The Starboard Sea: A Novel (36 page)

On our last night together, I told Aidan this secret. She listened, nodding. Afterward, she was quiet, absorbing the hideous weight of my confession. I could feel her trying to summon the right words. “What you did,” she said, “was awful. What it led to, even worse.” She held my hand. “You can’t change what you did, but if you honor Cal, maybe a time will come when you’ll be ready to forgive yourself.”

Race played it cool. He told me I could leave or stay. He didn’t care. “I’ll call you a cab,” he said. “Or I’ll pour you another drink. It’s all the same to me.”

I leaned over the balcony and looked down at Race’s fake paintings. “My brother Riegel works for this Wall Street big shot. He told me the stock market crash was caused by a bunch of traders who’d made a dumb bet. They wanted to have some fun, create mayhem. I figure you guys, Taze, Kriffo, and Stuyvie, you all had some sort of bet to see who could hurt Aidan the most.”

Race said nothing. Carmen with her overbite and low-cut T-shirt joined us on the balcony and told Race that his party kicked ass. Race was happy for the interruption. He had something he wanted to show Carmen and he steered her away from me and down the stairs.

I was in a room full of happy, young people. I’d never felt older. Never felt more alone.

FIFTEEN

Nadia and I woke up early on her birthday, sneaked out of our dorms, and met at the Old Boathouse. Both of us dressed to go for a run. The Boathouse smelled of paint and varnish but especially of mold. A row of high windows ran along one wall, but the sun would not rise for several hours. Nadia had arrived first and lit up wide pillar candles that sent the aroma of fake strawberries and vanilla bean through the small, enclosed space. We took off our sneakers and flopped on the mattress she’d already covered with her own soft blankets. We kissed and she went right for my groin. “There’s no rush,” I said. “We’ve got your whole birthday to celebrate.” Nadia began taking off her tank top, and I said, “Did you ever do that thing when you were a little kid where your parents balanced you on their feet?”

“Like an airplane?” she asked.

I stretched out on my back and bent my knees and Nadia leaned over and squared her chest against my feet. Straightening my legs, I balanced Nadia. She was so light. We both made funny zooming noises as though she were careening through puffy clouds. Looking up into her face I saw her perfectly shaped mouth, smelled her saccharine toothpaste, noticed where she’d forgotten to tweeze a hair from a small mole on her chin. I also saw myself as a child, the broad grin on my father’s face as he balanced me in the air.

“This is fun enough,” Nadia said, “but you can put me down anytime you like.”

Nadia was just humoring me. The airplane trick a bad idea, a poor distraction. I sat up and said, “Once we do this. You can never take it back.”

Nadia took off her tank top. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her left breast was larger than her right, and her nipples pointed out in different directions. Her arms and legs were tan but her torso was pale white. She slid off her running shorts and stood before me in just a pair of white lace panties. “Take them off for me,” she said. I brought her down onto the mattress. Hooking my thumbs around her panties, shucking them off in one clean move.

Without much thought, I stood up and took off my T-shirt, my sweat pants, and then my boxers. Nadia stared at my body. She’d never seen me naked, barely seen me with my shirt off. After all the sailing and training, my body was lean, strong. I’d never been overly proud of my physique, but I was aware of the muscles along my abdomen, the tension in my calves, the thickness of my thighs, the definition of my pectoral muscles. This was as good as I would ever look. Nadia’s eyes widened, first with a kind of frenzy, a desire, then suddenly her eyes dampened and she began to cry.

“What’s the matter,” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

Nadia looked at me not with desire but with resentment. “You’re so much better looking than I am.”
I told Nadia that she was the prettiest girl at Bellingham. I hugged her and kissed her neck.
“You’re just doing me a favor.” She pulled her face away.
There was no right thing to say. If I told Nadia that I did want her, she would hear the lie in my voice. She was a smart girl.
“I’ve just been kidding myself, haven’t I?” She pulled her tank top back on. She couldn’t find her panties, but she reached over me and picked up her shorts. “You’re still in love with Aidan.”
She didn’t say this in a mean or accusatory way. She wasn’t speaking out of spite. And she was right that I couldn’t stop thinking about Aidan.
While Nadia tied her sneakers, I sat naked on the mattress staring at the dark windows.
“Did you have sex with her?” Nadia asked. “Did you sleep with Aidan? Are you worried I won’t be as good?”
That night on the
Swan,
after I told Aidan my horrible truth, I expected her to reject me. To run away, even. But she seemed to understand that I needed comfort. Aidan knew what it was like to have your love turn to rage, to hurt the one person that you cared for above all others. “You need,” she said, “to find a way to trust yourself again.” The last time I’d been physical with a person, with Cal, I’d lost control and turned violent. I hated knowing that there was a violence within me that could mix so easily with sex. I was afraid of hurting Aidan. And Aidan was afraid of something else. “I used to try,” she said, “to have casual sex.” She sat up straight on our bunk. “But then I realized I’m not a casual person.”
We laughed. I ran my hand over her back. “Well, sex,” I said, “shouldn’t be a casual thing. Not if it’s worth having.”
And so Aidan and I did all of the private things we could to each other’s bodies, holding back that one last thing. Believing that there would be a time in the not too distant future when we would share everything with each other. Maybe we were beginning to fall in love, maybe we were just nursing each other back to health. For so long, I’d feared that I was hanging on to Aidan, on to all my thoughts and memories of her because of how our night together changed the meaning of all my nights with Cal. But I understood now that that it didn’t change anything. I loved them both. I’d opened my life up to each of them. I wasn’t worthy of either. If asked to choose between them, I wouldn’t.

I couldn’t salvage things between Nadia and me. I stayed naked as Nadia dressed. “I care about you,” I said. “The last thing I want is to be a disappointment.”

Nadia left, and I sat there for a little while among the old crew shells, the cans of dried paint. After Race’s party, I’d gone to Chester and told him how I’d confronted Race. How Kriffo had called the whole thing an accident.

“They lied to her mother.” Chester couldn’t stop shaking his head.

I begged Chester to come forward about the hazing, the harassment he’d put up with for years. “There’s got to be enough to get at least one of those guys kicked out. We could go after Kriffo. Say that he broke your arm on purpose.”

“You really don’t get it,” Chester said. “Aidan was killed. Windsor looked that girl’s mother straight in the eye and said ‘suicide.’ No one cares about my arm or the scar on my face. No one cares about a skinny girl from California.”

I picked up a paintbrush covered in a thick coat of dried white paint. I thought back to the night we’d painted the roof class of ’88. We had only a few days left before graduation. Not much time, but I realized that there was something I could do. I needed Chester’s help.

When I explained to Chester what I had in mind, I knew that there was a good chance he’d say no. But he liked my idea. “That’s clever,” he said. Together we sneaked out of Whitehall, climbed up onto the roof of the Old Boathouse. I’d gathered some unused brushes, some half-filled cans of white paint. Working quickly, cleanly, we managed to paint our message before the sun came up. When we finished, I jumped off the roof, then helped Chester down, careful not to hurt his arm. We sat on the wet lawn, our white message radiant in the dark.

“What made you so sure those guys hurt Aidan?” Chester asked. “How’d you know?”
“Because I loved her.” I peeled white paint from my hands. “And because I did something terrible once, something I’m ashamed of. I’m not so different from those guys.”
Chester didn’t ask me what I’d done and I’m not sure I would have told him if he had. Instead he told me a story about another black student who’d gone to Bellingham. “His name was Shawn. Everyone here loved him. He was from Chicago, well built, played football, basketball. The white kids tripped over themselves just to hang out with the guy.” Chester and Shawn were never friends. “He was older than me. First time we were alone together in the gym, he told me to keep my distance. It wasn’t like I thought we’d be friends just because we were both black. But Shawn saw me as some kind of threat. He’d figured out a way to make a place for himself. Didn’t want me to ruin it for him.” Chester’s eyes began to water. He wasn’t crying exactly. “My allergies,” he said, “they’re killing me.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “With Shawn?”
“It was stupid,” Chester said. “I went into his room when he wasn’t there, crumbled some of my mother’s cookies and brownies all over his floor and closet, his bedsheets, even in his sneakers. His room got infested with ants.” Chester sniffed. “Later, I heard these seniors talking about how Shawn was ‘dirty.’ For a long time, I hated myself.”
I told Chester I knew what it was like. To hate yourself for what you’d done.
“That book,” I said, “the one you lent me. It scared me a little.”
“How come?”
I ran my hands over the wet grass. “The way the writer went back and forth between men and women. I’ve felt that way. I’m not sure what it makes me.”
Chester nodded. “Doesn’t make you anything.”
In the East, the sun cast a brilliant red light on a distant, developing storm. “Red sky at morning,” I said. “Sailors take warning.”
“Let’s go.” Chester stood, offering me his good arm. I took his hand and allowed him to help me up.
I made it clear to Chester that I would take all of the blame. “We’re in this together,” he protested.
“If there’s any heat,” I said, “I’ll take it.”
Our message lasted that morning almost through breakfast. The grounds people had been ordered to drape the roof with a tarp, but the winds were heavy and the tarp kept blowing off, revealing our indictment: the crimes and cover-ups of the class of ’88. By lunchtime, the entire roof had been painted over in red, but then the rain came, rinsing the red paint away, the white letters showing through. It would take several more coats of paint to cover up our accusations of a cover-up.

At dinner that night there was all sorts of speculation. I sat at a long table with Kriffo, Tazewell, and Stuyvie. We ate fried chicken and chocolate pudding, Kriffo lamenting the fact that it would be for the last time.
“Who do you think did the paint job?” Kriffo asked. “What do

you think it means?”
“It doesn’t mean shit.” Taze smelled like he hadn’t bathed in days.
The great unwashed WASP.
I smiled. “I did it. You guys inspired me.”
All three of them exchanged looks. Wondering what I meant. “I didn’t want you to think”—I pushed back on my chair and
picked up my tray.—“that you’d gotten away with anything.”

For the first time since I’d been at Bellingham, the headmaster asked to see me. I went to his office ready for a fight, knowing that in many ways I was almost as untouchable as Race. Windsor wasn’t wearing a jacket or tie. He looked as though he’d just strolled off the golf course. His pants were decorated with pink whales spouting green water out of their blowholes. Windsor told me that he’d tried to reach my father but that my father seemed to be away.

“He travels a lot,” I said. “Works hard to honor all of his charitable donations.”
“I’m sure you know why I’ve called you in here.”
Windsor leaned back in his cushioned seat and I leaned back in my hard chair. Neither of us said a word. I noticed the spidery red veins on his nose and cheeks. He probably saw a look of contempt flash over my face. We were at a stalemate. Windsor couldn’t kick me out without losing his dorms.
“So how are we going to settle this matter?” Windsor asked. “I have a mind to send your father a bill for the cost of repainting the roof. You can tell him what you like. Create your own little cover story.”
Windsor looked like a man who was angry not because someone had stolen his car but because someone had scratched the paint with a key. His was a vibrant, intense anger.
“The one thing I can’t figure out”—I tore some skin from my rough, blistered hands—“is how you managed to write that fake suicide note. The one you passed off to Aidan’s mother.”
“I assure you,” Windsor said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I left Windsor’s office invigorated, high, even. Running out into the Fishbowl where students collected between classes and free periods, I searched for Chester, hoping to tell him what I’d said to Windsor. A crowd of students were busy Scotch-taping sheets of paper to the wall across from our mailboxes. Almost everyone was laughing. Yazid stood by the mailboxes and watched.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Wall of Shame,” Yazid said. “The rejects are posting their rejection letters.”
Yazid and I admired the memorial of denial. The embossed letterhead alerting Brizzey that she would not be attending Vassar. Skidmore’s red stamp of rejection negating Styuvie. I didn’t see any correspondence with Race’s name. Kriffo had posted his own note from Princeton so high on the wall that it was hard to read. It was nice, comforting, even, to see someone say no to my classmates.
Yazid was headed back to England to study at Cambridge. He asked where I was going.
I still hadn’t heard from Princeton. Still didn’t know if I was off their waiting list.
“Check your mailbox,” Yazid said. “Maybe you’ll have your answer.”
The envelope was thin. I hesitated before opening it. Told myself that either way, acceptance or denial, it didn’t matter. I’d be fine. I ripped through the envelope, tearing the message informing me that I’d been removed from the waiting list. My formal acceptance would appear shortly. I’d made it. I was in. A member of that exclusive group of men within my family.

The night before graduation, I bumped into Stuyvie at the General Store. We ignored each other, but when I left the store, he was waiting for me outside, drinking fruit punch. Though he kept wiping his face with the back of his hand, he still had red stains on the sides of his mouth.