The Turquoise Lament (25 page)

The attendant came churning up to the pulley enclosure, his face clenched with awareness of duty and responsibility. I did not know what he was going to do, and I don't know if I could have stopped him, or if I would have wanted to. He didn't unlock his gate. He climbed over. He braced himself and yanked one big vertical lever in one direction and shoved the other lever forward.

There was one hell of a shriek as the cable was yanked to a stop. I looked out there and saw the car swinging violently back and forth. An instant later I picked up the tiny shape of Howie Brindle, turning over and over, falling down toward the water. From that height, it would be the same as hitting stone. He hit about a hundred yards offshore from the canneries. He made a very small pockmark against the water. Pidge slid down onto the grass, then rolled up onto her hands and knees and threw up.

The attendant looked at me with a knotted brow and an attempt to smile. He shuddered and said, "Oops, sir." He closed his eyes and swayed slightly, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand, brow furrowing again in thought. He could find no words to explain an error so instinctive and so horrid. He looked at me and said, once again, "Oops, mister," and hauled away at his big levers. The cable began moving as before.

I had Meyer crushed until he got cute and found a way to put me in perpetual check with a knight and a bishop. We turned off all the lights and all the servomechanisms that click and queak and we went up to the sun deck to enjoy the September night, enjoy a half moon roving through cloud layers, enjoy a smell of rain on the winds.

The deck chair creaked under Meyer's weight. "Are you really going to go treasure hunting with Frank Hayes?" he asked me.

He was giving me another opening. My friend, the doctor. Never too obvious. Therapy sessions delicately spaced. Any invasion of personal privacy still stung, however. Still hurt. I let all irritability fade away before I answered.

"I'll have to tell Frank no thanks. It was an impulse. Change of life style. And maybe get lucky enough to drown."

"Strange thing," he said, "the terrible contortions we all go through trying to climb out of our own skin."

"As a way to stop hurting, to try to stop hurting." Okay. I had finally admitted it out loud. Chalk up one for Meyer, or for the poultice of time passing by, with infinite slowness.

Maybe I could get far enough away from it to believe nothing much had happened at Pago Pago. A young wife responded to treatment for deep depression. A tall hotel guest recovered from a slight sunstroke. A big young man, clowning around, showing off for his wife, had died in a tragic accident. A man from Auckland had eventually flown over to Pago Pago and purchased a fine motor sailer at a most reasonable price. Pidge could not have forced herself to ever go aboard it again.

Nothing much happened. We stayed there together, until all the knots in the red tape were untangled and retied, and until she felt strong enough to fly home.

Nothing much happened. I told her all about the life and times of Howie Brindle. We marveled together at there being such creatures in the world. We sighed, murmured all the words, made love in that concrete beehive, leased a little sailboat and found beaches without footprints and made love there too. We went to a fia fia, ate roast pig, listened to drums, locked eyes and laughed.

The world requires that one accomplish the little housekeeping chores, so after we flew back and I moved her aboard the Flush, I had my long and interesting chat with Tom Collier, retrieved Professor Ted's papers and records, and then had the conferences with Frank Hayes about the financing, the timing, the percentages.

"No big dramatic deal," I said to Meyer, breaking the long silence. "I thought it was some kind of crazy chemistry with that girl. Hangover from the time she stowed away and I took her back to Daddy. Or involved somehow with gratitude toward Ted for saving my life in Mexico. It was all too good there in Hawaii with her. Made me suspicious. Nothing is supposed to be that good. Ever. Tried to blur the impact with a few ladies."

"I couldn't help but notice."

"And comment. I remember. Then I think the worst time in my life up until then was when I knew she was alone in the empty Pacific with a monstrous… nonperson with no motivation except boredom and impulse. I never ached so badly. I knew he was going to kill her, and I felt as if that was exactly what I deserved."

"Can I say something?"

"Why ask?"

"Because you have a very low boiling point lately and I don't want you to hit me in the head first and apologize second. Try this for size. You have this Calvinist concept the fates should kill her to punish you for all the rotten things you have done in your life. Of course you are not exceptionally rotten. Just average rotten, like everybody. Okay, so maybe the fates decided that killing her was clumsy and simplistic. Maybe the fates have a sense of… irony."

He was right. My first impulse was to strike out. Even at Meyer.

One tries it for size; hoping it won't fit. Together, aboard the Flush, it had been so absolutely perfect we had a superstitious awe toward it. We made bad jokes about the horrid adjustment problems of having a wife too young and too rich. We made bad jokes about her adjustment problems-about the three afternoon hours a week she had to spend in group therapy, trying to get down to the places Howie had broken and attempting to mend them.

Two people, totally, blissfully, blindly in love. And gradually it became apparent that there was only one person in love, and the other one was merely repeating lines which had once been spontaneous, going through the motions which used to be bliss. Excuses have a hollow sound. Lies have an earnest tacky melody.

Because of my size and visibility, I have had to become adept at following people. It was all too easy to follow Pidge, and be acidly amused at her amateur precautions. It took four of those therapeutic afternoons to track her to the grubby little singles lounge, to the booth where he waited for her. My first impulse was to say to myself that it could not be true. Only in television, in the worst of daytime television, does the handsome young psychiatrist fall in love with the lovely young patient. Never in real life. Please make it never. Don't let her fall in love with him. By a simple device I tuned in on that fateful line, that timeworn line as she said, "But I can't ever leave him, darling. I owe him my life."

Okay, the fates are ironic. The biter bit. If it fits, wear it. If you wear it, you have to laugh. Maybe it will go away if you laugh.

So I tried to laugh. For Meyer. For myself. For all young psychiatrists in love. God only knows how ghastly that sound of laughter could have become had not Meyer raised his hand and hissed at me. "Shhhh!"

Then I heard it too. That great rush of fish escaping a predator in the moonlight. With the stealth of burglars, we got the rigged rods and went over the side and waded into the moon pattern. I could still taste the laughter in my throat, exactly like vomit. On the third cast, something hit like a cupboard full of dishes and went arrowing off across the flats making the reel yell in an unaccustomed agony.

It was a long long time before I thought about Pidge again. Very long, for me. Almost a half hour, I think.

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23/08/2007

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