“Shark! Oh my God, you mean it could attack you?”
“Oh, no. A dogfish is pretty harmless — unless you threaten him, in which case he might give you a nasty bite.”
For Alida, the whole character of the sea had changed on the instant. She was afraid of looking down now, for fear of seeing another gliding monster.
And Augie made it worse. “It’s kind of odd to see one out on his own. That’s why they’re called dogfish — they hunt in packs. See one, you usually see a hundred.”
Packs!
“They can live for fifty years, maybe even a hundred, which is a helluva great age for a fish. Hey, there’s another! I thought so.”
She didn’t dare look.
“Scavengers of the sea, they’re called, and they do a fine job of cleaning up.”
Shakily, she said, “Can we go back now?”
“Sure, but we still have a good half hour left. We could follow the sharks.”
Terrified of losing her balance, Alida turned her kayak toward the beach and began to paddle fast and splashily, sweeping not punching, through water squirming with hungry hundred-year-old sharks, their bald, underslung jaws opening and shutting to bare repulsive yellowed fangs.
“Alida!”
She was far ahead of Augie now.
“Alida, it’s okay! Really, it’s okay! They’re just dogfish. There’s nothing—”
But she was deaf to anything he might say: she was paddling for her life.
6
“POOR KID — she thought she was in Jaws 4, and it was all my stupid fault.” Augie was making martinis. Alida, who’d come back white-faced, lower lip trembling, had taken herself up to her room to do her math homework. Minna, refusing Lucy’s offer to help, was in the kitchen doing something complicated and French for dinner.
“I like mine dry,” Augie called from within the house.
“So do I. My dad used to say that one bottle of vermouth should last a decade, if not two.”
“Man after my own heart. Olive? Twist? Both?”
“I’d like a twist, thanks.”
He was quite the bartender, buttling the martinis out to the patio on a silver tray.
“I’m so sorry about Alida.”
Lucy laughed, trying to put his mind at rest. “It’s a good lesson to learn, that there are sharks in the sea.”
“Before we saw the dogfish, she was happy as a clam.”
“How is it that clams got their reputation for proverbial happiness?”
“I don’t know — all that squirting, maybe? That looks pretty much like fun.” Augie peered into the depths of the house for a moment, found a half-smoked cigarette in his shirt pocket, and lit up.
The thought crossed Lucy’s mind that this smoking business was a bad-boy act staged expressly for her benefit. Beyond the labyrinth of drying sand flats, the sea was turning copper in the late afternoon sun. “Would it be okay to ask what you’re working on now?”
“You may not like the answer. It’s a salvo in the war you don’t believe in. Wearing my last remaining academic hat, as an adjunct fellow in international affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations, I’m doing something for them about how to combat anti-Americanism abroad, especially in the Muslim world.”
“Sounds like you have your work cut out for you.”
“I don’t want to seem a lard ass, Lucy, but I love this country, and it breaks my heart to see it turned into the most hated nation on earth.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“We share a premise!”
“Oh, I think we share quite a few.”
Gusting smoke, Augie said, “The way I see it, every poor sap living under a dictatorship, when he dreams of being free he dreams of being an American. Most probably he doesn’t even know that himself. But it’s our freedoms he’s dreaming of, and in his heart of hearts he wants to be here on this patio, drinking martinis, talking like we’re talking now. He wants his press to be like our press, his elections to be like our elections. He wants our movies, our TV, our music, our automobiles, our standard of living. Syrian, Egyptian, Saudi, Indonesian — doesn’t matter what his nationality is — he dreams of being us, and if we can only waken him to that knowledge we can roll back this terrible tide of anti-Americanism that’s sweeping around the world.
“We got to invest, and invest big, in secular education in countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. We need a whole lot more scholarship programs in this country. But most of all, we got to open that guy’s eyes to what he’s really feeling. I’d like to believe that inside every would-be jihadi in a madrasa there’s a frustrated democrat trying to get out — and our job is to liberate that weak, uncertain little voice inside of him that talks of freedom and show it for what it is.”
So that was what the morning clatter of the typewriter was all about. “A pity we don’t set a better example, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” He was burying his cigarette stub deep in the watered earth of a potted hibiscus.
“I mean we go yakking on about human rights, then we torture them in their own jails. We talk up freedom of the press, then close their papers down, or bribe them to print feel-good stories about us, written by us. If I were your poor sap living under a dictatorship, I think I’d more likely see America as a hypocritical tyranny than as the land of the free.”
“Oh, abuses happen. Just because you’re a democracy doesn’t mean you’re perfect. Some commander in the field makes a wrong call. A department head in Langley, Virginia, okays something that he shouldn’t. Of course it happens. But because we’re a democracy we get to hear about it, and that’s the difference. If you read The New York Times—not my favorite paper — you’d think that’s all that ever happens, abuse after abuse after abuse, and that’s part of democracy, too. Sure we make mistakes, but we make them in public, and correct them in public. Trouble is, with an open society like ours, outsiders looking in think, Hell, if they’re putting all this bad stuff in the papers, what else is going on that doesn’t make it onto the news? What they don’t understand about America is that what you see is pretty much what you get, and that in their countries The New York Times would have been closed down long ago for sedition and treason.”
“So what is your favorite newspaper?”
“I think The Wall Street Journal has pretty balanced coverage on the whole. But I wouldn’t want to lay a finger on The New York Times, any more than I’d want to lay a finger on Fox News. It’s the spectrum I care about, liberal and conservative — I want the whole nine yards. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a First Amendment nut, and I’ve lived under a regime where the only newspaper was called Truth. Sometimes, when I hear liberals talk, I have a dream: I’d like the ghost of Stalin to come back and rule the U.S. for, let’s say, three days, and after that we’d pick up the conversation where it had left off. Boy, you’d see those guys change their tune. ‘Tyranny,’ you say. Lucy, I can tell you in all sincerity that you don’t have the faintest inkling of what tyranny is.”
He was the host, she the guest. She twirled her martini glass around and around between fingers and thumbs. To the receding sea in the far distance she said, “You’re right, of course. I don’t. But I still find it very hard to stomach a lot of what my country is doing in the world right now.”
“I know. It’s partly a matter of age, I think. I envy you being still young enough to be so intolerant of imperfection. Me, I’ve hit that stage of geezerdom when you recognize that everybody and everything has its flaws. Deep flaws. I think of Thomas Jefferson. ‘All men are created equal and independent’—when he wrote that, if he looked down from his window up there at Monticello, he’d’ve seen his own slaves working out in the fields. Hypocrisy? And what about Sally Hemings? Or how viciously he trashed his rivals, like Hamilton and Burr, with lies and spin? He was a master of the dirty-tricks campaign, could’ve taught the Watergate burglars or Lee Atwater a thing or two. It’s only by a whisker that Jefferson comes out on the side of the angels, and he’s still my great American hero. He’s huge. You’ve read Montaigne?”