Atlantic High Read online

  We went ashore in part to ogle at Fijian life, little of which we had observed. We found it to be exactly as described by National Geographic—men and women of all shapes and colors, pleasant, a little lethargic, that admixture of Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian and, finally, Indian (the Indians immigrated halfway through the nineteenth century as indentured laborers, the tending of agriculture being unappealing to the native population). They are now a peaceable race of people, and it requires an exercise of the imagination to recall that on his famous voyage from the Bounty to Timor in 1789 (3,600 miles in an open longboat) Captain Bligh did not dare to pause in these islands, so notoriously were the natives given to killing, and then eating, uninvited guests. The natives are cheerful, apparently unexcitable, notwithstanding the sweat they work up in their nightclub acts when imitating the frenzied manners of their forefathers. They have been self-governing since 1970, after ninety-six years of colonial rule by the British who had the uncommon good sense to leave 82 percent of the land in native hands. I am not qualified to say whether the 600,000 Fijians are competently governed, but whatever evidence there is of commercial sloth, justice is certainly swift. On Tuesday we read in the local paper that three men had been convicted the day before of raping a young woman of eighteen, receiving sentences of from two to four years of hard labor. The rape had occurred the preceding Saturday. Earl Warren never sojourned in Fiji.

  Through the town of Waiyevo, on the western shore of the island, the 180th meridian runs, and the spot on the roadside where this happens is of course properly designated, with wooden signs tapering in opposite directions, one of them marked “Today,” the other, “Yesterday.” We did a great deal of picture taking, inevery conceivable pose, one foot firmly planted on Tuesday, the second on Wednesday—that sort of thing.

  It reminded me of an experience a half-dozen years earlier at the exact geographical south pole when an escorting colonel, in the fifty-degree-below-zero cold, asked whether I would like to have my picture taken while standing on my head, making possible a postcard depicting me as carrying the world on my shoulders. That being a characteristic personal burden, I readily assented and was lifted by my boots by an aide. At exactly which moment my brother Jim, then the junior senator from the State of New York, in a fit of chauvinism fired off a firecracker which was programmed to waft to earth in the form of the New York State flag, which he would photograph and send out to his constituents. Unhappily the firecracker went instead directly to my nose, so that there exists only a picture of me standing on my head, being bloodied by the flag of New York State.

  No such infelicity marred our picture taking this time around, though I was later advised by an obstinately literal historian of the area that the official boundary marking the international date line was, in answer to a local provocation, made to jag eastward, then south, then west, and back to the 180-degree mark so that the whole of Fiji might repose, unconfused, in the eastern hemisphere. All that bureaucratic geographical commotion was in retaliation against an ingenious Indian vendor whose shop straddled the date line and who got around the sabbath laws by selling from the eastern end of his shop on the western Sunday, and from the western end of the shop on the eastern Sunday. That is the kind of problem the UN was born to solve.

  We returned to the Tau undecided whether to stop by at the neighboring islands of Nggamea and Lauthala, which are owned respectively by the American tycoon Malcolm Forbes and the Canadian-born actor Raymond Burr. Everyone knows Malcolm Forbes, whose hospitality is in any case widely advertised. The closest tie any of us had to Raymond Burr is that I had patronized his hotel in the Azores during a transatlantic crossing in 1975. I pronounced this an attenuated relationship, whereupon we all decided that in any event we really did not want to visit anybody at all, so we read, and had our wines, and chatted, and listened to beautiful music from the cassette deck I had so thoughtfully provided, and went to bed in high excitement, because the very next day we would visit the fabled Wallangilala.

  Thursday. Wallangilala even Captain Philip had never visited. It is a perfect coral crescent. More accurately, a mile-wide coral necklace, with three beads missing at the top, through which you enter. The inside is ringed with white sand, with palm trees on the eastern end. It has a voluptuarian appeal for anyone who cares at all about, or for, the sea. Its stark loneliness in the South Pacific is itself striking. The perfect protection it gives from wind or, rather, from the seas—the height of the coral is insufficient to block the wind—might have been specified by a civil defense engineer. The water is every shade of Bahamian blue; the diving and snorkeling could consume days. There was only a single other vessel there, a 45-foot ketch owned by an oil rigger who works six months of the year in the North Sea, accumulating enough money to sustain him the other six months of the year in Fiji, where he cruises with his wife and child, endlessly, from island to island, disdaining, except in extreme circumstances, the use of his engine, thus doing little to consume the mineral he is paid so handsomely to make available to others. At dinner that night we resolve that now that we have reached the easternmost part of our itinerary, we shall insist on using only the sails as we proceed south to the Lau group of islands. We retired with that vinous determination, which tends to silt away overnight, to be firm with the captain, but we dove before breakfast and this meant, by Jack’s hallowed tradition, a glass of red wine with breakfast (Vane does not permit us to eat before diving). And so, refortified in our resolve, we stipulate that only the sails will be used for our passage south to Mbalavu—from which Pat and I shall have to leave the party, to meet engagements in Australia more closely related in purpose to taking oil out of the North Sea than to cruising in Fiji.

  Saturday. It was a fine sail, and I suggested to the first mate that we board the Zodiac and take photographs of the Tau under sail. The first part of the operation was accomplished, but at full power in the Zodiac in a choppy sea we found we could not keep up with the Tau, so bracing was the wind that morning and so lively the Tau’s performance, unleashed on a broad reach, even with the mainsail reefed. It was an awful exercise in frustration, attempting to communicate to the people on the boat that they must slow down in order that we might photograph them. All boats should have walkie-talkies, perfect for contact between dinghy and the mother vessel. Pat has mastered the exploitation of these, and reaches me at remote grocery stores in native villages with such importunities as “Don’t forget the guava jelly, OVER!” The photograph reproduced in these pages is the forlorn result of attempting, on a cloudy day, to capture the Tau, headed adamantly across the same sound Captain Bligh passed through on his determined, legendary voyage. That night, another fine dive having been consummated, a sadness overtook the departing members, and the thought of going anywhere without Vane to guide me and Bindy to console me, and of leaving Jack and Drue, was a cruel capitulation to the world of getting and spending. The lot of them boarded an ancient open bus to see us off at what is called the airport. Our fourteen pieces of luggage were segregated and weighed outside a thatched hut where lukewarm orange soda was available. The terminal’s scales were brought out. The device was what you get from Sears, Roebuck for the guest bathroom, and one by one the bags were weighed (and a careful calculation made of the overweight) and lugged into the belly of one of those airplanes Clark Gable used to fly over the Hump; and we headed downwind, because into the wind would have required taking off uphill, and we were, miraculously, airborne. Suddenly it was sunny, and all the blue, and the coral reefs that have decimated the merchant marines of the world, spread out ahead, carpeting us the 150 miles to Suva, where the maw of convention was waiting, impatient to swallow us up.

  3

  Six weeks after Fiji came Christmas-cruise time. Dick Clurman advised me, over the phone, in clipped accents, that he and Shirley would meet us at JFK rather than attempt the trip to the airport in a single motor vehicle with twenty-six pieces of luggage. This detail is not entirely extraneous to ocean sailing. The summer b
efore, I had sailed the Aegean and one of the company, whom I had known since college though he is a few years my junior, arrived with a single moderate-sized duffel bag plus a wafer-slim briefcase good for one issue of the Paris Tribune and maybe three paperbacks. Every day of the week he was with us he turned up in serviceable but modish costume, and at night there would be a fresh shirt and colored pants or white ducks. Dick (Coulson) had sailed competitively since he was a boy, and twice he raced the Atlantic aboard a boat whose skipper is notoriously demanding. His disposition is quiet, he is organically unexcitable, and when he goes cruising he sees no need for chestloads of gear. If he finishes the books he brings, there are always others on board. If his laundry gets scarce, he washes it and it is dry the next morning. He has hisown foul-weather gear and one extra pair of Topsiders, and doesn’t go to sea other than to go to sea.

  Clurman and I are gadget-minded. He, for instance, even brings along his own voltmeter. He has, usually, three radios, and the paraphernalia that go with them. Then there is the fishing equipment. If he could catch a single fish per snare or hook he brings aboard, he would empty the Caribbean of underwater life. And now that we are onto scuba diving, there is that inventory. He reads at the rate of a book a day (I saw him begin Herman Wouk’s Winds of War one morning and finish it at noon the next day). And mind you he does not do all of this in Carthusian circumstances. He talks at least three times as much as the rest of the crew combined, though he is always available to undertake any chore; he receives, transcribes and analyzes the news for us, explores the lives and problems of the crew, expresses his preferences on a) where we should sail to, b) when we should eat, and c) what we should eat. Then of course there are the magazines to catch up on—about forty, and they range from Playboy to American Scholar. He is perhaps happiest on the radiotelephone, calling his endless list of friends, discharging his responsibilities as a counselor to them all. No doubt he came to the habit of being constantly in touch with all points of the globe during his long tenure as chief of correspondents for Time Inc. The world is dotted with former employees, associates, and acquaintances whom Dick has helped. On one of our trips he had with him David Halberstam’s new manuscript. The next trip out he brought along a copy of the published book for me to read. It was inscribed “Dick: I wanted you to have the earliest copy of your book which I took the liberty of writing.”

  I go in for navigational gear. Nowadays I regularly bring aboard the tables, the almanac, my own set of dividers and parallel rules, paper clips and rubber bands, plotting sheets, notebooks and logbooks, three computers, and two, sometimes three, sextants, plus books and unrequited correspondence. I leave the packing of my clothes to my wife, and she regularly sends me off with three sets of foul-weather gear and approximately four times as many shirts, pants, undershorts, sports shirts, sweaters, blazers, and shoes as I will need. Then, of course, I must have my peanut butter and my Swiss cyclamate. My happiest superstition is that if I take saccharine in my coffee, I can have hot-fudge sundaes for dessert.

  Some women associate cruising with fashion, and aboard at night, for them, every day is Easter Sunday. On one jaunt, in May a year before the crossing, we had on board Jeff Hammond, the yachting editor, whose dress was generally ascetic, his interest being in photographs (add one aluminum bag for photographic equipment). But also we had Aileen Mehle, best known to a vast public as “Suzy,” the name under which she reports, in her distinctive style, the affairs of society. I had that spring written a novel and was depressed, on going over it, that my women were inevitably dressed in “a white pleated skirt,” or in “a blue cotton shirt,” or in “a long, strapless red velvet gown.” To my dismay I discovered that my vocabulary, in describing clothes, is positively primitive. Since Aileen is required by her profession to describe in detail the dress of the ladies she mingles with night after night, I thought I would take some instruction. I required her to describe what Pat and Shirley and she wore every night, and sought ambitiously to expand my sartorial vocabulary.

  At the end of the eight-day sail I resolved to impose on myself a written examination. I set out to write a newspaper column after the fashion of the famous syndicated “Suzy” in order to exhibit my newfound knowledge. So at cocktail time I typed out and handed around a piece which the beautiful and amusing Aileen has never seen fit to publish as a guest column. Accordingly, I immodestly present it here:

  SUZY says …

  St. Martin. You know the famous line about the greatest concentration of brains that ever sat in the White House since Jefferson ate there alone? That was the charming toast by Jackie O’s First, when he gave that unforgettable dinner for all the Nobel Prize winners. Well, I thought of that the other day. Where have the beautiful people gone, in the great May diaspora? The heaviest concentration of them is on a boat. A big boat? No, dear, a little eensy-weensy boat, which is what makes it all so, well you know—unique?

  It’s a dear little boat, though. It would have to be, to attract the people on it. You’re getting impatient? Wait, just wait. It’s worth waiting for. The boat is the kind of thing you put in little Johnny’s bathtub and blow, and he giggles and giggles. Anyway, take that boat and magnify it twenty or thirty times, and what you have is—the yacht Sea-lestial. Clever? There’s no stopping American ingenuity, and I hope some Russians are listening (I know there are. Don’t ask me how I found out. Do you think they would send me to jail? I know my friends would let me pick out the jail, and Françoise de la Renta said she and Mica Ertegun would stop everything and decorate it for me. I think it would be fun to have pictures of all the famous killers, don’t you? Caligula, Genghis Khan, Jack the Ripper, Three Mile Island …).

  You thought I had forgotten about Sealestial? I’m just increasing the suspense. All aboard one boat. It has, for the nautical buffs out there who are interested in particulars, two sails and an engine, and the most divine steering wheel, with four sterling silver spokes, positively fit for framing.

  Who do you suppose is on board this unobtrusive, inconspicuous, anonymous little sailboat? To begin with, Aileen Mehle. I know, I know, all you Mehle-experts will write to me (sorry, darlings, I just can’t answer my mail; not even presidents get acknowledgments) that Aileen—known to a few dozen million people, plus the few hundred who really count, as “Suzy”—doesn’t travel on eensy-weensy sailboats. What you don’t know is that Aileen comes from pioneer stock. Her great-grandfather discovered El Paso. His great-grandfather discovered Mexico City (she speaks Spanish like a native: Aileen, ¿Tu sabes cómo te quiero?—that’s a private message, and you naughty voyeurs—wonderful word, but be sure, darlings, to pronounce it correctly—it’s vwa-ytrs—are invited to glide right by that little—shall I throw you off the track by calling it a graffito?). And his great-grandfather discovered the Inquisition. His great-grandfather (no slouch) converted the Khazar Jews; his great-grandfather—but you have the idea, anyway; so are you surprised now that Aileen Mehle was spending a week in an eensy-weensy boat with sails?

  Every night she would appear at dinner in something—special. Even the blasé guests on board (just wait, just wait) couldn’t suppress that little gasp of true astonishment. I can’t begin to give you an inventory. But let me tell you about last night, when the Sealestial was moored at a remote little harbor in St. Kitts, known for the savagery of its native population, surrounded by a stretch of brown-white sand, well over a hundred yards from David Rockefeller’s little beach house. Well, she wore tulle dungarees, with a voile blouse, positively streaming with scarlet ribands that rustled with the wind in the cockpit, over dyed Chinese characters that everybody on board spent hours trying to decipher, everybody agreeing that the key to the Chinese puzzle (Aileen just smiled and smiled when asked directly what it was) lay somewhere south of her nose (I’m using navigational language, darlings, but so would you if you had been where I have been this last week), north of her feet, southwest of her chin, and northwest of her navel. She looked ravishing with her swishy blond hair held
down by a babushka, but complaining (it was her only complaint, all week long) that her hair wouldn’t stand up under the typhoon for more than one hour. (The captain didn’t think it was a typhoon, he thought it was a hurricane, but then he doesn’t come from adventurist stock. All his great-grandfather discovered was his great-grandmother.)

  Now: What would bring Aileen out to such a boat, in the remote Caribbean? Well, for one thing, Jeff Hammond. Jeff, although he wears one of those beards, is a real softie. But that isn’t how they think of him at the Hearst Situation Room, where they track him as one of the jogging juggernauts (I like that, and I hope you do, my darlings; because I like you, as you know) who are headed for the big time. Jeff is the editor-in-chief of Motor Boating & Sailing, and it was he who told me that the Sealestial was a boat! You can’t put anything over on Jeff, he’s too smart, so don’t try. He wore khaki shorts and a T-shirt with Charisma written over the vest pocket. But he didn’t have to do that, because we all know that Jeff was born with charisma!

  Next? Would you believe, Dick and Shirley Clurman? They decided—they are so wonderfully sentimental—to celebrate the third week following the 22nd anniversary of their marriage, and they were the people who put together this whole marvelous experience. Dick was chief of foreign correspondents for Time-Life. But, as we all know, he was just warming up. He’s been all kinds of things since, and if you wake up one day and find out he’s President of the United States—just don’t forget, you had a vaticinator (????—see below, and you won’t be surprised) aboard the Sealestial. And Shirley—her best friends call her Shirleykins, and she roars with laughter every time—is as smart as her husband, and as accomplished. Beautiful Shirley was dressed last night in tapered white suede pants with a mauve shirt with pouch pockets studded with mother-of-pearl. Why? Because—only Shirley Clurman would think of this! Today was Mother’s Day. No wonder she has served as adviser to the high and mighty. If Dick goes All The Way, Shirley will be the very best FL since JO, though of course we’ve had some darlings in between, haven’t we, darlings?