Outer Banks (14 page)

I put my hands to my mouth to call her, and then a great bolt of lightning split the teeming sky and I saw her. She was far below me on the beach, at the very edge of the water; had, in fact, waded in as far as her knees. Lightning bloomed again and I saw that she was naked, her small body silver-white and perfect against all that shouting, heaving blackness, her arms lifted to the sky, her head
thrown back as if to receive in her face the full fury of wind and rain. As I watched, in the flickering light of the now near-constant lightning, she began to dance, an exultant, splashing little dance, turning round and round in the water and flinging her arms over her head. She stooped and scooped black water up and flung it about her, and then she dived into the sea and disappeared.

My heart stopped absolutely still, and jolted forward only when I saw her dark head break the water a few yards out. She was swimming strongly, parallel to the beach, and every now and then she turned over on her back and let the rain pound into her face. I watched for another moment, and then I turned and went back through the house and crawled into my bed and pulled the covers over my head. My heart was pounding, great, slow, dragging beats, and the picture of her, pagan-naked and alone in that terrible storm, in that black sea, seemed literally burned into my retinas. I still see it; when I think of Cecie Rushton Hart, that image from the beach at Nag's Head is what comes to me first.

I had my back to her and was feigning sleep when she came into the room. I heard her slide under the covers, and it seemed a very long time until I heard the familiar sound of her breathing in sleep. I knew that I would never speak of it to her. I would as soon have asked someone about their wedding night, or their conversion to faith. But I hoped she would speak to me about it. It seemed to hang in the air between us, an enormity.

But, the next morning, when Mrs. Fowler said, “I thought I heard somebody out on the porch in the middle of that storm last night,” Cecie said only, mildly, “It was me. I went out to bring in my bathing suit. I left it on the railing last night. I hope I didn't disturb you.”

“Oh, no,” Regina Fowler said. “But it was quite a storm, wasn't it? I'd love to have seen it over the ocean. Did anybody wake up and look?”

“Not me,” Fig and Ginger said together. Cecie turned and looked at me, an unreadable look. And I knew then that she knew
I had seen her, dancing her little dance of rapture and abandon on that wild beach, swimming in her pearly nakedness in that wild sea.

“I woke up but it was too dark to see anything,” I said.

She never did speak of it to me. From that moment, I think, we began, in grief and helplessness, to part from each other. I still do not know why. She always was a creature of secrets and intuitions; perhaps she sensed him waiting ahead for me, felt and smelled Paul Sibley like an animal or an Indian, and knew him for what he was, and would be to me. And began to leave me before I could leave her.

When I got back to Randolph for the last quarter of my junior year he was there, and after that nothing was ever the same.

I
SAW
him days before I met him. He walked into Louis Cooney's dreaded, mandatory Survey of World Design class on the first day of the spring quarter, fifteen minutes late and obviously unrepentant. The soft inhalation that went up from perhaps eighty throats was as much for his audacity as his physical presence. Both were formidable.

Nobody was late for Louis Cooney's class with impunity, and no one was ever late twice. Cooney was a slight, shudderingly homely, snake-tongued homosexual who punished male students for being not-so-covertly repelled by him, and female students for being competition for the males. No one escaped his tongue and few of us escaped his punitive grading system. He seemed to dislike me more than the norm for the women students, and to spew over me more than his automatic spray of sarcasm and spittle; it had become, last quarter in his Industrial Design course,
a kind of grim joke. Since I could not escape his classes if I wished to graduate and it was clear that to call attention to myself was suicide, I sat far in the back and kept as quiet as I could. When the newcomer strolled in fifteen minutes late without even the coating of sweat that meant an earnest attempt at promptness, I cringed for him, and waited for the inevitable.

“Ah, well. And what have we here, dragging in like the cat's dinner? Sitting Bull, I presume?” Louis Cooney drawled.

The class gasped again. The young man did indeed look like an Indian, though perhaps an idealized Frederic Remington Indian. He was tall, and appeared taller because he held himself very straight, and his high-planed, narrow face was dark with what seemed more than sun. He had a high-bridged hawk's nose and dark eyes set very deeply under level brows, and a lock of thick, absolutely straight black hair fell over his forehead. Somehow the sheer, physical fact of him smote the air, and a kind of stillness radiated from him like an odor. He stopped in the door and stood looking mildly at Louis Cooney. His hands hung loosely and easily at his sides, and he seemed to me very like a wild animal at rest in its habitat, relaxed but alert. He did not speak.

“Do you have a name or shall we call you Tonto?” Louis Cooney said. He was flushed, and I could see that something about the young man made him very angry. He did not usually resort to clumsiness.

“Paul Sibley.” The man—for he was that—was, I thought, a good five years older than the rest of us. “But Tonto will be fine. And I'll call you White Eyes, shall I?”

He smiled lazily at Louis Cooney. His voice was deep and slow, with nothing of boyhood in it. There was a faint something there, the edge of an accent of some kind. His teeth were very white. I felt my chest tighten, and realized that I was holding my breath. I let it out, and inhaled.

“Sit down, Mr. Sibley. You have just had a point taken off
your final grade for this course. You will be silent in my class and you will not behave like a
cochon
here.”

Louis Cooney had studied in France, and let no one forget it for long.

Paul Sibley smiled.

“Tout les hommes sont des cochons, non?” he said in rapid, fluid French.

There was a furtive ripple of laughter from the class. Not one in twenty of us understood French, but we all understood the tone.

“That's one point off the grades of every person in this room,” Cooney spat, and the laughter stopped. But glee lingered in the eyes that followed Paul Sibley as he found a seat near the front and folded himself loosely into it. Eyes swung to him from time to time throughout that entire first lecture. Mine hardly left him. I could not seem to will them away, and I could not stop the pounding of my heart. I had never seen anything remotely like this dark hawk of a man.

“Who is that?” I said to Janellen French, who worked in the admissions office, after class. Janellen would know, if anyone would.

I did not have to tell her whom I meant. Several other students were clustered around her, obviously having asked the same thing. Janellen was pursed with importance.

“He's a transfer from North Carolina State, in architecture,” she said. “He must be good; I've never seen grades like that. He lives off campus, over on Scofield. He's here on the G.I. Bill and the McCandless scholarship. He lists North Miami as his place of birth, but he's lived all over, and he was in France in the army for four years before he started at N.C. State. No living close relatives. He qualified for room and board in one of the dorms, but he refused it. He's paying for his own apartment. It must be the pits, if it's on Scofield; I think he's probably very poor.”

“Lord, Janellen, no shoe size? No color preference?” I said. I
did not know why her smug litany of information about Paul Sibley annoyed me. I had asked, too, after all.

“Well, don't pretend you wouldn't have read his folder after you'd gotten a look at him,” she said, smirking. “You're only the fifth girl who's asked me about him, and this is the first day of classes. And look at your face; you're red as a beet!”

I knew from the heat in my chest and cheeks that it was true. I left hastily for my next class. The image of that dark face and ripe voice went with me through the day, and was there when I awoke on the next.

I thought that I might meet him naturally in the course of the design class, but it was soon obvious that he was not interested in meeting any of us. He was not rude, only remote. He was usually in his seat when I got there, intent on his notes, and left without speaking or nodding to anyone when the class was over. He went purposefully, with a long, padding stride that seemed to start in his hips, like a big cat's. Cooney didn't speak to him again after that first day, and did not call on him in class.

I saw him frequently after class that first week, but he never saw me. I could have sworn to that. I saw him twice in Harry's in the afternoons, drinking coffee and reading alone in a booth, but though I haunted Harry's in the afternoons after that, his visits had no discernible pattern. Both times he was in what had become, to me, his uniform: sharply creased cotton chinos, a blue oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up his dark forearms, white tennis shoes with no socks. Both times he seemed oblivious to the eyes that turned to him. I was not the only one who felt the magnet of his presence.

I saw him sometimes at the drawing board in his permanent lab on the third floor of McCandless, but since the Interior Design department was on the first, I had no real reason to be there, and was embarrassed to be spotted lolling about the halls. Once I saw him going into the coin laundry across from McCandless, his laundry bag over his shoulder, and felt a flush of intimate heat all
over my body at the thought of his clothes, that had been next to that dark body, crumpled softly in the bag. I was so discomfited at the thought that I blushed even darker. Charlie Boyd, who had the board beside mine, said, “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Hot in here, though.”

I found excuses to drive down Scofield at least once a day. Cecie remarked on it.

“What are you going this way for?” she said, when I drove that way en route to Dairyland for a limeade one warm afternoon that first week.

“Why not? We never come this way,” I said casually.

“Nobody does, who doesn't have to,” she said. Scofield was an unlovely street of sagging small frame houses with garages behind them, melting into the earth and supported by honeysuckle and kudzu thickets. Many of these garages had been converted into student apartments; I knew that Paul Sibley lived in one.

“I just get tired of College Street,” I said.

“You're the driver,” Cecie said.

On Thursday of that week I saw him coming out of one of the garage apartments, and my heart gave a lizardlike leap in my chest, as if I had seen a wild animal or a fire raging. I stepped on the gas and swept by, eyes ahead. The number was 43 Scofield. I did not drive that way again. I was acutely embarrassed by my own behavior, and besides, now I had a context for him.

Talk about him was rife in McCandless Hall. He had captured our collective imagination as surely as if he wore a dark cloak and a slouch hat. I heard that he had made the best grades in architecture anyone ever had at North Carolina State, and that two of his student projects had been built. He had, it was said, won an international design competition while he was in Paris and, on the strength of it, had a job waiting for him in New York with the legendary McKim, Mead and White when he graduated from architecture school, providing that school was an American one. He had transferred to Randolph because it had a superb reputation
for engineering and building technology and he wanted to learn that; he was purported to have said, at his application interview, that he did not think his own innate design ability needed much in the way of instruction. He was, indeed, very poor. He was half Seminole Indian. He had won regional races on a Harley Davidson in his youth, and had been a cycle racer of some note in France.

He was a widower. He had married a French girl, from Orléans, early in his stay there with the army, and she had been killed in a fall from the back of his cycle. He never spoke of her, and he did not race anymore. They had had no children.

No one knew the real truth of the talk, nor where it had its genesis. College students are inveterate and creative gossips. Their world is small and their imaginations still unsullied. But somehow I believed all of it. It was all of a piece with him. I had read
The Fountainhead
early on; all the design students had. When I looked at Paul Sibley, I saw Howard Roark. I think that I was utterly lost to him the day I heard about his young French wife, and the motorcycle.

Once a week, on Wednesdays, because his was the largest class held in McCandless that quarter, Louis Cooney grudgingly allowed announcements of general interest to design students to be made at the end of class. I was chairman that quarter of the special events committee for the school of art and architecture, and it fell to my lot, the second week of classes, to announce a film on Mussorgsky's
Pictures at an Exhibition,
to be held in McCandless's small gallery. I began to dread the announcement days in advance. There was little chance of avoiding humiliation from Louis Cooney's tongue, and this time it would be before the dark Seminole eyes of Paul Sibley.

But at least he would see me; would have to. Could not avoid it. The Tuesday night before announcement day, I washed my hair and did my nails and gave myself a raw-egg facial. The next morning I got up early and put my hair up into the French knot that Cecie said looked so much like Old Money it ought to be
dirty green, and applied more makeup more carefully than I ever used except for dates, and put on my treasured black cashmere sweater and good gray Irish tweed skirt from Jaeger, that was my last Christmas present from my father. I hesitated, looking under my lashes at Cecie's sleeping form, and then pulled out the string of pearls he had given me for my high school graduation and fastened them around my neck, and fled from our room. I did not want Cecie to wake and see me, I could not have said why. But as I closed the door softly and went down the hall, I felt the first pangs of guilt I had ever felt in connection with her.

My heart hammered and my mouth dried to parchment during the class, and I mentally rehearsed my short announcement over and over. When the time came and Louis Cooney said, “I believe our own incomparable Miss Lee has a tidbit of culture to offer us,” I stood up, head light, eyes blind, and mispronounced Mussorgsky. I did not even get close. I heard it myself…
Moosursky
…and stood stricken dumb and mindless, unable to remember the correct pronunciation.

“Anyway, you all come,” I blurted. “It's a good program and you'll like it.”

There was general laughter, and even though I knew it was affectionate, I shrank into my seat and dropped my eyes to my notebook in utter humiliation. My body burnt in the fires of mortification from my waist to my hairline. I could feel tears of shame rising behind my lowered lashes. I waited dumbly to hear what Louis Cooney would say. He said it with swift, savage joy.

“Well, Miss Lee,” he said.
“Moo
sursky indeed. Oh, no, no, no. Not from one of your obvious distinction and cultivation, not to mention your splendid family pearls. Who'd have thought it? Might I just suggest that you invest some of your filthy lucre in a good dictionary?”

The class roared with uneasy laughter, and I laughed too, a blind idiot's bray, and went directly to the women's room and locked myself in a stall and flushed the toilet over and over, and
cried. Then I dropped the pearls in my purse, took down my hair, washed my face, and slunk over to Harry's. I cut my next class. The next period was a lab, and everybody would be working; Harry's would be safe. I bought a cup of coffee and took it to a back booth and put a dime in the jukebox by the table and pressed “Unchained Melody,” and buried my nose in my steaming cup. I tried very hard to will my mind blank and cool, and succeeded. I don't know how long I sat there.

I heard no sound, but I looked up and he was there, in the seat across from me. He was not smiling, and then he did. I had never seen him smile before. It transformed the dark face entirely. I felt my mouth curve into an answering smile of its own volition.

“I told Harry you were buying,” he said, gesturing at his coffee. “Since you're so rich, I thought you'd spring this time.”

“I'm not rich,” I said. I found it hard to make my voice work. “I could kill Cooney for that.”

“Forget him. He's a turd, and a queer one at that,” he said. “He wishes he looked like you, and since he can't, he's going to punish you for it. He can't, you know, if you don't let him.”

“How can you stop him?”

“By not caring,” he said. “By not giving a flying fuck.”

I used the word myself, to Cecie, mainly, but I was not accustomed to hearing it from men. I felt the hated red crawl up into my neck and face again. His grin deepened.