Outerbridge Reach

by Robert Stone

  Anne folded her arms and leaned in the doorway of her daughter’s room.

  “That sounds reasonable enough. But he is a strange guy, isn’t he?”

  “He’s gnarly,” Maggie said. “He’s repulsive.”

  “I wonder how they chose him,” Anne said. “I wonder what your father thinks.”

  In the master bedroom, she found herself drawn to the mirror on the inside of her closet door. She had been aware of Strickland’s insolent inspection. Standing in profile, she drew herself up and studied her reflection, hands on hips. Her breeches were skintight. The ride had left her feeling stiff and tired. She had gone out on a whim, to rent a mount and ride a trail in upper Fairfield County that she remembered from her high school days. As a girl she had learned to jump at a stable there.

  Anne was not altogether pleased at the sight of herself. She felt slack and ill-conditioned, a little overweight from days at a desk and wine in the evening. She sat down on the bed and struggled with her boots. When they were off she lay back and turned on her side, feeling utterly fatigued. Without taking her top or breeches off, she clasped her hands between her thighs, drew up her knees and went to sleep.

  Later, coming out of the shower, she heard Owen’s voice from the kitchen downstairs. She dressed deliberately, reluctant to give up the dim silence of her bedroom to face the male presences below. At the same time, she thought the interview might be worth watching. Owen was very articulate but he was also forthright and uncalculating. It would be better, she thought, if she were there when things took, as they just conceivably might, a wrong turn.

  Before she went down, she looked at herself in the mirror again. She had chosen slacks that were schoolgirl plaid, a white blouse and pearls—a chaste and impregnable outfit. At the last minute she decided to put up her hair and wear her pendant earrings. The earrings were a double touch of theater in defiance of Strickland and his cameras. She was coming to understand the amount of public performance that would be required of her. Sometimes she was able to enjoy it. In any case, she was determined to bring it off, to be and to appear worthy of Owen’s enterprise.

  She found them in the living room among the stacked provisions. Her husband was seated in an armchair by the window, awash in light. Strickland lounged on a sofa across the room from him. They had lighted Owen indirectly with a standing lamp and umbrella. The setup was familiar to Anne, who had modeled as a teenager.

  As soon as Strickland saw her, he stood up.

  “Hey, c’mere.”

  “Not me,” she said. “I don’t want to be in it.”

  Strickland raised his arms in an imploring gesture and then let them fall to his sides. “You don’t want to be in it? Then we have a major misunderstanding here.”

  “I only mean,” Anne said, “that when you’re filming Owen you ought to concentrate on him.”

  “I welcome your input,” Strickland told her. “But let me worry about what I’m filming. I’d like you both here.”

  Blushing slightly, she took a seat on her husband’s left. Owen winked at her as she sat down.

  “Don’t let her push you around, Ron,” he said to Strickland.

  “Your wife’s impossible,” Strickland said. “She won’t even wear what I want her to wear.”

  “Christ,” Owen said, “are you going to tell us how to dress next?”

  “Of course,” Strickland said.

  He had been filming Browne for nearly an hour, trying to uncover him. It was what he did with everyone and Strickland liked to say that they were all the same to him. Browne seemed possessed of an enormous confidence in his own presence. It would naturally be useful in selling yachts to suburban mariners. Whether this happy-go-lucky savoir faire reflected inner certainty was another matter. Probably, Strickland thought, Browne had always found himself the smartest, most articulate person in any given room. Strickland thought it was not much of a trick, considering the rooms in which Browne had passed his time.

  Idea-wise, Strickland found that Browne had a few nuggets for the camera:

  “I think most of us spend our lives without ever having to find out what we’re made of. Our lives are soft in this country. In the present day, a man can live his whole life and never test his true resources.”

  And also: “The sea is the bottom line. Out there you have the elementals. You have day and night. You have ocean and the sky. Your boat and yourself. It’s a situation of ultimate self-reliance.”

  “The great American virtue,” Strickland said. He was not averse to helping out.

  “I have no shame about invoking patriotism,” Browne declared. “There is a tradition of American seamanship.”

  “Great,” Strickland said, and gave him the superbo sign, touching thumb to forefinger.

  Browne went further: “I think we have to work at keeping the qualities that made us strong. I think we have to reach back and touch the past in a way. Long ago we had to fight the forces of nature. They were unforgiving of mistakes. So in winning out over them, we had to win out over ourselves.”

  “Those are the hardest battles, aren’t they?” Strickland asked obligingly. “The ones we fight against ourselves?”

  “No question about it,” Browne said. “And I’m not ashamed of achievement. I’m not ashamed to prevail.”

  Strickland thought it interesting that Browne had referred to shame three times in a few minutes. He declared a break and called Hersey into the next room.

  “I’ll take sound, you shoot it. I want Little Momma in a straight-backed chair, upright, uptight, got it? Let’s get some of her reactions. Can you handle it?”

  “Sure,” Hersey said.

  When they went back to the living room, Strickland brought a dining room chair for Anne to sit on. She accepted it without question.

  “Will you win?” Strickland asked Browne.

  “I’m supposed to say yes, I suppose. So I will. Yes, I’m gonna win it.”

  Strickland turned to Anne. Hersey panned to cover her. She was stiff-upper-lipping it with a strained smile. As Strickland watched her, their eyes met.

  “Won’t this come out a little unconnected?” she asked.

  “We clean up the transitions,” Strickland assured her. “Don’t worry about it.” He turned to Browne. “What does winning mean to you? As a man.”

  Browne laughed. He seemed to find the question embarrassing. “As a man? Hell, what would it mean to any man? It’s better than losing.” He turned to Anne as though for confirmation. Perhaps, Strickland thought, it was something they had talked about. Anne kept smiling, doing her best to look proud of him.

  “What about the prize, if you get it?” Strickland asked. “What will you do with it?”

  “Christ,” Browne said, “that question fills me with superstitious dread.”

  “Then don’t answer it,” Anne said.

  “I don’t know what I’d do,” Browne said. “No idea.”

  “Think about it.”

  Anne and Owen looked at each other. Hersey filmed them in turn.

  “I think I’d like to write if I had time. I have a few things to say.”

  “Go on,” said Strickland.

  “I like teaching people to sail,” Browne said. “It was something I really enjoyed when I was young.”

  Strickland looked at Anne. “Did he teach you to sail?”

  She only shook her head.

  “Annie was a salt when I met her,” Browne declared. “She knew more than I did.”

  Strickland nodded and smiled appreciatively. “Whom would you teach to sail, Owen?”

  “Whom? Well anyone. Kids, maybe.” He looked from the camera’s eye to his wife and then to Strickland. “It might be great for handicapped kids, don’t you think? It would build selfconfidence. And it would help train them to overcome.”

  No one answered him.

  “So,” Strickland suggested, “you have a sort of program in mind.”

  Anne spoke up before he could answer.

  “Absol
utely not.”

  “We have a few dreams,” Browne said, “that’s all.”

  “Let’s talk about the prize,” Strickland said. “How much is it again?”

  Both Brownes appeared uncomfortable.

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” Browne said. “But there’s more to it than that.”

  “Talk about that,” Strickland said.

  “There are opportunities,” Browne said, and faltered.

  “I really think it’s bad luck to talk this way,” Anne said. Then she saw that Hersey was still shooting. “Why is he filming this?” she demanded.

  “Take it easy,” Strickland told her. “We won’t use everything we have. I told you we would clean up the transitions.” He saw her turn a reproachful look on her husband. “How about letting me ask him one thing more?” he said with the parody of a guilty smile.

  “Hey,” Browne said to him, “you don’t have to ask her permission. Address yourself to me.”

  “No offense,” Strickland said. “It’s all in a good cause.”

  “I hope so,” Anne said.

  “How important is the money?” Strickland asked Browne. “In the great scheme of things.”

  “It’s important. I mean,” he said, “money is honorable. It’s an honorable goal. I’m not ashamed of racing for money.”

  “If there were no prize money would you enter all the same?”

  “I don’t know,” Browne said. “The prize is definitely an incentive. Definitely.” Anne Browne was watching her husband with an unhappy expression. “I mean,” he went on with a laugh, “some of history’s great voyages were undertaken for money. In the hope of eventual wealth. Even Columbus, actually. And Magellan.”

  “N . . n . . names,” Strickland declared to Anne, “that I haven’t heard since high school.”

  She looked away.

  “I don’t believe that anything as serious as a world race should be entered into for trivial reasons,” Browne said. “Money is a rational goal. An acceptable token.”

  “So you’re not just an incurable romantic?”

  “I don’t know,” Browne said. “Maybe.”

  Then the phone rang and Anne rose—gratefully, Strickland thought—to answer it. A moment later she was back, plainly relieved at an excuse to leave the session.

  “New York Nautical has the Admiralty charts I ordered,” she told the men from her kitchen. “This would be a good time to pick them up.”

  Strickland began to stammer an objection but Browne cut him off. “Good,” he told his wife. “Pick them up now and I’ll make dinner when you get back.”

  “Fair enough,” Anne said, and gave everyone a wintry smile and went out to her car.

  On the way home she was surprised by darkness. A light was on upstairs in Maggie’s room. Owen was in the kitchen reading. “Good,” he said, “you’re back. Can I fix you something?” Anne shrugged and took a bottle of chablis from the refrigerator.

  “I don’t know why,” Browne said, “but I have a bad feeling about today.”

  “About the filming?” she asked, pouring the wine.

  “I have the feeling,” Browne said, “that I acted like a complete ass.”

  “I don’t think that,” she said quickly.

  “Thanks,” Browne said. He sounded unconvinced.

  “I think it was him.”

  “I don’t know,” Browne said. “All he did was ask questions. Pretty routine questions, really.”

  “It was him,” Anne said. “Something about the way he questioned you was off.”

  “I think I said some dumb things. I may live to be sorry.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” she said.

  “I don’t want you to,” Browne said. “I’ll know better next time out. Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?”

  She shook her head. “You did surprise me with one thing,” she said after a moment.

  “Really?”

  “About the money,” she said. “You don’t really care about it, do you?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t give a damn about the money. Of course I don’t.”

  “Well, you more or less told him it was your motivation for the cruise.” They had taken to calling his undertaking the cruise, Navy-fashion.

  “I thought it was the right thing to say. The right answer.”

  She put her glass down. “But why, Owen?”

  “I guess I wanted to be a regular Joe.”

  “But you aren’t a regular Joe. Not in the least.”

  Browne laughed. “You’re an elitist, you know. That’s not considered a good thing to be."

  “I don’t care,” she said. “You mustn’t vulgarize yourself before a lot of inferior people. Publicity or not.”

  They sat in silence. Anne finished her wine. If the time had been right, she thought, she would have set out then and there to convince him once again of his own excellence and of her unqualified love. But the time was not.

  I will give him a letter, she thought, to read at sea.

  “There’s no reason Strickland should want to make me look bad,” Browne said finally. “The better everything goes, the better for his film, right? If I win, if I look like a champ, it’s all to the good.”

  “I don’t know about him,” she said. To herself she thought, He’s a snake, is Strickland. Thinking about him, she could picture a snake slithering across bright grass toward a dark cistern. “We’ll see.”

  19

  OVER THE SUMMER, they got used to frequent calls from Harry Thorne. One day Thorne called to suggest that Owen visit a person Harry called the coach. She was a kind of trainer and a kind of therapist, Harry said, and Browne might find her useful. Browne decided it would be politic to go.

  The coach’s name was Dr. Karen Glass. Her office was on West End Avenue in the Seventies, on the ground floor of a gray stone mansion older than the tall apartment buildings around it. When Browne arrived for his appointment thunderheads were gathering over Manhattan and, although it was only six in the afternoon, streetlamps flashed on along the avenue. The impending storm cast an expectant light.

  The front door was glass, curtained and barred with iron grillwork. When he rang the bell, a light went on inside. A female voice addressed him through a speaker in the vestibule. Browne identified himself and was admitted.

  Dr. Glass was a very attractive blond woman in a paisley dress of the sort that had been popular in the sixties. She came to the doorway of her office to greet him. A bicycle was propped against the wall beside it. On the left, a flight of carpeted stairs led up into darkness. On one step, halfway up the flight, a child’s Masters of the Universe doll lay against the balustrade.

  “Hi, Mr. Browne,” she said.

  Her office had three big windows opening on the side street. The room was earth-colored, decorated with landscape photographs, Indian blankets, an abstract oil painting in desert tones. Everything seemed positive and upbeat, although the effect was somewhat subverted by the light outside. Just as they settled down to talk, lightning broke and then thunder, and the rain came down.

  “Do you like white noise?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “It’s like the rain,” she said, gesturing toward the window. “It’s good for you.”

  “Oh,” said Browne. He saw that the white noise came in a machine, with attached earphones.

  “Can you relax a little for me now?” Dr. Glass asked.

  “I doubt it,” said Browne.

  He declined the white noise but before long she had him talking. They talked about his parents and about life on the Long Island estate his father had managed. His mother had been Catholic, his father a fallen-away member of the Plymouth Brethren. She wanted to talk further about that. Browne declined. He explained that his father had taught him to sail.

  From time to time, she would throw in some outrageous question designed to detect pathology. He had the right answers. They talked about the Academy and then a little about t
he war. She was trying to bring out the raconteur in him.

  “I started out in Tactical Air Control,” Browne told her. “Then I went to the Naval Advisory Command.”

  “You advised their navy?”

  He shrugged.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Red sky at night is the sailor’s delight,” Browne declared. “Red sky at morning is the sailor’s warning.”

  “Oh,” she said, “you’re funny.”

  “The navy of the Republic of Vietnam never produced many naval heroes,” Browne explained. “It did produce a number of amusing anecdotes.”

  Karen Glass kept smiling.

  “We had these people and we dressed them up and fitted them out as a navy. They pretended to be one. I didn’t advise them,” he told her. “I was a public affairs officer for NavAc-V. The advisory command.”

  “But you did some fighting?”

  “I wouldn’t call it fighting. I was fired upon.”

  “Is sailing like being fired upon?”

  He was twisting his Academy ring. She glanced quickly at his hands.

  “It’s the opposite,” Browne said.

  “Really?”

  “Sailing is harmony.” He hoped she would write it down. She didn’t.

  “Why sail alone?”

  “Alone it’s perfect.” As far as he could tell that was what he believed.

  “Do other people make things less perfect?”

  “Of course,” he said. They smiled at each other.

  “But there’s a whole other way of looking at things,” Karen said. “Where something’s less perfect because it’s solitary. It’s incomplete.”

  In the end they agreed to split the difference.

  “Come back if you like,” Dr. Glass said as he went out. “Tell us what’s on your mind. Try the white noise.”

  He thanked her with the excessive politeness to which he was prone. On the train home, after a brief period of elation, he became very depressed. Anne met him at the station in the car.

  When she went upstairs, he stayed down to read in her study. The entire lower story of the house was piled with provisions; there were stacks of canned goods and plastic jugs, heaps of new underwear in cellophane, and propane cylinders. The whole house smelled slightly of the beef jerky Anne had been making in the kitchen, drying strips of meat on the oven racks. The local butchers had come to recognize her as the person who bought several pounds of sirloin tips at a throw, sliced as thinly as possible.