After three years in New York , it was time to break myself of my unhealthy fixation on the sad, young literary men of New York, the ones who claimed to identify with George Plimpton and Ernest Hemingway to compensate for a modern world that had utterly castrated them. Because of the abundance of beautiful women at their fingertips, these guys seemed to feel entitled to treat me like just another dish on the Sunday brunch menuβusually the one sitting limp and uneaten under the heat lamp.
So I saved my money, went to Tierra del Fuego, down at the bottom of the world, and boarded a three-masted schooner to learn to sail. I figured that, when the trip ended two months later in the Azores, I was bound to have learned at least one useful skill. Maybe I could actually contribute something to the world rather than be a drain on its natural resources and Internet bandwidth.
Plus, it seemed likely that I might meet some guys who actually knew how to, you know, DO something, instead of just write about it. My plan worked better, and faster, than I could have possibly imagined. I was one of two single women in a crew of twenty, and Sailor Boy, 21, had shoulders you could crack a two-by-four on. Sailor Boy, born and raised outside Amsterdam, was like some unholy Real American mashup, a State U frat bro meets surf rat, in his liquor-logo T-shirts and the trucker hats that he would slam on backward over his shaggy sun-bleached hair, his accent like The Hague-meets-San Dimas.
He shimmered like phosphorescence shining up from the fathoms; like cool ocean water down my back. Hearing I was a writer, he came up to me the first day of the trip, as we were motoring out of the harbor, and asked me to edit something he had writtenβwritten! In English! Oh, lord. Not only was he hot, and a preternaturally gifted sailor, he was smart.
I soon saw why. He may have been brilliant, but the crew was making him earn his keep. Of course, he was smart enough to know he was too smart for that, so naturally, he hated it. He cracked the metaphorical whip on the easiest targetβme. He called me a mermaid and served me dessert first, always, in between, trying to impress me by misusing ten-dollar English words and asking me what I was reading on my Nook.
