Working Title: “Slow Boat, Bitter End”

A Rony Boston Mystery by RJ Stewart

IN HINDSIGHT, I see what was scarcely hinted when she stepped up the gangway and on to stern of the gulet at the Turkish port city of Marmaris. She just wanted it to end, wanted it expired, wanted no additional moment for any of it. Shut the door. Draw the curtain. The End.

She presented a collection of questions mostly, but certainly compelling enough to help me forget why I’d come aboard this improbable ship. I had been thinking of Conrad, who went to sea perhaps for adventure but more likely to end his own sadness in Eastern Europe. He invented Marlow and let him talk. Lies of course, in the sense of something invented rather than reported. Lies that told a truth, as a literary man whom I knew in the city liked to say. I had left my own despair in the sunless slot canyons of Manhattan. My divorce to a woman who I thought loved me set me back. Let’s just say I slipped into a small depression, and I’m not talking about a New York sidewalk. What’s more, my profession, Investigative Reporter for the New York Daily Tribune, had suddenly eroded thanks to the internet and its insidious appetite for market dominance and greed. I needed a break.

I had hoped that Aegean waves would wash my depression away. I packed a suitcase with clothes and a small case with books, regarding myself, I suppose, as a kind of Hamlet, taking arms against my sea of troubles, heroically self-doubting, tragically incapacitated, hopelessly adrift. Reboot yourself! Oppose your trouble like a knight in armor. Be a martyr for everything good and proper. Have a new beginning. I even hoped to write about it, to tell my own story, not in the first person –- boring – but with imagined realities, a heroic tale of a foundering soul. I thought that fictionally disclosing my innermost feelings would lend legitimacy to my failed persona, a kind of con, a self-swindle.

And then I met her. Griselda Lomi, a stunning American woman of Italian descent who had only the day before arrived from her home near Los Angeles. She wore improbable clothes: a long, fur-lined coat over tight white jeans, a loose camisole held above her breasts by the thinnest of straps, Mediterranean blue espadrilles with wedge heels, dark glasses and a brimmed straw hat pulled low, as if she hoped not to be noticed. If she were trying to look Mediterranean, she failed, because her American pretense almost glowed. Now in hindsight, I will say she had no idea of how to be unnoticed. She was unavoidably the center of attention.

If her clothes weren’t noticeable enough, I soon turned to the object she carried. Dangling at the end of her fingers like a shopping bag was an odd relic I supposed she had purchased at a bazaar. Its bas relief figures seemed to dance in the April sunlight, but of course they were frozen in brass or bronze or whatever. Whether it was the forms, the sunlight, or the carefree way she toted it all, the figures seemed in imminent peril, as if they might fall to the deck. It had the look of something old, perhaps Grecian. Only later would I put it together. She was going to sea for personal reasons far more creative than my own. She carried an urn.

She stopped suddenly, turned, and faced me directly. She lifted her hat to reveal one blue eye deftly showcased by an arched eyebrow.

Which berth is mine?

I suppose any berth you want.

You don’t know which berth is mine?

I do not.

Are you not a crew member?

I am not.

I could have snapped to my feet, introduced myself, offered a tour below where she could see the eight guest cabins for herself. But I only turned away, feigning indifference. Without smiling she went below, two porters tagging behind. I could hear them dropping her cases in the aft cabin. She seemed to know it would be the most spacious, the least roiled in choppy seas, the most private. As if it were meant for her. In hindsight, after that voyage and many years later, I can say that much of her life came together like this -- in pieces puzzled for her use but otherwise inexplicable. I would come to learn that what seemed to be circumstance served her as if she ordered it. Among her natural abilities was a compelling expectation that others would move the pieces for her, as though she played at life merely by thinking. Not solely in the abstract, she was a goddess. That we had chartered for a voyage along the Turkish coast suggested to me at least that she may as well have been Aphrodite headed to her birthplace. But that, too, is hindsight.

The power plant deep in the gulet chugged to life, and the smell of diesel fuel wafted above the calm Aegean harbor.  Crew members released the mooring lines then quickly hopped aboard and cranked the gangway into sailing position. The vessel moved lugubriously, cleared the pier, then accelerated slowly into the bay. I moved to the bow and stood port-side at the stainless-steel railing while the crew snapped to their various duties. The captain watched the activity silently as he wheeled the 30-meter gulet clear of idle boats moored in the bay.  We eased into the sea, the diesels grinding against the growing waves. The long boat heaved and rocked as it lifted and then settled in the troughs of waves, rocking me like a baby. I was pleased with myself for defying motion sickness; silently I patted myself on the back. Probably Nordic DNA, packed into my soul from the time of the invasion that put we Scots temporarily in our place. was Absorbed with my self-congratulation and the activity of getting under weigh, I hardly noticed her presence.

How long will it be until dinner?

Her sudden appearance superseded her pointless question. We had only just set sail, and she evidently thought I could supply the day’s schedule. She already had me cast me as crew, and my denial apparently was lost on her, and so she had it her way. I mustered what I hoped would be an impatient glance then turned to the sea. If she thought I was important to the operation of the gulet, I may as well suggest I was its navigator or captain, or even its owner. In time I would learn that the latter is the position she would have most respected. Wealth was important whenever she judged the suitability of companionship. It may have been a fear of poverty, or a notion that wealth at least fortifies elusion. But I was to learn that she did not come from a humble background; rather, she was the offspring of a line of prominent Californians, financiers, landowners, and the like. She was not one to invest in men of little consequence, although I came to learn that her estimation of worth, or even value, was not faultless. She was not financial, nor was she opportunistic; she was adventurous and largely unconcerned with risk. If saying so suggests many lovers, the inference would not be inaccurate. To say she was self-centered misses the sharp point of her instinct for conquest, which she seemed to measure in degrees of her lovers’ capitulation to her dominance. Even now in hindsight, I can see my attempt at indifference was within her control. Instantly, almost as if she had ordered it, the circumstances were hers to direct. I was circling before I even knew it. What could possibly be the danger of accepting the warming presence of an attractive woman, even if she played with my self-worth by suggesting I was the one who could inform her of the crew’s dinner plans? I understood my own allure; I recognized my charm, despite my ex-wife’s rejection, I remained confident. But my divorce was too recent for me to have developed an understanding of my frailty, and certainly not of my insecurity.

I suppose now in hindsight I see why friends in New York had suggested I see a counselor, or as they have come to be called, a life coach. Ha; a life coach. As if a few laps around the track, a couple of dozen pushups, a climb up the gymnasium rope would prepare me for life without my dependable wife of twenty-three years. How easily we invent narratives to support our fantasies. I had tried one counselor, a bespectacled woman who sat cross legged in an Eames chair, her tight skirt pulled around her shapely legs. “Tell me …” and so on. I found no benefit in repeating the things that looped in my head; I wanted direction. I dropped the life coach and opted for life on my own terms, risks, and all. Not to suggest that the daily small doses of fluoxetine had no effect. Although insidious, the drug did seem to ease the swings of moodiness that had dogged me most of my adult life. Scotch and jazz had a similar effect. I found comfort in a good saxophone and a wee sip of McCallan 18 at a neighborhood club on 106th and Broadway. I was beginning to climb from the abyss of rejection, I suppose, but these “friends” – alcohol, antidepressants and lonely self-indulgence at a carved walnut bar -- began to betray their potential for destruction. I decided to do something both adventurous and healing. Little did I know how the decision to go to sea would re-direct my life.