Outerbridge Reach (12 page)

“Don't call me Ronnie.”

“Strickland,” she said urgently. “We could have such a bitching good time.”

She was sprawled on his bed. Strickland was in the next room, making a list of the equipment he would have to bring.

“You wouldn't like Finland, Pamela.”

“The fuck I wouldn't,” she replied. “I'd adore it.”

“Nonsense,” he said.

Coming into his sleeping quarters, Strickland saw that her eyes were flooding, her lips compressed with anger.

“Don't be silly,” he said to her. “You don't want anything to do with a country like Finland. You'd find it . . . uptight.”

“I wouldn't,” she insisted.

“Come on,” he said, sitting down beside her. “You want to go to the islands, don't you? Maui? Aruba? You want the sound of the sea and the s-sun on your golden hair, right? So forget about Finland.”

“Please,” she sang to Strickland, “please, please.”

“O.K.,” Strickland said. “If you come for free.”

His words seemed to increase her anguish.

“You know I can't do that,” she said bitterly. “How can I go places for free?”

“Pamela,” Strickland said patiently, “I can't have you on my credit card ticking away like some kind of crazy taxi meter. You don't really want to go to Finland anyway.”

“I do!” she declared. “And you could make it all expenses. If you made that movie about me you could have a Finland sequence. That would open it up.”

Strickland found himself wishing he had her antic mood on film. Her tantrum amused him and made him feel strangely indulgent. He sat down on the bed beside her.

“Look, baby,” he said softly, and took Pamela by the hand, “you don't want to go to Finland. It's the land of the noon moon. There are wolf packs. People go insane from the cold and dark.”

She closed her eyes and clenched her fists.

“But that's just why I would adore it there!” she cried. “Because it would be so wild and interesting!”

“Out of the question,” Strickland told her.

Pamela burst into tears. She eased her legs off the bed and slowly crumpled to the floor where she curled in a fetal position and sobbed as though her heart would break. Strickland turned onto his stomach, reached down and stroked her hair. His gaze was on the city lights beyond the great window.

“There, there,” he said softly. “You see, it has nothing to do with Finland.”

Pamela moaned.

“It's your life, Pamela. It's very disorderly. It lacks cohesion.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“If you look into the center,” he asked her, “what do you see?”

“I don't know,” she said.

The thought of it made him shudder.

“Visualize, Pamela. What's in there?”

Infantile reprobation, he thought. A Third World of the mind, full of snakes and fever. He had almost gotten that much on film, for those who knew how to look.

“Nothing,” she insisted. “Me.”

When she stopped crying he let her do a line and put her in a taxi. As it drove off, she turned her pale pretty face toward him through the rear window. She had said nothing to the driver in Strickland's presence. He had no idea where she would go.

Back upstairs, Strickland sat before the Steenbeck and looked into its blank monitor. He had no regrets about solitude, of that he was certain. It was the only way to get things done and loneliness was an illusion. He had surrounded himself with a requisite silence and within it he could thrive. Outside was the swarm, the birds and the confusion. He had no serious connections there. All the same he was quite at home. Even strangling on his own words in that contaminated air, he could make them spread, make them dance. There were those who trusted him for the stammer, as though it should somehow keep him honest, and there were those, the stupider ones, who patronized him as a half-wit. His infirmity seemed to encourage people toward boasting and indiscretion. He had noticed it even as a child. It was they who came to him and impaled themselves.

But he had to admit that in the weeks since his return from Central America he had experienced a wavering of confidence. It had come out of nowhere, dogging his decisions on the Central American footage, making him increasingly wary of the strange Hylan project. Hardly since adolescence, it seemed to him, had he felt that hateful quiver of the gut, that tremor in the good right hand. But how familiar it was all the same, instantly recognizable over time. It waited, he supposed, for everyone. And perhaps there was such a thing as knowing too much. He was fast to his perception like some flying creature to its paralyzed wings. Once tiring he could never rest.

He had an urge to play the tape he had found of himself and his mother on the fifties Times Square radio show. He picked up the spool and turned it over. He could only wonder what had possessed him to play it for Pamela. What had he been trying to prove?

Strickland put the spool aside. He took a beer from his refrigerator and walked to the great round window to smoke a cigarette. The Hylan job was a good thing, he decided. It would allow him to let the Central American material settle so that he could cut it at his leisure. Moreover it was interesting. And the people involved were just like all the others. Pilgrims. Sleepwalkers.

Two days later, Strickland received a Hylan press kit and a set of travel agency vouchers. He spent the afternoon arranging to air freight his equipment. On the following day, he was in another taxi on the way to the airport. Passing Flushing Meadow, he let his eye fall on the detritus of the old World's Fairs. It was a place he often went by in his comings and goings. Most of the time, he passed it with hardly a thought.

Strickland understood that his mother had worked back of Eat Alley during the 1939 fair, with some attraction the city had closed down. He could remember her cursing the mayor, La Guardia, years after—also a picture postcard stuck in a mirror somewhere. The mirror would have been in their ancient Willys trailer, a prewar wonder they'd had when he was small. The postcard showed the totems of the fair, the Trylon and Perisphere.

Years later, living in New York and having taken New York as his subject, he came to read a history of the 1939 fair. War had broken out in the course of it. One by one, nations whose pavilions stood along the main concourse had passed under enemy occupation or even out of existence. In the end, the Trylon and Perisphere, the fair's symbols of progress, had been reduced to scrap—melted down, in effect, for weaponry. The fact had afforded him some vague satisfaction, a sensation completely divorced from reason, that had to do with his mother's rage. Strickland had become skilled at detecting and recording his own dumb reactions. About them he was not sentimental. His made no more sense than anyone else's but, unlike many people, he felt no compulsion to deny them. Your own shit, he thought, that sort of thing. It could be useful.

His cab shot by the tattered globe of the 1964 fair. Every inch of chrome had been stripped; ribbons of wire frame rattled around the supporting stanchions. Vietnam had been gathering around that one. Fairs were obviously bad luck and also bad business.

One day, he thought, he might make a film of the fairgrounds and its ghosts. He had never used old photographs and the music would be fun. No one would claim he was repeating himself. When his taxi pulled up in front of the Finnair terminal, he was deep in contemplation.

Stepping up to first class check-in, he found himself reluctant to part with the fantasy of a different film. The ones unmade were always pure. But in his heart he knew that there would never be such a venture, that he would never celebrate old fairgrounds or migrating salmon, threatened rain forests or Ojibway pictographs, or any of the other worthy subjects that sometimes occupied his daydreams. Strickland was devoted to the human factor. It was people he required.

“Y
OU HAVE
an Academy ring,” the woman at the stall opposite said to Browne. She was dark and slim, wearing sneakers and jeans. Her booth advertised a patented star-finder for the northern hemisphere.

Browne turned the class ring on his finger.

“Yes. Class of sixty-eight.”

It was opening day at the Maritime Exposition at the 42nd Regiment Armory in New York. The crowds were sparse. All day he had been sitting beside a screen on which he himself appeared, extolling the virtues of Altan boats. He was heartily tired of hearing himself.

“My ex-husband graduated from the Academy. His name is Charlie Bloodworth. Ever run into him?”

“Never,” Browne said.

“He's at Green Cove Springs now. That's where they make the old ships into razor blades.”

“So I've heard,” Browne said.

“We lived in Atsugi,” she said. “Guam, too.”

Looming above them were the hulls of two Altan stock boats. One was the Highlander Forty-five, which from his own experience Browne knew was badly made. The second was the Altan Forty, which he regarded highly. Before sailing south, Browne had actually made a tape on which he praised the Highlander Forty-five. He did not play it. Instead he played his pitch for the Altan Forty. A stand-up sign beside the Forty proclaimed it to be the stock version of the boat Matty Hylan would sail around the world. There was a picture of Hylan on the stand-up.

“I like your tape,” the slim dark woman said. She was deeply suntanned. “I'm really hung over.”

In the stuffy, humming air of the armor, he could not be sure he had heard her correctly.

“Too bad,” he said politely.

“Know any cures?”

“No,” he said. “I don't drink much.”

The woman laughed.

“How about watching my booth?” she asked.

Browne agreed and she walked away, still laughing.

As the afternoon wore on, the crowds became even smaller. The woman did not return to her star-finder booth. Browne had brought along a volume of naval history. That afternoon, he read about Trafalgar, Nelson and Collingwood advancing in separate columns toward the Franco-Spanish fleet, breaking the line.

At some point, he decided to get up and take an aspirin. Well over an hour had passed since the woman at the stall opposite had disappeared. Browne set out in pursuit of a drinking fountain.

Searching for water, he passed through the wing in which the powerboats were displayed. It was much more crowded than the sailing section. There were overweight matrons in yachting caps and couples with matching tattoos. There were cabin cruisers and sleek cigarette boats with gleaming fins. Model interiors blazed with chrome and tiger-striped upholstery. Browne walked through it all feeling light-headed. When he came to the beige curtain that divided the displays from the storage and receiving section, he slipped past it into the gloom.

The storage area was a wilderness of crates and cardboard boxes piled to the forty-foot ceiling. Beyond the crates, on a buffed concrete floor, stood two armored personnel carriers of the New York National Guard. Near them was a drinking fountain.

On his way to the fountain, Browne heard something like a sensual moan from the area behind the crates. Looking more closely, he saw the balding head of a middle-aged man above one rank of boxes. Extending from the boxes along the floor was a woman's foot with a tanned ankle and sneaker. Between one thing and another, Browne formed the impression that a sexual act was taking place. Drinking from the fountain, downing his aspirin, he felt angry and revolted. He avoided the area on his way back.

The woman from the star-finder booth returned fifteen minutes after Browne got back to his own booth. She seemed pleased with herself and he thought somehow it must have been she he had seen sporting among the stacked boxes. The exposition could be a wild scene, the top of the year for certain people. Browne had heard stories about the casual sex but he had never seen any evidence of it before.

A little before six o'clock, Pat Fay, the designer whom Browne had pressed into service at the Staten Island yard, came up and looked at the stand-up ad for the Altan Forty that had Matty Hylan's picture on it.

“You might as well take it down,” Fay said.

“Why?” Browne asked. He could see that the designer had been drinking.

Fay handed him a copy of the
New York Post,
open to page three. The headline over a three-column story inquired, “Where's Matty?”

There was a metal chair handy at a table piled with Altan brochures, so he sat down to read the story. Its substance was that in the face of bankruptcy and mounting scandal, Matty Hylan, bon vivant and captain of commerce, had vanished.

“They might have that race,” Fay said. “Matty won't be in it.”

“What I'm wondering,” Browne said, “is what does this mean to us?”

Fay shrugged and walked away.

Browne stayed seated at the table for a while, trying to ponder the results of Hylan's disappearance. All at once the idea came to him of volunteering to enter the race on his own. If he could not sail the boat Hylan was having made in Finland, he might sail the stock model on the floor in front of him. He was sure it was a good boat. He felt a surge of confidence in his own abilities as a sailor. Immediately he began composing, with a pencil on a sheet of lined yellow paper, a letter to Harry Thorne.

He had finished the letter and pocketed it when he saw the woman who sold star-finders still lounging before her stall. She sat on the ledge of industrial carpeting at the corner of the booth with one leg folded under her. Browne thought she was watching him suggestively.

“Matty's gone,” she said. “How about that guy?”

“Off for more congenial climes,” Browne said.

“I guess he won't be sailing.”

“Too bad,” said Browne. He began to gather up his papers. There were very few show-goers about. “It was a good boat.”

“If I was Matty,” the woman said, “I would have disappeared during the race. I'd vanish at sea.”