If I'd Known You Were Coming

Parts of a Boat

4 2 Parts of a Boat The boat is quiet except for the clanking of the halyard against the mast. Catherine edges herself down from the bunk and moves to the head, to wipe the crud of sleep from her eyes. She is still resolving herself to the horror the small, round mirror has revealed—her hair smashed, her face lined with sheet marks, her mascara—when the harbor dog, Buoy, starts up barking , followed by the quick, clipped footsteps of a woman on the dock. The boat leans starboard: the woman pulling herself aboard. Roxanne. “Have we got a good one for you,” Roxanne says. She is bent down in the boat’s companionway, a short blood orange dress frames her breasts—breasts as pert as if she were upside down. P a r t s o f a B o a t 43 Catherine eyes her wrist, her bare wrist: Bill having removed her watch while she was sleeping. His small niceties are equally considerate and inconvenient. “You’re early. I think.” “No. We’re late,” Roxanne says, already down the steps. “We’re always late,” she says, as if late and fabulous are equivalent. Behold Roxanne: hopping on the balls of her pedicured feet, red-ribboned sandals dangling from one tan, thin arm, the other weighted in a dozen golden bracelets. She is a well-heeled forty. Looking twenty. Catherine can’t help but hate her. Roxanne’s husband, Sean, follows with a canvas bag chinking at his side, announcing its liquor contents. He hefts the bag to the counter and leans in to kiss Catherine. “Looking good,” he says. He hasn’t looked at her. He is a disconcertingly handsome man, as if he were wearing makeup. Could that be? Yes, yes it could. Catherine has had dinner with these particular friends of Bill’s only once before, a year ago, not long after moving in with him. Neither Roxanne nor Sean had paid her much mind then and Catherine hadn’t held it against them. Plenty of women had passed through her chair, maybe even Roxanne. They’d been to an overcrowded Asian fusion place. Catherine needing to lean in to make out what was being said, lingo she didn’t yet understand, all the talk centering on Sean and Bill, their careers, naturally. Castings. Shoots. Who was Catherine anyway? Just a single mom, fresh off a moving van from the Midwest. And already lucky enough to be eating lettuce cups with Sean Max, the actor, and his striking wife, Roxanne. Roxanne had had work done, of course, but it was good work. Then, waiting on dessert, they ran through the usual questions about Catherine’s move from Illinois, the litany of expletives about the weather, how relieved she must be and all of that. It was a subject she tired of quickly. She was here now. Why speak of old lovers? “Where’s our Captain?” Roxanne says. She is flush, tan and flush. She maneuvers around Catherine, toward the unmade bunk, where she lifts herself up and settles on their strewn sheets, crossing and bouncing one bird leg against the other. “We have such a wicked little story,” she says. The boat feels narrower now, crowded with Roxanne’s taut good looks and gameshow energy. Bill has yet to return. “He’s gone to the store.” 4 4 P a r t s o f a B o a t “We have to wait for Bill,” Sean is saying. “Cath doesn’t want to hear the story twice.” Cath. Good then. They’re already the best of friends. Coffee, she needs to drink a tanker of coffee. She and Bill had spent the afternoon on the boat, leaving her son, James, at home with the woman Bill hired. The two of them needing a break from the family life—Bill’s phrase—from time to time. And she is flattered, his wanting her all to himself more often. Yet away from her son, Catherine feels a low-grade sort of panic underneath everything; James needs her, or she needs him, or she needs him to need her. A hollow vibration in the bones. Yet something still quieted by a glass of Pinot in the mid-day sun. They finished that bottle over a game of backgammon. She wasn’t really even trying. She’d let Bill trap her runners before she’d moved any points at all. The game was inevitably over and then...