She drank more and more; I hardly ever saw her without a glass in her hand. We went out together less often. There were long silences whenever we were together. Our sex life slacked off, to the point where I was spending much more time on Annalise than I was on Annalise. It didn't seem to bother her. Before, she'd been in a constant state of heat, and the aggressor at least half the time; now the aggressiveness stopped altogether. She was still cooperative enough when I initiated lovemaking, but without any of the wantonness that had always made it special between us. She was the dutiful wife, nothing more.
I kept trying to put us back together, giving her little presents, surprising her with an evening at a restaurant she liked on St. John. Nothing worked. The rift between us kept on widening. But I refused to believe it was permanent. Denial. I needed us to be all right, so we'd be all right. Every marriage has its rocky periods, I told myself, and this was ours—a bad patch that would smooth itself out sooner or later.
There were other problems, too. By the end of hurricane season, she was no longer spending time with Maureen Verriker. When I asked her about it, all she'd say was a curt "The friendship's run its course." She wasn't seeing much of her other friends, either, the apparent reason being that she'd made a new one at Sapphire Bay she liked more. JoEllen something—Hall, I think—an artist who lived out near Red Hook.
I didn't care for JoEllen. She was from somewhere in Florida, one of the divorcees who stayed on to make a new life for herself. It wasn't much of a life, as far as I could see. She was fortyish, loud, bawdy—the bohemian type who dressed sloppily in shorts and a loose halter that kept threatening to expose one or the other of a pair of juiceless brown tits. A polar opposite to Annalise in every way except for their shared fondness for sun, steel and scratch bands, and rum punches. Beach buddies, drinking buddies. JoEllen lived hand to mouth on what she earned from seascapes and island scenes aimed at the tourist trade. Annalise thought the oils and watercolors were better than they were, just as she thought her fashion designs were better than they were. She saw JoEllen as another yet-to-be-discovered genius. JoEllen saw her as a regular source of free drinks and small loans.
They hung out together three or four days a week, sometimes well into the night. Once Annalise didn't get home until after midnight. I was waiting up for her and I heard her squeal the Mini into the driveway, veer off the pavement, and slalighter half a dozen plantings on the way down. She wasn't just drunk—she was glassy-eyed, slack-jawed, jelly-legged plastered.
I was furious. "What the hell's the matter with you, driving in that condition?" I yelled at her. "What if you'd had an accident, run over somebody?"
"Well, I didn't."
"But you could have. You could've been stopped, arrested, thrown in jail. Any kind of serious trouble, the police might do a background check, and then we'd be finished. We can't afford to call attention to ourselves, we can't afford to lose control—not ever. How many times have we been over that?"
"A million. Two million. That's your favorite word—control. You know what you are? A control freak, that's what you are."
"That's not true, I've never tried to control you—"
"Oh, bullshit, Richard. You've been controlling me for four goddamn years. Do this, don't do that, don't take chances, don't take risks. What's that if not controlling?"
"Being sensible. Being careful. Trying to keep us safe."
"Careful, right. Another of your favorite words. You don't sound like Richard anymore, you know that? You sound like that tightassed accountant back in San Francisco, Jordan what's his name."
"Now who's spouting bullshit?"
"You are. Control, careful, sensible, safe. What happened to all the excitement you promised me?"
"Haven't you had enough already?"
"No! I'll never have enough. I told you a long time ago how it was with me. I can't stand the way we've been living, all safe and careful. I want to take risks again, live on the edge again. Feel alive again."
"There's a big difference between living on the edge and crossing the line. We're fugitives, for Christ's sake."
"You're a fugitive, not me. I don't know anything about what Jordan Wise did, I only know Richard Laidlaw. Remember?"
"If we're cought, no matter what you say or I say, you could still be convicted as an accessory. You think your life is dull and confining now? Imagine how it'd be in a prison cell!"
That was the first big fight we had, but not the last. She was contrite when she sobered up, and for a while she reined herself in. She still hung out with JoEllen, but there were no more drunk-driving incidents; I told her I'd take the car keys away from her and cut off her access to the joint bank account if she ever came home loaded again.
But then the holidays rolled up, and there was the night of the Verrikers' annual Christmas party.
Annalise didn't want to go, which would've been all right with me, but at the last minute she changed her mind. She and Maureen were stiff with each other when we arrived, avoided each other after that. At one point I asked Verriker what the problem was between them; he shrugged and said, "Beats me." Usually at parties Annalise was animated and charming, and restrained in her drinking. At this one she kept refilling her glass at the punchbowl, and the more she drank, the more erratic her behavior became.
I didn't realize how drunk she was until she dropped and shattered her glass on the floor tiles and then upset somebody's plate of hors d'oelivres. I was trying to ease her out of there without making a scene, when she said, in a voice loud enough for Verriker and some of the other guests to hear, "Oh, for Christ's sake, why can't you just let me enjoy myself? So I spilled a drink and some food, so what? I'm not gonna spill the beans, you know. Secrets are safe with me, yours, everybody's. My Ups're sealed."
"Be quiet!" I snapped at her.
"Whoops," she said. "Oh, shit."
Verriker said, "Maybe you'd better take her home, Richard."
"Yeah. Right away."
I dragged her out of there. When I got her into the house I cought her arms and shook her, hard. "Are you crazy? Are you trying to get us cought?"
"God, no." She wasn't fighting me. The night air had sobered her a little; she seemed horrified by what she'd done. "I don't know what happened. . . . It just slipped out. . . ."
"How many other times has something just slipped out'? To Maureen, to JoEllen, to Christ knows who else?"
"Never—never! First and last time, I swear."
"It better be the last time," I said. "I mean it, Annalise. Don't ever get drunk enough in public to make a slip like that again. If you do . . ."
She swore she wouldn't. Over Christmas and New Year's she controlled her drinking, stayed home most evenings. We still weren't spending a lot of time in each other's company—work on the yawl was nearing completion and I was putting in long hours at the marina—but when we were together, she seemed to make an effort to be reasonable and good-natured. No more pressure about moving, no more bitchy behavior, a couple of sessions in bed that she didn't treat as duty fucks. I felt relieved. It looked as if she'd gotten her perspective back and the bad patch was beginning to smooth out at last.
Work on Annalise was finally done at the end of January.
She was a thing of beauty by then, a sight to make you catch your breath when you stood off on the stringpiece and looked at her in the slanting rays of the sun. Her spars and brightwork, her hull and deckhouse gleamed with thick coats of varnish and blue and white paint, her brass was shined to a high gloss, her new Dacron sails had a freshly laundered dazzle when unfurled. The ship-to-shore radio worked fine. The overhauled auxiliary diesel ran without a hitch during every ten-minute test run. In the cockpit, all the gauges and dials were in perfect working order and the new compass sat bright and shiny in its gimbals. Belowdecks, the marine refrigerator and primus stove in the tiny galley were in order, the ventilators and new bilge pump worked fine, every fitting and connection had passed muster.