Two hours out of Djibouti, a great stir arose. The crew were alerted to the discovery of a massive bouquet of daffodils flooding from a stainless-steel pitcher on one of the mess tables. The mystery astounded them as if they were apes. Whence had this come? Certainly not from Djibouti’s scrub desert, and there were no greenhouses at Camp Lemonnier; and no prim, sunny, bay windows.
Had they been airlifted from the States? Taken on recently at Haifa? Grown in a secret, hydroponic enclosure at Lemonnier? Many theories proliferated, some ridiculous, none satisfactory. Though in the sea air the daffodils wilted after two days, when first they appeared they were the color of Vermeer’s yellows and so new and heavy with water as to be almost tumescent. Every theory pointed to Rensselaer, but he admitted nothing and seemed as puzzled as everyone else. Eventually, speculation was abandoned and the search for causes forgotten. Thence forward, in reference to anything inexplicable, the crew would say, “It’s like the daffodils.”
“Captain,” Josephson said as the sun was setting over Ethiopia almost directly astern. Pinafore was at the helm, listening intently. “When the sun sets here, it’s as if time is speeded up.” Then he was silent.
Rensselaer looked at him the way one would look at a clueless child. Josephson’s features were so finely delineated, his appearance so young, that he could have been mistaken for a fourteen-year-old. Everything about him expressed his newness to the world. “Are you on LSD?” Rensselaer asked, deadpan.
“Not to my knowledge, sir, but look.”
The sun was indeed racing to the horizon. Rensselaer didn’t need to look. “Have you ever been in these latitudes?”
“Eleven degrees? No sir.”
“Neither have I, sir,” Pinafore volunteered.
“What’s the farthest south you’ve ever been?”
“Norfolk, sir, Williamsburg,” said Josephson. “Or, I don’t know, Los Angeles? It was just Disneyland, and I was so young I didn’t know where I was.”
“Chicago,” said Pinafore.
“Well that’s not true, Pinafore,” Rensselaer told him. We boarded in Norfolk.”
“Norfolk is south of Chicago, sir?”
“It is, quite a lot. Now, we’re twenty-six degrees south of Norfolk. If you went twenty-six degrees north of Norfolk you’d be somewhere in the middle of Hudson Bay, where the sun sets really, really slowly.”
“It does?” Josephson asked.
Everyone on the bridge had an ear cocked to this conversation. “It does. Tell me why?”
“I don’t know. Why would it?”
“You were in NROTC?”
“Yes sir.”
“And they didn’t do navigation and geography?”
“They did, but no one talked about the sunset.”
“It’s like this, Josephson. Every time a wheel rotates, the rim has to cover a lot more distance than the axle, right? Figure that the earth is like an apple. Stick a skewer through it and have it rotate around the skewer as the axle. If there was a skewer with a thickness of, say, a penny, at the North and South Poles, skewering the earth, it would take twenty-four hours for a complete revolution to cover . . . what, the three-quarters-of-an-inch circumference of the penny? Meanwhile, at the equator, it takes the same twenty-four hours to cover the twenty-five thousand miles of the Earth’s circumference there. So at the North Pole, at the skewer, the earth is revolving at less than a millimeter an hour, but at the equator, more than a thousand miles an hour. The higher the absolute speed, as you get closer to the equator, the faster the sun seems to set.”
“That’s neat.”
“It is. Josephson?”
“Sir?”
“In your off time, read through Dutton’s Navigation and Piloting. And, Pinafore?”
“Sir?”
“Take a look.”
“Aye sir. Will do.”
“If you have a question, ask the LT.”
“Which LT, sir?”
“The quartermaster.”
Buck Lanham made a face.
At this point, Movius came onto the bridge to start his watch. He began to salute and then caught himself. Rensselaer took the 1MC. “This is the captain. Officially or not, we’re in a war zone, and we’re now really done with saluting. We’ve tried. It’s a hard habit to kick. Now I repeat, I say again, I emphasize, no more saluting. This will be posted on the watch bills, but make sure your shipmates who may now be sleeping are made aware of it.” His eye caught something in the corner. “Stand by.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Several people said, “Mail, sir,” referring to a large canvas sack resting against the bulkhead. It had arrived during the foraging expedition.
Rensselaer went back on the 1MC. “I’m happy to tell you that we got the mail in Djibouti. Pick it up at COMMS at the end of your watches, not before. When you turn in, be ready for general quarters—drill or otherwise. Captain out.”
Clicking off the 1MC, he turned to Josephson, the officer of the deck until his imminent relief by the XO. “COMMS to the bridge.”
Josephson repeated this into the 1MC, and went about his duties.
Soon, Velez came onto the bridge. “Mr. Velez,” Rensselaer said, “take care of the mail, and message CENTCOM and AFRICOM. ‘Athena in the Gulf of Aden. Where is Sahand?’”
“Directly to CENTCOM and AFRICOM, sir?” Velez asked as he wrote down the message.
“Yes. Whereas I don’t know about the other commands, they have liaison with CIA. CIA is watching the ports, and we received our orders through the embassy in Jerusalem rather than through normal channels. I could see a message lost forever in the stovepiping.”
“Please verify, sir,” Velez asked, holding out the message he had written.
“Message is correct. Transmit.”
“Aye sir.” Velez left, hoisting the heavy canvas sack onto his back.
Eight bells sounded the end of the second dog watch. “XO,” Rensselaer commanded, “darken ship. Tomorrow, weapons check (all weapons, down to pistols) and long-range practice with the thirty. It’s time to start using the telescopic mast. I want to calibrate the visuals and make its use routine. Note this on the watch bills and in the P.O.D. And the SEALs are getting too parochial. I want them participating and aware of what the ship is doing. They’re a separate nation, but they’re also sailors, which they tend to forget. I did, once. They have to be reminded of the unity of mission and command.
“We now have to worry about pirates. In the dark even with night vision it’ll be hard to tell the difference between a pirate skiff and an Iranian fast-attack craft. If the radar shows anything moving toward us at high speed, call general quarters. If I haven’t arrived and they’re within small-arms range, warn’em once. If they persist, blow them out of the water.”
Movius nodded. Before the captain left the bridge he announced, to the incoming and outgoing watches, “The XO has the con,” and the new watch began.
*
Before he turned in, hoping for a letter, Rensselaer stopped at COMMS, waiting at the door while Velez finished his transmissions. The mailbag lay in the corner, still unopened. Velez finished and swivelled in his seat. “I had to mess around a lot to send to AFRICOM. Never sent to them before, but I managed.”
“What’s that?” Rensselaer asked, referring to a kind of tiny cargo net hanging from the ceiling and bulging with equipment.
“The sat-phones. Commander Holworthy asked me to keep them here. In the past he’s had trouble with corroded contacts, and we have the best environment for electronics.” Indeed, he was surrounded, bulkhead to bulkhead, with complicated electronics and blinking lights. “He wants the batteries at a hundred percent.”
Rensselaer nodded.
“Captain, I can go through the mail real quick to see if you’ve got anything.”
“No,” Rensselaer said, “it’ll wait until I’m done with what I have to do tomorrow. Get it to the crew first.”
*
Encouraged by the captain’s instruction about the sunset, after dinner as Athena ploughed south in a rolling swell coming broadside from the east, Josephson sought him on the bridge.
“Do you know where I can find the captain?” Josephson asked Movius, who had the con. Movius just pointed up. The captain was on the open bridge, where he often went in the evening to survey the ship from stem to stern. Though Athena was rolling, Rensselaer wasn’t grasping a rail.
“Captain, sir. Request permission to speak.”
“You’re already speaking.”
“Then to speak further, sir.”
“Speak further, Mr. Josephson.”
“It’s really moving up here, sir.”
“Not that much more than on the bridge, but this is exactly what we were talking about.”
“Sir?”
“There’s more roll up here than on the enclosed bridge. The higher you go from the center of gravity, which serves as the ship’s axis, the greater the distance for every movement. Just like the apple with a skewer in the middle, or a bicycle wheel and hub. A five-degree pitch and ten-degree roll up here might lift us however many feet forward and aft, and take us however many feet to port or starboard, but the top of the mast will move much more. An imaginary line deep into the universe would move trillions of light-years in the seconds it takes us to move to and fro, or left and right.
“But that’s not why you came up here, is it?” Rensselaer asked, looking not at Josephson but at the fading light over the sea.
“No sir.”
“What then?”
“Sir, I wonder if I might ask you for career advice. It’s kind of a mystery to me.”
Rensselaer smiled. “Me? It’s obviously a mystery to me, too. I’m a captain assigned to the job of a lieutenant commander. For me, every minute of this deployment is supposed to be humiliation and reprimand.”
“Yes, sir. I know about that. But is it?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so, sir. So, the advice, which I think might be invaluable, is—why?”
“I’m impressed. That’s exactly what you should know. Because, in fact, I’m neither punished nor disturbed. Why? I was never ambitious except perhaps for a brief period when I was in love with a girl whose family were social climbers and they thought I wasn’t good enough for her, so I tried to prove them wrong. That lasted only as long as she did. I knew even then that you can’t engineer your path unless all you want is frustration. For everyone who plots an ambitious course and succeeds, there are ten thousand who suffer continual unhappiness and failure.
“I just tried to be involved in things that interested me, and I worked hard—because I liked it. Opportunities arose and promotion came as a result of that, not because I had a design. I’ll retire as a captain. Coulda been a contender, an admiral. Things interfered. But it was never my aim to be either, just to do my best at what I loved, and, when that was not available, at what I was assigned to do, like this.
“If you cease to think well of yourself because you shine in the eyes of others, but, rather, do whatever it is you do out of interest and delight (and discipline), such a great burden will be floated from your shoulders as you cannot imagine, and the world will appear as wonderful as it is to a child.
“So, what interests you?” he asked Josephson.
“You mean, what I would like to pursue?”
“What do you read about, think about?”
“Actually, distributed lethality, maximizing the punch of every combatant, even the smallest.”
“Perfect for where we are right now.”
“And fleet design, new weaponry, new concepts.”
“All right. Study that intensively. Read everything you can, take notes, engage with it until you can write about it. And then write. It will be satisfying in itself, and if you do well and publish, opportunities will likely arise. Keep at it. That’s how it works. And when you’re fully absorbed in something that’s deserving and worthwhile, you don’t have to worry about career.”
“What did you . . . ?”
“Deterrence strategy. That’s a deep pool: history, psychology, cultural comparisons, game theory, physics, operational art, weaponry of course, geography, weather, economics, politics, bureaucratic politics, organization theory. I didn’t think for a minute about promotion. I was far too busy even to know that time was passing.
“Josephson.”
“Sir?”
“Work hard, be interested, be a good dog, and don’t chase rabbits.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dismissed.”
*
When Rensselaer was back in his cabin and ready to sleep, he took out Katy’s picture and stared at it the way soldiers and sailors stare at the pictures of the ones they love who are distant at present and will be perhaps forever—something they take into account whether they are aware of it or not. One discovers either that he is numb to the image and his heart is cold, or that his love has deepened to the point of exquisite longing. The features in Katy’s photograph that others may have found imperfect—her inimitable physical sharpness, and the tension communicated even in a still photograph—he found painfully beautiful.
The next morning, Rensselaer allowed the OOD to keep the con even with the captain on the bridge, because he was in and out as he supervised the weapons checks. Gunners’ mates were cleaning, lubricating, and otherwise preparing their weapons, and mixing ammunition loads for various scenarios. Missilery was a different story—mostly electronic, calibration, exercising data links, checking for moisture where it should not have penetrated. Even though the decks were crowded, the SEALs were out in the open, maintaining their arsenals all the way down to scabbarded knives. A weapon must feel like it is a part of one’s body, so that it will do what it is intended to do with no more deliberation than one devotes to one’s legs when walking or running.
Back on the bridge at midmorning, Rensselaer said, with an amused expression, “Up periscope,” and the telescopic mast was raised. The OOD asked if what the captain wanted was to test the visuals even into the sun, to which the reply was, “Absolutely.”
First they looked at the telescopic mast’s radar. Counting atmospheric effects, the direct picture wasn’t that much different from the more powerful lower radar. Then they switched to visual. Someone said, “My grandfather told me that for a long time all they had was black-and-white TV.” As he looked at the monochrome picture, he marveled. “I wouldn’t have watched it if it was like that.”
“We had one when I was little,” Rensselaer said. “You get used to it.” Then they began the test, using their electronic maps and GPS to make precise determinations.
The air held very little haze. With a powerful binocular on the open bridge above, Rensselaer made out a feature of land, a crust-like projection of rocks that jutted into the sea—five miles, as measured on the electronic chart, between the rocks and Athena’s exact position determined by GPS. Then he descended to the enclosed bridge and zoomed in with the camera at the tip of the telescopic mast. Visible to him ahead was a village tucked into the rolling terrain and completely undetectable from standard height. He marveled at how people could live on the sand, with only occasional scrub here or there, everything baking hot and dry, and nothing inland but desert.
The village was called Ceelayo. Each house had a walled courtyard. There were no streets, just paths, but there had to have been water there, although it certainly didn’t look like it. Not that far from the sea was the mosque, identified on the electronic chart as the Masjidka Ceelayo. He could see it clearly. “What is the position and distance of the mosque,” he asked the OOD, who was at the electronic chart.
“Eleven degrees, fourteen minutes, forty-three seconds north, and forty-eight degrees, fifty-three minutes, thirty-five seconds east.”
“Calculate the distance from our position on my mark.” A few seconds passed. “Mark.”
The OOD worked the keys, and a line appeared on his colorful screen from a spot on the sea to the mosque in Ceelayo. “Ten point seven three miles.”
“Nautical?” Rensselaer asked, almost skeptically.
“Nautical.”
“Precisely in statute miles?” He already knew, more or less.
“Twelve point five.”
“That’s more than we got in trials,” Rensselaer said. “I don’t understand. We’re fully loaded and not riding high in the water.”
A rating stepped out onto the port bridge wing, and, craning his neck and shielding his eyes, stared at the telescopic mast. Returning, he announced that it had extended more, and was moving around like a sapling.
“They stiffened the mast with an electronic block that keeps the end-shaft deeper in the next-to-last shaft,” Rensselaer told everyone. “The block has failed, and the mast is now taller.”
“Yes sir,” the OOD added, “and we don’t see the greater movement, because of the image stabilization. Shall we attempt to fix the block, sir?”
“Leave it as it is. ‘Our indiscretions sometimes serve us well, Horatio, for a divinity shapes our ends, and praisèd be rashness for it.’”
By far the oldest person on the bridge, Rensselaer assumed that they would know this was Shakespeare, but none of them did, for their generations had been taught other, lesser things. The language he had used, and his calling the OOD Horatio, left them silent and tense. They didn’t think to inquire, because they didn’t know enough to suspect. Instead, the story would spread throughout the ship, where it would be received, as gossip so often is, as if it were the finest delicacy. It was in fact a lot of fun to think that the old man was slightly off his nut.
*
In midafternoon and more than one hundred miles east of Ceelayo, the XO was taking a break on the mess deck, where the snacks were, as opposed to the wardroom, where they weren’t. Although he had an ear cocked for any call that might require him, he was deeply absorbed in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. To the right of the book on the stainless-steel table were a plastic bottle of very cold Diet Coke and a large pile of cookies.
Seeking the cool, dry air, Holworthy walked in, his shirt soaking and beads of water on his face. “What’s that?” he asked Movius.
Although Movius was the XO, they were both lieutenant commanders, equal in rank. “Theory of Moral Sentiments.”
“I mean the cookies.”
“Oh. Special Oreos, vanilla outsides with chocolate inside. You have to request them.”
“From who?”
“From Oreo. If you order enough they’ll make specialty batches. We took them on in Djibouti. Don’t ask me why the Navy ordered inside-out Oreos for Djibouti.”
“Where are they?”
Movius pointed to a bin on the counter. Before long, Holworthy was sitting opposite him, twenty cookies piled into stacks of ten, like rounds in a magazine, and an ice-cold Diet Coke already condensing on the outside. “What’s the point of a Diet Coke with high-calorie cookies?” Holworthy asked rhetorically.
“Why add insult to injury?” was the reply. “And a lot of people, including me, think Diet Coke is wonderfully dry, even more than Champagne. It’s genetically determined. Don’t tell the French.”
“At birth?”
Movius looked up. He made sure his tone was not condescending. “Before birth.”
“Right.”
Movius, who thought SEALs feasted too much on their PR, went back to his book.
“What’s going on with the captain?”
A question like that was not to be taken lightly. Movius closed the book and looked up. “Meaning?”
“He called the OOD Horatio. He said he has to talk to God. He had us chasing around for camo nets, metal buckets, and rope. What was that all about?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. You’re the XO. I think it’s normal for me to report that my men, who thought we were going to the Gulf to do what we were trained to do, feel like they’ve been kidnaped to sit out the war fucking around in the Indian Ocean with a guy who’s got one foot in the grave and maybe the other in the funny farm.”
“Maybe he’s got one foot in the grave, but the other’s dancing, and anyway it wasn’t the captain’s decision. You know that.”
“I’m not saying it was. I’m just commenting on the morale of my detachment. They’re pissed off.”
“You too?”
“Maybe.”
“What do you want me to do about it,” Movius asked, “give them hot cocoa and safe spaces?”
“No. They want dangerous spaces. That’s the point. There’s a war on. You’ve got a bunch of racehorses down below, and they’re stuck in their stalls. I feel obligated to let you know that.”
“Very well. I know it.”
Very well is the phrase of a superior who has received information or a request from someone of lower rank. Movius had employed it to end the conversation, assert his higher position as XO, express his disapproval, and indicate that he would neither take action nor sympathize. Then he returned to his book.
But when Holworthy left, cookies and drink in hand, the XO closed the book and stayed in his seat. There was no point, he decided, in telling the captain, for Holworthy’s complaint lacked sufficient substance.
*
At evening, rounding the tip of the Horn of Africa at Cape Guardafui (on the old charts, Geez Guardafuy on the new), Athena turned south 176 degrees so as nearly to graze Ras Hafun, a small headland protruding almost directly east. Behind this cape for many miles were immense dunes that, like waves, had been driven south by the north wind. The same wind had given Athena an assist, but now the air had begun to flow from the cooling desert, gently, because it was early, and to the east. At three or four in the morning it would be strong enough and dense enough to vector the north wind to the southeast, its force dissipating only five or ten miles from shore. Farther out, it would be largely spent.
With few and necessary exceptions, Athena had observed radio silence since exiting the Canal. There had been no radiotelephony or Internet uploads from the very beginning. Now she exercised thorough emissions control. EMCON meant no radar, no uplinks. It was early in regard to Sahand, but as no one knew where Sahand was, they had to take into account that it might appear at any moment. The strain of EMCON was enormous, as no radar meant the only way to avoid collision with craft not themselves emitting radar was by sight and hearing, and as the desert in the Horn offered little except scrub for goats, the wretched villages on the coast survived by fishing and piracy, so the waters were fairly crowded with radarless skiffs. Lookouts were doubled, and no one slept quite enough.
One thing that electronic silence and weeks away from the Internet succeeded in accomplishing was to return the written letter on paper to the elevated, magical position it once held. Rensselaer was the only one old enough to remember the tidal force of the traces of a woman’s perfume on a letter; the charm, intelligence, and seductiveness of her handwriting; the excitement of holding in one’s hand an envelope and pages that had been held in hers. He was the only one old enough to remember reading a letter many times over, and each time feeling slightly different longings, reassurances, or fears. Now the crew had begun to be educated in this, and he was about to be re-educated. His duties finished, the respite in his cabin was compromised only by the fact that, like everyone else, in anticipation of general quarters, he slept in his clothes.
Katy’s letter was the last Velez had surrendered, as the captain, with so much to do and by his own order, had been the last to get his mail. It was on elegant but plain stationery—cream on the outside, a Tiffany-blue envelope lining, cream papers, hand-addressed and -written, with a floral stamp. And, yes, her perfume was strongly apparent, so much so that he spent a few minutes before he opened the envelope breathing in deeply to catch the scent, eyes closed. Then he opened it. Just the handwriting was as seductive as anything by which he had ever been seduced.
“Dear Stephen,” it began, as one would expect.
“Forgive me for not being good at letter writing. In the days when we did, I was too young and needy. When the family was together, we did not, of course, write letters. My children don’t write now. I don’t mean just to me; they stopped that a while ago. I mean in general. Now it’s all Internet or texting or other useless, fashionable means with infantile, baby-talk names like Bish-Bosh, Wombat, Crinkle, or Winka Dink.
“So I’m not exactly Jane Austen. And there’s so much Jane Austen going around that a lot of women now imitate her in what should be simple letters—‘Pray you, Captain Rensselaer, I should blush to acknowledge. . . .’ A new associate wrote me a note flavored like that. I called her into my office and said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’
“I’m really not good at letters. Add to that, I’m a tax lawyer, educated over the years to write like a vending machine or maybe a very insensitive chainsaw. Enough with excuses.
“I’m back in New Orleans now—I was in California, and will get to that later. The heat, humidity, and penetrating sun have slowed everything down here, as usual. People are as lazy as hell, and drink, and have sex (not me), because it seems to make sense and they can’t do much else. Please note that in that regard I really miss you, and (without putting into the written record anything that might embarrass me), as I lie in bed or sometimes even when I’m just reading, the object of my affection and the enabler of my action is you and just you.
“This year, perhaps because of the excellent timing of the rains, the vegetation is astounding. Flowers are so ripe with color that in bright sun rather than fade they dazzle the eye. If not for weed wackers, hedge trimmers, and illegal immigrants, the Garden District would be as swallowed by vegetation as a Mayan temple. I can’t run outside, so I have to use treadmills—with people watching cable news on either side of me—but mainly I swim a lot, and I think you would be pleased by the shape I’m in. That’s an invitation.
“A bunch of us had to go to L.A. last week at the emergency request of a big movie studio (I can’t tell you the name of it, but it begins with W) that was thinking of selling itself to China. This involved contract law, international law, Chinese law, tax law, investment banking, and God knows what else. We weren’t the only team. The Four Seasons in Beverly Hills was filled with lawyers. The deal was stupid and greedy. In fact, I knew that solely because of China’s current investment policies it wouldn’t go through, and it fell apart in a week. Meanwhile, we billed more than a million dollars, not counting the considerable five-star expenses, including a corporate jet that we had to charter because they had to have us out there immediately. Then, when we got there, they put us off and we spent two days by the pool.
“When we met in conference at the studio, about thirty people were sitting around the giant table, and we all had name placards. Our secretary, who calls me Katy, the only secretary at the firm who calls me Katy, because she looked up my high-school yearbook online, used it on the list of personnel. Somebody must’ve read the handwritten Y at the end of Katy as a Z, because my placard said ‘Katz Farrar,’ and everyone called me Katz, which broke up our people, and needless to say, me. The president of the holding company at one point turned to me and said, ‘Katz, what do you think?’ I couldn’t stop laughing. He must’ve thought I was an idiot, who, to boot, had the first name Katz. I don’t think they’ll ever hire us again, and the whole thing will only reinforce Hollywood’s prejudices about the South.
“Of the partners who, entirely inexplicably to me, will not leave me alone, the one most besotted, Roger, was along on the trip. We check into the hotel, and low and behold, our rooms are next to one another and there was a door between them. I thought this might not be a coincidence, so I took my suitcase downstairs and changed rooms. At dinner a couple of nights later, I heard our managing partner (who also has an interest in me, I think. Maybe I’m crazy) ask Roger, ‘Why were you banging on my door last night?’
“‘Your door?’ Roger asked in reply.
“‘Yes, my door.’ He wasn’t amused. It took Roger about a minute to figure out an answer, during which he pretended all that time to be fighting one lousy piece of sushi.
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess it was because your television was so loud.’
“‘It wasn’t on,’ was the answer. ‘It was four in the morning. I was fast asleep. I don’t watch infomercials.’
“‘It must have been coming from the room on the other side,’ Roger said. And then, stupidly, almost endearingly, he gave himself away, saying, ‘Sorry. That’s your room?’
“It didn’t stop there. The night before we left, we all met in the bar, to make a wrap as they say out there. But it was so noisy that no one could hear anything, so we decided to go out to the garden. But there was an Orthodox Jewish wedding in the garden with about four hundred people, so we trooped back in and found a room off the lobby—in which, by the way, the rugs are so plush they might as well be part quicksand, and everything else is marble shining beneath perfectly focused light.
“We did wrap up, about two scotches later for the men and one glass of Champagne for me. We were done and everyone was leaving when Roger, now on his third drink, asked me to summarize what I had said to one of the studio’s in-house lawyers about offshoring. The way he put it, I couldn’t really refuse.
“As soon as everyone was gone he said, ‘So, your beau is in the Navy.’ He talks like that—beau. He’s from here.”
“‘How do you know?’ I asked.
“‘Angela Jowet, the paralegal, saw you on a bench in a park somewhere, with a naval officer. You were in his arms, she said. Your eyes were closed, you were smiling, and she thought you looked like you were in heaven.’
“‘I was,’ I answered.
“‘Well, now I understand about the two-hundred-foot yacht,’ he went on, as if he had caught me.
“‘Yes, Roger,’ I answered, perhaps a little testily, ‘and don’t screw around with it or me, because it has big automatic guns and missiles and it can blow your shitty little sailboat to Mars.’
“It’s not so easy to dissuade a rich, drunk guy who has a crush on you. He found my response irresistible. ‘Katy,’ he said, ‘I love you. I’ve loved you since you first walked in the door. First sight, and it’s only grown stronger, and they want you to know that I’m here for you, and will be here for you, should you . . . now and in the future.’
“I said, ‘Who’s they?’
“He was so drunk. He said, ‘I mean I.’
“So this is what I told him: I said, ‘Roger, I’m flattered, but you’ve got to understand one thing. I love him, and it’s the kind of love that, by the grace of God, you can find after you’ve really messed things up when you’re younger, and been cast down, and you think it’s all done and you’ll be lonely for the rest of your life. Then someone comes along and you have all the excitement of falling in love when you’re fifteen, but, unlike when you’re fifteen, you know—and he knows—all those things that can poison, deaden, and destroy love. And amazingly, wonderfully, you also know that they’re absent. You know the way is clear forever. You’ve never loved anyone like this before, and that’s it. It’s enough to carry on even if one of you dies first. You’ve arrived. You’ve got it made. That’s how I feel about my naval officer. There’ll never be anyone else.’
“He knew there was no bravado in what I was saying, no strain, just the truth. To his credit, he bowed his head, and said, ‘I’m glad for you, Catherine, and sorry for myself.’ He’s a good and civilized man, and had you not shown up I might have married him out of expediency and lack of hope.
“But you did show up. And I’ll tell you, when you left I cried, but I knew that no matter where you are, whether on the sea or close to shore, and no matter what will happen, we’ll always be together one way or another. Bank on this, even should you doubt, or should you be in the fight. And when you see an evening star rising at the edge of a placid, waveless sea, know that it’s true.
“If our letters cross, or if we forget the exact details of one another’s faces or bodies, or the precise sounds of one another’s voices, the love is still unbreakable. It’s the kind of love that even if unexpressed is like those little particles that at the speed of light shoot effortlessly through ten thousand miles of dense rock, untouched and unmarred. Forgive my imprecise physics. I can’t adequately express what’s in my heart.
“Oh, and I forgot. This morning I heard a dove: very early, very close. Usually, it’s not until evening.
“Love,
“Katy.”
Off the Horn of Africa, in the Indian Ocean, with the desert rapidly cooling to the west and its great sand dunes even now cold to the touch, the captain of the Athena turned off the light in his tiny stateroom, and lay back in the dark.