Outerbridge Reach (20 page)

She looked away.

“I don't believe that anything as serious as a world race should be entered into for trivial reasons,” Browne said. “Money is a rational goal. An acceptable token.”

“So you're not just an incurable romantic?”

“I don't know,” Browne said. “Maybe.”

Then the phone rang and Anne rose—gratefully, Strickland thought—to answer it. A moment later she was back, plainly relieved at an excuse to leave the session.

“New York Nautical has the Admiralty charts I ordered,” she told the men from her kitchen. “This would be a good time to pick them up.”

Strickland began to stammer an objection but Browne cut him off. “Good,” he told his wife. “Pick them up now and I'll make dinner when you get back.”

“Fair enough,” Anne said, and gave everyone a wintry smile and went out to her car.

On the way home she was surprised by darkness. A light was on upstairs in Maggie's room. Owen was in the kitchen reading. “Good,” he said, “you're back. Can I fix you something?” Anne shrugged and took a bottle of chablis from the refrigerator.

“I don't know why,” Browne said, “but I have a bad feeling about today.”

“About the filming?” she asked, pouring the wine.

“I have the feeling,” Browne said, “that I acted like a complete ass.”

“I don't think that,” she said quickly.

“Thanks,” Browne said. He sounded unconvinced.

“I think it was him.”

“I don't know,” Browne said. “All he did was ask questions. Pretty routine questions, really.”

“It was him,” Anne said. “Something about the way he questioned you was off.”

“I think I said some dumb things. I may live to be sorry.”

“I'll talk to him,” she said.

“I don't want you to,” Browne said. “I'll know better next time out. Are you sure you don't want anything to eat?”

She shook her head. “You did surprise me with one thing,” she said after a moment.

“Really?”

“About the money,” she said. “You don't really care about it, do you?”

“No,” he said. “I don't give a damn about the money. Of course I don't.”

“Well, you more or less told him it was your motivation for the cruise.” They had taken to calling his undertaking the cruise, Navy-fashion.

“I thought it was the right thing to say. The right answer.”

She put her glass down. “But why, Owen?”

“I guess I wanted to be a regular Joe.”

“But you aren't a regular Joe. Not in the least.”

Browne laughed. “You're an elitist, you know. That's not considered a good thing to be."

“I don't care,” she said. “You mustn't vulgarize yourself before a lot of inferior people. Publicity or not.”

They sat in silence. Anne finished her wine. If the time had been right, she thought, she would have set out then and there to convince him once again of his own excellence and of her unqualified love. But the time was not.

I will give him a letter, she thought, to read at sea.

“There's no reason Strickland should want to make me look bad,” Browne said finally. “The better everything goes, the better for his film, right? If I win, if I look like a champ, it's all to the good.”

“I don't know about him,” she said. To herself she thought, He's a snake, is Strickland. Thinking about him, she could picture a snake slithering across bright grass toward a dark cistern. “We'll see.”

O
VER THE SUMMER,
they got used to frequent calls from Harry Thorne. One day Thorne called to suggest that Owen visit a person Harry called the coach. She was a kind of trainer and a kind of therapist, Harry said, and Browne might find her useful. Browne decided it would be politic to go.

The coach's name was Dr. Karen Glass. Her office was on West End Avenue in the Seventies, on the ground floor of a gray stone mansion older than the tall apartment buildings around it. When Browne arrived for his appointment thunderheads were gathering over Manhattan and, although it was only six in the afternoon, streetlamps flashed on along the avenue. The impending storm cast an expectant light.

The front door was glass, curtained and barred with iron grillwork. When he rang the bell, a light went on inside. A female voice addressed him through a speaker in the vestibule. Browne identified himself and was admitted.

Dr. Glass was a very attractive blond woman in a paisley dress of the sort that had been popular in the sixties. She came to the doorway of her office to greet him. A bicycle was propped against the wall beside it. On the left, a flight of carpeted stairs led up into darkness. On one step, halfway up the flight, a child's Masters of the Universe doll lay against the balustrade.

“Hi, Mr. Browne,” she said.

Her office had three big windows opening on the side street. The room was earth-colored, decorated with landscape photographs, Indian blankets, an abstract oil painting in desert tones. Everything seemed positive and upbeat, although the effect was somewhat subverted by the light outside. Just as they settled down to talk, lightning broke and then thunder, and the rain came down.

“Do you like white noise?” she asked him.

“I don't know what it is.”

“It's like the rain,” she said, gesturing toward the window. “It's good for you.”

“Oh,” said Browne. He saw that the white noise came in a machine, with attached earphones.

“Can you relax a little for me now?” Dr. Glass asked.

“I doubt it,” said Browne.

He declined the white noise but before long she had him talking. They talked about his parents and about life on the Long Island estate his father had managed. His mother had been Catholic, his father a fallen-away member of the Plymouth Brethren. She wanted to talk further about that. Browne declined. He explained that his father had taught him to sail.

From time to time, she would throw in some outrageous question designed to detect pathology. He had the right answers. They talked about the Academy and then a little about the war. She was trying to bring out the raconteur in him.

“I started out in Tactical Air Control,” Browne told her. “Then I went to the Naval Advisory Command.”

“You advised their navy?”

He shrugged.

“What did you tell them?”

“Red sky at night is the sailor's delight,” Browne declared. “Red sky at morning is the sailor's warning.”

“Oh,” she said, “you're funny.”

“The navy of the Republic of Vietnam never produced many naval heroes,” Browne explained. “It did produce a number of amusing anecdotes.”

Karen Glass kept smiling.

“We had these people and we dressed them up and fitted them out as a navy. They pretended to be one. I didn't advise them,” he told her. “I was a public affairs officer for NavAc-V. The advisory command.”

“But you did some fighting?”

“I wouldn't call it fighting. I was fired upon.”

“Is sailing like being fired upon?”

He was twisting his Academy ring. She glanced quickly at his hands.

“It's the opposite,” Browne said.

“Really?”

“Sailing is harmony.” He hoped she would write it down. She didn't.

“Why sail alone?”

“Alone it's perfect.” As far as he could tell that was what he believed.

“Do other people make things less perfect?”

“Of course,” he said. They smiled at each other.

“But there's a whole other way of looking at things,” Karen said. “Where something's less perfect because it's solitary. It's incomplete.”

In the end they agreed to split the difference.

“Come back if you like,” Dr. Glass said as he went out. “Tell us what's on your mind. Try the white noise.”

He thanked her with the excessive politeness to which he was prone. On the train home, after a brief period of elation, he became very depressed. Anne met him at the station in the car.

When she went upstairs, he stayed down to read in her study. The entire lower story of the house was piled with provisions; there were stacks of canned goods and plastic jugs, heaps of new underwear in cellophane, and propane cylinders. The whole house smelled slightly of the beef jerky Anne had been making in the kitchen, drying strips of meat on the oven racks. The local butchers had come to recognize her as the person who bought several pounds of sirloin tips at a throw, sliced as thinly as possible.

From the study he could hear Maggie in the laundry room off the kitchen. He put his book aside. When she went past the study with the clean wash gathered in her arms, he called her back.

“How are you, Maggie?”

“Fine,” she said. He asked her if she might put the laundry away and come back to talk. She behaved as if the request puzzled her. “Sure,” she said with a shrug.

After five minutes or so she came back down. She entered the study almost furtively, brushing her sleeve across her face like the original snot-nosed kid. She could always manage a few unlovely mannerisms for his disapproval.

“What does ‘fine' mean?” he asked.

“I dunno,” she said. “I mean, I'm O.K. and all.”

Browne realized suddenly that he had no idea what to say to her and no words to frame the questions he wanted to ask. The session with Karen Glass had left him somehow in pursuit of communication, hungry for something beyond language.

“It's been a crazy summer, I know,” Browne said. “Everything's upside down. I'm sorry we couldn't get to the island. I really wanted to.” Maybe, he thought, it was love he was after. The thing itself.

“That's O.K., Dad.”

“So how are things on the job?” She had taken a summer job stocking shelves in a supermarket on the Post Road. Browne had not allowed her to work at the local McDonald's, where she could have made more money. The neighborhood was bad; he worried about bandits, abductors, impulsive crackheads.

“Fine,” she said.

“I think it's a better arrangement,” he declared. “Your mother and I don't have to worry all the time. That's better, don't you think?”

“Sure,” she said. “I guess so.”

“We have to talk,” Browne told his daughter. “We'll go out to dinner one day before you go back to school. You can pick the place. We might even go to New York.”

“O.K.,” Maggie said.

“Where,” he asked with grim persistence, “would you like to go?”

Maggie swallowed and pursed her lips. Her shrug turned into a shudder. She gave him a desperate smile.

“I don't know.”

“No particular preference?”

“Anywhere,” she said. “Wherever you want.”

Before he could take it any further, Anne called down to them from the top of the stairs.

“Owen? Coming up?”

He and Maggie held each other's eyes for a moment, complicit in their secret struggle.

“Yes,” he called back. “Right now.”

“I don't know what the problem is with her,” Browne said to Anne as he undressed. “My presence seems to strike her deaf, dumb and blind. She behaves as if I'm her enemy.”

“She'll get over it, Owen. Really.”

“I read a piece last week,” he said, “about sustained marijuana use. Apparently kids lose their vitality. They become passive. I can't help but wonder if that isn't the problem.”

Anne only laughed. “It isn't. Believe me.”

“I don't know how you can be so certain. The stuff's all around her at school.”

Anne shook her head, climbed beneath the covers and closed her eyes. Then she asked, “How did it go with the shrink?”

“I think it was pretty bad,” he said.

She kept her head on the pillow and looked straight at the far wall. “Why?”

“I don't know,” he said quickly. “I think I made a fool of myself. I have a very strong feeling of that.”

He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

“Why?” she asked him when he got into bed. “What did he ask you? What did you say?”

“It was a young woman,” he told her. “The session was very short.”

“I'm sure it went fine,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I couldn't relax for some reason. I said the wrong thing sometimes. I felt as though I wasn't telling the truth.”

“Owen,” she said with a laugh, “you must be the only man in the world who gives himself such a hard time.”

He shook his head gravely. Anne got up on her elbows.

“Do you think other people demand so much of themselves?” she nearly shouted. The passion in her voice surprised them both. “Do you think anyone but you cares so much about things like the truth?”

He laughed and then realized that she must have been drinking. “Don't they?”

“Not in this country,” she said. “Not in this day and age.”

R
UNNING ALONG
the beach at the end of summer, Browne breathed a thinner, drier air. In the cooler mornings, mists rose like smoke from the Sound. Time grew shorter by the day.

The house to which he returned after each morning run had taken on the aspect of a chandlery. Half the rooms were filled with electronic gear, line and sailcloth, canned goods and charts. The reek of smoked meat, as they continued their experiments with jerky, varying the marinade to suit his taste, had seeped into the very woodwork. Its increasingly disagreeable presence left him disinclined to bring the stuff at all.

Anne had set up a computer system through which they could track the state of equipment and monitor orders and purchases. She spent most of her time in the office ordering charts, fielding requests for interviews and offers of sponsorship. For transport between the house and the yard in Staten Island, they bought a used Dodge van. Maggie had gone to a ranch in Colorado for the last weeks before school opened.