The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if this one’s being run right out of New York,” the Reverend will say. “This captain and his friend, they must be in some kind of cahoots with the ownership. They drive to the ship, they come and go. Suddenly they paint over the name and registry. Maybe they’re the owners, John. You think?”

  “Yeah, if they’re total dolts. Otherwise I don’t really see their stake, except a salary. I wouldn’t necessarily presume felonious activity here anyway, Kathy. Incompetence, bad luck, a bad deal. Probably just went broke. Bet that ship’s already up for sale. As is, where is. End up being sold or auctioned off for scrap, most likely. That ship isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Well, someone thought it was going somewhere. You really think those guys have been getting paid?”

  “I’d guess. But they tell the crew they haven’t been. All in this together and so on. But they’ve pretty much stopped coming out, it sounds like, so if they were getting paid, I bet they’re not anymore. I don’t know, we’ll see how they react once the lien’s posted. Maybe they’ll sue for back wages too.”

  “Or they’ll stay away for good. Vanish. John, you watch. Now, what happened to that old man?”

  “Sent back to Nicaragua. End of October that was.”

  “But what did he go to the hospital for?”

  “Hot cooking oil spilled all over his leg. Cooking out on a deck over a wood fire. The captain treated him with something or other, supposedly he has some kind of medical training. Seems commensurate with his maritime training. Then he just sat there for a few days until this first mate guy took him to the hospital. I guess I still have to get a clearer version of what went down—”

  “No pardi, not on a ship like this.” She’ll mean owner’s protection and indemnity.

  “On a ship like that, strongly doubt it.”

  “So let’s see what we have here. No electricity, cooking out in the dark, not getting him immediate medical care. Then that’s under the Jones Act—”

  “Unless the captain really is an M.D. or something. Ha.”

  “Owner’s negligence leading to serious injury. John, we can get them in federal court on that. If this doesn’t come under the Jones, I don’t know what does.”

  Just about the only thing you can get an owner on. She’ll probably be right, of course. Though, as usual, the Reverend’s overexcited and so often disappointed enthusiasm will make him reach for caution like an umbrella.

  “Yeah, OK, maybe. But we don’t know the whole story yet—” Like maybe the cook got mad and threw hot oil on the old guy and no one’s talking.

  “I want to reach that old man, John. Get a deposition. I want to know who paid for his plane ticket home. I want to see his medical records.”

  Kathy’s going to use this case, the Ship Visitor will think, to test the limits of her interest in ministry to seafarers, isn’t she? The case we’ve all been waiting for. A chance to push the institute’s board, see how far they’ll let us take combative advocacy of seafarers’ rights, strike a small but resonant blow, for once, against malefic shipowners. Lately, Reverend Roundtree will have been expressing a certain frustration and restlessness with the job, wondering if she really wants to forgo the chance of having her own parish somewhere, preferably right here in the city, to be a port chaplain the rest of her life, bringing Christian hospitality and the Good News to seafarers.

  “We’ll go back out there first thing in the morning.”

  “First thing?” The Ship Visitor will groan silently—if he meets Ariadne downtown, and he will, he won’t be getting to bed until at least three. “Yeah, all right.”

  “How’s that swank lady of yours?” Swank? Just the other day, Ariadne will have been that “dangerous” lady—potentially dangerous, the Reverend will have feared, to his future psychological and spiritual well-being. Now why should a Protestant reverend be troubled by, or even compassionately worry about, just awesome, total passion and love?

  “She’s fine. We’ve been getting along really well lately.” Which will be true enough. Will feel himself hooked, as usual, to a yearning to talk about it but stop himself—it’s only been a few months since Reverend Roundtree broke up with her “intended,” a shattering event for her. Divorced admiralty lawyer (like the Ship Visitor was going to be, once upon a time, before he decided he’d rather be a ship visitor), played big-time hockey in college. A much more probable, befitting, and seemingly enduring match, supposedly—and it wasn’t after all.

  After hanging up, the Ship Visitor will pour himself a vodka on the rocks, wash a lemon, carefully shear off a strip of rind with a paring knife, run it along the rim, and plonk it in. Rarely has more than one drink a night when Ariadne is home. There’s a British captain, fiftyish, about a decade older than Kathy, who always comes in for a drink in the institute’s cocktail lounge whenever he’s in port, always cajoles Kath down for a drink. Conservative, self-consciously proper type. Father a bus driver; votes for Thatcher. Calls Kath Bishop, of course. Talkative, with a submerged, typical air of lonely, void-washed (the ocean, the ocean) melancholy. Likes to probe Kathy for the great meaning of things. Seems to be trying to fix just the right look of respectfully adoring attentiveness on his face as he listens, almost like he’s rehearsing them both for what he thinks it might be like, eventually retiring from the sea to live full-time with a woman for the first time. On many things they would disagree, which he pretends to like, certain of his principles and unapologetic about any lack of cosmopolitan experience, after a life like his, spent mainly on ships. He’d like to attach himself to her, to her respectable sophistication and intellect, her other kind of worldliness. Or unworldliness. So the Ship Visitor will have been suspecting. Might work out, who knows? Solid guy, seems to be. Of course you never know what lies underneath—with anyone, but these guys especially. Onboard always the captain, usually an introverted way of life, yet every port offering a stage to try out a different self for an audience that’s never seen your very own particular act before and doesn’t need to know your name… Awful not to have all this stuff—what stuff? marriage, money, who the fuck you finally are, and so on—worked out by a certain age. Probably doomed if you can’t, though late rallies are not unheard of. But here I am, risking a lot on this girl. And liking myself for it, right? Though sometimes this inner voice wheedling, What’s she doing loving a prolish ship visitor thirteen years older anyway, how long can that last? Or, I’m in way over my head. More intelligent than he, zillion times better educated, stronger willed even, all blazing temperament, braininess, and wild, gifted body. Though she certainly has her faults, her, umm, vulnerabilities, her temper, at times, like a snapped high-voltage wire fallen to the ground, snaking and zapping. Gladly offer my love as a kind of national park where her neuroses can run protected and free. “When we’re married …” Ariadne will even have said, twice already, prefacing a passing speculation on the nonexistent future. (“When we’re married maybe we’ll live in Lisbon, it’s a port, you can be a ship visitor there, Johnny.” “When we’re married my father will definitely disown me.”) She with her fifty-grand-a-year trust fund (nearly twice what the Ship Visitor earns) outside all tuition and boarding costs, which her father (who will not have phoned her even once in the four months he’s been living with her) pays.

  Often Ariadne sits at her desk studying at night and the Ship Visitor pulls a book from her shelves, curls up on the carpet to read or pretend to, waiting for her to take off her reading glasses, switch off her desk lamp, come over and lower herself to his side, smiling her most unabashed and delirium-inducing smile …

  “What is it about a love that needs such watching over?” Will have found that a few weeks ago, browsing through, of all things, The Brothers Karamazov. “Othello wasn’t jealous, he was trusting.”

  After Reverend Roundtree’s lover of three years left her in October, you know what she will have said in the office one afternoon? “My father liked to say that a good man always marries a woman supe
rior to himself. Always? Well, he was, with all justification, referring to my mother. Otherwise, I suppose he was no worse than most. But like I’ve told you many times, my family was a drinking family, totally given over to nonstop mythomania!”

  “She says she wants to meet a real American guy, she’s sick of wimps in suits and Eurotrash—though aren’t we all?”

  “Me?”

  Daughter of a Colombian-French financier, venture capitalist of some sort, fortune rooted in a family coffee empire dating to the last century, offices and homes all over Europe and Latin America, and a French-Polish mother, a suicide in Paris when Ariadne was fourteen. Educated in European boarding schools and at the Sorbonne. And beautiful. Looks kind of like a tall, white Eurasian girl. All this his second cousin Belle Carbonel, an editor at the glossy women’s magazine where Ariadne had a summer internship before starting grad school in the fall, had told him.

  “Anyway, Belle,” he said, “guys in suits are real American guys, and so are wimps. I was a suit not so long ago.”

  For all the usual whimsy of her voice, Belle was, also as usual, earnest, blunt, and overreaching in her opinions about everything: “Well, we know you have a romantic wimp in your closet, Johnny. And a secret sybarite too. But don’t think I tell anybody, though I think it’s glorious.”

  “Don’t you think I’m a little too old for her?”

  “Oh come on! Just take her out and see what happens. You’re cute enough, I promise. Both from totally screwed-up families and backgrounds. She’ll figure you out.”

  “Well, that’s not necessarily good.”

  “It’ll take her a while. And you’ll never figure her out, but you know what? I bet you’ll have a helluva time trying.”

  Well, a pretty blatantly romantic wimp at times, though not lately. And the sybarite even a secret from himself, if the dictionary definition was what Belle meant.

  His divorce from Mona was finally finalized just before New Year’s, though they hadn’t lived together in three years. Mona was already living happily with another man; but she’d insisted right to the end that she liked being his wife, not that either had any notion of their getting back together. Sweet Mona O’Donnell, a brassily cheerful performer, but with any scrap of sentimental provocation tossed her way—her favorite TV weatherman in a car accident, a phone company commercial where a yuppyish brown woman with a foreign accent surprises her peasant mother on the other side of the world with an unexpected-good-news call—her face would redden and her usually wit-sharp eyes wellingly cloud and she’d sink back into her cave to chow down on the emotion, whatever it was, maybe even have a good bawling cry. So at the very mention of divorce the past swamped her present: but she likes being his wife! Cost him a thousand dollars that he could barely spare, the uncontested divorce, and what it bought him was the new sensation of knowing he was telling a complete truth whenever he told someone he was single. More than a relief. Partial truths can nag worse than a lie, like an untied shoelace in a nightmare, one you keep reaching for and missing, have to keep walking around with your shoe untied no matter what. And so he’d been out with three different women since the spring—conquests! Feeling almost like a ladies’ man, a rare period in his life. He was coasting, waiting for the right woman, in no big hurry, not letting himself get all hung up over some fetching nut like he usually did. A man feeling sturdy about his life, with nothing to hide. Shoes tied. A man who likes his job.

  And along comes this first date, a blind date, with Ariadne, on a hot, rainy night in late June, the very week that the Urus’s crew flew up from Central America to meet their ship. Never forget it. What kind of girl shows up two hours late for a blind date and actually expects the guy still to be waiting? Even bothers showing up, two hours late? What kind of guy waits? Not fair, he wasn’t waiting. Nothing else to do. Ball game on the TV over the bar, a hard summer rain outside. And a weird and terrible day at the office, in fact. Forgot all about his blind date, well, didn’t feel aggrieved anyway, maybe even a little relieved. Just sat there nursing his drink. He’d spent part of the day in a Port Newark hospital, sitting by the bed of a recuperating Colombian stowaway—he and three friends had hidden themselves inside a coffee-sack-stuffed container loaded onto a ship sailing from Buenaventura. So when the customs inspectors and the DEA guy opened the container down on the pier, this skinny kid in just his underwear popped out and took off running. The Ship Visitor had been up on deck with the crew when he sensed a change in the pitch of the stevedores’ shouts amidst the clanging commotion of cranes and hoisted containers, and saw the crane operator in his cable car—like cab wrenching around in his seat to look down at the pier while riding a container off the deck. He went to the rail and saw customs officials and stevedores jogging in the direction of a nearly naked brown body pinioned as if by wind against the hurricane fence, and others gathered around the open end of a container, holding their hands over their noses and mouths, some reluctantly clambering inside. Lifting out the first of the contorted, twisted bodies. Left the other two inside, for the ambulance drivers to deal with. Three dead from suffocating heat, hunger, and dehydration, hunched and sprawled amidst the coffee-bean-stuffed sacks, stiff with rigor mortis. And one survivor with enough energy left to take off in a wild sprint at the first splash of air and daylight …

  No one else has a job like mine. That’s what he often tells himself, taking satisfaction from it, whenever in that kind of Manhattan bar. The sort of bar where guys who look more or less like himself congregate, who all look like they might have gone to college together. White Boys, in the current, annoying parlance. Lawyers, like he almost was, or business, media, or publishing types, artists of one kind or another. Funny how he never meets any doctors in these places. He fits right in. And then he always tells himself, Yeah, but no one else has a job like mine.

  Not exactly well paid, but good benefits. In the heart of winter, when everyone else starts looking pale and scaly, it keeps him ruddy, ocean-wind-scrubbed, feeling strong. No doubt about it, the job will have improved his overall demeanor, his self-confidence; so many times a day climbing the gangway onto a ship where nobody knows him, then trying to win the crew’s trust, gauge their situation as quickly as possible, often by reading furtive glances and postures more than by what they actually say—few speak English, never mind Spanish. Captains and officers often not very glad to see him. Lots of floating squalor out there, but many good ships too. Roaming the ports and waterfronts in his van and on foot, he’ll have learned to feel as comfortable and alert in his solitude as some hard-boiled detective; this mixed with the easy camaraderie of his colleagues at the end of the day, the conversation of reverends and the other staff, of the seafarers and ships’ officers from all over the world who stop into the Seafarers’ Institute cocktail lounge when their time in port allows them to, the shipping agents, chandlers, tugboat men, stevedores, government guys, the samurai fraternity of harbor pilots.

  She came into the bar, out of the steamy rain, more than two hours late, came walking down the aisle folding and fastening her collapsible umbrella, glancing expectantly at the faces of men at the bar, sitting in booths. Red raincoat, red lips, a matte-pale, soft face, like milk with just a touch of brown sugar swirled in, long, lustrous, black hair cut in a fringe over her nearly black eyes; skitterishly bright, this first time he saw those eyes, with anxiety and high-spirited mischief, as if mortified to have arrived so late but deeply bemused by herself too. Knew right away this was Ariadne, though his smile must have been dumbstruck as he caught her glance, waving up from his seat. She sat down smiling, without subjecting him to any protracted scrutiny, simply said, “Oh, you’re still here!” and laughed. “The dinner I was at went on and on forever. I’m so sorry, but thank you so much for waiting. I thought I’d take a chance!” She’d shrugged off her raincoat, was wearing a simple sleeveless black dress. Just a kid. The slightly Frenchified singsong of her accent. French lips, shaped by the way they kiss their language when they speak i
t, drawing her soft cheeks forward (why so many French guys look poofy). Dazzlingly pretty and alive. You’re going to break my heart someday, he’d thought then and there. And later that long night, he even told her that: “I better be careful. Or you’re going to break my heart someday,” blurting it into the giddy, drunken haze enclosing them, and she leaned closer and laughed. “You’re probably right. But come on, it’s no fun being careful.”

  “… Biology, luck, how the hell else can you really explain it?” he told her that night, recounting the Colombian stowaway’s story, the first of all the ship visitor’s yarns he’ll bring her in the coming months. “He lay there in his hospital bed trying to come up with a reason. His faith in God. Always a hard worker. His sense of himself as a guy with an especially strong, stubborn character. His strength of will.”

  (Lay there with IVs pumping saline solution into his veins and looking like he couldn’t even have lost much weight, no slackness in his face, just a shocked glitter in his eyes. All that just to get to the U.S. of A., and he was going to be deported as soon as he was released from the hospital.