BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON
565
"'Help me' in French - well, we are going into French territory .
I mean the French and Spanish had something to do with the dis–
covering of America. I mean, Columbus wasn't exactly a Harvard
man...."
"Sweetie, put the booze in the lazaret beneath the back bunk.
Hard stuff in the head."
"Last week I saw a revival of
L'Atalante
at the Regency . . . ."
"L'A talante?"
"An old French movie about a barge. There is this girl, she
marries the bargeman. He takes her away from her home, only she
doesn't understand that he needs to make his living from the barge.
So, she runs away when they dock along the quay, in Paris. To see
the shop windows and...."
"Sweetie, get your books off the bunk and stop babbling about
some Frog movie . We'll sail through the night-three shifts and make
it across in twelve to fifteen hours."
"I've never night sailed."
Chris looks at Daniel like he is wacko. "I'll do your turn with
you, Mrs. Becker."
I weave red, white and blue yarn through the ROOSEVELT,
avoiding noticing the fog and cold. I use all my energy simply in
order not to make mistakes. Where I sit, how I move seems deter–
mined by Daniel or the demands of the yawl. I feel oddly passive.
Daniel steers while Chris is sacked out on one of the bunks . I am
seated in a corner of the deck, away from the wind. The needlepoint
keeps me from thinking about the graveyard of the Atlantic. I've
brought with me
Tender Is the Night, The Good Soldier, People
Magazine
and the new Random House edition of
Swann's Way.
Daniel looks up at me. "Mind if I ask you a personal question,
Elena?"
I have always found Daniel's sudden formalities of speech,
sandwiched in between "fuck the bastards" and hot sex, mind bog–
gling.
"Shoot."
"Does it bother you that I have never asked you about your
work?"
"Oh, my writing."
"Well-it's not very much my thing."
In point of fact Daniel was my first publisher. He owned
Braden's Press in Boston. During the McCarthy era, the time I was
in college, Braden's Press was one of the things that held . God, how
