The Memory of Place

"I want us. Us, Tom. We belong together."

"Yeah, we did once."

"We can again."

"Liz? If you don't mind, this is just a little too weird for me right now. Maybe in a few days?"

"OK, Tom. Could you still help out at the restaurant. We haven't found a new manager yet, and it would be a big help."

Ah. So that was it.

"Uh, no Liz. I've got other plans."

"Oh. Right, well, I'll give you a call."

I could hear it in her voice. I wouldn't hear from her again. Not unless she needed me for something, not unless she wanted somebody else's dreams to call her own again. I made my way down the companionway steps and flipped on the breakers, then turned on the red light over the chart table. I felt the boat move as she hopped off, heard her footsteps recede in the darkness. I'd never felt so utterly alone in all my life.

What was I doing? What had I done?

◊◊◊◊◊

Moving through the boat I just managed to get my clothes off and hopped into the head before I lost it. That thundering realization in the cockpit had been the single most nauseating moment of my life. I flipped on the shower and stood under the water, felt my soul's dis-ease wash away as the hot water beat down on the back of my neck. Everything seemed to be moving like the boat was at sea in a storm, though I viscerally knew the boat was still tied up to the dock. Everything felt out of place, because suddenly my senses weren't reliable anymore.

I don't know how long I stood there. The water cooled, then it stopped completely; I'd run the tanks dry. Maybe a hundred and fifty gallons of water, gone. I was shivering, and suddenly thought I was hallucinating. I smelled bacon frying, and coffee brewing.

Walking into the forward cabin, I heard her in the galley, knew she'd come back and was now making me bacon and eggs. I didn't want to face her, not now, not ever again. I didn't want to ever see her face again, and as I put on a shirt I grew angry at her audacity, at her contempt for my feelings.

She had what she wanted. Why couldn't she just leave it at that and go on her merry way.

I knew then that I'd have to leave this place as soon as I could get the boat provisioned, leave and follow my heart over the next horizon. I pulled on some sweatpants and slipped on an old pair of boat shoes, then stood and took a deep breath. I thought of what I needed to say, how I wanted to say it. Turning, I opened the door into the main cabin of the boat, prepared to let the full fury of my anger run its course.

She was in the galley with her back to me, cracking eggs in a bowl when I walked in. She turned and I stumbled, and my world lurched again. It wasn't Liz, and suddenly it hit me: I'd never been so happy to see a lawyer in all my life.

"You want some rum in your coffee?"

Now that was an ice-breaker if I'd ever heard one.

"I, uh..."

"Look, I heard Liz storming up the ramp, cussing under her breath. I came over here and heard you in the shower. You didn't, well, didn't sound too good. Anyway. Bacon and eggs usually get me over the rough spots. Thought I'd get some going for you."

"I'm glad you're here." She looked up from the stove, looked at me.

"Yeah? Well, what's it gonna be? Coffee black, or coffee with a little kick in it?"

◊◊◊◊◊

Over the next week or so I got all my stuff back on board and worked on getting everything stowed away. Not too hard a job when your head's screwed on tight, but I was still having a time of it. Maybe I was depressed, or maybe just tired, but I was having a hard time making sense of even the smallest things, and everything I tried to do seemed filtered through molasses. I felt like tar on hot pavement -- oozing around under the sun, getting stuck on everything, and ultimately just making a mess. And I found that my thought processes weren't much better. Hot and messy, if that makes any sense at all.

I'd never thought of Liz as the devious type, as a shrew. In almost five years of sailing, she'd never once been as overtly manipulative as she had been that last Sunday night. What was going on? Had we simply lost our way, or had I been missing something vital for almost twenty years? It just didn't make sense! Anyway, as I worked around down below, thoughts like those kept bouncing around in my head: after a few days of this nonsense I was beginning to question just about every assumption I'd ever made.

Then there was Ms Mullins.

Of course I knew better.

That didn't make our first night together any less interesting. She turned out to be an imaginative lover. Actually, maybe enthusiastic would be a better descriptive. Just about every time I touched her she launched into blistering wet orgasms, and yes, I'm using the plural here deliberately. I have never seen anyone so 'multi-orgasmic' in my life. It wasn't me, of that I'm fairly certain. I think a light breeze hitting her down there would have sent her over the edge. Anyway, the first time I went down on her it was like spontaneous combustion. She grabbed my face and pulled it into her and started yelling and pulling my hair and carrying on like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. After about a half hour and three hundred orgasms I think she collapsed. I say 'I think' because I had about a two minute reprieve before she went down on me, rallied round the flag, so to speak, then hopped on top of me.

The poor thing.

The first thing that ran through my mind -- after she'd mounted the flag -- was that she was having an seizure. Her body went rigid -- so rigid I thought something might have gone terribly wrong -- then tremors somewhat akin to shockwaves ripped through her body. She was soon flailing about and yelling so loud I was sure everyone in the marina was going to be dialing 911, and just when I thought she couldn't possibly get any louder the girl launched into a frenzied orgasm that, well, it still leaves me thunderstruck to think about it.

You have to keep in mind that I was, well, by that point just laying there, because anything else on my part might have been dangerous. I mean, it wasn't like she had just dropped by to borrow a cup of sugar -- I wasn't that detached about it, I don't think -- yet in a way I felt superfluous to the proceedings. I don't think she needed me at all, really, well, other than to make use of my hardware. When all was said and done (at least for me, anyway), the whole episode was kind of a letdown. She seemed kind of embarrassed for a minute, then got real sweet and cuddled up next to me and fell asleep. I guess she just assumed that somewhere in the maelstrom I had managed an orgasm of my own. But how would she have known? She hardly knew I was on the same planet.

Like I said, it was an interesting night. She took off in the morning, sometime around four or so, I think. Never said a word, no kiss on the forehead, nothing.

She came by again that next night, knocked on the side of the boat, called out my name.

I looked around quickly, wondered if there was a back way out of the place (kinda hard to pull that one off on a boat), then I popped up through the companionway hatch.

"Howdy," said I, ever the suave urbanite.

"How're y'all doin' today, big guy?"

OK, lets get this straight right now. I'm not real tall, and I'm not fat, either. Big Guy? Me?

"Fine, Lisa. You have a good day?"

"Well, kinda." She moved around, feigning pelvic discomfort. "Kinda sore down there, you know?"

"Hmm. Wonder why?" I tried not to smile. She, on the other hand, smiled like the Cheshire Cat.

"Up for a encore tonight?" Now for some odd reason that put the fear of God into me, so I just looked at her, indicated at best a passive receptivity. "Ooh, goody!" she said reflexively. "I've got some paperwork to do. Could I work here? I really don't want to go home." It was then that I noticed she had an overnight bag in her left hand.

You know, I had a decision to make. A big one.

I could send her packing, or by golly, I could take matters in hand and try to fuck her brains out.

For some odd reason, I chose the latter. Call it ego, but I was damned if I was going to let this broad get off again without returning the favor, so as soon as she got to the bottom of the companionway I was on her like Preparation H on hemorrhoids.

I didn't have a chance.

I think, after about an hour of her riding my face, I might have tried to cry 'uncle', but no way was this woman about to quit. Finally I threw her over and tore into her. At that point I felt like a crazed wolf and wailed into her with the hardest, deepest thrusts I'd ever delivered anytime to anyone, but after a whopping minute or so I hit the short strokes and popped off.

Well, not having had any in a while, I think it fair to say I let loose a gallon and a half of the stuff. She was coaxing me along the whole time, and as I slowed down a bit, spent as I was, Lisa just got foul-mouthed-horny and started in on me again.

I should have known what was coming next.

I lasted a little longer that second time. About two hours, give or take, but the creature underneath me was like a thing possessed. By the time I noticed her fingernails digging in to my back I really didn't give a damn, and when her not-so-short high-heels started digging into my calves, well, shit, I didn't care about that, either.

Once I slowed down and she slapped me, hard -- yet playfully, and told me to stop now only if I was prepared to die. Ahem. Not exaggerating here, Kemosabe. This chick was into her orgasms, and during my second she started in on me big-time. 'Do not to quit now or I will combust.' That was the message.

Now, give me a break. I'm trying to be modest here, and, well, you know, there was no way I was going for round three. Maybe fifteen, twenty years ago. At 40? Nope. No way.

Anyway, after my stalwart friend deserted me Lisa rolled me over and mounted my face again.

Lawyers!

And you know what? About four hours later she was set up in the salon working away on some depositions, while I wondered how many hours she billed that night, and for what services?

◊◊◊◊◊

And oddly enough Lisa didn't come to the boat again. In fact, I didn't see her for a couple of weeks, and then only in passing out on the docks. It was pretty disconcerting. When we did get a chance to talk for a minute or so a month later, she kinda let on that she'd given me a 'mercy-fuck' -- that she'd sensed I was really down and needed a quick pick-me-up.

Was she for real?

I saw Liz one day during that period, too.

I was working up on the foredeck, tearing down the anchor windlass and lubing the paws, and I looked up to wipe some sweat from my forehead and saw her up in the marina parking lot. She was looking down at me, down when I looked up. I think we looked at each other for a few minutes, then she waved at me before she walked off. I looked at the empty spot where she had been, for, I don't know, maybe an hour or so. There was a hole in my heart, and I didn't know how to fix it. I did, however, know how to fix a broken windlass.

A week after that, all my things stowed just so on the boat, I sailed out of Charleston Harbor, alone. I passed Fort Sumter, this time off to starboard, and I thought about civil wars again, and about who fired the first shot in our little war. I thought about that place in my heart Liz used to occupy, yet I was so far removed from the pain now it didn't matter. Yet still, I felt emptier than I'd ever expected.

Clearing the harbor, I looked to the right, to the south, then north. I didn't know which way to turn. So I turned around and looked deep into the wake that trailed behind me, looked back past the old Fort, back to the Battery, and I thought about my life up to that moment.

I could turn back, I thought. Turn back, chase my past. Live within that memory of place.

Or I could just move on, forge a new course.

I sat behind the wheel, looked at the chart-plotter with it's readout staring me in the face, almost daring me to dream again. I scrolled out, moved the cursor across the Atlantic until it rested right in the middle of the English Channel, and pressed the Calculate New Course button. A few seconds later the screen flashed a new heading, indicated the new course to steer, and just how far I had to go to get there.

There was a prompt on the screen.

Press 'Enter' it said, to start the new route.

Was it really so simple? Turn away from everything I had known for almost twenty years? Hit 'Enter' -- and start a new life?

Or turn around? Find my way back to the past and live there within all the lies and manipulations.

My finger moved to the screen, hit the 'Enter' button. The machine thought for a moment, and a new screen emerged. Me and my little floating world appeared as a small red arrow just off the mid-Atlantic coast of North America, and a new course was projected across the ocean to the waters between England and France. I settled in behind the wheel, put my feet up in the sun, with my eyes looking up at the set of my sails I listened to the water -- as it trailed away behind my little boat.

I of course had no way of knowing who else was gazing at my little boat that day, and the dreams that lay dashed on other rocks.

◊◊◊◊◊

So many passages at sea can be terrifying, one long physical ordeal that you wish would be over as soon as possible. My journey across the Atlantic was simply pleasant and uneventful. I had left Charleston, South Carolina a month and a half ahead of the boisterous Atlantic hurricane season, and the abnormally calm passage reflected my state of mind. I felt a release of tension as America drifted away. I puttered about the boat, tended little housekeeping chores like mending a sail or checking tension on shrouds and chainplates -- little things that need to be kept on-top-of in order to survive at sea. Well, that -- and I read a lot.

Curious about Lisa Mullins' question -- had I read Pat Conroy before? -- I had picked up a copy of Beach Music before Charleston became just another memory in my wake, and I passed many an hour reading that book. Conroy's tale made an impression on me. It was a story, to me at least, about the memory of place, about how place awakens feelings we've long since forgotten, and about the interconnectedness of place and emotion across generations. Rome and the Low Country, how far apart those two places stand on earth, and how close they were in his story. His relationship with his daughter made me think of my father, something that rarely happened anymore. He had moved on more than ten years before, and I missed his steady hand, and I thought, as I sat up at night eying the radar, how much he would have loved making this trip with me. And I think I cried one night thinking how fun it would have been for us to make this journey together.

And after a month at sea I closed the coast of France, and began to pick up contours of the Seine River estuary on radar in the middle of the night, and, mindful of the complex shipping environment in the English Channel, I moved in close to the French coastline to avoid the thickest of it. The boat fairly slipped along on a beam reach through the night, and as the sun came up I could make out the marina I was headed for in the distance, just to the left of Le Havre's city center and docklands. I negotiated a complex maze of breakwaters and turned into the marina a little after nine that morning, and threw my lines to the Gendarme waiting for me on the Customs Quay.

The plan was simple. I'd make arrangements to have aquaTarkus's mast unstepped and shipped to Marseilles by truck. Thus unencumbered, I would take my boat through the vast canal network that laces across France and emerge on the Mediterranean coast. I planned to move from Le Havre directly to Paris, spend a month or so there, then laze my way through the summer months and arrive in the South in, say, October or November, yet the more I thought about it the more I found I really didn't care how long it took. In fact, I was of half a mind to get lost somewhere out there in the middle of nowhere, someplace near a village that had a nice bakery, decent cheese, and, yes, a steady supply of rich, dark rum.

Anyway, I felt that after all I had been through with Liz, and with the confusing epitaph of Lisa Mullin's little "mercy fuck" routine well behind me, I was a little dead from the neck up. It was time for a change. A real change.

After I cleared customs and had made arrangements to tie up in the marina for a few days, I walked up to the Strand and looked for a coffee. I didn't have to look hard or long, and I ducked into a little place and ordered a café au lait and a couple croissant, then settled outside on the splendid boardwalk and marveled at a world that wasn't bouncing and rolling to the beat of maddened Sea-Gods. It's hard to convey sometimes just how good it feels to walk on solid earth, to feel the warmth of the morning sun on your face as the smells and sounds of life come to you on a quiet breeze that smells of life -- real honest-to-dirt city life.

After a while -- it could have been an hour or a day -- I walked back to the boat, collected some things in a rucksack and made my way to the train station. I hopped on a local to Paris and spent the next few hours reveling in the smooth motion of rails. Not one wave smacked the bow and washed over me or the boat, even if the motion of the train did feel a little odd to me. I got into Paris in the middle of the afternoon and made my way to the American Express office just in time to collect my mail. I flipped through the handful of bills and unwanted correspondence until I came to a letter from Liz, and -- wonder of wonders -- two from my humble, mercy-fucking attorney. I wandered if she was going to hit me for services rendered, and if oral sex was an allowable charge.

I planned to scout out a marina in the city -- or a place along a quay, perhaps -- someplace to bring aquaTarkus and tie her up. I didn't want to arrive without that much accomplished, so -- guidebook in hand -- off I went. Letters would remain unopened for the time being...

I looked at a couple of places upriver from the Isle Saint Louis, and the second one looked perfect. The proprietor told me it would likely take me a week to journey from Le Havre to Paris, what with all the locks and river traffic, and she encouraged me to set aside two weeks: "Enjoy the trip," she said, "you'll never pass this way again." It sounded like good advice, so I made a reservation, left a deposit, and after finding a nice place for dinner, jumped on the metro back to the train station and hopped on a midnight express back to the coast.

I think I slept for a day after I got back to the boat, then went out in search of provisions for the boat. The following morning saw the mast removed, and an hour later I was headed upriver, passing under the Pont de Normandie, then the past the limestone cliffs abutting the Pont de Tancarville, and in an instant I was in another world. The industrial sprawl of Le Havre gave way to a series of bucolic vistas as the river turned to the west and entered a land peppered with quaint villages and rolling farmland. Not to mention the occasional refinery. But as the coastline receded, the transformation continued, and soon I felt like I was -- home.

I know that sounds odd.

Something about the air, the light, and -- I don't know -- suddenly I felt like I was home. And here I need to take a little journey into the past...and talk about the other side of the coin for a while.

My mother's family still lives in France, and we traveled here many special times during my youth, but I was essentially an American, and I wondered if mother still kept up with all our people over here, because I sure hadn't.

"Maybe I should call Jean Paul?" I said to myself.