knots across six-foot seas. Nothing, really, just a fresh breeze. It's blowing twice as hard tonight. But I realized, with a certainty that has never left me, just how mindlessly malevolent the sea is, how much it craves the lives of the puny air-breathers who venture out on it.
When we came back in, I tied the boat to the dock and didn't move her again for six weeks. By that time I had convinced myself that my initial reaction was just an aberration, that I would soon get over my fright and begin to see the same beauty and feel the same joy that my heroes wrote of.
But I never have.
Why do I keep trying? Because. . because sailing is the only real thing I've ever done. No matter how frightened I am — and I'm sick with fear and ouzo right now — I can stilt define myself as a seaman. As an adventurer, a voyager, a striver against the elements. Otherwise I'm just an aging, failed writer, a drunk, alone.
What would I do, if I could ever find some fool to buy Olympius? When I try to imagine, I see myself, even older and fatter and more decayed, vegetating at some Podunk junior college, resting on my meager laurels, teaching pimply-faced adolescents to write brainless essays, fucking the occasional presentable coed.
I may, of course, be assuming too much, to think that even junior-college coeds would be stupid enough to be dazzled by my small frame and worn-out charm.
Or perhaps I might get a job writing guidebooks.
I WASN'T ALWAYS so pitiful. I remember, a long time ago, a wharf at Piraeus.
That was the day I met my ex-wife.
I was still young enough to believe that I would one day become a good writer, despite the poor sales and the unkindness of the critics. And I had learned to pretend fearlessness, sometimes so well that I fooled myself. I drank for joy, not for anesthesia. . or at least that was the theory.
I was splicing a bucket lanyard, sitting on the side deck, legs dangling, a cup of new red wine beside me.
I put a whipping around the rope end, separated the strands, concentrated on the work — but I gradually became aware of a pair of strong, bare legs on the wharf. My attention traveled up, to round hips in tight white shorts, to a smooth, bare belly, to small, perfect breasts in a translucent halter top.
She had a narrow, pretty face, noteworthy mainly for the clarity and directness of her gaze. Shiny brown hair. A long, graceful neck. She seemed a little older than the usual dock bunny; a few interesting laugh lines framed those luminous eyes. She was a beautiful woman, not a pretty one. „So what are you doing?“ she asked, in pleasant Midwest English.
„Making an eye splice,“ I said. I was holding one of the strands in the flame of a lighter, melting the end so it wouldn't unravel. I clicked off the lighter, dipped my fingers into the wine, and then rolled the melted nylon into a point between my wet fingers, It hissed and stuck to my skin, burning me.
I shook my hand and muttered a curse. She laughed, without any meanness. ''What happened?»
«A minor wound,» I said, noticing what a nice smile she had. «Usually I just spit on my fingers. But I didn't want to be indelicate.»
She stopped smiling and looked at me with that always-recognizable intensity, that sweet, flesh-calling-to- flesh energy. «Go on,» she said, licking her lips with a pointed pink tongue. «Use spit; I won't mind.»
We had a good run, Lissa and I. We did. Finally she left me, after eight wonderful and awful years. For a rich Dutchman with a big Swan, a beautiful boat indeed. But I'll never believe it was because he had a better boat than mine, or more money, or that he was still strong, while I… I had already earned this bloated drunkard's face, that now so perfectly masks what I once thought myself to be.
No. She was too fine a person, a woman of grace and compassion. Far too good for me.
No, I think she could not bear to see me sink. She never said as much; I think she wanted to hide her pity from me, a last act of kindness.
I haven't seen her for years. She and the Dutchman swallowed the anchor and moved back to his big tulip farm. It's funny. For months at a time, I avoid thinking about her, and then something will happen. Just last week, someone who knew us in the good days told me that she has a little boy now, just three years old.
I don't know why that bit of irrelevant information affected me so; I was almost in tears. I don't know why. Yes, I do.
I think maybe I didn't switch to the retsina soon enough. I should be trying to do something to ease Olympias, but here I sit in her weatherbeaten cockpit, blubbering over my decayed memories. We jolt into huge black waves, the sea so angry, so loud that I no longer hear the boat's voice — the commonplace, reassuring creaks and grinds and clatters of an old steel boat. Spray bursts high to windward, hanging in the green glow of the sidelight, and solid water courses along the lee decks. I'm soaked and shivering; it's too bad I was too drunk to get my oilskins early enough to do any good.
The masts are whipping like trees in the gale; she's carrying far too much canvas for this weight of wind.
I should be terrified; in fact, I should be even more terrified that I'm not as afraid as any rational person would be, but I continue to wrap myself in old hurts, safe in my regrets.
What the hell. Time for some terminal anesthesia. I throw away the retsina that remains in my glass, and grope for the ouzo bottle. It's no easy business — the gimballed table is snap-rolling in the violent seaway, and I risk a broken wrist.
Long practice sees me through, however, and I get the bottle out. Then tragedy strikes, and I lose the bottle; it slips through my wet hand and shatters on the cockpit floor.
I think that was my last bottle of ouzo, and it's not the sort of night that wine will serve. I don't know what to do.
While I still sit here, stunned by my loss, a big wave breaks onboard. The staysail catches the top of it and rips from luff to leech, a sound l ike a pistol shot. In a moment the sail dissolves into whipping tatters, and suddenly Achilles can no longer cope with the unbalanced rig. Olympias slews off downwind, and I clutch at the wheel.
The contact with Olympias restores a little of my perspective, though I'm still miraculously unafraid. The wheel throbs in my hands, as if Olympias were shuddering at some fearful thing only she could see. Abruptly, I remember the jagged rocks that line the leeward edge of this channel.
«Perfect,» I say, though the wind whips away the word before it can travel the tiny distance between my mouth and my ear.
I can feel Oiympias sliding across the sea, wallowing in the troughs, balanced precariously on the crests, moving toward her grave among the sharp rocks. When it occurs to me that it will be my grave also, I feel nothing but a great surprise.
Did I see her then, the goddess or demon, the lost one who moans in bewilderment for Great Alexander? Did she come to me, drawn by my numbness and defeat?
Did I see her ravaged face, with the black skin peeling back from the bone, a dead, dry thing in dusty rags, standing in a grotto of motionless, jagged water? Did I hear her pitiful question, in the sudden silence?
I don't know; I don't know. I'm afraid to know. But I do know that I answered her, shrieking as if the wind still raged.
Olympias threaded he r way through the rocks, miraculously. Was that the doing of the lost one? Because I gave her the right answer?
I don't know. And today, as I work in the autumnal sun, chipping rust from my boat, I ply the iron in a frenzy, like a man chipping rust from his own soul.
I think this: there are worse fates than mine, even if I never become more than a fat old drunk who writes guidebooks.
