(And how could he ask what he wanted to ask? Couldn’t, of course. What was it like? What were you all thinking? How did you know when the first one died? Was there a sound, a sigh? And then the other two? He finally asked, How did you not go mad? Left it at that.)
“But I believe in the will, Johnny, don’t you?” she nearly chirped. “I believe there must be something else, besides luck or biology, that makes him different. Consider torture, men who break under torture and men who don’t. I’ve always told myself that I could only marry the kind of man who wouldn’t break under torture.”
Many such preposterous opinions. An idealized sense of life, full of high but untested principles. Should hear her when she gets going on her philosophies of love! But this mixture of youthful unreality and daffily heroic convictions charmed him from the start. Better, even more intellectually arousing, than listening to the reverends, who you weren’t dying to sleep with at the same time too.
His stories about his occupation, death tinged by the day’s events, enkindled her imagination somehow; perhaps seduced her darker side a little, she with her own appalling history always crouched like a trembling madwoman in her attic. Anyway, gave him, in her eyes, that romantic, manly aura—just what she was looking for, right? A real American guy, not office bound but free in the manner of a movie detective, in touch with darker things but with the spiritual too, the open spaces of port and sea, and reverends. That’s how Ariadne saw him that night. A guy who’ll come home at night with ocean salt in his skin, and a story to tell.
“You’re comfortable among other men,” she said approvingly when he came back from the bar with another round—that was all it took, promptly returning to their table with a couple of drinks. She said the men she knew often weren’t; trying to press through the “burly crush” of a bar to order drinks intimidated them, they just stood there timidly at the edge, wagging a hand at the bartender, usually she ended up getting the drinks herself (as if any bartender was going to ignore her). This burly crush—in this bar? Ariadne actually thought they were all blue-collar workers.
“Hmmmm, I like that,” she said and gave his erection, propping up his boxer shorts, a playful swipe. He’d just gotten into Ariadne’s apartment mate’s bed; she’d gone to Boston. (An Iranian F.I.T. student, boyfriend studying in Boston—Ariadne would move into the graduate student tower in August.) Ariadne wouldn’t sleep with him, said she never slept with a man the first night. Though they’d kissed, in the bar, out on the street, in her living room. It was nearly dawn, too late to go all the way back to Brooklyn, wasn’t it? And then sent him to the Iranian girl’s bed, and went off to her own, and woke him hours later, sliding in naked beside him. They won’t have spent a whole night apart, not one, since. (Tries to get to his apartment in Brooklyn once a week, pick up mail; still paying rent on the damned dump.)
There’ll have been plenty of rough stretches, of course. For a while Ariadne will have been bitterly, obsessively—insanely, practically, considering how he felt about Ariadne—jealous of his ex-wife. Somehow, according to Ariadne, he’d polluted his own soul back then, marrying before experiencing a love as great as theirs. He’ll have started it all that time, early in their relationship, when he carelessly let slip that he hadn’t felt anywhere near this way since he’d first fallen in love with his former wife. Infuriated her—Ariadne doesn’t want to be compared with any other woman, not in that or any other way! Oh, this boring American honesty and fairness and reasonableness! What does reasonableness have to do with love? Fairness towards the past has no place in the kind of love she wants. She has a past too, doesn’t she? How would he like it, she’ll have taunted, if she was just as honest about her past as he was about his? Though really, she’ll have told him plenty, hardly less than what he’ll have told her. The nearly forty-year-old French television actor she went out with when she was sixteen and seventeen, who’d given her a key to his apartment, taken her to the most decadent parties and clubs, on holidays in the Caribbean, Greece, and Bali, who raged and seethed like a spoiled brat if a single night passed without her consenting to sex, the man she grandly claimed had corrupted her. Her father had become extremely cold to his only child after her mother’s death. She hated her father, she’d never forgive him for not having protected his young, starstruck daughter from this sordid affair. Her father should have killed him if that was what it took! That’s whatyou would do, Johnny, isn’t it, if it was your daughter? The past has to stay in the past! What’s fairness have to do with it! If I say something hurts me, then it does. And it doesn’t matter if you think it’s unreasonable or neurotic and unfair, if it hurts me, and you love me, then I expect you to protect me from it!
“I’ll protect you, I promise, from anything you want,” he’ll have promised.
“Oh yes, the great protector. But I’m not a poor sailor, Johnny,” she’ll have said. “Who’s going to protect me from you, and your callous honesty and fairness?”
She’ll have returned his baffled, wounded expression with a serious one of her own, and then, finally, broken out in a wide, mischievous smile…
Somehow, his job as a ship visitor will have become integral to the organic chemistry of their small, dual world—her way of conceiving of it as a strangely fantastical yet heroic occupation, which he can share only with her. But he’ll never have realized the degree to which she felt that way until that night in the bar downtown, the night of the day he’ll have found the Urus and her abandoned crew. She’ll have arrived ahead of him for once, Ariadne, four young men, and another young woman seated on couches and stuffed chairs around a low table in a darkened nook. Three of the men he’ll recognize as university friends of Ariadne. Very European, the way they look, the mood around the table, you’d know it at a glance. Or rich South American, same thing practically. All smoking. That relaxed, placid sociability. The other woman, reddish hair cut in a page boy, slender legs in silky green slacks hooked over the high back of her chair, torso twisting down like a mermaid’s, elbows propped on the sea rock of an armrest. Roberto, from Milan, a law student, also a concert pianist, will scoot over on the stubby couch without uncrossing his long legs so that the Ship Visitor can squeeze in next to Ariadne, whose hands will lightly clasp his biceps as he turns to receive her lipstick-perfume-tobacco-martini-flavored kiss. She’ll briskly wipe the lipstick from his mouth with a cocktail napkin, saying, “We’ve been discussing the fall of the Berlin Wall, Johnny.” But he’ll soon be feeling ill at ease, big and clumsy, in this company, as he knows he pretty much should, as he knows doesn’t bother her in the least, so long as he doesn’t make a noisy, defensive fool of himself, which he never really does, unless he’s drunk too much. Roberto will still be wearing Ariadne’s tan cloth raincoat, which she lent him one afternoon when he dropped by to visit and it started to rain. Apparently he won’t have taken it off since—testament to his otherwise unremonstratively, painfully, politely borne unreciprocated love. Wearing it to class, outside in weather too cold for its scant protection, probably to bed. He absolutely will not give it back. Which Ariadne will have been at least pretending to find amusing, Roberto not having any idea that it’s just this kind of silliness she’s seen enough of and finds pathetically boyish. The raincoat is many sizes too small, the sleeves stopping many inches above his wrists and long, pale, effete strangler’s fingers, bunching ridiculously under his arms. And yet it won’t look nearly as ridiculous on him as it should. Everything underneath Armani or some damned thing, cashmere scarf around his neck, Adam’s apple peeking over it, his smooth face of a young hawk, brilliant blue eyes, sensual-petulant lips, slightly mussed, dirty blond hair. Just the kind of boy anyone else might expect Ariadne to fall for, which, bless her, will be exactly why she hasn’t. Which must seem terribly unfair to Roberto. The Ship Visitor, just as invisibly and defiantly smirking back at them, will know they—Roberto and the other two, the French philosophy grad student and the Argentine economics grad student—think he represents just some passing
lunacy of Ariadne’s, that someday he’ll be gone and they’ll finally get to say, “Oh, Ariadne, how could you have?”
The other young man, who’ll turn out to be a Swiss investment banker with a Ph.D. in German literature, will suddenly get up and do a handstand, one hand on each armrest, over the mermaid, who’ll smile and kiss him while he’s upside down like that, one hand on each of his cheeks.
“… Fast as can, custom of the port,” the Ship Visitor will find himself explaining, having hit upon without even really trying to a certain gruff and drawling intonation that isn’t really his, in response to this unprecedented interrogation from Ariadne’s friends about the nature of his work, which will have been going on for quite some time already, prompted by his observations on how the sudden breakup of the East Bloc was affecting ships from those countries …
“F.a.c.c.o.p.,” Ariadne will interject, anxiously leaning forward, hands on knees, slightly chewing her lower lip.
“Ships just don’t stay in port as long as they used to, it’s too expensive, and with containerization, roll on and roll off and everything else, they don’t have to. It used to take days to unload and load a ship, but now they’re in and out in less than twelve hours if they can be. So there’s not so much of that old kind of port life, not in a big, modern port like we have here. The people who crew ships now, apart from the captains, some of the deck officers, just don’t get to go ashore nearly as much as they used to. It’s a drearier life for them now. Cooped up on their ships.”
And then the Swiss investment banker will remark on Plato’s dislike of sailors and the sea: A bitter and briny neighbor, he’ll say, quoting Plato, breeding shifty and distrustful souls, the hucksters, usurers, rip-off merchants of ports, and so on. (Will make a mental note to tell Reverend Roundtree about Plato.) And then that Roberto will say, “But there’s still a great deal of truth to that, isn’t there? Aren’t ports especially home to the criminal element?”
“Sure, there’s crime,” he’ll answer. “Contraband. Drug smuggling. All kinds of fraud. Also a new kind of pirate, truck hijackers. Containers get loaded onto trucks, and they drive out of the port and bang, sometimes within minutes, they get hit. A lot of the stuff you see getting sold on the streets of New York? Comes from stolen containers—”
“No, no, I don’t arrest anybody,” he’ll answer again. “I guess I mainly deal with crimes, if you want to call them that, against seafarers. People working on ships have so few laws protecting them, really. Every flag has its own laws. Every port has its own laws. And there’s no really strong or consistent or enforceable set of international maritime labor laws. Middle of winter, you’ll get a ship in with a Bangladeshi crew, ice and slush all over the deck, and they’ll be going around in just sandals—”
“Johnny brings them shoes and socks,” Ariadne will interrupt, glumly. “And sweaters.”
And he’ll answer, “No, I wouldn’t call it charity work, though, sure, that’s a part of what we do. Interceding, negotiating, mediating, I do a lot of that. Trying to figure out what’s going on between, say, a Greek captain and officers, Punjabi Sikh engine room guys, maybe a Filipino or Latino crew. Maybe there’s been brutality by the officers. Or even a murder the Yugoslav captain and shipowner want hushed up—what’s it to them what their Egyptian ranks do to each other? and supposedly the dead guy was asking for it, and they don’t want to be held up in port. Or an arrest has to be made, and I’ll end up liaisoning between the feds or the Coast Guard, the captain and ship’s agent, whichever national authorities have jurisdiction, and the seafarer who’s going to be arrested, extradited, whatever. Though it’s hardly ever that dramatic. Their pay’s being stolen, or not sent home to their families like it’s supposed to be. Or some seaman’s been ripped off by a fraudulent shipping agency in Tuvalu, has paid a fee for his job and all his savings to fly to New York to meet a ship that doesn’t even exist. Or a guy really needs to see a doctor and the captain won’t let him off the ship, doesn’t want to have to pay for it. Abandoned crews sometimes, like the one I found today. Or the ship isn’t seaworthy—maybe no ventilation, or plumbing for the crew. Stowaways. Or something simple but important to the crew, like bad food. Or religious problems. When the second engineer hired on, he was promised a Muslim diet, and now they just laugh at him when he demands it. Or something to do with beliefs and superstitions a crew from Kiribati has but their Polish captain just doesn’t get, thinks they’re a bunch of sissies and shirkers. Political tensions. Sometimes you’ll get six nationalities, all speaking different languages, on one ship. Maybe they’ve come in from a bad crossing, been through some awful storm, whole ship’s totally stressed, and every potential problem that was there before breaks out all at once. All kinds of things come up. And we get in there and do what we can.”
“… Actually, we’re supposed to use the term seafarer. Well, some of the reverends decided, you know how things are now, seaman just doesn’t cut it like it used to.”
“Uh-huh. People do always think you’re saying semen. On the phone you’re always having to go, seaman—you know, as in sailor? Ha-ha.”
“Johnny gets invited into the galley to taste every kind of food,” Ariadne will say.
“Well no, usually it’s not very good. But you do get to taste a lot of different foods.”
“Sometimes I’ll drive a bunch of them back to the institute so they can phone home from there. A simple thing like that means a ton. Though, of course, so many of them don’t have phones at home, not where they come from.”
“A ship is a ship is a ship? Not at all. Soviet ship’s a whole different world from, say, a Korean one. Russian captains almost always invite you up to their cabin for a vodka; they like to shoot the shit. There’s this one container ship comes in about three times a year, flies a Maltese flag, captained and crewed entirely by women, women from everywhere, a very well run ship—”
“No, not especially good looking. Some are. The most striking is the chief engineer, oddly enough. There’s this other ship crewed by criminal fugitives. And another entirely by Portuguese monks, though I’ve never seen it, was home with the flu when it came in last winter, Reverend Roundtree went—”
“Johnny and his colleagues make sure that every seafarer on every ship that comes into New Jersey and New York around this time of year gets a Christmas present,” Ariadne will interrupt. “Even Islamic ships and Israeli ships.”
“… Hah! They wish. No. Socks, slippers, gloves, wool caps, mainly stuff like that.”
“No, I don’t have to wrap the presents myself. Volunteers from local churches—”
“Dress up like Santa Claus? … No.”
“What I like about the job is getting to make a difference in the lives of people that hardly anyone ever even thinks about. We’re doing important things, we’re organizing a center for seafarers’ legal rights that, well, if we get the right kind of international cooperation, can become a world center and advocate for a new, and we hope more enforceable, international maritime labor code. We organize conferences, forums. But what I like is being out in the van, out on the docks, boarding ships. The detective part of it, you might even say. Kind of like being a cop without having to deal with other cops, or having to shoot anybody. The freedom of it. This sense that you’re getting to deal with the whole rest of the world, that in a hands-on way you’re experiencing something about the way the rest of the world is now. It’s a great job. Sometimes I really think I have one of the best damned jobs in the world …”
He’ll feel, God, frustrated. How can he make them see? A thousand stories and images moiling inside him, and they want to giggle snootily over Christmas presents. Will have met a pair of stowaways from Hong Kong just last week, an old man and his eleven-year-old granddaughter, they’ll have been traveling the world on this ship nearly two years already, at every port the authorities will have turned them away, and the Moroccan crew and Turkish officers, they’ll have practically adopted the pair, the old man helping in t
he galley, the little girl becoming fluent in Arabic, she had a pet pigeon, fattest pigeon he’ll have ever seen, nearly as big as a turkey, kept it in a cage one of the crew will have made for her from tar-stiffened rope. But the captain will have wanted it resolved, getting worried for the girl, her effect on the crew, this no environment for a little girl on the cusp of puberty: why tempt fate? Will have almost felt like a betrayal but it had to be done, getting in touch with people from UNESCO, convincing them to get the paperwork done and foot the bill for their repatriation without port authorities fining the ship for bringing in stowaways, no one else was going to do it. Captain Kemal will have even let himself be held over in port six extra hours to see it all through, invited him to the going-away dinner, broke out some not at all bad Moroccan claret. During the dinner the little girl will have stood on her chair and made a deft speech in Arabic and then sung a song in Cantonese … See what he gets to see? The girl took the obese pigeon with her, all the way back to Hong Kong.
Something will feel wrong. He’ll have noticed it even in the bar, but later, alone with her on the sidewalk, he’ll feel sure of it. As if the air has been let out of the complicity that usually binds them, that lets their inner gravity swagger elbow to elbow. She’ll be walking slowly, hands in the pockets of her leather coat, brooding down at the shadow-strewn sidewalk. And when he’ll say, “Ariadne?” she’ll glance up at him as if surprised to see him there, her eyebrows slightly raised, and then she’ll look away and keep walking. A typhoon of temper could be coming any second now. “You want to get a cab?” he’ll ask. She’ll say nothing, keep walking. Finally, two blocks later, she’ll suddenly step off the curb and put her arm up for a cab, and he’ll get into it beside her but she’ll slide to the far side of the seat and look out the window. This distance between them like an unraveling. Caused, he’ll anxiously decide, by his having blabbed on too long about his job, having carelessly let them in on something that Ariadne—unreasonably, of course—thinks of as solely their own. Well, he won’t have told them much about the Urus, her abandoned crew and all the stories he heard from them today. Maybe that’ll make it better, when he tells her …
The Ordinary Seaman Page 17
