Lapham Rising (13 page)

“Lonely,” I tell her.

She casts me a look somewhere between pity and reproach, but closer to pity, I think. I am too preoccupied to make certain. I have no need or will to hang on to the image of this girl. I ought to regret that more than I do.

A
t 6:19, it is do or die. Hector follows me to the cord of wood I keep stacked off to the side of the porch. He is half alarmed, half amused.

“You know,” he says as he watches me hobble, “you are beginning to look very much like a pirate. A buccaneer. And if you don’t mind my saying so, a mighty handsome one at that. Yes. There’s no denying it: that limp, that bandaged ear, that scowl—all very swashbuckling, whatever that means, Captain. And I’ll be your colorful pet, if you will allow me. I shall perch upon your shoulder and repeat all the very clever things you say.”

“Why don’t you try it?”

Bang bang bang bang bang
. The industrious Mexicans do not skip a beat. They do not give up, and neither will I. As they construct to destroy, so will I destroy to construct. Up goes one wall, down comes another. But which wall should
get the ax? The one in the parlor, I think. It is the widest in the house and therefore, it stands to reason, must have required the greatest amount of horsehair when it was built. I commend my mind on its ability to render cool analysis in the throes of frenzy.

Hector backs away. I raise the ax and bring it down. The wall crumbles like stale cake. I strike again and again, hoping that the span contains no supporting beams. And again. And again. In a twinkling the parlor wall is a dusty pile of its former self.

“Well done!” says Hector.

Using both hands, I ransack a portion of the plaster. Nothing. Another portion. Still nothing. A third.

“Here,” says Hector. “Let me help.” He gallops back and forth through the plaster in a mocking imitation of my own frantic behavior, generating a small blizzard into which his whiteness disappears. “No horsehair?” he exclaims. “No horsehair in the wall? What can have happened back in the eighteen twenties? Did the house builders run out of horses? Did the horses go on strike? Or did the horses build the house themselves and not wish to sacrifice their coats? Oh, well. Let’s not accept defeat so easily. There are plenty of walls around here—let’s chop ’em all down. Wait, I know! The horsehair is in the ceiling! They probably used jumpers like Mr. Huey!”

Suddenly he turns toward the creek. “It’s Dave,” he says. “Come to help us chop down the house. We’re saved! Thank you, Jesus!”

Dave it is. What now? Whatever it is he wants, it shouldn’t take long. A creature of habit, he will pull up on the outside of the dock without tying the boat, cut the engine, tell me what he has to tell me, and go away. I limp in a jerky lope down to where the dock angles left, the covered Da Vinci at my side.

“What are you doing, Harry?”

“Doing?” I must look about as innocent as Hector did when I questioned him about the horsehair.

“All that banging.”

“Surely a little banging wouldn’t disturb you.”

“I didn’t want to say this in front of the men”—he has chosen to ignore my meager attempt to go on the offensive—“but I know you’re up to something.” His tone is a mixture of worry and warning.

“How do you know?” My question concedes the fact.

“That ax, for starters.” I didn’t realize I was still holding on to it. “And the stuff you had delivered by those FedEx barges. I don’t know what that junk is, but it looks fishy.” He indicates the tarp. “And look at you. What is that, plaster?” I see what he means. I look like Jacob Marley fresh from the grave.

“Oh, it’s nothing, just a little project of mine. I’m making a collectible bust of John Dryden. So no one will forget him.”

“Are you planning to do something stupid?” I tilt my head and try to affect Hector’s expression of offended shock, but again he ignores me. “You’re behaving very strangely, even for you. You don’t write anymore. That hole in your shirt. Those notes to Lapham’s man every day. That toy boat. The statue of your wife. Your ear. And now you’re limping, aren’t you?” If he goes over the complete list, I’ll be here for a week.

“And you talk to
him
.” Hector wags happily at his inclusion. Dave breaks into a tolerant smile and cracks, “At least he doesn’t talk back.” Hector rolls over for the first time in his life in what appears to be a laughing fit. “You all right, Harry?” Dave asks.

“Right as rain.” I point to the threatening sky. If there were a last man on earth to whom I would confess my plot, other than Lapham himself, it would be Dave. He is one of those few who always know and do the right thing, the sort of fellow civilizations depend upon for continuity, and thus, to me, dangerous.

“You know,” he says, “I’m sorry about all the hammering, and about that air conditioner.” He has changed his tack to sweet reason, the way one does with children and the mad. “But we have to get this job finished on time.”

I tell him that I understand perfectly, but my graciousness and sudden affability put him on guard. Fortunately, he thinks I am merely upset about the noise.

“In a couple of weeks we’ll be out of your hair.” I summon a vision of the head of Kathy Polite detached.

“Perhaps sooner,” I tell him, and immediately wish I could take it back. I try to convey simple optimism: “Don’t bother about me.”

“How’d things go in Southampton, by the way?” he asks.

“Smooth as silk.”

He frowns at my cheer. “You
are
up to something.”

“Where’s Jack going to college?” I ask him, desperate to change the subject. Mention a good man’s child, and you’ll get his attention.

“That’s a sore point. He got into NYU on early admission, but I can’t afford to send him. He’s too good a kid to complain. If I had the money, I’d give it to him.” He shrugs. “But a fact’s a fact.”

“A fact is a fact” is precisely the reason I like Dave. In his own straight-shooter way, he is my eighteenth-century man: protects his family, does his work, pays his way, lives on the earth like any other animal. Should I take him with me to Chautauqua as a living exhibit of my thesis? I’d suggest it to him just to see his reaction.

And I like Jack. When he isn’t helping his father or doing valet parking for people like the Bittermans, he works at Westhampton Hardware on Montauk Highway. He has done so since he was twelve, supplementing his father’s income
and pulling his own weight, which is one of the reasons he’ll be starting university at twenty-one rather than eighteen. He’s honest and honorable, like his old man, with the same backbone. He once told me that his favorite movie was
The Maltese Falcon
, and when I asked him why, he said it was because at the end, “Sam Spade does the right thing because he doesn’t want to.” For a kid, he is also a modern oddball insofar as he does not think the world was created with him in mind. Jack will be the first one in Dave’s family to go to college.

“So where is he headed instead?” I ask.

“Stony Brook. Which is a perfectly good place. It just doesn’t have a film school.”

“That’s what Jack wants to do?”

Dave nods and looks at the water. This is the first time in all the years I have known him that he has seemed downcast, and it is just for an instant. He is not embarrassed that I caught him in the act. He is embarrassed by the act. “It’s no big deal,” he says.

“Wait here a minute.” I raise my hand, palm outstretched in the time-out signal, limp back up the beach, and head into the house. The Money Room smells like wet leaves; it has been that long since I last set foot in it. I grab some stacks of hundreds—I figure maybe twenty-five thousand dollars, give or take—stuff them into a garbage bag, tie it at the top in a
nice gift bow, and return to the dock. I toss Dave the bag. I am a very accurate tosser.

He gives me a what’s-this? look, unties the bow, sticks his face in the bag, and comes out blinking like Fairy Tale Dora. Then he asks directly, “What’s this?”

“A bribe. A down payment for your work stoppage on Lapham’s house. Play your cards right, and there’ll be more where that came from. Thanks.”

“But I haven’t agreed to stop work on Lapham’s house,” he says. “And I don’t take bribes.”

I am tickled that he ever takes me seriously. “OK, if that’s the way you want it.” I try to sound defeated. “Then use it for Jack, to make up the difference between Stony Brook’s tuition and NYU’s.”

“I can’t do that.”

I move away back up the dock so that he won’t be able to lob the bag to me without risking losing it in the creek. He tries to lasso a piling so as to pull his boat toward me, but I kick the rope back with my one good leg. This is my first moment of fun today, but it is no fun for Dave. “I can’t take this money,” he says, as definite as he should be.

“It’s not for you, it’s for Jack. Let him know it’s a business transaction, grown-up to grown-up. He’s ready for this.” I ought to be ashamed at how easy it is for me to find the best
tactic to use with him, but I’m not. “Tell Jack this is a loan from me to him, man-to-man, and that I expect him to repay me with the profits he makes from his first film, which had better be no higher than the amount of the loan. That way it’ll be guaranteed to be a worthwhile work of art.”

Dave studies the contents of the bag as though the money might change into coal at any second. “You’re not kidding?” he says. We have known each other long enough, in that type of silent, comradely friendship that men prefer, for him to take no offense. I am counting on that. I nod as a New Englander might in greeting. He actually scratches his head. “I’ll think about it,” he says, and gently places the bag in the hold as though he were setting down a baby bird.

“You do that,” I tell him.

“You
are
nuts.” His face shows a suggestion of relief worth a good twenty-five thousand dollars. For my part, I am even more relieved than he is, since he seems to have forgotten what it was he came over for.

“Thank you. Jack is very talented. His mother says so.”

“Got to go,” I say. “Busy, busy.” Then I turn. “Oh, Dave? One more thing. Don’t tell Jack about this till you get home.” I do not wish to talk about money, and I definitely do not want the boy coming over to thank me. Any more visitors this evening, and I’m cooked. I may be cooked anyway: no horsehair, no torsion spring, no Da Vinci, no Chautauqua, no me.

“Well!” says Hector as we start back to the house.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with
me
? You can afford to send Dave’s boy to college, but you won’t send me to business school? Me, your constant companion. Me, who has provided you with affection and interesting conversation and religious instruction, and who has been at your side for over sixty-three years. Sixty-three years! I’ll bet Mr. Lapham gave his Westie whatever he wanted.”

“Will you ever shut up?”

“When the time comes.”

I
t is now 6:48. Across the creek, Kathy alights from her cream-colored Mercedes and catches sight of me sitting in a despondent slump on my porch rocking chair. As ever, she is the last person I wish to see (at least at this hour), yet also the one I need. She flashes me a wave that combines a piano finger exercise with the Hitler salute. I do not salute back. A yellow Hummer pulls up, and out slithers a designer-thin middle-aged couple in pressed jeans. They are as stiff as pithed frogs. Kathy exclaims, “Fab, isn’t it?” as she presents the half-completed Attica nearest Lapham’s. He says yes. She says yes.

Kathy watches me watching her. She flips her braid like a horse’s tail in my direction, and I wince. After her clients depart—exclaiming, “Well, you certainly have given us a lot to think about!”—she stands on the shore with legs apart, cups her hands to her mouth like a hog caller, and hollers: “Going-
out-of-business sale! One day only!” Her voice is so shrill she has no need of the bullhorn.

“Last chance, Wrinkles! Here comes the countdown!”

I glide in a dream state and run what’s left of my mind over the events of the summer so far.

At the start of the season, on Memorial Day, a dual funeral was held in Wainscott for two women who were killed fighting over a salmon steak. It seems that the salmon was the only one left in the seafood shop after the weekend run, and both women had entered the shop at the same time. They raced over and grabbed the piece of fish, each hanging on to one slippery end as best she could, but their tug-of-war carried them out to the terrace of the shop. There they tumbled over the railing and into a truck loaded with shrimp, in which they suffocated to death before anyone could reach them.

When I read of this, I wondered if, at the funeral, the women had been laid out on beds of lettuce with cocktail sauce on the side, but I failed to inquire.

“Going once…”

Last month, the Kerouac Literary Prize, nicknamed the “Roady,” was awarded in a Nobel-like ceremony in a field of stiff thistles in the town of Flanders. The Roady is supposed to go to an East End writer of distinction (I once declined it myself, having come down with Tourette’s that year), but the selection committee of 207 local watercolorists and poet
asters long ago ran out of first-rank candidates, then out of second-rank, then third-, until they began giving away the award to anyone who wrote anything at all. This year’s Roady went to Betsy Betsy, a beat reporter over whose selection there was a brief dustup, since Ms. Betsy also chairs the committee of 207. Nonetheless, everyone much admired her columns on media business transactions in
Envy
magazine, and thought her Roady was well deserved. A motion to give the award to everyone on Long Island was tabled.

“Going once-and-a-half…”

As August began, Jacob McMinus, the Wall Street mogul who served time for insider trading, threw himself a seventieth birthday-and-parole party at his oceanfront estate in East Hampton. The rumored cost was sixteen million dollars. My invitation must have been mislaid, but I understand that the event was a howling success. Guests waltzed to the string section of the New York Philharmonic and were then treated to a tasteful miniconcert by ’N Synch. Royal Beluga caviar was scooped from hollowed-out softballs (Jake loves the game), and every guest received a goody bag worth thirty thousand dollars, containing ampoules of perfume, quarts of Macallan sixty-year-old single-malt scotch, a gift certificate for a year’s worth of Botox treatments, and a CD of Jake telling funny dirty stories at work. At the end of the evening the revelers repaired to the beach, where they divvied up the five-
hundred-thousand-dollar cake and drank themselves witless. The host thanked his guests, by whose friendship he said he was humbled, and added that for him, jail had been a “life-affirming experience.”

On the very same day, a real estate developer who had the misfortune to live north of the highway, and who, for twenty years, had striven to get his name in the “South o’ the Highway” column in
Dan’s Paper
, without success, hanged himself from the hoop of his backboard, employing the net. He left a note that read: “
Now
do I make it?” Unfortunately his body, though swaying out of doors in plain sight, was not discovered till five days later by two men from So-Low Waste Management. “We wouldn’t have found him ourselves,” said Lenny Bisselkorf of Swampscut, “if we hadn’t had a scheduled pickup. Who goes up here? No one.” The developer’s death was noted in the “North o’ the Highway” column in
Dan’s
, but was given a full paragraph.

“Going twice…”

Last Saturday the Paint Stores and Publishers softball game was played in East Hampton. Originally this annual charity event was called the Artists and Writers game. But after a few years, the players on the business side of things outnumbered the artists, so they changed the team names. These folks would themselves be overtaken by the Hollywood people as soon as it became clear that the game had publicity
potential for the participants, but the game’s new name would stick. In recent years some of the biggest stars in movies have been seen shagging flies and making crowd-pleasing attempts at the hidden-ball trick. So popular and competitive has the game grown, in fact, that several network crews are always on hand, along with at least one documentary filmmaker who sees the event as emblematic. The media were in luck this year, as over twenty “bona fide superstars” showed up, two of whom were tossed out of the game for sliding spikes-up into second, and another, disputing a call, split open the home plate umpire’s head with an aluminum bat. None of the injured parties complained. They said it was all for a good cause, though at the time no one could recall what the cause was.

“Going twice and a half…”

And then just a few days ago, to round off the summer mummery to date, an auction was held at the Water Mill Center for Self-Help, to raise money for the center to help itself. Among the items up for bid were a barbecue at the Bridgehampton home of Helmut and Greta Lopez, recently of São Paulo and widely thought to be war criminals from Vienna “yet fascinating people” two nights in any Hampton for a couple from one Hampton who wish to see what another Hampton is like; a tour of the U.N. General Assembly conducted by John Travolta; the broken left taillight from the
Mercedes driven by a famous socialite several years ago when she backed into the crowd waiting to get into a club (expected to fetch in the high six figures); and best of all, “
Your
picture with the Laphams at their fabulous new home in Quogue. And a Lapham Aphm written expressly for
you
.”

So it goes, so it will always go. Shadows cast by Lapham’s twelve virgin chimneys menace the roof, the walls, the green and perfect lawn, and then the water, where they fracture into kaleidoscopic ghosts. I sink deeper into my rocking chair. I am beginning to feel like a notebook dropped into the creek, my handwriting illegible, my pages drowned.

I look at the Da Vinci, then back at Lapham’s house, nearly four stories and growing. The overtime Mexicans are on their overtime evening break. They sit with their backs against Lapham’s front wall, pass cans of beer from hand to hand, and snooze. I look at the bulging clouds that have crushed the sun into a dappled line on the horizon, and at the creek on whose churning waters ducks float and bob, and toward the cranberry bogs and the rolling moors and the marshy banks on which the egrets and the cormorants strut, and then back at my home, which represents three generations of quiet purpose and attempted decency and yet is only property, real estate, after all, and then finally into my heart, which drums and asks,
Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?

“Going, going…”

“All right,” I call to Kathy. “You can have the house.”

“And the island?” She is deliberately speaking like a little girl.

“And the island.”

And my life. I wonder if I can lure her over here by agreeing to anything, then greet her on the beach with the ax.

The thought occurs that I can always renege, until I see that she is holding a pocket-size tape recorder high in the air and smiling like a dolphin.

“OK, Wrinkles. Here comes the hair.” And so saying, she displays a pair of cartoonishly large shears, which she must have brought with her, certain in the knowledge that I would cave. She cuts off her long braid with one clip and holds it aloft, as if it were the head of John the Baptist.

“What now?” I ask.

“Well, Ah know Ah said that Ah would hand over this prize to you mahself. Person to nutcase? But frankly, Mr. March, Ah’ve been observin’ you lately, and you seem to be about to topple off that rocker of yours. No offense. So for safety’s sake—
mah
safety, that is—Ah think Ah’ll just scoot the braid over to you by boat.”

“You’re not going to send the Grady White over here without a driver? You’ll crash it.” She cannot be that eager for this deal.

“Oh my, no, silly—
this
boat!” She holds up
Sharon
and lays
the detached braid in its toy hull. I hobble down to the dock, grab the remote, watch the vessel come toward me, and whisper good-bye to my life.

Terrible images present themselves to me, of strangers tramping over Noman, through the rooms of my house; Kathy sweeping her arms around and saying things like “Fab, fabulous, marvy, marvelous, like incredible, like wow” interested parties making inquiries as to what the previous owner was like, and receiving responses to those inquiries, my name being bandied about by aliens; blueprints being drawn up for changes to the property contemplated by would-be buyers; endless discussions being held regarding the addition of tennis courts, a swimming pool, of course, and a helipad; couples negotiating over the location of the genuine antique jukebox (“We have Eddie Fisher singing ‘Oh My Papa!’”) and the pool table (“Arthur plays a wicked game of pool”); and all their faces, Kathy’s included, lost in moronic reverie.

I try not to, but I cannot help but think of them sorrowfully, all of these people who seek the perfect life and believe that a pool table will put it within their reach. However often I condemn and ridicule them and hope they will boil in their own hot tubs, something in me also wants to comfort them, to put my arm around their exfoliated shoulders and tell them that the pool table, whose green felt now appears as an infi
nite landscape, soon will feel like an inch-square swath of fabric, as will their lives; that one fine evening, when the din of their schedules has momentarily ceased, and much to their horrified surprise not a single envelope bearing arabesque calligraphy has arrived in the mail, and there is nowhere (nowhere!) for them to go, they will descend to their pool-table room and stare at the soft green rectangle and weep without tears.

Sharon
arrives. I extract the braid and unravel it. The hair is just right: strong, heavy, and springy. My triumphs have come to this.

“One question,” I call to Kathy as she opens the door of her car, about to depart. She cups a hand to her ear to indicate that she is listening. “Why is my property so valuable? Anyone who buys it would tear down the house, I suppose, to build something as hideous as the things you sell. The island is inconvenient to get to and from. It’s a poor choice for Hamptons dinner parties, unless one can accommodate a flotilla. It will take much longer to unload than your usual junk. So tell me, why do you want it? Really.”

She stands still for a rare moment, then sighs deeply, as if she has just declared her undying love to a man she now discovers is stone-deaf.

“Harry March, you
are
an innocent,” she says. “Location, location. Do you know what that means?”

“Neighborhood?” I answer feebly.

“No, poor boy. Not neighborhood. If location location simply meant ‘neighborhood,’ then any old jackass could tell a valuable house from a worthless one. It takes someone with vision to see what you’ve got here. Someone with a vision of himself as well as of everything else. Someone who recognizes his place in the universe. Someone lahk me. Someone lahk…”

“Don’t say it!”

“You know what Ah think? Ah think Mr. Lapham will want to buy your island and flatten your house so that he may enjoy an unimpeded view of the beautiful surroundings to the west. That’s what Ah think. He’s quite the conservationist, you know.” She steadies her gaze. “But he’ll keep your dock, I’m pretty sure. He’ll keep your dock.”

“Why is that?” I ask.

“Because it’s an
L
, Harry. From his viewpoint, a great big Lapham-size
L!
” She laughs and drives off.

I read somewhere that Charlie Chaplin once finished third in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest. I know exactly how he felt.