I hadn’t used it, in fact, since I’d left New England.

She nodded. “Yes. I read it. And I was sure you must be the same Manning who’d written those sea stories. Why haven’t you done any more?”

“I wasn’t a very successful writer,” I said.

“But I thought they were awfully good.”

“Thank you.”

She was looking ahead at the road. “Are you married?”

“I was,” I said. “Divorced. Three years ago.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t intend to pry—”

“It’s all right,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it.

It was just a mess, but it was over and finished. A lot of it had been my fault, and knowing it didn’t help much. We’d fought until we wore it out, and it takes two to do that. I’d owned the boat before Catherine and I were married, and I insisted on hanging onto it in spite of the fact she cared nothing about sailing and the upkeep on it was too much for a married man on the salary I was making in the steamship office where I worked. She wanted to give parties, and play office politics. None of the office brass sailed; they all played golf. I should sell the boat and join a country club. The hell with that, I’d said; I didn’t care what the brass did. I spent my leisure time sailing, and trying to write. I didn’t have any ambition, and I was antisocial and pigheaded. Who the hell did I think I was? Conrad? It folded.

We even fought over that, over money again. We sold the house and the boat at a big loss in an outburst of mutual savagery and split the whole thing up like two screaming kids in a tantrum. I had learned diving and salvage work in the Navy during the war, and after the wreckage settled I drifted back into it, moving around morosely from job to job and going farther south all the time. If you were going to dive you might as well do it in warm water. It was that aimless. I’d tried writing again, but nothing came out right any more and everything was rejected. I was 33 now with nothing much to look forward to and not much behind except an increasing list of “ex-’s”—ex-engineering student, ex-Navy lieutenant, ex-husband, and ex-aspiring writer.

She slowed going through a small town, and when we were on the open highway again she looked around at me, her face thoughtful, and said, “I gathered you’ve had lots of experience with boats?”

I nodded. “I was brought up around them. My father sailed, and belonged to a yacht club. I was sailing a dinghy by the time I started to school.”

“How about big ones, out in the ocean—what do they call it?”

“Offshore? Sure.