Outerbridge Reach (2 page)

“
Na zdorovie!
” Fedorov repeated. In drink he became a professional Russian.

“Old Teddy's so loaded,” Buzz Ward said, “he's talking Polish.” He and Browne exchanged glances of resigned concern. Ward was a Kentuckian from a military family who had been a fighter pilot before taking his advanced degrees.

For dinner they went out to a restaurant in a restored colonial building near the state capitol. Their table was set by a bay storefront window overlooking Cumberland Street. The place was candlelit, herb-scented and mellifluent with Vivaldi. The wine somehow aroused Fedorov to a state of manic animation. He looked at his friends sidewise over his glasses, with a narrow-eyed crafty smile. Most of his adult life had passed in scholarly contemplation of the Soviet navy.

“Twenty years,” he said, “next June. Can you believe it?”

“Easily,” Buzz Ward said, and laughed at his own comment.

“I can't,” Browne said.

His friends looked at him in silence.

“Well I can't, I'm sorry. It's impossible.”

“All the same,” Buzz Ward said, “there it is.”

“Tell him,” Fedorov said impatiently to Ward. “Tell Owen your plan.”

Then Ward explained to Browne that he was leaving the Navy to take up religion. As soon as he retired, he and his wife were removing to northern California so that Buzz could attend a seminary there.

“That's incredible,” Browne said. In fact, he was not particularly surprised at Ward's decision. “What about your fourth stripe?”

“I can retire with it,” Ward said.

Browne shook his head.

“You were supposed to make flag rank, Buzz. We were counting on you.”

“Twenty is plenty,” Buzz Ward told him. “My kids are grown. I'm not about to divorce Mary. I need some love in my life.”

Each of them had gone to Vietnam during the war and each had faced some combat. All three, as it turned out, saw their naval careers destroyed through the events of the war. Ward's fate had been particularly heroic and complicated. He had started out as one of the Navy's F-14 aces. After twenty-five missions he had been forced to eject over the Dragon Jaw Bridge. Then he had spent five years as a prisoner of war.

Fedorov rocked in his chair, arms folded, his face gross and saturnine.

“Anything to stop the clock,” he said. “Extraordinary measures. Anything to break the treads of time.”

Ward laughed self-consciously.

“You got it, buddy,” he said. “You done put your finger on it, my friend.”

“Everybody wants to be happy,” Fedorov told them. “They're not happy if they're not happy. It's America. Remember the people who threw shit on us?” he demanded. He turned to look about the room as though he might find some antiwar demonstrators there. There were only a few elderly tourists. “Where are they now? Not happy, poor babies. Well, fuck them. They have their reward.”

“An excellent analysis,” Ward said. He turned to Browne. “Wouldn't you say, doctor?”

“I don't know,” Browne said. “I'd have to think about it.” Their lives were bound in irony, Browne thought. Not one of them had chosen the Navy on his own. Each had been impressed into the Academy by the weight of someone else's expectations. In the case of Ward, it had been family tradition. Browne and Teodor were the sons of ambitious immigrant parents. If they had all graduated from high school only a year or two later they might have resisted. He and his friends had been the last good children of their time.

“Our enemies are confounded,” Fedorov declared, “that's the good news. The bad news? So are we.” He raised his glass of wine. “
Na zdorovie
.”

They raised their glasses with his. Both Ward and Browne were drinking soda water.

Afterward, they went back to the house beside the river. Browne decided to stay the night, do his business in Waldorf the next morning and take an afternoon train home.

In the Wards' living room, Buzz poured a small glass of wine for Fedorov, who took it without complaint. He made coffee for Browne and himself. Ward had always been a tireless coffee drinker, Browne remembered, a very naval thing to be.

“Maybe it was me who should have stayed in,” he told Buzz Ward, “instead of you. Sometimes I wish I had.”

“I always thought so, Owen. You instead of me. But you made a lot of money in the boat business. You damn well couldn't have done that in the Navy.”

Browne shook his head quickly. “It's always risky. You can't count on anything one season to the next. Anyway,” he told Ward, “I never cared about money.”

Fedorov, who had appeared to be sliding into sleep, sat up straight on the sofa.

“You had better not go around saying that, Owen. You'll be locked up.”

“None of us cared about money,” Ward said. “That's the truth of it.”

“Absolutely,” Fedorov said. “Blitz was right about us.”

Fedorov's reference was to an upperclassman named Bittner who had persecuted Browne and his two friends during their plebe year. Bittner had decided that the three of them were sodomists. He had gone beyond hazing, to the point of setting loose one of the Academy's periodic homophobic inquisitions. The charges had badly shaken Browne and Ward, who were not homosexual and who had been slightly more naive about sexuality than the average midshipman. Fedorov had been driven to the lip of suicide. The experience had served to bond them. Bittner had turned out to have sodomy on the brain and been dismissed from the service. But he had been right about Fedorov.

“Well, I didn't stay in,” Browne said, “and you guys did. That's one decision at least that's behind us.”

“Wait until you see life in the economy, Buzz,” Fedorov said to Ward. “It's terrifying! People pay for everything!”

“Speaking of which,” Browne asked them, “did you guys register the market yesterday?”

Both Fedorov and Ward looked at him blankly.

“Christ,” Browne said, “you don't know what I'm talking about, do you?”

“Oh,” Fedorov asked, “the stock market?”

“Forget it,” Browne said good-humoredly. “Never mind.”

“The heroic age of the bourgeoisie is over,” declared Fedorov, the naval Kremlinologist.

Ward helped him toward the foot of the stairs.

“So is the cold war, Teddy,” Browne said. “We're all redundant.”

Fedorov climbed like blind Oedipus, one hand on the banister, the other held out before him.

“Rubbish heap of history,” he said fervently.

Ward went up behind him, ready for a fall.

On the train the next day, Browne watched the streetlighted slums of Philadelphia swing by, passing like time. The notion of twenty years gone was beginning to oppress him. In the dingy light of his shabby evening train, he felt himself approaching a new dimension, one in which he would have to live out the life he had made.

Ever since deciding to deliver the Forty-five, he had been looking forward to the sail and an evening with Ward and Fedorov. Riding home, he was discontent and disappointed. The anxiety that haunted him had to do with more than the design of Altan's latest boat and the state of the market. Old rages and regrets beset him. He felt in rebellion against things, on his own behalf and on behalf of his old friends.

As midshipmen, the three of them had been fellow stooges and musketeers. They had found each other, lost souls amid the monumental ugliness of Bancroft Hall. They had been wrongos and secret mockers, subversives, readers of Thomas Wolfe and Hemingway. They had appeared “grossly poetic,” as Fedorov liked to say, naively literary in a military engineering school where the only acceptable art forms were band music and the shoe shine. They had survived to be commissioned by pooling their talents. Ward was a natural officer, in spite of his bookishness. Browne was athletic and, as the son of a diligent servant, skillful at petty soldiering. Fedorov tutored his friends in mathematics; they discouraged his tormentors and turned him out for Saturday inspections.

Their bohemian longings went equally unappreciated outside the main gate. However painfully Browne and his friends might aspire to stronger wine and madder music, young civilian America was having none of them in the year 1968. Midshipmen were cleaning spittle off their dress blues that year.

They had all gone to Vietnam after graduation and watched America fail to win the war there. This insufficiency was often a more remote spectacle for the Navy than for the other services, but Browne, Ward and Fedorov had all worked close to the core. They had each done their jobs but only Ward had excelled, for a while.

In the piss-yellow light of Penn Station, the hustlers and the homeless wandered into Browne's path as he made his way from the track. What did they see, he wondered, when they looked at him? A tweedy, well-intentioned man. An enemy, but too big and still too young to be a mark. Checking the scene, he thought: Yet I also am an outsider. He had left for the Academy from Penn Station on a summer morning in 1964. It had been an occasion of joy.

Riding the escalator to the upper level, he found himself wondering how, on that morning of departure, he might have imagined himself twenty years along. The image would have been a romantic one, but romantic in the postwar modernist style. Its heroic quality would have been salted in stoicism and ennobled by alienation. As an uncritical reader of Hemingway, he would have imagined his future self suitably disillusioned and world-weary. On the morning in question, he would not have had the remotest conception of what such attitudes entailed. He would have awaited world-weariness and disillusionment impatiently, as spurs to higher-class and more serious fun. Of course, not even Hemingway had enjoyed them very much in the end.

At the top of the escalator, he encountered another tier of loiterers and, for security's sake, put on his glasses. Confident and watchful, he passed unthreatened among the hovering poor. And combat, Browne thought. He would have imagined himself recalling combat. He would have expected combat to resemble
Victory at Sea.

In the empty corridor that led to Seventh Avenue, an image of the old Penn Station came to him as he had first seen it as a child. He had tried to embrace the ponderous columns whose span defied the human scale. They had been still standing when he left for Annapolis the first time. Vanished sunlight came to his recollection, streaming through enormous windows in great beams and bursts, streaming from the throne of heaven.

Hearing his own echoing footsteps, he turned to look over his shoulder. Outside, teenagers debouching from a concert drifted along Seventh Avenue, looking covert and disorderly. Browne walked around the corner to the suburban-limousine ramp and boarded a car for home.

His house was old and outsized, a mansion on the edge of a slum in an unprestigious outer suburb. Undoing the locks, he awakened his wife. When he went into the bedroom, she smiled and raised her arms to him. On a wooden tray beside her bed stood an empty bottle of white wine, a glass and a jug of water.

“Oh,” he said, “you're in good spirits, are you?”

She laughed. “Yes, I've been writing all day. And listening to music and waiting for you.”

“Good,” he said. He sat down on the bed beside her. “Christ, what a dumb couple of days. Between the boat and the market.”

“Ross says they can fix it,” Anne told him.

“You talked to him?”

“I called to give him a piece of my mind. You might have gotten wet out there.”

“Poor guy,” Browne said.

“I think I really gave him a scare. He thought I was calling for the magazine.”

“Ross is scared of you anyway,” Browne said. “You're too much lady for him.”

He was suddenly moved to desire, wild with it. It was as though various hungers had combined to focus themselves on the woman beside him. He surprised them both with his avidity.

“Oh my dear,” she said softly.

When they were done he lay awake listening to police sirens on the highway across the marsh. He felt as resigned to his private discontents as to the world's.

A
GOVERNMENT
marimba band was playing in the lobby of the hotel when Strickland came down to pay off his crew. The sound man and cameraman were brothers named Serrano who Strickland believed had been charged by their government with reporting on his activities. The brothers Serrano took their leave with unsmiling formality. Strickland paid them in dollars. As he walked away toward the garden lounge, he heard one of them imitating his stammer. He did not turn around.

For a moment, he stood in the doorway of the garden and watched the declining sun settle into the mountains. Then he saw his colleague Biaggio at a poolside table. Biaggio was signaling, urging him nearer, coaxing with both hands like the landing control man on an aircraft carrier. He went over to Biaggio's table and sat down.

“Eh,” he said, “Biaggio.” He enjoyed saying it.

His friend Biaggio was in something of a state. Normally the man reposed within an aura of lassitude that weighted his every gesture.

“I'm in love,” he told Strickland.

“You'd . . . d . . don't know what love is, Biaggio.”

“Ha,” Biaggio told him, “it's you who don't know.”

Strickland shook his head with an air of tolerant disgust.

“You really have to dick everything that comes your way, don't you? You're like a fucking insect.”

The languid Swiss journalist regarded Strickland with an expression of intelligent distress.

“The earth is rising on new foundations,” he explained. “In the air—vitality. New beginnings. And this itself makes the heart prone.”

“And the weenie vertical,” Strickland said. He looked around for a waiter but there were none in sight. “Who's the lucky lady, I wonder?”

“But you know her, Strickland. She's named Charlotte. Charlotte . . . something.”