Lapham Rising (3 page)

“If I were a conquistador, guess where you’d be?”

“Where all the conquistadors are now.” He laughs. “What are you doing?”

I interpose my body between him and the jar, though he’s probably too far away too see it anyway. “Searching for serenity,” I tell him. “Trying to be where Lapham is not.”

He swings his arm in a slow arc, as if presenting the universe to eighth graders at the planetarium. “But Señor Lapham is everywhere!”
Bang bang bang bang bang
.

Would that he were speaking figuratively. Every time I take my eyes off the construction site, it seems to double its size, as though it were an endlessly enlarging mythical animal—one of those terrible Greek freak creations born of the forced copulation of a god with an animal, the god of cathedral ceilings or of mansard roofs with a toucan or a buffalo—producing a vague composite with indefinite haunches and misty tentacles; head of owl; horn of gnu; torso of panther; gills, claws, trunks; the tail of a langur; the feet of a fruit bat; a hundred legs splayed in a hundred different directions, the body parts continually ejected and becoming independent structures, outbuildings, each individually terrible yet bearing a ghastly resemblance to the mother animal. When the house is completed, will it expand of its own accord? In the middle of the night, will I be awakened by the bubble-bursts of skin, the popping of limbs and of eyes from their sockets, the elongation of a telescopic wing, and the screeching, the agonized screeching, of growing pains?

Hector eyes me as though I were a squirrel eyeing
him
.
“And by the way,” he says, “just where do your two little projects leave
me?
” No matter how holy he may sound, he is driven solely by self-interest.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take you to Chautauqua. You won’t be abandoned.”

“And what if I don’t
want
to go to Chautauqua?”

“Well, I can leave you here to deal with the police. You can explain what I did. They’ll doubtless arrest you as an accomplice.”

“Not me,” he says. “I won’t say a word. I’ll just look cute and bewildered. ‘Oh, where is my master? Why did he desert me?’ Poor little doggie.” He goes through his curriculum of head tilts, including the Adorable; the What’s-Going-On?; the You-Must-Be-Kidding; the Quizzical (representing genuine confusion); and his choice of the moment, the Forlorn.

“That’s why you’re coming with me,” I tell him. “I don’t want to leave any witnesses. Besides, you’ll enjoy hearing me lecture.”

“What a treat. And you know how I love treats.”

“Of course, if you want to stay behind and learn how to fill your own water bowl and buy dog food for yourself…”

“Bite me,” he says.

I’ve tried.

T
en
A.M
.: Kathy Time. Time for Kathy Polite to take off her clothes. She spells her surname Polite but pronounces it “pole-EET,” to add that continental
je ne sais quoi
to her uniquely successful real estate operation. Whenever I talk with her, which is as infrequently as possible, I make a point of pretending not to know how she pronounces her name, and I replace it with that adjective of courtesy that mocks her existence.

“That’s Pole-EET, as you perfectly well know, you old coot.” She always speaks to me coquettishly, as though she had just returned from Savannah to her favorite old uncle’s plantation, and is capable of reducing me to blushes and stumbles with the droop of an eyelid.

“Ah’m so sorry! I was just being polite.”

“Ah don’t know why Ah waste one word on you!” She puck
ers her lips like a grouper. “Ah’ll never sell you
anything
, you old skinflint.”

“That is
SKINE
-flint,” I correct her. “And Ah would gladly purchase one of your delightful Taras, Miss Pole-EET, but the cotton crop has been so po’ this year, we’ve had to eat the slaves.”

That I would never buy so much as a lean-to from Kathy has had no impact, I hardly need to report, on her booming real estate business. Alongside the hundreds of “gems,” “steps to the ocean,” “priced to sell,” and “just bring your toothbrush” houses for which she shills on both overladen jaws of Long Island, she also represents what grotesqueries are still for sale around Lapham’s. She did not sell that particular magnificence, of course: Lapham had his own broker (a roommate from St. Mark’s) and his own personal architect, an in-law of Albert Speer’s, whose firm has been in the family for generations, and which had erected the dank mossy manses in Newport and Saratoga, as well as several more recent, bright mausoleums in Florida and Wyoming, near the Snake River—where, it is said, the whitefish committed a Jim Jones mass suicide in response.

But, as Lapham rises, Kathy is not far behind. Mainly she sells spec houses to Lapham wannabes, of whom there seems to be an endless parade. Thus, though without a contract, and herself but dimly aware of it, she is Lapham’s silent partner
in the destruction of the universe. She once told me that she was—and I quote—“very grateful to Mr. Lapham for setting the proper standard of architectural elegance in the area. As yet, Ah have not made his acquaintance. But on the day that Ah am so fortunate, Ah shall shake his hand warmly and tell him, ‘It is people like you, suhr, who make the Hamptons the Hamptons.’”

Were it not for Kathy Time, I would have gutted her on the spot.

“Hah,” she calls from her boat this morning—“Hah” being a conjunction of “Hi” and a sigh.

“Hah,” I call back. She wants to assure herself that I am watching. She need not worry. I walk down to the platform of the dock facing the creek to decrease the distance between us, and improve my view. One does what one can.

She surveys me with a fatalistic shrug, as if I were a decision she regretted. “Harry, you need some new clothes.”

I would say, “And you do not,” but I don’t wish to delay her from her appointed rounds.

On the stroke of ten, this is what she does every sweet drifty summer day. And here she is again, with her forty-year-old diver’s body, standing like a soft little piece of vertical caramel in the bow of her Grady White with the dual 250-horsepower gunmetal-gray Yamaha engines lying at rest. The powerboat is anchored midway between Noman
and Lapham’s shore. It throbs. Who would not? I see her, clear as starlight, reaching for the heavens and stretching herself like some living figurehead on the prow of a New Bedford whaler.

On each side of her boat, port as well as starboard, facing both my island and the long line of developed and developing houses across from me, is a large red-painted sign: “Polite for the Elite, Realtors.” The lettering is thick, high, and three-dimensional. One could read it from miles offshore. I imagine that the signs allow her to write off the boat as a business expense. But the real, unforgettable, visually ineradicable advertisement is Kathy herself, out for her regular morning swim.

She has been skinny-dipping off her boat for nine glorious summers. And there is hardly a man around here—including those who drive over for the occasion from as far away as Shirley and Mattituck, and including all the–
ogues
on both alligator jaws: Patch-, Cutch-, Haupp-, Aquab-, as well as Qui- and Qu- who does not stop whatever else he is doing at precisely ten o’clock to gaze in appreciative wonder at the wonder of Kathy Polite.

“Hah, Hector!” He scampers down to the water’s edge and makes a snowy flurry of greeting her. His manner with people other than me is to rush toward them exhibiting a frantic
eagerness, wagging and levitating, as if he were a kidnap victim signaling for rescue.

“Hah, boys!” she calls to Dave and his men. Dave and Jack give her a decorous wave from the waist. The Mexicans are more demonstrative.

In her way, she is a genius. Other realtors in the area spend a fortune on brochures advertising houses that are “this side of Paradise,” or that offer “location, location,” or that were “built in a unique style by the owner,” meaning that they were designed by someone on whom German silent horror films made an indelible impression. The brokers need to print updates every week, because all of these houses sell in a snap and are immediately replaced by new listings. It is expensive to produce the brochures, and it takes both time and effort to distribute them around the sidewalks in front of the cheese shops and the basket shops and the shops that sell photographs of other shops, and to place them in the doorways of the “We have mahimahi!” restaurants, where they lie in stacks and gather sand.

What Kathy figured out was that it would be much more convenient, not to say more consonant with her own taste and character, if instead of having to seek out customers, she could devise an activity that would entice
them
to come to
her
. So without using a flyer, posters, a Web site with “such a cute
name dot-com,” or any other instruments of modern publicity, she attached her signs to her boat and began the practice of her mute morning sales pitch. She was, and is, her own Open House.

“Why don’t you join me today, Wrinkles?” she calls from the side deck.

“No time,” I shout back. “I have to water my duck.”

“Your WHAT?” She clamps a hand to her mouth as if shocked. The last time Kathy was shocked was when her cousin said no. She heard me, all right. I say the same thing to her every day.

“What’s wrong with your ear, Harry? Did you pull a Van Gogh?”

“Yes, Buttercup, I cut it off as a gesture of my love for you. Actually, I was trying to cut my throat.”

“Not if Ah get there first. And what
is
that under the tarp? It looks quite sinister—much lahk yourself, Harry March.” She often says my first and last names together, as if she were addressing and classifying me in the same breath. She presents two even rows of large, newly whitened teeth.

The front of the Da Vinci lies to my right. A portion of the aft crosspiece is still showing. I cover it. “Why don’t you just go on with your morning’s work?” I try not to sound too eager.

She preens on her deck, her face as cute as neon. She turns
first to the left, then to the right, as a much-honored actress might do onstage: the first lady of real estate, acknowledging an audience she cannot see but knows is out there. Distracted, she slips out of her green top and her beige shorts, displaying panties and a bra as white as glaciers against her autobronzed skin, which is russet-colored, or the color of unpolished gold. With the ceremonial prance of a Lipizzaner, she walks to the bow. She walks to the stern. Then to the bow. Then to the stern. Onshore, hedges jostle. Car windows open. Rabbits stiffen. Back to the bow. Back to the stern.

At last she is still again, and—as if lost in an ethereal reverie concerning plummeting interest rates or some newly minted millionaire just in from Rahway—she unhooks her bra and drops it at her side like a lace handkerchief. She looks out at the water. She looks at the shore. The shore’s mouth is dry and agape. Now she slips off her panties. One can almost hear a sighing of the clouds. But there are no clouds.

“Why do you stare like that every morning?” asks Hector.

“You wouldn’t understand.” I never mention his first medical procedure.

She touches her forehead, then reaches up into her hair, a braid of browns and oranges that swings down to the middle of her back. She loosens the braid, and out spills plenty’s horn. She touches her ribs and rubs them as if attempting to
induce wings. She glows like a coal in ash. Though I would have no way of knowing this, I would put her normal body temperature at about 106. The water will hiss when she enters it. Though I would have no way of knowing this either, I imagine that she initiates lovemaking by leaping on a man from a great height, say a hayloft or a chandelier, and whispering “Surprise!” She touches her thighs and her knees as she steps to the side of the boat away from me and facing Lapham’s. Now she straightens her body. Now she perches. Now she dives. The water opens its grateful arms and waits.

At this moment of her diving, as she is suspended in mid-jackknife, nothing happens on the East End of Long Island. Not a single nail is nailed. Not a single hedge is trimmed. Not a single bottle of Château Whatanamazingwine is sold. Not one compliment is paid to a tomato or an ear of corn or a peach. No one asks where the potato fields have gone. Likewise the duck farms. No Filipino housekeeper is yelled at for failing to position the fruit forks correctly. No year-round resident is pushed aside at a farmers’ market. No one asks anyone else to a small dinner just for close friends, or wishes there were more time to spend reading quietly on the beach away from all the big parties. No one gives kudos. Or draws raves. No one embarks on an exciting new phase of his life, or enters the third act of his life, or comments that life is a jour
ney. No one plans a benefit dinner dance for a fatal disease. No one lowers his voice to say “Jew.”

Nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound. The universe lies in respectful silence as sex and commerce find their apogee in Kathy Polite and her morning swim. For one brief moment in this day, for what
certainly
will be the
only
such moment, I am at peace—all bitterness relieved, all burdens lifted from me. The wind kicks up. I bless her unaware.

I
t may surprise you to learn that I have considerable difficulty performing the ordinary transactions of daily living. Having my home on Noman allows me to avoid those transactions generally. But there are times when I am forced by circumstance to live as others do, and at such times, I am reminded that there exists a sort of natural selection process that applies to one’s chosen place on earth. I live on an island because I have trouble making connections. One reason I became a writer is that a writer’s connections with people are made at long distance. Now I’ve given up even that. I would seek therapy, but I do not want to connect with an analyst.

So I have put off making my travel arrangements to Chautauqua until this, the very last minute, because I am bound to mess up those arrangements, to misunderstand what people have told me to do, or to leave home without my tickets or the papers required for my identification, or to try to check in at
the wrong airline at the wrong airport, or, failing all that, to board the wrong plane headed for the wrong destination.

“I don’t suppose you have a seat on a flight to Buffalo late tonight,” I say to the lady from USAir who finally picks up after two minutes of automated responses.

“Why do you put it that way?”

“Because I really do not want to go to Buffalo. Tonight or any night.”

“So why do it?” She sounds down-to-earth.

“I’ve agreed to make the trip. A deal’s a deal.”

“That’s honorable of you. I’m sure the people of Buffalo will appreciate it. Where are you now?”

“In Quogue.”

“The Hamptons. I’ve never been. It sounds exciting.”

“Excitement plus,” I murmur.

“All those parties!”

“That appeals to you?”

“I don’t know. But just reading about the Hamptons’ social life makes it seem like it goes on nonstop.”

She is correct. A mathematician who visited the Springs section of East Hampton a couple of summers ago, and who evidently had no more pressing use for his years of training, decided to quantify the social activity of the Hamptons. In the hundred-day season covering the usual stretch from the end of May through the first week of September, he counted
roughly 26,000 scheduled social events, for an average of 260 in any twenty-four-hour period. These included bona fide parties (brunch, lunch, dinner, private, club, birthday [surprise and non-surprise], anniversary, theme, and book), fund-raisers (political, medical, ecological, institutional), dances, artists’ shows, walkathons, boat races, softball games, wine tastings, official celebrations (Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day), and other, miscellaneous gatherings ranging from the poorly attended picnic held on July 9 to commemorate the halfway point between the Fourth and Bastille Day (at which guests gather to read the Declaration of Independence aloud in French) to the wildly popular re-creation of
Moby-Dick
(wherein an inflatable white plastic whale with happy eyes is floated in East Hampton’s Three Mile Harbor while participants attempt to harpoon it with broomsticks and holler, “He heaps me!”).

The mathematician, who also happened to be clinically depressed, further calculated that the average Hamptons resident slept for approximately seven and a half hours a night, leaving sixteen and a half hours in which to accomplish everything else. Doing the math, he determined that per individual, some four hours a day were devoted to eating, and other bodily necessities, which left twelve and a half hours for “interpersonal activities.” Eventually, he went a bit overboard and attempted to inventory the kisses of greeting
and departure bestowed on various occasions, breaking them down into one cheek and two, and then the number of times Tuscany was mentioned in a given week, also “gravitas,” “counterintuitive,” and “scenario.” But the amounts proved overwhelming. At the end of that summer, he found a different use for his own free time: he committed seppuku with a seafood shish-kebab skewer, standing next to a seven-thousand-dollar Viking outdoor grill offered for sale on the sidewalk outside the Loaves and Fishes culinary supplies store in Bridgehampton. Friends now gather for an annual cookout in his memory.

Bang bang bang bang bang.

“What’s that noise?” The USAir lady sounds alarmed. I tend to forget that what has become the soundtrack of my life may be shocking to others.

“That noise is the reason I’m escaping.”

“To Buffalo?” She is appropriately incredulous.

“Chautauqua—I’m actually going to Chautauqua.”

She seems to be considering something. “You don’t need to fly to Buffalo to get to Chautauqua. You could fly to Jamestown, New York. There’s a small airport there, and it’s much closer to where you’re headed.”

“A small airport suggests planes that are also small,” I offer, more nervously than logically.

“That’s true—the planes
are
small. But so are the ones to Buffalo.”

“You mean you don’t fly jets to Buffalo?” I distinctly remember that on previous visits, I flew up on big jets that did not crash.

“I don’t like flying,” says Hector, sticking his black nose into the conversation.

“Then it’s fortunate that you’re unable to do it,” I tell him.

“We used to use jets,” says the lady. “But you know how things are.”

“No, I don’t. How are they?”

“Nothing ever changes for the better.” Her voice carries the warm breeze of the British West Indies.

I often find that I prefer speaking with disembodied intelligences to having face-to-face encounters. For many years, before I stopped writing, I worked with a book editor with whom I never conversed except on the phone. She dealt with me by phone and I with her, and we spoke only when necessary. Over those years we developed a close and trusting relationship based solely on the ways our minds corresponded and diverged. If ever we had happened to be standing inches from each other in an elevator in an office building, or on a subway platform, and not spoken, we neither of us would have had the merest clue as to who the other person was, nor
probably would have shown any interest in finding out. And had we been looking at each other when we were discussing my manuscripts, we undoubtedly would have forfeited effectiveness and exactitude for the sake of courtesy or kindness or some other gesture of social compromise. But without visual distractions, we got along swimmingly, and my work was the better for it.

“Yes,” I agree with the USAir lady. “Most change is for the worse. But exactly how much worse are the planes to Buffalo?” Hector shudders and begins to pray aloud.

“The Jamestown flights originate in Pittsburgh,” she says, “so you’d have to go there first. And the planes are very small, only a little larger than puddle-jumpers. Eight passengers plus the pilot.”

“I’m glad the pilot goes along.” She chuckles politely. “And the Buffalo planes?”

“Turboprops.” She quickly adds, “They’re quite safe. The flight time is a bit longer than with a jet, but I’m told that the planes themselves are very comfortable.”

“But perhaps you’re all full up?” A small plane plummets in my head (the engine sputters, the propeller freezes, we sit knees-to-chest as the fuselage scrapes the topmost branches of the cedars). I tried, Chautauquans, but I could not book transportation. I tried for weeks. There must be something big going on in Buffalo. The annual Beef-on-Wek Festival,
the “How Many Inches of Snow Did We Have Last Winter?” conference.

“Do you know that you have a peculiar way of speaking to people?” she asks unnecessarily. Her tone is not accusatory. She sounds more like a nurse. I picture her delicately maneuvering through a hospital ward in World War I, wearing a crisp white cap with a red cross in the center, and stopping to read letters to mutilated, homesick doughboys.

“I’ve always been peculiar. It’s nothing personal. To you, I mean.” The reason I speak to people the way I do is that I tend to take everything I hear literally, and I pay what turns out to be a destructive measure of attention to the spoken word.

“You’re not married.” She is sure of her conclusion. “I hope you won’t mind my asking.”

“You didn’t ask,” I remind her helpfully.

“I don’t mean to be rude.”

“You don’t know what rude is. But why do you surmise that I am not married?”

“I wonder,” says Hector.

She hesitates. “You seem too…independent.” I appreciate the ellipses.

“I used to be married,” I tell her. Then I plunge into that song from
The King and I
: “I had a love of my own like yours, / I had a love of my own!” I nail the latter line and hold the note. There follows a long pause. “Yes,” I go on at last. “I was
married. To prove it, I have a life-size statue of my wife seated at our kitchen table reading the
New York Times
. She is in stone, and so is the
Times
.”

A longer silence this time. “You keep a statue of your wife in your house? Is she dead?”

“Oh, no. Alive and kicking. These days she reads the
Times
with an event planner named Joel in Beverly Hills. I told the sculptor to put Chloe in shorts and a T-shirt, the way she liked to dress, and to position her comfortably and give her a rapt expression. The statue solidifies our relationship. It proves that some things
are
set in stone. Now she has the life she liked best with me, buried in the news.”

“I gather you disapproved of her interest in the news.”

“As she disapproved of my
lack
of interest. It was a fair exchange. I especially disapproved of the
New York Times
. ‘The
New York Times
brings the world into your home every day’—need I say more?”

“Don’t you think the world is worth seeing?” she asks.

“‘Worth seeing, but not worth
going
to see.’” I am quoting Dr. Johnson’s retort when Boswell chided him for not wishing to accompany him on a trip to Scotland. Did the doctor not think Scotland was worth seeing? he’d demanded. I cite the reference for her and explain that Dr. Johnson was always right.

She seems to recognize that it would be prudent to return
to the matter at hand. “We have plenty of seats to Buffalo on the eleven
P.M
. flight. How many do you want?”

“One for myself.” Then, wondering if it will queer the deal, I add, “And one for my dog.” Hector’s ears prick up in alarm.

“I love dogs,” she says.

“Name your price.”

“The dog will have to travel in the baggage compartment. But that’s perfectly safe too.” Amazing what gentlenesses total strangers are capable of. “Do you want me to book your return reservations now?”

I have been afraid of that question. I have tried to put off thinking about what will happen
after
Chautauqua. Once I do what I shall do this evening, what then? A moment’s moral elation; a nighttime escape by rowboat to a safe haven; a hired car to take me to LaGuardia and USAir; the dreaded turboprop to Buffalo, where I shall be met at midnight by a Chautauqua driver who wants to talk to me about all the famous people he has driven since 1931—“really famous, not like you.” No sleep. The certain knowledge that the police are hunting for me, and the certain pleasure that they will never think to look in Chautauqua, either because they have never heard of it or because it is so hard to get to that it lies outside every jurisdiction and has no extradition treaty with the Hamptons. The morning lecture. Followed by a life of hiding and running. Loneliness, despair, memories of chicken-fried steak at Applebee’s in
Riverhead and of clambering atop the White Duck landmark when I was a kid, and bellowing quacks. Disgrace and eventual death in the cheapest room of the cheapest motel outside Bridgeport. Then interment in some potter’s field that is about to be sold to a developer. Of course, I could always live out my days in upstate New York, but I would prefer to be buried horizontally and underground.

So I tell her yes, I will want return tickets for Hector and me. Yes, I will be coming home to face the music. Anyway, I
want
to face the music. Why commit an act of social protest, of civil or uncivil disobedience, if one is not prepared to suffer the consequences? Suffering the consequences is the whole point.

“Don’t you think so?” I ask her. “Don’t you think that if someone does something on principle, pure principle, and that something happens to break the law, he should willingly pay for the act as a public statement of his noble intentions, and as a sign of his respect for the law in general?”

“It depends on how bad the act is.”

“Well, it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as acts get.”

“The question is still too general for me to offer an opinion. I hope you’re not planning to make your public statement on your flight.” She is gravely serious.

“Oh, no,” I tell her. “That would be crazy.”