Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“Where did you grow up again?” Didier asked skeptically. I felt skeptical, too. Was he making this up?

“Connecticut. Anyway, it was a place of real logic. A logic of the senses. Stunning, really, and I can still recall the scene in precise detail, the shimmer of blue tarps, the heady fumes of deck paint and turpentine vaporizing in the warm air. The green algae that flocked the dock moorings like furry hip waders from the waterline down. I was overcome by a sense of openness, an open destiny. Easy to say, of course, since I did not remember a single element of my old life, not one fucking thing. But actually,” he said, “I did remember one thing: after the log came down on me, the only image I held on to, strangely, was of a woman drying her hair with a bath towel. Rubbing vigorously, just out of the shower, with a dingy pink towel, like a white towel that had been washed with red T-shirts. I could only see her from the back, head bent forward, water-clumped strands that were the color of wet sand. Her neck. Her wet hair revealing the shape of her head and something more, a general strippedness, though I can only see her from the shoulders up as she towels her wet hair.”

“How oedipal,” Gloria said. “Let me ask: what color is Mrs. Fontaine’s hair? And I mean your mother. Not that teenager from New Mexico you were married to for a couple of weeks.”

“You married a teenager from New Mexico?” Stanley asked with barely concealed envy.

Ronnie shrugged. “She was a hitchhiker. I couldn’t help myself. She was just so adorable. With these bangs that hung down into her eyes. But she started to get on my nerves. It was like being a legal guardian, I had to tell her to eat her vegetables, to put on a sweater—”

“Ronnie,” Gloria said, “are we to assume your mother had sandy-blond hair?”

“No,” Ronnie said. He was staring at me across the table. “No, she doesn’t.”

It was a searching, scanning gaze. Like he was trying to discern something.

I had taken a shower that night that Ronnie stayed over. I’d put my hair in a faded pink towel, my Pickwick towel. I had lain next to him, thinking, so naively, that this would be the first of many moments with his fingers in my wet hair.

“I walked along the dock and considered each boat. Their names, one after another, appeared to me as the names of different lives I could choose. Me and Mrs. Jones. Loan Shark. Come to Papa. ”

There was laughter. Ronnie waited for quiet and continued.

“There was one especially beautiful boat. It singled itself out. It was the rich color of eggnog, a fifty-foot cruiser called the Reno .”

So. He was speaking to me from across that knife-scratched table. A story for twenty with a message for one. But what was the message? Could it be that Ronnie loved me? Or was his use of our secret history one more hoax? Yet another layer of the joke?

“The Reno, ” Erwin said. “That’s an odd name for a boat.” He said it with the confusion of someone who concerned himself with the naming of boats.

“This older couple sat on the deck. I shaded my eyes and looked up at them. ‘Well, hello,’ the man calls down. I said hello back. ‘The wind is just perfect,’ he says. ‘We’re getting ready to go.’ I asked where. He said to see the world. Was I interested? I guess I thought he meant generally, and I said sure. I mean of course. He asked if I liked the open sea. ‘Well, sure I do,’ I said, but what did I know? I liked the words open and sea . I still like those words. He said to call him Commodore. He told me they were setting sail that afternoon. I said, ‘Just you two?’ looking from him to his wife — he had introduced her by name but I forgot it immediately, and soon we were all chummy-chummy and it was too late not to know it. No one ever called her by it. He called her ‘dear,’ or ‘my wife,’ and everyone else simply said the commodore’s wife. ‘Just us,’ the commodore said, ‘and our first mate, Xerxes, who also cooks. And maybe you.’ And then he tamped his pipe, one of those meerschaum pipes, and something shifted or brightened in my mind. I didn’t know then, I mean I could not have recalled, that my own father smoked a pipe.”

“Huh,” Didier said, nodding. “Classic displacement.”

“Maybe. So he lights the bowl and puffs his pipe,” Ronnie said, “and tells me, ‘You look like you’ll work out just fine for us. Just fine. When Mr. Sneeks said he had a cabin boy for me, well, I imagined someone just like you. I thought of you, and here you are.’ ‘And here I am,’ I said, and as I said it, the world went clean and orderly in a way it almost never does.”

Ronnie paused, took a drink. Everyone was quiet, unclear where we were headed. They’d been expecting a funny escapade, like the one about Oppler’s E-type Jaguar.

“We set sail later that afternoon. I felt what I can only call a mystical vibration when we lost sight of land. The commodore said I brought luck on board, as the winds were such that we sailed wing and wing, with both jibs open at an angle and filled with air, so that the yacht looked like a huge white cabbage butterfly. The commodore explained that this manner of sailing was not only fast but also the most balanced and pleasing kind, because of the steady way the boat moved through the water. In the evening, Xerxes prepared our dinner on a gimbal stove, and we ate on the aft deck, in the bright, gassy glow of a Coleman lantern. The commodore and his wife talked about their lives, and having no memories or interests of my own, I was fascinated by their stories of tax shelters and cocktail parties, tennis elbow, summer compounds, and disowned children. Now, of course, this kind of thing couldn’t interest me less, though it’s often the artist’s duty to listen to exactly these sorts of details and to pretend they matter.”

Erwin Frame laughed uncomfortably, glancing at the two collectors he’d brought to dinner, a husband and wife much too polished and fancy for downtown Manhattan, the man’s platinum watch, his timepiece, glinting in the candlelight. The collectors’ faces were pleased and vacant, like they had already decided that this artist whose work they were buying was going to entertain them and he was. Whatever Ronnie actually said didn’t matter. They were surfing the experience of a loft on the Bowery, an environment foreign to both the man and his wife, but with the charade that for the man, it was not foreign. He would guide his wife. He was the expert. On downtown and painting and the art market and when to laugh and so forth. Just follow my lead, honey, his body language instructed his wife. Both looked at Ronnie with broad smiles.

“That first evening, the commodore gave me a private lesson on night sailing. He showed me how to flip on the red port light and the green starboard light. He said it was the law of the sea that these shine until daybreak, to warn ships of our presence. ‘The law of the sea’ was a phrase the commodore would invoke frequently, and each time he said it I felt his awe before the notion of a larger agency, a cosmic governance. But later, I mean much later, I came to wonder if the law of which he spoke was sometimes in truth not that of the sea but of the commodore, his own law, or even more arbitrary than law, and more fickle, the commodore’s private fancy. But this abuse, shall we call it, of his position, was never explicit. Even now, his ethics on our journey are a mystery to me. On that first night, he was a great teacher. He got out his sextant and explained how to take a star fix, although I didn’t get the precise method, overwhelmed as I was by the sensations of the night sea. There were stars overhead in a brilliant scatter, and we sailed on stars, too, which shimmered up from water so smooth and inklike that the heavens were reflecting back at themselves, as if the sky were underneath us. I heard the commodore’s voice and felt that we were in an open-air capsule or sleigh, traveling through the vast universe, a great, pin-speckled sphere, a black egg rolled in glitter.”