The Ordinary Seaman (20 page)

The telephone will ring, but the Ship Visitor won’t get up to answer, will let the answering machine take it. Ariadne has many friends, nine-tenths of them male, many of them wealthy foreign students like herself, her tumbling circus of besotted admirers laying patient, friendly, courtly siege. So much of the world still so polite and well mannered! Everywhere but here in New York, it often seems. Even if one takes the people a ship visitor meets boarding ships as a wide enough sampling of humanity. Even that ship he’s boarded twice in the last year when it’s come to load scrap iron, crewed entirely by internationally wanted criminals and escaped convicts who sail the seas and supposedly never go ashore (though they must, in far-flung ports less well policed than New Jersey-New York’s), working practically for free in exchange for their highly restricted freedom, that ship of floating homicidal manic depression—even
they’re
polite! Ariadne’s callers leave her long, jovial or suavely low-voiced messages, usually in languages he doesn’t speak, and though they rarely acknowledge his existence, they manage to carry
off even that slight politely. Ariadne speaks six languages (not counting Latin, which makes seven), though she is most and equally comfortable in French, Spanish, and English.

“Jawwwn? You there? It’s Kathy. I’m—”

Reverend Roundtree. He’ll snatch up the phone, and she’ll want to be filled in regarding the message he left about that ship in Brooklyn, the one that old Argentine woman will have phoned a couple of times about. And he’ll tell her everything he was able to learn that day:

“Another abandoned flag of convenience crew, I guess is what it comes down to.”

“Indeed, John. And many unanswered questions—”

Detective Reverend Roundtree, the Port of New Jersey and New York’s Father Brown. Vodka in the freezer. A drink would be nice.

“Uh-huh. As usual. Just another magical mystery ship.” He’ll walk the phone into the kitchen, stretching the cord to its full, tautened length, groping with outstretched arm and wriggling fingers for the freezer door and not quite, just not quite reaching, millimeters short…

“A bit more than usual,” she’ll be saying. “Wouldn’t you say? Trying to repair that ship for six months? Why?”

“Overly optimistic owner? Thought it would be doable and then it wasn’t.”

“Well,
that
doesn’t get him off the hook. I think we have time to get to work for a change. We have him right where we want him, don’t you think?”

“It’ll be freezing out, snowing out pretty soon, Kath. Any day, maybe. Can’t leave those kids on the ship then. You really want to try to bust the owner?” Come on, Kathy. The Panamanian Registry, like most flag of convenience registries, an assiduous protector of shipowners’ anonymity; anonymity built right into the system. Some twelve thousand vessels flying the Panamanian tricolor. And nowhere near the manpower to enforce Panamanian law on their ships, even if they really wanted to. Especially as pertaining to the rights onboard of international seafarers. Phantom owners are hard to identify down here on earth, yet we know they exist, because if they didn’t and if the flag of convenience ships they own didn’t,
if cheap Third World crews and low registration, incorporation fees, and tonnage taxes and every other related convenience didn’t exist, exports would lag, throwing many Americans out of work, and imported products would be much more expensive and not so abundant—Ariadne, your four-hundred-dollar French skirts, your La Perla underthings, so many of our favorite beverages, so much of this comes to you by ship!

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if this one’s being run right out of New York,” the Reverend will say. “This captain and his friend, they must be in some kind of cahoots with the ownership. They drive to the ship, they come and go. Suddenly they paint over the name and registry. Maybe
they’re
the owners, John. You think?”

“Yeah, if they’re total dolts. Otherwise I don’t really see their stake, except a salary. I wouldn’t necessarily presume felonious activity here anyway, Kathy. Incompetence, bad luck, a bad deal. Probably just went broke. Bet that ship’s already up for sale. As is, where is. End up being sold or auctioned off for scrap, most likely. That ship isn’t going anywhere.”

“Well,
someone
thought it was going somewhere. You really think those guys have been getting paid?”

“I’d guess. But they tell the crew they haven’t been. All in this together and so on. But they’ve pretty much stopped coming out, it sounds like, so if they
were
getting paid, I bet they’re not anymore. I don’t know, we’ll see how they react once the lien’s posted. Maybe they’ll sue for back wages too.”

“Or they’ll stay away for good. Vanish. John, you watch. Now, what happened to that old man?”

“Sent back to Nicaragua. End of October that was.”

“But what did he go to the hospital for?”

“Hot cooking oil spilled all over his leg. Cooking out on a deck over a wood fire. The captain treated him with something or other, supposedly he has some kind of medical training. Seems commensurate with his maritime training. Then he just sat there for a few days until this first mate guy took him to the hospital. I guess I still have to get a clearer version of what went down—”

“No pardi, not on a ship like this.” She’ll mean owner’s protection and indemnity.

“On a ship like that, strongly doubt it.”

“So let’s see what we have here. No electricity, cooking out in the dark, not getting him immediate medical care. Then that’s under the Jones Act—”

“Unless the captain really is an M.D. or something.
Ha.”

“Owner’s negligence leading to serious injury. John, we
can
get them in federal court on that. If this doesn’t come under the Jones, I don’t know what does.”

Just about the only thing
you can
get an owner on. She’ll probably be right, of course. Though, as usual, the Reverend’s overexcited and so often disappointed enthusiasm will make him reach for caution like an umbrella.

“Yeah, OK, maybe. But we don’t know the whole story yet—” Like maybe the cook got mad and threw hot oil on the old guy and no one’s talking.

“I want to reach that old man, John. Get a deposition. I want to know who paid for his plane ticket home. I want to see his medical records.”

Kathy’s going to use this case, the Ship Visitor will think, to test the limits of her interest in ministry to seafarers, isn’t she? The case we’ve all been waiting for. A chance to push the institute’s board, see how far they’ll let us take combative advocacy of seafarers’ rights, strike a small but resonant blow, for once, against malefic shipowners. Lately, Reverend Roundtree will have been expressing a certain frustration and restlessness with the job, wondering if she really wants to forgo the chance of having her own parish somewhere, preferably right here in the city, to be a port chaplain the rest of her life, bringing Christian hospitality and the Good News to seafarers.

“We’ll go back out there first thing in the morning.”

“First thing?” The Ship Visitor will groan silently—if he meets Ariadne downtown, and he will, he won’t be getting to bed until at least three. “Yeah, all right.”

“How’s that swank lady of yours?” Swank? Just the other day, Ariadne will have been that “dangerous” lady—potentially dangerous, the Reverend will have feared, to his future psychological and spiritual well-being. Now why should a Protestant reverend be troubled by, or even compassionately worry about, just awesome, total passion and love?

“She’s fine. We’ve been getting along really well lately.” Which will be true enough. Will feel himself hooked, as usual, to a yearning to talk about it but stop himself—it’s only been a few months since Reverend Roundtree broke up with her “intended,” a shattering event for her. Divorced admiralty lawyer (like the Ship Visitor was going to be, once upon a time, before he decided he’d rather be a ship visitor), played big-time hockey in college. A much more probable, befitting, and seemingly enduring match, supposedly—and it wasn’t after all.

After hanging up, the Ship Visitor will pour himself a vodka on the rocks, wash a lemon, carefully shear off a strip of rind with a paring knife, run it along the rim, and plonk it in. Rarely has more than one drink a night when Ariadne is home. There’s a British captain, fiftyish, about a decade older than Kathy, who always comes in for a drink in the institute’s cocktail lounge whenever he’s in port, always cajoles Kath down for a drink. Conservative, self-consciously proper type. Father a bus driver; votes for Thatcher. Calls Kath Bishop, of course. Talkative, with a submerged, typical air of lonely, void-washed (the ocean, the ocean) melancholy. Likes to probe Kathy for the great meaning of things. Seems to be trying to fix just the right look of respectfully adoring attentiveness on his face as he listens, almost like he’s rehearsing them both for what he thinks it might be like, eventually retiring from the sea to live full-time with a woman for the first time. On many things they would disagree, which he pretends to like, certain of his principles and unapologetic about any lack of cosmopolitan experience, after a life like his, spent mainly on ships. He’d like to attach himself to her, to her respectable sophistication and intellect, her other kind of worldliness. Or unworldliness. So the Ship Visitor will have been suspecting. Might work out, who knows? Solid guy, seems to be. Of course you never know what lies underneath—with anyone, but these guys especially. Onboard
always the captain, usually an introverted way of life, yet every port offering a stage to try out a different self for an audience that’s never seen your very own particular act before and doesn’t need to know your name… Awful not to have all this stuff—what stuff? marriage, money, who the fuck you finally are, and so on—worked out by a certain age. Probably doomed if you can’t, though late rallies are not unheard of. But here I am, risking a lot on this
girl.
And liking myself for it, right? Though sometimes this inner voice wheedling, What’s she doing loving a prolish ship visitor thirteen years older anyway, how long can that last? Or, I’m in way over my head. More intelligent than he, zillion times better educated, stronger willed even, all blazing temperament, braininess, and wild, gifted body. Though she certainly has her faults, her, umm, vulnerabilities, her temper, at times, like a snapped high-voltage wire fallen to the ground, snaking and zapping. Gladly offer my love as a kind of national park where her neuroses can run protected and free. “When we’re married …” Ariadne will even have said, twice already, prefacing a passing speculation on the nonexistent future. (“When we’re married maybe we’ll live in Lisbon, it’s a port, you can be a ship visitor there, Johnny.” “When we’re married my father will definitely disown me.”) She with her fifty-grand-a-year trust fund (nearly twice what the Ship Visitor earns) outside all tuition and boarding costs, which her father (who will not have phoned her even once in the four months he’s been living with her) pays.

Often Ariadne sits at her desk studying at night and the Ship Visitor pulls a book from her shelves, curls up on the carpet to read or pretend to, waiting for her to take off her reading glasses, switch off her desk lamp, come over and lower herself to his side, smiling her most unabashed and delirium-inducing smile …

“What is it about a love that needs such watching over?” Will have found that a few weeks ago, browsing through, of all things,
The Brothers Karamazov.
“Othello wasn’t jealous, he was trusting.”

After Reverend Roundtree’s lover of three years left her in October, you know what she will have said in the office one afternoon? “My father liked to say that a good man always marries a woman superior
to himself. Always? Well, he was, with all justification, referring to my mother. Otherwise, I suppose he was no worse than most. But like I’ve told you many times, my family was a drinking family, totally given over to nonstop mythomania!”

“She says she wants to meet a real American guy, she’s sick of wimps in suits and Eurotrash—though aren’t we all?”

“Me?”

Daughter of a Colombian-French financier, venture capitalist of some sort, fortune rooted in a family coffee empire dating to the last century, offices and homes all over Europe and Latin America, and a French-Polish mother, a suicide in Paris when Ariadne was fourteen. Educated in European boarding schools and at the Sorbonne. And beautiful. Looks kind of like a tall, white Eurasian girl. All this his second cousin Belle Carbonel, an editor at the glossy women’s magazine where Ariadne had a summer internship before starting grad school in the fall, had told him.

“Anyway, Belle,” he said, “guys in suits
are
real American guys, and so are wimps. I was a suit not so long ago.”

For all the usual whimsy of her voice, Belle was, also as usual, earnest, blunt, and overreaching in her opinions about everything: “Well, we know you have a romantic wimp in your closet, Johnny. And a secret sybarite too. But don’t think I tell anybody, though I think it’s glorious.”

“Don’t you think I’m a little too old for her?”

“Oh come on! Just take her out and see what happens. You’re cute enough, I promise. Both from totally screwed-up families and backgrounds. She’ll figure you out.”

“Well, that’s not necessarily good.”

“It’ll take her a while. And you’ll
never
figure her out, but you know what? I bet you’ll have a helluva time trying.”

Well, a pretty blatantly romantic wimp at times, though not lately. And the sybarite even a secret from himself, if the dictionary definition was what Belle meant.

His divorce from Mona was finally finalized just before New Year’s, though they hadn’t lived together in three years. Mona was already living happily with another man; but she’d insisted right to the end that she
liked
being his wife, not that either had any notion of their getting back together. Sweet Mona O’Donnell, a brassily cheerful performer, but with any scrap of sentimental provocation tossed her way—her favorite TV weatherman in a car accident, a phone company commercial where a yuppyish brown woman with a foreign accent surprises her peasant mother on the other side of the world with an unexpected-good-news call—her face would redden and her usually wit-sharp eyes wellingly cloud and she’d sink back into her cave to chow down on the emotion, whatever it was, maybe even have a good bawling cry. So at the very mention of divorce the past swamped her present: but she
likes
being his wife! Cost him a thousand dollars that he could barely spare, the uncontested divorce, and what it bought him was the new sensation of knowing he was telling a complete truth whenever he told someone he was single. More than a relief. Partial truths can nag worse than a lie, like an untied shoelace in a nightmare, one you keep reaching for and missing, have to keep walking around with your shoe untied no matter what. And so he’d been out with three different women since the spring—conquests! Feeling almost like a ladies’ man, a rare period in his life. He was coasting, waiting for the right woman, in no big hurry, not letting himself get all hung up over some fetching nut like he usually did. A man feeling sturdy about his life, with nothing to hide. Shoes tied. A man who likes his job.