Outer Banks (32 page)

Grief for Cecie flooded me. Cecie, who like me, had once seen the world as Halliburton did,
The Royal Road to Romance.
Cecie, who was to have traveled the world like a migratory swallow and come to rest in a house by the great river, whose light would dance on her ceiling and whose water would sing under her dock. Unworldly little flamehaired Cecie, who lived on wings, all these years a drudge, making life go on for her wounded family, away from the water…

I won't think about that, I thought to myself. Not yet.

“I'll be glad to see her,” I said. “You too, Gingerrooney. Fig too. Most especially Fig.”

“Then hurry on,” Ginger Fowler Sibley said, with joy and love in her gruff voice. “Eight more days to Nag's Head!”

“I'm on my way,” I said.

I came to the Chesapeake Bridge at mid-afternoon, when traffic was light, so that I could slow down and look about me and get the feel of that great arch into space. Halfway up it, when I could no longer see the land behind me or the glittering water below me, but only the endless vault of the sky, it struck me suddenly that this was it, this was what had waited for me all my life, this was the abyss. Low to the road, with the top down and only warm, high air around me, I could feel it with all my senses; there was nothing, now, between me and it. I slowed almost to stopping and listened: there it was. From far below me came the very voice of the abyss, the breath of it: the formless wind that sang up from far below, seeming to say many things, among them my name. Kate. Kate. Sweat broke out at my hairline and dried in the wind, but my mouth smiled. I had been wrong, then, all those years; it was the abyss that waited for me. Not the Pacmen. Not gobbling mouths, but space, clean and blue and receiving. It would be all right. I could do this.

Not in the car, though; I could see that. The guard rails were too dense and high. The Alfa would never break through. All right, then, just me. I would leave the car and go out into that blueness alone. With nothing wrapping me, not even the fragile red skin of the little car. Just me; just my own skin, clean and still taut and unadorned. I would hold out my arms like a lover, laugh, sing…I shook my head and drove on. The spell of space and glittering water was strong; it would have been easy on this transcendent afternoon. Well, it would be easier still in a week. No strings, then, no loose, flying remnants of Kate Lee to catch on the sun, snag on the edges of the world. The last weight flew off my heart and I drove on into Virginia, singing.

The last hundred miles did not go so fast. I left the highway and threaded my way over toward the coast on small blacktop roads, choked with resort traffic. At Barco I picked up 158, that would take me on into Nag's Head, and there got my first glimpse of ocean water: Currituck Sound, off to my left, just
beginning to go silver-pink with the westering sun. Parallel to it, further left, was, I knew, the wild, tawny necklace of the Outer Banks themselves. My heart began to beat faster. The palms of my hands were wet on the wheel. Thirty years, almost thirty years, it had been…

I crossed the Wright Memorial Bridge at Point Harbor and I was there. I was on the Banks. The great, heaving, dark blue ocean that I remembered stood off my left; I could see it, fleetingly, between tight-packed, stilted beach houses and shops and hotels and restaurants. But I could not get the sense of it. This was not the coast road I remembered. This was not the country of that long-ago idyll. This was a place of condominiums, RVs, antennas, neon, souvenir shacks, motels, shrimp and pizza takeouts. Even in the twilight of a September midweek, the coast road was thronged with traffic, blaring horns and farting exhaust fumes. This might be anywhere too many people come to the sea: Ocean City, Daytona, Myrtle Beach. Disappointment was so sharp in my heart that I could taste it, like the thin, sour reflux of vomitus.

I passed the great hulks of Jockeys Ridge on my right. On the highest ridge, antlike people lined up black against the setting sun. Great, prehistoric shapes like pterodactyls flew black against the orange sky, and I realized that the people of the Banks still sailed their kites, but such kites as I had never seen or imagined. I ground through Kill Devil Hills behind an RV from Portland that said on its bumper, “Hell, Yes, I Do Own the Whole Damned Road.” I passed the fishing pier, clotted with people, and went through Nag's Head, as bad as Kill Devil Hills. The air was thick and warm now, the fresh, streaming salt cut off by beetling condos and highrise motels, and I violated one of my own strictest rules and switched on the car's air conditioner, even while the top was down. It did little good. I hesitated, and then smiled grimly. Why not? What did it matter now? I turned the air on full blast.

Past the Coast Guard Station I turned left onto the narrow sand road that led over to the dune line, bumping between dreadful
new raw wood condos and chalets on stilts, and saw, ahead of me, the half-remembered, viscerally known, haglike line of the Unpainted Aristocracy black against the evening sky. My heart soared out of my stomach, where it had fallen, and rode up singing like a lark. Familiarity,
déjà vu,
snatches of pure memory and sensation and images, wisps of long-dead sounds and smells and tastes, all crashed down over me like a tidal wave.

“Yeah,” I whispered aloud. “Oh, yeah.”

At the end of the line of great cottages stood Ginger's. Ginger and Paul's, I amended, looking up at the sweet swoop of gray shingle that rode the tallest dune straight out to sea. Sunset light dazzled off its windows, and inside, warm yellow light glowed. Otherwise Ginger's house was just as I remembered it. Unlike most of the colossi of one's youth, it had not diminished one iota. It still stopped the breath and heart with its grace and substance and wild old beauty. Tears stung in my nose, but they were not tears of loss. I whipped the Alfa into the sandy, burred little backyard and got out.

For a moment I simply stood there, drinking it in, feeling that peculiar peace and stillness that I remembered stealing over me. I could not see the ocean, but as always before, I could hear it, booming hollowly on the sand below the dunes. The rightness of the place and the moment moved me; even Paul's studio wing, even the big Land Rover and the beach tractor underneath the first floor, that I knew must be his, did not intrude. I remembered that it was here, in this place, that I had first been given that great gift from the sea: timelessness. The thought bloomed in my mind, whole and finished: this place could heal you.

“Almost, anyway,” I thought to myself, and started up the sandy path to the back deck.

From the open windows of the studio I heard laughter. General female laughter, at first, and then, magically, wonderfully, a laugh unlike any other in the world. A silvery spiral, that wound up and up and up, hung on the very border of affectation, and then
rolled richly down into a bawdy, froggy whoop, and started up again. I began to run, stumbling in the sand.

“ ‘Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea,' ” I half-laughed, half-wept, as I ran.

From inside the studio came, on the wings of the laughter, “'And love is a thing that can never go wrong…' ”

“ ‘AND I AM MARIE OF RUMANIA!' ” we shouted together, and met on the outside spiral staircase.

And we stood in each other's arms again, Cecie Hart and I, after a very, very long time, and both of us cried.

 

The first thing I thought was how little she had changed. I would have known her anywhere on the earth; I would have known her if I had seen her in a group of nuns, of holy women, chanting in a temple in Himalayan Nepal. I could have found her in the throng outside St. Peter's on Easter morning.

The second thing I thought was how small she was. It had been many, many years since I had thought of Cecie in terms of size, but I remembered, in that moment, how her diminutiveness had surprised and charmed me in the first days of our friendship.

The first thing I said to her, stupidly, was, “Cecie, you're so
little.”
I had planned what I would say to her all the way down the Atlantic Coast, trying and discarding this pleasantry and that. But I could remember none of them. Idiocy prevailed.

“Yeah, well, what can you do,” she said, in the precise, dry Virginia drawl that was as familiar to me, all of a sudden, as my own voice.

We looked at one another for a long time, smiling through the drying tears; we dropped our arms from around each other, and I know that my hands felt huge and clumsy. I did not know where to put them. I think she felt it, too. Her small hands flexed and unflexed. They were rough and red now, but then, so were mine, with wind and salt and the earth of my garden.

All of a sudden we began to laugh again. I don't think either
of us could have said why. It simply felt good and right, and was better than silence. It was one of the things that we did together, Cecie and I. We laughed.

“You look exactly, precisely,
totally
like you used to,” she said, grinning. “Still skinny. Still got the famous Lee nose; nobody's put it out of joint in all this time, I see. Even still got the celebrated French twist. And the steaks. Do you still put lemon juice on it and sit in the sun?”

“It's gray, you numbskull,” I said. “Now I put white wine on it and sit in the sun. But you, Cecie…if it weren't for your hair, you still couldn't get a drink in any bar in America. I swear you've sold your soul to the devil.”

“Blind, too,” she said. “Ah, age, c'est tragique.”

It was true, though not literally. The profound and prevailing sense of Cecie was that she was still the redhaired, ardent friend and companion of my college years; that and that alone, whole-hearted, unchanged. It may have been solely in my eyes that she was, but nevertheless that truth remained. But the world's truth was that the riotous tangle of Orphan-Annie curls were pure white now, and her watercolor blue eyes were webbed with tiny lines, and deeper lines of pain and endurance cut her kitten-shaped face. She was very thin, as thin as she had been during the terrible siege of mononucleosis, at the end of my college days, and I saw that her small shoulders were stooped a bit. There was no sagging flesh on her face or neck; it was as tight and firm as it had been as a girl, but the soft rose color that seemed to flicker just beneath it was gone. Cecie was pale to transparency. Blue shadows stained the thin skin beneath her eyes. She wore, instead of the horn-rims I remembered, large, round glasses with thin, silvery gray rims. They were very becoming; somehow, even with the lines of pain and exhaustion and the white hair, Cecie was beautiful as a woman as she had not been…or as I had not seen…as a girl.

“You look beautiful,” I said. “You really do. I hope your children look just like you.”

“Nope. Just exactly like Vinnie. Which is great for boys, and makes me thankful every day of my life that we didn't have girls. They'd have had mustaches.”

“I have missed you so much,” I said.

“Me, too,” she said, in the formal little way she had when she felt shy. “I have, too.”

There was a great whoop and thumping flurry of legs and arms and Ginger was with us on the stairs, capering and squealing, trying to gather both of us into her arms at once.

“Lord, just look at you two,” she bubbled, hugging and patting. “You could be hugging hello after spring break. Neither one of you has changed one single bit. It's not fair; I'm the only one who's gotten old and fat. Oh, Kate, God, it's just so good to see you! We've been guzzling gin and counting the minutes till you got here! Come on up; we'll get your bags later. You're way behind.”

She turned and loped up the weathered gray stairs to the studio, chattering over her shoulder. Cecie and I followed. Unlike Cecie, it was hard, at first, for me to find the Ginger I had known and loved in the woman who went ahead of us. This woman was very fat, and moved heavily, without the long, vigorous, hip-slung stride that had been young Ginger Fowler's. This woman's flesh was plushy and wattled, though still the deep mahogany that Ginger's went in the summers, and her hair, though still the white-blonde of the girl's, was whorled and carved on her head and spongy in texture, and sprayed into immobility in the vast river of wind flowing off the ocean. This woman wore an elaborate yellow-flowered cotton caftan with wide, loose sleeves and a deep V neck; her great bronze-speckled breasts bobbled in the V. On her brown feet were strappy bronze sandals, and her toenails were painted platinum. Ginger Fowler would never in her life have worn such getup. She would have hooted out of the room anyone who did.

But the warm blue eyes, crinkled with sun and laughter, were
the same, though half-buried in flesh, and the sweet, snub puppy face, under layers of makeup, and the freckles and wide white grin, and the endearingly graceless gait and posture. I noticed that, though she wore several large, rather dingy diamonds on her big, shapely hands, the nails were still bitten short. I grinned at her back. The shy colt of a girl who had lost her fingernail in the ADPi's punchbowl and burned a hole in the Tri Omega's sofa was still under there.

“Shit,” Ginger said, tripping on the doorsill, and my grin widened. Still under there, and not so far, either.

I stood in the doorway of Paul's studio and looked in. I had been almost afraid to do it; afraid, I suppose, that some lingering essence, not of him, but of me in the days of him, would remain to pierce and diminish me. It had, after all, been my room on the inside. My gift to him, his austere white room. But I need not have worried. There was nothing of me here, and nothing of Paul. There was hardly anything of the sky and sea. I blinked, trying to take it in. But it was not possible to do that in one glance, or even two or three.

The vast room was indeed open to the pink and silver sea and sky, just as he had envisioned, but aside from the great, curved sweep of seamless glass and the panorama beyond it, Paul Sibley's white room no longer existed. This room crawled and teemed and shimmered and writhed with color and form and texture and objects. Many, many objects, so many that you had to concentrate on them one by one to get the sense of them. The white floor had been covered with blue and white vinyl tile, dotted with bright throw rugs like islands in the Gulf Stream. Fat-stuffed furniture, also covered with rugs and throws, stood in groups everywhere: before the great fireplace, in front of the seaward window wall, in corners and nooks and bays. Most of it was plaid or striped or print chintz. Two sets of bunk beds stood against a wall where I had designed bookcases, and boxes and bins and trunks and baskets spilled out children's toys everywhere. Child-sized furniture,
tables and chairs and dollhouses and stoves and refrigerators and rocking horses, clustered at the landward end of the room. At the seaward end, before the fireplace, a huge sofa and flanking chairs and a coffee table made a grouping, and a huge built-in bar and a complicated sound system flanked the stone fireplace itself. The lights I had seen from outside came from this end, from great bronze lamps on low tables.