Outer Banks (21 page)

Paul looked over at Fig.

She ducked her head.

“I'm really not very good,” she mumbled.

Suddenly I wanted to shake her.

“Fig has the highest grades anybody has ever made in English at Randolph,” I said. “I can't imagine why she's acting so coy. There isn't nothing she doesn't know about it, and I'll bet she'd love to tutor you, if you asked her nicely. And if you won't I will. You can't afford to let your point average slide, Paul.”

He shook his head.

“I wouldn't wish tutoring me on anybody,” he said. “I'm impatient and downright bad-tempered when I'm not interested in
something, and I just can't manage to get interested in the Elizabethan poets. Fig would hate me in two days.”

“No, I wouldn't,” she said, looking at him with such naked adoration in the swimming bug's eyes that I turned my head. Oh, don't, I said silently to him. Can't you see how she feels about you?

“I'd be very honored if you wanted me to help you,” Fig said formally. “If Kate doesn't care, I mean.”

And she looked at me with such abject obsequiousness that I felt amusement and annoyance spurt up. “Of course I don't care,” I said crisply. “Did you think I was afraid you were going to run off with him behind my back?”

“No,” Fig said in a low voice, looking down. My heart smote me with remorse at my careless words, followed by fresh irritation.

“Well, I think it's a great idea,” I said.

And so it was arranged that Fig would work with Paul on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday evenings, from seven to nine.

“Will you mind coming here?” Paul said to her. “I'll have to sneak you past the old dragon, but I can promise you a glass of wine and some supper, and you can kick me in the ass if I snap at you.”

“I don't mind,” Fig whispered, and I did not know if she meant she did not mind coming to the apartment, or being snapped at. Both, probably.

On the way home, crammed into the MG, Fig was uncharacteristically silent, and had the rapt look of a heroin addict or a charmed snake on her big face. Ginger was overflowing with talk of Paul.

“He's fantastic,” she said. “He's incredible. Can I date him?”

“No.”

“Well, then, can I screw him?”

“Ginger,
really
…”

“Are y'all doing the Black Act?” she said.

“Will you stop it?” I cried, my face flaming in the dark.

“Well, if you're not, you're crazy,” she said. “I bet Cecie knows. What about it, Cece?”

“I certainly don't know,” Cecie said. “But he sure is handsome, isn't he?”

I knew in that instant, though I will never know how, that she did not like him. I knew that, even though I was never able to get her to admit it.

“Why don't you like him?” I said that night, as we got into our beds.

“Who says I don't?” Cecie said, and it was all she would say.

When I thanked Paul again the next day for the evening, he said, casually, “And how about Cecie? Did I pass the famous Cecie Hart test?” And I knew that he did not like her, either.

“Oh, lord,” I said. “Why don't you like her?”

“Who says I don't?” Paul said.

“This is ridiculous,” I snapped. “That's what she says, about you. What's the
matter
with you all? I thought things went so well…”

“I did, too,” he said. “I tried. But I'm really not surprised. She's jealous of me, Kate. It makes me uncomfortable.”

“I don't know what you mean,” I said irritably. “Why should she be jealous of you? She's not jealous…”

He studied his coffee cup.

“I've seen it before, in France,” he said, not looking up.

I stared at him. A chilly stillness seemed to spread up over me from somewhere in my center.

“Are you implying that Cecie is…queer or something?” I said. “Because if you are…”

“No. I'm not. Forget it,” he said. “It wouldn't be the first time I was mistaken. I'll do better, I promise.”

And he did try. He always asked after her, and he cooked dinner for just the three of us one night, and he took my car and picked her up at the library each night for a week so that she would not have to walk home to the house; she was still weak, and
though she struggled not to, was falling farther and farther behind in her work. When we were together, the three of us, he went out of his way to make her laugh, and she did, always.

But I took to closing the bathroom door when I showered. I had never done that before. If she noticed, she did not comment on it.

W
E
had navarin d'agneau,” Fig said, mispronouncing it so badly that Cecie winced. “That's lamb stew with a lot of French things in it. And lots and lots of wine. It was quite exquisite, really.”

You could tell she had had wine. Her eyes, behind the thick lenses, looked poached, and her pug nose burned fiercely. She was just home from her first tutoring session at Paul's apartment, and her manner was that of a demi-mondaine Parisienne visiting the provinces under duress. She had been home less than ten minutes and she had said “Paul said,” and “Paul thinks” and “as I told Paul” so many times that Cecie and Ginger and I were mouthing it silently with her whenever his name came up again. I wanted to strangle her.

In the days that followed, we heard that he was teaching her about contemporary European architecture (“Corbu and Mies”),
opera, and the cuisine of the French provinces. With each ponderously dropped disclosure, she became more officious and more obviously smitten. Most of the chapter gathered to hear her recitals when she came in from a tutoring session now. I could hear them laughing all the way down the hall. I managed to laugh, too, sensing that to show my annoyance would be fatal. The nearest I came to it was to inquire acidly, after hearing that he was instructing her in French abstract impressionistic art, “I do suppose that you're getting a few licks of Edmund Spenser and George Herbert in between taste treats and artistic thrills?”

“Oh, yes,” she said seriously. “He's really doing awfully well. I just don't think he's ever had the right teacher.”

“Ah,” Cecie said. “That's undoubtedly it.”

The next evening she came into our room, diary in hand.

“I want you to tell me everything about him, Effie,” she said in the low, rapt tones of one of Gandhi's handmaidens. “I've started the story of you and Paul. It's the perfect love story. I know about you, but I need to know about him, and he won't tell me anything at all. You know how modest he is. It would make a wonderful novel. I'm going to write it one day. But I'll let you read what I write in the diary when I've finished.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But if Paul doesn't want to talk about himself, I don't think I ought to, either.”

“Well, he probably just needs to get so he trusts me a little more,” she said. “He's opening up, bit by bit. Tonight he told me about the white house, and showed me the drawing. I think it's the most wonderful and romantic thing I ever saw, that he's going to build that house for you. It's like you were a princess, in a castle. He's the most wonderful man I've ever known. If you weren't my big sister and my best friend I'd steal him.”

And she gave me a dreadful, slantwise grimace that I supposed was meant to be a leer.

“Well, please don't,” I said as evenly as I could.

“Why on earth did you tell her about the house?” I said to
Paul at coffee the next day. “I think she thinks you're building it for her now.”

“Oh, I don't know,” he said. “She saw the painting and asked. It was a relief to have something to talk to her about. Most of the time she seems like she's about to jump out of her skin. Like she thinks I'm going to put the make on her, God forbid. It would be like humping Dopey or Sneezy. Or sometimes she acts like I'm some kind of deity, and she ought to take her shoes off before approaching me. She's not so bad, really; and she's a damned good English teacher. She's helping me a lot.”

“She's bloody awful and you know it,” I said. “You mean you aren't teaching her about opera and French art and food, and architecture?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “I can barely get her to talk about Edmund Spenser. I give her supper, usually, and tell her what's in it, and ply her with wine so we can get some work done, and I guess she listens to what I have on the hi fi and sees what's on my walls, but we don't talk about it. The house is the only thing she's ever asked about.”

“You ought to hear her when she gets back from a session with you,” I said, annoyed and amused. “She's so full of French culture and so la-di-da that the whole house is laughing at her. It would be sad if it wasn't just so awful.”

“Well, she's not that way with me,” he said.

Late one night toward the end of the quarter I told Cecie what Paul had said about the nights of tutoring, and she grinned. It was her old grin, whole and light-spilling and full of Cecie. I had not seen it often that summer.

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe they're not doing what either one of them says?” she said. “That maybe he rips her clothes off the minute she walks in and they make mad, passionate love
à la française
for three hours? That he calls her Emma and she calls him Gaston and the whole apartment rocks with the force of their passion?”

I stared at her for a moment, and then the mental image of it forced its way into my mind and I gave a shriek of purely involuntary laughter and collapsed onto my bed. Cecie began to laugh, too.

“I can just see it,” I cried. “First he pulls her exotic French silk underwear down and nibbles at her navel, and then he covers her with kisses from her neck to her waist…”

“Oh, Jesus, stop!” Cecie howled. “I'm going to have a heart attack and die. What navel? What neck? What waist? It would be like kissing a totem pole!”

“And then,” I gasped, rolling from side to side, “he sinks to his knees and kisses
her
knees, and then, one by one, her toes…”

“Stop,” Cecie choked. “Oh, stop! I'll throw up.
He'd
throw up! Oh, my God, her toes! Fig's toes!”

I put my arms over my face and twisted myself into a knot of hysterical, unstoppable laughter. We were in the midst of finals, and everybody was tense and fatigued, and much of the laughter was about that. But the image of Paul with his mouth pressed to Fig's toes while she writhed in ecstasy was too grotesque for my mind to contain.

“He said,” I shrieked in a transport of joy, “that it would be like humping one of the Seven Dwarfs!”

And we howled and shrieked and hooted and yodeled our glee and release until Ginger beat on the wall and the girls next door yelled at us to shut up.

“It's enough,” Cecie murmured after our lights were out and we were drifting toward sleep, “to give the Dirty Deed a bad name.”

I lay awake for a time, thinking about that. It struck me that to Cecie, the act of love still meant words: the slang of lasciviously innocent college girls, or a line in a dirty fraternity limerick, or words on a page of Flaubert or Henry Miller, or even the Song of Solomon. But to me, now, it was flesh and blood, my own and Paul
Sibley's. I
knew,
and she did not. It must have occurred to her; of course it had. But I knew that she would not speak of it to me. I was in another place from Cecie; I had crossed a border. I could not go back for her. It was a great gulf, one of the primal ones. I felt the isolation of it that night as keenly as if I were in a foreign city, completely alone.

I think of that night often. I remember the laughter. It was the last time that we laughed together, Cecie and I.

We had planned to go back to the Outer Banks to Ginger's parents' cottage between quarters. She had asked us weeks before. I was torn; that old black house by the sea called me like a siren. But Paul's dark flesh called me to stay in Randolph. On the night before we were to leave in the car sent by her father and driven by the unhappy Robert, Ginger came into our room grinning. Cecie was tossing clothes into a suitcase. I had not yet made a move to pack. I felt drowned in lethargy.

“I have a surprise,” Ginger bubbled. “I just called Paul and asked him to come with us, and he said he thought I'd never ask, and now you can stop mooning and start packing, Kate.”

“Oh, Ginger, that's a wonderful idea,” I cried. “Oh, bless you for thinking of it! I've told him so much about that house…”

“Thank Fig,” Ginger said. “It was her idea. I guess she can't bear to be parted from him. Of course I had to be begged, but in the long run she talked me into it.”

“Lord,” I said. “I hope you don't mind…”

“Mind?” she grinned. “Two days in a closed car with Paul Sibley? Five days on the beach looking at him in a bathing suit? Mind?”

I laughed and hugged her. I thought, as I did, how solid and warm her flesh was, how comfortable and comforting.

“I love you, Ginger,” I said.

“Me, too,” she said.

It was a far better trip this time than the first. Paul kept us laughing with scurrilous lies and half-truths about the French and
himself among them, and taught us French sailors' ditties, and even sang an accomplished two-part duet of a particularly odious one with Cecie. I knew it was odious because she was red from chest to hairline even as she sang and laughed. He and Ginger swapped what he called bawdy songs and backroom ballads until he wrung a reluctant grin out of even the dour Robert. By the end of the trip he was riding in front with Robert, telling him jokes in low tones that had him chuckling outright, and I think, from the smug masculine tone of Paul's laughter, that Robert even contributed a few himself. I could just imagine the tenor of those. When we stopped overnight in Charlotte Paul bunked in with Robert, and when we stopped for food and bathrooms he ate with him, or accompanied him to the men's room, or sat in the Cadillac with him. By the time we reached the Warren Bridge over Croatan Sound they were friends of the bosom, as Paul put it later.

“I figured it was him or Fig,” he told me. “And of the two, I'd a hell of a lot sooner sleep and eat and pee with Robert. And, I suspect, he with me.”

“Well, you got the best of it,” I said. “I got to sit in back and watch her make love to the back of your neck with those eyes, and breathe like a guppy out of water. Cecie said it was like riding eight hundred miles with a pygmy in heat.”

“For a convent virgin, Cecie knows a lot about the darker passions,” Paul said, grinning.

Once past Manteo he fell silent, and as we crossed the Umstead bridge over Roanoke Sound to Nag's Head, he leaned slightly forward and crossed his arms on the dashboard. At a low word from Paul, Robert cut off the air conditioner and lowered the right-hand front window, and the wild, sweet, salt-fresh wind off the sea poured into the car. I took a deep breath, and saw that Paul did, too. To me there has never been anything more evocative of summer and wildness and bittersweet joy than a sea wind.

When we came bumping up into the backyard of Ginger's house he sat still for a moment, staring up at it, while the rest of
us tumbled out yelping with joy and freedom. He got slowly out of the car, and hung back, hands in pockets, while Robert trailed Cecie and Fig and Ginger up the steps with the luggage. This time Mr. and Mrs. Fowler were nowhere in sight.

I took his hand.

“Come on,” I said. “I want to show you something before we go in.”

And I led him around the house through the pine and juniper windbreak and across the open deck and up to the crest of the dunes.

As it was on that day the spring before, when I had first seen it, the wide, tawny beach was empty. The dunes still soared high and lonely against the evening sky, and the sea oats flattened themselves backward in the steady stream of wind off the Atlantic. The tide was high today, and the white surf creamed at the feet of the first low dunes. The water was very dark blue, and the pale light was so clear that you could see the rippled herringbone pattern of the sand in the shallows of the tidepools, and the bankerly patrols of strutting gulls that must have been two miles away. The air was warmer around us than I remembered from the spring, like warmed honey. But the wind was cool and fresh and tart as wine. We both inhaled deeply at precisely the same instant, and looked at each other. We smiled, but neither of us spoke.

He turned then, and looked back and up at Ginger's great house, dreaming above us in the September sun. I felt his hand tighten almost convulsively on mine, and a tiny, hard tremor go through him, that I felt sometimes at the moment of his orgasm. His face did not change, but I saw the muscles in his jaw clench.

“Didn't I tell you?” I said, loving him for that silent interior explosion.

He did not answer. He continued to stare up at the house, and then along the line of the dunes that fronted it on both sides.

“I'd put it right there,” he said finally. “On that highest dune, off the left end, where it would look straight out to sea. That way
it wouldn't break the roof line of the house, but you'd have a sense of connectedness. Inside, you'd see water on three sides, all the way to Spain or wherever. I don't know if you could cantilever in sand, though; there are probably ordinances…”

He fell silent. I knew what he spoke of.

“How would it look, all that white concrete connected to that weathered old black?” I said. The words were pedantic and tire-some; I did not know where they had come from.

“I'd use the weathered wood on the outside. It doesn't matter about that; that old sable black is wonderful. Strong, for a strong, cold sea. Inside it would be white. In spirit it would be white…”

“It would be beautiful there, wouldn't it?” I said. “I knew you'd love the Outer Banks, and this house. Of all the people I know, it seems the most like you. It's definitely not contemporary, though.”

“No,” he said. “I thought that would matter, but it doesn't.”

At dinner that night, at the big refectory table overlooking the deck and the moonlit sea, he charmed the Fowlers just as he had Robert. It was a side of him I had not seen before; I was as proud of him as a mother with a precocious child. He said just the right thing to the right Fowler, and I beamed fatuously.

But there was a strangeness, too. The laughing man who knew how to make small talk with a new-rich mill owner and his pretty, fluttering wife was such a different persona from the intense, consumed builder and wildly inventive lover that I had the feeling of sitting in the presence of someone I was supposed to know, and did not. I waited restlessly for the time when we could sit alone in the dark of the porch or walk on the night beach, and the lover would come back to me. I was weary, suddenly, with sharing him.