by Robert Stone
At certain times Owen’s absconded presence obsessed her. She had imaginary conversations with him, laughed and teased him, argued, sometimes bitterly. She entertained fantasies of telepathy. At other times, she was surprised at how remote from her life he seemed. When she tried deliberately to imagine his voice and manner she could not always bring them into focus. Early on in the voyage, tracing his progress on the chart in her study, she liked to think she was sharing his days and nights at sea. For weeks she was really off with him; people were amused at her abstractedness. It had been thrilling at first, his becoming a man of uncustomary skies, other stars, impossibly far horizons. Though she had never learned to love Nona, she thought fondly sometimes of the cabin that lodged him, how it would smell, of being in the bunk with him.
But after the holidays she found herself resisting the image of him at sea. When she entertained his presence, it was unlocated. In the middle of the night, she would wake up and think of him in the roaring forties and fifties and imagine some lapse in seamanship or fit of absentmindedness and be filled with anxiety. It had turned out not to be like the war. They were not young anymore. Then she had been proud in the teeth of the world. Now, entitled to conventional, respectable pride, she found her only security in dread, as though her fear were his ransom.
At one point she tried taking up religion. She wanted it back in her life, to practice it earnestly, energetically, the way she had as a kid. The eleven o’clock Mass at Annunciation was always filled with families in their Sunday best and she felt out of place. She knelt alone and recited formal prayers for his safe passage.
The exercise classes nourished her physical vanity. After a couple of weeks, still sore and newly abstemious, she felt trimmer and brighter. She tried on old breeches and bikinis she had once despaired of and antique miniskirts like her leather one from the sixties. Abstention from alcohol gave her vivid dreams. Occasionally these were euphoric, sometimes frightening, often sexual. A doctor wrote her some Xanax; the drug seemed to make her dreams even more spectacular and emotionally unfamiliar, as though they were drawn from the stuff of someone else’s life. Sleeping and waking, the notion of being lost, of having wandered out of the right life, kept turning up in different guises. She imagined mirrors in which she could not find herself.
One fantasy she had deliberately indulged involved sailing the world with Owen and collaborating on a book. After he had been gone a few months, the idea took odd turns that made her anxious or angry. Every day she hated the soiled suburban winter more. She turned away, superstitiously, from the sight of calendars. Sometimes she dreamed of sailing alone.
Unbidden, unplotted fantasies also prowled the margins of her concentration. One was based on a dream and involved negotiations over an antivenom kit of the sort sports outfitters sold. In it, she found herself in conversation with a kind of louche salesperson who appeared to be encrusted in armored scales, part condottiere, part lizard. The other seemed to come from parochial school martyrology. She was chained behind a cart, or more elegantly behind a chariot. The image had come either from some obscure actual martyrdom or from Technicolor movies. Never had she been so taken with the processes of her own mind. She supposed that, for her, consciousness had mainly been a synonym for being awake and a tool with which to discharge responsibilities. Self-observation made her feel more and more like going to sea herself.
Every day she entered Owen’s position on the master chart in her study, as reported by the VERC Global Positional System. Since the race had begun, she discovered that at least half of their competitors were following daily courses set by assistants ashore who had the best and latest shoreside equipment and the best weather information. She regretted bitterly their not doing things that way, because it would have engaged her energies.
Duffy called regularly from the office they had given him in Brooklyn. Although Anne had come to rather like Duffy, she often left his calls unanswered. He always began by asking her about the film and Strickland.
“He hasn’t called for a while,” she told Duffy a week after she had given up wine. “Maybe the money’s not there. Maybe he’s changing his mind.”
“He got a lot of money up front and a good deal on rights,” Duffy assured her. “That won’t happen.”
“He always sounds so casual about it.”
“Never mind casual. He’s in too deep.”
“Good,” she said, “so am I.”
Anne thought that Strickland might be feeling awkward about all that he had told her. She always tried to receive his confidences, ugly as they were, in a sympathetic spirit. Sometimes, pondering them, she found it hard to look at him. Inwardly she would imitate his stammer and cold quick laughter. It was plain that he wanted to shock her and then to be forgiven. As in most situations, she found her attractiveness useful. She felt it provided a certain security.
You had to pity the man’s early life, she thought. It was all confusion—no religion, no father, a scandalous mother. If he was sometimes frightening, it was because he had been so often frightened. Almost a handicapped p . . p . . person. The sense of her politely philistine Catholic education was that weak men, flawed men, often made good artists. It gave them another sort of power, not necessarily benign.
Imagining him hog-tied over the hole in Cu Chi, she was driven to silent, guilty laughter. She raised a hand to her mouth. It had served him right. How terrified he must have been. How he must have needed something. But all he had was style.
42
THE FIRST iceberg Browne had ever seen appeared to him in the middle fifties around eleven o’clock on a summer evening. He had sighted a distant glint at first light and suspected ice. Rather than get closer, he had immediately changed course, set his radar alarm and headed due east. The weather was still clear, with only a single mother-of-pearl band of clouds low on the northern horizon. His westward heading put him on a beam reach in about twelve knots of apparent wind. For days Cape Town had been promising advancing depressions and winds of force 7, so he stayed with his basic sail plan: main plus genoa on a spinnaker pole. With possible ice in sight, he reset the steering vane and took the helm. He had trouble staying awake. Once, secured to his lifeline, he even dozed off on his jury-rigged outdoor toilet, only to be awakened by the cold on his private parts. An absurd story for the great world there, earthy and ingratiating.
Late in the day, he had gone below to catch the weather report and somehow fallen asleep again. It was after that, when he came wearily on deck, that the tower of ice confronted him.
The ice at first appeared to Browne as a steam tug, like the ones his father-in-law owned at Outerbridge Reach. The tug had polished brightwork and gilt lettering on the wheelhouse. The colors, he thought, were ones popular at the turn of the century, colors that were obsolete today. Each color represented a certain quality. A kind of blue might stand for honesty at the same time it suggested someone’s eyes. Some of the old tugmen were deep in Masonry.
Browne stared at it, sleepy and amazed. Only gradually, as his vision adjusted to the special brightness of the Antarctic light, did all the embellishments fade away. Then he saw how incredibly complicated the actual colors were and how the shapes were unknown to geometry, beautiful but useless in any sort of measurement. It seemed to Browne that others had remarked on the protean nature of sea ice. He thought Shackleton might have been one. It was a principle known to adventurers.
In spite of the danger, he went below to get the camcorder. So equipped, he brought Nona around and made another pass at the berg, watching the water ahead of his bow. But even as he filmed he knew that he had failed to record the ice’s mystical, Shackletonian quality. How to photograph a psychological principle? He had to be content with a banal observation.
“This is your flat-topped Antarctic berg. It’s the first one we’ve seen and we hope it’s the last.”
He could think of nothing more to say. Well, he thought, I’ll see the film and I’ll remember.
He stayed awake at
the helm during the short night. When the sun rose again the sea was clear. There was nothing he could do but set the self-steering again and hope that the radar might give him some warning. The same morning he checked his satellite position against a sun sight and located himself at fifty-six degrees forty minutes south, nine degrees fifty minutes west. He kept his northeasterly heading, waiting for the winds.
He had stopped reading. In Vietnam, at the worst of times, he had been able to read himself clear out of the war, into history or else out of it, depending on the point of view. Now, with plenty of time, he somehow lacked the patience. And about music he had found that it was necessary to be careful. Certain music produced a confusion that was hard to resolve. The best entertainment, Browne discovered, was his own thoughts. And then, as a kind of puzzle, there was the radio.
The day after he had seen the iceberg, Browne managed to locate the missionary station again. The reader, who sounded like an English-speaking African, announced that a dramatization from Genesis would be broadcast at twenty hundred Greenwich mean time. Browne decided to celebrate. In order to keep his thoughts clear, he had been fasting, living mainly on unheated, undiluted consommé. To accompany the broadcast, he undertook to prepare a homely feast: frankfurters southern-style from his Fannie Farmer Cookbook, with canned tomatoes, chopped onion, thyme and oregano.
Browne’s feast proved a disappointment. He had spent the afternoon trying to clear his generator’s fuel injectors; when he turned to in the galley, his hands were still fouled with diesel fuel. It was extraordinary the way the stuff managed to contaminate the ingredients of his proposed meal. Finally he gave up on it and opened a can of corned beef instead. He ate the corned beef with saltines and settled down to listen to the night’s drama.
The missionaries’ radio play was about Isaac and his family. Jacob was played by a young Canadian. Isaac sounded like an elderly southern white man. Esau was played, somewhat humorously, by an African. Rebekah was played by a young woman with a sweet clear northwestern voice, which reminded Browne of a woman from Oregon he had once known. It was apparent that there was some doubling up. Isaac was also Laban. Rebekah was both Rachel and Leah.
A narrator, who might have been the English lady Browne had been listening to before, reminded the audience of how Isaac had been spared sacrifice and of his adventures among the Philistines in the land of Gerar. She pointed out that even in today’s world, travelers must be careful to protect their loved ones.
“How many of our listeners,” she asked, “have been sojourners, have been among those of some other nation? How many have feared for their safety? Do we know,” she inquired, “how we shall behave when our loved ones are threatened?”
Browne wrapped the remaining corned beef in foil, turned on his Kempar heater and wrapped himself in a dry Navy blanket on his bunk as the dramatization began.
“Oh, that red pottage,” said Esau, “that red pottage smells so good to me. I am faint with hunger.”
“Would you like some?” Jacob asked. He sounded honest enough, a wholesome North American. “Then sell me your birthright.”
Esau seemed to consider the offer in a stage whisper.
“I am afraid I going to die. What good is some old birthright to me?”
Browne thought he heard voices rising all over Africa. No! Esau!
“Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils,” recited the English lady, “and he did eat and drink and rose up and went his way.” She paused. “Thus,” she proclaimed severely, “Esau despised his birthright.”
The scene shifted to the tent of old Isaac. Rebekah spoke to her son in the voice of that daughter of the pioneers whom Browne had known in Bremerton so long ago. She instructed Jacob to kill the goats and she would cook them up the way the old man liked it. Then young Jacob would bring the meal to him and Isaac would bless him before he died.
The girl of whom Rebekah reminded Browne had been the daughter of the captain of the USS Pollux out of Bremerton. It was she who had asked Browne to sail with her around the Queen Charlotte Islands. Out of fidelity to Anne, he had not gone. Then he had lied about sailing the same waters.
“But, Mother,” said Jacob in a slightly epicene tone, “brother Esau is hairy! My skin is smooth. Father might feel my arm. Then he’d say I was a deceiver. He’d give me a curse instead of a blessing.”
Rebekah’s reply was sweet as country water. She sounded more resigned than conniving, like someone doing what she had to do.
“Upon me be the curse, my son. Only obey my voice.”
So of course Jacob did. Any boy would.
There was one line that caught Browne’s particular attention because he had often heard his father use it: “The smell of my son is as the smell of a field the Lord has blessed.”
Later, when Esau found he had been displaced from his father’s blessing as well as his birthright, his anguish was unsettling. The actor’s voice trembled terribly. Who knew, Browne thought, over there in Africa, what his life was like, what things he’d seen?
“Have you only one blessing, Father? Please bless me, Dad. Bless me also.” But he was out of luck.
“And Esau lifted up his voice,” declared the stern English lady, “and wept.”
Browne listened to all of it, huddled in the blanket. He was unaware of the tears that coursed down his cheeks. Isaac let poor Esau know that he was basically on his own. Then Jacob went to work for Laban and Laban deceived him, substituted Leah for Rachel, extorted his labor. Then he returned and simple-hearted Esau welcomed him and miracles ensued.
When the dramatization was over, the lady returned.
“When Esau came in from the field,” she asked the public, “was he really starving to death? I hardly think so. Wasn’t he only being greedy after a day in the field? Listeners will remember how he despised his birthright. Wasn’t he a thoughtless young man?”
The English lady allowed that many listeners would feel sorry for Esau because of the way things turned out for him. She admitted it was only natural to do so.
“But what are we to think of Jacob’s behavior?” she asked. She paused again for general reflection. “Didn’t he act wrongly? What do listeners think?”
Jacob’s behavior was absolutely unjustified, the lady maintained. It was wrong of him to impersonate Esau. She made no comment regarding Rebekah.
“What are we to think of this story?” the lady asked. “What message does it hold for us?”
“Good question,” Browne said from his rack.
“Its message,” the lady replied, “is that of God’s almighty will. Never forget that God is strong. What is God’s is likewise strong. The will of God binds the world and everyone in it. There is no setting it aside. There is no pleading against it.”
Browne stirred in the bunk, his teeth set in rage.
“When we say that our God is a fortress,” the lady declared, “we proclaim His strength. Would a weak God be worshipful? Would a weak God be worthy of love?”
In spite of the tender emotions he was experiencing—the selfpity, the loneliness, the disappointment—Browne found himself compelled to admit that a weak God would not be worthy of love. As for the English lady, she had no doubts whatsoever.
“Certainly not!” she declared vigorously. “The weakness of a little child is moving,” the lady said. “We have all seen sick, unhappy children. There are millions of them today. We pity them. We help them. This does not mean that we are worshipers of weakness. Almighty God is our all-eternal father, the Lord of Hosts and stronger than the strong. Almighty God makes provision for the weak in His mercy,” the lady went on, “as provision was made for Esau. But his weakness and heedlessness were not blessed. They were forgiven but not forgotten. There was no covenant with Esau.
“Doesn’t all of nature proclaim the great strength of God? Can we not see the strong plants forcing their way through the earth? Can we not see our strong cattle thriving and providing for us? Don’t we rejoice in the strength of our
young men? Whom would listeners prefer for a son? Esau? Or Jacob?”
Browne considered his daughter, the only child close to his heart. She was without guile. There were many things he wanted to explain to her.
“I think they should prefer Jacob,” the lady declared. “Just as Rebekah did. In preferring Jacob, Rebekah anticipated God’s will. She was its instrument.”
Browne pondered the admission into which he had just heard the Christians trick themselves. They were talking to Africa, engaging primary process. You had to come a long way, he thought, to the margins of the world, to get the message straight. Of course, the woman was absolutely right.
“When God had made His covenant with Jacob, Jacob was raised up into Israel,” the lady concluded. “It is easy for God to raise man to His purposes when that is His almighty will.” During the white night, the glitter of distant ice beguiled his mind’s eye and denied him sleep. Around one in the morning, he started up the engine to charge his batteries and found one of the starboard fuel tanks contaminated with algae. His other tanks, it turned out, were fine but the injectors were glutted now with an animal-vegetable-mineral jelly that took him hours to clear away. Eventually, he was able to hook up and charge.
Wiping the scum off his hands, Browne considered God’s will, how hard it was. Toward morning, he climbed into his bunk. For a long time he lay awake. His mind was racing and it struck him suddenly that there might be some form of false thought, notions that had their origin outside the brain and even outside ordinary reality. He went to sleep trying to work it out.
Sleeping at last, he dreamed. In the dream, he was swimming with difficulty, his chin raised awkwardly for breath. In reality, Browne was a strong and skilled swimmer. There was turmoil in the water behind him and he was paddling away from it. There was a gray sky and an angry voice. Browne knew that his father was behind him, drunk and enraged. It was some kind of swimming lesson. He woke up breathless and terrified.