“Searching for the Northwest Passage?”
She hadn’t heard him come in, but there he was, dressed in a green turtleneck sweater and frayed orange watch cap. He was clean-shaven, shockingly so. In the bright neon glow his chin lay wholly revealed, its dimple winking at her.
“Homesick,” she replied, pitching the dividers into the Norwegian Sea. “I figure we’re a good four days from Kvitoya.” She rubbed each arm with the opposite hand. “Wish that damn stove worked better.”
Anthony slipped off his cap. “There are remedies.”
“For homesickness?”
“For cold.”
His arms swung apart like the doors to some particularly cozy and genial tavern, and with a nervous laugh she embraced him, pressing against his woolly chest. He massaged her back, his palm carving deep, slow spirals in the space between her shoulder blades.
“You shaved.”
“Uh-huh. Feeling warmer?”
“Hmmm…”
“Can you keep a secret?”
“It’s been known to happen.”
“The Vatican’s ordered us to turn around and head south.”
“South?” Panic shot through Cassie. She tightened her grip.
“We’re supposed to rendezvous with the SS Carpco Maracaibo back in the Gibraltar Sea. She’s got formaldehyde in her cargo bays.”
“Those angels ordered Him frozen, not embalmed,” she protested.
“That’s why we’re holding steady.”
“Ahh…” Cassie relaxed, laughing to herself, cavorting internally. Holding steady — wonderful, perfect, straight into the clutches of the Enlightenment.
He kissed her cheek, softly, tenderly: a brotherly kiss, non-carnal. Then her brow, her eyes. Jaw, ear, cheek again. Their lips met. She pulled away.
“This isn’t a good idea.”
“Yes, it is,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” she agreed.
And suddenly they were connecting again, hugging fiercely, meshing. They kissed voraciously, mouths wide open, as if to swallow one another. Cassie shut her eyes, reveling in the liquidity of Anthony’s tongue: a life-form unto itself, member of some astoundingly sensual species of eel.
Disengaging, the captain said, “The stove gets hotter, you know…”
“Hotter,” she echoed, catching her breath.
He crouched over the Coleman and adjusted the fuel control, turning the flame into a roiling red mass, a kind of indoor aurora borealis. Opening the INDIAN OCEAN drawer, he whipped out a large, laminated map and spread it on the floor like a picnic blanket. “Madagascar’s the best place for this sort of thing,” he explained, winking at her. Slowly, lasciviously, the chart room heated up.
“You’re wrong,” said Cassie playfully, shedding her parka. She rifled the SULU SEA drawer and grabbed a portrait of the Philippines. “Palawan’s much more erotic.” She released the map, and it glided to the floor like a magic carpet landing in thirteenth-century Baghdad.
“No, Doc.” Scanning the drawer called FRENCH POLYNESIA, he removed the Tuamotu Archipelago. “It’s really Puka-Puka.”
“This one,” she giggled, pulse racing as she extracted Majorca from the BALEARIC ISLANDS drawer.
“No, Java here.”
“Sulawesi.”
“Sumatra.”
“New Guinea.”
They locked the door, turned off the overhead lights, and lay down amid the patchwork of scattered landfalls. Cassie exposed her neck; his lips roamed up and down the length of her jugular, planting kisses. Groaning softly, rolling toward the Caymans, they undressed each other, adrift in the warm waters of the Bartlett Deep. The tensor lamp cast harsh shadows across Anthony’s shaggy legs and great simian chest. As they glided into the Bahia de Alcudi, Cassie went to work with her mouth, sculpting his ardor to full potential, until it seemed the figurehead of some grand priapic frigate.
They floated north, entering the cold, jolting Mozambique Channel, just off Madagascar, and it was here that Anthony drew a Shostak Supersensitive from his wallet and put it on. Wrapping her legs around the small of his back, she piloted his jacketed cock where it wanted to go. Smiling, he plied her salty waters: Anthony Van Horne, a ship with a mission. She inhaled. He exuded an amazing fragrance, an amalgam of musk and brine shot through with all the rubbery, suckered things God and natural selection had wrought from the sea. This, she decided, was how the Galapagos Islands would have smelled, had she gotten there.
By the time he came, they had journeyed all the way past the Mindoro Strait to the bright, steamy beaches of China’s Hainan Island.
Withdrawing, he said, “I guess I feel a little guilty.”
“Oliver?”
He nodded. “Making love to a lady with her boyfriend’s condom…”
“Father Thomas would be proud of you.”
“For fornicating?”
“For feeling guilty. You’ve got a Kantian conscience.”
“It’s not a painful sort of guilt,” he hastened to add, sliding his index and middle fingers inside her. “It’s not like how it feels to blind a manatee. I’m almost enjoying it.”
“Screw Matagorda Bay,” Cassie whispered, reveling in his touch. The Coleman hissed and growled. She dripped with all the planet’s good and oozy things, with chocolate sauce and clarified butter, melted cheese and maple syrup, peach yogurt and potter’s slip. “Screw guilt, screw Oliver, screw Immanuel Kant.” She felt like a bell, a wondrous organic Glocke, and before long she would peal, oh, yes, just as soon as this gifted carillonneur, so attentive to her clapper…
“Screw them,” he agreed.
Her orgasm occurred in the Gulf of Thailand.
It lasted over a minute.
As Anthony worked his condom free, the little sack leaked, adding its contents to the lovely mess of sweat and juices now rolling toward the shores of Hainan. “The thing I’ve always noticed about Chinese sex,” he said, pointing to the tidal wave and grinning, “is that you feel like doing it again an hour later.”
“An hour? That long?”
“Okay, twenty-five minutes.” The captain cupped his hand around her left breast, hefting it like a housewife evaluating a grapefruit. “You want to know the key to my father, Doc?”
“Not really.”
“His fixation on Christopher Columbus.”
“Let’s forget about Dad for a while, okay?”
Gently, Anthony squeezed the gland. “This is what Columbus thought the world looked like.”
“My left breast?”
“Anybody’s left breast. As the years went on, it became clear he hadn’t come anywhere near circling the globe — the earth was obviously four times bigger than he’d guessed — but Columbus still needed to believe he’d reached the Orient. Don’t ask me why. He just had a need. Next thing anybody knew, he’d made up this crazy theory that the world was really shaped like a woman’s breast. He had gone most of the way around, only he’d done so at the nipple” — Anthony ran his finger along the edge of Cassie’s areola, tickling her — “whereas everyone else was measuring the circumference much farther south.” His fingers wandered downward. “So my father, in the end, has a fool for an idol.”
“Jesus, Anthony — he can’t be all bad. Nobody’s all bad, not even God.”
The captain shrugged. “He taught me my trade. He gave me the sea.” A sardonic chuckle broke from his lips. “He gave me the sea, and I turned it into a cesspool.”
Cassie grew suddenly tense. Part of her, the irrational part, wanted to keep this despairing sailor in her life long after the Valparaíso put to port. She could picture them chartering their own private freighter and setting off together for the Galapagos. The other part knew that he would never, ever be free of Matagorda Bay, and that any woman who let herself become entangled with Anthony Van Horne would end up treading the same malignant oil in which he himself was drowning.