by Robert Stone
“I guess we did the right thing,” he said.
“Absolutely the right thing,” Mary said. “And it was really up to you. I’ll always be grateful.”
“I’ll always have a few regrets,” he said.
She nodded and put her hand against his face. Her look had such tenderness it took his breath away, although it had all been twenty years before and she was no longer, as she had been, beautiful.
At the airport, the Wards told him love to Annie.
“You be sure and tell her to call us,” Mary said. “We’ll be in the East through the winter.”
“You know,” Browne said, “it’s incredible how positive she is about this. I think she wishes she was going instead of me.”
“She was always a good sailor,” Mary said. When he started for the gate, she looked at him again as she had that morning. She did not reach out to him this time.
Walking across the runway toward his plane, Browne saw the Wards at the terminal window and gave them a quick thumbs-up sign. Buzz Ward, though he smiled and waved, did not return it.
21
ONE DAY Strickland was trying to concentrate on his Central American film when some footage he had taken of the Brownes came back from the lab. It was a humid drizzly afternoon, with a wet mist over the rooftops that obscured the buildings of lower Manhattan. He stacked the cans in his work space. In the next room, where Pamela lay sleeping, a radio played softly, tuned to WBAI. An announcer with a mild speech impediment was imperfectly reading the wire copy from Sri Lanka. A great many villagers in one part of the island had been cut to pieces, the corpses and odd survivors set alight. “More than one hundred,” declared the leaden-tongued broadcaster. He had a touch of the Elmer Fudds.
Strickland had no choice but to imagine the scene on film. He had once spent two weeks in Sri Lanka, the most beautiful land on earth. The people there were intelligent, humorous and kind. The event described was one of those from which the viewing public required protection.
“Nice day for something,” Strickland said aloud. He felt at the point of inward riot.
On the bulletin board, he had pinned a row of photographs of Anne Browne. He walked over and inspected them. Some of them were contemporary shots he had taken around the Brownes’ place or in the boatyard. Some were the prints of pictures that had appeared in advertising supplements over twenty years before when she had been a teenage model. Her body then had been striking, with a behind that was about as hefty as a model’s could be and the slimmest of waists. Her hips now were a little broader and her waist a little wider but she had managed to maintain the principles of her construction. She had wonderfully long legs. Between her knees and her navel, Strickland thought, she was sublime.
His reflections were interrupted by the downstairs bell. Looking out the window, he saw Hersey and Jean-Marie, Hersey’s girlfriend from film school, waiting outside. He went down and brought them up in the elevator.
“Just in time,” he told them.
“I love your place,” Jean-Marie said. “I’ve never been here.” She was a petite Italian American from Jersey. She had never been there, Strickland suspected, because she despised his work and dreaded him.
When his guests were seated before the monitor, Strickland went to wake up Pamela.
“We have company.”
“Who’s here?”
“Hersey and Jean-Marie. Now do me a favor and don’t try to sell them any drugs. And keep your hands off them.”
Everyone settled in front of the monitor to watch the new footage.
Pamela passed a joint around. Everyone smoked it. Hersey and Jean-Marie had brought wine and some salad from the corner Korean.
“I don’t get it,” Hersey said. “What are we seeing here?”
They were seeing the Brownes’ daughter, Maggie, pacing beside her garden wall in Connecticut. She walked frowning, arms folded, eyes downcast. Her lips moved. She was speaking.
“Does she know you’re there?” Pamela asked.
“She believes herself alone,” Strickland said. “She’s addressing herself.”
“Sneaky,” Jean-Marie said. “Poor kid.”
Next they saw Browne himself, walking along a chain-link fence against a waterfront background.
“When did we get this?” Hersey asked.
“I filmed it myself.”
“I get it,” Pamela said. “They walk the same.”
“Pamela,” Strickland said, “there isn’t always an it to get.”
“You always have an it,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean I always know what it is.”
“Yes you do,” she said. “You know everything.”
“But should you be filming them without their knowledge and permission?” Jean-Marie asked with affected innocence. “It seems unfair.”
“What are you, Jean-Marie, a lawyer? I thought you were in film school.”
“I am,” she said.
“Well, tell me,” said Strickland. “Should I? Pudovkin set a cow on fire. Should he have done it? I mean, who knows?”
“Shit,” Hersey said, “the entire cow?”
“It’s the Siberian equivalent of lobster,” Strickland said. “Seals in the flavor.”
“I don’t think it’s right,” Jean-Marie said.
They watched Browne on the monitor, looking lost in thought, gazing out over the Lower Bay.
“He looks like Irving Pichel,” Hersey said, “in Dracula’s Daughter”
Everyone was amused.
Next they saw Browne groping through what appeared to be the curving stairway of a duplex apartment high over the city. He held his hand out in front of him. What appeared to be a huge red brocade curtain across the window closed out daylight.
“I call it,” Strickland said, “The Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun.”
“He doesn’t know you’re filming?”
“He thinks he’s in the dark. It’s Matty Hylan’s apartment. We managed to get in. I put infrared bulbs in the light fixtures.”
“So,” Hersey said, “he thinks he’s invisible but he’s lit up like Disney World.”
“What’s on the walls?” Pamela asked. “Is it blood?”
“Now he looks like Bruce Cabot,” Hersey said. “How come you didn’t let me in on this?” he demanded of his mentor. “What am I, some fool from the real world?”
“What did you tell him was happening?” Jean-Marie asked. “How did you get him in there?”
“I told him I wanted to try something. He went along. He’s an educated man. He appreciates the arts.”
“That’s so unethical,” Jean-Marie said.
Strickland was still pondering his previous notion.
“This is a guy,” he told the young people, “who understands art. He just doesn’t know what he likes.”
“You have to have sympathy,” Jean-Marie said almost tearfully. “I mean, don’t you?”
“Sympathy of a kind, yes. Sympathy is funny. It’s various.” Pamela suddenly began to tremble.
“Who here saw Lost in Space?” she asked. “They had like this Aryan fascist family. In a nice way. There was this one show. It had a robot and a gay man. It was about an echo. From a cavern. It was like soo frightening. Does anyone remember?”
The people in the room ignored her.
“I mean,” Jean-Marie said, “is that how documentary works? Is it really all right to impose an arbitrary context on your subject? And trick them? And blind them?”
“Jean-Marie,” Strickland said, “all this time I thought you were this nice little dumb guinea.”
Hersey took the plastic bowl of cole slaw from her right hand before she could throw it at Strickland. Disarmed, she bit her thumb at him instead.
“When I’m filming people, Jean-Marie, I see it this way: They’re the town, I’m the clock. Get it?”
“You think you’re the clock,” Jean-Marie said bitterly. “Someday, man, someone’s gonna be the clock on you.”
22
VERY EARLY one morning Browne skipped his customary run and went to Staten Island. Sunrise found him driving past the spoiled salt marshes of the Bronx and the towers of Co-op City. At the yard he let himself in with his electronic key and went aboard the Nona.
The afternoon before, a letter from Buzz Ward had arrived. Browne had not had the courage to read it. He put the letter, unopened, in one of the study’s desk drawers. During the night, he had awakened every few hours, thinking himself back at sea. He and Anne had planned to spend the day driving in the country and it had been necessary to leave her an apologetic note. It seemed important that he go back to Nona.
Once aboard, he had little to do. The boat stank of the past days’ mistakes, or misfortunes or malfunctions or whatever the unrelenting fuckups of Nona’s maiden voyage might rightly be called.
All around him were the gauges and grids of his expensive performance equipment, stuff which even after three days at sea he had not begun to understand. It had been installed the previous week by a couple of former Navy electronic technicians. The ETs had been no help; ETs never were. ETs, as Browne knew well, were always science-fiction-reading autodidacts who tended toward Maoism, neo-Nazism or the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The two who had installed Nona’s performance equipment commanded no diction other than that of New Age mysticism and computer-babble.
In fact, there was no one to whom he could turn for technical advice. Now and then, Harry Thorne would dispatch a few of the company’s engineers to Staten Island and Browne would have to make notes on the run and try to hold their interest. Crawford and Fanelli had performed reasonably on the shakedown cruise but he had determined not to let them see the limits of his knowledge.
It was also true, Browne had discovered, that the intricacies of marine dynamics bored him. He was used to using technology as a selling point, building syllogisms out of gadgetry for people who knew less than he did.
Sitting at Nona’s navigation station with a cup of cold coffee in his hand, Browne was compelled to reflect on how much he had discovered about himself since the beginning of the adventure.
The shakedown had started out in cheerful confusion. Strickland and his obnoxious assistant had filmed Anne repeatedly failing to break the champagne across Nona’s reinforced bow. Duffy had huffed and puffed among such of the media as he had managed to assemble. There had been a youth from the Times, some yachting-press stringers, a woman from the Brownes’ hometown paper and a photographer from the Staten Island Advance. A Channel Seven Eyewitness News team had appeared, taken some footage without interviews and disappeared with it forever.
“It’s on the cusp of sports,” Duffy had explained. “They haven’t learned how to handle it.”
But the morning’s wind had been a true inspiration, the wedge of a cold front whipping from the northwest at eighteen knots. Browne, Crawford and Fanelli had clambered aboard. Strickland had handed over a video camera for Browne to practice with. Then they had raced out of the Narrows on a broad reach and he had played moviemaker, crouching amidships to capture the spray across the weather bow and the web of the big bridge overhead. It was fun. It turned his head; he could imagine his own fine narration. After a while he let Fanelli take the camera.
He had used the bell buoy over Cholera Reef as a downwind mark, cut it close and headed for Ambrose Channel. Within an hour they were reaching along the south shore of Long Island in a moderate sea. From the start, he had not been able to use his electronic gear to good advantage. He suspected it had been imperfectly calibrated. Still, its automated wizardry seemed to be functioning, reading out the arcana of wind speed, boat speed, and polar curves. His own impulse was to simply watch the luff and feel for the wind, and that was what he did.
Browne was so pleased with it all that he began to imagine he might somehow win his two pressed crewmen to the cause—the day was so bright, the vessel so responsive, the sails setting so nicely. But whenever he took time to notice, he only felt their eyes on him, as though they were strangers on some subway platform in the dead of night. He had to wonder if they would ever forgive him. Fanelli, as ordered, took pictures.
The night watches passed. They did four hours each. Browne had hoped that being aboard together overnight might ease his relations with the yard workers but the two men kept their distance. He decided he preferred Crawford to Fanelli, or at least disliked Fanelli more.
On the first day, they had averaged a glorious seven knots on a steady port tack. On the morning of the second day, they kept finding holes in the wind, which would rise, gust for a while and let them down. Browne tried using his racing computer to find out the optimum sailing angle, an uncertain business in a shifting wind. It was so much easier to just read the telltales. Toward evening, with the Mohegan Bluffs of Block Island in sight, he practiced trimming sail from inside the plastic bubble that had been fitted over the cockpit for heavy weather.
That night they beat around the island’s North Light. At dawn the wind changed again, shifting northeasterly and bringing rain. They spent most of the day testing the boat in Rhode Island Sound. Nona’s behavior had a certain consistency: very fast reaching, to windward, uncertain. Toward evening they were tacking broadly, hurrying to pass through the Race on a favorable tide. Browne forbade any use of the auxiliary.
“I think we’re gonna be out here all fucking night,” Fanelli told Crawford, quite within Browne’s hearing.
“Just do your job, mister,” Browne told him. He couldn’t keep from saying it.
Off Long Sand Shoal in the dark, they came close to passing over the cable of a tug and barge, Long Island Sound’s specialty disaster. Barge running lights were always hard to see.
The next morning off Stratford Point, Browne went aft to ease the backstay with the hydraulic ram and took a fall, banging his wrist against the gunwale. It hurt enough to make his ears ring and it kept on hurting. Below deck, gear had shifted overnight. He had never properly replaced the mad pacifist’s woodwork.
“Gonna have to move that generator,” Fanelli said happily. His eyes shone with spite. Browne was learning to hate him.
Next the plastic of his cockpit bubble began misting and could not be cleared. Eventually it would mean harassing the manufacturer for a better plastic. Even through the streaks, though, he could see the self-steering vane working itself loose aft. Trying to fix it was what landed him overboard, clutching in the last dreadful minute at the rail and sliding over, the sea rising over his eyes like disgrace.
Snorting and swallowing to catch his breath, he had turned over on his back and arm-rowed into the swells. Browne was an excellent swimmer. He had the leisure to observe Crawford bringing the boat about while Fanelli filmed him helpless in the water. Looking down at him there, the two men seemed transfigured in their joy, a pair of angels in some Last Judgment, a couple of justified slaves whose fallen master was blessedly afloat in shit.
From Norwalk, Nona motored home on her auxiliary. Browne remained on deck with a Navy foul-weather jacket over his wet clothes, ignoring the cold useless wind, ignoring his pain.
The somber landscapes of New York went by, the penitential islands of Hell Gate, the industrial flats of Queens and finally the towers of Manhattan. From Nona’s deck, the city looked utterly impregnable, thrusting up its walls against them, every building monstrous and brutal. The cable car to Roosevelt Island passed above them as they came down the East River, scurrying overhead with insect vitality. They passed, reduced to insignificance, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
Anne was waiting on the dock when they arrived at the yard, together with Duffy and Hersey. As they tied up, Duffy and Anne applauded.
On the drive home, she asked him how it had gone and he had said, “Pretty good. She’s very fast. Handles well.”
The same night they had planned dinner in New York with Harry Thorne, Strickland and Duffy.
“I can easily cancel,” she said. “We’ll go later in the week.”
“Good idea,” he sa
id.
He was afraid of what he might tell her. He thought he might say something negative, something to make her afraid.
Browne put his coffee cup in the galley sink and went out on deck, nursing his taped wrist. Over the city, the sky was clear, the wind brisk and westerly. The yard was still with Sunday silence. After a while he went ashore and started walking along the waterfront, hands thrust into the pockets of his windbreaker. He kept thinking about rolling overboard. “What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears! What ugly sights of death . . .” He knew that one.
At the end of the yard property was a metal gate topped with razor wire. He let himself out and followed the shore along a private street of neat wooden houses. There were Neighborhood Watch signs on the telephone poles. A garage door displayed the colors of the Italian flag. Where the street ended, he eased himself around the sunburst spikes of an iron barricade and onto the cement sea wall that continued beyond it. Beside the water, a slope of littered, balding parkland rose to the squat brown rectangles of a city housing project at the top of the hill.
He met no one on his walk. Farther along, ringed with dying maples, was a deserted playground. A huge herring gull sat atop a children’s slide that was slashed with black curling graffiti. There were chipped crack vials and broken glass underneath the ruined benches. Beyond the project was a cemetery, and beyond that the Veterans’ Hospital and then, across a cove, the Bethlehem Steel shipyard. In that yard, Browne had reported aboard the only ship of his naval career, an attack transport called the Mount McMurdo. He had gone to her straight from the Academy and before leaving for Nam, a temporary billet. His first watch as officer of the deck was on her quarterdeck, returning the drunken salutes of men staggering back from the gin mills of New York.
Browne found himself among the gravestones of the cemetery. There were rusted VFW markers and beside some of the graves small flags were stiffening on the westerly breeze. On his walks he had passed through the same cemetery many times before. Most of its fellowship had died of influenza while being mustered out of the First World War.