The Pacific and Other Stories (17 page)

Shocked by his own carelessness and ashamed of the contribution he had made to his lasting defeat, he wanted only to live modestly and unnoticed. No longer in the newspapers as were his former partners, no longer a source of capital or ideas, he would remain as if motionless in his very lovely garden, in the midst of freshly watered hydrangea, geranium, spruce, and peach. Just over the protective dunes, which did not protect his regret, the
Atlantic, supremely cold and navy blue, broke into white foam and salt spray that carried on the wind and sparkled in the sun.

I
N
1912, they had built Vandevere’s limestone Georgian to fairly modest proportions that now appeared almost glorious but nonetheless were everywhere perfectly understated. The way almost a hundred years had weathered the stone and slate said that this house had not been built by an IPO, but its newly revised detailing made it clear that an IPO could not be totally excluded.

Though you could not see them, the things you could not see were flawless. The plumbing supply lines, for example, were made of an alloy used in United States naval ships to coat areas subject to the greatest corrosion. When water ran to sinks and tubs, you could not hear it coursing within the walls even with a stethoscope, and when it drained it cascaded inaudibly down stainless-steel pipes with sides two inches thick, themselves encased within walls as heavy with plaster as the White Cliffs of Dover.

The water was hot the instant it flooded from its English nickel fittings into the light of tiny high-intensity lamps set in the marbled bathroom ceilings and walls so as to make every bath sparkle like the Aegean. Because Vandevere took his vitamins with mineral water, he placed in the travertine wall next to his sink a refrigerator specially constructed by the Sub-Zero Company to mimic a feature Vandevere had observed at the bar of a hotel in Prague. Two dozen little bottles of Badoit were chilled silently and without condensation, ready to roll into his hand one at a time.

As the bathrooms were as big as kitchens, the kitchen too was overwrought. It had not only every excellent, unnecessary, heavy-duty commercial system, but also mechanisms designed to augment each one. The cooktops and ovens had digital thermometers that read out in a continuously moving display as if they were stock prices. Things like mixers and blenders rose slowly from nowhere on silent, smooth-running elevators. Because Vandevere did not want dust to accumulate in gray drifts beneath or behind his refrigerators and Agas, at the touch of a button they all moved at once toward the middle of the vast kitchen, like circus elephants on Pentothal, to reveal
white ceramic runs that could be polished with a mop and chamois before the appliances were commanded back to their stalls.

The pantry, or what his chef called the
garde-manger
, was alphabetized. Under
G
, for instance, you could find Greek malted milk balls (made with goat’s milk) in a glass canister with the date of purchase in calligraphy beneath the identification entry. You could also find, among other things (such as grape leaves and ginger), guacamole, gaufrettes, galichons, gooseberries, and gayettes. The shelves were of woven stainless steel, the baseboards limestone, the floor marble, the moldings from a renowned workshop in Flanders. In temperature- and humidity-controlled air, with its own window (most of the closets, too, had their own windows), the
garde-manger
could and did hold enough food to feed Vandevere, his staff, and guests, for three years. A special room, always dark and cool, was for the storage of olive oil in two-hundred-gallon glass-lined tip-flasks with nondrip ceramic stopcocks. Although Vandevere did not drink wine, his wine cellar held ten thousand bottles carefully arranged by region, château, and vintage.

The distribution of electricity, the heating of water, and the generation of auxiliary power from a two-hundred-thousand-watt, propane-fed generator that could run independently for a year, were accomplished underground, a hundred feet from the house, in a clean, well-lighted, Teutonic bunker. Even in a winter storm when the power was out and all the neighboring estates were dark, Vandevere’s house glowed with light, heat, and good order.

The interiors were so beautiful that people who saw them for the first time were stunned into silence. In some places the colors were rich and in others perfectly austere, but each room was proportioned as if by magic to make its occupants feel both fully awake and wonderfully at ease. He had had paintings from the very beginning, and now he had more. Even the lesser ones from his earlier days were cleaned and restored, and all were perfectly lit, framed, alarmed, and insured—Gainsboroughs, Monets, a big Caravaggio, and others. The formal garden that led eastward from the pool was a reproduction of the garden visible in a corner of the Caravaggio. And the fence surrounding the property—with the exception of its sensors and surveillance aids—was a reconstruction of the iron fence described in Ser Brunetto’s dream of the monastery in which he imagined that God had imprisoned
him forever and without explanation. Along the inside of the perimeter ran a wide gravel walk with stone curbs behind which were dense evergreens.

H
E HAD HAD THE OLD POOL FILLED IN
. It was neither big enough nor deep enough and was in the wrong place, having been set between house and ocean by a dentist, the previous owner, whom Vandevere called, although Vandevere was not a dentist, “the previous dentist.” This man had become wealthy, in the seventies sense, by inventing a kind of implant. No pool should be made to compete with the ocean and have as its backdrop ramparts of white sand ground from rock over a span of a billion years by the fierce blue water that covers two-thirds of the earth. So Vandevere built a new one, eastward of the house, in a place where in July and August the shadow of the chimneys began to move across the pool decking, as on a sundial, from six to seven in the evening. He made the new pool 105.6 feet long, so that fifty laps were a mile, which is the distance he swam every day. The water shone blue in a foil of white marble set in classical Italian gardens, and, in honor of Melissa, the water was, at one end of the pool, forty feet deep.

In May of 1967, Vandevere, a Harvard sophomore whose academic career was soon to be interrupted by the draft and a year on the DMZ, had gone with some friends to swim in the abandoned granite quarry at Quincy. Neither courageous nor foolish enough to jump from the highest rock platform, which the locals called
Rooftop
, and take the eighty-foot plunge into a lake of aquamarine water hundreds of feet deep, he had leapt instead from fifty feet, and was floating about after the shock of collision with the water, when he saw against the sun a blaze of something purple and gold that had appeared at the highest level and flown out with no hesitation. It fell like a meteorite and landed next to Vandevere as if it were a projectile from a sixteen-inch gun. The water foamed like the cataclysmic circle of a depth charge, and then, from the crown of white and aquamarine, like a leaping dolphin, up rose a girl.

Her hair stayed blond when wet; her eyes were green; her shoulders broad. She was the kind of woman who, in a sundress, looks nine feet tall, and when she breasted the foam Vandevere was struck by how sharply her
nipples showed through the violet leotard in which she was barely dressed. There in the water next to him, as fresh as rain, was his destiny, for in her, and in him, and in time, were his children. As he and this beautiful young woman, the water running off her golden hair, floated in the quarry, they were immediately attracted and ready to be drawn to each other, and it might not have seemed unnatural had they fused like lizards on a rock.

He thought at first that she was a town girl who had found her way into a leotard (the summer uniform of Radcliffe), and he youthfully determined that he would marry her despite this. He would marry her even if she did have the hyena Boston accent, even if her father owned a luncheonette, and even if she had never been to France—because no matter what she was, she was pure force and life. To have leapt so heedlessly from eighty feet, she had to have been a town girl.

“You jumped from Rooftop,” he said, full of admiration.

“I did,” she answered, smiling with arresting beauty. The wind rippled the blue water around her.

“You could have been killed.”

“Yes, but when I saw you jump from fifty feet, I had to do it …” she spoke beautifully and very unlike a hyena, “because I was mad at you.”

“You were mad at me?” he asked, treading water furiously.

“I was.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t stand the way in Hum Two you asked Finley questions about what we were reading
in translation
, to show six hundred people that you knew Greek. And not just once, but every goddamned day. I thought you were an ass.” Her eyes narrowed as if she were still angry.

After a long silence, Vandevere simply said, “I was.” And they studied each other while floating.

Though he wanted to ask her right then and there if she would marry him, and right then and there she probably would have said yes, as she was to say yes soon thereafter, he held himself in check, as he often did. “Let’s swim to shore,” he said, and offered his hand to her. She took it. In that first touch was their marriage. And they swam together through the opalescent waters of the deep quarry, shaming any royal procession that ever was.

•   •   •

T
HE PROBLEM OF HER LEAVING
was insoluble in more ways than one, some minor but intricate nonetheless. Left with a double bed, for example, he could sleep symmetrically neither on one side nor on the other. Nor could he sleep in the middle, as that would have meant moving one of the pillows to the center and doing God-knows-what-else with the other. Three pillows, an odd number, would be as out of the question as would be one. To sleep in the center of the bed, he would have to go either distressingly asymmetrical with an even number of pillows, or symmetrical with a distressing odd number. A single bed would not harmonize with the proportions of the room. Double singles (or, as the consultant he hired called them,
twins
) would simply restate the agony of asymmetry.

So every night he slept on a different side, but this, too, was offensive to symmetry in that there were seven days in a week and 365 days in a year, and even the Pope could not change that. Vandevere sometimes wanted to drown such problems in scotch, except that he did not drink, because once you opened the bottle it was no longer whole. The only thing to do was to get married again, but how could he know whether or not the woman he chose to marry was simply concealing her messiness during the seduction phase, as most women did? Women were absolutely pristine and symmetrical until, after a few months of marriage, it was as if tornadoes emerged from their purses and ripped up the ordered fabric of life.

Philosophically, Melissa had understood the argument that, as death and dissolution are unavoidable, life when it can be chosen should be the assertion or creation of an aesthetic order. Even the dissolution that followed death did so according to the absolute laws of nature. Within decay was order. Molecules linked and unlinked with more precision than cabooses in a freight yard. Streams of particles followed perfect trajectories and rose from what had once been a body, joining with the great oceans of air in an inconceivably complex ballet of fluids. Even with burial came a balanced transformation, a model of infinitude, a textbook case of gasification, combination, oxidation, mineralization, et cetera.

Vandevere wanted order not in the sense of control or imposition, but in
the sense of a painter who orders his colors into a painting. Buying and selling companies was more like directing traffic than making something of beauty, but, then again, in the abstract what was so different about directing the traffic of colors and directing the traffic of sums? Perhaps if he had stayed with some of the businesses he bought, instead of tossing them away in frenzies and bubbles, he would have been less in need of another order to make. Most of the businesses he bought, however, were in the larger scheme of things suitable for sale only in a frenzy.

Thus, the house, and the need, when the children were gone, to make perfect gardens; to store the best olive oil; to mount, construct, build, perfect, and refine; to anchor things, and keep them, consuming as little as possible and laying in as much as could be stored and preserved.

Melissa understood philosophically, but, despairing of argument, she could not agree. To him, his meticulous approach and unvarying discipline seemed redolent of life. But to her they seemed always to freeze things in place, and were like death, which is why she left. But she still loved him, and he loved her, and while he dreamed that she would come back, suddenly neat, she wished that he could break free from what she considered an all-consuming tyranny, and that then they could remarry.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
, East Hampton can be the most beautiful place in the world, when the ocean, brimming over with a whole summer of sun, surges to and fro in clear light, finally warmer than the air. Beaches newly empty of bathers and haze reflect in the far distance like gold, and cicadas make a hypnotic white sound that almost holds back time. Only a Mercedes or two passes down the beach road or climbs up from Napeague. Seagulls wheel in the air, relaxed, landing anywhere, unafraid of being chased by boys who, now, as white foam crashes onto warm and brilliant sand, are trapped in prep schools from Maine to Manhattan, sweating in their blazers, doing sums, and learning Latin.

Sometime in the last week of September, in late morning, Vandevere sat in his east garden, the Italian one. Both he and it were exemplary of what he had long undertaken. Although fifty-four years of age, he was in perfect health except for a slight deafness on one side, the consequence of having
been a rifleman without earplugs. Early that morning he had run six miles, done calisthenics, lifted weights, and swum. His exercise clothes, washed and ironed, were back on the polished blond wood shelves of his airy closet. He had read the
Washington Post
, the
Wall Street Journal
, an article on naval operations in narrow seas, and an essay by Friedrich Hayek. At a breakfast table set with Copeland china, George III sterling, and Austrian crystal, he had dared eat a peach, some fat-free yogurt, and a piece of dry toast.