Outerbridge Reach

by Robert Stone

  “He’s a friend of Dad’s.”

  “He’d like to be a friend of yours.”

  “He’s favorably disposed to me,” she said. She was somewhat drunk. “I think that’s good. He’s a solid guy. A stand-up character, as Dad would say.”

  “Look,” Strickland said, “I need to think about the project. Maybe we should talk. How about taking a ride with me?”

  “I ought to get back.”

  “What for?”

  “There’s always something.”

  “C’mon. I brought my car. I want you to help me ponder.”

  She gave him a brave, distant, troubled look as though she were coping cheerfully with problems that did not remotely concern him. “Where would we go?”

  “Down the road a little.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll give you a ride in Harry’s car if you like.”

  Saying her goodbyes to the thick-necked executives and politicians assembled on the mezzanine, she offered rides right and left. To Strickland’s relief, no one accepted. On the way out she stopped in the ladies’ on the ground floor. As he waited for her to come out, he glanced up to the mezzanine floor where the party had taken place and saw two hard-faced men looking down the stairs at him.

  The driver was the same man who had driven them in New York, his eyes still obscured behind dark glasses. He drove very fast, speeding them across the wastes of central Jersey.

  “What’s the latest from Owen?” Strickland asked.

  “He’s in the fifties, northeast of the South Sandwich Islands.”

  “I hope he’s using the equipment,” Strickland said.

  They sat looking out at the pines and power lines.

  “Are you afraid for your film? That it won’t look good?”

  “Sure,” Strickland said.

  “Well,” she said, “the film is your problem. But I’m afraid too. That makes two of us.”

  “You don’t act afraid.”

  She looked out the window without answering.

  “Has your life changed?” Strickland asked.

  “What a question.” She looked him in the eye, accepting, he hoped, a somewhat different level of discourse. “My life’s all right.”

  “You know what I wish?” Strickland asked her. “I wish I knew the things in your imagination. I wish I could get you to talk about them.”

  Anne bent her head and put her hands over her eyes. “God,” she said, “you are a peculiar guy. Wherever did they find you?”

  They drove for almost an hour before Strickland asked the driver to pull off the parkway. They followed a local road through the pines, toward the coast. At the beach they turned right and headed south toward the glass towers of Atlantic City.

  “Ever down here?”

  “Never,” Anne said.

  “Not . . . your sort of place?”

  “I have to admit,” she said, “it’s really not my sort of place. I don’t gamble. I don’t like taffy.”

  “We’ll see,” said Strickland.

  He had the driver take them through the streets of the decayed city, among ruined Victorian houses and cinderblock buildings with windowless saloons. There were very few people on the street and, except for the wind, the place lay under a strange silence. The dingy metal sea rolled in as though propelled by a machine. The gigantic casinos along the beachfront and the gray sky looked like painted stage flats.

  A few blocks from the ocean they saw what appeared to be a plastic elephant three stories high. On a street called North Carolina Avenue, he had Anne get out of the car and walk with him. Harry Thorne’s chauffeur followed them slowly in the Lincoln.

  “The first time I ever saw anybody dancing was in that building,” he said, pointing to a squat turreted house with a broad veranda. “It was called the Chateau Dumaine. There was a line of little broads in top hats dancing to ‘The Beer Barrel Polka.’ The girls were white. The band was black. In a back room there were craps tables and wheels.”

  “That’s the first dancing you ever saw?”

  “I was very small,” Strickland explained. “My mother took me there.”

  She laughed. “What for? The dancing?”

  “The food,” Strickland said. “The food was out of sight. The best steak, the best Italian food you can imagine. We ate with the help.”

  “I gather,” Anne said, “your mother was an entertainer.”

  “At the time we dined at the Dumaine,” Strickland said, “my mother was selling lace. Or Meissen china. Or furniture—early American knockoffs. The place was owned by a friend of hers.”

  “Oh,” Anne said, “but you said carnivals and hotels.”

  “We lived in the Chalfonte on the Boardwalk then. Sometimes there were fashion shows there and my mother would deliver the commentaries. She always sounded very . . .” Strickland bore down on the word, trying not to blow it: “. . . High class. That was the term people used. Especially here. In this town.”

  “So she was educated.”

  “Skidmore, class of 1925. Or so she told me. Her father was a Methodist minister. Or so she told me. Sometimes she made things up. I never checked her out. I mean, she was Mom.”

  Anne laughed, and for a moment Strickland was sure that she might take his arm. She didn’t.

  He showed her where the old Atlantic Club had been and the Sea Breeze and Clothilde Marsh’s interracial brothel.

  “My mother went there for bridge,” Strickland recounted. “Clothilde Marsh had a lesbian girlfriend called Ernie, her own Alice B. Toklas. With them in the place was a very light-skinned black man they called Doctor Leroy. God knows what he did there. Every week Mom and Clothilde and Ernie and Doctor Leroy played a couple of rubbers of bridge. She always had bridge games going.”

  “And you went there too?”

  “I made drinks for the bridge players.”

  “And did you talk to the girls?”

  “I hardly ever saw the girls. They weren’t allowed near Clothilde’s bridge game.”

  “And then you grew up and made a movie about prostitutes.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Funny. Want a drink?”

  She frowned. “Not around here.”

  “We’ll go to a casino. We’ll have a quick one.”

  At the entrance to Bally’s no one made any trouble about the car when it parked to wait for them. Strickland led Anne across the spangled lobby toward the bar at the edge of the casino floor.

  “About what you expected?” Strickland asked when they had their drinks.

  “Let’s have our drink and go,” she said. “I can take the carpet colors but not the cigarette smoke.”

  “Have another drink,” Strickland said. “I want my snake-eyes bet.”

  “I’ll have one more and then I want to go.”

  She stood up a little contentiously. Definitely an Irish relationship with alcohol, Strickland thought. Her intoxication had a rowdy, slightly dangerous quality that pleased him. At the same time he understood that the seductiveness he had thought to see might be an illusion. He led her down the steps to the casino.

  The dice tables were nearest the bar and fairly uncrowded. Out among the slot machines, several thousand dull-eyed, emphysemic proletarians pumped away in a hereafter of mirrors. Strickland kept a lookout for someone he might know at the craps tables. A number of the people he had met making Under the Life came down to Atlantic City, although not usually on winter afternoons. The cocktail waitresses, the security, the pit bosses, took a fraction of a second to notice Anne Browne. She was agreeably out of place there.

  At one table a broad-shouldered, short-necked man in a good suit was picking up the dice for a come-out roll. The man had a flushed, pushed-in face and looked like an ex-fighter or a crooked cop or an actor who played one. There were half a dozen other players at the table. Strickland put a fifty on the table and said, “Aces.” The dealer took his money.

  “What are you doing?” Anne asked. No one answered her.

  As they watched,
the old pug rolled snake eyes. Strickland put his drink down in disbelief.

  “Did you win?” she asked.

  Everyone at the table looked at her, except the dealer and the man who had rolled.

  “It pays thirty to one,” Strickland explained when they were in the car on the way out of town. “It’s a dumb bet. Really irresponsible.”

  “So you won fifteen hundred dollars?”

  “I bet it for you,” he told her. “It’s yours.”

  She laughed that away. She seemed alert and sober.

  “Really,” Strickland said. “I should buy you something. What would you like?”

  “How wicked. What will you buy me?”

  “Hey,” he said, “you name it.”

  “Well,” she said, “how about a new waffle iron? How about a rowing machine? An inflatable boat?”

  “You’re not supposed to make fun of a winner,” Strickland told her.

  On the drive along the Garden State, Anne asked him who his mother’s friend had been.

  “His name was Phil Hassler. He owned half of the Dumaine and he was a kind of movie producer.”

  “What kind of movies?”

  “It was a scam,” Strickland said. “It’s a long story.”

  But she persisted and he told her how Phil Hassler had done it. “He starts out with a flick. Some kind of crazy Dutch sex-education movie. A training film for Bulgarian midwives. Some artifact he’s acquired. Remember, this is back in the forties and fifties. Has to have something to do with sex.”

  Strickland paused, closed his eyes and drew breath.

  “Then he drives into some shit town where there are lots of rednecks and Catholics. He finds a crummy falling-down theater. Tells the owner he’s some kind of mogul. He was mogul-like, Phil.”

  “I’ll bet,” Anne said.

  “Money’s no object,” Strickland continued. “Only thing is he has to have the place for a couple of nights. To measure something or test something. Some rebop. The theater owner needs to believe this. Then Phil brings in his cruddy Dutch pregnancy picture. He blitzes the shit town with the horniest possible advertising and fake reviews: ‘Dirtiest foreign porno movie I ever saw!’ ‘My eyes bugged out of my head!’”

  “Didn’t people object?”

  “But of course,” Strickland said. “He makes sure all the preachers see the advertising, but too late to close him. Figures it close. By show time there are twenty thousand jerkoffs screaming to pay ten dollars to see the goddam thing. He runs it around the clock. He’d hold it two days if he could. By the second night the cops would close the theater but by then Phil had emptied the till and was on his way to the next shit town.”

  “Didn’t he ever get arrested?”

  “Usually the theater owner got arrested. But occasionally Phil got picked up. Of course there was always an out for him. Remember that these things were not actual pornography. So the line would be: ‘Your honor, this movie instructs the young and prevents unhealthful practices! It’s hygienic! It’s educational!’ This was known in the trade as ‘the square-up.’”

  “And that’s how you got into film making?”

  “Not really,” Strickland said.

  He thought that she might fall asleep on the drive back but she looked quite animated, lost in thoughts the nature of which he could not imagine. She kept a half-smile that might have been booziness or amusement at his tales or anything, for all he knew. Her hand was on the seat by her side and for the longest time he wanted to put his own on it, just touch her. But of course the excursion and the stories were not appropriate to such a move. Presently he felt foolish and bitter.

  “The square-up,” she said at one point along the road. “I like that.”

  When they got back to Craven’s Point it had been dark for hours and the empty white buildings were ablaze with light. The high flat on which they stood was completely deserted.

  “I seem to have this need to tell you the story of my life,” Strickland said to Anne.

  “Yes,” she said, “I see that you do.”

  Getting out, he peeled off the top bill from the roll he had won at the casino and thrust it toward the driver. Without even glancing at Strickland, the driver shook off the tip with a barely perceptible shrug. He was still wearing the dark glasses.

  When the limousine pulled away Strickland found himself alone with the glowing towers and the lights of Asbury Park across the flats. It was a cold, dangerous place to be. He walked deliberately across the frozen mud to his car and then stood beside it, looking down a dark bank into the soiled marsh. The roll was still in his hand, new bills, crisp hundreds. He took the money in his right hand and fanned out the bills like a dealer and tossed it all into the darkness.

  40

  THE EVENINGS grew shorter and faded no darker than cold blue. He felt as though he were stalking the wind. The absence of it seemed unnatural. One morning it occurred to him to call up Duffy.

  “Where you been?” the publicist asked him.

  “Can’t you see me?”

  “That’s a blip, Owen. We like to hear your voice. I like to tell Annie I talked with you.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s a rock, man. A tower.”

  A tower of ivory, Browne thought. “Don’t I know it,” he said.

  “By the way, we’re supposed to use a standard procedure on these calls, Duffy. You’re supposed to say ‘over’ when your transmission is over. When you’re signing off you say ‘out.’”

  “I don’t know whether I should tell you this, bro, but your sponsoring organization is in bad shape. Listening to the news?”

  “I get the BBC,” Owen said, “once in a while. Over.”

  “There isn’t going to be much left of the Hylan Corporation.”

  “Tough,” Browne said cheerfully. “That doesn’t mean much out here.”

  “You don’t care,” Duffy informed him, “because you’re gonna win regardless. You’re gonna win it for the little guy.”

  “Am I?”

  “Affirmative,” Duffy said. “The fat cats fade but the little guy goes on and on. That’s the angle.”

  “I like it,” Browne said.

  “Yeah,” Duffy said. “It’s a good one. Little boat, big ocean. Unquenchable spirit. What’s money?”

  “I hope you’re being paid,” Owen said.

  “Hey, what do I care?” said Duffy. “I’m in it for the story.”

  “How’s your wife?” Owen asked.

  “Better,” Duffy told him. “You’re neck and neck with Fowler and Dennis. They’re not getting any more wind than you are.”

  “Good,” Browne said.

  “So,” Duffy asked, “how the hell are you?”

  “I always dreamed of being here,” Browne said, “and now I am.”

  “And it’s terrific, right?”

  Far off on the horizon, Browne thought he saw an instant of reflected sunlight. He could not imagine what could be out there to catch it. He let Duffy’s question go unanswered.

  “Do you want to provide a quote,” Duffy asked, “or am I authorized to invent one?”

  “I’d like to get it right,” Browne said. “I’d like to do it justice.”

  “Think about it,” Duffy said.

  “The quality of light is extraordinary,” Browne said.

  “Don’t forget the pictures.”

  “I have no regrets,” Browne said. “I’m where I need to be and they should all know that.”

  “Whatever you say, Captain.”

  “It’s like the edge of things.”

  “Really? Are you feeling O.K.?”

  “Yes, it’s a different dimension. A little faster, maybe. There’s a quickening. It’s good,” he assured Duffy. “It’s really good.”

  “That’s great, Owen,” Duffy said. “Stay with it.”

  Since they had closed Duffy’s office at Shadows, he worked out of what had been a realtor’s office on the twentieth floor of the old Saint George Hotel in
Brooklyn Heights. Although it overlooked sedate brownstones and the harbor, the place always reminded Duffy of the boiler rooms from which he had supervised telephone sales campaigns during newspaper strikes.

  It took Duffy less than fifteen minutes to whip up a handout. When he was done he phoned in a digest of it to one of his cronies on the Daily News.

  “It’s the fulfillment of a lifetime dream. Out on the edge the pulse quickens, the light takes on a new dimension. He’d rather be out there than anywhere else.”

  “Jesus,” said the Daily News man, “he’s a fucking wordsmith, ain’t he?”

  “The client is introspective,” Duffy told his reporter friend. “He’s definitely a thinker, this guy.”

  41

  ONE MID-WINTER MORNING, Anne awoke in a state of some confusion about the night before. At the end of her day’s writing she had stayed downstairs to read. The book was Minna Hubbard’s memoir about crossing Labrador. She had been drinking a Sangiovese alongside. Anne found that she could not remember having dinner, nor could she account for a missing second bottle of the wine. Neither could she remember coming upstairs to bed.

  Later in the morning, she recalled a film she supposed she must have watched in bed. Bits and pieces came back to her. It had been something she never would have endured sober. There had been murder and lyrically pornographic scenes in which a greasy-haired, unshaven man in a leather jacket and lifter’s gloves slapped an undressed, slack-mouthed blonde and called her a bitch. She had turned out to be a killer.

  That day Anne decided to stop drinking. It followed hard on her excursion to Atlantic City with Strickland. When she called the local Veterans’ Hospital to volunteer as an aide, she found herself not required. She had done years of hospital work during the Vietnam War. As a poor substitute she started early morning exercise classes at the Y. The classes began before dawn at a desolate building in a dangerous part of town. On the bulletin board over the sign-in sheet someone had put up an amusing Larsen cartoon called “Aerobics in Hell.”

  Often, in the late afternoon, she got blue. Sometimes she thought about going riding but the trails were icy and the nearest stables closed for the winter. She began writing more for Underway, sentimental pieces about nature or sailing with children, drawn from her own childhood adventures or outings with Maggie. They made her cry when she wrote them and embarrassed her in print. Magowan was no help; he published everything she wrote without comment.