The Affairs of Others: A Novel (26 page)

“Is that so?” Mr. Coughlan asked and squinted at him, at everyone briefly, his hazel eyes more opaque in the sunlight than I’d remarked before, a blue cloud mixing through them as if to protect him from this day, maybe from the likes of us, preserving his sight for distances and views and places that lived inside him, that none of us would ever be in a position to know in the same way.

When he was offered wine, he asked for scotch. When I asked him how he liked it, he said, “Neat and hard and no trouble to you good people.”

I told them all that Mr. Coughlan had been a merchant marine and ferryboat captain. I told them he’d been on a trip and had only just gotten back, and that he lived on the top floor. “You can see a bit of the harbor from there,” I explained.

“Are you two related?” asked Darren.

“I have a daughter Miss Cassill’s age,” Mr. Coughlan answered. “She’s not fond of her father. She’d like me to do as I’m told. I’m not so good at that either.”

“Ah, a true man!” said Jorge, raising his glass and spilling his wine on his shirtfront. Two small birds, swallows maybe, dashed over our heads, complaining, a car horn sounded, and food was served to Mr. Coughlan, whiskey set next to his plate. “I feel like a king,” he said to Hope, now seated beside him.

“A king returned from a crusade,” I said.

“
Another
crusader?!” Blake interjected, lifting his glass.

“Well,” he chewed slowly, “an inquiry maybe.… Thank you, Miss Cassill, for all you do, and you, ma’am. This is very good food.”

“Hope can do anything,” I said.

“What did you inquire about?” asked Jess.

“Work on ferryboats. Some beautiful boats operating right out there.”

Evidently, Jess had been waiting for the right moment to say that he was a distant relative of Robert Fulton on his mother’s side. It tumbled out of him.

“That so? He didn’t invent the steamboat so much as make it better. He sank one of his first go’s in a river, in France. It sank like a stone,” Mr. Coughlan told us.

“He went there to be a painter. That’s how he supported himself, doing portraits,” said Jess.

“I think I heard that. My, this is the best food I’ve had in a long time.”

Hope lit up: “No, no—”

“You couldn’t support yourself as a fine art painter anywhere now. Could you?” Darren queried.

“Why not?” said Mr. Coughlan. “It depends on how grand you want to live.”

“Did you find work?” Leo asked.

“Sort of.” Mr. Coughlan explained that they’d hire him to babysit deckhands or assistant captains. They didn’t know knots like he did. They weren’t trained on the instruments much anymore, didn’t have to be with the new technology, GPS. “They don’t have the same respect,” he said. “Not their fault. Computers make them lazy.”

He chewed, swallowed. “One woman who has two touring boats—a sailer and a pleasure cruiser—said she might take me on if I subject myself to some tests.” He sipped his whiskey. “But I’d be a fool not to fear those tests. And it’s not a ferry, is it? I worked the Staten Island route many years ago. No one there remembers me. No one left to. But those ferries, those ferries are a marvel.”

“Ugly,” said Andrew.

“Maybe, but the Barberis, the two big ones?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “They have an eggbeater drive. Know what that is?” He looked at Jess.

“No, sir.”

“A German design. Goddamn Germans.” He grinned as he shook his head. “There’s no rudder, no propeller in the normal sense. There are these big circular plates flush with the hull. From each plate comes down a number of paddles, six feet by two feet or so. They go into the water and by altering the pitch of the paddles and the speed they turn the plates, you go forward, back, slow, fast. Those big orange monsters can turn a 360 in their own length.”

“Did you ever pilot one?” Leo asked.

“Not legally. They weren’t in service when I was around. But on my recent trip I made some friends. They took pity on an old man. I held the wheel so to speak. Not for long.”

“They could get in big trouble for that,” said Jess.

“What are you?” Jorge asked of Danielle’s young man, in the full swing of his drunkenness. “A woman?”

“Pay no attention to Jorge,” said Josephina. “He is a big, stupid testicle.”

Darren spit out his wine.
“Darling!”

“Well,” Mr. Coughlan said, “we won’t tell on my friends at Whitehall. Will we? And who would believe me anyway?”

“I would. I do,” said Hope, lightly bumping her shoulder to his. She loved the hardship his face showed it had survived, that he had the wrists and arms of a bigger man.

“And where did you captain?” asked Leo, plainly fascinated.

He recited places that most of us knew, but in this city backyard turned riotous garden with the afternoon light coming in sideways, it sounded the stuff of fantasy: Lake Champlain, Woods Hole, New London. New England by sea and lake. He told about the
Adirondack,
the oldest ferry in operation, how she’d been converted from steam to diesel. “She’s still on the lake in Vermont. They know what they have in her. They take good care of her. My wife and I met on that boat, long before I became its captain.”

“And where is your dear wife now?” asked Josephina.

“Buried with her family upstate.”

“Ah, I’m sorry to hear.”

“It’s been a long time, but I dare say she loved the
Adirondack
as much as I did.”

Hope’s bandaged hand found my own under the table and gripped it as if to say,
like you,
maybe, yes, another widower, another loss observed, a course set. She didn’t let go, and I felt the excitement and heat vibrate through her and through her son to the other side of me, whose hand had landed on my knee, when Mr. Coughlan had said Lake Champlain for the second time. I thought it an accident at first. I tensed but only for a moment, as Leo began to feel my knee’s contours, bending time for me suddenly with the pressure of his fingertips, collapsing days. For me, and for Mr. Coughlan surely, even as we sat here so brightly well companioned, we were yet keeping our vigils. Death wasn’t an abstraction. I’d done more than watch my husband vanish into it. I had gone there with him, as far as I could go, and in resurrecting him as I did, even now, I resurrected myself. A man more full of life than I was then or now, as alive as Leo’s hand restless and oily from the food on my knee. Melville said that nothing exists by itself. “To enjoy bodily warmth, some part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.” Or by likeness—I would forever locate my husband in others, and in me, when anyone touched me with anything like love or loving desire. There was nothing to regret in it—or I could find nothing suddenly, nothing at all. Mr. Coughlan might have compared Hope’s food to his wife’s, whose cooking never came up wanting. We held on to our ghosts as we held hard to each other. My husband had not lived as long as our love had, not long enough to disappoint me in real ways. I knew that by now. We weren’t tested by boredom or the demands of raising children, but even if we had been, for however many years, it may have only increased the fact, or what was to me a fact, that it’s never easy to separate the living and the dead—we living are in some part best expressed by our dead.

Hope now took my hand into both of hers, as if she would drag the chill out of me, as the day faded and Mr. Coughlan talked on and Angie’s head fell on her husband’s shoulder and his head onto hers.

Mr. Coughlan went on describing why he’d chosen ferries and would again. “Some will tell me it’s all done. I blackened the eye of one guy who said that to me only a few weeks ago. They forget I’m from a generation that wasn’t afraid to hit and get hit back and no one called the damned police or involved lawyers. I told him to tell me that again. You, Miss Cassill, you understand, I think?” He’d spoken to his daughter since he’d returned then, and he winked at me as proof. I blushed and Leo’s hand moved up my thigh. “You see, people change when they get on the boat. It’s like an old friend. Simple back and forth. Commuters—you pick out the same faces. Hello, goodbye, hello again, goodbye again. Weather changes, but that doesn’t. No one squalling at you over the loudspeaker. Birds scream. Kids scream back. Until recently out here you could stay on the boat both ways, stay on as long you’d like, keep crossing, seeing what there was to see, you could put your car right on there with you—” He leaned into the table at which we all sat, enjoying that we’d become subdued with the food and the wine and him. He didn’t have to hide where he most wanted to be, but here he was, for now, surrounded and talking with reverence not all of us knew or had occasion to know of the simple back and forth, of attachments that sustain us without apology, that drive us, no matter the years, all while asking us to cross with him—why not?—imagine it, the tides of coming and going, the distances and views and places, and the love, such love—before saying goodbye to us, goodbye for now.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Great thanks to Picador, the best house on the block, and to all the imaginative, never-say-die people who make it go: Stephen Morrison, James Meader, Anna deVries, and Devon Mazzone.

To my own Melville: Thank you for taking on the challenge of living with this writer and editor (which means living with many writers). You always have my back. You are my balance, the song in the house.

Thanks to Jess Walter, Ron Hansen, and Will Blythe, who loved this book and its heroine, Celia, when my own sometimes unpredictable nature (and hers) got in the way. Don’t know better writers or better friends.

To Warren Frazier, the most sublime, capable, and forgiving literary agent and ally a woman writer could have.

To my family, my parents, who are my heart. Pop, a man from Vermont, can do anything better than just about anyone, from percentages to parallel parking—blindfolded. He has always been my first reader, my best critic, the rousing march in my ears. He is well met in my beautiful, ingenious, and wildly generous mother, who fights the gray off every day. These two have always bent the world into wondrous shapes for all of us who know them and have given me colors and sustenance and room (after room) in which to write, hope, persist. And to my sisters, Meredith and Ellen, warriors of love and light both, and my sweet brother-in-law Tom—they never fail to cheer me on even when I resist cheer.

And my thanks to my other family, the one I’ve found along the way: David Slocum, my brilliant best friend, who has to hear it all, even when he’d rather not. To glorious Rebecca Rotert-Shaw, so full of music and poetry and my kind of life and love, resilience and resignation. To Eli Dickson, my safe place in any storm and the sky after it goes. To Lee Froehlich, who bamboozles me every time with that line about the life of the mind, who reminds me of the joys of eccentricity. To Chris Napolitano, the best magazine editor in town, an adventurer who changes the frequency in any room, leaves us all buzzing. And to Anthony Vargas, my assistant, my teammate, and one of the finest readers of fiction or nonfiction around; to Tom Woodring, whose smarts and practical wisdom steady and inspire me; to Kate Strasburg, who can’t help but be an angel; to Gayle Pemberton, my talented teacher, fellow romantic, and co-conspirator in the resistance; and to Caroline McDaniel, who never fails to show up, who’s a real reader, a real woman, a sorceress in fact.

Finally, there are the writers I’ve worked with over the years who’ve become friends, family too: Margaret Atwood, James Ellroy, Jonathan Ames, Carmela Ciuraru, Jonathan Lethem, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Ford, Jane Smiley, Simon Winchester, and Rick Russo. Ten stories of gratitude for your example, for the heights you can’t help reaching for every day, for your faith in me as an editor, friend, and more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A
MY
G
RACE
L
OYD
is an executive editor at Byliner Inc. and was the fiction and literary editor at
Playboy
magazine. She has been a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE AFFAIRS OF OTHERS
. Copyright © 2013 by Amy Grace Loyd. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Cover design by Henry Sene Yee

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Loyd, Amy Grace.

    The affairs of others / Amy Grace Loyd. — First edition.