Outerbridge Reach (39 page)

“My brothers know him,” she said. “I rarely met him because his operation was in Boston.” She paused and saw that he was waiting for more. “He spoke at Maggie's grammar school graduation.”

“And did she have a crush on him?”

Anne laughed as much as she dared.

“Not at all. The kids all thought he was a boob. The nuns told them to overlook his bad manners.”

“The nuns took his money, though.”

Then he was off on Hylan the Son and Betrayer. And Boston, and everyone at Harvard Law. She drank her tea and nodded.

Finally she said, “You ought to tell me how this affects Owen.”

“You're going to know everything,” Thorne said. “The two of you will be all right. I know you. I know your people. I was in the Navy, you know, same as your husband. You have nothing to fear.” He kept staring at her as though poised between fondness and some kind of rage. “Would you like a drink?” he asked her suddenly.

At the point of declining, she felt an impulse somehow to give way to him. To allow him something and assuage all that emotion. The idea of a drink was welcome, too.

Thorne served the drinks himself. Scotch from a decanter. Sipping hers, Anne savored the tawny glow of the lamps and the bright apartment and the dark, heavy-browed elegance of the unhappy man across the room from her. Drinking it, she soon missed her clear head and regretted the wasted days of self-denial. In spite of that, the drink made her feel better. Owen, she thought, what things have you left me to?

“Ever been to Ireland?” he asked her.

She shook her head.

“No? I'm amazed. It's beautiful. How about Newfoundland?”

It was flattering that he had remembered her background. She had never been there either, but Harry had.

“Austere,” he told her. “We had a lot of Newfies go to Boston, you know.”

“Right,” she said. “Relatives of mine.”

“They went to Southie. Disappeared among the Irish there.”

“Yes,” she said, “that's me.”

“I sold papers on the docks up there,” Harry said with a hard grin. “I was the only Jew some of those guys had ever seen. The only thing they knew about Jews was Father Coughlin. You probably don't even know who Father Coughlin was.”

“I've heard of him,” she said. It made her blush because she knew well enough. Her grandfather had been a great contributor to the Shrine of the Little Flower.

“Boston was a tough town for a guy like me, Anne. But I'll tell you what—I love it. If I had time I'd keep a place on Beacon Hill.”

“They say living well is the best revenge,” Anne said.

“That's the only kind of revenge I want,” Thorne said. He said it so violently that his jaw trembled slightly. They both looked at the beige carpet. Thorne cracked his knuckles.

“We're trying to salvage the recreational side, Anne. Originally I was sure we could do it. Now it's a little uncertain.”

“In which case,” she said calmly, “there won't be any dealerships. Or a new line of boats.”

“I'm not kidding myself anymore,” Thorne said. “I see now the kind of losses we're going to take. But I also see more clearly what can be saved.”

“You have to take care of Owen, Harry. You owe it to him.”

Thorne smiled at her directness.

“I asked you here for two reasons, Anne. One, so that you would hear everything first from me. And two, to tell you that we can provide for you and Owen.”

“How?”

“What would you like?”

“The boat,” she said at once, “and a cash settlement if Altan and Hylan go under. We'll be writing a book.”

“How expensive is that?” Harry asked good-humoredly. “Writing a book.”

“Not very,” she said. “Not for us. We'll probably live on the boat.” Her heart rose up. She found herself speaking her dreams. “We'd like the equivalent of his past two years' salary and commissions.”

Harry kept watching her and nodding as though in recognition. “You're a cool one,” he said.

“You know me, Harry. I'm like my father.”

“Don't be silly” was his answer. She thought he must know whereof he spoke. “Down the line Owen will find a valued place with us. If he wants.”

“He's a good man,” she said.

“He's a lucky man too,” Harry said. “Don't worry, we'll take care of him.”

“What about the film?” Anne asked suddenly. “Will it go ahead?”

Thorne looked at her blankly. “What, that Strickland guy? Who needs him?”

“I'd like it to continue,” she said. “It might be good for us. If we write something.”

Harry laughed. “Be kind,” he said, “if you write something.”

She left the building high on the whiskey and the notion of freedom. As long as they had some money and the boat, the whole Altan business was beside the point. The fact was they had been wasting their lives. She had been bored sick without knowing it. Owen had been right about the race. It had opened up life.

Thorne's chauffeur had double-parked the Lincoln several car lengths from the canopy at the Seventy-first Street entrance. Making her way through the falling snow, Anne happened to glance up the block and recognized Strickland's van parked fifty feet or so beyond the limousine on the far side of the street. She hesitated for a moment and walked toward it. Halfway across the street she recognized the man himself behind the wheel. He was alone in the van. When she came up he rolled the window down.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him. “Were you filming?” Strickland regarded her with his thin-lipped stare. He looked disheveled and weary. “What's the story on you, Ron?” she asked. “Sitting out in the weather.”

“Maybe you can figure it out for both of us,” Strickland said.

She stood beside the van for a moment, eye to eye with him.

“You look happy,” he told her. “Pleased with yourself.”

“Just drunk,” she said. “Anyway, what's the matter with happy? What's the matter with pleased?” She laughed at him. “I mean, what
are
you doing here?”

“Call it research,” he said. “Call it background.”

“Are you following me around?”

“His car's waiting,” Strickland said. “Where are you going?”

“I'm going home,” she said. “Get off my back.” On her way to the limousine, she turned in the street and called to him. “You are truly a heartless man. And you know nothing about me.”

“You're mistaken,” Strickland called back.

She paused, took a confused step toward him, then turned again and got into the Thorne limousine.

On the road back, in spite of everything else that had happened, she kept running the last exchanges with Strickland over and over in her mind. She should never have turned after walking away, should not have spoken again. She had lost a trick.

She realized that the thing had always been more complicated than they could ever have imagined. What had appeared to be a race was war, life stakes for everyone. Owen was at sea. Ashore she was beset, outmaneuvered, of questionable morale.

I must be careful, she said to herself. I must understand what is required. She had always heard it said that it was necessary to know what you wanted. She thought she might have a difficulty with that but hoped it might not matter.

As usual, as they sped through the snow, her driver kept his dark glasses on.

O
VER THE AFTERNOON,
the wind kept rising; by sixteen hundred hours, his indicator clocked it at thirty-six knots apparent. Browne distrusted the indicator. Opening the sliding panel of his plastic hemisphere, he peered through the freezing rain. It was very hard, even with much experience, to judge the speed of the wind you ran before. Finally, although the barometer was falling steadily, he decided against reducing sail. He had come south for the big winds and it would be necessary to live with them.

More and more, he was coming to dislike the bubble that protected him. Closed, it clouded over, obscuring his vision. The confinement made him sick. When the panel was open, following seas flooded the cockpit well, and the constant rain had a gruel of ice in it.

Nona
still held her lead although the race, at that moment, seemed a distant notion. He was sailing on main and headsail—a number-three genoa poled wide. It was a strategy derived more from his reading than from experience but it worked for a while. Increasingly he was aware of aspects of the boat's performance he had not noticed in lighter air. For days he had been hearing a curious rending sound beneath the cabin sole. In gusts, she kept turning to weather, losing speed as the autopilot labored to bring her back around. It made him reluctant to leave the helm. Another problem was that no amount of trimming could make the main set right. Its perverse luffing and flapping drove him to distraction. Eventually he got out of the cockpit and crawled forward along the hatchtop, hitching his harness to a jackline.

At the foot of the mast, he rose slowly to his feet and embraced it, peering up the shaft toward the swirling sky. He stayed there for a long time, eyeing the luff of the mainsail until he was dizzy. The sail was slack and its camber uneven. In the south forties he had loosened the backstay to give the mast a slight forward rake. Now, in harder weather, he decided to tighten up.

Easing back along the cabintop, he looked out at the soaring black waves and wondered if he were not dealing with force 11 seas or even higher. But when he got back to the cockpit his elegant anemometer read forty-seven knots, which was a mere force 9. Somewhere he had read that waves were always about three fifths the size they appeared.

On deck, the icy rain fell from every direction. Hunched up and partly blinded, he pulled on his canvas gloves and tightened the stay with the hydraulic jack. Then he winched up the halyard, trimmed the mainsheet and cleated it in the cockpit. He wore oilskins over his wool-lined foul-weather gear.

By evening the wind was still increasing. The sea was gathering itself up in towering masses that rolled from the horizon, trailing ghostly wands of foam. The sight of these enormous rollers and their fragile, attendant spindrift hypnotized Browne. He had never been out in such a sea before and never heard such wind. The boat felt as though she were gliding, airborne. The sky overhead was prison gray. He understood that he was about to experience the true dimensions of the situation in which he had placed himself.

S
HE SPENT
a cold gray afternoon trying to write. Around three she tried lighting a fire under the piece with a little Pouilly-Fuisse. It was reminiscence, about a solitary hike in Dominica she had taken one spring break years before. The island had been sumptuous, gloomy and sinister. Its mountains were shrouded in small rain. The people were secretive, their patois inscrutable. At every bend in the trail she had sensed menace and surveillance. She had done a lot of whistling in the mist on that one. Later on, others had told her about the dangers of walking alone there, but she had sensed them all along. She considered them an acceptable price for the private pleasure of the island.

Around five, she heard a car in the driveway and turned to see Strickland's van parked there. She finished the wine in her glass and waited for him to appear at the door, but for nearly fifteen minutes no one came. Just as it was dark, she heard him rap on the kitchen door that opened to the back garden. She stood up to the sight of herself in one of the hall mirrors. Its frame was gold, topped with a rampant eagle. She was wearing jodhpurs and slippers with a navy blue shirt. She looked pale; her hair was down. She brushed a strand from her forehead.

Straight-backed, stiff-gaitedly she walked into the kitchen and saw Strickland through the glass. His graying, thinning hair was wet with rain. There were pouches under his eyes; otherwise his face was all dark angles, mean, deprived. She had never looked at him so forthrightly. She unlocked the door and stepped back and folded her arms. He came in and wiped the rain from his eyes with the arm of his sweater.

“Hi,” she said coolly. “What's up?”

Strickland opened his mouth and began to speak. Words failed him. He stood in front of her, struggling with his jaw until she could stand no more of it. She put her hand out and covered his lips with her fingers. She was astonished to have done so. Having done it, she closed her eyes as though she were waiting for a wave.

As he took hold of her there was an instant when she might have hit him, caught him on the jaw with her left elbow. She very nearly did. Then there was the wet wool and warmth and the taste of his bitterness, watchfulness and humor. It turned out to be what she wanted.

“I knew you would come,” she said a moment later.

“You knew it,” he said. “And I knew it.”

“Since when?” She could see her own face in the pane of the kitchen door as he ran his hands over her. At first she tried to make him stop by holding tight to him. It was not the way.

Strickland took his time answering. “Since day one. Since that island.”

“Steadman's Island,” she said helpfully.

“That's the one,” Strickland said.

Upstairs, undressing, he removed a thin chain from around his neck on which a tiny ornament was hung. Anne found her own avidity embarrassing. It was as though he had hardly to breathe on her. They kept it up for what she might have sworn was an hour.

“Christ,” she said when he had indeed come, “you fuck like a god.” She was laughing. Her words echoed blasphemously in the empty house. I must be drunk, she thought.

“No, I fuck like a musician,” Strickland said. “I've been told that.”

L
ISTENING
to the wind, Browne recalled that, with luck, noise was the worst part of certain experiences. Lashed within his bubble, he struggled with the helm. For hours it had been blowing over sixty miles an hour. His own intermittent headway was off the scale; sometimes it exceeded fourteen knots. Surfing down the crests brought on a double vertigo. Each slide promised to bottom out in nothingness itself, each stalling of the rudder brought him the sickening impotence of an unresponding helm. In each trough his bow dug deeper into blue water, the vessel shuddering as though scalded as she tried to rise. He felt he was riding the edge of a green wall that closed off possibility, thinly balanced, accelerating and about to fall. Spinning out, every minute.