“Salaud,” the woman said amiably, and spangled over to the juke box.
“What’s Lake Superior got to do with Cannes?” Thomas said. “I’ll tell you what Lake Superior’s got to do with Cannes. You’re a hot small boat sailor on Lake Superior …”
“Well, I …”
“Are you or aren’t you?”
“For Christ’s sake, Tommy,” Dwyer said, “I never said I was Christopher Columbus or anybody like that. I said I sailed a dory and some small power boats when I was a kid and …”
“You know how to handle boats. Am I right in supposing that or ain’t I right?”
“Sure, I can handle small boats,” Dwyer admitted. “I still don’t see …”
“On the beach at Cannes,” Thomas said, “they got sailboats you can rent by the hour. I want to see with my own eyes how you rate. You’re big on theory, with charts and books. All right, I want to see you actually get a boat in and out of some place. Or do I have to take that on faith, too, like your not being a fag?”
“Tommy!” Dwyer said, hurt.
“You can teach me,” Thomas said. “I want to learn from an expert. Ah—the hell with it—if you’re too yellow to come with me, I’ll do it myself. Go on back to the boat, like a nice little boy.”
“Okay,” Dwyer said. “I never did anything like this before. But I’ll do it. The hell with the ship.” He drained his beer.
“The grand tour,” Thomas said.
It wasn’t as good as he’d remembered it, because he had Dwyer with him, not that wild English girl. But it was good enough. And it certainly was a lot better than standing watches on the Elga Andersen and eating that slop and sleeping in the same stinking hole with two snoring Moroccans.
They found a cheap little hotel that wasn’t too bad behind the rue d’Antibes and went swimming off the beach, although it was only springtime and the water was so cold you could only stay in a little while. But the white buildings were the same, the pink wine was the same, the blue sky was the same, the great yachts lying in the harbor were the same. And he didn’t have to worry about his weight or fighting some murderous Frenchman when the holiday was over.
They rented a little sailboat by the hour and Dwyer hadn’t been lying, he really knew how to handle small boats. In two days he had taught Thomas a great deal and Thomas could slip a mooring and come up to it dead, with the sail rattling down, nine times out of ten.
But most of the time they spent around the harbor, walking slowly around the quays, silently admiring the sloops, the schooners, the big yachts, the motor cruisers, all still in the harbor and being sanded down and varnished and polished up for the season ahead.
“Christ,” Thomas said, “would you believe there’s so much money in the world and we don’t have any of it.”
They found a bar on the Quai St. Pierre frequented by the sailors and captains working on pleasure craft. Some of them were English and many of the others could speak a little and they got into conversations with them whenever they could. None of the men seemed to work very hard and the bar was almost always at least half full at all hours of the day. They learned to drink pastis because that was what everybody else drank and because it was cheap. They hadn’t found any girls and the ones who accosted them from cars on the Croisette or back behind the port asked too much money. But for once in his life Thomas didn’t mind going without a woman. The harbor was enough for him, the vision of the life based on it, of grown men living year in and year out on beautiful ships was enough for him. No boss to bother about nine months of the year, and then in the summer being a big shot at the wheel of a hundred-thousand-dollar craft, going to places like St. Tropez and Monte Carlo and Capri, coming into harbor with girls in bathing suits draped all over the decks. And they all seemed to have money. What they didn’t earn in salary they got in kickbacks from ship chandlers and boatyards and rigged expense accountts. They ate and drank like kings and some of the older ones weren’t sober from one day to the next.
“These guys,” Thomas said, after they had been in town for four days, “have solved the problems of the universe.”
He even thought of skipping the Elga Andersen for good and trying to get a job on one of the yachts for the summer, but it turned out that unless you were a skipper you most likely only got hired for three or four months, at lousy pay, and you were let go for the rest of the year. Much as he liked Cannes, he couldn’t see himself starving eight months a year just to be there.
Dwyer was just as dazzled as he was. Maybe even more so. He hadn’t even been in Cannes before but had admired and had been around boats all his life. What was an adult discovery for Thomas was a reminder for Dwyer of the deepest pleasures of his boyhood.
There was one Englishman in the bar, a dark-brown colored little man with white hair, named Jennings, who had been in the British navy during the war and who owned, actually owned, his boat, a sixty-footer with five cabins. It was old and cranky, the Englishman told them, but he knew it like his own mother, and he coaxed her all around the Med, Malta, Greece, Sicily, everywhere, as a charter captain during the summer. He had an agent in Cannes who booked his charters for him, for ten per cent. He had been lucky, he said. The man who had owned the boat and for whom he had worked, had hated his wife. When he died, out of spite, he had left the boat to Jennings. Well, you couldn’t bank on things like that.
Jennings sipped complacently at his pastis. His motor yacht, the Gertrude II, stubby, but clean and comfortable looking, was moored for the winter across the street, just in front of the bar, and as he drank Jennings could look fondly at it, all good things close at hand. “It’s a lovely life,” he said. “I fair have to admit it, Yanks. Instead of fighting for a couple of bob a day, hauling cargo on the docks of Liverpool or sweating blood oiling engines in some tub in the North Sea in a winter’s gale. To say nothing of the climate and taxes.” He waved largely toward the view of the harbor outside the bar where the mild sun tipped the gently bobbing masts of the boats moored side by side at the quay. “Rich man’s weather,” Jennings said. “Rich man’s weather.”
“Let me ask you a question, Jennings,” Thomas said. He was paying for the Englishman’s drinks and he was entitled to a few questions. “How much would it cost to get a fair-sized boat, say one like yours, and get into business?”
Jennings lit a pipe and pulled at it reflectively. He never did anything quickly, Jennings. He was no longer in the British navy, or on the docks, there was no foreman or mate to snarl at him, he had time for everything. “Ah, that’s a hard question to answer, Yank,” he said. “Ships are like women—some come high and some come cheap, but the price you pay has little to do with the satisfaction you get from them.” He laughed appreciatively at his own worldliness.
“The minimum,” Thomas persisted. “The absolute minimum?”
Jennings scratched his head, finished his pastis. Thomas ordered another round.
“It’s a matter of luck,” Jennings said. “I know men put down a hundred thousand pounds, cash on the barrelhead, ships designed by the fanciest naval architects, built in the best shipyards in Holland or Britain, steel hulls, teak decks, every last little doodad on board, radar, electric toilets, air conditioning, automatic pilot, and they cursed the day the bloody thing was put in the water and they would have been glad to get rid of it for the price of a case of whiskey, and no takers.”
“We don’t have any hundred thousand pounds,” Thomas said shortly.
“We?” Dwyer said bewilderedly. “What do you mean, we?”