by Norman Lock
“She moves like a logical argument from one shining term to the next, toward an ineluctable end,” said Juan Carlos, who was, during the space of that journey, changed, like someone in a spell.
He spent the time, which seemed unmeasurable, on deck, playing shuffleboard or shooting skeets, or inside the cabin, feeding Spanish coins into a slot machine or playing the piano. Astonished, I listened as he moved effortlessly from “Chopsticks” to Debussy’s “Poissons d’or”—this man who had been tone-deaf since birth. Finished, he stood for my ovation, which I gladly gave, while a señorita dressed pertly in a sailor’s blouse showered him with roses.
Wanting to be alone, I went outside and, sitting in a deck chair, watched the western ocean turning gold. It was then—I swear!—I saw Jim cradled by a golden wave, wreathed in a Stephen Foster song. His course, unaltered by the prevailing current, tended toward the place of his birth: Africa. He may have hoped to find his wife and children there. On the raft, in the shade of the lean-to, during intimate and earnest conversations with Henry Wilson, Jim might have heard of Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. I didn’t blame Jim for turning away from his countrymen; after all, he’d been enslaved and lynched by them. Seeing him now recalled me sharply to our common past: a shapelier time, a happier one for me, though not for him.
Thank you for this dream! I shouted in my mind, so as not to disturb Juan Carlos, who had gone below to the royal suite in order to savor his.
How marvelous it is sometimes to feel the minor agony of a broken heart! (I supposed this to be true, for I had yet to undergo love’s trials, however much I knew of its lunacy.)
Jim vanished into the east, where sky and water had turned dark after the departed sun. The moment when day’s effulgence suffers its eclipse is terrible! I was harrowed by a thought, perhaps because of it: What would become of Jim, or any other creature cursed with immortality, if the world were destroyed? Where all is naught, what space can an immortal occupy—what ground is left to stand on? A chilling thought made all the more so by another: Suppose Huck Finn is immortal, too, as experts in literary history have declared him? Does it matter I’ve left the role and changed my name to Albert Barthelemy?
You want to know where this is leading.
I may not have escaped Huckleberry Finn. You’ve heard of people unusually amenable to suggestion, who are regressed by hypnosis to other, earlier lives, as if the self were an archaeological record of personalities that disappeared without a trace until—by patience and exertion—they are, one by one, unearthed. Huck may be waiting underneath Albert Barthelemy for the final call to bring him, smartly, forward. Huck’s personality may be the stronger and, in the end, may have power to overthrow my own. Perhaps Huck can better endure eternity, or the grave. Should I send for a hypnotist to release him, the way devout Catholics do a priest to daub their brows with the olive oil of Extreme Unction? Ought I go into eternity as Albert Barthelemy—or will I stand a better chance as Huck, who was less fastidious and scrupulous than I have become at the close of my days? And what if there is a still deeper antecedent self beneath us both, whose name might be Mark Twain? Had I tried to outrun the past, and failed?
I woke, feeling anxious and afraid. The king seemed not to know me. At breakfast, he was curt and, when I called him Juan, rebuked me for an insolent disregard of etiquette. After his toast had been reduced to crumbs and his coffee to its lees, he stood—on his dignity—and left without another word, allowing me to consider what was due a king. The steward reassured me, saying that his majesty often became sullen when he remembered the race of Spanish bulls, now sadly extinct. At Rotterdam, the Canción docked with an undignified bump against the pier. I rented a bicycle and pedaled the twenty-one kilometers to Papendrecht.
I MET JAMESON—BY ACCIDENT—at the Golden House in Papendrecht, where Willem and I had gone to eat dim sum. She was by herself at a table placed beneath a painting of the Yangtze River, elegantly conducting with chopsticks an orchestra of dumplings on her plate. Willem asked if we could join her. She smiled agreeably, and when two additional places had been set, we sat. Bashful for a reason I could not explain, I fiddled with a spoon while Willem introduced us to each other:
“Jameson Tarn . . . Albert Barthelemy.”
“How do you do,” she said, her eyes sounding mine, which slid away to a calendar by the kitchen door. I read the date, as if to steady myself in time: August 15, 2034.
Willem nudged my ankle with his shoe. I turned my face to hers and stammered, “Glad to meet you.” And I was! As absurd as it must seem, I was pleased to meet this lovely black woman with a frankly penetrating gaze that searched for something in my eyes throughout the meal.
All right! It’s far-fetched, but I believed from the first instant I saw her that she was Jim. No, that’s too disturbing an idea! Let’s say instead that I believed Jim had entered her. That’s not exactly right, either. I believed Jim had been infused in her, the way tea leaves are in boiling water, to become what is neither one nor the other, but something tonic and strengthening. In other words, Jameson—by an unimaginable transubstantiation—had acquired a vital aspect of Jim, who meant to look after me in death as he had in life. He may have fallen in with the egun, spirits of the dead for the Yorùbáns, who believe the border between the spiritual and physical life is porous. Fortunately for my readers (to speak optimistically), in 2077 I can talk of numinous states without fear of ridicule. In previous ages dominated by a vulgar materialism, I could not have told this story. (I’d have had to tell some other to explain my life.) But I want my readers to understand that when I fell in love with Jameson and she with me, there was nothing unnatural in our feelings.
“You have an unusual first name,” I said later, when we were walking along the Merwede.
“My father named me after his favorite whiskey,” Jameson said, and laughed.
“Willem said you were stranded.”
“I am, although Holland is a lovely country to be stranded in. I chartered a cruiser at Rotterdam and planned to travel the Merwede to the river Waal, then on to the Rhine. But at Papendrecht, the captain took sick. His appendix burst, poor man. He’s in the hospital. I’m thinking seriously of giving up and going home.”
“I have my captain’s license,” I said, and, noticing her doubtful glance, added, “I’ve spent more years on the river than you’d think to look at me.”
There are no coincidences, Tom Sawyer whispered in my mind to bedevil me.
“You have time?” she asked.
“As much as you need.”
Time, for me then, seemed all but inexhaustible.
We walked in silence along the river—she looking thoughtfully at the water, I shyly at her face in profile, which stirred in me memories of other elegant lines, like a heron’s in flight or the prow of a riverboat in the charged instant before getting under way. I suppose I was thinking of a quality as elusive as beauty; I mean expectancy. Isn’t it marvelous how, with the speed of light, we can be recalled from the present to a commensurate moment in the past? And just so did Jameson and I arrive at a band shell on the riverbank—empty and silent now, but able to unearth an evening buried long ago when Tom Sawyer, Jim, and I stood by another river and heard a brass band playing military marches that had incited men to fall at Austerlitz and, on our own shores, at Dearborn and Detroit, on ground made noble, or ignoble, by death.
“People have been kind,” said Jameson, her eyes resting on mine, which this time didn’t flinch from hers. “Even here: Willem and now you. It’s enough to make me believe in providence.”
“Or accident,” I said, feeling obliged, again, to resist the tyrannical persuasion of fate. (As if it matters to the body mangled in a car wreck whether the fault lies with fate, accident, or a moment’s inattention!)
Earlier, I mentioned that something had changed me: an accident I had no earthly reason to expect. Do you have the passage? Yes? Let me see it. I was changed, too, by something that I will insist, always, wa
s accidental: an instant of senselessness and absurdity when I fulfilled the river’s purpose and my own. I was talking about Jameson and the impetuous moment on the Merwede when I offered myself as captain and she just as impulsively accepted.
IN SANTA MONICA, WHERE JAMESON wrote and illustrated children’s stories, she’d had the happy thought of turning a pilgrimage to the German town of Münchhausen into a picture book. An eighteenth-century baron by that name is famous for his fantastic tales and became himself the subject of improbable narratives like Marvelous Travels on Water and Land: Campaigns and Comical Adventures of the Baron of Münchhausen. She’d planned to follow the Merwede’s more or less easterly progress to the Waal, then on to the southerly tending Rhine. Below Koblenz, she’d travel the Lahn, a tributary of the Rhine, northeasterly to the Wetschaft valley and the town of Münchhausen. It was not until she hired a boat and captain in Rotterdam that she understood her intended journey’s impracticability. (With its feints and twists, the river system seemed a folly to me, who was used to the frank ways of the Mississippi.) The captain soon persuaded Jameson to forgo a trip to Münchhausen in favor of the Middle Rhine and its castles.
“It was a disappointment!” she said to me. “Still, there’s no reason why I can’t honor the baron with a marvelous travel story of my own.”
She’d turned the smaller stateroom into a studio, where I discovered pencil sketches she had done between Rotterdam and Papendrecht. She had a gift for capturing, in barest summary, small moments that promised larger things. Her line was confident; her shading conveyed an absence made mysterious by an almost-glimpsed presence. She’d brought a number of her published books. One in particular, about a boy and a giraffe named Rupert, moved me by its unchildish refusal of sentimentality. It began: From autumn until spring, I left the attic just once—to go to Africa with Rupert, my friend. There was a war. Smoke darkened the sky. At night, it covered the moon. We were afraid. The attic belonged to a man who made shoes.
I don’t propose to recite the itinerary of our river journey, my last, as it turned out (unless another awaits me beyond time’s final reach). In any case, I don’t remember the places where we stopped. My thoughts were centered on Jameson, who was herself the beauties of the way. I can’t recall the rails on which we slid, according to love’s commissioning, from affection into attraction. Like the rivers themselves, the passages down which we moved were unmarked. We struggled at once to cleave and to fend off—the countervailing motions of the bewildered heart.
I do remember the drawings she made while the boat took us deeper into Europe and ourselves: a boy tying a rope to a deck cleat, a boy at the wheel, a boy—always the same boy, whose given name she made my own: Albert. Albert opening a canal lock; fishing with a net for eels; reading in his berth; shivering after an evening’s swim in the Rhine. There were many other drawings—all framing the boy as he traveled, like us, on rivers that became increasingly uncertain of their course. Life—even one as long as mine—had left me unprepared for love. I realized with a start that I had never before loved anyone, except maybe Jim. I kept an eye on the river, whose bends followed hard on one another much too fast to be careless at the helm. But I was helpless not to steal a glance at Jameson as she sketched and smudged, scrumbled and grumbled over her failure to seize with her pencil what her eyes saw. She took a miniaturist’s delight in details: of the boat, a weathered pier, or an elm branch, still oddly leafed, lumbering along in the current. She was transfixed by the story unfolding—in pictures and in words—while the river unfolded from reach to reach. At night, we tied up to the bank or, when the river was wide enough, moored out toward the middle—the better to be alone.
You will have read enough about love to make the recounting of mine unnecessary. Passion bores me; maybe I’d think otherwise if I were not an old man. I’m not sure I can speak the language now. I wonder if I ever could with the effortlessness of those who do not seek each other in the dim bowers of their selves, but, rather, in sunlit uplands—or on a boat traveling between untroubled shores. We must have stopped often during the three hundred miles of that fateful, if uneventful, trip. (God-damn the unalterable courses it seems our lot to bear!) We halted for fuel, food, water, to stretch our legs. But I can’t recall anything other than a sensation of contentment and a genial peace. Jameson and I might have been in the peaceable kingdom painted by Hicks, speaking to each other in the sensual language promised by Jakob Böhme, for all I remember of the way. Doubtless, it had its excitements. After all, I was in love, although I’ve never known the fits and seizures of a heart besotted like Jim’s for his mad mermaid of the mud. Mine was joy in a quiet harbor. All the same, the journey was marvelous. Not even the hyperbolic baron could have imagined one more marvelous than ours. I was entranced as I had not been since the days on the raft. But time tick-tocked on the Rhine as it had not on the Mississippi for Jim and me.
You want to know about our rough-and-tumble in bed, on the ottoman, the deck chair, and foredeck sun pad? Forgive me, but I haven’t juice enough to indulge a salacious interest. We had sex, naturally. Leave it at that.
“Have you read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?” Jameson asked me one night while we lay in a drowse, listening to the stiff noise of reeds scraping against the hull, the soft music of water lapping there. The portholes were opened to the night, which stole into the cabin, already nervous in the wavering tides of shadow. There was something in the air: a disturbing odor compounded of sluggish water and compost.
“No,” I said, and quickly changed the subject in order to be rid of the hated book. “Tell me the story you’re writing. What’s it called?”
“The Boy in His Winter,” she said. “At least, that’s the working title.”
I thought that strange and asked her what it meant.
“The story’s told by an old man looking far back into the past at his boyhood. From that vantage, he can see things clearly without the haze of childhood to soften and alter them.”
She was too young to know how old age also has a haze that can dissemble, according to the dying mind’s insults and injuries, or its senile happiness. She went on to tell me the story, which I have forgotten. And then we—what’s the romantic expression? We fell into each other’s arms and slept.
Forty miles below Koblenz, in the Rhine Gorge, where, on a granite cliff, Lorelei once caused ships to founder and men to drown, she received an e-mail message from her brother: Father died unexpectedly last night. Massive stroke. Funeral Friday.
“You’d think he was sending a telegram—he’s so frugal with his words,” she said; and I heard in hers a reproach that hid her grief.
“I’ll turn around and head for Cologne. You can get a flight there for the States.”
Jameson looked at me. I saw in her candid gaze a question, which I answered impulsively but not—as things turned out—rashly.
“I’ll go with you, if you like.”
She nodded, then went below to mourn or pack, or both, while I turned the boat around. Before we left it at the wharf in Cologne, I had e-mailed my resignation to the chairman of Chronos Yachts and to the beautifully dressed mannequin in Palm Beach, whose face I no longer recall.
JAMESON AND I FLEW TO AMERICA. As the plane neared the eastern seaboard, the captain began to talk over the PA system. He spoke lovingly of the sea. As a young man, he wished above all else to become a sailor. (How strange the convergences of life!) I looked out the window at the little lights shaking on the black ocean.
“Fishing boats,” the captain said, as if he could read my thoughts.
The interior of the plane was dark. Jameson and the other passengers were asleep—all, that is, except me. The window was cold against my forehead. The sun was waiting for me over the brink of the western world and beyond “the Territory,” which in Huck’s childhood marked the limit of our imperial destiny. Behind the locked cockpit door, the captain talked softly.
“I dream,” he said, “of sleeping with Madeleine, a
stewardess on the Paris–New York flight. We met only once, in a small hotel on the Trocadero. We stood together at the window and looked at the Eiffel Tower. It was a moment of high romance. When the light went out of the sky, we went to bed.”
He described her lingerie, her eyes, the shape of her mouth. Her hair, he said, was “like mahogany”—the color and the shine of it. He described his ecstasy as the Eiffel Tower loomed in at the window, its lights trembling against the Parisian night. The captain fell silent while the great black wings dipped. A beverage cart rolled slowly down the aisle. Then over the PA, I heard a sound like water over stones. Like rain. Like the sea. It was the sound of the captain weeping. The plane stopped, lingered in midair—a dream. I touched my forehead to the cold window, and the plane continued on to LAX.
IN CALIFORNIA, I SOUGHT AN END to movement, which had—outside of time and in it—bewildered and exhausted me. I have theorized, since returning to Hannibal like an elephant at the end of its road, that the Pacific coast summoned so many of us so that we might finally be rid of restlessness. We went, not for gold, oil, oranges, or Hollywood, but to be finished with the westering tide that began—centuries ago—in the British Isles, Europe, and in Africa (bringing Jim to me, no matter how he may have fought and suffered by it). We sought cessation at the edge of the blue ocean and relief at stopping in our tracks. Until we’ve stopped, how else are we ever to begin? This is what I think, and it is the case for me, who had never stopped, never truly made a start or loved or been happy until I settled by the Pacific Ocean with Jameson. Maybe that is what the book will be about: not Huck Finn’s or Albert Barthelemy’s journeying, but their having reached a final destination—save one.
My logbooks are entrusted to the safekeeping of my friend and executor, Marco Knauff, a Dutchman I met in Papendrecht; they might serve as an appendix for my memoir. Remind me to give you his address.