“Tim? What do you think?” Jackie’s oddly coy voice startled my somnolent researches. She had appeared on deck, but instead of using the main companionway she had climbed through the forward hatch into the bright sunlight of Stormchild’s foredeck. I looked up from the Estrecho Desolado to blink at the sudden brilliance of the tropical daylight, in which, to my considerable surprise, a very shy Jackie Potten was standing in a newly bought bikini. “You don’t like it,” she responded anxiously to my half second of silence.
“I think it’s very nice,” I said with clumsy inadequacy, and I knew I was not referring to the bikini, which was yellow and more or less like any other bikini I had ever seen, but to Jackie herself, who was unexpectedly revealed as sinuous and shapely, and I had to look quickly down at the charts as though I had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. “I hope you bought some good suntan lotion.”
“I did. Yes. Lots.” She sounded very chastened, and I guessed she had never worn anything as daring as a bikini before. “The Dutch lady made me buy it,” Jackie explained. “She said it was silly to wear too many clothes in the tropics. I’ve bought some shorts and a skirt as well,” she added hurriedly, “because the lady in the shop said that it’s kind of respectful to look pretty decent in the town, but that the bikini’s OK on the beaches or on board a boat. Is it really OK?” She asked very earnestly.
“Yes,” I said very truthfully, “it really is OK.” She needed still more reassurance. “It’s a very, very nice swimsuit,” I said inadequately, “and you look terrific,” and the realization that I had spoken the truth was suddenly very embarrassing because Jackie was only a year or so older than my Nicole, and I also realized that I was blushing, so I looked hurriedly down at my charts and tried to imagine the speed of the winds funneling through the Estrecho Desolado, but somehow I could not concentrate on winds and tides and currents. I looked back to the foredeck, but Jackie was lying down, hidden from me by the thick coils of halyards that hung from the cleats at the base of the mainmast. I sighed and shut my eyes. I told myself that bringing her on this voyage was a mistake, that it had always been a mistake, and that now it suddenly threatened to be an even bigger mistake, because I could feel the temptation to make a damn bloody great fool of myself over some crumpet from Kalamazoo.
So I poured myself a great drink instead.
We waited for the winds to take us away. My birthday came, and Jackie had somehow discovered its date and solemnly presented me with a book of Robert Frost’s poetry that she had miraculously discovered in a secondhand bookshop in Las Palmas, and that night she served me a birthday dinner of rabbit stew, the cooking of which was a real triumph of friendship over conviction, and she invited the Dutch woman, who had helped her shop, and whose boat was moored nearby, to join us with her husband. The four of us sat round a dining table under the cockpit’s awning, and three of us drank wine until, at last, Jackie decided that she would not die if she tried it too, after which four of us drank wine and told tall stories of far seas and I felt the subtly pleasurable flattery of being mistaken for Jackie’s lover.
“I didn’t realize,” Jackie said after the Dutch couple had left us, “that you were kind of famous.”
“It’s a very fading fame,” I said, “if it ever was really fame at all.”
The next day, still waiting for the trade winds, we took a ferry to Lanzarote where we hired a car to explore the famous black island. Jackie wanted to ride one of the camels that carried tourists up the flanks of the volcano, and I, who had taken the uncomfortable trip before, let her go on her own. The camels were rigged with curious wooden seats that accommodated three people abreast, one on each side and one perched high on the beast’s hump, and Jackie found herself sitting next to a young Frenchman. He was obviously attracted to her, and I watched the animation with which she responded to his remarks and felt a twinge of the most stupid jealousy, but nevertheless a twinge so strong that I had to turn away to stare across the landscape of black lava.
Joanna. I said my wife’s name to myself over and over, as though the repetition would prove a talisman to help me. I was tempted to insist that Jackie fly home, except now I did not want her to go. Things would be better, I told myself, when we could leave, for then we would become absorbed in the routine of sailing a boat. At sea, on a shorthanded yacht, a crew sees remarkably little of each other. I would be awake when Jackie slept, and she awake when I slept, and in those few moments when we might share the deck or a meal together, we would be far too busy with the minutiae of navigation and ship-keeping to be worried about my adolescent fantasies.
More and more boats left. I waited, not because I wished to draw out these lotus-eating days, but because the winds about the islands were still depressingly light, and I did not want to motor the heavy Stormchild all the way south to where the unvarying trade winds blew across the Atlantic. I was waiting for a northerly wind to take me away, and each day I haunted the splendid Meteorological Office in Mogan to study their synoptic charts. “Soon, Tim, soon!” one of the duty weathermen would greet me each morning.
Jackie translated my irritability as an impatience to leave the Canary Islands. She confessed to some impatience herself, declaring that she had developed an unexpected taste for sailing. “I mean I used to watch the yachts on Lake Michigan, right? But I never guessed I would ever be on one. I thought yachts were just for the rich, or at least for the middle class!”
“Aren’t you middle class?” I asked idly.
“Jeez, no! Mom works in a hardware store. My dad left her when we were real little, and he never sent us any money, so things have always been kind of tough.” Jackie spoke without any touch of self-pity. She was sitting in a corner of the cockpit with her bare, brown knees drawn up to her chin. It was evening, and behind her the sun was setting toward the high harbor wall, and its light imbued her untidy hair with a lambent beauty. She laughed suddenly. “Mom would be really knocked out to see me now.”
“Does that mean she’d be pleased?”
“Don’t be stuffy, Tim, of course it means she’d be pleased. Mom always said I should get more fresh air, because I guess I was kind of bookish as a kid. My brother was always out-of-doors, but I was the family’s nerd. Mom would be really astonished to see me now.” She turned to watch a graceful French sloop that was motoring slowly toward the harbor entrance. A lot of boats liked to leave at nightfall, thinking to use an evening breeze to spur them through the doldrums.
“It’s strange,” I said, “how we don’t really know our children. We think we do, but we don’t. I never thought Nicole would do anything stupid. Then, of course, her brother died, and she really went berserk.”
“She was fond of her brother?”
I nodded. “They were inseparable.” I paused, thinking about Nicole’s childhood, raking over the ancient coals of guilt to discover whether I had caused her unhappiness. “The trouble is I was away a lot when they were little. I was sailing round the world, being mildly famous. And Joanna was always busy, so the twins were left alone a lot. But they were happy. They did all the things kids are supposed to do.” I poured myself another finger of Irish whiskey. “I was really proud of her. She was a tough kid, but I thought she was levelheaded.”
Jackie smiled. “And that’s important to you, Tim, isn’t it? Being levelheaded.”
“Absolutely.”
“And you think when Nicole ran off with von Rellsteb she wasn’t being levelheaded?”
“Of course she wasn’t,” I said firmly.