Outer Banks (28 page)

“Are you a dancer?” I said to him, getting out in front of the Vanguard, watching him climb out behind me. “You walk like a dancer. You have a dancer's nice, tight little behind. Whoops. You didn't hear that. I don't say things like that.”

“I'm a boxer,” he grinned. “Welterweight at NYU. Golden Gloves welterweight in the Army, in France.”

“Ah, France,” I said. “Very popular with architects, France is. Must be something in the wine.”

“That's right,” he said. “That's where Carl first got Captain Tightass, isn't it? Well, never mind, he couldn't have gotten his fingerprints on all of it. Enough left for us common folk to enjoy.”

Soon after we sat down in the smoke-blued dark of the big, subterranean room, and Mulligan swung into his first skittering, dissonant set, I began to black out, and from that point on, remember only chiaroscuric flashes and snatches of sight and sound. I remember standing on my feet clapping and yelling, with everybody else in the room, as the trio, with Mulligan on baritone sax, romped coolly and fluently through his classic “Walking Shoes.” I remember a bit later, standing on the sidewalk outside the Vanguard, holding hands with Alan and singing, loudly, “On the Street Where You Live.” Even later we were in a car, humming along a dark, deserted, seemingly endless highway, the light from the dashboard radio glowing green and throwing his slightly Oriental face into Mongol relief, and I was quoting Dorothy Parker to him. I have the impression that he quoted a lot of it with me; at any rate, he told me later that I must have parroted, fairly accurately, almost everything she ever wrote.

“I'd like to meet this Cecie of yours, that you keep talking about,” he said at the time. “From what you said about her, I fully expect holy miracle rays to shoot out of her ears.”

But I did not remember, that night, speaking of Cecie at all. There was a long, dark space in which I remembered nothing more at all, and then a very clear and somehow delicate memory of waking up on an empty beach at dawn, the sand cold under my legs and feet, the sea silver-pink and perfectly flat and still. I lay on my side, curled up fetally on a beach towel, and a man's tweed jacket was spread over me. The first thing I saw was the flat silver sea, and then a flock of small, stilted seabirds skimming the creaming shallows, and then, beside me, Alan Abrams, sitting with his arms around his knees, looking straight out to sea. I heard the soft, sibilant husshhhh of the tiny surf, and the rattle, in it, of shells and pebbles, and the cry of gulls, and far away, on the horizon, the muffled chug of a fishing boat heading out. I heard Alan's soft, even breathing. I felt the wet cool of dawn sea air and tasted salt on my parched lips and felt the pounding in my sinuses that signals, as soon as sensation hits fully, the hammer of hangover. I struggled to sit up, tangled in tweed. I did not know where I was, on what beach. But I never for a moment did not know who Alan was.

He turned to me and smiled. Incredibly, he looked as fresh and clear-eyed as when I had first seen him, the night before.

“But soft, what light from yonder window breaks?” he said. “It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.”

“Where are we?” I said. “What time is it?”

“We're on the beach at Sagaponack,” he said. “It's five fifty
A.M.
Before you say another word, let me assure you that the whole thing has been as excruciatingly proper as dancing school. You insisted on coming out to see the sun rise and looking at our site, and you went to sleep the minute we hit the beach, and that's where we've been ever since. Except to cover you with my coat, I have not laid a finger on you. I have, however, had three hours'
worth of improper and unclean thoughts, watching you sleep.”

“If I don't get a cup of coffee and some aspirin, and go to the bathroom, I'm going to die,” I said. “And I think, in a minute, when I remember everything, I'm going to wish I would die. I sang, didn't I?”

“You did,” he said. “Well and loudly. Thousands cheered.”

“Oh, God,” I said.

We found an all-night diner on the Sunrise Highway outside Bridgehampton and I washed my face and scrubbed my teeth and we got paper cups of coffee and carried them in the car back to the beach. I remembered the town from Christmas at the Seaborns', but it had been closed and silent with snow then. Now it was green and fresh and vibrant with full summer, and the flat black and green potato fields and gray barns and small, still ponds and straight little roads that led toward the beach charmed me, reminding me as they did of the country outside Nag's Head. When we came out to Sagaponack and turned onto Potato Road, and I saw the high, ragged, grass-crowned line of the dunes against the pale sky, my heart contracted painfully. So like the Outer Banks, it was, so like….

We parked the car beside the road and walked through the shifting sand and the thickets of sea oats, beach grass, primrose, sea spurge and beach pea to the top of the dune line. I drew in my breath. Below the high dunes beach grass and sea oats ran thick and wild down the steep slopes to the tawny sand, and beyond it the flat beach disappeared into a sheet of vivid pink fire. The sun, at that precise moment, broke over the sea, and set the earth aflame with dawn. I closed my eyes against it, and felt tears start behind the lids. In its wild aloneness and its great and timeless peace, it was Nag's Head all over again. Its beauty pierced me like an arrow.

Beside me, Alan said, “Do you know that poem of Eliot's? ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.' Prufrock, I think it is. This reminds me of that.”

I turned and looked at him. Who was this man?

“I know it,” I said. “I hate it.”

We were silent for a bit, sipping our coffee, and then I said, “Why did you bring me out here? Really?”

“Because I wanted to see how you felt about the ocean,” he said seriously. “This beach house is very important to me. Any house by the ocean is. I love the sea better than just about anything on earth, and I don't think I could work on a seaside project with someone who didn't.”

“And what do you think about me?” I said.

“I think you do, too,” he said. “You can't fake much of anything when you first wake up with a hangover. I saw your eyes light up.”

We walked down the beach a way, the cool water lapping at our ankles. The sand was like that of the Outer Banks, too; almost too soft to walk in, so that you had to walk at the tide line. He pointed to a tall white silolike shape in the distance.

“Our site is next to that abomination,” he said. “Of all the unspoiled coast along here, the Friedmans had to buy right next to the Maginot Line there. Maybe they felt it was appropriate; they fight all the time. He gets mad and flies the private plane home to Sneden's Landing, or she gets mad and calls the pilot to come get her and fly her home. At this rate we'll never get the house done, but at least they're pretty good about letting me do what I want to. They'll probably let you have free rein, too. We ought to break ground this week.”

We walked on in silence, comfortably, companionably. I thought only once of Paul and Ginger, waking up in a tumbled white bed that faced that other beach, on this same sea, and shoved it far down inside me. As well to begin now to bury them.

“Want to buy me some breakfast?” I said.

“In a minute. I want to show you something first,” he said.

Down the beach the shoreline curved back into a small bay, and as we reached the curve and came around it, I saw that the
tallest dunes of all crowned the beach here, soaring to a height that dwarfed the others around them. Sea oats waved gently against the deepening blue of the morning sky to the east, and behind them a thicket of wax myrtle, bayberry, yaupon, cottonbush, catbrier and beach plum stood dense and green and untouched. It was a beautiful spot, wild and secret and somehow entirely magical. White lines of surf crisscrossed diagonally in the little bay; apparently the tides here were unwilling captives, fighting the enclosure. I thought that in high winds the entire ocean would funnel into this little half-moon, white and furious and glorious.

“How perfectly beautiful,” I said. “How…enchanted.”

“It's mine,” he said, smiling. “I saw it this spring when I first came out to look at the Friedman site, and I mortgaged my soul and bought it the same week. I have two acres. I'm going to put a house here, right along the dune line, with a studio wing that crowns that tallest dune and looks straight out to Madagascar. It will take me about a million years, but I'm going to do it. It's already designed.”

I turned away abruptly, and started back down the beach. Water flew under my feet. My heart was triphammering. Whoever or whatever this man was, I wanted no more of this uncanny duplication. Paul Sibley redux would have no place in my life. I would go to Carl Seaborn; I would ask off the project…

He caught up with me and turned me around.

“What's the matter?” he said. “What is it?”

“Paul Sibley wanted the same thing,” I said tightly. “You know, Captain Tightass. He's building it now, in fact, on the dunes at Nag's Head. Those interiors Mr. Seaborn told you about, that I did…they were for that house. You knew that, didn't you? Didn't you know that?”

He stared at me, shaking his head silently, no, no, and then he began to laugh.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Why is it us Jews always get there one step behind the goddamned Golden Goyim?”

I stood still in the climbing sun for a long moment, and then I began to laugh, too. I laughed until I could not stand any longer; I laughed until my sides hurt and I clutched them and sank down onto the sand.

“He ain't your typical Golden Goy,” I choked. “He's half Seminole Indian!”

Alan Abrams gave a great hoot of joyous laughter and sank down on the sand beside me, and we laughed and laughed in the new morning, until we were finally able to climb to our feet and make our way back across the dunes to the car. When we rolled out of Bridgehampton toward Manhattan, we were still laughing.

“Okay, Kate Lee,” he said, when he let me out at my building. “It's time to go to work.”

I
T
is how my life came back to me that summer, work and laughter. From the first day the Friedman house went so well that I forgot any qualms I had had about being at McKim on sufferance. Ideas and intuitions, colors and textures and details and solutions came bubbling up as they were needed, so effortlessly that I began to get superstitious about it.

“It can't possibly be this good always,” I said over and over to Alan as we worked. We worked side by side in his office; he had asked that my board be moved there for the duration of the beach house project, and Carl Seaborn had agreed.

“You're right. It almost never is,” he said. “This project makes me nervous, it's going so well. The Friedmans haven't even had a fight since we broke ground. You and I haven't had a fight. Well, not a major one. Carl hasn't yelled. We haven't had a rain delay.
The subs are actually fully developed life forms. Let's don't even talk about how well it's going until it's over.”

And so we didn't. And the beach house on the dunes at Sagaponack continued to grow under his hands and mine, and I don't think I will ever love another design project as much as that, my first.

I can see now that much of the joy and success of the Friedman house came from the nature of Alan's talent, and how he felt about it. He was enormously talented, perhaps not so much as Paul Sibley, and in a very different way, but greatly gifted, anyhow. It was not a dark, consuming, flaming thing, like Paul's; Alan was always more of the earth than the air. He was easy, methodical, patient, often even plodding in his attention to detail…but he lived his projects in a kind of sunlight of pure delight. Sometimes, when something he had done pleased him, he would whoop his pleasure and glee, and people would come running out of surrounding offices to see what he had done. Alan's designs were a kind of communal thing; like the man himself, they enfolded you, wrapped you in safety and warmth, connected you unalterably to the earth. To live in a house of Alan Abrams's would be to feel always the pulse of the earth and the breath of the sea and the cool shelter of the sky, to rest like a ship on the currents of the very air around you. To live in one of Paul's would be to live with a laboring heart and shuddering breath; to live outside one's very skin, stretched to the outer edge of being. You could not rest in a Sibley house; but you could always rest in one of Alan's, and with Alan himself. It was just where I should have been that summer.

We worked from early morning often until late at night. We talked, argued, fought, laughed, yelled, laughed some more. We ate lunch at our desks or at the coffee shop around the corner, and we spent at least one or two days each week at the site, sweating and peeling with sunburn, hair wet beneath our hard hats, driving the crew nearly mad and driving the Friedmans, whose habit it had
been to hang around the construction and second-guess the crew, back to Manhattan for the duration. Alan accomplished this by simply telling them one day in July that if they didn't lay off he would see to it their house never saw the pages of
Architectural Digest.
The Friedmans flew home in their little airplane from McArthur Field that very afternoon, together for once. I upbraided him for it.

“That's blackmail,” I said. “How can you possibly affect what goes into the
Digest
one way or another? You're not much more senior than I am.”

“It's already in, if we can get it done by December,” he said. “Carl told me last week. Most of his houses are. The Friedmans know that. It's one reason they came to us. We're probably saving their marriage.”

As the house grew, we began to forget which of us had done what to it; it was simply, to us and to the firm, Kate and Alan's house. Carl held us up in a design meeting once as a perfect example of the cooperation between architect and interior designer. We took a great deal of teasing after that, but it was true, and the firm began to pair us on other projects. If I had made the choice myself, I could not have picked a swifter, higher-arcing star than Alan Abrams to whom to hitch my wagon.

I suppose it was inevitable that we would carry the relationship over into the other parts of our lives. I for one had few other parts, and so I was perfectly content to let his presence shape all of life for me. It never occurred to me that he had a life independent of me that summer. He must have; he had family I did not know, and friends, but he seemed to have put them on hold. For those months, that season, we might have been Siamese twins. With the emphasis on twins. Never once in all that time did Alan do more than take my hand, and casually at that. Never once did I do more than throw my arms around him in a transport of discovery and delight.

For that was the summer that he truly gave me New York.
That was the summer that I really did, with him, all the things I had been saving to do with Paul. Because I was coming out of pain and all things seem new then, and because Alan's presence beside me gave everything we did the patina of laughter as well as the rich warmth of safety and surety, New York bloomed for me that summer as it never will again. Sometime during those months I put away, in my heart, everything to do with the treacherous South and all I knew of its softmouthed, dreaming, murderous men. I knew that I would not go home again, and I did not. Not until many, many years later.

I can scarcely remember what we actually did: I remember a blur of work and music and food and drink and endless walking, and late nights in odd, smoky places, or exotic-smelling bright ones. We ended up in these spots, usually, to eat and drink coffee and listen to music; after that first night we drank very little. We did not need to.

He showed me all the things he said I needed to see…the Statue of Liberty, the top of the Empire State Building, the Public Library, Carnegie Hall, Central Park, the Zoo, the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn, the Aquarium, the Metropolitan and the Modern and the astounding new Guggenheim; we saw plays and art movies and exhibits and circuses and once or twice the Yankees, at Yankee Stadium up in the Bronx. Alan was an avid sports fan. He took me to boxing matches at the Garden, and the races at Belmont, and to tennis matches at Forest Hills, and once, when we were out at Bridgehampton, we rented a Flying Dutchman and went sailing. He was good, quick, and deft.

“Where did you learn to sail? Not NYU,” I said, when we came in at sunset that day.

“No. In France, actually,” he said. “Where did you? You're not bad yourself.”

“On Cape Cod,” I said. “And I've hated it since the first day I set foot in a Beetle Cat.”

He laughed. “Me, too. Makes me sick and upsets my precious
equilibrium for days. I only brought you because you look like you ought to sail, like Grace Kelly in that movie. You know, where she sings.”

“Well, then, let's don't do it again,” I said gratefully. “Life's too short.”

And we didn't. There was enough of New York to fill many more summers than that one. We went up to the Cloisters and spent an entire Sunday; my passion for medieval herb gardens was born that day. We spent many weekend afternoons at the Museum of Natural History, and at the Metropolitan. We saw Shakespeare in the Park, and heard the symphony there; we prowled through Chinatown and hit every ethnic street festival we could find; we ate at least one meal from every cuisine the city offered, or tried to. In all that time, in all those places we went, at all those hours, among all those peoples, I never remember being afraid. New York was a different city then. And I was with Alan.

He undertook to teach me to cook that summer. He had a small apartment in a stained brownstone on East 18th Street, near Gramercy Park, and we produced, from its scurrilous little kitchenette, a succession of sloppy, highly seasoned, wonderful suppers in the late evenings after we'd finished at our boards. Alan's cooking was, like his apartment, the antithesis of Paul's; profound disorder prevailed, and nothing cost much. But both had the complex, slapdash charm of the man himself. Books tumbled and sprawled everywhere, like the bright pushcart vegetables he brought home, and photographs and posters of designs he particularly admired lined the walls and lay scattered on tables and the floor. There was little glass and steel and concrete; Alan loved wood and stone, and the evidence of that love was everywhere. In the center of the living room, on an improvised stand, stood a scale model of the Friedman house. There was little room for anything else. We ate sitting on cushions on the floor; the sofa was given over to teetering piles of drawings and blueprints.

“Where do you sleep?” I said.

“Under there.” He gestured at the piled sofa. I giggled.

“Well, I guess there's no doubt you're celibate,” I said. “There's not an inch to ravish a maiden in in here.”

“It's hard, but not impossible,” he said. “There's always standing up in the shower, or then there's…”

“Okay, okay,” I said hastily. For some reason I was blushing fiercely. I thought of that small, beautiful body, glistening with water, entwined with a woman's in the fragrant steam…

“What are we making tonight?” I said.

“Sauerbraten, with gingersnaps,” he said.

“Why don't you eat at home more often?” I asked curiously. Alan's father had a kosher delicatessen with his uncle on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, and his mother cooked for it often. She was, he said, a truly wonderful cook.

“Are you kidding? I'd weigh five hundred pounds. My mother force-feeds you her chopped liver like you would a Strassburg goose. Grabs you by the neck and rams it right down you. And then she's usually got Daddy and Uncle Daniel and Aunt Rose and my older brother Eli, the good one, old Eli the rabbi in Astoria, you know…”

“Alan, do you not get on with your family too well?” I asked. “You haven't been home more than twice this summer that I know of. Is it me? Do they dislike it that you're working so closely with a…a goy?”

“They're not crazy about it, but it isn't that,” he said slowly. “It's that they can be so censorious of someone that they haven't even met. It's that whole Jewish thing, that dark old weight of it…all the thou-shalt-nots, and the taboos, and the refusal to let any new light in at all…the old ways, always the old ways…”

“Doesn't any of that matter to you?”

“I'm not sure about that yet, Kate,” he said soberly. “The religious part of it doesn't, much. Maybe it will later. I have this funny feeling that the other part…the cultural, the heritage thing
…will come to mean a lot to me. But it's going to have to come in my own time, and fit into my life. You know, there's room in a good life for chopped liver and gray shingle architecture, too. And for loyalty to a family that might include an outsider, children with blue eyes and names like Sally and Michael, a wife with blonde hair and a nose like a Gainsborough painting. There's just too much world to be satisfied with a tiny snip of it.”

“I'd hate to think I'm causing any kind of wedge between you and your family,” I said.

“Nah,” he said. “The wedge got driven in by my first blonde shiksa, when I was about seventeen. The rest is just a matter of degree.”

“Well,” I said, somehow stung. “Just so it's not me.”

“No,” he said. “Mostly it's me.”

I did not meet any of his friends per se that summer, but I met several people who, one way or another, had ties to Alan Abrams. I met the old man next door, who came at night to get the plate of supper Alan cooked for him when he was at home. The old man was very shy, and did not speak to me; he took his plate and nodded his thanks and scuttled out. When we left the apartment to go back to mine, the clean plate would be set neatly at Alan's door, with a paper napkin over it, and a peppermint on the napkin.

“His daughter is supposed to bring his meals, but she doesn't do his supper,” Alan said briefly. “I found him going through the garbage cans once. What's one plate of sauerbraten, when I've made a whole batch?”

I met the black mailman who came by one evening full of smiles, with a sealed envelope and a photograph of a skinny, beaming young black man in satin trunks, posing with gloved fists upraised.

“I helped his boy get a Golden Gloves scholarship to NYU,” Alan said. “Which didn't take a whole lot of doing, since the kid
is the best natural boxer I ever saw. And I lent him a little to get him started. He's paying me back on time.”

I met the rheumy-eyed, half-crazed old woman from upstairs who brought her sad, malodorous old poodle, who looked amazingly like her mistress, down to Alan's apartment to be walked on weekends, and once to be kept for a week while the old woman visited her house-proud daughter on Long Island.

“Won't let me bring Suzette,” the woman whined to me, trailing Marlboro ashes down the front of her negligee and onto Alan's floor. “Says she smells up the place. I tell her Suzette smells as good as her house does, all that fish she cooks, but she still won't have her. But this angel boy, this sweetie pie, he takes good care of my precious. Precious loves him, don't you, Precious?”

Precious sighed and lay down in the corner beside the sofa to wait for her dinner. When the old woman had gone, Alan opened a can of roast beef and she bolted it down so quickly that her scrofulous stomach bulged. She was instantly and deeply asleep. A profound and pervasive odor emanated from her corner.

“Now she'll fart for seven days, on top of everything else,” Alan sighed. “But I don't think she gets a square meal until she comes to me. When I walk her on weekends we go by the White Castle and both have burgers.”

“You're a terrible softy,” I said fondly. “You let people impose on you awfully.”

“Nah,” he said. “I like this old bitch. The furry one, that is. And she likes me. You should see her when I come in after a day at the office. You'd think I'd been gone for a month. ‘Oh, God, you came back, you came back, oh God, I'm the happiest dog in the borough. Oh, God, let me fart for you!' ”