There was a Caribbean hurricane that first year, in early August. Hurricane Allen, I think it was. A monster blow, so intense that it reached Category 5 status—sustained winds of more than 156 m.p.h.—three different times over a period of about five days. Its central pressure was one of the lowest of all time, around twenty-seven inches when it was south of Puerto Pico. For a while it looked as though it might hammer the Virgins, and there were all sorts of storm warnings and preparations. But the eye stayed out over open water, bypassing us and howling up through the Lesser Antilles, where it weakened off Haiti and Jamaica; it didn't cross land until somewhere near Brownsville, Texas. We did get a taste of it, though: high winds and heavy rain for a couple of days.
Annalise was terrified the whole time. Her appetite for danger didn't extend to hurricanes. She'd been through earthquakes, as most native Californians have, but they were a tolerable threat because they came suddenly and were over in a minute or two. With a hurricane, you had plenty of advance warning and dire predictions of how much devastation to expect, and then, when it came howling and screaming like a bombing blitz, you had to ride it out over a long period. She wouldn't leave the villa, or let me take down the storm shutters and open the jalousies, until the day after the winds died down and the rains stopped.
I didn't say anything to her, but I had just the opposite reaction to Hurricane Allen. There is something in the elemental fury and frenzy of a tropical storm that excites a matching wildness in me. Still does to this day. An appeal to the dark side, I suppose. Yes, definitely an appeal to my dark side.
Annalise was jealous of my relationship with Bone. It threatened her somehow, in ways other than the time I spent with him—irrational ways. She hadn't liked him when I first introduced them, a reaction based on nothing I could see that passed between them. He was polite to her, on his dignity, as he was with everybody he met for the first time and especially with whites. And yet all she had to say about him afterward was "God, he's ugly, isn't he?" It occurred to me that she might be prejudiced. I didn't want to believe it and I never spoke to her about it, and she never said anything to me, but now I'm convinced she was. She avoided native Thomians other than service and trades people, and looking back, I can see that there was a kind of condescension in the way she treated blacks.
Once he suggested we take Conch Out on a three-day run to St.Croix, and that night I told Annalise about it and asked her to join us. With Bone's blessing, I said, a poor choice of words.
"His blessing!" she said. "Well, isn't that big of him!"
"He thought you might like to go along. So did I."
"Well, I don't want to. You know how I feel about small boats."
"It's only three days. And the weather forecast—"
"Three days. Lovely. Cozy. Just you and Bone now."
"What does that mean?"
"If I didn't know you so well," she said, "I'd think the two of you were sleeping together."
"For God's sake, Annalise."
"Well? You spend more time with him than you do with me."
"That's not true."
"Oh, isn't it? Sure seems that way."
"You know how much sailing means to me—"
"And what about the things that are important to me? Like visiting other parts of the world. Like trying to get a foot in the door of the fashion industry. I haven't given up on that idea, even if you think I have . . ."
There was more in the same vein. And it was no use arguing or trying to reason with her when she was in one of those moods. I'd had a few stings from her sharp tongue in Chicago, and a few more that were even more barbed down here. It gave her a hard, nasty edge that I didn't like at all.
If she'd used that tongue on me regularly, I'd've confronted her about it. But she didn't. She seemed to sense how often and how much she could provoke me, and she never went beyond the limits of my tolerance. Most of the time she was the same soft, sexy, loving woman she'd been that year in San Francisco and the first several months on St. Thomas. It was only Bone and the time I spent with him, and not getting her way when she had her heart set on something, that brought out the bitch in her.
In February of '81 I had a call from Dick Marsten. I'd told him I was interested in buying a boat of my own, and he had one in the yard, he said, that I might want to take a look at. A twenty-five-year-old yawl, thirty-four feet at the waterline, that had just come over from St. John. You don't see many yawls down here anymore, but there were still a few around in those days. This one had been built in Connecticut, run for a time on Long Island Sound, then sailed down in the fifties. Her owner had been ill for some time and she'd been neglected as a result, but she was still a sound vessel. The owner had died recently and his heirs were looking for a quick sale. So the price was right—not exactly a steal at $16,000, but still something of a bargain.
I'd been counting on a ketch, but that was because it was the type of sailboat I was familiar with; the only difference between the two is that the mizzen is smaller on a yawl, and stepped behind the wheel. So I said I'd come down, and when I went I took Bone with me. The yawl was out of the water for scraping, and she looked old and frowsy sitting there in the hot sun. There were a lot of things wrong with her. Her hull and deckhouse needed painting, the spars and brightwork sanding down and varnishing; the halyards would have to be replaced, the tracks and slides overhauled, a new bilge pump put in, and any number of smaller repairs made above- and belowdecks. But she had nice lines, a plumb stem and broad beam, a clean-running stern without too much overhang, and lifelines that had been rigged in heavy bolted stanchions.
When I asked Bone what he thought of her, he said, "Good salty sea boat. Built strong, caulked tight. Hull's solid. Engine got to have an overhaul, but it should be okay. Tell you better when I hear it run."
"How long to put her back in shape?"
"Hard to say. Lot of work to be done."
"Six months?"
"Maybe longer."
"Is she worth the asking price?"
"Seems so to me. You want her?"
An odd feeling had come over me as we examined the yawl. The same sort of feeling I'd had for Annalise in the beginning, without the sexual element—an intense possessive need that I now understood was the first stirrings of love.
"Yes," I said, "I want her."
"Then you better buy her," Bone said. Then, as if he'd intuited what I was thinking, "Right boat for a mon like the right woman. Grab her quick before somebody else take her away."
"Will you help me with the repairs?"
His two gold teeth flashed in one of his rare smiles. "Nothing Bone likes better than shining up a good salty sea boat."
The $16,000 price was firm, but I wouldn't have tried to haggle anyway. We signed the papers that same day, in Marsten's office. When I told Annalise that night, she wasn't pleased I'd gone ahead with the deal without talking to her first, but she didn't turn bitchy about it. Not then. I took her out to dinner and Bamboushay to celebrate.
The next day I went to the harbormaster's office, reregistered the yawl in Richard Laidlaw's name, and arranged for slip space not far from Bone's at the Sub Base harbor marina. Once she was barnacle-free and had been relaunched, Bone and I ran her over to Sub Base harbor under power. The auxiliary diesel labored somewhat, but he was satisfied with its durability. The first thing we did after we got her there was to paint a new name over the old one on the transom. She'd been Moonlight Lady; now she was Annalise.