The Starboard Sea: A Novel (12 page)

EIGHT

Earlier in the week, following Tazewell’s suggestion, I’d phoned Riegel at Princeton and left a message warning him about a party I had to go to. That he’d be my weekend alibi.

Since leaving for college, my brother had become a near stranger to me. We were never close, but when I was younger, on the weekends when we were both home, Riegel and I would wake up early and challenge each other to competitive morning sprints through Central Park. We’d run, taunting whoever fell behind. The loser would spring for street vendor snacks, treats our mother never allowed. Walking back to the apartment, Riegel would suck the rocky salt from his pretzel and disclose one of his guilty secrets. My big brother stashed his rotten behavior with me for safekeeping as if confessing his sins to a child absolved him of any crime.

Riegel and I had the same cleft chin, but my brother had a rough potato face, a doughy body. His sweat turned almost instantly into a sour yeasty stench. Yet more than anyone I’d ever encountered, Riegel exuded a profound self-assurance. “Entitlement,” our mother called it. In Maine, Riegel would dive off rocky cliffs just assuming the water below would be high enough to contain him. If we went skiing, he could be counted on to sneak off trail without consideration for the rush of snow that might avalanche in his wake. Because of his confidence, Riegel could sidle up to any bar and instantly be enclosed by a clutch of admirers.

With minimal effort, my brother had fingered his way through the
Social Register
. Drunken debutantes regularly appeared before me at Dorrian’s armed with berating messages for my cheating brother. “Tell him, I hate him,” they’d slur before penciling down their phone numbers. “Tell him to call me,” they’d insist. These girls had platinum hair and smelled like lavender and gin. They deserved better than Riegel Prosper, but I could not have turned these girls off even with Riegel’s dark truths: his ritual of shoplifting his Mother’s Day gifts, his affair with his best friend’s underage sister, the abortion he paid for with our dad’s American Express.

More than girls, my brother loved wealth. “The problem with our parents’ money,” he liked to claim, “is that there isn’t enough. Not for the two of us to share.” When Cal died, Riegel tried to cheer me up by disclosing his own dubious involvement with an upstart hedge fund. “I’m roaring with the Asian tigers. Plan on putting our trust funds to work.”

Having left Riegel a long, convoluted phone message, I hadn’t expected to hear back from him. So I was surprised that Saturday morning to return to Whitehall and find my balding older brother wearing a tuxedo and playing floor hockey with Yazid Yazid in the hallway outside my dorm room.

“Dude,” Riegel said, his red face glazed with perspiration. “I just totally hat-tricked.” Earlier that morning I’d woken up belowdecks in the Swan’s forecabin berth, shivering, confused by my surroundings. I called out to Aidan, but she was already gone. Before slipping off and leaving me, Aidan had placed a book on my bare chest, a stolen library copy of Joshua Slocum’s
Sailing Alone Around the World
. Slocum had circumnavigated solo for three years on his sloop,
Spray
. The first man to conquer all of the world’s waters on his own strength and company. Flipping through the brittle pages, I remembered reading Slocum’s adventures together with Cal—we were fascinated by the cranky sailor’s antics with pirates and shipwrecks. Slocum’s book had even inspired my own fake captain’s journal. Cal had once asked me if I thought I could do it, sail alone around the world. “Sure,” I said. “But why would I want to do it alone when I could sail around the world with you?”

Cal’s eyes lit up. “That’s the right answer.”
I noticed in the book that some long-ago reader had underlined one of Slocum’s bits of wisdom:
“I once knew a writer who, after saying beautiful things about the sea, passed through a Pacific hurricane, and he became a changed man.”
The hurricane was supposed to hit today. I was looking forward to the storm and wondered if I’d be able to convince Aidan to go to Race’s party with me. I wasn’t sure how to interpret Aidan’s leaving me Slocum’s book. Our night together had left me uneasy, though Aidan had done everything she could to reassure me.
“Take me sailing,” Aidan had insisted. “I’m ready to be out on the water with you.”
I cupped Aidan’s face in my hands. “Can you swim?”
“I’m a regular mermaid.”

While I ushered Riegel into my room, Yazid insisted on a rematch. “Your big brother is a high-sticking, cross-checking motherfucker.” I nodded in agreement.
Once we were alone, I asked Riegel, “What’s with the tux? Did you
get hitched? Some lucky girl invite you to prom?” I wondered if everything was okay.
“Thanks for the garbled phone message,” he said. “Had a trip planned
to Boston. Figured I’d swing by on my way back and surprise you.” “What were you doing in Boston?” My brother always drank dark
and stormies, and I could detect last night’s rum and ginger beer on his
breath. His black tie fell loose, unknotted around his neck. He looked
and smelled like some down-on-his-luck lounge singer. I snapped the
tie off and said, “You hate Boston.”
“I loathe Boston, but you know . . .” Riegel snatched the tie back
from me, tucking it inside his breast pocket. Surveying himself in my
mirror, he ran a hand through his thinning blond hair. “I go where
my investments take me.”
I knew all about my brother’s investments.
After Cal’s death, I cracked up, acted up, and finally, with just a few weeks left in the semester, got caught cheating on a precalculus exam. I’d told Aidan all about this during our late night on the Swan. I described Kensington’s mercenary Honor Code. How the dunce kid I cribbed from, Spenser Macauley, self-righteously narked. “You should have copied off someone with the correct answers,” Spenser insisted, not understanding that I wasn’t looking for answers, just hoping for a way out. I’d suspected the dean might refuse to cut me any slack. He seemed eager to punish me, to confirm to the school and to all my Kensington classmates that I was the one responsible for Cal ending himself. At least that’s how I read the dean’s ruling to kick me out.
Leaving his office, the dean warned me, “Cheaters never prosper.” Dad was stunned when he couldn’t pull the necessary strings to
keep me enrolled. The best he could manage was to cut a deal ensuring I’d receive full credit for that final semester so that I could graduate elsewhere on time. Driving away from Kensington, my dad turned
to me and I steeled myself for a lecture, for more fatherly admonishments. Instead he said, “Let’s go get some ice cream.” And we did.

I sat out the remainder of that spring at home in Manhattan. My bedroom had a view of the reservoir, and I murdered time gazing out at the boatless, placid water. Every morning I’d choose a different detail about Cal and attempt to vaporize it from my memory.
Today, I forget how Cal enjoyed flaring off bottle rockets indoors.

I shuffled around the penthouse in an old terry cloth robe, a souvenir I’d stolen from the Greenbrier during a long-ago family vacation. Mom greeted my return home with a prescription for some choice tranquilizers and I kept the pills safe in the bucket pocket of my robe— the orange bottle my one beacon of hope.
Today I forget how Cal borrowed my sport coats and returned them with holes punched in their pockets.

Neither of my parents was interested in having me interrupt their daily routines. Dad traveled a lot that spring, and if I saw him it was only very late in the evening and only to say good night. Mom left the apartment every morning by ten, eager to have her hair done, happy to enjoy an alcoholic lunch with a rotating cast of
Mayflower
matrons.

I got so used to being alone that one morning, when I was startled out of sleep by a loud rumble of voices, I actually hid briefly in my closet before finding the courage to investigate. I pulled a polo mallet out of an old umbrella stand, swinging my sporty weapon at invisible intruders until I determined that the voices originated from the formal dining room. No one in our family ever went into that room. Everything in there was fragile and famous. Mom had emphasized the significance of these heirlooms. We had Philadelphia Chippendale, an Augustus Saint-Gaudens bronze, a Miró tapestry, a tangled red-andblack Calder mobile, a seventeenth-century Japanese scroll. But the item of greatest value in our entire home, the thing to save in case of fire, was a John Singer Sargent full-length portrait of our great-greatgrandmother.

As a portrait artist, Sargent was notorious for making rich people more attractive than they actually were, and my great-great-grandmother was no exception. Sargent, the original airbrush artist, had given this homely socialite a chin she didn’t have, corrected a lazy eye she did have, and shaved a good thirty pounds off her waist. Now she hung in our dining room, a priceless beauty.

The noise in the apartment grew louder, and I hoped to hear something domestic, something that would reassure me that Mom had ordered the carpets cleaned, the candelabras dusted. Then came a racket that could be understood only as the criminal clamor of a multimilliondollar painting being heisted.

With my polo mallet poised to brain any and all art thieves, I stormed the dining room and was summarily clotheslined by a phantom forearm. I buckled onto the floor sputtering for breath while Riegel and a half dozen of his Princeton buddies stood over me, a blur of madras and Nantucket Reds.

Riegel kicked my ribs with the blunt tips of his loafers. “Shake it off,” he instructed before lifting me to my feet. He greeted me with a hug, feeling up the prescription bottle in my robe. While I panicked for air, Riegel picked my pocket, scanned the label, and whispered, “Valium is for suburban hausfraus. You need Thorazine.” He popped two pills and introduced me to his college pals. Hairy-legged men in Bermuda shorts with navy sport coats and striped ties. A fraternity eager for a hazing. Then my brother turned to the enormous, spike-haired Asian man whose strong arm my chest had already encountered. “Jason,” Riegel said, “this is my boss, Hiro.”

Hiro was busy deaccessioning our great-great-grandmother from her perch.
“Hiro?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Hiro said. “Like Hiroshima.”
“Oh.” I blinked. “I’m sorry.”
Even in my Valium-induced stupor, I was able to summon a degree of concern for the Sargent. As Hiro excused himself to escort the Princeton princes from our apartment, I punched Riegel on the shoulder and mouthed, “What the fuck?”
“Business meeting.” Riegel picked up the mallet and gave it a few practice swings. “Reeling in some new clients. Young blood, old money.”
My big brother was using our dining room as a boardroom. “Why’d you take down the Sargent?” I asked.
“Hiro’s an art lover. Didn’t believe me when I told him we had a Sargent. Now he owes me lunch.”
Hiro managed the hedge fund where Riegel interned. He seemed to be using my brother’s social connections to bring in new investors. Hiro strode back into the dining room, overhearing the last bit of Riegel’s spiel. “It’s a real Sargent, all right,” Hiro said. “Total beauty.”
While Hiro admired our art collection. I stood back transfixed by his wingspan, his arms thick and boundless. The ropy veins in his neck like taut sailing lines.
Today I forget how the veins in Cal’s neck and arms bulged after he bench-pressed.
Hiro waxed on about Sargent’s technique. The way the artist loaded up his brush with clumps of color and painted in spontaneous flourishes imitating Velázquez. “Aristocrats and tycoons—you were nobody until Sargent painted you. Nowadays critics fault him for being too stodgy, but for his day, he was a real revolutionary. Look at the way he turned your grandmother into some sort of gypsy.”
Hiro had a point. With her gold-fringed scarf and wild red hair, our great-great-grandmother looked more like a dancing beggar than an heiress. Riegel cracked his knuckles and said, “Art is still one of the best long-term investments a person can make.”
When Hiro finally left, I said to Riegel, “Never seen you so eager to impress.”
Riegel waved me off. “Hiro’s already impressed and it’s making Dad ner vous.” Riegel smiled. “Dad always thought I’d graduate and start slaving away for him. Now he knows I have other options.”
“You’d really leave the family business?” I was blissfully ignorant on the subject of our parents’ wealth. Knew little beyond the impressive fact that Prosper Investments had not merely survived but had famously profited from the 1929 stock market crash. “I never thought you’d abandon the family fortune.”
“More like misfortune these days.” Riegel laughed. “Our ship is sinking.”
Overhead, the Calder mobile turned almost imperceptibly. The Sargent towered in the space between us. I wrapped my arms around the gold frame. “Help me hang this back up,” I said.

As my brother stood in my Bellingham dorm room staring glassy- eyed and sleep deprived at the picture of a half-naked Cal tucked into my mirror, I wondered about his supposed investments. “So,” I asked again, “what exactly were you doing in Boston?”

“Went fishing.” Riegel lightly slapped my face. “Now I need you for bait.”
The weather that late morning was sunny and mild. The literal calm before the actual storm. “See those clouds,” I said to Riegel, “those are prehurricane clouds, all thin and straggly. Nimbostratus.”
“You and your weather patterns.” Riegel shook his head. “Breathe in that salty air. This school reeks of seagulls and malfeasance.”
My brother had parked his hunter green Jaguar next to some visiting parent’s red Alfa Romeo, the flashy car the color of fake blood. We caught Tazewell and Kriffo goofing off inside the two competing convertibles, each guy in his respective driver’s seat.
“Make yourselves at home.” Riegel motioned for Taze to climb out.
“Hey, Riegel.” Tazewell patted my brother on his back. “Sweet ride. Is that a legit car phone?”
“Comes in handy.” Riegel knew Tazewell’s older siblings Maxwell and Linkwell. I imagined he’d already hit them up for Hiro’s hedge fund. “You taking good care of my brother?” he asked.
“We’re throwing him a bash tonight.” Kriffo pulled at the pouncing jaguar hood ornament and asked, “Jason are you ready to get bashed?”
“Take it easy, big guy.” Riegel triggered his fingers and Kriffo let go of the jaguar.
Just then Chester Baldwin jogged by in a pair of white shorts and a blue T-shirt. He held a small yellow Walkman and wore the headphones with the metal halo resting low against the back of his neck. Chester had slid an envelop of cash under my door. I’d slid it back under his with a note asking him if he wanted to play tennis sometime. As he ran by in a blur of sporty orange sneakers, I waved but Chester failed to notice.
“Don’t worry, Jason,” Taze said. “Chester’s going to DJ our party. He’s probably picking out tunes. You’re coming right, Jason? Race will be disappointed if you don’t show.” Tazewell gave us directions to Race’s house.
Riegel looked at me. “Guess I better have him back in time for the festivities. You guys need me to buy any booze?”
My big brother was just trying to help me out, but with his showy sports car, his shiny tux, his offer to corrupt minors, he seemed like somebody’s sad stepfather—a little too eager to be cool. In the bright daylight, I noticed a streak of dried ketchup on his tuxedo shirt, saw a stain of sweat yellowing his collar, a pile of fast-food garbage decomposing on the car floor by the passenger’s seat. Riegel wanted to appear Ivy League genius and Rat Pack slick, but he was a regular mess.
“We’re taking off.” I hopped in the car, kicking a Styrofoam container under the seat. “But I’ll check out Race’s tonight.”
“I’ll be sure he gets there.” Riegel gunned the engine and saluted good- bye.