The Edge of the Gulf (7 page)

Chapter 11

Charlie brought the drinks out onto the upper gallery, following Hudson’s gaze toward the sunset, southwest over the Gulf.

“It’s yours in a way, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. He handed Hudson his drink. “That’s how
I’ve
always felt.”

“I guess you’re right. I never articulated it that way but, yes, you’re absolutely right. Just like people have their own river or lake or pond. This is
our
ocean.”

“Well, for you Memphis folks, it really is. The Mississippi River feeds it, connects you to it.” He gestured over the railing of the gallery. “Your blood’s out there.”

Hudson smiled. They had been having parts of this conversation for many years. He had always known that one reason Charlie took a shine to him was that he’d recognized Hudson’s passion for the Gulf. “Well, you grew up on the Ohio, which leads
into
the Mississippi.”

“Not the same. We seemed a little more removed in Louisville. When I was a boy we vacationed in Virginia, where both my parents had family, usually the mountains. Once or twice the beach, such as it is, Virginia Beach. Didn’t know what real sand was till I got down here in the Navy. The Gulf and I adopted each other.”

“Forty years?”

“Forty. My God.” He squinted into the sunset, sipping his drink. Standing straight, with his white hair whipping in the wind and his other hand on the railing, he looked like a captain at sea. Or the benevolent lord of a great estate, which, it occurred to Hudson, he no doubt was. He looked like a man who had been in this place not four decades, but always, a man in whom place and soul have become inseparable.

“I remember,” said Hudson, “when I was a kid, waking up in the middle of winters in Memphis, from dreams about Fort Walton and Destin—that’s where my family used to come—and being completely wrecked that I wasn’t really here, but
there
, with my third or fourth grade class to walk to in a cold rain. The dreams were so vivid, so real. I couldn’t believe the cruel joke. It was devastating.”

“Poor little guy.”

“For a lot of years I think I fairly well lived for those two or three weeks in summer. I was always the navigator, in charge of the map, for the family car trip. I had everyone scouring the shoulders of the highway for the first trace of sand like prospectors for gold. We always had a contest as to who first smelled the ocean. When we hit the coast, before we got to wherever we were staying that year, my sister and I made my poor father pull over and let us out. We ran up the dunes and just stood for a minute or two. I guess that first sight of the Gulf was the purest joy I knew.”

Hudson had been looking out to sea, but turned now to Charlie. “I wondered what it would be like now. If I’d feel either the excitement or that in some way I was coming home. The summer’s something of a test flight. I’ve been on automatic pilot for quite awhile.”

“And?”

“Nothing, here, there, or anywhere, is the same.” He paused. But it’s…good…. It’s good.”

“God, I hope so. Maybe not pure joy, oh no. But something that’s always been here for you, something real.” He grasped Hudson’s arm. “Something.”

Hudson nodded. They took in the magnificent view for another minute or so, framed by the tall old trees, the broad beach at Laurel white in the distance against a tangerine sky and the water going cobalt. “Let’s go in,” Hudson said. “Probably not for an old salt like you, but it’s still pretty warm for a hot-natured, air-conditioning addicted city slicker like myself.”

“Did you notice how I whisked you up here through the sunroom? I’ll show you why, now. I have a surprise I’m pretty happy about and want to share with you in the living room.”

***

“It’s a Walter Anderson. I’ve had it about a year now and I’ve never had a picture mean so much to me. It’s Western Lake at sunrise.”

Charlie sat in his favorite chair in the long, handsome room, facing the large oil over the mantel. “I can sit here for hours, perfectly content, usually reading or doing a crossword puzzle, but sometimes just listening to music and looking at it. Great company.”

Hudson could understand. The landscape, some five feet wide and four feet tall, was at once imposing and retiring; it drew you into its rich color treatment of the lagoon that lay just to the east beyond the side porch of Charlie’s house.

“It’s
so
fine.”

“Apparently it was one of the last things he did and someone got hold of it and had it in their home in D.C. for years, and then a dealer in Palm Beach got it who’d been over this way once or twice and knew what the inscription on the back meant. She called and made me an offer—an arm and a leg—but, of course, I had to have it. It was meant to be in this house. Right up there.”

“I’d say so. Charlie, it really is magnificent. So, now that you’re divesting yourself of your real estate, is this what you’ll be doing?”

“No, no. I had to have this. But no, I don’t plan to get any more serious about collecting. Don’t need any more. This is the crowning jewel.” Charlie modestly overlooked the fact that here and there, on walls throughout the house, along with a lot of excellent watercolors, oils, graphics and photos by local artists, hung small works and sketches by the likes of Homer, Roualt, Dufy, O’Keeffe, Gorey, Stuart Davis, and Marsden Hartley.

They had gone from room to room, sipping the Brompton house special Hudson had requested, some dark variant of mai tai, visiting the old pictures like friends, inspecting the new paint job upstairs, a few new pieces of furniture here and there, an old pine table that Charlie had just refinished, looking into the many bedrooms, sitting for awhile in the sunroom that opened onto the east porch and the lagoon beyond as Charlie brought out some photos from a recent party or two that had included a few people of Hudson’s acquaintance.

At a little after eight, they stood again in the elegantly understated living room, its old mahogany and walnut pieces interspersed with bentwood cane chairs, the broad plank floors dark and lustrous, enlivened by gorgeous kilims. Charlie said: “Shall we freshen these here or have a second one there.”

“There. You know,” Hudson mused, looking at Charlie’s new painting from yards away at the other end of the room, “it’s odd, but its presence is so strong, it just seems so inevitably
there,
that I can’t even remember what you had there before.”

“That portrait of Andrew.”

Charlie took the glasses to the small bar just inside the door of the library. “I always liked it there. That’s all. Even my more vocal friends who have questioned the taste or sanity of my keeping it there know I’m not a torch carrier. It just worked there, and it was a good painting. We passed by it in the hall upstairs.”

“Oh, of course.” Andrew had been the great love of Charlie’s life. Hudson had met him only once or twice before his final exit. There had apparently been three during the course of the relationship’s sixteen-year span.

“But twelve years is long enough. And now I have this, this
miracle
painting.” He laughed, but Hudson thought perhaps he had detected, in the laugh and somewhere deep in the lively blue eyes, a shadow of uncertainty.

He wondered why Charlie might feel vulnerable.

To the past, to Andrew? He thought not.

But if not that, what?

Chapter 12

“Nothing has changed.” Chaz luxuriated in the large chair by the hearth, looking at Sydney, who had nestled into one end of the sofa with her legs tucked up.

“He didn’t say a word about his will, the land, anything. Zip. It was all very
en famille
, long walks on the beach, long talks about my father. Long talks about you. He can’t wait for us to come down. But last night over dinner at 26-A, he did say that he had ‘begun to reach some decisions about his life’ that would ‘affect’ me, and that he’d let me know more about it soon.”

“So we have absolutely no reason to think he knows anything about your father’s unmailed letter, and, therefore, no reason to think that he thinks you suspect anything.”

“None. Why would he? He knows we were never
that
close. It was my father he loved and I’m sure he heard for a lot of years what a source of anguish I was to him. Charlie may have felt sorry for me from time to time, but we were never tight. It wouldn’t occur to him that I
expected
anything much from his will, especially since he’s certain that my father never even let me in on the fact that he was Charlie’s heir…”

Sydney interrupted smoothly, “…or thought you might possibly be interested in or capable of responsibly disposing of sixty to a hundred million dollars in prime real estate. With advocates like dear old dad, who needs enemies?”

Chaz looked away, out into the garden, his large, bright eyes haunted for a moment, even glum. His dramatic pale complexion, framed by dark, loose ringlets, looked to Sydney more than ever like the face of a beautiful, slightly dissolute lost boy.

“It’s amazing what people can do in what they mistakenly assume are someone’s ‘best interests,’” she said. “My mother and that hideous stepfather, for instance. She thought she was doing it for me. That it was in my best interest.” She paused. “I’ve told you how that worked out. And then of course there is my ace former fiancé.” She paused again and then went on, quietly. “You know I had really begun to like your father. We seemed to be getting along so well. It never occurred to me that beneath that elegant exterior and the impeccable manners was a fearful, rather selfish old man, who had not a shred of faith in you. No real feeling for you, no knowledge even of who you really are and what you can really do. Well, my darling, we are looking out for our own best interests now.”

“Charlie says he’s proud of me.”

“So did your father. And look what they’ve done, the two of them, to you. Is he proud enough of you to reconsider?”

“Well, there
is
some ambivalence there. I think dad’s death has left him feeling older, more vulnerable. I got the feeling he really wants us to be closer. But, no…. He may feel warmly disposed to me now, but I don’t think that’s made him stupid. He knows there are precious few folks around who would hold that land in reserve or only allow a couple of tasteful houses to be built there. He may believe I’ve cleaned up my act and he may be growing sentimental, but he doesn’t mistake me for his more-like-a-brother-than-a-cousin, my sainted father.

“But I do know that we’ve at least bought some time. His attorney is on some exchange program with a firm in London and he hasn’t told him anything about his intentions. He says he needs to ‘get completely settled in his mind’ about the changes and isn’t going to rush into handling it by phone, fax, and mail. He said that by the time the guy gets back in August, he’ll be certain about ‘all the pieces’ and will sit down with him then. I have the definite impression, though, that he plans to tell us about the house before then.”

“A wedding gift,” mused Sydney. “So as a public relations venture, an insurance policy, your junket was a success? You left Charlie even more convinced of your respectability and stable course in life.”

“Right. The house is in the bag, maybe some cash.”

Sydney smiled. “That’s sweet. Of course, he might live another twenty years. What about the restaurant and the bar? They’re worth another—what?—three or four million? If he’s getting close to really retiring, couldn’t we have a chance at convincing him that his own flesh and blood might want to take them on?”

“He knows that’s not my thing and that although I think the coast is fine, I don’t love it like he does.”

“Who
does
?”

“The staff he’s gotten into place at 26-A over the past few years. I met them all at the restaurant. They’re confirmed year-rounders, they’re hospitality people just like he is, and they’re hands-on. That’s the
real
flesh and blood as far as he’s concerned. Except one guy, named Main. He’s manager at the Blue Bar but apparently wasn’t asked into the buyers’ group with the others.”

Sydney rose from the sofa, stretched, and headed toward the kitchen. “We need to think about all this. But right now we’re going to sit down to the lovely pesto tortellini I picked up at Ciarazzi’s and a good bottle of wine. You’re tired. But I want to revive you enough for us to have wild and imaginative sex. I’ve missed you.”

***

Just before drifting into sleep, two hours later, she nuzzled into his neck, saying, “We need to get on down there, and for more than just a few days.”

Chaz shifted under the crook of her arm and cupped his hand under her breast. “Okay.”

Sydney did not so much sink into slumber that night as she was buoyed into it, aloft, as on a gentle but insistent wave. She reached for sleep as if with open arms, desiring rest so that she would be at her best for whatever lay ahead now. Beneath her she felt an unaccustomed swell of security in the shape of an annual trust and a house with a market value of more than a half-million.

But a siren song beckoned to her, drawing her out, out to a wider shining horizon, beyond the shallows of cranking out corporate training videos half the week and keeping the shop accounts for Chaz the other, beyond the endless schmoozing with pretentious clients, be they Atlanta’s clamorous legions of nouveau riche or its disdainfully paranoid old guard, out beyond caring whether she could, indeed, beat the system at its own game.

Instead of the tiny hotel where they had once stayed in Venice, she saw Chaz in a gracefully cavernous palazzo, padding toward her in pale peach pajama bottoms across pools of summer moonlight. She saw not the frowsy flat in Notting Hill that an acquaintance had condescended to let them have for a few days, but a large house with a garden in a mews in Kensington. She saw the two of them, refining an A-list guest list by the fire as an autumn sunset emblazed their library overlooking Central Park.

She saw freedom and travel and laughter and great sex and people who came and went as you chose and who were not small and provincial and prosaic and lacking in the sorts of mystery that made life interesting.

And even with her eyes closed, she could see Chaz, lying close beside her. She saw that, until someone altered a piece of paper a few weeks from now, he was the heir to a fortune that would once and for all allow her to create the only role, in a life of performance, that she had never really played as fully as she would have liked.

The one role created not as a means of escape, created to satisfy no one’s purposes but her own, no one’s criteria but her own.

Herself.

It was the only one now that intrigued and challenged her. She saw this not as a dream, but as a fact, a truth that she could ensure would unfold. She slept soundly, gathering in the darkness her certainty of purpose, her focus and strength for the weeks ahead.