The Ordinary Seaman (21 page)

And along comes this first date, a blind date, with Ariadne, on a hot, rainy night in late June, the very week that the
Urus
’s crew flew up from Central America to meet their ship. Never forget it. What kind of girl shows up two hours late for a blind date and actually expects the guy still to be waiting? Even bothers showing up, two hours late? What kind of guy waits? Not fair, he wasn’t waiting. Nothing else to do. Ball game on the TV over the bar, a hard summer rain outside. And a weird and terrible day at the office, in fact. Forgot all about his blind date, well, didn’t feel aggrieved anyway, maybe even a little relieved. Just sat there
nursing his drink. He’d spent part of the day in a Port Newark hospital, sitting by the bed of a recuperating Colombian stowaway—he and three friends had hidden themselves inside a coffee-sack-stuffed container loaded onto a ship sailing from Buenaventura. So when the customs inspectors and the DEA guy opened the container down on the pier, this skinny kid in just his underwear popped out and took off running. The Ship Visitor had been up on deck with the crew when he sensed a change in the pitch of the stevedores’ shouts amidst the clanging commotion of cranes and hoisted containers, and saw the crane operator in his cable car—like cab wrenching around in his seat to look down at the pier while riding a container off the deck. He went to the rail and saw customs officials and stevedores jogging in the direction of a nearly naked brown body pinioned as if by wind against the hurricane fence, and others gathered around the open end of a container, holding their hands over their noses and mouths, some reluctantly clambering inside. Lifting out the first of the contorted, twisted bodies. Left the other two inside, for the ambulance drivers to deal with. Three dead from suffocating heat, hunger, and dehydration, hunched and sprawled amidst the coffee-bean-stuffed sacks, stiff with rigor mortis. And one survivor with enough energy left to take off in a wild sprint at the first splash of air and daylight …

No one else has a job like mine. That’s what he often tells himself, taking satisfaction from it, whenever in that kind of Manhattan bar. The sort of bar where guys who look more or less like himself congregate, who all look like they might have gone to college together. White Boys, in the current, annoying parlance. Lawyers, like he almost was, or business, media, or publishing types, artists of one kind or another. Funny how he never meets any doctors in these places. He fits right in. And then he always tells himself, Yeah, but no one else has a job like mine.

Not exactly well paid, but good benefits. In the heart of winter, when everyone else starts looking pale and scaly, it keeps him ruddy, ocean-wind-scrubbed, feeling strong. No doubt about it, the job will have improved his overall demeanor, his self-confidence; so many times a day climbing the gangway onto a ship where nobody knows him, then
trying to win the crew’s trust, gauge their situation as quickly as possible, often by reading furtive glances and postures more than by what they actually say—few speak English, never mind Spanish. Captains and officers often not very glad to see him. Lots of floating squalor out there, but many good ships too. Roaming the ports and waterfronts in his van and on foot, he’ll have learned to feel as comfortable and alert in his solitude as some hard-boiled detective; this mixed with the easy camaraderie of his colleagues at the end of the day, the conversation of reverends and the other staff, of the seafarers and ships’ officers from all over the world who stop into the Seafarers’ Institute cocktail lounge when their time in port allows them to, the shipping agents, chandlers, tugboat men, stevedores, government guys, the samurai fraternity of harbor pilots.

She came into the bar, out of the steamy rain, more than two hours late, came walking down the aisle folding and fastening her collapsible umbrella, glancing expectantly at the faces of men at the bar, sitting in booths. Red raincoat, red lips, a matte-pale, soft face, like milk with just a touch of brown sugar swirled in, long, lustrous, black hair cut in a fringe over her nearly black eyes; skitterishly bright, this first time he saw those eyes, with anxiety and high-spirited mischief, as if mortified to have arrived so late but deeply bemused by herself too. Knew right away this was Ariadne, though his smile must have been dumbstruck as he caught her glance, waving up from his seat. She sat down smiling, without subjecting him to any protracted scrutiny, simply said, “Oh, you’re still here!” and laughed. “The dinner I was at went on and on forever. I’m so sorry, but thank you so much for waiting. I thought I’d take a chance!” She’d shrugged off her raincoat, was wearing a simple sleeveless black dress. Just a kid. The slightly Frenchified singsong of her accent. French lips, shaped by the way they kiss their language when they speak it, drawing her soft cheeks forward (why so many French guys look poofy). Dazzlingly pretty and alive. You’re going to break my heart someday, he’d thought then and there. And later that long night, he even told her that: “I better be careful. Or you’re going to break my heart someday,” blurting it into the giddy, drunken haze enclosing them,
and she leaned closer and laughed. “You’re probably right. But come on, it’s no fun being careful.”

“… Biology, luck, how the hell else can you really explain it?” he told her that night, recounting the Colombian stowaway’s story, the first of all the ship visitor’s yarns he’ll bring her in the coming months. “He lay there in his hospital bed trying to come up with a reason. His faith in God. Always a hard worker. His sense of himself as a guy with an especially strong, stubborn character. His strength of will.”

(Lay there with IVs pumping saline solution into his veins and looking like he couldn’t even have lost much weight, no slackness in his face, just a shocked glitter in his eyes. All that just to get to the U.S. of A., and he was going to be deported as soon as he was released from the hospital.

(And how could he ask what he wanted to ask? Couldn’t, of course. What was it like? What were you all thinking? How did you know when the first one died? Was there a sound, a sigh? And then the other two? He finally asked, How did you not go mad? Left it at that.)

“But I believe in the will, Johnny, don’t you?” she nearly chirped. “I believe there must be something else, besides luck or biology, that makes him different. Consider torture, men who break under torture and men who don’t. I’ve always told myself that I could only marry the kind of man who wouldn’t break under torture.”

Many such preposterous opinions. An idealized sense of life, full of high but untested principles. Should hear her when she gets going on her philosophies of love! But this mixture of youthful unreality and daffily heroic convictions charmed him from the start. Better, even more intellectually arousing, than listening to the reverends, who you weren’t dying to sleep with at the same time too.

His stories about his occupation, death tinged by the day’s events, enkindled her imagination somehow; perhaps seduced her darker side a little, she with her own appalling history always crouched like a trembling madwoman in her attic. Anyway, gave him, in her eyes, that romantic, manly aura—just what she was looking for, right? A real American guy, not office bound but free in the manner of a movie detective,
in touch with darker things but with the spiritual too, the open spaces of port and sea, and reverends. That’s how Ariadne saw him that night. A guy who’ll come home at night with ocean salt in his skin, and a story to tell.

“You’re comfortable among other men,” she said approvingly when he came back from the bar with another round—that was all it took, promptly returning to their table with a couple of drinks. She said the men she knew often weren’t; trying to press through the “burly crush” of a bar to order drinks intimidated them, they just stood there timidly at the edge, wagging a hand at the bartender, usually she ended up getting the drinks herself (as if any bartender was going to ignore
her).
This burly crush—in
this
bar? Ariadne actually thought they were all
blue-collar workers.

“Hmmmm, I like that,” she said and gave his erection, propping up his boxer shorts, a playful swipe. He’d just gotten into Ariadne’s apartment mate’s bed; she’d gone to Boston. (An Iranian F.I.T. student, boyfriend studying in Boston—Ariadne would move into the graduate student tower in August.) Ariadne wouldn’t sleep with him, said she never slept with a man the first night. Though they’d kissed, in the bar, out on the street, in her living room. It was nearly dawn, too late to go all the way back to Brooklyn, wasn’t it? And then sent him to the Iranian girl’s bed, and went off to her own, and woke him hours later, sliding in naked beside him. They won’t have spent a whole night apart, not one, since. (Tries to get to his apartment in Brooklyn once a week, pick up mail; still paying rent on the damned dump.)

There’ll have been plenty of rough stretches, of course. For a while Ariadne will have been bitterly, obsessively—insanely, practically, considering how he felt about Ariadne—jealous of his ex-wife. Somehow, according to Ariadne, he’d polluted his own soul back then, marrying before experiencing a love as great as theirs. He’ll have started it all that time, early in their relationship, when he carelessly let slip that he hadn’t felt anywhere near this way since he’d first fallen in love with his former wife. Infuriated her—Ariadne doesn’t want to be compared with any other woman, not in that or any other way! Oh, this boring American
honesty and fairness and reasonableness! What does reasonableness have to do with love? Fairness towards the past has no place in the kind of love she wants. She has a past too, doesn’t she? How would he like it, she’ll have taunted, if she was just as honest about her past as he was about his? Though really, she’ll have told him plenty, hardly less than what he’ll have told her. The nearly forty-year-old French television actor she went out with when she was sixteen and seventeen, who’d given her a key to his apartment, taken her to the most decadent parties and clubs, on holidays in the Caribbean, Greece, and Bali, who raged and seethed like a spoiled brat if a single night passed without her consenting to sex, the man she grandly claimed had corrupted her. Her father had become extremely cold to his only child after her mother’s death. She hated her father, she’d never forgive him for not having protected his young, starstruck daughter from this sordid affair. Her father should have killed him if that was what it took! That’s
whatyou
would do, Johnny, isn’t it, if it was your daughter? The past
has
to stay in the past! What’s fairness have to do with it! If I say something hurts me, then it does. And it doesn’t matter if you think it’s unreasonable or neurotic and
unfair,
if it hurts me, and you love me, then I expect you to protect me from it!

“I’ll protect you, I promise, from anything you want,” he’ll have promised.

“Oh yes, the great protector. But I’m not a poor sailor, Johnny,” she’ll have said. “Who’s going to protect me from you, and your callous honesty and fairness?”

She’ll have returned his baffled, wounded expression with a serious one of her own, and then, finally, broken out in a wide, mischievous smile…

Somehow, his job as a ship visitor will have become integral to the organic chemistry of their small, dual world—her way of conceiving of it as a strangely fantastical yet heroic occupation, which he can share only with her. But he’ll never have realized the degree to which she felt that way until that night in the bar downtown, the night of the day he’ll have found the
Urus
and her abandoned crew. She’ll have arrived ahead
of him for once, Ariadne, four young men, and another young woman seated on couches and stuffed chairs around a low table in a darkened nook. Three of the men he’ll recognize as university friends of Ariadne. Very European, the way they look, the mood around the table, you’d know it at a glance. Or rich South American, same thing practically. All smoking. That relaxed, placid sociability. The other woman, reddish hair cut in a page boy, slender legs in silky green slacks hooked over the high back of her chair, torso twisting down like a mermaid’s, elbows propped on the sea rock of an armrest. Roberto, from Milan, a law student, also a concert pianist, will scoot over on the stubby couch without uncrossing his long legs so that the Ship Visitor can squeeze in next to Ariadne, whose hands will lightly clasp his biceps as he turns to receive her lipstick-perfume-tobacco-martini-flavored kiss. She’ll briskly wipe the lipstick from his mouth with a cocktail napkin, saying, “We’ve been discussing the fall of the Berlin Wall, Johnny.” But he’ll soon be feeling ill at ease, big and clumsy, in this company, as he knows he pretty much should, as he knows doesn’t bother her in the least, so long as he doesn’t make a noisy, defensive fool of himself, which he never really does, unless he’s drunk too much. Roberto will still be wearing Ariadne’s tan cloth raincoat, which she lent him one afternoon when he dropped by to visit and it started to rain. Apparently he won’t have taken it off since—testament to his otherwise unremonstratively, painfully, politely borne unreciprocated love. Wearing it to class, outside in weather too cold for its scant protection, probably to bed. He absolutely will not give it back. Which Ariadne will have been at least pretending to find amusing, Roberto not having any idea that it’s just this kind of silliness she’s seen enough of and finds pathetically boyish. The raincoat is many sizes too small, the sleeves stopping many inches above his wrists and long, pale, effete strangler’s fingers, bunching ridiculously under his arms. And yet it won’t look nearly as ridiculous on him as it should. Everything underneath Armani or some damned thing, cashmere scarf around his neck, Adam’s apple peeking over it, his smooth face of a young hawk, brilliant blue eyes, sensual-petulant lips, slightly mussed, dirty blond hair. Just the kind of boy anyone else might expect Ariadne to fall for,
which, bless her, will be exactly why she hasn’t. Which must seem terribly unfair to Roberto. The Ship Visitor, just as invisibly and defiantly smirking back at them, will know they—Roberto and the other two, the French philosophy grad student and the Argentine economics grad student—think he represents just some passing lunacy of Ariadne’s, that someday he’ll be gone and they’ll finally get to say, “Oh, Ariadne, how could you have?”