Outerbridge Reach

by Robert Stone

  “And you figured all this out over there, Buzz? In the Hanoi Hilton?”

  “I was not confined in the Hanoi Hilton,” Ward said. “It was known as the Zoo.”

  They sat in silence until Mary came in.

  “We’re drunk,” Anne told her. “Don’t let him kid you,” she said, nodding toward Ward. “He is too.”

  Ward grunted.

  “So what am I going to do?” Anne asked the Wards. “Just wait it out? Like before?”

  “Affirmative,” Buzz Ward said. “Traditional situation.”

  36

  “LIGHT AIR, horse latitudes” read his log entry. He filmed the flying fish. Then he lazed against the mast, reading. He had brought along some published memoirs by solitary sailors to reacquaint himself with the form. As it turned out, he found the books hard going. Except for Slocum, even books that had kept him reading through the night ashore seemed to lose pertinence at sea. The authors all sounded alike. He suspected them of cribbing from each other. The style was that of naval history, British and high-hearted.

  They are writing about what cannot be fully described, Browne thought. They reduced things and provided no more than what they knew was expected. It was useless, Browne decided, to speculate about the men themselves. Who knew what they were really like? They seemed not much like him but there was no way to tell. The books gave nothing away.

  Browne was used to being where others were not like him. In the past, it had sometimes been possible to find a few kindred spirits. But not out here, he thought, inspecting the horizon. It looked untroubled, perfectly benign. No kindred here.

  In his Thanksgiving conversation with Anne, he had lied about the weather. It had been difficult but it seemed to him a little deception was necessary to confuse the opposition. The trades had been intermittent. The boat was not quite so fast as he had hoped.

  Seated atop the hatch, he leafed through the stack of books, inspecting the jacket photographs of his memoirists. They were all suitably lean and leathery. Well, he thought, I can do that. Things had their public side and it was not altogether dishonorable to pose. He wanted a book or a cassette of his own. He was sure he could come up with the necessary posture and humorously tough-minded prose.

  The sun rose higher and Browne sought the shade of his mainsail with Francis Chichester. As he half dozed the thought struck him of what it might be like to record the reality of things, matched with the thoughts and impressions it brought forth. To find the edge on which the interior met the exterior space. It would not be something of general interest, Browne thought, only of a morbid fascination to certain minds. Something for private reflection that might or might not lend itself to very selective sharing. If he could keep some sense of how things really were, he might retain a little of it over time. The past was always disguising itself, disappearing into the needs of the moment. Whatever happened got replaced by the official story or competing fictions.

  Once he had succumbed to the temptation to telephone home via the high-seas operator, in violation of his own instructions. He had been worried about the Thanksgiving business, about the way it had sounded.

  “Baby,” Anne had said, “you don’t have to perform so much. No one expects it.”

  “I know what people expect,” he had told her. “I’ve read the books and I know the lingo.”

  “Just be yourself, Owen.”

  Later that day, the true trades had risen, preceded by their long blue swell. It was as though lies summoned forth the things themselves.

  He had put on an Elgar tape, In the South. Very grand it was.

  When the wind rose again, he decided to rig the spinnaker. He set Strickland’s camera in the cockpit to film himself as he did so, passing the jib sheet over the pole. When that was done he took a sponge bath and put on clean clothes in celebration of the bright brisk weather.

  His face in the mirror showed a bad sunburn. He had not been shaving and hadn’t seen his own face for some time. The sight of it gave him an odd thrill of fear. He stuck a Band-Aid on his nose, put on his windbreaker and a Tacron-9 squadron cap and settled in the cockpit to wait for the next position reports. He kept a notebook by his side.

  The wind was steady all through afternoon but Browne found no reflections worthy of his notebook. Voices from the false sea stories he had been reading stayed with him. He could achieve neither the correct attitude nor the appropriate language. It was another case of things not being what they were supposed to be.

  Around evening he had another great attack of desire for his wife. After the lust was temporarily taken care of, came loneliness.

  She had told him not to perform so much. That people did not expect it. To be himself.

  His father had been a professional authority on expectations. He lay back and watched the fluttering telltales.

  “What about it, Dad?” he asked aloud. “Can I just be myself then? How about it?”

  The very notion of such a question filled him with hilarity. He rolled in the cockpit laughing, imagining his father’s voice gathering force for the reply.

  “Yerself?”

  It was too funny, Browne thought. First the mild and reasonable mode.

  “Be yerself, you mean?”

  That had been the time of terror, when the pitch changed and the voice ascended sweetly toward the thunderous heights on which it would charge itself with fury.

  “Are you inquiring, my son, as to whether your private person will be deemed suitable for the station in life toward which you aspire?”

  Browne clapped his hands and laughed harder. He could actually hear the old man’s voice.

  “Right, Dad. How about it?”

  “You?”

  The guy went slack, the wind changed, there was a luffing in the main. He heard his father, not enraged but cursing and weeping. That, of course, had been the other side of things.

  In the last of the light he put on his safety harness, secured the spinnaker and ran up an all-weather jib. His SatNav position located him at 36°36′ south and 2.7°33′ west, a formidable combination of treys. He sat up for a while taping preventers, listening to tangos. Eventually he climbed in the rack for some proper z’s.

  If I have forgiven him, Browne wondered, nodding off on the wholesome swells, why is he out here, waiting for me?

  37

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE, Maggie came home from a skating party in Darien looking prettily flushed and eager-eyed. There was a boy she liked, one whom, at least on ice, she could briefly manage not to humiliate and terrorize. It was possible for the moment to imagine Maggie happy and Anne was pleasantly surprised. Happiness was the last thing she expected to imagine at Christmastime, which she had been devoutly dreading.

  In her despair at the onset of the holidays she had invited Strickland and his crew up, with permission to film as they liked. On Christmas afternoon, just after Anne and Maggie got back from church, Strickland arrived in his Porsche. He brought along a single light, one camera and Pamela, who appeared more thoughtful than usual.

  “Where’s Hersey?” Anne asked.

  “I gave him the day off,” Strickland told her. “He’s probably in New Jersey. With his girl. Eating squid and cassata.”

  “That sounds kind of nice,” Anne said.

  Strickland filmed Anne and Maggie in their church clothes and then shot the tree, a handsome balsam they had driven halfway to Litchfield for. Under it were arranged the day’s brightly wrapped presents, and the drill called for them to be opened when Browne phoned in. Anne had even bought small tokens for Strickland, Pamela and Hersey, and a couple of extras in case anyone unexpected arrived. When he put the camera aside and she had changed clothes, Anne gave him a Scotch and took one for herself. Pamela sat broodingly by the lighted tree, chainsmoking without permission.

  “I love it,” she kept saying. “It’s a home-style tree.”

  Upstairs, on the telephone, Maggie was laughing. Hearing her, Anne and Strickland looked at one another and smiled. She had alw
ays found his smiles troubling. They had a light that could not be shared. In doubt, she fell back on apology.

  “I was sorry we couldn’t all have dinner together on Thanksgiving. I hope we didn’t make you feel like hired hands.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Strickland said. “Anyway, we are hired hands.”

  “How did it turn out?”

  She realized that he did not know what she meant.

  “The film you took,” she said helpfully. “The material.”

  He laughed. “Oh, the material. The material was fine. Real good.”

  He had laughed at her, Anne understood, because she did not know what she was asking. She had no idea what his standard of satisfactory material might be. Her suspicions of his good intentions waxed and waned. Since Thanksgiving they had done only one day of filming, at the offices of Underway magazine. It occurred to her that she had better discover, as exactly as possible, what he was up to.

  As the turkey roasted, they sat and drank in the living room. While Maggie was still upstairs, Anne allowed herself the observation that Christmas was difficult.

  “You have your own past Christmases to deal with,” she said. “And then your children’s.”

  “I prefer Christmas in a Moslem country,” Strickland said. “Christmas in Iran is very nice. Of course under the shah they used to put up decorations. But I think they’ve knocked that off now.”

  “You know what?” Pamela asked Strickland. “You’re a prick.”

  Strickland ignored her. Anne pretended amiable distraction.

  “I suppose you’d probably rather be somewhere else today.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Strickland.

  “Good,” Anne said. When silence descended she hastened to fill it. “We’re at the stage in this house,” she explained, “where we still make a big thing of Christmas. Of course everything’s different this year, with Owen at sea.”

  From where she sat Anne saw Maggie appear at the top of the stairs, hesitate and start down. Strickland heard her coming.

  “How,” he inquired, “except in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?”

  “Please don’t tease her,” Anne said to him. The image of Strickland as a prick, as something literally phallic, was one she could not somehow put aside.

  “Of course not,” Strickland said. “Why didn’t you go to your father’s?”

  Anne raised her chin in polite umbrage.

  “It would have been too much,” she said. “Anyway, Owen’s calling.”

  “The Christmas broadcast,” Strickland said. “I wonder what the subject will be.”

  They sat in the dining room. Anne sliced turkey; Maggie saw to it that the garnishes went round. There was a fine Bordeaux in token of the importer’s respect for Anne’s father, and Pamela commenced to drink it greedily. She brought her ashtray to the table and carried on with her smoking. When the first bottle was finished she asked for more.

  “So you went ice-skating,” Strickland said to Maggie.

  Maggie smiled. “Yes,” she said, “I had fun.”

  “Good,” Strickland said. “You deserve a good time.”

  Blushing, Maggie looked at her mother and then at the film maker. “Really? Why?”

  “Because you know how to have one.”

  “Why do you say that?” the girl asked.

  “I can tell,” Strickland said.

  Maggie pondered the subject in a brown study.

  “God,” Pamela said, “I used to love ice-skating.” The food on her plate was untouched. She looked at Maggie, frowning through the smoke from her smoldering cigarettes. “It used to get me high.”

  “Really,” Maggie agreed.

  “I used to go to Rockefeller Center. This time of year when they had the tree. It was so excellent.”

  “Pamela’s very sentimental about this time of year,” Strickland observed. “That’s why she came.”

  “I didn’t make him bring me,” Pamela said. “He wanted to.”

  “Relax, Pamela,” Strickland said.

  “I was bummed and it was Christmas.”

  “You’re welcome,” Anne said. “Right, Maggie?”

  “Yesterday,” Pamela said, “in a truly elegant French restaurant this businessman spewed me with pâté. He wanted to make the guy I was with fight him.”

  “Oh, dear,” Anne said.

  “Did they fight?” Maggie asked.

  Pamela shrugged. “I left.”

  “Naturally,” Strickland said.

  “All this time,” Pamela said, growing more agitated, “this idealistic young doctor has been searching the system for me. To help me out. And he still is, like all through the system.” She put out her cigarette and began to search for another. “A guy who cares for me.”

  “Eat your turkey,” Strickland told his friend.

  After a while she got up unfed. “I think I just want to go watch television. Can I do that?”

  “Of course,” Anne said. “It’s in the back.”

  “I’m finished,” Maggie said. “I’ll show her where it is.” Pamela followed Maggie out toward the television room.

  “I’m sorry about Pamela. She’s having a crisis.”

  “I’m glad you brought her. It was the right thing to do.”

  “I figured it was,” Strickland said. “How was church?”

  “What can I say?” she asked. “We always go on Christmas.”

  “We should have filmed you.”

  “The less of that the better,” Anne said. “Don’t you think?”

  “We want things the way they really look.”

  “Is there such a thing?” she asked. “A way they really look?”

  “Well,” Strickland said, “there will be.”

  “How about you?” she asked archly. “Did you make it to church this morning.”

  “No. But I played racquetball.”

  Anne got up and walked to the window, looking through the fog over the project roofs toward the railroad tracks and the shore.

  “Warm sickly weather,” she said. “Aren’t you going to film anymore?”

  Strickland shrugged. “When your old man calls in.”

  She turned to him. “You’re tired of us,” she said. “You must be. And it’s only Christmas.”

  Strickland laughed.

  “Please don’t laugh at me, all right?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll give you a tip about being a subject. Never worry about anybody being tired of you, or being boring or any of that. Never, never.”

  “Maybe it’s me being tired of cameras.”

  “There you go,” Strickland said.

  “Not that a lot else is happening to keep us occupied.”

  “Filming is kind of boring,” Strickland said. “Looking at film is another story. Especially people. I can look at people on film all day. I could look at one person for eight hours. Longer.”

  She glanced at him quickly, trying to tell whether he was joking. He seemed no less sincere than usual.

  Outside it started to rain. A lukewarm wind off the Sound cast the drops against the living room windows. Maggie laid and lighted a fire in the main hearth. Pamela trailed along with a handful of kindling, playing at helping. They had more to drink, waiting. It was only a few minutes until Browne’s call was due.

  “So what were your childhood Christmases like?” Anne asked Strickland.

  “Tell her about your mother,” Pamela said.

  “They were ordinary,” Strickland said. “We were a very small household and not wealthy.”

  “Ron and his mom,” Pamela said.

  “I lived with my mother in hotels,” Strickland said. “What used to be called theatrical hotels. The kind of places where you might get born in a trunk.”

  Pamela settled herself by the blaze Maggie had produced and sipped her wine.

  “The kids that got born in trunks in those places,” she said, “went out with the laundry and never came back.”
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br />   “It really wasn’t as sordid as that,” Strickland said.

  “Carnival nights,” Pamela said. Maggie and Anne stared at her. Strickland looked into the fire.

  “What do you know about carnies, Pamela? All you know is from the movies.”

  Pamela reached out to put her hand around Maggie’s shoulder. “I really needed to see someone my own age,” she explained. “Even Ronnie said so. Even the shrinks.”

  Maggie was not usually responsive to such demonstrations but out of social responsibility and native compassion she endured Pamela’s embrace.

  “For a while,” Strickland said, “we traveled with Hill Brothers Great North American Show. So we were indeed carnies. In the twilight of the carny years. For a little while only.”

  “Wow,” Maggie said.

  “Wow indeed,” said Strickland. “So I can remember your little prairie towns. Talkers. Hey-rubes. Shortchange artists. Colorful stuff. But mainly we lived in theatrical hotels. And my mother worked on stage.”

  “Doing what?” Anne asked.

  “She conducted a kind of seminar on self-improvement.” He smiled at their puzzled expressions.

  “Were you in it?” young Maggie asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “He’s got some great tapes,” Pamela said. “Make him play them.”

  “Sure,” Strickland said. “One time we’ll do a memory-lane thing.”

  When midnight Greenwich mean time arrived there was no call from Owen Browne. Three quarters of an hour later only Pamela was still talking but no one was paying attention. Maggie went upstairs to her room.

  “Want to call him?” Strickland asked.

  Anne did not want to call him. She did not want to be the one who broke the arrangement regarding the radiotelephone. With no clear idea of what next to do, she excused herself and went into her study where there was a separate line. She kept half hoping that the phone would ring but, quite irrationally, dreading it also. For a few minutes she sat at her desk, waiting. Finally she called Duffy.

  “He dictated a statement,” Duffy told her. “Guess he doesn’t want to give it himself.”

  “Is it O.K.?”