It was dawn by the time we left Sally Ann’s party. We went to my hotel. It was clear the man in the reception booth recognized Joey from the day before. He watched us out of the corner of his eye, his lips faintly twisted in an expression of disgust, so Joey waited downstairs while I went upstairs to quickly pack up my things.
“Here is my forwarding address,” I said upon checking out. I pushed a slip of paper under the window. On it I’d scribbled the number of the Sausalito P.O. box Sally Ann had given us. The clerk accepted the slip of paper with a grunt. He looked me over with a flat, stoic gaze and spat the sunflower seed he’d been chewing into a cup. I found myself feeling skeptical that I’d ever see any forwarded messages.
“Ready?” Joey asked.
• • •
As we walked down to the pier to catch the ferry, I took off my coat and carried it folded awkwardly over my arm. The weather in San Francisco, I had decided, had something of the coquette about it. It was impossible to dress for it. One minute you might find yourself basking in the blinding sunshine and sweating under the heavy weight of your winter coat, while the next you might be shivering in the kind of gray, bitter cold usually reserved for Gothic novels.
The ferry ride was pleasant. Once in Sausalito, we followed the shoreline past the marina to a group of eccentric-looking structures. Joey later told me the history behind the houseboat, as it had clearly been cobbled together over the years. Sally Ann’s grandfather had purchased the houseboat, as well as a small fishing boat, back when Sausalito was still a fishing village. With no Golden Gate Bridge at that time, San Francisco was a faraway place, a glowing orb across the bay that meant a lot to the yachtsmen who made port and talked loudly about their holdings in El Dorado gold mines, but was little more to the local fishermen than a glorified lighthouse. When both her grandfather and father had died and this meager legacy passed on to Sally Ann, she sold the fishing boat but retained the houseboat, mostly—as she had told us—as a secondary location for the infamous parties she threw.
The day we moved in, we picked our way around the deck and past the plants in their chipped terra-cotta planters, and turned the key for the first time. Right away, nothing was how I’d pictured it. When I had first heard the word houseboat, I expected lots of white and navy paint, and for everything to be airy and lightweight and able to float on water. Contrary to my expectations, the front door was a heavy piece of redwood. Joey pushed it open and we were met with a rush of cool, somber, wet air. It smelled of silt and marine salt and of fragrant herbs and at the same time of a cold, moldy basement.
Like the front door, the walls of the houseboat were made out of redwood. But unlike the front door, which had lost most of its natural red pigment to the elements, the wood of the walls was alive with color. The paneling inside the houseboat was a marbled combination of crimson, amber, and gold. There was a tinge of shiny gloss to the walls—not from any owner’s attempt to seal them with a gloss, but from the simple passage of time rubbing them smooth with human contact. In a far corner sat a wood-burning stove made out of black iron. This was by far the most unexpected item in the room as far as I was concerned. I don’t know what I had imagined should keep the boat warm, but certainly not this. Its heaviness alarmed me; it seemed to me the boat might sink under its weight. And the idea that one should heat the boat by burning the very thing that kept it afloat—wood! Nonetheless, there it sat, belching heat into the room once it had been properly fed.
The interior of the houseboat bore the evidence of several curious attempts to fix it up. Someone had laid down felt as a sort of makeshift wall-to-wall carpeting. It was billiard green and wet to the touch during my entire stay on the houseboat. If you walked over it in socks, your soles were wet for the rest of the evening. When I think about it now, it makes sense that perhaps the green felt accounted for a good portion of the cold, moldy basement odor that seemed to permeate everything.
The houseboat was sparsely furnished, yet somehow felt stuffed with bric-a-brac. Various tools and fishing accouterments hung from nails hammered all over the walls of the boat’s one main room. Magazines and newspapers were stacked waist-high, and the windowsills were littered with scraps of paper and receipts. A pair of outdoor deck chairs sat in the middle of the room, surrounding a small wooden table too high for the chairs. It was a height difference that rendered all three items somewhat useless; this observation was verified when I sat in one of the deck chairs and promptly found the table came to my chin. The only other major piece of furniture on the houseboat was a captain’s bed built into the far corner. It was an unusual size: ostensibly it was a double bed, but was a good six inches shorter than one might ordinarily expect. I’ll admit I had quite a bit of trouble with that bed. The nights I slept there, my feet dangled over the edge, and I often woke up only to discover they had gone numb due to the night’s chill and poor circulation.
Joey and I took two very different attitudes towards the houseboat. We both saw it for the dingy dump that it was, but we responded to its dull sheen and drab environment in opposite ways. Joey made changes. He began with the windows, wiping clean the crust of white haze some previous occupant had purposely applied with soap. He dragged what little furniture we had around the room, seeking their ideal arrangement. He lifted whole stacks of newspapers and magazines and dumped them into the bay. “The fish can catch up on the headlines,” he said.
It was obvious Joey was in the mood to create some kind of true home on that houseboat. I did not notice or understand this at the time, but I see it now. I had a very different reaction to the houseboat. I moved around the space like a stranger, careful not to leave my mark. If I needed something that might require that I hunt in the cabinets or in the trunks, I waited until Joey came home. Or, even more often, I went without. I touched nothing, I opened nothing, I dusted nothing.
It was not that I was leery of Sally Ann, worried that she might turn up unannounced. It was more nebulous than that. It was the houseboat itself I didn’t want to disturb, as though it might swallow me up if I opened the wrong drawer or stirred the wrong cobweb. The truth is I was afraid.
Up until the moment I packed my suitcase and checked out of my hotel, Joey was merely a helpful stranger who had developed a vested interest in helping me look for my father’s journal. This is the lie I told myself. And this is the lie that kept me comfortable in his presence and allowed me to continue inching closer to him without feeling the space between us diminishing. But the day we moved onto the houseboat, this lie evaporated, carried off by some more substantial breeze. I was well aware that as soon as we unlocked the door and let ourselves in, I should have turned and left. There was only one bed and no sofa; I’m certain Sally Ann was conscious of this fact when she offered the houseboat in the first place.
We didn’t speak about sleeping arrangements as Joey and I began to nervously unpack our things. The banter between us was too easy, and too difficult, all at the same time. I knew I should get out of there and never look back. But by then the lie had delivered me into the hands of the truth, so to speak, and there was no going back. I was, for the first wonderful, terrible time, exactly where I belonged. Together we put our things away with a shared sense of solemn, frightened dignity. When our suitcases were empty, we turned to face each other in the middle of the room, and with a soldier’s bravery Joey reached out to hold the back of my skull, very gently, in his hand.
We were lost to each other after that.