-Chapter 5-
'It feels so damn good to work; hard, physical work melt’s away all other concerns’, I mused with delicious fatigue, and decided in the light evening breeze he would hoist all the sails by hand, his veins pulsing with sudden force. The Stranger seemed to breathe with collective relief as she moved easily out of the claustrophobic little cove and into the opalescent black ocean, letting the little dull amber spots on the distant shore guide her north to Nice and the mainland. The wind kicked up into a healthy southwesterly as we moved out of the wind shadow of the little isle. The Isle of Jacques de Marquee became a murky shadow, a reflection both warm and sad.
The void of the Mediterranean swallowed us up as quickly as I'd expected, and the trip regained its forward momentum at last it seemed. I felt the warm black water was the only thing I could stare at with singular intensity, or even just full awareness, and not feel uncomfortable. Alone on a boat there was no self-consciousness, no doubt, only action and consequence. I was tired and a bit sore from the vigor with which I'd attacked the rigging. It reminded me of the playful competition of skiing or rock climbing back in New England in college, the weariness that only caught me when the intensity of the experience wavered.
The best -the absolute best- was the full body contentment, surreal and immediate, that came from total physical exhaustion. Everyone ought to work hard, to be tired, content, to be absolved from the sin of projecting into the murky future. A lot of people were like those little black dots I'd seen in the north Atlantic on flights to Stockholm as a child, I realized. They seemed strange and fascinating from 30,000 feet up, but closer they were just boxes upon boxes, stacked compartments motoring along from point A to B. I wanted my path, our path, to be circuitous, strange and unpredictable. I willed it to be so, setting a steady course in light wind and quickly falling asleep below deck.
In the cabin, things were quiet and contemplative, as they ought to be, and the wind ran steady from the southwest at ten knots, propelling the boat north towards the dull amber of the mainland. I secretly wanted another altercation, even in sleep, a chance to taunt the feebly grasp it seemed most people had on reality- retaliation from the hurt I’d felt for leaving so suddenly. In the meantime, though, the loneliness of the boat and the black salty ocean sufficed. Suddenly, without prelude or expectation, a loud glancing blow deflected my shallow sleep. I woke with a deep shudder, expecting to simply be wretched from nightmare to calmness. Instead the thud became many rhythmic, tapping steps- quick, assertive feet on the deck above and whispers of bold provincial French. A flashlight beam pierced the stale air of the cabin and I smiled and held up my hands instinctively. Authority always chagrined me, mischievous and arcane, and I felt surrender without question was the best-played irony. A rapid exchange of broken English and confused accusation followed, and I learned that a mid-sized, recreational sailboat much like the Stranger was rumored to be at large in the Mediterranean near Nice, carrying a hundred kilos of cocaine and a dozen illegal immigrants from Algiers.
The French naval police seemed easily satisfied by my profession of innocence, and the conversation soon turned to friendly banter over the weather and the superiority of French to American girls. I relished at first the warmth and simplicity of interaction with others, the isolation of the boat and Julian's hold on me melting under hot sun and recognition. Soon though I wished I were asleep again and blissfully unaware of the pirates nearby, as the police clearly had fulfilled the day’s agenda and now were content to bullshit and linger on the boat. They had tied up their little escort boat next to mine and thrown a hasty anchor down into the shallow azure water. Relieved of having to navigate these new, possibly treacherous waters in morning grogginess, I figured I ought to at least pour some drinks for my new friends. I measured even portions of sweet vermouth, cheap gin, and a half-empty bottle of Campari into a large pitcher and stirred mildly till the liquid shone brilliant orange-red in the sun. Negroni's for all, which prompted their leader, a man called Benoit, to compliment my good taste 'for such a young man.'
I wanted to tell them I was an old spirit, a person half-realized and translucent, but thought better of inflicting my bizarre idiosyncrasies on them at this hour, even as the alcohol and the lazy overhead sun dulled my senses. Benoit, as his arrogant little metal nametag announced, turned out to be a fine fellow, from a poor farming family in the Champagne Valley to the north and not much older than myself. His aesthetics pleased me, his smart, rigid build poised ever so slightly forward, it seemed, as if always about to start a race. His eyes set beneath deep sun creases filled with straightforward kindness. I pictured Benoit and I, sweaty and fatigued, picking grapes on his family's farm in Champagne, exhausted with the dull pleasantries of rural labor. I saw us getting drunk on the remains of a bottle of Pinot Noir, fighting in the itchy fields like brothers or cousins, the endless vineyards that came sweeping over green hillsides like ocean swells. I always projected, always anticipated, always theorized the guilt of not knowing. Sometimes my life was like a child's Christmas Eve restlessness, drawn out 24 years. Benoit- he couldn't have been older than 30 or so- was now reading from his lengthy mental archive of past sexploits amongst the university girls in Marseilles and Nice. His tales were carefully crafted to hide the obvious lies, yet not quite well enough. I yawned; his vivid style and sharp inflection betrayed him and I knew Benoit was like me- open, confused yet certain, seeking love from everyone. His little naval police group seemed to know this as well, yet they followed politely and egged on his masculine folly, mentally comparing their own records to his. A few hours passed languidly. As the ball of yellow fire eyed us obliquely from above, the critical time for departure seemed to have arrived. I informed them of my plans to take leave of the Stranger for some time, to explore terra firma and the provincial culture I admired and they seemed to deride.
Benoit told me to follow them into Cannes, some 20 kilometers distant, where I could tie up for free for a few days at his friend’s marina. I agreed gratefully, following the little police boat at a bounding clip across the now growing whitecaps and foaming sea, the storm clouds to the west looming and ominous. I reefed the mainsail and brought it in on a close haul, the keel leaning hard to starboard and shooting out over the wet, static plane like a greyhound after a rabbit, its eagerness sincere and singular. Propelled by nothing but thermal gradients and ambition, I thought myself a modern Huck Finn, the naïveté of childhood at ease with the physical constraints of adult life. We pulled into a sheltered cove and the marina just as the sun violently extinguished itself to the west over broken chalk cliffs and half-silhouetted palms. Benoit suggested I hop into the police boat for the ride across the bay to Cannes. I felt the sharp pinprick of anticipation, the reluctant exhilaration of a 16-year-old out for a nightdrive with the cool kids. Benoit was a cool 27 and apparently knew all the best discothèque’s in Cannes. He made promises of things that seemed so absurd and half-perfect I felt obliged to find out for myself.
We left the little grey escort boat at the police station docks and walked briskly along the faded cobblestone quay of downtown Cannes. The rest of the group were apparently married and settled, and they declined the invitation politely, heading up Rue St. Catherine towards what I presumed was home. Walking beneath the busy neon signage and humming nightscape of the waterfront with Benoit, I felt painfully self-aware and transparent. Perhaps my dull, torn Levi’s and striped navy shirt were actually a new direction in local style me. Perhaps I was watched and admired, envied, or otherwise noted, a transient blending in with the cool kids and washed up old folks alike. Everyone wanted the same things in life; the expressions were just different. My liquid confidence, my placeless aluminum aura, it all distracted me. I felt aloof and without worry for the first time since leaving the isle. The evening spun involuntarily into sharp corners and narrow buildings as we took turns from the gin bottle, encased in cheap, dirty conversation and delicious silence. Benoit was a neon prophet surrounded by uptight Lacoste polo's and tweed jackets, having made it a priority to stop at home and change into his 'disco clothes' before they went any further. Nights out with new strangers were unidirectional and spontaneous, I thought. Like a rock kicked down a cliff into the sea, the course was random but the destination certain.
Just as the night seemed resigned to pointless wandering, Benoit arranged a last-minute rendezvous with his friends from the University in Marseilles, the wealthy white kids at their family beach homes for the summer holiday. I was truly uncertain of myself for once- unaware of the environment around me, yet content enough to be static and watchful around these new, bright faces. The Cote D'Azure was like a white stucco and red brick jungle. Ancient fortresses of privilege and inequity looked out across the bored sea towards the parched disparity of Africa. I thought of Africa, the real jungle lush and impenetrable, filled with dark shadows and brooding violence. The subtle neo-violence of these social classes and parties, the houses where the ‘cool’ kids slept bored and fitful- it was all insignificant to the 3rd world, the real world, the world of exotic spices and smells and colors.
As it was, the smells and colors and young people of Cannes were enough to distort my surroundings pleasantly. I walked briskly in step with Benoit, like a young boy determined to keep up with his mother but still look casually separate from her watch. A group of 4 university girls, their breasts round and taunt beneath rakish stripes and revealing lace, joined us in a fit of giggles and cigarette smoke. Suddenly I snapped out the social apathy I’d felt; I needed to know them. I played my cards smoothly, or so I thought, making conversation in overly casual broken French and instigating more nervous eyes and laughter. Soon we’d decided, or Benoit had decided, that we would start at Leroy, a formerly trendy restaurant and bar a block east. Leroy was packed with people young and old- Parisian's, Berliners, Lisbonites. They were all ecstatic, all high on the humid air of summer freedom, vacationland replacing their work-obsessed daily lives; respite from the too-often gray realm of ‘productivity.’ The break from routine Cannes afforded meant most people were open, unprompted, waiting for the fantasies they played in their heads alone in bed at night or on the 6AM train to work- the supposedly hedonistic lifestyles and green chasms of the coast. The reality of course was a compromise, a night out on the town ending in bed with a usual lover, a husband, a wife held for 20 years too long, instead of that local who made brief, delicious eyes with you earlier.
I liked the style and ease of movement the Europeans seemed to have, the acceptance of fate paired with sharp, stinging humor, the subtle distaste for dull moments. The girls had obviously done this before, and I got the impression Benoit may not have been bluffing when he claimed to have slept with all of them at various times. The boldest and tallest, Marie, was 22 and hated everyone and everything except the beach and her car, a lime green 63' Mercedes. I wanted to hate her, to hate Benoit, to forget her from the first introduction, but I found myself grotesquely attracted instead. Much like her, the nosebleeds and nervous tapping couldn't hide my past nor the present, a monster of her own making that threatened to consume the details of her disarmingly girlish smile.
Her smile was smug, knowing, and radiant- I wanted to see it in my head when I slept at night, and I playfully tugged at the mauve edges of her skirt when our drinks arrived. She responded with subtle creases of her lips, smoldering ideas of the evening that lay hidden to Benoit and I, men caught in the silly conquest of the moment. Her accomplices, 20 year old Natalie, shy and out to prove herself amongst these alpha females, sat on a narrow stool beside Julie and Eva, each an indestructible 21 and overflowing with warm flesh and ideas.
Youth was so tame, a sheltered cove in the sea of career and identity that would inevitably follow, yet I also liked the limitless austerity of it, the horizon line unbroken and forward. The undertow of doubt and consequence taunted me even at my most radiant moments, times like this suddenly pleasing evening with five wonderful partners in the August humidity, the air sweating like sex and 5th floor walk-ups with no air conditioning. Marie was about to enter her last year of university, studying literature with a minor in pornography and cocaine. She seemed to exist of the delicious fringes of Marseille bourgeoisie society, a transient by choice and popularity. Vaguely disoriented from a third vodka tonic, she told me about her trip this past Christmas to Papua New Guinea, where she’d spent 3 weeks living alongside one of the world's most 'primitive' tribes, the Asmat people. From the drunken sound of it, they had a better handle on reality than anything produced in the post-happiness first world.
The Asmat made love to whomever they wanted and seemed to possess none of the sexual taboo's of western culture- it was common for a young man to have several male lover's as well as a wife with whom he’d bore a child. The justification for their seemingly anti-societal hedonism was simply that no justification was needed- if it was in the spirit of love and partnership, connected to the world of waving Sago palms and tannin-infused rivers, then all was blessed. They believed we all share a common, interconnected spirit, Marie informed me, wide-eyed and stuttering. The jungle breed’s wild animals and violence just as it breed's compassion and the strange virtue of man, and all living things ought to be worshipped for their own identity. Marie’s eyes dilated and her pupil's fixed absently on a distant barstool as she explained this to me- it was clear the experience was still very much a living, breathing entity within her. Even here surrounded by familiar luxuries, she longed for the jungle again. I was entranced, lost in the poorly lit fog of greater-than-this-moment nightclub bullshit. Except this wasn't just bullshit, it was real because it had touched Marie- she’d flushed the coke down the toilet and told her heavy-handed boyfriend to fuck off and get a job, and she was here now, changed for the better it seemed.
Marie had this singular fascination with the foreign, incomprehensible edges of society; that which eluded her own upbringing. I knew I was much the same, resigned to exploring the safe and familiar while longing for something more tense, and then forgetting how soft things had been before. The other two girls had gone home with boys they’d met that evening, and I imagined their expressions during sex, glazed and disappointed, as if there was something more to being young and easy and slightly bored. When everyone bores you, I thought irritably, life is reduced to quiet madness, steady compromise and tedium. I remembered unevenly my early childhood in suburban New York, the circuitous chains of commuters snaking towards the city, seemingly content to let their souls wither in aluminum and steel boxes for a few bucks each day. ‘They weren’t bored though, not all of them, since interest was often created from within, so rare were the sublime coincidences of place and experience’, I drunkenly told myself. This sort of drivel amused me, stroked my ego so much at the moment that I let it distract me from Benoit and Marie temporarily. Money, however, was obscure and hypocritical, I now postulated with no evidence from the lofty position of a 4th cocktail. It was easy to abstract like this when it was of no immediate concern, yet I knew it remained the bane of most people's existence, the reason and the reward for discontent.
Marie was distracted and distant, her eyes playing out future scenes of lovemaking or drug taking. Benoit had apparently left without warning- his drunken restlessness had pushed him to roam the streets a bit. I kind of wanted to roam the nightscape a bit too; the dirty black walls and seedy corners of the bar had compressed inward with sweat and stereo bass, and the cool, dark evening was enviable. I hated the awkward expectations of departure, so I summoned my most indifferent smirk and politely asked Marie if she wanted to go back to her place and fuck. She replied with a single flat note- "oui". It was fun enough, I rationalized- she was another wild child of the 20tth century jungle, and when she fussed under the covers and kicked and bit at me like an untrained puppy, I wished they’d all been this fun.
I woke early, the dull neon edges of the sun barely making shadows across Marie's 5th floor townhouse on the quay. I could never sleep naturally in another's bed, as if trust existed only between inanimate things and nature. I liked the consequences of bets against the wind, the sea or a mountain. People, even perfect, shining Marie, had somehow become repetitive and indistinguishable in the morning light. I wondered where I’d be in 20 years, still wandering the streets at night or escaping reality on some mountain, while my colleagues and family dug roots into the comfortable confines of midlife society, jobs and children and mortgages taking the edge off reality just right. I could never settle though, never buy into the system of trading adventure for security- they had to be mutually exclusive, tense. I thought perhaps I'd run up to a storefront and lick the glass in a mock embrace with commercial barriers, the exchange of paper shit for plastic shit, to become lewd and ridiculous as a way to love or at least tolerate myself. Marie suggested espresso and a croissant at a little patisserie down the block, and I agreed easily; what else were we going to do? Lie in bed and discuss politics or sex or relationships? Certainly not! I don't open up to people like that, or at least not in that kind of timeframe.
Maybe someday I'd live in some upper class suburb that melted indistinguishably into an upper middle-class suburb, which then morphed with disarming speed into the ghetto. New York or Los Angeles or any other place we’re told we want to go. I’d drive a Range Rover and have two restless, uncertain little children whose lives were full of surrogate activity for simple love and running around outside, and a wife held ten or fifteen slow, middling years too long past the time when it was just right, but wasn't it the American Dream? Entropy was always right, eh? I didn't know what he was mad about, mad about things I didn’t even understand, why I couldn't just hug himself and not want to distract others into false security. Marie sensed this distraction and bought me a triple shot espresso and a huge croissant with lox and strange green mustard, which at my surprise she said was to "stop your ribs from showing!" It was true I thought sheepishly, my ribs did show a bit. I couldn't gain weight despite the ungodly caloric intake and junk he consumed. I decided my metabolic rate must be tied to the chaotic business upstairs.
Suddenly, the quiet hum of the cafe was interrupted by loud, mournful wailing. Ragged breathes and shallow gasps emanated from a young woman who had the classic look of someone who woke up in an unfamiliar location having stumbled there the previous night in disheveled clothes, her dress rumbled and slightly stained. "Julie!" Marie cried, and I realized it was the girl from last night, the one who had eyed him suspiciously and inquisitively as Marie put the moves on across the bar. She was completely beside herself and now whispering rapid, slurred French in the embrace of Marie. Marie’s face had turned white and ashen, her eyes vacant and locked on some distant horizon line outside.
Benoit had committed suicide last night. A group of boys out fishing along the beach below the big steel suspension bridge that crossed over the canyon on the edge of town had found him. Crumpled and still warm at seven that morning, a handwritten note clutched in his left hand had read:
All I ever do is smolder,
When I really want to burn
All I ever get is older
When the point of youth’s to yearn
I felt ill and dizzy; I fell forward a few feet and caught myself on a table and slowly, deliberately staggered outside, vomiting cheap gin and bits of breakfast on the cobblestone patio. ‘Jesus fucking Christ; that could have been me that could have been me that could be me.’ The miasma of drunken, hopeless, lonely nights that filled my memory bank, the times things seemed beyond repair. Benoit had seemed so confident, so easy around these sly panther's of the bourgeoisie social scene. His body language had even projected austere resolve against the loser's and the washed up, the boring people and occasional snotty kids, everyone not worthy of his private obsession. I needed to leave- this place was toxic, the grand white villas and their ornate stucco details and brick façades suddenly melted into a foul current of unfairness. I vowed never to return to Cannes; this place was dead, Benoit was dead, hope had left and gone out to sea. I stifled tears and fought back deep, choking sobs as I hugged Marie, who was still in shock and sat static in her chair inside the café. I turned and ran down the steep, narrow street to the docks; The Stranger was waiting there. Humble and beautiful in the morning fog, she was all I needed.
I boarded hastily and began to ready the rigging to set sail, and instantly calmed and swallowed the acrid bile that had begun to build in my throat. The boat was always there, always the same, ready to love and expect nothing in return. I turned the heavy wooden wheel with tender affection as she slid deftly out of the little marina under power at 5 knots moving south 60 west. I wanted music, I wanted art, but really I wanted aural, visual, peripheral stimulation without loss. The warm teal ocean swallowed me up once again and shut out all the other bullshit. Now 10 kilometers out to sea and set on a broad reach towards Corsica, I filled leaky plastic buckets with briny water and scrubbed the wooden slats and fiberglass hatches along the deck with vigor and determination. My forearms bulged with exertion and the little marlin twine bracelet I wore on my left wrist tightened satisfyingly. Blood flow was adrenaline realized; a steady respite from weariness or too much thought. I wished for the classic, visceral redemption of the hero; the part of the film where the audience had seen enough injustice and rallies for a happy ending. This was the experience though, that goddamn spontaneous, evolving situation that could never be too easy, otherwise it wouldn't be real.
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