The end of a fine day

I sat on one of the wicker chairs trying to read a book by Raymond Carver. I knew I was quite tight. I had read the Raymond Carver book before, but it seemed quite new. Probably I read the same two pages over several times. I was quite tight and did not want to go downstairs to my bunk because the room would go round and round. If I kept on reading that feeling would pass.

It must have been after one in the morning when Bobby came upstairs. His blond hair was messy but his eyes were clear. He seemed surprised to find me upstairs. He sprawled across one of the wicker lounges and read a book on Modernism, underlining certain passages with a mechanical pencil every now and then. His girlfriend, Francis, was an art history major and I imagined he was reading the book because of her. Why else would you come to Cuba on a fishing trip with a book on Modernism? He kept glancing up from his book and looking at me or glancing at the door that led to the crew’s quarter. He seemed nervous.

I had to take a leak. I walked carefully down the metal staircase to the level below and stood on the stern of the boat pissing over the railing and into the water. Flood lights from the Avalon shone down into the water and you could see schools of fish coming in out of the dark water and into the light and then away again. It was like a separate world down there with flickering schools of silver sardines and wary jacks and baby groupers and pointy needlefish and darting juvenile barracuda. When I was done pissing I leaned against the railing and just watched the fish swim by.

I could hear hushed voices upstairs. Bobby’s British accent a low rumble and a softer voice—Suliet. I heard them laugh. I heard the tinkle of ice cubes dropping into glasses and the soft sound of salsa music mixing with the night breeze and the burr of the Avalon’s generator. More laughing. I looked at my watch; it was after two. I did not bother to go back upstairs to get my book. I could close my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. I went below deck to my room, undressed, and laid back on my bunk with my arms behind my head. But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light.

I reminded myself that it had been a fine day, one of the best I’d ever had fishing. I’d come back to the boat happy and we had had a wonderful meal and some whisky and everyone had been in a good mood, myself included, and I had gotten a little tight and then Suliet had come out and listened to music with Bobby and now they were up there drinking or perhaps dancing or maybe she’d taken him back to her room in the crew quarters. What did it matter? It was none of my business. Suliet was a fine woman. Her skin was the color of café con leche, smooth as a hardboiled egg, and she smelled of night jasmine. But what was that to me?

I turned on the light again and read. I read a sad story from The New Yorker in which a man who betrays his wife. She knows about it without ever saying anything. He knows as well and doesn’t say anything. They just go on as if nothing had happened but everything had happened and that was what was so sad about the story. I knew that now, reading it in my oversenitized state of my mind after too much whisky, I would remember it somewhere, and afterward it would seem as though it had really happened to me. I would always have it. That was something you paid for and then had and could not escape.

My room was hot. I opened up the portal window. I could not hear any sounds coming from the top deck. Perhaps they’d gone to bed. Perhaps they were just being quiet in the dark. What did it matter?

Some time along toward daylight I went to sleep.