Bill Pronzini - The Crimes of Jordan Wise

Gavin and Robin Kyle were both architects pushing forty, owners of their own firm. A study in contrasts, those two. He was short, on the tubby side, with sparse hair the color of ginger ale, and a gossipmonger who liked to hear himself talk; she was six inches taller, skinny, had thick dark hair, and seldom spoke more than two sentences in a row. I liked them both. Despite Gavin's constant chatter, most of what he had to say was interesting and amusing.

The guest I related to best, though, was Jack Scanlon, the middle-aged manager of a cement plant. That was because he was a day sailor, the only person there who had any but a passing interest in sailing. He owned a twenty-four-foot sloop that he kept at the marina adjacent to the West India dock. When I told him I was planning to learn to sail, hoped to buy a boat of my own one day, he invited me to join him on a day cruise after the holidays.

St. Thomas is a small island, just thirty square miles. Annalise had already seen some of it, but we explored it all together, one end to the other, in a handful of day and night excursions.

Some of its attractions appealed to both of us. The views from atop Crown Mountain and the Drake's Seat overlook, of the sixty-odd reefs, islets and islands that ring St. Thomas, and on clear days, of the British Virgins and some of the Puerto Rican archipelago. Coral World, an underwater observation tower where you could see all sorts of exotic marine life and coral formations. Blackbeard's Castle, atop Government Hill—a sprawling, three-hundred-year-old, cannon-guarded fortress that had been turned into a luxury inn and restaurant. Annalise liked it for the cuisine, which was among the best on the island. I liked it for its architecture and its history. Local legend had it that Edward Teach, the pirate known as Blackbeard, used the five-story masonry tower as a lookout post for the merchant ships carrying rum, cotton, and spices he later ambushed. I felt a certain kinship with the old buccaneer, and his supposed use of St. Thomas as a safe haven amused me.

But for the most part, Annalise's and my tastes differed. She preferred Market Square, the remodeled Danish warehouses along Dronningens Gade that dispensed all the duty-free goods, the palm-fringed beaches at Magens Bay, Coki Bay, Secret Harbor, and Sapphire Bay, and the raucous nightlife. I preferred the marina next to the West India dock, with its slips for two hundred luxury yachts, and the working waterfronts at Red Hook and Frenchtown and Sub Base harbor where you could hire charter boats or catch ferries or buy fresh fish and shellfish or watch the pelicans and flamingoes on their fishing rounds. The narrow, winding, old-world streets of Frenchtown. The bluff above Nazareth Bay, where you had the best view of St. John three miles across Pillsbury Sound. The ancient French cemetery on Harwood Highway with its decaying walls and rusted iron gates, its gnarled old trees and peeling whitewashed tombs.

And the sunsets.

Christ, the sunsets.

They impressed me more than anything else. Annalise was alleady starting to take them for granted by the time I got there, but I never have. They still stir me, even after twenty-seven years. Bright gold, dark gold, burnished copper, old rose, fiery orange, lavender and pink and saffron and deep purple . . . all the colors and some gradations and combinations you can't imagine until you see them. Plus thousands of intricate cloud shapes and formations to reflect the colors and the dying light. Most travelers will tell you that Caribbean sunsets are the most spectacular in the world; I don't see how anybody can dispute it. Doesn't matter where you watch one—backyard terrace, restaurant patio, mountaintop, deck of a boat at sea, even through an open-air window in a back-island cafe like Jocko's. Each is unique, and nearly all of them are magnificent.

Our different tastes weren't a problem in those early days. We'd come down here to enjoy ourselves, do whatever made us happy. It wasn't necessary to agree on all our pleasures, to share them in lockstep. There was plenty for us to do as a couple. So why shouldn't we each have time to ourselves, some private space of our own?

Annalise was thrilled and a little overwhelmed by her present on Christmas morning. She cried when I slipped the diamond wedding band on her finger, the first of the two times I ever saw her shed a tear.

I seemed to have passed muster with the Verrikers. They invited us to a New Year's Eve dance at the Royal Bay Club, one of the members-only, whites-only places that they and the Kyles belonged to. It took up a full block down near the marina. The old, whitewashed main building housed a bar lounge with leather chairs and card and chess tables and a private library, and a ballroom large enough for a five-piece orchestra and a ring of tables around the dance floor. A smaller building at the rear contained handball courts, men's and women's saunas, and locker room facilities. Outside there were tennis and badminton courts.

At one point during the evening, while the women were in the ladies' room, Verriker asked me if I played handball. I said no, nor tennis or golf, explaining it by saying I'd been too busy making a living to get involved in sports.

"Great game, handball," he said. "Keeps you fit. I could teach you the basics in one session, if you're interested."

I wasn't, but I said, "Sure, I'd like that."

"Members have unlimited use of the courts whenever they're free. All the other facilities, too. How would you and Annalise like to join?"

I pretended to be flattered and asked casually what becoming members entailed, if there was some sort of screening process. No, he said, the club wasn't that exclusive. Strictly social. There were no hard and fast rules for membership; financial status and background were of no importance. As long as you were able to pay the yearly dues of $500, and had the sponsorship of a member, your acceptance was pretty much a given. And he'd be glad to sponsor us.

So I accepted with a show of gratitude. The more firmly entrenched we became in island society, the less likely our new identities would ever be questioned or breached.

I went sailing three times with Jack Scanlon on his little sloop, Manjack. Annalise came along the first time. The sea was calm that morning, when we left the harbor, but a strong wind kicked up later in the day as we were tacking out of Caneel Bay on St. John, and it got a little rough. She was seasick and shaky by the time we docked. Never again, she said afterward. I thought that once I had my own boat, something larger and made for smoother sailing like a ketch or yawl, I might be able to change her mind. But until then I wouldn't try. You can't force somebody to love the things you love, any more than you can force them to love you.

That first sailing experience had just the opposite effect on me. I took to it immediately, as I'd been sure I would. Had my sea legs from the start. From my reading I'd already internalized much of the basic information and language of the sea. I knew that sloops and catamarans had a single mast, ketches and yawls two masts, and that most modern sailboats were Marconi rigged. That's a triangular rigging with the sails spread by two spars, with a lower boom that extends past the mast and a second that runs at an angle from the forward end of the boom to the masthead; Depression-era sailors gave it the Marconi name because the stays and shrouds holding up the mast reminded them of the first radio towers set up by the Italian inventor. I knew the names of all the sails, the meaning of such terms as luff and kedge and reef points, and I could define jibstay, lapstrake, burgee, spinnaker, genoa, freeboard, lubber line. I knew that a boat will sail in three basic ways—before the wind on a run, with the wind abeam on a reach, and close-hauled or toward the wind; that the wind fills the sails from both sides, on either a starboard tack or a port tack. I knew a lot of facts about sailing, or thought I did, but I didn't know a damn thing until I learned the working application of those terms and principles.