Beast Read Free

tuition, fifteen thousand a year for eating out a couple of times a week, twenty thousand for vacations, fifty thousand for maintenance and upkeep.
    Twenty thousand here, twenty thousand there—they used to joke—and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
    It was a joke, because the money just kept coming in.
    And then one day the tap was turned off. Griffin was laid off. A week later, Elizabeth was given a choice: half time at half salary, or quit.
    Griffin’s settlement would have allowed them to live for a year, no frills, while he looked for another job. But another job (undoubtedly at less money) would have meant climbing onto the same treadmill, a few paces back of the pack.
    The other option was to take their severance money and buy a boat and see if, in fact, there was more to the world than confit de canard and designer fizzy water.
    They kept the house in Stonington, sold the apartment in New York and put the proceeds in a trust to fund the children’s education.
    They were free, and with freedom came excitement and fear and—day after day, almost minute after minute—discovery. Discovery about themselves, about each other, about what was important and what was dispensable.
    It could have been a disaster, two people confined twenty-four hours a day to a space forty feet long by twelve feet wide, and for the first couple of weeks they wondered. They got in each other’s way and carped about this and that.
    But then they became competent, and with competence came self-assurance, and with self-assurance, self-esteem and appreciation for one another’s strengths.
    They fell in love again, and, just as important, came to like themselves again.
    They had no idea what they would do when they got home. Maybe Griffin would try for another job in the money business, though from everything they’d read— mostly in the Caribbean edition of Time—the money business was in the dumper. Maybe he’d try to find work in a boatyard. He loved tinkering, didn’t even mind varnishing and sewing sails.
    And she? Maybe she’d teach sailing, maybe try to join the staff of an environmental group. She had been horrified by what they had seen of the destruction of the reefs in the Bahamas and of the wildlife in the Windwards and Leewards. They had snorkeled over barren bottoms littered with the sea-bleached shells of dead conchs and the shattered carapaces of spiny lobsters. Around island after island they had seen the ocean environment despoiled and destroyed. And because they had had time to think and observe, they had come to understand more fully the cycle of poverty breeding ignorance breeding poverty breeding ignorance. She had concluded that there might be something she could do, could contribute—as a researcher or a lobbyist. She still had contacts with a lot of the rich people she had dealt with at Chemical.
    It didn’t matter. They’d find something. And whatever they found would be better than what had been before, for they were new people.
    It had been a wonderful trip, with not a single regret.
    Well, that wasn’t quite true. There was one regret— that they had had to turn on the engine. She hated its relentless rumble, the absurd gurgle as the exhaust pipe dipped in and out of the water, the vile smell of the fumes eddying over the stern and swirling in the cockpit.
     
    The hole in the exhaust pipe had begun to grow, as tiny bits of rusty, weakened metal had flaked away. With each surge of the boat, with each slight heave from side to side, there was movement, not only of the hull but of everything within it—not much, not noticeable, but enough to cause strain, enough to aggravate weakness.
    An eye could not have seen the hole grow, but now, as the boat’s bow stuttered between two short, choppy seas, the exhaust pipe was seized by a slight torsion. It buckled and tore, and then all the water from the cooling pump poured into the bilges. And because the pipe was broken, when the boat’s stern dipped and