The Starboard Sea: A Novel (11 page)

Coach Tripp held the sextant up to his eye. “Haven’t used her since the Newport Bermuda Race.”
“My uncle Roland had a swank sextant like that. All brass,” I said. “He’s the man who taught me how to sail. Great guy.”
“Your dad didn’t teach you how to sail?”
“My dad gets seasick eating fish and chips.”
Coach laughed. “Well, your uncle Roland probably taught you that you never want to become too dependent on some computer or satellite for your location. With a little basic math and this”—he held up the sextant—“you’ll never get lost at sea.”
The two of us climbed out onto my fire escape and looked out at the harbor. “It’s great to be this high up,” Coach said.
“Yeah. It’s like we’re in the crow’s nest on some tricked-out schooner.”
The night sky was bright with stars. We could still make out the horizon line. A sailor needed to mea sure the stars against the horizon, but when it was too dark to separate the night from the ocean, the stars would be nearly useless. “Aries is the first star in the zodiac. All of the other stars are fixed in relationship to Aries.” Coach reviewed how to take a sight mea surement and how to use the mea surement to calculate position. I knew the basics of sighting stars, but Coach Tripp explained how the position of the stars was plotted not using latitude or longitude but declination and right ascension. “It seems like the stars are fixed in the sky, but they do move, and you need to know how to account for those adjustments.” He made everything sound simple and clear, and I realized that Coach was actually a good teacher. He’d promised to look out for me and even though I wasn’t on his team, he was making good on his promise. It was a nice gesture, but I worried that Coach Tripp was reaching out to me only in the hope that I would rejoin the sailing team in the spring. I promised to study the maps and charts.
We talked about the in pending hurricane, and I asked if Coach had ever sailed into a squall.
“I don’t go in for that sort of adventure,” he said. “I like to play it safe. Plus, I’ve never owned my own boat. Wouldn’t feel right putting someone else’s yacht at risk.” Coach Tripp told me that he’d grown up in Cleveland, Ohio. “Not in Shaker Heights either.” His dad had worked for some tire company. “Middle management,” Coach said, “the worst thing that can happen to a man. To wind up in the middle.” Coach had grown up sailing Lake Erie on borrowed Lasers and Larks. “I did what the rich kids did.” Coach smiled at me. “Always trying to blend in. Now you know my secret.”
Coach Tripp was a striver. He’d wound up at Bellingham because he didn’t know any better. He saw a beautiful school by the sea and figured he’d be lucky just to be a part of it. I told him his secret didn’t change anything, but I knew Coach had given up a little of his power.
Before he left my room, I asked, “Do you still want me to be one of your SeaWolves? Are you hoping I’ll join the pack?”
Coach Tripp placed the sextant back in its velvet case and locked the box.
“Look, Jason,” he said, “I’d love to coach you. But it’s your talent to squander.”

SEVEN

The more time I spent with Aidan, the more she opened up to me. She was shy about her childhood not because it was modest but because it was so oddly glamorous.

On the morning Aidan was born, three wise and dutiful men arrived at the Beverly Hills Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to claim her as their own. Aidan’s mother had actually warned several different admirers that they might be new fathers. “She was unmarried. Gorgeous but in decline. An overfathered baby one more lapse in a lifetime of lapses in judgment.” Aidan’s mother had been, on various occasions, an heiress to a Simi Valley orange grove fortune, a merry prankster on the Grateful Dead’s tour bus, a Whisky a Go Go go-go dancer, Jane Fonda’s stand-in during the filming of
Barbarella,
a studio executive’s mistress, and, finally, a producer on an Academy Award–winning film. “You know that song ‘Hotel California’?” Aidan asked. “That’s my mom.”

I wasn’t certain how a person could be a song, but Aidan made this music seem possible. The details of her mom’s misadventures might have made for serious late-night gossip, might have served as powerful social currency. Instead, this backstory embarrassed Aidan. Extracting information took patience and restraint on my part. East Coast wealth and social status had long failed to impress me, but West Coast scandal and intrigue left me a little starstruck.

“Don’t you miss it?” I’d ask Aidan. “All that Hollywood sunshine?”

“It’s like hating the color yellow,” she’d say, “and living in a golden age.”
Two of the men who showed up at the maternity ward were competing real estate developers, business rivals who upon seeing each other exchanged insults, threatened lawsuits, then fled. The third man stayed. He was the actor, Robert Mitchum.

The night before Race’s party, Aidan and I camped out in the mildewing basement of the library’s video room watching tapes of the miniseries
The Winds of War
. I was supposed to be taking copious notes for a Mr. Guy research paper on cinematic misrepresentations of World War II. As the film flickered with inaccuracies, an intrusion of silver beetles swarmed around us. Aidan kept snatching the insects from my polo shirt and charming them onto her wrists only to have the beetles fly off and attack the television screen. Aidan toyed with her beetles while I heckled Jan-Michael Vincent and Ali MacGraw as they pretended to fall in love. Then Mitchum showed up, stoic and kick-ass in his Navy dress blues, promising his blond lover he’d leave his wife, abandon the war.

Aidan had painted her nails an intense shade of cobalt, turning her already pale skin ghostly and diaphanous. She tapped the small TV screen with her fingers and said, “He was almost my father.”

I thought she was kidding. It seemed unlikely that the evil star of
Cape Fear,
Marilyn Monroe’s laconic lover in
River of No Return
, and the scariest man in the world in
The Night of the Hunter
could ever be anybody’s father. The fact that I could rattle off Mitchum’s credits impressed Aidan. In truth, I studied leading men, tough guys, heartbreakers, princes among thieves. Maybe I felt I needed to. I also didn’t reveal that with my cleft chin, broken nose, and almost handsome face, I knew Mitchum’s films only because I’d always secretly hoped someone might tell me I looked like him.

Aidan traced Mitchum’s profile with her blue fingertips. “The first photograph ever taken of me was in his arms. Old enough to be my granddad. Mom claims she never met a man who loved his wife more. Didn’t stop her from sleeping with him.”
Aidan had certain suspicions about her father’s identity but no definitive answers.

“If you don’t ever know where you come from,” Aidan said, “it’s impossible to know what you’re supposed to be.”
I paused Mitchum and his wars. The room grew dark and the beetles turned into flashing fireflies.
“We have swarms of lightning bugs in our orange groves,” Aidan said. “In springtime they star up the white blossoms like Christmas garlands.” Aidan knew the names of every orange. Her mother the citrus heiress had taught her daughter how to tell the difference among blood, Valencia, navel, and satsuma, but she wouldn’t teach Aidan anything about her dad. The only detail her mother had ever revealed was that her father, who refused to give his daughter his last name, had insisted on choosing her first. Aidan knotted and unknotted her hair. “I almost don’t care anymore. Figure if I stop caring entirely, she might tell me who he is.”
“I’ve met my dad,” I said. “I’d prefer the mystery.”
The tiny Yankee warden who ruled the library neglected to escort us out at closing, locking us in with the silverfish, the ancient sets of Britannica. The fireflies followed us upstairs as we explored the building in search of unlocked exits. We dared each other to climb a column of freestanding bookcases, scaling the tall shelves like they were our own stand of sequoias. When we reached the top, we perched opposite each other kicking our feet against the unread books. I hated seeing Aidan sad, lonesome for a father who hadn’t welcomed her into his life.
“You need some fun,” I said. “Come with me to Race’s party tomorrow night. We’ll get trashed, then trash his house.”
Aidan smiled. “When he was young, Robert Mitchum was arrested for drug possession. Film studios usually protected their stars, but he actually went to jail. That happened a long time ago, before he met my mom, but it made me think maybe he really was my dad.” Aidan jumped down from the shelf, her gypsy skirt parachuting out as she landed hard on her knees. “I can’t go to any party.”
Aidan roamed the dark library, thieving books into her leather bag. I followed her into a storage locker stuffed with abandoned slide projectors, leaking mimeograph machines. The room reeked from the cloying purple duplicator fluid. “You can get high off that sweet scent,” Aidan said. “I’m a former powder girl. But there was a time when I’d inhale anything.”
I knew a fair number of guys who seemed destined for a lifetime of waking and baking, of spending minor fortunes on epic bongs. Knew girls who emptied blister packs of amphetamines when they wanted to slim down and embezzled their moms’ Klonopin when they wanted to calm down. Then there were the rehab cases, sick kids who promised to destroy their own privilege, who hoped to construct a cage just small enough to contain themselves. But it wasn’t all illicit times and overdoses. With cash, self-control, and the right careless spirit, there was plenty of fun to be had. Once during a deadly dull charity auction for the American Heart Association, Cal and I each snorted two snowy rails in the bathroom of the New York Racquet and Tennis Club. We bailed on our parents, sneaked into the squash courts, and swatted handballs for hours, stopping only when we noticed each other’s palms bleeding.
“Drug stories don’t interest me.” Aidan narrowed her eyes. “Especially not my own. But if you want to, you can ask me anything.”
I told her how I’d heard from Stuyvie that she’d seduced a teacher, then attacked him. That she’d been arrested. “Stuyvie insists you were tabloid news. Claims you’re famous.”
“I prefer infamous.” Aidan laughed. “Or maybe I just wish I were that glamorous. The truth is I had a crush on someone who wanted to help me get straight. As a thank-you, I broke all of the stained-glass windows in her house.”
Her
house. I didn’t say anything. Just hoped that Aidan would continue. She left the storage closet and I followed.
Aidan found a fire exit and decided to chance that the door wouldn’t be alarmed. It wasn’t. We could have walked back to our dormitories, waved good-bye, entertained our proctors with our excellent excuses for being late, but neither of us wanted the night to end.
“Let’s go down to the harbor,” I said. “I want to show you something.”
The fireflies lit our way to the dock where earlier in the day I’d noticed Coach Tripp battening down a classic Nautor’s Swan 36. The moniker
Solitude
stenciled on her white transom in thick black cursive. The sailing team usually kept her moored out in the harbor, but with the storm threatening she’d been nestled into a slip along the academy’s main finger pier. This baby yacht had real history—one of the first and finest fiberglass racers ever built. A museum piece of science and engineering. I tried to explain its significance to Aidan—how this yacht constituted a marriage between Finnish boatmakers and American naval architects, how the founding designers at Sparkman & Stephens had grown up cruising in this very harbor, but Aidan knew nothing of sailing.
“What did they make boats out of before fiberglass?” she asked.
“Forests and steel,” I said.
“Oh.” She laughed at herself. “My first dumb question. Feel free to make fun of me.” She climbed into the cockpit and I joined her.
“We can sleep here.” Aidan gripped the wheel. “I love waking up in the cold air.”
I didn’t want to sleep. More than anything I wanted to listen to my friend talk about her past. The cabin door was unlocked and I went belowdecks in search of blankets. I found four white billows of sail silk and brought the sheets up to Aidan. We sat across from each other on the cockpit’s opposing teak benches, our capes of silk warm and thermal against our skin, the boat lullabying in the light waves. My eyes struggled to adjust to the dimness. Though she sat just a few feet away, I couldn’t see Aidan’s face.
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Why did you break those windows?”
“Has anyone ever stopped paying attention to you?” she asked.
I nodded, weighed down by the memory of Cal’s final days, though I was the one who’d stopped paying attention. Not Cal. I was the one who’d allowed a flood of silence to swell between us.
“I thought I mattered most to someone.” Aidan shook her head. “But being nice to me was simply her job.” Aidan described the first time she saw her art teacher, Hannah Florent. “She wore a wife beater, jodhpurs, a welder’s mask. She was wielding a blowtorch. I watched her forge horse shoes for this Abyssinian the school allowed her to stable. She was wild.”
I wasn’t sure who was wild, the horse or Hannah.
Though Aidan wasn’t much of an artist, she began hanging out in the studio hoping that Hannah might notice her. “I’d come to class all hyped up on this shitty baby laxative cocaine. Then I’d tinker with the heat settings on the kilns, open all the supply drawers, decorate my toenails with acrylic paints, knock over cans of turpentine, and threaten to light the spill on fire. The only way Hannah could settle me was if she sat beside me and focused all of her attention on keeping my hands busy. I was lousy with love for her.”
Aidan described Hannah’s long chocolate hair. How she kept the layer above the nape of her neck shorn. How when she wore her hair up in a ponytail, Aidan could see this soft bristly trapezoid of fuzz. “Her horsehair, I called it. When I was good she let me run my fingers over and through it. Hannah said she could always tell when I was high because when I was high I always seemed to know exactly what I wanted.”
My eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness that I could see Aidan grin.
“Then,” she said, “there was the sad matter of Hannah’s husband.”
Colin Florent refused to be entertained by Aidan’s schoolgirl crush on his wife. “He considered me a threat to his marriage. Some marriage.” Hannah too had a history with drugs, had kissed her share of women. She’d given up both for her husband, the lacrosse coach and head of admissions at Miss Lilly Tate’s School for Young Ladies. “Miss Little Tits” I remembered Cal calling it.
“I wasn’t the only one with an infatuation.” Aidan waved her hand as a constellation of fireflies sparked between us. “My first night in Miss Lilly’s dorm, I heard the older girls on the floor above me pushing their beds together. Almost everyone had a girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend, boyfriend.” I closed my eyes and paused before finishing my question. “Which do you prefer?”
Aidan said nothing. Maybe she’d drifted off to sleep or maybe she hadn’t heard me or perhaps she understood that in my own way, I was telling her something about myself. Then she yawned and stretched her arms.
“I’m exhausted,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. “Good night.”
I rested there in the darkness trying not to breathe too loudly. I didn’t dare move or even take off my shoes. Just timed the fireflies as they flashed at one another, trying to decode their mating signals. I heard Aidan rise. She paced along the companionway to the foredeck before returning to the cockpit. Then she sat down on my bench facing away from me.
“Hannah designed and built those stained-glass windows herself, the ones I broke. She’d made them for Colin. Abstract images in reds and blues. Fire and ice. It wasn’t easy to destroy them. I mean literally, the first bricks I threw just bounced off the glass.” She turned, looked at me, then rubbed her eyelids. “It’s hard when you have that much love inside of you, so much it just explodes.”
I imagined pulling Aidan down on that teak deck. Stripping off her clothes. Taking plea sure in the way she moved. Even in all that darkness I could see her beauty. Still, I couldn’t claim it for myself. Instead, I decided to hurt her.
“You loved someone,” I said, “who was completely inappropriate. Does she even speak to you anymore?”
Aidan caught a pair of fireflies. She held them for a moment before pinching the beetles between her fingers and tweezing away their light. I sat up, confused by this small show of cruelty. Before I could ask why she’d killed them, Aidan raised her hand. With her fingertips, she rubbed the phosphorescence onto my bottom lip. Then Aidan leaned over and placed her mouth against mine. Her kiss this time calm, restrained. When she pulled back, her own lips shimmered green and gold. My mouth stung with the sharp bite of lemon.
“Don’t worry.” Aidan stared at me. “Neither of us has anything to prove.”
I swiped the back of my hand against my mouth, brushing away the firefly light.
“Maybe”—Aidan’s lips continued to burn and glow—“I just like you because you remind me of Robert Mitchum. With your cleft chin and your curly hair. You look like him when he was young and in trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?” I reached out, clasping Aidan’s wrists, bringing her closer. We’d come to need each other and I decided to push our attraction as far as Aidan would allow. She’d just told me about the father she didn’t know, the woman she’d loved, alerted me to her own addictions, her temper. I could see that spark of gold glass in her eye and I understood now where it came from, what it could lead to. I wanted to be part of what she desired. Contrary to what Aidan believed, I had everything to prove.