The Last Ship (64 page)

“But, sir, as I understood the deal, we promised to share all of this with him anyway—in exchange for the fuel.”

“What if he couldn’t get the fuel, and he came anyway? He might then think we wouldn’t share. Or: Why share if you can have it all? This island’s also got women. These are all mere conjectures, Miss Girard. Normal paranoia for a ship’s captain. I’ll see you in four days.”

 *  *  * 

As she began, and even as I attended with all my faculties to what she had come to say, in some separate part of my mind I began a process that in all of our many sessions together had never truly occurred: I observed her. Objectively so, almost as I might appraise a painting in some gallery. Aspects, some of which I naturally had been unavoidably aware of, as would have the most unobservant of persons, but now taking on manifest forms as I actively assessed them as discrete facets of her personality, her being; her mental and especially physical self (a painting being a physical thing). She conveyed a remarkably felicitous physical presence; she was cool and gleaming. A narrow, lanky racehorse figure; yet, I suspected what the French call
fausse maigre.
A distinctive “carriage,” her movements fluid, untight, near metrical; incapable, one felt, of a sudden or jerky motion or gesture, of being surprised into something she would not purpose; an almost lyrical body, supple, lithe, at thoughtless ease with itself, reflexively responding as she wished; an actual tool of her inner intentions. One does not often see that, in man or woman. And in the manner in which I am speaking of it, that is, of utter unconscious naturalness, a quality I believe virtually impossible to teach; one has it or not. Emerging from her officer’s hat and just touching the top of the epauletted white blouse was a pleasing plumage, blond-brown hair with the shining peanut-butter layers that bespeak the real thing as opposed to something out of a bottle. There was a cleanness about her, one having nothing to do with soap and water; cleanlimbed, with her fairness of skin, the high, clean-wrought cheekbones, the clean lights in her hair. Above all one felt about her, like a barrier aura, that withheldness, a mystery of allurement that suggested endless discoveries to be made, if one could only break through it, some of them possibly of the most oppositive nature, not necessarily excluding a thriving bitchiness. One simply did not have the slightest degree of certainty what she was in that territory.

I observed these things now, as it were in a single comprehension, a flash, a moment, and wondered that I had not especially noticed any of them before. But of course I knew. One’s subconscious, embedded in it an avalanche of Navy directives, dictated that aboard ship such attributes not be lingered over; in all things a captain must set an example. But more important, the intimacy of life on ships of a destroyer size soon creates a curious eye-of-the-beholder view of one’s shipmates. One ceases actually to be aware of their physical aspects, certainly of those commonly associated with such terms as homeliness or ugliness or handsomeness (Billy Barker an example there) and comes instead to define these qualities in terms of the character, the goodness or otherwise, dependability and the like, inner worth as opposed to outward aspect, of the shipmate under consideration. This perspective, of course, exists to a degree on land but is magnified a thousandfold aboard ship, perhaps because every hand’s well-being, and quite possibly life itself, depends on that shipmate in view. Lieutenant Girard’s body had occupied no more of my thoughts than had that of Noisy Travis. My view had centered on how good a supply and morale officer the one was and how good a shipfitter the other. An old personal belief of mine may have explained further my present objective scrutiny and a certain esthetic pleasure I derived from it. As far back as I could remember, to me the primary beauties of life were three: the sea, the stars in their courses, and women. I judged this trinity to be God’s finest handiwork, preeminent among His gifts to mankind, standing alone and unrivaled. I never put them in any order.

There rested in her lap an envelope the nature if not the particulars of what it contained I of course knew. Oddly, she seemed first to want to talk of other things, to lead up to that particular subject the envelope represented in all its cruciality and long-awaitedness rather than crudely to spring it; I curiously felt that the “random” matters she touched on first might not be that at all but rather have critical bearing on the main subject, if there existed a man discerning enough to see, perhaps even to master, such nuances. Through the opened side of my cabin we had a full 180-degree view of the Pacific, in the eternal emptiness it always presented us now quietened again to stand flawless and serene to that horizon beyond which the rest of the world lay. To watch it was almost helplessly to be drawn to thoughts both of what that world might be like now, and what it once was; to contemplations of the most immensely varying nature, one day to another; varying even more if one were with a shipmate.

“Paris,” she said, looking across that sea, at that horizon, and as it were beyond it. Her voice with its low pitch fell as pleasingly on the ear as in any other matter, random or otherwise, that she might feel a desire to comment on, again the unfailing “naturalness” of her manner itself seeming in a kind of marvelous way to make any subject an entirely normal one to be discussing. “I’m glad I had Paris. That third school year there. I’m glad for every city I saw. Sorry for every city I missed. Now that they’re not there anymore. Venice. I regret very much that I never saw Venice. Wasn’t that a stupid thing? I resent not having done so. I envy you all those years in the Navy. You must have seen them all.”

“Well, not quite all . . .” She had that strange gift, one I had run across but two or three times in my life in other personalities, of imposing her own mood on others, unresentedly so, if anything a pleasant procedure; I found myself doing exactly what she was doing, the cities, places, ports I had known beginning to run through my mind as of pictures out of some old book, historical in nature, cities and places of some ancient civilization, long since vanished.

“I’d like to hear the names of some of them—the ones you saw,” she said, a tone close to playful in her voice, as if we had embarked on some game that might prove instructive; or if not that, interesting; even perhaps necessary, for a reason yet mysterious to me. So going along with her, I began to play it.

“Well now, let me see. Port cities, of course, most of them. Or cities not far from ports, close enough for a day, sometimes an overnight of liberty. No particular order, but as they come . . . Alexandria, Athens, Algiers, Constantinople, Tokyo—up from Yokosuka, the Navy base—Bombay, Djakarta, Shanghai . . . Naples, of course, landlocked there for a couple years, therefore seeing everything Italian . . . Palermo, Cagliari, Florence, Siena, your Venice . . .”

“My God, how I am jealous of you. It’s not fair.”

“Seattle.”

She laughed shortly; in no way a put-down of that city; in fact, the opposite, to take the edge off the introduction of the places of home.

“Did you ever see Seattle?” I said.

“No. How was it?”

“Beautiful place. Especially to any sailor. Water everywhere. Even from above. Rained all the time. Heaven if you like salmon. I do.”

“You saw so much! It seems I saw so little.” Her body turned slightly more toward me—an awareness in myself of that movement. “Did you ever have the feeling—toward the last there, I mean—that you were doing things for the last time?”

The question startled me for the almost eerie precision of its accuracy. “Why, yes, I did. Exactly that. I think that started . . . well, about two years before it actually happened. How would you know?”

“I suppose because I had it. I remember, it didn’t seem anything special, even unusual. That was the horrible part of it. It seemed perfectly natural, that feeling. I suppose one just accepted it. If you can’t do anything about something, that would seem the smart thing to do.” She laughed a little. “It should at least have made me hurry up more. I did—but not enough. I remember the last time I was walking across the Alexandre III bridge in Paris and I thought, I will never see that bridge again, never cross it again. On that same day, the Louvre, thinking: I will never see those pictures again. I felt that I was doing things for the last time. That I would never be doing this again. And having nothing to do with the fact I was leaving, going home. Normally I would be back. When I got back to New York . . . the same thing. I would look at people going into a restaurant just as if everything was going to last forever . . . into Bloomingdale’s . . . people walking down Fifth Avenue on a pretty October day just as if it would always be there . . . the city, the avenue itself . . . and I would think, I am seeing these things for the last time . . . and these people, they will never be doing those things again. That certain knowledge that there was very little time left in the world.”

The softly falling words, heard against the plangent metronome of the sea touching the shore far below—her voice had in it now a tone almost of sweetness, of some kind of music, however touched by a sense of infinite poignancy—came to me spectrally only because they were such punctilious representations of my own thoughts as they had been then, not really actively recalled until now; not at all aware, as one would not have been, or ever really wondering about it, whether such thoughts had been in others; a curiously singular sense of relief to discover now that they had been; that one had not been alone in having had them, though why this should have mattered I could not know. Somehow though, having the effect of drawing us more closely together in a way we had not before, a way of two human beings to whom this mental process had happened simply from the fact of both being that; of the same kind; fellow members of the species. I felt oddly a kind of smile on my face.

“Strange. My feelings could not have been more exactly those you describe. I can remember going into San Francisco, sitting at a sidewalk cafe down by the wharves, saying to myself quite the same thing: ‘I am doing this for the last time. Having this glass of wine. Watching those people walk by. I will never be doing this again. Nor will they’”

“I never even saw San Francisco. It makes me feel guilty almost! But then—I was just too late. For so many places.”

Then it was over. She turned away from the view, and as it were from the view of all cities, places, that might once have lived, existed, beyond that horizon. It was as if she had shut a door on the past—that that had been quite enough time for it, that we had perhaps the luxury for an occasional glimpse into it, as now, but that an excess of it was not to be allowed. To live in the past had become infinitely dangerous. As she turned back facing me I was aware of the remarkable pebble gray of her eyes and of her face suddenly lighting up as with some pleasure, some newly found joy or discovery that, having brought the other, she was anxious to bring me it.

“I was just thinking, Captain. It may well turn out that the most important cargo of all we brought out is those nine hundred and eighty-five books in ship’s library. Do you realize that we have all of Shakespeare?
All
of him.” Her eyes brightened like a girl’s scanning a bounty of glorious gifts just conveyed her on some special occasion of her life. “All the tragedies. All the comedies. The sonnets. The histories.”

“The fact relaxes me. He would have been anyone’s first choice to make it out.”

“And . . .
we have one or more of”—those eyes lighting up—“Dickens, Conrad, Hardy, Eliot, Blake, Stevenson, Yeats, Thackeray, the Brontë sisters . . . Also, I’m glad, P. C. Wren, Dorothy Sayers, C. P. Snow . . .”

“Only Englishmen?”

“. . . Gide, Balzac, Camus, Proust . . . Some Simenon . . .”

“No Russians?”

“Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov . . .”

“We’re Americans.”

“Faulkner, Melville, Twain, Emerson, Cather, Flannery O’Connor, both Jameses, Bret Harte . . . I don’t think you’ve given me proper credit.” She spoke almost peevishly. “I chose most of them myself, as I told you, in case you don’t remember. You weren’t very impressed at the time.”

“I am now. I’ll have to think up some award for you.”

Her face lighted up. “And the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
” She gave a sigh of awe and pride, this time as if offering me, and all ship’s company, a gift beyond price. “The complete set. Aardvark to Zulu.”

“That may turn out to be the most important of all. After Shakespeare.”

“Yes,” she said. “After Shakespeare.”

She took a deep breath from all of this; talked now with excitement. “What’s more, the men are reading. I’ve never seen people doing so much reading. Not in school, not anywhere. My father . . . well, he was a newspaper editor in a very small town in North Carolina . . . and we read everything. It’s like that now with the men. Talley has given them the straight dope. They are to treat every book like it was the Gutenberg Bible. Give it the most tender handling, wrinkle or turn down no pages, use book marks she gives them . . . She examines each one when they bring it back, and gives them unvarnished hell if there’s a scratch, a mark . . . Also we’ve got music tapes. Not so extensive but we’ve got three hundred and sixteen. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Verdi . . . They all made it!” She paused for breath. “Not to mention some pretty handsome rock, country and western . . . When not reading they do a lot of listening. Talley herself—I don’t think she’d ever
heard
of Mozart. Now she listens to him practically all day. Think of all we brought out, Captain! All who made it. Aren’t we lucky!”

“What are you reading now?”

“Nathanael West.”

“I’m glad he made it.”

“All of him did. All four in one volume.”

“Let me have him when you finish.”

“Will do. One other thing. We’ve got those thirty thousand sheets of bond paper you’ve put off-limits. I had an idea that at some point we might want to start, every one of ship’s company, putting down whatever we remember . . . anything, everything. Also—more important maybe—everything anyone knows about some skill—all the knowledge every single one of us has. Isn’t that what you had in mind for all that paper?”