“Was there that stuff in Italy? Did you have faithful family retainers who were actually hit men?” Holly asked.
“God, we had a maid and a cook, like most people do.”
“Well, we do, of course. And a butler. You can’t do without one, especially at the holidays,” Holly said, crooking her pinkie.
“Come on! Everybody did. And workers on the fattoria. That’s it. No one thought of me as a countess except my mother. It’s a Communist government, for Pete’s sake. It was just an old, inherited title,” Olivia said, waving a hand. “Basta.”
“But you used the crest on your Christmas cards!” Holly teased her.
“I showed Cammie her baptismal gown a couple of years ago, that you had made there?” Tracy said. “My God, Livy, it was the most beautiful thing.”
“Venetian lace,” said Olivia. “The tradition is, that same lace is supposed to trim her wedding gown. . . .”
“One world at a time,” Tracy said.
“Is she giving you a run for it, Tracy?”
“Kind of,” Tracy said.
“And what did you expect?” Olivia asked coolly. She had an overwhelming desire to sleep again. Perhaps tonight she would lie out again in the hammock. But nothing would happen. She yawned. Her abdomen tingled at the memory. Why couldn’t Cammie wait her turn? she thought. Poacher.
After Lenny set off in the tender, Cammie concentrated on not noticing Michel’s every move. He uncovered the sails, carefully stowing their coverings, and attached the whatchamajigs to them, running them up and down experimentally. As it grew warmer, he slipped off his shirt. Cammie lowered her baseball cap and concentrated on Mrs. Dalloway. She read the first sentence on the page six times.
“It’s just a treat for the older ladies,” Michel said to her softly as he stalked the ledge of the ship, sure-footed and feline. Was that why they called it a catwalk? Did they call it a catwalk? Or was that modeling? Was he modeling? Cammie concentrated on her book. She’d read the same half page six times.
“I loved Virginia Woolf,” Olivia said, coming up from her berth and settling down beside Cammie. “I had the most glorious nap! I’m not used to schedules,” she added. “Now I can sleep outside again tonight.” A spurt of irritation possessed the girl, but she dismissed it.
Olivia was attractive. Michel had admitted he was wrong. She could still feel his . . . She blushed. Olivia noticed, and Cammie thought she saw her godmother actually grow taller as her back stacked itself up over her hips, her posture transforming from lounging to imperious.
“Odd to see a handsome man with his shirt off in the middle of the day, huh?” Olivia commented.
Cammie thought, She doesn’t think I know. She’s trying to draw me out about him. “Yes, I guess,” she said. “Though they don’t seem to wear many clothes here. You are dressed up, Aunt Livy.”
“I try.”
“Well, as for Virginia Woolf, I . . . don’t,” Cammie said. “It’s all so downbeat. I don’t see the point of why the artist has to die. He’s just thrown in there to die.”
“Well, in the novel, it’s a sacrifice. A metaphor. The artist has to die, like Christ. But she was foreshadowing her own death. Don’t you think? She wrote all that in longhand, over and over, three hours at a sitting.”
“And then she committed suicide. Didn’t she want to enjoy it? She worked so hard. Can you imagine wanting to die so much you’d fill your pockets with great big rocks and—”
“If there was no hope,” Olivia said. “There was a moment, when Franco was diagnosed, that I thought, I can’t live without this man, who’s taken care of me so long. I don’t know that Virginia Woolf ever knew she’d be famous. I don’t think she thought she could ever live up to all the talent of her siblings. . . .”
“But she’s the only one anyone remembers.”
“That’s the irony.”
“Mmmm,” Cammie said.
“And she was truly ill. Depression is an illness. I was never that way. Only terribly, terribly sad.”
“Oh, Aunt Liv,” Cammie said politely. Olivia was so old. She was so lonely. She might look younger, but she wasn’t. She was old, like Tracy and Holly. Sympathy overtook Cammie’s pique.
Olivia said then, “Your mother told me luck could be bad, but life is good.”
“She got that from Holly. Holly says that all the time.”
“Well, maybe she does, but Tracy is the most purely good person I’ve ever known, Camille. She’s done a lot for me. I’ve done a lot for her. She might be stern . . .”
“Stern is the word for it. But I know she loves me. Us.”
“You confuse uprightness with uptightness.”
“I just called her that. Something like that. Just a couple of days ago.”
“When we were young, there was no dare your mother wouldn’t take. She rode the wildest horse at my uncle’s stable. She drank the most shots of brandy quickest. In high school, mind you. She was the Michael Jordan of St. Ursula’s. She brought home a state championship twice.”
“I don’t think of her that way,” Cammie admitted. “Can you imagine? Teaching in the same gym you played basketball in when you were seventeen?”
“I can’t, but your mother . . . she’s like the North Star, Cammie. We were all over the place. First, we were greasers. Then, we were metal heads. Then, in college, we all let our hair grow out and got political. But Tracy was always the same. If you asked her today what she wanted, she’d say the same thing she said then.”
“What?” Cammie put her finger in her book and tried to clench her legs to ignore Michel, who was climbing the mast.
“To have a happy home, a good man, and be of service. She would say that. Be of service.” Olivia felt pleased with herself. She had done something nice. She’d made up for whatever perceived slight was airborne between them.
“To what do I owe this lecture, Aunt Liv?” Cammie asked.
“Just, nothing. Franco was totally needy. And I was ready to give up. Just leave, go, give up. He didn’t know I was there half the time anyway.” Olivia found any kind of demand debilitating. She had never been able to grasp the yearning for children, who embodied the worst of human characteristics, being both demanding and boring. At the end, Franco had been like that. Waking if she let go of his hand, asking for his rosary.
As if clairvoyant, Cammie said, “Are you very, very sad now that you and Franco didn’t have children? Could you not, like Mom, or is that too personal?”
“God, no! I could. I wouldn’t. He had grown sons. From a first marriage. I rarely saw them. They lived in Rome and had their own families.”
“Didn’t you want to know them? They must have been . . . my age when you got married.”
“I did, in a sense, but they were their mother’s sons.”
“Well . . .”
“And Franco wanted me to be his little one. His piccola.”
Cammie found this creepy. If she had been more given to the precision of words, she would have called it “precious.” She mused, though, “You could have had nannies. You probably would have had an exotic child and sent her to some Swiss boarding school.”
“I don’t like children. I like you, Cammie. But I can barely do all it takes to look after myself, much less another person.”
Cammie thought privately, It’s a good thing you don’t have children. They’d be in trouble. She felt a stitch of regret for the way she treated her own mother but then said, “I do respect my mom. I’m more like my dad, though. To me, she’s just my mother. She’s a gym teacher. She didn’t exactly cure cancer, Aunt Livy. Oh, I’m sorry. That was dumb.”
“It’s okay,” Olivia said. “But, Cammie, not all lives have to be comets in the sky.” She smiled wickedly. “Just some of ours do.”
“And you’re still on the way up, huh?”
“I hope so!” Olivia said
“You’re making me sleepy. I’m going to go lie in the hammock. Was it comfortable?” Cammie asked with a tang of malice.
“A little hard on the back,” Olivia said.
I can imagine, Cammie thought, and got up to get her towel.
A few hours later, Michel woke her. She had fallen asleep, numbed by the tranquillity of sea and sun, the breeze that kept everything from ever feeling too hot. “You’d better turn over. You’re done on this side,” he said. “Do you want to run into town with me?”
Cammie jumped up and threw on her MAUI shorts. “If they’re British, do I need a shirt? Is it more formal?”
“Not from my point of view, but probably. For the sun if nothing else,” Michel told her.
“How do you stand it here? Is every day like this?”
“Mostly. Not always. There are filthy, foggy, rainy days. Storms. Crud. And you can get tired of . . . you know the saying. Just another shitty day in paradise.”
She chose modest denim shorts and a cotton shirt that tied under her breasts.
They spent two hours wandering narrow streets in the little town. After the first hour, Cammie, with a comic graciousness, allowed Michel to hold her hand.
He was twenty-five, and holding a teenage girl’s hand made him feel as though he had a winning Lotto ticket.
“I want to buy you something,” Michel said. He reached out, plucked a blossom of bougainvillea from a trailing vine, and tucked it behind Cammie’s ear. “Now you look like a native girl. You need a bauble.”
“That’s dumb,” Cammie said.
“To remember me.”
“Okay, whatever,” she said, and meant more than she would say.
“I want to.”
Michel chose a necklace made of the tiniest identical shells, lion colored, interspersed with hematite beads. It was pricey and would mean a week of beans on toast this winter. But there was a mad thrill in seeing how the shells caressed the hollow of her throat, just above the cross she never removed. “I have to keep my cross on. It was my baptism gift,” Cammie said. “I wear it for luck now. I’ll wear this always, too.”
“Don’t wear it always. You scratch those shells up and it’s ruined. If you take care of it, it will last forever,” said the woman who owned the little store.
They had a drink—Cammie a Hurricane and Michel a Pepsi—and then Michel asked her to wait while he darted into a pharmacy. “I need . . . uh, toothpaste.” And a can opener, he thought. He would have to get a can opener before they went back out to the boat. He had to remember. But then, the radio crackled.
“Okay, get some toothpaste,” Cammie agreed, wondering if he really had run out of toothpaste or meant what he seemed to be signaling, wondering if anyone could go crazy from sheer horniness.
“You stay here. Don’t walk off. We have to get back,” Michel said.
“I thought I could get some cheese and bread. We could have a picnic.”
“Later,” Michel said, and kissed her lightly. “Lenny radioed. He wants me back. Work before pleasure.”
As they motored back out to Opus, Michel reached over, touched the necklace, and took her hand lightly. Cammie was sure then. You could go crazy. She sent up her sweetest prayer: Thank you, God, that my uncle is fine, and that he had to have an operation. Thank you.
Day Six
Okay!” Lenny said. The women didn’t know it, but his voice on this, his twentieth voyage on his own boat, was as elated as it had been on his first. “Today, you’re going to see her under sail! You aren’t going to see much of me, because I want this to feel wonderful and make good time, too. But Michel will fix the drinks.”
Michel asked Lenny, “Did you get anything else? More food?”
“A dozen eggs and some fresh bread for French toast. Sharon has more than enough of the rest. She’s coming in loaded. The group they had fished, but they won’t be able to take the fish home. Emergency back in Texas. And she’s got a ton of stuff I said I’d take off her hands. I’ll call her in a bit.”
“She won’t take money for it.”
“So she already said. You know Sharon.”
“Well, I’ll take her and Reggie out for a big dinner if I stop in New York on the way home for Christmas,” Michel said.
“I’m going to go and see them then, too,” Lenny said. “Maybe we’ll make a week of it, if you want.” He nodded absently, busy with other tasks. Michel noticed that Lenny had not mentioned the can opener. Damn it, Michel thought. Next stop. But he wasn’t about to bring it up.
The women watched as the two of them unfurled the genny and raised the mainsail, which thrust themselves up like massive flags, towers of white. Lenny cut the engine; Michel unfurled the sheets to sail with the wind.
And Opus did what she was built to do. She threw out her wings in the way that sailing ships do, inspiring immoderate ecstasies in painters and poets as such boats have for centuries, even among those who’ve never set foot on one.
“Lenny is a real sailor,” Michel said as they sipped rum punch and nibbled on mango salsa. “I can do it, but he has the lightest touch. He’ll barely have to touch the wheel. It’s called bearing away. The wind’s running over the side of the stern, see how the mainsail is filled? It’s like he said. The wind is pulling us. The mainsail is set on the opposite side of the wind. She’s running now, until the wind changes.”
“It’s not what you’d think,” Holly said.
“We’re pretty free with what we can do this late in the season,” Michel said. “The important thing is that either Lenny or I always keep watch. We change every six hours or so.”
“It does feel like flying.”
“It feels like my guts are flying,” Holly said suddenly.
“Ginger pills,” Michel said, leaping lightly down into the galley.
“It’s funny how one person can feel nothing and the other everything,” Cammie said.
“It’s your ears,” Michel said. “I’ve seen these big, burly guys go green the minute we leave the harbor. It has nothing to do with whether you’re weak or strong. Maybe some leftover nausea from her bite.”
“I’m sure that’s it,” Holly said. “I’m still not . . . right. I’m a nurse, so I know this is a little . . . something.”
Michel set out to eyeball oncoming vessels. He held Cammie’s hand so she could stand up beside him. “See out there? A cruise ship. It looks a million miles away, doesn’t it? But we could get to her faster than you can imagine. We can make more than a hundred miles a day if we want to this way. You can make fifty even drifting with the current. The likelihood is that the captain might not see us even in broad daylight. I have to go tell Lenny about that ship, though I’m sure he’s already seen it. They’ll talk to each other, and most likely, since we’re going faster, the ship will stay clear until we pass. We’ll be the stand-on vessel, in that case. That’s what we call it. It would be different if they had nets in the water for fishing.”
When he returned, Tracy asked, “Is there any land out here at all?”
“Tonight we’ll drop the anchor by a couple of tiny islands, hardly islands at all, really. Just little spits of scrub and trees. They don’t have beaches, hardly any shallows around them,” Michel said. “The only reason to go over onto them is to go crabbing or something. Or if you just have to feel land under your feet or take a swim or something and you don’t want to go around the boat. Our boat.”
“Like the kind of island you’d get marooned on?” Cammie asked.
“Only if you were the unluckiest lub alive. Or if you wanted to be . . . like alone to meditate.”
“Like a monk,” she said.
“Yeah, or not. As for us, we’ll anchor off one,” Michel said, averting his eyes. Why was he as shy as a kid in sixth form? “If we go in, we’ll motor in the tender. You could swim over there easily. You could never expect an anchor, or even two huge anchors, to hold a boat overnight. But usually, it’s okay here. You don’t get in trouble the way you would other places. You get in trouble drifting around.” Michael felt abashed. He was babbling.
“So I hear,” said Cammie, rescu
ing him and running one fingernail down his spine.
Tracy watched the minute adjustments Michel made to the sails at Lenny’s instruction. The angles were understandable. It wasn’t so different from a massive version of her grandfather’s little Cat. Michel detached the sheet and cleated it off. She imagined the rudder underneath, keeping the boat out of a skid, the flow of water under the keel. She remembered what her grandfather had taught her. If she put her hand outside the car window when the car was moving and cupped her hand, all the wind did was blow her hand back. But if you turned your hand, technically, your hand would be blown forward, not back, by the wind slipping over it. She remembered nothing of what he’d taught her about sailing upwind, except that it required ducking her head when he moved the boom to the other side of the little boat. Magellan, Grandpa had told her, had to have his sails set at a ninety-degree angle to the wind; and still he went around the world.
Just as the sun began to drop, she heard the sails flap against the mast as Lenny lowered them and folded them neatly, tied to the boom. She felt a leveling off in the forward motion of the boat. Michel readied the motorboat to tie to a big tree on a tiny island. While Lenny held their place, Michel zipped across and tied off the line.
“If there’s no wind, you could make a fire out there tonight,” Michel said when he got back. “It would be nice.”
“I could do that. It would be like camp,” Cammie said.
“Not really,” Michel said softly. “Not like the camps I went to.”
Oh well, Tracy thought, overhearing them. She felt a sudden pang of longing for Jim, his reddish burr of hair and long limbs. Was she longing for Jim or for both of them, her and Jim when they were young? Or simply the liquor of being young, a single potent glassful that was supposed to fuel a lifetime?
That night, while Lenny prepared the makings for baked mussels with spinach and wine, Michel took the tender, pulled it up onto the sand, and walked over to the quiet side of the island, to shore-cast for a fish to quickly fillet and grill. Stealthily, in her bathing suit, Cammie hopped over the side of Opus and swam the thirty feet to join him. Her stealth was invisible to no one.