Outer Banks (23 page)

“Now that's the place to ride out a storm,” I said. “Light your little fireplace and take a bottle of wine and keep feeding the bed quarters. Wow.”

Ginger laughed.

“You'd have to be a good swimmer to do that,” she said. “If it's a bad enough storm the bridges are under water. Nobody comes down here in a blow. Not even for Magic Fingers.”

“Pity,” I said. “It would be the perfect aphrodisiac. Oh, Lord, y'all, has this been a perfect day, or what?”

That last night we sat late on the deck after supper. The first of the wispy mare's-tail clouds that preceded the storm Mr. Fowler had promised trailed milky skeins across the clouds of stars, and the ocean seemed stiller than I had ever seen it. It was then that Ginger told us the story of the mermaids that sang the sailors to their fate on the shoals.

“What kind of mermaids would those be?” Fig said earnestly. “The only kind I ever read about were Greek, like the sirens, or German, like the Rhine Maidens. I guess these would be Indians. They'd probably be singing Indian songs.”

We were all elaborately silent. None of us dared look at the others. I knew we were struggling, in the dark, not to laugh. We had simply laughed too much at Fig this trip; we all sensed it. But the image her words called up was almost too much for us to handle.

From the open kitchen window, where she had gone to make tea, Cecie's voice trailed sweetly out into the still night.

“When I'm calling you—ooo-ooo,” she warbled, “will you answer tru—uuu-uuue…?”

And the laughter exploded out of our mouths and noses into the night. Even Paul laughed. It went on and on, and every time it drifted to a stop a snort from one of us would set it off again.

“Well, I wanted to get it right,” Fig said primly. “Y'all are always telling me to get it right.”

After everyone had straggled off to bed, Paul and I lingered on the deck, moving finally to the big new hammock Mr. Fowler had hung at the far end, tucked under the overhang of the great roof. We climbed carefully into it, so as not to fall out, and lay as still as we could, and as quietly.

“We really should go in,” I said. “We've got to get an early start tomorrow. I haven't packed yet.”

“Stay a minute,” he said. “I haven't had any time at all alone with you. I've been looking at that body practically naked for five days, and I've hardly touched it.”

“Well, don't touch it now,” I said, only half-teasing. “If you do, we'll end up doing it in this hammock and everybody will hear us and know what we're doing…”

“They already do,” he said, and put his hand on my breast.

I drew in my breath sharply. Fire leaped in my groin.

“Don't,” I whispered. “Oh, don't…”

“Then what about this?” he said, and slid his hand down my body and under the waistband of my shorts, and finally to the secret warmth between my legs. I arched my back and opened them for him. I knew as I turned my body and face into his that we were lost.

He was nearly inside me, murmuring, moaning a little, I was blind and fully opened with pure sensation, when it happened. I shifted my weight and the hammock tossed us onto the deck with a hollow thud that sounded as if it might be heard to the mainland. We froze in a tangle of arms and legs and naked skin, hardly breathing, laughter beginning deep inside us, skirling relentlessly
up. At the end of the dark house a light went on.

We righted ourselves and our clothing and sat demurely side by side on the steps down to the sand, feeling it snake-cold on our bare feet, shaking with suppressed laughter and the release of tension. Presently the light went off again.

“I guess that was an omen,” he said. “But I promise you one thing, Katherine Stuart Lee. The minute I get you here again I'm going to bang you in that hammock. Before we even unpack. Before we even go in the house. I'll drive all night to do it, if I have to.”

“You know, if we got married here, you wouldn't have to drive all night,” I said. “You wouldn't have to unpack. You'd just have to wait till the last guest left and unzip your fly. It's the best argument for a Nag's Head wedding I ever heard.”

“Don't tempt me,” he said. “But I'm sure your mother would never stand for that. It's bad enough I'm dragging you away to the Yankees. I know Southern mamas. It's got to be the big deal with the twelve bridesmaids and champagne fountain and an orchestra and a tent and God knows what else. I'll be lucky to get you into that hammock for a week after we're married.”

I told him then. I sat in the darkness beside him and told him about my father, and the summers of servitude on the Cape, and the careful, unceasing tutelage, and the money that was not, and the Lee that was not
that
Lee, and the sad squalor of the old house on the Santee River. And I told him about my father's suicide on its banks.

“I should have told you before, but I didn't really think it mattered,” I said. “And I know it doesn't, not to you. But I can't go on letting you think I'm rich. I'm an awful long way from that. It doesn't change anything; I'll still be going to New York and working, and you'll be starting the house and your practice…”

I let my voice trail off so that he could speak. He did not. He sat beside me on the steps of Ginger's big house and stared out
to sea, where the clouds had finally eaten the thin moon, and said nothing. I could not see his face.

“It does matter, doesn't it?” I said finally, my voice breaking. “You're mad at me.”

“The only thing that matters is that you thought you couldn't tell me right off,” he said in a remote voice. “The only thing that matters is that you thought it would matter to me. You must have, or you'd have told me. Did you really think I'd care about that?”

“I guess I didn't think at all,” I said despairingly. “Somehow it just never seemed the time for it. I'm sorry. Please don't shut me out.”

He was silent again, and I began to cry, quietly and in absolute anguish at what I had wrought. I could not bear his silence.

“Ah, Kate, don't cry,” he said finally. “It doesn't matter. Nothing has changed. You've told me now, and that's the end of it. Come here and give me a hug.”

And he pulled me to him and kissed the top of my head. Gradually I stopped crying. We sat so for a long time, I listening to his breathing and feeling the warmth of him in the cooling night. Finally, with the sharpening of the wind that meant the turn of the tide, we got up and went inside. In the other bed in our room, Cecie slept quietly, her face turned to the window on the sea. But it was a long time before I slept.

We were almost across the Lindsay Warren Bridge to the mainland the next morning before anyone spoke.

“Well,” Ginger said to Paul, turning around in the front seat so she could see him. “Wasn't it everything I said it was?”

“Oh, yes, Gingerrooney,” he said. “It was all that and more.”

 

It was upon me then, the time of urgency and endings: there was nothing, now, between me and December graduation. No break existed so that I could say “after vacation.” Nor could I say “this
time next quarter.” There would not, for me, be a next quarter. The sense of imploding time was terrifying.

Paul said more than once that I reminded him of an overtuned violin. I wept more often, and more easily, that fall than I ever have since, even in the days after Stephen's death, even after they found the cancer. Those two horrors were beyond weeping. But in that last autumn at Randolph, everything touched me like an electrical charge, and everything brought quick, tremulous tears. I would walk across the campus in the grape-colored early dusk of October and smell the smoke from the Friday night pep rally bonfires, and I would think, “This is the last time I'll ever smell that smell, or see this light.” The Saturday thunder of the drums from the stadium, on bronze afternoons, made my heart hurt. I would walk into the steamy clatter of Harry's out of a nippy November wind and the dreary, banal little scene would move me to blindness with its sweetness and beauty. The light from my drawing board lamp on a night of blowing rain, seen through the bank of windows in McCandless, struck me to the quick. Next quarter another head would lean over into its white pool. Even the midge-whine of chapter meetings, and the fretful scramble of rush, made me nostalgic. Ginger's white grin made me want to run across the room and hug her, and I often did. Once or twice I even did it to Fig, who colored and simpered.

I found that I could hardly bear to look at Cecie. Whenever I did, and saw her red head bent over her books, or received her full, sweet kitten's smile, loss nearly drowned me. I had to turn my head away frequently, lest she see the tears in my eyes. I had the sense, at those times, that it was Cecie's ghost I saw; that the essential Cecie had moved on somewhere else, somewhere I could not follow. I found that I was starting a great many sentences to her with “Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember, it was only a year ago,” she said to me once. “What's the matter with you? You'd think you were going to Inner Mongolia for the rest of your life.”

“I'm afraid I'm going to forget it,” I said. “I want to keep all of it, everything we said and did and laughed at, everything we read. And I want you to remember it, too.”

“I'm not going to forget it, ol' Kate,” she said seriously. “And I'm not going to die, either, and you're not. Stop acting like December was the end of everything. We'll see each other. I'll come to New York next summer, if you still want me to, and we're all going to meet at Ginger's in March, remember.”

“I know. It's just that there's something so…bittersweet about everything this fall. Everything I see or hear…”

She smiled.

she quoted.

“I know I'll never forget the Dorothy Parker,” I grinned mistily. “It's the first thing I'm going to unpack in New York. I'm going to read it every night, like the Bible.”

“So will I,” she said. “And I'll read aloud to you in my head, and you to me, and we'll be able to laugh just as hard as if we were in the same room.”

“Oh, Cecie…” I began, my eyes flooding with tears.

“Don't you dare,” she said fiercely. “I don't have time to cry. I'm doomed as it is. We'll cry later.” And she left for the library, and I for McCandless.

I was finally into my senior design thesis, and was spending virtually every waking hour in labs or with my adviser. I felt a keen pressure to make the project as good as it could be. Paul had, indeed, written Carl Seaborn, his mentor at McKim, Mead and White, about employment for me, and Carl had called the next day to say that they'd found both a place for me as a junior draftsman
in their interiors department and a tiny apartment on First Avenue in the 80s, that had just been vacated by an employee who was joining the Peace Corps. The job was a foregone conclusion, he said, but they'd want to see my thesis, just as a formality. And so I poured heart and soul and hundreds of hours into it, and Paul photographed it in progress and sent it to Carl Seaborn, and the word came back that they thought it very good indeed, and were proud to have me on the team. I thought they probably were. The project was good; even I knew that. I had, inevitably, chosen to do interiors for the house by the sea, and the clean, low lines of the massive furniture and the sea-and-wind-cool blues and greens and vibrant whites and gull grays flowed from my fingers as if fountains had been tapped.

“We're going to do these rooms just this way,” Paul said, looking at it. “It's perfect. I won't want to change anything. The house is a real partnership now.”

And happiness flooded me, bringing, inevitably, tears.

Urgency infected everyone that autumn, it seemed. Paul's entire quarter was devoted to a design competition for a bus station in Tuskegee, and his hours at the board were even worse than mine. We made silent, urgent love in haste, gulped coffee in haste, met in dark stairwells and parking lots and kissed and broke apart, sweat-damped, and dashed on our different ways. He continued to work three nights a week with Fig, at the English, but mercifully she ceased making so much of it, and he simply forgot to mention it unless I remembered to ask. I seldom did. His summer English grade had been a B. The tutoring was obviously a success.

Ginger was away much of that quarter, doing a stint of elementary school practice teaching in nearby Montgomery. She stayed with elderly relatives in a dim, enormous old house during the week and streaked for Randolph like a homing pigeon when her classes were over on Friday afternoons.

“She has shingles and the UDC at her house every Wednesday, and he doesn't do anything but talk about Martin Luther
King,” she said in disgust. “And they as much as said they thought Daddy was trashy. I said in North Alabama we called it rich. They'll be as glad as I am when this quarter's over.”

I saw less of Fig that quarter than I ever had. Perhaps it was because I was so distracted and overflowing with work and angst. But often days went by before I was aware of seeing her, and when at last I put my head into hers and Ginger's room, she was usually curled up on her bed writing in the diary. She was still as secretive about that as ever, shielding it elaborately from my eyes.

“I've started my novel,” she said one evening. “I'm going to make you and Paul famous, like Cathy and Heathcliff. But you can't read it till I'm finished.”

“Well, I hope we come to better ends than they did,” I said, smiling to hide my annoyance at her fatuousness. “Does Paul know you're immortalizing him?”

“Yes, but he can't see it, either. He's already said he was going to break my neck if I tried to publish it.”