Flat Water Tuesday (2 page)

Here’s the thing. Somehow we all decided never to talk about what happened during the last year at that school. I have no idea how it affected you guys. Maybe your memories are better, more useful, or more selective. But I’ve been talking to people. People in the group, mostly, and a therapist who says I should express my feelings instead of acting out because of them. She also says, over and over, that whatever emotional energy you waste on feelings of guilt, rage, and emotional pain, your body will reclaim in self-destructive behavior. She says the things I tell her about the past are surely tragic but that I have to “seek closure.”

We all know something more happened back then than just a simple everyday tragedy. I should know, because I’m living a simple everyday tragedy. Hey, here’s a secret: A few months ago I started to think people were following me when I was really drunk. The therapist informed me I suffer from “paranoid segues” (she also uses another term, “mild delusional psychosis”—my vocab is increasing in direct proportion to how crazy I get). But one day somebody might ask me some hard questions about what happened to me when I was eighteen years old. It could happen, right?

I swear, Rob, if they ever do, I’ll tell them I forgot it all. I’ll claim with my trembling hand on the Bible that I blanked it out. The whole year.

It might even be a little true.

I’ve been forgetting lots of things. Forgot to drive on the road a month ago and totaled the BMW—flipped it twice. Those German fun bags deployed perfectly. Pull one of those stunts and you wake up hours later, wondering where the hell you are—in my case, it was in the emergency room in Sharon, Connecticut, with a nurse snapping her fingers over my face, catching a contact buzz off my breath.

So, anyways, the nitty-gritty details of what went on during senior year at Fenton are a little fuzzy, but the basic memories are intact. I bet they’re pretty intact for you, too. And for the rest of the crew. If you’re like me, you think about it. Maybe you think about it at strange times. Like in the shower, when you’re sneaking shots while your wife brushes her teeth. (You fill a shampoo bottle with vodka; it tastes a little soapy but gets you through breakfast. Know where I learned this? Fenton, of course.) Or like when you’re washing dishes with your third or fourth scotch on the windowsill. Pissing in your own Jacuzzi with a beer in your hand. Pissing in your bed after.

Maybe, if you’re like me, this stuff comes back when you’re sitting in a rented condo, five miles away from your house in Greenwich, and just a hop, skip, and jump away from that school. Just sitting here on somebody else’s furniture eating pizza and smoking cigarettes with a rented Ford out front.

I admit it: I have taken up the wicked weed in this last month. It’s awesome. You can smoke all day and still drive somewhere. If you have somewhere to go, that is. Try doing that on G&Ts. I’m eating lots of candy. And drinking milk shakes. Remember milk shakes? I order them from the place down the road because I don’t trust myself with a blender.

Try to imagine being the kind of person who can’t have a blender in the house.

I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself, I know. The first rule you learn at Fenton is to never feel sorry for yourself. Same thing in rehab. So let’s say it loud and proud, Rob: “I am the one at fault for everything that has happened to me.”

I also know this: If things hadn’t turned out the way they did at Fenton, you might actually be heading back to the reunion this year. Me, too.

I told my ex-wife (that word looks weird on the page, Rob—it’s the first time I’ve ever written it, I’m not even sure if it’s supposed to be hyphenated) about all of it a few years ago, after we were married, just to be on the safe side. She told me to drop you an e-mail and I got pretty fired up to make contact for a while, but … You know how it is. Georgia (my ex—it’s getting easier to write) thought it was pretty dumb that we never kept in touch.

None of us have, I told her.

Stupid people, she said.

I regret it now.

Do you know the school has no record of you? I bet that’s the way you want it. You are listed as an alumnus who is Missing in Action, but I Googled your ass off and got your producer’s address, finally—after seeing your name on a credit for some film called
The Disappearing Mountain Gorillas of Uganda
that you can get (on deep discount) via Amazon, if you’re interested. Finding you took me about an hour. But that’s okay. I’ve been spending lots of time surfing the Internet. I found everybody on the team sooner or later, but you were the hardest.

Carrey, did you really move to South Africa? It had to be you on the Web site. You look pretty much the same, but you’ve gotten bigger and you’ve lost all that hair. It says on your filmmaker’s bio on the National Geographic homepage that you divide your time between New York and Cape Town. Good idea. I’ve always wanted to see Africa. Send me a ticket. I’ll fly down and we’ll sit on a beach and drink beer. Well, you’d have a beer. I’d get a Coke or a lemonade or Kool-Aid or a virgin banana daiquiri or whatever they serve ex-drunks with ex-wives and ex-careers over there.

Anyways, Rob, I’m writing all of you. Everyone who was on that team.

I saved this letter to you for a good while, though. I really did want to contact you for years, even when most of what I had to say was scribbled on the back of cocktail napkins. I battled to write this, wondered if I even have a right to say anything at all to you about that year, even if you are reading this letter in some rainforest or whatever. But for what it’s worth, here it is: Make peace with the past. Figure it out.

If you do, drop me a line.

Fifteen years, Rob. Sitting here in this room, it feels like two minutes ago we were gods.

I’m so sorry for everything, after all.

Your friend,
John Perry

[email protected]

1-860-564-7165 (Call now. We never close!)

PROLOGUE

I folded the letter in half so I could look at the embossed name on top of the stationery. I laid it on the airplane’s tiny tray table. It was the twentieth time I had read it, at least. It had been forwarded to my Cape Town apartment while I’d been on the eastern coast of South Africa on a marine shoot; two weeks of sitting on a boat with a diver, a fisherman, and two cameramen in the middle of a shoal of sardines, waiting for the game fish and the sharks that would pile into the melee. Now I was flying home with a hard case full of Beta SP tapes as carry-on luggage and the half-finished script for the documentary I’d spent six weeks putting together. I had promised myself I would do some writing on the airplane, but by the time the nineteen-hour journey was two hours gone, I gave up and watched a movie and then ordered a drink, knowing I’d feel it upon landing in dawn’s brutal light at Kennedy. I was tired from the moment I boarded the plane in Cape Town and settled into my seat, thanking God the 747 was only three-quarters full and I’d been given a full row on which to throw down my chewed-up leather briefcase and the magazines and newspapers I’d bought to get back up to speed on world events. I was dreading New York and what was going to happen there.

I ran my fingers over the postmark on John’s letter. It had left Greenwich, Connecticut, over five weeks ago and done a detour in DC until
National Geographic
had sent it on to me. I had found it when I got back from the shoot along with a crumpled pile of bills, junk mail, fast-food menus, and traditional healing ads that had been jammed into the metal box in the foyer of the crumbling art deco apartment block where I lived. I had immediately thrown it away when I saw the return address, just before I locked up the flat and ran down to the street to meet the taxi. But as I opened the back door to the whimpering yellow Mercedes-Benz, I signaled “hang on” to the wiry kid tapping his fingers to a Kwaito riff on the beaded steering wheel and climbed back up the three flights of stairs. I cranked open the dead bolts and unlocked the alarm so I could scrape the envelope from the bottom of the wastebasket and stow it in my bag. I almost trashed it again at the airport, came a hairsbreadth to stuffing it in the overflowing orange bin by the X-ray machines along with the other contraband passengers jettison before getting screened. But I kept it, even though I didn’t tear it open until I was halfway across Dakar.

John’s was one of the few personal notes I had received from anyone in a while. I almost decided to call him when I landed. I’d say hello and tell him I was too busy to see him, which was true. I had a film to edit, a script to finish, a Jeep to sell, and I had to get more work. Over the next few days my personal and professional lives were going to be rejiggered—this week I was splitting with my girlfriend, Carolyn Smythe. My heart clenched at the prospect. We had a business to hammer out and a contract to renegotiate. So I’d wish John well. I’d tell him to hang in there, that alcoholism is a rough row to hoe and I could sympathize.

Or maybe I’d just e-mail him and be done with it. Say it was good to hear from him—no matter how random and rambling his letter was—and not even mention I was in the city and planned to be there for three weeks before I flew back to Cape Town to start life again, single.

I pressed my aching lumbar vertebrae into the seat and twirled the plastic South African Airlines tumbler. They had turned out the lights and tucked us in over an hour ago. The passengers in my section sat glaring at the tiny screens in the backs of the chairs. Some of us were draped in our flimsy blankets, trying to sleep, lines of seated mummies in the mausoleum darkness. We’d entered the dozing purgatory of the tourist-class long-haul flight. Another eight hours of stifling boredom lay ahead.

The flight attendant drifted through the darkness to me, took away my tiny menagerie of Johnnie Walker bottles, and brought a new one, with new ice and a small bottle of still mineral water. As she placed them on my tray she gave me a quick, commiserative look that might have been a warning or maybe something else. I examined the dark porthole beside me and saw only my reflection under the orange reading light, a ghost of a face looking back at me with Jack-o’-lantern eyes.

None of the others who were close to me at that school had tried to contact me, ever. John was the first.

I squeezed my eyes shut, hard, trying to picture him, the John Perry I knew in boarding school. To my mild surprise I could not summon an image of his face; I could only remember how physically big he was and I wondered if he had aged well or if all that hulking muscle had slowly turned to fat. I imagined him over the intervening years; at his college graduation, at his wedding—he had forgotten that he’d invited me. I remember receiving that invitation, belatedly, from my brother Tom, who lived in my parents’ old house in Niccalsetti, New York. I had opened it in Cape Town and folded it away guiltily after seeing his name and that of the girl whose parents were proudly announcing her impending union.

I had stashed the thick, ivory envelope in my desk and told myself I’d send him a picture of one of the lions we’d spent an agonizing month filming in the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. I assured myself that I’d go online and send the couple a gift off their hopeful wedding registry site and follow up with an e-mail, one lousy e-mail saying congratulations. If I’d actually done that it would have been the first time I had contacted anyone from the Fenton School since the day I walked out of there.

But I didn’t send him a photograph, or an e-mail or a gift or even fill out the RSVP postcard.

And I was damned sure none of the others did, either.

FALL

1.

My fragile rowing shell was moving fast and light down the river. It surged forward, then coasted while I recoiled for another stroke. I felt the pull of the sculls in my legs, then in my back. I heard only the splashing and the
zing
of the water dripping from the blades as I slipped by the ancient school. The endless lawns to starboard turned into soccer fields and then into the practice football field. The freshly painted goalposts marked the end of my practice session, and passing them I tasted my speed, closed my eyes and inhaled it, the vibrations of the boat in my spine.

I leaned back and the shell ran out beneath me, gliding over the water like a bird. A million trees up, the mountain threw rippled reflections across the water. The blades of my sculls kissed the smooth surface as I neared the Fenton School boathouse. I could turn and see the dock floating four inches above the waterline. Even this late in the season I could feel the heat rising up off the banks, as if the valley had kept part of summer’s warmth for the fall. I hunched over and drew a stopwatch from my sweatshirt and did the daily math, looking at the digital numbers through watery eyes. The calculations were easy. I knew how far two thousand meters was down the course and I allowed some time, because you rowed with the current to get down the river and fought it coming back. I was shaving off seconds, all right.

I had a notebook stowed under the foot stretchers and I pulled it out after I slid off the boat’s sliding seat onto the dock. I flattened the pages on my damp thighs to pencil in my new times, saw the improvement and shut the book fast, slid it in the waistband of my rowing trunks. I flipped the scull out of the water to my shoulders, then settled it on my head and waited while it dripped, balancing, my body the fulcrum as the boat gently teeter-tottered against my scalp. Holding the boat steady with my left hand wrapped around a rigger, I bent my knees and picked up the sculls with my right, straightened, and began the careful walk up to the boathouse. When I had negotiated the fifty-seven steps to the dark entrance, I aimed the bow into the straps hanging from the rafters within, then strapped in the stern. I popped open the deck plate and used a crusty, grease-stained towel to wipe the river water from the hull. I pulled the ropes that raised the boat to where it settled into a sliver of reflection in the gloom and tied up, still a little out of breath. I set the sculls upright in their wooden rack and pulled the great sliding doors shut.