Two Time (21 page)

“Killing yourself is good for sales, but it puts a cap on future production.”

“Sure wasn’t making it playing cards. Hard to be much good when you’re half-stewed all the time.”

“Unlike Walter Whithers, who Burton said was a first-rate poker player.”

“Way out of my league,” said Hodges.

“Don’t sell yourself short. That game in Springs is taught in art school.”

“If you met Joyce you can understand why Whithers needed to get out of the house. Probably motivated his card skills. Which I heard were considerable.”

“You did?”

“The Spoon’s been open for about twenty years. Used to be a regular game there. Serious. All whales.”

“As in the prince or the big fish?”

“Casino talk for high rollers. Big bet boys. At least that’s what you heard from the people who worked there, parking cars, serving drinks, muscling drunks out the door. When you work in the restaurant business, nothing’s private. By the way, whales aren’t fish. They’re mammals. Descended from herbivores. Used to walk on land. Weren’t as big then.”

“Still probably couldn’t fit em in a fry pan.”

I heard some rustling feet up toward the bow and looked in time to see Eddie launch into hysterics over a pair of swans who’d finally decided to glide into view. I don’t know what it was about the big white birds, but they really pushed
his buttons. Maybe because, unlike other victims of Eddie’s belligerence toward all things feathered, swans were inclined to fight back, rearing their long necks and spitting out a deep wet hiss, which scared the crap out of me even if it didn’t deter him.

Hodges’s Shih Tzus joined in the clamor, Eddie’s supporting cast, heedless and vocal, black-and-white balls of reckless frenzy. Hodges stood up in the cockpit and yelled something at the swans, who must have understood, because they quickly turned and slid back around the stern of the hulking houseboat next door. Eddie looked like he was about to give chase, but I told him to cool it, so he sat down on the bow of the boat and stared at the water, ready for the next encounter. The Shih Tzus fluttered back into the cockpit so Hodges could acknowledge their audacity. He had a hand for each, to scratch behind their ears.

“I was just remembering those games at the Silver Spoon. Whithers and Charlie Garmin, Edgar Rose, the producer, ah, what’s-his-name, Balducci, Enrico Balducci, developer, vintner—that’s another word for winemaker. Has a place on the North Fork. I don’t remember who else.”

“Good recall.”

“I remember a lot of stuff, Sam. But only stupid stuff. It’s a curse. Can’t remember where I put my checkbook or whether it’s Dotty’s birthday or the day my wife died. But this wasn’t that hard. Big topic of conversation during the late late shift. It’s tough when you’re a waiter or a bartender—where do you go when you’re done work? The guys from the Spoon would come into the Pequot after knocking off, knowing we’d serve them as long as they wanted. I used to consider closing hours sort of an academic concept.”

“A. legal theory.”

“Exactly.”

With breakfast finished I helped Hodges clean up and get the cockpit of the boat shipshape. I was about to start jogging back to Oak Point when he suggested sailing me back, since he was planning to cruise up to Sag Harbor to relieve Dotty, who’d opened the joint and would be working through lunch. After almost breaking his neck, and succeeding with a stack of ribs, Hodges was having trouble working the eight-, ten-hour days he’d worked for forty years. He’d been lucky enough to find a kid to manage the kitchen, and the rest Dotty could handle on her own, more or less. The medical people had wanted to keep him in physical therapy, but he felt that’s what sailboats were for, and since he already owned one, a cruise up across the Little Peconic, atop Noyac Bay and under Shelter Island to Sag Harbor every once in a while was therapy enough.

We cast off the dock lines and Hodges motored out of the slip and eased along the dock-lined channel and out into Hawk Pond. The light delivered by the Canadian air was hard and brittle, but would deepen as the sun burned up and swept away the morning haze. The tall grasses that filled the marshland bordering the pond swayed in the wind, and cormorants were lining up along the booms of the boats moored in the pond to dry out their wings and crap white graffiti all over the blue-and-tan sail covers. The wind was on our nose through most of the course. Then the channel made a right turn and it hit the port side hard enough to heel us over, an accomplishment given the heavy displacement of Hodges’s stolid old Gulf Star. I checked the wind gauge, which showed around thirteen knots, which was high for the protected reaches of Hawk Pond. Ten minutes later we were through the cut and out into the Little Peconic, beating upwind under power through a succession of buoys that led to the deep water. The boat started to meet a stiff chop
shoved up by the northwesterly, but was unperturbed. The gauge showed about fifteen knots of actual wind, which wasn’t much of a challenge for the heavy sea-worn cruiser now that we were underway. Hodges stood behind the wheel and squinted into the light spray that bounced off the dodger, one hand to keep us on course, the other to finish his cup of coffee. I lit a cigarette and followed suit, savoring the bitter concoction like a crystal snifter of vintage brandy. The Shih Tzus were happily stowed below, but Eddie was still out on the bow, face to the wind, fur combed back, legs spread to compensate for the motion of the boat, watchful but otherwise composed.

Once clear of the buoys and into open water, Hodges came up into the wind and I helped him hoist the mainsail. The main halyard winch was in sore need of lubrication, and the halyard itself was bristling with frayed cords, but we got the big sail up and tight behind the mast, so Hodges could fall off toward Sag Harbor and kill the engine. This was my favorite moment, when the sounds of the tightening sails and the gentle slap of water on the hull, the creak and rattle of the rigging replace the chug and rumble of the little diesel, and the vertiginous slant of the boat as she finds her balance and accelerates up into the wind tells you the hand of nature is now engaged in your propulsion, and all pretense of human supremacy is rendered inconsequential.

Without waiting for Hodges to ask, I unfurled the jib and set it a crank or two shy of the lifelines, flattening the chaotic telltales and pulling the boat up close to her hull speed. I knew from a lifetime of plying the waters of the Little Peconic that we needed to be tight to the wind to make decent headway toward a place where he could drop me off and still have a reasonable sail up through the messy race above Jessup’s Neck and on to Sag Harbor. After tightening
and tailing off the jib sheets I looked back at Hodges manning the helm and he grinned, as all seaman do under a set of wind-filled sails and a sunny day. I saw him then as a young man, rough and ugly but receptive to the resonance of sun and salted air, and the cruel unpredictability of the water, the way it seduced you into numb devotion, blind to its terrors until it was too late.

“You know, in about four hours we could have this thing clear of Montauk and be on our way to France. Or the coast of Africa,” he yelled over the wind.

“We could see the lions playing on the beach.”

“Or stroll down the Champs Élysées.”

“Fine if you’re into Pernod.”

“All talk and no action. Tighten down that boomvang, will you?”

Eddie worked his way back toward the cockpit down the windward side of the boat on cautious legs, casting occasional glances over the gunwale at the foam churning out from the hull. For a rejected lubber of a mutt he had great instincts for the random kick and pull of sea movement, demonstrated on both Hodges’s old cruiser and Burton’s elegant thoroughbred. I was poised for a leap across the deck if he got into trouble, but as always, he slalomed through the rigging and bounded nimbly into the cockpit.

“Where’s the catch? I was expecting a mouthful of bass.”

Instead he gave me the privilege of scratching under his chin for a few seconds before scooting down the companion-way to join the Shih Tzus.

Our point of sail exposed us to the full brunt of the rising sun as it crested the top of the short ridge that ran like a leafy spine down the center of the South Fork. Along the coast were little bay-front cottages like mine, slowly but inevitably succumbing to demolition and rebirth. I’d been watching the
process from the dirt side as I jogged along the coastal sand roads, but you could see it better out here on the bay. Some of the new houses were very beautiful, architectural jewels crafted by gentle, thoughtful people in cool, sophisticated studios in East Hampton, or Amagansett, or high above the tangle of city streets. Others were clumsy or idiotic derivations, prideful, foolish assertions of self-importance or blind ignorance.

As it always was, as it always will be.

“What say we haul over to Jessup’s Neck, then come back around to drop you off,” said Hodges. “We’re doing over six knots. Gives us plenty of time.”

“No argument here. All I have to do today is help stick a Giant Finger Up the Ass of Authority.”

“I thought you were on a reform kick.”

“Technical assistance only.”

I told him what I knew about Butch Ellington’s project; Amanda had left me a note that the Council Rock was in session later that afternoon. Hodges made some trenchant comment about the dynamic tension between the forces of abstract and representational art, though not quite in those words, but otherwise kept his concentration on steering the boat toward Jessup’s Neck, the sandy wooded peninsula and bird refuge that defined the line between the Little Peconic and Noyac Bays. He took us just shy of the shallow water along the beach before cranking the wheel hard and bringing us about, interrupting the breezy peace with the clamor and commotion of flapping sails as we stuck the bow through the wind and retrimmed for the trip back.

“I never had what you’d call a cuddly relationship with authority myself over the years,” said Hodges. “But I’m not sure I’d want to be sticking them with any fingers, assuming you could find the point of entry.”

“Always the danger they’ll stick you back.”

“That’s my thinking.”

In what felt like a few minutes we were off the pebble beach at the tip of Oak Point. I furled the jib and Hodges dropped the mainsail into a loose pile between the lazy jacks, and Eddie bounded up from below to watch me drop the anchor off a roller on the bow. He knew all this activity preceded a trip to shore in the dinghy, another chance to set a bold figure at the bow of the inflatable as it shot across the water. I cinched a piece of dock line around his collar just to be safe, while Hodges manned the smelly antique outboard that drove the dinghy into shore. I’d seen my cottage, and what was once Reginas, from the water side a million times, though the sight never quite lost its novelty. The houses from a distance looked like miniatures, scale models dwarfed by the surrounding oak trees and the wooded hills beyond.

As we closed in on the beach I could see Amanda in her recliner settled in with book and bikini. Next door was another figure, sitting in one of my Adirondack chairs. Also a woman, with a flare of kinky strawberry-blond hair and a white eye patch. She looked agitated, even from several hundred yards, waving what looked like a big beige-colored envelope.

“Yeah, she’s better all right,” I yelled to Hodges over the snarl of the old two-cycle outboard. “God help me.”

E
DDIE AND
I waded in the last few feet so Hodges could spin the dinghy around without grounding the propeller and head back to his boat, affording Jackie the special joy of being greeted by a wet, sandy dog.

“Love you, too, Eddie, get the hell off of me. That heap of yours was in the drive, so I thought you were jogging.”

She looked a lot better than the last time I’d seen her. Someone had evolved my bandage redesign into something even more elegantly discreet. And her color was back. Kind of a fleshy spotted pink.

“You were half right. Want some coffee?”

She held up the envelope, which turned out to be a manila file folder.

“Yes. And a conversation.”

I really didn’t need any more coffee, I just wanted to get the taste of Hodges’s hand-picked beans out of my mouth. When I got back she had the folder open on her lap, with a
binder clip securing the short stack of papers against the breeze coming off the water. She had a pen stuck in her mouth and a pencil behind her ear, probably forgotten there.

“The first thing to decide,” she said, “is whether to burn these right away or wait until tonight when we might need the heat.”

“Okay I’m listening.”

“Most of the stuff is blacked out. Understandably, given the risk he was already taking.”

“Who?”

“Web.”

“You did it.”

“Kind of. Took a protracted game of twenty questions. More like twenty thousand. And things like, if I’m getting warm, hum a few bars of
La Marseillaise.’”

“Takes persistence.”

“And a little tit, per your suggestion. Though I’d have done that anyway.”

“And?”

She pulled a piece of yellow legal paper out of the middle of the stack and clipped it on the top. It was covered with her handwriting. She put it up to her chest and cleared her throat.

“Where do you think Jonathan ranked in his class at the Harvard Business School?”

“Is this another twenty questions?”

“Come on. You’d do it to me.”

“I don’t know. First.”

“Sure should’ve, given his performance. Though it’s hard to graduate at the top of your class when you never graduate.”

“Really.”

“Or even matriculate. Not according to Harvard. And they’re sticklers on things like admission and tuition.”

“He didn’t go?”

“Not officially. He somehow managed to sneak into some courses and even submitted papers that impressed his professors, until they discovered he wasn’t actually enrolled in the school.”

“Gosh.”

“All I have is the copy of a memo from one of his professors to the Dean of Admissions. Alternately apologetic, or defensive, about getting snookered, and full of admiration for the quality of Jonathan’s work. It ends with something like, if Mr. Eldridge ever decides to engage with the university in an appropriate fashion, assuming the absence of legal encumbrances, I fully recommend we consider his candidacy very seriously, yadda, yadda.’ I think Web let me see this as a good summary of the situation. Took me about three stanzas into the French national anthem, but I got the gist.”