by Robert Stone
“Yes, me too,” she said, “but I’m ending it anyway.”
“I can’t.”
Strickland looked as though he were on the edge of control. She began to feel oppressed by him.
“Can’t? Grow up.”
He began to stammer. She looked away.
“I’m willing to wait,” he said finally. “I will.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t. I won’t give you hope because there is none. I’m sure of that.”
“This whole grip-of-fate bullshit—it’s ridiculous.”
“Look,” she said, “I can handle him. I can handle life with him. You I can’t handle.”
“You put your finger on it!” he said. “That’s the bottom line. Now you got the idea!”
“Maybe so,” she said.
“Then don’t be suicidal.”
She stood in the middle of the living room, folded her arms and shook her head.
“You have only one crack at it, Anne. You have only one life.” She laughed. “Sure,” she said. “Life is sweet.”
He hit her across the face with the flat of his hand. He brought the hand up from his side and caught her across the cheekbone, snapping her head back. She backed away in astonishment.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He followed her into the downstairs bathroom and stood behind her as she looked in the mirror.
“I lost it,” he explained.
Anne examined her blazing cheek and felt along the left side of her upper lip.
“I guess it’s not serious,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“But I didn’t like it much,” she told him. “You better not do it again.”
They went back out to the living room. She looked at him and at the door.
“Well, I can’t put you on the road in your condition. You can stay in the guest room.”
“Come on,” he said. “I lost it for a minute.”
“I’m not receiving you tonight. Sorry.”
“All right,” he said. “O.K.”
“Funny thing,” Anne said. “I grew up with my old man and three brothers—the only girl. They were sort of basic guys. Nobody ever put a hand on me. I’ve spent twenty years married to an officer type and it would never occur to him to strike me. Nobody ever did. Not until I started hanging out with you sensitive artistic souls. Now I get clobbered.”
“We’re temperamental.”
“Really? Well, I’m not used to it. So don’t.”
“You know I love you. You know that, don’t you, babe.”
She hurried past him, then turned and pointed silently to the guest room. Upstairs in the bedroom, she locked the door and went into the medicine cabinet for her Xanax. With the tube in her hand she sat down on the bed and poured the tablets out on the spread. There were twenty-five. The last thing he had said sounded in her mind’s ear.
“I love you . . . You know that.”
Vain words, a sad little song. She put one pill aside and, one by one, replaced the rest in the tube.
63
ONE BRIGHT blue morning, Browne felt himself unable to pursue the fiction of lines. Ceaseless singularities had obviated all connections. For weeks he had been trying to organize reality into a series of angles. Alone, in hiding, he had the sense of constant scrutiny.
His actual location was north of Ascension Island. His official one was in the far Pacific. He had mastered the mathematics involved and filled every available space with calculations. The sunny, windy weather was fine for sailing; the mast held firm. Over the radio, Mad Max was trading coins in Morse. Max no longer responded to his call sign. Browne had frightened him away.
His nights still teemed with old voices; the crab woman’s was only one. He was incapable of sleep. Sometimes his father offered ironic English counsel:
“Give them every assurance, son. Deliver what you can. It’s the only way.”
It’s all up, Browne thought, all over with me. In spite of the bad boat, he had faced down every aspect of the ocean. They would have to give him credit for that. He had never stopped wanting to prevail and go home. It was only that he was tired of imaginary lines. The one abyss he could not cross was wider and deeper than he had imagined. Its horizon was not relative.
That morning he tossed his parallel rulers on the chart table and went on deck. The day was so brilliant that he could imagine making port: a white city. Its domes and tapered spires would be welcome after months of savage geometry, chopping the cup of sea and sky into imaginary angles. Of pretending to locate himself in space and time as, little by little, he was reduced in scale and duration, and singularity erased all reference points.
In the cathedral square, Browne thought prayerfully, he might kneel and walk on his knees across the cobblestones of the plaza and strike his brow against the lowest step of the temple until the blood flowed. Until sleep came, an end of calculation.
What’s this, Browne’s father said, religion? Unctuous religiosity in extremis? That’s for women, my son. For little Juanito, swart Maria and your lady mum.
In port, bougainvillea. Red tile roofs and mandolins. In the cool cathedral square he would offer his humiliations to the Holy Spirit. In the soft spring evening, watch and pray.
Everything is relative, Browne thought, but a joke’s a joke. Another man might have done it—have taken the prize and spent the rest of his life in secret laughter. God, he thought, it’s truth I love and always have. The truth’s my bride, my first and greatest love. What a misunderstanding it all had been. He could no more take a prize by subterfuge than he could sail to the white port city of his dreams.
So it had been in the war. Things had turned out strangely. The order of battle, the hamlet evaluation reports, the Rules of Engagement, were dreams. Truth had been a barely visible shimmer, a trick of the mind that confounded logic and caused words to cast odd shadows.
Browne experienced his reflections with welcome clarity. His state of mind seemed to mirror the weather. The sky was as clear as creation morning. The sea was true blue. He could not help but watch for petrels or pelicans. Nothing came.
He stood clutching the mast with one arm, facing the wholesome wind. He was thinking it would be wonderful to have back the man he had once been. The honest innocent drone who had never seen the blue forties or heard the crab songs. Unattainable. Then he reflected that the man he had once been had never been satisfactory. In any case it was too late. The lie had been told and sustained. It was horrible, Browne thought, to have to lie with complete precision. To employ the godly instruments of rectitude—compass, sextant, rule—in lying. It eroded the heart and soul.
He supposed there would always be something to conceal. It was a difficult situation for one so in love with the truth as he had become. He felt ready to do anything in order to be reconciled.
Mad Max was on the line. Browne knew his fist and listened in.
“REPEAT ZULU 1800 DESCRIPTION PLAYBOY CENTERFOLD AUGUST 1989 OVER.”
He thought of the boy’s darkness. The whole world in hiding.
There was a way to resolve the real and apparent aspects of things. Refusing the option, he put both arms around the mast and it swayed with his weight. So clumsy, while the world before him was perfect, absolutely in balance.
If he moved toward resolution, those few truths he had retained would be forever lost. Some of them were worthwhile. He had not been such a bad sailor after all. He had not given in to fear or storms; he had looked into the terrible light. The lie had been only a game. No one would ever know.
He had to wonder to whom the truth might matter. Anne and Margaret were the ones he loved most. It was a shame that they would never understand how it had all come out. Maggie was, down deep, a good and clever girl; she might live long, seeing the clouds, looking into the night sky. His regret for her was sweet and sunny, rose hip and honeysuckle, a broken promise on some summer down the road. Too bad, but the lie had broken the covenants. He had made himself unworthy of his own predicament and the truth was no longer h
is to convey. It had to be served alone. Single-handed, he thought, I’ll make myself an honest man.
Browne went below and from the cabin’s squalor retrieved the diver’s weight belt he had brought along. He had thought it a useless encumbrance. Now it would come in handy. He made a final entry in his log.
Then he went up and sat on the afterdeck and put on the belt. Pulling himself upright, he stood bent-backed along the rail and looked wide-eyed at the wake that trailed behind. All at once a surge of hope rose in his breast. He had learned so much. He felt filled with illumination. It seemed suddenly as though he might go home after all and tell the tale and take life as it was. He nearly unclipped the belt and let it fall. Living, he thought, affords the only truth there is.
But when he had taken only a single step toward the helm, he saw how false it felt. A single step was so charged with ambiguities. A single word, the smallest gesture, was a compromise. The thing itself, the pure reality, was always unavailable. Every act betrayed it. Every whimper, every fidget, every argument defamed the truth. He would never be satisfied. He would always be ashamed.
And jumping, stepping into space, he had to wonder if something might not save him. Somehow he had always believed that something would. He had never realized how much he had believed it. Be out there for me, he thought. Stay my fall.
Nothing did. He saw the wind-whipped surface of the water. He felt the warm surge of it around him. The sky overhead was flawless. Here, he thought, is deeper than Gennesaret.
He struggled to turn and raise his head and saw the rudder holding firm as the boat, imperfectly surviving, left him her wake to swallow. Then the ocean smothered him.
64
AT A leaded battlement window above the river, Thorne received the first news of Browne’s deception. Nona had been picked up derelict the week before. The man on the line was calling from Brazil.
“Are you sure of this?” Harry asked him.
The man assured him that the evidence lent itself to no other interpretation. Browne had been preparing two logs—one genuine, one spurious. He had never gotten much beyond the Cape of Good Hope. In the end he seemed to have gone over the side. His late entries were altogether irrational.
“As of now,” Harry asked, “who knows this?”
The man was a Miami admiralty lawyer named Collins, a consultant to the marine insurance business.
“As of now,” Collins said, “you, me, Duffy and the lady. Also her friend. The guy that’s making the movie.”
“Strickland. He’s there?”
“At the same hotel.”
Thorne was silent for a moment. “What about the Greek?” Floating abandoned, Nona had been taken aboard by a Panamanian freighter called the Eigea. Captain Diamantopoulas of the Eigea had examined the logs and called Duffy, whose telephone number appeared in the margins.
“We don’t know what he knows. Obviously he reads English. Anyway, his ship’s at sea. En route to La Guaíra.”
“Is your phone secure?”
“Negative.”
“Fucking mess,” said Harry sadly. “Tell Duffy to call me.”
In the small hours of the morning, Duffy called. He sounded less than sober.
“Sit on it,” Harry told him. “Understand?”
“Harry, what else would I do?”
“We have to do something about Strickland.”
“It’s up to her, Harry.”
“Quite right,” Harry said.
He had taken to spending some of his insomniac nights at Shadows. The place had grown on him. Through the heavy lancet window, half obscured by ivy, he could see the moonlight on the Hudson and the great brooding shape of Storm King Mountain against the luminous night sky. In one corner of the oak-paneled room stood his reading chair attended by a Tiffany lamp. His books lined the wall beside it. There was a fire in the grate. That evening he had been reading a history of the Venetian republic.
The ironies, Harry thought, might be satisfying had he been a bitter man. He tried not to be one. The last measure of Matty Hylan’s perfidy had come to light: banks purchased with junk bonds making loans secured by worthless boats. Cooked books, forged storage receipts. He himself had survived it all. Every division of the Hylan Corporation he directly controlled had weathered the crisis. No allegations of dishonesty had been proved against him. Sunday supplements and the slick yuppie press had run his most unflattering pictures, sinisterly lit from below. They had mocked his good causes, his cultural pretensions and his diction. Even his dead wife’s memory had amused them. In the end, they had proved nothing against him. His attorneys were reviewing areas of defamation.
The truth was they had wanted him dead. They had wanted him smashed to a pulp on the sidewalk like his old friend Sam, disgraced and out the window. They had wanted to jerk off and moralize over his corpse and turn his life’s work to laughter.
In the end, all his most jaundiced suspicions had been confirmed, all his trust confounded. False friends and Schadenfreude, cheerful lies and bad intentions had all been made plain. The time of reckoning was at hand, when the foxes would have their portion and the common laughers their reward. There was a last laugh available for him, if he wanted it.
But laughs were easily come by, Harry thought. What he had wanted for once was not to laugh. To be reduced to reverence, to be worthily impressed, to be edified even, by something human. And now this.
In the firelight of his riverine fortress, Harry shook his head over the Brownes. So elegant, so intelligent, and finally a pair of flakes. It had been naive of him to fall for the old white-shoe routine, but of course he had always been a sucker for it.
His lost regard for Anne embarrassed him. He could imagine her laughing at him. Indeed, considering her background, he could imagine the worst. He knew her father well. Hardly a surprise that Jack’s daughter turned out to be a superannuated, angel-eyed colleen with a round behind and heels to go with it. As disillusionments went, it was survivable.
Enough to make a just man fall back on religion, Thorne considered. His old friend Sam had been a scholar, betrayed by books, confused by explanations. Of course there was more to faith than commentary and explication.
Punishment had come to her. You had to wonder about the scene down in Brazil. The new widow, her husband dead and disgraced, her stuttering boyfriend, the clever prick. Some godforsaken equatorial port. What would he talk her into? He might have a promising film there if he could finance it.
Of course a film was not desirable. It reflected badly. Moreover she should realize that the relief fund he had established when Nona was found was no longer viable. No one wanted to contribute to the relicts of a chiseler. He might provide something for her himself, privately, if the film was dropped. If she had the self-respect to ease herself from sight. On the other hand, she might realize that, properly advised, she could do well from a film, if she was whore enough to profit from her own family’s humiliation. It remained to be seen.
The idea of putting something aside for her appealed to him. Lest they should dare imagine, he thought, that he, vain suitor of excellence, hoped to profit by their argosies, their fancy dancing. When the dawn colored the sky above the mountain, he got up and went to bed.
65
THE HOTEL stood beside a river called the Cachoeira; her window commanded the squalor of the port. Police klaxons, exhaust fumes and the fragrance of hibiscus drifted up from the streets.
“Don’t you see it?” Strickland demanded. He was drenched in sweat because there had been a power outage. Thunder sounded over the deep green peaks to the north. “It’s an incredible story!”
“What is that to me?” she asked. “What good is it to Maggie?”
“The story here is more important than a couple of people.”
“In your world maybe. Not where I live.”
“Look,” he insisted, “it’s a way of coming to terms with it.”
“I don’t want your advice on coming to terms.”
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��You talk as though it were none of my business.”
“It isn’t,” she said. “Not really. It’s not you going through it.” He stood in the open balcony doorway mopping his brow.
“I want to be here for you.”
She simply put up her hand and turned away, cutting off his words, blocking out the sight of him.
“You’re wrong,” he insisted softly. “You’ll regret it all your life if we don’t finish this.”
Clear-eyed, she looked out at the gray sky.
“My responsibility is to my daughter. It’s my job to protect her now.”
“It is not your responsibility to stage a cover-up. It’s not your responsibility to lie.”
“I did this to her,” Anne said. “I caused it all to be. I lost her her father, letting him go.”
“Anne, that’s utterly crazy.”
“He was sick at heart. I talked him into being a goddam hero instead of helping him cope. I played around.”
Strickland rolled his eyes heavenward and smote his brow.
“I think God punished me,” she said.
“What are you? Some shawlie in the hills of fucking Skibbereen? Get straight.”
“I can’t give her her father back,” Anne said. “But I can keep the world from making him a figure of contempt.”
“This is wrongheaded,” Strickland told her. “Look, the world will find out. You know it and I know it.” He smiled grimly. “I mean, it’s too good to conceal. A thing like this will surface.”
“I know how it would look in your hands.”
“You talk as though I were your enemy.”
“You were his enemy. Don’t say you weren’t.”
“I was in a state. Involving you.” He stood back and folded his arms as though surprised. “That’s true enough.”
“You mocked him. You encouraged him to try and explain his dreams.”
“I told him not to go,” Strickland said. It had just occurred to him. “I bet that’s more than you did.”
“Did you?”
“I did. In the boat at South Street. I got a feeling.”