The Flamethrowers Part 21

This is what I told myself. And then repeated. And then said again. I ignored the part where I drove Gianni's getaway car-or maybe it was his hea.r.s.e.

"So in the fall of 1967 I went to Los Angeles," Marvin said. I was on the white divan for a new round of prints, something to do with emulsions, different emulsions.

Roberto had now been in captivity for a week. I kept expecting to run into Sandro, waiting to. Marvin was speaking in the flat, nasal, unmodulated tone of his, almost a drone, indicating that he was going to recount in great detail some aspect of what he considered his critical personal history. I had just said that Sandro's brother had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades. It was impulsive, but I figured maybe we could talk about it. It was Marvin who had introduced me to Sandro in the first place.

Marvin said it was terrible news. He shrugged and added something about it being a high-profile family and then there was an anecdote and we were suddenly, it seemed, going to talk about Marvin instead, about his own history.

"The first job I had was as a stock footage researcher. I was employed by a director doing preliminary work for a feature. The script called for doc.u.mentary scenes of people dying violent deaths. That's to say, actual people dying. The stock footage vaults where I did my research had the negatives of the Pathe newsreels from beginning to end. I went through, looking for violent deaths. What I found overwhelmingly were executions, almost all of them by firing squad. I gave the director all the scenes I'd had printed. Nothing ever came of the project, and that director disappeared off the face of the Earth, as people tend to do, change their names, become Hare Krishnas, drink themselves to death, whatever. I never heard from him, wouldn't have thought of him again, but one of the scenes I'd given him was, according to the newsreel caption, the execution of an Italian Fascist by a partisan militia, and when I met Sandro in 1968 or '69, I had a deja vu about his name. Was the condemned man in the stock footage also Valera? Because that would be an incredible coincidence. In the summer of 1974 I was back at that same vault and tried to find out. But in the intervening time, things had changed. They used to make a viewing print for just a lab charge. Now they charged a fee for each phase of their service. I didn't want to find out badly enough to spend a lot of money. Really it had nothing to do with Sandro Valera. It was about something specific becoming stock footage. I always had this feeling there were two worlds. The one we live in, you know, just streaming along, future into present into past, recorded distortedly in people's minds, and this other world: stock footage. Small integers of life, I mean life in quotes, which represent whatever did take place, whether or not what's on the stock footage actually occurred. Cropping can make outcomes so ambiguous, but it doesn't matter, see. It's stock footage. A reference file to reality. Like you're a reference file for Caucasian skin tones; it doesn't matter that you exist. For the technician or projectionist, you're an index for the existence of woman, flesh, flesh tones. Which brings up the question of race, unaddressed. You, as you, have nothing to do with it."

Marvin took pictures of me holding the color chart. I began to feel like I was made of lead, heavy enough to sink right through the divan. If he had touched on the subject of Roberto, even in the most glancing way acknowledged the possibility that Roberto could be harmed, he would have helped me out. But he used the subject as a pretext to talk only about himself.

"I tried to explain this idea about two worlds to the people who worked in the vaults. One of them said, 'If you love stock footage so much, won't any piece of it do?' And the thing is, I had to agree with him. Even if they were just trying to get rid of me. He reached into a fireproof safety container and retrieved a role of negative that had started to deteriorate. He gave it to me for free, since they were discarding it anyway. And here is the kicker. It was of . . . uh, hmm. Actually, I can't recall. That's funny. It's gone, just . . . poof. I guess it wasn't that important to the story. The story was about how it doesn't matter what they ended up giving me. Also that violent deaths are part of stock footage, even if someone had to be killed, I mean originally, to generate the reference. You look different, by the way. Did you dye your hair or something?"

On my way home from work, I ran into Giddle on the Bowery. It was too late to avoid her.

"Want to come drink old overheated coffee and entertain me while I get paid and you sit and listen to me?" she said.

"No," I said.

We could meet later, she said. She was going to park herself at Rudy's and drink after her shift was finished.

"That kind of drinking where you make a wilderness," she said, "and tear a path in. You meet someone else there, deep in the woods. Go home together. Claw your way toward each other through the booze, confusion, misery, horniness."

"Sounds like fun," I said, "but no thanks."

"I bet you're going to Ronnie's opening," she said.

I said yes. It was tonight.

"You know what it is, right? His show? Pictures of beat-up women."

Stanley and Gloria would be hosting a dinner for Ronnie after the opening. When I got back to the loft, Gloria had a.s.sistants running here and there, moving tables, putting out flowers, preparing food.

"What a mess," she said. "It's not the time to entertain but I cannot let Ronnie down. I won't. But it could not be a worse time."

I asked why.

"They killed his brother," she said.

Sandro had called earlier that afternoon to tell them the news. "He says they weren't close. But he's in terrible pain. He's leaving tomorrow for Milan. But he'll only be gone a few days-just for the funeral. And when he comes back, we need to be there to support him. Stanley wants him around. You can stay until you find a place, but perhaps find a place soon."

I called Sandro's number and got the machine. I hung up, unable to bring myself to leave a message, and went to lie down in the little guest room, the Burdmoore room, as I thought of it, my own photographs, the white on white of the salt flats, on the walls above me. I closed my eyes, but with the noise from the party preparations, the news about Roberto, the jangle of thoughts in my head, I felt like I was trying to rest on a freeway overpa.s.s. I tried Sandro again and got the machine. I went out for a walk. I'd seen a FOR RENT sign on a fire escape on Kenmare, near my old apartment.

As I left the Kastles', I decided to walk over to Sandro's. Who else knew Roberto? Only me. Sandro never spoke of his brother. He downplayed his family, the company, in every way he could. I rang the bell. No one answered. Gloria had said he was coming to Ronnie's opening. I would see him in an hour. We'd speak then.

I had not guessed Ronnie would use the photos he'd taken that night at Rudy's, of Talia Valera and her friends. I should have. He did. The show was called Match Your Mood. Talia and the other women mugging for the camera with their faces roughed up. They'd gotten drunk, and instead of meeting a stranger in the dark wilderness that lay before them they met themselves, in slaps and punches.

Talia was larger than life, with her bruised, swollen eye. She stared out from the glossy black-and-white image with a look of calm satisfaction, as if Ronnie had revealed her profound nature by asking of her this task, to punch herself, and she had, and look, she was not afraid, she was undamaged, still beautiful. But she was damaged; they all were.

I thought of the pregnant biondina. The biondina told to strip nude, deloused for the camera, and what was the difference? Vincenzo has the baby.

There was no sign yet of Sandro. We would be speaking in front of a huge image of Talia's battered face. She was just a confused girl, like Sandro said. Roberto was dead and maybe it was time for me to come home.

Helen h.e.l.lenberger had not wanted to show the work. Ronnie had left the gallery and was now represented by Erwin Frame, on Mercer Street, which was Sandro's old gallery. I walked around the show with Gloria, who told me Helen had felt the work was too misogynistic.

Gloria started glancing behind me as we talked. I turned around. Sandro had arrived.

He was with a very young woman, practically a child. She might have been eighteen years old. A friend's daughter, I thought. Someone's daughter, pet.i.te and delicate, a blonde in a black sliplike dress, tiny shoulder blades like a bird's wings, a child someone had dressed up for this event. But they were holding hands, she and Sandro. Walking together, her hand in his, and then he pulled her to him and kissed her on the side of the head. It was the girl on layaway. I hadn't recognized her dressed up, the blonde in the photograph in Ronnie's studio, who had stood in a cave of noise and smoke and gazed sadly at Ronnie that night at the bar, and no one had noticed her but me.

From that moment I began to drift, to really drift. I felt light and queer and untouchable, by people or things. The huge black-and-white photos of beat-up faces receded and blurred. They were too large, like tribal masks or billboards. Gloria's hand was on my arm but I could not really feel it, just a vague pressure. "Let's get you some wine."

I better leave, I thought. Go to Rudy's and get drunk with Giddle, as much a stranger as any of these people but she never really professed to be anything more. Go and enter the dark and tangled wilderness, a different one than Giddle's, each of us tumbling in, in, in.

I was outside, pondering Rudy's, when Ronnie appeared.

I felt keenly aware that it was the second time in a month he'd done this. Followed me out when I'd left someplace alone. But I knew his game, showing just enough interest to keep me hooked in.

"You're ditching my opening."

"f.u.c.k you," I said. I was unsure where it came from but it seemed appropriate.

He laughed. "You really are growing up. Just come to dinner. Sandro won't be there."

"That's not why I'm leaving," I lied.

"We both have dead brothers now," he said. "But no one knows about Tim. You're the only one I told. You can be my date tonight. What do you say?" He grinned stupidly, showing that broken tooth. He never had explained how it had happened. "Walk with me. It's my dinner and I want you to come. To be my guest."

Ronnie held my hand as we walked, and I wondered if he was doing it to console me because Sandro was holding the hand of a child bride, Ronnie's layaway plan transferred to Sandro. Did a pink owner's t.i.tle go with her? The strange compet.i.tion and sharing of friendship. We both have dead brothers now.

He squeezed my hand. Then he squeezed it again.

"I never understood you," I said.

As Ronnie had promised, Sandro and the girl did not come to dinner. I a.s.sumed they did not come because he was grieving, but the thought crossed my mind that it was also because he wanted to be affectionate with his date without the censoring element of my presence. The day I had caught him with Talia and left for Rome was only two months earlier, and he was already with someone else. What I had considered an open issue, the question of me and Sandro, was closed. I hadn't been ready for that. I had forgotten that he was free to move on, that he would seek comfort. A new girlfriend to help bear his sadness about Roberto. Roberto, whose death I felt connected to in a way I would never be able to disclose.

Most of the Larrys whom Ronnie had found so funny bunched together at John Dogg's opening had been invited to this dinner for Ronnie. And Saul Oppler, who seldom attended these things. And Didier, puffing his Gauloise and taking bites of the fish Gloria served, his plate a mixture of fish and ashes and cigarette b.u.t.ts.

Erwin made a toast to Ronnie. Gallerists needed so badly to believe. They were not allowed the skepticism the rest of us harbored. The photographs were tasteless and mean. They were as questionable as a doc.u.mentary about a pregnant girl with a fever and no place to lie down. The movie director sleeping with her as a way of offering her a bed. And because Ronnie's photographs were so obviously tasteless, Erwin talked about their tastefulness and surprising tact, their great humanity, Erwin said, their honesty, an unexpected tenderness- As he spoke, he searched the table for us to agree with what Ronnie himself would have called bulls.h.i.t hagiography.

We clinked and sipped.

Ronnie cleared his throat.

We waited quietly for him to speak.

"When I was a kid," he said, "I was messing around at a construction site and got whacked on the head by a railroad tie." He looked around. "Have I told any of you this story?"

We shook our heads. Wind came in through the open windows of the Kastles' loft, and the little candles on their long schoolhouse table dimmed and flickered, as if in antic.i.p.ation.

"I got whacked so hard I forgot who I was. Twelve years of life, gone. I wandered with a headache, stunned and aimless, for a couple of days, sleeping in public parks, competing with pigeons for old french fries, relieving myself in bushes, drinking from plaza fountains-"

"Ronnie," Gloria said, "they recycle that water. You're not supposed to drink from fountains."

"For crying out loud," Stanley said, "Ronnie just told us he hit his head and forgot who he was. What does it matter about the water?"

"I came to a small marina," Ronnie said. "Probably I'd been there before, but everything looked new to me. The ocean flashed and glistened. A salty breeze riffled my hair. The gentle slap of waves against the boats docked in the marina was a voice beckoning me. The sound of the rigging. Of sun-bleached, heavy canvas snapping in the wind. The creak of rope knots-"

"Where did you grow up again?" Didier asked skeptically. I felt skeptical, too. Was he making this up?

"Connecticut. Anyway, it was a place of real logic. A logic of the senses. Stunning, really, and I can still recall the scene in precise detail, the shimmer of blue tarps, the heady fumes of deck paint and turpentine vaporizing in the warm air. The green algae that flocked the dock moorings like furry hip waders from the waterline down. I was overcome by a sense of openness, an open destiny. Easy to say, of course, since I did not remember a single element of my old life, not one f.u.c.king thing. But actually," he said, "I did remember one thing: after the log came down on me, the only image I held on to, strangely, was of a woman drying her hair with a bath towel. Rubbing vigorously, just out of the shower, with a dingy pink towel, like a white towel that had been washed with red T-shirts. I could only see her from the back, head bent forward, water-clumped strands that were the color of wet sand. Her neck. Her wet hair revealing the shape of her head and something more, a general strippedness, though I can only see her from the shoulders up as she towels her wet hair."

"How oedipal," Gloria said. "Let me ask: what color is Mrs. Fontaine's hair? And I mean your mother. Not that teenager from New Mexico you were married to for a couple of weeks."

"You married a teenager from New Mexico?" Stanley asked with barely concealed envy.

Ronnie shrugged. "She was a hitchhiker. I couldn't help myself. She was just so adorable. With these bangs that hung down into her eyes. But she started to get on my nerves. It was like being a legal guardian, I had to tell her to eat her vegetables, to put on a sweater-"

"Ronnie," Gloria said, "are we to a.s.sume your mother had sandy-blond hair?"

"No," Ronnie said. He was staring at me across the table. "No, she doesn't."

It was a searching, scanning gaze. Like he was trying to discern something.

I had taken a shower that night that Ronnie stayed over. I'd put my hair in a faded pink towel, my Pickwick towel. I had lain next to him, thinking, so naively, that this would be the first of many moments with his fingers in my wet hair.

"I walked along the dock and considered each boat. Their names, one after another, appeared to me as the names of different lives I could choose. Me and Mrs. Jones. Loan Shark. Come to Papa."

There was laughter. Ronnie waited for quiet and continued.

"There was one especially beautiful boat. It singled itself out. It was the rich color of eggnog, a fifty-foot cruiser called the Reno."

So. He was speaking to me from across that knife-scratched table. A story for twenty with a message for one. But what was the message? Could it be that Ronnie loved me? Or was his use of our secret history one more hoax? Yet another layer of the joke?

"The Reno," Erwin said. "That's an odd name for a boat." He said it with the confusion of someone who concerned himself with the naming of boats.

"This older couple sat on the deck. I shaded my eyes and looked up at them. 'Well, h.e.l.lo,' the man calls down. I said h.e.l.lo back. 'The wind is just perfect,' he says. 'We're getting ready to go.' I asked where. He said to see the world. Was I interested? I guess I thought he meant generally, and I said sure. I mean of course. He asked if I liked the open sea. 'Well, sure I do,' I said, but what did I know? I liked the words open and sea. I still like those words. He said to call him Commodore. He told me they were setting sail that afternoon. I said, 'Just you two?' looking from him to his wife-he had introduced her by name but I forgot it immediately, and soon we were all chummy-chummy and it was too late not to know it. No one ever called her by it. He called her 'dear,' or 'my wife,' and everyone else simply said the commodore's wife. 'Just us,' the commodore said, 'and our first mate, Xerxes, who also cooks. And maybe you.' And then he tamped his pipe, one of those meerschaum pipes, and something shifted or brightened in my mind. I didn't know then, I mean I could not have recalled, that my own father smoked a pipe."

"Huh," Didier said, nodding. "Cla.s.sic displacement."

"Maybe. So he lights the bowl and puffs his pipe," Ronnie said, "and tells me, 'You look like you'll work out just fine for us. Just fine. When Mr. Sneeks said he had a cabin boy for me, well, I imagined someone just like you. I thought of you, and here you are.' 'And here I am,' I said, and as I said it, the world went clean and orderly in a way it almost never does."

Ronnie paused, took a drink. Everyone was quiet, unclear where we were headed. They'd been expecting a funny escapade, like the one about Oppler's E-type Jaguar.

"We set sail later that afternoon. I felt what I can only call a mystical vibration when we lost sight of land. The commodore said I brought luck on board, as the winds were such that we sailed wing and wing, with both jibs open at an angle and filled with air, so that the yacht looked like a huge white cabbage b.u.t.terfly. The commodore explained that this manner of sailing was not only fast but also the most balanced and pleasing kind, because of the steady way the boat moved through the water. In the evening, Xerxes prepared our dinner on a gimbal stove, and we ate on the aft deck, in the bright, ga.s.sy glow of a Coleman lantern. The commodore and his wife talked about their lives, and having no memories or interests of my own, I was fascinated by their stories of tax shelters and c.o.c.ktail parties, tennis elbow, summer compounds, and disowned children. Now, of course, this kind of thing couldn't interest me less, though it's often the artist's duty to listen to exactly these sorts of details and to pretend they matter."

Erwin Frame laughed uncomfortably, glancing at the two collectors he'd brought to dinner, a husband and wife much too polished and fancy for downtown Manhattan, the man's platinum watch, his timepiece, glinting in the candlelight. The collectors' faces were pleased and vacant, like they had already decided that this artist whose work they were buying was going to entertain them and he was. Whatever Ronnie actually said didn't matter. They were surfing the experience of a loft on the Bowery, an environment foreign to both the man and his wife, but with the charade that for the man, it was not foreign. He would guide his wife. He was the expert. On downtown and painting and the art market and when to laugh and so forth. Just follow my lead, honey, his body language instructed his wife. Both looked at Ronnie with broad smiles.

"That first evening, the commodore gave me a private lesson on night sailing. He showed me how to flip on the red port light and the green starboard light. He said it was the law of the sea that these shine until daybreak, to warn ships of our presence. 'The law of the sea' was a phrase the commodore would invoke frequently, and each time he said it I felt his awe before the notion of a larger agency, a cosmic governance. But later, I mean much later, I came to wonder if the law of which he spoke was sometimes in truth not that of the sea but of the commodore, his own law, or even more arbitrary than law, and more fickle, the commodore's private fancy. But this abuse, shall we call it, of his position, was never explicit. Even now, his ethics on our journey are a mystery to me. On that first night, he was a great teacher. He got out his s.e.xtant and explained how to take a star fix, although I didn't get the precise method, overwhelmed as I was by the sensations of the night sea. There were stars overhead in a brilliant scatter, and we sailed on stars, too, which shimmered up from water so smooth and inklike that the heavens were reflecting back at themselves, as if the sky were underneath us. I heard the commodore's voice and felt that we were in an open-air capsule or sleigh, traveling through the vast universe, a great, pin-speckled sphere, a black egg rolled in glitter."

"Beautiful, Ronnie," Gloria said. Her tone presumed he was making this up. We waited, and Ronnie continued.

"We docked in the Keys, and the commodore golfed while his wife directed the purchase of a new wardrobe for me. She had particular tastes, the commodore's wife, and a methodical sense of how shopping is done. I needed a certain number of boys' cotton shirts, and sweaters of various blends of wool and cotton. I needed three bathing suits. Duck pants. A tie and jacket, just in case, she said, ports of call led to formal situations. Canvas Top-Siders and a pair of beautiful hand-tooled wingtips whose leather was the dark stain of boysenberry syrup. I can tell you now it wasn't a typical cabin boy's wardrobe, but I had nothing to compare it to. The wingtips had been crafted by the finest English shoemaker, according to the commodore's wife. They came in their own chamois sack, with a tin of saddle soap and a silver-plated shoehorn. They probably wound up decorating the feet of an otherwise naked Polynesian, or resting on the bottom of the sea. I actually never wore them. I grew so accustomed to going barefoot on the boat that wearing any kind of shoes felt too constricting.

"Before we left the Keys, the commodore and his wife picked up one more crew member, Artemio, who, it was fairly clear, would be fulfilling the actual duties of cabin boy. I pretended not to notice, and in part of my mind I didn't. But in some deep s.p.a.ce, I knew he was the cabin boy and what I was. I knew what I was, and yet I didn't. I was a blank and innocent boy who'd wandered onto the Reno. We made our way-"

"So what the h.e.l.l were you?" Stanley asked, breaking the spontaneous code that had formed, that we would let Ronnie tell the whole story before we attempted to figure out what it meant.

"Come on, Stanley," Didier said, "just let him talk."

"We journeyed south, all the way to the Panama Ca.n.a.l. The commodore was thrilled for me to witness our transfer through the locks and channels. Although he'd gone surly with the Ca.n.a.l Zone Police when they'd boarded our boat. He instructed me to stay in my berth, because I had no papers or pa.s.sport. I did as he said, and listened through the closed cabin door as he tried to intimidate and scoot the police off the boat. The police were not so easy to scoot. They said they'd heard he had a boy with him. 'We don't like funny business,' they said, and the commodore a.s.sured them that neither did he. And then he did something strange. He asked if they would like to see his wife. 'Where is she?' they wanted to know. 'Sleeping,' the commodore said. 'Like a baby.' And then I heard him walk past, down to her berth, and after him, the heavy footsteps of the police, with the extra weight from their guns, holsters, batons, and radios. From what I could gather, the commodore opened his wife's door and let the police into the room where she was sleeping. I heard him say something, and then he closed the door again, and I heard no more sounds. Sometime later, the police slunk past quietly, as if they were on tiptoe.

"The commodore's wife looked unusually radiant at dinner that night, and she told me that life was full of surprises, and also that it was not full of surprises, and that this was one of the surprises, that you could often predict exactly how people were going to behave in a given situation. 'The commodore and I make bets,' she said. 'But the thing is, we never risk losing anything we weren't secretly interested in getting rid of anyhow.' The commodore looked at her and winked a dirty little wink. I didn't like it. I don't know how I knew it was a dirty wink, but I connected it to the police, with their epaulettes and gun holsters. For a moment, I wondered if she and the commodore were a positive influence on me. I was, after all, so impressionable, with no memories or experiences to draw from. The commodore's wife called Artemio to bring out dessert, a quivering flan whose surface was not flat, as one should expect, but angled like a slipway, because it had set as we traveled at a tilt, tacking starboard. The moment of wondering had pa.s.sed. I spooned the crooked flan and did not think again about what might have happened in the commodore's wife's berth to make the footsteps of the policemen so light."

"They shtupped her," Stanley said.

"Probably," Ronnie said with measured tolerance, as if he were annoyed at having to pause and reward Stanley for declaring the obvious.

"Thanks to the commodore, I knew, by that point, how to take a sun fix, and as we approached zero degrees lat.i.tude, which I confirmed with the commodore's s.e.xtant and his gentle coaching, I became, through a ritual that remains vague in my memory, an official 'sh.e.l.lback,' which is what you're called once you've sailed south across the equator. Soon we hit the doldrums. The air was sweltering, and we didn't make much headway, but no one seemed to really mind. The commodore and his wife sat under a canvas shade on the aft deck drinking English gin, and Xerxes occasionally furled the sails and dropped anchor so I could swim in the warm and placid water. When I climbed back onto the boat, Artemio had sandwiches, iced tea, and a fresh towel waiting for me. Giant sea turtles knocked and clacked against the sides of the yacht, friendly and lethargic, as heavy and dense as bowling b.a.l.l.s. I was feeding one of them my sandwich crusts when Artemio whacked its head with a mallet. It made a delicious soup.

"Sailing into Polynesia, we encountered our first serious weather, a real squall, and huge waves, combers, the commodore called them, rose up and curled over, foaming and crashing onto the boat, which was thrown violently around. Artemio, Xerxes, and the commodore bailed like crazy. Night came, and the storm continued. 'All hands on deck!' the commodore shouted, and even his wife bailed. Waves socked and pummeled and heaved the Reno, which creaked and shuddered as if it were going to burst apart. My fear was primitive and desperate. I asked out loud what we had done to deserve this. I shouted it. The commodore took hold of me and said the sea was not for us or against us. 'It doesn't know we're here,' he said. 'It doesn't know.'

"The storm pa.s.sed and we sailed toward the Friendly Islands under calm skies. We dropped anchor in the leeward harbor of Puka-Puka and spent several days relaxing, having a good time. The commodore taught me all about sh.e.l.l meat, which was tastiest and which highest in protein, which was deadly poisonous. I dove for murex, purple conch, cowries spotted with chocolate freckles. We cooked on the beach and shared our meals with the local people, who brought a drink called quee-qum, which we pa.s.sed around in a single coconut sh.e.l.l. It was my job, as the youngest male, to drain the coconut sh.e.l.l and then holler 'Maca!' which means finished, or empty, or more, please. I can't remember exactly. But I remember how I bellowed 'Maca!' and the natives all laughed and smiled, and one of them scampered off to refill the coconut sh.e.l.l. Also I remember that the commodore wore a kind of special woven basket around his waist, like a weight lifter's belt, not unlike the special woven belt that the local tribal chief wore. I wasn't sure what it signified, if anything, but the commodore seemed to know these people, and they treated him almost as if he were a kind of visiting king from a nearby island.

"We continued south and west. As we dipped into Melanesia, we were all deep in the rhythm of the journey. We would make the world round by circling it. Then one morning we woke to discover we were taking in water. The Reno had sprung a slow leak. Fortunately we had a transmitter and were able to send out a distress signal. A devious cruising tug from the tiny island of Kokovoko managed to find us. By the time we spotted its smokestack, chugging merrily in our direction, we were loading supplies into a rubber dinghy, just in case we had to abandon ship. The tug captain advised us to ride with him, to be on the safe side, as he towed the Reno. He was jovial and friendly to us, at least to me, the commodore, Artemio, and Xerxes. He didn't much like the commodore's wife and even suggested she remain on the Reno, despite having already said it was dangerous to do so, since our boat was technically sinking. Much later, when I worked on a tug in New York Harbor, the captain wouldn't let his own daughter on the boat. Said it was bad luck. He used to tie her to the dock with sandwiches and some cans of beer. Pretty girl, but sort of spent looking, even at the age of twelve. Once I saw that girl at Magoo's, all grown up and dead drunk. She dropped her c.o.c.ktail, picked it up, and fit her hand into the broken gla.s.s to dig out the maraschino cherry. Put the cherry in her mouth and ate it. I said, 'Hey. Hey, I know you. You're the tugboat captain's daughter, aren't you.' You know what she said to me? 'f.u.c.k off,' and walked away. Can you believe it? Anyway, the tug captain from Kokovoko eventually agreed that the commodore's wife could board the tug if she rode in the very back of the boat. The tug captain had wanted her to put a burlap sack over her head because he said if she faced the spray the water G.o.ds would be furious and drag us to our deaths. The commodore eventually got the tug captain to agree that his wife would ride unhooded, but would remain astern and keep her eyes on the wake. The commodore's wife was upset about this, and in truth we were rather annoyed with her, too, for disrupting the flow of our rescue. I sensed the magical spell among us begin to evaporate just the slightest bit.

"That night, in a thatched hut on the island of Kokovoko, I woke with a start. I was disoriented in the dark hut and had to struggle to recall where I was. I listened to the squeak and rustle of palm fronds, the soft, crashing metronome of the sea. Images from my old life started rolling in, one by one, each welling up like sudden kelp in a wave break. I knew who I'd been when I was struck at the construction site: Ronald Franklyn Fontaine of 1331 Castle Peak Drive. Son of Lee Anne Fontaine, homemaker, and Fred Fontaine, Chevrolet salesman, and big brother of Tim Fontaine, who had not yet, but would later, rob several banks and a Brink's vehicle.

"The commodore was always talking about sailing sense, and how many nights he'd woken, suddenly, having realized somewhere in the depths of sleep that the rhythm of water lapping the prow was different than what it should have been. He would get up and discover that his boat had sailed off course. I had a similar feeling lying there in the dark: the rhythm of the commodore and his wife was lulling and seductive but wrong. It was the wrong rhythm. Still, I felt a lot of regret. Because it wasn't a bad life, this new one, even if it might have been more dignified to have remained a properly paid cabin boy, or to have at least resisted complying with the commodore's requests, when complying gave me a bad feeling."

Didier snickered. It didn't seem funny to me, even if Ronnie was making it up.

"It's just that kind of thing," Ronnie said, pointing his chin at Didier, "that I a.s.sociate with the commodore. A smirk. A m.u.f.fled glee. He said everything he wanted me to do, or did to me, was for my good, but often it seemed like it was for his good. If it was for my good, why did he m.u.f.fle his glee? Was I a slave of some kind? I suddenly wondered as I lay there in the dark between the two of them. All existence is slavery of one kind or another, right? Who isn't a slave? And whatever dignity I sacrificed by accepting their gifts, by doing what they asked, still, I was sailing the world with only the smallest of worries: the water is a little cool for swimming this morning, and where do we keep the Band-Aids, because I spiked my toe on a bit of coral.

"I heard Artemio quietly snoring from his station on the floor, there in our hut, in case one of us needed a gla.s.s of water in the middle of the night. Did I have to reject this new life simply because something else had come before it? I had no ch.o.r.es and no homework. I swam whenever I wanted, and every so often explored a new port of call, with the paper currency of its government slipped into my pockets by the commodore and also by his wife, each of whom seemed to believe that they alone delighted in spoiling me. Did I want to sail the world, explore remote islands? Or did I want to mow the front lawn, jerk off to the ill.u.s.tration of the lady in the Hoover vacuum replacement bag manual, and get beaten on occasion with Dad's leather belt? Obviously, these were two different realities. I could simply choose between them. And yet I felt the crushing sense that there was only one correct choice. And so I didn't really have a choice, because I had to choose correctly.

"The natives were resealing the Reno. Once it was repaired we were onward to the Coral Sea and then the Cocos Islands. Who knew what the Fates had in store. I did not face them. I could not shake the feeling that I had wandered off the track when I chose the Reno from among the yachts that reared up in my vision that day. I could no longer suppress the old life. With its drab and dull brutalities, I knew it was the real one, my real life. I'd lost the toehold on my new life, with the commodore and his wife. I didn't understand it anymore. Lying in the dark hut that night-an endless night, a night of great confusion-the commodore snuffled in his sleep and nuzzled close to me. I felt his humid breath on my shoulder, in two little streams from his nostrils. His wife stirred as well, and turned her face in my direction. They breathed on me asynchronously, as if it was their duty to cool me in their sleep. All of a sudden I panicked. Who are these people? I wondered. And why the h.e.l.l are they naked?"

We all should have laughed. Because if it wasn't true, it was surely funny. But none of us did laugh. Outside, rain began to fall, but softly. Cooler air came in through the loft's big open windows, and there was a sound of wet tires on the Bowery.

"I got up and crept out of the hut without waking them. The surf pounded like a heart. I walked barefoot along a dirt path until I found a larger hut with ceremonial sh.e.l.ls hanging from the front door. The local tribal chief. I knocked and explained my situation the best I could. We walked over to the munic.i.p.al government headquarters, where there was a switchboard, and I cabled my parents.