Change of Course Read online

  At the boatyard one evening, Jack painted over the faded lettering that had graced the stern of the boat since before he’d bought it. We wanted to rename her after some sleek creature of the sea, and at one time or another we’d considered Dolphin, Porpoise, Barracuda, and Amberjack. But as we were buying fish from a local market at the end of one day, Jack and I came across a package of unappetizing-looking imitation crabmeat that some marketing euphemist had labeled “sea legs” in a burst of optimism. We looked at each other and grinned. Neither of us spoke a word - it was like that between my brother and me. But our boat had its new name.

  The day of our departure dawned bright and clear and unseasonably warm, and we were joined by a throng of well-wishers at the dock. There were toasts and speeches, hugs and kisses, tears and pledges. Jack’s ex-wife pulled me aside at one point and held my eyes with hers.

  “Promise me you’ll both come back safely,” she said.

  And of course I promised.

  Finally, Jack fired up the diesel. I sounded three short blasts on the air horn, and we dropped our land lines and shoved off. With Jack at the wheel, I took up a spot near the bow, from where I could look back and watch those who continued to wave from shore grow smaller and smaller, until they disappeared completely.

  We motored out of the marina and into the harbor before raising our sails. There comes a moment in sailing unlike anything else I know, a single instant so precious and intense that it never passes without producing a sense of total reverence in me. It is that moment when, with sails newly raised and trimmed, the engine is killed. Suddenly, the mechanical drone that has filled the air gives way to the silent sounds of the sea - the slapping of wind against canvas and water against hull, and the wonderful groan of the boat as it strains to surge forward under the same power that has propelled man over the waves throughout the ages.

  I made my way back to the cockpit and took up a position next to Jack, so that we stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the wheel. We’d been the same height since he’d caught up sometime during our teens. At this point I outweighed him by a good ten or fifteen pounds, but people sometimes asked if we were twins. The truth was that I was nearly three years older than Jack. Once those years had seemed a significant gap, and it struck me that Jack had spent much of his early life trying to bridge it. He’d played harder, studied longer, and worked more diligently than I. He’d discovered girls earlier, taken up cigarettes, and even grown a beard - all (he’d confessed to me years later) in a determined effort to close whatever distance our births had placed between us. By now, perhaps through his sheer will (or, more likely, as a simple result of our inevitable passage into adulthood), he’d succeeded.

  “I’m glad you came,” Jack said softly, without taking his eyes off the mark we were aiming for.

  “Me, too,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  Touching wasn’t something that came easily for Jack and me. We had a mother who, I’m quite convinced, loved us dearly. But she’d never been one to show her affection, and her sons had suffered as a result. Finally, well into our thirties, Jack had driven over one night when his marriage was falling apart, and we sat by a fire, talking until the sun came up, and we were all talked out. “You know, Joe,” he’d said, “we never hug each other.” And he’d been right, of course. So we’d stood and hugged. It seemed a little awkward at the time, but it felt good, too, and we’d been doing it since. Still, we weren’t natural-born huggers, the way some people are; our intimacy lay elsewhere.

  We sailed until dusk that first day, following the shoreline before putting in at an anchorage well out of the way of coastal traffic. With the sun down and no clouds to trap the warm air of the afternoon, the temperature dropped sharply. I heated up some homemade soup someone had brought down to the dock that morning, and the aroma of broth and vegetables filled the cabin. But when I offered a mug of it to Jack, he shook his head.

  “You know me,” he said. “I’ll be over the rail most of the night as it is.”

  And I remember: Jack, who loved the motion of a boat under sail as much as I, fell victim to seasickness at anchor. One might think that fact alone would be enough to keep a man ashore. But I’m a rock climber who’s afraid of heights, and I’ve got an actor friend who suffers from a terrible case of stage fright. Jack would deal with his problem, though not with the aid of pills or patches; he preferred to tough it out all that first night “over the rail,” as he put it. After that, he knew he’d be okay the rest of the way. I guess you could say Jack earned his sea legs the hard way, as he did so many things.

  We spent the first week or so sailing just offshore, working our way gradually down the coast. We’d wake early, when the morning air was still cold enough that we could see our breath in the first light that filtered into the cabin. We’d fire up the stove and start a pot of coffee, then climb back into our sleeping bags while it brewed.

  When you’re at anchor in the lee of the mainland, the wind dies down considerably at night, and an early start is generally a sluggish one. We found it better to wait until the sun was well up before setting out each day. So we’d lie in our sleeping bags, taking our time over whatever we happened to be having for breakfast. We’d often brew a second pot of coffee. And we’d talk.

  If Jack tended to be a better worker and a harder player than I, it was I to whom words came more easily. Perhaps that had always been the case; more likely, lawyering had brought it out in me over the years. Where Jack spoke carefully and sparingly, I’d long since succumbed to the obnoxious occupational hazard of needing to say the same thing two or three times over, in slightly different ways.

  But now Jack seemed to loosen up, and on those chilly spring mornings, as we lay in our sleeping bags at anchor, sipping strong black coffee and waiting for the breeze to freshen, it was Jack who did most of the talking, and I who became the listener.

  He talked of his childhood, and how he’d never quite felt like one of the family. For one thing, he hadn’t looked the same as the rest of us. My dark hair favored that of both our parents while Jack had been almost blond early on, and later sandy-haired. Where my coarse looks closely resembled my father’s, and many claimed to see my mother’s smile in mine, Jack’s narrower face and finer features set him apart. Even his eyes were different: Ours were brown while his were a bluish green.

  Growing up, I’d teased Jack that he was adopted, and though he’d pretty much known it wasn’t so, every once in a while I’d come up with some shred of evidence to start him worrying all over again: a baby book of mine, but none for him; a photo of me with our parents, with him nowhere in sight, or the family collection of monogrammed napkin rings (a silly fancy in those days), mine in the same style as our parents, and his (no doubt added later on) in a slightly different style and printing. Then he’d run to our mother, sobbing (real tears at first, which eventually gave way to mock ones as he grew older) for fear that it was true, that he’d been adopted after all. My mother would do her best to reassure him, and she’d promise solemnly that he’d been born into the family, and Jack would be okay for a bit, until I’d get around to explaining to him that of course she’d have to say that, or that she’d probably completely forgotten about his adoption by that time.

  One time when we were sitting around the dinner table with our parents, Jack had asked for more whipped cream on his dessert. He loved whipped cream and would put it on just about anything: cereal, cantaloupe, even eggs. At that moment, he was licking the last of his portion from his plate. “It must be true,” I said, “what they put in the report from the adoption agency.” All eyes turned to me. “You know,” I explained, “the part about his being raised by cats?”

  Mornings on the boat, Jack talked about school, and about how for years he’d been known to his teachers as “Joey’s brother.” Finally, our parents had had the good sense to switch him to a different school, and he’d done well there after a while, though the change was difficult for him at first. If I’d been a hard act f
or Jack to follow, I’d also been his protector. No one messes with a kid who’s got a big brother nearby. So I’d become a mixed blessing for my younger brother: I was his idol, his teacher, and he loved being around me. But I could make his life miserable at times, too.

  He talked of how intense his transition from adolescence to young adulthood had been. He’d started smoking when he was ten or eleven, sneaking puffs from some cigarette our mother would leave burning unattended in an ashtray. Occasionally, he’d grow bold enough to steal one from her pack. Then he’d lock himself in the bathroom, and soon I’d hear him running the water or flushing the toilet to cover the sounds of his coughing and choking. “I was determined to become an adult,” he explained now, “even if it was going to kill me.”

  It struck me that I’d spent half a lifetime trying to keep from growing up, while all along Jack had desperately been trying to get there.

  His precocious interest in girls had been part of the pattern. In my shyness, I’d hidden behind a pose of superiority and self-sufficiency. “Who needs em?” I’d say, shrugging, while disparaging as “queers” those of my friends who learned to dance. Jack, on the other hand, discovered girls with a vengeance. Perhaps he seized a playing field I’d left to him by default. Or maybe he intuitively recognized that it would one day be a relationship with a girl that would be his ticket out of a family where he so strongly felt the sting of unfair competition. Whatever it was, beginning in his early teens, he fell for one girl after another; each time he fell, he fell hard.

  “Do you remember being in love for the very first time?” he asked me now. But as I began to search my memory, Jack barely paused between thoughts, and I quickly realized that his had been a question that needed no answer. “God!” he shouted, recalling some young girl from long ago, whose name I can no longer summon but whose memory was clearly burned in my brother’s heart forever. “I thought the sheer intensity of it might kill me. Every time we were separated, I cried myself to sleep until I was afraid my heart would give out. I was absolutely, totally convinced that we were the only two people who had ever felt like that.” He described making fumbling love with her in the backseat of a car he was too young to drive, in those simpler, long-ago days when getting caught or getting a girl pregnant were the worst things that could possibly happen to a boy.

  He talked of a series of such infatuations, each one as consuming as the one before it and the one that would follow it. These were no locker-room boasts on Jack’s part; they weren’t recounted out of some sense of bravado. They said less about his prowess than they did about his passion - how he’d grown up with this burning, consuming need to love and be loved, and, above all, to be in love.

  One morning, he told me about meeting the woman who later became his wife. It was a story I’d never heard; for some reason, Jack and his wife had always kept it their secret, even after the love had been wrung out of their marriage, and they’d agreed to go their separate ways. Had it begun with the same sort of passion as the others?

  “At first.” Jack nodded, his eyes clouding over. I was older then, after all, almost twenty! I was off at college, living off campus in a big old rooming house. I was mowing lawns and splitting firewood in exchange for a free room. Another student dropped out of school and moved out, and the landlady ran an ad in the local paper to fill the empty room, and she asked me to show it to anyone who called to see it.

  “One evening, this sophomore transfer student came by. She’d just had a fight with her roommate or something and had stormed out of her dorm. I showed her the room; she didn’t think much of it. But she was gorgeous. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Somehow, I got her to sit down, and we started talking. We must have talked for hours. By the time we looked at a clock, it was way past midnight, and her dorm was locked for the night. She started making phone calls, trying to find someone to put her up for the night. God, how I prayed that she wouldn’t be able to reach anybody!

  “So I put on my sincerest voice, swore to the purity of my intentions, and managed to convince her to stay. I let her have my room; I took the unmade bed in the empty one. I gave her my pajama tops to sleep in; I wore the bottoms. For the next hour, I tried my hardest to fall asleep. But it was no use: All I could do was picture her lying in my bed, wearing my pajama tops, and listen to my heart pounding. Finally, I tiptoed down the hallway and stood outside her door, holding my breath. To this day, I don’t know what I intended to do next. But I couldn’t have been there fifteen seconds when the door slowly started to open, and there she was, getting ready to come down the hall to look for me.

  “She never left. We spent the night together, and all the next morning. We ate peanut butter sandwiches on Ritz crackers. It was all I had. We cut whatever classes we were supposed to go to. In the afternoon, we got out of bed long enough to move her stuff in. We were married that June.”

  “And the passion?” I asked. “Did it continue?”

  “For a while,” Jack said. “But, you know, it was okay when my heart finally stopped pounding. Living on the edge all the time was just too exhausting, too intense. There were simply too many ups and downs, too much anguish, too much jealousy. After we were married awhile, it became different. I began to feel for the first time that I could go to a party and not have to worry about who my date was talking to. I could fall asleep at night, and this person would still be there when I woke up in the morning. It felt safe, somehow.”

  “You were pretty young to get married,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, you tried to tell me that.” He smiled. “But I wasn’t about to listen. I was convinced I was wise beyond my years.

  And besides, I needed to prove that I was just as grown-up as you were.”

  That, of course, had been one of the dominant themes of Jack’s early years. “You were awfully rough on me, Joe,” he now confided. “You always could do everything better.”

  “I was almost three years older than you.”

  “Easy for you to say. But try to imagine what it’s like to grow up in someone’s shadow, every day of your life, for twenty years.”

  “You sound like you think I rubbed your nose in it.”

  “You did!” he pounced. “Not always. But you had your moments. Hey” - he smiled a little ruefully - “you must have loved being better at things every bit as much as I hated being worse. How could you not?”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “You know, I can still remember the first time I ever beat you at something,” he said, and I knew what was coming before he told me, because I remembered it, too. “We’d both been in some stupid Ping-Pong tournament one summer when we were away on vacation somewhere. And we’d both gotten all the way to the finals. I must have been ten, so I guess you were thirteen. I wanted to beat you in the worst way. So help me, I can still remember some of the points, some of the shots I made. And I did it - somehow I beat you. And as soon as it was over, you told me you had let me win.”

  I didn’t remember that part. “I lied,” I confessed now. “I played my best. But I guess it must have been too hard for me to let you know that.”

  “But don’t you see what you did? For a moment, I was on top of the world. You took it all away from me when you said that. Don’t you see that?”

  “I do now,” I said. “I was thirteen, remember.”

  “How about me, Joe? I was ten, for God’s sake.”

  On the tenth day, we motored into a marina, which would be our last stop before turning cast and leaving the mainland behind us. Though we both preferred lying at anchor to spending the night tied up in a slip, we decided to make an exception that evening.

  We took on water and fuel, knowing it would be our last chance to top up our tanks. We bought fresh fruits and vegetables, two commodities you never have enough of in a small boat at sea. We found a Laundromat to do our wash, and a pay phone to call family and friends. We took showers ashore without having to worry about how much hot water we were using. Then we sat down for dinner in a r
estaurant, complete with menus and wine lists and tablecloths and waiters - something we knew we wouldn’t get to do for another two months.

  When we got back aboard Sea Legs, however, we were kept awake by noises coming from other boats, and by the odor of diesel fumes indigenous to marinas everywhere. The combination of the two was enough to drive us from our slip. We untied our land lines, motored out in the darkness, and dropped anchor well out in the harbor. There, the only sounds and smells to reach us were those of the sea herself.

  We realized at that moment that although we stilt lay in the shadow of the mainland, our hearts had already cast off from it.

  In the morning, an offshore breeze came up early. We raised our sails while still at anchor, so as to avoid the noise and needless bother of the motor. As I pulled the hook free at the bow, Jack worked in the cockpit, pulling in the sheets at exactly the right moment to catch the breeze. The sails stiffened and filled, as though they, too, were eager to get under way. Slowly at first, then more and more surely, we left our anchorage behind us, picking up speed as we traded the protection of the harbor for the vast expanse of water ahead. We pointed due east, away from shore, away at last from dry land, toward a tiny speck of land in the middle of nowhere. Ours was the very first boat on the water that morning, and to me it seemed as though we were the only two men alive on the face of the earth.

  Sometime before noon, we saw the sea beneath us gradually change from the familiar green and aqua shades of coastal waters to the deep majestic blue of open ocean.

  When I think back now to what I felt that morning, the single word that keeps coming to mind is exhilaration. I was doing what I loved as much as anything in the world, and I was doing it with the person who’d been my best friend for all his life and nearly all of mine. We were heading east, into a sun whose warmth reached out to welcome us, and whose reflection on the water dazzled our eyes with its brilliance.