The repair work went slowly. Among other tasks, the spars had to be sanded down to the wood; that meant hoisting up in a bosun's chair, and I've never been fond of heights. I put in two and sometimes three days a week, much of that time by myself. Bone helped when he wasn't working on
At the rate the repairs were progressing, and with the off-island trip with Annalise coming up, there wasn't much chance the yawl would be ready for cruising until the end of the year. And maybe not even then.
We flew to New York via Miami the first week in June. We were away a total of three weeks. Five days in Manhattan: museums, restaurants, a couple of Broadway shows. I would've liked to hear a performance of the New York Philharmonic, but they were dark for the season. Annalise took one entire day to make the rounds of large fashion houses like Gloria Vanderbilt and Calvin Klein, as well as a couple of the smaller ones, lugging a portfolio of her designs and trying to wangle an audience with one of the head designers. I thought she was being naive, that she wouldn't get past the receptionist in any of the houses, and I was right. But the turnaways didn't dampen her enthusiasm. She left designs at two or three places, and held on to the belief that they were good enough to generate interest somewhere.
Six days in Paris, three in Monte Carlo, five in London. Annalise loved them all. For me the whole trip was an exhausting and uncomfortable experience. The cities were interesting enough, but not to my taste. Too many people, too many eyes. Every time we went through passport and customs checks, I felt exposed and vulnerable. I imagined policemen were watching me, thinking that I looked familiar. Ordinary citizens, too. In London a tourist pointed a camera in my direction, and I ducked and turned away before I realized it wasn't me but one of the double-decker buses behind me that he was interested in. If Annalise noticed my discomfort, she ignored it because she was having such a good time.
I was relieved to get back to St. Thomas. The island was my safe harbor, the Caribbean my comfort zone. An illusion, sure; I could've been recognized there just as easily as in New York or London or Europe. But everybody has a place where he feels secure, a lifestyle that suits him perfectly, and this was mine. More of a home, after only two and a half years, than Los Alegres or San Francisco had ever been.
I slept for fourteen hours and then went down to the harbor and talked Bone into a day sail on
It wasn't long after our return that things began to deteriorate rapidly between Annalise and me.
She was still on a high from the trip and she started lobbying for us to move to New York—'not immediately, in a year or two.' I told her it wasn't going to happen, and why it wasn't going to happen. At first she pouted. Then, when the high faded and sank into a low, she turned broody and distant.
One set of the designs she'd distributed in New York came back stuffed in a envelope with no note and postage due. The others were never returned. This depressed her, started her drinking more than she had before. And the drinking brought out the bitch again.
'I'm never going to get anywhere with my designs living down here. If we were in New York I could talk to people, meet somebody who'd look at them and see the potential and give me a chance. Or I could enroll in Pratt Institute and eventually get a referral from them.'
'How many times have we been over this?' I said. 'New York is too expensive. And the weather is miserable.'
'Somewhere outside the city, then.'
'Same negatives apply.'
'I suppose you want to stay here for the rest of our lives.'
'That was the plan, wasn't it? We're settled now, we're safe here—'
'We'd be safe in New York, after all this time. That's just an excuse.'
'Don't you like St. Thomas anymore?'
'You want the truth? No, not very much.'
'Why? What's changed?'
'Nothing's changed, that's the point. There's not enough to do on an island this small—half the time I'm bored to tears. But you don't even notice. You don't seem to care about my feelings, my needs. All you care about is that goddamn boat of yours. And your black buddy Bone.'
'That's not true, Annalise.'
'Isn't it? Makes me wonder if you still love me. Or if now I'm just somebody you keep around to screw when you feel like it. . . .'
She drank more and more; I hardly ever saw her without a glass in her hand. We went out together less often. There were long silences whenever we were together. Our sex life slacked off, to the point where I was spending much more time on
I kept trying to put us back together, giving her little presents, surprising her with an evening at a restaurant she liked on St. John. Nothing worked. The rift between us kept on widening. But I refused to believe it was permanent. Denial. I needed us to be all right, so we'd be all right. Every marriage has its rocky periods, I told myself, and this was ours—a bad patch that would smooth itself out sooner or later.
There were other problems, too. By the end of hurricane season, she was no longer spending time with Maureen Verriker. When I asked her about it, all she'd say was a curt 'The friendship's run its course.' She wasn't seeing much of her other friends, either, the apparent reason being that she'd made a new one at Sapphire Bay she liked more. JoEllen something—Hall, I think—an artist who lived out near Red Hook.
I didn't care for JoEllen. She was from somewhere in Florida, one of the divorcees who stayed on to make a new life for herself. It wasn't much of a life, as far as I could see. She was fortyish, loud, bawdy—the bohemian type who dressed sloppily in shorts and a loose halter that kept threatening to expose one or the other of a pair of juiceless brown tits. A polar opposite to Annalise in every way except for their shared fondness for sun, steel and scratch bands, and rum punches. Beach buddies, drinking buddies. JoEllen lived hand to mouth on what she earned from seascapes and island scenes aimed at the tourist trade. Annalise thought the oils and watercolors were better than they were, just as she thought her fashion designs were better than they were. She saw JoEllen as another yet-to-be-discovered genius. JoEllen saw her as a regular source of free drinks and small loans.
They hung out together three or four days a week, sometimes well into the night. Once Annalise didn't get home until after midnight. I was waiting up for her and I heard her squeal the Mini into the driveway, veer off the pavement, and slalighter half a dozen plantings on the way down. She wasn't just drunk—she was glassy-eyed, slack-jawed, jelly-legged plastered.
I was furious. 'What the hell's the matter with you, driving in that condition?' I yelled at her. 'What if you'd had an accident, run over somebody?'
'Well, I didn't.'
'But you could have. You could've been stopped, arrested, thrown in jail. Any kind of serious trouble, the police might do a background check, and then we'd be finished. We can't afford to call attention to ourselves, we can't afford to lose control—not ever. How many times have we been over that?'
'A million. Two million. That's your favorite word—control. You know what you are? A control freak, that's what you are.'
'That's not true, I've never tried to control you—'
'Oh, bullshit, Richard. You've been controlling me for four goddamn years. Do this, don't do that, don't take chances, don't take risks. What's that if not controlling?'
'Being sensible. Being careful. Trying to keep us safe.'
'Careful, right. Another of your favorite words. You don't sound like Richard anymore, you know that? You sound like that tightassed accountant back in San Francisco, Jordan what's his name.'
'Now who's spouting bullshit?'