“Thanks.”
He laughed at my expression. Maybe I was looking daunted. “This is going to eat up your life, youth. It’s going to fuck you over. You should consider quitting WaterPrice so you can afford the time to go fully nuts.”
So I floated back down the Hudson feeling good. Looking for more beavers, dodging ice floes that ranged in size from spilled ice cubes to monstrous icebergs. The tabular bergs, flat on top, served as aircraft carriers for big flocks of Canada geese.
I felt good when I got to Pier 57 and tied off in the marina, and walked up to the big sunset room and saw the gang there, Jojo included. Then I still felt good, but nervous.
Jojo was friendly but not excessively so. Not personal. Eventually she did allow me to talk to her on the side, away from the others, and I told her some of what I had just managed with Hector.
But she frowned. “You know that that’s my idea, don’t you?”
I felt the shock of that statement buckle my knees a little. I had to close my mouth, and as I did I realized my face was numb. “What do you mean?” I said. “I told you about it when I got it started. I’ve been working this up with Hector Ramirez and the people in the Met, Charlotte and Vlade and the others. You weren’t even there!”
“I told you I was doing this,” she said crisply, and turned her back on me and went back to the others. I rejoined them, but there was no way to talk about it there, and she was pleasant to the others, and drinking fast, but cool to me. Would not meet my eye directly.
Fuck! I was thinking as I groveled around trying to nudge her back out to the rail to talk freely again. What the fuck!
But she wouldn’t be nudged. She stuck fast to the end of the bar; I would have had to detach her elbow from it and hip her out the door to get her to move. That was not going to happen. She was tied to the mast. I’d have had to drag her out of there, shout in her face that she had never, never, never spoken of intertidal raft housing stock to me, not ever, and she knew it!
So why had she said it?
Convergent evolution?
I thought it over as I regarded the adamantine side of her face. Jojo and me as the fucking Darwin and Wallace of Manhattan redevelopment? Both coming up with the same idea when faced with the same problem and the same tool kit of solutions? The octopus eye staring at the human eye? And which one was I?
But I had told her about it. I had shared the idea with her in the hope of impressing her with my desire to do real-world good, which had begun as an act performed for her, and now had gotten into me somehow. And yet now she was claiming it was her idea?
Well, shit. It was possible she had forgotten that conversation, or turned it into an exchange of remarks in which she had figured things out for herself. Even in my very bad mood I could see that this could have occurred. She had definitely been the first to mention she wanted to build something, rather than just trade; then I had tried to do the same, to impress her with our soulmatedness, to get back into her pants. So I had come up with what seemed to me now a pretty obvious solution to the problem, which maybe she had taken and reinvented after hearing me hint vaguely about it. While meanwhile I had forged ahead at speed. So now she was upset by that, and instead of establishing our soulmatedness I had grossly alienated her. Although really, since it had been my idea, her claiming it was her idea was her problem. Indeed an indication she was possibly a liar and an idea thief, the kind of shark that one ran into all the time in finance.
A shark whom I wanted so badly. Because even while I was glaring at her stubbornly nonresponsive profile, she looked wonderful.
Well, fuck fuck fuck. Oh the humanity.
There was an implication here, which kept rearing its ugly head as I thought it through, that I was being an idiot in this mess, and only now coming late to the obvious: that she had been just having a night out with me, a fun night without meaning, followed by a breakup and then a mean claim on my idea as hers. Making her somewhat awful. If I had it right, or even close. But even if I did, I couldn’t really take it on. I had just put together a really good deal; she had just called me a thief, a purloiner of intellectual property; I still wanted her. Meaning I was a fool. A fool getting angrier by the second.
So after rolling my eyes at Inky and downing a last concoction he had thrown together to ease my pain, I went out to the bug and took the Thirty-fourth canal in to Broadway, and then down Broadway in the late-afternoon boat parade, the traffic jam as aquatic Mardi Gras. Then east on Thirtieth to Madison, stopping at the dockdeli at Twenty-eighth and Madison to get a float-by Reuben sandwich, because I really didn’t want to go down to the dining hall that evening and eat the co-op’s virtuous mush of the day. After that I was humming blindly along when I nearly ran into that Stefan kid, in his same rubber dinghy, looking anxiously over the side as he held an air tube in his hand.
“God damn you guys,” I exclaimed as I reversed my motor to come to a rapid halt. “You are just trying to get drowned.”
“No!” he said, looking over the side. “At least I’m not.”
“Well, your buddy down there is an idiot. What are you doing this time?”
“This was 104 East Twenty-sixth street,” he said, pointing down.
“So?”
“This is where Herman Melville lived.”
“Moby-Dick?”
He was sadly impressed at my immense knowledge of American literature. “That’s right! He was a customs inspector on the docks down at West Street, and he lived right here.”
We were surrounded by the big buildings between NoMad and Rose Hill, block-sized stone-and-glass monsters, rising sheer from the canal to the first setbacks high overhead. Nothing less like the nineteenth century could be imagined, there were no little remnant buildings tucked between the monsters to give a glimpse back into the Holocene.
“Jesus, boy. Pull your buddy up by the air hose, I want to talk to him. He’s not under that diving bell of yours again, is he?”
“Well yeah, he is. We went up and got it.”
“That’s not okay,” I said, weirdly angry. “You’re in a heavily trafficked canal here, and your bud is not going to find anything of Herman Melville’s down there! So yank him up before he croaks!”
The boy looked chastened, but also a little comforted to have some support for his own evident feeling that this was a lunatic quest on his bud’s part. Roberto the Reckless. He tugged three times, which I supposed was the signal for the maniac to resurface.
“You don’t have any radio contact with him?”
“No.”
“Good God. Why don’t you just dive off the Empire State Building and get it over with.”
“Don’t they have a jumper screen up there?”
“Okay, so what you’re doing is more dangerous than jumping off the Empire State. Come on, get him up out of there.”
Stefan hauled up hard on their diving bell’s rope, happily still attached to it this time, and after a while the smaller one appeared from the murky surface of the canal, looking like an otter with a human face.
“Come on,” I snapped, “get your ass out of there. I’m going to tell your mom on you.”
“Don’t got a mom.”
“I know that. I’m going to tell Vlade.”
“So what.”
“I’m going to tell Charlotte.”
That got their attention. Mulishly Roberto pulled himself back on board their rubber boat, and as he shivered bluely I helped them haul up their pathetic diving bellette, then towed them around the corner into the bacino, then into the Met boathouse.