“Sit down, please,” Mrs. Wade said now, and the steward said again, “Please, monsieur. Sit, please,” and Joe Bill watched as Lee said, “Colonel, I know. I was a soldier, too, you understand.”
“You’re some kind of damned communist,” the colonel said now, pushing his wife’s hand away as she reached for his.
“No, I’m not,” Lee said. “Communism’s just another tool of the state. Just another illusion. I’m a Marxist-Leninist-collectivist.”
“I knew it,” Colonel Wade said, ruddy and livid, pointing at Lee. “Why don’t you just keep going? Don’t stop in Sweden or Switzerland or Denmark or wherever it is you’re going. Just keep on. You’d be happier in Russia.”
“My mother would be better off there, that’s for sure,” Lee shouted, then pushed his way past the steward and out the door.
“I am very sorry, gentlemen,” the steward said. “Very sorry, madame. It is the ship, certainement. It is not a luxury liner, no? Some people get upset . . . how you . . . cramped? It makes some people . . . irritable. I will try to have a talk with monsieur Lee. If necessary, we will make other dining arrangements.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Wade said as Colonel Wade returned to his seat with a snort. “Of course, it was my fault, really,” she said. “I shouldn’t have pried. I could tell he was sensitive.”
“He’s nuts,” said the colonel now, picking his glass of tomato juice from the holster and bringing it to his face.
“Again, please accept the apologies of the captain and crew of the Marion Lykes.” With that the steward spun quickly away. Colonel Wade turned to Joe Bill.
“Is he like that all the time?”
“To tell you the truth, sir,” Joe Bill said, “he really never speaks to me. We talked some the first day, but since then he’s hardly said a word. I don’t really see him that much, actually. I have no idea where he goes. Just wanders around on the deck, I guess. He’s gone when I get up in the morning and still gone when I go to bed at night.”
“The poor thing,” Mrs. Wade said. “I should have just let him be. I have a problem with talking too much, don’t I, Richard? I always have. I just had to pry.”
“It’s really quite amazing,” Joe Bill said. “It’s like he vanishes or something.”
“This is 1959,” Colonel Wade said now. “No one can still be that naive about communism. Not after Korea.”
“A mother would have known better. I was never a mother. Female troubles.”
“It’s not that big a ship. There are only so many places he could go.”
“Not after Stalin.”
And the three of them went on like that for the rest of the meal, each in their own conversations, their own attitudes of sympathy, mystery, and disbelief, until the steward came again to clear the table, and Joe Bill and the Wades said goodnight.
And now another week, or four days, or ten days, had passed. The sky in the daytime was the color of smooth lead, and at night no stars came out and the dark was low and cloying, like the sky had dropped down to meet the water and seal the Marion Lykes inside, holding it in place somewhere far away from the port of New Orleans or the port of Le Havre, and there it would stay until the waters dried up and the sky squeezed the earth into nothingness, until all that was left was matter, and then not even that.
If only he’d spoken his French earlier, he would have someone to talk to, the deckhands or the officers. Joe Bill imagined them up late with a drink in the mess discussing Baudelaire or de Gaulle as the mooring chains clanged against the bulwarks and the ship gently pitched through the night toward France.
His spy game had been a bad idea. That was clear. But it was also clear that to suddenly start speaking French now would seem rude at best, make him look like he really had been spying on them, and they would certainly distance themselves from him even more. By keeping his secret, at least he could still listen.
On one of these starless, heavy nights, Joe Bill went out on the deck for a smoke, hoping to eavesdrop on the deckhands while they worked. It was starting already, his mother would say if she saw him flicking four, five, six matches before he could get one to light, the collar of his overcoat turned up against the ocean chill and scratching against the stubble he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. Hasn’t even got to France yet and already he’s smoking. And the truth was, he didn’t even like it, didn’t even know how to smoke, but he was so lonely and bored that so many times smoking a cigarette was the only thing to do. He’d bought his first pack of Chesterfields—the only American brand on sale in the ship’s mess—sometime shortly after the blowup between Lee and Colonel Wade at dinner, the last meal Lee had shared with them. And now Joe Bill was already up to a pack a day because he didn’t feel like he could just go stand outside and not smoke, and he was going outside all the time. It was a shame, Joe Bill thought, puffing his Chesterfield, that he and Lee hadn’t hit it off. They could have been pals—nothing like the hothouse of a freighter cabin to form fast friendships. They could have visited each other this fall—Lee could have come to Tours and Joe Bill could have gone to Switzerland (or Sweden or Finland). It was a shame, but it was unlikely to change now.
It was after dinner, and the Wades were on deck as well, but across the ship, at the bow, and just as Joe Bill started over to talk with them, they briskly turned to go back inside, Mrs. Wade tucked under her husband’s arm against the cold. Joe Bill waved, but the Wades didn’t see him, and again he felt the kind of utter loneliness we can only feel when there are other people around to amplify that loneliness. The Wades, the deckhands, the officers, they all had each other, and Lee, well, Lee seemed to want nothing more in life but to be alone, and thus wasn’t really lonely.
Joe Bill was pacing now, counting his slick-shoed steps like a man in prison. The urge to fling himself into the water actually entered his heart, only failing when the urge reached his mind. It wasn’t death he wanted, just a new medium, a new color besides the gray steel of the boat, the grayer steel of the sky. He began to rehearse the letter he would write to his parents as summer neared and it came time to return home, the letter that would beg, cajole, demand the terrible expense of airfare. And as he crushed out one cigarette and reached for another, he heard two of the deckhands speaking in French about the “young American.”
He couldn’t tell where their voices were coming from at first, but soon he realized he’d made his wandering way down by the cargo stacks. Among the boxes strapped and tarped there, the men must have made some space for themselves to be alone, away from the captain or the mate or the steward.
“He was in the engine room, drawing something in his book,” one man said, and Joe Bill realized it was not him they were discussing, but Lee.
“He is a strange one.”
“Then Thierry found him in our cabin.”
“I’ll kill him.”
“And Thierry said to him, ‘But monsieur, surely you know this area is private.’”
“And he said?”
“He said he was lost.”
“Lost at sea.”
“Thierry said, ‘Yes, monsieur, it happens. This ship all the decks look alike.’”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the American says, ‘In Russia,