I thought Annalise would be pleased when I brought her down to show off the yawl. Wrong. Her reaction was distaste, scorn. The bitch coming out in her then, as if it were the end product of a long brood since I'd told her about the purchase.
"This is what you named after me?" she said. "This is what you spent sixteen thousand dollars on?"
"She's rough around the edges," I admitted, "but Bone says she—"
"Bone says. Bone says."
"She needs work, that's all. A lot of hard work."
"So you'll be spending even more time down here."
"It's going to take some time, yes."
"You and Bone."
"I asked him to help me. What's wrong with that?"
"Oh, nothing. Nothing at all." Heavy sigh. "I suppose now you'll never take me to Paris. Or even to New York."
Paris again, New York again. She'd been pestering me about a long trip to both cities, and I kept putting her off. The FBI wouldn't have forgotten about Jordan Wise after only two and a half years; there was still a risk in traveling on the mainland and in Europe. But it was a small risk, I couldn't deny that. And now that I had what I'd always wanted, and the way she was reacting to it...
"All right," I said.
"All right?"
"We'll go to New York. We'll go to Paris."
"When?"
"This summer. June or July."
Fast change. The bitch vanished; she was soft and sweet again. "Richard! You mean it?"
"Yes."
"Promise? You won't try to back out?"
"No. We'll start making arrangements right away. But you have to promise me something in return. When the repair work is finished and the Annalise is ready for a shakedown cruise, you'll come along. No fuss, no argument."
"When will that be?"
"At least six months. Maybe not until the end of the year."
"Just the two of us?"
"Well, maybe. Bone might have to join us."
"Why, for God's sake?"
"I don't know when I'll be ready to sail a boat this size by myself. It could be another year or two before I can singlehand. If Bone does come along, he won't bother us. You'll hardly even know he's there."
"So you say."
"Will you promise?"
"Yes, I promise," she said. Then she said, "New York, Paris. Monte Carlo, too? I've always wanted to go to Monte Carlo. And London? Oh, God, I can't wait!"
Jack Scanlon came down to see the yawl. So did another boat owner I'd met, and the Kyles. Royce Verriker wasn't interested. "I hear you bought yourself a boat," he said when I saw him at the Royal Bay Club. "A fixer-upper that's taking up a lot of your time."
"I wouldn't describe her as a fixer-upper," I said. "She's got a good pedigree. She just hasn't been taken care of."
"Well, everybody needs a hobby."
"It's more to me than a hobby."
"Sure, I understand. Every man needs a vice, too." He winked at me. "Mine's making money."
The repair work went slowly. Among other tasks, the spars had to be sanded down to the wood; that meant hoisting up in a bosun's chair, and I've never been fond of heights. I put in two and sometimes three days a week, much of that time by myself. Bone helped when he wasn't working on Conch Out, or at Marsten Marine or taking out a day charter, or when he hadn't been seized by the need to be alone at sea for an extended period. I offered to pay him longshoremen's day wages to work on Annalise on a regular basis, but he still wouldn't take money from me. He didn't make friends any more easily than I did and he had his own ideas, stubborn and prideful, about what was acceptable in a friendship and what wasn't.
At the rate the repairs were progressing, and with the off-island trip with Annalise coming up, there wasn't much chance the yawl would be ready for cruising until the end of the year. And maybe not even then.
We flew to New York via Miami the first week in June. We were away a total of three weeks. Five days in Manhattan: museums, restaurants, a couple of Broadway shows. I would've liked to hear a performance of the New York Philharmonic, but they were dark for the season. Annalise took one entire day to make the rounds of large fashion houses like Gloria Vanderbilt and Calvin Klein, as well as a couple of the smaller ones, lugging a portfolio of her designs and trying to wangle an audience with one of the head designers. I thought she was being naive, that she wouldn't get past the receptionist in any of the houses, and I was right. But the turnaways didn't dampen her enthusiasm. She left designs at two or three places, and held on to the belief that they were good enough to generate interest somewhere.
Six days in Paris, three in Monte Carlo, five in London. Annalise loved them all. For me the whole trip was an exhausting and uncomfortable experience. The cities were interesting enough, but not to my taste. Too many people, too many eyes. Every time we went through passport and customs checks, I felt exposed and vulnerable. I imagined policemen were watching me, thinking that I looked familiar. Ordinary citizens, too. In London a tourist pointed a camera in my direction, and I ducked and turned away before I realized it wasn't me but one of the double-decker buses behind me that he was interested in. If Annalise noticed my discomfort, she ignored it because she was having such a good time.
I was relieved to get back to St. Thomas. The island was my safe harbor, the Caribbean my comfort zone. An illusion, sure; I could've been recognized there just as easily as in New York or London or Europe. But everybody has a place where he feels secure, a lifestyle that suits him perfectly, and this was mine. More of a home, after only two and a half years, than Los Alegres or San Francisco had ever been.
I slept for fourteen hours and then went down to the harbor and talked Bone into a day sail on Conch Out. I needed time on a boat on the open sea to unwind and resettle.
It wasn't long after our return that things began to deteriorate rapidly between Annalise and me.
She was still on a high from the trip and she started lobbying for us to move to New York—"not immediately, in a year or two." I told her it wasn't going to happen, and why it wasn't going to happen. At first she pouted. Then, when the high faded and sank into a low, she turned broody and distant.
One set of the designs she'd distributed in New York came back stuffed in a envelope with no note and postage due. The others were never returned. This depressed her, started her drinking more than she had before. And the drinking brought out the bitch again.
"I'm never going to get anywhere with my designs living down here. If we were in New York I could talk to people, meet somebody who'd look at them and see the potential and give me a chance. Or I could enroll in Pratt Institute and eventually get a referral from them."
"How many times have we been over this?" I said. "New York is too expensive. And the weather is miserable."
"Somewhere outside the city, then."
"Same negatives apply."
"I suppose you want to stay here for the rest of our lives."
"That was the plan, wasn't it? We're settled now, we're safe here—"
"We'd be safe in New York, after all this time. That's just an excuse."
"Don't you like St. Thomas anymore?"
"You want the truth? No, not very much."
"Why? What's changed?"
"Nothing's changed, that's the point. There's not enough to do on an island this small—half the time I'm bored to tears. But you don't even notice. You don't seem to care about my feelings, my needs. All you care about is that goddamn boat of yours. And your black buddy Bone."
"That's not true, Annalise."
"Isn't it? Makes me wonder if you still love me. Or if now I'm just somebody you keep around to screw when you feel like it. . . ."