Outerbridge Reach

by Robert Stone

  “Any message?” Browne asked him.

  Jernigan shook his head.

  “Everybody’s gone home. We’ve closed the switchboard.”

  “Right,” Browne said. “The lessons of eighty-seven. Fear itself.”

  When he called his broker again the line was still busy.

  That evening, Browne had been commanded to attend a seminar called “All About Sales and Product Liability,” which was scheduled for six at a motel off I-95. He went straight from work to find the first lecture canceled. Browne and a bearded young man from Scotland were the only people who had appeared. The two of them went to the motel coffee shop.

  The man’s name was Ogilvie and he worked for Pepsico, who had brought him out for some Stateside conditioning. Young Ogilvie’s face was flushed with an anger that seemed to transcend falling markets and canceled seminars.

  “It’s all spec-ulation,” he complained as they sat at the Formica counter drinking decaffeinated coffee. His voice broke around the word as though it were some non-Covenanting heresy. “And absolutely unproductive.”

  The confusion and excitement of the day had inclined Browne to a slight pointless elation. He was amused by Ogilvie’s sour Scottish oratory.

  “Maybe,” he suggested to the young man, “the heroic age of the bourgeoisie is over.”

  This notion further darkened the Scot’s countenance.

  “Socialist are you?”

  “No,” Browne said, “just joking.”

  Ogilvie looked at him critically.

  “Right bastards they are,” he told Browne. “They don’t want to work and they don’t want to see you work. They despise the productive classes.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Browne said. “I’m a salesman after all.”

  “I’m an engineer myself by training,” Ogilvie said.

  Browne considered a reply but made none. He went away feeling slighted. Driving home, he found himself thinking more about his brief unsatisfactory conversation than about the terrors of the market. The heroic age of the bourgeoisie was over, he thought, and socialism was finished for that reason.

  When he got home, his wife and daughter were watching The Nightly Business Report.

  “Anything new?” he asked them.

  When Anne turned to him he saw that she was upset. She shrugged, disinclined to speak in front of Maggie.

  “The market’s in bad shape,” she said. “They haven’t even got the figures yet.”

  “Really,” Maggie added excitedly. “Everybody’s stock is totally worthless.”

  He laughed and then remembered that he and Maggie were formally estranged.

  “You go finish your assignment,” Anne ordered her daughter. “You’re getting an early train tomorrow.”

  For dinner, he made himself a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. Making it reminded him of his daughter as a small girl, when she had proudly cooked such a sandwich for him from her kiddie cookbook and announced it as croque-monsieur. As he was eating it at the kitchen table, Anne came in and leaned against the counter.

  “Maggie’s on my case,” he said.

  “Of course,” Anne said. “She’s that age. You loom large in her life.”

  “I hope she’ll apologize before she goes,” he said wearily.

  “She’s written you a note,” Anne told him. “She hates to fight with you.”

  “Our Maggie,” he said as he cleared the table, “she’s larger than life.”

  When the dishes were in the washer, Browne turned to see his wife tight-lipped, leaning in the same spot, twisting her wedding ring.

  “You don’t look happy, Annie.”

  She flashed a false smile, raised her hands and let them fall to her sides.

  “It’s only money, right?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “Tomorrow we’ll get the calls.”

  She had been buying stock on margin through her brother for several years, profiting where others failed. Browne thought of her as clever at business. He had stopped keeping up with the numbers.

  “We’ve learned a few things since Black Monday,” he said. “It may pass.”

  After a moment she said, “I’m not going to take Maggie out of school. I’ll go to my father if I have to.”

  “Surely,” he said, “it won’t come to that.”

  “Think not?”

  “The crisis passed in eighty-seven,” he said. “We’d all have done better not to panic. Wait and see.”

  She went into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine.

  “Are you going to say ‘I told you so’?” she asked him.

  “I’m not going to say anything,” Browne said. “Not a word.”

  “Dad’s going to say it.”

  “Let him say what he likes. Tell him it was my idea. He can’t think any worse of me than he does already.”

  “He doesn’t think all that badly of you. He said you were a good provider.”

  “Frankly, Annie, I don’t give a shit what he said.”

  Anne’s face was flushed with the wine. She leaned in the kitchen doorway with her forehead against the jamb. He went over and put a hand against her cheek, bidding her to look at him. She turned to face him and closed her eyes.

  “I’m so ashamed,” she said. “I feel so stupid.”

  “We agreed, didn’t we? That it was only money?”

  Browne was surprised at his own indifference. For some reason he could not bring to bear the emotions appropriate to disappointed speculation.

  “We may lose,” she said, “in a somewhat major way. We’re going to have to hustle to pay it back. We’re going to have to borrow and we’re going to have to cut down.”

  “Let’s tote it up in the morning,” he said. “I’ve had enough of today.”

  “Never again,” Anne said. “I swear.”

  “Forget it, Anne. It’s over with. We’ll proceed from here.”

  He went into the kitchen to get the wine. He refilled her glass and poured a small measure for himself. Ordinarily, he never drank alcohol. He touched her glass with his own.

  “Slainte, Annie Aroon. Don’t feel bad.”

  As he drank, she burst into tears. He touched her on the shoulder. Then it occurred to him that she might want to be alone. He put the glass down and went out of the dining room.

  On the night table in their bedroom, he found a comic friendship card of the sort available from stationers, together with a smile button and a red rose. The face of the card showed a cartoon drawing of two cute anthropomorphic little animals driving a jalopy toward the sunset. “Friends to the End” said the motto inside. Maggie had signed it, “With love and apologies to Dad.”

  A shade impersonal, he thought, but it was as far as she could go. He went to her room and knocked on the door. A Megadeth tape was in the machine and he heard her turn it off.

  “Hardly anybody sends me flowers anymore,” he told Maggie when she opened the door.

  She came out to him blushing, avoiding his eye, a wise guy no more.

  “So we’re friends again, are we?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. Teasing a little, he pursued eye contact. She kept looking away, at the point of tears. When he hugged her, she tensed into a statue of iron. King Midas’s daughter, he thought, ungilded.

  “When you’re back next month,” he told her, “we’ll have a trip. Would that be good?”

  She nodded, all confusion.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  In the master bedroom he watched television for a while, a documentary on public television about Cuba. In the film, Cuba’s idea of itself seemed very appealing. The ideal Cuba was a place in which the ape of ego was not worshiped. People could live their lives on behalf of something more than just themselves. The ideal Cuba seemed to honor poverty and obedience with all the fervor of a Catholic boarding school.

  He was still watching it when Anne came upstairs.

  “Aren’t thing
s bad enough?” she asked him. “Do I have to look at Castro on top of it?”

  “I’m considering life in Cuba, Annie. If our losses are too severe. Of course you wouldn’t be able to play the market.”

  “It’s not funny,” she told him. “I was trying to help out. So I fucked it up. Please don’t make fun of me.”

  “Sorry,” Browne said. “I’ve been dealing with customers all day. I’m in a disorderly state.”

  He pressed the remote button and turned off the set. She sat down on the side of the bed, looking at herself in the mirror.

  “What do they say? The customers.”

  He smiled without good humor.

  “My customers are luxury consumers. They could use a little grace under pressure.”

  “Boy, me too,” Anne said.

  “Did I tell you that Buzz Ward was retiring?”

  “No.”

  “He is. He’s going to become a preacher in his old age.”

  “He’ll be good at it,” she said. “He’ll look wonderful.”

  Again, Browne was unable to sleep and passed the early morning hours sitting up beside his sleeping wife. He thought it might have been the wine. To the Source of the Oxus lay open on his lap but his thoughts, for some reason, stayed on the Cuban documentary. A car went slowly by outside, cruising. With it came the sound of a rap tape played at full volume as though one of its windows were open.

  The documentary had been no different from a hundred other programs that had offended Browne with their liberal humility and left-wing bias. But the vision of its imagined country, a homeland that could function as both community and cause, was one that remained with him. Browne felt his own country had failed him in that regard. It was agreeable to think such a place might exist, even as home to the enemy. But no such place existed.

  The war would never be fought because the enemy had proved false. All his fierce alternatives were lies. Surely, Browne thought sleepily, this was a good thing. Yet something was lost. For his own part, he was tired of living for himself and those who were him by extension. It was impossible, he thought. Empty and impossible. He wanted more.

  Ward had said, “I need some love in my life.”

  Ward, Browne thought, would make a good minister. A decorous man who knew the secrets of the heart. But what about me, Browne wondered. Which was the very question he had sought to elude. For a moment he felt as though he were standing at the edge of a great darkness with an ear cocked to the wind, attending silence. It was a place he dared not stay.

  He remembered walking as a stranger in the ruined terminal. For a moment he became a stranger in his own house, in his own bed, beside his own woman—a stranger but without a stranger’s freedom. On the other side of darkness, he imagined freedom. It was a bright expanse, an effort, a victory. It was a good fight or the right war—something that eased the burden of self and made breath possible. Without it, he felt as though he had been preparing all his life for something he would never live to see.

  6

  STRICKLAND had been asleep only a few hours when the phone woke him. A drab sun addressed Manhattan at a late morning slant. Pamela, his visitor the night previous, was gone.

  He picked up the phone and said, “Hold on.”

  Hurrying to the studio door, he put the police bolt in place. He glanced about him as he went back to the bedroom, wondering if she had been pilfering. He had been too tired to see her out. Pamela had mainly learned to keep her liberated fingers under control around his property but he had once caught her with a six-thousand-dollar zoom lens.

  “Yes,” Strickland said to the person on the phone. He stood in the long window, pulling on his trousers, squinting in the sunlight. A bright young voice hailed him.

  “I have Mrs. Manning of Hylan, Mr. Strickland.”

  “That’s great,” Strickland said. He sat down on the bed and reached for a cigarette and his Rolodex file.

  “Mr. Strickland,” an older woman’s voice declared, ‘Mrs. Manning of Hylan.”

  The Hylan people, Strickland had observed, tended to offer their surnames as possessed by the corporate suffix. It suggested foggy glens and Celtic heraldry.

  “How are you, Mrs. Manning?”

  “Just fine. Will you be coming to see us today?”

  “Yes I will, ma’am. I have an appointment.”

  “Mr. Hylan himself can’t make it,” Mrs. Manning of Hylan informed him. “But we’ve arranged a schedule.”

  Strickland decided he did not care for the sound of it. His annoyance occasioned him his first stammer of the day.

  “But ma’am,” he began, and stuck on the next sentence. “I . . . I came back a week early to meet Mr. Hylan. We set this up months ago.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Mrs. Manning said. “We’ll make it up to you.”

  The unusual promise intrigued him. He waited for her to go on.

  “We’ll show you Shadows,” she said flirtatiously. “We’ll give you the tour. You can look at tapes. Hello, Mr. Strickland?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Really,” she assured him. “You’ll have a good time.”

  Strickland considered that it was early in the day for Mrs. Manning’s wry alertness.

  “Hey,” he told her, “I’m having one already.”

  Strickland kept his car on the second level of a pier on the Hudson, a priceless midtown spot, convenient and secure. The car was a 1963 Porsche with austere lines and black leather upholstery. The fittings were rusty but the engine reported like a Prussian soldier on the first turn of the key. Strickland gave a little whistle of satisfaction.

  At the Twelfth Avenue barricade, he paid his parking bill to an unkempt youth of Caribbean Spanish origin.

  “I’m looking for storage space,” he told the young man. “I don’t need a lot of it. I’d like to talk about renting some.”

  It was desirable, Strickland felt, to rent from the same waterfront outfit who ran the garage. Their property had a way of avoiding violation. The young man gave him a card with a number to call.

  On the drive upriver, he thought about Matthew Hylan, the young merchant-adventurer who had engaged him to record his next voyage. Strickland had amassed a dossier of Hylan clippings. There were pieces in Fortune, Harper’s and Manhattan, Inc. There were admiring profiles in the yachting press, dippy puffs in the weeklies, poisonous anecdotes in the upscale celebrity magazines. Hylan was forty-four and supremely rich. He had inherited a North Shore Boston mortuary business worth a couple of million dollars and parlayed his legacy into a late-century colossus of fun services and real estate. He appeared vain and lippy, a millionaire vulgarian in the contemporary mode. He was single, dressy and apparently heterosexual. He liked a party. His chosen image seemed that of a sailor. There was nothing in any of the material to engage Strickland’s insight. Hylan of Hylan resembled many others.

  Physically, Hylan was more or less conventionally handsome. His jaw was large and emphasized in caricatures. His eyes were slightly protuberant and fleshily hooded. His mouth was large and suggestive of the appetites. Strickland had never witnessed the face in motion.

  He made it up to Hylan headquarters in little more than half an hour, over the George Washington Bridge and up the parkway. Hylan Corporation headquarters occupied an old estate called Shadows, on the right bank of the river, opposite a sugarloafshaped hill called the Plattsweg. The main house was an odd structure, built in the middle of the nineteenth century to the eccentric designs of a disappointed matron who squandered her husband’s dishonestly acquired fortune in its construction. The house was enormous, with carved buttresses and much gingerbread and a roof that curved upward at both ends with the thrusting violence of a Viking chapel. The lady founder had called it Shadows because of the way the surrounding hills abridged the sunlight. She affected to rejoice in the changing patterns they cast. There was plenty of light to be seen on the river, though; the prospects, upstream and down the Hudson, were sublime.

  The old
building had a modern wood-paneled reception room with a security guard on duty at a circular desk. When Strickland had been announced Mrs. Manning came promptly to claim him. She was a handsome, high-colored upper-class woman in her forties.

  “Mr. Strickland,” the woman cried, “I’m Joyce Manning. Welcome to Hylan.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Strickland said humbly.

  “Too bad about Matty. He’d have loved to meet you. He’s a great admirer of your outstanding work.”

  “Yes,” Strickland said. “Too bad.”

  “It just wasn’t on. Things are in chaos today.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Meetings. Arrivals and departures. Excursions about.”

  Strickland smiled politely.

  Joyce Manning conducted him to a man called Thorne, whose name occurred often in the more serious of the Hylan articles. Harry Thorne, a hard case from the Boston construction wars, vice president of the corporation, was said to be Hylan’s mentor and partner. Journalists liked to contrast Thorne’s dangerous manner with the hail-fellow glibness of his younger pal.

  Thorne received Strickland in Matty Hylan’s office. He was ugly, vigorous and sixty-odd. There was absolutely no more to his face than function required: it was spare and brutal, with an impatient squint and a lipless pseudo-smile that emphasized the lustrous melancholy of his black eyes. Great mug, thought Strickland. Thorne’s shirt was white on white, his suit funereal and superbly cut.

  “How are yez?” Thorne asked with faint insolence. His voice suggested gulls over India Wharf. Strickland had no trouble recognizing his manner, which was that of a man who equated documentary films with souvenir napkins or balloons and had other things on his mind. Beyond that, Strickland thought, Thorne looked distinctly weary and irritated, as though their meeting represented a particularly unwelcome irony. He was not offended.

  “Fine and dandy, sir. How about yourself?”

  Joyce Manning bustled nervously, like a good witch.

  “Harry,” she insisted, “you’ve got to let Mr. Strickland see the view from Matty’s office. He may want to use it.”

  Thorne looked blank. “Use it?”