The Last Ship (68 page)

I had almost forgotten: She was the sole woman, save for Meyer, not participating in the Arrangement, just as I was the sole man (except for the seven voluntary abstainers). It was a decision that half-surprised me and half-seemed almost as logical as my own: that as leader of the women, she could not participate, any more than could I as captain of the ship. For exactly the same reason that I could not be one of several men assigned to a woman, she could not be one of the women to whom several men were assigned. For she, too, now held something like a sovereign power, as to the women, and thereby to a large degree over the men. We never discussed it. But each of us feeling I am certain that these roles of ours—commanders—were indispensable to the continued well-being of the settlement, and each knowing that our respective positions of leadership, of authority, of power, of command, would be unacceptably jeopardized by participation.

Girard. Lieutenant Girard. Never using her first name. I had almost forgotten what it was.

At first the very having of the idea profoundly shocked me, and I dropped it instantly. The complications such a relationship would unloose, both as between ourselves and between each of us and ship’s company, were so obvious and so almost unlimited in nature that they scarcely need listing. After a while the idea returned. Again, I immediately put it away. It was only to return again, with more force; to be rejected again. This cycle continued, the periods between when I was not thinking of it shortened, the consciousness of the proceedings in the cottages pressing me to the point of agony. I forced my mind to calm, to reason things out; thereby in time reaching a rationale and a conviction that ran somewhat as follows.

I myself needed this to survive, at least survive with all my faculties intact; if I did not survive, the settlement, the island, the ship’s company, all that we had accomplished: All this would at the very least find itself at risk. This vanity of a ship’s captain, and most particularly of myself, to which I have made occasional reference, may or may not have been based in reality. There may well have been others who could have stepped forward and taken my place and matters to have continued as propitiously as they now were. But that is not the point. The point is that I did not at all
know
—and there was no way to know—that this desirable thing would have eventuated. What I did know was that under my command, we had come through the most testing of events; that under it, the island was functioning as well as does a good ship properly commanded; more, that we were beginning to make not just an acceptable home for ourselves but rather—yes, a good home in which one could sense a growing well-being, seeming ever more to approach a feeling of love for this place. I felt I had had a great deal to do with these achievements. But I was human. Above all I came to feel not just that I had to have a woman but that I had to have this particular one; partly because of what she was, partly because of the fact that the above-delineated strictures concerning fraternization would not be breached in so doing, she being no other man’s woman. I was taking no woman from anyone, for if Girard were not to be with me she could be with nobody.

These cogent reasons for taking the fateful step amplified with no difficulty, and began pressing my mind in almost constant iteration. I had to have a woman and no one else to have her. And it had to be one woman, Girard. I had to have Girard and have her alone. By the exact same token, she had to have me, and me alone: There was no one else she could have. The logic seemed impeccable: I took another step in the desired direction. I came to feel that that was owed me, that it was not an excessive reward for having led ship’s company through all our terrible hardships from the Barents to this tiny particle sticking up in the great ocean-sea of the Pacific. After all, every other man had a woman. Why was I, who had brought us all to safe harbor, to be the only one denied this solace? By the end of these reasoned processes, proceeding step by step in orderly fashion, I had convinced myself that it would actually be wrong for this thing not to happen.

Having reached this impregnable position, even armed with this library of rationality, I yet knew this: I could not announce my decision to my own ship’s company. They might understand and they might not; themselves having to share the other women, why should anyone have a woman all to himself: It was not at all implausible that such a question should arise. Being unalterably determined now to proceed, I had no intention of testing these waters. There was only one problem remaining as to these matters, which I had come, the question itself already decided, to consider almost logistical in nature: It would have to be done clandestinely, somewhere on this tiny island. Precisely where I had not the slightest idea.

Having worked all of this out, having given myself all these wonderfully logical, even lofty reasons to proceed, something else abruptly occurred to me. My God, I thought, all along I had just been assuming things on her part—assuming compliance. Vanity indeed! She might not be in the slightest interested. Especially in myself. For all her being a superb, astute officer, absolutely cool under fire, and professionally congenial, there had always been something withheld, guarded, even forbidding, about Lieutenant Girard, as I have earlier related; something that seemed intentionally to communicate to whomsoever that her personal, inner life was her exclusive possession, strictly off-limits: keep away. It was not inconceivable that she might not even like it at all. I had heard of such women. How stupid I had been to make all these assumptions, almost to take for granted her own willingness! Surely the last woman with whom one should make such a mistake. Nevertheless I would try, at least tentatively explore, with prudence, with infinite caution, ready to draw back instantly if my fingers were so much as singed. There was no one else to try with. I would wait for the appropriate opportunity to make my move; thinking, how calculating, how transcendency devious, I was becoming; nothing in life, my thought was, furthering that quality more than that particular enterprise of supreme self-interest I was about to set my course on.

 *  *  * 

It happened then; their absence not being noticed until two days after the deed was accomplished, we had been able to calculate, the reason being that the off-days worked out under the watch system we had instituted fell in his case at that time, so that there was another watch on the Lookout Tower, himself not missed. Indeed they must have picked that time to do it, to give them that head start lest we decide to try to overtake them. As for her, her coxswain duties kept her moving about. No one noticed at first. Then Lieutenant Girard brought me the news. Missing also—Number 2 boat. Our boats now all rigged with sails, all coxswains having become adept at sail-powered boating. None more so than these two. We sat in my cabin overlooking the sea they must have hoped would be their highway to somewhere. God knew where.

“The little fools,” Girard said; holding everything back.

“Your conscience should be clear, Lieutenant.” I was making words. “The system—the Arrangement—would never have worked once any exception was made. You said that yourself. And it was true. It is true.”

“Oh, my conscience is clear all right,” she said. “But for them to take it to the point of . . . doing what they did.”

“Poets and others built their stories around love of that kind—that would test it to that degree.”

Her tone was brutal. “To the point of madness, you mean, Captain?”

“Yes, I suppose I do. Not literally. But they say that kind of love makes you do things other people might call crazy. I wouldn’t know. Outside my experience. I wonder which suggested it.”

“Why Meyer, of course. A selfish little bitch. Both of them. As if bodies were all that important.”

Then something appeared to give way for a moment in her. She spoke very tentatively.

“I don’t suppose we could take the
Nathan James
—make at least a brief search.”

“Leave it, Lieutenant. We can’t spare a drop of that fuel. Selfish indeed: how dare they take one of our boats. Takes us down to two.” The hardness in my tone real enough. Perhaps, also, in both of us, meant to hold back tears; useless tears.

W
e had gone there I believe innocently enough. Though committed to its happening, or at least—bearing in mind the great unknown of her own feelings, committed to testing the matter at some point, how I did not know . . . I had not crudely planned it for this specific day. Rather, it being our regular weekly session on supply and morale and now gunnery and missile matters and also a beautiful day, I suggested we conduct business while taking a walk; we had done this before. We proceeded away from the settlement, no particular destination in mind, through the rain-washed foliage, on a course—perhaps something subconscious in that—I had never before taken, toward the northern, least explored part of the island, now moving mostly along the corridor made by the stream bed, that area being clear of the thick growth, the morning sun filtered in soft dazzling shafts through the trees, then after a while up a high hill, hardly knowing the distance we were putting between ourselves and the settlement, realizing with a certain interest and excitement that we were into land-territory certainly neither of us had explored before nor, I believe, had any other of ship’s company. It was a considerable climb. On the ascent I marked on my part a notable agility in her lithe body moving upward ahead of me. At last topping the hill, we could see the island narrowing quickly now to a point not far ahead, and we went along the comfortable ridge until we came to its very tip, could go no farther. We stood and looked all around.

Glittering uncounted fathoms down went the sunlight through the waters, translucent far below us, straight down the heights. The view was a lookout’s dream. It was, we could now tell, the island’s highest point. There was hardly a place on the island that did not boast its discrete perspective, but this seemed from the island’s sharp narrowing here like a ship’s prow—one felt a strong wind would have blown you right off it—and from the elevation, the prince of all views. The sea near circumferential, seeming to come straight at us in a vast plain of turquoise, almost as if we were not on land at all but on a tall ship, sails unfurled and breasting the waters. Turning, a haunting prospect across all the bursting green of the island, and most especially straight down both its shores. The singularity being that the contrasts between the two sides were simultaneously visible from here as surely at no other vantage point, so marked as to make it difficult to believe one was on the same island; one side presenting that familiar fierceness of aspect, the other a sonnet of gentleness. To the west, the high cliffs plunging straight to the sea and stretching as far southerly as the island itself, seeming unapproachable; to the east, the land softly sloping to the white-sand beach reaching to the end of the island on that side, indeed to the Farm on the southernmost tip; the Farm, faraway, we could not see from here; no more could we see the least sign of the settlement on the western shore. It was a place of infinite solitude, at once glorious and the loneliest place that ever was, so untouched as to speak of the beginnings of time, no sense of life anywhere, only the eternal sea and a precious green island, flung up it seemed to adorn the immensity of the waters. Standing there, virtually encircled by the great waters, we seemed the only two creatures in the universe. We did not speak; it was as though the place forbade it. Stood I think a rather long time, in the stillness; a sense of time stopped, ourselves some sort of permanent statuary planted on this peak, the invasion of a sense of phantasm, as if attempting to divine what we never could; consisting, it seemed to me, in this incomprehensible strangeness of our standing there, not as of this particular day, but standing there at all, the mystery reaching back in time to our own origins far away, as human beings, to childhood, to youth, to lands called Oklahoma and North Carolina, to places called Annapolis and Wellesley, these very names now seeming ancient artifacts: What in the world had ever brought us here? Why? Felt this in myself, felt I was by no means alone in feeling it; that rare certainty of a given thought of oneself’s being known identically, simultaneously, to one’s companion. Startled to hear actual speech: “Why don’t we have a look down there?”

The westerly cliffs, perhaps influenced by the nearby eastern sandy shore, seemed less forbidding here, not nearly so steep as a bit further down . . . indeed, before I knew it she was starting down this declivity, myself following, until we stood on an apron of beach, as if the western shore wished to edify us with the fact that it too could have one of these, and of fine white sand as well, where we now stood; if not much of one in size. The sea slid in with a whisper. We turned and scanned the cliff just above us and she saw it.

“Look up there!” she said, a girlish excitement in her voice.

Her leading, we climbed up the rocks until we stood on the ledge, not high at all above the sea. It was as though it was a porch for the sea. And for the thing she had had a glimpse of below. The cave that opened immediately behind it.

I followed her into it, not much surprised at finding it there. Islands and caves: They went together in my mind; the dozens of islands of the Mediterranean I had visited during my Naples tour of shore duty. I could remember none absent of caves; some always underwater; more, such as this one presently turned out to be, belonging half to the land, half to the sea. It was low to the water. Evidence, in fact, that at high enough tides the sea actually entered the cave, and if high enough, put it entirely underwater. Fresh encrustations, barnacles, on its walls. We explored eagerly around. High enough to stand up in, most of it, and quite roomy. Tides, too, further manifested by the smoothness of the floor of gray rock. We moved into it, the cave going deeply enough that we soon found ourselves in darkness, or near-darkness, and I wished for a flashlight. We came back out into the sunlight and sat down at its entrance, on the porchlike ledge, and looked at the sea, hearing its low throb on the cliff stretching to the southwest. The cave seemed to delight, to excite her, its discovery, to bring a flush to her cheeks. She was wearing Navy work clothes, dungarees, shirt, and had picked up one of the baseball-type caps that were used by the trackers at their computer screens to protect them from flashing images on missile-launch; fair hair emerging from underneath. We sat talking comfortably.

“That cave, for some strange reason. I get the feeling there have been people here,” she said. “Sometimes when I’m walking through the forest, too. Almost as if there still are. People watching me from within all that darkness.”

“Yes, I’ve had that too. Perfectly natural, I’d think. If kind of spooky. But I believe we’re the first. We’ve seen no evidence.”

A long and comfortable silence; no compulsion to fill the stillness with words; watching the sea, turning all argentine now under a climbing sun. By habit, when with her, no one aboard more identified in my mind with the well-being of ship’s company than herself, keen to its changes, its nuances, alert as a ship’s lookout for signs of danger, after a time my soft, almost routine probing.

“Well, Lieutenant. Do you think the men are becoming resigned to . . . that this is it, this island . . . that we’re here to stay?”

She waited, careful and precise as always in these matters. “More so all the time, I’d say. Partly the island and its goodness. Partly, what other choice is there? Except of course for that small party of men we’ve talked about that hangs on to there being life, habitability, back there. I sometimes think even some of them are changing.”

Then I was surprised. She asked me something of a kind she never had, our talk always excluding questions the least personal in nature; some of that breached of late. Quietly, the tones of reflection seeming to take us, now somehow natural, perhaps having something to do with where we were.

“Yourself? Are you content to live out your life here?”

“I’m getting there. Anytime I get a little restless, I remind myself of all that dark and cold we went through. That awful contamination. Just thinking of it, I sometimes breathe it. Then I feel very good to have the island.”

And yet again, coming on in those same quiescent tones, the susurrant sea on the rocks its backdrop. I sometimes thought her voice was the best thing about her; I had never heard it shrill, heard it raised. I had heard it tough, coming down hard. Now a touch of conversational curiosity.

“What do you miss?”

“There isn’t all that much to miss, for me.”

She hesitated, as if uncertain as to my meaning. Then:

“You didn’t have anyone?”

“Not really.”

She seemed to pause a moment. “Didn’t you ever miss that?”

This was different. She was coming very close to my own self.

“I used to—now and then. Now I’m damned glad. When I look at some of the others—wives, children. I think how much easier it is for me. They’re the ones who have it rough. I’ve very grateful not to have anyone. All alone. And you?”

“There was someone. I’m sure there isn’t anymore.”

High up and far away, gossamer cirrus had begun to streak the skies. Now I did move away from it. “Mostly what I miss is the ship. Being at sea. All I ever had. All I ever wanted.” I laughed shortly. “I wish we could take the
James
for some runs. Some very short runs I’d settle for, even just around the island. I miss her, miss that.” I sighed. “We can’t.”

“The fuel, you mean.”

“We daren’t expend a drop. If we should ever be forced out of here . . . Very remote. Even Selmon says that. Whatever was going to happen has happened. So he judges. Still with qualifications. You know Selmon. So we still have to have that reserve.” I looked out to the horizon. Earlier merging synchronously with the sea, it now had begun to establish its own distinct line. “Of course, what I would really like is to have a five-year-fueled ship under me and take her around the world—to see with my own eyes what happened.”

“You have doubts as to that?”

“Not really. I come down on the idea that—at the most—there are a few scattered clusters of human beings—somewhere. I’d kind of like to see where—and if. Talk with them. To find out. When I knock off the mooning, mostly I know this: These few miles of island—we’ll always be here.”

“Yes,” she said, like an echo of finality. “We’ll always be here. I’d like to see us fifty years from now.”

“A number of children running around. Grandchildren . . . Reminds me: That project, all hands, putting down everything they know or remember. How does it go?”

A quick interest felt from her like a spark. “We’ll be starting it next week in the Main Hall. I’ve talked with a number of the men—the women. You can’t believe how eager they are for it, excited. They got right with it. Its importance. The women will be doing most of the work. Classifying the material—subject matter—history, skills, the rest. We’re getting all organized for it. It’s going to be good. What a nice big project! They want very much to do it. Excited by what exactly they’ll be putting down. They understand it. We’re about to turn into a community of writers.”

“It’s for the children, of course.”

“Yes, for the children.”

We were using the word as if it were a sure thing when we knew there were problems; maybe, both of us, feeling that saying it would make it happen.

I hesitated. “The men, you said, feeling better about the island. It’s the women have made all the difference.” Hurried on from that lest she think I was fishing for details, was prying into an area we had agreed should be reserved for themselves, and for her. “But I felt it before that. The beginnings at least of an acceptance—to live out their lives on this island. The women, too?”

It was quite otherwise. She seemed almost to welcome the subject of the women.

“I would say the women most of all. Any talk of going back—it’s almost disappeared with them. Of course, not a one of them had ties of marriage, or children. They’re like you in that. And me,” she added. “I’ve come to consider it fortunate they don’t.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, indeed. Extremely fortunate.”

“And, of course, they’re a coping lot. They wouldn’t have got to sea in the first place if they weren’t. I used to resent it like hell the way the Navy made it so damn deliberately tough, for me, for every one of them. I look back and say, Thank God. It took a lot of—something—in a woman to tough her way out through that. They handle things. Like right now. The way they’re handling what we always thought would be such a problem.”

I was surprised, even astonished—not at this recitation of the women’s qualities, save only that she knew long since how entirely I agreed with such a characterization—but at what seemed a readiness, even an eagerness, to speak with such a direct reference to a subject on which we had so carefully refrained from being remotely explicit. Perhaps again it was simply being away from the formalities of our usual morale-and-supply session in my cabin.

“No one thought so more than myself,” I said. “I was never more glad to be wrong.”

I would not probe further. It seemed to me we had gone quite far enough, certainly further than we had ever before ventured. She would continue or she would not. I felt almost that she was debating with herself whether or not to do so. A sense also of an almost irresistible desire on her part to talk about it. I kept silent, making sure to do nothing to encourage her. It would have to be her choice. She took off her baseball cap and shook her hair back, the slanting sunshine seeming quick and eager to catch its own clean lights.

“You’d have to say they’re pretty resourceful,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Lieutenant, I’d have to say they were just about anything you want to call them.”

She spoke now in tones of philosophy, as if come upon a subject which it might be exceptionally interesting to explore, and by no means yet exhausted; dispassionately discoursing on some striking experiment in human relations.

“I sometimes wonder if having all those qualities that brought them to sea . . . I wonder if there could be any connection between those and possessing what I would call . . . well, let us say, a generally high sexual quotient.”