by Robert Stone
He leaned against the cemetery wall. Are you languid, are you weary? An old hymn. He knew the nature of his lassitude. It was fear.
Fear, he thought, was something he had come to terms with. He believed himself as capable as any man on earth of putting the spongy stuff aside and getting on with the day’s business, no matter how bad the day’s business might be. Still, the thing had such variety. It could change temperature and color, taste and odor, hit you high or low. Sensations of an indeterminate nature so often resolved themselves into fear.
Fear of death, he thought, no. Nor of pain, nor of other people’s anger. Hardly. Neither snakes nor the cries of your well-motivated oriental infantry, startling and demoralizing though they had been one dark night, had paralyzed his hand. Still, such variety.
He was no great shakes of a sailor but of course that was not necessary. Inexperienced adolescents had single-handed around the world and the winners always looked good after the fact. It was a question of what was inside. He had begged all his life for such a chance and all his life done what had to be done and never once regretted risk or contest. Quite the opposite, he had always regretted the lost chances, played safe and been sorry. It seemed to him he was dying of the last of his youth and strength as day after gray day they went untested and his blood thickened. Now the action had come for him and he was afraid. Such variety, he thought, had fear.
On the harbor, a lighter shot past, its decks piled with coils of wire. Across the lighter’s wake stood the Lady and the exotica of Ellis Island. Suddenly he thought of his conversation with Strickland, his interview given dead into the camera. Utter crap, absolute drivel! He cringed recalling it. Strickland must think him a complete fool.
On the way back, he walked through the streets of the project. People at the yard were warned against it but there were only a few drunks and middle-aged black women walking back from church and children, little girls in taffeta, big-eyed little boys in bow ties.
It was as though, he thought, some rat lived around your heart. But not a rat—a child, a brother. Your late brother, the infant reprobate, beaten senseless by the rod, by the drill sergeants and the good nuns of life. Smacked proper but always back for more, always appearing in the clutch, the stretch, the shadow of the goal, to ask who you think you are. So insistent, so persuasive, and above all innocent, a choirboy who didn’t do it, snitching on you to yourself. Terrified and enraged by the threat of accomplishment. All childish urges, excuses and despairs. No rat, no other, but snotty, weepy, fearful self, the master of most men. The contemporary God.
Had he not, babbling to that film maker, said something about all the big battles being with yourself? Something of that sort had got said. It was true enough of him. That was at the heart of his fear. In his nightmares he was powerless and craven. The sensations were so familiar that even though he had behaved well enough up against the real thing, his weakness and cowardice in dreams were more real to him than the courage he had actually mustered. When you were good and scared it could never be undone.
His fear was not of being overcome but of failing from the inside out. Discovering the child-weakling as his true nature and having to spend the rest of his life with it.
It all made him think of his father. Good-naturedly. Yes, he thought, I remember him fondly now. In spite of everything he was a friend to me.
23
STRICKLAND opened the street door of his building to find Harry Thorne waiting for him, offering an umbrella against the rain. Thorne had a complacent expression. He seemed eager. All spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch, Strickland thought.
“Mr. Strickland, my good friend,” Thorne inquired, “how are you?”
Strickland was taken with Thorne’s good-humored, patronizing manner. He stammered a half-reply and let Thorne conduct him to the limousine, a Lincoln Continental. When they got to the car, a chauffeur in dark glasses hastened out from behind the wheel, anxious to display his readiness to stand uncovered in the rain.
“Relax,” Thorne told the man, and opened a rear door for Strickland. Strickland murmured his faltering gratitude and settled down in the back seat for a look at Harry Thorne. Thorne caused Strickland more difficulty in his speech than was usual. He was so avid.
“How’s it going?” Thorne asked. He oversaw Strickland’s attempt to reply. Some people endeavored not to stare at Strickland when he stammered. Not Harry.
“Fine,” Strickland managed at length. “How’s business?”
The counterquestion provoked a tight bitter smile.
“Never better,” Thorne said, and kept his eyes on Strickland. “What’s the matter, don’t you believe me?”
“Sure,” Strickland said. “I was wondering if you could give me some time in the next week or so. Before Owen sails.”
The limo prowled the streets of the theater district. Thorne removed his attention from Strickland and eyed the dinner crowds.
“Pose for you, you mean?”
“Well,” Strickland began, “n . . not pose, necessarily, but—” Thorne interrupted him. “I don’t want to be in your movie, Ron. Sorry, but I don’t think it’s appropriate.”
“You have to be,” Strickland said. “I’ll have to convince you.” Thorne returned his attention to Strickland’s person. “Why’s that?”
“Because your presence is necessary,” Strickland said. “Without it the story can’t be told.”
“What story?”
“You’ll see.”
“I will?” Thorne asked lightly.
Strickland swore an inward oath. He would make Harry Thorne sit in the dark and watch himself.
“Well,” Thorne said, “maybe I can give you five or ten minutes on a weekend.”
“Five or ten minutes won’t do,” Strickland told him. “Two afternoons might.”
Thorne nodded. “We’ll see.” Strickland understood that his forthrightness had claimed Harry’s attention. “When do I get to see some of it?” .
“It’s too soon. When he’s under way I’ll edit what I have.”
“Good,” Thorne said. “I look forward with interest.”
Outside the restaurant, the chauffeur escorted them through the rain. The place was a steak house with red banquettes, racing pictures and sawdust on the floor. Its downstairs dining room adjoined a bar at which a great many boisterous and competitive New Yorkers were gathered three deep. Strickland saw Browne and his wife at a table that was only a few feet from the crowded bar. The din was considerable.
“Welcome home,” Harry said to Browne, and shook his hand. He kissed Anne attentively. Then he gestured abruptly to the waiter. In hardly any time a maître d’hotel arrived. Thorne drew him aside. Strickland hovered close to hear.
“Why are my friends at this table?” Thorne asked. The man inclined his head, taking his medicine.
“You know what they say about these tables?” Thorne asked Strickland when he saw him eavesdropping. He gestured toward the banquettes over which the racing watercolors were hung. “They get the horses.” With an identical gesture he indicated a horizontal intersecting the bodies of the customers at the bar. “And they get the asses. That is what you say, isn’t it, Paul?”
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Thorne,” Paul, the maître d’, said. The Brownes seemed unaware of the exchange. Paul led them to a different room in which the lights were softer and the conversation more subdued. Harry walked between Owen and Anne, arms linked.
The house sent over a bottle of wine and Thorne offered it for Anne’s inspection.
“But that’s wonderful,” she cried. “Obviously,” she said archly to Thorne, “you’ve been here before.”
Over the appetizer, Strickland watched her flirt with Harry. Her presence made him feel irritable and frustrated; he had to consciously resist looking at her all the time. It was not usual for him to be reticent with women. Generally, he was happy to let them notice his attention and figure things out for themselves. Browne himself was very quiet, Strickland observed
. He was sunburned and apparently very tired, which was likely enough after a few days on the ocean. Watching him, Strickland tried to measure the bias between the man himself and the image he left on the screen.
On the screen, Strickland thought, Browne looked pretty good, a tame tiger. His features were strong but so regular that the effect was of overhandsomeness. That, together with his mild eyes, gave him a soft appearance, at least on first glance. His good looks caught one’s attention but their blandness did not inspire the proper measure of respect.
In person, he did not seem so easygoing. His moves were full of anger, something the camera could not convey in the absence of perspective. At rest, his face could look quite haunted and unsound. There was something violent about Browne, Strickland decided. It was a quality he was good at spotting.
The wine was so good that Strickland, lost in his own observations, found himself smiling on Browne like a doting patron on a protégé. All at once he understood why Browne, in spite of his clean-cut aspect and beautiful wife, had been given a bad table in an establishment like the one in which they sat. His physiognomy was unlike that of a winner, Manhattan-style. In one quick look he could be seen as naive and anxious to please and remotely dangerous.
“Younger people should understand,” Harry was telling Anne, “that private commerce does not have to mean selfishness. Because you can’t live and work in the name of self alone, not any more than you can live and work in the name of nothing. Do you know the phrase ‘the moral equivalent of war’? Politicians use it but they don’t know what it means.”
Duffy arrived at their table from the bar, where he had apparently been rallying some of his fellow publicists. Owen seemed at the point of going to sleep.
“You know,” Duffy announced, largely, it seemed, for Thorne’s benefit, “when I first saw Owen I said right away: Lindbergh! I said it right away.”
Thorne broke off his conversation with Anne by putting a hand on her shoulder.
“Duffy, does anyone but you under the age of seventy care about Charles Lindbergh? Or even know who the dickens he was?”
Having said it, Thorne looked at Anne to see if she was amused. They ordered another bottle of the same wine.
If Thorne seduced her, Strickland thought, he would have to find a way to get it in the film. The notion displeased him. He decided he thought it unlikely.
“What I mean is the personal quality,” Duffy said. “The way one man can exemplify the best of America.”
At that point Browne—to his credit, Strickland thought—rebelled and roused himself.
“Give me a break, Duffy.”
When he saw that everyone was waiting for him to go on, Browne began to tell them about the shakedown. Together with Fanelli and Crawford he had sailed Nona to a point east of Block Island and back, a three-day voyage. At one point, Browne told them, he had fallen overboard.
“Where was that, Owen?” Anne asked him.
“Off Bridgeport, I think.”
“Where else?” Harry asked, and everyone laughed.
As Browne told them the story of his shakedown cruise, Strickland found himself watching Anne again. She had put away quite a lot of wine. Though she continued to play the coquette with Harry Thorne, it seemed to Strickland that she avoided his eye. Perhaps, he thought, an interesting sign. The sight of her responding to Thorne’s charm made him impatient.
“And what will she do,” Harry asked Browne playfully, “while you’re at sea?”
Anne hastened to answer for herself. “I think I’ll read War and Peace. A little every night.”
“You sh . . should both read it,” Strickland said helpfully. “Then you could discuss it when he got home.” He smiled to indicate that he spoke in fun. The company ignored him.
When coffee was finished, Owen declared that he’d had all the celebrating of which he was capable. Anne stood up at once.
“Yes,” she said, “we’d better go.” Strickland thought he saw a shade of hesitation and regret.
“Take my car,” Harry said. “I’m staying in town.”
“Thanks, Harry,” Browne said. “Can we drop anyone?”
“You can drop me,” Strickland said. He was slightly drunk. He should at least, he realized, have asked which way they were going.
Once in the car, they headed for the Triborough Bridge by way of Hell’s Kitchen. Owen Browne apologized for his fatigue and went to sleep in a corner seat with his head thrown back against the cushion. For a while, Anne rubbed her husband’s shoulder blades.
In the near-darkness, Strickland felt that she was wary of him. He regretted coming along now and being at such close quarters with her and so outside her life. He was taken with the thought that he might never, ever get any closer. The thought made him feel both lonely and angry.
Once, when they were stopped for a light on Thirty-fourth Street and Tenth Avenue, he managed a long secret look at her. Her bright silky hair was braided behind her head. The color of her eyes was nearly Viking blue, but with a Celtic shadow. Her face was strong, willful and austere, wonderfully softened by her smile. It was a brazen, faintly androgynous pre-Raphaelite beauty, daunting, almost more than he thought he could handle.
It was unclear to Strickland how she had worked her way into the scheme of his senses. Generally, he favored the mysterious and perversely turned and, on the face of it, Anne Browne was neither. No one had ever instructed her in concealing her intelligence or moderating her enthusiasm. Nothing about her spoke to his particular desires. But somehow everything about her did.
They talked a little, about the wine. When they got to Strickland’s loft, she got out of the car and came with him to the door. It had stopped raining.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Anne said to Strickland. Her face was flushed and she was at the edge of unsteadiness. “We must talk when we get a chance.”
“Sure,” Strickland said. “We must.”
“I’ve been thinking about your Vietnam film,” she said. “You definitely weren’t on the team, were you?”
“Definitely not.”
“Some of it’s very funny. I mean tragically funny. You’re a very persuasive film maker.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You’re on our team, though, aren’t you?” she asked. “You’re not making fun of us, are you?”
Trying to answer, he found it impossible. Out of the question. But he had actually begun to speak and he could not make himself stop uttering the arrested consonant or put his teeth around the end of it.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. Then she laughed at him. Actually simpered and put a hand to her mouth, laughing at his stammer. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s O.K.,” Strickland said.
“We really must talk,” she said, trying to bend her laughter to a polite smile.
“Absolutely,” Strickland said.
Upstairs, he poured himself a drink and stood by the round window, leaning his forehead against the glass. When he had finished his drink he dialed Pamela and left a message on her machine, asking her to come over. Then he poured a second drink and dialed her again and said, “Forget about it.”
24
KEITH FANELLI, his wife, Silvia, and their three-year-old son, Jason, lived in a single-family house in Tottenville on the south shore of Staten Island. The house was modest and painted yellow with aluminum siding on its front. There was an extra apartment over the garage. Behind the house was a comfortable back yard in which stood a portable gas barbecue and a redwood picnic table.
Silvia, Strickland found, was a fierce little brunette who spoke the pure and uncorrupted Brooklyn poissard, a diction almost extinct in its home borough. They were teaching Jason to chew gum and talk like his mother.
“I think he’s crazy, the guy,” Silvia declared. She meant Browne. “He wants to sail around the world? Never happen!” She turned to invoke her husband’s witness. “Right, honey?”
Fanelli nodded faintly without looking at her.
&
nbsp; “He’s a fruitcake,” Silvia added. “I mean, c’mon.”
“Why don’t you go to the park?” Fanelli asked her.
Strickland was visiting the Fanellis on a balmy Indian summer afternoon. Fanelli’s fellow yardbird Jim Crawford had driven over from his house in Jersey. Strickland had brought a bottle of unblended Scotch and two six-packs of Colt .45. He had also brought a tiny Maxell tape recorder, which was concealed under his shirt. Both men had refused to speak on camera. Strickland decided to examine the legalities involved from some future perspective. He therefore proposed an off-the-record conversation and that, Fanelli and Crawford believed, was what they were having.
The three men sipped their whiskey and watched Silvia lecture Jason with mock sternness.
“Jason, don’t you swallow it. No, no, no!”
“Hey,” Fanelli said, “Silvia, eh?”
“Yeah,” she said crossly, “yeah, yeah. He’s never home,” she said to Strickland. “He comes home and we gotta go out.”
When Silvia and the tyke had departed for the park, Strickland poured more Scotch into everyone’s glass.
“The thing is,” he said to them, “can this guy win?”
Fanelli and Crawford exchanged a quick look and drank their whiskey.
“He’s a phony,” Fanelli said. He looked at them as though he were ready to fight about it. “That’s all he is.”
“Don’t mean he can’t win,” Crawford said. Crawford had a Maine accent, which Strickland much admired. He could only hope the recorder was doing its number.
“Nah,” Fanelli said. “He’s just a fuckin’ hype artist.” Crawford shrugged.
“Hey,” Fanelli insisted, “c’mon man. Browne? He ain’t gonna win.”
“Could surprise,” Crawford said.
Fanelli turned up his lip. “Nah.”
“Why do you say that?” Strickland asked Crawford.
“I think he really wants to win. I mean wants to a whole lot.”