Outerbridge Reach (37 page)

“I seem to have this need to tell you the story of my life,” Strickland said to Anne.

“Yes,” she said, “I see that you do.”

Getting out, he peeled off the top bill from the roll he had won at the casino and thrust it toward the driver. Without even glancing at Strickland, the driver shook off the tip with a barely perceptible shrug. He was still wearing the dark glasses.

When the limousine pulled away Strickland found himself alone with the glowing towers and the lights of Asbury Park across the flats. It was a cold, dangerous place to be. He walked deliberately across the frozen mud to his car and then stood beside it, looking down a dark bank into the soiled marsh. The roll was still in his hand, new bills, crisp hundreds. He took the money in his right hand and fanned out the bills like a dealer and tossed it all into the darkness.

T
HE EVENINGS
grew shorter and faded no darker than cold blue. He felt as though he were stalking the wind. The absence of it seemed unnatural. One morning it occurred to him to call up Duffy.

“Where you been?” the publicist asked him.

“Can't you see me?”

“That's a blip, Owen. We like to hear your voice. I like to tell Annie I talked with you.”

“How is she?”

“She's a rock, man. A tower.”

A tower of ivory, Browne thought. “Don't I know it,” he said.

“By the way, we're supposed to use a standard procedure on these calls, Duffy. You're supposed to say ‘over' when your transmission is over. When you're signing off you say ‘out.'”

“I don't know whether I should tell you this, bro, but your sponsoring organization is in bad shape. Listening to the news?”

“I get the BBC,” Owen said, “once in a while. Over.”

“There isn't going to be much left of the Hylan Corporation.”

“Tough,” Browne said cheerfully. “That doesn't mean much out here.”

“You don't care,” Duffy informed him, “because you're gonna win regardless. You're gonna win it for the little guy.”

“Am I?”

“Affirmative,” Duffy said. “The fat cats fade but the little guy goes on and on. That's the angle.”

“I like it,” Browne said.

“Yeah,” Duffy said. “It's a good one. Little boat, big ocean. Unquenchable spirit. What's money?”

“I hope you're being paid,” Owen said.

“Hey, what do I care?” said Duffy. “I'm in it for the story.”

“How's your wife?” Owen asked.

“Better,” Duffy told him. “You're neck and neck with Fowler and Dennis. They're not getting any more wind than you are.”

“Good,” Browne said.

“So,” Duffy asked, “how the hell are you?”

“I always dreamed of being here,” Browne said, “and now I am.”

“And it's terrific, right?”

Far off on the horizon, Browne thought he saw an instant of reflected sunlight. He could not imagine what could be out there to catch it. He let Duffy's question go unanswered.

“Do you want to provide a quote,” Duffy asked, “or am I authorized to invent one?”

“I'd like to get it right,” Browne said. “I'd like to do it justice.”

“Think about it,” Duffy said.

“The quality of light is extraordinary,” Browne said.

“Don't forget the pictures.”

“I have no regrets,” Browne said. “I'm where I need to be and they should all know that.”

“Whatever you say, Captain.”

“It's like the edge of things.”

“Really? Are you feeling O.K.?”

“Yes, it's a different dimension. A little faster, maybe. There's a quickening. It's good,” he assured Duffy. “It's really good.”

“That's great, Owen,” Duffy said. “Stay with it.”

Since they had closed Duffy's office at Shadows, he worked out of what had been a realtor's office on the twentieth floor of the old Saint George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights. Although it overlooked sedate brownstones and the harbor, the place always reminded Duffy of the boiler rooms from which he had supervised telephone sales campaigns during newspaper strikes.

It took Duffy less than fifteen minutes to whip up a handout. When he was done he phoned in a digest of it to one of his cronies on the
Daily News.

“It's the fulfillment of a lifetime dream. Out on the edge the pulse quickens, the light takes on a new dimension. He'd rather be out there than anywhere else.”

“Jesus,” said the
Daily News
man, “he's a fucking wordsmith, ain't he?”

“The client is introspective,” Duffy told his reporter friend. “He's definitely a thinker, this guy.”

O
NE MID-WINTER MORNING,
Anne awoke in a state of some confusion about the night before. At the end of her day's writing she had stayed downstairs to read. The book was Minna Hubbard's memoir about crossing Labrador. She had been drinking a Sangiovese alongside. Anne found that she could not remember having dinner, nor could she account for a missing second bottle of the wine. Neither could she remember coming upstairs to bed.

Later in the morning, she recalled a film she supposed she must have watched in bed. Bits and pieces came back to her. It had been something she never would have endured sober. There had been murder and lyrically pornographic scenes in which a greasy-haired, unshaven man in a leather jacket and lifter's gloves slapped an undressed, slack-mouthed blonde and called her a bitch. She had turned out to be a killer.

That day Anne decided to stop drinking. It followed hard on her excursion to Atlantic City with Strickland. When she called the local Veterans' Hospital to volunteer as an aide, she found herself not required. She had done years of hospital work during the Vietnam War. As a poor substitute she started early morning exercise classes at the Y. The classes began before dawn at a desolate building in a dangerous part of town. On the bulletin board over the sign-in sheet someone had put up an amusing Larsen cartoon called “Aerobics in Hell.”

Often, in the late afternoon, she got blue. Sometimes she thought about going riding but the trails were icy and the nearest stables closed for the winter. She began writing more for
Underway,
sentimental pieces about nature or sailing with children, drawn from her own childhood adventures or outings with Maggie. They made her cry when she wrote them and embarrassed her in print. Magowan was no help; he published everything she wrote without comment.

At certain times Owen's absconded presence obsessed her. She had imaginary conversations with him, laughed and teased him, argued, sometimes bitterly. She entertained fantasies of telepathy. At other times, she was surprised at how remote from her life he seemed. When she tried deliberately to imagine his voice and manner she could not always bring them into focus. Early on in the voyage, tracing his progress on the chart in her study, she liked to think she was sharing his days and nights at sea. For weeks she was really off with him; people were amused at her abstractedness. It had been thrilling at first, his becoming a man of uncustomary skies, other stars, impossibly far horizons. Though she had never learned to love
Nona,
she thought fondly sometimes of the cabin that lodged him, how it would smell, of being in the bunk with him.

But after the holidays she found herself resisting the image of him at sea. When she entertained his presence, it was unlocated. In the middle of the night, she would wake up and think of him in the roaring forties and fifties and imagine some lapse in seamanship or fit of absentmindedness and be filled with anxiety. It had turned out not to be like the war. They were not young anymore. Then she had been proud in the teeth of the world. Now, entitled to conventional, respectable pride, she found her only security in dread, as though her fear were his ransom.

At one point she tried taking up religion. She wanted it back in her life, to practice it earnestly, energetically, the way she had as a kid. The eleven o'clock Mass at Annunciation was always filled with families in their Sunday best and she felt out of place. She knelt alone and recited formal prayers for his safe passage.

The exercise classes nourished her physical vanity. After a couple of weeks, still sore and newly abstemious, she felt trimmer and brighter. She tried on old breeches and bikinis she had once despaired of and antique miniskirts like her leather one from the sixties. Abstention from alcohol gave her vivid dreams. Occasionally these were euphoric, sometimes frightening, often sexual. A doctor wrote her some Xanax; the drug seemed to make her dreams even more spectacular and emotionally unfamiliar, as though they were drawn from the stuff of someone else's life. Sleeping and waking, the notion of being lost, of having wandered out of the right life, kept turning up in different guises. She imagined mirrors in which she could not find herself.

One fantasy she had deliberately indulged involved sailing the world with Owen and collaborating on a book. After he had been gone a few months, the idea took odd turns that made her anxious or angry. Every day she hated the soiled suburban winter more. She turned away, superstitiously, from the sight of calendars. Sometimes she dreamed of sailing alone.

Unbidden, unplotted fantasies also prowled the margins of her concentration. One was based on a dream and involved negotiations over an antivenom kit of the sort sports outfitters sold. In it, she found herself in conversation with a kind of louche salesperson who appeared to be encrusted in armored scales, part condottiere, part lizard. The other seemed to come from parochial school martyrology. She was chained behind a cart, or more elegantly behind a chariot. The image had come either from some obscure actual martyrdom or from Technicolor movies. Never had she been so taken with the processes of her own mind. She supposed that, for her, consciousness had mainly been a synonym for being awake and a tool with which to discharge responsibilities. Self-observation made her feel more and more like going to sea herself.

Every day she entered Owen's position on the master chart in her study, as reported by the VERC Global Positional System. Since the race had begun, she discovered that at least half of their competitors were following daily courses set by assistants ashore who had the best and latest shoreside equipment and the best weather information. She regretted bitterly their not doing things that way, because it would have engaged her energies.

Duffy called regularly from the office they had given him in Brooklyn. Although Anne had come to rather like Duffy, she often left his calls unanswered. He always began by asking her about the film and Strickland.

“He hasn't called for a while,” she told Duffy a week after she had given up wine. “Maybe the money's not there. Maybe he's changing his mind.”

“He got a lot of money up front and a good deal on rights,” Duffy assured her. “That won't happen.”

“He always sounds so casual about it.”

“Never mind casual. He's in too deep.”

“Good,” she said, “so am I.”

Anne thought that Strickland might be feeling awkward about all that he had told her. She always tried to receive his confidences, ugly as they were, in a sympathetic spirit. Sometimes, pondering them, she found it hard to look at him. Inwardly she would imitate his stammer and cold quick laughter. It was plain that he wanted to shock her and then to be forgiven. As in most situations, she found her attractiveness useful. She felt it provided a certain security.

You had to pity the man's early life, she thought. It was all confusion—no religion, no father, a scandalous mother. If he was sometimes frightening, it was because he had been so often frightened. Almost a handicapped p . . p . . person. The sense of her politely philistine Catholic education was that weak men, flawed men, often made good artists. It gave them another sort of power, not necessarily benign.

Imagining him hog-tied over the hole in Cu Chi, she was driven to silent, guilty laughter. She raised a hand to her mouth. It had served him right. How terrified he must have been. How he must have needed something. But all he had was style.

T
HE FIRST
iceberg Browne had ever seen appeared to him in the middle fifties around eleven o'clock on a summer evening. He had sighted a distant glint at first light and suspected ice. Rather than get closer, he had immediately changed course, set his radar alarm and headed due east. The weather was still clear, with only a single mother-of-pearl band of clouds low on the northern horizon. His westward heading put him on a beam reach in about twelve knots of apparent wind. For days Cape Town had been promising advancing depressions and winds of force 7, so he stayed with his basic sail plan: main plus genoa on a spinnaker pole. With possible ice in sight, he reset the steering vane and took the helm. He had trouble staying awake. Once, secured to his lifeline, he even dozed off on his jury-rigged outdoor toilet, only to be awakened by the cold on his private parts. An absurd story for the great world there, earthy and ingratiating.

Late in the day, he had gone below to catch the weather report and somehow fallen asleep again. It was after that, when he came wearily on deck, that the tower of ice confronted him.

The ice at first appeared to Browne as a steam tug, like the ones his father-in-law owned at Outerbridge Reach. The tug had polished brightwork and gilt lettering on the wheelhouse. The colors, he thought, were ones popular at the turn of the century, colors that were obsolete today. Each color represented a certain quality. A kind of blue might stand for honesty at the same time it suggested someone's eyes. Some of the old tugmen were deep in Masonry.

Browne stared at it, sleepy and amazed. Only gradually, as his vision adjusted to the special brightness of the Antarctic light, did all the embellishments fade away. Then he saw how incredibly complicated the actual colors were and how the shapes were unknown to geometry, beautiful but useless in any sort of measurement. It seemed to Browne that others had remarked on the protean nature of sea ice. He thought Shackleton might have been one. It was a principle known to adventurers.