Galilee (46 page)

It passed through Rachel's head that she wasn't living this but dreaming it: that every detail of this moment was in such a perfect place there was no improving it. Sky, sea, clouds, lips. His eyes, meeting hers. His hands on her back, at her neck, in her hair.

“I'm sorry . . .” he murmured to her.

“For what?”

“For not coming to find you,” he said. “I should have come to find you.”

“I don't understand.”

“I was looking away. I was staring at the sea when I should have been watching for you. Then you wouldn't have married him.”

“If I hadn't married him we'd never have met.”

“Oh yes we would,” he said. “If I'd not been watching the sea, I would have known you were out there. And I would have come looking for you.”

They walked on after a time, but now they walked with their arms around one another. He took her to the end of the beach, then led the way over the spit of rocks that marked the divide between the two bays. On the other side was a stretch of sand perhaps half the length of the beach behind them, in the middle of which was a small, and plainly very antiquated, wooden jetty, its timbers weathered to a pale gray, its legs shaggy with vivid green weed. There was only one vessel moored there:
The Samarkand.
Its sails were furled, and it rode gently on the incoming tide, the very picture of tranquility.

“Did you build it?” she asked him.

“Not from scratch. I bought her in Mauritius, stripped her down to the bare essentials and fashioned her the way I wanted her. It took two years, because I was working on my own.”

“Like the house.”

“Yeah, well, I prefer it that way. I'm not very comfortable with other people. I used to be . . .”

“But?”

“I got tired of pretending.”

“Pretending what?”

“That I liked them,” he said. “That I enjoyed talking about . . .” he shrugged “ . . . whatever people talk about.”

“Themselves,” Rachel said.

“Is that what people talk about?” he said quizzically. It was as though he'd been out of human company so long he'd forgotten. “I mustn't have been paying attention.” Rachel laughed at this. “No seriously,” he said, “I wouldn't have minded if they'd really want to talk about what was going on in their souls. I'd have welcomed that. But that's not what you hear. You hear about pretty stuff. How fat their wives are getting and how stupid their husbands are and why they hate their children. Who could bear that for very long? I'd prefer to hear nothing at all.”

“Or tell a story?”

“Oh yes,” he said, luxuriating in the thought, “that's even better. But it can't be just any story. It has to be something true.”

“What about the story you told me last night?”

“That was true,” he protested. “I swear, I never told a truer story in all my life.” She looked at him quizzically. “You'll see,” he said, “If it isn't true yet, it will be.”

“Anybody could say that,” she replied.

“Yes, but anybody didn't. I did. And I wouldn't waste my time with things that weren't true.” He put his hand to her face. “You have to tell me a story sometime soon. And it has to be just as true.”

“I don't know any stories like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know,” she said. “Stories that could stir you up the way that story stirred me up.”

“Oh it stirred you up did it?”

“You know it did.”

“You see. Then it must have been true.”

She had no answer to this. Not because it made no sense but because after some fashion that she couldn't articulate, it did. Obviously his definition of
true
wasn't the standard definition, but there was a kind of cockeyed logic to it nevertheless.

“Shall we go?” he said, “I think the boat's getting lonely.”

A
s they walked along the creaking jetty Rachel asked him why he had dubbed his boat
The Samarkand.
Galilee explained that Samarkand was the name of a city.

“I've never heard of it,” she told him.

“There's no reason why you should. It's a long way from Ohio.”

“Did you live there?”

“No. I just passed through. I've done a lot of passing through in my life.”

“You've traveled a lot?”

“More than I'd like.”

“Why don't you just find a place you like and settle down?”

“That's a long story. I suppose the simple answer is that I've never really felt I belonged anywhere. Except out there.” He glanced seaward. “And even there . . .”

For the first time since they'd begun this conversation, she sensed his attention wandering, as though this talk of things far off was making him yearn for them. Perhaps not for the specific of Samarkand; simply for something remote from the here and now. She touched his arm.

“Come back to me,” she said.

“Sorry,” he replied. “I'm here.”

They'd reached the end of the jetty. The boat was before them, rocking gently in the arms of the tide.

“Are we going aboard then?” she asked him.

“We surely are.”

He stepped aside, and she climbed the narrow plank laid between the jetty and the deck. He followed her. “Welcome,” he said with no little pride. “To my
Samarkand.”

The tour of the boat didn't take long; it was in most regards an unremarkable vessel. There were a few details of its crafting he pointed out to her as having been difficult to fashion or pretty in the result, but it wasn't until they got below deck that she really saw his handiwork. The walls of the narrow cabin were inlaid with wood; the colors, the grain and even the knotholes in the timber so chosen and arranged that they almost suggested images.

“Is it my imagination,” Rachel said, “or am I seeing things in the walls?”

“Anything in particular?”

“Well . . . over there I can see a kind of landscape, with some ruins, and maybe some trees. And there's something that could be a tree, but might be a person . . .”

“I think it's a person.”

“So you put it there?”

“No. I did all of this work thinking I was just making patterns. It wasn't until I was a week into my next voyage I started to see things.”

“It's like looking at inkblots—” Rachel said.

“—or clouds—”

“—or clouds. The more you look the more you see.”

“It's useful on long voyages,” Galilee said, “when I'm sick of looking at the waves and the fish I come down here, smoke a little, get a buzz going, and look at the walls. There's always something I hadn't seen.” He put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her round. “See that?” he said, pointing to the door at the far end of the cabin, which was constructed in the same way as the walls.

“The design on the door?”

“Yes.”

“Does it remind you of anything?”

She walked toward it. Galilee followed, his hands still laid on her shoulders. “I'll give you a clue,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “The grass looks very comfortable . . .”

“The grass?”

She stopped a yard or so from the door, and looked at the patterns in the wood. There were arrangements of dark shapes toward the top of the door; and a sliver of pale wood running horizontally, broken in places, and some more forms she could make no sense of arbitrarily laid here and there. But where was the grass? And why was it so comfortable?

“I'm not getting it,” she said.

“Just look for the virgin,” Galilee said.

“The virgin?” she said. “What virgin?” He drew breath to give her another clue, but before he could speak she said: “You mean Jerusha?”

He put his smiling lips against the nape of her neck and kept his silence.

She kept looking, and piece by piece the picture began to emerge. The grass—that comfortable bed on which Jerusha had lain down—was there in the middle of the door, a patch of lightly speckled wood. Above it were those dark massy shapes she'd first puzzled over: the heavy summer foliage of ancient trees. And that bright horizontal sliver running across the door? It was the river, glimpsed from a distance.

Now it was she who smiled, as the mystery came clear in front of her. She had only one question: “Where are the people?”

“You have to put those in for yourself,” he said. “Unless . . .” He stepped past her and put his finger on a narrow, almost spindly shape in the grain of one of the pieces of wood. “Could this be the riverman?”

“No. He was better looking than that.”

Galilee laughed. “So maybe it isn't Jerusha's forest after all,” he said. “I'll have to invent a new story.”

“You like telling stories?”

“I like what it does to people,” he said, smiling a little guiltily. “It makes them feel safe.”

“Going to your country?
Where the rich were kind and the poor had God—”

“I suppose that
is
my country. I hadn't thought about it that way before.” The notion seemed to trouble him somewhat. He grew pensive for a moment; just a moment. Then he looked up from his thoughts and said: “Are you hungry?”

“Yes, I am a little.”

“Good. Then I'll cook,” he said. “It'll take a couple of hours. Can you wait that long?”

“A couple of hours?” she said, “What are you going to cook?”

“Oh it's not the cooking that takes the time,” he said. “It's the catching.”

There was no trace of the day remaining when
The Samarkand
left the jetty; nor was there a moon. Only the stars, in brilliant array. Rachel sat on deck while the boat glided away from the island. The heavens got brighter the further they sailed, or such was her impression. She'd never seen so many stars, nor seen the Milky Way so clearly; a wide, irregular band of studded sky.

“What are you thinking about?” Galilee asked her.

“I used to work in a jewelry store in Boston,” she said. “And we had this necklace that was called the Milky Way. It was supposed to look like
that.”
She pointed to the sky. “I think it was eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You never saw so many diamonds.”

“Did you want to steal it?” Galilee said.

“I'm not a thief.”

“But did you?”

She grinned sheepishly. “I did try it on when nobody was looking. And it was
very
pretty. But the real thing's prettier.”

“I would have stolen it for you,” Galilee said. “No problem. All you needed to say was—I
want
that—and it would have been yours.”

“Suppose you'd got caught?”

“I never get caught.”

“So what have you stolen?”

“Oh my Lord . . .” he said. “Where do I start?”

“Is that a joke?”

“No. I take theft very seriously.”

“It
is
a joke.”

“I stole this boat.”

“You did not.”

“How else was I going to get it?”

“Buy it?”

“You know how much vessels like this cost?” he said reasonably. She still wasn't sure whether he was joking or not. “I either stole the money to buy the boat, or stole the boat itself. It seemed simpler to steal the boat. That cut out the middleman.” Rachel laughed. “Besides, the guy who had the boat didn't care about her. He left her tied up most of the time. I took her out, showed her the world.”

“You make it sound like you married her.”

“I'm not that crazy,” Galilee replied. “I like sailing, but I like fucking better.” An expression of surprise must have crossed her face, because he hurriedly said: “Sorry. That was crude. I mean—”

“No, if that's what you meant you should say it.”

He looked sideways at her, his eyes gleaming by the light of the lamp. Despite his claim not to be crazy, that was exactly how he looked at that moment: sublimely, exquisitely crazy.

“You realize what you're inviting?” he said.

“No.”

“Giving me permission to say what I mean? That's a dangerous invitation.”

“I'll take the risk.”

“All right,” he said with a shrug. “But you remember . . .”

“ . . . I invited it.”

He kept looking at her: that same gleaming gaze.

“I brought you on this boat because I want to make love to you.,,

“Make love is it now?”

“
No
, fuck.
I want to fuck you.”

“Is that your usual method?” she asked him. “Get the girl out to the sea where she hasn't got any choice?”

“You could swim,” he said. He wasn't smiling.

“I suppose I could.”

“But as they say on the islands:
Uliuli kai holo ka mano.”

“Which means what?”

“Where the sea is dark, sharks swim.”

“Oh that's very reassuring,” she said, glancing down at the waters slopping against the hull of
The Samarkand.
They were indeed dark.

“So that may not be the wisest option. You're safer here. With me. Getting what you want.”

“I haven't said—”

“You don't need to tell me. You just need to be near me. I can smell what you want.”

If Mitchell had ever said anything like that as a sexual overture he would have killed his chances stone dead. But she'd invited this man to say what was in his head. It was too late to play the Puritan. Besides, coming from him, right now, the idea was curiously beguiling.
He could smell her.
Her breath, her sweat; God knows what else. She was near him and he could smell her; she was wasting his time and hers protesting and denying . . .

So she said: “I thought we were going to fish?”

He grinned at her. “You want a lover who keeps his promises, huh?”