“It would be a shame if all the pretty fishing boats started to disappear just because you won’t sign the contract.”
Beaky tucked Fingers in his jacket pocket and turned away. Duncan listened to his retreating steps on the stairs that led down to the factory floor, and above the din of the machinery he heard Beaky call up to him. “Leland! You have until tomorrow!”
Duncan started humming “Tomorrow” from Annie . Maybe he’d build a playlist around it for the factory. Then his problems would be over because they’d lock him up. He felt a strong pull to the window but resisted the urge and sat down at his desk, determined to tackle the contract. He arranged the manila envelope in the exact center of his desk. DUNCAN LELAND was penciled with precision on the envelope. He touched the “D” with the tip of his finger. The lead point had dug in deeply, like engraving on a tombstone. He pulled the contract out of its envelope and let his eyes wash over the words, which were typed in an unusual, severe font, but his brain could not process the information they were meant to convey. The more he focused, the more the words floated beyond his grasp, drifting about his mind like the wreckage of a foundered ship. Everything—the lines and paragraphs, the subheadings and punctuation, even the page numbers—seemed like sad, isolated units yearning to join together in some grand design. And yet they composed a peculiar beauty that made him forget for a moment his agonized situation. He felt he was in one of those modern art museums Cora used to bring him to, where he understood nothing but left changed in spite of himself.
She was always so good for him that way, exposing him to the new and unusual, asking him to see the world with fresh goggles. She was a native New Yorker, a single Upper West Side child raised by her divorced mom, who’d become a therapist after Cora’s dad abandoned them both to find fulfillment on an ashram in California in the late seventies. Cora had been finishing her own master’s of social work degree at NYU when she met Duncan on campus. He was there to recruit students for lab experiments at Revlon. He gave her a bag of free makeup samples, and they became inseparable. She introduced him to foreign movies, exotic food, obscure books, alternative music, and other cultural goodies. Gift baskets for his brain, she called them, as if she were fattening up his intellect for marriage.
And what did she get out of their marriage other than managing his anxieties? She hadn’t even gotten a baby, though she often told him how grateful she was that he’d brought her to live by the sea, so fully immersed in the natural world, so different from the one she grew up in. They were a good match that way, she’d said—she brought urban culture to the marriage; he brought the water. But now that she lived here, maybe there was nothing left for him to do.
“Enough.” He shook off this dangerous heading and got down to business. He read what he could manage of the contract, then faxed a copy to Mallory Cole’s law office and called to ask him to do a quick once-over. While he waited for him to respond, he stood at the open window and breathed in deeply. Next door was Petersen’s Marina, which did not cater to the yachting crowd as other marinas in town did but serviced the commercial fleet, supplying ice and diesel and doing complete haul-outs. It had always been in a state of picturesque decay but lately seemed to be in unromantic decline, surrounded as it was by rotting pilings and sinking floats. At the dock, two pleasure fishing boats were in line to be pulled for the winter. It was not exactly a rush. Usually in September boat owners were clamoring to get out of the water before a nor’easter did the job for them, but last spring many of them couldn’t afford to put their boats in for the season. So much unemployment, and yet no one could enjoy their free time. He watched Bear Petersen, grandson
Beaky tucked Fingers in his jacket pocket and turned away. Duncan listened to his retreating steps on the stairs that led down to the factory floor, and above the din of the machinery he heard Beaky call up to him. “Leland! You have until tomorrow!”
Duncan started humming “Tomorrow” from Annie . Maybe he’d build a playlist around it for the factory. Then his problems would be over because they’d lock him up. He felt a strong pull to the window but resisted the urge and sat down at his desk, determined to tackle the contract. He arranged the manila envelope in the exact center of his desk. DUNCAN LELAND was penciled with precision on the envelope. He touched the “D” with the tip of his finger. The lead point had dug in deeply, like engraving on a tombstone. He pulled the contract out of its envelope and let his eyes wash over the words, which were typed in an unusual, severe font, but his brain could not process the information they were meant to convey. The more he focused, the more the words floated beyond his grasp, drifting about his mind like the wreckage of a foundered ship. Everything—the lines and paragraphs, the subheadings and punctuation, even the page numbers—seemed like sad, isolated units yearning to join together in some grand design. And yet they composed a peculiar beauty that made him forget for a moment his agonized situation. He felt he was in one of those modern art museums Cora used to bring him to, where he understood nothing but left changed in spite of himself.
She was always so good for him that way, exposing him to the new and unusual, asking him to see the world with fresh goggles. She was a native New Yorker, a single Upper West Side child raised by her divorced mom, who’d become a therapist after Cora’s dad abandoned them both to find fulfillment on an ashram in California in the late seventies. Cora had been finishing her own master’s of social work degree at NYU when she met Duncan on campus. He was there to recruit students for lab experiments at Revlon. He gave her a bag of free makeup samples, and they became inseparable. She introduced him to foreign movies, exotic food, obscure books, alternative music, and other cultural goodies. Gift baskets for his brain, she called them, as if she were fattening up his intellect for marriage.
And what did she get out of their marriage other than managing his anxieties? She hadn’t even gotten a baby, though she often told him how grateful she was that he’d brought her to live by the sea, so fully immersed in the natural world, so different from the one she grew up in. They were a good match that way, she’d said—she brought urban culture to the marriage; he brought the water. But now that she lived here, maybe there was nothing left for him to do.
“Enough.” He shook off this dangerous heading and got down to business. He read what he could manage of the contract, then faxed a copy to Mallory Cole’s law office and called to ask him to do a quick once-over. While he waited for him to respond, he stood at the open window and breathed in deeply. Next door was Petersen’s Marina, which did not cater to the yachting crowd as other marinas in town did but serviced the commercial fleet, supplying ice and diesel and doing complete haul-outs. It had always been in a state of picturesque decay but lately seemed to be in unromantic decline, surrounded as it was by rotting pilings and sinking floats. At the dock, two pleasure fishing boats were in line to be pulled for the winter. It was not exactly a rush. Usually in September boat owners were clamoring to get out of the water before a nor’easter did the job for them, but last spring many of them couldn’t afford to put their boats in for the season. So much unemployment, and yet no one could enjoy their free time. He watched Bear Petersen, grandson
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