins for used diapers. We started to adjust our lives. I had one big shoot to do, in Zambia, in a nature reserve called the Luangwa Valley. The money would allow me to take some time off when the baby was born and get us into a new apartment. That was the plan.

  The two of us started thinking about changing our living arrangements. Should we still live in the city? The studio had been great, but it wasn’t a living space for a mature couple like the two of us, with a kid on the way. The studio was also drafty, she pointed out, and it was loud—everytime you walked across the bare wooden floor you’d wake a sleeping infant. Especially if you were wearing boots or heels, she added. The kitchen echoed, the cars down below on the street sent noise up through the push-open factory windows, which, she pointed out, were so filthy from decades of grime they’d never come clean. The pigeons in the morning would wake up the baby, too, not to mention the sweatshop downstairs. We could never have guests or do much work at home, because the only private space was the sleeping area and anyway a baby needed its own bathroom, next to the nursery, which was right now the spare room that was filled with film junk, boxes, and her clothes and shoes.

  The baby was always referred to as “she.” I have no idea why. “If we were trying to work here, Rob, she’d hear every word,” Carolyn would say, in a voice I had never heard. “And we have to push the volume on the edit suite pretty high to hear the ambient, you know? She’ll hate that.”

  I told her the Zambia shoot would be one of my last assignments outside the country. Part of the good vibe of her being pregnant was that both of us were terrified and we didn’t care. Anything was possible.

  * * *

  “Smooth out, Robby.” Connor’s voice sounded controlled and patient, the voice of someone out to test me. I had been avoiding him ever since the episode with Perry and was taken aback and immediately irritated to find him on the water. He sat hunched in his own flat, thin craft, watching me. We had been enjoying a few temperate days—a last respite before the really cold weather blew in—and I was sneaking in this dawn practice because I doubted I’d have a chance to scull again. Connor was the last person on earth I wanted to see right now. He was waiting for me where the river bowed after the bridge, had to have started out in the dark at least twenty minutes before me in order to catch me off guard like this.

  I grit my teeth, the rubber ends of my oars slippery in my hands. Balancing, I crept forward, the fragile wooden scull precariously gliding across the water, my arms outstretched for another stroke. I dropped the oars in behind me and pressed with my feet and then my legs, fell back into the stroke and the boat surged, water running around the bow. Connor was just ahead of me now, eyeballing my bladework.

  The muscles across my chest tightened as I tapped the oars out of the water, gently feathering them for my next stroke. I saw the stern of Connor’s shell as I passed. He was still crouched languidly in his seat. I caught another stroke, and the boat ran free, losing me in a familiar sensation, the feeling of speed and hypnotic rhythm. I fell backward for a second into that mysterious rush.

  “Decent, decent.” Connor leaned forward and pulled his boat to me. “Not bad.”

  I sincerely wished he would vaporize.

  Connor rowed the Morrison, christened after a Fenton old boy who had been shot on Sword Beach. It was a Vespoli racing shell, blue and black, banged together from carbon fiber and aluminum, light as an arrow. Connor reached forward, dipped his oars into the water and snapped off a swift, level stroke. He fell back into the coda of each finish. He feathered his blades and torpedoed away from me. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  I spun my craft and dipped the oars into the water, flung down a few quivering strokes, then settled into a smooth set that left me feeling as if I were being borne down the river only inches above it. I shot by him, then slowed down to wait for him to catch up. I watched Connor’s back as he leaned into his own oars, his eyes level, the black shafts extensions of his long arms.

  As he drew even, his blades disappeared into the river and his boat began to really move. I drove into my oars. When I floated forward into my recoveries, I could hear his breathing and the splash of his oars. I heard the tiny drops of water falling from them as he gathered for each new stroke. Lungs burning, I glanced over my shoulder at the dock, a blur just visible over the waterline less than eight hundred meters away.

  My long, slender oars bowed a tiny bit each time I drew them through the water. The living bones of my forearms and wrists and the birdlike ones of my hands were flexing as well. Bones and wood snapped back into shape at the end of each stroke. My lungs began to smolder and I found myself gasping for air. Matching my every movement, Connor gave me a quick glance, noting the distance to the dock. Our oars were almost touching one another, our blades sharing the same swirling whirlpools.

  Then, unexpectedly, he leaned into his finish and paused, granting me some time. I slipped by him, leaving him tense and poised, carried along by the river and his own flowing inertia. I pounded through ten more strokes, then I paused as well. My speed carried me forward. Was it over? Abruptly, his glistening back bowed and his oars sank into the water again. I glanced behind me, the dock maybe only twenty strokes away now, then focused once more down the river. Connor was charging toward me, his oars smooth and low and quick, the Morrison’s bow ball claiming giant increments of water with his every stroke. I could clearly see the rigid muscles of his back straining through his wet shirt. By the time I reckoned the dock was beside us, the bow ball had vanished and Connor himself appeared in my red vision, gliding, face contorted, a great silent bird of prey falling upon its quarry. Mouth open, eyes bulging, arms outstretched, he snatched the final stroke from me and drew it to his chest.

  Unbelievable. He was just unbelievable.

  We paused mid-river, inside the dank shadow of the bridge. Our breathing echoed hollowly. We tapped the boats back to the dock gently. Connor didn’t look at me as he pulled his feet from the foot stretchers, heaved himself out of his seat to stand beside his boat dripping wet, his face red beneath his bone-white shock of hair. “You’d go faster in a better boat,” he said.

  Please. Shut. Up. I took a deep breath, my lungs scorched from the race. “Have you ever rowed in a wooden boat? Ever used wooden oars?”

  He still wouldn’t look at me, and it was satisfying to see how exhausted he was. He was struggling to fight off the pain, to stand straight on his red knees. I held my shell a foot away from the dock’s edge. “The oars flex, like a tree flexes in the wind. The boat gives against the water. My father used to ask people if they’d want to play a plastic violin, or a plastic guitar, or a steel piano.”

  “Do you plan on playing music with that thing?” Connor looked at the boat dubiously. “Did your father make those repairs to the bow deck?”

  “Yeah.” I waited for the insult.

  “He worked the wood right in. He had to strip it, huh? Revarnish?”

  “Everything.”

  “You can barely see the joins.”

  “He’s pretty good.”

  “How old’s that thing?”

  “Thirty, maybe forty years old.”

  “My father keeps a wooden sailboat on Cape Cod. You sound like him, getting sentimental about wood when it’s just a liability on the water. A pure liability and lots of work to keep
up. I still beat you. I even spotted you seven or eight strokes.”

  “You gave me nothing. You were just messing with me. Plus, you took the outside lane around that bend. I figure you must owe me a length anyway, considering we only started about a thousand meters down.”

  “I’d say maybe half a boat length. The river’s not that high.”

  “You weren’t going to mention that though, were you? You wanted to let me think you had me.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m just wondering if you were going to be honest about it.”

  “I’m not about to talk to you about currents and details like that when you’re bashing away with those oars. You’d have found that extra stroke easily if you’d used good old American carbon fiber.”

  “I’d have found it if I had that outside lane.”

  He bent down, braced himself, flipped the scull out of the water, balanced it on his head, then steadied it. “I’m thinking that if you can do what you did today in the God Four, maybe you’ll stand a chance at greatness. Because you’re pretty damned good.”

  “What makes you think I had any doubts?”

  “I’m just informing you.”

  “You want to go out and race again? For real?”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to prove yourself.” He began walking the boat back up toward the boathouse. I watched him balance it as he reached the incline, finding his footing carefully on the ramp. His dirty white socks were soaking wet, making the trip all the harder. He stopped, his back to me, and steadied the boat one more time. “You’re good,” he said. “I’ll be the first to admit it, Carrey. That was not easy.”

  I hated how he felt he could pass judgment on me. Despised it. He knew he had a right to, because he had won—no matter by just a second, unbidden and unfairly. He was just so incredibly powerful. I watched him walk up the ramp and into the boathouse, waited for five cold minutes until I got out of my boat. I flipped it up and knelt easily for the sculls with the boat balanced against my scalp. I picked them up, wet wood slippery and heavy in my hands, the sculls balanced in my palms. I had twisted open the scuppers and airholes and the warm, living smell that breathed out from the innards of the boat calmed me. I kept my neck straight, felt the press of the weight against the bottom of my spine. Water dripped off the bow, along the sides of the boat and from the splashboards. The boat felt light, and I held it far down on the port outrigger, walked carefully so it wouldn’t tip and smash the stern or the new rubber bow ball.

  Had I looked down the shoreline, I would have seen Channing turning his stopwatch in his hands. He’d walk to where he believed we started racing and gauge the distance properly. He’d gaze down the river humming softly to himself, check the distance against the times he had scrawled inside his diary and slip his stopwatch into his trousers. He’d walk through the long river grass to the fields, then across to the road, whistling.

  12.

  I had an old rolltop desk that Carolyn’s uncle once had in his house in Sag Harbor and sent down to us when his second wife went on a redecorating binge. It was a hulk, with tiny post boxes and letter files and a key to lock the entire thing up. It was an easy eighty years old and when I first got it I saw myself working at it late into the night on scripts alongside Carolyn. Except there wasn’t really space for a desktop PC on it, so I’d use my notebook and that became a royal pain because it was easier to write where she was working, sitting next to her with the notebook on my lap. The desk became the bill storage center, a place of waiting for newspapers, junk mail, menus shoved under our door, invitations to gallery openings. The piles quickly became fearsome. Our files and our paid bills were shoved into the drawers. Important documents, like passports and film permits and visas for me and letters from National Geographic, were stacked in the little letter boxes in no particular order.

  Carolyn’s desk wasn’t a desk, it was a black, faux ebony counter I’d built into the bricking of the loft and bolted in with industrial-size plugs and supports. It was ten feet long and it was always clear. Her personal files, as well as anything related to the business, were neatly packed away in a series of matte stainless steel file cabinets. My behemoth desk was pushed aside and always looked a total mess. Her area was pristine and it irked me, but she did point out that organizing my crap wasn’t her job. Yes, I argued back, but she would never leave so much as an open envelope or a Coke can in the Sacred Sanctorum of the Temple to Apple, Inc. while my work area, unused as it was, was her dump zone.

  Carolyn would roll her eyes at this.

  As Carolyn edited I started the process of emptying out my desk. I wanted to do it casually—not look like I was boxing everything up, angry that I had to start making plans to leave the apartment and that some of the documents under the piles in that desk were three years old and probably important. Insurance documents for the car ranked high here, as well as documents relating to its long-term parking, not to mention all the receipts for the camera gear, plus, of course, my bank statements and credit card bills. I took the piles of papers and letters and bills, as well as the rubber-banded returned check envelopes, and stacked them on my chair. It took me almost half an hour to clear down to the actual wood of the desk and then start moving out the stuff that she had cubbyholed. Two steel cans of pencils and pens, three packs of Post-Its, a box full of stained, dusty business cards, more cups, two coffee mugs—mismatched orphans from Carolyn’s first apartment that didn’t jibe with the sand-colored ones hanging in the glass fronted cabinets of the kitchen. And then a picture of us taken in DiSoto’s Bistro, another snapshot of the two of us kissing at an opening for my friend Alex Thompson’s Canoe Diaries, a documentary on northern Canada canoeing that was a surprise hit here in New York.

  As I sat clearing out all that stuff, it became clear that the detritus, the real junk, had been unceremoniously shoved into the desk, but that my most important documents—bills, permits, tax receipts, plane ticket stubs, hotel vouchers, dead checkbooks—had been organized by date, and carefully labeled. Carolyn had taken the trouble to do that for me, perhaps over a long period of time, perhaps only over the last few weeks as she prepared to jettison the relationship. I piled all of these records on the floor, and knew that Car was watching me do it while she worked, her lack of comment a giveaway. Now that I was working under her gaze I was more careful. I piled each stack on top of the other and casually dumped the rest in a couple of grocery bags. I was whistling while I did it, trying to camouflage my first act of retreat.

  Still whistling (and I am not a whistler, and Car knew this, yet I whistled on through this knowledge), I rifled through the letter holders, noting that there, too, my passes and cards had been stashed away with some care. And then, lo and behold, packets of receipts from jobs I had completed here and overseas and claimed as expenses to the accountant and of course the channel. Each packet was neatly organized and double clipped. Then, amidst all of that, I found a picture I had not looked at for some time … a framed picture from my parents’ house in Niccalsetti. The frame’s soft, felt prop had been torn off years before. I gently wiped away the dust from the glass with my thumb and there we were, Tom, Wendy, myself on the dock of Miller’s Point.

  I squinted down at the picture, amazed at how young we all looked. We were children, despite Wendy’s knowledgeable, challenging gaze into the camera (held by my mother, the person who took all of the pictures in the family, my father uninterested in posterity, and rightfully so, given what it held for him). Wendy was wearing a one-piece bathing suit and Tom and I were in cut-off jeans, Tom thrusting his skinny chest out, his eyes dark and jovial and sharp. Wendy’s hair was wet, she had been swimming that day, had beaten us both back to the dock and regarded the future she would never see with a bemused arrogance, her chin lifted slightly, her face girlish and pale under her weasel’s coat of hair. Her skin glistened in the sun. I stood slightly apart from them, shading my eyes, squinting so my mouth was forced into an awkward grin. I had swum in last
behind John. I still remember his white feet kicking the brown water into a froth next to my head as we tried to reach Wendy, who swam into the sunlight with her head down, her arms whipping lazily out of the water while we thrashed behind her.

  We had climbed up the dock after her while she stood over us. There was no ladder. The Miller’s Point dock was meant to be a boat slip, but you could haul yourself out of the lake if you were young and light and strong and didn’t mind the wood cutting into your stomach while you did it, or risking bites from the dock spiders that occasionally lived below.

  The picture was taken in early June. I was sixteen years old, Wendy was nearly fifteen, Tom was eighteen. Even standing flatfooted on the dock, you could see the beautiful woman she would have been. She was already moving from being skinny to being willowy, her breasts swelling under the suit, her shoulders thrown back to give them the best effect for the camera. Yet she still had a defiant, tomboy poise. She was still the type of girl who would climb fences or agree to play the all-time-no-tackle-or-free-kick quarterback or join in on a snowball fight or a loogee contest. Even in that picture you could see Tom’s unconscious protection of her. He was standing as if he was blocking her from time, one foot forward, settled on his back heel, one shoulder almost jutting between her and the camera.

  Yet to the casual observer, to the person not sitting in a quiet room holding the picture up to his eyes and trying to look through nearly two decades into the faded colors, to that observer, Wendy looked older and more mature and certainly not in need of protection. She was the composed face in the picture, the child who knew herself well, and to whom the camera gravitated. Had I been doing interviews with doomed Niccalsetti families, I would have set the shot just like that, with the striking girl/woman in the centerpiece. I would have interviewed her while the two brothers smirked and looked on, because the camera would have liked her better, because just looking at her, you knew she’d have the kind of answers that would count and could be edited well into the documentary. If she could be interviewed today, speaking through time from out of that photograph, she might say, “Look at the three of us as we stand now.” Her voice would be light but full of that mimicking gravitas she used with Tom and me. “We’re as perfect as we will ever be. One of the boys beside me will be sent away by a broken father, the other will break himself. I will die fifteen feet from where you see me. Look carefully at these people.”