Outer Banks (20 page)

In fact she was not feeling all that much better. She was still very thin and shadowed beneath her eyes. The horn-rimmed glasses would not stay up on her nose, and her red hair was wispy and ragged. She was no longer flushed and glassy-eyed with fever, but she was pale, and the laughing fit so drained her that she fell asleep in mid-sentence, and I drew the shades and tiptoed out. When I came back from McCandless late that evening, having done some work on my own summer design project and had a quick cup of coffee with Paul, she was propped up in bed reading Dorothy Parker and drinking Coca Cola.

“Have you had supper?” I said. “I'll go get you something from the kitchen if you haven't.”

“I'm not hungry,” she said. “I did try to go down, but my legs just gave out on the stairs and I came back. I guess it's going to take longer than I thought. And I don't see how on earth I'm going to finish classes this summer. I'll bet you anything I lose this entire quarter.”

“So what?” I said. “You'll catch up. It's better than making yourself sick again.”

“Well, you know, with you graduating a quarter early and me a quarter late, you'll be gone half a year before I will. What's that going to do to Europe?”

I had not thought about our plans to tour Europe after graduation since I met Paul; not seriously, anyway. The plans had been comfortably nebulous. I looked at her, and looked away.

“Actually, I may be going straight to work,” I said. “Paul is pretty sure he can get me on in the Interiors department at McKim,
Mead and White. I just couldn't turn that down. I'd never do it on my own.”

“That's terrific,” she said quickly. “Could he really do that?”

“Well, he has a job waiting there for him, and they want him awfully badly. He thinks he can,” I said.

“Ah,” she said in her light, sweet voice. It was the tone she used when something had touched her in some way and she wished to conceal the fact. I had heard it often, but never directed at me.

“But listen,” I said hurriedly. “He's got another year or two here, and I'll be by myself in the apartment…if I can even find one. Why don't you come share until he gets there? Oh, Cecie, think about it…New York, and all the plays and the museums and things; maybe we could even meet Dorothy Parker. She reviews books for
Esquire
…and Long Island for you, if you want the water…”

“It's certainly an idea,” she said, and I knew then that it would not happen.

“Cecie…” I began.

“Oh, Katie, of course you have to do it,” she said warmly. “Lordy, McKim, Mead…you'll be lunching at the Algonquin with Parker inside a year. You go on and I'll come visit. You'll get so sick of me you'll start locking the door in my face.”

“We could all go to Europe, you know,” I said. “Paul knows it like the back of his hand. We were going to go sometime during his first year up there, anyway. You couldn't have a better tour guide than him.”

She smiled at me.

“I gather Paul is going to be permanent,” she said.

“I guess…yes. He is,” I said. For some reason I blushed furiously.

“Then don't you think it's time you told me about him?” she said. “One might almost think you were ashamed of him.”

And so I did, that night. We sat up late with Dave Brubeck
spilling out “Lullaby of Birdland” into the hot night, with the tepid wash of the fan on us, and I told her what I could about Paul Sibley. I found the words frustratingly flat and short of the reality of him, but all of a sudden I wanted Cecie to know him intimately, in all his contexts and aspects, almost as I knew him. I fairly stammered with the effort to make him live in the air between us.

I told her about his childhood, and his mother and uncle and the foster homes, and about what he wanted to do as an architect, and what I believed he was capable of doing. I told her about what he wore and ate and drank and listened to and thought about and laughed at. I told her, finally, about the French marriage and the dead wife.

“She sounds awful,” Cecie said. “Does she haunt you?”

“Not for a minute,” I said.

She grinned, and parroted:

“Nuts to that and nuts to her,” I grinned back. “I don't think he ever did really love her, and there wasn't a single thing he wanted out of life that she liked or approved of. Not to speak ill of the dead. But oh, Cecie, everything he loves, I love! Everything he wants is what I want! Listen, let me tell you about his white house…”

And I did. When I had finished, she was still smiling, but the essential Cecie-ness had gone out of it. I stopped talking and looked at her.

“Don't you think it sounds too perfect for words?”

“I sure do,” she said. “I also think it's at least as much your white house as it is his. You're going to be the one supporting him while he makes his dream come true.”

I could not think of anything to say. Did she not see?

“Well…one of us will have to work full time, and he can't do it and build a house and a practice at the same time,” I said. “And I was going to try for a job in New York, anyway. What's the difference? Now I'm working at a dream job years before I could expect to, and for a house and a man I never even dared to dream about…”

“No difference, really,” she said in her precise voice. “It's just that he's an extremely lucky guy, and I want him to realize it. And you should realize it, too. At least call it ‘our white house.' ”

“ ‘Our white house,' then,” I said. “Oh, this is useless; I can't describe him. You're just going to have to meet him. You'll see, then. We're about one week away from that dinner party.”

“Good,” Cecie said. “I look forward to it.”

On the first Friday evening in August Cecie and I and Fig and Ginger tiptoed up the stairs to Paul's apartment in the thick, leafy dark. There was not so much need for silence; the landlady was at the Passion Play in Oberammergau. But Paul had asked us to wait until dark fell.

“I think she's put her neighbors on red alert,” he said.

And so we groped our way, trying not to fall and not to giggle. There was a white half-moon rising behind the trees, but it had not broken clear yet. I thought suddenly how much earlier dark was coming now. Off in the distance, at the edge of the trees, cicadas called and winter waited, crouching. I felt a wing-brush of melancholy. The coming fall would be my last one at Randolph, my last one with Cecie. After that, I would be in another country entirely.

He opened the door to us in tight white pants and a striped French sailor's jersey. On his dark head was the little round
matelot's
cap, and he wore, astoundingly, well-worn rope-soled espadrilles. Behind us, Edith Piaf wailed of pain and degeneration and late nights and cigarettes, and something smelling powerfully of raw red wine and herbs bubbled audibly behind the painted screen.
I stared at him as if I had never seen him before, and indeed, I had not, not this Paul. He looked absurdly, theatrically, indescribably wonderful, and as remote from Randolph, Alabama, or even New York, not to mention Kate Stuart Lee, as it was possible for a human being to look. This man was the very essence of the word exotic. It struck me, standing there dumbly and hearing the little, indrawn breaths behind me, that he might be mocking us with the costume, but then he grinned, easily and charmingly, and I saw that he was not. He was parodying himself for us. He had surely known that I would make much of his years in France to my friends. This was his way of defusing the formidability which he well knew clung to him, of laughing at himself so that we might laugh, too.

And at his grin we did, all of us, even Fig. Even as they gaped around at the apartment, even as they sniffed the air and heard the Piaf and the accordions, even as they stared at Paul Sibley whenever his eyes were not on them, Cecie and Ginger and Fig laughed with delight and a kind of relief, and with capitulation. I had seen him do it before; topple walls and barriers with one brief, wry smile. He had done it to me. But it never failed to amaze me. I loved him so much in that instant that I closed my eyes with it; so the room swam.

“Thank you,” I said to him silently. “Oh, thank you.”

Aloud I said, “Where on earth did you get that costume? You look like Gene Kelly in
An American in Paris.”

“Actually, I look a lot better,” he grinned. “Kelly is a dwarf. This is not a costume, my dear; I actually wore these astounding garments during my first days in Paris. I even carried a baguette around with me under my arm. I thought I was wonderful. But I had to give it up; none of my French friends would be seen in public with me.”

Cecie's laugh burbled.

“What did they wear?” she said.

“Blue jeans and Brooks Brothers shirts,” he said. “Come on in.
I'm making tripes à la mode de Caen. It's as authentic a peasant dish as I could think of.”

“Smells heavenly,” Ginger said, wrinkling her freckled nose at him in appreciation. It included, I knew, Paul as well as the food.

“It sure does,” Fig echoed, faintly. Something was wrong with Fig's voice. She sounded as if she had been hit in the midriff with a baseball. I looked at her. She was very pale, and two vermilion spots stood out on her cheeks. Behind the thick glasses, her eyes looked stunned and stupid. She seemed to be breathing hard through her nose, as if an asthma attack were imminent. I opened my mouth to speak to her, and then it dawned on me. Fig had, in that instant, fallen in love with Paul.

“Oh, shit,” I whispered, and saw Cecie's mouth quirk.

“I'll say it does,” I said briskly, to cover the “shit.” “What is it?”

Cecie snorted. Paul grinned at her, the dark eyes dancing.

“Actually, it's tripe,” he said. “The first and second sections of the stomach of a ruminant such as a sheep, or a goat. The guy at the grocery store gave it to me free; I think he called it a gut. Of what animal I dared not ask. I do it the classic way, with pigs' feet and carrots and onions and leeks and all kinds of herbs and wine, and pastry. Plus enough Calvados to make you forget what it is. Or at least not care. It's the acid test. If somebody I've just met eats my tripe without throwing up, or at least tries, I know I've got a friend for life.”

“Maybe it would be easier to try a little Russian roulette,” Cecie murmured, and he laughed outright.

“It may be the same thing,” he said.

“The only way you're going to get me to eat that stuff is pour scotch down me from now till dinner time,” Ginger said.

“I love tripe. We have it all the time at home,” Fig said. Her voice sounded so frail and bruised that I thought she might burst into tears.

“Then,” said Paul, “there's no help for it. I will simply have
to marry you. Kate here has said she'd as soon eat dog.”

“I've said nothing of the kind,” I said in mock indignation, loving him and his foolishness and his kindness to poor Fig, loving them for admiring him, loving the place and the night and the world and everything in it, stars and bugs and elephants and shoes and pins and needles. I felt ready to burst, in that instant, with pure joy.

“Ha, I accept, then,” Fig brayed, in a savage attempt at sophistication. He smiled at her and ruffled her wiry, impossible hair, and she turned fuchsia and clamped her jaw shut. I saw that it was working as though she were chewing something.

“Drinks coming up,” he said, and led us into the room, and the night flowed on.

We drank a great deal of wine before he finally served dinner, and somehow he even had scotch for Ginger, though I did not remember having told him she drank it, and he told wry, deadpan stories of his adventures and misadventures in France, omitting any mention of the dead Berthe. She was there, though, hovering in the air above us like a thwarted demon, and I thought how very attractive it was of him, how becoming, not to at least allude to her. The sympathy for him was palpable in the room, though he obviously did not seek it. We laughed, and he played the velvety music of the Mediterranean, and taught us a few simple French songs, including some that made Cecie blush to the roots of her hair through her laughter, and before the night was over he had out of each of them at least the bare bones of their lives and experiences, and their plans for the future.

“What about your future?” Ginger said as we waded into the tripe. By that time the wine had done its work, both on the meat and us; the dish, served with more Calvados and tiny boiled potatoes and a simple green salad, was sublime, and we ate it all. We were on Stilton and dry red wine when Ginger asked her question.

“I don't have to ask if it includes old Kate here, do I?” she
grinned. “She's been mooning around lovestruck for weeks and weeks.”

“Ginger,”
I hissed at her, and she put out her tongue.

“Oh, yes, it sure does,” Paul said, reaching over to touch my cheek. I heard Fig make a small, strangled sound. I did not look at her.

“At least, long range, it does,” he said. “Although I'm not going to have one, if I don't do something about that goddamned English 401. I think I flunked another test today, Kate. One more and my point average is going to be in more trouble than I care to think about.”

I looked at him blankly. I had not even known he was having trouble with his English course. I knew that he did not often read; when he had spare time he spent it at his board. But I could not imagine that he would not pass his courses.

“Welcome to the club,” Ginger said comfortably. “Don't worry, though. Kate'll get you through. She and Fig and Cecie carried me bodily through my English classes when I was a pledge. Hell, get Fig to tutor you. She's the best there is at Randolph. She's going to be a writer. She's written at least five books since I've known her.”