Float (5 page)

With envy Duncan eyed the floor, whose fortunes had been rising as Seacrest’s had been sinking, and he contemplated the fleeting nature of business compared to the eternal value of art. The vaguely anatomical shape of the harbor beneath his feet was as recognizable now as it had been to his ancestors, with only the slightest alterations. Over the years, family members had sketched in new dangers, such as a sunken boat or a new shoreline due to erosion or rising water levels. Great-Aunt Hilda had penciled a toothed eel where she claimed to have seen a sea monster while rowing out to check her lobster pots. On the shore, fish sheds had been overlaid with honeycombs of condos, but Seacrest’s still sat in the little loop off the inner harbor, its stack a landmark for sailors. Black cans and red nuns and other important navigational markers were repositioned as needed, while isobars in a fine teal line marked the depths. Dotted lines indicated the different tides, and at the far end of the room were the words
Aqua incognita.

The hills around the harbor were included in Dodge’s portrait, too, along with the town graveyard, where crosses had been added over time due to natural causes or when the family called a missing sailor dead, as they had done for his father. On the hopelessly distant shore was his real home, where Cora sat, refusing to call him back to where he belonged.

Neither Nod nor his mother looked up as Duncan walked across the water, stepping on green islands with names lettered in black archaic script. He knew enough not to get near the fleet, the dozen or so foot-high, felt-bottomed boat models being maneuvered around the floor with a velvet-bumpered tool, a cross between a push broom and a croupier stick.

“If the wind comes in from the southeast, you’ve got to head up towards the lighthouse, then work your way around Parker’s Island on the lee side,” his mother said, tapping Nod’s blue boat along. She wore, as she so often did, canvas ducks and a tailored shirt with the Boat Club burgee knotted like a scarf around her neck. Her feet were bare and perfectly pedicured in red. “Like this.” She moved swiftly across the harborscape, expertly prodding the little boat between the shore and the island, then gave it a firm shove with her stick out to the center of the room, where it skidded a few feet until it finally rested at the head of the pack. She leaned on her stick with both hands, her face pink with satisfaction. She’d once been a redhead, but the bright color had softened with age to a shade of orangey-gray, which she kept in a long braid that fell down her back like a serpent. Her nose was pronounced, and the tip of it glowed when she was happy, as she was now, when winning was still possible. The race—and her life—was perfect as long as it stayed in her head and in this room, which went a long way toward explaining why she had not left the property in close to a decade. At first, everyone, Duncan included, explained away her self-imposed house arrest as an expression of deep grief when his father died, and, while odd, it was perfectly understandable when judged against the family baseline for “normal.” Soon what was once a temporary derangement became the new norm, especially since no one called her on it. Cora marveled that Duncan never even tried to get her out. “It’s hard to say who’s the crazier,” she often said with a laugh.

“But what if Roger tries to follow me in
Dragon’s Teeth
and blocks my wind?” asked Nod, who spoke, as always, through rising bubbles in his throat. He was tall like Duncan, but his shoulders were so bowed he seemed inches shorter, and his clothes were too big, which only added to that impression. He wore racing shorts and a green collared T-shirt emblazoned with his boat’s name on the back—
Ariel
. He had gone prematurely bald, and his hair was a black sickle above his neck, framing a head so sun-damaged it was as spotted as a trout. He had a clean-shaven face that added to his overall monkishness. He’d been born with an anomaly on the edge of his ear of which he and his mother were inordinately proud: A gill, a very small pinpoint of a hole that was an evolutionary throwback, like webbed fingers or a stub of a tail. The two of them claimed that in the same way the caul protected her, the gill would protect him from a watery grave. They shared a strange, isolated existence that they constructed with myths and truths of their own making.

If this was Nod’s first choice of any life he might have lived, it had not seemed that way when they were children, when he was bright and engaged with the wider world. Cora had once pointed out that addicts were stalled at the age they started using their substance of choice, and it did seem that racing had kept Nod a perpetual adolescent. Lately Duncan began to wonder if that’s how she thought of him, too, as stuck in his life. If she thought of him at all.

Nod motioned at the floor with his stick. “I’ll have enough trouble finding air behind the island.”

His mother swung her stick and whacked
Dragon’s Teeth
’s little white hull. The boat skidded sideways across the map and ended up at the far side of town, near the dump. “Blow him out of the water with speed and cunning.” She tapped her temple with her stick.
“Speed and cunning,
my boy! Put some lift in your sails.”

Nod took on a slack expression, as if he were already accepting his defeat. He put up with a great deal of abuse from their mother. Once, when he had not bailed out the boat to her satisfaction, she made him carry around two buckets of water for the rest of the weekend so he could see how heavy water was. It never occurred to him to just say no.

“I’ll get my head handed to me if I cut across his bow,” Nod mumbled.

His mother set the boats back up at the starting line and sighed. “Let’s begin again. The wind is from the southeast, the tide is high but going out. What do you do?”

As his mother and brother played out their imaginary race, Duncan flipped open a table and set down the food. There was no real furniture in the room, only drop-down tables and seats from the wall, as on a yacht. There was a Murphy bed for when his mother stayed up all night plotting, but Duncan always imagined her up in the crow’s nest, sleeping upside down like a bat. To get up there, she had to ascend to a gibbet in the center of the pitched ceiling, using a rope ladder that hung on a clip. The only free-standing piece of furniture, if you could call it that, was the bible stand in the shape of a boat’s prow bolted into the floor, where sat the Log, the handwritten family record of nautical conditions and race results going back a century or more. Duncan settled down, then picked up the container of marinated octopus—or pulpo, as Slocum called it—and took a tentative bite, which made his mouth pucker. Too much vinegar. He hoped it was vinegar—who knew with Slocum? He gazed outside as he chewed, watching the pillar of light from the stone lighthouse sweep across the lawn, a beacon meant not so much to guide boats in as to tell them to keep away from this place of danger. He swallowed, imagining tentacles as they slithered down his throat.

Nod turned to Duncan as if suddenly awakened and opened his mouth just as the stick on his shoulder got caught in the rope ladder. Nod couldn’t be within a mile of ropes without getting tied up in them, and therein lay his fatal flaw. He had never won a race because of it. While Nod tried to untangle himself, Duncan used the opportunity to grab their attention. “This is probably the final week of Seacrest’s Ocean Products,” he announced. “As you two are on the board, I thought I’d let you in on it first.”

“Oh,” said Nod, removing a rope from around his neck.

“Mmm,” said his mother. She had a rolled-up nautical chart under her arm and was inspecting the instruments on the wall, including two working barometers that she was constantly comparing. She also consulted a broken barometer, which always pointed to bad weather so that, according to her logic, they would never take fair winds for granted. Or, as Cora often said about her, “You don’t need a weather vane to see which way the wind blows.”

“Don’t you two care?” Duncan asked. “This is the family business we’re talking about, and it’s going under.”

“Nonsense,” said his mother. “It’s just a bit of chop. Pull your sails in, you’ll be fine.”

“I will not be fine,” he said, irritated, as always, by her combination of daft optimism and bullying. Not to mention that he’d had it up to here with sailing metaphors. “The bank won’t give Seacrest’s more credit, I don’t have any of my own, and there’s no time to find investors willing to put up money for dried gurry. A loan shark approached me tonight. That’s how bad things have gotten.”

From his cat’s cradle of ropes, Nod looked at him with an uneasy expression, as he always did when forced to envision the world outside his own strange kingdom.

“If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it!” his mother said without looking up from her fleet.

“Maybe we could take a mortgage out on the house,” Duncan ventured. Even after Boat Club dues and property taxes, there was still family wealth, but the bulk of it was the house itself. He looked pointedly at the painted floor. “Or something.”

His mother stopped her examination of instruments and looked at him. “Are you mad?”

“Why not? Seacrest’s is a good investment. Dad’s company. Grampy’s. Don’t you want to save it? Think of old Lucius. Their initiative shouldn’t be allowed to just trickle away.”

“This is no time,” she said, using the words she used to derail any conversation she did not like, then gave a red boat a little push toward the western shore. Seacrest’s was, after all, not her family’s business. She had only married into it and felt no sentimental attachment. Her family, the Tarbells, had made their fortune by introducing glass fishing floats to America in the 1840s, launching the industrial fishing era by making it possible to deploy much larger and more efficient fishing nets. In retrospect, it was probably a very mixed blessing.

Chandu started barking in the yard. “Let him in, Duncan, dear,” his mother said, dismissing him with a wave of her hand before turning back to the arrangement of teeny boats on the floor. “Look at this situation now, Noddy. At last, we have a firm hand on the tiller!”

Duncan opened a French door and stepped out onto the widow’s walk to see what the dog was barking at. He stared down the great distance to the ground and saw Chandu, a black shape against the moonlight reflecting off the harbor, which was flat and glassy in its stillness. He could smell the salt marsh in the distance. Tall cedars, almost human in their posture, stood guard at the Drop where the lawn ended. When Duncan was growing up, the house was fifty yards from the Drop, but now it couldn’t be more than thirty. Rocky steps and an iron railing zigzagged ten feet down to the beach. The rail had been reset three times in his lifetime as the edge of land moved closer to the house, and it was not long for its current position either. The freak tides were coming more often, jumping the bluff and reaching the house once or twice a year now. Duncan voiced his concerns, of course, but to his mother erosion meant she could watch the races from a closer perspective. It would not be too many years before the quiet spot in the yard where the family pets were buried got washed away. He heard an owl cry, then saw it drop out of a cedar as it swooped across the lawn. The sight startled Chandu into silence, and he turned to sway slowly back to the house.

Duncan went back into the war room. “Eat the calzone before it goes cold,” he said. “I’ll let Chandu in.”

“Leave our rations there,” his mother said, and she began reading out loud from the Log. “On this day in 1911, the wind was coming in at twenty-three knots from the southeast. You see that? Great-Uncle Torkle managed to place second in the Huntington Cup in spite of that.”

“Duncan, wait,” said Nod, who was hanging the rope back on the ceiling hook. “I saw you on YouTube today. You! On YouTube!”

“YouTube?” Duncan looked up from putting his shoes back on. Nod, who had no job, spent his day surfing the Internet for anything to do with Port Ellery weather that might give him an advantage in the race. He also maintained electronic correspondence on a number of networks dedicated to sailing and the Boat Club. LISTSERVs served as his social life.

“It was smashing,” Nod said, clearing his throat. “You catching a seagull like that. I sent it out to everyone.”

“Duncan, dear,” said his mother, her eyes still on the configuration of boats on the floor. “If you spent more time in the office, paying attention to business, and not outside playing around with birds, maybe Seacrest’s wouldn’t be in the trouble it’s in now.”

Duncan closed the door without answering, passing his caul as he went downstairs. After letting in Chandu, he locked himself in the library where Nod kept his computer, prepared to have a good long look at himself as others saw him.

The Batten Cove Boating Club was exclusive, but it was not fancy. It was sided with plain brown clapboards stained white with salt, and its only prominent architectural feature was a screened-in porch that ran its length. Duncan sat there on Saturday afternoon, alone in the shadows, to watch Nod race, an activity as exciting as observing the movement of crabs in a tide pool. After three hours, the fleet was still bobbing along out beyond Fletchers Island on water becalmed as Jell-O. The only boat with a pulse was not even in the race; it was a dory rowed by Rheya, Slocum’s sister. She was a decent chef, better than her brother in that her dishes were innovative while still being recognizable, and she often hired herself out on yachts, being handy crew besides. Or it’s what she used to do until she married Marsilio Collodi, who insisted she stay home and cook just for him. And then he was lost in the storm the week before. Every day she circled the spot in her dory where her husband’s vessel had been found, turtled and empty. Duncan refocused his binoculars on her pregnant stomach, Slocum’s much anticipated niece or nephew, who would now be born fatherless. He wondered if the police had told her about the knee Josefa had found on Colrain Beach, but maybe they wanted to wait for DNA results before breaking the news. Hope was such a useful emotion. He remembered having it once.

Chandu, lying near the screen door, groaned in his sleep and kicked all four legs out as if he were swimming. Duncan tried to recapture an image from a watery dream of his own the night before, but it sieved through his mind, and—as so often happened when he slept in his childhood home—he’d woken up seasick. He really had to get out of that house.

With a start, Chandu lifted his head but was still connected to the floor by a line of drool. He and Duncan watched as the Phinneys and Coles crossed the lawn on their way to the clay tennis courts. Chandu dropped his head to the floor with a thud, and Duncan leaned back in the wicker chair, trying to make himself invisible. The springs in the upholstery pushed against the cotton padding, and he felt the pressure keenly, no matter how he adjusted his position. Peter Phinney silently mouthed words to the others, like a fish, then Mallory Cole, Seacrest’s lawyer, wiggled his hands at Duncan in a fair imitation of someone trying to catch a seagull.

“Go kelp!” shouted Miriam Phinney, and they all laughed.

Duncan shifted again in his chair, causing it to molt fine white flakes of paint. He had prayed that Nod had not shared Duncan’s YouTube seagull performance with their entire known world, but so much for prayer. He waved gamely and tried to maintain a posture of strained dignity as he lifted his binoculars to his eyes and watched as the wind picked up. The little boats with their outspread sails dispersed like seagulls. He had nothing to be ashamed of. The video had not been shot by an employee spying on him from the factory window, as he originally suspected, but by members of an art collaborative out to recreate the sand installations of Adoniram, the preacher’s son, Port Ellery’s only other famous artist besides the floor-painting Dodge. In the early 1970s, Adoniram was a well-known conceptual performer, and his grainy film clips were still shown at universities around the country, inspiring young artists, a few of whom, armed with grants and theories, had formed the New Adoniram Project, of which he—Duncan—was currently the featured work. The original Adoniram clips were posted on the site, showing the artist as a full-bearded young man in cutoff jeans and dark hair that hung in his face and rippled down his bare back. With a cigarette clasped between his fingers, he wrote nonsensical phrases in the sand with a stick—
Toil Tear, Adversity
or Lamb,
and
Failure Flight Fortitude
—creating the sayings for the arrangement and beauty of the letters rather than any meaning. Then, as the moon played with the sea, water washed over the words, erasing them forever. He filmed these installations, then sped them up, condensing an eleven-hour tide cycle down to sixty seconds. He worked with and against the clock, “as do we all, in the end,” quoteth Adoniram. “To no avail.” The curator’s text explained that aside from the obvious impermanence of worldly existence, and the meaninglessness of the written word, Adoniram was expressing his belief that we have to learn the same things over and over again, in our own lifetimes and the next. Old souls don’t get wiser. Generations pass nothing on. We learn nothing.

God Help Us
was Adoniram’s last sand installation, created in 1976 when he washed his hands of the human experiment altogether and took off in a handmade boat to Europe in a work he called “In Search of the Miraculous.” The craft was found nine months later off the coast of Ireland. His body was never recovered, and so he was transformed into a piece of ephemeral art himself. Duncan did not wonder that Adoniram got lost, what with all that hair in his face. He was twenty-eight when he died.

To recreate
God Help Us
, the NAP conceptual artists used the same location as Adoniram had, directly in front of Seacrest’s, originally chosen for its industrial taint. And, like Adoniram, they had arrived by a flat-bottomed skiff, leaning out from the boat to write in order to protect the pristine canvas of sand, which explained both the lack of footprints and the wobbly handwriting. The artists had been rowing back to the mother ship to wait for the tide to recede a bit more before filming when they saw Duncan change the message. They took some footage, which led—certainly to their joy and amazement—directly to the dance of the seagull. Then they posted it on YouTube as a promotion for the reenactments and as an example of the transformative power of art.

Duncan let the binoculars hang from his neck. The wind was gone. It was the third leg of the race, and Nod had managed to trail half his lines in the water. The wonder was not that he had never won a race; the miracle was that he never killed himself in the process. Right about now, his mother would be throwing herself against the glass in her cupola like a trapped bird. It was strange the way she behaved as if defeat were an unknown quantity in her life. Aside from competitiveness to the point of instability, she suffered from a chronic case of unrealistic expectations. She transmitted her debilitating disease to Nod. Every week they still both expected to win in spite of what past experience had to teach them. Maybe Adoniram was right. We learn nothing.

The good news was that the officials would have to call the race soon even if no one crossed the finish line. Nod wouldn’t have lost because no one would have won. It usually worked the other way around—as long as he was in the race, the rest of the sailors were never last, which made Nod one of the more popular members of the Club. No matter how late he came in, he was greeted with a hero’s welcome, with drinks and cheers all around, which tempered his chronic state of loss. Racing had given his life meaning, such as it was, and as pathetic as it might have seemed to some, it was more than Duncan had at the moment.

Judson Drake—Duncan’s stock broker when there had been stocks to broker—walked across the lawn toward the boat ramp and waved as if he were innocent of any YouTube. Duncan held his breath and waited. Judson was never innocent of anything. Just before he disappeared down the ramp he turned around, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Go Kelp!” Then he continued to the launch boat, his shoulders shuddering with laughter.

Duncan’s humiliation was now complete. He was not art, as he had begun to think of himself; he was an idiot. Judson’s voice traveled over the water as he joked with the launch driver. The boat puttered past the old stone pier, which was half submerged like the spine of a sea monster. At high water, it was a profound danger when its jagged stones were invisible to the navigator’s eye, but the Club felt it kept out the amateurs and weak of heart, and so it stayed. The launch continued to the outer edge of the mooring field where
L’ark
floated like a swan. The glare of the low sun played on her brightwork mast as the vessel rocked, sending bursts of light up and down the shaft. Among the many lovely yachts in the tranquil cove, she stood out for being the most elegant. She was a vintage Q-boat, all brass and beveled glass, thickly enameled in Prussian blue and as sleek as a thoroughbred horse, at many times the price. Judson was insanely proud of her even though he didn’t have time to actually sail, but he often came out just to sit, sometimes even spending the night on her linen-covered bunks. Most of the yachts of this caliber were owned by people in the financial industry, like Judson, and very few by their clients, like Duncan. Lately though, he’d heard that Judson was having trouble holding onto her. Business was that bad. He’d already let go of his captain and cook when the market crashed, and while he still managed to hold on to his precious boat, he rarely sailed her. He barely even knew how. The only time he’d gotten out this year had been when Nod volunteered to take him for a two-day shakedown cruise in the spring. Nod much preferred the freedom of a one-man vessel with a simple sail, but he was adept at big-boat sailing, so he offered to captain for the weekend but would not cook. For that, he took on Rheya, who could work the lines as well. Marsilio was not happy about that, and it was the end of Rheya’s working life at sea. She didn’t put up a fight because she soon found out she was knocked up, yet another local pregnancy that made Cora both wistful and determined.

A trio of men walked past the porch steps, discussing the price of boat slips in Miami. They were headed for the Club’s office to arrange for their vessels to be pulled and delivered to their winter homes. It was that time of year when, one by one, the migratory cocktail set stepped through the seasonal mirror and into the alternate reality of Florida. Soon the waterfront crew would pull the floats, and maintenance would board up the diamond-paned windows of the Club, and with it close another avenue of hope that he would run into Cora, or at least mingle with her friends who might speak well of him. But she’d kept her distance, sticking close to their wooded neighborhood on the other side of the bay.

The screen door slammed, and Duncan looked up. Osbert Marpol appeared as a flat silhouette against the outdoor light. “It’s ‘mud, blood, and green grass beyond,’ eh Leland?”

Osbert, a gaunt man in his sixties, had a stone-and-gravel company somewhere inland. He was not just from out of town but out of state as well. He’d showed up in Port Ellery in the late nineties from Rhode Island, during a time when there’d been a shake-up of mobsters in that state, which led to speculation about his past. He seemed to have no use for sailing or boats but managed to get himself nominated for membership. His smooth-shaven face was as pale as a polyp and so deeply lined it seemed drawn in with a pencil. A thin slither of black hair was pulled back in a one-inch ponytail, streaked with gray that was concentrated at the temples, like two white volutes. He was not cozy with the other members but used the club as a place to bring construction clients for drinks, its exclusivity being a strong financial aphrodisiac. The Club had no food service outside of the snack bar, but, as if to compensate, it maintained a very full bar, featuring an enormous stuffed albatross that hung from the high-timbered ceiling, its wings spread in flight. Many lucrative deals had been consummated under that bird.

“Blood?”

“An old Brit war saying,” said Osbert. “Rereading Churchill’s memoirs. Mind if I sit?” He held a knobby walking stick, sort of like a sheleighly, and used it to point to the rocker next to Duncan.

Osbert had never done anything but nod politely at Duncan before, so this sudden intimacy must be the result of the video. He’d become an official curiosity. “I ought to start charging people to stare at me,” he said, flipping his hand to the rocker. “I’m not doing an encore, if that’s what you’re hoping.”

Osbert chortled as he stepped over Chandu to take a seat. “You were very impressive.” He had a corrosive voice but maintained a pleasing smile. The split-cane rocker creaked as he arranged himself to face Duncan, smoothing the contours of his fitted gray suit. He rested his walking stick on the floor but did not take off his sunglasses. “So was your pretty little factory.”

“True that.” Duncan examined the hinge of his binoculars. The video was good advertising, and if Seacrest’s future were more promising, he would even post it on his own website. If he had to look like an idiot, he might as well do it for the sake of his company. “It looks great from the outside.”

“I’m told things aren’t quite so perfect on the inside.”

Duncan removed his glasses and stared directly at him. “Who said that?”

Osbert took a thin cigar out of a case from his inner jacket pocket and tapped its end on the arm of his chair. He leaned in closer, so that Duncan could see his reflection in his Ray-Bans. “You shouldn’t be so defensive, Leland. ‘Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.’” He leaned all the way back in his rocker, which squeaked as if he had crushed a nest of mice. “Churchill.” He looked up at the porch ceiling, then he rocked forward and held his position, level with Duncan’s head. “Annuncia tells me that you work miracles with fish garbage.”

“You know Annuncia?”

“I like to keep up with the working waterfront, and she does not keep her opinions to herself.”

Duncan wondered what else Annuncia told him. In her enthusiasm for her cause, she might be courting danger. He leaned back in his chair and feigned indifference. “Seacrest’s turns seaweed and fish frames into fertilizer. It’s hardly a miracle.”

“Fish frames?”

“The seventy percent of the body left after filleting, including the scales and entrails.” He smiled. “Even eyeballs.” He lifted his binoculars to check on Nod, and it took him a moment to realize that the ocean had become small, focused, and radically foreshortened. Osbert watched with undisguised amusement as Duncan flipped the binoculars around, then kept them there longer than necessary to cover his embarrassment. The boats were back to floating around in a cluster, except now the dory was gone.