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"Not necessarily," Lucas said. He stepped carefully into the cockpit, balancing the cooler. "The goddamned town is overrun with nubile prospects. Find somebody with a nice set of knockers, you know, not too smart so you wouldn't have to worry about the competition. Maybe with a fetish for housework…"
"Fuck the sailing, let's go back into town," Ke
"God, I'm looking forward to this," Lily said. "The flashing wit, the literary talk…"
Lily and Lucas rigged the sails, with Ke
"You could live here," Lucas said to Ke
"I do, a lot of the time," Ke
Ke
"You gotta be careful," Lily said anxiously, watching him.
"Yeah, yeah, this takes two fingers…" To Lucas he said, "Don't have a heart attack-it just unbelievably fucks you up. I can run the engine and steer, but I can't do anything with the sails, or the anchor. I can't go out alone."
"I don't want to talk about it," Lucas said.
"Yeah, fuck it," Ke
"What does it feel like?" Lucas asked.
"You weren't go
"It feels like a pro wrestler is trying to crush your chest. It hurts, but I don't remember that so much. I just remember feeling like I was stuck in a car-crusher and my chest was caving in. And I was sweating, I remember being down on the ground, on the floor, sweating like a sonofabitch…" He said it quietly, calmly enough, but with a measure of hate in his voice, like a man swearing revenge. After another second, he said, "Let's get the sails up."
"Yeah," Lucas said, slightly shaken. "I gotta pull on a rope, right?"
Ke
Lucas got the mainsail up. The jib was on a roller, with the lines led back to the cockpit. Lily worked it from there, sometimes on her own, sometimes with prodding from Ke
"How long have you been sailing?" Lucas asked her.
"I did it when I was a kid, at summer camp. And then Dick's been teaching me the big boat."
"She learns quick," Ke
They slid lazily back and forth across the river, water rushing beneath the bow, wind in their faces. A hatch of flies was coming off the water, their lacy wings delicately floating around them. "Now what?" Lucas asked.
Ke
"That's what I thought," Lucas said. "You're not even trolling anything."
"You're obviously not into the great roundness of the universe," Ke
Ke
"You've got a cabin on a lake, right? Don't you have buoys?"
"On my lake? If I peed off the end of the dock, I'd hit the other side. If we put in a buoy, we wouldn't have room for a boat."
"I thought the great North Woods…" Ke
"There's some big water," Lucas admitted. "Superior: Superior'll show you things the Atlantic can't…"
"I seriously doubt that," Lily said skeptically.
"Yeah? Well, once every few years it freezes over-and you look out there, a horizon like a knife and it's ice all the way out. You can walk out to the horizon and never get there…"
"All right," she said.
They talked about ice-boating and para-skiing, and always came back to sailing. "I was pla
"French?"
"Yeah… you run down the Atlantic, see, to the Islands, then across to the Canaries, maybe zip into the Med for a look at the Riviera-that's French-then come back out and down along the African coast to Cape Town, then Australia, then Polynesia. Tahiti: they speak French. Then back up to the Galapagos, Colombia and Panama, and the Islands again…"
"Islands-I like the idea," Lucas said.
"You like it?" asked Ke
"Yeah, I do," Lucas said, looking out across the water. His cheekbones and lips were tingling from the sun, and he could feel the muscles relax in his neck and back. "I had a bad time a year ago, a depression. The medical kind. I'm out now, but I never want to do that again. I'd rather… run. Like to the Islands. I don't think you'd get depressed in the Islands."
"Exactly what islands are we talking about?" Lily asked.
"I don't know," Ke
"What difference would it make?" Lucas asked Lily.
She shrugged: "Don't ask me, they're your islands."
After a moment of silence, Ke
Lucas, startled, looked at him. "You've had one?"
"Right after the second heart attack," Ke
They turned and started back downriver. Ke
"Dick. Throw those fuckin' cigarettes…"
"Lily… I'm smoking one. Just one. That's all for today."
"God damn it, Dick…" Lily looked as though she were going to cry.
"Lily… aw, fuck it," Ke
"That's better," Lily said, but tears ran down her cheeks.
"I tried to bum one from Fell the other day, but she wouldn't give it to me," Ke
"Good for her," said Lily, still teary-eyed.
"Look at the city," Lucas said, embarrassed. Ke
"What a place," Ke
"Can't see the patches from here," Lucas said. "That's what New York is, you know. About a billion patches. Patches on patches. I was walking to Midtown South from the hotel, crossing Broadway there at Thirty-fifth, and there was a pothole, and in the bottom of the pothole was another pothole, but somebody had patched the bottom pothole. Not the big one, just the little one in the bottom."
"Fuckin' rube," Ke
They brought the boat back late in the afternoon, their faces flushed with the sun. And after Lucas dropped the mainsail, Lily ran it into the marina with a soft, skillful touch.
"This has been the best day of my month," Ke
"So would I," Lucas said. "We oughta go down to the Islands sometime…"
Lucas hauled the cooler back to the truck and Lily brought along an armload of bedding that Ke
"Shame that he can't drive the truck," Lucas said as Lily popped up the back lid.
"He does," she said in a confidential voice. "He tells me he doesn't, but I know goddamn well that he sneaks out at night and drives. A couple of months ago I drove back to his place, and when we parked I noticed that the mileage was something like 1-2-3-4-4, and I was thinking that if I only drove one more mile, I'd have a straight line of numbers: 1-2-3-4-5. When I came over the next day, the mileage was like 1-2-4-1-0, or something like that. So he'd been out driving. I check it now, and lots of times the mileage is up. He doesn't know… I haven't mentioned it, because he gets so pissed. I'm afraid he'll get so pissed he'll have another attack. As long as it has power steering and brakes…"