I set sail to windward on a starboard tack and let the trades take me wherever they felt like. I had a little trouble handling her at first, without Bone's sure hand with the rigging and the Dacron, and came close once to a bad jibe. But the lessons I'd learned from him, plus instinct and applied skill, allowed me to regain and maintain control.
The not-caring didn't last long. Singlehanding a thirty-four-foot yawl is work, hard work, and requires constant vigilance even under optimum conditions. When you have a passion for sailing, the work soon translates to pleasure and then to that sense of exhilarating freedom. I could singlehand. I was on my own boat, alone on the open sea. Everything else diminishes after a while, loses some of its importance—even betrayal and a suddenly brutalized love.
By nightfall I was no longer running aimlessly. I reckoned my position by compass and celestial navigation, used the nautical almanacs and logarithmic tables to chart a course that would take Windrunner on a broad loop around St. Croix, and put her on the right coordinates.
The weather held until the afternoon of the third day, when I encountered a rain squall off East Point on the northeastern tip of St. Croix. That was the only real test of my seamanship that I faced. A following breeze had risen, and before long the swells steepened and there was a rough cross chop. Then, as the wind increased, I saw the squall line moving in dark and fast. I double-checked the hatches, lashed down the loose gear, then went forward to replace the genoa with a working jib, again to reef in the main, and one more time to replace the working jib with the storm jib. Rain burst over the yawl in a blinding tropical downpour. The squall lasted about an hour, but despite the driving rain and thrashing sea it wasn't bad as Caribbean blows go. Windrunner showed no desire to broach, and I rode it out with the wheel tied down and a lifeline fastened around my waist and clipped to a backstay.
I stayed out five and a half days. At night I slept on the cushions in the cockpit aft. Every morning I pumped the bilges, ran the auxiliary for an hour to charge the batteries, checked the sails and halyards. I shot the sun at noon and took star sights at dusk and dawn, and kept a daily log. The yawl sailed herself with the wind abeam or on the quarter; those times I ran a piece of the sheet from a cleat on the lee coaming to the wheel's king spoke to keep her off the wind, and made my meals and lazed on deck, communing with the towering emptiness of sea and sky. I saw schools of flying fish, and what I was sure was the dorsal fin of a trailing shark. I passed deserted cays and other boats with their sails bellied fat, and avoided reefs, and once made five knots running close-hauled against the wind.
Bone was right, as usual.
When I sailed back into the harbor at Charlotte Amalie, the poison was gone.
The second dose came two weeks later.
I was all right then. But I wouldn't have been if I hadn't purged myself of the first dose with that long singlehand voyage.
I don't know why I picked that Tuesday to make my last visit to the Royal Bay Club. I don't believe in predestination, cosmic manipulation, any of that crap. It was a random choice of day and time to clean out my locker and cancel my membership. I'd never really felt comfortable at the club, and now there was no longer any need to keep up appearances. Since my return I'd managed to avoid the Verrikers and Kyles and other members, and I intended to keep on avoiding them; the last thing I wanted to have to deal with was pity.
The club was usually more or less deserted in the middle of the afternoon, the hottest part of the day. I expected to be in and out in a few minutes. The fact that Gavin Kyle happened to be in the lounge, and I happened to overhear him talking to the British banker, Horler, was sheer coincidence.
The steward wasn't in his customary cubicle at the front entrance, so I walked into the lounge looking for him. Gavin and Horler were at the bar. I would have done a quick about-face before they saw me, except that voices carry in a mostly empty room. When I heard Gavin use my name, I stopped and listened.
"You can't help but feel sorry for Laidlaw," he was saying in his gossipy way. "He doesn't know how much better off he is without that bitch. She—"
I was on the move by then, straight toward them. Horler spotted me first and jabbed Gavin with his knee. When Gavin saw me, his moon face warped in on itself as if squeezed from within. He squirmed visibly on his stool.
"Go ahead," I said. "Don't let me stop you."
"Christ, Richard, I—"
"Let's hear the rest of it."
Horler muttered an excuse and made a hasty exit. Gavin gulped his drink and started to get up, but I held him down with a hand on his shoulder. His eyes pleaded with me, as if he were a dog about to be kicked.
"I'm not going to make a scene," I said. "I'll just buy you a drink and we'll chat a little."
"I don't blame you for being pissed—"
"I'm not pissed. What're you drinking?"
" . . . Scotch and soda."
I ordered another round for him, a double shot of Arundel for myself. Then I said, "What did you mean, I'm better off without that bitch?"
"I've got a big mouth," he said. "Robin says so, and she's usually right about my shortcomings."
"What did you mean?"
"You don't really want to hear it."
"Why is Annalise a bitch? Why am I better off?"
The drinks came and he slugged half of his. "All right, you asked for it," he said, not quite looking at me. "She wasn't faithful to you. She . . . well, not for a long time."
It was several seconds before I asked, "How long a time?"
"At least six months."
"How many men?"
"I'm not sure. Two that I know of."
"The first?"
"Does it matter?"
"You, Gavin?"
"Christ! I don't play around. Never have, never will."
"Who, then?"
"If I tell you . . . what're you going to do?"
"Nothing," I said. What could I do that wouldn't call attention to me? "I'm not the confrontational type. Or the violent type. I just need to know."
I watched him struggle with it for half a minute. Then he said, "Screw it, I don't owe him any favors," and swallowed some of his fresh drink. "Royce Verriker."
Verriker. I felt a rush of hatred for him. Every man needs a vice; mine is making money. And making friends' wives.
"How do you know?"
"I saw him going into your house one afternoon," Gavin said.
"When you were out and Maureen was away visiting in San Juan."
"It could've been innocent."
"It wasn't. I asked him about it later on and he owned up."
"Just like that, he owned up?"
"You don't know Royce like I do. He's a shit when it conies to women. Likes to brag about his conquests. He never bragged to you?"
"No. But then he wouldn't, would he, if he was screwing Annalise."
Gavin made the rest of his Scotch disappear. "He's been like that ever since I've known him. Dozens of women—that divorce practice of his is tailor-made."
"How long did it go on with him and Annalise?"
"A while. Until he met somebody new, I guess."
"Does Maureen know what he is?"
"Hell, how could she not know? She either doesn't care or just turns a blind eye because she loves him."
So that was the cause of the rift between her and Annalise, the reason they'd stopped being friends. Had Annalise felt any shame? Probably not. Did she feel any over running out on me? Probably not.
"Who else besides Verriker?" I asked him.
"Nobody you or I know. Some rich tourist from New York."
"Name?"
"Jackson, Johnson, something like that. Manufacturer of women's clothing. Down here for the sport fishing, stayed at the old Grand."
"How do you know about him?"
"It was right before she left you," Gavin said. "A week or so. By then she wasn't bothering to be discreet about it. Snuggling up to him in public, spent at least one night in his room while you were o
ff on your cruise."
"When did he go back north?"
"I can't tell you that. You'd have to ask at the hotel." Pause. "You think she ran off with him?"
Of course she'd run off with him. A women's clothing manufacturer from New York? She'd have sat naked on his lap on the plane for an opportunity like that.
Gavin said, "Richard, man, you're not thinking of going after her and this guy? Trying to get her back?"
"No," I said.
He seemed relieved. "That's the right attitude. What you heard me say to Horler . . . well, it's a fact. You really are better off without her."
He was right.
I had no doubt of it by then.
In an odd way, finding out the full scope of Annalise's betrayal made it easier for me to get on with my life. You might think that I hated her then, but I didn't. Nor did I have any love left. I felt nothing at all for her. It was as if someone who had once been very close to me had died, and I'd gone through a short period of bereavement, and then I was able to move ahead with no emotional baggage.
At first I tried to figure out how and where it had all gone wrong, if there was a turning point, any specific incident that had led to her betrayal. But of course there wasn't. It was a gradual thing. She had been right when she accused me of evolving back into Jordan Wise, but she'd been undergoing a metamorphosis of her own. We were two divergent life forms, changing in opposing ways—that was what had doomed our relationship. It wouldn't have mattered if I'd realized it along the way. I couldn't have stopped it. The deterioration, the decay, was inevitable.
I could see all this now with an objective eye, as if across a chasm. I understood Annalise as I never had before. And I understood myself, as an individual and in relation to her.
She'd given me a lot to be thankful for since that night in her apartment in San Francisco. Four years of greater passion and stimulation than I'd ever known. St. Thomas and the sea and sailing and Bone's friendship. But I hadn't given her all she'd wanted. She had never been content living here. Or content with me. From the first, I was a means to an end, a source of satisfaction for her cravings—an integral part of a package deal. If she'd ever felt love for me, even a little, it had been for that reason and that reason alone. That was why she'd stayed with me as long as she had.
Verriker had been a dalliance, a way to relieve the restless boredom. The New York clothing manufacturer had been a ready-to-wear excuse. When I refused to satisfy the most important of her hungers, a shot at the New York fashion world, she ran off with the first man who could offer it to her. She'd been gone a long time before she actually left.
What it boiled down to was that I couldn't have held on to her because I'd never really had her in the first place. That was what hurt the most. Even at the moments of our deepest connection, in and out of bed, she'd never really been mine in the way that I'd been hers. I don't mean love—I mean the extension and cornmingling of self, the absorption of one persona into the other that creates a bonded third. Or, hell, maybe I do mean love. Maybe that's another thing love is, the only definition that's not strictly personal.
If I hated anybody during that time, it was myself for not understanding sooner. Love is blind—the platitude makers got that one right. Blind and stupid and short-sighted. I accepted that, and accepted that I was a fool for believing otherwise. That was why, when the hurt went away, the rest of the emotion went with it.
Did I stay in the villa? Yes. I would have moved out right away, except that the lease ran until December; I'd been paying the rent in six-month increments to take advantage of a discount offered by the owners. Giving it up immediately would have meant breaking the lease and taking a heavy financial hit, because one condition of the discount was that the biannual payments were nonrefundable. I'd been so careful with money up to then, I couldn't bring myself to throw away thousands of dollars for no good reason.
Aside from a short period of adjustment, I had no trouble learning to be alone again. I slept at the villa most nights, but I spent very little time there otherwise. Days, except when there was a storm, I was at Sub Base harbor or Frenchtown or the native quarter, or out on Windrunner. In port I worked on the yawl's upkeep or just sat on deck reading and listening to music. Sometimes Bone would join me; sometimes I would join him on Conch Out. I ate all my meals alone or with him on one boat or the other, or in Harry's Dockside Cafe or one of the native eateries. Now and then I would drive over to Red Hook to see Dick Marsten, or up to the top of Crown Mountain for a sunset watch, or out to Coki Bay or Sapphire Bay for a swim and some snorkeling among the coral reefs. Once at Sapphire I helped a native kid with a speargun drag a big moray eel in from the reefs offshore—an ugly creature with a body like a bar of white iron and foxlike jaws, that even dead scared hell out of a couple of female tourists.
St. Thomas crawled with unattached and willing women; it would have been easy enough to pick one up for a one-night stand. But I had no interest in playing that kind of game. No interest in female companionship, no interest in sex. My libido had reverted to what it was before I met Annalise. Maybe that would change eventually, I thought, and maybe it wouldn't. It didn't seem to matter much either way.
What mattered was doing as I pleased twenty-four hours a day, every day, with no encumbrances. I didn't have to attend any more parties, play any more handball, dance in any more nightclubs or eat in any more expensive restaurants or take any more lengthy trips that didn't involve sailing. I let my hair get long and shaggy and I grew a beard to go with my mustache. I saw none of the people who no longer cared to see me. The only one of that crowd who ever came around, once, was Jack Scanlon. I didn't encourage him and he never came again.
After a while I came to realize that I not only preferred this way of life to the one I'd had with Annalise, but that it was actually a relief to be alone again. You can change your financial status, your environment, your perspective, but you can't change your basic nature. After three years or thirty, you're still the same person. Jordan Wise had led a quiet, contemplative, mosdy celibate, loner's existence in San Francisco; Richard Laidlaw, without Annalise, gravitated to the same on St. Thomas. She had been only half right when she accused me of evolving back into my former self. I'd never really been anything else.
I thought about her less and less. And when I did, it was only to wonder, with detached curiosity, whether she was still with the manufacturer, whether her intro into the fashion industry had paid off, whether she had any regrets, whether she ever thought of me. I didn't wish her ill and I didn't wish her well—I didn't care one way or the other.
Out of sight, out of heart, out of mind.
Gone.
On one of the solo voyages on Windrunner, I discovered an island. A tiny cay, actually, out near the King fish Banks, so small and low-lying it didn't have a name on the charts. It was about the size of a couple of football fields, humped in the middle, not much more than a sandspit formed by the action of wind and sea. One day it would probably disappear if a Category 4 or 5 hurricane passed anywhere near it.
Curiosity and the fact that the day was clear and the seas calm led me to explore it. I hunted up a gap in the reef that surrounds almost every cay, large or small, eased in as close as I dared under power, and then weighed anchor and put the dinghy over and rowed in the rest of the way. There was nothing on the cay other than a few twisted screw palms, scatters of broken coral and shells, some tiny, almost translucent crabs, and a noisy colony of nesting terns and frigate birds. It was a beautiful place, quiet except for the birds and the murmur of the sea, lonely unless you were a loner yourself. There were tidepools and a little lagoon among the reefs on the leeward side, the water so clear you could see the dark red starfish on the bottom sand and the multicolored fish darting in and out among the lace and brain coral. I stripped down and had a swim in the lagoon. Later, in the tidepools, I cought a brace of yellow-and-black-mottled crayfish and pried loose a couple of dozen mussels.
Fine, lazy afternoo
n, so much enjoyed that I returned twice over the next few months for more of the same. On the third trip, I decided the spit-kit needed a name and christened it Laidlaw Cay. When I told Bone about it, he laughed and said, "Next thing, you gonna want to move out there and build a house."
"Nope. I was thinking of burying my loot on it like one of the old buccaneers."
"Not you, mon. No pirate blood in you."
That made me laugh. That's what you think, my friend, I thought.
That's what you think!
On the first of November I gave six weeks' notice that I would not be renewing the villa's lease. That was fine with the real estate agent: rental prices were climbing—there were a lot of new expats moving in, and other wealthy people looking for vacation homes—and the owners would be able to command a much higher lease price from the next tenant. He asked whether I wanted him to find me a smaller house or apartment, but I said no. I was spending so much time on Windrunner, I figured I would try living on her once the lease expired. Her main cabin was large enough to hold all my possessions. Surprisingly few possessions, I found when I took stock of them—clothing, a small collection of books, the brass-bound chest, a few odds and ends. And I could rent a parking space for the Mini cheap.
The Crimes of Jordan Wise Page 13