“Because I want you and the children to get away and have a good time,” he replied. “Lisa’s always had a crush on Jimmy,” he went on, smiling at his daughter, “and Neil Loken’s a hunk, if you like the type.”
“Give me back my cookie!” Skippy said abruptly.
“What’s the type?” Jeanne asked, remembering that the previous summer Bob had found the captain officious and remote.
“You’ve had enough,” announced Lisa.
“Horatio Hornblower,” Bob replied. “The quiet he-man always standing tall on the poopdeck squinting into the salt spray, letting everyone know he’s in command.”
“I have not,” Skippy whispered in his squeaky voice. “I’ve had six, same as you.”
“Well, we’ve had enough.”
“You make him sound like a pain in the neck,” said Jeanne.
“I have not,” Skippy said firmly. “Give me—”
“Let go!” Lisa hissed as Skippy’s little body sprawled across the tablecloth, lunging for the plate of cookies.
“Ouch! You shit!” said Skippy.
“Skip!” Bob Forester exclaimed. “Don’t swear like that, and sit down!”
“She pinched me.”
“Lisa, leave Skip’s punishment to us,” Jeanne said wearily.
“He was stealing a cookie,” Lisa insisted with dignity.
“I was not!” Skippy exclaimed.
Bob erupted finally from his chair and pulled his son firmly back into his seat, twice striking him sharply on the hand, Jeanne wincing with each slap. As the boy pouted and fought back tears Bob resumed his seat and looked self-consciously back at Lisa and Jeanne.
“Yes, now, where were we?” he said.
“At sea,” said Jeanne ironically.
“Oh, yes, Neil,” Bob went on, adjusting his cloth napkin in his lap, his narrow eyes scowling. “He’s too quiet to be a pain in the neck.” His eyes crinkled into a smile. “You have to be aware of his loud quietness in order to be annoyed. Some people like him. Women, I imagine, would find him attractive.”
“Not if he never leaves the poopdeck,” Jeanne commented.
Bob glanced at his watch and stood up, smiling awkwardly.
“Oh, Frank tells me he’s perfectly willing to come down to… shall we say, ride frailer vessels?”
Jeanne glanced over at Lisa.
“Daddy means he can be a makeout artist,” she explained to her mother.
Jeanne laughed for the first time that day.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said.
“Mommy?” said Skippy.
“Yes, dear?”
“If there’s going to be a war, I think we should eat all the cookies now.” And this time they all laughed.
But when Bob prepared to return to Washington twenty minutes later, she didn’t laugh.
He called her over to him and took her in his arms and said simply, “I love you.” For years he hadn’t said the words; their separations were marked by such parting comments as “Where did you leave the keys to the Rabbit?” or “I hope you left the refrigerator well stocked.” But that evening, just when she felt herself most alienated from him and their life together, he said, “I love you.”
She looked across at him, her large dark eyes widening with both surprise and attention.
“All right” was all she could say.
“Go down to Point Lookout tonight,” he went on. “Get on the boat. Forget the mess the world’s in.”
Again at first she could only stare at him.
“You come too,” she said impulsively, feeling a sudden fear.
“I’ve got my job,” he said.
“Leave it,” she countered desperately.
He smiled softly, a tinge of sadness in it.
“I like my job,” he replied.
And she felt the wall fall between them again. As he started to turn, though, she grasped his arm and held it.
“You’re a good man,” she said.
“Really?” he said, with that same half-sad smile.
They looked at each other, and for the first time she saw that he was afraid too. Then she saw the emotion click off and the computer come back on. He frowned.
“Did you remember to get some frozen dinners in the freezer?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Good,” he said, pecked her cheek, and was gone.
With Vagabond becalmed Neil finally had Jim put the seven-horsepower outboard on the inflatable dinghy to tow the trimaran into the docks of Tangier Island. Earlier, even after the wind had fallen to mere puffs in the late afternoon, they’d been able to ride the incoming tide northward toward Crisfield. But as the sun set and the tide was about to turn against them they were still almost fifteen miles short of their goal. Finding himself only a mile off the little village of Tangier and needing to let Frank know what had happened to them, Neil had Vagabond towed in with the dinghy.
He moored her at the end of the gas dock, which was closed for the night. With her three white hulls gleaming under the glow of the dock lights, the fifty-foot trimaran lay among the old fishing boats and conventional stinkpots like a futuristic fighter plane among World War II relics. But towing her in was a joke: like pulling a space satellite with a tricycle.
While he had Jim secure and adjust the spring lines and fenders he went into his cabin to change for going ashore. He was tired now, the dull fatigue of trying for six hours to nurse a sailing vessel toward her goal with winds that sometimes wouldn’t ruffle a feather on a flea. He poured himself a shot of brandy and switched on the shortwave radio. After he had pulled off his blue jean cutoffs, he stood naked for a moment trying to tune in the BBC frequency. He finally located it and, after pulling on a pair of pants, sat back on his bunk with the brandy and listened. The cultured English announcer reported with the usual stylized indifference that a flotilla of thirty private boats had left England for Ireland or the Azores, that international flights out of the country were booked solid, with near hysteria reigning at Heathrow. The exodus was stirring up a national outcry, and one M.P. categorized the fugitives as “no better than rats deserting a sinking ship,” an analogy that made Neil smile sardonically: “sinking ship” was a devastatingly apt metaphor for Great Britain on the eve of a possible nuclear war.
When the BBC announcer began to discuss more parochial events, Neil turned the set off.
He was tired and depressed, a combination he knew from experience often went together. He felt a restless need for a woman, a feeling he knew was often associated with low-level anxiety. It was the Mideast crisis, of course, but also the fact that in a few hours Frank would be joining them and Neil would lose his freedom. He always resented it when an owner first rejoined a boat he’d been living aboard as captain and king. The owner inevitably liked to run things differently, and he hated to relinquish the control that was his when he was sailing with just a crew. Frank was about the only owner he’d sailed with who consistently shared Neil’s exhilaration at the grueling joys of an ocean passage; Frank genuinely loved sailing, loved being out on the water, and wasn’t aboard simply to impress clients or make a few women, but Neil was still a little depressed at the prospect of his return.
Jim interrupted his gloom by shouting down the hatchway that he was going to change and spruce up. Neil stood up and searched for a clean sport shirt. Jim might be a sailor like his father, but this trip north had been too easy a passage to be a true test. In the last four hours of their crawling with the tide Jim had given up on sailing and spent his time with his guitar and cassette player. Well, that was cool. He himself had read half a novel.
Glancing at his watch he saw that it was nine ten. He quickly switched on the shortwave radio again and tried tuning it to a ham radio operator he’d discovered on the trip north who broadcast sometimes at nine. After the news from the BBC, listening to a farmer from East Tennessee might be a welcome relief. Soon he had located the farmer’s gruff voice, speaking as usual in a casual folksy monologue as if he were chatting with neighbors around a hot wood stove in mid-winter.