The Ordinary Seaman (39 page)

It never even occurred to Elias that it would turn out to be nearly impossible to find replacement circuit breakers for a circa 1970 made-in-Japan generator. Just the other afternoon he and Mark argued about it up on the bridge, shouting. Elias started talking about buying a whole new generator switchboard, said it would cost about thirty thousand dollars. That was just a bit less than what Mark had left in the bank, and he was resolved not to put in another cent. And Elias couldn’t go back to Kate for more. What do they owe already? Including the crew’s wages, about a hundred and fifty grand.

Elias is flying out to Los Angeles today. Because of the much heavier Asian trade in the West Coast ports, the scrap yards out there are more likely to turn up the circuit breakers. This is probably their last chance. Elias could hardly have asked Mark to go. Elias can hardly get him out to the ship. Mark can’t bear the sight of the
Urus
anymore. He can’t bear the sight of
them
anymore, useless nitwits.

Last night, after Kate and Elias’s pathetically pretentious dinner party, where at least he got to sit next to Moira Meer, he and Elias dismissed themselves to go to a bar for a nightcap and a little business chat. Kate and a friend were doing dishes in the kitchen down at one end of the Imperial Loft, Kate wearing some probably Soho designer maternity
apron and looking gorgeous, bathed in muted industrial lighting amidst all the restored old metal shapes of a turn-of-the-century rum still Elias had found in the Amazon and brought back in crates, with Kate’s money—huge kettles converted to cabinets, condensation tubes hung with utensils, smokestack-steam-whistle-looking things fitted with lights.

“Now, Mark,” Kate sweetly thundered across that vast interior tundra, “you leave my savings alone! It’s expensive having a kid!”

At the bar Elias wasted no time. He said, “We might have a bit of a problem.”

“No kidding.” Mark was already drunk but feeling elated about Moira Meer, one more bourbon he was going to be all over the place, but he ordered one anyway.

Elias clutched a pint of beer without even drinking from it. He said, “This is serious, Mark.”

“Moira’s a wonderful—”

“Mark, shut up. Bernardo had an accident. He burnt himself.”

“The old guy?”

“Bernardo. The waiter.”

“I kinda like that guy.” Just that night, he’d told Moira about the pistachios and pink-lipped sailors and she’d giggled.

“I treated him this morning—”

“Oh, come on, Elias!”

“It’s just a burn. Second degree, mainly.”

“Elias—”

“Mark, for fuck’s sake, I studied for two years, I’ve always kept it up, I was practically licensed in London, I—”

“I know, Doc, I know, the shamans,” said Mark. Elias’s high-tech greenhouse and herb garden on the roof of the loft, his little alchemist’s laboratory. Even Kate lets him give her stuff for her pregnancy and something made from pineapple extract for her tennis elbow.

“He goes to the hospital we could end up sued for everything we’ve got and will ever have. We could even end up in jail, do you realize that? Do you know the Jones Act?”

“All right,” said Mark.

“Not to mention,” said Elias, “that we’d be responsible for the medical bills.”

“John Paul Jones, it’s named for?”

Elias shut his eyes. “No.” He opened them, coldly glaring. “You catch my drift, don’t you? We cannot risk taking him to the hospital.”

“So how bad is it?”

“It’s just a burn. He’s healing. I’m fairly sure I prevented an infection. Those idiots tried cleaning him up with a dirty rag.”

“So what do I do?”

“Just leave him be. He’s being looked after now. Tomaso Tostado—”

“Jesus, their names. Which one’s he?”

“The one with a gold tooth. He and Panzón are changing his dressings, giving him his medication. I showed them what to do.”

“You gotta admit, Barbie’s a pretty hilarious name for a guy looks like that.”

“Hmn.”

Mark ordered another bourbon.

And then he said, “Elias. That Moira Meer. I mean, what a really wonderful, remarkable girl.”

“You can’t have her,” Elias petulantly snapped, eyes flashing. “She’s mine. And if she’s not mine, she’s Phil’s.”

“She’s—
what
did you say?
Phil’s?”
Phil the Landfill?

“Moira would be good for Phil.”

“Elias, she’d be good for
me.
Anyway, who the hell are you to—What the fuck you mean, she’s yours!”

“You think you’re God’s gift to women, Mark,” said Elias. “I’ve got news for you. You’re not.”

“Me? I’m
God’s gift to women? Wow, Elias.”

God’s gift to women! If he were feeling any more demoralized, he’d fuck Miracle.

* * *

Mark Baker and Elias Tureen had met sixteen years before, at Bley College, a venerably dilapidated and sufficiently ivy-covered, little coed private college that lured most of its students from prep schools and affluent northeastern suburbs: kids who hadn’t been accepted to the better schools but whose parents still wanted to pay that level of tuition and board. Bley College was situated in upstate New York’s snow belt, amidst frozen Finger Lakes. Every November psychologists were sent into the old steam-heated dorms, where no one who’d ever grown up to be famously eminent had ever scratched initials into an old wooden sill or door, to counsel the students against the suicidal depressions inevitably brought on by the long, brutal winters. Elias was a transfer student living on Mark’s floor. It was unusual for anyone to transfer to Bley; the most exalted idea about the place was that it was a good school to transfer out of if you had the grades, a second-chance sort of place during an era when second chances were, perhaps, especially prized (they all had been taking drugs since they were about fourteen and spent their freshman year realizing they weren’t going to be poets after all). Most upperclassmen lived in fraternities or off campus, so the transfers were sifted in among the freshmen. In Mark’s dorm there were three, two Vietnam vets from nearby farming towns, there on the G.I. Bill, one of whom looked nearly forty and kept a pet lizard under his bed and who dropped out after just a few weeks; and Elias Tureen, who’d grown up in Mexico City, where his father, British, was a former journalist turned investment analyst, and his mother, Greek-American, ran a small art gallery. He’d gone to private schools in Mexico City, where he’d been precocious but wild, already full of romantic ideas about an adventurous life out in the world like his own father had, covering wars and revolutions during the fifties and into the sixties. At the age of sixteen Elias had entered Mexico’s most prestigious nautical academy, La Escuela Náutica at Veracruz, where he’d chosen to major in mechanical engineering and engine plant studies rather than in navigation and deck officer training because that seemed the most practical, and also more romantically rugged. The training and education there were excellent, but the discipline was severe. After a year spent circling the world
in the engine room of the academy’s training ship, back in Veracruz, at the beginning of his fourth year and already confined to his quarters for curfew violations, he’d been caught with marijuana and expelled. Bley College had accepted Elias as a junior engineering major. Several Ivy League schools, according to Elias, had accepted him as a sophomore, so he’d chosen Bley. That was Elias’s résumé as he described it, then.

Mark was not a freshman, he was a junior, and the resident adviser on Elias’s floor of their coed dormitory. He probably didn’t have the grades to transfer out and up. No, he definitely didn’t have the grades. But he loved Bley. In his own way, he’d shined there. At Bley he’d found an acceptance that he’d never known before, an outer peace that soon became almost an inner one. Mark’s wholesome, cheerful demeanor—the wholesomely cheerful one he had back then—came partly from his shyness, partly from his having grown up in suburban Peterborough, New Hampshire, and partly from his joy in being away from a father, mother, and sister who lived as if they violently despised one another, and him. Mark was the quiet one, whom his father was given to beating on with a belt and open-handed wallops and knee kicks to the back, often saying, I’ll wipe that silly grin off your face. His parents owned a chain of dry cleaners, one in every thriving New Hampshire ski resort. In his hometown, where he was not especially good at any sport—terrible at hockey, an acceptable skier, bored by fishing, hunting, “Funny Car” races—his brilliant, year-younger sister, Linda, had gained a notoriety that had oppressed and depressed Mark for years. She was a miraculous girl, really, one leg shrunken by polio beneath the knee but a busty, high-spirited and defiant beauty, a straight-A student who hung with the baddest girls and greaser boys, who by the ninth grade was already known as the
very
loosest girl in town, affectionately nicknamed Lousy Linda (she was destined to go on to Stanford; despite the peg shin she swaggered along on like a pirate, unverified rumors of summer vacations spent as an exotic stripper in San Francisco circulated among enviously left-behind former classmates for years; Linda was now a heart surgeon in her second year
of residency at San Francisco General Hospital, living in Berkeley with her husband, a musician and record producer, and their two children). So Mark hadn’t had an especially happy adolescence and had arrived at Bley College a virgin. At Bley the girls found Mark naive, cute, and sweetly, fashionably neurotic: New York City Jewish girls who dressed like rich gypsies and whose fathers were psychiatrists; extravagantly spoiled yet doting Long Island girls; California hippie girls; arty girls from everywhere. Only the WASP prep school girls were indifferent to Mark’s newfound charm, but they were like a separate species, seemingly indifferent to anybody who didn’t give off the same pheromones. During his freshman year a famous mystical poet had come all the way to Bley to give a reading, and when he spotted Mark sitting eagerly in the second row of the auditorium, he turned to the student girl charged with tending to his needs during his visit, and said, Who’s that angelic cherub? I bet the girls love to mother him. He has Federico García Lorca’s light in his eyes.

Lorca’s light. Yeah, right. Mark’s newly discovered inner sensitivity had not revealed him to be a poet after all, but the girl was in his creative writing class and was a total Lorca freak; she was so struck by what the visiting poet said that she led Mark back to her dorm from the postreading party that night, ordered her roommate to go sleep somewhere else, and fucked him. Honest to goodness, that’s how he lost his virginity. Lorca’s light, can you believe it!

And now Bley College had even made him a resident adviser. It was like a reward for the cultivated but not dishonest, quietly cheerful sensitivity that Mark had discovered inside himself at Bley. His parents were certainly happy that his room and board were free now, one less thing to torment him about during school breaks. As an RA, he had his own room. Up and down the long hallway on his floor rooms shared by freshman girls alternated with those shared by freshman boys. And all the way down at one end of the hall lived Elias Tureen, the crew-cut transfer student who’d grown up in Mexico but spoke with a British accent, who’d spent three years enduring the military discipline of a nautical academy and a year at sea, and who immediately began to terrorize
his freshman roommate, a premed student from New Rochelle who had styled, feathery hair in the manner of Jane Fonda
inKlute
and who played Bread on his stereo all day. Davey was his name. Not David or Dave. Davey had a girlfriend at nearby Cornell, they’d been going steady since junior high. He was going to be on the golf team. He had excellent study habits, which meant he was at Bley because he wasn’t very bright, yet he always found time to tie up the phone talking to his girlfriend, or spent hours primping his hair with a portable hand dryer and eating the grilled cheese sandwiches he made in his portable oven, listening to Bread. Soon, every time Davey played Bread, Elias put some raw-throated Mexican bolero chanteuse on his own stereo, or some howling mariachi band, and turned the volume all the way up, sat at the edge of his bed facing his stereo with a bottle of cheap tequila in his hand screaming and howling along.

When students had problems with their roommates, or any other problems they felt like talking about, they were supposed to come to Mark, their resident adviser. And they often did. The boys especially knocked softly at the door during the late hours of the night, with their eyes red from marijuana or crying or both, slipped in to sit on his little couch and spill their troubles. The girls could go upstairs to talk to Tish Carter, the female RA on that floor; but sometimes they came to Mark, and sometimes he slept with them. It was easy, because often that was why they’d come. When they lay on his bed in the deepest hours of the night, the conversation having switched from the usual problems with parents or friends or boyfriends, and suddenly started talking about sex in the way that girl from California had, talking about her summer passion with a surfer who was now in jail or something, meticulously and longingly describing their fires on the beach and how happy she’d been lying there naked and stoned on her back in the sand looking up at the stars and listening to the waves while he ate her out for hours, for hours, ate her out for hours, Bro. They’d get themselves and Mark so turned on, well, what were you supposed to do?

Davey had come several times to complain about his roommate. At first, Mark advised that Davey and Elias come to some agreement about taking turns enduring each other’s music taste. He was reluctant
to impose on Elias, who seemed so aloof and mocking and
foreign.
Mark was afraid of Elias. With his crew cut and tall, lean build, his dark, narrow face like the imprint of a forearm smash in wet sand, his unnervingly somber eyes. Conflicts over music tastes, those were the sorts of problems roommates should be mature and socialized enough to solve themselves. Whenever he passed Elias in the hall or ran into him in the showers, Elias seemed to scoff at him silently. Or he would put on a garishly whinnying voice and say, “How do you do, Mr. Adviser?” One night Mark was walking down the hall and Elias and two freshman football scholarship guys and a couple of girls in nighties were sitting in the hallway together drinking tequila and beer and smoking pot—it was against the rules to do that, in the hallway—and Elias shouted at his back, “What fucking advice
doyou
have to give,
motherfucker!”