The Tape Recorder

I woke up on the floor of an engine room, which is not a sentence I ever expected to type, let alone live.

The light coming through the porthole above me was that thick late-morning gold that photographers chase and never quite catch, and it was cutting a long warm stripe right across my face like the universe wanted me to know I'd overslept in a stupid place. My cheek was pressed against a steel plate that had been warming all day, and when I lifted my head off it I could feel the faint grid of the plate embossed into my skin. Thirty-eight years old and sleeping on deck plates like I was twenty-two and broke again. Well. Some things circle back.

Beside me, Maxwell was still out. He was lying on his back with one arm flung over his eyes, still in his uniform trousers from the night before, the gray shirt half untucked and wrinkled beyond what any wash cycle could fix. Fifty-five years old, a working firefighter, and a man who had apparently decided that the last night of the old Meridian Books deserved to be slept off on the deck plates of the ship that used to be the Meridian, before somebody bolted bookshelves to it and called it a store.

And I should back up, because if you're reading this cold it sounds like a scandal and it wasn't. Not yet, anyway.

The Meridian was a cargo ship once, decades ago, and for the last eleven years it had been a bookstore, of all things, moored at a pier downtown while the engine room filled up with shelves and paperbacks and one very patient woman who ran the whole operation. The city had decided the hull was too old to insure, the lease was up, and yesterday was the last day. The owner threw a party. Half the neighborhood showed up. There was a guy selling fried dough off a cart on the dock and somebody's cousin playing guitar badly and everybody drinking warm beer out of a galley cooler because the power had been shut off that morning.

I'm a news photographer, and the paper sent me down to shoot the closing. I'd known Maxwell for about four years by then, just from around, shopkeepers and pier people and the little economy of nods that a waterfront neighborhood runs on. We'd had coffee most Thursdays. He liked old photographs and I liked old ships, so we'd found plenty to talk about over the years, and I never thought about him as anything except a friendly face with a lot of questions about my camera.

Then last night happened. And last night is its own story, and I'll get to it, but here's the part that matters for the morning: at some point past midnight, after most of the party had wandered home, Maxwell and I went hunting for a tape recorder.

That's it. That was the innocent start. One of the owner's volunteers had been playing old sea shanties off a cassette deck all evening, and I'd gotten it into my head that I wanted to interview people on tape for a personal project, some document of the store's last day, and somebody swore there was another recorder stowed somewhere down in the engine room from the ship's actual working days. So down we went with a lantern and a bottle of wine we didn't finish, and we found a battered tape recorder wedged behind a panel, and we found out it still worked, and we found out it had been running the entire time, and it had us.

Which is how I woke up to the sound of my own laughter.

The little machine had run all night on batteries nobody believed it had, and it had reached the part of the tape where Maxwell was telling some story about a firehouse prank involving a rubber boot and a probationary firefighter, and my own laugh came crackling out of the speaker, high and stupid and honest, followed by his laugh, which is a deep rusty-hinge kind of laugh that I have heard maybe a few hundred times over four years of coffee and never once thought of as anything but friendly.

I lay there in the gold light and listened to two people who were definitely us have the best time I'd heard either of them have in years.

Then Lorraine stirred. Sorry, I mean I stirred. I'm Lorraine, that's me, I should have said that sooner. Old habit from writing captions.

Anyway, I stirred beside him, and I discovered two things at once. One, my dress was twisted around me like I'd put it on during an earthquake, the zipper halfway down my ribs and the hem somewhere around my shoulder. Two, my camera strap, which I never take off, apparently ever, had somehow tangled itself around Maxwell's forearm during the night, so that we were loosely joined by about three feet of worn black nylon, like the universe was playing a very slow game of cat's cradle with us.

He lifted his arm off his eyes, saw the strap, followed it to me, and blinked.

"Good morning," he said, in the flattest voice I have ever heard a human being produce.

"Don't," I said. "Don't say anything. I'm assessing the situation."

"Assessing." He held up his arm, trailing the strap. "You're arresting me. Is that what's happening. You're a very patient cop."

I tried to sit up with dignity and failed, because the strap pulled his arm along with me, and he yelped, and then we were both laughing, and the tape recorder, still going, caught that too. Which meant there was now a tape in the world with our laughter from last night and our laughter from this morning on it, and I couldn't decide if that was the most romantic or the most humiliating artifact of my life. (I've since decided it's both. You can hold two things at once. Nobody tells you that until you're thirty-eight.)

We untangled ourselves in stages, giggling like this was a comedy routine we'd rehearsed, and I got my dress sorted and my strap freed and he sat up against the old boiler casing and rubbed his face with both hands.

"I have sand in places," he announced.

"That's rust, probably."

"That's worse. Thank you."

The thing about the morning after a night like that, though, is this, and I'm going to be careful how I say this because last night needs its own telling and it deserves to be told right. Last night, before any of the sleeping on the floor part, there was a moment. He'd said something about the store, about how he'd been coming here since before his knees went, how his father used to bring him, and I'd said something dumb and true back, and there was this pause where we were both just looking at each other in lantern light and the tape recorder humming.

And I asked him. Plainly, out loud, no cleverness, because I was too old and too tired for games. I asked if I could kiss him. And he said, God, yes, please, like I'd offered him water in a desert, and that settled it, and then we talked until we fell asleep like a couple of degenerates. Nothing else. We were fully clothed, wine mostly untouched, and we slept on a steel floor like two worn-out campers, except we are a thirty-eight-year-old woman and a fifty-five-year-old man and we both had terrible backs this morning.

So that's where we actually were. Awkward and grinning and not sure what the rules were now.

Maxwell hauled himself up with the groan of a man whose spine had its own ideas, and looked around the engine room as if to see whether it had changed overnight. It hadn't. The shelves were mostly empty now, just a few stragglers the owner couldn't sell, and the smell was different without a couple thousand books breathing, more metal and less paper, the old smell of the ship coming back up through the floor like it had been waiting eleven years for the books to leave.

"I'll make coffee," he said, with terrible confidence.

"On what."

"The galley stove."

"Maxwell." I stood, knees cracking. "That stove hasn't run since Baldwin. It's a museum piece. It's decorative."

"It's a stove. Stoves are my whole job, Lorraine. I fight fire for a living. I think I can handle a little stove."

"You fight fire. You don't negotiate with it."

He was already halfway up the companionway ladder toward the galley, calling back something about how complicated could it be, and I stood there on the deck plates in my wrecked dress with my camera still hanging off me, listening to a firefighter declare war on a cold iron stove, and I did the only sensible thing.

I followed him up to watch. And I brought the tape recorder, because if this went the way I thought it would go, I was absolutely getting it on tape.

The galley was a narrow little room with copper counters gone green at the edges and that stove squatting in the middle like a black iron animal. Maxwell opened the front of it and peered inside the way a man peers into an engine he doesn't understand, bravely and wrongly.

"Where's the, ah." He reached in and touched something. There was a clank. A small one, but a clank.

"That sounded expensive," I said, leaning in the doorway, recorder rolling.

"It sounded structural," he said. "There's a difference."

"Is there."

"There is when you say it with confidence." He found a valve and turned it, and something hissed, and we both jumped back like it had bitten us, and then nothing happened at all, just that faint empty hiss of a pipe full of nothing, and he turned to me with the most wounded expression I have ever seen on a grown man.

"Lorraine. Does this ship have gas."

"It's been decommissioned for eleven years, honey."

"Honey," he repeated.

I hadn't meant to say that out loud.

I froze for a second, both of us standing there in the galley, the recorder still running in my hand like an idiot witness. "Well," he said finally. "Now I have to make the coffee work, or that was embarrassing for nothing."

"It was already embarrassing," I told him, but I was smiling, and he caught me smiling, and that kind of settled something between us, or at least parked it. We let the honey go. We'd come back to it later, maybe, or we wouldn't. That's how it is at our age. You let a word sit on the counter like a cup you're not done with.

The coffee was not happening. We both knew it after ten more minutes of Maxwell threatening a cold stove with a wrench he found in a drawer, but it turned out there was a camp burner in the storeroom, left over from the owner's last desperate party prep, and one dented kettle, and a tin of some instant stuff that smelled like it predated the ship's cargo days. We also turned up a carton of shelf-stable milk and, buried under a tarp, a bin of sugar packets, or what we thought was sugar packets.

He was elbow deep in the bin when he made the noise. Not a gasp