The Same River Twice (40 page)

“I know I keep saying this,” Rachel said, “but I think it all has to do with the
Nachtvlinder
and this actual
duty
Groot and I feel to restore her—not bring her back to life, of course, because she never died in that sense, but to reinvigorate her, make her seaworthy again. I like that word, ‘seaworthy.’ It gives me hope for the world. Well, not for the world, exactly, but at least it gives me gratitude for the possibilities that still exist, even in the worst of times.

“So, to return to—what to call it?—the melodrama of me: I’ve decided not to worry any more about where Groot’s money came from. I just bought a cashier’s check with it and mailed it to my parents. That’s it. The end.”

Without looking up from her magazine, Allegra turned a page and said, “In other words, you’re saying that you’re going to marry him and live happily ever after and the whole et cetera?”

Max kept his camera on Rachel. Seconds passed. “Well,” she said finally, downshifting as they turned into the boatyard.

The chandlery at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine was the successor to one that had closed years before, and the methods it now employed allowed it to do in two days what once might have taken a month. When Max, Rachel, and Allegra arrived, Jacques was filming the Breton chandler as he detailed for Groot the restorations that had been lavished on the
Nachtvlinder
. weather-damaged planks replaced, every seam recaulked, the props refurbished, teak oil lovingly rubbed into the deck, woven jute fenders dangling from the sides, brasswork brought to a shine, the hull sandblasted clean and repainted a blinding white with an encircling blue boot stripe. A hundred years old, the vessel looked immaculate.

“She’s a good one,” the man said grudgingly. “Back then they knew how to make them. No fiberglass, no aluminum, none of that shit. With wood, everything lives, everything responds. Pay attention and it can do the impossible.”

Groot caressed the boat with his palm.
“Ja
. This is good; very, very good. Thank you so much.”

When Groot followed him to a battered oak desk and, without sitting down, began counting out in cash the payment they’d agreed upon, Max set up his tripod and vidcam facing the port side of the boat. He trained it on the spot where he thought it most likely that Rachel, Groot, and the
Nachtvlinder
would next intersect, amidships more or less, and walked casually away, signaling Jacques to take over when the time came. Then he went outside. Standing just beyond the door of the hangar, frowning at the sky and clutching a zippered Bible, was a priest in clerical collar and coat, clearly unhappy to be there but resigned to his mission, whatever it was.

Max went immediately back into the hangar.

The scene between Groot and the chandler was winding up. When it was done, Max whispered to Jacques, “Get Groot and Rachel in front of the camera where I left it. Let them walk in and out of the frame occasionally, which they will do, no instruction needed. Go for minimum self-consciousness. Usable sound would be a plus, but not essential. We’ll probably run some other audio over the shot anyway.”

“Risky,” Jacques replied, thinking about it. “Definitely counterintuitive. But yes, it might just pop.”

“I’ll take your camera and set up right outside,” Max continued. “Remember to let them move in and out of the frame naturally, even if you lose the sound. But keep the sound on them once they leave the hangar—self-consciousness
no longer a factor, okay? When the boat comes out, I’ll stick around while you find your new spot, then I’ll go down to the water to pick up the medium-shot visuals.”

“Check.”

“And don’t forget the priest. There’s a priest out there.”

“A priest?”

“Right. Keep him in the mix. Let’s hear what he has to say.”

Jacques shrugged. “Don’t they all say the same thing?”

“Nevertheless.”

Jacques nodded, trying to work out Max’s thinking. He was by nature a serious young man, his turn of mind unconventional. Max had lately decided to grant him more leeway at work, curious to see what might emerge.

“Okay, then,” Max said. “No shortage of variables, right? So let’s do it.” He took the backup camera and hurried for the door, Allegra hastening after him.

“Daddy!”

“What is it, sweet? I’m working right now.”

“I
know
. I just wanted to ask you.” She was holding her cell phone in a stage-one adolescent death grip. “Can I go to this party with Dominique tomorrow night? Monsieur Bouvier thinks it’s okay.”

“Where is it, when is it, and who’ll be there?”

“Um, like, I’m not totally sure? But I’ll find out.”

“Then get your data together and we’ll talk again, all right?”

“Cool.”

“And watch out for this boat thing. It could be dangerous, I don’t know. Stay away from the rails.”

“Check,” she said, in imitation of Jacques. Laughing merrily, she withdrew to make the necessary calls.

Frowning at the sky, Max set up his camera.

Since coming to the conclusion that his wife was having an affair with this art impresario, a man Max had scarcely thought about before, he found himself prey to a host of conflicting notions. Maybe she’d betrayed him a dozen times, with a dozen men, or perhaps Turner was her first. It was love, it was sex, it was boredom, it was revenge. He was supposed to find out about it, or he wasn’t. He was meant to suffer, or he wasn’t. Maybe there was a side to her character he didn’t know, or maybe her character had changed. But amid all this circular thinking, useless and demeaning, Max knew one thing to be unquestionably true: Odile did nothing without purpose. She
had a message for him, and however painful it might be, he wanted to fully understand it. A man could do nothing less. Then, quite often, he had to do much more.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Max looked up from his camera to find the priest addressing him. God’s servant looked uneasy. “Yes, Father.”

“I am not acquainted with these people, this Rachel and Groot, but I have been asked to bless their boat before it is launched. Of course I shall do so; it is my duty. But I wonder if you could tell me: have they married within the Church?”

“Of course, Father. Why else would they have called you?”

“It wasn’t they who called me. But no matter. This is an ancient nautical tradition. I am happy to be of service, and of course such is God’s will.” He withdrew a few steps toward the river, looking, if anything, even more disconsolate. Max discreetly filmed him for nearly a minute as he gazed out over the Seine and paced back and forth. There was always room in Max’s films for priests, if only for a few seconds. Their black-and-white raiment made everything surrounding them snap to, visually speaking, and inspired in much of his audience a vague sense of guilt or revulsion, if only subliminal, that served his purposes. Still, there was no point in overdoing it. He stopped shooting and checked his watch.

Moments later, mounted as before upon the wheeled railroad chassis and attended by half a dozen men, the
Nachtvlinder
emerged from the hangar onto the short expanse of flat ground outside. Close behind it, holding hands and staring at the boat like proud parents, were Rachel and Groot, seemingly reconciled, or at least united in the glow of their now resplendent boat. Max zoomed in slowly on their faces, until Rachel noticed and turned to whisper something into Groot’s ear. Jacques stood at some distance behind them, holding the sound boom low over their heads.
Good
, thought Max.

The priest cleared his throat, and it immediately became apparent that no one present had expected him. Still, he was a priest, and when he called them to prayer, they all reflexively bowed their heads. That was all he required.

“Hear us, O Lord, from Heaven Thy dwelling place,” he intoned. “Thou, Who dost rule the raging of the sea, when loud the storm and furious is the gale …” The prayer was mercifully short, another six or eight verses at most, and when amens had been said, he sprinkled holy water over the bow of the
Nachtvlinder
, blessed it, and hurried off as precipitously as he had arrived.

“Now,” the chandler announced, slapping the side of the
Nachtvlinder
, “let’s see if she floats.”

Max took his camera and tripod down the incline to the riverbank.

Not much later, as the
Nachtvlinder
slowly descended the tracks toward him, it came to Max that nothing about the boat was so radiantly beautiful, so infused with hope, as its knife-edged prow, designed to part the waters of the world so that men might pursue dreams of which they were only half aware.
She’s been around the world, for sure
, Rachel had said of the boat, the day of the police raid. Max cursed himself for not having shot the
Nachtvlinder
head-on while she was still in dry dock, but there was no time now for second thoughts. The boat was nearly upon him.

The railway track ran down into the river, where the descending vessel would be lifted off the chassis and onto the surface by her own buoyancy. Still, a thirty-ton boat doesn’t return lightly to her element, and Max was glad to be no closer to the
Nachtvlinder
than he was when she reentered the Seine, throwing up jagged curls of green-tea-colored water on either side, pitching fore and aft like a yearling horse at play. The vidcam got it all.

When Groot had her tied up to a pair of bollards embedded in the bank, the chandler threw a ladder over the side, and everyone but Jacques, who’d agreed to film the boat’s departure and drive the Citroën to the quai de la Tournelle, climbed on board to cluster respectfully on deck. There was enchantment to the moment, an alien magic that Max hadn’t anticipated, but he reminded himself to record precisely what was there and decide later what really shone the most. Groot and Rachel embraced and kissed. Allegra spoke excitedly into her cell phone, using, it seemed to Max, some sort of post-linguistic teenage speed-talk. Boldly colored ensigns fluttered crisply in the breeze. And finally, tantalizingly out of sight, were the rebuilt engines, as yet neither tested nor mentioned, though they weighed heavily on the minds of all present.

Three days before, bringing the boat downstream, Groot had chosen not to engage the untested engines until the ship chandler could look them over. Instead he’d hired a tugboat to prod and nudge the vessel into its place of rest. For the journey back, however, there would be no tugboat. There would be a reckoning.

Once aboard, Groot immediately assumed formal command, stationing Rachel and Allegra on the bridge while he went below to the engine room. Max had planned from the first to stay close by Rachel at the helm, to record her response as, for better or worse, the vessel got under way or failed to, taking her and her boyfriend’s hopes with it. The scent of diesel hung heavy in the air about them, an uncertain omen. Rachel stared at the
control-console gauges: oil pressure, water temperature, fuel. She looked scared and beautiful, Allegra bored and thirteen. Max kept them both in the frame, as closely fitted together as the optics of the lens would allow.

“Now!” Rachel shouted suddenly, her eyes still fixed like a fighter pilot’s on the gauges.

There followed the infuriating pause that precedes all diesel combustion, then the starboard engine came to life with a low, stuttering rumble that settled into a roar. An agonizing second later, the port engine did the same. Rachel hopped up and down with joy. Allegra hugged her, hopping too, both soon doing a comic dance of happiness unhinged.

Groot appeared, grinning, at the top of the companionway, his face streaked black with grease. “You see,” he said in English. “For the stubborn and the stupid, everything is possible.” He said it again in Dutch. “This is the secret motto of my people,” he added, laughing. “You can say that—motto?” He gave the chandlery crew a thumbs-up and received theirs in return. They almost seemed to approve of his success.

Relieving Rachel of her post, Groot engaged the port-engine clutch and then the starboard. Slowly at first, but gaining momentum, the boat edged into the river’s upstream lane, headed again for Paris. Before long, the
Nachtvlinder
had attained a bracing seven knots, an impressive speed when running against a strong current. Rachel laughed and wept and laughed again, her hair streaming out behind her with such abandon that Max was reminded of mortal things, things he didn’t care to name, but that he nonetheless found strangely moving, especially as framed by the camera. All that was merely nautical seemed to fall away before this silencing sight, so real and yet so much like beauty.

“Really, really ultra,” Allegra cried, obviously suffering no such inhibitions.

And then, as if in response to her words, Max was suddenly pierced to the heart by a baffling sliver of fear, fear as cold as a steel lancet. It staggered him, almost literally casting him to the deck. Embarrassed, he made gestures of exaggerated landlubberliness and repositioned himself behind the camera, itself serenely stable on its tripod.
Nerves
, he told himself. But he knew it wasn’t nerves, that it was something he’d never felt before. So, for want of other options, he filmed. Filming without flinching was what he understood. It was what he did best. And before very long at all he was himself again, seeing the sort of things he saw, filming the sort of things he filmed, his sudden moment of foreboding—if that’s what it was—now dispersed and forgotten.

Barge traffic, which had been diminishing year by year on the Seine, seemed unaccountably heavy that afternoon, and the
Nachtvlinder
, which commercial boatsmen contemptuously categorized as a “yacht,” was over and over again forced to yield to vast, freight-laden barges whose pilots honked deafening horns at them and shouted imprecations, reminding them that
“yachts
go last.” It didn’t matter, though; nothing could spoil the crew’s collective good mood as the boat churned upstream to Paris.

At Andrésy, not far out of Conflans, Groot threaded them through the crowded lock, navigating between the two rows of barges tied up on either side, where they waited for the gate at the upstream end to open and the water to spill in so they could continue their journey. Groot’s was a risky maneuver—normally he should have taken his place behind the last barge, on one side or the other—but he was feeling cocky, and besides, Max thought, it made for good film. The female half of the crew—Rachel at starboard, Allegra at port—stood by with tires suspended on ropes to cushion against any accidental contact with the barges’ steel hulls as Groot, defying protocol, took them farther and farther forward. Finally, he chose to tie up to a barge near the front. Turning the wheel over to Rachel, he tossed first one line, then another, over the barge’s bollards. Her captain scowled at this heedlessness, but allowed his deckhands to secure the ropes. Shortly after, the gate opened, the lines were cast off, and they were under way again, ahead of most of the pack.