Shipwreck

by Louis Begley

  A plan for my next steps was ripening. I would have some bread, sausage, and cheese, and just a little wine. Then I would dress warmly for the night sail, pack my toilet kit and clothes to go ashore in when I got to Nantucket and a bottle of whiskey and some more sausage and cheese, and put the clothes Léa had taken off and her bikini into her suitcase. It seemed to me best to leave the suitcase at home, for the time being. If the improbable had happened, and she survived, it would not help to have it seem that I had tried to get rid of it. The time to do it would come later, after I got back, if she hadn’t been heard from. That was giving her a good forty-eight hours to rise from the dead, which in the circumstances was ample. These simple chores finished, I would drive to Vineyard Haven, row myself out to the mooring, and at last board my boat. Immense happiness. Wasn’t sailing my boat, being with her alone, whispering my secrets to her, what I really lived for?

  The rest, said North, is deplorable. It’s like another bad dream, this one of a boy’s adventure story gone very wrong. Are you fond of sea adventures? No? Not even Conrad? That’s all right. So often he overdoes it. You will hear my seagoing tale, such as I think it is, told very simply, stripped down, without the sonorities of Typhoon.I got to the boat. The breeze, as I had expected, had freshened, and the moment I hoisted the mainsail Cassandraperked up, ready to go. I did not turn on the running lights—the less chance of creating witnesses to the hour of my departure the better—and cast off the mooring. We began to move in total silence and with total grace. The darkness and the fog that was rolling in from the south and had reached the harbor were nothing to me. I could have sailed there blindfolded. In no time flat, we were out. I turned on the running lights, cranked the jib up the mast, set it, adjusted the main, and set the course for East Chop. I loved the feel of my boat. We rounded the Chop. The wind was from the south, which was usual. On a reach, the boat humming, I headed for Cape Poge. So far it had all been a cinch. It would be another cup of tea when we were past Edgartown and entered waters that are like a goddamn choppy minefield, with shoals all around you. Then the real fun would begin, especially if the breeze stiffened and did not blow away the fog. With visibility rapidly declining to nothing, I judged it prudent to get out my previous year’s purchase, a handheld GPS, and verified what I had done. So far, the compass had stood me in good stead. I had not made any mistakes. There was no reason that I shouldn’t dig into the food and treat myself to a real drink. Cassandrahas an open cockpit, as befits a racing boat, and having fastened the jib and the main, I huddled in it, feeling cozy in my oilskins, and concentrated on the wheel and the food and drink. The whiskey was slowly but perceptibly steadying my nerves. Pillows of fog swept over the deck of my boat and I exulted in the challenge. What else was a great sailboat for, if one had been her skipper for as long as I had, and its brave mast and huge sails were in familiarity and function no different from the trunk of your body and arms only vastly stronger and more beautiful? My jitters definitely over, I examined my ghastly deed. That I was guilty, I did not for a moment doubt, the question was, of what? Not murder; I had not killed the girl, I had not planned it. It was a simple truth that I was not ready for it, though doubtless to kill her seemed to be a price I would have paid for keeping her away from Lydia. Not just out of fear for my tranquillity and happiness, but because I would have rather died myself than seen Lydia humiliated. That was the true nature of Léa’s threat. But it hadn’t yet come to that. The other simple truth was that I had done something unforgivable and vile by leaving the girl in mortal danger when it would have been easy for me to bring her out of it. Was there any excuse? I did not think so. Whereupon, a squeaky little voice piped up on my behalf, reminding me, as though that were needed, that the girl was a phenomenally strong swimmer, a much better swimmer than I. Yes, but blind, my more respectable voice replied, blind as a bat, isn’t that how I had put it? Yes, but I would not have left her out there—I was pretty sure—if she had been a weak swimmer, or even just a normally competent swimmer. I certainly wouldn’t have set a trap, wouldn’t have lured her out way off shore only to abandon her there, I reassured myself. We went back and forth like that, my conscience and I, and it was pretty boring, but nothing changed, or could ever change, I thought, the fundamental fact that I had let a crazy and wicked girl who loved me die a dreadful death. No, it wasn’t an assured death; for all I knew, with her stamina, she would wash up on a Vineyard beach naked and only half dead. The dogfish and the crabs would not have made a meal of her. I was not about to turn myself in to the police—as a matter of fact, I wasn’t sure what crime I could be accused of, although I supposed one could be found to fit my case. The effect, were I to do such a crazy thing, was bound to be worse for Lydia than anything that Léa might have done. I had to dispose of my case myself. A solution appeared before me: I would roll the dice for life or death. She had had a chance to make it or to drown, and so would I; in any case, I would not go scot-free. The fog had thickened so that I could not make out clearly the bow of my boat, the splendid breeze had turned into a gale whose whistling split my ears. Cassandrawas rising and falling with waves of a height I had not foreseen. I checked the GPS and the chart again. We were halfway to Cape Poge, heading for the old lightship that is no more. If only, I said to my boat, if only I could do this without hurting you. There was no such way. I tossed the GPS overboard and with my other hand tore out the electrical wires that led to the compass. Its face went black. The last time I had Cassandraon a reach like that, heeling like a dinghy, was just two days ago, when we ran back from the Elizabeth Islands, in beautiful sunshine, the sea festive with many colored spinnakers of other ships and, in comparison, tame. We were all alone now and blind. I could make out the cockpit, the deck as far as to the mast, and the waves that washed over it. That was all. Now the only way to stay on the course I had set was to be true to the wind, which I judged to be steady although growing in strength. It turned out that I did not steer badly. The shoal I ran onto was just past the old lightship, so I had strayed very little. Had I been able to free us of the shoal quickly, I would have saved my beautiful Cassandra,but before I could manage it the waves filled the cockpit and turned her on her side. Then they broke her up. I survived clinging to the rudder. Since I had determined not to load the dice, I was not wearing a life vest. That gesture in fact loaded the dice against me. It was a miracle or a fluke that I didn’t drown. My brother-in-law, Ralph, was the one who started the Coast Guard search. When Lydia told him that I was on my way to Nantucket, right away, on a hunch, he checked the weather. He knew exactly what that squall could do even to a good sailor with navigational instruments.

  North fell silent, his head bowed.

  For a while, I didn’t dare to speak. Then I asked him, What happened later?

  What do you mean, he replied.

  I mean to Léa, for instance. Have you found out whether she really drowned?

  North laughed and shook his head. No, he said, I have not had de ses nouvelles.After I was fished out, I was obliged to stay in the hospital longer than I would have imagined. When I got out, I went carefully through the Martha’s Vineyard papers, the New York Times,obviously, and also three of the Paris dailies, for the two weeks after the wreck, looking for some sort of mention of her disappearance. I never found any. A short time after my discharge, I had to go to the Vineyard to deal with the marine insurance claim. Her little suitcase was exactly where I had left it, in the closet in my uncle’s bedroom. I took it with me on the plane to Boston and there I left it at the airport, having first wiped it clean of fingerprints and removed the luggage tag. I suppose it’s still at the Lost and Found.

  Do you really think she could have survived? I said after a while. I had been lost in thought.

  Your guess is as good as mine, was his reply. It was not impossible, but all I can say for sure is that I don’t know. She hasn’t come near me. I haven’t gone near people who know her.

  But why, I asked, utterly uncomprehending, if she were
alive, why wouldn’t she seek you out? How could this be?

  That’s easy, said North. Wouldn’t she be afraid that given another chance I would really kill her?

  And you, and Lydia?

  Lydia is well. She found it only natural that after the shipwreck and my illness I would need to get away for a while. As for me, you know more about me now than anyone else alive.

  SHIPWRECK

  A Reader’s Guide

  LOUIS BEGLEY

  In memoriam Siegfried Unseld

  Read an excerpt from

  Memories of a Marriage

  By Louis Begley

  Available from Doubleday

  July 2013

  I

  ONE EVENING IN May 2003, not many days after George W. Bush’s astonishing announcement that the “mission” had been accomplished, I went to the New York State Theater to see a performance by the New York City Ballet company. I had hoped to find an all Jerry Robbins program, and there was, in fact, such a program scheduled for later that month. Unfortunately, the date was inconvenient—I had accepted a dinner invitation from a newly remarried classmate—and I had to settle for a performance that included the official premiere of Guide to Strange Places, one more of Peter Martins’s empty creations. The music by John Adams left me indifferent. If only, I said to myself, Martins had allowed us to go on thinking of him as the magnificent dancer he had been in his prime and being grateful for his management of the company, instead of giving us again and again occasions to deplore his choreography. Unable to concentrate on the movements, brilliantly executed by the cast, that seemed to me to lead to nowhere, I allowed my thoughts to turn to Jerome Robbins. He had been my wife Bella’s and my dear friend, regularly inviting us to rehearsals. We would watch him go over each segment of a ballet tirelessly: scolding, correcting, and cajoling, until a mysterious change, often imperceptible to Bella and me, signaled that the music and the dance had come together and now corresponded to his vision. He would clap his hands, turn to his assistant Victor, and say, That’s it, the kids have got it, let’s go and eat. Jerry was ravenously hungry after rehearsals. We would tag along with him and Victor to Shun Lee, a Chinese restaurant on West Sixty-Fifth Street, where Jerry, so abstemious in daily life, devoured one after another the mild Cantonese dishes that were his favorites. He died in 1998, fifteen years after George Balanchine, and the curtain went down on a great era in ballet history that their work had defined. I was grateful to have seen so much of it while they were still alive, danced by dancers they had formed. Would the company for which they had created so many masterpieces continue to perform them in high style? I hoped it would, at least for the remainder of my years.

  At the intermission, I got a whiskey at the bar and, the weather being mild, went out on the open terrace. The fountain in the center of the plaza had not yet been redesigned and programmed to keep time to a beat as intricate as Fred Astaire’s steps and no easier to decipher, but I liked it anyway and never tired of looking at it. I was bewitched. How wonderful, I said to myself over and over, how glad—really how happy—I am to have come back to live in this city! For much of my life I had dreaded admitting to myself or others that I was happy. To do so, I was certain, was to invite the gods to strike where I was most vulnerable. Not my own person, but Bella or our little Agnes. Alas, the full measure of punishment had already been meted out, leaving me diminished but invulnerable. We had been living between Paris and New York, with longer stays abroad because of Bella’s family, all of whom were there. Soon after the beginning of one of our New York sojourns Agnes was killed—instantaneously—by the falling limb of a tree in Central Park, which also gravely injured the nurse who was taking her home from the Children’s Zoo. Our grief was extreme. Unable to speak about the disaster for two years or more, we suffered in silence and, without need for discussion, concluded that we would not have another child; Agnes’s place could not be taken, and we did not wish to give another hostage to fortune. We stayed away from New York as much as possible, learning to live for each other and for our work. We were hardly ever apart. I am a writer and so was Bella; we designated as our offices two adjoining rooms of every habitation we occupied, whether in New York City or the house on a rocky hillside outside Sharon, Connecticut, I inherited in the fifties from a maiden aunt or the apartment in Paris near the Panthéon.

  Then one winter, which for professional reasons we were spending in New York, Bella, who had never complained of an ache or a pain, who never caught colds or allowed jetlag to upset her sleep pattern, whose digestion triumphed over every cuisine, began to suffer from lingering sniffles and strange little infections; red blotches appeared on her skin. She joked that if either of us were a drug addict sharing needles or sleeping with fellow addicts she would think she had AIDS. But in her case, she said, she had simply been beaten down by the interminable New York winter. I thought she was right. For the first time in our lives we went south in search of the sun, to Barbados, the only appealing island where a place to stay that met our requirements—those indispensable two offices and close proximity to the beach—was immediately available at a price that was not outrageous. The beach house in St. James turned out to be perfect. We worked at our desks starting in the early morning. Before lunch, we luxuriated for an hour or two in the sun and the caressing Caribbean Sea that regaled us with an unending fashion show of fish darting about the coral reef, and then went home for lunch and the postprandial nap that was our moment of choice for making love. Afterward, until late in the evening, we worked again. After a week of this paradisal existence, Bella told me, as we were leaving the lunch table, that for once we would have to rest quietly during our nap. She hurt everywhere and, it seemed to her, particularly down there. She had noticed some strange bleeding. Would I mind? Immediately, I told her that we must book seats on the next available flight to New York and see our family doctor and whomever else he thought appropriate. She refused categorically, insisting that we stay on the island through the remaining two weeks of our lease. There was no reason to sacrifice even one moment of our idyll. It didn’t take long, however, after we returned to the city to learn that there had been reasons aplenty. Bella’s symptoms were those of acute lymphoblastic leukemia that had attacked her bone marrow and was methodically, implacably subverting it. Increasingly draconic treatments would be followed by perhaps a month’s remission. The cycle was repeated over and over, leaving Bella ravaged and exhausted, with no hope of cure or longer-lasting remission, according to her hematologist, other than a successful bone marrow transplant. Bella’s only sibling, her older brother, was eager to be the donor. The consanguinity and the resulting near-perfect match of their blood types reduced considerably the risk of rejection. After considering the protocol she would be required to observe following the transplant, and the benefits she could expect, about which she was stubbornly skeptical, Bella decided against the procedure. I don’t believe this cancer will leave my body, and I don’t care about gaining a couple of years, she said. They won’t be good years. We’ve had such a splendid life together. Let’s not settle for one in which I will be so horribly diminished. Neither of us wants that. There was no hiding of the fact that I agreed. With the help of opiates we had saved up she died in my arms, peacefully, some six months later. And what can be said of me? I am on a rack, but I still have my work. I do it conscientiously and modestly for the pleasure it gives me, expecting no other award. And I have my memories. Dante’s Virgil was wrong to tell him that there is no greater sorrow than to remember past happy times when one is in misery. Memory is a solace. Perhaps the only one. Memory is also the best of companions.

  My reverie was interrupted by a voice I knew, although I didn’t immediately identify it, calling out my name: Philip! I turned and saw a tall slim lady in her late sixties or perhaps early seventies, strikingly good looking and turned out in a black suit I attributed to Armani and black pumps. A black pocketbook hung from her shoulder on a gold chain. I blinked as I realized who she was.
Many years had passed since I had last seen her. How many I couldn’t immediately calculate. But yes, without doubt, it was she.

  My goodness, the lady continued, what’s the matter with you, don’t you know me? I knew you right away, even with your back turned. Your hair is all white, it’s still cut too short, and your ears still stick out. I had no idea I’d changed so much. For God’s sake, I’m Lucy Snow. Lucy De Bourgh Snow.

  Yielding to irritation because her voice had been much louder than necessary, I replied using Hubert H. Humphrey’s standard response to strangers who introduced themselves while he pumped their hands: Of course you are, and I’m glad to see you.

  Well, I should hope so!