by David Vann
I had also wanted to escape cheap apartments. They had always depressed me. But now even this would be out of my reach, because I wouldn’t be able to pass a credit check, and neither would Nancy. I would have to live with Nancy at her parents’ house for now, and I didn’t know when that would end.
But there was something more, some general, hollow ache I couldn’t name. I just felt lost. Everything had been decimated, mostly through my own blind workings but also by what felt like a powerful fate—hubris, perhaps—a force swelling like an enormous wave and crashing upon me, making me see the world would not be shaped by my will. I had run and run and escaped nothing. And what had happened could not be undone. Who I had been before could never be returned to me. The only word I could think of was ruin.
And most likely it would get worse. The insurance could refuse to pay because I had moved the boat from a harbor in St. Croix toward the British Virgin Islands in my attempt to find repair. And my lenders might sue. They could obtain judgements against me and attach my wages if I found a job.
I had already been threatened by the broker who had booked five charters for us and helped us in so many ways. He wanted his broker’s commissions on the four cancelled charters. He said he had earned these commissions, and it’s true he had worked hard for them. But he wanted to put a lien on my insurance policy. This would only delay and complicate my already difficult claim.
“These clients will want their money back, David. How are they going to be paid?”
He had their money in a trust account, which he’d have to simply return to them, so he was really talking about his commissions. I had to take a hard line. I told him the insurance would not pay for loss of business, especially a third party’s loss of business.
“So you’re telling me to stuff it. After all I’ve done for you.”
“No, I’m just saying the boat sank, I have no money and no job, and the insurance will not cover your commission.”
“After all I’ve done for you. I am ashamed of David Vann. I am ashamed of the day I first heard the name David Vann.”
“Did you hear that we lost our boat?” I asked.
“I am ashamed of the name David Vann. I am going to have to put my lawyer on you.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Your contract says right in it that you give up the right to sue under the contract.”
“Oh, so that’s how it is. After all I’ve done for you. I am ashamed of the name David Vann.”
MY FATHER KILLED himself in his new, unfurnished house in Fairbanks, Alaska, alone and suffering. It may have been a beautiful scene outside, the long stands of paper birch etched in moonlight or even the green, wavering bands of northern lights since it was winter. But what he did was bitter and small and left us with two mysteries.
One is the mystery of his life and suicide, sealed forever. The other, abiding in each of us who loved him, is the impossibility of knowing or living the life we would have had without his suicide. Would I have thrown away my academic career—and, for a time, my writing—for boats and the sea if my father had not killed himself? Have I built boats out of love or obedience? The questions are impossible to answer. My own reasons are an opaque sea, my own dreams and desires things I can never fully know. I can only hope that my entire life hasn’t been a plaything of his abrupt end.
In any case, like my father I’ve built my life around boats, and a boat builder is part of who I’ve become. Two years after the sinking, I’ve gone back into business with new partners and am nearing completion of a ninety-foot aluminum sailing catamaran, Paradiso. I’ve designed every part of Paradiso, every curve and line, and I’ve been at the warehouse every day to build it. All of that aluminum, so similar to watching my father’s boat being built.
A year ago, even before we had welded the first plates, I could see it three-dimensionally in my head, from any vantage, from within any stateroom. Its flybridge, open to the sun and stars, has teak deck and more than two hundred square feet of cushions. This is the excitement for me, the creation of something from nothing, the pre-existence of form, and the constant modification, also, the reshaping every day as I refine the design. Even metal is as malleable as a manuscript.
The boat is unique. It will be the largest sailing catamaran based in the Virgin Islands, and it is one of the largest ever built in the United States. Inspected and certified by the Coast Guard, it far exceeds even their regulations, with each hull divided into nine separate watertight compartments. There have been many hassles during construction, and no doubt these will continue, but in three weeks we will launch, and a week later I will sail with Nancy and my uncle and friends from San Francisco to Panama and then to the Virgin Islands on a ship of my own creation, a beautiful bird with wings.
A life can be like a work of art, constantly melted away and reshaped. The imagining and remaking is itself a form of satisfaction, especially when I’m dreaming together with Nancy. And this is what I wish my father had known. Many of his dreams ended in ruin, but his mistake was in not waiting for the new dreams to arrive, and in not realizing that those dreams were to be shared. He could have been nearly anything, his life reshapeable in thousands of ways, none of which he, or those of us who still love him, will ever know.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank all those who were so generous to me, as described in these pages, and I’d like to apologize to all I failed.