The Starboard Sea: A Novel (34 page)

The only thing left to do was celebrate. Race had planned a blowout party that weekend, just a week before graduation. Our time together was running out.

Chester finished his spring tennis season with only two losses. He’d hoped to go undefeated, but he told me that he’d actually learned more from losing those two matches. “I figured out some of my weaknesses,” he said. “Turns out losing can be good for you.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I think losing is only good for the winner.”
Chester had been accepted to the University of Chicago and was still hoping to hear from Columbia. We were playing chess in his tidy room and I asked him if he would come to Race’s party with me. He thought about it, weighing the upside and downside as he did with every chess move. “Can you guarantee my safety?” he asked. “I’m dead serious.”
Though I promised to protect Chester, I knew I couldn’t guarantee anything. “Aren’t you at least curious to see the Race’s house? Consider it our going-away party. Our last blast.”
“Is that what this is about? Having a good time? What about your friend Aidan? What did you find out about her? Or did you forget? Were you having too much fun winning?”
Chester slid his knight across the board and explained to me that the game was over. He was four moves away from checkmate. I left, ran back to my room, and returned with the book he’d given me to read. “I read this,” I said. “I read it for you because you asked me to.”
“I appreciate that.” Chester rearranged the pieces on the chessboard. “But I’m not going to Race’s. I need to protect myself. Jason, as much as I’d like to believe that we’re friends, I know I can’t count on you.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “If it came down between you and them, I’d throw you the life jacket every time.” I thought of all the people who’d been unable to count on me, and I began to understand just how important to me Chester had become. “Look,” I said. “You’re right, you shouldn’t go to the party. It wasn’t fair of me to ask you, but please know this: I’m your friend.”

Mr. Guy had insisted on meeting with each of his students individually to discuss our final projects. I walked over to his home, the little brick house near the beach. My final project was a consideration of the INF Treaty, an agreement between the U.S. and the USSR to eliminate all intermediate- and short-range missiles. Mr. Guy was fascinated by my optimism regarding U.S.-Soviet relations. He continued to call me naïve. “Well,” I said, “a little hope is better than mutual assured destruction.” We sat in his modest living room in wingback chairs. He served me black currant tea and a cinnamon-flavored cookie that he said his friend Paul called a snickerdoodle. The name seemed to delight Mr. Guy.

The walls of his living room were decorated not with candid photos of grandchildren but rather formal photographs of men in military uniforms. “Are any of those your students?” I asked.

Mr. Guy had graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis and one photo was of him in his uniform, another of his friend Paul, and then several more of students from Bellingham he’d sent there. I watched Mr. Guy in his three-piece suit and bow tie admiring the photo of himself as a young midshipman.

“I heard you’re an old salt.” Mr. Guy winked. “We should have recruited you as well. Though I don’t imagine you’d care to spend much time on a battleship. Certainly, I suppose, you could be an astronaut. We could rocket you off on a spaceship. I think you’d quite like that.”

Relaxed in his home, Mr. Guy was an entirely different character. “You’ve done good work for me this year,” he said. “Wish I’d gotten to you sooner. You came to us from Kensington?” Proud of himself for having remembered this.

“Seems like a long time ago,” I said. “Another lifetime.”

We talked about my paper, and Mr. Guy confided in me that he was dubious about the cooling tensions between the U.S. and Russia. “There’s still too much money to be made on war. Perhaps they’ll determine a new configuration, what with China and the Middle East ripe for conflict.”

“If you graduated from Annapolis,” I said, “you probably worked in military intelligence. Bet you know where all the cold war bodies are buried.”

He smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Now you’re on to me. All of that’s for my memoirs. But I will tell you this: Where the government is concerned, never believe the official story. It’s always a cover. The truth: unattainable.”

We sipped our tea and ate our cookies and talked a little about Mr. Guy’s retirement. When I asked him why he was finally calling it quits, he said, “Because I’m a relic.”

Mr. Guy kept showing me periodicals I should read, arguing over Reagan and Gorbachev. Finally, when I told him that I had to go, he searched around and handed me a manila folder filled with notes for a paper that seemed to focus on the influence of
The Grapes of Wrath
on the lives of migrant farmworkers. “What’s this?” I asked.

“Your friend Aidan,” he said. “Her independent study. I felt her insights were always keen but she needed to work on her organization. These are her notes. I gave her mother most of her other papers, but I found this file when I was cleaning out my office. I’m taking a chance that you might want it.”

There was Aidan’s round, looping handwriting. The notes were in fragments and though I could decipher individual words, I had a hard time reading full sentences. But the real reason Mr. Guy had given me this file was that in the corner of one of the pages, Aidan had sketched a cartoon of a boy with curly hair and a cleft chin holding a bird. She’d labeled the figures “Sweet Boy” and “Seabird.”

“That was an awful business,” Mr. Guy said. “Completely mishandled.”
I held the file against my chest. “Aidan thought you were great.”
“I’m hardly great.” Mr. Guy drank his tea. “But I was bothered”—he paused—“by a lot of things.”
I nodded. The bird Aidan had drawn was small, like a starling. “Is there anything you can tell me?” I asked.
“There were times in the past when I was asked to secure certain favors, but I can assure you that where Aidan is concerned, I have been left in the dark.” Mr. Guy shook his head. “I have no facts for you, just gut feelings. When the police chief’s son is suddenly given a full scholarship, it sends a certain message.” Mr. Guy got up to refill his teacup, pacing and agitated. “I’m right to retire. The teachers here no longer run the school. Students do. I might as well be a butler following you lads around with a dustpan, sweeping away your dirt.”
Before I left, I asked Mr. Guy, “What will you remember about this place?”
He paused for a moment, took a sip of tea, and said, “I used to believe having a good memory meant being able to remember everything in perfect detail. Now I believe having a good memory means being able to selectively forget. It’s not what I’ll remember, Jason,” he said. “It’s what I’ll forget that matters.”
Nadia’s birthday was coming up and she wanted me to take her virginity. “I know I can trust you.” She offered to sneak into my room at night. I argued that it was too dangerous for her to sneak out. “What about early in the morning?” Nadia suggested. “We could wake up at four a.m., pretend that we were going running, and just meet up. I’ve heard guys prefer having sex in the morning.”
I wasn’t sure where she’d heard this, though I imagined Nadia and the Astor girls had done their share of plotting around this matter. “I’ve never taken anyone’s virginity before,” I said. “It’s not something I want to do.” It was scary having that sort of power over a girl. You could hurt her in ways you might never understand. “Okay,” I relented. “On your birthday.”
There was a mattress set up in the Old Boathouse and that was where Nadia wanted to have sex. Among the paint cans and retired crew shells. She went over to scout out the space right before her birthday and brought blankets, scented candles. “Can you buy the condoms?” she asked.
I walked to the Gas Mart. A familiar blue Chevy Malibu was parked in front. I hadn’t seen Leo since the fall, and I wondered if he’d gotten a job at the convenience store. I braced myself to see him. When I went inside, Leo was busy buying a jug of milk. He was dressed in a white polo shirt with goodwyn marina stitched in blue over his heart. Leo didn’t say anything to me. He didn’t have to. I waited until he’d left the store to buy the condoms.

The first time I had something that could be mistaken for sex was with Ginger. It was summertime and we were staying at her rambling mansion. My father hadn’t made the trip. It was the last time I saw Ginger’s father, Roland. I’d been so excited to sail with him, to show him how far along I’d come, but he couldn’t take me sailing because he kept having to walk along the beach with my mother. At some point during that weekend, Miriam took Riegel and me grocery shopping and left us at the store. My mother was furious.

It was hot that summer and the house had no air-conditioning. To stay cool, Riegel and I camped out on army cots up in the tower’s screened-in sleeping porch. A swarm of Japanese beetles clawed at the mesh screens, and I wondered if they’d eat through the wires and attack me. Suddenly, a door swung open and Ginger climbed into my bed. Riegel was sleeping just a few feet away. I thought maybe she’d made a mistake and meant to curl up beside him.

“Are you awake?” she asked.
“I was having a dream,” I said. “About beetles.”
Despite the heat, I had a sheet wrapped around me. Ginger lifted

the sheet, swung a leg over my body, and straddled my waist. She held the sheet over her head, making a tent. She was seventeen. I was twelve. Her blue cotton nightgown transparent. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. I remember being confused by the stickiness of her crotch. Though I’d had wet dreams, I’d never considered the actual mechanics of sex. I had purple giraffes on my shorts. Ginger pulled them down and kissed the tip of my penis. I was too young for this. I would have preferred it if Ginger had sneaked into my room and asked me if I wanted a bowl of ice cream. This was my fault, I feared. I kept wondering if I’d sent some signal to her, if I asked to be misread. She kissed my stomach and before I could stop myself, I came. I remember wincing, drawing a hand over my face. Ginger didn’t move. She stayed on top of me. For as long as I could recall, she had been like a sister: kind, loving, a bit of a terror.

Afterward, she told me that she’d wanted to be my first. Wanted to take care of me in this way. I didn’t know what to say to Ginger and so I said, “Thank you.”

“You’re just a boy. Aren’t you?” She pushed the hair back from my face, kissed my forehead, and said, “Let’s go up to the observatory. See the stars.” We left one tower for another. I felt ashamed. Ginger must have wanted to make everything right between us and so she taught me the one poem she knew and said that it was ours. That William Blake had written it for us.

I thought of this as I walked back to campus, wondering if I should share it with Nadia. It wasn’t that Ginger had messed me up. I realized that most guys would have been grateful. But she had taken some not-small thing from me. Nadia was fifteen and she wanted to have sex. I wanted to do her this favor. Hoped that I wouldn’t mess her up for life. We were all pretending we knew what we wanted to do with our bodies.

Race had invited almost everyone from the sailing team and most of the guys from Whitehall to his party. Instead of driving us over the causeway and onto Powder Point, Race picked Kriffo, Stuyvie, Taze, and me up at the Bellingham finger pier not in his Boston whaler but in a vintage Chris-Craft, the mahogany hull a rich toffee brown. “Taking you guys over in style,” he said. All he needed was a white captain’s hat to complete the allure.

The Baker Trophy was a trophy in name only, but Race’s mother had had an actual sterling silver trophy cup made with Race’s and my name engraved on the body. As Tazewell steered the Chris-Craft, Race poured several cans of Miller Lite into the large silver cup while Kriffo and Stuyvie chanted “Tastes great, less filling” over and over again. A joke that for them would never get old. Race hoisted the trophy and Stuyvie and Kriffo changed their chant to “Jason’s great, Race Is better, Jason’s great, Race Is better.” We each took long chugs from the trophy, the beer tasting of silver polish.

We cruised over to South Side, and I finally witnessed up close all the stone mansions Leo and I had blindly driven by so many months ago, their imposing hedges blocking any roadside view of their opulence. The mansions opened their lawns, their arms, to the ocean. Race’s house was large, though not nearly as impressive as Ginger’s rotting family home. I’d seen bigger estates, but I’d always imagined myself living in a stone house by the sea. Fine Italian masonry work that would withstand the elements and time. Round gray stones that would keep me cool in the summer. I resented Race a little for having my chosen home. More than anything, I resented that I’d no longer be able to think of my dream house without Race wandering into the picture.

Docking at sunset, the sky streaked with orange and purple, the air calm and sweet. Before any of us could disembark, Race said, “Hold on a minute. I want to remember this.”
Race led us up the path to his home. Kriffo found a basketball on the lawn and challenged Stuyvie to a game of one-on-one. Tazewell and I followed Race inside the house. The entryway was crowded with dirty clothes and sailing gear.

“My mom just left. We’ve got free rein.” Race picked up a duffel bag and walked upstairs. “She cancels the maid ser vice when I’m here alone. Trying to teach me a lesson.”

Taze disappeared through the kitchen’s swinging door. I held back and admired the living room. High cathedral ceiling with wooden support beams. A few of the interior stone walls were exposed, but most had been covered over with plaster. Standing in the middle of that living room, I tried to imagine Aidan in this house. A coldness ran through me. A ghost passing through a living body. This was the last place Aidan had visited before her death. I wondered if Race heard her spirit at night. Through the window, I saw Kriffo and Stuyvie shooting hoops, unaware of just how lucky they were to be alive. At times, I felt haunted.

There were several ornately framed oil paintings in the living room. Still lifes and seascapes. A picture of an old man in a wooden bateau seized my attention. The image resembled something I’d seen months ago at the Whaling Museum. I went up close to the canvas, trying to discern the artist’s signature.