She’s tubby, he says.

I’m thinking haunch, two sweaters, sweatpants (why is sweat such a selling point?). It’s the end of a demonstration against violence to women and my mind is quite ready to veer from justice and truth to personal judgment, though the speeches have been good, including his girlfriend’s.

He turns out to be talking about a boat not a woman, the subject of these particular placards and shouts from the gathered, and the boat he means is the girlfriend’s, a woman wearing a sweatshirt saying Violence to Women is Shit. She knows sweat, her dad was the model for the captain who fought the shark in Jaws, and although she said nothing personal in her speech about said violence, she did work as an officer on the Exxon Valdez, a seriously big boat with terrible oil spill problems that no doubt favored males, and what my husband and she are critiquing is the tubby sailboat bobbing in the marina facing the demonstrators’ park. Her own boat, moored beside it, is sleek.

We greet. Nothing is said about the paltry turnout for the demonstration: seaside villages uphold the patriarchy like a seawall. I am all admiration that she has organized the event, and when she says, I have a job for you, meaning my husband, I am not jealous. I am fully okay with her as an object of his hands-off affection. I have my own interests, and his fall hard in the marine department, a non-compete in our legal contract. Just a short afternoon, she says, and I’m paying.

Paid to co-pilot her — he’d do it for free in an instant, she is such a sailor. I pack him a lunch on the day of their liaison. He’s too excited to put down his winch handle and scrubber to think of anything other than an apple for eating, he’s zinced white on the head and hands, he’s out the door with his bag before he knows any details. It’s three hours later when I start getting texts.

Plutonium on board. Coast Guard deterrence.

This text should have been a headline, except it’s top secret, he says in his next text, shouting in caps, and he ends with: Boat unharmed.

Just like him to be more concerned for the boat than himself. Is he referring to the usual daredevil attitude of all sailors with regard to pushing a boat fast through gigantic waves, and a guy who wants to make an impression? What plutonium?

The password, he says once home, peeling off his slicker, was “calamari” and damned if anybody could remember it. That’s when the Coast Guard took out their firearms.

The Coast Guard wanted to identify how easy it might be to smuggle plutonium across our little stretch of water, where Germans plowed their WWII submarines so close, and drug dealers still deal with impunity, and New York City sprawls a mere two-and-half-hour train ride away. They blocked the channel with two of their boats and stopped every boat that came through, he says, asking for the password and wielding geiger counters. No simulators they, the Coast Guard, having hidden an actual radioactive can-you-get-me-a-hostage package on her boat alone. They had this cheesy — well, fishy — password to the question: what dish would you recommend if you were ordering at Sal’s? With all the excitement, it just slipped our minds. Otherwise, the exercise was perfect.

Did you sit beside the plutonium? I ask.

They hid it way forward. I sat beside her, aft.

You did a lot of free associating?

He smiles.

The week before I met him twenty-five years earlier, he filmed Three Mile Island’s reactor disaster as part of a documentary crew, and he was a hot date even then. I’m wondering how to wash his outfit, or if ever kissing again is out. Did you hold hands?

He says she’s coming for dinner.

+

We set her up with a fresh widower, perhaps too fresh, for most of what they talk about is their dead spouses. She does tell the story of the Coast Guard boarding, however, embellishing it as if it were the nineteenth century Wild West, with disguises and mustaches and pistols, each Fed prick boarding her boat acting officious. The government boat was blue but otherwise showed no insignia, she says, nothing to give their hand away with regard to their true motives. Even the cigarette boats in the channel had to slow down. Then no spray from an AK/47, they just pulled out hand guns when nobody could remember the damn word.

Would she do it again? I ask her.

Of course, she says. Deterrence is the best offense. But I said no to the next exercise, where they’re going to use blanks and fire away in a pretend shoot-out, which will damage a boat’s interior. Violence to my boat is the same as violence to me.

The like of her is strong. Neither of us want her to leave with the widower.

+ + +