On waking from my two-day sleep, in spite of what I had told Lily and Margo, I felt less convinced of my father’s presence among us. But in case he
could
know my thoughts, I tried to think some good ones about John. Why had I loved a man who was snobby about restaurants and in love with his own mother? Because we both loved libraries and would spend many free days together wandering through them, taking books off the shelves and reading them at those wide, polished wood tables with the immovable green shaded lamps. I had never before met a man who shared my passion for libraries. Because he kept a small black-and-white television in his austere classical office so that he could lock his door and watch me on
Beyond the Bridge
every day between two and three. Because he would pass up big parties because I hated them. Because he had comforted me before and after my father had died. And because, for one year, from one spring till the next, he had given me all the love I had thought I wanted.
Chapter 2
W
hen I first felt better after what Lily and Margaret had come to call “The Awakening,” I took a book to read on one of the docks. The day was clear and fine, a brilliant day with a stiff offshore breeze. Beneath my long white pants and billowy shirt, I was covered with sunscreen. I wore sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat, tied on with a blue silk scarf. Perhaps I looked like a reclusive movie star, but my purpose was more urgent: cancer runs in the Cavan family, especially in the fair among us, the ones who freckle easily. And I have red hair.
“Delilah, can I have your autograph?” asked one girl in a group of high school girls clustered around The Yard’s entrance. They moved nervously while I signed the covers of their paperback books with someone’s eyeliner: no one had paper or pen. Why did that act have the strange effect of lifting my spirits so high? Because it told me I was loved. It didn’t matter that the man I had loved was perverse, that I had twice seen my father’s ghost, that I believed the Cavan women had the power of witches. Nice high school girls liked me, and that counted.
“Una!” I turned to see Boom-Boom hurrying toward me from
Manaloa
. Instantly I resolved to call him Alastair. I would never call another man, even a sailor, by an idiotic nickname. I would learn the Wild One’s first name and call him by it.
“Hi there,” he said, grabbing me in a hard, close hug. His body was stout and muscular, and he anchored it to me. Grains of salt clung to his short, curly brown hair. He smiled a three-cornered smile, like Elvis. “Your sisters keep telling me you’re off-limits. You feeling any better?”
“Yes. Much better. Thank you for the daisies.”
We kissed, and I touched his hair. It felt warm, and his scalp felt hot. We were sheltered from the wind behind a toolshed, and the sun beat relentlessly down from a cloudless August sky.
“I’ve missed you,” he whispered, his mouth on my ear.
We walked toward
Manaloa
. I felt brave, as if I had fallen off a horse and was daring myself to get back on. A sense of adventure: desire tempered by terror.
Manaloa
was an eighty-foot racing sloop, owned by a rich Floridian and crewed by twenty-five men. It always won most of the SORC trophies. Boom-Boom—no, Alastair—and I stepped down the gangway into the main salon, a fabulous room with teak walls, an enormous leather settee, a gimbaled teak table at which a party of twenty could eat without spilling a drop while ten-foot seas battered the hull, and a door that led to a well-stocked wine cellar. Alastair went through it and emerged with a bottle of Cristal Louis Roederer champagne.
“We’ve got to celebrate your return to the living,” he said. I loved the way Australians talked, the way they made “celebrate” sound like “celebright.”
We walked into the crew’s quarters where Alastair, as one of the senior men, had his own compartment. He undressed me tenderly, as if my absence had made me more fragile. Unhooking my bra’s front closure, he spent ample time nibbling my nipples, circling them with his pink tongue, cupping my round breasts with calloused brown hands, murmuring “beautiful, beautiful.” We climbed into his bunk with the champagne and two champagne glasses shallow as fingerbowls. They reminded me of the sign at the old Blue Danube.
Alastair opened the bottle the way I knew he would: with one mighty twist that sent the cork ricocheting off the teak walls and bubbly cascading over our naked bodies.
“Can’t waste a drop!” he said, bending to slurp champagne out of my navel. Then he poured two glasses and we toasted to health.
I needed that champagne. It blazed on my tongue like fireworks fizzling on the surface of a bay. It went straight to my head and transported me. If Alastair had set sail and pointed east, I couldn’t have felt farther from Newport.
“You need a tan,” Alastair said, tracing my pale shoulder with one big finger. He smelled faintly like the medicated powder he used to combat the dampness on board.
“I hate the sun.”
“You can’t hate the sun, Una.”
“But I do.” The banality of our conversation soothed me somehow. It was nothing like what had gone on between me and John. What went on between me and Alastair was pure sex, and the conversation was filler.
“You’re sure you’re feeling better?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. Much better.”
“Well, you’re going to feel much,
much
better,” he said, a devilish grin on his handsome, tan face. When he grinned, the tiny white creases around his blue eyes closed up. I liked that. It meant he spent most of his time in the sun with a big grin on his face.
We kissed, and Alastair turned serious. Every time we made love, it was as though he was going for the Anaïs Nin award. With his eyes on my face the entire time, he stroked my body, hardly smiling even when I squirmed and giggled when he got to my belly. He kept his eyes on my face as he moved slowly. What was he watching for? Signs of passion? I felt it, so he saw them. When he was finished, he kissed me and fell asleep. I knew he’d be awake in ten minutes. For ten minutes I lay there, eyes on the teak ceiling, wondering what, in the largest sense, comes next?
That was Newport: sex with handsome sailors. Everybody did it. Climbing off
Manaloa
, we met Ian, another crew member, with a woman I recognized from the Candy Store. We smiled as we passed. On the dock I couldn’t help glancing around, nervously expecting to see James Cavan standing by the power station, blocking my passage. But he’d had it wrong. It wasn’t sailors with their hands caught in the cookie jar—it was his daughters.
That night Margo had to work at The Yard office, so Lily, my protector, took me out to dinner at Christie’s.
“I still can’t believe what that rat did to you.”
“John?”
“Yes, John. If I ever meet the guy, I’ll break every bone in his body.”
“The worst part of it is, I thought he’d be a pretty good contact for you and Margo in the museum world.”
“That’s bad, but it’s not the worst part. We’ll get jobs.”
Our waiter brought oysters on the half shell. We stared at them for a few seconds. All of us loved raw oysters and clams, but it took a minute to get used to the idea of something slick and raw sliding down the throat.
“Dear little oyster from the bottom of the sea,” Lily said, holding it between two fingers. She always had to say that before eating oysters, the way other people say grace or “Bottoms up” or “Skoal.”
“I don’t know what the word is at Brown,” I said, “but jobs are fairly tight for art history types.”
“I think Margo will wind up staying in Providence, to tell you the truth. She has a good thing with Professor Allen, and she’ll probably teach and become more of a Rodin expert.”
“Do you still want to move to New York?”
“I have one more semester to go.”
“I know, but after that. You can share my place.”
“Listen, Buster, when you were with that asshole, you told me I could
have
your place. I’d like to kill him.”
“Don’t bother.” The subject of John was making me nervous. “Do you still want to be a conservator?”
“Yes. Don’t get excited, but I have an inside track to the Tate Gallery.”
“Don’t go to London—you have to come to New York. Who’s the inside track?” I asked.
“Guy I met at a party. I know—I know how that sounds. But he’s really nice. He’s on the Tate’s board. He says the department at Brown is regarded very highly at the Tate.”
“Forgive me for asking,” I said. She knew what I wanted to ask.
“Did I sleep with him? Yes. But so what?”
“And is he married with four children and a country house in Hampstead?” My sister Lily was at that instant staring at me with vivid anger in her green eyes. She was brilliant, even without her degrees, but she was naive. “How does the Wild One figure into this, by the way?”
“Why should he figure into it at all?”
“I thought you said you’re in love with him.”
“His family lives in Marseilles, and Marseilles is only a plane ride away from London. But who knows what will happen? I’m not about to tie him down,” she said with unconvincing detachment. More than either Margo or me, Lily teased herself with dreams of marriage.
Tie him down, Lily?
I wanted to say to her.
You could be his sails
. “What’s his real name?” I asked instead.
“Bruno.” She giggled.
“No wonder he’d rather be called ‘the Wild One.’ Do you call him that even in bed?”
“No. In bed I call him ‘Wild.’”
At that moment we were interrupted by Sherry Adamson, Queen of the Sailor Fuckers. She collected sailors the way other women collect stamps or commemorative plates. She was short, tan, with long blond hair and huge breasts. She most often wore halters or bikini tops over tight shorts, but that night she wore a backless sundress. For some reason she amused Lily, and Lily tolerated her. Sherry despised me. Before my arrival in Newport, Alastair had been at the head of her list of new acquisitions. When Lily had introduced us, telling her that I was Delilah on
Beyond the Bridge
, Sherry had said snidely, “Oh, I watch
All My Children
.”
“Hey, Lil,” she said. Her eyes flicked at me. “Hi, Una. I thought you’d be back in the city taping by now.”
“Not for a couple more weeks.” Sherry’s loathing for me was blurred by a desire to break into television. She acted with a group that did farce at a bar on Long Wharf. She loved jargon like “taping,” and she cultivated any person who might turn into a connection.
“What’s up, Sherry?” Lily asked.
“Party on
Vamp
tonight.”
“What’s
Vamp
? She’s not at The Yard, is she?”
“No, she’s a Swan 48 over at Treadway. Owned by Bill Grumbacher—doesn’t that ring a bell?”
Lily shook her head.
Sherry exhaled impatiently and sat down at our table without invitation. “Grumbacher
Precision
? They build
instruments
?”
“Like trombones?” I asked.
“No, high-tech. This guy was a pioneer in Silicon Valley. Big buckaroos at the Treadway tonight, girls.”
I felt like one of a trio of whores planning to scout the automobile dealers’ convention at the Hyatt.
“I don’t think so, Sherry. I’m meeting Bruno later,” Lily said.
I smiled, noting the “Bruno.”
“Your loss, but I must admit that
I
wouldn’t let the Wild One out of my sight either. Mind if I order a drink?”
The waiter brought rum-and-tonics for all three of us. Then he brought our dinners. “Sorry,” Lily mouthed to me while Sherry used her pointy fingernails to eat scallops off my plate and shreds of swordfish off Lily’s. The sun had set behind Jamestown, and a fake Dixieland band had started to play “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” on one of the wharves. Wind sang in the halyards of boats on mooring and lining the docks. I ate my lemony scallops and listened to my sister-protector tell Sherry about the Emmy
Beyond the Bridge
had won for best daytime drama the year I had joined the cast. But, nevertheless, I felt jealous that Lily had allowed Sherry to stay with us at all.
After Labor Day the crowds left Newport. Children returned to school, tourists went back to work, and the sailors headed south. Every day docks at The Yard were lined with women and girls, some crying, all waving goodbye to the boats.
“Why don’t they just go along?” I asked Alastair one afternoon. We were sitting on the bow of
Manaloa
, half in and half out of the next boat’s shadow, watching two women hold on to each other and sob as
Twister
heeled out of the harbor.
“What, the girls?” he asked.
“Yes, those women. Why don’t they just sign on and crew their way through the SORC? Then they wouldn’t have to go through these painful separations.”
Alastair fixed his eyes on my face and laughed. He wanted to see whether I was serious. In retrospect I realized that I was picking a fight, but at that moment I felt innocent, even blithe. “Girls in the SORC?” he asked.
“Those two are not girls, Alastair. They are at least twenty-five.”
He looked at the two women, still waving at a fast-retreating white blur. “Una, a lady doesn’t like attention called to her age. I call ’em girls to give ’em a lift. I call my aunts ‘girls.’”
“Don’t do that anymore. Would you like me to call you a boy?”
“Sometimes, sure. That’s okay.”
He wasn’t reacting the way I’d hoped he would. I switched tacks. “Well, what’s wrong with women in the SORC?”
He laughed again, this time nervously. “Una, I know you’re a women’s libber, and that’s fine with me. But you don’t know racing. A girl—a woman—can’t live the way she’s meant to. Most of the boats don’t have the right—facilities. Know what I mean?”
“You mean bathrooms, don’t you?”
“Well, sure. I mean, say you’re sailing an upwind leg, and you’re heelin’ as far as you can go, and you have to—relieve yourself. What’s a lady going to do? She can’t hang over the side the way a guy can. And no one would ever want her to. And there’s no way the skipper’s going to let her go below to use the head.” He shrugged his wide shoulders. “I mean, pissin’s not all. It’s not the most important thing. Sure, there are some lady racers, but none you’d want to share your bunk with. You need muscles to sail, Una. It’s not like flapping around in a dinghy, you know.”
“I know that,” I said solemnly. It was clear that Alastair considered his use of “lady” instead of “girl” a concession to my feminist sensibilities. As I have said, I had previously found comfort in Alastair’s and my banal conversation, but at that moment I felt that he was being used. By me. The way my father had accused me of being used by Alastair, the way I had accused Lily of being used by Bruno. It was a sad revelation. I sat in the shade and Alastair sat twelve inches away in the sun. Our hands touched. I felt fond of him, and even at that moment of disturbing insight, a growing desire. But I found myself sneaking glances around The Yard, just in case my father had come back. I felt dirtier as a user than I ever had felt during any moment of forbidden sex. The thing I despised most was manipulation.