by Robert Stone
“Well you’re right,” she said. The dreadful night before his departure came back to her. He would not have gone if she had only spoken up. “It’s more than I did.”
They stood in silence for a moment.
“Sorry.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” she said. “I know how cruel you can be. That’s why I can’t let you go ahead.”
“I suppose,” he said, “I suppose I have to infer from this conversation that things are over between us.”
She looked away.
“Sorry to hear it,” Strickland said. “But that’s life, right?” He looked out over the tin roofs toward the mangrove banks of the river. “So I won’t say anything about what you might owe me.” He walked over to where she stood and put his palms together.
“Let me explain something to you, Anne. It may look to you as though Owen is a figure of contempt. You may think that the world will despise his memory and that my film will somehow further that.” He shook his head and showed her his bleak smile. “You’re so wrong! Can’t you understand? What he did—it’s what everybody does.”
She looked at the ceiling and folded her arms. “No, I can’t understand, Ron. I can’t follow your reasoning. I never could.”
“Everybody trims, Anne. Everybody fakes it. Of course they do. We all try for the reach. Believe me, I’ve been putting the movers and doers on film all my life. They’re all fakes, one way or another. It’s the c . . .” He fought for the word. “Condition.” Strickland grew encouraged from her look.
“In a way he was a true hero, Anne. Not as some hyped-up overachiever but as an ordinary man. He reduced his problems with life to that diagram—the sky, the ocean. For Christ’s sake, don’t you see it?”
“It was a simple lie!” she shouted. “He would have lied to us.”
“I have a feeling you’re wrong,” Strickland said. “I think he would have told you everything.”
“I wouldn’t have accepted it,” she said. “I wouldn’t!”
“My dear Anne. Of course you would have. You would have forgiven him.”
“Do you really have so high an opinion of him now?” she asked coldly. “You didn’t used to.”
“I don’t have to see you go back to him now,” Strickland said, “so I’m on the level.”
She bit her lip and looked away. Strickland sat down on the bed and watched her.
“You know, his problem was really his honesty.” He shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “Some men would have faked it and spent the rest of their lives laughing. Not our Mr. Browne.”
He watched her for a moment, then shrugged.
“You should be proud of him. He wasn’t a great sailor. But he was an honest man in the end. Annie,” he asked, facing her opaque scrutiny, “are you hearing me at all?”
“Yes,” she said, “I hear you.”
“I’ll tell you something else, my love. My former love, in your case, although not in mine. I really am an artist. I mean to the extent that it means anything, if it means anything. I do try.”
“I suppose you do,” she said.
“This I swear to you, Anne.” Standing up, he raised his right hand. “Any audience that sees my film will understand what I’ve said. If you will let me work. If you will let me tell the story, I will compel them to understand. Now do you comprehend what I’m telling you?”
“Sure,” Anne said. “I get it. The square-up.”
66
THAT NIGHT she slept on sedatives, awakening to her grief and crashing rain. It took her nearly an hour to notice that the old-fashioned, legal-size manila envelope that contained the log sheets was missing. Before calling anyone, she sat trying to imagine what had happened.
Strickland had a key to her room. The sliding bolt on the lock had sheared in half and could be opened by anyone with a key. She called Collins, the lawyer, and Duffy. As they sat in her room pondering what next to do, the town’s electricity failed again, putting the air conditioning and the lights out of commission. Duffy opened the shutters.
“Some goddam nerve,” he was saying.
Anne paced the floor.
“I can’t believe he did it,” she told them.
Later the hotel desk called to say that an envelope had been left for her. The envelope contained the logs, with a note from Strickland. She told Collins immediately, before reading the note.
“Anne,” it said, “I have a responsibility to Owen, to myself, to all the other people in the world—even to you and Maggie. This is one you ought not to win. Love R.”
She sat and reread it, blushing with rage. He had copied the logs in the hotel office. Later Collins determined that he had gone to the marina and taken all the exposed film he could find from the boat. Then he had flown to Salvador, Miami and home.
“That no-good son of a gun,” Duffy said.
“Of course,” Collins told them, “it was his film. He provided it to Mr. Browne.”
“It belonged to me,” she insisted. “To us. We could have gotten the Brazilians to hold it.”
“Ma’am,” Collins said, “I’d say he got the jump on us.”
That afternoon she engaged one of the taxis in front of the hotel to take her to the marina where the boat was being held. On the drive they passed a burning cane field and Indian cattle grazing under swarms of flies among ruined vines. The earth was blood red, the vegetation fleshy. Everything was death and fecundity. The taxi’s radio played softly insinuating music.
A black Brazilian sailor in whites and spats patrolled the gate of the marina, carrying a carbine. He swung the metal barrier aside and motioned the taxi through unchallenged. They followed a winding asphalted road that led down to the water through groves of sea grape and coconut palms. Where it ended, two long docks stretched into the bay, lined with the pleasure boats of the rich. The air carried a scent of teak and suntan oil, but the day was stormy and there was no one in sight. Palm fronds tossed uneasily. The bare rigging of the moored boats whistled and jingled in the wind. She had the driver wait.
Nona was off by herself, moored by the harbormaster’s cabana at the north end of the marina. The sight of her caused Anne a swelling of grief because for a moment she was sure she would see Owen aboard. The boat’s contours suggested his presence.
Drawing nearer, she saw that the mast was sagging badly. A litter of turnbuckles and wire lay across the cabintop. The sails hung slack and unsecured. She tossed her shoes on the dock and stepped aboard over the bow rail. The warm fiberglass deck underfoot increased her sense of moving in his traces.
She ran her hand along the salted surface of the mast, then leaned on a stay and looked out toward the open sea. The water, light green under a heavy gray hot sky, was flecked with dirty whitecaps. For a while, at first, she had indulged an unlikely hope that, having fallen overboard in some unsound mental state, he might be rescued. Now, in sight of this feverish green ocean, she felt certain he was dead. Months of solitude had impressed his living presence on the boat. That was what she had been feeling.
She paused for a moment on deck and then went down into the main cabin. It seemed to her that the interior still held a sullen male smell that suggested violence. She felt it was more than just imagination. She found the innumerable fiberglass patches around the mast step and the splintered bulkheads.
On the flight back to New York, she had nothing to drink but cried unashamedly. The other passengers were mainly Brazilians on their way to Miami. The Brazilians were young, chic and good-humored; many of them appeared to be gay men. A middle-aged lady seated across the aisle from Anne watched her cry, approvingly. Back home, sitting alone in her living room in Connecticut, Anne decided to get some advice regarding Strickland and the film in his possession. That night she called her father.
67
“So,” Pamela said, “it turned out really interesting. They were like doomed.”
“They put it all in one boat,” Strickland agreed.
He was just back from Brazil,
having spent a night in Miami en route. The two of them lounged side by side across the great bed, which was covered in a quilt and piled with notebooks. It was an hour or so before dawn and they had both been drinking. “And you like found love.”
He looked at her in dull exasperation.
“I bet you’re not so cynical now,” Pamela said, “about love and all.”
“It definitely makes the world go round.”
“But it’s all over, right?”
“All over.”
“She hates you, I bet. I bet she hates herself too."
“No doubt,” he said.
“But you’re sitting pretty. You have like this superb movie.”
“Not yet,” said Strickland.
“I bet it will be so good.”
“The potential is there. There’s very little on the stuff he shot out on the ocean. The best stuff is him. And the logs.”
“Hey, you can do it, Ron!” said Pamela.
“The logs are astonishing,” Strickland mused. “I have to find a way to get them in. I mean, he quoted Melville. ‘Be true to the dreams of your youth.’ He wrote that in.”
“Wow,” she said. “The dreams of your youth?”
“Melville!” Strickland exclaimed. “Moby fucking Dick." “Yipes.”
“It’s all there,” Strickland said. “I think. But I don’t know if I can pull it off.”
He slept briefly, then got up to run the tape again. The blue of the ocean was marvelous. The Owen Browne who appeared on the monitor was a different entity from the tame Connecticut citizen who had set out from South Street. The man on the monitor had blazing eyes and a lupine grin. At first Strickland thought it might actually be another person. The quality of the sound was poor and he could hardly understand a word of Browne’s occasional monologues. What little he could make out led him to conclude that Browne had been speculating on weighty matters. The Big Picture.
He began to think about which section of the logs to match with which footage. This would entail a limited degree of deception, since the association between the words and pictures would be arbitrary and imposed from without. It would be in a good cause. While he was deliberating the phone rang. Freya Blume was on the line.
“You may have some legal problems,” she told him. “Widow Browne is claiming the tapes as her property. I think she’s going to sue you.”
“She’s out of her mind. I mean she’s actually gone bonkers. Maybe I can still talk her around.”
“Better watch it.”
Freya had seen difficult times, to say the least, and Strickland was inclined to trust her instinct for trouble.
“Coming into Manhattan?”
“Yes, this afternoon,” she said.
“Come for dinner. I’m going to make duplicate tapes. I can do it on my television. I’ll give you a set.”
It occurred to him then that he ought to make duplicates of his copy of Browne’s log books. The security of his building was generally good. Nevertheless.
He took the logs and set out for the nearest copy shop, which was at Forty-seventh and Eighth. When the logs were copied he stopped at a grocery to buy penne and mozzarella for dinner with Freya. He was thinking of penne primavera.
Walking west again, he thought he might as well put the duplicates in his storage locker and get it over with. He walked as far as the river.
In the block between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues, a stretch limousine went past him at high speed and someone in the limo seemed to whistle at him. It was a peculiar New York moment. When he got down to the storage building beside his garage on Twelfth Avenue, two young men were engaged in a shoving match.
“You guinea prick, ya!” one of the young men said.
“You no-good Irish asshole,” replied the other.
They were in his way. Both men were smiling foolishly as they quarreled and seemed to have been drinking. Strickland steered a wide course around them, entering the building through the garage entrance. The gasoline smell of the first level of cars brought back to him some childish recollection. He tried to bring it up to consciousness. Long-finned, chrome beauties lined up in a carnival parking lot somewhere. Some field on the edge of a smoky copper town out west on a muddy spring night. A film he had never made, never would.
A middle-aged security guard with a sick pale face and long oily hair stood by the steel door that connected the garage to the storage rooms. The guard simply walked away as Strickland approached the door. It was unlocked. There was no one at the lobby desk to sign in with.
The light in the elevator in which he rode to the next level was defective and the space was lit only by its red emergency sign. The door was slow to open. He got out into the narrow corridor short of breath. Banks of storage lockers stretched to within a few feet of the spongy cement ceiling. There were flaking sprinklers overhead and bare-bulbed lights in wire housings. It was impossible to walk facing forward; he had to ease sideways, clutching the envelopes that contained the logs, to avoid the filthy locker doors. Passing down the first corridor, he felt irritated and depressed, then increasingly anxious. It occurred to him that the logs contained the essence of things. Behind him in the cement room, the old elevator rattled into action. At the first turn of the tier he stopped and looked both ways down the silent rows. The left-hand corridor ended at a blank brick wall. The aluminum sign indicating section numbers was missing and for a moment he could not remember which way to turn. The elevator door rang in the distance. People came out of it. He was momentarily relieved.
Strickland shambled toward his storage locker like a child lost among the attractions. A great sadness had settled on him. It had to do with the woman and the film; he understood that much. Stress and the pains of love. It would be necessary not to drink too much, to exercise and concentrate the empty hours in work. The work would have to make up for a great deal. In his anxiety, he clutched the logs, together with the cheese and pasta, close to his body. A ghostly telephone rang somewhere in the building.
For a moment, Strickland paused in his passage. Regret and longing ached in his throat. They did not suit him. Apparently, he thought, it would be worse than he could ever have imagined. Never had he contrived so strenuously to impress anyone, to beguile and entertain. Certainly he had never sought to be understood before. Quite the opposite. Now, having had her beside him, a companion, bending to his wit and lust and will, he could not forget what it was like. For the first time in his solitary life, Strickland felt himself alone.
“Dumb bitch,” he muttered softly. Immediately he was aware of other voices on the same floor. They seemed to converse in malignant whispers.
At the river end of the building, the storage spaces were larger, divided into sections by metal walls that were scratched with graffiti. Each section was a few feet off the main corridor, approached through a tiny three-sided room. The spaces were protected by a single heavy metal door secured with a combination lock. Strickland hurried on, feeling vaguely frightened and not altogether well. It occurred to him that the security provided was inadequate. When he got the logs out, he decided, he would go to a bank and rent a safe-deposit box. He had never stored anything so at risk before. The distant telephone stopped ringing.
Finding his cubicle, he stood just outside it without switching on the light. The logs were clutched under one arm, the groceries under another. Two men were coming down the corridor; one of them was softly whistling a one-note ditty between his teeth. Strickland experienced an impulse toward full flight. He stayed where he was.
The first thing Strickland noticed about the two men who came up to him was the smell of alcohol on their breath. Even before one reached up and switched on the cubicle light, he knew they were the pair who had been shoving each other out on Twelfth Avenue.
One of the men had thick black hair, brush cut with a lock down the back. Although Strickland had no way of knowing it, the man was called Donny Shacks for his gallantry with the ladies. The second man was fair; confronted wi
th his long lashes and huge irises, Strickland was reminded of his own phrase: “the eyes of a poet.” The poetically-eyed young man was called Forky Enright, from a nasty incident at a New Jersey picnic. They were with an out-of-town local.
“Open it, you fuck,” Donny Shacks said to Strickland. Forky seized the logs from under his arm.
“You drunken moron, give me those!” Strickland shouted.
“Open it,” Donny Shacks repeated.
Strickland bent to open his locker. It was empty. He straightened up again. He was angry and alarmed.
“Those aren’t worth anything!” he explained. Forky smiled and began to sing. Donny Shacks looked up and down the corridor.
“Ireland was Ireland before Italy got its name,” Forky sang plaintively. “Ireland is Ireland and Ireland it remains!”
Strickland stared wide-eyed at the minstrel, who sang louder still.
“We’re all Roman Catholics! We all go to Mass!
And all you guinea bastards can kiss my Irish ass!”
Donny Shacks reached up and switched out the light.
“Help!” Strickland shouted, without much conviction. “I’ll call the p . . p . . p—” He failed to get the word out.
One of them punched him in the face. Strickland flung himself forward in a rage. He had been raised by a woman of genteel pretensions, and violence, although he had experienced a fair amount of it, always opened new and terrifying doors in his psyche. He was resolved to fight for the logs. Only at the last minute did he see the shadow of the implement coming at him. Just in time, he raised his clenched, embattled fists in a defensive posture and felt half a dozen of his knuckles shatter like Christmas ornaments under the blow. It was a baseball bat, hence the land from which no film maker returned. He dived and covered up and took one bad blow at the back of his ribs and a lesser but painful blow across the spine. Most of the others were glancing, aimed generally at his legs, because Forky was quite drunk and out of breath. Donny Shacks had broken Strickland’s nose with the first punch.
“P-p-p-p-p . . . pop? P-p-p-p . . . poop?” Forky stood over him in the darkness, leaning on the bat, sputtering like a half-wit. “You better not say cops, you fuck. You was gonna say police? You better not, you fuck, you.”