Outerbridge Reach (24 page)

“And what will she do,” Harry asked Browne playfully, “while you're at sea?”

Anne hastened to answer for herself. “I think I'll read
War and Peace.
A little every night.”

“You sh . . should both read it,” Strickland said helpfully. “Then you could discuss it when he got home.” He smiled to indicate that he spoke in fun. The company ignored him.

When coffee was finished, Owen declared that he'd had all the celebrating of which he was capable. Anne stood up at once.

“Yes,” she said, “we'd better go.” Strickland thought he saw a shade of hesitation and regret.

“Take my car,” Harry said. “I'm staying in town.”

“Thanks, Harry,” Browne said. “Can we drop anyone?”

“You can drop me,” Strickland said. He was slightly drunk. He should at least, he realized, have asked which way they were going.

Once in the car, they headed for the Triborough Bridge by way of Hell's Kitchen. Owen Browne apologized for his fatigue and went to sleep in a corner seat with his head thrown back against the cushion. For a while, Anne rubbed her husband's shoulder blades.

In the near-darkness, Strickland felt that she was wary of him. He regretted coming along now and being at such close quarters with her and so outside her life. He was taken with the thought that he might never, ever get any closer. The thought made him feel both lonely and angry.

Once, when they were stopped for a light on Thirty-fourth Street and Tenth Avenue, he managed a long secret look at her. Her bright silky hair was braided behind her head. The color of her eyes was nearly Viking blue, but with a Celtic shadow. Her face was strong, willful and austere, wonderfully softened by her smile. It was a brazen, faintly androgynous pre-Raphaelite beauty, daunting, almost more than he thought he could handle.

It was unclear to Strickland how she had worked her way into the scheme of his senses. Generally, he favored the mysterious and perversely turned and, on the face of it, Anne Browne was neither. No one had ever instructed her in concealing her intelligence or moderating her enthusiasm. Nothing about her spoke to his particular desires. But somehow everything about her did.

They talked a little, about the wine. When they got to Strickland's loft, she got out of the car and came with him to the door. It had stopped raining.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Anne said to Strickland. Her face was flushed and she was at the edge of unsteadiness. “We must talk when we get a chance.”

“Sure,” Strickland said. “We must.”

“I've been thinking about your Vietnam film,” she said. “You definitely weren't on the team, were you?”

“Definitely not.”

“Some of it's very funny. I mean tragically funny. You're a very persuasive film maker.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You're on our team, though, aren't you?” she asked. “You're not making fun of us, are you?”

Trying to answer, he found it impossible. Out of the question. But he had actually begun to speak and he could not make himself stop uttering the arrested consonant or put his teeth around the end of it.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. Then she laughed at him. Actually simpered and put a hand to her mouth, laughing at his stammer. “I'm really sorry.”

“It's O.K.,” Strickland said.

“We really must talk,” she said, trying to bend her laughter to a polite smile.

“Absolutely,” Strickland said.

Upstairs, he poured himself a drink and stood by the round window, leaning his forehead against the glass. When he had finished his drink he dialed Pamela and left a message on her machine, asking her to come over. Then he poured a second drink and dialed her again and said, “Forget about it.”

K
EITH
F
ANELLI
, his wife, Silvia, and their three-year-old son, Jason, lived in a single-family house in Tottenville on the south shore of Staten Island. The house was modest and painted yellow with aluminum siding on its front. There was an extra apartment over the garage. Behind the house was a comfortable back yard in which stood a portable gas barbecue and a redwood picnic table.

Silvia, Strickland found, was a fierce little brunette who spoke the pure and uncorrupted Brooklyn
poissard,
a diction almost extinct in its home borough. They were teaching Jason to chew gum and talk like his mother.

“I think he's crazy, the guy,” Silvia declared. She meant Browne. “He wants to sail around the world? Never happen!” She turned to invoke her husband's witness. “Right, honey?”

Fanelli nodded faintly without looking at her.

“He's a fruitcake,” Silvia added. “I mean, c'mon.”

“Why don't you go to the park?” Fanelli asked her.

Strickland was visiting the Fanellis on a balmy Indian summer afternoon. Fanelli's fellow yardbird Jim Crawford had driven over from his house in Jersey. Strickland had brought a bottle of unblended Scotch and two six-packs of Colt .45. He had also brought a tiny Maxell tape recorder, which was concealed under his shirt. Both men had refused to speak on camera. Strickland decided to examine the legalities involved from some future perspective. He therefore proposed an off-the-record conversation and that, Fanelli and Crawford believed, was what they were having.

The three men sipped their whiskey and watched Silvia lecture Jason with mock sternness.

“Jason, don't you swallow it. No, no, no!”

“Hey,” Fanelli said, “Silvia, eh?”

“Yeah,” she said crossly, “yeah, yeah. He's never home,” she said to Strickland. “He comes home and
we
gotta go out.”

When Silvia and the tyke had departed for the park, Strickland poured more Scotch into everyone's glass.

“The thing is,” he said to them, “can this guy win?”

Fanelli and Crawford exchanged a quick look and drank their whiskey.

“He's a phony,” Fanelli said. He looked at them as though he were ready to fight about it. “That's all he is.”

“Don't mean he can't win,” Crawford said. Crawford had a Maine accent, which Strickland much admired. He could only hope the recorder was doing its number.

“Nah,” Fanelli said. “He's just a fuckin' hype artist.” Crawford shrugged.

“Hey,” Fanelli insisted, “c'mon man. Browne? He ain't gonna win.”

“Could surprise,” Crawford said.

Fanelli turned up his lip. “Nah.”

“Why do you say that?” Strickland asked Crawford.

“I think he really wants to win. I mean wants to a whole lot.”

“Fuck, man,” Fanelli said. “He's a pussy.”

Crawford shrugged.

Fanelli turned on Strickland, appealing to reason.

“He's a preppy!” Fanelli insisted. In his excitement, his voice went shrill. “He's a fuckin' salesman and he's not even a good salesman. That's what I heard. I heard it's Harry Thorne who's putting him in this race. Harry Thorne, man, Harry Thorne don't know boats. Harry Thorne started out in the glass business. He don't know shit either.”

“He's like a bad officer,” Crawford said, “Browne is. The kind you don't want over you. Gung-ho do-or-die bullshit. Sometimes they do, sometimes they die. Take you with 'em, too.”

“You sound like you're speaking from experience,” Strickland said.

“Yep,” Crawford said.

“You know what it is?” Fanelli demanded. “They're hyping this boat. This piece of shit.”

“Piece of shit?” Strickland asked. “His boat?”

“Never mind the boat,” Crawford said.

Fanelli appeared chastened into something that might pass for silence. He folded his arms and rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath to indicate the measure of insight he was sacrificing to discretion.

“With a little bit of luck,” Crawford said, “he might just take her around.”

“Thorne is queer for him,” Fanelli said.

“They want to sell boats, all right,” Crawford said. “No question about that. He wins, we'll be seeing his picture.”

Fanelli shivered with disgust.

“Me, I thought he was a total pussy too,” Crawford said. “Since we went out, I ain't so sure. He's accident prone. There's a bucket on deck, he'll step in the fucker. But he might get lucky.”

Fanelli appeared scandalized. It was as though he could stand no more.

“Fuck you! You wanna bet? I'll give you fuckin' odds.”

“What odds?” Crawford asked.

“Fifteen to one.”

Strickland rejoiced at the turn the conversation had taken.

Crawford was silent for a moment. “Tell you what,” he said. “My bet would be this—either he wins or he dies. You pay me either way. If he quits or runs behind, I pay you. You give me the odds. Ten to one.”

Fanelli went stock-still as though frozen by some kind of stroke. He stared at the sky.

“Fuckin' A,” he shouted. The two shook hands. “You're a witness,” Fanelli told Strickland.

“Absolutely,” Strickland said.

O
N A
Sunday afternoon, with the yard quiet, Browne looked up from his labors and saw Duffy the publicist standing on the dock beside
Nona.

“Maiden voyages always go badly,” Duffy told him.

“Who says?”

“That's just what they say,” Duffy explained. “It's a proverb of the sea.”

“Who says it went badly?”

“Just kidding,” Duffy said. “Anyway, you owe me an interview. Anne said you'd come down here.”

“Sorry,” Browne said. “Not today.”

“Jesus, chum, you have to talk to me sometime. You have to give me something to work with.”

“Not today, Duffy.”

“I have to tell you, Owen, it's not supposed to be this way. We're supposed to be hyping you to the limit.”

“I know,” Browne said. “One day I'll find the time for it.” Duffy studied him for a moment and nodded toward a bench on the end of the dock.

“Come with me, will you, Owen?”

Browne followed him to the bench and they sat side by side. “Are you O.K.? I mean off the record. Bullshit aside.”

“I'm perfectly fine.”

“You're such a Yankee, fella. I can't tell what's on your mind. I don't even think your wife can. And she can if anyone can.”

“I'm not really a Yankee, Duffy. My parents were immigrants like yours.”

“No kidding? From where?”

“From England.”

Duffy guffawed.

“That's not emigration, Owen. That's colonialism. I mean, you grew up on the North Shore of Long Island. You went to Fessenden School. I mean, it's pathetic.”

“I grew up on the estate of John Igo,” Browne said. “That's where I learned to sail. My father was basically a servant. My mother definitely was.”

“But you went to Fessenden.”

“Mr. Igo had no sons. He thought, incorrectly, that my father liked and admired him. He sent me there. Or caused me to be sent. I went to Fessenden to please Mr. Igo. I went to Annapolis to please my father.”

“How about that!” Duffy exclaimed.

“Mr. Igo believed his family came from Gloucestershire. Maybe they did. Anyway, he hired all his help over there. His millwrights, his stable hands. He hired my parents.”

“Your folks alive?”

Browne shook his head.

“My father grew up in a temperance household and took to drink at forty. My mother died young.”

“What were they like?”

“Like gnomes,” Browne said. He laughed at Duffy's astonishment. “Mother's family were exceedingly small. She had an album. Her parents had huge eyes and tiny bodies. She came from a town where everyone looked that way.”

“Shit,” Duffy said, “this is interesting. Only I don't think we can use it.”

“Annie doesn't put it on the resume,” Browne said. He looked toward the Manhattan towers. “And my father? What can I say? On a certain level he was an English servant.”

“Like in the movies, you mean?”

“I always found movie servants very puzzling. They weren't anything like my father. My father was very smart. Very well read. A big boozer once he started drinking. He taught me wine. How to taste it. How to order it.”

“But you don't drink.”

“No,” Browne said. “That's probably why.”

“How come he took a job out here?”

“I never really knew,” Browne said. “He never really told me exactly. There was some secret. Or some scandal. Something got stolen. He was accused of something. He'd get loaded and complain about the unfairness of it all and my mother would hush him.”

“That's a familiar story.”

“Right,” Browne said.
“Silas Marner
.”

“Never mind
Silas Marner
,” Duffy said. “It's every immigrant family's story. Every goddam one of them. It's my family's story, it's your family's. Every child of immigrants I ever met had the same family story. The big secret back in the old country. The one thing the Americans must never, ever know. It's a fucking archetype.”

“He didn't think of himself as an immigrant,” Browne said. “Didn't care for the term.”

“Did he talk about England a lot?”

“He told me I was lucky we didn't live there. He said the English live in fear of each other. An Englishman is always spying out the high ground, he said. People like to compare themselves favorably. With anything. A log, a passing cloud. He said that here the more intelligent people are, the nicer they are, and in England it's just the opposite.”

“Too bad they're not around to see you win,” Duffy said.

They sat in silence for a while. Then Browne said, “Tell me something. Who should I be? Who's the irreplaceable man the public requires?”

“Somebody better,” Duffy said.

“Better than me, you mean?”