Flat Water Tuesday Read online

  Complete Praise for Ron Irwin’s Flat Water Tuesday

  “Irwin debuts with movingly rendered literary fiction about love and loss, youth and maturity, ambition and its cost … a powerful study of the muddled, stumbling steps from youth into adulthood.… Irwin’s descriptions are observant and intimate—readers become immersed in the Darwinian cruelty of the young reflected against the loneliness of a lost, jaded teacher, then confront a man finding purpose, and close the book after bathing in a deeply evocative, hope-filled conclusion. An elegy to love and loss and reconciliation.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “All you ever wanted to know about the world of competitive rowing is contained in the pages of Ron Irwin’s new novel, whose hero is not only a prodigious oarsman but the lover of two memorably realized women.”

  —J. M. Coetzee

  “In taut, muscular prose Irwin details the punishing training regimen of the God Four, a crew of competitive oarsmen who commit themselves body and soul to the pain and glory of their sport. Flat Water Tuesday is a powerful consideration of the exhilarating love of competition and the high cost of victory. Ron Irwin has written a propulsive, heart-stopping story in the tradition of such sporting classics as Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. Flat Water Tuesday is a world-class champion of a novel.”

  —Amber Dermont, New York Times bestselling author of The Starboard Sea

  “A gripping read. If you’ve ever marveled at the fluidity of a quadruple scull cutting through water in first light, and wondered what makes its four-man motor work, this book will provide the answers, and then some. Irwin is adept at revealing the tricky bonds between rowers, and the way those bonds can shape—and misshape—a life.”

  —Tom McNeal, author of To Be Sung Underwater

  “Flat Water Tuesday is the best debut novel I’ve read this year, a compulsively readable dark drama that weaves multiple story lines toward one marvelous denouement. Ron Irwin writes with confidence and skill and authenticity in this exploration of identity and the poisonous fuel of ambition. It will call other books—A Separate Peace, The Art of Fielding—to mind but stands alone as an original and powerful work. I’ll read anything Irwin writes after this.”

  —Michael Koryta, New York Times bestselling author of The Prophet

  “In Ron Irwin’s capable hands, past and present fuse into a haunting meditation on class, guilt, and the perils of victory. You don’t need to have set foot in a scull to be swept along by this affecting book. Flat Water Tuesday is the debut of a deft and talented new voice.”

  —Eric Puchner, author of the Pen/Faulkner Award finalist Model Home

  “With echoes of A Separate Peace, Ron Irwin’s wonderful Flat Water Tuesday is a masterful coming-of-age story about making one’s place in the world, about the sacrifices love asks of us and of the rewards it may give us, about friendship and responsibility and so many other aspects of being human. It’s compelling, moving, and often heartbreaking—all of the things we want good novels to be.”

  —Joe Schuster, author of The Might Have Been

  “The opening scene of Ron Irwin’s lovely debut novel left me breathless. Irwin writes astutely about finding one’s place in the world, testing the limits of our endurance, and how we find the strength to carry on.”

  —Amanda Eyre Ward, author of Close Your Eyes

  “Ron Irwin’s rowing tale—Flat Water Tuesday—brings to life a rite of passage that is complex, insightful, and stirring. Inside the gunnels of the rowing shell secrets are kept. Powerful fathers produce legendary sons, and legends arise that haunt some forever. His artistry weaves heroism, rivalry, romance, tragedy, and raw life together inside the ethereal dynamics of a boarding school crew—not any crew, but the ‘God Four’—which, in the end, leaves all to wrestle with the reckoning that God was indeed watching. Written in the tradition of The Dead Poets Society, Ron Irwin’s story is a must for anyone who loves rowing, sports, or just a darn good read.”

  —Susan Saint Sing, member of the 1993 U.S. National Rowing Team and author of The Wonder Crew

  “Flat Water Tuesday is more than just a wonderful coming-of-age novel, it’s a gripping and beautifully drawn portrait of a man coming to grips with his demons. His unforgettable story will take you through heartbreak and back, where resilience can teach you not just about achievement, but also about love.”

  —Elizabeth Percer, author of An Uncommon Education

  “A biting, beautiful novel about the cost of winning and the lessons of loss. In Robert Carrey, Ron Irwin has created a character of precision and depth, a man who must learn that he cannot scull through life alone.”

  —Jennifer Miller, author of The Year of the Gadfly

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This novel is for my mother, Donna H. Irwin, who told me to get it all down in writing.

  The Fenton School believes that the sport of rowing boats encourages Discipline and Fellowship and builds young men of Good Character.

  —Letter to parents, The Fenton School, 1905

  The Fenton School reserves a limited number of places for students who wish to take a postgraduate year in a boarding school environment. A postgraduate year of study at Fenton is a repeated senior year of high school that offers, in many cases, more rigor and discipline than the average student has become accustomed to at home. Postgraduate students at Fenton are often attracted to our extensive sports program, and each year they play important roles on our varsity football, hockey, and rowing teams. The postgraduate student receives a certificate of attendance upon successful completion of their year at the Fenton School.

  Extensive financial aid is granted to PG candidates on a needs basis.

  —The Fenton School Handbook (current edition)

  Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain.

  —Bob Dylan

  CONTENTS

  Front Sales

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Map: The Fenton School

  Epigraph

  Letter to Rob Carrey

  Prologue

  Fall

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Winter

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Spring

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Mr. Rob Carrey

  c/o National Geographic Television

  1145 17th Street NW

  Washington D.C. 20036–4688

  Dear Rob,
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br />   It’s been fifteen years since we last saw each other, one month to the day. Can you believe it?

  I’m sure you wish it was longer.

  In six weeks it will be our fifteenth reunion at good old Fenton School. A milestone! And they want us all to come on back and reminisce. I am positive you have no plans to attend. But I’m sitting here trying to tie up loose ends. Trying to knock off unfinished business I thought would go away by itself.

  When you are rehabbing you are told to get in touch with people from your past. To apologize for the things you did while you were hammered. They give you a little model letter you can send if you don’t know what to say. Some people in my group just photocopied it about a hundred times and sent it on to all the people whose lives they screwed up on the way down. My group leader insists that you can’t just send it via e-mail. I don’t know why. E-mail appears less genuine, I guess.

  I have the letter here in front of me. It says I ought to tell you that thanks to some spiritual principles, I have been able to get my life on track. I don’t hold with all that about “spiritual principles.” But you do get some time to think when you’ve lost your job. When your wife leaves you. At the end of the letter you’re supposed to tell the recipient how long you’ve been sober. In my particular case that’s about three and a half weeks, give or take.

  Anyways, Rob, I have nothing to apologize to you about. I have about ten more people on my sorry list (second smallest list in the group, I kept track) but you are a guy who does not need my groveling.

  Here’s the thing. Somehow we all decided never to talk about what happened during the last year at that school. I have no idea how it affected you guys. Maybe your memories are better, more useful, or more selective. But I’ve been talking to people. People in the group, mostly, and a therapist who says I should express my feelings instead of acting out because of them. She also says, over and over, that whatever emotional energy you waste on feelings of guilt, rage, and emotional pain, your body will reclaim in self-destructive behavior. She says the things I tell her about the past are surely tragic but that I have to “seek closure.”

  We all know something more happened back then than just a simple everyday tragedy. I should know, because I’m living a simple everyday tragedy. Hey, here’s a secret: A few months ago I started to think people were following me when I was really drunk. The therapist informed me I suffer from “paranoid segues” (she also uses another term, “mild delusional psychosis”—my vocab is increasing in direct proportion to how crazy I get). But one day somebody might ask me some hard questions about what happened to me when I was eighteen years old. It could happen, right?

  I swear, Rob, if they ever do, I’ll tell them I forgot it all. I’ll claim with my trembling hand on the Bible that I blanked it out. The whole year.

  It might even be a little true.

  I’ve been forgetting lots of things. Forgot to drive on the road a month ago and totaled the BMW—flipped it twice. Those German fun bags deployed perfectly. Pull one of those stunts and you wake up hours later, wondering where the hell you are—in my case, it was in the emergency room in Sharon, Connecticut, with a nurse snapping her fingers over my face, catching a contact buzz off my breath.

  So, anyways, the nitty-gritty details of what went on during senior year at Fenton are a little fuzzy, but the basic memories are intact. I bet they’re pretty intact for you, too. And for the rest of the crew. If you’re like me, you think about it. Maybe you think about it at strange times. Like in the shower, when you’re sneaking shots while your wife brushes her teeth. (You fill a shampoo bottle with vodka; it tastes a little soapy but gets you through breakfast. Know where I learned this? Fenton, of course.) Or like when you’re washing dishes with your third or fourth scotch on the windowsill. Pissing in your own Jacuzzi with a beer in your hand. Pissing in your bed after.

  Maybe, if you’re like me, this stuff comes back when you’re sitting in a rented condo, five miles away from your house in Greenwich, and just a hop, skip, and jump away from that school. Just sitting here on somebody else’s furniture eating pizza and smoking cigarettes with a rented Ford out front.

  I admit it: I have taken up the wicked weed in this last month. It’s awesome. You can smoke all day and still drive somewhere. If you have somewhere to go, that is. Try doing that on G&Ts. I’m eating lots of candy. And drinking milk shakes. Remember milk shakes? I order them from the place down the road because I don’t trust myself with a blender.

  Try to imagine being the kind of person who can’t have a blender in the house.

  I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself, I know. The first rule you learn at Fenton is to never feel sorry for yourself. Same thing in rehab. So let’s say it loud and proud, Rob: “I am the one at fault for everything that has happened to me.”

  I also know this: If things hadn’t turned out the way they did at Fenton, you might actually be heading back to the reunion this year. Me, too.

  I told my ex-wife (that word looks weird on the page, Rob—it’s the first time I’ve ever written it, I’m not even sure if it’s supposed to be hyphenated) about all of it a few years ago, after we were married, just to be on the safe side. She told me to drop you an e-mail and I got pretty fired up to make contact for a while, but … You know how it is. Georgia (my ex—it’s getting easier to write) thought it was pretty dumb that we never kept in touch.

  None of us have, I told her.

  Stupid people, she said.

  I regret it now.

  Do you know the school has no record of you? I bet that’s the way you want it. You are listed as an alumnus who is Missing in Action, but I Googled your ass off and got your producer’s address, finally—after seeing your name on a credit for some film called The Disappearing Mountain Gorillas of Uganda that you can get (on deep discount) via Amazon, if you’re interested. Finding you took me about an hour. But that’s okay. I’ve been spending lots of time surfing the Internet. I found everybody on the team sooner or later, but you were the hardest.

  Carrey, did you really move to South Africa? It had to be you on the Web site. You look pretty much the same, but you’ve gotten bigger and you’ve lost all that hair. It says on your filmmaker’s bio on the National Geographic homepage that you divide your time between New York and Cape Town. Good idea. I’ve always wanted to see Africa. Send me a ticket. I’ll fly down and we’ll sit on a beach and drink beer. Well, you’d have a beer. I’d get a Coke or a lemonade or Kool-Aid or a virgin banana daiquiri or whatever they serve ex-drunks with ex-wives and ex-careers over there.

  Anyways, Rob, I’m writing all of you. Everyone who was on that team.

  I saved this letter to you for a good while, though. I really did want to contact you for years, even when most of what I had to say was scribbled on the back of cocktail napkins. I battled to write this, wondered if I even have a right to say anything at all to you about that year, even if you are reading this letter in some rainforest or whatever. But for what it’s worth, here it is: Make peace with the past. Figure it out.

  If you do, drop me a line.

  Fifteen years, Rob. Sitting here in this room, it feels like two minutes ago we were gods.

  I’m so sorry for everything, after all.

  Your friend,

  John Perry

  [email protected]

  1-860-564-7165 (Call now. We never close!)

  PROLOGUE

  I folded the letter in half so I could look at the embossed name on top of the stationery. I laid it on the airplane’s tiny tray table. It was the twentieth time I had read it, at least. It had been forwarded to my Cape Town apartment while I’d been on the eastern coast of South Africa on a marine shoot; two weeks of sitting on a boat with a diver, a fisherman, and two cameramen in the middle of a shoal of sardines, waiting for the game fish and the sharks that would pile into the melee. Now I was flying home with a hard case full of Beta SP tapes as carry-on luggage and the half-finished script for the documentary I’d spent six wee
ks putting together. I had promised myself I would do some writing on the airplane, but by the time the nineteen-hour journey was two hours gone, I gave up and watched a movie and then ordered a drink, knowing I’d feel it upon landing in dawn’s brutal light at Kennedy. I was tired from the moment I boarded the plane in Cape Town and settled into my seat, thanking God the 747 was only three-quarters full and I’d been given a full row on which to throw down my chewed-up leather briefcase and the magazines and newspapers I’d bought to get back up to speed on world events. I was dreading New York and what was going to happen there.

  I ran my fingers over the postmark on John’s letter. It had left Greenwich, Connecticut, over five weeks ago and done a detour in DC until National Geographic had sent it on to me. I had found it when I got back from the shoot along with a crumpled pile of bills, junk mail, fast-food menus, and traditional healing ads that had been jammed into the metal box in the foyer of the crumbling art deco apartment block where I lived. I had immediately thrown it away when I saw the return address, just before I locked up the flat and ran down to the street to meet the taxi. But as I opened the back door to the whimpering yellow Mercedes-Benz, I signaled “hang on” to the wiry kid tapping his fingers to a Kwaito riff on the beaded steering wheel and climbed back up the three flights of stairs. I cranked open the dead bolts and unlocked the alarm so I could scrape the envelope from the bottom of the wastebasket and stow it in my bag. I almost trashed it again at the airport, came a hairsbreadth to stuffing it in the overflowing orange bin by the X-ray machines along with the other contraband passengers jettison before getting screened. But I kept it, even though I didn’t tear it open until I was halfway across Dakar.

  John’s was one of the few personal notes I had received from anyone in a while. I almost decided to call him when I landed. I’d say hello and tell him I was too busy to see him, which was true. I had a film to edit, a script to finish, a Jeep to sell, and I had to get more work. Over the next few days my personal and professional lives were going to be rejiggered—this week I was splitting with my girlfriend, Carolyn Smythe. My heart clenched at the prospect. We had a business to hammer out and a contract to renegotiate. So I’d wish John well. I’d tell him to hang in there, that alcoholism is a rough row to hoe and I could sympathize.