The Starboard Sea: A Novel

by Amber Dermont

  I stuck a leg inside the room and down onto her wood floor, nearly slipping and landing in a split. The floor was wet in places, as though she hadn’t bothered to clean up after the storm. Aidan wasn’t in her room. I figured she might be down the hall with Diana or off brushing her teeth, or maybe she’d sneaked out to Whitehall and was standing under my Star Child poster looking up at the photo of Cal. That would have been perfect.

  I shone my flashlight around her walls. Aidan didn’t have any of the traditional prep school posters. No obligatory John Lennon peace signing by the Statue of Liberty. No golden kissing Klimt or Salvador Dalí dreamscape. No lame hippie tapestries. In addition to Fred Astaire’s tap shoes, she had a series of photographs of her own feet framed and hanging above her bed. Aidan had told me that she’d taken the pictures to mark all of her favorite memories: swinging from a tree house her grandfather had built, at the kitchen table in her mother’s Malibu home, barefoot on her backyard beach, standing on line waiting for a hot dog at a place called Pink’s. “I like to take pictures of my feet to remind myself of where I’ve been.” Her feet doing all the smiling for her.

  The longer I waited, the more I felt like I was trespassing, but I decided just to relax. Aidan trusted me and I had to believe I could sit on her bed and wait for her. Aidan kept a pile of leather-bound books on her nightstand. I opened one and saw her loose, curly handwriting. Her journals. Flipping through the pages I caught fragments: “hurt myself,” “complete disappointment,” “end it all.” This wasn’t the Aidan I wanted to know. I closed the book. On a shelf, I found a photo album. I picked it up and began riffling through the heavy black pages wishing she were there to tell me who the different people were. The first pages were all sepia portraits of married couples. The album then shifted into faded Technicolor snapshots featuring girls in miniskirts and men on surfboards. I tried to pick out Aidan’s mother. I turned toward the back of the album and flipped open to a picture of a pregnant woman in a bikini sunbathing by a swimming pool. The woman looked like my fake cousin Ginger and not just because she was pregnant. It was more the way she stared out over her sunglasses defiant and seductive. I knew instantly that she was Aidan’s mother, and I suddenly understood how a pregnant woman could be the sexiest and most desirable thing a man could want. I couldn’t fathom my own mother allowing a photograph like that to be taken. Maybe that was why Dad had left her. Maybe he had his reasons.

  On the opposite page was the picture I realized I’d been looking for: Aidan’s baby photo with Robert Mitchum. I hadn’t doubted the truthfulness of her story, but it made me tremble a little to see it confirmed. Aidan was just a chubby blanket and a blurred face. The actor himself almost unrecognizable in thick black glasses, but there was his signature swoop of hair and his rebel good looks. I knew that I was kidding myself into believing that I was a young Mitchum. Cal was the one who really bore a resemblance. Cal was the movie star. I was the stunt double. I felt the bridge of my nose where Cal had broken it. If she’d been given a choice, Aidan would have been wise to pick Cal over me. He would have thrilled in the curves of her body, the softness of her skin, would have loved her sharp tongue and quick wit.

  Aidan had told me a story about Mitchum. Right after he was released from prison a reporter had asked him what being locked up was like. Mitchum claimed that prison was just like Palm Springs only without the riffraff.

  “Bellingham’s like Palm Springs,” she’d said. “Full of riffraff.” “Yeah,” I said. “Prep schools might as well be jail.”

  “Obviously,” she said, “you’ve never been to jail.”

  I wondered about Aidan’s mug shot, the one Styuvie claimed to have seen. It occurred to me that Aidan and I could have fun sneaking into the dean’s file cabinet and performing our own background checks. Maybe I’d break in there myself and steal her file back for her. There were so many adventures I wanted to have with Aidan. We had the beginning of something I didn’t feel compelled to name. Maybe it would be a romance, maybe a friendship, but all I wanted was the plea sure of discovery, the joy of being swept up inside knowing her and allowing her to know me.

  As the night passed, I began to worry about Aidan. I was blinking tired and poked my head down the empty hallway wondering if she’d fallen asleep in someone else’s room. Perhaps she was up counseling Diana, or maybe they really had run off together, skipping town until classes started up again. I felt a little jealous of their friendship and decided to leave Aidan a note asking her to meet me that afternoon at the beach. I tore a sheet of paper from a sketch pad and left my message on her desk. Casting my flashlight’s beam over Aidan’s tap shoes, I saw that one of them had writing on the insole. I was never any good at reading other people’s cursive handwriting, but I could clearly make out Fred Astaire’s autograph. Aidan didn’t have a father, but she had something better: a mythology of father figures.

  On my way back to Whitehall, I passed the Swan still pinned upright, its mast mired in oily water. The Swan was one more casualty of my confusion. One more thing I’d touched only to see destroyed. That evening on the Swan, I’d joked with Aidan that having a girl on a boat was considered to bring the crew bad luck.

  “But then why do ships always have those naked women carved on the front?”

  “The masthead, you mean,” I said. “Well, a woman can be on a ship if she bares her breasts. Naked women calm the seas and bring everyone good luck.”

  This was an old superstition, but Aidan took it as a challenge.

  “If that’s the case . . .” Aidan stood, pulled off her tights, and stripped off her sweater. She stood on deck long enough for me to take in the fullness of her breasts, the flatness of her stomach. Then she turned, arched forward, and dove from the Swan.

  I followed her, the two of us skinny- dipping in the harbor, barely able to see each other’s naked bodies in the dark. Aidan floated on her back, claiming her superhero power was buoyancy. She tucked her arms behind her head, crossed her feet at the ankles.

  “No one floats as well as I do.” She laughed. “I don’t need to paddle or kick. I can just stay on my back and enjoy the stars.”

  The sky was bright with constellations. The warm waves licked our bodies. I could see Aidan’s breasts round and white. I thought of water lilies.

  “You’ll need a superhero name,” I said. “We can call you Bellatrix, the Amazon star. She’s one of the brightest. Sailors use her for navigation.”

  “The stars are like a map to sailors, right?” Aidan splashed lightly in the water.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And they’re also a clock.”

  “A star clock,” Aidan said. “I like that.”

  Recalling Coach Tripp’s lessons, I explained how the stars provided position and mea sured time. During the day it was enough to rely on the sun and horizon. But at night, so long as the horizon was still visible, a sailor used whatever was most brilliant: Sirius, Canopus, Arcturus, Polaris. I tried to describe a sextant to Aidan, the way the double mirrors provide a steady image on a rocking boat. “The best thing about taking a sight reading is that you have to forget all that stuff about the earth revolving around the sun. In order to stay on course, a sailor has to believe that the universe revolves around him. You and your boat are the fixed point. The heavenly bodies just rise and fall circling around you.”

  “I always wondered why sailors were so arrogant.” Aidan flipped over on her belly. “You guys actually think you’re the center of the world.”

  On Wednesday I woke up just in time to miss the brown bag lunches the cafeteria kept pawning off on us. I couldn’t bear another peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. At first I thought I’d walk into town and pick something up at the General Store. Then I decided that what I needed to do first was go for a run. My body felt restless. Weeks had passed since I’d bothered to exercise, and though I’d held my own on the football field, I was worried about getting soft. I stopped by Chester’s room thinking he might be up for a workout.

 
Chester also had a single. His room was half the size of mine, and to compensate for the compactness, he’d lofted his bed up onto stilts and placed his desk in the narrow space below. The room smelled like musky cologne, the kind children give their dads for Father’s Day. Chester’s desk was impressively organized with actual folders and file cabinets. A plastic caddy held pens, highlighters, scissors, a ruler, and tape. The bed was neatly made, the blankets tucked, the comforter straightened, the pillows actually fluffed. In his closet, I could see shirts tightly folded, stacked like gold bars. His room looked as tidy as a mother would have left it for her son on the first day of school. I thought of my own mess, how I was content to sleep the entire semester on the same dirty sheets. How I’d sooner throw out clothes than wash them. My parents were paying a ser vice five hundred dollars a semester to clean my belongings and I hadn’t once bothered to drop off a bag of laundry.

  Despite being smaller, Chester’s room had more interesting architectural features: built-in bookshelves, a plaster rosette blooming in the center of the ceiling, dark wood paneling, and a large bay window with a cushioned seat. When I entered, Chester was stretched out over the window seat’s gold velvet cushion wearing a white polo shirt and a pair of orange Bermuda shorts. The light shone on his shoulders as he read The Sun Also Rises. Mr. Guy had informally assigned the book. He’d been trying to make a point about World War I and the Lost Generation and was stunned when almost no one understood what he was referencing. “Don’t they teach you anything anymore?” he’d asked, as though he wasn’t the one responsible for our education. Mr. Guy had rambled on about Hemingway and the human condition, acting like he and Ernest had gone to Boy Scout camp together. I’m not sure what got into me, maybe I wanted Mr. Guy to stop talking, to stop chastising us, but I mentioned The Sun Also Rises, how it was one of my favorite books, how you could learn a lot about what it must have been like to go to war, to be wounded and unable to return to your former life. How Jake’s impotence and expatriation were a metaphor for his guilt. Mr. Guy put his hand on my shoulder and told me that though I was wrong about my interpretation, at least it was comforting to know that one of his students was semiliterate. I regretted opening my mouth. Now seeing Chester with the book I’d recommended, I felt a surge of pride. Maybe it had been worth it to speak up.

  “You’re quite the overachiever,” I said.

  It took Chester a moment to recognize me, like he was trapped inside the pages of the novel, lost at a zinc bar in Paris. He paused to take me in, then looked down at the book. “So you really like this?” Chester closed the paperback and held it up.

  I nodded. “One of my favorites.”

  “Yeah, I guess I can see why you like it so much. It’s about you in a way, right?”

  I smiled and shook my head, unsure of Chester’s question.

  “What I mean,” Chester continued, “is that the world must have seemed familiar to you. You could be Jake, Lady Brett’s like Brizzey, Bill might as well be Tazewell. Made me start looking for myself. Do you remember the section with the black boxer?”

  I told Chester that the things I remembered most were the passages on fly-fishing and bullfighting and the final line, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

  “Well, there’s a section where Bill tells this story about a boxer he helped rescue. Bill calls the man a ‘wonderful nigger.’ ” Chester looked at me. “Is that a phrase people use?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean”—Chester smoothed his polo shirt across his chest—“is that a phrase people use? Are you familiar with it?”

  “That book was written a long time ago.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “True.” Chester blinked, his long eyelashes fluttering. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not surprised to see the n-word. I just never expected to see the word “wonderful” in front of it. Got me wondering. What does it mean to be a wonderful nigger?”

  “People were different back then,” I said. “The way they spoke.” I could hear the inadequacy of my own words. “Hemingway was writing for a different time.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “I mean . . .” I shifted back and forth from leg to leg. “I don’t have to tell you what people used to be like.”

  “Used to be, huh?” Chester worried the scar on his jaw. “So what would Hemingway have thought of me in my tennis whites?” Chester rose up and popped the collar on his shirt. “There’s another phrase here.” He shuffled through the book and showed me a page. “ ‘Awful noble-looking nigger.’ Is that what Ernest would have called me?”

  I could feel myself blushing. I knew this wasn’t something to shrug off. Chester was dead serious. He tossed The Sun Also Rises facedown on the window seat and walked over to his bookshelf. I tried to think of something to say. I pivoted and followed Chester. “Look, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry I’m being abrasive again?” he asked. “Or sorry you knocked on my door? Don’t worry, you just walked in on me thinking aloud.”

  Chester was giving me an easy out if I wanted to take it. I knew that I shouldn’t. “We could bring it up to Mr. Guy,” I said. “Talk about it in class. I’m happy to admit that I didn’t read the book carefully. That there were things I missed.”

  “I’ve got a recommendation for you.” Chester found what he was looking for on his bookshelf. He carefully handed me a book that said “Advance Copy” on the cover. “I’m one of the few people in the world who has this.”

  The book was called The Motion of Light In Water. I flipped it open and saw an author photo of an older black man with a wiry beard.

  “The writer, Chip Delany, he’s a family friend. Grew up in Harlem with my dad. Chip’s very careful about the words he uses. Why don’t you borrow it and tell me what you think.”

  I didn’t know when I would find the time to read the book and I hated taking something that obviously mattered to Chester knowing that he was so careful with his own belongings while I was so careless with mine. In the corner of the room a small metal folding table held a chessboard, the plastic pieces arranged in midstrategy. I wondered who Chester’s opponent was, or if he was playing against himself. After one night of hanging out together, I’d thought we’d have a casual friendship, but now I understood that I owed Chester something more.

  I thanked him for the book and asked if he wanted to go for a run. “I need to get back in shape. I’m turning soft.” Chester picked up a racquet and explained that he had tennis practice. Even though Windsor had suspended classes, athletics were still running on schedule. We made a plan to play tennis later on in the week.

  I was about to leave his room when Chester called me back.

  “Jason, you know what sucks? Up until that ‘wonderful’ moment, I really liked The Sun Also Rises. I did. But now I feel awful for ever having liked it.”

  Whether he’d meant to or not, Chester had given me a lot to think about. He had problems and concerns I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I wanted to be his friend. One day in the library, Aidan had mentioned that she thought Chester was probably the strongest person at Bellingham. “What he has to go through, none of us can imagine.” At the time, I was skeptical. I argued that Chester was just as privileged as we were, that he’d grown up with every advantage she and I had, but Aidan said, “No. Tazewell and Kriffo went after Chester like he was something they wanted to break.” I explained that guys hazed one another, that it was harmless, that it would ultimately lead to a lifelong bond. “They’re war buddies,” I said, confident that I knew what I was talking about.

  I didn’t bother to stretch my hamstrings or warm up for my run. After two miles, the insides of my thighs burned, my calves were cramped, and I had a stitch in my side from breathing sporadically. It wasn’t easy, but I powered through the pain and managed to do an eight-mile circuit. It felt good to sweat in the cold, biting air, and I headed into town hoping to grab some snacks for Aidan and myself. Figuring we could have an impromptu feast on the beach.<
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  All of the leaves had blown off the trees. I loved the rustling sound of charging through a pile of dried leaves, but these leaves were soggy from the storm. I kicked my way through a wet patch of maple foliage, the pointed leaves clinging to my sneakers like small golden hands.

  The General Store had its own generator, and all of the refrigerated cases were freshly stocked. I heard the owner, Eddie, an older man, his hair a shoe- polish black, tell another customer that he felt guilty about the brisk business. “Just doesn’t seem right to profit from a disaster.” The owner asked me how I was doing and gave me a free sample of apple cider. There was more to this town than the school. This was the sort of place where people strove to be nice to one another. The type of place where you could raise a family. It had never occurred to me that I would live anywhere other than New York, but I understood how people could enjoy a small town, the familiarity, the safety.

  I picked out a pair of clementines, then grabbed a block of cheese, a box of crackers, and some sparkling grape juice. Eddie joked about carding me. I was mad that I’d given my Army knife away to Race and asked Eddie if he had any plastic knives or paper cups. He nodded and packed everything up. I’d slipped a twenty- dollar bill into my sock before setting out for my run but when I reached down to peel it away, the twenty was gone. I’d probably lost it to the wet maple leaves. I apologized to Eddie and was about to put the groceries back when a voice behind me said, “Just put it on my tab.” Turning around I saw Race holding a jug of milk.

  “That’s awfully nice of you,” I said, “but totally unnecessary.”

  Race shrugged. “It’s no big deal. All my friends at school charge snacks to my mom’s account. Isn’t that right, Eddie?”

  Eddie said, “Mrs. Goodwyn is very generous.”

  Race and I stood out on the sidewalk together. He had a fading shiner on his left eye, the green and purple bruises shadowing his face. Someone had punched him hard. “What does the other guy look like?” I asked.