“When you put it that way–”
“You will take the five thousand.”
“And close the account without any… squabbling.”
She smiled. “And I planned it so carefully.”
“Planned what?”
“You would take the twenty thousand and then I would feel perfectly free to ask you a favor. You see, I have to go to that bank in Nassau. On the transfer of those special accounts there has to be an actual appear-ance in person, with special identification, as prearranged by the owner of the account. I was going to fly over and see them and fly back, and find someone to help me take the Likely Lady around to Naples, Florida. A man wants her, and the price is right, and he would pick her up here, but… I can’t bear to part with her without… some kind of a sentimental journey. So I thought after you took the money, I could ask you, as a favor, to crew for me while we take her over to the Bahamas. Mick and I planned every inch of her. We watched her take shape. She… seems to know. And she wouldn’t understand if I just turned my back on her. Do you find that gro-tesque?”
“Not at all.”
“Would–?”
“Of course.”
So we provisioned the Likely Lady and took off in the heat of early July. I had the stateroom Maureen and Bridgit had used. We fell into an equitable division of the chores without having to make lists. I made the naviga-tion checks, kept the charts and the log, took responsibil-ity for fuel, engines, radio and electronic gear, minor re-pairs and maintenance, topside cleaning, booze, anchor-ing. She took care of the proper set of the sails, meals, laundry, belowdecks housekeeping, ice, water supply, and we shared the helmsman chore equally.
There was enough room aboard to make personal pri-vacy easy to sustain. We decided that because we were on no schedule and had no deadlines, the most agreeable procedure was to move during the daylight hours and lie at anchor at night. If it was going to take too long to find the next decent anchorage, we would settle for an early stop and then take off at first light.
There were several kinds of silence between us. Some-times it was the comfortable silence of starlight, a night breeze, swinging slowly at anchor, a mutual tasting of a summer night. Sometimes it was that kind of an awkward silence when I knew she was quite bitterly alone, and say-ing good-bye to the boat and to the husband and to the plans and promises that would not be filled.
We were a man and a woman alone among the sea and the islands, interdependent, sharing the homely chores of cruising and living, and on that basis there had to be a physical awareness of each other, of maleness and femaleness. But there was a gratuitous triteness about the unconventional association that easily stifled any intensifi-cation of awareness.
It was five years back, and she was that inevitable clich‚, an older woman, a widow, who had invited the husky younger male to voyage alone with her. I knew she had married young, but I did not know how young. I could guess that she was eleven years older than I, give or take two years. At the start her body was pale, too gaunted, and softened by the lethargy of months of mourning. But as the days passed, the sun darkened her, the exertion firmed the slackened muscles, and as she ate with increasing hunger, she began to gain weight. And, as a result of her increasing feeling of physical well-being, I began to hear her humming to herself as she did her chores.
I suspect that it was precisely because any outsider, given the situation and the two actors on the stage, would have assumed that McGee was dutifully and diligently servicing the widow’s physical hungers during the an-chored nights that any such relationship became impossi-ble. Not once, by word, gesture, or expression, did she even indicate that she had expected to have to fend me off. She moved youthfully, kept herself tidy and. attrac-tive, spent just enough time on her hair so that I knew she was perfectly aware of being a handsome woman and did certainly not require any hard breathing on my part to confirm her opinion. Nor did she play any of those half-innocent, half-contrived games of flirtation that invite misinterpretation.