Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (9 page)

Charleston is a
harbor well familiar to me. I had gone there in 2003 to acquire the
Gypsy Moon
from her former owner. Her name then was
Moonlighter
, formerly
The Gypsy in Me
. In a nod to seagoing superstition against renaming boats, I incorporated both names into
Gypsy Moon
. Neptune, so far as I can tell, has been pleased.

I had intentionally come back to Charleston once before, in 2007, when the
Gypsy Moon
was en route to the Bahamas with a crew of four men. In that more modest undertaking, I had arranged to sail to the Abaco Islands in a series of 120-mile legs over six weekends, coastwise down the Eastern Seaboard, with each leg manned by enough crew to keep a twenty-four-hour watch. However loftier my ambitions had been for this second expedition to be nonstop, it appeared that I was following much the same herky-jerky heading as before, only without the crew.

It was a bracing upwind sail for the twenty miles back to the channel at Charleston. Had I been headed to the open sea it would have been thrilling, but knowing that my destination was a marina and an admission of defeat, the voyage had all the excitement of a cab ride. In the interminable hours it took me to fetch the Fort Sumter Range again, I came to appreciate just how far and long my battle with the wind vane the previous night had gone on.

By midday I was finally in the channel, and the
Gypsy Moon
’s two-cylinder diesel engine rumbled once more to life in the shadow of a large container ship coming to port beside her. It is a long, tedious way through the Fort Sumter Range, and the absence of any significant hazard to navigation for all but the most foolhardy makes for mind-numbing boredom on a slow-going sailboat under power. My mind was already miles away and busy with plans for my return to Raleigh when boredom was banished. The engine transmission suddenly refused to answer, and I could make no way.

I let the helm fly free and ran up on the cabin top to raise the sails. The
Gypsy Moon
, now leaderless, dodged and veered of her own accord across the channel. Finally catching the wind and the ability to steer, I maneuvered into a protected anchorage amid the shallows and dropped anchor with sails still flying. The plough dug into the sand and snubbed up the anchor rode smartly in the bow chocks, whipping my little boat around to attention like a mother grabbing a wayward child by the nose. I lay there in the shadows of Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, and wondered who, exactly, had decided to shoot out both my autopilot and my engine transmission on this voyage. There would be no leaving Charleston anytime soon, while repairs were made.

A likable towboat captain (they are uniformly likable fellows, I have found) was quickly on the scene. He threw me a bridle to pull the
Gypsy Moon
against the swift tide that flows in the Ashley River up to Charleston City Marina, where I had first made my boat’s acquaintance nearly seven years before.

The Charleston City Marina is staffed by platoons of mannerly and officious southern boys in starched uniforms who no doubt come from what in an earlier day might have been called the “better families.” They gave no appearance in the least of needing my business or my money, but they required a considerable sum of the latter for the privilege of taking on the
Gypsy Moon
until repairs could be completed.

I spent the next four hours maneuvering a wheelbarrow up and down the ramps of the marina, offloading a mountain of supplies and provisions from the
Gypsy Moon
into a rented compact car. I wasn’t altogether sure how extensive the needed engine repairs would be or whether I could afford them. I was also, in my heart of hearts, less enamored of the idea of continuing the voyage than I had been two days earlier. What had once seemed so exciting and adventurous in the telling was turning out to be damned lonely and expensive in the doing. Feverish thoughts again came of selling the boat. I knew that would be rash, but I decided to strip her of anything of added value before I drove back to Raleigh. I wanted to be ready to let her go, if it came to that.

This experience of remorse and others like it, as the voyage continued, taught me something about myself. I know that I come too quickly to these overreactions of despair. I know but often fail to learn that I must give time and temperament their due. At that particular moment, I was greatly discouraged and more than a little embarrassed, frankly, that my once-grand adventure had come to naught. I didn’t know it then, but that fog was about to clear.

After returning to
Raleigh, I received welcome news from the mechanic: my transmission problem was merely a parted cable that would be easily replaced, and the cost of a new drive unit on the autopilot would come in well south of my worst fears. The voyage was suddenly back on, my melancholy woes were just as quickly forgotten, and Nassau loomed even closer than it had before. With any luck, I thought, I'd be there by Christmas and just in time for Junkanoo—the Bahamian answer to Mardi Gras. I made plans to meet the boat on Friday, December 18, and set sail the following morning.

Not long after this happy news, another cheerful message came my way. It was a message of the most profound consequence for my life, though I surely didn't know it at the time. A woman named Susan, in South Carolina of all places, shared with me this intriguing prayer in an e-mail: “God, I wish I lived closer.” It seemed then that God's in-box did runneth over.

She was responding to the online dating profile that I, carried away in a gush of hope and narcissism that spring eternal from the same well, had posted on Thanksgiving Day. On that day, after arriving alone again at another forlorn marina, I had resolved to cast my fate once more to the winds of the Internet. For all I knew and truly for all I had expected, my fate had been carried only briefly aloft on those winds before getting stuck in an unseen tree, there forever to remain. The early returns had not been promising. But this message from a lovely lady in South Carolina most certainly was.

Looking at her picture, what I noticed as soon as I recovered from the initial distraction of her impossibly long legs, rapturous hips, and flowing blond hair, and the careless typographical error concerning her age (only one year younger than I), was something about her face, and specifically her eyes. I don't mean her beauty, though beautiful she certainly is. It was something else. It was something new. It was something important.

The human mind, with its power to perceive the finest nuances of emotion, character, and intention in the face of another, is a wondrous thing. A child need only glance at his mother to know affection, approbation, or anxiety. What I saw in Susan's photograph that day eluded my powers of description, and for a while I remained unable to find words for it—even after I met her in person. I knew that I was seeing something very different from what I had seen in others, but I didn't know why or how that was so. I knew only that I wanted God to answer her prayer and mine, and I sensed that He already had. I wanted her to be closer, and I wanted to be closer to her.

Her address was listed as Ridgeville, South Carolina—a place unfamiliar to me. I knew it was nowhere near my home in Raleigh. I feared it might be far out of reach on the western end of the state, but I was delighted to learn that it was right outside Charleston, to which I planned very shortly to return. “What are the chances of that?” I thought.

We exchanged banal pleasantries and polite compliments by e-mail at first, as all participants in the modern Kabuki dance of online dating are obliged to do. I learned that she had skipped a grade in high school and graduated with a business degree from the College of Charleston a year earlier than I had stumbled out of the University of Maryland, skipping over no one. She had two teenagers and so did I, all spaced within four years of age. When I discovered that she had risen from payroll clerk to comptroller of a hospital before holding, for twenty-one years, her current position as director of accounting for Charleston's public works authority, I rejoiced that my radar for finding bitter, unemployed alimony mavens had malfunctioned at last.

Soon our correspondence crossed a kind of line. It became real. I noticed—or better to say I was astonished—that this woman was capable of the true intimacy of self-revelation. That is no small thing. We are all, to some degree, reluctant to allow others into our inner world. Women who have given their hearts to others, only to have them badly broken, are the most prone to this fear—the fear of getting close, of letting go, of being mocked, of being rejected, of being truly known, of surrendering control, of trusting men to catch them when they fall and risking that they won't. My sojourn through singlehood has been a fascinating study in human nature. Despite the recent discoveries concerning the planet Venus, I have met many women who are card-carrying citizens of Mars, some of whom are quite incapable of true intimacy. Their guard is up to stay.

There was something else about Susan, too. A capacity for intimacy is important, but it is not all we need to be lucky in love. Two people can be emotionally intimate yet want very different things in life. What I wanted and sorely needed was a partner, ready for marriage, who could commit to a life in which our relationship would be the first priority—the constant star around which the demands of our families, our careers, and every other aspect of our lives would find its orbit and fall into place. I made no apology because I refused to orbit some other star in some outer galaxy, and Susan expected no apology. She wanted the same thing. That was a first. Here, I thought, was not only a woman whom I could easily love and adore, but one who was capable of loving me back.

But we had to meet first.

I told her I was coming to Charleston on Friday, December 18, to spend the night aboard the boat in the marina and get ready to sail the next day. Following
The
Boyfriend Handbook
to a tee, I proposed that we meet for coffee at a local shop near where she worked, in downtown Charleston. Coffee would be brief, giving both of us an easy out if the meeting didn't live up to our expectations.

Our expectations kept rising with each letter we shared, back and forth in the ether of e-mail. Soon the e-mail started coming with family photos attached. I marveled at my good fortune that she could actually be that gorgeous, a grown-up, and normal to boot. Coffee, it was quickly apparent, would hardly do. I had this one chance to impress her, and I needed more time. It would have to be dinner. She agreed.

It was not
just raining but flooding in Charleston when I arrived for our date at the Peninsula Grill that Friday night. Recalling the winds that had crippled my ship and driven her ashore, and seeing the biblical rains that now threatened to bar my way back there, I began to suspect I might be starring unawares in some Cecil B. DeMille epic. Could a plague of locusts be far off?

Knowing that I would one day write this chapter, I have long wondered how I would find the words to describe the moment when I first met Susan. I can certainly report that a woman of remarkable beauty with a confident, winning smile and kind eyes strode into the foyer of the restaurant, wearing a black dress and carrying the world on a string. Those are the facts. But I must admit that beyond this, my skill for expositional narrative falls well short of the task. I can only hope that readers can give aid to my failing prose with the recollection of just such a moment in their own lives and know what I mean when I tell you that when I saw her, I
just knew
.

It is certainly true that not every first impression of mine has been authoritative, nor have all those decisions I have made quickly been wise. Prudence would have counseled more caution in coming to conclusions about my feelings for Susan, but my heart would hear nothing of it. I could have pretended after our first evening together that I didn’t know she was
the one
, and she could have pretended the same thing about me. But had we been the kind of people for whom pretending came so easily, we would not have experienced such a powerful mutual attraction in the first place.

When I looked across the table at the face of the real woman smiling back at me over dinner, I noticed again that thing—that intangible something—that had caught my attention when I first looked at her photographs. For most of the evening, I struggled to put my finger on it, like the name of someone you think you might know but just can’t recall. Then suddenly I realized what I was seeing. It was a face without guile.

There was no subterfuge and no artifice about this woman. She was not jaded or cynical or sarcastic. She was not gaming me. There was no come-hither stare, no intention to use her feminine charms to her clearly superior advantage. She was surrendered to the possibility that we might fall in love, with all its attendant dangers and complications and costs. Those were secondary or tertiary concerns for her. She wasn’t afraid of that possibility or the risks it portended. She wasn’t shrinking from the challenge before us. She wanted more than anything, it seemed, merely to be with me. I was defenseless against the honesty in her eyes.

I had been looking for these very qualities in a woman for so long, and my hope of their discovery had for so long been a mirage, that I did not have the capacity at first to understand that what I was seeing was real. Yet when the flicker of my understanding finally became a flame, it ignited my resolve with all the urgency of a five-alarm fire. I knew, in the course of an evening, that my life had been forever changed and that so, too, had hers.

Mr. DeMille had been characteristically busy, and so it was to be expected that an offshore gale followed the rain. Because of this weather I would be unable to leave the next day, which became the happy occasion for Susan’s second invitation to dinner. This meal would be served on Saturday night aboard the
Gypsy Moon
by her captain. It was a camp-style affair brought forth from the ship’s larder and prepared upon her antique alcohol stove. Canned chicken, diced tomatoes, onions, black beans, and garlic were sautéed in olive oil and served in a white sauce over pasta topped with grated Parmesan cheese, accompanied by candlelight, wine, and music for dancing in the two-by-two-foot space afforded by the cabin sole.

She brought family photo albums, we curled up in the vee berth together to go through them, and we both laughed at how everyone looked in the sixties. That was such a time of hopeful innocence. Examine the photographs of young families back then, and you can see it in their faces. It was a time when Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed that we would all one day be free, and when John F. Kennedy called us to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle” to see such dreams come true. But that burden proved too great for those men alone to bear, and an entire generation saw the shadows of that twilight struggle grow longer with their passing. We lost our innocence, and in some ways I think many of us from that generation have never regained that feeling of exuberant hope.

Looking across the table of my ship’s salon at Susan, I had those feelings of hopefulness once more, and the innocence to believe that my hopes could come true. Kennedy needn’t have worried about the Russians. Another American flew over the moon that night, and he made the trip without a rocket.