Outerbridge Reach Read online

  “Forget it,” Browne said good-humoredly. “Never mind.”

  “The heroic age of the bourgeoisie is over,” declared Fedorov, the naval Kremlinologist.

  Ward helped him toward the foot of the stairs.

  “So is the cold war, Teddy,” Browne said. “We’re all redundant.”

  Fedorov climbed like blind Oedipus, one hand on the banister, the other held out before him.

  “Rubbish heap of history,” he said fervently.

  Ward went up behind him, ready for a fall.

  On the train the next day, Browne watched the streetlighted slums of Philadelphia swing by, passing like time. The notion of twenty years gone was beginning to oppress him. In the dingy light of his shabby evening train, he felt himself approaching a new dimension, one in which he would have to live out the life he had made.

  Ever since deciding to deliver the Forty-five, he had been looking forward to the sail and an evening with Ward and Fedorov. Riding home, he was discontent and disappointed. The anxiety that haunted him had to do with more than the design of Altan’s latest boat and the state of the market. Old rages and regrets beset him. He felt in rebellion against things, on his own behalf and on behalf of his old friends.

  As midshipmen, the three of them had been fellow stooges and musketeers. They had found each other, lost souls amid the monumental ugliness of Bancroft Hall. They had been wrongos and secret mockers, subversives, readers of Thomas Wolfe and Hemingway. They had appeared “grossly poetic,” as Fedorov liked to say, naively literary in a military engineering school where the only acceptable art forms were band music and the shoe shine. They had survived to be commissioned by pooling their talents. Ward was a natural officer, in spite of his bookishness. Browne was athletic and, as the son of a diligent servant, skillful at petty soldiering. Fedorov tutored his friends in mathematics; they discouraged his tormentors and turned him out for Saturday inspections.

  Their bohemian longings went equally unappreciated outside the main gate. However painfully Browne and his friends might aspire to stronger wine and madder music, young civilian America was having none of them in the year 1968. Midshipmen were cleaning spittle off their dress blues that year.

  They had all gone to Vietnam after graduation and watched America fail to win the war there. This insufficiency was often a more remote spectacle for the Navy than for the other services, but Browne, Ward and Fedorov had all worked close to the core. They had each done their jobs but only Ward had excelled, for a while.

  In the piss-yellow light of Penn Station, the hustlers and the homeless wandered into Browne’s path as he made his way from the track. What did they see, he wondered, when they looked at him? A tweedy, well-intentioned man. An enemy, but too big and still too young to be a mark. Checking the scene, he thought: Yet I also am an outsider. He had left for the Academy from Penn Station on a summer morning in 1964. It had been an occasion of joy.

  Riding the escalator to the upper level, he found himself wondering how, on that morning of departure, he might have imagined himself twenty years along. The image would have been a romantic one, but romantic in the postwar modernist style. Its heroic quality would have been salted in stoicism and ennobled by alienation. As an uncritical reader of Hemingway, he would have imagined his future self suitably disillusioned and world-weary. On the morning in question, he would not have had the remotest conception of what such attitudes entailed. He would have awaited world-weariness and disillusionment impatiently, as spurs to higher-class and more serious fun. Of course, not even Hemingway had enjoyed them very much in the end.

  At the top of the escalator, he encountered another tier of loiterers and, for security’s sake, put on his glasses. Confident and watchful, he passed unthreatened among the hovering poor. And combat, Browne thought. He would have imagined himself recalling combat. He would have expected combat to resemble Victory at Sea.

  In the empty corridor that led to Seventh Avenue, an image of the old Penn Station came to him as he had first seen it as a child. He had tried to embrace the ponderous columns whose span defied the human scale. They had been still standing when he left for Annapolis the first time. Vanished sunlight came to his recollection, streaming through enormous windows in great beams and bursts, streaming from the throne of heaven.

  Hearing his own echoing footsteps, he turned to look over his shoulder. Outside, teenagers debouching from a concert drifted along Seventh Avenue, looking covert and disorderly. Browne walked around the corner to the suburban-limousine ramp and boarded a car for home.

  His house was old and outsized, a mansion on the edge of a slum in an unprestigious outer suburb. Undoing the locks, he awakened his wife. When he went into the bedroom, she smiled and raised her arms to him. On a wooden tray beside her bed stood an empty bottle of white wine, a glass and a jug of water.

  “Oh,” he said, “you’re in good spirits, are you?”

  She laughed. “Yes, I’ve been writing all day. And listening to music and waiting for you.”

  “Good,” he said. He sat down on the bed beside her. “Christ, what a dumb couple of days. Between the boat and the market.”

  “Ross says they can fix it,” Anne told him.

  “You talked to him?”

  “I called to give him a piece of my mind. You might have gotten wet out there.”

  “Poor guy,” Browne said.

  “I think I really gave him a scare. He thought I was calling for the magazine.”

  “Ross is scared of you anyway,” Browne said. “You’re too much lady for him.”

  He was suddenly moved to desire, wild with it. It was as though various hungers had combined to focus themselves on the woman beside him. He surprised them both with his avidity.

  “Oh my dear,” she said softly.

  When they were done he lay awake listening to police sirens on the highway across the marsh. He felt as resigned to his private discontents as to the world’s.

  2

  A GOVERNMENT marimba band was playing in the lobby of the hotel when Strickland came down to pay off his crew. The sound man and cameraman were brothers named Serrano who Strickland believed had been charged by their government with reporting on his activities. The brothers Serrano took their leave with unsmiling formality. Strickland paid them in dollars. As he walked away toward the garden lounge, he heard one of them imitating his stammer. He did not turn around.

  For a moment, he stood in the doorway of the garden and watched the declining sun settle into the mountains. Then he saw his colleague Biaggio at a poolside table. Biaggio was signaling, urging him nearer, coaxing with both hands like the landing control man on an aircraft carrier. He went over to Biaggio’s table and sat down.

  “Eh,” he said, “Biaggio.” He enjoyed saying it.

  His friend Biaggio was in something of a state. Normally the man reposed within an aura of lassitude that weighted his every gesture.

  “I’m in love,” he told Strickland.

  “You’d . . . d . . don’t know what love is, Biaggio.”

  “Ha,” Biaggio told him, “it’s you who don’t know.”

  Strickland shook his head with an air of tolerant disgust.

  “You really have to dick everything that comes your way, don’t you? You’re like a fucking insect.”

  The languid Swiss journalist regarded Strickland with an expression of intelligent distress.

  “The earth is rising on new foundations,” he explained. “In the air—vitality. New beginnings. And this itself makes the heart prone.”

  “And the weenie vertical,” Strickland said. He looked around for a waiter but there were none in sight. “Who’s the lucky lady, I wonder?”

  “But you know her, Strickland. She’s named Charlotte. Charlotte . . . something.”

  “Sure,” Strickland said. “Charlotte Something. The little Hun who was au p . . pairing in New York.”

  Biaggio shrugged and sighed. “Her eyes are pure.”

  “I never noticed that,
” Strickland said. He stood up and went to the bar to buy a beer. The bar was selling Cerveza Hatuey, a Cuban beer, at ten dollars a pop.

  “You know, don’t you,” he told Biaggio, “that pure-eyed little Charlotte is fucking a minister of state.”

  “They’re friends,” Biaggio said.

  Strickland burst out laughing. His laughter was loud and explosive. Strickland was aware that his laughter discomfited others. That was fine with him.

  “They’re friends!” Strickland cried happily. He mimicked Biaggio’s Ticinese accent. “They are a-friendsa!”

  Biaggio appeared bored with his own disdain.

  “You’re embittered,” he said after a while. “Temperamentally you belong with the Contras.”

  “They’re no longer worthy of my attention,” Strickland said. “You’re in the Contra mode.”

  “Fuck you,” Strickland said. “I’m a man of the left. Wait until you see my film.”

  “Is it finished?”

  “Hell no, it’s not finished. It has to be cut. But I’ve shot all I need. So I’m short, as we used to say in Nam. I’m so short I’m almost gone.”

  “Strickland,” Biaggio said earnestly, “I have to borrow your jeep tomorrow. And your driver. I’m taking Charlotte to the front.”

  Strickland uncoiled a burst of merriment. Biaggio winced. The marimba band had stopped playing and Strickland’s unsound laughter attracted the attention of people at the nearby tables.

  “I myself,” he told the American, “don’t share this obsession to find absurdity everywhere. To find contemptible the honest impulse which—”

  “Get off the dime, Biaggio. What do you mean by ‘the front’?”

  Biaggio looked at him uneasily.

  “I was thinking of . . . thinking of going to Raton.” Seeing Strickland at the point of mirth, he raised an imploring hand. “Please,” he begged of his companion, “please don’t laugh.”

  “There’s a brigade headquarters in Raton,” Strickland said. “There’s an army airfield there. If Raton’s your idea of the front, I understand how you’ve survived so many wars. You can have the jeep for f . . fifty dollars if you’ll return it to Avis for me. You’ll have to drive it yourself because I’ve already paid off the driver.”

  Biaggio slapped his forehead.

  “You know I don’t drive.”

  “Then fly. Or get Charlotte to drive. Remind her not to hit any mines.”

  Strickland’s attention settled on the front pocket of Biaggio’s yellowing white shirt. With a quick predatory gesture he removed a laminated card from it before the Swiss could intercept his move.

  “Partito Comunista d’ltalia,” Strickland read from the card. “I suppose you’re going around town flashing this.”

  “And why not?” Biaggio demanded. “Since it’s mine.”

  Strickland tossed the card on the table.

  “The best thing is to be known as a Mason,” Biaggio said, retrieving the card. “The Masons run everything in this revolution. They are the true ruling cadre.”

  As the marimba orchestra took up a song of the people, a party of Americans entered the garden. Their overalls and metal-rimmed spectacles served to identify them as internationalists. Among them was a tall, dark-haired young woman whose skin had been turned the color of honey by the sun. Around her neck was the banda roja of the national youth movement. The two men watched her pass.

  “You know who that is, Biaggio? That’s Garcia-Lenz’s reserve popsie. She’s the backup for Charlotte.”

  “Bullshit,” Biaggio said.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Always the sous entendre,” Biaggio said loftily. He looked away.

  “I know the secrets of the heart, Biaggio.”

  Strickland went back to the bar for another beer. When he returned to Biaggio’s table, he found young Charlotte seated in his chair. Ignoring Biaggio’s impatient stare, he sat down with his beer.

  “This is Strickland,” Biaggio said curtly to his companion. The young woman, who had encountered Strickland in the field, gave him a wary glance. He returned what appeared to be an easy, amiable smile.

  “Hi, Charlotte. What’s this you have around your neck here?”

  Charlotte, like the young American woman who had settled several tables away, wore a red and black neckerchief. She blushed charmingly as Strickland displayed the banda to Biaggio.

  “I wear this,” she explained, “for solidaridad.”

  “Solidaridad,” Strickland repeated. “How about that? I’d like one of those. Where’d you get it?”

  Charlotte was encouraged by his naive admiration.

  “I have interviewed Compañero Garcia-Lenz,” she said with demure satisfaction. “And he has given it to me.”

  “No shit?” Strickland asked earnestly. “Hey, you’re right about her eyes, Biaggio.”

  “We have to go,” Biaggio said. “If you could give me the keys for the jeep. And also the papers.” He brought out his wallet and found it empty of bills. He seemed to search it for secret compartments.

  “Don’t be in such a hurry,” Strickland said. “I understand you were an au pair, Charlotte. Before you came down here? Is that right?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. “In the States.”

  “How was that?” Strickland asked her.

  The young woman laughed happily.

  “It is in Saddle River, New Jersey,” she said. “They are so conservative I have freaked them out.”

  “Is that right?”

  “And Nixon is there,” Charlotte reported. “In Saddle River, yes?”

  “No!” Strickland exclaimed. “Really?” He put his hand over hers on the table. “Sit tight, guys.” He stood up, backed off a step and made a placatory gesture. “Don’t go away.”

  “Strickland!” Biaggio wailed after him. “The jeep!”

  Strickland went directly to the table where the party of young Americans was sitting and approached the dark-haired girl with the red bandana.

  “Would you excuse me, please,” he said softly, bending over her. “May I introduce you to a v . . visitor?”

  Observing his defect of speech, the woman went sympathetic. Strickland expanded his smile so that it might irradiate the entire tableful of young Americans.

  “I know who you are,” the young woman said ironically, “but I don’t believe you know me.”

  She told him her name was Rachel Miller. He moved back her chair as she stood up to follow him.

  “Ah,” he said. “Raquel!”

  “Not Raquel,” she said. “Just Rachel.”

  Although there were only three chairs at the table, Strickland insisted that Rachel sit down. Standing across the table from the two young women, he looked at each in turn.

  “Charlotte, this is Rachel. Rachel, Charlotte.”

  Regarding Charlotte’s brave ribbon, Rachel seemed to pale slightly beneath her suntan. Charlotte remained cheerful.

  “And this is Biaggio,” Strickland told Rachel, indicating his friend. “A veteran of la soixante-buit. Is he a French spy, a Swiss hustler or an Italian Communist? No one knows.”

  “I don’t get it,” Rachel said. She had become alert.

  “Biaggio and I are researching the youth movement of Minister Garcia-Lenz,” Strickland explained. “We’re interviewing foreign members. Honorary members like yourselves. We’re wondering if there’s a common thread in their experience.”

  While not losing their good-natured expression, Charlotte’s features seemed to thicken and her comprehension to fade. Rachel was staring at Strickland in cold fury.

  “What’s that song?” Biaggio asked cheerfully. People were singing far off, somewhere in the streets outside the hotel.

  “That’s a revolutionary song,” Strickland said. “It’s called ‘A Clean Old Man Will Do.’”

  Charlotte’s lips moved in silent translation.

  “What I’m curious about,” Strickland went on, “is how foreign visitors like yourselves
are recruited for the movement. Do you read his works? Does he take you to see the hovel he claims to live in?”

  “What’s your problem?” Rachel asked.

  Charlotte appeared to have fallen asleep with her eyes open.

  “My problem is the bottom line,” Strickland explained. “The difference between what people say they’re doing and what’s really going on.”

  Biaggio shrugged and shook his head as though he were in conversation with himself.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t judge too harshly,” Strickland said. “The guy was a priest for about seventy years. He’s making up for lost time.”

  “What makes you so smart?” Rachel demanded. “Who do you really represent down here?”

  “What do you care?” Strickland asked her. “You’re just a tourist.” He turned to Biaggio. “Next year,” he said, “the old fuck will be giving them T-shirts. What would the T-shirts say, Biaggio?”

  “No pasarán!” Biaggio suggested. He and Strickland had a giggle together. Rachel took a deep breath, stood up slowly and went back to her table. Strickland sat down in her chair.

  “What the hell,” he said equably. He tossed the keys to his jeep toward Biaggio. “Enjoy yourself.” Then he leaned forward and spoke loudly to Charlotte, as though she were hard of hearing: “You too, liebchen. Drive carefully.”

  “You’re a bad element, Strickland,” Biaggio said when the keys were in his pocket. “A Trotskyite. A Calvinist.”

  “Goodbye, Biaggio.” He raised his voice again. “Ciao, Charlotte! Don’t run my pal on any mines!”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said faintly.

  “Forget him,” Biaggio told Charlotte as he led her away. “He cannot harm you.”

  Strickland turned to watch Rachel several tables over. She had taken off the scarf and she appeared to be crying. She sat in silence looking down at the table, taking no further part in conversation. After a while she got up and went toward the lobby. Strickland intercepted her just inside.

  “What now?” she asked him.

  “I want you to come with me.”

  “You must be crazy,” she said.

  “That could be it.”

  She made no move to leave but she said, “Leave me alone.”