“Darlin’, believe me when I tell you — you really don’t want to know.”
A boat was all he’d thought when he first visited the harbor in Santa Cruz. A small sailboat like the one he’d kept back on the Detroit River, or a catamaran with an engine to take him out a little farther. But then one afternoon the CFO took him out on his yacht and the scale of Ray’s dream began to change. He began to look at listings online, poring over the details as other men study catalogs of fine wine.
One day he saw an ad for a fifty-footer moored up in Sausalito. He took a surreptitious day trip up to see it, exactly as if he were going off to meet a paramour. When he saw the sleek, sexy vessel in person for the first time, Ray thought he finally knew what people meant when they talked about falling in love.
The yacht was the first thing he and Maureen really fought about in California — the first big thing. Everything in her upbringing — and in his, for that matter — suggested that this was just “showing off.” After a week or so, she saw it was pointless to resist and said no more about it. This wasn’t quite the same thing as accepting the idea, but good relations were restored.
Ray was learning about the nautical life. He named his new craft Departure and made improvements to the navigation system and other electronics, as only a man of his skills could. He forgot Brady’s bar for a time and began to hang out at the Crow’s Nest on the harbor, getting to know other boat owners. Maureen went with him the first couple of times but didn’t take to it. He continued going alone.
It took longer than one might think for a good Methodist boy to realize the yacht afforded him the chance to have women. He made discreet inquiries, both at work and here in town, about how to get exactly the kind of thing he wanted. It took Ray longer to figure out exactly what that was. At first he worried about what his wife might find out, or at least suspect. But with the long hours he kept at his job, the crazy commute, there was plenty of wiggle room. She resented the boat and Ray had to bribe her with doing household chores to even get her to even come aboard.
Ray was still trying to be a good family man. But he felt that there had been a divine dispensation that had allowed him to reach California, that somehow he’d been absolved of everything in advance. All the strict rules of childhood, the black-and-white way of seeing things that had followed him into adulthood, had simply dropped along the roadside on the way out west.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, his early childhood edicts would resurface and Ray would wake, sweating. But then he’d turn and see Maureen sleeping soundly beside him and tell himself everything was all right. If she was still here, it must be.
Ray didn’t take Jazz to the yacht right away. Yet there was only so much you could do with nice dinners and anonymous hotel rooms. Ray could tell, despite the money he regularly deposited in her bank account, Jazz was losing interest. She was the kind of woman who always had other offers. So one night he told her about the boat. She was not as impressed as Ray had hoped, but he thought she’d perk up when she actually saw it. He arranged to pick her up at Brady’s on a Wednesday night.
On a whim he couldn’t have explained, Ray decided to take his family out on the yacht the weekend before his date with Jazz. It had been a while since he’d done so and the kids were excited. The captain he’d hired to maintain the yacht lived in a considerably smaller boat in the harbor and was free to take them Sunday afternoon. When they were all on board and the kids had explored below deck a bit, he asked the captain to take them out on the open sea. Despite all his love of the ocean, he had rarely taken the boat out of the bay.
Maureen declined to come on deck, and stayed in the cabin, reading a novel. As the Departure picked up speed, Ray stood with his hands on the shoulders of his youngest son, looking over the bow at the Pacific horizon.
“What do you think, son?”
“It’s so big, Daddy. Bigger than I ever thought.”
“You got that right,” Ray said. Here I am on the edge of all of this, he thought, and I’ve barely ventured out. Despite everything, I’m still a landlubber at heart. Still just a farm boy from Kansas. He told himself that he would change that. He would risk bigger things.
He had expected Jazz to be impressed with the yacht but she wasn’t. Ray was surprised at how well he’d learned to see the world through her eyes. It was nice for a boat, but as a place for a rendezvous, it wasn’t all that much. His electronic gadgetry meant nothing to her. That was the kind of background stuff she took for granted.
She did notice the surveillance cameras and gave him a funny look — a sly look that said she knew exactly what he planned to do with those. In fact, he had gotten them so that he could keep his eye on the vessel when he was elsewhere — as innocent as that. But Jazz would never take a thing at face value when she could read a lewd meaning into it. Ray wondered briefly what had happened to Jazz that she always saw life like this. But he realized he, too, could now see prurient motives in everything. She’d shown him that.
They had a drink. Then another. Ray tried to kiss her, but she pulled away, dancing on the opposite side of the small cabin, as enticing and remote as ever. Ray thought, I have a large yacht, more money than I know what to do with, and yet I have nothing to offer this woman. So he had another drink, a strong one, and then he told Jazz that he loved her.
She looked at him strangely, as she had on that very first night at Brady’s, as though he didn’t really grasp anything about her. “Let me take you to the wild side, baby.”
What would that be? Bondage? Strange sex toys? They’d already done that. But when Jazz pulled the hypo out of her purse, he saw that he had misunderstood. Ray was disappointed. Ah, only that. He could get drugs on his own. He had been trying them recreationally for a while; it was part of the culture at work.
Maybe when this night was over, maybe he would go home and see what he could do about patching up things with Maureen. The affair with Jazz seemed to be reaching the end of the line. Well, at least he’d probably get some kind of sex out of this. Ray smiled gamely, like a kid offered his first cigarette by a popular girl in middle school. Bravado is sometimes everything.
“Sure,” he said. He watched her passively as she got out the rest of the gear and readied the rig. Her expertise shone through and he was reminded of nothing so much as going to the doctor’s office as a kid and gravely watching the nurse as she prepared the vaccination. Maybe that was the right way to look at this. A vaccination against the shortcomings of living.
“You done this before, babe?”
Ray shook his head. He’d been afraid of needles as a boy. She was half his age, he thought — and yet there was a way in which she seemed almost maternal now, as if she were guiding him through some rite of passage.
At the same time, watching Jazz be focused like this, not theatrical, not “on,” he could see how young she really was. He caught a glimpse.
She looked him in the eyes again, and he was reminded of the first night he’d seen her — the way their gaze had locked. There was something fated between them that went back a thousand years. He felt a chill go up his spine and shivered.
“Don’t be afraid, darlin’,” she said. “I’ve done this a hundred times.”
He was afraid, though. Until he wasn’t.
Ray remained aware of Jazz for quite a while before he died — the way she tried to rouse him, speaking to him quietly and then more urgently, before finally giving up. His eyes were no longer open, though he had a sense of her presence. He heard the quick glug glug of the wine as she poured herself another glass, then felt her moving around the room, stepping over him to pull the curtain down and gently drawing the door closed behind her. Don’t leave me, Ray thought, as he heard the clicking of her heels recede down the dock. Don’t leave. And then the ocean rushed in where she had been, the beautiful ocean, and swept him out to sea.