Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  “I feel I have to earn your love, but it doesn’t matter what you do, you can smell or be foolish, and I still love you. I still love you, even though you don’t like my writing, you don’t like my haircuts. I love you even if you never take me to the Plaza for tea.”

  Bob lifted his head. “You’re choosing now to list all the grievances you have against me?”

  “Bob,” I said, pacing the floor. “It’s been bugging me for a long time. You are so withholding, you won’t talk about deep feelings, and you won’t even recognize them! I don’t think you’re even in touch with them. Or mine. I spent days writing a love poem to you. But do you appreciate the effort? No, you’d rather drop it on the floor.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Stop your bellyaching, I want to go to sleep.”

  I picked up his trousers and threw them at his head. “There’s just too many years between us. The generation gap, that is our quintessential problem. You are like on the cusp of the Silent Generation, and I come from a culture that keeps no secrets.”

  “And in the process you don’t care who you hurt. You just pound away at me and make out as though I’m inadequate. You think that’s the way to get me to talk?”

  “This is not how I thought it would be. Marrying someone who communicates with the grunts of a Neanderthal.”

  “I didn’t know you knew such a big word.”

  I gritted my teeth. “I’m calling my father! I’m going to go stay with him. At least he doesn’t diminish me.”

  “Oh, please, not that threat again,” Bob said with a withering look.

  So I picked up the phone and, for the sake of my credibility, actually dialed Daddy. He told me to go to bed, get up tomorrow and have a cup of coffee, read the newspaper, and everything would be fine again.

  I hung up. “Bob, did we make a mistake?” I said very gently. “Maybe we weren’t meant to be married.” I expected him to soften, tell me that we certainly were.

  “You are a horse’s ass of considerable dimensions,” he said, flicking out the light and turning over on his good ear so he couldn’t hear me anymore. “And no lighting any candles,” he added, nestling into his pillow. “The Harvard Health Letter says you need a completely dark room to sleep.”

  I stood and stared at him, a lump in the bed. Since I couldn’t talk, I had to write. But I had no light, so I decided it was a good idea to crawl out the window onto the inn’s awning. I paused for a minute when I realized that all that wine Bob had ordered had put me in some stage of inebriation, but my qualms quickly passed. It was a nice strong canvas anyway, brightly lit, and the smell of cigarette smoke wouldn’t wake him up. So I grabbed an ashtray and pen and paper and climbed out. Then I began to write:

  Mind racing like a runaway train. Why can’t I be more relaxed and understanding? Why is everything an emergency with me? I know there is no perfect marriage and I want everything my way, perfect. But when he didn’t throw me on the bed and lock me to his body on this anniversary that will never come again. His parents undoubtedly taught him that a proper hug might break you in pieces.

  “Lucinda! What the hell are you doing? Get back in here!”

  Bob had woken up. “I don’t want to bother you,” I called icily.

  “You’ll fall through the canvas!” He was pleading now. “It won’t hold you.”

  “You think I’m that fat?!”

  “I’d come out and get you, but then it really would cave in.”

  I ignored his pleas and commands until, exasperated but defeated, he finally went back to bed.

  When I was tired of writing, I inched up to the window on my belly, climbed through, got in bed, and curled up behind him.

  * * *

  The next morning, we woke feeling like caterpillars in the pupal stage. We had never drunk as much as we did the night before.

  “My back aches,” Bob croaked.

  “My stomach hurts,” I moaned.

  “Do you know why your stomach hurts? Because it was next to my back.”

  Then his face clouded. “I’m glad to see you’re still alive.”

  “Oh God, don’t remind me.” I buried my face in his hand. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know how you can possibly love me. All I do is make your hair stand on end.”

  He thought for a moment. “I’m afraid that’s why I love you,” he said, then picked up my poem and with a sweet little smile began to read it.

  11

  In June 1980, we are sitting on our terrace in T-shirts, watching balloons of black smoke pump from an ancient stack next door, when Bob quite casually says, “Why don’t we circumnavigate the state of New York in our boat?”

  “What?”

  “Let’s sail the canals and lakes. We’d go west, then north, then east, then south. Make a complete circle.”

  “Are you serious? What a superlative idea!” Bob does not love adventure traveling, but he knows I do. He knows what I need to be happy. The power of his love comes over me, and I feel him, feel him as though I were him; it must be in moments like these that a couple really achieves oneness. Not in lovemaking, not in the exchange of language, but in the act of forsaking our own desires in order to identify with the desires of the one we love.

  I feel so close to him now. I can hear him thinking, hear him, behind his strong, confident words, wondering, “Can I pull this off at the age of almost sixty-one? Am I up to it? Yes, I better be. Her excitement will inspire me. If I learn to love the things she loves, I’ll always have her.”

  “You will always have me,” I say. I kiss his arm from his fingers to his elbow and feel him shiver. I hear him say to himself, “It feels like a caterpillar’s inching up my arm.”

  “You’re tickling me,” he says aloud.

  “It could be dangerous,” he warns. “Lake Ontario can turn rough as an ocean.”

  I kiss him again, this time on the lips.

  This is what the boat we will travel on looks like: a thirty-two-foot wooden Bass boat with a large deck, half of which is taken up by a diesel-engine box, and a miniature galley with a tiny head, a tinier sink with no faucet, and one and a half bunks. It is seventeen years old and painted a pale pinkish orange.

  The boat leaves Cape Cod in August and comes steaming into the West Twenty-Third Street pier like a big Creamsicle, its hull freshly painted gleaming black and the deck a rosy ivory. I am beyond excited. But when the boatman docks it and I step down below, it looks like nautical salvage: everywhere are little plastic lures with rusty hooks, reels, spinners, rods, dirty sponges, and an oily outboard motor lying on what will be our bed.

  That night, we sit down with an atlas, and Bob solemnly traces our route: up the majestic Hudson, through the Erie and Oswego Canals, across Lake Ontario, through the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence River, past Montreal, up the Richelieu River to Lake Champlain, through the Champlain Canal, and back down the Hudson. This will encompass more than a thousand miles, four canals, sixty locks, four lakes, three rivers, and two countries. And it will take, he says, a great deal of skill.

  “But you’ve manned huge destroyers in the war, big fishing boats, little Sailfish, and, in the Vineyard, you’ve gone eight or so miles out to Nomans Island. And don’t forget me. I’ll help. I ran Daddy’s boat while he was up on the flying bridge spotting swordfish. We went twenty miles out deep-sea fishing in a boat six inches bigger than yours.”

  Whoops. I bit my lip. I just compared him with my father. Big mistake. I wait for a reaction now, the scowl or something, but it doesn’t come. Or at least not then.

  The next day, when we board the Souvenir, he is wearing an old blue captain’s hat complete with gold braid. Without a word, he goes up to the bridge and installs a new radiotelephone, radio direction finder, and depth finder and lays out parallel rulers, a barometer, and a pile of charts, or maps, of the waterways. He has also brought aboard a carbine with cartridges the size of carrots, and that is one toy he is not taking. Period.

  I ponder how a boat is a man’s pl
ayground—a place where he can empty his mind of work and worries and absorb himself with fiddling and charting and moving pieces back and forth. He begins writing in the ship’s log, so I take out our first chart from its waterproof sleeve and study the channels of the lower Hudson.

  “What are you doing?” He yanks it away. “Don’t touch the charts or the log. Look, there’s going to be some danger out there. You’ve heard that a ship has only one navigator, one captain, and on this ship that’s me.”

  I begin to argue, but he interrupts. “When I instruct, you’re going to follow. Now go clean off the gunwales. Go on, get abaft with you!”

  And so I go, wondering where the man I married went. My father had treated me as an equal nautical partner. Why was I being demoted by my husband?

  But to my surprise, I find myself yielding to him. I slip too easily into the role of first mate. My back aches when I scrub the deck, my fingers go numb as I wash oil from his shirts in a bucket of cold water, I am constantly wiping out water bugs and spiders that dangle like drop earrings from the portholes.

  The truth is, I find the experience of his being my lord and master oddly appealing. No, I find it downright sexy. And allegorical. Sometimes we see only one facet of our spouses. But now I see a work in progress, a man kaleidoscopic, mercurial. He liked and respected women; he hired so many that one day soon they would make up half his staff of lawyers. He was a friend to females one minute, and the next he was a medieval knight holding them down with his robust, beautifully veined foot.

  Does the modern liberated woman have some prehistoric memory in her genes: the memory of her favorite Homo erectus dragging her off by the hair? I’ll have to talk to Betty Friedan about this.

  My surrender to Bob’s domination has put an edgy excitement in the air. He is usually a gentle lover. But one day, he simply kills the engine, drops anchor, and summons me to the bow, ordering me to strip off my clothes—fast. He doesn’t even bother to take me below.

  I think how much relief his overtaxed mind is getting on this trip. From morning to night, he tinkers. He tinkers with the engine and the lines, peers through binoculars, and uses the radiotelephone every chance he gets, especially when we pass a Coast Guard station. “This is the yacht Souvenir,” he says in his basso profundo. “Are you reading me?… Roger. Over and out.”

  The Hudson is ravishing: silvery, winding, and wide. The smell and the sound of freshwater on the tarp, like a thousand birds landing. Eventually, we reach Albany, and the water lifts 568 feet. Once in the Erie Canal, or the Barge, we navigate the many cobweb-filled locks. Locks are like big bathtubs that raise or lower a boat in a canal when there is a sharp change in the elevation of the ground.

  On one of our last locks, we are exhausted and grouchy. We had been stuck in the previous lock for two hours, and now, almost immediately, we have to deal with another. Bob has made fast the bow and stern lines with Schenectady hitches, and we wait our turn to enter. Then the big iron gates creak open to reveal slimy stone walls that are so high the lockkeeper above looks three feet tall. It is dark and dank, and to add to this infernal aura, the heavens open up and the sky bugles with thunder. We maneuver toward the port side and kill the engine. The gates, like dungeon doors, close behind us.

  “Untangle the knots in the stern line!” Bob yells at me.

  “Would you like to explain how?” The lines are a point of contention between us. He has them so overly long that they keep tripping me. And getting knots.

  “Then get the hell up and get the bow line! Hook the first rung you can.”

  I reach out with the long boat hook and successfully hook the ladder embedded in the wall. Then I am pulling the long boat hook with all my might so I can loop the bow line over a rung of the ladder.

  “Pull!” he shouts. Bob has already thrown his line around the stern ladder and is holding the boat with difficulty against the rising, swirling currents.

  “What do you think I’m doing!”

  “Harder, dumbbell!”

  Just as I finally get to the ladder and grab it, the wind tears Bob’s fingers from his own line, snapping it back into the boat. The stern swings dangerously outward, and I suppress a bubble of laughter. Inappropriate, for sure, but not only is Bob’s temper a new and humorous thing; the order of command on the Souvenir has been suddenly and delightfully reversed.

  “Jerk, you have the IQ of the Little Moron!” I call. The boat is all mine now. But then another violent gust comes up, and I panic and let go of my bow line, and the boat hook goes flying into the oily waters.

  “Pinhead!” he yells. “You’re the dumbest woman I’ve ever met!”

  “Oh, that’s right. Assassinate my character, that’s typical Morgenthau!” My indignation gives me strength. I am able to grab a rung and climb up the ladder with my hands, rung after rung, holding as tight as I can, the water rising quickly.

  The toothless lockkeeper, who is getting bigger and fatter as we get higher, sits grinning, no doubt because of my predicament. The direction of the gale keeps changing and is now pounding the stern against the wall: Bob has been thrown flat on the deck. I know he is all right because he is roaring out instructions I cannot hear. I keep pulling the boat to the ladder, lightning cracking around me, a single bow rail the only thing that keeps me from plunging into an eddy of dead fish. I ignore Bob. “Hand over hand,” I say to myself, gritting my teeth. “Just hand over hand, that’s all you have to do.”

  Suddenly I see alarming fountains of water spurting through leaks in the gates ahead of us, and I wonder if they have ever yielded to the pressure, letting the water rush in and wash us away.

  And then, just when I think I’m going to lose my grip, I’m at the top. Out of this hell comes Arcadia. The rain has stopped. I am mesmerized; balls of mist rolling off the towpath, revealing emerald pastures, a tiny red lock house, sun lighting the silver hair of the lockkeeper, the last of the wind gently batting pink roses back and forth.

  The lockkeeper glances at me with reluctant admiration and ties the line to a bollard while I run along the gunwale to Bob. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” he says gruffly. “Just a bruised rib.”

  “You were hit by a tornado! Nobody could have gone up against that,” I say, trying to be comforting.

  “You should have gotten that line over as soon as you’d hooked the ladder,” he says gruffly. “Good thing I put extra fenders down, or the boat would be in splinters. It’s a miracle we got up.”

  “No, Captain, it was not a miracle,” I reply. “It was me.”

  He looks at me grudgingly. “I never thought you had that much muscle.”

  Then I notice his body and start to giggle. He looks like Jack in the Beanstalk, his arms poking out of the too-short yellow sleeves. The storm came so suddenly that we must have mixed up our slickers, and my cuffs hang halfway down my hands. It dawns on me that this is why I was able to hold on so long: his cuffs had protected my hands from the punishing rusty rungs.

  “Look at yourself!” I say, and when he does, he chortles. Then he flaps his arms, sticks out his tongue, and sends us both into paroxysms of laughter.

  Outside the lock, I am bleary-eyed in the gray pink of the morning, and I see rowboats everywhere. This is Theodore Dreiser country, and for a moment I am inside An American Tragedy, sure that I see a young man try to drown his companion by pushing her out of the boat.

  That night I have a dawn nightmare.

  The locks get harder and emptier, the ones that lift us up and those that take us down. As we are holed up in them, cobwebs actually form on our spring lines. It is 102 degrees. “The Amazon couldn’t be as bad,” I kvetch. If we must wait in a long line of boats, we must smoke cigars to ward off no-see-ums. By the time we enter the Oswego Canal near the Canadian border, however, we feel immune, river-hardened salts with that russet tan achieved only on the water.

  We eat pots of creamed tuna in the rain, uncork some table wine with an ice pick, the corkscrew having abr
uptly jumped overboard, and then fall into the bunk, rocked to sleep by the music of rope rubbing against wood.

  * * *

  When we enter Lake Champlain, there are multiple storm warnings. We try to find berths at several marinas, but every boat has gone in and they are full. So my husband steams ahead into the wailing sea, huge waves smacking us around. He knows the direction and force of every oncoming swell and cuts through the turbulence until we are out of it. We finally find a deserted steamship pier, throw our line up over a bollard, climb the ladder to the top, and walk across a bridge into the state of Vermont.

  Too soon, we are bouncing back down the Hudson in twenty-five-mile-per-hour winds, waves arching and lifting us up and whacking us down, depositing spray everywhere. Then the Manhattan skyline rises before us, and, oddly, the waters go quiet. The end of our adventure.

  We disembark and take one last look at our boat. He gently puts his arm around me, and we turn and walk up the dock. The genteel, tractable husband whom I married reclaims his body. But what was with this dictator who sprang from the river?

  “I’ve been thinking,” I say, swallowing, trying to keep my voice light. “This whole captain thing, all that ordering me around, were you trying to send me a message? Should I be doing things for you that I’m not doing, more wifely things? Do you want me to learn to cook and be more demure, put your cardigan over your shoulders, your briefcase in your hand? Is that why on the boat you put me in my place, where you thought I belonged? Unconsciously anyway.”

  He drops his arm. “Do you have to psychoanalyze everything? Boats are a dangerous business! A boat can go down in a minute if you don’t know what to do and quickly. That’s why they invented executive officers. It’s basic boatmanship. Nothing more complicated than that.”

  The light is golden now; the boats look as if they were painted by the brush of Vermeer. He catches up with me and hooks my arm, and I know that he is trying to make it up, becoming cute and loving, as he always does when he thinks I’m pissed off.