Outerbridge Reach

by Robert Stone

  “Fuck, man,” Fanelli said. “He’s a pussy.”

  Crawford shrugged.

  Fanelli turned on Strickland, appealing to reason.

  “He’s a preppy!” Fanelli insisted. In his excitement, his voice went shrill. “He’s a fuckin’ salesman and he’s not even a good salesman. That’s what I heard. I heard it’s Harry Thorne who’s putting him in this race. Harry Thorne, man, Harry Thorne don’t know boats. Harry Thorne started out in the glass business. He don’t know shit either.”

  “He’s like a bad officer,” Crawford said, “Browne is. The kind you don’t want over you. Gung-ho do-or-die bullshit. Sometimes they do, sometimes they die. Take you with ’em, too.”

  “You sound like you’re speaking from experience,” Strickland said.

  “Yep,” Crawford said.

  “You know what it is?” Fanelli demanded. “They’re hyping this boat. This piece of shit.”

  “Piece of shit?” Strickland asked. “His boat?”

  “Never mind the boat,” Crawford said.

  Fanelli appeared chastened into something that might pass for silence. He folded his arms and rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath to indicate the measure of insight he was sacrificing to discretion.

  “With a little bit of luck,” Crawford said, “he might just take her around.”

  “Thorne is queer for him,” Fanelli said.

  “They want to sell boats, all right,” Crawford said. “No question about that. He wins, we’ll be seeing his picture.”

  Fanelli shivered with disgust.

  “Me, I thought he was a total pussy too,” Crawford said. “Since we went out, I ain’t so sure. He’s accident prone. There’s a bucket on deck, he’ll step in the fucker. But he might get lucky.”

  Fanelli appeared scandalized. It was as though he could stand no more.

  “Fuck you! You wanna bet? I’ll give you fuckin’ odds.”

  “What odds?” Crawford asked.

  “Fifteen to one.”

  Strickland rejoiced at the turn the conversation had taken.

  Crawford was silent for a moment. “Tell you what,” he said. “My bet would be this—either he wins or he dies. You pay me either way. If he quits or runs behind, I pay you. You give me the odds. Ten to one.”

  Fanelli went stock-still as though frozen by some kind of stroke. He stared at the sky.

  “Fuckin’ A,” he shouted. The two shook hands. “You’re a witness,” Fanelli told Strickland.

  “Absolutely,” Strickland said.

  25

  ON A Sunday afternoon, with the yard quiet, Browne looked up from his labors and saw Duffy the publicist standing on the dock beside Nona.

  “Maiden voyages always go badly,” Duffy told him.

  “Who says?”

  “That’s just what they say,” Duffy explained. “It’s a proverb of the sea.”

  “Who says it went badly?”

  “Just kidding,” Duffy said. “Anyway, you owe me an interview. Anne said you’d come down here.”

  “Sorry,” Browne said. “Not today.”

  “Jesus, chum, you have to talk to me sometime. You have to give me something to work with.”

  “Not today, Duffy.”

  “I have to tell you, Owen, it’s not supposed to be this way. We’re supposed to be hyping you to the limit.”

  “I know,” Browne said. “One day I’ll find the time for it.” Duffy studied him for a moment and nodded toward a bench on the end of the dock.

  “Come with me, will you, Owen?”

  Browne followed him to the bench and they sat side by side. “Are you O.K.? I mean off the record. Bullshit aside.”

  “I’m perfectly fine.”

  “You’re such a Yankee, fella. I can’t tell what’s on your mind. I don’t even think your wife can. And she can if anyone can.”

  “I’m not really a Yankee, Duffy. My parents were immigrants like yours.”

  “No kidding? From where?”

  “From England.”

  Duffy guffawed.

  “That’s not emigration, Owen. That’s colonialism. I mean, you grew up on the North Shore of Long Island. You went to Fessenden School. I mean, it’s pathetic.”

  “I grew up on the estate of John Igo,” Browne said. “That’s where I learned to sail. My father was basically a servant. My mother definitely was.”

  “But you went to Fessenden.”

  “Mr. Igo had no sons. He thought, incorrectly, that my father liked and admired him. He sent me there. Or caused me to be sent. I went to Fessenden to please Mr. Igo. I went to Annapolis to please my father.”

  “How about that!” Duffy exclaimed.

  “Mr. Igo believed his family came from Gloucestershire. Maybe they did. Anyway, he hired all his help over there. His millwrights, his stable hands. He hired my parents.”

  “Your folks alive?”

  Browne shook his head.

  “My father grew up in a temperance household and took to drink at forty. My mother died young.”

  “What were they like?”

  “Like gnomes,” Browne said. He laughed at Duffy’s astonishment. “Mother’s family were exceedingly small. She had an album. Her parents had huge eyes and tiny bodies. She came from a town where everyone looked that way.”

  “Shit,” Duffy said, “this is interesting. Only I don’t think we can use it.”

  “Annie doesn’t put it on the resume,” Browne said. He looked toward the Manhattan towers. “And my father? What can I say? On a certain level he was an English servant.”

  “Like in the movies, you mean?”

  “I always found movie servants very puzzling. They weren’t anything like my father. My father was very smart. Very well read. A big boozer once he started drinking. He taught me wine. How to taste it. How to order it.”

  “But you don’t drink.”

  “No,” Browne said. “That’s probably why.”

  “How come he took a job out here?”

  “I never really knew,” Browne said. “He never really told me exactly. There was some secret. Or some scandal. Something got stolen. He was accused of something. He’d get loaded and complain about the unfairness of it all and my mother would hush him.”

  “That’s a familiar story.”

  “Right,” Browne said. “Silas Marner.”

  “Never mind Silas Marner,” Duffy said. “It’s every immigrant family’s story. Every goddam one of them. It’s my family’s story, it’s your family’s. Every child of immigrants I ever met had the same family story. The big secret back in the old country. The one thing the Americans must never, ever know. It’s a fucking archetype.”

  “He didn’t think of himself as an immigrant,” Browne said. “Didn’t care for the term.”

  “Did he talk about England a lot?”

  “He told me I was lucky we didn’t live there. He said the English live in fear of each other. An Englishman is always spying out the high ground, he said. People like to compare themselves favorably. With anything. A log, a passing cloud. He said that here the more intelligent people are, the nicer they are, and in England it’s just the opposite.”

  “Too bad they’re not around to see you win,” Duffy said.

  They sat in silence for a while. Then Browne said, “Tell me something. Who should I be? Who’s the irreplaceable man the public requires?”

  “Somebody better,” Duffy said.

  “Better than me, you mean?”

  “Better than them. The public.”

  “But there aren’t really any heroes.”

  Duffy shook his head. “You gotta have heroes, Owen.” After a moment he stood up and looked toward the soiled clouds over the Jersey marshes. “Know whom I’m thinking about?”

  “Lindbergh?”

  “No, man. Vince Lombardi.”

  “A great man,” Browne said. “What about him?”

  “Wrong,” Duffy said. “Vince Lombardi was not a great man. Vince Lombardi nearly de
stroyed this country. A first-generation guy, right? Ex—Fordham football player. Not a great man at all.”

  “I happen to disagree,” Browne said. “I think he was a great coach and a great sportsman. A good example for the kids.”

  “He was a fucking monster,” Duffy declared. “He caused the Vietnam War.”

  When he got home that night, Browne told Anne about Duffy’s carryings on. She laughed.

  “Duffy adores you,” she told him.

  “Really?”

  “Oh, but absolutely,” she said. She had been drinking a bit. “We all do.”

  26

  THAT NIGHT, in Hell’s Kitchen, Strickland, Hersey and Pamela smoked dope and watched the footage Fanelli had taken of Nona’s maiden voyage. On the screen, Browne, gasping for breath in the Sound, commenced his rowing backstroke.

  “What’s he doing in the water?” Hersey asked. “Is he supposed to be there?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to be in the water, Hersey. I think that’s why you have the boat.”

  “You mean he like fell off?” Pamela asked.

  “So it would seem,” Strickland said.

  There was a sequence in which Browne stood somewhat heroically at the helm. Strickland played the tape of Fanelli and Crawford’s conversation behind it and the effect was supremely funny. Hersey grinned. Pamela was undone. She tilted over backward in the lotus position until her knees were pointed at the ceiling. Her screechy laughter filled the studio.

  “So you like that,” Strickland asked, “do you, Pamela?”

  “Oh God,” she said, panting.

  “Great stuff, boss,” Hersey said.

  “It’s time,” Strickland told them, “to consider the framework here. He may win. He may not. He may die out there. We have different possible outcomes and we should be ready to cover all of them.”

  “You lose some of the humor if he dies,” Hersey said.

  Strickland regarded him with injured innocence.

  “Why?”

  Hersey’s grin grew brighter.

  “Things don’t lose their humor, Hersey, just because somebody dies. Humor goes on and on. So do things. But if he does—if he actually sinks with my priceless Sony Betacam—we’ll have to go with what we’ve taken here and offshore.”

  “Can you make a picture out of that?”

  “I’m sure I can,” Strickland said. “If he makes it we’ll have a mix of tape and film which could be interesting. Intimacy matched against articulation. If he sinks we’ll do a sort of Riders to the Sea.”

  “Och, aye,” Hersey declaimed in a keening proto-Celtic lament, “the sea, the sea, ochone. The cruel grave o’ the sea.” Pamela started to cry.

  “I don’t want him to die,” she said, sniffing. “I want him to win.”

  Strickland turned to her.

  “Right,” he said. “It sort of figures that you would.”

  “Don’t you want him to win?” Hersey asked Strickland. “I mean, he’s ours.”

  “I want the picture,” Strickland said. “That’s all I want.”

  “Anyway,” Hersey said, “you should worry. You got him fucked regardless.”

  Strickland abruptly turned off the projector and stood up. He turned on the overhead light, one that was hardly ever used.

  “I’m t . . tired of it!” he shouted at Hersey. He paused and closed his eyes until he could say the rest of it. “I am fucking tired of you suggesting that I’m fucking him in some crazy way. I don’t think it’s funny anymore.”

  Hersey and Pamela regarded him with dread.

  “I’m after the truth about this guy,” Strickland said. “Maybe he thinks I’m his personal fucking press agent but I’m not. There’s a way things are. There’s a way he is. This guy, this family, they say something about how it is now. That’s what I’m after. I don’t give a shit about his feelings or your feelings or anybody’s. Understand me?”

  “Sure,” Hersey said.

  “That’s enough for tonight,” Strickland said. “Let’s break it up. We have a lot of work tomorrow.”

  Pamela was having trouble in her life which required a considered absence from her suite at the Paramount. Strickland let her camp in his studio. When Hersey was gone and Pamela out of the way, he started running the film again. Browne coming aft over the hatches, ducking the boom. Browne in the galley making soup, glancing morosely at the camera. Browne asleep. Fanelli had a nice instinct for the right shot.

  Strickland watched Browne squint into dawn—haggard, sensitive, Browne agonistes, representative of man the measure. Pamela had cried for him but it was Pamela she mourned for. If Duffy were any good at his job, Strickland thought, he would have been selling Browne to the masses. The polite yachtsman, out there for the insulted and injured, the losers and the lost. They could track him in their atlases day by day, the disappointed, the misled, the self-sacrificers, as he bore their wounds away and washed them in salt. They should all feel for Browne, Strickland thought, the soft, wet people of the world. They should all honor and admire him, the Handsome Sailor, their charioteer.

  You could play a clever game of inside and out, Strickland thought, and divide humanity between those who were of Browne’s constituency and those who were not.

  Do I understand him as well as I think? Strickland asked himself. And if I do, why? It was a question he scarcely dared consider. He smoked a joint and had a drink and a Halcion and lay in bed awake until his thoughts were scattered.

  27

  THE NIGHT before sailing, Browne stood in his garden watching the lights go on in the terraces of the town below his house. Along the shore, the illuminated cars of an Amtrak train raced by. It was a clear cold evening. Venus, forty degrees over Long Island, was the evening star.

  For a while he lingered among the blanched grapevines in the arbor, looking at his own house. His daughter was in her room, studying to Megadeth. Anne was in the kitchen sipping wine as she cooked dinner. All Things Considered was on the radio. Maggie’s room and the kitchen showed the only lighted windows. The homely comforts which the sight of his house suggested made Browne feel somewhat forlorn. Before going in, he took a quick look at the sky that would be waiting for him.

  For the first time in many weeks, the downstairs rooms and hallways were clear of his supplies. Everything had been put aboard Nona. He found Anne at the kitchen table.

  “How are you?” she asked. The red bandana she had worn around her hair when they were loading Nona was folded on the table beside her.

  “A little restless,” Browne said.

  A difficult silence descended on them. He cleared his throat. They had been straining every nerve to avoid portents.

  “I have a feeling,” he said, “that I’m going to appreciate things a lot more when I get back.”

  “Yes,” she said, “it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  They laughed.

  “I think this is the way to live,” he told her. “Taking hold of it.”

  Somehow he could not quite succeed in saying what he meant.

  For months they had talked about a night-before-sailing celebration. In the event, they had simply let the idea drop. Anne and Owen had steak and salad at the kitchen table. Neither of them ate much. Maggie had a sandwich in her room under the pretext of finishing the book she was reading for school. She had come home with special permission because of his departure. After dinner, he decided to go up to her.

  On his way upstairs, he kept thinking that he owed them both some kind of further explanation. He was haunted by a sense of estrangement not only from his wife and daughter but even from the familiar house in which he found himself. Things had a peculiar novelty that was both invigorating and unsettling.

  He knocked on Maggie’s door and went in. She was sitting on the window seat among her stuffed animals, looking out at the darkness. Her tuna fish sandwich was uneaten on its plate right in the middle of her bed. Beside it was the book she was supposedly hastening to finis
h, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

  “For God’s sake,” he said, “do you want your bed full of tuna fish?”

  She jumped to get it and put it on her night table.

  “Sorry, Daddy.”

  “Listen, my young friend,” he said. He wanted to touch her but he could not quite bring himself to do it. “This isn’t goodbye, because we’ll be seeing each other tomorrow. But tomorrow is going to be sort of chaotic.”

  She sat on the side of the bed and looked at the floor.

  “There are some things I’ll need you to do for me,” Browne said. “Help your mother as best you can. Keep yourself out of trouble and study hard. I’m relying on you.”

  She nodded and cleared her throat.

  “I don’t think I’ll come to the boat,” she said. “I have tons to read. I’ll be up really late.”

  The fact was that he preferred her not to come. He knew it would make things easier for both of them. Nevertheless he felt compelled to stand up for convention.

  “But you came home to see me off.”

  She gave him a trapped look.

  “You’re right,” he said. “So be good.”

  A quick frightened smile crossed her face and she picked up the book, fleeing the moment. He had always found her physical resemblance to him an impenetrable mystery. Someday, he thought, the two of us will be able to speak. He bent to kiss her and she froze as she had done since the age of twelve or so, went rigid in the presence of his affection. Touching her cheek with his lips, he could feel the tremors that beset her. Outside her door, he was struck by a wave of regret.

  All that evening, he prowled the house like a stranger. Odd old things turned up: his dress sword, a record of the Blackwatch Pipe Band that he had bought in his last year at the Academy and taken with him to Vietnam. He found an album that had pictures of their wedding at the Academy chapel and Maggie’s baby pictures and pictures he had taken during the war. One showed the officers of Tactical Air Control Squadron Nine in their tin cylindrical officers’ club. Another was of sunrise over the A Shau valley, the mists and mountains like the pattern on a Chinese screen. The sight of his youthful self preserved made Browne uneasy. It made him feel, he thought, a little like his own ghost.