T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

We leaned forward.

“It was the Sirens,” he said, “they lured me onto the rocks. One siren, anyway. Her name was Denise. Short, tight ass, skin like ice cream — like toasted-almond ice cream. I met her on the beach in Venice, summer before last. We were having a party and she was somebody’s cousin or sister or something, in a white two-piece that offered up her nipples like hors d’oeuvres. She walked up to me and traced the scars on my stomach with the tip of her finger. ’Where’d you get that?’ she says. ’Gall bladder?’ When I told her, her eyes went funny for a second, narrowing like little periods and then opening wide, green light, let’s go.

“We went. She took me home with her — she had money, a ground-floor apartment in Manhattan Beach with a little patio and cactuses that must have cost five hundred bucks apiece. Next day we went out to lunch. We went to the zoo, saw a band at the Whisky. Then two days later she called and asked me did I want to go out on her father’s sailboat. Sure, I said, why not?”

Phil said he’d been sailing exactly three times in his life, twice on lakes and once on Long Island Sound. All three times he’d ended up in the water.

Gesh lit a cigarette and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “That’s about as much experience as I’d had, too, fooling around in lakes and coves in those little fourteen-foot jobs, Sunfish or whatever you call them. But this boat was big, thirty-five feet or so, bobbing in the water at Marina del Rey like a big white coffin. … I mean it had bunks and a galley with this little stove and refrigerator, Stolichnaya in the freezer, teakwood decks, the works. It was called The Christina Rossetti —after some poet her mother’d studied in college, Denise said.

“She said she knew what she was doing, but we had a lot of trouble just getting the sails up and making it out of the marina without hitting anything. But after that, with the whole wide blue sea out there, it was easy. The boat ran itself. Every once in a while the sail would come round and Denise’d tell me to haul on this line or that, but it was no big deal — it wasn’t like we were going anywhere or anything. Shit, I began to enjoy myself. The sun was flaring away, there was a nice breeze blowing, Denise looked edible in this black bikini. I mixed us some cocktails and slipped my hand in her pants. We did it right there, standing up, her holding onto the wheel, the boat rocking, seagulls flapping by. It was fantastic, like being on an island or something — nobody around for miles. There was no reason to put our suits back on.”

Gesh looked up at me. “Sounds great, huh Felix? Paradise on earth, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I’ve got a feeling this is where it turns nasty.”

“Nasty? That doesn’t even come close, man — this was fucking horrifying. One minute I’m getting laid and sipping a martini, the next I’m in the water. What happens is the wind comes up all of a sudden while we’re lying there on the deck, stroking each other and getting hot to do it again. I’ve got a hard-on like a steel rod and I lift myself up to stick it in her when the boomline breaks and this fucking pole comes slamming around and catches me under the chin. Next thing I know I’m in the water — the ocean. Miles from shore. I can’t even fucking swim that good, and I’ll tell you”—he was holding my eyes—“snakes may be your thing, but mine is sharks. I’m scared shitless of them. I don’t even go in over my head at the beach because I’m afraid some saw-toothed monster is going to rip my legs off. Really, I don’t care how I go, just so long as I don’t wind up as shark shit.”

I watched as Gesh extracted rolling papers and an envelope of pot from the pocket of his dungaree jacket. He rolled a joint thin as a Tootsie Pop stick and passed it to me. I lit it, took a drag, and passed it back.

“So anyway, Denise jumps up and starts wringing her hands and screaming and whatnot, and then runs back to the wheel and tries to swing the boat around. Meanwhile, I’m churning up the waves like Mark Spitz — it’s amazing what you can do when you have to — and the boat is drifting away. Drifting? I mean it was flying, really moving out, sails humming and everything. I wasn’t in the water ten seconds and it was already fifty yards away. Then it was a hundred yards, two hundred, and then it was gone.

“Christ. I was in an absolute panic. For about the next ten minutes I swam for all I was worth, the chop of the waves crowding me in, gulping water, stopping every few seconds to kick myself up as high as I could and try and see something. Water, that’s all I saw. No land, no boat. Nothing. It was cold. There was salt in my eyes. It was then, completely by accident, that I blundered into a life preserver— The Christina Rossetti , it said in big red letters. I felt like I’d been saved, right then and there. I hooted for joy, heaved myself up on the thing and waved my arms. She’ll be back any minute, I thought, soon as she gets the goddamned boat under control. She’ll be back, she’s got to be.

“I was in the water for six hours. Shivering, praying, scared full of adrenaline. I kept making deals with the Fates, with God, Neptune, whoever, thinking I’d trade places with anybody, anywhere — lepers, untouchables, political prisoners, Idi Amin’s wives — anything, so long as I’d be alive. I remember I kept looking down to where my feet disappeared in the murk, feeling like they were separated from my body or something, sure that at any moment they’d be jerked out from under me. I thought about Jaws and Blue Water, White Death. Thought about the guy who got hit by a white shark off the Farallons and was dragged down about a hundred feet by the impact and said the happiest moment of his life was when he felt his leg give at the knee.”

The joint had gone dead in Gesh’s fingers. He was staring down at the floor and seeing waves, his face sober with the memory of it, nobody laughing now. I wondered why he was telling us this, what the point of the exercise was. At first I thought he’d been boasting, letting us know how tough he was, how hip and cynical and experienced with the ladies. But now, looking at the way his face had gone cold, I realized that wasn’t it at all.

Phil got up with a snap of his knees and fed a bundle of pine branches into the stove. There was a fierce crackling and an explosion of sparks as he slammed the door and eased back down on the blistered linoleum. “So come on,” he prodded, “don’t keep us in suspense — finish the story.”

I made some noises of encouragement and Gesh relit the joint.

“I spotted seven boats that day,” he said, shaking out the match, “and I shouted my lungs out, tried to throw the fucking life preserver up in the air — anything. But nobody saw me. That was the worst. You’d get your hopes up, thinking, I’m going to make it, I’m going to live, and you’d start paddling for the boat, screaming like a wounded rabbit, and they’d just coast right by as if you didn’t exist, as if you were dead already. Then the sun went down. If they couldn’t see me in the light of day, what chance was there they’d spot me in the dark? None, zip, zero. I began to cry — the first time I’d cried since I was a kid. There was a hole inside of me. I was shivering nonstop, like a machine about to break down. I was dead.

“Then, just after the moon rose, this gigantic cabin cruiser — fifty feet long at least — comes cutting across the waves straight for me. It was lit up like Rockefeller Center at Christmastime, they were having a party. I could see them, gray heads, cocktail glasses, two women in low-cut dresses. ’Help!’ I scream. ’Help!’ The engine was chugging away, waves slapping the bow: they couldn’t hear me. I fought my way toward the point where I thought the boat would pass and tried once more, screaming till my throat gave out. Then, like a miracle, like statues bleeding and the dead coming to life, one of the gray heads turned. ’Here!’ I shouted. One woman touched the other’s arm and pointed.”