Outer Banks (25 page)

It seemed to me that the city did all its tricks for me that first night. Carl Seaborn sent a slim, elegant young man from the firm to meet my train, wearing a bored, polite smile with a bunch of hothouse violets in hand, and he tucked me and my luggage into a waiting limousine. It was a small, hired one, and the driver did not wear a livery, but it was a limousine, nevertheless.

“Good Lord, what an introduction to New York,” I smiled at the captive minion.

“Well, I hear your boyfriend is practically a partner before he even gets here,” the young man said. “Of course, we're glad to have you, too.”

“Of course,” I said dryly, and turned my attention to the city flashing by. It was raining that night, a soft, fine, icy rain, and lights wore halos, and hissing tires left iridescent snails' tracks on the streets. Horns blatted and street corner Santas rang bells and crowds jostled on the sidewalks and lights climbed into the skies and vanished into the clouds and the very air seemed charged with particles of diamonds, like the sidewalks.

I said something about the diamond sidewalks to the young man.

“Manhattan is built on mica schist,” he said, lighting a cigarette and leaning back against the seat. “It's a pain in the ass to build on.”

I fell silent, determined to stay that way, but just then the car flashed past Rockefeller Center at the precise second that the great tree bloomed into light, and I gave a small cry of pure pleasure.

“Don't you dare tell me how much lighting that tree sets New Yorkers back every year,” I said to my companion.

He laughed. “Don't worry, I wouldn't even try,” he said. “You're a goner. I know that look.”

He brought my bags up to the apartment for me, through a dim, tiny lobby and past a dozing doorman, and unlocked the door and saw me in, and made a perfunctory sweep of it before surrendering the key. The apartment was about the size of mine and Cecie's room at the Tri Omega house, with a thin, flaccid bed that pulled out of the wall, a kitchen even smaller than Paul's behind a screen, and a bathroom in which it did not seem possible even for midgets to ablute themselves in any comfort. It had scarred parquet flooring and a growling radiator and a liver-colored, metallic-threaded couch and a formica table and two aluminum dining chairs in front of its lone window and an enormous leather Morris chair, patched with tape a shade darker than the burgundy leather. A long-dead, copper-brown palm tree in a plastic pot sat in a corner. Someone had tossed Christmas tinsel over it.

“I love it,” I said. “It's wonderful.”

“Better you than me,” he said, turning to leave. “First month's rent is free; they should pay you to live here. Welcome and enjoy.”

And he was out the steel door and gone to wherever elegant young men went in New York on icy evenings just before Christmas, and I was alone with the city.

I walked to the window and rubbed the steam off it and looked out. I saw an alley with garbage cans far below, and other pale cubes of buildings, and jumbled rooftops, and, in a gap between two of them, far away and luminous, the top of the Empire State Building. Tears came into my eyes again.

“I am in New York,” I whispered to the black window. And then, turning to the room, hugging myself, eyes closed and head thrown back, I shouted as loud as I could, “I AM IN NEW YORK!”

“AND I WISH YOU WAS IN CANARSIE,” a voice yowled thinly through the wall, and I sat down in the Morris chair and laughed until I was out of breath and my sides hurt. I was still laughing, off and on, when I finished unpacking late that night and heaved the bed out of the wall and crept beneath the lone nylon blanket. At least, I thought, I would not need more covers. No
matter how I tugged and banged on it, the radiator continued to pump steam into the apartment like a fire-breathing dragon. When I awoke in the middle of the night, somehow absolutely certain of where I was, I was soaked in sweat.

It was a good job, or at least I knew that it was going to be. I had an anonymous drawing board in an anonymous big room full of bright, serious young men and women bent over similar boards, all in smocks over the chic wine and eggplant and gray clothing that all New Yorkers seemed to wear. The entire office had an air of forward motion, involvement, muted excitement. From the beginning everyone was nice to me, and Carl Seaborn was warm and courtly and downright fatherly. He had a long, pale Medici face and thinning white hair, and might have been formidable, but wasn't. He sent a car and driver for me on Christmas morning to bring me out to the big, gray-shingled house in Bridgehampton, and I fell in love with the serene little green and white towns, all clapboard and drifted snow, that we passed. Wainscott, Southampton, Water Mill…they looked like the substantial, insular towns and suburbs I had visited with my friends from the Cape, all those summers ago; I would be all right here. And I was. The drill came back to me, word and gesture and inflection: perfect. In Carl Seaborn's big Colonial, I was surrounded by his picturebook family: smiling, ash-haired, tanned wife, identical daughter home from Wellesley, two well-mannered young sons home from Choate, beaming, white-aproned retainer in the fragrant kitchen, capering sheepdog on the hearth rug in the library where the big, radiant tree stood. We had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner, and carols played softly on the hi fi set, and we had toasts to the New Year and my new job and Paul's imminent joining of the firm with lovely, silken, dry champagne, and I thought, gratefully, that even if the whole thing was almost ridiculously redolent of an upperclass Norman Rockwell painting, it was still as seductive a scene as my starved heart had ever beheld. I determined then and there that somehow Paul and I would surround ourselves with
family at our Christmases by the sea, even if they were someone else's.

“It was like something in an English country house play from the Thirties,” I said to Paul the next night, when I phoned. “I kept expecting the vicar and his wife to come by for brandy after dinner.”

“Neat trick, considering that they're Jewish,” Paul said, and I could hear the smile in his voice across the night miles. “What about the apartment?”

“It's perfect. Of course, it's awfully small, and it has no furniture to speak of, and the bed comes out of the wall,” I said. “I thought I was going to be able to pick up a few things for it, but even at second-hand shops things are so expensive up here. And do you know what a junior draftsman makes? We're going to have to be very, very frugal for a long time…”

“You won't be a draftsman long,” he said. “By the time I get there you'll be a full-fledged designer, and you can get discounts. And I'll hit 'em up for new furniture just before I come.”

“Well, you can hardly do that, seeing as how you're not going to be going with them,” I said. “They'll probably fire me, as it is, when you don't.”

“How will they know I'm not, until the stuff's bought and in?” he said. “And you're too good to fire. All's fair, Katie. All's fair.”

“How was your dinner at the Fowlers?” I said. “Did you get roast turkey and Grandma's stuffing and all that? What's the house like?”

“The house is sort of like the Boston Public Library,” Paul said. “I kept wanting to check out Proust. Everything in its place and the flowers and plants are artificial. The bed in the room I slept in had red silk hangings, for God's sake. And we had an all brand-name Christmas dinner, served, by God, by a Negro butler.”

“Lord,” I said. “You'd never know it from Ginger, would you? Was it just you all?”

“No,” he said. “Fig was there, too.”

“Fig? Why wasn't Fig at her own house for Christmas dinner?” I said.

“I don't know. I didn't want to ask, and she didn't say. I didn't see much of her,” he said. “I took her and Ginger to the movies the last night there, but mostly I was with Ginger's father. We went duck hunting up the Warrior, and played some poker. I like him, I think. He's a pirate, of course, but not a bad kind of pirate. And I think he liked me. It's plain he wishes he had a son; he tried hard with Ginger, but it's pretty clear she's afraid of him.”

I did not say anything for a moment, and then I said, “How long did you stay? I thought you were just going up for the day…”

“Well, I was, but then the heat went off in the apartment, and the Gorgon was in Texas, and so I went for three or four. It was okay. They're pretty loose people, and I was able to give them a little design advice on a pool and pool house they want to put in this summer. It paid my way, I think.”

“I miss you so much,” I said, suddenly desolate.

“I miss you, too, my dear, lovely Kate,” he said. “You just don't know. I guess I'm just going to stay in a cold shower from now until Nag's Head.”

“I know. I don't think I can wait,” I said. Tears were beginning to thicken in my throat.

“Work hard,” he said. “Work very hard; work night and day so you don't think about it and you won't have time to go out with slick New York guys. The time will pass before you know it, and we'll be there.”

It didn't, though. I did work prodigiously, as much to advance myself to the rank of designer so I could afford some things for the apartment as to keep busy, but the time still crept by on sticky small fly's feet. Nag's Head and the big house and the beach seemed stuck in amber, far in the future. I did little else besides work; somehow I kept putting off the trips to the museums and galleries and the theaters, and the concerts and the plays that I had
planned. For one thing, they cost a great deal. For another, always, in the back of my mind was, “I'll wait for that until Paul comes. I'll save it until he's here.” I walked about the city a great deal, and I read enormously, and I worked. I wrote him every night. I read and reread his letters, that came twice a week; I could not realistically expect him to write as often as I did. I called him as arranged every Wednesday night and every Sunday, after the rates went down. And I waited.

In the first week of February, his Monday letter did not come. When I called that Wednesday night, I said, “Is anything wrong? I missed your letter.”

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “No, nothing's wrong. I just flat forgot. I'm sorry, Katie. I've been in the lab every second I wasn't asleep; there's a competition from Raytheon with a three thousand dollar prize, and I'm trying for that…”

“Oh, good,” I said. “What are you doing for it?”

“Actually,” he said, “I'm doing the pool and pool house for the Fowlers. The project is for a residential leisure facility.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that's great. Bring some sketches to Nag's Head, will you?”

“Sure will,” he said.

“It's only five weeks now,” I said.

“Don't I know it,” he said.

On Sunday when I called he was not there. It had never happened before. I was worried, and sounded it when I finally got him, at midnight.

“The library,” he said. He sounded distracted and tired. “I'm sorry again, sugar. This is really a bad quarter for me. You mustn't worry when you don't get me.”

“No, I won't. It's just that we decided on these nights…”

“I know. I'll do better,” he said.

There was no Monday letter; and he did not answer his telephone on Wednesday or Sunday. The letter the Monday after that was scribbled and brief and noncommittal, and the alarm that
I had steadfastly banished to the back of my mind surfaced. He was sick; something had happened with his grades; he had been evicted…I called. He was not at home. He was not there the next night, either, or the next.

That night I swallowed my wounded pride and called Cecie, to see if she had heard anything from him. The phone rang and rang, and finally it was Fig who answered it, not Cecie.

“Oh, Effie, it's you,” she caroled. “I thought you'd deserted us. I was just telling Cecie the other night that you'd probably gotten so New Yorky that…”

“Is she in? Cecie?” I said. I could barely hear myself over the pounding of my heart.

“No, I think she's at the library,” Fig said. “Won't I do?”

“Well actually, I was trying to reach Paul, and I thought maybe…”

“You mean he hasn't called or written you?” she said. Her voice was intimate and horrified, as if I had confessed I had a venereal disease. “How thoughtless! I'll get on him tomorrow night, I have a tutoring session with him. He's fine, Effie; he's working awfully hard is all. I fuss at him all the time about it. Boy, am I going to read him the riot act about not calling you…”

“No, don't,” I said numbly. “Just ask him to call when he has a minute.”

And I hung up.

He did not call.

I spent two days and nights in dumb, sleepless misery, and then I called Cecie again. Again, I got Fig.

“I'm afraid she's in the infirmary,” Fig said solemnly. “She should have been a long time ago. All she ever does is sleep. She doesn't go to classes anymore. I'm sure she's flunking. Did Paul call? He said he would.”

“Yes,” I said.

I called again two nights later, dulled and sapped with fear
and despair. This time, after many rings, it was picked up by Lucy Davenport, who lived two doors down.

“She went home yesterday,” Lucy said. “I think somebody was sick, or maybe it was her. Listen, how's New York? We envy you to death; we were all talking about it at dinner last night.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Maybe we'll all come see you,
en masse,”
she giggled. “Do you want to talk to Fig?”

“No,” I said.

The next day, when I got in from work, as ill and detached as a person with one of the great, depleting tropical malaises, there was a letter from him in my box. It was a thin one. I did not wait for the elevator, but ran all the way up four flights of stairs, and dashed into the apartment, leaving the door open, and sat down to read it. Everything would be all right now, there would be a perfectly simple explanation, I would laugh at myself and sleep that night, the frail spring would come on in a rush, in two weeks we would be together by the sea at Nag's Head…