by Robert Stone
On an impulse, he put his bagpipe music on the phonograph in the study. The skirling made him smile. It was his oldest record, part of the process he had developed to raise his spirits in times of danger, along with night-before-battle scenes from Shakespeare and cavalier poetry.
Now thrive the armorers and honor’s thought
Reigns solely in the breast of every man.
It was all completely adolescent; still, it helped.
Anne came in laughing, drawn by the pipe music. “God,” she said. “How long since you played that?”
“A long time,” he said.
She sat down in the study’s worn leather chair, took up the album and began to leaf through it.
“I often think of those times, Owen. The war. Do you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Lately.”
“Those were not bad times,” she said. She had been drinking again; wine sometimes made her seem cool and dispassionate, mysterious. “I shouldn’t say it.”
“Say it,” Browne said. “We had some of our best times then. We knew the difference.”
Later, she prepared herself for him, did herself up in the perfumes and lingerie he favored. His feeling of estrangement persisted and somehow it increased his desire and gave her a certain intriguing unfamiliarity. They made love for a long time and finished wet and exhausted. Like swimmers, Browne thought. By the standards of his sexual haruspication, it augured well. He woke briefly, thinking he had heard her in tears. She appeared asleep. He thought it must have been a dream.
He could not sleep for long. He woke up again in the dead of night, a little after two. There were more dreams of salt water, the ocean and tears, full of anxieties he could deny in the light. He found himself lying awake and trying to remember the way in which he had dealt with fear during the war. It was as though he had known some special system then and since forgotten it.
As he lay trying to summon up his youthful courage, a thought came to him, suddenly and with a dreadful clarity. The thought had the shape of an insight and its core was the message that he was not sailor enough to make the trip. That he lacked the experience, the patience, the temperament, the qualifications entirely. As an insight it was very convincing.
In the wake of this reflection, a long-rejected possibility occurred to him. In spite of everything, he thought, he did not have to go. It would be quite possible for him to simply not do it. There were any number of sound reasons to claim: his health, the boat, considerations of family. There were a thousand alibis.
Thinking of the boat made him recall the electronic equipment uncertainly assembled in the cabin, the snaking lines and turnbuckles, the stiff, store-new canvas in his sail bags. He felt helpless at the prospect of it all. It was more than he could handle.
Lying in the dark, he wanted more than anything not to go, wanted it with an intensity that made him feel like weeping. His heart raced. Anne stirred beside him and he was tempted, in his black panic, to awaken her. Then he realized she was awake. She reached out a hand and touched his forehead.
“You’re soaking wet,” she said. “Are you O.K.?”
“Yes,” he said. “I thought of something I want to read up on. Last-minute research.”
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing worth waking up for,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
He got out of bed and at once felt cold. Shivering, he put on his bathrobe, went down to the study and laid a new fire in the grate. When it was burning, he sat down in the leather chair beside it, unconsciously rubbing the damaged joints of his right hand. Though his fear remained, his thoughts were clearer. He understood that he must go. He would have to distance himself from the terrible panic and go in spite of it. Within twenty-four hours everything would be resolved and he would be at sea. He remembered the cold night sky he had looked into that evening, an infinity of time before. Then he thought of Buzz Ward’s unopened letter. He got up and took it from the desk drawer in which he had secreted it.
“Dear Owen,” Buzz had written, “I will treat your question as a serious one. I have written down what I think are your reasons for going and also some good reasons for you not to go. I think, on balance, that you ought not to go and that you have gotten yourself into this and ought to get yourself out. Still, I know that you will choose to do the honorable thing.”
Browne smiled. Buzz was a sound man and had covered the angles. The message was that he ought not to go but that he had to, now. Exactly what I would have said myself, Browne thought. He read no further but crumpled the four pages of the letter in his hand and aimed a shot at the fireplace. At the last minute he decided not to toss it. He was curious about its length, about what there would be in four pages of Buzz’s veteran counsel not to venture, to eat the bread of quiet desperation instead. He decided to take the letter with him to sea.
She had awakened from alcoholic dreams to drunken regrets. Half sick and thirsty, she lay in the dark trying to place the sound that had awakened her. It was a sound, she thought, like weeping. She thought it might have been herself, crying in her dreams. She remembered reaching out and finding him bathed in sweat.
Owen was in the downstairs study; she heard him crumpling paper for a fire. Finally she gave up on sleep, got up and pulled an Irish sweater over her nightgown. When she was halfway down the stairs, she saw him in the small study, sunk in the big leather chair, looking into the fire. She realized at once that he was considering whether or not to go. She drew a sudden breath of hope and freedom.
Hurrying down the rest of the stairs, she was possessed of certainty and resolution. Of course he must not go. Of course his experience was insufficient and his preparations jury-rigged. She had always known it. It was time to say so, in spite of everything.
When she got to the doorway of the study, he looked up at her. He was desperate, she thought, that she ask him not to go. She was sure she saw it in his face. He would not abort the race on his own. It was up to her to ask him.
“What are you doing up?” he asked her.
That he considered such a thing at all, she thought, was a measure of how lost they had become. Changes, yes, but not this terrible adventure thrust on him by others, this folly, this delusion.
“I heard you,” she said. “You woke me.”
“Is something wrong?”
She stared at him, wanting to speak.
“Are you O.K.?” he asked.
If I ask him not to go, she thought all at once, it will be with us the rest of our lives. He will regret it forever. She would always have stood between him and the sky-blue world of possibility. She would be responsible for every boring, repetitious day as things went on and the two of them grew ever more middle-aged, disappointed and past hope. Their lives would be like everyone else’s and it would always be her fault.
“You’ll be starting out exhausted,” she said. “You should be resting.”
The weight was more than she dared carry. And, in spite of everything, she wanted him to do it, wanted him to win.
“I’ll be O.K., Annie. Don’t worry.”
“What are you reading?”
“A letter,” he said. “An old letter from Buzz. Go on back to bed.”
Obediently, she turned away. She got a bottle of mineral water from the kitchen and three aspirin and took it all up to bed. Then she lay awake, heavy with fear, to wait for the morning light.
28
IN THE MORNING, Strickland and Hersey arrived before dawn and waited in the van until the first light went on in the Brownes’ house. Anne let them in without a word.
For a while they filmed Browne drinking tea in the kitchen. “His voice sounds funny,” Hersey said when he and Strickland were alone.
Strickland declined to reply. He had recognized the inexpressive quality in Browne’s voice as fear, that old softener of the palate and misaligner of the jaw. Fear’s peculiar melancholy reminded him of the morning fog at Phu Bai. There were several kinds of sweat, Strickland recalled.
W
hen everything was ready, Owen and Anne stood holding hands in the living room, exchanging pale smiles. They leaned forehead to forehead until Browne said, “O.K., folks, let’s go.”
“What about Maggie?” Anne asked. “Isn’t she coming along?”
“She was up late. We’ve said our goodbyes.”
Anne looked as though she might protest but in the end Maggie was left to sleep, or the pretense of it.
“Great stuff,” Hersey said when he and Strickland were back in the van. They were driving the Merritt Parkway headed for town.
“When you’re shooting it,” Strickland told his assistant, “remember that he may fuck up. We have to be ready to go both ways with this.”
“How much of a difference do you think it makes,” Hersey asked, “what you’re thinking when you shoot it?”
“I don’t know,” Strickland said.
In the yard office on Staten Island, Crawford told Browne that a replacement set of solar panels he had ordered late had not arrived.
“So be it,” Browne said. He did not seem chastened or alarmed. Then they filmed Crawford and Fanelli getting Nona on the elevator and into the harbor. Fanelli kept flashing knowing looks at the camera. When Nona was afloat, Strickland and Hersey helped the Brownes carry cardboard boxes filled with books and music tapes aboard. There were more pieces by Elgar than Strickland had ever heard of and some nautical hearty-har by folkies such as Gordon Bok. There was some Sinatra, which Strickland assumed would have been the height of sophistication at Annapolis in the middle sixties. The rest was proper highbrow uplift, much Beethoven, the best-known baroque pieces. Among the books, Strickland spotted a Bible and the poetry of Frost, John Donne, Garrett Mattingly’s biography of Columbus and some histories by Samuel Eliot Morison. Hemingway’s stories. Look Homeward Angel. A Treasury of American Humor in case laughs were hard to come by. Your basic Great Books for that desert island.
Putting the last box aboard, Browne lost his balance. His foot slid off the end of the floating dock and down the slimy edge of a rotting piling that looked as though it might have supported a prison hulk from the Revolutionary War. When he brought it up, Strickland saw that there was blood on his white tennis shoe and on the leg of the gym trousers he wore.
“You’re cut, man,” he said to Browne.
“It’s all right,” Browne said quickly. He looked around to see that his wife was on the pier above, out of earshot.
Strickland peered into the murky water into which Browne’s leg had briefly disappeared. He could make out a rusted and jagged-edged half-chock, a foot and a half or so below the water line. Browne bunched the cloth against his wound and limped aboard. He used a rag to wipe the blood from his sneaker.
“Don’t you think you should have it looked at?”
“Fuck it,” Browne said.
Before they cast off, Crawford shook hands with both Brownes.
“Good luck, Captain,” he told Browne somberly. An exchange of forgiveness seemed to be taking place. Fanelli merely smirked and nodded. Then Browne, Anne and Strickland got aboard and they set off across the harbor, powered by a fifty-horse Evinrude borrowed from the yard. On the way over, Strickland sat with his back against the mast, shooting Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. They passed Governors Island close enough to inspect the Coast Guardsmen’s children, lining up for class outside P.S. 109. Anne, sitting beside the Plexiglas dome over the cockpit, waved to them. Only one child waved back, a girl of eleven or so, a head taller than the others.
“Well, bless her,” Anne said.
At the mouth of the East River, Strickland shot the Brooklyn Bridge looming large overhead. He remembered seeing it as a child on the Sea Beach express, kept pigeons from the Brooklyn tenements wheeling against the city sky. As a kid he had spent a few winters out at Coney Island, living across the slot from Steeplechase and the gypsies. He put his camera aside and zipped up his jacket. Obviously, he thought, the day was going to be difficult, full of time trips and empathy. Fear was contagious. Such a tender emotion, truly the mother of sensibility.
From the cockpit Browne began to recite Hart Crane. He kept one hand on his leg where he had cut it.
“O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!”
Strickland neglected to film Browne reciting. He watched Anne listening to her husband. Must be love, he thought.
“Go on,” he said when Browne stopped.
“It’s all I know,” Browne said.
“Ah,” Strickland said. “Well, we don’t have good sound out here anyway.” He turned his attention to the mast. “What’s the round thing up there? I don’t remember seeing it.” He was pointing to the transponder housing. “Is it radar?”
“It emits a signal,” Browne told him. “The signal is picked up by a satellite and sent to a dish in Switzerland. It records my position. That’s how people know where I am.”
When Nona tied up at the South Street Seaport dock, Strickland gave Browne some instruction in the use of the videotaping equipment. Then Strickland went ashore and Hersey met him on South Street with the van. A few banners proclaiming the race fluttered on poles around the seaport complex but it was too early for crowds. They drove uptown to get the rest of their equipment.
After eleven, Strickland came back with Hersey and Pamela. They found a parking space on Peyster Street. Strickland and Hersey humped the equipment across South.
“Oh shit,” Hersey said, dodging a taxi, “a carnival atmosphere.”
It was so. The morning had ripened into a fair, blustery Sunday suitable for wholesome high adventure and at South Street Seaport a carnival atmosphere prevailed. In its Sports Monday section, the Times would call the crowd at five thousand plus. The attending public was an exercise in gentrification; there were infants backpacked onto Daddy, colorful Finnish caps and tall slender women with prominent teeth. A beer company’s brass band, uniformed in red and gold, played “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” The fife-and-whistle mariners who had entertained at the Southchester Yacht Club, peacoats unbuttoned over their striped jerseys, stood ready to fill in during band breaks. Along South Street vendors sold hot sausages, franks and roast chestnuts.
Hersey and Strickland moved among the crowd; Hersey had the camera and Strickland took sound. For a while Pamela followed closely, trying repeatedly to insert herself into the shot. She was drinking methamphetamine and grapefruit juice from a miniature plastic bottle that said “Spanish Fly” in pink letters. Only drugs could raise Pamela at such an hour. She had become a woman about town and gone out of the life. She had an apartment in Battery Park City, a no-show job with a foundation newsletter and a weekly cleaning lady.
“Please, I want to meet them,” she begged Strickland. “Really! Can’t I?”
Beside the vessel, secured to the New York Yacht Club’s float, Pamela got her wish. She blushed like a schoolgirl.
“Really,” she said to Browne, “you’re like so brave. I mean, that’s really an incredible thing to do.”
“I haven’t done it yet,” Browne reminded her modestly.
“But you really can’t miss, right?” Pamela asked breathlessly. “Everything that goes around comes around.”
Everyone smiled thoughtfully.
“Well,” Browne said, “I wonder where Harry is? Anyway, I should go see the other guys.”
As he started off, Pamela put her arm in his and went with him. Anne and Strickland were left together on the float.
“Is she your significant other?” Anne asked.
He laughed at her. “My what? Are you kidding me?”
“No,” she said, “I’m not kidding.”
“She’s a whore,” Strickland explained. “She’s in Under the Life.”
“Yes,” Anne said, “I recognized her.”
“P-Pamela doesn’t have any significance,” Strickland said. “She’s a child of the universe.”
“Is she really drinking Spanish fly?” Anne ask
ed. “I didn’t think there really was such a thing.”
“Speed,” Strickland told her. He thought her particularly attractive and courageous at that moment. The force of her selfcontrol both aroused and challenged him.
Browne and Pamela, a pleasing but incongruous couple, were making the rounds of the other entrants in the race. Hersey was signaling to Strickland across the crowded concrete plaza.
“Gotta go to work,” Strickland said. He walked up the gangplank from the yacht club float, leaving Anne alone beside Nona.
A local television station was filming Browne together with the Virginian, Preston Fowler. Fowler had taken hold of Pamela and was hugging her close. Hersey and Strickland set up and began shooting.
“I see your boat over there, buddy,” Fowler said to Browne. “Looks like one of your regular forty-footers.”
“It’ll be our special after next year,” Browne said.
“Yeah,” Fowler said. “I know all about it. Well, you have the courage of your convictions, old shoe. Gonna stop and see Matty on the way around? Where is he? Down in Nassau, somewhere like that? Havana?”
Pamela made herself comfortable in Fowler’s embrace. He was drinking champagne from a plastic glass, sunburned, unshaven, wearing a dirty, yellowed wool sweater. His eyes were sleepy and his speech slurred.
“Yeah, we got him tucked away, Fowler.” Browne walked over and extended his hand. “Anyway, good luck.”
Fowler shook his hand, avoiding his eye, pretending infatuation with Pamela.
“He’s loaded, right?” Strickland said to Browne when they had left her in Fowler’s keeping. “Is he going to sail around the world that way?”
Browne laughed. “He’s probably been partying all week. He’ll lay offshore somewhere and get himself together. Then he’ll be out to win.”
With Strickland and Hersey following after him, Browne sought out each of his competitors in turn. Ian Dennis was in the cockpit of his gleaming aluminum cruiser with a young woman from his publisher’s office. When he saw Browne he stood up quickly.