Outer Banks (29 page)

I collapsed into laughter. He was essence of dog; he was the best dog I ever saw. His gift for mimicry was fey and dead on the money. The old dog thumped her tail in her sleep.

“I know just how she feels,” I said, still laughing. “Safe as a baby, cherished as a lover. You have a wonderful gift for nurturing,
Alan Abrams. You take great care of me. How can I show my appreciation?”

“I don't know,” he said, looking at me with his bright eyes. “Fart for me, maybe?”

“Hug you,” I said, and I did, a hard, long hug. He patted me on the back and pulled gently away.

“Why won't you kiss me?” I teased. Or was I teasing?

“You're not kosher.”

“That's not it. Either I'm just not sexy or you're not interested in women.”

I did not know why I could not leave it alone.

Alan looked at me for a time, and then he grinned widely. He reached over and picked up my hand and put it on the crotch of his blue jeans. A hard mound strained at the fabric. I jerked my hand away as if it had been bitten. Heat flooded my face and neck.

“Does that feel disinterested?” he said.

Things changed for me after that. We still did the things we had done together: worked, cooked, prowled the city, listened to music, ate, drank, laughed, talked. But I did them, then, with the thought of that warm hardness never far under the light-dappled surface between us. I do not know how he felt. He did not touch me again.

I had told Alan early on about my life in Kenmore, and my mother and father, and about Cecie and Fig and Ginger and Paul. After I did, perhaps sensing that I was done with that part of my life, he never alluded to it. As for me, I cut my ties with care and finality. I canceled the subscription to the Randolph monthly alumni newspaper that came automatically with my diploma. I threw away the appeals for money that came from the development office, and, unopened, the three or four notes from Ginger that came from Nag's Head. When a Tri Omega passing through found my number in the directory and phoned me, I put her off and had my number unlisted. I canceled my subscription to the Tri Omega Alumni magazine. I did not read out-of-town newspapers;
indeed, all that long summer, I read few newspapers at all. When my mother phoned in late August and said that she was marrying the deacon in a little ceremony in the Baptist church and would like me to come home for it, I said that I would provided I could bring a friend. My mother said, “Is it that Indian?”

“No,” I said. “It's a Jew named Abrams.”

“You're obviously doing this just to spite me,” my mother said coldly.

“Impossible as it may seem, I never even thought of you,” I said, and hung up. I did not go to her wedding; I sent flowers. I knew that I would not go home again to Kenmore, Alabama.

In November,
Architectural Digest
ran a spread of Paul Sibley's studio addition to the house in Nag's Head. Color photos showed it soaring out heartbreakingly over those old dunes, with the blue sea beyond it, and one of them showed Paul inside it, bending over a drawing, with Ginger, in skirt and sweater and pumps, admiring it from the other side of the board. A fire roared in a great gray stone fireplace, and furniture the colors of the sea and sky and ocean storms sat about in the soaring whiteness. I knew that furniture as well as I did the people in the photograph. I looked up at Alan, who had brought the magazine to show me. We were in his office. Outside, in the twilight, the first snow of the season was falling silently onto Third Avenue.

“Uh huh,” he said, smiling grimly. “I noticed. You even got a byline.”

I looked closely; in tiny type, at the bottom of the page, a line read,
Interiors by K. S. Lee.

“That son of a bitch,” I whispered, tears of fury starting in my eyes. “He took my interiors and built them for her.”

“I rather think he built them for himself,” Alan said mildly. “He'd never have gotten ones as good anywhere else. It's a perfect room, Kate. It doesn't matter who lives in it. Enjoy the byline and forget it. You'll do better ones for a place of your own, some day.”

And to my great surprise, I could and did forget it. Both the photographs of the studio exterior and the one of him with Ginger in the room that was to have been ours. Or at least, I almost forgot. Perhaps they haunted me a bit in those soft, new winter days, but distantly. Like very old ghosts.

Just before Christmas the Friedman house was finished, and the Friedmans gave a little champagne party for the firm and a few friends in it. Outside snow blew like white fog around the dunes, and the surf roared on the beach below, but inside firelight and tree light and candlelight and the clear, vibrant, medieval jewel tones I had chosen lit the big, carved room to radiance. It was a lovely party, with a lot of laughter and music and toasts, and even more champagne. The Friedmans were having one of their good nights, and
Architectural Digest
had indeed been out to photograph just days before, and already four requests had come in from acquaintances and passersby who had seen the house from the beach or from Potato Road, inquiring as to whether the team who had done it was available for consultation.

In the white and gray and sea-green living room, Carl Seaborn raised a champagne glass to Alan and me. We stood in front of the fire simply looking around at the beautiful room we had created, grinning like, as Ginger used to say, ‘possums in the middle of a cow plop. We had both had quite a lot of champagne; I could feel it burning in my cheeks, like flags. Alan's eyes were as bright with it as a squirrel's.

“To the very formidable young team of Abrams and Lee,” Carl said, “who give new meaning to the old expression, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.' Long may you be on our team. Long may you
be
a team, as far as that goes.”

Everybody clapped and shouted, and Alan reached over and kissed me. It was not a friendly kiss, or a brotherly one. I was so surprised that I simply stared at him.

“We will be a team as long as Kate will let us,” he said. “Like
maybe, as long as we both shall live. How about it, Kate Stuart Lee?”

“I'd love to,” I said.

 

When Stephen died, someone gave me a copy of Juliana of Norwich's
Book of Hours,
intending, no doubt, that I should find comfort in the words of that terrible old abbess. It was a long time before I could read that or anything, but when I did, I opened it to the passage that goes, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all shall be exceedingly well.” I threw the book into the fireplace in a cold, trembling rage, and was about to set fire to it when Alan rescued it and read the passage. He cried then, terrible, tearing sobs that went on and on and on, rising sometimes into a kind of wail I had never heard before. It frightened me badly; I had cried, torrents, rivers, seas of hopeless, anguished tears. But he had not, until then.

We talked about it later, after the awful crying had stopped, and he was calm again, limp and somehow clean and light.

“I hated her for saying that,” I said, by way of explaining why I had attempted to burn the book. “ ‘All shall be exceedingly well.' It's horrible. Nothing shall be well. It's the worst thing that ever happened. How can anything be well again?”

“It's not the worst thing that ever happened, Katie,” he said. “It's just the worst thing that ever happened to you. To us. And now, nothing this bad can ever happen to us again. I think that's what she meant. She wasn't stupid; she lived a godawful life. And my dear love, for a very long time all was most exceedingly well with us. And may be again, who knows?”

I was angry with him for days. I did not want optimism. It was a long time before I saw that it was not that; it was the only way Alan could stay alive in those unspeakable days. But from the moment he spoke the words, I knew in my savage heart that he had been right when he said that indeed, for us, all had been, until then, exceedingly well.

From the beginning we were a fortress against the world. A unit. As Kahlil Gibran said, we two were a multitude. Our world was, from the very first, the small one of our work and the people who shared it with us. For neither of our families would.

My mother slammed the telephone down when I called to tell her that Alan and I were being married; I could picture her, in her mercilessly new brick ranch house in Kenmore, saying to the deacon, “It was a wrong number.” I am sure she was afraid that he would leave her if it got about that her daughter was marrying a New York Jew. And Alan's mother wailed and shrieked for weeks; his father came around in the end, and his brother the rabbi, but his mother was inconsolable and unshakable in her conviction that I would bring nothing but ruin to her son. After Stephen was born she allowed herself to be cajoled and lulled, and we saw a good bit of her, but when he died she felt herself vindicated, and closed her door and heart to us for good. Or rather, to me. In her eyes I had kidnapped her son and murdered her grandson. There would be no sufferance for me. Alan saw her rarely and grimly, and so far as I know, her absence from his life was not the profound sorrow it might have been. The two of us together were always enough, sufficient. Sometimes, in the early years of my marriage, it seemed simply miraculous to me that I had found this port, come home to this. I did and do love Alan Abrams with an enduring sweetness and complexity that I did not know myself capable of. And I know that he does me.

I don't know when, in that first year after the civil ceremony in Carl Seaborn's living room in Bridgehampton, I realized that I was in love with my husband. I knew, when I married him, that I loved him, and that he was the best and most constant friend I might hope to have in the world, now that Cecie was lost to me. And I knew that nobody else could ever understand me as he did, or make me laugh as he did, or comfort me and anchor me to the earth as he did. And I knew by then that I adored going to bed with him; that slight, fluid, hard-muscled body sated my emptiness
while it fanned my greed for him like a desert wind. But I was not aware, for a long while, that those things were enough to add up to being “in love,” for “in love” was what I had been with Paul Sibley, and that drowning, consuming, helpless thing was light-years away from the lighthearted, sweet-fitting, lockstep rightness I felt with Alan. And then one night, when he was away on a project and I was alone in the apartment, puttering restlessly and feeling as empty and wrong as a shoe for an amputated foot, it struck me that I was deeply in love with him and very likely to stay that way forever. A tide of elation washed over me, followed by a dark surge of fear. If I had been religious, I would have been on my knees praying, “Dear God, please don't let me lose this.” I think on some level I was, anyway.

When he called later that night, I said, “Do you know that I love you so much that my toes curl up and I can't get my breath?”

And he laughed, and said, “It's about time.”

Early in the second year of our marriage Alan bought two lovely old weathered-silver potato barns and had them moved to the top of the dune line on his lot on Potato Road. All that summer we built decking around them, and a breezeway to connect them, and started work on a crow's nest sleeping loft atop one of them. I began my garden that summer, and though it was another year before we were able to move out to the gray house beside the sea that has been our home for all these years, it became the central reality of our life to us. In those first years we shared it with our friends, bringing food out from Manhattan on weekends on the train or in Alan's battered Toyota, and later cooking our sprawling dinners in the small kitchen we built off one end of the larger barn. I know I speak truthfully when I say that no one who ever sat on our deck amid my rioting flowers and watched the surf on the wild beach below failed to feel the spell of the house and the sea. Even Alan's mother, who spent only one night under our roof in all the years of our marriage because, as she said, the sound of the ocean upset her, said also that she approved of the house.

“You've fixed things up real nice, Kate,” she said. “If you like this kind of thing, that is.”

“Thank you, Golda,” I said, managing not to grin at Alan, who rolled his eyes behind his mother's back and pantomimed stabbing her.

“You're welcome, I'm sure,” she said.

“If your mother likes it, it must be some kind of house,” I said to him that night. “What makes it so special, do you think? There are grander houses all over the Hamptons.”

“It's a happy house,” he said seriously. “It was built by people who love each other and it, and it had a good, productive life on this old ocean before it became a house. Everything about it works hard and has a purpose, and works in harmony like a good team. I think you feel that in houses.”

“Is that what is known as artistic integrity?” I said, grinning.

“Holy shit, I hope not,” Alan said.

That fall Carl opened a branch of the office in Bridgehampton, to handle the burgeoning spate of residential beach work. The Hamptons were starting their great odyssey toward mediocrity and overdevelopment, and the firm was swamped with requests for beach properties. Carl, who loved the wildness of the area, nevertheless saw the potential, and turned the office over to Alan and me.

“If it's going to be done anyway, it ought to be done well,” he said, “and I can see the handwriting on the wall. If I don't put you two out there I'm going to lose you to those potato barns of yours. I will anyway, sooner or later, but maybe this way it will be later.”

And so we moved into the house on Potato Road, and there took up the life that would sustain and nourish us for all of our years, and there conceived our son Stephen, on a night of wild, moaning November wind…I know that, because a Nor'easter blew for most of November, and for a good part of it we were without power…and there, the following summer, Stephen
Daniel Abrams was born. And then we added the big studio wing over the dunes that Alan had planned long ago, and there wasn't anything else in the world I could even conceive of wanting. The three of us, then, were a multitude.