by Robert Stone
She heard his bitter, self-satisfied laughter. It made her seethe.
“Do you think I’d let her go to public schools up there?”
She gave him no answer.
“I want you to come and see me,” he said.
After a moment she said, “All right. Soon.”
“I want to tell you something, Annie. And you can pass this along to him.” Her father managed to use Owen’s name as infrequently as possible. “Matty Hylan’s going to get his ass in a sling. His organization is in trouble.”
“Yes,” she said. “We’ve heard rumors.”
“You had better provide,” her father said, “for every contingency.”
“Owen’s been with the Hylan companies a long time, Dad. You know how he feels.”
“Sure, sure.” He cut her off. “I can’t stay on the line. Come for lunch one day.”
Having called only made her feel more tense. Old Magowan was standing in the corridor outside her office. She supposed he had been listening to her end of the conversation.
“Ever hear from your father?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve just spoken to him, in fact. Just now.”
The old man waited for a moment and said, “Give him my best.”
She fought to hold her tongue, swallowing her unpurged anxiety, her shame and anger.
“He’s not a reader of ours, Mr. Magowan,” she called after him. “Nor a yachtsman.” The old boy was out of hearing.
She turned off her word processor, put her desk in order and found herself wondering how Owen had passed his afternoon. Putting on her coat, she walked to the office window and looked out at the waning light of afternoon on the leaden rooftops of lower Broadway. She was sorry to lose the day, the sense of the streets, the mindless promise of unseasonal weather. Suddenly it seemed to her that the last place she cared to be was in her house beside the Sound. A drink was what she wanted. Only one or two, she thought, to soften the margin between the bright day that was passing and the cares of the evening.
The young temporary secretary had gone home. Mr. Magowan was puttering around his office.
“Mr. M,” she said, “would it please you to buy me a drink?”
Shameless, but she knew it might actually please him. He would be curious about the state of Altan Marine and about her notorious father. She wanted to go somewhere that was lively and pleasant but she dreaded having to hold down a table by herself and fend off passes. Magowan was often a trial but he was not without humor and his sea stories were sometimes diverting.
“Oh gosh,” the old man said. “Yes, indeed.” But having said so much, he seemed to lapse into confusion. He picked up his memo pad and leafed through it while she stood by.
“Maybe another time,” she suggested.
“Yes,” he said. “When we close the issue. We’ll celebrate at Fraunces.” Years before, Mr. Magowan had come within centimeters of being blown to pieces at Fraunces Tavern by a Puerto Rican nationalist’s bomb but he continued to favor the place. “Have to face the docs tomorrow. Prayer and fasting.”
“Ah,” Anne said, “too bad.”
She took the subway up to Fifty-ninth Street and walked east. Across the street from the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art was a small hotel where she and Owen sometimes stayed when they were in the city. It had a pleasant Bar Américain and what she remembered as a good martini, and she might have one in peace there.
The maître d’ took her to a table beside a window. In the lounge next door, a house pianist was playing “Send In the Clowns.” The martini made her wince; she was no longer accustomed to hard liquor. For a while she sat and drank and watched the midtown crowds pass on Fifty-fourth Street. At the next table, four men in expensive suits conversed in lisping European Spanish. An elderly man in dark glasses, accompanied by a middle-aged woman in furs, hobbled slowly by on their way to dinner in the restaurant.
She had been to the same place last over the Christmas holidays with Owen and Maggie when they had come in to see Les Misérables. Maggie had contrived to get herself served a whiskey sour. In all, the holidays had not been particularly pleasant. Maggie and Owen had found every possible occasion to quarrel. A few nights after Christmas Maggie had gone into New York to a Grateful Dead concert at the Garden. She had stayed overnight with her friends, not calling home until after three in the morning. That had been thoughtless and selfish but he had absolutely refused to let it rest. He had made it the central event of the season.
Finishing her first martini, Anne ordered a second. With her gaze fixed on the street window, she was aware that one of the Spaniards at the next table had an eye on her. When she took a blank, chastening look in his direction, he turned away discreetly. It made her feel gratefully inclined toward him.
Anne had always taken her good looks for granted. Since adolescence she had been used to modestly altering the valence of a room. When she paid and rose from her seat, the man was watching her again. Anne glanced at him briefly, kept her eyes down, her expression pleasant. It gave her a lift to be admired. If it mattered to her, she thought, the time had come to work at maintenance. She would be forty in the spring, although some people she knew would have been surprised to hear it.
She walked quickly down Fifth Avenue, flushed, buoyed by a vague, hopeful confusion that owed everything to gin. Rockefeller Center and Saint Patrick’s were places charged with fragments of her girlhood.
At the ramp leading down to the train, she bought a nip of Gordon’s and soda. It was a seedy thing to do. She sipped it on the ride home, looking out at ringed track lights in the fog and the last of the previous day’s soiled snow.
Owen was asleep in her study when she got home. He lay in her leather padded desk chair with his feet up on an adjoining couch. Three books and a National Geographic Atlas were stacked beside the chair. She picked them up. One of the books was Melville’s White-Jacket.
She stood over him for a moment, regarding his long-jawed face at melancholy rest. Sleep lay lightly there. On the desk were the specifications for a stock boat called the Altan Forty, some pictures and a dummy ad. The copy he had begun to write was in the typewriter.
“With any Altan product your buying power commands the finest engineering, styling and craftsmanship in the industry. The Altan name is itself an emblem of quality . . .”
So he had fled from that to Melville. She left him sleeping. He rarely brought advertising copy work home; whenever she saw it, its paltriness made her feel ashamed for him. She experienced a glancing, barbed notion: He has wasted his life with me.
Upstairs she felt soiled and dry. Alcohol’s no use to me, she thought, if all it can do is serve up little morbid conceits. She was not used to thinking of herself as drunk. She had been Pegleg Annie at school, outdrinking the mere Irish. After she had changed into jeans, she went downstairs again and turned on WNYC in the kitchen. Vivaldi’s “Winter.” Whirling. She took an aspirin and a glass of water and planned a take-out order from the local Chinese restaurant.
Owen had always been a better writer than she. She felt as convinced of that as that she had always been the better sailor. It was altogether unfair that he was consigned to filling blocks of type in color brochures. The pieces and essays that caused her so much labor came much more easily to him. He enjoyed doing them but never had the time. Hers were trivial, she thought. His were serious and elegant.
There was a bottle of Entre-Deux-Mers in the refrigerator that she had opened a few days before, almost full. It might be as well to have a little and go to bed early. Without it, the cocktails might keep her awake.
As for her, she liked persuading people. It would be easy for her to turn to copywriting, to organizing presentations, maybe even to organizing deals. The idea of action, of moving product and turning cash, seemed not at all uncongenial. In the world of boats, she could never sell directly. Women didn’t. But indirectly—by skill, by guile, by stealth—that was another story.
She drank her
wine and began to spin a fantasy of how she might make time for him to write. He could do travel pieces that were as good as anyone’s, surprisingly sly and funny. Together they could sail anywhere.
If only there were some way. She had tried a little wheeling and dealing through her brother and his friends in the stock market and it had gone badly. Sometimes she thought about the commercial possibilities of bringing women into sailing, teaching, making videos. Owen hated public performances. He would soon have to face the boat show with his sales package. He would hate it and complain. Whereas she, she was sure, might thrive there. If only there were a way.
After a while, Owen woke up and walked into the kitchen rubbing his eyes. A Bach adagio played on WNYC.
“Are you all right?” she asked him.
He shrugged. They listened to the news headlines and the weather report. More springlike weather was predicted for the next day.
“I should have wakened you. You’ll be up all night.”
He laughed at her solicitude.
“I’m all right, Annie. How are you?”
“I stayed in New York and got addled. I went to the American Bar on Fifty-fourth Street.”
“Alone?”
“I couldn’t find anyone to take me.”
“I should have taken you.”
“You’re no good,” she said. “You don’t even drink.” She was silent for a moment. “Ladies used to go to Schrafft’s and drink old-fashioneds. I wonder whatever happened to that.” Have I no friends? she was asking herself. Is it that other women dislike me? “And anyway, you had to work on the brochures.”
“Right,” Browne said.
They called out for dinner and ate in the kitchen, the radio turned low. Anne had another glass of wine.
“Do you have to go in tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.” He seemed to think about it. “These days I’m afraid to turn my back. I mean,” he said, “there may be layoffs.”
“They need someone who can write,” Anne told him.
“I wouldn’t mind taking a couple of days off before too long,” he said. “We could sneak off to the island.”
“Ah,” she said, “the island.”
A little after nine she went to bed, quite weary. Owen stayed downstairs, listening to the program of 1930s jazz and swing he enjoyed.
For a while she lay awake, restless and dizzy. The band music drifted up to her, truly old and far away. When at last she went to sleep, it sounded across the dark water of her dreams, all tremulous tenors, naive syncopation and loss. Dreaming, she understood that its syncopation was not really so naive. It was Owen’s music. It mourned some dream of his.
8
OWEN BROWNE had met Matty Hylan, his ultimate employer, only twice. On each occasion he had either been slapped on the back or punched ceremoniously on the arm. Not being one to dissemble heartiness, Browne did not remember the meetings as having gone well. He had never been asked to Shadows, the corporate headquarters on the Hudson. He was surprised, as a result, when one morning Ross dispatched him there to appraise a few of Hylan’s boats. The boss himself was said to be in Europe, preparing for a single-handed sailing race. Business was not thriving. Although the market had come back, the fortunes of Altan Marine had not risen with it. The spirit of recreation had somewhat folded her wings.
Ross was a shy man a few years younger than Browne, with steel-rimmed spectacles and a brush mustache. He had a way of emphasizing his statements with a dental grimace that lent his person a touch of Bull Moose enthusiasm and made him appear older than he was.
“It’ll do you good,” Ross said. “You ought to get to know the folks over there.”
Since his visit south, Browne had been having trouble with his moods. His dreams were troubling. Sometimes he had violent fantasies of a frighteningly vivid quality. Occasionally he flashed scenes from the war. At other times, pieces of music or halfremembered scraps of poetry would send him headlong into a fond reverie, without much content but vaguely religious and sentimental. Inevitably it ended in anger, sleeplessness and fear. His sexual life seemed to be progressing by extremes, periods of indifference alternating with much desire. The summons to Shadows was interrupting one of Browne’s better days. He had been in the throes of composition, writing copy on the company’s new stock boat, the Altan Forty. It was said to be based on the boat Hylan would take to sea later in the year. Browne had convinced himself of its high quality.
“I’ll go,” Browne said resignedly. “I don’t expect I’ll like it much.”
He drove the icy back roads over the Taconic ridge and crossed the river at Peekskill. Going up the right bank, he thought he could hear a military band playing on the parade ground at West Point. The river was icy gray and the trees along the high slopes still bare with winter. Driving down toward Shadows, he was thrilled with the grandeur of the old house. He had grown up around a large estate, although not one so fanciful and grand. The sight of the place filled him with a sad nostalgia, a mixture of disappointment, hope and pride.
In his office, Harry Thorne was chatting with Livingston. They were waiting for Joe Duffy, the representative of the public relations firm Matty Hylan had retained.
“I think I’ll write a book,” Thorne said. “Have I material?”
“About what?” Livingston asked. “Yourself or Matty?”
“Matty,” Thorne repeated. “What a story that would be, huh? Not the story he liked to put out. But the real story of the real Matty Hylan. Some story it would be.”
Livingston sighed and nodded.
“I’ve known him from when he was a kid,” Thorne said. “I made the man my science. What happened? He dazzled me.”
“Everybody understands,” Livingston said. “Believe me.”
“The fucking gutter press . . .” Thorne began. Anger prevented him from finishing.
“Everybody knows it was Matty,” Livingston said. “They’ll say: Harry loved the guy.”
“I was a fool.”
“Everybody will say the same, Harry. That you’re a man of your word. That your word is your bond.”
“You know what I think?” Harry asked. “I think a lot of them would like me out the forty-fourth-floor window. Like Sam Spencer.”
When Duffy arrived they listened sadly to his efforts at exculpatory prose. He was a red-faced, pot-bellied chap in a checkered English sportcoat. Livingston had told Harry that Duffy was smarter than he looked. As Duffy was reciting from his handouts, Joyce Manning came in to announce that Owen Browne had come to look at the boats.
“The guy from the Altan yard,” Livingston reminded Thorne. “To do the appraisal.”
Thorne waved the notion away like an unpleasant odor.
“Matty’s race was going to be an important part of your public picture,” Duffy pointed out. “Cancellation is going to be bad. I mean, I think you’re going to have to pay for the whole thing anyway. Maybe something can be done with these boats.”
“You’re the artist,” Livingston said to Duffy. “Know anything about sailboats?”
“The wind makes them go,” Duffy replied. “Let me have a talk with this guy.”
Stepping into the outer office where Joyce Manning presided, Duffy saw Browne pacing in the corridor.
“Looks like a sailor, doesn’t he?” he asked the confidential secretary. “Suntanned. Square jaw.”
“Yes,” she said. “Isn’t he lovely?”
Duffy went and introduced himself to Browne and they started walking along the lawn to the river. Browne explained that he wrote copy for Altan and appeared in the company videos. The chilly day warmed as the sun rose higher.
“You like to sail?”
“I like nothing better,” Browne said.
In the echoing boathouse, Browne conducted Duffy on a tour of the boats moored there.
“This is a Concordia yawl,” he told Duffy of one handsome vessel. “Mahogany hull, built in the late 1930s. Bronze fittings and winches. Designed by a man named Hun
t, the best.”
“Jeez,” said Duffy reverently. They moved along.
“A Tayana Thirty-seven,” Browne explained. “Designed by Robert Perry. Teak decks. She’s heavily built and traditional.” They looked at two Wright boats, Newports, Dickersons, Farrs. At the end of the dock were three of the Altan stock boats.
“You have over two million dollars’ worth of boats here,” Browne told Duffy. He walked over to the stock boats at the end of the line. “Next year we’ll have the new racer-cruiser out, the Altan Forty. A beauty. Finnish design.”
“I’ve heard,” Duffy said. “The one your boss is racing.” He studied Browne for a moment. “Come up to the office for a minute, Owen. I want you to meet some people.”
At Shadows, they sat in Hylan’s office after Duffy had introduced Browne to Thorne and Livingston. He had asked Joyce Manning to come in as well.
“So will Altan sell Matty’s new boat?” Livingston asked Browne. “Even in a bad year?”
“In a word, yes,” Browne said. “A forty-footer, thirty-six feet at waterline? We would price her at a hundred and a half. She’s going to be a fine vessel. I can sell her, I assure you.”
“Owen does sales videos,” Duffy pointed out.
“We’ll have a look at them,” Livingston said. “Get us some,” he told Mrs. Manning.
“I understand you went to Annapolis,” Harry Thorne said. “Class of sixty-eight,” Browne said.
“Sixty-eight,” Thorne repeated. “What a year. I was in the Navy too,” he told Browne. “During my war, I was a gunner’s mate aboard the cruiser Northampton.”
“Owen’s a great sailor,” Duffy said. “Sails alone, like Matty.” Browne had once sailed alone from West Palm Beach to New Bern, North Carolina. It was the only solitary sailing he had done.
“That right?” Thorne asked.
“Yes,” Browne said, “I’ve done some.”
“What’s so good about this boat?” Thorne asked him.
“It’s sound,” Browne said. “It’s beautiful.”
“Yeah?” asked Thorne.
