by Robert Stone
“But the ship was now in the midst of the sea,” the lady said breathlessly, “tossed with waves, for the wind was contrary.”
He imagined himself listening with his wife. They would laugh together.
“And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.”
“Fantastic!” Browne said. There, complete with special effects, with tame whistles and a pussycat’s roar so unlike the thing itself, mighty J.C. went strolling on the briny—the hoariest, silliest miracle of all.
“They were troubled,” the lady declared.
Browne spilled a little broth in his high spirits.
“They cried out for fear,” she said.
Browne did a silent mouthing imitation of the disciples crying out for fear.
“But,” the lady continued, “straightaway Jesus spake unto them, saying—” Here the lady’s voice was interrupted by that of an actor. His was the North American voice—fruity, resonant and epicene—a beach-blond, Aryan, California Jesus.
“Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.”
Browne thought he would die of laughter at the pious, bogus style.
Peter, preternaturally amazed straight man, was portrayed by an African actor—perhaps, Browne thought, the same one who played Esau. Conned again.
“Lawd, if it be Thou, bid me come unto Dee on de water.” A moment of dialect comedy.
“And He said—” breathed the lady.
“Come!” intoned the self-satisfied American voice.
Browne laughed and laughed. But in the voice of the African actor, shouting next, “Lord save me!”—when the wind was boisterous and he was afraid and beginning to sink—there was something rather sad. Something honest and desperate. In his own boisterousness, Browne was inclined to foolish tears.
“Lord save me,” he repeated.
“O thou of little faith,” asked the cool J.C. reproachfully, “wherefore didst thou doubt?”
“And when they were come into the ship,” declared the Englishwoman, “the wind ceased.”
Afterward, Browne put his broth aside unfinished and lay in his bunk. Why on earth, he thought, broadcast such pointless, foolish, unconvincing stories over thousands of miles of empty sea? He found that he could not put the question out of his mind.
It was amusing to consider the personalities behind the voices. The English lady with the fussy, overpunctilious diction. Who was she, and what was her life? A smarmy American, an African, a complacent Torontonian. Alone with them on the ocean, Browne sometimes found it difficult to remember that they were not inventing the stories they enacted. He discovered at some point during the hours of darkness that he was still weeping. People were sentimental about religion.
Unable to sleep, he kept thinking about the story. Very sweet, he thought, but after a while he decided there was something sinister about filling the air with false promises. Homely as these little presentations were, a sly skill underlay them. People were vulnerable. In certain circumstances it was hard for the mind to resist examining them over and over.
Slavery, Browne thought—we are enslaved to these strange stories. Hidden voices, bought and paid for, endlessly repeated them. Out on the ocean you had no option but to listen and recognize and ponder as though you had the other half of the dollar bill. They kept making you recognize yourself on their terms. It kept a man from being free.
Concealment was a constant theme. Someone was always being played for a fool. The very process of telling the stories was a game of withholding. Every narrative was reversible and had its outer and its inner side. They were all palimpsests.
They start the stories for us, Browne thought, but we have always known the endings without knowing it. They lead us to water and they make us drink, if it really is water and not wine. Again and again these demands for blind trust. Jump, leap and He may or may not be there. And you—spread-eagled over the ocean—may or may not fall and sink when the wind is contrary. When the wind is boisterous and the sea so big and the boat so small. Endless games. Deception without end, infinity to one, all against all. And on the wind, amplified through the stratosphere, stories to give it form. To keep us absolutely fast in the ice and darkness. Stories like false dawns. But ice, darkness, boisterous winds, and false dawns were all true things that had to be lived out.
If we didn’t have the other half of the bill, Browne thought, if we didn’t know the end of the stories, we might actually begin to understand. The stories only reinforced our ignorance.
Then suddenly Browne thought: Christ (walking on the water!), what about the stormy petrel? Because in Joshua Slocum, circumnavigator and master of hallucination, a connection was made between the stormy petrel and the story he had just heard. Quickly, but with all the calm he could muster, he sought among his books until he had found both his King James Bible and his copy of Commodore Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World. He remembered quite clearly that at some point old Slocum had traced the origin of the petrel’s name to the same lame miracle, Simon Pedro Pescador shuffling off across the deep. In his impatience, Browne could not find the reference in Slocum, although he was sure it was there.
Of course, he had seeen a petrel that morning. Connections were always being invited. Also he remembered the petrel he had seen in the doldrums. They lived so impossibly far from every appearance of hope, on Providence itself, it seemed. Mother Carey’s chickens, a sailor had to feel for them. Scattered broadcast from her apron was the grace, the corn, littering the remotest latitudes.
If I were to entertain for the moment, Browne thought, a notion of some strange causality that might apply only on the ocean—why a petrel? Why that morning?
He put the books aside and lay back. Why should there be petrels at all, he thought, if not for some purpose? What was the need? What message in all those wings? Why petrels? They weren’t beautiful. To occupy the emptiness? On behalf of what? Because we’re out there, for us? For me?
The tape recorder clicked off. He started rewinding it to listen but at the last moment became afraid of what he might hear.
51
STRICKLAND sat watching his Central American documentary in a studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vultures were on the screen. Startled, they scattered from the corpse of a burro. The tracery of their plumage as they rose and their spread wings made the composition suggest the blossoming of some fatal flower.
Good, thought Strickland. He glanced secretly through the darkness at Clive Anayagam, the PBS producer who had expressed interest in the film. Anayagam, a rotund south Indian, fidgeted in his seat and blew into his fist. One seat away, Anayagam’s assistant Mary Melish watched in sober silence through her aviator specs.
To Strickland’s intense annoyance, Anayagam laughed his way through most of the film. The figure of Mary Melish seemed to exude a quiet satisfaction that Strickland imagined must bode badly for him. He was suddenly struck with the notion that his film had failed utterly in all that it set out to do. For a moment he could not even concentrate on what that had been.
When the lights were on, Anayagam turned to him and giggled. “Very good. Very subtle. Un-American.”
“Are you sure that’s good?” Strickland asked politely.
“Yes, it’s good, good,” the producer said briskly. Anayagam wore a checkered shirt and knit tie. He had white hair and eyebrows, and full cheeks. These, together with his manner, gave him the appearance of an English country squire—less the windburn and whiskey coloring. He looked at Strickland, twinkling mischief. “Are you sincere, I wonder?”
“I don’t know what you mean by sincere,” Strickland said. “The film reflects the reality of the situation there.”
“Truth is beauty,” Anayagam said. “Don’t you think?” He turned toward Ms. Melish and Strickland half expected him to wink at her. “In film I believe that truth is beauty,” Anayagam told him.
“Seems reasonable,” Strickland said.
“You have a penetrating vision,” Anayagam
said. “You’re a veritable fucker.”
“Thanks,” Strickland said.
“You know what the law of rape says?” Anayagam asked playfully. He addressed the question first to Ms. Melish and then to Strickland. “It says that penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.”
“Is that right?” Strickland asked.
“Penetration,” Anayagam repeated, “however slight.”
They went out of the screening room to the adjoining corridor. Chairs with red leatherette cushions and tubular arms and legs were lined against the purple wall. A framed San Francisco Mime Troupe poster hung opposite them.
“The Grecian urn in Keats’s poem depicts a rape,” said Anayagam in a droll manner. “Yet we say: Truth is beauty. And of course it’s true.”
Strickland courteously showed him a smile.
“Some of your subjects, Mr. Strickland, may feel violated when they see your film.”
“Maybe. But they’ll recognize themselves.”
“You’re political, Mr. Strickland. That’s against the temper of the times.”
Strickland began to stammer. “It f. . falls where it falls in my shows.”
“Shows? Is that what they are?”
“That’s right,” Strickland said.
“You’re a showman?”
“Yes,” he said.
Anayagam chuckled. Everything amused him. “A dangerous sort of entertainment, eh?”
“That’s the best kind,” Strickland said.
When Anayagam withdrew, he was left alone with Mary Melish. “He really likes it,” she said.
Strickland studied her briefly. She was a tall handsome woman with sharp blue eyes and a long jaw.
“Does he? Will I get paid?”
“I’m sure you will, Ronald. What do you want, praise? Are you insecure or something?”
He had a room at the Sonesta, overlooking the Charles and the Boston skyline. It was very late when he came in. Ray’s They Live by Night was on WGBH and he watched it with the sound off. Frame for frame, he decided, it was the best film in the world.
When the movie was over, he lay back on the bed in the flickering light of some nature short and thought about his own work. No one, he thought, could ever accuse him of trimming. He had never changed a frame to suit a soul. Although gold was honorable he had never whored after money or even purchased cheap recognition. He had always declined to sentimentalize but it did not seem to him that his work was without feeling. People who wrote about his work, if they understood it, assumed the facetious and knowing manner of the insulted.
He thought of himself sitting in the dark waiting for the fat man’s approval and was ashamed. But there was no other way to do it. In spite of his pride he had accepted the attendant humiliations.
The trouble was, Strickland decided, that his work was too much like things. People required their illusions. They wanted to be inspired and he had nothing for them. He had only the news they wanted not to hear. Demystified, things were disappointing.
On the other hand, he thought, perhaps that was not the trouble. Perhaps the trouble was that things had some aspect he could not perceive. Sometimes he suspected they must. Sometimes he almost hoped for it. The other aspect of things might be routinely visible to the average asshole in the street, a personage upon whose inner life Strickland had long speculated. Then his own insight might be the result of some minor mutation, like the ability of the color-blind person to see through camouflage. It might be that he perceived in relief and reversed all signifiers. Thus his impatience and his penetration and readiness to fuck, all the consequence of what he failed to see. A great many careers were based on misperception. Most people had no idea what they were looking at and would pay any fool to tell them.
Above all, he thought, you had to stay in charge and ensure that your definitions prevailed. His unquiet mind and thick tongue had taught him the arts of silence. Untended silence was anarchy, potentially anyone’s, an unacceptable free-for-all. He knew how to work the silences, the white noise and dark frames. Anyway, he thought, vissi d’arte.
In spite of philosophy, Strickland’s doubts frightened him. It was his job to look clearly into the dark. But if you look into darkness long enough, he wondered, will it not look back into you? If his nerve failed him in the dark, he was sure to fall. He imagined an impossible circumstance, that he had long ago gone blind. Imagining his own blindness, he heard the telephone. Anne was on the line.
“I thought you’d be awake,” she said.
“I was.”
“Did you hear about the satellite?”
“What satellite?” he asked. She sounded cheerful enough.
“The GPS—global position system. The monitor in Switzerland was bombed.”
“Bombed?”
“By Armenians, I think. Or Kurds. All the boats in the Eglantine are off the screen. So we don’t really know where anyone is.”
“Permanently?”
“I can’t quite make it out. I think temporarily. The Coast Guard guys at Avery Point say it could be up to a week.”
“But,” Strickland said, “it doesn’t make any difference, does it?”
She was silent for a moment. “Not really.”
“Everyone’s all right, yes? Owen’s all right?”
“Yes,” she said. “As far as we know, everyone’s all right. Owen’s out of radio contact. Generator trouble.”
“Are you worried?”
“No,” she said.
“Well, I’m coming down,” he said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“It’s O.K.,” she said. “I just wanted to get in touch or something. With you.”
“I’m on my way.”
“But I’m home.”
“On my way,” Strickland said.
At Logan he got a commuter flight to New Haven and took a cab from there.
She was bathed and dressed when he arrived. She still smelled of soap. They sat in her downstairs study and she got them both coffee as though it were a polite call.
“It’s not that I’m worried,” she said guiltily. “I happened to be thinking about you.”
Strickland put his cup and saucer aside, took Anne’s from her hand and led her up to the bedroom. She came along smiling gravely.
“What are you doing?” she asked, teasing him.
They made love and he went to sleep. Awakening to the quilts and paisley and suburban birdsongs, he had no idea where he was. She came in and sat down on the bed beside him.
“Glad you came,” she said. He was gratified by her sweet spacey smile. After a moment he realized that she had taken a drink.
“Are you O.K.?”
She smiled the wider. “I’m tense.”
“You said it was all O.K.”
“Yes,” she said, holding the smile. “I’m not worried about Owen. I’m sure he’s fine. I’m just tense.”
“O.K.,” he said. He kept an eye on her as she walked to the window. “I just hope he’s filming. Owen, I mean.”
She looked briefly frightened. “I’m sure he’s doing what you wanted him to. He’s a neat photographer.”
Strickland sat up, wondering if she was about to cry for her husband on the sea.
“If you’re not worried,” he asked, “why are you tense?”
There were no tears. She seemed in control.
“I must be feeling guilty,” she said. “That must be it.”
“I see.”
“You know,” she said, “I have to ask myself if I love him.”
“How do you have to answer yourself?”
“Well, I do,” she said matter-of-factly. “Of course I do.”
Strickland edged up against the sunny wall and put a pillow behind his back.
“I really don’t know what that means.”
“You don’t know what love is?”
“The word covers such a range of behavior. I really don’t. I mean,” he added, “it’s an alibi.” He shrugged.
“Some people,” Strickland said, “might call that a codependency problem.”
She laughed. He got up still naked and brought her beside him on the bed. He saw her frown, thinking of the unguarded window.
“Maybe it is. Are you trying to help me or something?”
“You’ve been out of the fucking world,” Strickland said. “You’ve been playing household nun for that guy.”
She pulled away from him and stood up.
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Don’t get mad,” Strickland said. “I’m jealous. I’m entitled.”
“What do you mean, household nun?”
“Ah,” Strickland said, “the two of you—you’ve been hiding from life, for Christ’s sake. In your pretend world. Running off to that island.”
“We got by.”
“You got by like a couple of fucking children. Juvenilizing your life. The guy was doing a number on you, understand?”
“No,” she said.
“I say yes,” Strickland shouted. Seeing her stare at him, he spoke more coolly. “You’re a fantastic woman. You’re too good for him. He’s this dorky fucking citizen, for Christ’s sake. A stiff. A stuffed shirt.”
“I don’t want to hear that,” she said. “I love him.”
“Well,” he said, “that is what I don’t want to hear.”
She sat down on the bed and looked at him sadly.
“I have feelings,” Strickland said. “I’m an artist, right? Anyway, I make movies.”
“But I do love him,” she said.
“If you’re going to use that kind of diction,” Strickland said, “I can’t help you.”
“Twenty years is a long time, Ron.”
“Sure,” he said. He shook his head in disgust. “For God’s sake. He kept you out of circulation. Exploited you. You’ve been married twenty years because you don’t know anything about the opposite sex. Neither of you. And because you don’t know anything about the opposite sex you’ve stayed married.”
“I wish,” Anne said, “I knew as little about it as you do.” She went out and downstairs and he heard her pouring a drink. She came back with a glass of wine.