Outer Banks (18 page)

“Listen,” I cried. “Listen! Let me help you! Let me do it. I want
it too, I always have…a house by the ocean, by the dunes, I can just see it, I want that house, I want to live there with you…”

He took my hands in his and held them, and I could see him smiling in distress, and shaking his head, no, no, and trying to calm me, but he could not. I would not be stopped.

“Yes,” I said. “You were going to New York anyway, you know you were, you know you said you'd get me on at McKim…well, do it, Paul, and I'll work for them and you start your own firm and we'll build the house wherever you like…Long Island, or New England, or anywhere, any ocean, anywhere…let me help you and live there with you. I have a little money, it will be enough, we can do it…”

“Katie,” he whispered, “Kate, Kate listen…I can't take your money, I can't let you support me…”

“I don't see why, when it's what I want more than anything in the world,” I said, beginning to weep in earnest. “I don't see what difference it makes who earns it if we're together…”

He did not answer, and he did not look at me. I turned away. The enormity of my words and actions beat dimly at the bell of liquor and exaltation and love and pity that enclosed me. I could literally hear again my father's voice: “That coolness of yours, that dignity and distance…it's one of the best things you've got going, Effie Lee. You use that.” I shut my eyes tight. As I could hear the voice, so could I see myself, a drunk and disheveled college girl, weeping lugubrious tears and begging love and allegiance from a man a universe beyond her in experience and heart.

“Oh, God,” I whispered, putting my hands over my face. “I'm so ashamed of myself.”

“No,” he said. “No, don't be. You're wonderful. You're not like anybody else, you don't have anything to be ashamed of. But Kate, what kind of a man would I be if I let you do that? You'd come to hate me after a while…”

“No,” I whispered. “No. I wouldn't.”

I turned around again on the sofa, so that I was facing him.
I put both arms around his neck and locked my hands there. I took a long, deep breath. My ears rang and my head spun.

“You said I'd have to ask,” I said. “You know, tonight, out on the steps? Well, I'm asking.”

“Kate…”

“Will you make love to me, Paul?”

“Jesus, Katie…”

“Yes or no. If it's no, that's fine. But if it is I'll want you to run me back over to the house.”

“Think about what you're saying, Kate…” he said.

“No. I don't have to. You think about it. Was that just hot air, then? Did you not mean it?”

“I meant it. I did and I do. Christ yes, I meant it,” he said. His voice was low and ragged. “You think I don't want you? I want you so much I take cold showers in the middle of the night…”

“Well, then, for God's sake, do it,” I said, teeth chattering in fear and wanting and inevitability. “Only promise me no fancy French stuff. I just don't think I'm able to do that.”

He laughed and moved over and put his arms around me, and put his mouth to the side of my neck and made a rude noise, like a Bronx cheer.

“Miss Otis regrets she's unable to fuck today,” he said into my neck.

So that whatever I came to think of him after that, I will always remember that when he led me out of my damaged girlhood, through fear and pain and then, incredibly, flowering, secret warmth and finally pleasure so intense I cried aloud with it, across the whistling abyss and beyond it into the company of women, it was to the sound of laughter, his and my own.

 

Much later, around three, he got up to bring coffee and came back spinning my white cotton panties on one finger.

“Pretty tame stuff for a rich girl,” he said. “I figured you for different colors and days of the week, at least.”

I should have told him then, of course. It was the time for it. I knew it, and lay there smiling at him in his dark nakedness, my heart still galloping, my body still sheened with sweat, and did nothing of the kind.

“I was raised to think that anything but plain white cotton is ostentatious,” I said.

“Christ,” he said, tossing the panties aside. “There's absolutely nothing more boring than a rich puritan. I'd rather you didn't wear panties at all.”

“Your wish is my command,” I said, giddy with joy and transformation and the suspected sensuality I had found within myself. Or rather, that he had found, and set free.

I held out my arms to him, and he came into them. After that, of course, it was too late.

I
N
the middle of summer, when we had been together almost six weeks, I gathered my courage and said to Paul, “I want you to meet Cecie now.”

He lifted his head from the model he was working on and looked at me, frowning. I knew that it was not my words that he frowned at, but the interruption. When he worked, Paul was a drowned man; it took him minutes to surface.

“I thought we'd agreed about that,” he said mildly. But his eyes were opaque with patience. He had a temper but it never flared at me; nevertheless, I knew when he was irritated. He looked more like an Indian than ever then, closed and turned completely inward.

“I know. We did,” I said. “But I'd like to change my mind about this one thing, if I can. She's the most important person in my life, next to you. I want you all to know each other.”

He got up from the desk and walked into the little kitchen and came back with two glasses of wine. I took mine and he slumped bonelessly on the daybed beside me and sipped his, looking at me over the rim. I thought again what a flawless, all-of-a-piece kind of beauty he had; rough-hewn and completely masculine. I never tired of simply looking at him.

“Ah, Katie, give me a break,” he said. “I just can't go over to the Tri Omega house and meet the girls. I can't do pledge swaps. I can't sing to you under the balcony and get thrown in the fish pond. I couldn't when I was the right age for it and I can't now. You know that.”

“I'm not asking you to do that,” I said. “I'm just asking you to meet Cecie. She could meet us for coffee. Or we could have her over here. She'd love this place; it would just enchant her. I want her to know that I…have something like you and this in my life. Paul, it's like I have this whole other life, my real one, and nobody knows about it. It makes me feel…unreal.”

“I don't see why you need anybody else to make your life real,” he said. “I'd hoped that by now I was enough.”

I felt unreasoning tears start in my eyes, and blinked rapidly. Being so much in love did that to me: I felt as if some vital, protective emotional connective tissue had simply melted. Everything…tears, laughter, joy, fear…was so close to the surface that summer that it seeped out at the slightest pressure, like an underground spring. It made me feel as if I had no skin, I was absurdly and totally vulnerable.

“You are enough,” I said. “I just don't see why it has to be either or. Either you or Cecie. It's not as if there's only enough of me to go around once.”

“Well, maybe there's only enough of me,” he said. “I've never been able to handle many people at one time.”

I thought of his terrible, blasted childhood, the feckless, faithless dead mother, a grotesque Circe; the smashed uncle, the stinking mangrove swamp, the foster homes. And of the prim, sucking
marriage. My heart twisted. Later then, I thought. Later, after he's used to the fact of us. After he feels safe.

I did not come often to his apartment. The need for darkness and drawn curtains and lowered voices was just too oppressive; it angered him too much. When I did, I sneaked in up the dark stairs as I had the first time, heart pounding, feeling like a paid strumpet. Perhaps, as he said, the love we made on the daybed or the floor on these nights was the wilder and sweeter for that element of stealth, but I never got used to it. I wanted to shout aloud my rapture and completion, to laugh, to yell, as he had said he sometimes did, like a panther or a Seminole. It was such an alien need for me, the compleat fabricated woman, that I longed to indulge it, but he was teaching me control, he said, along with some delicate and dexterous French tricks. Or at least, I assumed they were French. Whatever they were, they made me burn and ache and itch at the very center of my being, my dark and secret core, and nothing would assuage them but more of him and his swift, skilled, driving love. It was, almost completely, a summer of sensation.

But far more often we would meet at Harry's for coffee, or sit in one another's labs while we worked. He never faltered a beat with his work, or his awesome, still, white concentration.

“I want you in my world,” he said once. “But this
is
my world. You need to know that right off the bat. If you're not in it, there won't be anybody else. But this will be it. And the more I can learn, and the better and the quicker, the closer the house by the ocean comes. We have the rest of our lives to be together and play and screw, and we will, in that house. But first, let's get the house built.”

Somewhere in those summer weeks we had tacitly agreed that after my graduation I would go to New York and begin work, and he would follow when he finished, after his fifth year, and would begin his practice and the house by the sea.

“I'll let you work and support us for a little while because
you're half of me, and you were going to, anyway. But I'm not going to take any of your family's money,” he said.

“Well, actually, everything is mother's until, you know, she's gone,” I said, not looking at him. It was not precisely a lie.

“Yeah, and she's going to want to subsidize us; all good little Southern belles' mamas do. Don't trust their sorry men. Hell, she'd probably be right not to. But I'm putting you on notice now. We're not taking a penny of it.”

“Well, all right,” I said with deep-hidden alacrity. This was a fine way out; by the time the truth of my patrimony came to light we would not need it anymore, and the whole thing could dissipate as naturally and unnoticeably as ground fog. As for his going home with me to Kenmore and meeting my mother, I did not plan to allow that to happen. Given the scope of my mother's placid indifference, it would not be hard to circumvent. I thought, if I could arrange that they meet away from the house, she might carry off the FFV business to perfection; she had, after all, been doing it all her adult life. So she would come to Randolph, or we would meet in Montgomery. But we would not go home. The thought of Paul in that squalid, melting house, in the bull-necked presence of the deacon, made my blood run cold.

We did not talk much of the future, and I don't recall that he had actually mentioned marriage, not then, anyway, but it was there, under everything, a solid, shining bridge over the abyss.

Often I would laugh aloud with the sheer joy of it all, of this miraculous love and my liberation into pure flesh, and the fact of a life with him in his white house by the sea. And burn with the wanting of him so that to reach out and touch his arm with one finger would set off a violent, silent, interior explosion. And settle back once more to wait and be silent, even while my raucous heart nearly burst to tell of all this…to tell, to tell.

I could have spoken of him, of course, at least to Cecie. He had not asked me not to. He had said merely, one of the first times we had made love and were lying half-asleep in each other's arms
in his apartment, “The thought of anyone else knowing about this makes me almost physically sick.”

And rapt and humbled with this new love, I had vowed an unspoken vow that it would remain perfect and secret, ours alone. But it was proving a hard vow to keep. I was beginning to realize that it was the sharing of a love, at least a young one, that kept it vivid. Like fire, it needed oxygen. I looked at Cecie sometimes, studying on the bed or at the desk opposite me, and she would lift her red head and smile, and I would almost cry aloud with the pain of my own joy withheld. We were not talking nearly so much in those days. I missed the simple fact of Cecie. I was annoyed with myself that my heart could not seem to stretch to encompass two. And irrationally, I was sometimes annoyed with her.

I realized much later that I had wanted her, in those first days, to storm my barricades and have it out of me, to topple walls, to take my hidden happiness by force. Being Cecie, of course, she did not. Her fastidious delicacy of heart would permit no such thing. She retreated into her unassailable inner world, leaving me with a love affair that was somehow not complete and an aching loneliness for Cecie Hart. I did not thank her for it.

It was no secret at the Tri Omega house that I had a boyfriend. It would have simply been too much to expect that such intelligence would go undetected on a small summer campus. I had always been too bizarrely different, too visible, to escape notice, and Paul was simply too spectacular. People saw us in Harry's or in McCandless Hall, if not at the apartment, and of course they talked, and of course the talk drifted back to the Tri O house. I had been dodging, not very successfully, smiles and talk and teasing and questions all summer. Remarks about Kate's mystery man and the ice queen and the Indian chief flew like gnats at those summer suppers, and there was much hilarity at Ginger's proposal that the sisters form spying parties and track us to our lair. But I was sure they did not know a lair existed, and I would simply smile and pretend the talk did not bother me, and if it did not die, at least
it did not flame into wildfire. I knew that the others pumped Cecie, but I knew also that she would not tell them what little she knew. At that point, his name and the fact of his Seminole blood were the only things she did.

Paul and I looked up from my desk by the window in McCandless one July afternoon to see Fig and Ginger waving elaborately from the sidewalk and pantomiming the drinking of coffee, and I knew then that the game was up as far as secrecy went, and sighed.

“Who in God's name is that, Brünhilde and Loki?” Paul said irritably. He was fond of Wagner, and played
The Ring
frequently on the hi fi. He was teaching me as much about opera as about love, although I was enjoying it considerably less.

“It's my suitemates,” I said. “Ginger Fowler and Fig Newton. Fig is the little one; she has a kind of history of spying on me. Lord, I'd like to kill them. They'll break their necks getting back to the house to tell all about you. I better go have some coffee with them at Harry's and see if I can short-circuit this. I gather you don't want to join us?”

“God, no,” he said, mock-shuddering. “I thought the Tri Os were into cheerleaders and majorettes.”

“They're nice girls,” I said, defensive, suddenly, even of the goggling Fig. “They're good friends. You can't blame them for being curious. I'm the only one in the whole house who doesn't bring her boyfriend around, or talk about him.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, bending his head back over his board. “You go on. I'll meet then another time. This is due tomorrow.”

He was alone with the wood and glass and stone structure growing under his hand before I left the room. I looked back at the window as I reached the sidewalk where they stood, staring, and saw what they saw, and smiled in spite of my annoyance. He was utterly beautiful in his dark aloneness and his oblivion, and he was mine. Now I could share at least the fact of him, and that fact was enough to make Fig's mouth hang open and her breath honk
adenoidally through her nose, and Ginger's blue eyes round with appetite and awe.

“Holy cow, Kate, no wonder you hide him,” she said, grinning. “You ought to put a chastity belt on him.”

“Heathcliff,” Fig breathed. “Effie, he's Heathcliff. He is! I always thought of you as Catherine; I put it in the diary when I first met you, but this is just too perfect! Oh, wait till I…”

“Shut up, Fig,” Ginger and I shouted together, and she clapped her hand over her mouth and pantomimed guilt, and we crossed the street and went into Harry's. When we came out again, Paul was gone from the window of my lab.

After that the talk at supper took on fresh life, and one by one the Tri Omegas began to appear on the sidewalk outside McCandless on this urgent errand or that, and Paul took refuge in his own third-floor lab.

“I feel like some kind of rare specimen of swamp bird being stalked by the Audubons,” he grumbled. “Can't you call them off?”

“Nope,” I said. “They're only doing it because you won't meet them. Let it go and they'll stop; you know how it is summer quarter. Everybody gets silly. I do wish you'd at least let me bring Cecie up, or come and meet her, though. She's my best friend, Paul. I miss her.”

“Then spend more time with her,” he said. “I'm going to be over my head with the hospital thing for another couple of weeks. I'm not going to be able to be with you much. McGee said today they might build the winning design. That would mean a little money for Operation White House.”

“Well, would you maybe meet her after it's in?” I persisted. “Just have coffee with us at Harry's? She's the only one of them who isn't going to come parading past your window. And she means more to me than any of the rest of them put together.”

He smiled.

“Tell you what,” he said. “After the competition's over I'll
cook dinner for her. For the dwarf and the valkyrie, too, if that's what you want.”

“Oh, it is,” I said, hugging him. “Oh, it is. And you'll see, you're going to like them. Well, Cecie and Ginger, anyway. Fig is…Fig is our collective punishment for being sorority snobs in the first place. The fact of Fig Newton will keep you humble, I'm here to tell you.”

That night I stayed in my room at the Tri O house for the first time in weeks and settled in for one of mine and Cecie's marathon talks. I brought cokes and Baby Ruths from the machine in the basement, and put a stack of June Christy and Jeri Southern on the Webcor, and took a shower and got into my nylon shorties. Cecie was at the library, and I was alone in the room for the first time since the end of the previous quarter. I looked around it; for a moment it might have been the room of strangers. In the few weeks that I had been with Paul it had lost the spoor of me, of Kate Lee, and in the hot twilight it seemed to have lost more, too: lost the rich particularity and the little resonances that made it mine and Cecie's and no other room on earth. Cecie's plants looked leggy and frail and some had browning tips and yellowing leaves, and my books, that had always lain scattered on my side of the desk, had been neatly stacked in the corner beside my dresser. Cecie's alone littered the top of the desk and her bed now, and on my bare side of the desk a coffee cup that I recognized as Molly Sloan's, from down the hall, rested, half-full of scummed liquid. My Dorothy Parker anthology lay on the desk beside the cup. I wondered if Cecie and Molly had been reading it together, and felt something akin to panic flutter briefly in my stomach. I looked at the page that was marked with a pencil; it was Cecie's favorite,
Testament.
I picked the book up, and read: