However, this was the very Friday I was due to pick up Jojo Bernal dockside at Pier 57, so I had to get up to my room and quick shower-shave-change, so I tied the zoomer off on the dock of the Met’s North building, paid the squeakers to look after it for me, ran to the elevators and then my apartment, made the change, trying for casual but sharp, and got back down and took off toward the west side, exchanging final ritual curses with the littler pipsqueak.
Jojo was standing on the edge of the dock looking up the Hudson, in a crowd of people all reading their wrists. Again, hair gleaming with sunset; regal posture; relaxed; athletic. I felt a little atrial fib and tried to glide up to the dock with an extra bit of grace, although truth to tell, water is so forgiving a medium that it takes something more challenging than a dock approach to show off any style in steering. Still I made a nice approach and touch, and she stepped onboard as neat as could be, her short skirt showing off her thighs and revealing quads like river-smoothed boulders, also a concavity between quad and ham that testified to a lot of leg work.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I managed. Then: “Welcome to the zoomer.”
She laughed. “That’s its name?”
“No. The name it had when I bought it was the Jesus Bug. So I call it the zoomer. Among other names.”
I got us out on the river and headed south. The late sun lit her face, and I saw that her eyes were indeed a mélange of different browns, mahogany and teak and a brown almost black, all flecked and rayed and blobbed around the pupils. I said, “When I was a kid we had a cat that our family just called the cat, and that seems to have become a habit. I like nicknames or what-have-yous.”
“What-have-yous indeed. So you call this the zoomer, and also?”
“Oh, well. The skimmer, the bug, the buggy, the buggette. Like that.”
“Diminutives.”
“Yes, I like those. Like the zoomer can be the zoominski. Or like Joanna can be Jojo.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That was my sister who did that. She’s like you, she does that.”
“Do you prefer Joanna?”
“No, I’m easy. My friends call me Jojo, but people at work call me Joanna, and I like that. It’s a way of saying I’m a pro, or something.”
“I can see that.”
“What about you? Isn’t there anyone who shortens Franklin to Frank? I would think that would be a natural.”
“No.”
“No? Why not?”
“I guess I think there are enough Franks already. And my mom was very insistent about it too. That impressed me. And I liked Ben Franklin.”
“A penny saved is a penny earned.”
I had to laugh. “Not the Franklin saying I quote the most. Not my operating principle.”
“No? Highly leveraged, are we?”
“No more so than anyone else. In fact I need to find out some new investments, I’m kind of clogged up.” But this sounded like bragging, so I added, “Not that that can’t change in a minute, of course.”
“So you are leveraged.”
“Well everyone’s leveraged, right? More loans than assets?”
“If you’re doing it right,” she said, looking thoughtful.
“So you might as well take some risks?” I suggested, wondering what she was thinking about.
“Or at least some options,” she said, then shook her head as if wanting to change the subject.
“Shall we zoom a little?” I asked. “When we get clear of traffic?”
“I’d love to. It looks like magic when you see one of these lift off. How does it work again?”
I explained the adjustable foils that caused the zoominski to plane up once you got to a certain speed; this was always easy to do with anyone who had ever stuck a hand out the window of a moving car and tilted it in the wind and felt it shoving their whole arm up or down. She nodded at that, and I watched the sunset light her face, and I began to feel happy, because she looked happy. We were out on the river and she was enjoying herself. She liked to feel the wind on her face. My chest filled with some kind of fearful joy, and I thought: I like this woman. It scared me a little.
I said, “What do you want to do for dinner? We can cut over to Dumbo, there’s a place there with a roof patio looking at the city, or I can anchor us to a buoy on Governors Island and grill you some steaks, I’ve got everything we need here with us.”
“Let’s do that,” she said. “If you don’t mind cooking?”
“I enjoy it,” I said.
“So can we zoom there?”
“Oh yeah.”
We zoomed. I kept one eye ahead to make sure nothing snuck into the blind spot. The other eye I kept on her, watching her feel the wind with her face as she took in the view.
“You like zooming,” I said.
“How could I not? It’s kind of surreal, because most of the time I’m on the water I’m sailing, or just taking the vapos, and this isn’t anything like either of those.”
“You sail?”
“Yes, there’s a group of us share a little catamaran over at Skyline Marina.”
“Cats are the zoomers of sailboats. In fact some of them have foils.”
“I know. Ours isn’t one of those, but it is great. I love it. We’ll have to go out in it sometime.”
“I’d enjoy that,” I said sincerely. “I could be your ballast, on the upwind hull like they do.”
“Yes. The outrider.”
Around the tip of Battery Park I dropped the bug back on the water and we hummed in a leisurely way over to the Governors Island reef, where a little flotilla of boats was tied off on buoys. The various buildings on the sunken part of the island had been removed to make sure they didn’t turn into hull-rippers at low tide, and after the demolition a great number of oyster beds and fish pens had been laid down, plus the anchors for a little open-water marina of sorts, a tie-off for overnights or evening trysts like this. I had once saved a guy from dying in the third tranche of a bad intertidal mortgage bond, and he had repaid me with the right to tie to his buoy here. One intertidal for another.
So we hummed up to it and Jojo tied off at the bow, looking glorious as she did so. The bug swung around on the ebb tide and we were looking at the Battery Park end of Manhattan, majestic in the pynchonpoetry of twilight on the water. The other boats bobbed at anchor, all empty, a ghost fleet. I liked the place and had taken dates out there before, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about as this one plopped down beside me on the cushioned seat of the bug’s cockpit.
“Okay, dinner,” I said, and opened the dwarfish door to the bug’s little cabin, very nice but just barely head high. I’d stocked the refrigerator, and now I got a bottle of zinfandel from the rack next to it and uncorked it and passed it out to her along with a couple of glasses, then took my boat barbecue out of its cabinet and lifted it up to its brackets on the stern thwart. Stack mini charcoal briquettes in it, deploy a lighter like a long-barreled gun, and all of a sudden we had a little fire, great look, classic smell, all smartly out over the water to avoid the kind of mishap that has sent many a pleasure boat flaming to the bottom.
“I love these,” she said, and again my heart bounced. I knocked the half-burned briquettes around into a flatness, with one corner of the grill left cooler. I oiled the grill and dropped it in position, and then as it was heating up I ducked in the cabin and put potatoes into the microwave, got the plate of filet mignon medallions out of the fridge, took them out into the dusk and put the meat on the grill, where it sizzled nicely. Jojo’s limbs glowed in the dark. As I moved back and forth across the cockpit cooking, she watched me with an amused expression that I couldn’t read. I never can, maybe no one ever can, but amused is better than bored, that I knew, and the knowledge made me a little goofy. She seemed happy to go along with that.