Flat Water Tuesday (41 page)

She handed me her wineglass, reached into the pocket of her white shorts, and extracted the package of cigarettes. Tapped one out. She was winded from walking up the hill. Ruth inhaled on the cigarette. “I swear these things taste better here. Maybe because we weren’t allowed to smoke.” She inhaled again, took back her wine.

“What was he like?” I poured my own drink. I sat down on the ground and she lowered herself down next to me, always careful of herself now, the instinctive care you take in the dark when you are used to drinking. She sat with her legs crossed before her, the end of her cigarette like a beacon, her drink twisted into the grass beside her hand.

“I told you already. A nice guy. A nerd. He grew up in Bend, Oregon, for God’s sake. When he started making money we used to take little romantic trips from New York to the shore, you know? So eventually he bought a house near Chatham, which I had to furnish and which he hated but made sure remained his in the settlement.” She inhaled again and folded her arms, looked down at her wine as if discovering something unexpected and adorable, picked up the glass and almost drained it. “And here I am.”

I glanced over at Ruth’s silhouette in the dark and wondered how to form the question I wanted to ask. There were lights on the second floor of the Rowing Cottage. Somebody was carrying a baby around in there. I could not imagine that front room covered in baby toys and pictures, with a TV and cartoons.

Finally I just came out with it. “How are you doing with all this?”

Ruth looked at me and her eyes welled up. “I just can’t believe Jumbo is dead, too. That we’re back here to say good-bye and attend
another
memorial service. It seems … unreal. It’s brought it all back. That whole year.” She took a sip of her wine. “He jumped off a bridge. A
bridge
. Do you think it was some kind of message?”

“A message? To us? No. Perry was a mess. You read his letter.”

“I wish I had written back. Or called him. Something. I keep thinking that maybe if I had—”

“He might not have killed himself? I doubt it. He would have liked to have heard from you, sure, but it wouldn’t have made that big a difference if he was in such a bad place. I didn’t call him either. I don’t feel great about it, but whatever was going on in his life was beyond us.”

“I hope so. I really do.”

“Ruth, Connor was another mess. We never really knew him, not really—”

“I knew him better than you did.”

“Okay, fair enough. Then you knew the kind of world he lived in. About his father. About what it was like growing up under all that pressure to be the best. To be … superior. I think now about how driven he was. It was unnatural. There was something obscene about it.”

“But we were
all
like that back then.”

“For all the good it did us. We had nothing to do with Connor’s death, either, Ruth. We just had the bad fortune to be there when he finally decided to jump.”

“Then why do I feel so guilty when I think about it? I don’t think any of us really got over it.

“Perry and you were stuck with Connor on the shore for a long time.”

“I can still remember him floating in the water, you know? I still see it sometimes. It haunted me for years.”

“I don’t think I ever told you I was sorry for leaving you there.”

“Well, you and Wads could run faster. It was the only logical thing to do, anyway. We were all in shock.” She inhaled hard on the cigarette and I remembered John Perry’s letter; he had taken up smoking, too. “I had never seen a dead person. I’ll never forget that look on his face.” She bit her top lip. “Poor Perry. Do you know what he kept saying to me the whole time we were waiting?”

I sipped my drink, waited for it. Drank again and realized the wine was almost warm now. I had been gripping the top of the glass.

“‘
We shouldn’t have done it, Ruth, we shouldn’t have done it. It’s all our fault. It’s all our fault.
’ That’s what he said. Over and over and over. And I just ignored him, you know, the way you do when a boy is crying, but I can remember him saying that. He kept saying it until the ambulance came with you and Wads and then he shut up. He put his hands over his mouth to make himself keep quiet, like this,” and she showed me, her fingers entwined over her lips.

“We didn’t
do
anything. We didn’t cause Connor’s death, Ruth.”

“That’s what I should have said to Jumbo. He needed me to say it, to comfort him. But I didn’t. Would you like to know what I did instead?”

“Yes.”

“I just kept nodding, hard, again and again. I kept nodding but I was whispering something, too. It was the word ‘yes.’ Every time he said we shouldn’t have done it, I said yes. Every time he said it was our fault, I said yes. This deranged, incessant mantra. And I do not think…” She looked away to compose herself. “Anyway. I told my mother about it, you know, in detail, a year or so later. How responsible I felt, what Perry had said and what I said back. All she told me was that we were lucky I wasn’t an adult. I was just seventeen.” She shivered. “My mother has a horror of lawsuits. Well, who doesn’t, I suppose? But that was the extent of her empathy.”

“I was nineteen.”

“I know. Bad things happen when you are a teenager. But when you are that age they haven’t happened before.”

“Did you and Connor ever…”

“No. And yes. We were young. I don’t need to tell you he had a certain kind of attraction. I knew him longer than you did, Rob. We were both outsiders. Until you came along.”

I refilled her glass all the way to the rim, in the dark, hardly able to see it.

35.

Had Connor fallen a foot farther beneath the bridge, he would have missed the rocks and he would have lived. But they told us later that he died almost instantly. He landed at an angle on a rock, hard. We saw him floating face up in the water, which was clear and metallic in the spring cold. His arms were extended behind his body, not as in a crucifixion but down deep, as if he was thrusting his chest upward, trying to levitate over the surface of the river. He was still grinning, the water just covering his jaws, and then he floated away from us as if he was knuckling himself along the bottom. We ran down the right hand side of the river and I was the one who left the shore and waded through the current to him, falling twice, three times, the cold tearing through my clothes, dropping my body heat. When I got to him I was shoulder deep. I wound up hugging him around his neck in order to hold his face above the water but it was a futile effort because he was now nothing more than a sodden bag of meat and bone.

I tried to pull him through the current but his body was like lead, his feet, made heavy by his sneakers, dangling behind me. I finally towed him by his shirt to the shore and then Perry was next to me, whimpering and wheezing but swimming hard, and he grabbed Connor’s waist and the two of us heaved him out the river and hauled him up to the mud and reeds and grass on the bank where we knelt beside him.

I think about that day and wonder if any of us had known CPR, or how to do mouth to mouth, if we would have tried it. I like to tell myself that of course we would have. We would have had the presence of mind to touch that body. But nothing we could have done would have saved him. The back of his skull was crushed. He broke his neck as well, fractured two of his seven cervical vertebrae. I have never forgotten that term,
cervical vertebrae
. It was revealed to us by one of the trauma counselors brought in from New Milford. She told us that the impact had smashed the
atlas
and the
axis
, the bones responsible for stabilizing the head. This is why as he lay on the grass beside the river, still grinning up at us, blood and water tricking from his mouth, Connor’s head had flopped backward at an unnatural, truly dead angle.

I have filmed the hundreds of mutilated bodies that washed up beside the Kagera River in Rwanda after the massacres, bodies emaciated by HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in clinics across Zambia and Swaziland, the tortured bodies of poachers that we found in Botswana wrapped in razor wire and burned beyond recognition, and bodies macabrely outfitted in evening wear and squeezed into old-fashioned, rent-by-the-day, faux mahogany open coffins in the sprawling cemeteries outside Soweto in South Africa. Every time I witnessed those corpses, the rag-doll uselessness of their twisted limbs, their dead, fish-eyed stare, I thought of Connor.

Ruth had been kneeling in the wet grass when we dragged him to shore. She nudged her way between us, stared in horror at Connor’s head and face and started retching and groaning at the same time. Perry was mewling like an animal in agony. Wadsworth had taken one look and started sprinting for the road, screaming at me to come with him. I jumped up and followed him and didn’t look back.

By the time we got back with the ambulance, Connor was lying in a pool of pink froth. Ruth and Perry were covered in it. They had stayed next to him the whole time; two kids who had never been so close to death, immobilized by it in the rain.

*   *   *

Ruth pulled her knees up to her chest. “Have you been back to the boathouse, Rob?”

“What do you think?”

“No. I haven’t either. I don’t want to. I never set foot in Yale’s boathouse, can you believe that? I wanted to drop you a line a few times, find out if you were rowing.”

“I gave it up, too.”

“Did you keep that wooden scull of yours?”

“Yes. In my father’s workshop. Actually, he took it from me when I came back from school, never said a word about it. I was only home for a couple of weeks after that, then I got a job. My dad said he wouldn’t hire me if I didn’t go to college and he kept to it. My parents were pretty disappointed I turned down Harvard. In fact, they were furious.”

“What did you do?”

“I traveled up to Canada. Got a job near Vancouver. I wound up working as a fix-it guy for a small documentary film company—sort of a carpenter and general skivvy. I’d drive the vans, haul equipment around, that sort of thing. One day they offered to teach me how to use one of the cameras, and that was it for me. I wound up doing my own filming, working with a really tight Canadian film crew called Mercenary Productions that got sent all around the world doing doccie stuff and news fillers.”

“Doccie?”

“Documentary film work. Whenever a big outfit needed shots in someplace in the middle of nowhere, they’d call us up. We once spent six months filming a team trying to get a beached tanker off an island in Newfoundland. We got sent out to the Yukon to film Inuit people in reservations. The crew I worked with did underwater filming. Nasty stuff. If a TV channel or production house needed shots of fishing nets underwater, or the bottom of a boat, or even shipwrecks that were leaking oil into the sea, we were the guys they called. I was twenty-one years old, the other three guys were almost thirty. I got PADIS certified, learned about the equipment, edited on an old Avid system in this craphole studio they had in Vancouver, just outside the Gaslight District in an old railroad siding. Then digital video came along and I got into that.”

“Do you keep in touch?”

“I wound up doing a year at the University of Vancouver to get up to speed on some of the business aspects of filming. I couldn’t even do a spreadsheet. While I was studying, one of the guys died on a shoot.”

“What, did he drown?”

“Nope. He had a heart attack at thirty-one. After that, the other two just threw in the towel. I bought some of their equipment; their sound stuff and a Sony Beta SP, which I still use when customers insist on Beta. And then I was my own operator.
National Geographic
started buying more and more of my footage and then they started commissioning pieces. It’s mostly been pretty good. I never regretted saying no to Harvard, but my dad never really forgave me. It was always between us.”

“Then you met the woman you live with.”

“Yes. Carolyn. Five years ago.”

“Is she in the business?”

“She’s an editor and writer.”

“Why isn’t she with you?”

“The short answer is she’s working, editing my latest shoot.”

“And the long answer?”

“The long answer is she’s working.”

“Okay, I get it. It’s complicated.” There was a brief silence as she drained the last of her wine. A million unspoken possibilities passed between us and then Ruth gracefully let the subject drop. “You used to write pretty well.”

“But you have to learn to write like a documentarian. Channing wouldn’t have approved.” I grinned. “Short, punchy, repetitive sentences. No equivocation.”

“Like sales copy.”

“Yeah.”

“So here you are.” She carefully set down her wineglass on the lawn, pressed it into the grass as if planting it, let go. The glass toppled over. She stood up and reached out, gripped my shoulder for balance. “Which way is your dorm?”

“The one I’m in tonight?”

“Uh-huh. I remember where you used to stay. In North Dorm. Where are you tonight?”

“I’m back in North Dorm.”

“Me, too. That’s where we’re going.”

I stood up and she took my arm, leaned against me while we picked our way blindly across the field in the dark. I wondered what would happen if I let her go. We’d left the glasses and wine bottle behind for Buildings and Grounds to find the next morning. We reached my old dorm and went in through the back entrance. When we came to my room she flicked on the light and squinted. “I love what you’ve done to the place.”

She sat on the bare mattress, picked up one of the folded blankets, and opened it before her, stood, and tossed it back on the bunk. “I need to use the bathroom. And get changed. I need something warm to sleep in. I need socks.”

“Demanding woman.”

“Make your bed, Carrey. I’m damn well not sleeping alone tonight if you’re around. I’m going to be back here in ten minutes and this place better be ready.”

“Good night, Ruth.”

“It’s not good night. I told you I’ll see you in ten minutes, sailor.” She grinned, that crooked grin that she had saved for years, and reached up to me, her wrists dry on my neck, and kissed me quickly, theatrically, drunkenly, her eyes closed. Then she took an unsteady step back, turned, and slipped out the door. I heard two guys talking loudly in the hallway, laughing. They greeted her and demanded to know why she was sneaking around like this, wanted to know who she was visiting. Ruth played up to it, swore she’d never tell, told the two of them to go to bed, which they found hilarious.