T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

I’m working my way round the cramped table, pouring coffee into a desolation of plates, cutlery, crusts of bread and fish bones. “But why?” I hear myself asking. “Haven’t we gone deep enough? What crime have we committed that we don’t deserve to see a port, a tree, the inside of a good brasserie?”

Twenty pairs of eyes settle on me. I can see that this last bit about the brasserie is having its effect. Cousteau glances up. “I will never rest,” he says, “until I see with my own two eyes what lies on the bottom. Who knows what miracles will be revealed, what kaleidoscopic vistas of the unknown and silent world?”

I bite my tongue, though I could say plenty. Cousteau is getting old. We’re all getting old. We’ve plumbed every body of water on earth, from McMurdo Sound to the Arafura Sea and the Firth of Clyde, we’ve found every wreck and frolicked with every fish, and I just don’t see the point of it anymore. But Cousteau is the perennial Boy Scout, intoxicated with adventure, if not the cru bourgeois the Calypso carries in her three-ton stainless steel wine tank. For him, everything is “kaleidoscopic,” “dreamlike,” “phantasmagoric,” from the life of the coral reef to the dregs of vin rouge left in the bottom of his glass after dinner. The whole watery world is his to embrace, but for me it’s the galley and the galley only, for me it’s a dwindling supply of veal chops and limp vegetables and nothing but pois-son, poisson, poisson. Twenty ravenous gastronomes stare up at me from the table each night, and what do I have to offer them? Poisson.

The first to break the silence is Saôut. He has bags under his eyes, and his chest, once sculpted and firm with his years of manhandling winches and hawsers, droops like an old woman’s. “Bernard has a point,” he says. “We’ve gone over two months now without liberty.”

“Two months without women,” Didier growls.

“Or meat,” Sancerre puts in.

I try to keep from smirking as I lean over the sun-blasted nape of this man or that to pour my bitter black brew. But Cousteau is oblivious. He merely waves the lank flap of his hand and says, “Deeper.”

We are anchored — have been anchored for two months now and counting — some 160 miles off the coast of West Africa, hovering over a deep sea canyon that for all intents and purposes has no bottom. Sense and sonar indicate that it is there, somewhere between thirteen and fourteen thousand feet, but because of poor maneuverability, undersea mudslides and senile dementia on the part of captain and crew, we have been unable to locate it. As if it matters. As if we haven’t already sounded out the sterile bottoms of a hundred canyons just like it and found absolutely nothing that would change anyone’s life one way or the other. The usual complement of scientists is aboard, of course, eager boyish men with pinched features, oversized eyeglasses, clipboards and calculators. They are geniuses. Learned professors. World-renowned authorities on the sponge or the sea cucumber. Tant pis. To me they are simply mouths to feed, mouths that tighten perceptibly at the mention of fish.

I am up, as always, an hour before dawn, preparing breakfast. I still have flour — thank God for that or we’d have a full-scale mutiny on our hands — and am busy fashioning crěpes from thin air. I find myself absently filling them with artificial pastry creme and the obscenely flavorless pulp of defrosted strawberries, but what can I do? Even the batter is bastardized, the eggs produced from a tin in the form of a noxious yellow powder that looks like something you’d use in a chemistry experiment. What I wouldn’t give for a dozen fresh eggs. Half a dozen. Merde: even a single one. But of course there are no chickenhouses on the open sea.

Busy with my whisk, I fail to notice Sancerre creeping into the galley. I hear him before I see him. “Who’s there?” I demand, the portholes black with the vestiges of yet another night at sea, the ship undulating beneath my feet in an incipient morning swell.

Sheepish, the sleep still glued to his eyes, Sancerre emerges from the pool of shadow behind the deep freeze. “Me,” he says simply.

“What are you doing here?”

I watch as his long mulish face reconstitutes itself in the glare of the galley lights, a face yellowed by the shambling years and the hostility of the sun. He shuffles his big feet, drops his shoulders and spreads his hands wide. “I’m hungry,” he says.

“Hungry, eh?”

My first impulse is to toy with him, make him squirm a bit, offer to perhaps fry up a batch of the flying fish that lie stunned on the deck each morning. Fish isn’t what he wants. He wants sausage, cheese, croissants pregnant with butter, he wants cold chicken, thick slices of Bayonne ham, beefsteaks and pâté maison spread on crusty rounds of peasant bread. Yes, of course, but he too must suffer through this hell of fish.

“A little something would do,” he says almost apologetically. “Just a bite to settle the stomach.”

And in that moment, even before I reach for the smoked sausage I keep hidden behind the saucepans, I realize I have an ally.

As soon as breakfast has been tucked away, down goes the bathyscaph, accompanied partway by the soucoupe plongeant —our diving saucer — and all hands are hungrily occupied till lunch. Cousteau himself is piloting the bathyscaph, though he’s too old to sit for hours in the moist cramped bubble of steel and glass down there in the ultimate hole of the earth, too old by far, just as I’m too old to prepare fillets of loup de mer in this straitjacket of a galley or ladle scalding chaudrée from the pot in an unsettled sea — and I have the scars to prove it. One of the scientists has gone down with him, an American with big American teeth and a braying American laugh that makes me want to kill every time I hear it. His very name — Dr. Mazzy Gort — sticks in my throat. I wish no one harm, but sometimes I fantasize. What if Cousteau and Dr. Mazzy Gort never come up again? What if the lifeline fails or a mudslide buries them two miles down in ooze a hundred feet thick and they join the fishes forever? It’s an evil thought. But it’s not my first, nor, I suspect, will it be my last.

For lunch I serve a grouper Falco speared last night. I’ve taken some care with it, marinated the fine white flesh in olive oil and fennel — the last of my fennel — and a soupçon of pastis. I serve it with fresh bread, the remaining potatoes and defrosted green beans in an explosion of aromas, pretending, for all and sundry, that this is not fish at all, that this is not the open sea, that we are not prisoners of Cousteau’s madness. And what do I get for it?

Saôut: “Oh, merde , not fish again.”

Piccard: “What else?”

Sancerre: “I want my mother.”

Didier: “I want a whore. Two whores. One for this — and one for this.” (A manual demonstration, very nimble and expressive.)

Afterward, in the interval between morning and afternoon dives, I find my feet directing me to the main deck and the cabin Cousteau used to share with his wife, back in the days when we were young and such things mattered. I am thinking. Talking to myself, actually. Making speeches. In one of the rear compartments of my brain, uninfected by the primordial reek of the sea and the visible evidence of the portholes, is the image of a modest auberge in Cluny or Trévoux, a tasteful little place that specializes in country dishes, viands mostly, heavy on cassoulets, game and sweetbreads, though perhaps, after a year or two on dry land, the chef might consider adding a pike quenelle or a truite aux amandes to the bill of fare. In the forefront of my consciousness an argument simmers for Cousteau.