Outer Banks (15 page)

“S'cuse me,” he said. “I forgot. You poor little rich girls aren't accustomed to such functional things. I like the blush, though. Do they pass it along with the family pearls?”

“The pearls are fake,” I muttered. Under the embarrassment I felt an aching disappointment. Please don't be like this, I said silently to him.

“Uh huh,” he said. “Look, I don't care if you have money. It's nice. You can buy the coffee all the time. You can even pay for the movies and the pizzas. I have, to my entire name, two pairs of khakis and three shirts and one pair of tennis shoes and a G.I. Bill
check every month, and that's it. But I didn't pick you out because of it.”

“Have you picked me out?” I said. I could scarcely breathe over the pounding of my heart. I was terrified that he would hear it.

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Because I like the way you look,” Paul Sibley said. “And I like the way you talk—or don't—and I like it that you don't giggle. And you're talented; I went in and looked at your board. And you're smart. I know you can pronounce Mussorgsky, no matter what that asshole says. And you're not like the others.”

“How do you mean?” I said faintly. I watched him steadily, hypnotized like a bird by a snake. It struck me suddenly that his nose had been broken.

“You're just different. You must know by now that you are. So am I. I thought we might as well be different together.”

“Do you always come on like this with girls?” I said. I could not think of anything clever, profound, or even basically intelligent to say.

“No,” he said. “Only one time before.”

I knew he meant the girl who had been his wife, and was silent. I could not think of anything to say. The silence between us spun out, and finally, I said, “I have to go now,” and rose. He watched me without speaking, and I turned and walked away.

“See you tomorrow,” he called after me. I nodded without looking back. Joy started up; I knew it would soon flood me.

“Hey, Kate?” he called after me once more. This time I did turn.

“Don't forget to pay Harry for my coffee,” he grinned.

I paid for the coffee and left Harry's, laughing and near tears with the rising of the joy. I do not remember driving the MG back across campus to the Tri O house.

I was sitting in the twilight looking out my window when Cecie came in from her lab.

“What's the matter?” she said, her radar instantly alert.

I did not turn to look at her. I could not. I was profoundly and viscerally reluctant to speak; I actually dreaded the words. But I said them.

“I've met somebody,” I said.

She was quiet for what seemed a very long time.

“Oh, Katie,” she said then. “Oh, Kate.”

 

And so it began, that spring that took all my deep aches and diffused yearnings, all my subterranean fires and storms and tears and laughter, all my buried hungers and thirsts and terrors, and focused them on the dark face and body of Paul Sibley. The spring of becoming. Not everyone has such a season; I had not thought it would come to me. If I looked far ahead at all, I saw myself, Kate the child, only older, and in a different place. But now I looked and saw a woman I did not know, and I was both tremulously grateful for her, and terrified. She was all appetite and response, and she had no boundaries.

From the very beginning I wanted him physically, fiercely and sometimes even savagely; I would sit across from him at Harry's, or beside him at his board, and I would be weak and almost sick with the longing for him to touch me. I felt every inch of warm, thick air on my skin, wherever my clothes were not, and so wanted to feel his hands there on me that I grew dizzy from it, and blushed. In the secret places beneath my clothes, the longing was so particular and piercing that I was frightened and appalled, and wondered in shame if people around us could read the stigmata of it on my face. I had never felt anything like it before.

I remembered my voice, not so long ago, to Cecie: “I can't imagine wanting to do it with anybody,” and her cool one, to me: “I can if it's the right somebody. That's everything.” So here it was, that imagining, that somebody. This was it then. I would like to
have told her she was right, but I would have died before I would have spoken of it to anyone, even Cecie. Especially airborne Cecie. This feeling was in every way of earth and flesh. Every day after that first one, in Harry's, I sat beside Paul and laughed lightly and talked glibly and listened in cool amusement, and came near to shuddering apart with this thing that I could not control, and could not abjure. I think, if he had touched me, even on the arm, even on the hand, I would have bolted like a spooked horse.

But he didn't. He did not so much as indicate that he might like to. He smiled, and teased me, and sometimes laughed aloud at me, and asked me questions about myself, and listened while I answered, and he talked. Mostly, he talked. He talked, and I listened. I would have listened to him forever. He talked, in those early days, about architecture, and what it meant to him, and what he wanted to give it, and what he wanted it to give him. I could not imagine that all of it would not come true. He was awesomely, slashingly talented, almost savagely disciplined, in love with architecture as he would be with a woman, with a dark and obsessive joy. The sketches and elevations and designs that piled up on and around his board were soaring things, seemingly formed of earth and air and steel and stone, and they were where he put his passion and his touch. I was envious of his work that spring. I wanted that wholeness for myself.

He wanted to do residential architecture. Just that.

“I don't want to do habitats for cat food and potato chips, or for places where people hurt and die, or for assholes who make rules for other assholes,” he said. “I want to do places where people live, and where there are no rules but mine and the house's, and the site's.”

“What about the people who live in the houses?” I said.

“Their rules will be the same as mine, or they wouldn't hire me, and I wouldn't work for them,” he said.

“You really do sound like Howard Roark,” I said. I knew that he had read the book.

“He was an asshole, too,” Paul said.

“No, he wasn't! Why?” I cried. This was heresy. I had never heard an architecture student say this.

“Because he blew up his own work,” he said. “No real architect would do that.”

“It was to keep it from being…sullied…by idiots,” I said.

“Better just to shoot the idiots,” Paul said.

“Well, you're going to have a hard time at McKim, Mead and White, then,” I said. “They're not going to take it kindly when you refuse to build cat food plants or call your residential clients assholes, much less shoot them.”

“I know it,” he said soberly. “I don't know how I'm going to handle that. I don't know if I
can
handle that. If there was any way on earth to just start out with my own practice, I'd do it, but there isn't. I don't have any money and there's no way to get any. Not even any family to steal it from. McKim was the best I could do, and I'm going to do it for the very minimum amount of time I have to, to build a practice. But Jesus, it's going to take years…”

“Paul, it's one of the best firms in the world,” I said. “Everybody I know would kill to work for them. I would.”

“You could,” he said. “You're good enough. They have an interiors department, one of the biggest in the country. Maybe I'll take you along when I go. Make it a condition of employment. It's not a bad idea, come to think of it. Might make the slave labor easier to take.”

I was faintly stung, that he seemed to think I would need the entree of his auspices for a job with such a firm as McKim, Mead and White, but I knew that he was probably right. The firm would be flooded each year with newly graduated applicants. Talent would not be enough.

“You think a word from you would do it?” I said tartly. Under the acid my heart sang. He was talking in terms of the far future.

He looked at me gravely.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, for your information, I was going to New York anyway, after graduation,” I said. “And a lot sooner than you are. If I go to summer school this summer I can double up, and do my thesis in the fall, and graduate at Christmas. I'll be there a good two years before you will.”

“Good. Then you can stake out the territory and find a loft or something. Pay for it, too, since you'll be a career woman.”

I did not know if he meant for myself or for both of us, but my heart began a pounding that made speech impossible.

“Hah,” I managed, idiotically.

He laughed.

“Don't knock me down accepting my offer,” he said. “Thank God for you, Kate. If you hung on to me I don't think I could stand it.”

And he bent back over the drawing that was sprouting like a flower or a tree on his board, and I leaned back on my stool to try and slow my runaway heart. What was he doing to me? He spoke of apartments in New York together, of a future that included me, and then of my not hanging on to him. Was the dichotomy purposeful? Did he even know he was doing it? In addition to being hopelessly in love that spring, I was painfully and permanently off-balance. It would have helped, I think, if I could have talked to someone about him. But I did not think that I could. He was in another country from anyone I knew at Randolph.

I did not see him at night; he did not make any effort to see me then, and I could not bring myself to mention it. I knew that he worked at his board far into the nights, and in any case, I did not know where we could have met. I was loath to hang around his lab; men habitually worked late at their boards in McCandless, but women normally did not. I could not even imagine him on the brocade sofas in the Tri Omega drawing room, and could imagine myself even less in the shabby little garage apartment on Scofield.
In any case, women students were not permitted in men's rooms and apartments, on campus or off. And I knew without knowing how that it would simply never occur to him to take me to a movie or to get a hamburger. I supposed, bleakly, that I was doomed to see him in an endless succession of afternoon booths at Harry's. And so I spent my nights as I always had, with Cecie, or studying at the library, or dating this fraternity boy or that, all the while the fact of Paul Sibley roaring in my blood like a fever, unseen and consuming.

Only once did Cecie mention him.

“What happened to that somebody you met?” she said casually, not looking up from her history textbook. Her head was bent beneath the desk lamp for better light, and her copper curls flamed in it. She was wearing an oxford-cloth shirt, an outsized one, and she looked in it like a little boy dressed up in his father's clothing. She looked, suddenly, very thin; her neck in the drooping collar of the shirt seemed as fragile as a lily's stem, and her collarbones stood out in sharp relief. It seemed a very long time since I had really seen Cecie.

“Oh, he's around,” I said. “I have coffee with him sometimes in the afternoons. Probably nothing will come of it. He's even poorer than you and me and Fig, and he works all the time. He's going to be one of the architects we'll remember out of this century.”

She looked up and smiled. There were lavender smudges in the thin skin under her eyes, and the faint stain of golden copper that usually lay just beneath the skin of her cheeks was gone. Her pointed face was pale.

“He sounds nice,” she said. “Does he have a name, or shall we just call him Louie?”

“Paul Sibley,” I said, feeling my cheeks flame at the sound and taste of his name on my lips. “Are you not feeling good, Cece? You don't look like you are.”

“I'm tired, is all,” she said. “I can't seem to get my ass in gear,
as Ginger says. I've got this research thing on English Common Law coming up next quarter, that's going to take two whole damn quarters to finish; I won't be done with it till Christmas, and I'm trying to double up in history this quarter to clear some time for it. But it's awfully hard, for some reason. I feel like I'm wading through molasses.”

“Why don't we drop a hint to Ginger that the Outer Banks might not be amiss between quarters?” I said.

“Can't,” she said, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. “Aunt Eugenia wants to go to the Holy Land with her Circle, and there won't be anybody with Grammy. I need to read Keynes, anyway.”

“God, I wish school was over, that I was out of here, that we were. I wish we were already in New York, or Europe,” I said, suddenly restless and uneasy. I longed suddenly and with all my heart for the days before Paul Sibley, when the future meant endless days, bright past imagining, in the quicksilver company of Cecie Hart. I missed her, acutely and painfully, as if she did not sit here in the room with me.

“You're wishing your life away,” she said lightly. “That's what the sisters always told us when we wanted time to pass.”

She did not comment on New York or Europe. Presently I put out my light, and slid into an unquiet sleep. Her light was still burning when I finally drifted off.

On the last day of classes I loaded the MG and dropped Cecie off at the train station. We were not going to be apart long…both of us would be back in three weeks, for summer school. But I felt suddenly chilly and peculiarly vulnerable, as if I stood on a plain ringed with forests, and in those forests eyes were watching. I felt as if someone, either Cecie or I, were not coming back.

“Well…see you in June,” I said, still not moving away in the car.

“Yep,” she said.
“Toujours:
Tomorrow is another day, Katie Scarlett.”

“Oh…bye!” I called out, laughing, and put the car into gear.

“Bye,” floated back to me from the closing door of the station. I stepped on the gas and drove a block or so toward the southbound highway that would take me to Kenmore and the dank, peeling house and the light-eyed deacon and the primmouthed stranger who was my mother now, and then I swung into the driveway of the post office and turned the car around and drove back up College Street and turned left on the street that ran past McCandless Hall. It was twilight, and a few lights bloomed in the big bay of windows, but most of the boards were empty.