The Boy in His Winter (21 page)

I do remember the drawings she made while the boat took us deeper into Europe and ourselves: a boy tying a rope to a deck cleat, a boy at the wheel, a boy—always the same boy, whose given name she made my own: Albert. Albert opening a canal lock; fishing with a net for eels; reading in his berth; shivering after an evening’s swim in the Rhine. There were many other drawings—all framing the boy as he traveled, like us, on rivers that became increasingly uncertain of their course. Life—even one as long as mine—had left me unprepared for love. I realized with a start that I had never before loved anyone, except maybe Jim. I kept an eye on the river, whose bends followed hard on one another much too fast to be careless at the helm. But I was helpless not to steal a glance at
Jameson as she sketched and smudged, scrumbled and grumbled over her failure to seize with her pencil what her eyes saw. She took a miniaturist’s delight in details: of the boat, a weathered pier, or an elm branch, still oddly leafed, lumbering along in the current. She was transfixed by the story unfolding—in pictures and in words—while the river unfolded from reach to reach. At night, we tied up to the bank or, when the river was wide enough, moored out toward the middle—the better to be alone.

You will have read enough about love to make the recounting of mine unnecessary. Passion bores me; maybe I’d think otherwise if I were not an old man. I’m not sure I can speak the language now. I wonder if I ever could with the effortlessness of those who do not seek each other in the dim bowers of their selves, but, rather, in sunlit uplands—or on a boat traveling between untroubled shores. We must have stopped often during the three hundred miles of that fateful, if uneventful, trip. (God-damn the unalterable courses it seems our lot to bear!) We halted for fuel, food, water, to stretch our legs. But I can’t recall anything other than a sensation of contentment and a genial peace. Jameson and I might have been in the peaceable kingdom painted by Hicks, speaking to each other in the sensual language promised by Jakob Böhme, for all I remember of the way. Doubtless, it had its excitements. After all, I was in love, although I’ve never known the fits and seizures of a heart besotted like Jim’s for his mad mermaid of the mud. Mine was joy in a quiet harbor. All the same, the journey was marvelous. Not even the hyperbolic baron could have imagined one more marvelous than ours. I was entranced as I had not been since the days on the raft. But time tick-tocked on the Rhine as it had not on the Mississippi for Jim and me.

You want to know about our rough-and-tumble in bed, on the ottoman, the deck chair, and foredeck sun pad? Forgive me, but I haven’t juice enough to indulge a salacious interest. We had sex, naturally. Leave it at that.

“Have you read
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
?” Jameson asked me one night while we lay in a drowse, listening to the stiff noise of reeds scraping against the hull, the soft music of water lapping there. The portholes were opened to the night, which stole into the cabin, already nervous in the wavering tides of shadow. There was something in the air: a disturbing odor compounded of sluggish water and compost.

“No,” I said, and quickly changed the subject in order to be rid of the hated book. “Tell me the story you’re writing. What’s it called?”

“
The Boy in His Winter,
” she said. “At least, that’s the working title.”

I thought that strange and asked her what it meant.

“The story’s told by an old man looking far back into the past at his boyhood. From that vantage, he can see things clearly without the haze of childhood to soften and alter them.”

She was too young to know how old age also has a haze that can dissemble, according to the dying mind’s insults and injuries, or its senile happiness. She went on to tell me the story, which I have forgotten. And then we—what’s the romantic expression? We fell into each other’s arms and slept.

Forty miles below Koblenz, in the Rhine Gorge, where, on a granite cliff, Lorelei once caused ships to founder and men to drown, she received an e-mail message from her
brother:
Father died unexpectedly last night. Massive stroke. Funeral Friday.

“You’d think he was sending a telegram—he’s so frugal with his words,” she said; and I heard in hers a reproach that hid her grief.

“I’ll turn around and head for Cologne. You can get a flight there for the States.”

Jameson looked at me. I saw in her candid gaze a question, which I answered impulsively but not—as things turned out—rashly.

“I’ll go with you, if you like.”

She nodded, then went below to mourn or pack, or both, while I turned the boat around. Before we left it at the wharf in Cologne, I had e-mailed my resignation to the chairman of Chronos Yachts and to the beautifully dressed mannequin in Palm Beach, whose face I no longer recall.

J
AMESON AND
I
FLEW TO
A
MERICA
. As the plane neared the eastern seaboard, the captain began to talk over the PA system. He spoke lovingly of the sea. As a young man, he wished above all else to become a sailor. (How strange the convergences of life!) I looked out the window at the little lights shaking on the black ocean.

“Fishing boats,” the captain said, as if he could read my thoughts.

The interior of the plane was dark. Jameson and the other passengers were asleep—all, that is, except me. The window was cold against my forehead. The sun was waiting for me over the brink of the western world and beyond “the Territory,” which in Huck’s childhood marked the limit of our
imperial destiny. Behind the locked cockpit door, the captain talked softly.

“I dream,” he said, “of sleeping with Madeleine, a stewardess on the Paris–New York flight. We met only once, in a small hotel on the Trocadero. We stood together at the window and looked at the Eiffel Tower. It was a moment of high romance. When the light went out of the sky, we went to bed.”

He described her lingerie, her eyes, the shape of her mouth. Her hair, he said, was “like mahogany”—the color and the shine of it. He described his ecstasy as the Eiffel Tower loomed in at the window, its lights trembling against the Parisian night. The captain fell silent while the great black wings dipped. A beverage cart rolled slowly down the aisle. Then over the PA, I heard a sound like water over stones. Like rain. Like the sea. It was the sound of the captain weeping. The plane stopped, lingered in midair—a dream. I touched my forehead to the cold window, and the plane continued on to LAX.

I
N
C
ALIFORNIA
, I
SOUGHT AN END
to movement, which had—outside of time and in it—bewildered and exhausted me. I have theorized, since returning to Hannibal like an elephant at the end of its road, that the Pacific coast summoned so many of us so that we might finally be rid of restlessness. We went, not for gold, oil, oranges, or Hollywood, but to be finished with the westering tide that began—centuries ago—in the British Isles, Europe, and in Africa (bringing Jim to me, no matter how he may have fought and suffered by it). We sought cessation at the edge of the blue ocean and relief at stopping in our tracks. Until we’ve stopped, how
else are we ever to begin? This is what I think, and it is the case for me, who had never stopped, never truly made a start or loved or been happy until I settled by the Pacific Ocean with Jameson. Maybe that is what the book will be about: not Huck Finn’s or Albert Barthelemy’s journeying, but their having reached a final destination—save one.

My logbooks are entrusted to the safekeeping of my friend and executor, Marco Knauff, a Dutchman I met in Papendrecht; they might serve as an appendix for my memoir. Remind me to give you his address.

Yes, I was content to be in Santa Monica with Jameson for as long as we were together. Which was long enough for happiness, but not so long as to see happiness become like the porridge set before me with a thump on the table by Miss Watson as a punishment, the spoon tasting like tarnish, stiff in the cold gray mound. What made me happy was the perfect ordinariness of our years together. Days passed, one merging without comment into the next. She made her picture books.
The Boy in His Winter
won a Caldecott Medal. I wrote articles for a yachting magazine. My style was praised. I rode in boats, but my voyages by river or by sea were finished. We took our meals together. We watched television or read. We made love when desire summoned us. We rested, slept, and submitted to our separate dreaming on the black rivers of sleep, which never will converge. Returning, we kept those figments to ourselves, like two guilty persons surprised by what is either too precious or too disturbing to share.

Were we ever bored?

Many times. Boredom is an aspect of time, impossible to escape. (I was never bored during that aeon on the raft with Jim, because we traveled outside time, or beyond it.)

Did Jameson love me?

Who can say what another person thinks; how he or she loves or hates? Dragons nesting on their golden hoard, we guard our deepest feelings—tender or base—like a wound that secretly thrills. That is, if we are aware of them; I think the most important lie too deep for sounding. But yes, I suppose Jameson did love me. She behaved toward me like a woman who loves someone over the course of years, constantly and inconstantly. I read her feelings, even those hidden from herself, the way a pilot does a river’s bars and shoals. She was sometimes warm and at other times cool as our affection waxed and waned and waxed again. So yes, all in all, Jameson loved me, and we endured.

I remember little of our nearly twenty years—shy of twenty by a little less than two. Our marriage was like a journey down an unknown river so uncommonly wide you can’t see the shore. Afterward, you recall water, moving fast or slow, not much else. Let’s see. I remember black umbrellas tipping rain when the mourners leaned to look at Jameson’s father lowered into the raw, blackish earth. That was the beginning. And that was at the end, also—only it was Jameson’s turn to disappear and mine to watch alone. My umbrella was furled; the rain had only threatened; the earth was not so black, but raw notwithstanding. But those dismal parentheses enclosed a life, which passed, for beings like us, with the speed and terrible suddenness of time.

I’ll tell you something else I remember: a picture. For years and years while I was with Jameson, I had not thought of Jim or Tom Sawyer. Or if I did, they seemed figures in a childish dream. And then on an afternoon when I was going through her things—
handling
them as if they carried, like a light-sensitive emulsion, the memory of her
face—I came across a book of Civil War photographs made by Brady, Gardner, Gibson, O’Sullivan, and the rest. And among those taken at Vicksburg, was one of Jim in front of a white tent, fixed forever in time and space. And the black and formless shape (a smudge of shadow) caught in the tent flaps’ narrow darkness must be Huck. Must be
I
. I tell you it has to be! I recalled how the photographer had shooed me inside, to shuffle nervously among dead men stacked in waiting for the cart. The photographer had wanted only Jim for his wet-plate negative. He may have chosen him for no other reason than the picturesque effect of a black man posed against a white tent. But by an accident of color and falling light, Jim’s existence had been confirmed, while Huck’s—mine—had not. The picture unnerved by recalling me to the long-vanished past while, at the same time, it caused me to doubt it. In panic, I came near to forsaking Albert Barthelemy for Huckleberry Finn!

I stayed in the apartment where Jameson and I had lived, with its view of the Pacific Ocean, which in Huck’s time had been America’s manifest destiny. (Because the nation’s impressionable years coincided with my own, its destiny may well be mine. If this is true, I’ve spent 240-odd years trying to evade it.) You may think me like the starling, which appropriates the home laboriously carved from a dead tree by the industrious woodpecker. But I was jealous of the place where she’d lived. She lingered yet in the curtains, the wardrobe, the drawers, in the spoon she used to stir her tea. Even now, so very many years later, I can hear its pleasant clatter against the bone of china cup and saucer blooming with mauve roses.

So I stayed on, writing boat reviews and collecting, as her assignee, royalties from her picture books, which did
well, especially “ours”; I mean
The Boy in His Winter,
whom I was fast becoming. Like a loose tooth we wiggle in the gum—half in fear of pain, half for the pleasure it incites—I would read it during days of nostalgia or self-pity. It’s gone, that book; I don’t know where I lost it. I wonder if it’s in print anymore. I still have Jameson’s book about the giraffe. Remember, I recited the first page. The last went like this:
“I see a giraffe, standing at the edge of the world. On one side is the night. But he is not looking at the darkness. He faces the light that is spilling over the earth’s shining edge. See how he is standing in it?” Mother and Father looked. And they saw Rupert. They saw him wading in a flood of golden sunshine as the sun began to rise.
I like to think it was Albert who was looking at Rupert, whose name might as well have been Jim. Do you know I’d forgotten what Jim looked like? If it weren’t for the photo of him at Vicksburg, he would have vanished forever. My past had haunted me and then, what’s worse, it deserted me.

I tried once to write a book of my own: a time-travel novel, of all things. But I couldn’t imagine a machine to shuttle between the tenses as gorgeously as Wells’s had. So I gave it up and, turning seventy, stopped writing for the magazine and yielded entirely to stillness. I could no longer afford the apartment with its view of the ocean, and found a cheaper one in town, on Euclid Street near Fourteenth. I smiled to think what Jim and Tom would say if they knew I’d arrived, at last, in Mexico, even if it was only “Little.” I frittered away time, happy to squander that element which had figured even more than water in my life and its story.