Scorpion in the Sea

EIGHTEEN

By the time Mike had made his calls, checked back on Quigley, and talked to Lieutenant (J.G.) Sorento, it was well after four o’clock. He made his way to the entrance of the hospital and found that it was raining hard, the skies darkening even as he stood in the vestibule. He slipped into his plastic raincoat, pushed his hat down over his forehead, and made a run for his car. His shoes were soaked after about twenty feet by the standing water in the parking lot.

He made it to the Alfa and piled in, fighting the flapping raincoat as he wedged himself into the car. The rain drummed down on the car roof vengefully, as if angry that he was finally under cover. He lit off the engine, and waited for the rain to let up so that he could see where he was going. After a few minutes of increasingly harder rain, he decided to go.

Turning on his lights, he threaded his way out through the lanes of parked cars. The main hospital building was no longer visible, blotted out by sheets of rain; he had to stop in the lot periodically to get his bearings. Using a line of streetlights as a landmark to find the narrow exit road, he crawled along in first gear to make sure he stayed on the road, which was rapidly becoming indistinguishable from the flooded drainage ditches on either side. It was a serious, tropical rain, and he knew that those ditches were four feet deep. A sheet of lightning glared in the dark clouds overhead, followed by a boom of thunder. He turned his wipers on high, but without much effect. The entire area of the road ahead was a yellow white wedge of thrashing raindrops.

Coming around the second bend in the road he nearly ran into a car that was stopped ahead. Stopped and listing to starboard. As he closed in, he saw the car lurch even more to the right, its brake lights flaring in the rain. It ended up hanging at a precarious angle, half on the road, halfway into the ditch. It was a Volvo station wagon. As he slowed, the driver of the Volvo tried to pull it out to the left, but the rear end slid the last few remaining inches over into the ditch. The entire rear end began to sink down into the deep ditch, the drive wheel churning the water as the right brake light submerged, canting the front of the car up high enough for its headlights to illuminate the tops of the palm trees on the other side of the road. Then all the Volvo’s lights went out as the water shorted the system. Scratch one Volvo, he thought, as he pulled up as close as he could get, turned on his flashers and set his hand brake.

He kept his engine running to provide lights. As he prepared to get out, he saw the driver’s door open on the Volvo and a woman climb out. In the glare of his headlights he recognized Diane Martinson. She had no raincoat on, and the rain quickly soaked her Gray Lady uniform as she went around to look at the rear end of the car. She banged a fist on the back window of the Volvo, and then stumbled back as the car lurched even deeper into the ditch. She lost her footing and sat down hard.

Mike got out, forgetting his hat. He ran forward to where she was sitting in two inches of water in the pouring rain. Mike fought down a sudden wild impulse to laugh, and offered her his hands. He pulled her up off the road. She stood there, eyes blinking, not yet recognizing him.

“Dammit!” she cried. “I couldn’t see the road. Look at my car. His car. He’s absolutely going to kill me!”

Then she recognized him, and became aware that she was gripping both his hands. She let go, and turned to stare at the car. The rain came down even harder, as if it were proud of what it had done.

“Hey,” he shouted over the noise of downpour. “Grab your purse and get in my car. I’ll take you over to the Exchange garage and we’ll get a tow truck.”

He started back to the Alfa, but she just stood there looking at the Volvo. He went back, took her arm, and pulled her along to the Alfa, where he handed her into the right front seat. He went back to the Volvo, gingerly opened the driver side door, and recovered her purse; the car was still settling into the ditch. He ran back to the Alfa, opened the driver’s side door, handed her the purse, and then went back to the Alfa’s tiny trunk and extracted a flare. He tried for a minute to get the thing going, but the striker became soaked the moment he ripped the top off.

“Screw it,” he said, throwing the flare into the ditch.

He got back into the Alfa. Diane sat there, soaked to the skin, her mouth tight and her eyes very close to tears. The rain drummed hard on the roof.

“Shit,” she said.

“Shit, aye,” he said, putting the Alfa in reverse.

He backed away from the Volvo, and then pulled out around the sinking station wagon. He crept along the road even more carefully now; the ditch that could take one third of a Volvo could eat an entire Alfa. Diane remained silent for the next fifteen minutes as he navigated in first gear across the golf course perimeter roads towards the Exchange Service Station area. The rain continued, although not quite so hard.

They arrived at the Exchange gas station to find it dark. An attendant inside the small office waved him off as Mike figured it out. Power failure. He maneuvered the Alfa alongside the office door, and rolled his window down. The man stepped reluctantly into the doorway.

“We’re shut down,” he called. “No electricity.”

“I don’t need gas, I need a tow truck,” Mike shouted over the noise of the rain on the metal overhang. “Got a Volvo in the ditch over by the hospital.”

The attendant shook his head in the doorway.

“Truck’s already out; we got a three car pile-up on the main drag. You can leave a work order if you want, and we’ll get it when we can. But it’s gonna be awhile. Like tomorrow, maybe.”

“OK, we’ll do that.”

Mike rolled up the window, and pulled the Alfa under the gas pump line overhang. He looked over at Diane. The front of her hair was plastered to her forehead, and the Gray Lady dress was a sodden mass of wet cotton. He found himself staring again. She looked back at him for an instant, and then down at the floor.

“I have to call J.W.,” she said, resignedly. “Might as well get it over with. I take it they can’t help us.”

“Not right now, but they’ll go pull it out sometime tonight, or maybe in the morning, after this rain lets up a little and they get power back in this part of the base. I’ll go in and call the cops on a base phone, and get the guy to work up a towing order. There’s a pay phone over there you can use to get off base. I can run you home, and then you’ll probably have to come back over tomorrow morning. That’s the best we can do, I’m afraid.”

She nodded, and fished in her purse for a coin. She got out, and went to the pay phone. Mike got out and went inside to call the base police to report the Volvo. The rain on the tin roof of the gas line sounded like hail. The attendant wrote up the towing order, which Mike signed. By the time he came back out, she was standing at the edge of the office apron, with her back to him. He could see her shoulders shaking. Alarmed, he went over to her. She was crying silently, her arms folded over her stomach, her chest heaving in short gulps. He put his right hand on her shoulder.

“Hey. What happened?”

She did not turn around, but stood there, trying to get control of herself. He remained silent, his hand still on her shoulder, until she could speak. The attendant was watching through the window of the office. A car pulled into the gas islands, saw that there was no power, and pulled out again, its headlights sweeping across the two of them for an instant. Finally she spoke.

“He said — he said that I’m to stay here until they get the car out. He said I should have waited for the rain to stop before leaving the hospital. He said — I should have taken my car, and now that you’ve destroyed my Volvo, you get it fixed, and don’t come home until you do. That’s what my dear husband said. Among other things.”

She closed her eyes in frustration. Mike shook his head.

“Hey, Diane,” he said, speaking to her left ear over the noise of the rain on the roof. “They’re probably not going to get that car out of there until tomorrow morning — they won’t work those ditches in the dark. You can’t make it happen any faster by hanging around here. I’ll run you home — just give them a credit card, and let’s get out of here.”

She half turned towards him, leaning into him a little bit, her face still wobbly. She smelled of damp cotton, that perfume, and wet hair. He suddenly ached to take her in his arms. He steered her instead towards the office. They went in and she handed over a credit card for an imprint. The rain continued outside, but it was now a steady, Florida rain instead of a tropical monsoon. The attendant was obviously trying to figure out why the card said Captain, but the man with her was a Commander. He started to ask, but then looked at the woman’s face and decided to mind his own business.

When they were finished in the office, they walked back to the Alfa. He started off again, headed for the back gate. Diane remained silent as they left the base and made their way towards the Jones Point bridge back across the St. Johns. She fussed in her purse for a comb and made a desultory pass through her wet hair before sighing and giving it up as a lost cause. He watched her out of the corner of his eyes; her dress was plastered to her lush figure. He concentrated on keeping his eyes on the road.

“I can’t go home,” she declared minutes later, as they turned north on A1A after crossing the bridge. “Not after what he said. I just can’t.”

He was silent for a long minute, and then took the plunge.

“I can offer a hot shower, a washer and dryer, and a drink back at the Lucky Bag. I’m the guy with the houseboat, remember?”

He kept his eyes on the road. What the fuck was he doing. A voice in his mind was telling him that he was being incredibly dumb. A second voice said, you want her. Her husband doesn’t. You’ve rarely wanted a woman as much as you want this one. She can always tell you to take her to a neighbor’s house.

“Thank you. I think I’ll just take you up on that. It sounds like just what the doctor ordered,” she said, her voice neutral.

It was her turn to keep her eyes on the road. They remained silent, alone with their thoughts all the way back to Mayport. A new band of heavy rains swept through as they arrived at the marina parking lot. They made another dash through the downpour to the boat. He was glad that it was raining, that no one would see him with this woman. His heart was pounding as they climbed aboard, and it was not all from the quick sprint across the bulkhead pier. He flipped on lights and showed her below to the main lounge. She stood in the middle of the room, soaked and uncomfortable, looking around. Hooker roused himself on his perch when the lights came on, and stared at Diane. He bobbed his head back and forth a couple of times, and then gave a long, loud wolf whistle. Diane smiled.

“That bad, hunh, bird?” she said.

“That was a compliment,” Mike laughed. “This way to the amenities.”

He took her to one of the forward guest cabins, produced a full length, terry-cloth bathrobe and showed her where the bathroom shower was, checked towels, and handed her a Navy style laundry bag. She took her purse with her, gave him a brief smile, and closed the door. He went aft to get out of his own wet clothes and to shower. He dried off in his bathroom, and then paused for a moment, wondering what to put on. She would be in a bathrobe; it wouldn’t do for him to get dressed up. He pulled on a pair of swim trunks, and then his own terrycloth bathrobe. He was setting up the bar when she reappeared a half hour later. He tried mightily not to stare.

The white bathrobe came down demurely to her ankles. She was carrying the laundry bag with its limp, wet contents. The bathrobe was made of a thick pile material that revealed nothing, but the flash of white lace in the laundry bag confirmed what he already guessed. Her dark, wet hair was pulled straight back in a limp mass covering the collar of the robe, accentuating the fine arch of her eyebrows, the lush contrast between her creamy, white skin and her dark eyes. She smiled tentatively before glancing away, clearly reading the interest in his eyes.

“I think I’m going to live,” she said.

“You look — marvelous.” He almost blushed. “What’s your preference?” he asked, nodding towards the bar.

“A brandy, I think,” she said, coming closer. “Yes, a brandy. It’s not cold, but it’s been a brandy sort of day.”

“Brandy it is. There’s a washer-dryer set in the galley, just back there, if you want to get that stuff going. Soap’s in the cabinet above the washer.”

He poured two snifters of Courvoisier while she attended to the laundry, and started to take them over to the leather couch.

“Goddamn,” said Hooker. Mike diverted to the perch.

“Yeah, Bird. Goddamn is right. You want a hit?”

He tipped the snifter so that the bird could get his beak in the glass, but at the last moment he shook all his feathers and backed away from the fumes.

“You don’t really let that bird drink alcohol, do you?”

She came over to the perch, where he handed her the other snifter. They stood side by side, watching Hooker as he weaved from side to side to keep them both in view. Mike was very much aware of her nearness. He could smell her wet hair, and a trace of perfume that had eluded the downpour outside. Part of his mind did a whirlwind comparison between this woman and the occasional dates he had brought home from the Jacksonville Beach bar scene. Diane projected the self assurance that all attractive women have, exuding a mature awareness of sexual competence without the coy trappings and flirtatious devices of the young single set. She was looking at Hooker, who continued to shift from one leg to the other, looking back at both of them.

“This parrot is a natural born boozer,” Mike said. “But he mostly likes fruity sort of stuff — wine, gin and tonic, rum and tonic.”

“Doesn’t it make him drunk?”

“Absolutely. Once he starts to weave around, I have to put him in his drunk bird box until he sleeps it off.”

She reached out to pet Hooker on the head. Mike held his breath. Hooker was into amputations. But this time the parrot bent his head sideways, looking at Diane first with one eye and then the other, and then, miraculously, bent his neck forward and let her scratch the bright green feathers on his neck.

“He must like you,” said Mike. “Normally you would have been chomped by now.”

“Where did you get him?” she asked, sampling the cognac.

“Bought him in Norfolk two years ago. Always wanted a parrot, but they tend to bond to their humans, and you can’t leave them. When I found out I was coming to a ship that didn’t deploy, I figured it was safe.”

“What happens when you go out to sea for more than a couple of days?”

She sipped her cognac carefully, using one hand to hold the snifter, and the other to run a fingernail lightly through the bright plumage on the parrot’s neck. Hooker kept his head down and made small sounds. Her robe was partially open at the top, revealing the swell of her breasts. Mike was torn between looking at her breasts and watching that fingernail slide up and down the parrot’s neck feathers.

“He goes along.” He smiled down at her. “As Captain, I can get away with that; couldn’t do it before.”

They stood together by the perch, not touching and yet within each other’s personal space, she stroking the bird’s head, he trying to tamp down a sense of building physical excitement, trying hard to pretend that something wasn’t happening between them. A sudden burst of heavy rain drummed on the cabin roof. The boat moved slowly in the wind sweeping off the intracoastal.

She watched the parrot for a long minute, and then stepped away from the perch, walking towards the after end of the lounge, towards the couch. She stood before it for a moment, as if trying to decide something. He watched her carefully, excited by the way the robe clung to her hips. The muted grind of the washing machine in the galley tried to compete with the noise of the rain overhead. She gave her head a little shake, and then sat down, pulling the robe modestly around her legs. Mike discovered that he had been holding his breath. He relaxed, and moved to join her on the couch.

“Aw, shit,” croaked the parrot.

They both broke up, laughing a little louder than necessary. He sat down and looked at her. She smiled.

“For a moment there …” she said.

“Yeah. Me too. It’s the cognac, I guess.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were almost purple in the dim light of the cabin.

“No, it’s not the cognac. I wanted — I mean, we’re both grownups here. You’ve been very nice to me, and J.W., my husband, is not very nice to me. It’s kind of complicated. I’ve just recently made a discovery: my husband has a girlfriend.” She lowered her eyes in embarrassment.

Mike did not know what to say, so he kept his silence. She looked back up at him.

“You’re an attractive man, and over there, standing next to you, I felt — something. Part of me would very much like to indulge my desires for a while, but the part that’s been married for sixteen years keeps surfacing the usual consequences.”

She looked directly at him for a moment before continuing, her eyes luminous.

“I don’t think I have what it takes to have an affair, to sneak around, to manage the deception. I’m the type who would just come right out with it one morning, admitting all, and I’m not prepared to put up with what would follow. That’s what I meant by consequences; I’ve seen it too often in the Navy.”

She looked away again. He started to say something, but she put a finger to her lips.

“Let me finish, before I lose my nerve. I wanted — I still want, actually — for you to make love to me. When we ran into each other at the O’Club, and again when you gave us the tour of the boat, I felt the attraction. I think you feel the same thing.”

He waited, his mind whirling.

“As you’ve guessed,” she continued, “my marriage is not, I don’t know — working? Is that the word these days? No, that doesn’t quite describe it.”

She tossed her head impatiently, and sipped some cognac. She continued to keep her eyes averted from his face.

“J.W. and I are at the going through the motions stage. When we first got married, he explained to me that his career in the Navy would come first and foremost, that he was determined to make Admiral, and that getting to Flag rank would take a hundred percent effort. I went along with that. I was supposed to have the family, and do what was required to support his career. We tried hard to have kids, but that didn’t work out. Which meant that the career became everything. And even that was pretty interesting, at least for a while. He was on the fast track, and people seemed to think he was a comer.”

“But—?”

“But. I found out that his career didn’t leave much of a role in life for me. I tried a couple of things — real estate in Washington, going back to school, and that filled in the empty space for a while, but J.W. made it clear that I could do anything I wanted as long as it didn’t interfere with my support role.”

“And, of course, everything you tried did just that.”

“Yes. That was made clear, always in a subtle manner, but clear. And now, I find out he’s been seeing some woman on his trips to Norfolk. I realized that I was an important part of the frame but not part of the picture. I should have guessed, of course; the wife’s the last one to figure it out.”

Mike wanted to reach out for her, to hold her. Her discomfort was palpable.

“Is the woman someone you know?” he asked.

“No. I found out quite by accident. I almost wish I hadn’t. She’s in the Navy, of all things. A Commander, on the Fleet Commander’s staff in Norfolk. J.W. goes to Norfolk to meetings all the time because the Admiral hates to go to conferences. She has a condo out in Virginia Beach. He gets a room at the BOQ, but stays with her. It’s apparently been going on for nearly two years.”

“How did you find all this out?”

She laughed, a short, bitter sound.

“At one of those awful receptions at the O’Club. I was in the ladies room, and two women came in while I was in a stall. They were talking about J.W., how good looking he is, and all about — her.”

Mike leaned back in the couch, unsure of what to say. He was sorry for her pain, but at the same time aware that the fact of her husband’s infidelity somehow changed the equation. He remembered the aviator’s comments that she was scouting. He wondered if she was, behind all the protestations, ready to have an affair of her own. She looked across at him and smiled a bittersweet smile, as if reading his thoughts. He felt himself beginning to blush.

“Does he know you know?” he asked, trying to divert his own thoughts.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I was very hurt for a while, but I’m not sure what a confrontation would prove. He has his career, his nice office, the staff at his beck and call, a mistress, and a presentable wife. I have my volunteer work at the hospital and at the Navy Relief Office, the nightly round of receptions, a very nice set of quarters on the beach, and a presentable husband. Most women in America would think I was pretty well off. But lately it’s gotten pretty lonely inside; I keep thinking that there’s something else — you know the song, is that all there is?”

She smiled ruefully and sipped her cognac again.

“And then I say to myself that I’m being stupid, that there are thousands of women who have not one tenth of what I have and to grow up and shut up. Maybe even he will grow up one day.”

She shook her head again, as if to clear away the complexity of what she was trying to say.

“I think that what I desperately need is to be, well, wanted. As a woman, as a wife, as even a friend. And now, here I am, on a bachelor’s boat, with nothing on under this robe, and a very attractive and considerate man a few feet away, and part of me is saying, Diane, he wants you, you want him, do it for God’s sake, let go, and the other part is saying, don’t be an ass — married women who fool around always, but always, get nothing but pain out of it, even when their husbands are cheating on them.”

She shook her head again, slowly.

“I’m not doing this very well. Maybe I better just get the hell out of here.”

He moved closer to her on the couch. He leaned across the space between them, reached out and brushed her cheek with the back of his fingers. She turned her face slightly.

“You must live right,” he said, softly.

She looked at him, a question forming in her eyes. He cupped her face in his hand for a moment, and then leaned back.

“My turn. I was married briefly to a girl I thought I knew; came back from a deployment to find out she’d left me for a lawyer, for God’s sake, and that I didn’t know anything, not anything, about her, and probably not about women in general. I’ve been single now for, what, almost as long as you’ve been married, sixteen years; in all that time, I’ve made it a hard and fast rule never to go after another man’s wife. I have this superstition, see: if I take up with another man’s wife, it will come back to haunt me. One day, maybe, I’ll fall in love, and get married, and then some evil bastard will come along and seduce my wife, and I’ll find out, and there won’t be shit I can do about it, because I will have been guilty of the same crime. It’s silly, probably, but there it is. And it’s a bitch, lady, because when an attractive, married woman sends out that ‘I want’ signal, all the sweet young single things get blown right out of the room. I don’t know what it is, exactly — basic biology, I guess.”

He threw up his hands in a gesture of exasperation.

“So, yes,” he continued. “I would dearly love to take that robe off, but, right now my stupid conscience would get in the way. But not for lack of inspiration.”

They looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment. She made a small sound, deep in her throat as tears welled up in her eyes. He slid over then and held her while she wept, great wracking sobs, punctuated after a few minutes by the beginnings of hyperventilation. He patted her on the back and calmed her, telling her that it would be all right, to breathe slower, until she quieted. He left her on the couch and went to the bathroom, returning with a cold cloth. He wiped her face gently, erasing the smudged remains of mascara, and reducing the blotches of color on her cheeks. She kept her eyes closed while he did this; he was glad that she did, because he did not think he could restrain himself from loving this woman whose need was so strong. He Continued to smooth the skin of her face with the cloth, tracing her features, marvelling at the folly of a man who could ignore this woman. He suddenly found himself to be ravenously hungry.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

She opened her eyes and looked at him blankly for an instant, as if she were trying to fathom the question. He tried again.

“I’m not a bad cook, and I’ve just decided that I’m starving. Let me fix something, and then we’ll get you home.”

She nodded quickly.

“Yes. That would be nice. And thank you — for everything.”

Her voice wavered, as she understood what he was doing — breaking the tension. They were both very close to being overwhelmed by their separate desires. He looked down at her face for a moment.

“I think I might be kicking myself in the tailfeathers when you’re gone,” he admitted, smiling. “I’m pure hell on what might have been’s.”

She looked back at him, the beginnings of a smile playing across her face.

“Sex without intimacy is usually a disaster, Captain,” she said. “I read that in a book somewhere, so it must be true. The fact that you did not take advantage of me inclines me to think that I don’t — I don’t want to just drop things, if you can understand that. I’d like to build, well, intimacy. Yes. That’s the right word. I think that’s my basic problem, the absence of intimacy. I desperately need a — someone. Can you put up with that idea?”

He paused for a moment, his face serious.

“Yes, I think so, but you have to understand that I don’t believe in adult men and women being just friends when there’s sexual desire between them. That’s just an exercise in mutual frustration. I’m all for the intimacy, but only because that makes the loving that much more profound.”

She nodded her understanding.

“Yes. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing just now. But I’m going to do something. I can’t just let things keep drifting, now that J.W. has stepped over the line.”

“Well, you probably already know that I don’t stand very high on your husband’s hit parade, and professionally I don’t think very much of him or his tactics. I hope to hell he doesn’t make Admiral, although I’m finding out that he’s more likely to make flag than I am to make Captain. I guess you’re going to have to decide whether or not you’re a free agent. If you are, I’d love to take up your option.”

“The ironic thing,” she said with a sigh, “is that I suspect he’s taken up with her as much for her access to the Fleet Commander’s inner sanctum as for any other reason. But maybe I’m just rationalizing. He may actually find her more attractive.”

“I find that kind of unlikely.”

“Thank you, kind Sir,” she said with a smile. “You better go make us dinner before we talk ourselves into trouble.”

She got up from the couch, and went to the porthole, staring out over the inland waterway in the rain. He walked up behind her, aching to put his arms around her, but he stopped himself. He could see the reflections of their faces on the porthole glass, pale blurs in the indistinct light of the cabin.

“I’m very much attracted to you,” he said in a low voice. “I’d call it falling in love, but it probably isn’t, not yet, anyway. But I think I’d like it to be love, and when it is, I want to hold you and love you and keep you. Until then—”

She turned to look at him over her shoulder.

“Until then,” she finished for him, “I want to see you, and get to know you, and maybe sort out in my own mind what’s going on. I know I can’t keep going on like I have been, or I’m going to go crazy.”

He toyed with the tips of her hair, if only to keep his hands off the rest of her.

“Good,” he said. “That way we can both make sure this feeling is not just a temporary short circuit between our brains and our groins, as my XO says.”

She turned all the way around and stared at him for a moment, and then her face began to work, her mouth forming the words short circuit and before she dissolved in helpless laughter.

“OK, OK, people, it’s chow time in the city,” he announced in a loud voice. He left her standing by the porthole, still laughing.

“I’ll have you know that I am a chef of some repute,” he called from the galley door. “I will now make you a goor-met dinner. But first, we gotta get some atmosphere in here.”

He came back in from the galley with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. He motioned for her to return to the couch. Opening the wine with much ceremony at the bar, he filled the glasses, and brought them over to the couch. He put the wine down on the coffee table, went over to the stereo and fired up a Vivaldi tape. Then he went over to the fireplace, turned on the gas log and adjusted the flame. He turned out two of the three table lamps, and returning to the couch, he bowed theatrically as she clapped silently at all the accoutrements of seduction.

“A little late, but de rigueur,” he said. “Just so you know that I know how; I have my reputation to protect, after all. Now, you just relax, and I will go see what’s available.”

“Then we have to figure out how you’re going to get me home tonight,” she called, as he went into the galley.

“No sweat,” he called back.

Half an hour later he brought back a tray of shrimp sauteed in seasoned butter, hot French bread, and a salad. They ate hungrily, relaxing, finally, to enjoy each other’s company, lingering over dinner until the lights suddenly went out as the power failed. The gas log continued to burn, providing the only light. Vivaldi died with the lights, as did the air conditioners. The sound of the rain grew louder in the sudden silence.

They ignored the power failure, absorbed in each other’s company. They sat on the couch in the flickering firelight for another hour, talking, exploring each other’s pasts and present. She described her years as a Navy wife, the long separations, the envy she sometimes felt when she saw other Navy wives wrap themselves up in their children while their men were gone to sea, trying as she did to pick her way through the slow desiccation of her own marriage, speculating on precisely when her husband had sought another woman’s companionship, or perhaps even love.

He described to her the years following the loss of his own spouse, his own absorption with career, and the subconscious decision to shut any permanent relationships with women out of his life, and how that decision, which he had always termed “for a while,” had solidified over time into years. She mused about the parallels, how they both had defined their personal existences in terms of careers and what was missing from their lives, consciously at first and then, as with much of life, by sheer force of habit.

Mike listened avidly, content to watch her face and to be with her. It seemed to him that they were communicating on two levels at the same time: the first filled with the medley of necessary but superficial things two people ought to know about one another, and the second a thrumming reinforcement of desire, the small, vital moves of body language and nuance of expression, the touching without touching that creates the delectable prelude to joining. He was surprised to find himself beginning to experience an exquisite anticipation of love in a way he had not felt for years. They were both careful not to look directly at each other for very long, as if both were aware that even a long look would be a sufficiently volatile conduit, once established, to allow passion to flare in defiance of their careful approach to each other’s feelings.

They talked about the Navy, and how it had both surprised and occasionally disappointed them. He told her of his years in Vietnam operations, first as skipper of a gunboat on the rivers, and then later on the shore bombardment gunline and in the Tonkin Gulf, and how he had thought that building a combat record was the most important thing he could do to further his career. But then you found out, she said, that the clever young men who had positioned themselves close to rising Admirals and not necessarily the sea-going operators were the ones who snapped up the early promotions and the elegant assignments close to the seats of power in the Navy. It’s just the system, he told her; once I had figured it out I could have gone along. I chose not to, stayed at sea, and now other guys have the big new ships and go out on deployments.

She asked if he was going to stick it out in the Navy for a full thirty years. Mike shook his head thoughtfully. “I don’t think so. All my Navy career I worked to get command, and now that I have it, I’m finding out that I may have aimed a bit too low.”

“But lots of officers never get command,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, but the truth is that command isn’t at all what I thought it would be. My image of it was formed as a junior officer: the Captain this, the Captain that, the Captain God Almighty in his cabin and on the bridge. They ring the bells on the quarterdeck when you come and go, and they all stand up when you come into the room. For the first few days after I assumed command I kept mentally looking behind me to see if the Captain was behind me when everybody got up, and then it finally sank in. And then you read the Navy Regs, what the Captain is personally and finally and ultimately and irrevocably responsible for, and it curls your hair. I started out by lying awake nights wondering what I would do if this situation or that situation arose; I had dreams about getting into maneuvering situations, and having the whole bridge watch freeze as they waited for me to give the magic order that would keep us from colliding or going aground or hitting the pier. I got over it, but it took awhile and the responsibility took the bloom off the rose of command at sea, let me tell you.”

She smiled sympathetically. “Sounds like some romantic notions just being worn off by reality. And maybe just a bit of an overactive imagination.”

He laughed. “I keep forgetting you’re a Navy wife; you must have heard all this before.”

“No, not directly. J.W. took his first command tour all in stride, as if it were his natural due. He is a vain man, I finally figured out. He never let command worry him very much, but, then, he also short-toured. He told me that his mentors told him to “limit his exposure in command,” as they put it. I think in retrospect that he lacked the imagination to be particularly apprehensive about the burdens of command.”

Mike began to feel uncomfortable with this talk of her husband; that first voice was back. He got up and went over to Hooker’s perch, put the parrot on his left hand, and came back to sit down again on the couch. He began to scratch the bird’s head while he talked.

“Well, Goldsborough is all work and very little fun. I mean fun in the professional sense — all we do is churn through the peacetime drill of training, replacing personnel, doing maintenance and mostly boring operations. It’d be different if we got to go overseas with the deployed fleets, to go out and do something real, but Goldsborough is too old. Everybody knows she’s going out of commission next year, so nobody cares too much about the ship. We end up going through the motions of maintaining readiness, but the whole crew knows it’s a drill. You can’t fool them, and I’m no longer inclined to even try. I wish that I had gotten a better command, a deploying ship instead of the Oldy Goldy.”

“Why did you get Goldsborough,” she asked, remembering J.W.’s revelations about putting non-conformists in special boxes. “All those decorations you wear usually mean better things than a training ship.”

He nodded and sighed.

“Because on my third ship I fucked up — excuse me— because I made a significant professional error one night, and there was a collision. The Bureau told me when I got command that the only reason I was being given a ship was because of my war record. Goldsborough wasn’t the greatest assignment, naturally, but you know how it is with a command: you can take it or leave it, but if you ever decline one, you’ll never get another offer. So I took it.”

“I’m curious about this collision incident,” she said quietly. She was leaning back on the couch, her face obscured in the darkness. “Frankly, you don’t strike me as the type who makes mistakes like that.”

He stared down at the parrot’s shiny feathers, his eyes becoming unfocused as he thought back to that night years ago. Then he stood up from the couch, and walked over to one of the portholes.

“I was the Evaluator in CIC, the senior officer on the watch team. We were in a night carrier screen formation, a little after one in the morning. The OOD lost the bubble and got confused over a change of station tactical signal. While he was trying to sort it out with the Junior Officer of the Deck, the Officer in Tactical Command on the carrier signalled to execute the maneuver. The OOD called the Captain, told him he was in trouble, and then, finally, and much too late, he called me. I came out onto the bridge to help him sort it out; the Captain came out on the bridge about a minute after I did. He was angry at being called, and even more pissed off when he found out his whole bridge watch team had lost the picture.”

“He was a screamer, so, naturally, he started yelling, without really knowing what the tactical maneuvering situation was, and chewing everybody’s ass in the process. The OOD went into the parrot mode: tell me what to say, Boss, and I’ll parrot those orders. I was pissed off at getting yelled at, especially because I hadn’t done anything wrong, and was actually trying to help. So I clammed up and said nothing. While all of this was going on, ships were going everywhere. It was pitch dark and windy, so everything was being done by radar. If it had been daylight, if we could have seen the other ships, it would probably never have happened.”

“What happened?”

“The Captain finally started issuing maneuvering orders, which, by the book, meant that he had assumed the conn. The rest of us were now legally superfluous. He told the OOD to come left; I knew in my guts that that was the wrong order. They hammer it into you in maneuvering and emergency shiphandling school: never turn left in a situation where there’s risk of collision. But. Because I’d been part of the initial problem, and was now too afraid or too pissed off to speak up, I held my silence. The next thing I knew there was a big shape fine on our starboard bow showing a red running light and a hell of a crash and everybody and everything went flying. Three of our sailors in a forward berthing compartment were crunched into dogmeat by the bow of a cruiser.”

Mike stared off into space for a long minute. Not for the first time did he see again the darkened pilothouse, the faces of the watch officers, pale green in the illumination from the dim radar screens, their eyes wide with apprehension as the Captain shouted questions and curses, and then gave the fatal order. Not left. Tell him, don’t just stand there. You don’t ever turn left. Tell him. Tell him!

“And they blamed you for this?” she asked, bringing him back to the present. He was silent for a few moments before going on.

“Not exactly. The investigation, and then the eventual court martial, officially blamed the OOD and the Captain. The OOD for not calling the Captain sooner, when he first got into trouble, and the Captain for turning the wrong way when he was in extremis. The Captain was relieved for cause. I was a made a “party” to the investigation — that’s what a Board of Investigation calls accessories to the crime. In one sense, I was exonerated: the original maneuvering recommendation we had sent out from CIC had been the correct interpretation of the signal, and both the OOD and the Captain had ignored it. But. The investigation board took a swipe at me in their official report for not speaking up when I thought that the Captain’s final maneuvering order was wrong. They said that I had, and that I probably knew that I had, a better picture of the maneuvering situation than the Captain did. The President of the Board gave me a lecture about an officer’s responsibility to speak up regardless of the possible consequences to himself. Because the Captain legally had the conn, they couldn’t legally blame anything on me. But as you’ve probably heard, the system neither forgets nor forgives. It was never put into a fitness report or anything, but the taint of having participated in a disaster tends to linger in the Navy for a long time.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “And you’re convinced to this day that you did own a piece of it.”

“Yup,” he said, looking down at the floor. “For a while, I tried to rationalize it, say I tried and all that, but I remember, all too vividly and all too often, a little voice inside me on the bridge that night telling me to do something, just don’t stand there because you just got your tail bit …”

“But what would have happened if you had spoken up — would the Captain have countermanded his order?”

“Probably not. He was always more of a transmitter than a receiver. But there was always the chance that he might have hesitated, and then maybe we might have had a near miss instead of a bang in the night and three body bags. So that’s the part I own.”

She was silent for a few minutes. He came back to the couch, pitched Hooker up on his shoulder, and reached for his wine.

“And now you’re the proud owner of Goldsborough?”

“For my sins, yes. I mean, hell, they could have told me no for command altogether, so I guess half a loaf, et cetera. But a lot of the professional satisfaction that ought to come from destroyer command is missing from this old girl. Like this stupid submarine thing.”

“I’ve heard J.W. talking about that. He acted like it was some kind of joke. A joke on you, if you must know.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he sighed. “The Commodore tells me that the Chief of Staff disapproves of me and my life style.”

He paused for an instant as the irony of the Chief of Staffs wife sitting here in the darkness with him sank in. He wondered if she caught it, too. He quickly continued.

“And it’s a typical mission for Goldsborough. Some fishermen reported seeing a ‘U-boat’; that’s what they called it. Made it sound like they actually saw a surfaced German submarine from World War II out in the fleet operating areas. Gimme a break. So we get sent out to have a look, and, of course, find absolutely nothing. The chances that a foreign conventional sub would be operating off the coast of Florida is almost zero. Maybe in wartime, but these days? Bullshit. Nobody would have any reason to do that. Then last week one of the local fishing boats went missing; we were told to conduct a search, and we find an oil slick and a name board. The Coast Guard found the boat on the bottom using a robotic TV system. No damage, no holes, signs of fire or anything. Big mystery. But certainly no plausible connection to a submarine.”

He told her the various theories of why the boat was lost, and something about Chris Mayfield and the missing crew. He told her about the bullet hole in the nameboard. She listened intently.

“Now some of the local guys are saying that the phantom submarine got Mayfield, because of the bullet hole in the nameboard. So the Admiral decides to do some public relations damage control to make sure the local Navy doesn’t look as if it doesn’t care. Goldy gets to go back out next week and look for the phantom submarine again. It’s stupid. If Mayfield did mix it up with somebody, then druggies would be the most likely answer.”

She turned to face him.

“What if it’s true?” she asked. “What if there is a submarine out there, and it did sink the fishing boat?”

“C’mon,” he protested, sitting up. “It’s all sweetness and light between the Sovs and us; what would be the point?”

“What if it’s not a Russian submarine? Don’t other countries have conventional submarines? Diesel boats, I think you call them?”

He got up from the couch again, and put Hooker back on his perch. He began pacing around the dark lounge.

“Yes, of course. Our NATO Allies have exclusively diesel boats, except for the Brits and the French — they’ve got some nukes. But—”

“You keep labelling this thing as if it came from, I don’t know, a known source, like the Russians or NATO Europe. I think I’ve heard J.W. talk about other countries, like the North Vietnamese, and the Israelis, and some of the Arab countries — you know, some of the bad guys. If there really is a submarine out there, could it be one of theirs?”

He turned to look at her in the firelight; her body a white form on the leather couch. A Captain’s wife, talking shop. A sudden apprehension filled him. What the hell was he doing here, messing around with a senior officer’s wife? He was glad that she couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness at this moment. But she’d made a point — what if it were one of the crazies? He thought about it for a minute.

“I suppose,” he said. “I suppose it could be done … I mean, the Germans ran 12,000 mile patrols during the war; so did our guys in the Pacific. Diesels are economical as hell; long range is what they do best. I suppose if somebody wanted to deploy a diesel boat all the way over here, from, say, the Med, it could be done.”

He shook his head before continuing.

“But what the hell for? Yassir Arafat going to start a war of shipping attrition against the United States fishing fleet? Most of those rag-heads only have three or four boats, max, and most of them don’t work. Hell, Diane, it doesn’t wash. Dispatch a boat all the way to the east coast of the U.S. to start sinking the Mayport shrimping fleet? What’s more likely is somebody’s smoking dope or drinking too much Jim Beam. Some old fart dreaming about being in the convoys during World War II, waking up, and seeing U-boats.”

She got up and went over to the porthole. The storm was playing out, the lightning moving offshore, creating a vivid sound and light show among the piled clouds over the ocean.

“Well, at least you get to go out,” she said wistfully. “I have to stay at home. Which reminds me, we need to get me home before my sweet husband sends out the base police to check on his missing car and possibly his missing wife.”

He joined her at the porthole, and looked down at her.

“Last I heard, he didn’t seem to give much of a shit where you spent the night, just as long as he got his Volvo back in one piece.”

She smiled sweetly. “Which is one of the reasons I spent the best part of it with you, kind Sir.”

Before he knew what was happening, she turned and put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him, withdrawing before he had time to react. The momentary press of her body against his had transmitted a promise that made him ache.

“What time is it?” she asked then, matter of factly.

He looked at his watch, while trying to find his voice.

“It’s 1230. I guess it’s story time.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling ruefully. “Story time.”

He collected the wine glasses and the remains of dinner, and headed for the galley.

“No biggee,” he called over his shoulder. “We keep the essential elements as they happened, with the exception of you having come here. I did find you at the car, took you to the gas station, and then we waited around for them to do something. When they didn’t, we stopped for dinner in Orange Park, went back, waited some more, and then I brought you straight home to the quarters. I had reason to be out there at NAS because of the motorcycle accident, which the Group knows about by now.”

“I need to do something about my clothes,” she said.

“Take ‘em out of the washer and put ’em in the dryer for ten minutes; put them on all wrinkled — it corroborates your being out in the elements.”

“Or I could always tell him I got picked up by a super horny sailor, taken to his pad, and ravished repeatedly. It’d be worth it to see his face.”

She kept her voice light, but there was an undercurrent of bitterness in it. He paused with a dish in his hands.

“Well, you can always call. If you’re going to burn some bridges, the boat’s right here,” he said.

His voice had carried a hint of worry. She laughed at him in the darkness.

“I don’t even know your phone number,” she said.

“I don’t give it out to just anybody. They have to qualify.”

“That might take some time,” she whispered.

“Then you probably shouldn’t burn bridges. Yet,” he said. “Makes it hard to get back across the creek.”

The quarters were dark when they pulled up. There was not even a porch light on. She got out of the car. Her hair still damp from the trip from the houseboat to his car, her gray lady uniform a wrinkled, damp sack. She bent to look back at him in the window.

“I can’t thank you enough, Commander,” she said, loud enough for ears to hear if any were listening. “We’ll go recover the car in the morning, as soon as they get it out of that ditch.”

He smiled at her in the door. She closed it, and walked briskly up the walk to the quarters. A light came on inside the house as she unlocked the front door. Story time.