by Robert Stone
“George Dolvin,” Crawford said. “He’s a hotheaded guy. People used to say he was a mad bomber. Been in jail.” He turned to Fanelli. “What was it about? Abortion?”
“That’s right,” Fanelli said. “Abortion and the bomb and stuff.”
“I think he’s like religious,” Crawford said. “Seventh Day or something. His wife’s the same.”
“He better fucking pray,” Browne said, “if he’s damaged that boat.”
When Browne and Crawford examined the interior, however, the frame was quite intact.
“The guy’s like a Seventh Day or something,” Crawford assured Browne over again. “One of those things.”
“Well, we’ll do it over,” Browne said. “Maybe I’ll do it myself.”
“Yeah?” Crawford asked. “You work with wood? Cuz I got this friend, he’s a carpenter. He’s good, the guy. He might do it for the same price.”
Browne declined to answer.
Half an hour later, he drove to a Sears off the Garden State Parkway and spent an hour or so pricing woodworking equipment. Dolvin had taken his receipts with him so Browne had no idea where he had obtained his wood. On impulse he bought a set of books on carpentry and brought them over to Staten Island with him. Then, just before lunchtime, a Federal Express truck delivered some of the electronic gear he had ordered. He spent most of the afternoon taking inventory of parts and arranging to stow them. The compartments in which he had planned to place the major equipment no longer existed.
For a few minutes, late in the afternoon, he found himself completely overcome with rage. It bore down on him so violently that he was afraid to so much as reach out a hand. He hid from the yardbirds in the innards of his boat. Motionless, sweating in the close space, he tried to will it away. But the anger seemed capable of crushing him, will, intellect and all. With his arms folded, his eyes closed, he sat trembling at the bottom of the companionway and made himself eat it. Swallow it whole.
Driving back that evening, he began to worry about money again. It began to seem to him that Thorne’s guaranteed eighty thousand might not be quite enough to cover the trip. He was determined not to cut corners.
Once home, he cooked a quick stir-fry dinner for himself and Anne. Somehow he could not bring himself to tell her about the business with Dolvin. It was too bad, he thought, because he knew the story would engage both her indignation and her sense of the absurd. He wanted her company in the business. But he said nothing.
Anne had been buying books and making lists. From bookshops, chandleries, maritime museums and libraries she was acquiring checklists, texts on meteorology and the journals of solitary sailors. At home, she continually revised her own inventory of necessities for Nona. At the office, she worked on old Magowan, trying to worry him and Underway magazine into an arrangement for a series of articles about Owen’s voyage. She had determined that a book must come out of it, a book they would write together. The study that Owen had built for her had been converted into their headquarters.
After dinner, the Brownes lingered over the table, Anne sipping white bordeaux. She could see that he was in the grip of a storm.
“Maybe you should have stayed with Nona tonight,” she said.
“It’s you I’m after tonight,” he said, “not Nona.” He said it in a way that was not at all lighthearted.
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, Owen. Maggie’s having a sleepover party. We’ll be up to here in squealing fifteen-year-olds.”
He shrugged.
“I suggest you keep a low profile,” she said to him. “I hope you won’t get annoyed.”
“This time,” Owen told her, “we’ll all have to put up with each other.”
From the kitchen they could hear Maggie on the phone; she sounded eager and happy. Home from boarding school, it was a thrill for her to have her own company. Her school friends visited infrequently because of the neighborhood.
“She told the same thing to Alison Moran,” Maggie was saying on the telephone, “and she repeated it! That girl is such a loser. A total loser!”
Anne raised her eyes heavenward. They went upstairs.
In the bedroom he took his shoes off and settled on the covers, trying to make himself read the manual that had come with his satellite navigation equipment. Anne turned on the bedroom TV set to a special program from Lincoln Center, a performance of the Verdi Requiem. She lay across the bed with her chin on her hands, her glass on the floor beside her. After a while the funereal Latin began to make her uneasy. When she saw that Owen was paying no particular attention to the music she got up and turned it off. The music sounded on from somewhere else in the house.
Anne got up, went into the hallway and followed the sound. She traced it to the attic, where Maggie and four of her friends were gathered around an old set, lounging on mattresses on the floor, convulsed with laughter at the Agnus Dei. Maggie, the house comic, was holding forth at the expense of the singers and musicians over whose unlovely countenances the camera roved. Anne stood concealed at the top of the steps that led up to the loft.
“Look at them,” Maggie cooed with malign delight, “they’re all losers! They meet every week to cheer each other up with music. They’re gross. They’re absurd. They’re losers, losers, losers.”
This interpretation of the performance reduced Maggie’s friends to a helpless, mirthful tangle of pubescent limbs. Not wanting to spoil the fun, Anne crept back down the attic steps and called up from the floor below.
“Please keep the sound down, kids.”
Her intrusion produced a stricken silence that reverberated through the house.
Sitting up in bed, Owen had put the manual aside. He watched her come in and finish off the wine.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Anne said. “They’re having a ball.”
She sat down on the bed and looked at the floor.
“Maggie has this thing about losers,” she told her husband.
“Yeah,” he said, “I heard her on the phone before.”
“It’s a word I dislike.”
“Hell, it’s just a word,” Browne said. “They don’t mean anything by it.”
“It’s vulgar and cruel,” Anne said. “It makes her seem crass. I’m going to have to talk to her.”
“You’re pretty high-toned,” he said, “aren’t you?”
“I particularly dislike that word.”
Owen laughed to himself.
She looked at him sharply. “Yes?”
“Nothing.” Then he said, “I know why you dislike it.”
“Really? Why?”
“Never mind,” he said. He stuck a pillow against the bed’s headboard and lay back.
“I mean,” Anne said, “I don’t know where she gets it from.”
“It’s in the air,” Owen said, “these days.”
“The kids have this false sophistication. It’s repulsive.”
After a moment, Browne leaned up on his elbow. “Is it such a bad thing that they know the difference between winning and losing?”
“I wasn’t suggesting they shouldn’t,” she said.
“I don’t think kids should be taught that somehow winning is morally suspect. Or that losing is a nobler condition.”
“Owen, you aren’t listening to me.”
“Sure I am,” he said. “Sure I am and I’m concerned with the deeper meaning.”
“Oh, bullshit,” she said, somewhat to her own surprise. She was mildly drunk again.
He looked at her blankly, a little scandalized by her insolence. “Don’t you tell me bullshit, Annie. I’m concerned with the message that gets across. Life has winners and it has losers.”
“Life?” she asked.
“Losing stinks,” he insisted. “Kids should know that. They should have a horror of losing!”
“I suppose you have to take that attitude,” Anne said. “To prepare.”
“You sound as though it was all something I invented. But I know why it
bothers you so much. Shall I tell you?”
“Sure,” she said, “tell me.”
“Because the prospect of losing at anything scares the bejesus out of you. It’s not me that’s the compulsive winner around here. It’s you.”
“Do you really think that?” she asked.
“Yes, I do. You hate not winning so much you can’t stand the sound of the word ‘loser.’ But you were brought up not to let on. You’re very aggressive and competitive, in fact.”
She stared at the floor for a while, thinking about it. Then she lay back beside him and covered her eyes with her hand. “I don’t think I like it,” she said, “when you tell me about myself.”
“No,” he said, “you like it the other way around.”
They made love. He thought it went well and that he felt her rejoicing. It made him smile in the darkness. His heart was high. He could see a sun-dappled ocean, a suitably azure sky, pennants flying. The lesser forces giving way before the strong.
“Is that winning?” she asked, laughing at him. “Did you win that one?”
It was a long time before he went to sleep. Although they said nothing further he had the sense that she remained awake beside him.
18
“GREAT HOUSE,” Hersey said. They parked across the cul-de-sac from it, on the highest slope of the terrace. When they had carried their equipment across the road Strickland rang the bell at the gate.
It was not a large house but clearly an old one. It had been painted white, although not recently, and its green shutters were attached with rusted fittings. There was a balcony over the front door and an uneven portico supported by squared pillars. The whole front had the charm and incongruousness of ancient, hand-hewn carpentry.
“George Washington slept here,” Strickland said.
“No shit?” asked Hersey.
The house was set in a disorderly garden with hedges and arborvitae. There were two large oaks on either side of it and an iron spiked fence around the whole enclosure. Planters full of pansies hung beside the front door.
Strickland turned and looked behind them at the town that sloped down to the Sound. Between the hill on which they stood and the water’s edge lay the rooftops of a city housing project daubed in black graffiti and a few disused skeletal mills.
Turning again, he saw that a fair-haired young girl had come to the door. The girl was frowning; Hersey was giving her an artificial comic smile. From the pictures he had seen, Strickland recognized the Brownes’ daughter, Maggie. The pictures had not captured the girl’s extraordinary resemblance to her father.
“Hi, Maggie,” Strickland said. “Can we come in?”
“Nobody’s here,” she said.
“You’re here,” Strickland told her. The girl blushed and looked grave. “We’ve come to put your house in the movies. Didn’t your parents tell you we were coming?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t think they were expecting anyone. Mom went riding. Dad’s speaking at a yacht club down in Tarrytown.”
“Well, we’d like to shoot your terrific house if that’s all right. And you too.”
Maggie groaned and grimaced. “Oh, no!”
Strickland and Hersey walked around the house to the back garden, which was thick with fallen leaves and riotous with ivy.
“Are these people preppy or what?” Strickland asked his assistant. “Mom went riding. Dad’s at the yacht club. Tennis anyone?”
“Real class,” Hersey said. “How we gonna fuck ’em?” Strickland appeared indignant. “What’s the matter with you? You don’t like my work?”
“I love it,” Hersey said. “In the dark, anyway.”
“That’s good enough,” Strickland said. “But you persist in not understanding. My subjects often fuck themselves. They discover themselves through me. In this case I’m quite sympathetic.” Strickland preferred to work with film rather than videotape and he had decided to use it for the footage taken ashore. He would then provide his solitary sailor with a Betacam and Hi Band videotape for the voyage; later, the tape and film might be married. Tape had a wiggy sincerity that appealed to humanists.
Out in front again, on the edge of the hill, Strickland considered the ways in which he might make use of the shabby neighborhood in the film. On the way up they had passed a street corner on which a number of ragged black men were gathered. It might be nice to bring them in. And to bring in also the worn frame houses in need of paint, the boarded tenements, the projects. It might be nice, he thought, to have the eye ascend in a spiral and achieve the house and the squeaky-clean world of the Brownes, Mom, Dad and little Sis, self-absorbed, oblivious on the hill. There was scope for experimentation. It was Hylan’s money after all.
They set up outside the front gate and Strickland prevailed on the girl to come out of the front door and walk to the gate and open it. Solemn, self-conscious Maggie advanced with all the breezy informality of a sacrificial maiden opening the gates to fate itself. Hersey hand-held the camera.
Then she let them inside and everyone went into the kitchen, the only room in the house that was not piled high with gear.
“What a great kitchen,” Strickland said, inspecting the bare brick wall on which Anne had hung omelet pans from Brittany.
“It’s where we hang out,” Maggie said.
“Who hangs out?”
“Well, us,” Maggie said. “My mom and my dad and me.”
“Your mom,” Strickland repeated. He took the camera from Hersey and sighted it at Maggie. “And your dad and you. The trio.”
Another one of Maggie’s comely frowns obscured her face.
“How old are you, Mags?”
“Fifteen,” the girl said. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that. You knew my name.”
“Ah, touché,” Strickland said. Hersey was standing by with the Nagra recorder. Strickland turned toward him and blinked. It was an eye signal they had worked out. Hersey gave him the sound beep.
“So tell us about this house,” Strickland said, and stammered as he said it.
Maggie blushed and swallowed and looked away. “Well, it was built in, umm, 1780. And it was a captain’s house. The owner of the house was captain of a clipper ship that went to China in 1785. It carried ginseng.” She took a quick panicky look at the mike Hersey had thrust in front of her. “And it brought back porcelain. And silk.”
“You don’t say,” Strickland said. “And where do you go to school?”
“I go to Mount Saint Clare,” the girl replied mechanically. “I’m a sophomore.”
“Is that a convent?”
“It’s just a regular school,” Maggie said. “There are some nuns teaching there but mostly regular people.” She looked around her in distress. “Would you excuse me now?” Without waiting for a reply, she hurried from the kitchen.
“Sure,” Strickland said to the empty room she had left behind. “This time.”
“You scared her away,” Hersey said reproachfully. “You’re confrontational.”
“I engage,” Strickland said. “That’s my method.” He shook his head. “She’s high-strung. Like her dad. And her mom.” He pronounced the household words with an edge of disgust. “The Browne Package. It’s very fragile.”
The two of them listened to her run upstairs. Then Strickland got to his feet. “Here’s Mom now,” he told Hersey. He had seen Anne drive up outside. She was out of the car, opening the driveway gate that led to a garage at the back. When she had parked the car she started for the front door. Before she could reach it, Strickland went out to her.
She was wearing fitted rust-colored breeches and black boots, a short-sleeved polo shirt and a riding hard-hat. She had a pair of tan gloves in her hand. The sight of her rocked him.
“How’d you get in?” she asked him.
“M-Maggie let us in. Are you annoyed?”
“I guess not,” she said. “But we weren’t expecting you.”
“I spoke to your husband yesterday,” Strickland said. “He must ha
ve forgotten.”
Anne pursed her lips and shrugged. Strickland was trying to remember their most recent conversation. Which aspect of himself, he wondered, had he last left with her? As he faced her in the front yard, his thoughts were not of pound cake. The slow pain of desire assailed him, musk in the throat.
“What’s he doing?” Anne asked.
She meant Hersey, who had gone into the back garden and was looking over the roofs of town toward the Sound.
“He’s looking for shots,” Strickland said. “You know, checking it out.”
While she was looking at Hersey, he ran his eye over her. When, she turned back toward him, she raised a hand to the braid behind her neck. It made him think she might have sensed his attention.
“Owen should be back in midafternoon,” she told him, “if you can wait until then. I can give you some lunch.”
“Very kind of you,” Strickland said. “We have lots to occupy us. And we bring our own lunch.”
When she started for the door, he called her back. “You’re not going to change, are you?”
Anne failed to understand him.
“You’re not going to take those clothes off, are you? Because we’d like to get you like that. It says something about your life.”
She stayed by the door for a moment as though she were thinking about it. Then she smiled slightly, tossed her head and said, “Sorry, but I think I will change.” She laughed nervously. “Sorry.”
“All right,” Strickland said. He watched her go inside and strolled over to where Hersey stood admiring the view.
“She has a nice body,” Hersey said. “Should we emphasize that?”
“She’s a big creamy bitch,” Strickland said. “Let’s emphasize that."
“Hey,” Hersey said, “I think you’re in love, boss.”
Upstairs, Anne found Maggie in her room with a rock video on TV, trying to write a letter.
“That man is so ghastly,” Maggie said when she saw her mother. She put a hand on her stomach and turned the corners of her mouth down in a parody of nausea.
“Was he asking you questions?”
“Sort of. Well, he asked me where I went to school. And I told him about the house and stuff.”