Outer Banks (26 page)

The letter said that he was marrying Ginger Fowler the day after her spring graduation, at the house on the Outer Banks. They would be moving there; her father was giving them the house for a wedding present, and he had already designed the studio addition. It would begin rising on the dunes in April. He was desperately, terribly, miserably sorry. There was no excuse for any of this. He was a complete rat and he knew it. He had loved me, truly. But he loved Ginger, too, and she him, and quite frankly he needed the kind of money she had, and she knew that, and was willing to take him on those terms, and he thought they could have a good life. I was not to blame her. It had all been his idea. I must forget him forthwith. He knew, with my gifts and a promising career with a great design house, that I would do wonderfully well. Better by far than I might have with him. At least he had been able to give me my start.

“I would have hurt you sooner or later,” he said. “It seems to be what I do best. At least it won't be when there's no turning back for either of us.”

He signed it, simply, Paul.

 

Sometime in the middle of the night, when I was struggling to keep on breathing through the white-hot anguish, when I was thinking in terms of living just one more hour, and then just one more minute, “…surely I can do that, surely I can get through one more hour, one more minute, and then it will be day…” I thought of Cecie. The thought was like cool water, like night, like sleep. I rose and stumbled to the telephone and lifted the receiver to dial, and then I remembered that she was not there; that she had gone home. I could, I knew, get the number of the old house on the Tidewater cove from Information, but I did not. Cecie had not even come to my graduation. She had not even said goodbye. And she had not liked Paul; had almost, at times, seemed to fear him. I knew that I would get sympathy and succor from Cecie; I knew that as certainly as I knew she still lived on the earth. But I knew, too, that under it there would be relief. I did not call.

Sometime later even than that, my eye fell on the dog-eared little chartreuse and rust copy of the Viking Portable Dorothy Parker that I had brought from Randolph. “I'll read it every night before I go to bed, Cece. Like the Bible. And you do, too, and we can laugh together.” I picked it up and it opened itself to a page near the beginning of “Enough Rope.” There was a red-violet blot on the page; raspberry turnovers, I remembered, one night in the winter, saved from supper. I read:

I took the book to the window and cranked the dingy casement open and flung it out into the night. There was the faintest thinning of the dark in the east, toward the hidden river, and a fresh, small wind smelling of earth and new green, somewhere far out on Long Island, came teasing by, and was gone. I waited until I heard the book land in the alley four flights below.

And then I sat down to wait for morning.

A
LAN
woke me at seven, as the pink was beginning to go out of the flat sheen at the tide line, and I got out of bed and showered and put on clean slacks and a shirt, and pulled my wild hair up into its French knot. How long had I been wearing it like that? So long that my fingers could and did gather up the heavy mass and form the knot of their own volition. I had not paid a great deal of attention to my appearance in a long time. It seemed somehow to be thumbing my nose at fate to do so.

I was as stiff and sluggish as if I had slept off a hangover, and then I remembered that indeed I had. I grimaced. The few times I have ever waked after drinking too much, it has taken me days to make peace with myself. Control is still too important.

Alan was sitting at the umbrella table on the deck drinking coffee. The cool sea-light picked out the gray threads in his beard and hair, and threw the lines at the corners of his dark eyes into
sharp relief. At first he did not see me, and sat slumped on his spine, legs stretched out before him, head resting on his chest as if he were sleeping. But I knew he was not. Tension was clear in the muscles of his neck and shoulders and arms, although people who did not know him well probably would not have seen it. But I knew. I knew that worry about me lay like sinew just below his skin. Remorse at the sorry little scene in the bedroom, and at my blurted words about the Pacmen's return, flamed through me and I ran across the deck and put my arms around him from behind and kissed the top of his head. His hair was thick and springy, slightly wiry, under my mouth.

“I hate what I did to you this afternoon,” I said. “It doesn't do for me to drink, and it doesn't do to go back into all that. I should have known better even than to open that damned letter. Forgive me and feed me, in that order.”

“I will, both,” he said without turning around to me. “Forgive you now, and feed you forthwith. But I want to talk to you first. Sit down for a minute.”

“Uh-oh,” I said, going around the table and sitting opposite him. “This sounds like a capital T talk.”

“I guess it is,” he said. “I hope it won't be, but I guess it is, at that. Kate…”

And he fell silent and looked at me. My stomach plummeted as in a runaway elevator, and sweat broke out at my hairline. I knew the look. It was a look that said that something greatly different from the way I was accustomed to things happening was about to be asked. Perhaps even commanded. Alan could, sometimes, command; he did it rarely, but enough of the blood of those iron Minsk patriarchs still ran in his veins so that he did it easily when he thought he had no other recourse. I thought that we were at one of those places now. I damned myself silently; I had gotten us here myself.

“Tell me,” I said. “Nothing could be as bad as The Look.”

“I called Ginger Sibley while you were asleep and told her
you were coming,” he said, calmly and reasonably. But the pulse in his throat said that he was not calm.

“No,” I said, just as calmly. My own galloping heart showed me the lie of it.

“I'm going down to Bucks County at the end of the month on the Conroy project,” he said. “I called them, too. It's set now and I can't back out of it. And I can't leave you alone the way you are. You're not fooling me; I know you've got it in your head the stuff's back. I'll lay off taking you to McCracken now, but in return you're going to have to go to Nag's Head while I'm gone. You just can't ask me to give up my work on top of everything else.”

I was very angry with him; this was not fair. He had promised to put off the Bucks County project until the fall, after my last checkup, and now he had gone back on his word. And he had come very close to betraying me by calling Ginger when he knew that I did not want to go. It was blackmail, and his closed, stubborn face told me that he knew it.

“You know what I think of both those things, I suppose,” I said coldly.

“I do, and you're right to think it, and I'm sorry I had to do them. But I'm not going to apologize to you. I have a life to lead, too. It can't stop because you've put yours on hold.”

“Alan, I don't mind being by myself,” I began. “I like it, I'll be perfectly happy here while you…”

He rose.

“Then I'm calling McCracken and putting you into the hospital in the morning and getting the tests done now,” he said.

“No, don't,” I cried softly, and he sat back down. He stared levelly at me. I knew that I could do or say nothing to change his mind. Under his easy sweetness, Alan is as stubborn a man as walks upon the earth. And he seldom doubts the rightness of his decisions, though he comes to them very slowly and carefully.

“What are you doing to me?” I whispered.

“Trying to save your life,” he said. “Trying to give it back to
you. Trying to save…us. I don't think the lovely thing that we are can stand another month of this death in life. We may stay together but the thing that we are won't be here anymore. I can't stand that, Katie. I'd rather leave you. I'd rather you left me. If you don't care about yourself, can't you care enough about me just to go down to Nag's Head and see your oldest friends for a week? Is that so hard? Don't you care about me, Kate?”

I began to cry again, drearily, tiredly, dully. It seemed in that moment that there were more tears in my body than blood or bone or tissue. Just tears and the Pacmen.

“More than anything,” I said. “I just don't know if it's enough.”

“Well, decide,” he said. “And let me know.”

He turned and went into the house, and in a minute or so I heard the sound of the Volvo's engine start up, and heard it wind out onto Potato Road and finally vanish down it toward Bridgehampton. I sat on the deck as the dark fell down around me and thought, very clearly, just exactly what would my life be like if Alan were not in it, and never had been?

And the answer was, nothing at all.

 

I met him at almost the exact instant that Ginger Fowler was marrying Paul Sibley beside the sea at Nag's Head, and we went out and got drunk together, and were seldom apart after that. Years later a friend of ours got a contract to do a book called
Meeting Cute,
and wanted to use ours in it.

“It's got everything,” she said. “Sex, romance, revenge, urban interest, and a happy ending.”

But I would not allow it. There was nothing cute about that time in my life; when I met Alan I had not yet decided if I would live, and though I did not see it until much later, he was one of the factors that tipped the scales toward life. When he touched his gin and tonic to mine that night and said, “L'chaim,” he spoke a greater truth than he could possibly have known. I was far too superstitious
to let that meeting be put into a book for the momentary titillation of stockbrokers on the 9:20 from Larchmont.

The unique legacy of the suicide to his children is possibility. Death as an option. Even while the thought of it appalls and angers and devastates, suicide remains one of the things the suicide's child may consider with impunity as an answer, because it has been done successfully by his parent. It is not that he wants to die by his own hand; it is simply that it can never be something of which he can say, “I would never do that.” His creator has done it; ergo, so might he. As a possibility it has probably saved as many lives as the actuality has taken. It is only when it is acted upon that it kills. I know that many of the nights after the letter came from Paul I was able, finally, to sleep enough to sustain life because the thought would come stealing into my mind, cool and whole, “I can always die. If it gets too bad, I can always do that.”

And knowing it, could go on for one more day.

It is how I got through those first cold spring days: one hour at a time. One twilight at a time. One evening. One midnight. I went to work at dawn and stayed late; I walked home slowly and turned on my second-hand television the instant I entered the apartment. I could not watch dramas, and it was nearly a year before I could listen to my records, but the idiot noise of game shows and comedy half-hours got me through many nights, and books of a certain type got me through the others. I don't remember crying much; I was terribly afraid that if I began the tears would sweep me swiftly into the abyss. I don't remember very much of what I actually did in those early months; that period of time to me now seems like time spent in a long illness, an illness with fever. I have some impressions, and a general sense of desperate and primitive pain that did not end, but over it all there is a kind of still nothingness. Alan calls it my First Ice Age.

I do remember that about the second month, in April, I devised a way to get through the pain. Or rather, I resurrected it. I simply sat down and thought, “How would a woman who was
not about to die of pain live in New York?” and I acted like that. It was how I had gotten through long stretches of childhood and adolescence, and it served me remarkably well again, for a time. I don't know why I did not think of it sooner.

A young woman in New York with a job like mine would be happy and energetic and committed, so I smiled and made friends and worked prodigiously and volunteered for more. I went to lunch with this young man or woman or that; I read the
Times
Arts & Leisure section conscientiously every Sunday, so that I would be able to join in the repartee about books and movies and plays. No one asked me on formal dates; it was widely known that I was the property of the paragon who was coming from France, like Lancelot, to be the King's favorite, and that was respected. But I know that I was liked for myself—or for the self I presented—and I was grateful for the easy conversation that wrapped me from morning till night. Often I could not put a name to the face from which it was issuing. But I was still grateful. When the sound stopped, ah, that was when danger lurked. That was when the abyss howled.

“How's Paul?” Carl Seaborn would say frequently, stopping by my board.

“He's fine,” I would say, smiling brilliantly.

“Haven't heard from him in ages.”

“He's awfully busy. He's got some kind of monster project going.”

“And boy, would you be surprised at what it was,” I did not say. Maniac laughter leaped inside me. I bit my lips. Destruction by sheer craziness was never far from me in those days.

Despite the success of my Kate-Career-Girl role, I began having panic attacks in early May. I would be walking home up Third Avenue in the sweet, green spring twilight and suddenly terror of such magnitude that my heart nearly stopped and my legs buckled and sagged and I was drenched in an instant with sweat would sweep over me. I would clutch a lightpost or a store
window and presently it would ebb, and I would creep home and shower and turn on the TV and lie watching it, limp as a dishcloth. But it would come again in a day or two, or a week, perhaps at work, and once in the middle of the night. It was indescribable, awful, close to unbearable, but I bore it. I told myself that the attacks were fear of being totally alone, and of losing my job when Carl Seaborn found out about Paul; but somehow, on a deeper level, I knew them for what they were, though we would not have a name for them for many years. Abyss-walker that I was, I knew that they were the price I paid for success in my daytime persona. I had learned that truth early: suppress pain, abandon reality, and you will pay the price in another anguish. Never think that you won't. I handled this monstrous fear the same way I had every other pain: I acted my way through it like Bernhardt.

I went that spring to see the movie of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
I went right after work, with a girl from my office; I do not remember her name. I am willing to bet, though, that she will never forget mine. Minutes into that ineffably tender, heartbreaking, and evocative little movie I began to cry, and by the time Atticus Finch walked out of the courtroom and the Negroes in the balcony stood silently to salute his passing, I was crying so hard that I had to excuse myself and leave. I mopped my face in the washroom and tried twice to go back into the theater, but it was no good. Gregory Peck's good face on the screen drove me back like the Cross of Jesus would a vampire. Finally I simply went home, without telling my friend I was going, and sat on my sofa and cried for all truths fought for and lost, and all fathers gone, and all strength and goodness never experienced at all. When at last I stopped, I called the girl from work and apologized. She was polite and cool; I did not blame her. I would, I thought, take her to lunch the next day by way of atonement.

Then I called Cecie Hart. This time I did not call the Tri O house but the old house in the Tidewater; I did not dare risk hearing Ginger's voice, or even Fig's. I did not know why I was
calling; it had more to do with the movie than with Paul, I thought, but I was simply not clear on that. I knew only that I wanted Cecie.

A very frail, old voice, crazed like an eggshell, answered and said that Cecie was in Boston, and might she take a message?

“This is her friend Kate Lee, from Randolph,” I said. “Her roommate. When will she be back?”

“Lee?” the old voice quavered. “Does Cecelia have your number, Miss Lee? What Lee is that? Are you one of our Lees? We have a great many, you know…”

I gave her the number, shouting; I realized that she was quite deaf, and that it was probably useless to try to gain any information about Cecie from her. But Boston? Why Boston, in the middle of a school term?

“Will she be in Boston long?” I tried again.

“Just a little social visit; we have people there, you know,” the old lady said. I gave up.

“Please have her call me,” I shouted.

“Oh, I will,” she said.

But Cecie never did. And I did not call back.

Much later I wrote; she did not answer.

I sat down then and thought about the fear, and the aloneness, and the truth. I saw that I always had been alone, as alone as I felt now that, without Paul's metaphorical and lethal presence behind me, I was in New York. I had just not known that I was. It was all perception; always had been. The truth of the thing changed nothing but the way I felt, but it was enough. The next morning I went into Carl Seaborn's office and told him about Paul and me, and that he would not be coming to work for McKim, Mead and White.