The Edge of the Gulf (4 page)

He had always had a deep respect and a zealous concern for those stretches of the Emerald Coast that had managed to escape the first big development boom, from the end of the War up through the late ’50s, and as his real estate interests expanded they never included careless abuse or trashy exploitations of the landscape. He eschewed hotels and motels and concentrated on renovating and building discreetly superb houses, something of an indulgence which was paid for by small, exclusive enclaves of duplex or quadplex condominiums and a couple of small, charming inns, all of which were nearly as elegant as his houses.

When Seaside had begun to develop twenty years ago, Charlie dabbled a bit; it was to his great financial advantage as the village immediately apotheosized into an upscale Southern destination. Hudson didn’t doubt for a moment that Charlie still loomed large as the guiding presence at 26-A, as the doting patriarch behind the Blue Bar, and, in other degrees and fashions, as a force to be reckoned with along a hundred miles of the coast. But in the fifteen years Hudson had known him, Charlie had always handled life, himself, with a lightness, a grace. He had exquisite taste and a generous, almost exhaustive, sense of hospitality that anticipated every detail. But never once had Hudson seen a wheel turning, a pinched face, the slightest betrayal of effort. The man had a finely tuned informality. He liked to smile and he liked to see other people smile. He had been raised to consider manners as real values, foremost among them that no effort should be spared but must never show. He worked all his life to erase the line between working and living and to make it all one, large, marvelous party, for those for whom he cared and for himself.

But now, of course, everything had altered.

***

Hudson asked, “And what are you doing at home?”

Charlie laughed and shook his head. “I could do two days’ work every morning before I leave the house. I swear I think that house grows in the night.” He looked around. “I probably should have a beautiful cottage like
this
. Just the right size. Right now I’m hip-deep in painters. My young cousin’s coming for a couple of weeks and I’m using that as an excuse to do the north guest suite.” He paused. “But I do love my home. More than ever.”

They talked on. About the cottage, about the weather, about who had moved in and who had moved out of Laurel Beach and who was renting what, about local politics, until the clock-barometer on the big pine desk in the hall whirred dully, clicked, and feebly bleated out midnight. Kate had found the clock, which she had dated around 1900, at a flea market in Fort Walton and had had everything done to it that could be done. But its creaky wheeze continued, and anything more than three or four o’clock drove him crazy. On the long hours he would look at her, roll his eyes and shake his head like a madman. “Oh, but think of all the stories it brings into our house,” she would say, sometimes making a few little whirring noises of her own just for spite. “Think of all it’s seen.”

He suddenly realized they had, during his reverie, become mired in a long and awkward pause.

“Hudson.”

He blinked hard as Charlie began to speak again, now in a low and very measured way.

“You know I would never presume on your loss. I think we’re very private men, the two of us. But I want to say that I am so glad to see you sitting here in front of me. You look well. I can only say that I know what you’ve been through is all anybody ever needs to know about hell. I knew there was nothing I could do except call and write every now and then. That you’d have to find your way by yourself. I can’t imagine that there’s anything I can do even now. But if there is, if there ever is
anything
, please let me be your friend. I’ve always known you are a strong man and a good one. I guess I just needed to say, face to face, I’m so, so sorry. And that I hope, even through the pain, you can feel just a little bit like some part of you has come home.”

Hudson walked to the hearth and looked down, tightening his jaw. When he spoke his voice sounded, even to himself, as cold as the empty grate. “Thank you.”

“And just…” Charlie nodded, almost as if to himself. “Just keep going.”

“That’s what I do.”

Another long pause.

Charlie rose and stretched. Moon did too, and yawned.

Charlie said, “I have to have a little business dinner Friday evening but other than that I’m free into next week. You let
me
know when you want to get together. If you don’t,” he winked, “I’ll probably start bothering you.”

Hudson took a grip on himself. “Saturday, then. I want to arrive at your home at six-thirty, in time just to sit around here and there in it because I always like being there so much,
and
for a complete tour of all new art, furnishings, and paint colors. By seven-thirty, I want to be standing on your deck in the sunset if its tolerable and there’s a breeze, or ensconced in that long, cool solarium looking east over the lagoon if it’s not, sipping one of those rum things you do with fresh guava. I want us to arrive at 26-A at eight-thirty or whatever the exact moment is that the evening reaches that ineffable
frisson
that only Charlie Brompton’s restaurant, the best in west Florida and arguably the best this side of New Orleans, can attain.”

“Can’t wait.”

“My shrink, Alex, would be disappointed at the continuing tendency to over plan every second of my days and nights, but pleased that I’m ‘asking for what I need’ as he puts it.”

His hand on the door, Charlie grinned, his hair more tousled than usual and the beginning of sleep near his eyes. He hugged Hudson, a bit awkwardly, for a moment.

“Smart shrink.”

“Not only that, he’s an Episcopal priest. Fifteen years a parish rector, wanted a change. You’d like him. He comes at psychology and spirituality with enormous common sense. Very articulate, in a theological good-ol’-boy sort of way. I get my head shrunk and my soul shriven all on the same nickel.”

***

As soon as Charlie was out the door, Hudson felt a tremor rifle through his body. He was glad he was past the first encounter. But he had no idea whether, when, or if he’d ever be able to let go of the fact that Charlie knew so much. That Charlie, more than anyone else, knew him. Knew Kate. Knew the two of them in Laurel.

It wasn’t helped by his noticing again, as he turned off the lights, the key to the cottage that Charlie had left on the small table by the door. “You may need this other one for some reason this summer.”

Charlie had been too close. Known too much. And Hudson felt it like a powerful undertow, a hollowing drag at his guts that made him feel all too familiarly desperate.

And that desperation made him feel an all too familiar rage.

Much later, after tossing in the sheets like a banshee for more than an hour, he finally edged into a shaky sleep.

Just as his consciousness slipped into darkness, he saw the two of them. Charlie and Kate. She was looking at him, in her eyes a question, while Charlie’s had a shrewd glint. He smiled his lopsided grin at her and said, “Don’t let him blame me.”

***

It had been those six days, that glimpse of the world in October, that had hovered in front of Hudson ever since, an eidetic image always just beyond the immediate reality, a memory more palpable than his own flesh, a measure, a radiance, a torment.

They had wavered for weeks over whether to remain in Memphis for Christmas and the New Year. They were tired; each of them had skirmished for a month with a nastily prevailing flu bug; Hudson’s semester, featuring two new class preparations, had been especially demanding; a huge project Kate had been orchestrating through the fall all needed to come together just after the first of the year; Hudson’s mother, a feisty woman of seventy-five, was recuperating from minor surgery. They finally decided to accept a Canadian family’s very attractive request for three weeks at the cottage, and to stay put and do as close to nothing as possible.

The two weeks passed in a gray blur of cold, slashing rains, clotted at times with sleet and snow. They talked incessantly of the cottage, of Laurel. “We did the right thing,” first one and the other would say. “It would have felt crowded and rushed,” said Hudson. “Yes. We mustn’t be like children,” said Kate. “It’s
there
. We don’t have to prove a point. There’s March. There’s summer. There’s next Christmas if we want it.” They congratulated themselves on the premium holiday rental income. By the fire in their best friends’ living room one evening after dinner, Kate whispered to Hudson: “The porch chairs are being paid for even as we speak.” Through the days and nights, in their shared imagination, in the shifting fragments of what was one long happy conversation, they decorated and redecorated the cottage and planned holiday meals, took long walks up the beach to Seaside in a brisk morning breeze, read in the sunlight near the windows, built fires.

Every night in bed, Hudson would interrupt his homework reading now and then to riffle among his maps. Kate read a local history of South Walton County. She had used a photo of the cottage as a bookmark; whenever she stopped reading, she’d look at the photo and say: “I still can’t believe it.” Before sleep they would turn to the Weather Channel to see what might be happening on the coast. Was their place in the throes of this cold rain as well? Would tomorrow be sunny and seventy? They dreamed of Christmases and New Years to come.

***

It had been on a crystalline, cold morning in early March—only two weeks before they were to go down during Hudson’s spring break—a morning when a thick late frost burned off quickly in the sun, and the surprised daffodils bounced back unscathed, that the world ended.

Unimaginably, without warning, without even time for goodbyes.

Kate was gone.

Chapter 7

Sydney looked at the clock on the desk again. Chaz was returning from another quick trip down to the coast to spend a weekend with Uncle Charlie and was due into Hartsfield within the hour.

She weighed her own first impressions of Charlie, from their weekend visit in April. Actually, he was Chaz’s cousin-once-removed: his father and Charlie had been first cousins. Particularly close, apparently, more like brothers.

She had found him charming, sincere, funny. And still attractive. What was not to like? She felt fairly certain he’d taken to her. Most men did. It wasn’t a suit she played shamelessly; like so much in life, it was simply the cards one had been dealt. Just as she was a source of strength and focus for Chaz, she had imagined that she might shed some pleasant lights from time to time into Charlie’s declining years. She was nothing if not adaptable. Perhaps, she had thought, she would simply transfer the emergent attentions she had begun directing to Peter, instead, to Charlie.

Of course, he was gay; that could potentially prove to be a problem. Not that she cared in the least about the variety of people’s sexuality; she had, after all, spent years in the theater and known a number of strong, kind, attractive, witty, intelligent and talented gay folks. No, what niggled at her was something else she’d encountered from time to time in gay men. Would Charlie either not notice her enough, or notice her too much? She wanted to have an effect that might be of practical benefit to her and to Chaz. And why should she not? But what if, on the other hand, Charlie was one of those gay men who seemed at times so astoundingly perceptive, capable almost of knowing what you felt and thought even before you did yourself? She’d known one or two like that and it made her uncomfortable. Given the men in her childhood and her former fiancé, she had few delusions left about the male animal, and she found it necessary, not to manipulate, but to be able to anticipate, and thus to keep a very firm grip on her relations with men.

Certainly there could be nothing wrong with that. And it was part of who she was, the person she’d made of herself. No one had needed her when she was young, indeed no one had particularly noticed she was alive. She liked having people, especially men, depend on her.

She’d earned the right to enjoy being strong.

To being needed.

Wasn’t it, after all, a common, key aspect of being human?

Chapter 8

For Hudson, the first year was sheer blind agony, the summer a freefall through hot days and nights of numb solitude in which he alternately tried to grapple with and avoid the constantly ungraspable nightmare, not sleeping, not remembering to eat and not wanting to when he did, crying jaggedly while he tried to make himself work in the garden, seeing only two or three worried family members and friends very briefly, drinking far too much, staring at unnoted hours of mindless television programming the only criteria for which seemed to be that it have no credible storyline and not the faintest whiff of real emotion.

He had managed a frail semblance of getting himself together in the fall. His mid-life career change back to teaching had been a transition, like his marriage, to gratitude and joy. He loved teaching literature and writing, and he loved the all-girl environment; he enjoyed his upper-level courses but was also especially fond of the ninth graders. His changelings, as he called them. His work saved him.

For what, he couldn’t imagine.

***

He woke in mid-sentence, trying to formulate an answer.

It hadn’t happened in quite some time. For a moment, utterly lost as he looked around the room, he forgot the question. It was always a question, sometimes posed by Kate, sometimes by Alex, and usually unanswerable. In its most nightmarish manifestations, the voice was an unknown, disembodied, oracular echo, welling up loudly and then trailing away into utter darkness, pursuing him up and down the pews and aisles of some cavernous, deteriorating, medieval sanctuary.

Three-fifteen. He had fallen asleep over a magazine, although not before, apparently, turning off the reading lamp. In the pale wash from the porch light through the windows, the sofa and chairs, the tables, and the large expanse of rug were a black-and-white study of softened angles and planes. Insubstantial. He did what the harsh necessity of time had taught him to do. He roused himself from the chair and rubbed his hands over his face. Standing, facing the windows, he stared hard at objects, riveting them into concrete reality, attempting to ground himself in the mundane.

He went down the hall to the bathroom and turned on the light. The man he was so profoundly unsure of, unsettled by, loomed there in the mirror again; would he ever go away? The tall, lanky body, stiff and awkward with confused sleep; the features, startled, eyes wildly searching. What by day might be a pleasant, if serious, face, with a strong jaw and large eyes of an unusual green, came at him now like some mottled ghoul. The thick red-brown hair, longish and somewhat curling, was caught in crazed snarls and dully showed all of its grey under the harsh light. The green irises of his eyes squinted noxiously in their bloodshot whites, the pale skin around them looking thin and bruised.

He went to the kitchen, got out a tea bag and put on the kettle. In the four or five minutes it took to come to a boil, the question, and the voice, came back to him. Are you angry because she’s gone, or because she won’t go away?

It was the rumbling, faceless howl in the void, and the kitchen burgeoned with it, pinning him against the counter. Everything else was obliterated and Hudson, engulfed, sensed no borders between it and himself; he reverberated like a hollow reed. When the hiss of the steam became a low screech, he saw two hands come up, whitish anonymous things, seemingly detached. He made a cup of tea and then sat down at the long trestle table. He could not feel his body; the hot tea seemed to trace a path down his throat but to lose itself where his chest should be. He knew that the process of draining away into space, of evaporating, took no time at all. The reassembly was the hard, slow part.

Beginning with: why bother?

He’d gutted out many a night at home, and had been doing better over the past several months. Fatigue had gotten him fairly well through the night before, but now, in the empty hours, the newness of the cottage was depleted.

Of everything except Kate. It was like having a second skin; he could look nowhere, at nothing, without seeing it with her, without being with her.

He tried to calm himself. This was to be expected, he told himself. He would get through this. He got up from the table; he turned off the porch light and opened the front door. A bright half-moon, augmented only slightly by one of Pendennis Street’s two streetlights, filtered through the tangle of the front yard, leaving small pools of white across the porch and steps and down along the walk. Hudson stared through the thicket of leaves to the two six-foot palmettos that leaned in, just slightly, from either side of the crushed shell walk, out where it ended in the road. They inclined toward one another as if sharing a juicy piece of gossip, and Kate, God only knows why, had named them Louie and Martine.
“She’s the one with that ruff of fronds off on one side. She’s just said something sly and he’s throwing back his head. Laughing.”

He went back in and shut the door. Moon was waiting with a resigned look. He had stayed put where he lay near the sofa when Hudson first awoke; he, too, knew something about interrupted nights and had a refined instinct for discretion. He sat now on the cool plank floor of the broad hallway, offering a companionable way to the bedroom or a friendly ear. Hudson wasn’t calm, despite what he kept telling himself. He felt the loss of control. His head filled with spoken words and images coming faster and faster, one crowding out the other; the movie had started and there was no stopping it and he wasn’t just watching it, he was in it.

“Go on, boy. Go back to sleep. It’s all right.” Moon obeyed, returning with admirable nonchalance to the spot between the sofa and the hearth that he seemed to be breaking in. His eyes, however, did not, for quite a long time, completely close.

Hudson poured another mug of tea and then sat in the other chair of the matched pair, the one he knew, from a small tear under one arm a silver bracelet had made, to have been hers. That way he wouldn’t have to look at it. Maybe he would make that a house rule. God knows he had made other rarefied and vastly detailed deals with himself in the house in Memphis.

Just now it didn’t matter that much. He knew that a vigil had begun and there was nothing to do but see it out. He felt it before him, pulling him in. He sat comfortably, the mug of tea at hand on a small table, and leaned his head back against the cushion. He let go, and let it come, again. Not hot, fast tears. Those caught you by surprise; and he’d become fairly adept, the momentary bout that morning notwithstanding, at heading them off. No, this was the fond, familiar terror. The not knowing what to believe. Kate was not with him; Kate was with him. He was surviving; he would never really be alive again as long as he lived. They had only had a handful of years, but they had defined life for him and he would never be the same. They had only had a handful of years and they would, over more years and in life’s great leveling irony, lose their life-defining meaning and fade away.

He sat back, at once watching and within the frame, as the film of his fear took him toward morning. He thought of the evening with Charlie. That had gone fairly well. But had it gone perhaps too well? Which was more real: a high-functioning will and an impulse to reach out, or the need to grapple with the spiritual world and one’s own wearied self-consciousness? Part of him already needed to see Charlie again, and yet he knew too that he had hardly been able to wait for him to leave. So that he wouldn’t have to see his satisfaction. So that he could do this. Keep this appointment. That was it, that was the great impossibility: he wanted connectedness to Kate and he couldn’t have it. He could never make it right. Whatever he did or didn’t do, life would never be right.

Well, this is how it is now. This day. It may not be this way tomorrow. I didn’t seek it, it sought me. I can’t avoid it. Goddamn it, I can’t. Even if I want to, I can’t avoid it every time or forever. There are going to be times when it’s best to give in.

He let it all come, a long hard review, the longest and hardest and sweetest he’d taken up in close to a year. One palpable word, scene, dream after another; everything but the touch. It was all he wanted to do and all he wanted not to do. It was all there was to do. It was like making love to oneself, but it was all he had.

***

By the time dawn seeped up amid the trees out front, he was spent, and hovering just this side of madness. But he was also mildly irritated. I might actually try for a nap this afternoon, he thought. Why not? There’s always a first time. He wanted a shower and coffee, and he was hungry.

Very chill comfort, but he could hear Kate say:
Good.
She was the strongest person he’d ever known and never one for drama.
Go on, now. Get on with it.
He reached down to the stack of papers tossed on the floor and pulled up a book review. There were a few fine points he still needed to get right.

It was sometimes a kind of reassurance to fall asleep reworking an article, the words stretching, rocking gently, like one of those fragile swinging rope bridges, over the darkness below. And so, for an hour or so, he did.