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The Memory of Place Ch. 01

By: Adrian Leverkuhn



What can you say about a marriage that dies, not quietly in the night, but in the harsh light of broken dreams? What could I say you haven't heard a hundred times before?

My wife had, once upon a time, been my best friend. We dreamed a little, conspired a lot, and had, I thought, been completely in love with one another. We had managed to build a pretty successful restaurant business up over the years - together - and then an unexpected opportunity had come along one fine September day. A friend wanted to buy our place, and it looked like one of those once in a lifetime shots at breaking away from the grind that you always hear about. Was that what we wanted? We were at the top of our game, making good money and enjoying ourselves to boot. But we'd both always been vagabonds at heart, or so I thought, consumed with more than our just share of wanderlust. We looked at the sailboat we'd bought a few years before - even then with distant horizons gleaming in our eyes - and we talked through that night about long-forgotten plans of sailing to faraway places and exploring distant beaches with our bare feet planted firmly in the depths of remembrance. 

Remembrance? Why does that word resonate so?

Was it really so simple? Was it lack of connection we felt to our everyday life that pushed us past the memory of place, into the beckoning grasp of worlds we'd never really known? If that was what we had held on common ground - a lack of connection to the past - why did we hold our future in such high regard?

Look at in another way: could so much in common lead two people so far astray?

Liz and I had read books and magazines on cruising in sailboats for years, and while the journey itself always seemed through our mind's eye to be idyllic, seeing the world was secondary to living the journey. Had we become experience junkies? Had the means grown more important than the ends? Yes, and it felt good, too. Heady, enabled feelings ruled our outlook.

We had sailed from our home port of Newport Beach, California to Baja more than once over years before the big break, so we knew the reality behind the dream. We came to know this dream as a calling, and the call grew louder, more insistent with each year we denied it's tortured grasp on our souls, until finally our desire to cast away the ties that bind grew with shrill insistence into the drumbeats of lust. The crescendo came with the offer to buy our restaurant. 

After talking about the choices over dinner, we decided it was time.

We moved aboard aquaTarkus after we sold our house. We actually said we were moving aboard for good, didn't we? For good. Not for better of worse, not in sickness and in health, but for good. It was our decision, wasn't it, to not go quietly into that good night? We would journey hand in hand, together, beyond the threshold of dreams. We would walk those faraway shores. For good.

Faraway shores, indeed. I smile when I think back on that night.

__________________________________

We sailed down Baja, then jumped off to make the 'coconut run' to French Polynesia.

I remember blue water. A lot of blue water. No storms. No howling gales. Just an endless expanse of the most startling blue sea, day after day of cerulean dreams come true. Maybe I remember most our first big landfall in the Marquesas. Kaoha Nui. Welcome. We were kaohi nui. Welcome to dream here among the pearl-like atolls and volcanic ridge-lines away from a world moving too fast. Time stopped for us in Nuku Hiva, in the shadow of the cathedral spires of Hatiheu bay. 

After only three weeks at sea all our choices seemed vindicated, our future assured.

After a few months in paradise we sailed onward to Tahiti. When we arrived we weathered not storms on our approach to the island, but cruise ships and tourists flooding Papeete like an errant tide of affluent effluence, and it was here that we first perceived the ghastly contours of a world out of sync with itself. So many people in search of unsullied harmony were in the infinite progression of their quest destroying that which they sought. It was like we were all on a pilgrimage, seeking out the holy in an ever more profane world, and the reality of our explorations began to feel more and more like an act of desecration. Over the next year we ran into the same phenomena over and over again. They had built a six lane freeway right over what had once been 'off the beaten path'; commuter airliners disgorged hundreds of SCUBA divers on atoll after atoll, and even remote anchorages were filled with scores of million dollar yachts, and we were all in search of something ephemeral, some connection to our past, perhaps, but all in search of something missing from our lives.

That much was simple to see. It was clear, in-your-face, an unavoidable conclusion.

We were disillusioned. We were on a pilgrimage among disillusioned travelers, you might say, looking for the way to salvation.

Liz and I had both grown up in a world dominated by the aftermath of world war and the shimmering reality of nuclear holocaust just over the next horizon. Emaciated bodies of Jews rotting in lime-lined pits were nothing new to us; we had been schooled in the "realities" of genocide on a daily basis for, well, all our lives, and Vietnam had simply been our generations calling out. Liz and I had gone to college at UC Berkeley, and at the height of the anti-war movement, so we had grown to know one another in the course of our generations stated commitment to end warfare and violence, to gather on the grounds of resistance and to say to the world that we were better prepared to unravel the never ending cycles of history and pave the way for a brighter tomorrow.

Yeah. I know. Can you believe we actually believed that crap? It's hard to look back on it now without feeling a little embarrassed about it all.

Anyway . . .

Moving from the heightened sense of the possible we found at rallies and teach-ins to the corporate sensibilities of Orange County was, in retrospect, the beginning of our journey to the plains of dissolution. More and more, our lives focused on becoming successful, on making money, on buying a house, then a bigger house, that new BMW, a boat, a bigger boat - it was endless. It's hard to look back on it now - from the perspective of our unravelling - as we, like the world around us, slipped into quiet dissolution. But I guess somewhere along the way Liz and I sold out. We joined the Me Generation and never looked back. And it was so fun. Sorry, but it was. I bet Faust had fun until the bill came due, too. 

But you know what? Devils always have the last laugh.

_________________________________

Sometime in our fourth year of traveling we decided we'd had enough enlightenment and decided to head back to the States. We knew we wanted to return there, we were just not exactly sure where. We couldn't go back to California, however. That place seemed to have gone wrong, terribly wrong, during our time there. Too many bogus lawyers chasing big bucks, prices out of control. Anyway, that's what we thought at the time.

I had grown up on a ranch outside of Durango, Colorado; Liz in Charleston, South Carolina. We decided, after many lively nights under the stars talking about the options to head for the Gulf of Mexico, maybe New Orleans, and open a new restaurant. Of course, we were at anchor in the middle of Milford Sound, on the ass end of New Zealand's South Island when we said this. Look at a map sometime if you want to get an idea of just how far off the beaten path you can get. Just how far it can be from where you are to where you want to go. Searching for a metaphor? By that point, it felt like we were stuck in the middle of an volcano. We were ready to blow, so we opted for the straightest course home, to buck the trade-winds and head straight for Panama. It was, in retrospect, a bad choice.

Sailing in a small boat hard into the wind and swells of the anything but Pacific Ocean is a job for the well and truly insane, as both Liz and I could attest to when we finally dropped anchor off Balboa, adjacent to Panama City, some forty seven days after leaving Whangarei on New Zealand's North Island. We were beat up, bruised, tired to the bone, and thought seriously of selling the boat right then and there. Anyway, we secured the boat and grabbed the next flight on American to DFW, changed planes, and about six hours later were in the heat and humidity of the South Carolina lowlands. I'm sorry, but you haven't experienced culture shock until you've tried something as harebrained as sailing a boat almost five thousand miles into gale-driven mountain-sized swells for damn near seven weeks, then hopping off your boat onto a still-lurching dock and into a twenty year old taxi, and a few hours later sitting inside a waterfront restaurant in the American South with your alcoholics. 

Take my word for it. You ain't been there, and you don't want to go.

__________________________________

Let's get down to basics, right here, right now.

If Liz's dad was a pistol, her mom was an anything but small nuclear bomb.

Fritz Strohman had come back from dropping bombs all over Europe in 1945 and within a few years managed a Buick dealership for some of the local rich kids. He made a good name for himself, married the unimaginatively wild and beautiful Betsy Cummins, and somewhere along the way they managed to have some kids. Betsy was the hard-charging Duke alum, the real go getter type, went on to Georgetown Law before returning home to go through all the local boys like a hot knife through buttered grits. They were a team. A well-lubed team, too. Fritz went out on a limb in the 70s and mortgaged his soul to buy a Japanese car dealership, and, well, the rest is, as they say, History. By the 80s he bought the Buick dealership out from under the rich kids and never looked back, at least until his right carotid artery got so clogged up from cheese grits and chicken-fried steak that he almost died while banging away on one of his secretaries.

Then he found God.

Betsy Strohman? Well, the last time I had seen her she just didn't have any use for God.

Very practical woman. Liz was a lot like her in some ways. As I watched mother and daughter that afternoon in Charleston, so much became clear. Where mom was rapacious in her lust for power and control, Liz was demure, a little more manipulative when she wanted something from her daddy. I felt for the guy. He'd never had a chance.

Charleston isn't quite New Orleans when it come to haute cuisine, but, to be fair, some of the restaurants there come pretty close. Fritz wanted to go in with us and open up a restaurant, a world class place to put the city on the culinary map. Betsy did too, really she did. Wouldn't we move back, settle in, have some kids before it was too late? I think Betsy looked at her watch right after she said that. Liz, bless her heart, was licking her lips she wanted to come back so badly.

Like I said, Liz was a lot like her mom in some ways. I never had a chance.

_______________________________

We returned to Panama on American a few days later, got aquaTarkus all ship shape and readied her for her first trip through the canal. We rounded up some gringos at the local yacht club to help with lines in the locks, and as soon as the (required) Pilot from the Canal Zone was dropped off on the boat we shipped anchor and motored off toward the Miraflores locks.

You know what I remember most about that day?

The look on the Pilot's face when he saw our boat. 

No, no super-tanker for this Pilot. A forty foot Hinckley. A sailboat! The poor guy looked so crestfallen it was almost heartbreaking. We motored across Gatun Lake looking over our shoulder as thousand foot long behemoths slipped silently through the water not a hundred yards off our ass. Our Pilot hid his face so their pilots - on those real ships - wouldn't see him stuck on this lowly gringo yacht trolling along a five knots.

I felt for the guy. Really.

We stopped off in the San Blas Islands after we cleared the canal before heading north across the Caribbean. Once these islands were famous, out of the way places. Now? They were overrun with tourists from a never ending flow of cruise-ships that plied the Caribbean, and hey, everyone was smiling, making money, having a hell of a time.

Me? I'd bought some local rum in Balboa. It was like rocket-fuel, so I was set. I'd even given the Pilot a bottle for his troubles before he hopped off the boat, muttering obscenities in spanish.

He almost smiled as he motored away. Almost. 

They probably gave away better rum on the cruise ships. Poor guy.

_____________________________

A couple of months later we were sailing past Fort Sumter into Charleston Harbor, bound for a huge marina on the west side of the Battery. I wondered if it was just me, but why did the walls of the fort look like they were coated in old, worn out blood? What memories of place did those walls hold inside? More to the point, would history repeat itself in the world around these troubled waters? It always seems to, doesn't it?

Liz and I followed a subtle progression from happiness at our newfound sense of place after we arrived in Charleston, to a mild entropy as time wore on. As we drifted within this entropical paradise, found we were trying to be polite to each other, to avoid conflict at all cost. To not rock the boat. All of a sudden she was talking about buying a house, setting down roots, having kids. Hell, we were almost forty years old and she was talking about kids, not just one. The longer we stayed tied up at that dock the more insistent this talk grew. It was frankly upsetting, and she took on a wistful, pouty look when she hinted about moving back to the street she had grown up on as a kid; pretty soon it was like she was telling me it was her societal obligation to bring two or three more souls back into that world, and that world only, and well, when contrasted against the life we'd known the past four years her whole performance just struck me as being so delusional it was almost comic.

And I told her so.

Hell, I don't know, maybe I said that while I was looking at Fort Sumter off in the distance. Maybe I fired the first shots of our soon to be uncivil war. I don't know anymore, and in the long run I don't imagine it really matters. Anyway, she looked at me like I'd thrown acid on her dreams. I'd never seen so much hate on another human being's face in my life, and I looked at her for a moment - until she turned and looked away, looked at the old spires and buildings along the Battery looming out of the afternoon smog - and I shuddered at the feeling of desolation that swept over me. Had I really ever known her? Had we really been on such a different path? Had I really been so clueless?

Yeah, probably so.

I thought back on our first day back in Carolina. I found the marina Liz's dad had booked for us, and called them on the VHF as we sailed into the Ashley River channel. They said they'd send a boy out to help us into our new slip. We motored around in circles for a while until the kid bounced down to the docks, then I followed his directions and took the boat into the slip he pointed out to us, and Liz and I jumped off to help him get her tied off.

"Where y'all coming from," the kid asked us as he helped us with the lines.

"Whagarei," said I, ever the seasoned world traveller.

"Oh, that down in Florida?"

"New Zealand," I tossed back at him in my slowest deadpan. John Wayne didn't have nothin' on this white boy!

"Oh, right," the kid said, "down by Miami, ain't it. Heard of that place."

"Yeah." Me too, kid. 

No one could relate to what Liz and I had just done, let alone what we'd been through emotionally. Funny I couldn't see what was coming.

_________________________________

I gave it my best. I tried to like her dad, I tried to like his country club and his brown Rolls Royce, but the poor guy was so sauced by noon he never remembered a thing we talked about. And Betsy, Liz's mom? Hell, the first time she slipped her hand under the table and tried to pull down my zipper . . . well, I don't know. Things between all of us just seemed to get weird after those first fateful encounters. 

Maybe weird isn't the best word to describe events, but it's damn close. Things got weird. In a hurry. We opened the new restaurant down on one of the rivers, a pretty upscale river country place that soon hit the cool zone and was the place to be seen. Liz and I became local celebrities for a while, the book we penned about our adventures in the Pacific did a brisk business for a week or two, and things were beginning to shape up as, well, maybe predictable would be stretching the point, but things were at least tolerable between Liz and I. We were making money again, everyone was happy, and . . .

. . . She came back from a doctors appointment one day, told me she couldn't have a baby, that we'd waited too long. You're off the hook, she told me, but it was she who looked relieved. She had me to blame, I guess. I'd made her wait, or so the story went, so it was all my doing. 

And nobody seemed to give a damn. Not her mom, not her dad, not the brother or sisters who dropped by the restaurant occasionally to claim a free meal. Surreal. But Liz did seem to care about not being able to have a baby, in a convoluted way that felt increasingly manipulative. I think there were so many conflicting emotions boiling around in there, well, I thought for a time she was just starting to come unglued.

No. She was thinking along different lines. She was plotting a different course.

We still lived on the boat; neither one of us could let go of that, but the space there began to feel small. It never had before, not in 12,000 miles and almost five years, but now we just couldn't keep out of each others way. Everything was out of balance. Everything seemed so confined.

I came home one night and found a Sheriff's Deputy waiting for me by the dock.

He served my divorce papers to me there in the early morning fog, and gave me notice that the boat - my home - was now off limits until the divorce proceedings settled questions of ownership. He would wait while I got some things off.

True to form, all Liz's things were gone too. The boat looked like a huge, empty tomb, now impossibly large. Had we really taken her half way around the world? The Deputy came below and looked around, and I talked to him about the journey Liz and I had made. He was impressed. Hell, so was I.

Had we really done so much together?

And learned so little?

________________________________

The lawyer I'd found to handle incorporating the restaurant - one Lisa Mullins, and a real tiger by all accounts, as she was universally loathed by most of the divorced men in town I'd met - knew more about my life than I did by this time. Mullins told me not to worry, she'd take care of me. Within a few days I had rented a small loft near the Battery, and a small circle of friends I'd accumulated at the marina began to rally round. Lot of rum flowed in those first few days, though. It was dicey for a while. Things felt alright, like I might live, you know? Hell, stranger things have happened, but when your world gets rattled like this it takes a while to figure out which way's up.

I kept to a schedule. Walked to a coffee house up the street in the morning, got to the restaurant by nine to get things up and running, hit the office behind the kitchen to get caught up on all the paperwork, then out on the floor to get ready for the lunchtime onslaught. I hardly ever bumped into Liz, and she was cordial when we did.

The lawyer called after a few weeks. Liz and her family wanted all interest in the restaurant; I could have the boat and a little cash. Sounded like a good deal for them, not too bad for me, so I gave Mullins the go-ahead. Liz signed off on it a few days later, so the case went to court uncontested, and after a few weeks it was a done deal. Seventeen years of marriage. Done. Over. Faithful all the way, reasonably happy with each other, we didn't hit each other, bite each other, tell lies about each other. We had watched the idealism of our generation take hold and move the world, we had tried to reach out into that world, tried to understand the forces that always seemed to keep people at each other's throats. No matter. In the end we turned on each other. Maybe like everyone else in our generation, we just self-destructed when we realized the enormity of what we'd attempted.


The Memory of Place Ch. 01



So, was our marriage was like a mirror of our times? I don't know. Maybe.

We'd sold out once before for the path to suburban conformity, then dropped out, tried to rekindle the spark that defined those years in Berkeley. We moved out into the world, searching, but ultimately we were lost, just lost, and we knew it. Like all of us who sold out, we tried to come back to the reality of what we'd lost, only to find that we'd become anachronisms, our dissolution as a generation complete. And what had we learned along the way?

Maybe by turning our backs on the choices we made, to the choices that defined a generations need, we repudiated the very meaning of our lives. In the vacuum that was left, all manner of crazy extremism rushed in to fill the void. No amount of running from that simple truth could take us back to the truth we'd found out there on the ocean. No amount of self-deluding existentialist bullshit could erase the reality of what we'd come to.

And now it was all over.

It was unnerving, moving back on the boat, putting my shirts back into the same old drawers - drawers that had been Liz's for so many years - then laying out navigation instruments . . . like I really knew where I was headed. I did, however, have a ton of boxes up on the dock to move back on-board. Anyway, it gave me time to think about the options.

Money wasn't a problem, but staying here would be. Charleston was a small town, and I wasn't a local. That's always a bad mix. There were still lots of places I wanted to sail to. I'd never considered ding that alone, but it could be done.

I walked up to the car and brought another box down to the boat. Mullins, the lawyer, was waiting by the boat when I walked back down the ramp.

"Hi," she said. "Nice day for a sail. Wanna go out?"

I looked at her. Dressed just like a freshly-minted boaty out of an L L Bean catalog. Red shorts, new Sperry Topsiders, white Polo shirt. Every fucking cliché in the book. She looked kinda cute, though, in a preppy kind of way. Clean, ya know. 

"Yeah, it looks nice out there. I'd love to but I've got stuff all over the place down there, things not stowed yet. Maybe in a week or so . . ."

"Let's take mine. It's just over there." She pointed across the way to little brown-hulled double ender.

"Oh? Is she yours. What is that? A WestSail?"

"Yeah, an old 28. I picked her up a couple years ago, been cleaning her up."

You know, all of a sudden I felt like going out for a sail.

"Yeah, sounds good. Let me get this box below and I'll be there in a minute."

"OK," she said. I heard her walking away down the dock.

"And, Lisa," I said to her, not really knowing why, "Thanks."

"No problem."

_______________________________

She came down every Sunday, she said, and took Soliloquy out for a spin on the harbor. No matter, if the weather was foul she came down and sat on her, read a book; it was symbiosis, she said, they both gained from their time together. She'd come down today, saw me loading boxes on board and decided to ask me to go out with her. No pre-arranged agenda at work, just a simple gesture. She had a quiet smile on her face.

She wasn't a bad seaman, either. I don't know why that surprised me. I stood out of the way as she took the boat out, kept out of her way as much as I could as she hoisted sail, just watched and enjoyed the day as it unfolded like any other guest on her boat. It was a cool Spring day, a fresh breeze was coming out of the northwest, and a couple of whitecaps dotted the distant harbor. A handful of other sailboats were out, and their sails stood in bold relief against the stark, clear sky.

"There are a couple of cinnamon rolls down on the table," she said as she watched for traffic in the Ashley River channel. "Wanna bring 'em up?" 

I dropped down the companionway, picked up the sack and turned to climb back out into the sunshine, but something caught my eye. A little plaque mounted by one of the portlights; a diploma from an Outward Bound School in Colorado, dated January, 1977. A winter mountaineering program. Now I was impressed.

Lisa sheeted off the genoa and we munched on cinnamon rolls for a while as Soliloquy reached across the harbor towards Fort Sumter, and I watched her quietly as she steered with her foot on the tiller, her eye on the sails. She seemed to be communing with the boat; I knew the feeling well. Or, and I was shocked that I felt this in that crystalline moment, I used to know that feeling well. Somewhere, somehow, that simple symbiosis had left my life. 

Instead of reveling in the audacity of our choice, Liz and I had grown complacent, begun to take for granted the so many beautiful things in our life, and in that complacency the meaning of those things was lost. The purpose of our life grew vague and obscure.

No compass had helped us find our way back. There had been no course to steer.

Lisa Mullins hadn't lost that sense of purpose. Somehow, she held on to life just as she held on to Soliloquy - firmly, symbiotically. 

"Where are you?" I heard a voice, and I looked at Mullins. She was looking ahead, looking at the set of her sails.

"Did you say something?" I asked.

"Yeah, where are you? You look lost."

There is was. It was so obvious.

"Yes, I suppose I am."

She turned to look at me. 

"Is it Liz?" Are you so lost without her? So obvious.

"I don't know. I don't think it's that simple."

"Maybe you just need some sea time." She chuckled a little.

"Yeah, that's got a be it." I looked at her and smiled. "So, where we headed, skipper?" 

"You up for a little adventure."

"Always."

"Let's head down the ICW a couple of miles, down Stono's Creek. There's a good dive down there on the water. Shrimp and grits kinda place."

"A what?"

"Shrimp and cheese grits. Oh, I forgot, you a California boy, ain't you." She gazed at me for a moment, and a thrill passed through me. I hadn't felt one of those in years. Amazing.

"Is that a Charleston kinda thing?"

"Low country, you poor white boy. You ever read Pat Conroy?"

"Nope."

"Poor stupid white boy." She laughed, and her eyes sparkled as she tacked the boat through the wind, heading back up for the Intra-Coastal Waterway.

"Sorry. Man's got to know his limitations."

"Yeah? That must be a guy thing."

So, she wanted to play dirty, huh. "Where'd you go to school?" This could be fun . . .

"School? You mean like high school?"

"College."

"Tulane. Then Penn for law. Why?"

"Just wondered."

"Wondered? You wonderin' about 'lil ole me?" she said in a Carolina accent that seemed a little thick all of a sudden. She was looking right at me, though, with an intensity I found a little amusing. She was definitely alpha-chick, and enjoying herself.

"Yeah, well, it's not everyday I get to go sailing with an Ivy league lawyer into cheese grits, know what I mean?"

"Yeah, yo ain't lived till you et cheese grits wityo lawya."

"I hope they have cold beer."

"Shit, white boy, you almost dumb, you know it? People breast fed on beer 'round these parts." Now she was smiling, truly enjoying the persona she had so easily slipped on. I think she was trying to make me comfortable, me being a foreigner and all, but this really was a world apart from anything I'd ever seen before. It felt comfortable. Like an old pair of shoes. But it didn't feel like home.

"I've never been on the ICW before. Have you done much of it?"

"Naw, not too much. You have to motor, so what's the point. I like blue water."

"Done much of that?"

"Nope. That's the dream, though."

"What? Sailing off into the sunset?"

"Yeah, something like that. Got to finish up some things first, then I'm gonna head off, look around for a while."

"Not your everyday kinda dream, you know."

"What, for a girl, you mean?" She took a sidelong glance at me, then focused on traffic in the channel ahead.

"I didn't say that. It's just that not many people have that dream anymore, you know. It was a sixties kind of thing. Drop out and see the world."

"That's bullshit, and you know it. Why is that dropping out?"

"It's turning your back on what society expects of you."

"So?"

"Well, that's kinda frowned on, ya know."

"So what? Who gives a shit?"

"I don't know, isn't that what the law is? I mean, think about it." I looked off at the sky, the water, looked back on all the implications of our choice to leave, to sail away. "That's what it's all about, isn't it? Conformity? Conforming to the will of the group, to the rule of law. It's pretty off the wall for someone who represents the force of conformity to be a non-conformist. If you think about it, I mean."

"Hmm. I don't know that I buy that. But I'll think about it." She looked ahead, adjusted her course to scoot behind a trawler crossing ahead of us. "So, is that what it was all about? For you and Liz? Non-conformity?"

"No. I didn't mean to frame it in just those terms. It wasn't about what other people thought about what we were doing, about why we were doing it. It was the act of doing it - of leaving - that was, I think, a statement of, oh, I don't know. Rebellion, maybe. Getting out there and doing it. Experiencing the world while everyone else watched it unfold on television. We chose not to live on anyone else's terms. I don't think we cared about what other people thought about us, about what we were doing."

"So, what, you and Liz had a monopoly on that dream? No one else can take a shot at it?"

Our eyes met. I laughed; she didn't.

"You know, we met tons of people out there. Mainly from Europe. A lot from France, lots of Germans and Swiss. Bunch of Brits. Most of the people out there, and I hate to generalize about something like this, but here goes, most of the folks out there were tired of conforming to arbitrary rules set out for them by bureaucrats and governments, they just wanted to live their lives without governments and jobs breathing down the necks all the time. I think all of us were looking for something simpler."

"Amen to that."

"So, doesn't that make you the non-conforming conformist? Or are you a conforming non-conformist?"

"Asshole."

"Who, me?"

"Yeah, you. Like I said, I'll have to give that one some thought."

"Take your time." I was laughing again.

"You're bad, you know it?" She was still smiling as she said that. That was a good thing. I didn't want to swim back to town.

"Don't you have any beer on this tub?"

"Tub? Tub!? You callin' my baby a tub?" She leaned over a rubbed a patch of teak. "There, there, girl," she cooed to the boat, "don't let the mean asshole hurt your feelings." I just shook my head, grinned at her.

"So, you gonna take this girl out on your trip?"

"I don't know. She's about as big as I can handle alone, you know. I wouldn't mind something bigger." She let that thought hang in the air for a minute. "I don't know, Tom. I always thought I'd end up doing this . . . I always saw myself doing this alone."

"No boyfriend?"

"I was married once."

"Oh? Didn't take?"

"No. Leukemia. About ten years ago."

"Oh, God, Lisa. I didn't . . ."

"I know that, Tom. I know you're not from around here, don't know all the local gossip. Don't worry about it. And," she said as she looked at me again, "I know you're not mean."

We settled on a course down the middle of the waterway and she asked me to take the tiller for a minute. She went down below for what seemed like an hour, then came back up, her face scrubbed, her eyes a little puffy. She'd been crying. She looked around, took in the surroundings.

"Almost there," she said. "About another half mile." She looked at me while she sat down, didn't take her eyes from me. "Man, it's nice to have someone around to take the stick for a while."

"You really sail around here by yourself all the time?" 

She nodded her head, smiled defiantly at me. "You betcha."

"I don't know, Lisa, but I think I admire you."

"Admire me? Oh, boy. That's not was I was hoping for, Tommy-boy."

"Oh, what were you hoping for?" Then it hit me: I had smiled as her words hit me.

"Yeah, Tom. I was hoping - I was hoping I'd finally met someone who likes cheese grits as much as I do."

"Well, like you said. We'll have to give that one some thought."

She just looked at me for a minute. Then she smiled.

"There it is. Hope you're ready for this, white boy!"

_________________________________

She was right. I felt there was something mystical about the South as I sat in the screened-in porch overlooking the waterway. Everything about the place felt like a proud anachronism, with more than a little paradox thrown in for good measure. On one side of this bifurcated terrain you had a fairy-tale land of overt meanness, the sidelong suspicions of in-your-face rednecks, the really uncool vibes of down-home racism that still bubbled in near-dormant malevolence to the surface from time to time, and perhaps most disconcerting of all, an easy acceptance of intolerance that was utterly unnerving when you saw it in action. Not exactly Gone With The Wind, but not too far removed when you got right down to it. On the other you had, you had people like Lisa Mullins. Bright, articulate, compassionate, accepting. She was everything the South was not, except she was the South, and it was this contradiction that had me baffled.

Whatever it was about these contradictions that fascinated me, it was all soon forgotten as she sat across from me, leaning over the driftwood-planked table pointing out some of the good things on the menu, and hinting that there were some really, really good things for the asking. If you knew who to ask, and what for. She leaned closer to me as she talked about her love of place, this place in particular.

I could feel heat in the air between us. I was getting warm. Unsettled. So many contradictions alive in the air.

I looked out across the river. Motorboats droned along under the intense afternoon sun - buzzing like insects - while an occasional sailboat drifted by in hot silence. Both these forms of moving across the water embodied contradictions too, didn't they? Ultimately, they were one and the same, people moving across the water from point A to point B, people looking for some time alone or with friends away from the noise of everyday life, but were there contradictions inherent within the choice to sail or burn gas? Something about purpose? Looking for that place?

Lisa ordered her low-country favorites, cheese-grits with shrimp, some Gulf lump crabmeat sauteed in butter and Jack Daniels, with some chopped pecan and cilantro thrown in for good measure. We ate and talked, talked and ate. The beer was bitterly cold, and it felt good going down even though we were sitting in the shade. The sun arced across the sky as we sat there, but time had long since stopped having any real meaning. We were lost within that arc of time. I was soon lost in her story.

Her parents were evangelicals, and she grew up hating everything about them. She had considered herself a hard corp agnostic all through high school, and flirted with being a full time atheist by the time she moved away from home. By the time she finished law school she knew enough about the world to understand you didn't make these kinds of choices lightly, and seeing how other people's faiths sustained them had made an indelible impression on her. She envied people whose faith seemed pure, unassailable - at least on the surface - but the more she scratched that surface the uglier faith became to her. Religion, she said, would be the central paradox of her life, one she felt would never be resolved.

The law had become her religion. I could see that plainly as she talked over shrimp and crab that afternoon. When she talked about the law, she would become assertive, almost masculine. She picked up her long-neck beer by the top of the bottle and swung it up to her lips with two-fingered ease. Nothing feminine or dainty about the way she did that; no, plainly she just felt so at ease in these surroundings that all pretension melted away.

It was inevitable that as she talked I drew comparisons to Liz.

While Liz had always been open - even vivacious - in public, she was really quite shy around people she cared about. She cared a lot about what others thought of her, about the way she looked. She watched television but hated movies, hadn't read a book since college, and loved to invite strangers to the boat for dinner whenever we pulled into a new anchorage. She hated that I listened to the BBC on the boat's shortwave radio while we sat in some remote anchorage at night, and thought my interest in the stars was pathologically weird. But we cared about social justice, about finding common ground for the disenfranchised, and we argued about things we held in common, challenged our preconceptions. We had always found it easy to talk to one another, even when we knew things between us were turning sour. And there was that history between us, those California afternoons that seemed to linger like her breath on my neck in almost every memory I have of those days. Liz was a fragile, almost willowy blond that always seemed to stand deep in the middle of life . . . but then again, I always thought she had embraced life on her own terms. As the tears and years swept by, I realized she had been holding on to me through my dreams, following in my wake, resenting the implications of my choices on our lives. She was, I had come to realize, a pretender. And now she was bitter about it.

As I listened to Lisa, I had the feeling she had had her fill of pretension, her fill of men who sought power for power's sake, and that she'd also had a belly full of life in the sewers. She made it clear that while almost all legal professionals have to deal with the sewer from time to time, she had embraced criminal law, knew the implications, but made her choice and stuck to it. It was amazing to me that she wasn't more jaded than she appeared to be. Sure, she was rough around the edges, but hell, who isn't . . . I mean, life does that to you, it grinds away at you. But . . . she still wanted to go after her dreams, and in my experience not too many people can claim to hang on to those by the time they hit forty. Conforming to expectation chews away at your dreams until one day they're gone.

I was pretty sure that was what killed our marriage. I asked Lisa what she thought of marriage. Surely she'd seen enough marital bliss in family court to have a fair understanding of the terrain.

"You know," she began, "most marriages fail for a simple reason. People play games with one another. Power games, dominance games. Con games. They get used to conning people for what they want, and sooner or later all honestly leaves the relationship. There's not an honest emotion left in the marriages I see falling apart. Everyone I see says the same thing: 'I can't believe I married that son-of-a-bitch'. Is it that? Is it that they didn't know the truth when they got married, or is it that the truth got lost in all the lies and games?"

"Truth gets lost? That's an interesting insight."

"Have you thought much about Liz, and you. What happened, I mean?"

I looked at her. There was no hesitation on her face, no regret for having asked the question. "I don't guess I'm too different from most people, Lisa. For a while it's all I thought about. It hurts. It seemed so unexpected, yet so inevitable. I don't think we got caught up in lies, I think they caught up with us."

"That's a subtle distinction. You were running? Is that what the boat was all about?"

"I'd never thought about it in those terms. And I'm not sure it's accurate, either. But I'm willing to think about it." I think I was smiling as I said that.

"So, what are you going to do?"

"I've been wanting to get a smaller boat, shallower draft. I want to go to Europe, wander through the canals in France, then go to Greece." Liz and I had always talked about doing that someday. I guess our dream was mine after all.




The Memory of Place Ch. 01



"When are you going to leave? I mean, any plans firming up?"

I shook my head. I didn't know where this was going. "No, gonna play it by ear for a while."

"Well, one thing's for certain." She looked down at her watch. "We gotta be headin' back or the tide's gonna smack us head on the nose."

Life's like that, you know? If you don't watch out, you spend your whole life swimming against the tide.

__________________________________

The wind faded with the afternoon, and we motored the last mile or so back into Charleston Harbor. I watched Lisa again, her calm self-assurance, the practiced eye she cast on Soliloquy's sails and other traffic crossing ahead. As we drew near the marina, I set out dock lines and dropped fenders over the sides to shield against a hard landing, and stood up by the bow-sprit for a while, enjoying the sunset and the history that was all around us as we turned by the Battery. It was beautiful. Quiet, and beautiful. I looked over toward my boat, and saw the outlines of a woman sitting in the cockpit. I squinted through the fading sunset, and could just make out Liz sitting there.

I turned, looked at Lisa, and saw the expression on her face. She had seen Liz, too, and suddenly to me she looked hurt, almost betrayed.

We docked gently, and I turned to help Lisa sort out the lines, but she stopped me short.

"You need to go now, Tom. She's come back for you, you know. Be careful."

________________________

"Well, it didn't take you long to land on your feet."

I was just stepping onto our boat - our boat - when she let go with this first assault.

"Hey, you know, I didn't file for a divorce. You did. Tell me again what I'm doing wrong here, would you?"

"Oh, Tom, I'm sorry. I didn't come down here to fight with you. I, well, to tell you the truth, I half expected to find you shacked up down below with a girl when I came."

"Well, you know, if you'd given me another hour . . ." I let the meanness in my voice trail off into the air. She looked at me for a moment, then shook her head.

"I'm sorry, Tom. I really am. I should never have done this to you. To us."

"Well, breaking news, kiddo. We're divorced. You said you wanted one, in writing, as I recall." I was trying to be as obtuse as I could possibly be, and I think I was succeeding pretty well, too. "I'm just curious, is this a social call, or was there something you wanted from the boat?"

"No, no Tom. Nothing." 

It was almost dark now, and I could barely make her out in the looming night. Suddenly she was crying. I knew that quiver in her voice. I remembered the air of alarm that sound used to imply, how uncomfortable I used to feel when she cried. She was a manipulative crier, cried when she wanted something and didn't get it, or when she didn't get her way. Now she was facing the consequences of her actions. Maybe she was sorry, or maybe she was feeling sorry for herself. There was no way to tell, maybe there never had been, and standing there on the boat I realized that I didn't care anymore one way of the other.

"Yeah, well, mind if I go below? I wanna change clothes."

"Was that your lawyer, Tom?"

"Uh-huh."

"She's kinda pretty - in a dumpy kind of way. Never would have thought of her as your type, though."

I moved past her through the cockpit, unlocked the companionway and began to lift the boards out, then moved to place them on the seat next to me. Liz reached out and took the first board and placed it gently on the seat, taking care not to scratch the ten coats of varnish she had so lovingly applied to the teak not a year ago. Automatically I handed her the next one, then the last board, and I was caught short by my reaction to the familiar within my mind.

Caught within the memory of place, within the echoes of a heartbeat, I saw Liz as she was twenty years ago on a Saturday in San Francisco when we had gone out sailing on our first date, and within that moment I saw her face as she looked up at mine on our wedding day, her eyes so full of love, and I remembered my love for her on that day as an absolute. As something time could never rip asunder.

I paused before I pushed the companionway hatch open, unsure of where I was, unsure if I was still on the boat or caught within the shadows of a never-ending dream. I saw her standing next to me when we first saw our boat taking form at the yard in Southwest Harbor, I saw the pride in her eyes, the will to take this creation to the limits of our imagination.

Were we really so bound together through the life we had shared on this boat? Had we really been such a well oiled machine that we sailed half way around the world - and back - trusting each other so completely, knowing how the other would react in the face of a storm, knowing that if we worked together we could overcome any obstacle, reach any destination?

"Do you want me to leave, Tom?"

I didn't have an a pithy comeback waiting that time, did I?

"Liz, just tell me what you want."

"I want us. Us, Tom. We belong together."

"Yeah, we did once."

"We can again."

"Liz? If you don't mind, this is just too weird. Maybe in a few days."

"OK, Tom. Could you still help out at the restaurant. We haven't found a new manager yet, and it would be a big help."

Ah. That was it.

"Uh, no Liz. I've got other plans."

"Oh. Right, well, I'll give you a call."

I could hear it in her voice. I wouldn't hear from her again. Not unless she needed me for something, not unless she wanted somebody else's dreams to call her own again. I made my way down the companionway steps and flipped on the breakers, then turned on the red light over the chart table. I felt the boat move as she hopped off, heard her footsteps recede in the darkness. I'd never felt so utterly alone in all my life. 

What was I doing? What had I done?

_______________________________

Moving forward through the boat, I managed to get my clothes off and into the head before I lost it. That thundering realization in the cockpit had been the single most nauseating moment of my life. I flipped on the shower and stood under the water, felt the grief from my soul wash away as the hot water beat down on the back of my neck. Everything seemed to be moving like the boat was at sea in a storm, but I viscerally knew that the boat was tied up to the dock. Everything felt out of place, my senses weren't reliable anymore. 

I don't know how long I stood there. The water cooled, then it stopped completely. I'd run the tanks dry. Maybe a hundred and fifty gallons of water, gone. I was shivering, and hallucinating. I smelled bacon frying, and coffee.

Walking into the forward cabin, I heard her in the galley, knew she'd come back and was now making me bacon and eggs. I didn't want to face her, not now, not ever again. I didn't want to ever see her face again, and as I put on a shirt I grew angry at her audacity, at her contempt for my feelings. 

She had what she wanted. Why couldn't she just take it at that and leave it be.

I knew then that I'd have to leave this place as soon as I could get the boat provisioned, leave and follow my heart over the next horizon. I pulled on some sweatpants and slipped on an old pair of boat shoes, then stood and took a deep breath. I thought of what I needed to say, how I wanted to say it. Turning, I opened the door into the main cabin of the boat, prepared to let the full fury of my loathing run its course.

She was in the galley with her back to me, cracking eggs in a bowl when I walked in. She turned and I stumbled, and my world lurched again. It wasn't Liz, and suddenly it hit me: I'd never been so happy to see a lawyer in all my life.

"You want some rum in your coffee?" Now that was an ice-breaker if I ever heard one.

"I, uh . . ."

"Look, I heard Liz storming up the ramp, cussing under her breath. I came over here and heard you in the shower. You didn't, well, didn't sound too good. Anyway. Bacon and eggs usually get me over these rough spots. Thought I'd get some going for you."

"I'm glad you're here." She looked up from the stove, looked over at me.

"Yeah? Well, what's it gonna be? Coffee black, or coffee with a little kick in it?"

______________________

Over the next week or so I got all my stuff back on board and worked on getting everything stowed away. Not too hard a job when your head's screwed on tight, but I was having a time of it. Maybe I was depressed, or just tired, but I was having a hard time making sense of things, and everything I did seemed like it was filtered through molasses. It felt like tar on hot pavement - oozing around, getting stuck on everything, and ultimately just making a mess. And I found that my thought process wasn't doing any better. Hot and messy, know what I mean?

I'd never thought of Liz as the devious type, as a shrew. In almost five years of sailing, she'd never once been as overtly manipulative as she had been that last Sunday night. What was going on? Had we simply lost our way, or had I been missing something vital for almost twenty years? It just didn't make sense! Anyway, as I worked around down below, thoughts like those kept bouncing around in my head. After a few days of this nonsense I was beginning to question just about every assumption I'd ever made.

Then there was Lisa Mullins.

Of course I knew better.

That didn't make our first night together any less interesting. She turned out to be an imaginative lover. Actually, maybe enthusiastic would be a better descriptive. Just about every time I touched her she launched into blistering wet orgasms, and yes, I'm using the plural here deliberately. I have never seen anyone so 'multi-orgasmic' in my life. It wasn't me, of that I'm fairly certain. I think a light breeze hitting her down there would have sent her over the edge. Anyway, the first time I went down on her it was like spontaneous combustion. She grabbed my face and pulled it into her and started yelling and pulling my hair and carrying on like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. After about a half hour and three hundred orgasms later I think she collapsed. I say 'I think' because I had about a two minute reprieve before she went down on me, rallied round the flag, so to speak, then hopped on top of me.

The poor thing.

At first I thought - after she'd captured the flag - was that she was having an epileptic seizure. Her body went rigid at first - enough so I thought something might have been terribly wrong - then tremors somewhat akin to shockwaves ripped through her body. She was soon flailing about and yelling so loud I was sure everyone in the marina was going to be dialing 911, and just when I thought she couldn't possibly get any louder the girl launched into a frenzied orgasm that, well, still leaves me speechless when I think about how I might possibly describe what happened.

You gotta keep in mind that I was, well, just laying there. Anything else on my part might have been dangerous. I mean, it wasn't like she borrowed a cup of sugar for a minute - it wasn't that detached - but in a way I felt superfluous to the proceedings. I don't think she needed me at all, really, well, other than having the use of my hardware. When all was said and done (at least for me, anyway), the whole episode was kind of a letdown. She seemed kind of embarrassed for a minute, then got real sweet and cuddled up next to me and fell asleep. I guess she just assumed that somewhere in the maelstrom I had managed an orgasm of my own. How she would have known that was beside me. She hardly knew I was in the, well, room.

Like I said, it was an interesting night. She took off in the morning, sometime around four or so, I think. Never said a word, no kiss on the forehead, nothing.

She came by that night, knocked on the side of the boat, called out my name.

I looked around quickly, wondered if there was a back way out of the place (kinda hard to pull that one off on a boat), then I popped up through the companionway hatch.

"Howdy," said I, ever the suave urbanite.

"How're y'all doin' today, big guy?"

OK, lets get this straight right now. I'm not real tall, and I'm not fat, either. Big Guy? Me?

"Fine, Lisa. You have a good day?"

"Well, kinda." She moved around, feigning pelvic discomfort. "Kinda sore, you know?"

"Hmm. Wonder why?" I tried not to smile. She smiled.

"Up for a encore tonight?" Now for some odd reason that put the fear of God into me, so I just looked at her, indicated at best a passive receptivity. "Ooh, goody!" she said reflexively. "I've got some paperwork to do. Could I work on it here? I really don't want to go home." It was then that I noticed she had an overnight bag with her.

You know, I had a decision to make.

I could send her packing, or by golly, I could take matters in hand and try to fuck her brains out.

For some odd reason, I chose the latter. Call it ego, but I was damned if I was going to let this broad get off again without returning the favor, so as soon as he got to the bottom of the companionway I was on her like Preparation H on hemorrhoids. 

I didn't have a chance.

I think, after about an hour of her riding my face, I might have cried 'Uncle', but no way was this woman about to quit. Finally I threw her over and tore into her. At that point I felt like a crazed wolf and wailed into her with the hardest, deepest thrusts I'd ever delivered anytime to anyone, and after a whopping minute or so I hit the short strokes and popped off. 

Well, not having had any in a while, I think it fair to say that I let loose a doozey and a half. She was coaxing me along the whole time, and as I slowed down a bit, spent as I was, Lisa just got foul-mouthed-horny and started in on me to rise to the occasion and go for two.

I shoulda known that was, ah, coming.

I lasted a little longer that second time. About two hours, give or take, and the creature underneath me was like a thing possessed. By the time I noticed her fingernails digging in to my back I really didn't give a damn, and when her not-so-short high-heels started digging into my calves, well, shit, I didn't care about those, either.

Once I slowed down and she slapped me, hard yet playfully, and told me to stop now only if I was prepared to die. Ahem. Not exaggerating here, Kemosabe. This chick was into her orgasms, and during my second orgasm she started in on me big-time. Do not to quit now. That was the message. Yes, Ma'am!

Now, give me a break. I'm trying to be modest here, and, well, you know, there was no way I was going for round three. Maybe fifteen, twenty years ago. Today? Nope. No way.

Anyway, after my stalwart friend deserted me Lisa rolled me over and mounted my face again.

Lawyers!

And you know what? About four hours later she was set up in the salon working away on some depositions. I wonder how many hours she billed that night, and for what services?

______________________

Lisa didn't come to the boat again. In fact, I didn't see her for a couple of weeks, and then only in passing out on the docks. It was pretty disconcerting. When we did get a chance to talk for a minute or so a month later, she kinda let on that she'd given me a 'mercy-fuck' . . . that she'd sensed I was really down and needed a quick pick-me-up.

Was she for real?

I saw Liz one day during that period, too.

I was working up on the foredeck, tearing down the anchor windlass and lubing the paws, and I looked up to wipe some sweat from my forehead and saw her up in the marina parking lot. She was looking down at me, down when I looked up. I think we looked at each other for a few minutes, then she waved at me before she walked off. I looked at the empty spot where she had been, for, I don't know, maybe an hour or so. There was a hole in my heart, and I didn't know how to fix it. I did, however, know how to fix a broken windlass.

A week after that, all my things stowed just so on the boat, I sailed out of Charleston Harbor, alone. I passed Fort Sumter, this time off to starboard, and I thought about civil wars again, and about who fired the first shot in our little war. I thought about that place in my heart, so far removed from the pain now, but still so empty. 

What memories would flood that wounded land?

Clearing the harbor, I looked to the right, to the south, then north. I didn't know which way to turn. So I turned around and looked deep into the wake that trailed behind me, looked back past the old Fort, back toward the Battery, and thought about my life up to that moment.

I could turn back, I thought. Turn back, chase my past. Live within the memory of place.

Or I could just move on, forge a new course.

I sat behind the wheel, looked at the chart-plotter and it's readout sitting silently in my face, almost daring me to dream again. I scrolled out, moved the cursor across the Atlantic until it rested right in the middle of the English Channel, and pressed the Calculate New Course button. A few seconds later the screen flashed a new heading, indicated the new course to steer, and just how far I had to go to get there.

There was a prompt on the screen. 

Press Enter to start the new route.

Was it really so simple? Turn away from everything I had known for almost twenty years? Start a new life?

Or turn around? Find my way back to the past, and live there.

My finger moved to the screen, hit the Enter button. The machine thought for a moment, and a new screen emerged. Me and my little floating world appeared as a small red arrow just off the mid-Atlantic coast of North America, and a new course was projected across the ocean to the waters between England and France. I settled in behind the wheel, put my feet up in the sun, and listened to the water as it trailed off behind.

Part II forthcoming.



The Memory of Place Ch. 02



So many passages at sea can be terrifying, or simply a physical ordeal that you wish would be over as soon as possible. My journey across the Atlantic was simply pleasant and uneventful. I had left Charleston, South Carolina a month and a half ahead of the boisterous Atlantic hurricane season, and the abnormally calm passage reflected my state of mind. I felt a release of tension as America drifted away behind me. I puttered about the boat, tended little housekeeping chores like mending a sail or checking tension on shrouds and chainplates - little things that need to be kept on-top-of in order to survive at sea. Well, that - and I read.

Curious about Lisa Mullins' question - had I read Pat Conroy before? - I had picked up a copy of Beach Music before Charleston became just a memory in my wake, and I passed many an hour reading that book as aquaTarkus arced eastward across the sea. Conroy's tale made an impression on me. It was a story, to me, about the memory of place, about how place awakens feelings we've long since forgotten, and about the interconnectedness of place and emotion across generations. It made me think of my Dad, something that rarely happened anymore. He had moved on more than ten years ago, and I missed his steady hand. I thought, as I sat up at night eying the radar, how much he would have loved making this trip.

After seventeen days at sea I closed on the coast of France, and began to pick up contours of the Seine River estuary on radar in the middle of the night, and, mindful of the complex shipping environment in the English Channel, I moved in close to the coastline to avoid the thickest of it. The boat fairly slipped along on a beam reach through the night, and as the sun came up I could make out the marina I was headed for in the distance, just to the left of Le Havre's city center and docklands. I negotiated a complex maze of breakwaters and turned into the marina a little after nine that seventeenth morning, and threw my lines to the Gendarme waiting for me on the Customs Quay.

The plan was simple. I'd make arrangements to have aquaTarkus's mast unstepped and shipped to Marseilles by truck. Thus unencumbered, I would take my boat through the vast canal network that laces across France and emerge in the Mediterranean. I planned to move from Le Havre directly to Paris, spend a month or so there, then laze my way through the summer months and arrive in the South in, say, October or November. I found that I really didn't care how long it took. In fact, I was of half a mind to get lost somewhere out there in the middle of nowhere, someplace near a village that had a nice bakery, decent cheese, and, yes, a steady supply of rum.

Anyway, I felt that after all I had been through with Liz, and with the confusing epitaph of Lisa Mullin's little "mercy fuck" routine behind me as well, I was a little dead from the neck up. It was time for a change. A real change.

I cleared customs and made arrangements to berth-up aquaTarkus in the marina for a few days, then walked up to the Strand and looked for a coffee. I didn't have to look hard. I ducked into a little place and ordered a café au lait and a couple croissant, then settled outside on the splendid boardwalk and marveled at a world that wasn't bouncing and rolling to the beat of mad Sea-Gods. It's hard to convey sometimes just how good it feels to walk on solid earth, to feel the warmth of the morning sun on your face as the smells and sounds of life come to you on a quiet breeze that smells of life - city life.

After a while - it could have been an hour, or a day - I walked back to the boat, collected some things in a rucksack and made my way to the train station. I hopped on a local to Paris and spent the next four hours reveling in the smooth motion of rails. Not one wave smacked the bow and washed over - me - and the boat, even if the motion of the train did feel a little odd to me. I got into Paris in the middle of the afternoon and made my way to the American Express office just in time to collect my mail. I flipped through the handful of bills and unwanted correspondence until I came to a letter from Liz, and - wonder of wonders - two from my humble mercy-fucking attorney. I wandered if she was going to hit me for services rendered.

I planned to scout out a marina in the city - or a place along a quay, perhaps - someplace to bring aquaTarkus and tie her up. I didn't want to arrive without that much accomplished, so - guidebook in hand - off I went. Letters would remain unopened for now . . .

I looked at a couple of places upriver from the Isle Saint Louis, and the second one looked perfect. The proprietor told me it would likely take me a week, maybe ten days to journey from Le Havre to Paris. He encouraged me to set aside two weeks, enjoy the trip, he said, you'll never pass this way again. It sounded like good advise, so I made a reservation, left a deposit, and after finding a nice place for dinner, I jumped on the metro back to the station and hopped on a midnight express back to the coast.

I think I slept for a day after I got back to the boat, then went out in search of provisions for the boat. The following morning saw us headed upstream, passing under the Pont de Normandie, then the past the limestone cliffs abutting the Pont de Tancarville, and in an instant I was in another world. The upscale urban sprawl of Le Havre gave way to a series of bucolic vistas as the river turned to the west and entered a land peppered with quaint villages and rolling farmland. Not to mention an occasional refinery. But as the coastline receded, the transformation continued, and soon I felt like I was - home.

I know that sounds odd.

Something about the air, the light, and - I don't know - suddenly I felt like I was home. I knew my Mother's family in France, we had had many special times together during my youth, but I was essentially an American. I wondered if mother still kept up with them? Maybe I should Jean Paul?

I don't why I pushed on that first day, but I ended up tied off to a little public quay near Caudebec-en-Caux as the sun set, and I walked into the village and sat in the first place that looked good and had some wine and cheese, then some oysters and duck. It was amazing. With each passing moment I felt as though I was nearing home. Were my roots really so shallow?

After eating I stood in a phone booth as a cold fog rolled in and called my mother in Colorado. We exchanged cool pleasantries, then I asked her if she still kept in touch with Jean Paul, with her family in France.

Quite often, as it turned out. I listened as she rumbled from the old house in the shadow of the Rockies - cussing and muttering as she did - and she made her way back to the phone breathlessly. She rambled on for a minute about this nephew and that good for nothing cousin, and I wrote as she dictated names and addresses and telephone numbers of family all over northern France. She offered to call Jean Paul the next day, and I gave her my sat-phone number to pass along. I rarely used the thing, the cost per call was exorbitant, but I thought the situation warranted it. I caught her up on the trip across, and she told me Liz had been calling two times a day for the past three weeks. Mom said Liz was upset about something.

That seemed odd.

After I hung up from talking to Mom, I fished out the letters Liz and Lisa had written. I hadn't opened them. Frankly, I didn't want to.

I opened Liz's letter. Call me! she wrote, and her words were underlined insistently.

I opened Lisa's first letter.

She loved me, she wrote in two pages of parsed legalese. And she was pregnant.

Then her second letter. Please come back for me!

____________________________________

I didn't know what to think.

I looked at my watch. Almost midnight here in the chilly coastal fog; that would make it seven in the evening back in Carolina. I could hear cicada buzzing away in pecan trees when that thought rolled over me, and soon the heavy brackish air of the Ashley River filled my senses. I just as quickly thought of Lisa and her pulsing need, and in an instant we were on the boat again, making frenzied love after she had fixed me breakfast that fated night. I could see her face, her inextinguishable need for connection, her fine breasts heaving as she thrashed away in the clutches of her abandon.

I called the restaurant's number, asked for Liz, and waited impatiently while she came to the phone.

"Tom? Tom, is that you?"

"None other, kiddo."

"Where are you? Did you make it to England, or France?"

"I'm on the coast, in Normandy. I picked up your letter today, and talked to Mom. What's on your mind?"

"Tom, oh Tom! I don't know where to begin! Dad's got prostrate cancer, it's advanced, has moved up into his spine."

"Oh. Sorry to hear that, Liz. Really. How's your mom taking it?"

"And Tom, that lawyer of yours is pregnant. She's been telling people you're the father, and that you skipped town when you found out. Also, I heard from someone who knows her well that someone else might be the father. Someone named Drew."

Well, what can I tell you? That's life in the big city.

"OK Liz, thanks for the heads-up. How are you doing?"

"Tom? I miss you terribly. I want us to be together again, and I don't care what it takes. I love you more than anything in the world."

What was this? The second act in her play? I couldn't think of anything to say, so I remained quiet for a while - while the fog wrapped it's arms around me. Such was my need . . .

"Tom? You there?"

"I am indeed."

"Well?"

"Well, what?"

"I see. OK, Tom. I wish you the best." Her voice was breaking up, I could hear tears welling up, then the line went dead.

I hung up the phone, stood in the damp air for a long time. My eyes were blinded by the dingy fluorescent light in the booth; between the light and the fog I couldn't make out anything around me. It was like I was floating in milky space. I could hear the river in the distance, but there was no way I could pinpoint the direction.

I thought about Liz for a moment, and her father. I remembered our wedding day, when her father and mine, both more than three sheets to the wind, had danced together while our mothers egged them on. My father. Lung cancer. And now that link to the past would be gone. Another sentinel gone.

What Liz said about Lisa seemed to me simply incredible; something in my gut said if Lisa was pregnant, it had to be mine. And I couldn't believe Lisa would spread a rumor so vile about me - or anyone else, for that matter. I just didn't think she had that kind of meanness in her.

So, I stood there in the fog wondering if I should call Lisa. I looked at my watch. Again. Ran a couple of fingers through my damp hair, looked at water on my fingers glistening in the light. 

I picked up the phone, punched in the interminable string of international calling codes, credit card numbers, and telephone numbers. The first ring caught me off-guard. I thought about hanging up. Second ring. I'm about to hang up when someone on the other end picks up the phone.

"Hello?"

"Lisa?"

"Tom?"

"I got your letter."

Now it was someone else's time to be quiet, to keep someone else guessing.

"I'm sorry, Tom. I guess I should have been more careful."

"Well, it takes two to tango, darlin'. By the way. Who's Drew?"

A long silence followed that question. Then the line went dead.

____________________________________

I called Mom the next morning. Turned out the whole herd of relatives still lived on the coast near Deaville, in the little village of Hennequeville, which is just down the beach a bit from Le Havre. I always marveled at Mom's journey as a young woman from the Norman coast to Southwest Colorado. It was the stuff of legend.

It's a long story, but not uninteresting.

Dad's B-17 got shot up over Germany in early 1944, and he almost managed to get the bird back to the English Channel before it came apart on him. The crew had bailed-out all over northern France, and he jumped ship before fire engulfed the entire plane. He came down in thick forest just a few hundred yards from the beach, breaking his ankle in a tree as he did. A farmer - and his future father - pulled him from that tree before a German patrol found him, and well, the rest is, as they say, History with a capital H. 

You couldn't tell a farmer's daughter joke around dad without risking a serious pop in the mouth. He worshipped Mom - and her family - did until the day he died.

"You know, Tom," I heard her saying, "if you're going up to see family, I'd love to come. I haven't seen Jean and Marie for years, and I'd love to see them again."

Hmm, this was beginning to take on hues of a major family get together.

"Mom, do you feel up to the trip?"

"Oh, silly boy. Of course I do. How is the weather there now?"

I was sitting in the cockpit, talking on the hideously expensive sat-phone, and I looked around at the lush trees and ancient buildings all around me. It was so beautiful outside that it took my breath away.

"Oh, mom, it's beautiful here right now. I think you should come, in fact, I insist on it! I can book you a flight right now if you want me to."

"Oh, Tommy! That would be so nice, so nice to see our family again. Yes! Let's do it!"

"OK, Mom. I'll call you in a bit. Start packing, and would you call Jean Paul? Tell him I'm tied up at the quay in Caudebec-en-Caux."

"I did, Tom. He said you should go see the little chapel there, up the hill."

"I will Mom. Talk to you in a little while."

__________________________________

Later that afternoon I was working down below, in the galley as I recall, when I heard someone calling my name and a knocking on the side of the boat.

"Tom! Tom! Are you there, Tom!" 

I knew that voice, that unmistakably cultured physician's voice. It had to be Jean-Paul. My cousin, Jean-Paul Dumas. I hadn't seen him in more than ten years; and he had always been a rascal. He was brilliant and women simply stared at him when he came into a room - he had eyes that seemed to be express pure empathy - and everyone - everyone - seemed to gravitate toward him. We had all of us - Liz included - come over for his wedding in the early nineties. He had married an American woman - irony of ironies - the insufferably intelligent and unbelievably gorgeous Marie-Suzanne Sommers. She was a career diplomat at the U S Embassy in Paris, and a lawyer by training. 

I popped up the companionway to see Jean Paul rubbing his hands along the boat's teak cap-rail.

"Tom. She's beautiful. I read your book, but I had no idea."

"Thanks, JP. How ya doing?"

He stopped rubbing the wood long enough to look up at me, then spoke.

"Not so good. Marie and I are, I think you say, in Splitsville. Getting a divorce."

I think that was my cue to be empathetic.

"What's happened, Jean? I can't believe it!"

"Oh, this mess in Iraq. It has caused us much tension. Here in France, and in our house."

Yes, I could see that. Jean Paul was about as liberal a human being as one could find, anywhere, whereas Marie had always been a bit of a hawk if you scratched beneath her Radcliffe exterior a little too deeply. Perhaps it had always been inevitable. But this Iraq mess, as JP called it, had taken it's toll on relations in very unpredictable ways.

"Sorry to hear that, Jean Paul. Anything I can do?"

"You? No, dear Tom! But have you been to the chapel yet, up the hill?"

"No, not yet."

"Well, put some shoes on. Let's go!"

We walked through the little village for about ten minutes, then stood looking up at a beautiful gothic church. Jean Paul told me all about the building, its origins and significance, and as we walked inside he crossed himself and said a quiet prayer. I had forgotten this, this piety so remote from the America I grew up in, and the simple act startled me with it's significance. 

The light in this part of the world is so pure, yet so pink; it suffuses the stone buildings of the region with an otherworldly quality that really must be seen to be appreciated, and all this came together in a blinding moment of insight as I took in the beauty of the gothic interior. I was, in a very real way, a part of this land - just as much as I was an American. In that instant I felt again just what had suddenly intruded only two days ago. This sense of being "home". This part of France, unlike so many of the places Liz and I had visited during the last five years of our marriage, was a part of me in startlingly intimate ways. My mother was from here, as was her family. They had lived in the region for as long as records had been kept in the village halls and churches; chapels and cathedrals around the region recorded dates of marriages and baptisms of family members back to the twelfth century, and that history was a part of - me. Jean Paul was a part of - me! These limestone cliffs, the soil from which all life sprang, all were a tangible part of what had created - me - and the resonance of that insight penetrated my soul as we walked about in that hallowed space.

It was a pure moment, to have roamed so far and to realize I had - at least in part - found what I had been so desperately looking for, and for so long.

Jean Paul and I walked back to the quay, and there looked out on the Seine and the barge traffic that made its way to and from Paris - and on out into the world - as it had for hundreds of years. We had a coffee, talked about Iraq and Darfur, and of Jean Paul's recent decision to rejoin Médecins Sans Frontières and return to volunteer medicine in Africa.

"You should come to the house tonight," he told me. "Some physicians that are just returning from six months in Darfur will be talking to some of us, sharing insights on new medicines. It might be boring, but you might learn something, too. It will only take an hour to make the drive, and I can bring you back later tonight."

We asked about leaving the boat again for the night, and the once surly harbormaster said he would look after the boat. He said he knew Jean Paul, and now knowing my relation to him I was suddenly a member of the family, so to speak, in more ways than one. I told him when I would be back, and he told me not to worry about the boat.

We crossed the Seine in Jean Paul's little silver Citroen and drove along winding country lanes overgrown with riotously verdant trees until we arrived at Mom's family's ancestral home. I wasn't a huge chateau, but neither was it a farmers shack, and there was that mesmerizing view down to the English Channel through trees and gardens. We arrived in time for dinner in the village, then walked back to the house. Cars full of chattering physicians began arriving not a half hour later.

I do speak a bit of french - my mother insisted that I speak at least enough to get by here - but my medical vocabulary was woefully inadequate to the animated discussions that filled the house that night. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to run into a couple Liz and I had encountered in Moorea. Small world, indeed. Luc and Claire Menton were amazing sailors, having ventured from Deauville to Tahiti - via Cape Horn - in an engine-less 28-foot sailboat. We caught up with each other's progress - including my divorce, to which they expressed sorrow - and they were more than interested in my plans to travel through the canals down to Marseilles. 

"We have never done this journey," Luc told me during one of the breaks in the medical presentations. "Would you mind some company, perhaps, for part of the trip?" I knew the portion on the Rhone - from Lyon south, would be a monotonous river journey, but the segments between Paris and Lyon were arduous, with many locks to be negotiated. A couple of extra helping hands would be appreciated, and I told them so. Luc looked at Claire, gave her a knowing nod, and we exchanged phone numbers, and he looked at mine suspiciously.




The Memory of Place Ch. 02



"Is this an American number, or a satellite number?" he asked.

"Satellite," I advised.

"You really must get a local number. Coverage is excellent and cheap through this organization. I can arrange for you to get one in Paris." I thanked Luc, said I'd take him up on the offer and he smiled, satisfied now that he had returned a favor.

I laid eyes on Madeleine Lebeq for the first time in my life not an hour later.

Actually, Luc introduced me to her. Fate turned that evening on my meeting Luc and Claire almost three years earlier in a lagoon in the South Pacific. When I think back on the circumstances, it really was breathtaking.

And to be exact, she was introduced to me as Doctor Madeleine Lebeq. She was a physician, a specialist in infectious diseases who had vast experience in tropical medicine accumulated in over fifteen years of volunteer work with Médecins Sans Frontières, and I could not have conjured up a more opposite number to Liz if I had worked on it for years.

Where Liz was tall and willowy, Madeleine is short and looks purpose built to work in small, confined spaces. While Liz was known best for her almost obtuse loquaciousness, Madeleine is studious, quiet to the point of being regarded as snobby, and rarely speaks unless addressed first - unless she is giving a lecture on medicine somewhere. Liz, athletic, a great swimmer; Madeleine intellectually dexterous, and had never been swimming in her life, at least not until she met me, and not under the best of circumstances.

Anyway, Madeleine had made her way over to talk to Claire, and Luc introduced us. I had been talking to Jean Paul when Luc first tried to get my attention; it was Jjean Paul who tugged on my elbow and asked me to turn around. 

I turned to Luc, caught on that he was trying to make an introduction, but I almost didn't see Madeleine. She was caught in the ebb and flow of the meeting, and it just has to be driven in here that she is not at all tall, and that she does not stand out in a crowd. Indeed, I'd have said when I first laid eyes on her that she had gone out of the way to be as unobtrusive as possible. And I'd have been wrong. Madeleine simply didn't give a damn what she wore, never had, and probably never will.

Anyway, she was wearing a teal colored turtleneck sweater and taupe gabardine slacks; her hair is auburn, a little to the reddish side if you ask me. No makeup whatsoever. And she had the most stunning eyes I'd ever seen in my life. Penetrating, intelligent eyes, the deepest blue-gray I've ever seen. I was a good foot taller than she, and I looked down at her while Luc tried to cover for my less than stellar attentiveness. After a minute she moved off to join another conversation, and I watched as she walked away with a lump in my throat.

I rejoined Jean Paul and our conversation about Mom's arrival two days hence, and we confirmed plans to drive together to Charles De Gaulle to pick her up and take her to lunch at Le Grand Vefour. We continued to talk about Marie and the problem of divorce in general when I felt a tug on my shirt-sleeve and turned to see Madeleine Lebeq.

"I understand that you are a sailor, like Luc. I would like to learn, but never have had the time. Could you teach me?"

"Madeleine! Do you know this is the world famous sailor Thomas Deaton? Of course he can't teach you - he's too busy!"

"Oh, knock it off, would you, JP?!"

"So, you are a famous sailor, Thomas?"

"No, not in the least. Jean Paul likes to make me look like an idiot sometimes, if you know what I mean."

"Now, now, Tom. Why would I do that when you are so accomplished at doing that on your own?" I threw a pointed glance at Jean Paul, then turned to Madeleine.

"What do you have in mind? I'm not really going to be sailing until I get down to Marseilles, perhaps in August or September."

"What are you doing now. Luc said you were on your boat. I assumed here in Deauville."

"Not anymore, Doctor. I'm on the Seine now, the mast is down. I'm motoring across France, through the canals. Then I will put the mast back up, in Marseilles, and move on."

"Where? Where exactly do you plan to move on to?"

"I haven't decided yet. To Greece, perhaps, or maybe to Corisca. Maybe both. Who knows?"

"That sounds . . . I don't know . . . odd, yet nice. To not know where one is going . . . to just go. I sounds almost like heaven. You are very lucky. So?" she added, "you wrote a book."

"Ah, yes, my wife and I did. About two years ago, about sailing through the South Pacific."

"You are married?"

"No, like all Americans, I'm divorced."

"Indeed. Most of the men in this room are from France, and most are divorced. Are all Americans so self-deprecating?"

"Yes, Ma'am. It's our defining characteristic."

"I see," she said. And there it was, the beginnings of a smile. Just a hint, really, the faintest echo of a smile touched the corners of her lips. "So. Perhaps I could join Luc and Claire for a part of your journey? Would that be good for you?"

Frankly, I didn't know if it would be good or not, but something in those eyes had me by the short hairs. I mean, they were looking right into the depths of my soul and my heart was pounding. I could see that her practiced eye was taking all that in, and that she was not unamused.

"I would be honored to have you, Doctor." So said I, the humble world traveler expert sailor, in my most urbane middle school French.

"Ah. I hope you sail better than you speak our language, Mister Thomas Deaton." And with that she walked away. I think then I remembered to breath again. Jean Paul, bless his heart, didn't laugh at me.

___________________________________

JP and I made the quick drive to Paris and picked up Mom on the anointed day, and had our ritual lunch at the Vefour; there's something inherently intoxicating about eating in a three hundred year old restaurant that used to be one of Napoleon's hangouts. Anyway, the grub was good and Mom wasn't too jet-lagged, so we ate and reminisced and commiserated on the prevalence of divorce in the post-Tammy Faye Baker era. We drove back to Deauville and put Mom to bed by mid-afternoon; jet lag finally hit her and she slept for almost twenty hours. Jean Paul cobbled together a somewhat massive family get-together for the coming weekend - even Marie Suzanne was coming - and Mom wanted to be rested for the affair.

I - for my part - wanted to get to the bottom of this nonsense with Lisa back in Charleston. It had begun to weigh heavily on my mind. The idea of becoming a parent with Lisa was disconcerting, to say the least, but the somewhat odd twist Liz had tossed out about a possible third party being involved only served to make me terribly ill at ease. I was hoping the matter could be settled over the phone, but unsure how to proceed after my last attempt to talk to Lisa had ended so ambiguously. Something really smelled about the whole situation.

So, while I was sitting on the patio behind JP's house, looking out over the garden at the English Channel, I decided to call Liz.

She was at the restaurant, working in the back office when I called that afternoon. I got right to the point. I asked her what she knew about Lisa and this alleged third party - this Drew - whoever he might be.

"Tom, I don't like all this third-party stuff any more than you do. I'm just hearing things, you know?"

"Well, when I called her after I talked with you the other night she sounded fragile, but when I asked "who's Drew?" she hung up the phone. I think, well, I'm a bit flummoxed, you know what I mean? Bad enough she's claiming to be pregnant, but to me the situation appears anything but clear. Something's not right."

"Yes, I think so too, Tom. He's supposed to be a guy she's been seeing off and on for a couple of years. Drew Nicholson's his name, by the way. They almost got engaged a while back, too; at least that's the rumor going 'round now. Maybe high school sweethearts, or something like that, but now I'm hearing that he's the one who ran off as soon as he heard about the baby. That would've made her nervous, you know, but I can't believe an attorney would try to pull something like this, make a false allegation like this. It's just too bizarre."

"You got that right, kiddo."

"You know, Tom, I never liked it when you called me 'kiddo'; you think we could do without that from now on."

"I'll try, Liz. Old habits die hardest, you know? What do you think I should do, by the way?"

"I don't know, Tom, really I don't. Hire a P.I. maybe, or just confront her . . . well, that probably wouldn't accomplish much over the telephone. But it's suspicious she hung up on you, that's for sure. Anything else going on over there?"

"Mom flew over; we're having a family get together at JPs house this weekend."

"Oh, that ought to be lovely this time of year. I wish I could make it. How are Jean Paul and Marie doing?"

"Uh, getting a divorce, or at least thinking about it."

"Oh, no, Tom! That's so, that's such bad news. What's wrong with this world? Nothing is permanent anymore."

I actually thought that was an odd comment coming from her. Really ironic, as a matter of fact. I politely kept my mouth shut. The silence stretched out for a moment longer . . .

"Well, I wish I could be there anyway. I love those people," she said.

"Oh, remember Luc and Claire from Moorea?" I shot back, wanting to lighten the mood a bit. "I ran into them at JPs a couple nights ago. Small world, huh?"

"Oh, my, yes. I remember Luc. What a great ass that guy had!"

"LIZ!" Just when you think you understand women they hit you with something like this.

"Oh, Tom, just kidding. How are they doing, anyway?"

I filled her in on the rest, leaving out talk of Luc and Claire joining me on the river this summer, and I didn't mention Madeleine Lebeq, either. When it's over, it's over. No reason to rub salt in that wound any longer. I thanked her for the info and that was that. Cordial. No bullshit, no hysterics. Just like old friends. So goddamn weird!

I sat looking out on the garden as the sun fell closer to the western horizon, and resolved to be nicer to Liz in the future. Then I called Lisa.

_______________________________________

"Mullins and Associates," the voice on the other end sang out. Associates? I thought. Who was she trying to fool?

"Lisa?"

"Tom, is that you?"

"It is indeed."

"I'm sorry about the other night."

"Listen, Lisa, I want to get to the point here; I just want to know what Drew Nicholson has to do with this. Is that asking too much?"

"No, Tom, it's not. And you have every right to be angry with me."

"I do? So, this pregnancy is not related to anything you and I - to what we did? The baby isn't mine?"

"Correct on both counts, Mr Deaton."

"So, well, excuse me, but why? Why all the calls and letters. I've heard he ran off. Is that the score?"

"Yes."

"I'll be damned."

"I doubt that, Tom. I might be. But not you. I treated you poorly, and I'm sorry." The line went dead again. 

This was about the weirdest string of conversations I'd ever had in my life. I wanted to get well and truly drunk. I wondered if JP had any rum in the house. He was French, after all. I doubted he even knew what rum was.

Boy, was I wrong about that.

_______________________________

We drove Mom back to the airport a week later. She was looking frail, and was terribly lonely without Dad. She mentioned selling the ranch back in Colorado, asked me if I wanted the place when she passed on, and I told her that no, my ways were pretty well set now. I'd live aboard until it was my turn to check out. Then she tossed out a bombshell.

"I'm thinking about moving back here, Tom. To be with family." I could see Jean Paul looking nervously out of the corner of his eye at Mom. He nearly lost control of his little Citroen.

"Oh?" I said, ever a master of understatement.

"There's no one, no family in the States for me, Thomas." Uh-oh. Whenever she uses Thomas I know she's like a tick all dug in. She's ready for a fight.

"You know, Mom, if it's what you want to do, I'm all for it." That took the wind out of her sails! She actually looked disappointed. Women!

"What about you? Where are you going to settle, Thomas?"

"Wherever the anchor drops longest, Mom." She shook her head at that.

"No children. Such a waste." Now that I didn't expect.

"Well, Mom, you never can tell about these things."

"Oh, that's a wonderful thought. My grandchildren being born on a sailboat, being raised like gypsies."

"Ce la guerre, Momma." Jean Paul looked as if he was going to explode when he heard that one. He was laughing so hard he almost missed his exit for the airport. We'd all been drinking rum the past few nights. I've heard that hangovers from rum are the worst ones. Maybe that was behind all this nonsense about children, and moving.

_________________________________

Two days later I slipped my lines from the municipal quay in Caudebec-en-Caux and motored upriver against the current toward Paris. As much as I wanted to stop in Rouen and visit the cathedral there, I resisted the impulse; the docks there were a mess, and I really wanted to move on towards the big city. Rolling hills rich with trees and fertile farmland gave way to a broad expanse of generic industrial landscape over the next three days, and too soon aquaTarkus and I were enfolded in the rich fabric of Paris. I was early for my reservation at the "marina", but the manager found me a temporary spot to tie up near Le Petit Palais, right under the Pont Alexandre. I could see the Eiffel Tower right off the stern, and I think about two million gawking tourists walked by the boat that first hour alone. I don't think many of them could believe their eyes.

Right there on the banks of the Seine - smack-dab in the middle of Paris - was a sailboat flying an American flag, hailing from Newport Beach, California. My bare feet were propped up on the cockpit coaming, and I was munching on Reese's peanut butter cups while I finished rereading Conroy's Beach Music. All in all, I'm sure I made a most unusual sight. 

Ce la guerre, indeed!

_________________________________

I met Luc the next morning and we walked a block or two from the hospital he and Claire were working at to have lunch. We talked about the proposed journey down the Seine toward the first canal, and the rigorous trip to Lyon that would follow. The more I talked about the journey, the more poor Luc got worked-up about making some of the trip. By the time lunch was over he wanted to make the entire trip! Clearly I'd have to lay on more rum if that turned out to be the case . . .

He gave me directions to go pick up a cell phone that would work particularly well in rural France, and that would be cheap as hell, to boot. And toward the end of lunch, he asked me what I thought of Madeleine Lebeq, and would I mind them coming down to the boat some time to see it. Madeleine was, or so Luc said, very interested in seeing it, and in learning to sail. 

I told Luc I liked Madeleine just fine, at least in the few minutes I'd spent with her, and that tonight would be fine. I would have drinks ready about seven. I remembered Luc could throw down rum with the best of 'em. I hoped Claire would warn Madeleine. 

Drunk sailors on the Seine! Who woulda thunk it!

_________________________________

Fashionably late, Luc and Claire arrived about seven fifteen; Madeleine would be along shortly, they said. I had laid on some cheese and crackers and had mixed up a couple of Suffering Bastards for my poor, unsuspecting friends. They sat down in the cockpit and shook there heads; the last time we had all been together - almost three years ago to the day - we had been sitting in Cook's Inlet, surely one of the most beautiful lagoons in the world, deep in French Polynesia. The incongruity of the scene was startling to each of us, as memory was juxtaposed against the reality of our surroundings, bound together as one in the modest confines of my boat's cockpit. I know it's hard to describe, let alone relate to the immediacy of the moment, but boats have a way of transporting much more than the physical; our souls' had been rejoined by the memory of place.

Luc tossed down his drink in the spirit of the moment and asked for another one. Against my better judgement, I demurred and fixed him another. By the by, if you've never had a Suffering Bastard, head to the nearest Trader Vics and be prepared for the unexpected. You've been warned. Luc finished his second while Claire and I cautiously sipped away on our first, and I looked on utterly amazed while Luc started in on hers.

Madeleine arrived and I helped her negotiate the little wooden steps up onto deck. The girl had run out to buy a pair of boat shoes after work, she said, and I complemented her on her choice as I helped her duck into the cockpit. The little teak table attached to the wheel was set up, and she marveled at the varnish on it. I had to bite my tongue; Liz had probably spent a week layering twenty coats of varnish onto that table little more than a year ago. She had taken such pride in her varnish work. So many memories crammed into such an impossibly small space!

I fixed a Bastard for Madeleine and she flinched when she sniffed the drink, and took a tentative sip at the thing. Her eyes went wide and a little shiver ran up her body. Luc commented that 'this was a real sailor's drink' and the poor thing gamely took a long pull on her drink. One thing about Bastards: they hit hard but get real smooth after about three or four good pulls. After that - look out! Luc was already three sheets to the wind and going for broke, Claire looked on with a wry eye at her husband, and Madeleine - on hearing that what was in her hand was in fact an honest to God real sailor's concoction - gamely tossed her drink down in one fell swoop.

I thought the girl was going to have a seizure right then and there!

But mon Dieu, she was up for another one!

"Listen, I know we've just met and all, but could I get you an Evian, or perhaps some Perrier?"

"Oh no, please, I'd like another one of those!"

It's fair to say that I knew where this was going to end. I mixed the next round with a lot more juice - which led to choruses of derision - and while I remixed the drinks to a nice healthy octane rating equal to perhaps something akin to jet fuel, I asked them if they'd like to go out to dinner.

"Let's whip something up here!" Madeleine said. "I can't believe you can cook on a boat!"

That, ladies and gentlemen, was the wrong thing to say to both Claire and your modest author. Quicker than you could say 'butter my muffin' we were down below whipping up all kinds of nonsense, and by midnight we had dispelled any deluded notions of inferiority that poor, demented Madeleine might have harbored about galley facilities on yachts.

I'm not saying that having had six Suffering Bastards clouded the woman's judgement. No, not at all. On the contrary, I'm sure she was quite sober after diving into the Seine - buck naked, mind you - while a tour boat motored by, it's spotlight trained on her bare ass while she sputtered and screamed like a drowning child. Hadn't she mentioned she didn't know how to swim?

Thus are our memories made.

_________________________________

In due course, Luc and Claire helped me fish Madeleine from the river, and we dried her body and tears and we consoled her while she ranted about being (almost) forty and not having learned how to swim. It was official, she declared to us all in front of God and three hundred laughing tourists, 'I am going to take swimming lessons! starting tomorrow! so help me God!' or words to that effect. I think the fact that she was stark naked on the deck of a sailboat in the middle of Paris had something to do with the solemnity of her oath. But maybe that's just me.




The Memory of Place Ch. 02



Ah! We had also cleared up one other item of vital importance. Claire and I could cook a mean Gran Marnier souffle - even if we were on a Goddamned sailboat!

_________________________________

I doubt if it would surprise you to learn that within a week Madeleine and I were going out with one another almost every night. She belonged to a tennis club that had a very nice swimming pool, and I cheered her on while she took lessons in the evening. We would follow that on most nights with her beating me at tennis (and by humiliating margins, too), then we would head out and grab a quick bite before returning to the boat for some serious exercise. It was all very nice. Paris is like that. Nice. Of course, there were riots in the suburbs, almost unbearable heat as June droned along and old people were dropping like flies, and there was Madeleine's looming commitment to return to Darfur in September for another three month stint. But, like most people in Europe, Luc, Claire, and Madeleine were scheduled to take their six week vacation in July and early August. Accordingly, I planned to take off from Paris and putter along slowly for a couple of days until they could join me for the rough passage through the canals toward Lyon.

That was when Jean Paul called to tell me that Mom had died.

_________________________________

Sitting in an Air France 747 flying over the Atlantic, I watched as hundreds of miles of ocean passed underneath in what felt like the blink of an eye; those miles are hard won in a sailboat, of course, and I thought about that for a while. Perhaps that seems out of place, given the circumstance, so perhaps I'd better explain. 

Jean Paul was with me that morning, and we sat quietly as the jet arced across the Atlantic towards America, and I suppose we were lost in all manner of thought. I was sitting by a window on the left side of the plane, looking down at the sea as time reeled by so quickly, and I hurt so badly inside at my mother's passing that it left me feeling cold and empty. The passage of time; I guess that's what was really on my mind. Not the passage of miles.

We had put her on this very same flight not two weeks ago - it felt like only hours ago - and I reached into memory to remember her face as she looked at me that last time, and I felt her cheek on mine as she kissed me. Had she sat looking out this same window, I wondered? What had she thought about on that hideously long flight back to Denver. Alone. Moving back to France, certainly. Grandchildren? Probably. In fact, I supposed that was a certainty. I didn't have to wonder about her feelings about my decision to live aboard: that much she had made abundantly clear over the past few years.

No, as the jet slipped through time I wondered what she had learned in her life. Why had she loved my father so fiercely? How did she make the transition from France to Colorado? What had she left undone at the end of her life? What were her regrets, what had she never done that she wanted to?

Why had I never taken the time to ask her these questions? Why do sons take their mother's love so pitifully for granted?

_________________________________

Mom left directions - explicit directions, really - on what to do with her remains. They were on the kitchen table, along with a note from her attorney to call when we got in. The first thing I did, after JP and I got settled in, was to read her last thoughts.

There was a tree on the estate in Hennequeville. She had drawn a map, as a matter of fact, that revealed in remarkable detail just where to find their tree. It was the tree where her father had found my father, dangling upside down in his parachute harness late one February afternoon in 1944, and it was here that she wanted her body - and my father's - to intermingle one last time. As stardust, perhaps, but joined in the soil of her France one last time and for all eternity. I smiled as I read her directions to find the tree, remembering our walks there when I was so small she had to carry me most of the way. Yes, we all knew where the tree was, where the initials Dad have carved into the stately old oak were, even the very branch where he had become lodged, and his ankle had snapped. It was a part of our mythology now, a part of our family's community of memories. A part of our memory of place.

Mom had spelled exactly which verses from which books she wanted read, and what food to serve in the garden later that day. I think she left the wine to our discretion, or perhaps I lost that page in my connivance. I'm not sure anymore. She specified who she wanted to attend, and who should not be invited, and it was then I noticed that she had scribbled these notes down two nights before she passed on.

She had known. Known what was coming.

And she was ready.

Mom also wanted Liz and Marie to be at the treeside service. If Mom had been there as I read that, she would have caught an earful. I read this request to myself once again, then again - aloud - for my cousins benefit . . .

"Mon Dieu, mon Dieu," Jean Paul muttered as he listened to me read that passage. "I never knew she had it in her to be so . . . I don't know . . . so adroit? Is that the word I search for?"

All I could do was laugh. I think JP thought me a little crazy that evening as he watched me laughing. Laughing until I cried. 

And there wasn't a drop of rum in the house.

_________________________________

And Liz came, bless her heart. I think the audacity of my mother's last wish wasn't lost on her, too, but she came anyway. We walked the Norman beaches one last time together, Liz and I, and even held hands for a while as we remembered how things had once been, how life had been special once, between us. But she seemed like a different person now, like she was alien to my personal landscape - now decidedly out of place. She no longer wanted a reconciliation. I think she sought redemption in my Mother's rest. 

Madeleine and Claire were there, as well. Luc was engaged with a lecture and could not make it, but I think he had the presence of mind to tell Madeleine more about Liz and the circumstances of her being there than I had the stomach for. And Madeleine was amazing. She laid back, avoided playing the possessive's hand and gave Liz and I the space we needed to say this last goodbye.

Family was there, all of our family. And this was my family now, this was where I belonged in that most spiritual sense. If thoughts live in the shadows of our senses, then surely with that realization I had found that peace which had eluded me for so long.

Chapter Three forthcoming



The Memory of Place Ch. 03



Jean Paul and I drove back to Paris after we said our final goodbyes to Mom, and we dropped Liz off at de Gaulle for her flight home on our way back to aquaTarkus. I was quiet on the drive into Paris, I had nothing to say, really. We helped Liz with her bags, made sure the Skycap put the right tag on it, kissed her on the cheek and she was gone.

I felt empty inside. Empty in ways I never had before. As bad as it had been when Dad passed away, this was worse. I wished then that I had brothers and sisters, and realized that I had always relied on Liz’s family to fill that role. Now that too was gone. In it’s place I had a mega-family of people I’d met once or twice before, but who, really, were strangers. Well, not Jean Paul. The boy could put down rum when it came right down to it, and that made him the best kind of family, in my book, anyway.

We had grown close the past week. Mom was JPs last link to his parents, and he felt her loss acutely, too. I think we needed each other more now than we felt comfortable talking about.

aquaTarkus was now moored in a sliver-like marina about three hundred yards south of the Ile Saint-Louis in a little slip of water that ran from the Seine to the Place de la Bastille. I had never been in any place quite like it before in my life. There she was, my home for so many years now berthed right in the middle of a slender park in the center of Paris. Kids in strollers rolled by, dogs on leashes walked by the most eclectic people I’d ever seen ambled along the walk above my home at all hours of the night and day. With a ten minute walk I could sit by Notre Dame Cathedral or hop a train at the Gare de Lyon. I could take in an opera or walk to any number of world class restaurants.

Me?

I’d found an eminently practical fellow who had a rolling crepe stand, and Gaston made the best crepes I’d ever had in my life right there out in the open about fifty yards from the boat. Within a few days of my return from the coast we were on a first-name basis.

Madeleine and I resumed our affair, as well.

We continued to go swimming at least to or three times a week; she continued to whip my ass at tennis at least as often, though I was improving. With the change in plans necessitated by Mom’s passing, it now looked as though Madeleine - along with Luc and Claire - would depart Paris with me, and we decided to make a mad dash for Marseilles so we could all experience the entire passage together.

Actually, mad dash is a bit off. The trip could be made in as little as seventeen or eighteen day; we had six weeks. The only possible bugaboo was the intense heat and the possibility that drought conditions could lower water levels enough to close some of the routes. I didn’t have air conditioning on aquaTarkus, had never needed it, but France was in the deathgrips of a brutal heatwave. I had contacted a sailmaker in Le Havre in May and had an awning made that would at least keep the sun off most of the living spaces, and when that simple addition arrived I sat on-deck in the marina - in the middle of Paris - and rigged-up the most fantastic looking contraption I’d ever seen. My new awning looked like something out of The Arabian Nights. It was huge, it was geometric, it was . . .

“My God in heaven, Thomas! What is that thing?!”

I turned to look up at Madeleine and Jean Paul standing up on the walkway above me. Such is life in a marina. You get used to it . . .

“Just think of it as an umbrella. For the sun.” I looked up at them and smiled, and tried to sound reasonably sure of myself as I did so, but not having seen my new addition from their vantage I now guessed that the thing must look like a total monstrosity.

“Ah! Of course!” Jean Paul said. “If you say so, Thomas.”

“Mon Dieu!” said my dearest Madeleine, and I heard her muttering something off color to JP about the thing looking more like a zeppelin than an umbrella, and soon they joined me down below for a nice refreshing Suffering Bastard. Actually, this was JPs first introduction to the lethal concoction, and he rolled his eyes after taking his first good pull from the drink.

“My, my . . .” was all he managed to get out before Madeleine and I broke out laughing. “Refreshing . . .” he got out after his second tentative sip. Then he was off to the races. Madeleine set about whipping up dinner while JP and I finished setting up and taking down the awning, and JP kept popping down Bastards until he was looking like he was seasick, then he was down for the count. I got him down into the guest stateroom and got him situated, then returned to help Madeleine in the galley.

It was amazing to me how well she had acclimated to life on board, but then I remembered her long stints with MSF in Darfur and Somolia, and Chad and Uganda. She wasn’t your run of the mill department store addicted American girl, that’s for sure, but there was something else about her experiences that drove her resilient outlook. I wasn’t sure what it was yet, and wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but by now I knew she was one in a million. As she cooked dinner I looked at her again and again. I couldn’t contemplate life without her now . . .

I helped carry dinner up into the cockpit and we sat and ate as the sun slipped behind the canyon of buildings that surrounded us. A simple omelet, some summer squash, and a nice cool wine . . . I looked up at all the folks strolling by on their way to dinner or the opera and I wouldn’t have traded anything for this moment.

I thought about marriage again as I picked at my food. I don’t know, maybe that’s just what men do . . . feel an overwhelming attraction and act on it. Was I ready to even think about marriage again? I had felt that impulse with Lisa Mullins as we sat eating shrimp and grits in the sun. I knew it was a juvenile reaction, but it was there. And it had felt all too real. And now, here it was again. 

Why yearn for such connection? Was it the only way to feel so aboriginally bound - one soul to another?

I took a sip of wine, looked up at Madeleine. She was lost in thought, watching people move in the twilight dance of water and city; she looked calm, serene, almost contented as she drank her wine. Lights reflected off the water, and washing over her the reflections formed quiet nocturnes in my mind. 

We made love that night like we were the last human beings on earth who understood the severity of our desire for one another.

We joined our struggle in the forepeak, and with the hatch above us open to moon and stars we rode through the night, our joyous cries I’m sure more than entertaining to the couples who strolled by above.

___________________________________

It’s an odd thing, really, to pull out of a marina in the middle of a city and motor off under bridges heavy with trains and cars. Some of the neighbors I’d shared this magic space with waved as the four of us puttered away slowly toward the Seine, and we instinctively ducked when a train full of people rumbled overhead. Too soon it seemed we transited the three overpasses that lay between us and the open river, and we were in a sense free of the city. We turned to port as we cleared the last overpass and looked upon a waterscape full of tour boats and barge traffic; I could just make out Notre Dame aft of us before it slipped behind a row of buildings, and I eased the throttle forward to work our way more fully into the current.

What can I say here? Give you a travelogue? A play by play commentary of our world as we slipped from urban cityscape to rolling pastures where horses grazed on the banks of a watery ribbon as we drifted by? We became, I soon knew, just one more part of a world that seemed to have stopped, where time was held in abeyance, and each of us on aquaTarkus seemed very much aware that this journey was a transformation.

Aren’t all journeys transformations. Maybe that’s Conrad talking, but the feeling was there . . . the feeling that we were a changing - or were we being changed? - by the landscape as we reeled by on our cellophane ribbon. 

What can I say about motoring into a river’s current for hour after hour, day after day, then into locks that lift you a few feet at a time to higher elevations, into cooler waters and softer airs that seem to hold you in a kind embrace. We motored along waterways barely wider than our boat, the banks we passed lined with trees that grew up and over the way ahead so that at times it looked as though we were driving down the center aisle of a vast cathedral. Farmers walked along ancient pathways beside the water, and we waved at one another, lost in our contemplations about each other’s lives.

We cruised along like this for several days. Watching ancient worlds drift by in our waking dream, ramping alongside a town quay for lunch or dinner, walking to a farmer’s market or a bakery as we saw fit, holding this earth in our open embrace as we moved across her soul. 

Time became meaningless; I watched our wake trail away behind us and I thought the strictures of time dissolved in our passing. Luc and Claire were, I saw, as enchanted as Madeleine and I. 

One night Madeleine and I made love on deck in the moonlight. We lay together afterwards in the warm breeze, listening to swift waters race by against the hull, and we jumped when we heard a noise in the grass on the nearby bank and turned to see a huge white horse standing not five feet away. As we stared at each other it wasn’t hard to imagine that once upon a time he had been a unicorn or a dragon - so distant had that other reality become.

Days became weeks, and weeks too soon almost a month. We made Lyon, and now deep in the wide reaches of the River Rhone we tumbled southward at an alarming rate toward the Mediterranean Sea and Marseilles. We soon arrived, and at a yard the mast was reunited with the hull, and lickity-split, we were a sailboat again! With a bit more than one week left together we burst out into the blue waters of the Med and turned hard left and sailed past Marseilles toward a very special part of the coast . . . a series of small, steep-walled inlets - called Callanques - and to one in particular, the Callanque d’En Vau near the Port of Cassis. Here, though the water was quite deep, it was as clear as any swimming pool I had ever seen, and we slipped like seals from the boat into the water and dove among rocks and pulled ourselves out onto the beach and lay in the blistering sun until it was time to swim back to the boat and do something really strenuous - like eat lunch.

This kind of pleasure comes but a few times in life, I knew, and I was sorry to see our time together end. We all took a bus into Marseilles and I went to the American Express to collect my mail after taking Luc and Claire to the train station for a painful goodbye. Madeleine and I took a room for the night and I held her to my breast as tightly as I could, fearing tomorrow’s parting more than anything I could remember. I simply didn’t have words for what I felt; my feelings were oceanic - beyond simple knowing.

We walked along the quay that evening, lost to the world around us, lost to anything and everything but the simple joy we found in the touch of each others skin, the warmth and hope we found in each other’s eyes.

We ate a small dinner by the harbor and walked back to the hotel where we sat on the front steps as the moon rose overhead. I think we knew we hadn’t finished our music together, but I knew the road ahead without her by my side would be an unpleasant one.


I had no idea.

___________________________________

I’ll spare you a description of our parting the next morning. I’m not big on tears, especially when they’re mine.

I made my way back to the boat - she empty now for the first time in months - and sailed down to the Callanque de Cassis - where there is a lovely marina - and I had the boat hauled and much too long neglected maintenance begun. I remained on board, even though the boat was hard on the ground, and I worked on replacing an old braided fuel line that looked long past it’s prime.

For some reason the marina had asked for emergency contact information. Which came in handy. Do you believe in coincidence?

It was dreadfully hot, hotter than any other time I could remember that summer, and I was working down below, not drinking enough water and pushing myself way too hard when it came.

A crushing pressure in my chest. Yes. That pressure we all know and love.

I managed to crawl up into the cockpit and get a passing mechanics attention before I passed out.

___________________________________

I have no recollection of events as they transpired. A medical team took me to Cassis and thence to Marseilles. Jean Paul was contacted, and he must have called the Premier because overnight I was flown to the best cardiac hospital in Paris where a team of JPs friends went about clearing out my somewhat over-clogged plumbing. Madeleine was soon in attendance, clucking over the freshly minted zipper now right down the middle of my chest, and she chided me once again about not eating enough fruits and vegetables and drinking too much rum.

You know, fruits and vegetables are one thing, but messing with a sailor’s rum?

Come on! Cut me some slack, wouldya . . .

___________________________________

Madeleine left for Darfur about a month after my événement cardiaque. I healed nicely, or so JP said anyway, and I used the time to get caught up with business affairs back home. Getting Mom’s final affairs put to bed - the ranch sold, equities liquidated, etc. - took up most of the time that wasn’t being chewed up by truly sadistic nurses in cardiac rehab. Fortunately, my little hiccup wasn’t a really bad affair - more like a warning shot across the bow, really - but it was a warning that I took to, well, to heart. I know, I know . . .

Madeleine was due to return just in time for Christmas, and we had talked about spending the time down on the boat, so as soon as I could I planned to make my way back to the coast. And so it was that JP flew down with me in late October, and we found that the workers in the yard had done a nice job on the bottom paint and engine overhaul. The sailmaker who’d made the zeppelin, er, the sun awning, had graciously made me a new main-sail and the yard crew had put that on, too, so with a fresh autumn breeze at our backs JP and I sailed down to the Callanque d’En Vau. We dropped anchor and slipped our toes into the water.

It was unanimous! Way too cold for mere mortals to swim in, so we made a nice (healthy) salad and sat in the sun as the steep walls of the canyon kept the blustery air just offshore from working us over too badly.

“What are you going to do about Madeleine?” Jean Paul asked me in his usual delicate way.

“What am I going to do? To do? What the hell does that mean?” I shot back.

“When she heard about you, dear Thomas, and about your little heart problem, she came unglued, you know. I mean totally unglued. Mind you, this is a woman with a heart of steel, pure steel. I’ve never seen her cry before. And the things she’s seen, well, they make me cry sometime.”

“I hear you, Jean Paul. I love her. That’s all there is to say about it.”

“And?”

“And what?! Look, the ink on my divorce papers has barely had time to dry, you know what I mean?”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. Love is love. Commitment is commitment. Time is fleeting. You of all people should understand that now.”

“And don’t I just know it, my dearest friend. Thank you for reminding me.”

“And I thank you for that, Thomas. Truly. I am honored to be your friend. And as your friend, I tell you that you are full of bullshit.”

Yeah, there was no doubt about it. He was from my mother’s side of the family alright.

___________________________________

I didn’t know much about Darfur. I don’t keep up with that stuff anymore. I figure that people are going to keep killing people for any and whatever reasons they can come up with. I’ve experienced it personally in Central America, in the southwestern Pacific, and in Ireland. I’ve seen it in South Central L.A., and in Oakland. I’ve nearly been knifed in Mexico City and Panama City and New York City. Yeah, it’s usually some kind of religious gripe that sets people off, but hell, why blame God for all this nonsense. Assuming he gave us this paradise in the first place, most of the time we’ve pretty much fucked it up all by ourselves. Besides, more often that not it just comes down to somebody else wanting your stuff, and they’re willing to hurt you to take it from you.

So, when it comes to believing in people, I’m an agnostic.

That’s why I was such a stoic when I heard that Madeleine and a handful of other physicians had been abducted by Islamic militants from an aid station outside of Nyala in southwestern Sudan. 

As far as I could make out, there wasn’t much reason for this war. One group of (well-armed) muslims with - basically - nothing of value were out killing another group of (unarmed) muslims who had - basically - nothing of value. A few well-intentioned people were trying to stop the murder, but - basically - the general public had had it with the never-ending stream of tribal genocide that had been playing out on television in their living rooms night after night for almost thirty years. Throw in a few misadventures playing out in the Middle East at the same time, and - well - Darfur was just getting lost in the shuffle.

All of a sudden, Darfur got real personal for me.

___________________________________

I flew up to Paris and met Luc and Claire; Jean Paul was at MSF headquarters getting caught up with the latest news. Rumors were flying about a French military mission into the area to try to recover the physicians - something the docs at MSF were adamantly against, by the way - when video was released showing one of the doctors being beheaded. A masked militant declared that any attempt to rescue the others would only lead to their death. I watched him tell me he was going to kill the woman I loved right there in the baggage claim area at Orly Airport on CNN.

You have to believe me when I tell you this. I believed him, I was willing to take him at his word. And I wanted to kill that son of a bitch more than anything else in the world.

___________________________________

Well, it seemed the son of a bitch had used an unsecure connection to send his demands to CNN, and of course my good buddies at the NSA intercepted the transmission and forwarded the coordinates to a group of Marines already operating (covertly) in the area. 

I never got the chance to kill that prick. Some kid from East Lansing, Michigan probably got that honor. One other doctor got wounded in the rescue, but the rest were hustled out of the Sudan on a US Air Force C-17 within a couple of hours of their ‘release’ - at least that’s what the press was told - and Madeleine and her associates her winging their way back to Frankfurt, Germany where a group of French spooks would debrief them before their return to Paris.

All this Jean Paul related to me over dinner near the Tuileries; Luc and Claire were simply too devastated to eat - they had known the murdered physician quite well - so JP and I sat quietly by ourselves and ate our dinner. The worst was over, Jean Paul said, and though relieved this part of Madeleine’s ordeal was now in the past, we both knew there would be trying times ahead as she came to grips with the broader contours of her ordeal.

“Have you thought about our last conversation? On the boat?” he asked.

“Little else, my friend. Little else.”

“And?”

“Don’t you think this would be the most inappropriate time to bring that up? I mean really, Jean, look what she’s just been through.”

“I see. I see that you are still full of bullshit. Too bad. She deserves better.”




The Memory of Place Ch. 03



“Pardon me, Jean Paul. But fuck you.”

“No, you spineless coward, fuck you! You love the woman, she loves you! She is all alone in this world, no family, and a handful of friends, but it is you she loves more than anything else in this world. What are you going to do? Get on your boat and run away again!?”

I think I was stunned, too stunned to say a word. I think everyone else in the restaurant was too stunned as well. But was my dear cousin finished with me?

Oh no, mon ami, he was just getting started.

“You are getting disgusting, Thomas. You called yourself a hippy once, a counter-revolutionary, then you opened up a restaurant and served plates of fifty dollar crap to the very same people you once condemned. You got rich off them, off their money. Then off you go in search of everything you turned your back on in a half-million dollar plaything, and you did this when your country needed people of conscience more than at any time in it’s history. Shit, Thomas, when the world needed people of conscience. And now here you are, faced with the reality of love, love from a true woman of conscience, and you are prepared to run away from her too, aren’t you? Aren’t you!”

I felt like getting up and walking away from the table, but he held me there with his eyes. Remember, I think I once mentioned his eyes. Empathetic, all knowing eyes. Jean Paul is a rare bird, and I love him. But he could be such an ass!

“You gonna eat those snails?” I asked him in my best deadpan, but I gave it away and started to laugh.

He looked at me for a moment longer with astonishment registering clearly in those eyes, then he too laughed. I’m not talking about a little snort of derision, either; we’re talking a major-league blow-out laugh, and eye-watering, side-splitting laugh, and soon he was pounding the table and trying to catch his breath, and the people around us started to laugh.

That was it.

The stitches in my chest hurt I laughed so hard. Everyone in the restaurant was laughing, and it spread to the street, across the city, then a continent. Soon the whole world was laughing.

We laughed until we cried. All of us.

___________________________________

Late in the rain-soaked afternoon of the next day, Madeleine returned to Paris in a little Dassault Falcon 50 that MSF shuttled people around in, and all of us were waiting for her when the little white jet pulled up on the ramp at a private airfield outside Paris that MSF occasionally uses. She was the third one off the plane, and she walked with a limp and a cane as she came toward us. When she was still a good distance away she saw me and started to run. I could see her grimace at an unseen pain, and I moved past a security guard to meet her. We met while still out on the wet tarmac, rain falling on our shoulders and faces as we kissed, and I think we both cried, though it was hard to tell - we were both so wet.

We piled into JPs little Citroen and slipped back into Paris and made our way to Madeleine’s little apartment next to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. 

What do you do at times like this? Do you celebrate? Get drunk? Go to church?

Well, yeah, but in what order?

___________________________________

I sat beside Madeleine as she kneeled at our pew inside the Abbey, and I listened as she whispered a prayer and crossed herself. After a while she sat beside me and I took her hand; she returned the pressure I felt building in my heart, and with her hand in mine I turned and looked at the overwhelming beauty of her face in the subdued light of the chapel. She tried to smile for me, but the attempt was lost in the grief she felt.

We left the chapel and walked out into the chill air of the late autumn evening and walked the four blocks down to the Seine, and it was as if gravity pulled us as we walked upstream to the Ile de la Cité and Notre Dame. We continued along the river, her hand in mine, on past the cathedral until we came to the little bridge that cuts across to the Ile Saint-Louis. Still we walked on, on toward the Place de la Bastille and our little marina. 

On to the memory of place.

Gaston, the astute youngster running my favorite crepe stand, recognized me from a distance and put on a couple for us as we approached. We asked him to fix us two with Gran Marnier, then went to sit on a bench overlooking the spot where aquaTarkus had sat not so long ago, and we sat in the quiet night and ate our crepes as we looked down at boats and relived another time. We sat there for hours, I suppose, wanting to commune with other times, the memory of place guiding our love tentatively towards a just conclusion.

I felt a chill on Madeleine and stood, held my hand out for her, but instead she took mine and pulled me back down to face her. 

“Tom, what is to become of us?”

Ah, there it was. Had we come to the question of my life - and hers - so soon?

“Madeleine . . . I . . .”

“Oh, Tom, I’m so sorry. This must be so strange for you? I should not . . .”

“Strange? Why would you think it strange for two people in love to ponder their future? Why shouldn’t two people who love each other as much as we do talk about commitment and what we want the future to hold for us?”

Suddenly she was very quiet, and the air took on a preternatural hush. 

“So, I don’t know Madeleine, perhaps it would be crass to ask you to marry me tonight. I know you’ve been through so much the past few days, so much violence and sorrow, so why would you want to contemplate spending your life with an old vagabond.”

“Thomas?”

“Yes?”

“Shut up, Thomas. Shut up and kiss me.”

___________________________________

“Thomas?”

“Yeah JP, what’s up? You still at the office?”

“Thomas, a woman is here in the clinic. An American. Lisa something. She says she’s here with your daughter, and that she wants to see you right away.”

“My daughter? In Deauville?”

“That’s what she says. Yes. My, Thomas, you have led a complicated life.”

“Last I heard, Jean Paul, she said another fellow was the father, but I haven’t kept up with her too much since I left America. I think she may have a few loose screws, know what I mean?”

“Well, she has made an appointment to see me. So. Would you like me to talk with her about this, or would you like me to keep out of your affairs?”

“Hell no, Jean Paul. Find out what you can. Just keep in mind that Liz has heard some contradictory things about this woman, and her pregnancy. Do you have Liz’s number?”

“Yes. But it shouldn’t come to that,should it?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

“Can you come up tonight?” he asked.

“Yeah. On my way. I can just make the one thirty to Deauville. Be there about five.”

“Good. I’ll pick you up at the station. Oh. Thomas. Will you come alone?”

___________________________________

I didn’t know what to think.

Was this woman a pathological liar? What in God’s name was she up to?

The one thirty was a local, not an express, and the train stopped at every little station between Paris and the coast. The closer we came to Deauville, the more upset I became until at one point I was so nauseated I thought I might vomit. I had for so long thought this incident over, well, at least my part in the affair was over, I hadn’t given Lisa and her problems a thought in months.

Oh, so complicated, yet so simple. Some mistakes never leave you; they follow you until they find you at your weakest, then they return for the kill.

I called Madeleine before I left for the station. She had gone to work that morning to do some difficult analyses in her lab, and I simply laid it out on the table for her as best I could. I could hear the strain in her voice when I told her I would get to the bottom of this as fast as I could and call her that evening.

She wished me good luck.

When the woman you love wishes you good luck, in my experience you ought to start packing your bags.

___________________________________

The train arrived a half hour late. Jean Paul was on the platform, waiting I could see impatiently as a light drizzle coated the old beige tile of the station platform. I met him, shook his hand and we walked over to his Citroen.

“I dropped her off at the house. I thought it would be better for you two to talk in quiet surroundings.”

“What did you find out?” I asked Jean Paul.

“No, Thomas. I want you to talk to this woman. Listen to what she has to say. Also, forgive me, but I called Madeleine, asked her to come up tonight.”

“You did what!?”

“Again, Thomas, talk with this woman. Listen to what she has to say. But Thomas, understand this. I love you; you are my family. I will support any decision you make, because I know you will make the right choice.”

___________________________________

We drove down the gravel drive, the tires crunching the wet stones as we pulled up to the front door. I was dark now, and honey colored lights shone out the front windows and spilled out onto winter grass now long asleep. I grabbed my overnight case and walked with Jean Paul into the house. He took my case from me and indicated that I should go down to hall to the last bedroom - the old blue one at the end of the hall - that Lisa was waiting for me there.

I walked down the hall; instinctively I walked as quietly as I could, like I was sneaking up on my past.

There door was open, and I looked in.

Lisa was asleep on her side, and though a light was on I couldn’t make her out too well. I knocked lightly on the door.

“Thomas?”

I could hear the truth in her voice.

“Yes, it’s me.” I walked into the room. I could smell her sickness all around the room.

“I’m so sorry for this. I really am.” I could see her emaciated body under the sheets, her bright eyes now lined with dark circles, and sunken deeply into her face.

I moved to her, sat on the bed beside her.

“Lisa, what’s happened? What’s happened to you?”

“Well, baby, turns out I’m a little sick.”

“I can see that. Where’s the baby?”

“She’s with Liz right now, in the kitchen.”

“She’s . . . Liz is . . . here, now?”

“Oh, poor Thomas. This must be so hard?!”

“I . . . uh . . . ”

“Go. Go see her, Thomas. Then come back to me.”

I was speechless, frozen in place, and felt like I was floating outside of my body.

“Will you please tell me what’s going on here?”

“Go. Now, Thomas. Go see your daughter.”

I stood in a daze and walked to the kitchen. Jean Paul watched as Liz, holding the little girl close to body, held a bottle to her lips. She looked up at for a moment as I walked into the room, and she smiled as though this was the most natural thing in the world.

Ah, I understood now. I was having a dream! No, a nightmare! None of this was real!

“Was she asleep?” Jean Paul asked me.

Oops. No, no dream.

“No, she’s. Jean Paul? What the hell’s going on?”

“Sh-h-h!” hissed Liz. “Don’t upset her, Tom. Here, come hold her.”

I walked forward, looked at the little bundle in Liz’s arm.

“No, no. Not quite yet. Jean Paul? How ‘bout a little truth right now?”

“Lisa has an aggressive cancer, Thomas. A pancreatic cancer. It’s a miracle she carried the baby to term, really.”

“Liz?” I asked. “How long have you known about this?”

“Me? Oh, right after the funeral, Tom. Lisa made me promise not to tell you.”

“And the baby’s mine?”

“Well, the blood test for the other fellow, Drew, turned up negative. He insisted, wanted to . . . wanted proof. So, he was happy, anyway, and moved on. Then Lisa found out she was sick, back in August. That’s when she came to see me.”

“I see.”

“She wants you to raise the baby.”

“I see.”

“Thomas. Look at this baby girl. This new life. It is yours.”

Thanks, JP, always nice to have a master of understatement in the family.

I walked closer to Liz, looked at the little girl bundled up in my ex-wife’s arms. I gasped when I looked at my little girl.

She looked exactly like pictures of my mother when she had been so little.

I took her from Liz and held her close.

___________________________________

We moved down to the coast, my two girls and I, we moved on board aquaTarkus. Moved on for good.

But not before Madeleine and I married on Christmas Eve in the chapel by my mother’s house - by my home, really - in Hennequeville. Liz stayed for the wedding, and even Marie came, too. Jean Paul talked about a reconciliation while Luc and Claire played with little Elizabeth in the snow afterwards. Madeleine and I decided to put Lisa’s ashes in the yard by my parent’s tree, so Elizabeth would always have the sanctity of familial love focused intently on that spot that had united us all.

So Elizabeth would always know the memory of place.

So, yes, we moved aboard, for good. We resolved to live our lives afloat, to carry Madeleine’s practice to far distant lands, where she could bring the miracle of her strength and love to those bereft of hope, to those bereft of peace. And yes, to those bereft of love.

After all, she had done this for me. And my daughter.




(author’s note: many of you have asked in comments and by email if I’m writing from experience when I write about places and events in this story, as well as in The Hemingway Maid series. That’s a fair question, and deserves comment. The answer is, in part, yes. On my sailboat, Awaken, I traveled the US west coast and transited the Panama Canal, then sailed through the San Blas Islands and up through the Caribbean and beyond to the US east coast, including one trip to Bermuda. I sailed from California to the Marquesas in college and in a Transpac race in the mid-70s, and again years later chartered a boat in Tahiti. Europe by sail remains more a mystery to me. I have sailed from Greece thru the Corinth Canal to Corsica. The Cuban experiences in ‘Hemingway’ were, unfortunately, all too true in many respects. The canal journey described in this story? I helped a friend do part of the journey years ago (the Parisian details in the story and from Le Havre to Paris most relevant here) and have vowed to do the whole journey myself before it’s all over. So, with a bit of luck, and if the clock doesn’t run out on me, maybe one day! 

To all who have expressed in so many kind words that you’ve enjoyed these stories, let me thank you. It does indeed mean a lot to me to hear from you, and I have enjoyed sharing stories on this site because of the positive feedback I’ve received. 

One other aside: if anyone would like to ask more detailed questions about sailing in general or living aboard in particular, please feel free to email me with any questions you might have; email address is on the author’s bio page. Thanks again. ‘AL’)