Outer Banks (27 page)

“I know that you might want to think twice now about keeping me on,” I said. “And I wanted you to know I would understand if you did.”

He looked at me for a long moment, and then he smiled.

“Did you think that I was going to fire you, Kate?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I know that he was the reason you took me. A favor to him. And I know how valuable he was to you. Would have been…”

“What I know mainly is how valuable you are to us,” he said. “You have talent and grace and wit and sweetness, and you work harder than any young person I have ever seen. No, I do not want to think twice about having hired you. I am, however, going to move you over into the design department, as a junior associate. I should have done it long before now. We'll do it as soon as I can find the right project for you. Let me look and see what's coming in and I'll be in touch. And Kate…I'm sorry about Paul.”

“Thank you,” I said. This time I did not cry until I had reached the women's room on the executive floor. When I had finished, and repaired my makeup, I went back over into the drafting department, to make peace with my friend from the movie. I thought then that perhaps I would, after all, live. I just did not know yet how.

One of the odd things about intense loss and pain is that it comes close to blinding you physically. For more than three months I did not see faces. I made friends, or acquaintances, rather; went out with them, lunched with them, laughed and talked with them, spent an evening or two with this girl or that. But I found that two minutes after leaving them I could not have described their faces. Paul's was as vivid and close to me as if he stood two feet away; Paul, whom I would never see again, lived with me permanently, burned into my retinas. But the people with whom I was attempting to make a new life eluded me altogether. It did not worry me, particularly, but it was odd, and gave everything I did in those days an air of even greater impermanence and unreality. I was, I thought, as ready as I would ever be to resume some sort of life, but there simply did not seem any imperative to do so. I paddled in circles in the pain, like a duck, but at least by then I had come to the surface of it.

On the Saturday after Randolph's graduation I went to my
office at eight
A.M.
and stayed there until after eight that evening. I knew that if I did not, I would spend the day in a hell of images: Ginger getting out of her bed for the last time as a single girl, breakfasting with her parents at the big table by the sea; Paul walking alone along the tide line, or perhaps driving far down the National Seashore by himself, trying to avoid seeing his bride until the wedding; the bustle of caterers' trucks and bridesmaids and chairs being aligned on the deck over the dunes; armfuls of white wild flowers and beach grasses being set about in baskets; the little liquid skirl of the string quartet spilling out into the fresh salt air. And the guests arriving, and Paul coming out into the sunset with his best man…who?…from the great house, and finally Ginger, her plain face aflame with love and happiness and the last of the sun, walking to meet him above that eternal old sea….

I worked as steadily as an engine, and as mindlessly, all that day, but the images came anyway. And always, in my mind, it was I who walked to meet him. At eight o'clock, when the twilight that washed Third Avenue was bathing Paul and Ginger in its benediction a scant three hundred miles to the South, I put my pen down and cradled my head in my arms on my board and began to cry. I had meant only to rest a moment, but the tears flooded up and out as though an inexhaustible underground spring had been tapped. I let them come. I was simply too tired to battle them. I had been alone in the great, dim room since mid-afternoon; there was no one to hear me. It did not occur to me to be afraid there, as it might have normally. Bodily harm had been far from my thoughts for months. I had some idea, as I cried, that these tears would be the last; that when the moment of his marriage passed so would some of the pain. I cried and cried and waited for relief, but found only more pain below the first, and more tears.

When a dry voice with the rasp of Brooklyn in it said, “Booze is the answer, but what is the question?” I flung my head up and saw, for the first time since March, clear and whole, a human face. It was sharp and clever and somehow simian, with bright, opaque
dark eyes and a long, humorous upper lip and sharply slanted cheekbones. He was smiling through a clipped, short beard, and his teeth were small and white, like a clever carnivore's. He was small and slender and well-muscled, and wore a close-fitting black tee shirt and black jeans and tennis shoes. His face was the peculiar pale olive of the Eastern urban male: very slightly greenish, probably impervious to suntan and sunburn alike. His hair was black and curled closely. I remember thinking two things, sharply and instantly: he could only be Jewish, and his hair under my fingers would feel rough and springy, like the coat of a well-tended terrier.

The third thing I thought, even before he spoke again, or I did, was that I was alone with him on the floor and perhaps in the building and I did not know who he was. He did not look like anyone who would work for McKim, Mead and White. It was not that they did not have Jewish employees, but that all their employees wore the carefully careless khakis and Oxford-cloth shirts of the Ivy League, and all looked as if they would go to Brooklyn only to catch a plane at LaGuardia or a train for the Hamptons. This man wore sinister black like a foreigner, and talked like a mobster from Flatbush, and moved like a cat burglar. Sudden fear made me angry.

“If you aren't out of here in one second flat I'm calling the police,” I said, reaching for the telephone on the windowsill beside my board.

“For what, felonious possession of a T-square?” he said, and grinned again. “Take it easy, lady. I've only come to carry you off to Long Island. I can just as well make it another day…”

I stared at him stupidly, aware that my eyes were swollen nearly shut, and my nose ran.

“Aren't you Kate Lee?” he said.

“Yes…”

“I'm Alan Abrams. I work for McKim; I'm an architect. I'm doing the beach house you're starting the interiors for next week; I was in the office and saw that you'd signed in, and took a chance
that you might be free to run out to Sagaponack with me and look at the site tomorrow. I could have you back in town by four. But this is obviously a bad time for you…”

“Am I doing a beach house?” I said numbly.

“Carl told me yesterday he was assigning this one to you. Has he not gotten to you yet?”

“No,” I said. “He hasn't. I didn't…maybe he's changed his mind. I've never done a design project before, except at school…”

“He hasn't changed his mind,” Alan Abrams said. “He told me he'd seen interiors you did for a beach house that knocked him out. He said he thought you'd work well with me and for me to see if you'd like to drive out to the site before we did any actual work. He'll probably tell you himself Monday. I was going to call you tonight, but then I saw your name on the board downstairs…”

“A beach house…” I said again.

“Yeah,” he said dryly. “Like a house at the edge of the ocean. Lots of people around here have them. See, there's this ocean…shit, I'm sorry. I come across as sarcastic when I don't mean to. Something's upset you; I'll let you alone till Monday, why don't I? We can have some coffee or something and talk then.”

He turned to go, padding silently out in the sneakers. He walked like a dancer. I looked after him. At the door he turned and came back.

“Look, I can't leave you up here in the dark crying,” he said. “Go wash your face and I'll buy you a drink and some dinner. Like I said, booze is the answer. I won't even ask the question.”

“You don't have to buy me dinner,” I said in a small voice.

“I don't
have
to do much of anything,” he said. “I
want
to buy you dinner. I'm going to be spending a lot of time with you. I want to see what you look like when you're not crying. You will stop crying, won't you?”

“Yes…”

“And you would eat some dinner if somebody put it down in front of you, wouldn't you?”

I realized I had not eaten since a slice of cold toast at breakfast.

“Yes,” I said. I managed a small smile. It made my lips tremble, but no more tears overflowed my bottom lashes.

“Come on, then,” Alan Abrams said. “P. J. Clarke's for drinks and a hamburger, and then we'll go down to the Village Vanguard and listen to Gerry Mulligan. You like jazz?”

“I love jazz,” I said. “But I don't look like going anywhere.”

“Are you kidding? You look great. A little wet, is all. Like Ondine. Just the thing for a beach house.”

When I came out of the ladies' room he was sitting at my board, doodling on tracing paper. He looked up and smiled at me. It was a singularly sweet smile. You could not help but smile back at him.

“Better and better,” he said. “Like Grace Kelly playing Ondine. My goose is cooked. I'll probably propose to you by the time we eat dessert. I never could resist cool blond shiksas. It's the bane of my mother's existence.”

“She wouldn't approve of me, I gather,” I said, following him out into the warm twilight. The lights were just coming on along Third Avenue; it struck me suddenly as very beautiful.
L'heure bleue,
the French call it. The term might have been invented for New York. It had been a long time since I had noticed it.

“Are you kidding? She'd hire an assassin to dispatch you,” he said, holding up a finger for a cab. One cut out of the river of lights and came sliding over to the curb. “She's already hired a match-maker to fix me up with a nice Orthodox girl. Spent a fortune, she has.”

“So has she found you somebody?”

“Nah,” he said. “The last one had a mustache.”

At P. J. Clarke's we sat on stools at the little bar and ordered
gin and tonics. When they came, he lifted his glass and touched it to the rim of mine.

“L'chaim,” he said.

“L'chaim, indeed,” I said, and took a long swallow. The drink was wonderful, clean and icy. I drank it down and ate my lime, making him wince. He ordered us another, and again I drank deeply, and sighed and put it down on the counter and leaned back on my stool. The edge of the pain was blunted and the wires that had bound my chest for all those months eased a bit.

“You're right,” I said. “Booze is the answer. I wish I'd thought of it sooner.”

“Then do I get to ask what the question is?” he said.

“Not yet. But one more of these and you can ask me anything.”

My head was spinning and my ears rang slightly, but I was not dizzy. I felt more focused and clear than I had in many days; as if a miasma of some sort, a fog, had lifted from around me. The clarity felt delicious.

“Actually,” he said, looking at me obliquely, “I know what the question is. Or at least, I think I know what the matter is. I don't want to start things off between us under false pretenses. Carl told me about your chickenshit boyfriend, the man with the golden arm, as it were.”

“He had no right to do that,” I said, the gin-induced well-being vanishing. “That was a very private thing.”

“He had every right, even a responsibility, to tell his architects that Mies Junior wasn't coming on board after all,” Alan said mildly. “We've all been living under that sword of Damocles for two years now. A cheer went up you could have heard in Newark. Most of us met him when he came up for his interview with Carl. Captain Tightass, we called him.”

“You didn't have a chance to get to know him,” I said in a low voice. And then I stopped. Why was I defending Paul Sibley?

“Chance enough to tell that he'd have screwed Carl and the
firm and taken off with as many clients as he could, as soon as he could,” he said. “I have an infallible radar for assholes. I know I'm right, too. Carl told me what he was doing instead. Marrying your rich buddy, I mean. He didn't tell anybody else, but he thought I needed to know it, since we were going to be working together. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell anybody else. For one thing, they'd be all over your bones the minute it got out. This gives me a leg up, you should pardon the expression.”

“Well, we don't have to talk about it anymore, then, do we?” I said. Far down, I could feel the tears gathering once more.

“Nope,” he said. Then he looked more closely into my face.

“The wedding was sometime this weekend, wasn't it?” he said.

“Just about an hour ago,” I said, trying for an ironic smile. I didn't do too badly. “About the time you were saying booze was the answer, he was saying I do. That's all, now. I'm not going to talk about it anymore. It's done.”

He was silent for a while, sipping his drink, and then he reached down and took my hand and held it lightly in his, in my lap. His hand was small and hard and warm.

“Tough,” he said. “Tough.”

We drank a great deal that night. I don't remember how many we had. P. J. Clarke's gradually filled with the kind of crowd a summer Saturday night brought out in those gentle years: well and casually dressed, handsome, young, laughing, laughing. I remember that mostly, from that warm, long night: the succession of clean white drinks and the laughter. I laughed as I had not since I laughed in the nights with Cecie, and I laughed at the same kinds of things. Alan had a sharp, clever, and self-deprecating tongue; sheer kindness saved it from malice, and sheer intelligence gave it wit and focus. He had read the same writers Cecie and I read, and liked much the same music and art and drama and architecture and furniture, and most important of all, disliked the same things. We talked of them all that night, and laughed at most of them. I knew
by the time my hamburger came that I was very drunk, but it was not the kind of slurring, stumbling drunkenness that shames and incapacitates. Everything sharpened, glowed, was enhanced. I did not see how he could have escaped being drunk, too; he had had even more than I, but he did not seem so. His hand under my arm, as we got into a cab to go down to the village to the Vanguard, was light and steady, and his step was still lithe and quick and sure.