If she’d only loosen up a bit, he thought,this trip would be a lot more interesting. I’m the only guy within a hundred miles and, hell, we both have nothing to lose from a little companionship.
He’d tried being soft and gentle, listening for hours as she finally told him about Dimona and the air force pilots. She explained again and again that she had no choice about sending the jet toward Damascus. It wasn’t her decision at all, in fact, since she was just following orders, she’d told him. He’d decided not to point out the irony of her excuse, “just following orders”—especially for a Jew, and especially for a Jew responsible for what was already being called the Islamic Holocaust.
He’d tried being domestic, whipping up the last of the fresh meat into a beef Wellington that would have impressed the guests at his parents’hotel. He tried being the tough soldier, telling her tales—mostly true—about manning the inshore patrol boat, dropping commandos on the beach in Lebanon.
But all they’d done was talk. He talked. She listened. She talked. He listened.
Levi was surprised during the first three weeks of their crossing at the amount of rum Debra put away. She drank without pleasure, as if she were taking medicine. Some days she started at breakfast and kept a glass going through the entire day, like a chain-smoker lighting one cigarette from the previous one. Levi assumed this drinking was something new to her. She can’t have drunk like this for many years, he thought. Not while maintaining her appearance, her health, her sanity.
It came to a head after three weeks, when Reuben stormed on deck swearing.
“Where the fuck is that second case of Bacardi,” she screamed at Levi. “I bought two cases. I told you to load them into the forward cabin. The first case is gone and I can’t find the second fucking case. I need it. Now. I need it.”
“There was only room for one case,” Levi answered. “It was that or the carton of extra provisions, and I made a decision. Hey, look, I never thought we’d go through even the first case of rum.”
Levi’s answer did not satisfy Reuben. She tried to speak, tried to yell, but only sputters came from her mouth. Instead, she stormed to the bow of the boat, stamped her feet on the deck and lay down, rolled into a ball, hugging her knees, rocking slowly from side to side.
Levi chose to leave her alone.
That evening, over dinner in the cockpit—a bluefish he’d caught with the trolling rod he left dangling from the boat’s stern rail—she tried to speak to him, failed, was silent, then sobbed. Levi rose from his seat and sat next to her, his arm around her shoulder. Debra leaned into him, her head against his chest.
Without the alcohol to dull her pain, to kill her thoughts, she ceased fighting and gave in to the fist that had been clamped on her stomach since she awoke at Dimona with the planes gone. Levi held her tightly as her body shook, sometimes softly as the pain drained from her, sometimes so violently he feared she’d fling herself over the side of the boat. He did not know what to say, so, uncharacteristically for him in such a situation with such a beautiful woman, he said nothing, just held her as the sun splashed into the western sea and the boat, guided by the autopilot and leaning gently with the wind in its sails, followed Columbus’s wake toward the sunset.
Eventually, her body and mind both tired. He carried her to the bunk in the forward cabin she had claimed for herself and, for the first time since he’d met her in Marbella, she slept through the night. He chose not to wake her for her late-night watch and remained in the cockpit himself until dawn.
Whether it was that night or the missing second case of Bacardi, Reuben seemed eased the next morning. Neither acknowledged what had happened the previous night, although both realized they had shared an intimacy more intense than simple intercourse would have been. Nonetheless, despite Levi’s hints, Debra rebuffed any further steps toward physical closeness. Levi felt like a teenager, taking pleasure from accidentally brushing against Reuben in the cramped cabin, thrilled by a goodnight peck on the cheeks from her. He sensed that she was not rejecting him, she was rejecting life itself—rejecting it as a gift she did not know if she deserved after what she had done.
So she claimed the foredeck during the day and the forward cabin at night. He ruled the cockpit. Inside the boat they were each shielded by an invisible zone of protection that the other was forbidden from entering. In that way, they sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, more like brother and sister than two young, healthy people, people who had lost important parts of themselves, he his country and his family, she her belief that she was a good person.
Their first landfall was the tiny island of Jost Van Dyke, a speck of land north of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. They tried to blend in with the fleet of bareboat charters filled with idling Americans trading several thousand dollars for a week of sunshine and warm breezes, beach bars and snorkeling. Levi and Reuben inflated the dinghy and rowed ashore, where they stretched their legs on the walk to the only grocery store in the small harbor, buying overpriced apples, oranges and potatoes shipped in from Florida. Before rowing back to the Hinckley, Levi persuaded Reuben to sit with him under a palm-frond umbrella at Binky’s Peace and Love Beach Bar.
“At least have a piña colada with me to celebrate our transatlantic crossing,” he urged. “This isn’t something you’re going to do every day.” He knew she would not refuse the alcohol.
“Okay,” she said warily, looking at the group of Americans at the next table glowing red from days of tropic sun blasting on their winter-pale skin. “Ply me with rum.” Maybe she was a bit severe with him. After all, the man had just brought her —and a tactical nuclear weapon—safely across the Atlantic Ocean. She smiled at him. “And sing the Banana Boat song to me.”
Levi grinned. It took long enough. But then, patience is a virtue, he thought, appreciating once again the power he had with women, with all women.
Four piña coladas later, he really did stand in front of her and warble, with not a hint of any accent heard on any Caribbean island, “Hey, mister tally man, tally me bananas.” Reuben looked at him softly, smiled to herself, smiled at him and said slowly, “Lets row back to our boat, banana boy. It’s feeling crowded here.”
Before she could stand up, however, a loud, grating voice reached from across the thirty feet of sand and six tables making up Binky’s Peace and Love Beach Bar.
“Debbie Reuben. My gawd, is that Debbie Reuben from Great Neck? Wait till I tell yaw motha where I saw you I haven’t seen you in ye-ahs and ye-ahs come and give me a great big hug.”
Reuben turned and saw a vaguely familiar woman, hidden behind yard-wide sunglasses, head wrapped in a yellow scarf, bathing suit covered by what looked like the greater portion of a white parachute. Rising from her table and flapping her arms out wide, surplus flesh palpitating below her arms, this apparition from her Long Island childhood stood waiting for Reuben to cross the hot sand.
“Debbie Reuben, I haven’t seen you since you were in that wonda-ful high school play I forget its name with my daughta Miriam. You look older but not so much is that yaw husband sitting there with you invite him ova.”
Miriam Babinsky’s mother, Reuben thought. Funny, I never would have thought of her as a sailor. She started walking toward the woman.
Levi leaped up on suddenly wobbly legs and mumbled loudly to Reuben, “Honey, I don’t feel so good. I think I drank too many piña coladas. I think I’m going to be sick.”