Aubade
Karen Brown

I am in the dinghy, rowing away from you. I have my cigarettes and my lighter. It is night, and I am swallowed up in it. I feel the force of the sea and its swelling under me, the water sloshing in the boat about my bare feet. My arms pull, fueled by fury. I watch the palm shadows wave at me from the moonless shore. Tonight, we drank rum with the couple from The Sharon. They were from England and as drunk as we were. You were quiet, sifting the sand through your hands. I could not ask you, What? I was too afraid to hear it.

We are on Tobago, in the Lesser Antilles. Your boat, The Pearl is anchored off of Charlotteville, and we have been here for two days. I know very little about sailing, so in bad weather I was told to stay under, a nuisance. We met in a bar in New Haven, and I had a look, you said, that made you weak. That was all you would say when I asked why you wanted me. Oh Darling, you said. Let’s not worry. We stopped and stayed in anchorages you know, Castara Bay and Parlatuvier, bought food from Miss Esmé in the little shack—crab and dumplings, Bake and Fish. Her arms were round and black, her palms soft as she took my hand to say hello, smiling at me, her brown eyes keen. You dove most days with your friends. I stayed on the beach, or on The Pearl, reading, thinking about you returning.

Now the current yanks me along, swift and indifferent. I listen to the sea thunk against the dinghy, the clank of the oarlocks, the dip of the oars. My hair, my skin, are damp and sticky with salt. I think about each day with you. I remember everything we said to each other. We did not say much, or enough. We let our bodies answer the question of love, lying in warm sun on the deck, lazy with martinis, swimming without clothes, the water pale and green and tepid, the little fish darting between our legs. Our bodies are knowledgeable of each other—your eager and expert hands, my mouth understanding them. Tonight, drinking rum by the driftwood fire, you kept your eyes narrowed on me, your body separate.

“This will be it,” you said. “Once we head back.”

I knew not to laugh, and question you, to pretend I was confused. I said nothing, accepting this condition of parting as if I had once agreed to it. The sea came onto the beach, rushing and churning. The fire popped. I looked across at you and you looked away. Your profile in the firelight was beautiful, your hair grown long in the weeks on the water. I smelled the wood burning and the rum on my breath and I felt calm and dead. Out on the water, rowing, I hear my own breathing, my anger replaced now by inexplicable sorrow. The water in the dinghy is warm on my feet. I stop rowing and see nothing, not the shore and the torn palms waving, not the bonfire where we sat and drank the rum. I feel the sea tug and pull the boat. I realize, with something like the sea’s sad indifference, that the current must have taken me past The Pearl. I am adrift now, with the water sloshing over the sides and the waves tossing me, caught in the current that empties into the Caribbean Sea.

---

The only water I’ve known has been Long Island Sound, cold and gray, creased with age. My grandfather took me out in his wooden Chris Craft beyond the mouth of the Connecticut River, past the jetty and the lighthouse at Fenwick, a stark sight, even on a day with sun. The rocks were granite blocks, striated, impervious. The boat skipped over the little waves. Once, we stopped in front of rows of beach cottages, dropped anchor and ate sandwiches on white bread. I was seven, and fished with a drop line. My life jacket was orange and heavy with spray. “Steady now,” my grandfather said, baiting the hook.

He sold lightning rods, traversed the New England countryside in a shiny Cadillac quoting prices for barns stacked with freshly mown hay, for clapboard farmhouses with mourning doors. He climbed the old slanted roofs, nailed the copper cable and the bracketed rods to the tops of silos, to widow’s watches, his boot heels slipping on slate and loose asbestos shingles.

“The clergy believed that demons lived in the air and caused the storms,” he told me. “Bells used to be blessed. They were struck by lightning in the church spires. The bell ringers, too.”

They called the lightning rod the ‘heretical rod.’ They didn’t think it was right to try to control something that came from God. The Sound rocked and slapped the boat, benevolent. The sun slipped in and out of banks of piled clouds. I sat, lulled and pleased with my sandwich. When the sun came out I closed my eyes and felt it on my eyelids. On this unknown Caribbean I try to find the sea’s kindness. But I cannot stop rowing for fear of capsizing, and I must bail the water that rises up beyond my ankles. The sky remains black, without stars. The water is a roiling presence, invisible, nearly, in the darkness.

After you left the bonfire with the couple from England I remained behind on the beach. You glanced back at me and sighed and asked was I coming and I lied: “In a minute,” I said. I launched the dinghy myself. The sea drenched me, but I wanted to row away from you, your pursed mouth, your eyes and their finality, your heart shut like a door. The sea sends the dinghy up on a swell. I feel a new, fresh kind of panic. I am afraid of drowning. I admitted this to my grandfather once, and he glared at me, sternly.

“Never fear the water,” he said. “The water is like the face of God.”

My grandfather wasn’t a religious man at all. Sometimes, he went to the Presbyterian Church on the town green. My mother took me regularly to the Latin Mass in the old Sacred Heart Church, where the pews smelled of polished pine, and the statuary of Joseph and Mary gazed smooth-faced and pitying. We dipped the tips of our fingers into the holy water. In nominee Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. The priest came swinging the censer. The little bells rang and ushered in a deep, encompassing silence. No one breathed during the consecration. In mei memoriam facietis. Later, they tore down the old church and built a newer one, in a modern style, and we did not go anymore.

That afternoon on the Sound my grandfather sang a hymn. Launch out, into the deep, oh let the shoreline go. Launch out, launch out in the ocean divine, out where the full tides flow. He drew the anchor up, singing, his voice a resonant baritone. The ant-like people in front of the beach cottages stilled their busy movements, their splashes and dabblings in the shallows, their magazine-flipping under umbrellas. I saw their faces all turn up, listening. Oh let us be lost in the mercy of God, till the depths of His fullness we know. The boat’s motor idled, like an accompaniment. My grandfather’s singing made me giddy with laughter. He winked at me, and kissed my forehead. I smile and row now, remembering the press of his dry lips.

I have lost track of time. Surely, it should be daybreak. I row toward what I believe is the leeward side of the island, against the current. I do not know if I make any headway. My cigarettes and lighter are useless, bobbing now in the water inside the dinghy. It is still night, and I am sober and repentant. I see I’m not in a good position. By the driftwood fire you had asked me if I needed any money, and I shook my head and smiled at you, uncomprehending. But yes, now I think that I will take your money, and the thought mortifies me. My blistered palms sting. I feel the muscles in my back tense and sharp, like want. I hear helicopters, sense them stirring up the water, but their beacons are far off, searching elsewhere. The sea is vast, and I am very small on its face, nodding and disappearing under its waves.

---

In the end, the sea calms itself in fits and spurts like a crying child. The light around me thins and stretches. There is a little fog, wafting, gauzy. I am singing the mercy of God is an ocean divine when the helicopter shushes and descends like a humming wind. The water lightens to its lovely green. Hoisted up, I am suddenly thirsty and tired and no longer alone. I have a blanket and provisions, and I am deposited back on the island. It is noon when I see you again. You have come from Charlotteville in a taxi. I assume you are relieved that I have been found, that you do not have to carry any guilt. You don’t touch me when you see me, but stand a little apart, with your hands clenched at your sides. You have not slept. Your hair is dirty, your clothes rumpled. I try not to look at you, or cry.

“I would rather not have been saved,” I tell you, bitterly.

“Don’t talk of it again,” you say. Your face crumples, your expression so hopeless I reach out and take you in my bandaged hands. Our bodies’ touch is forgetfulness. Later, on The Pearl, cruising up to the Grenadines, we pour out martinis and I eat the gin-soaked olives. The wind pillows the sails. I tell you that during lightning storms you should avoid trees, and high houses, and open water, and barns. Benjamin Franklin said to be safest indoors, lie in a silken hammock in the middle of the house.

“The sea is the face of God,” I tell you. You will not stop looking at me. You look and look, drinking me up. At night, I dream of rowing. The sea and salt are in my mouth and eyes. The oarlocks clank. The boat rolls and the sea comes in up to my ankles. When the dream ends, I am always still rowing.