Outer Banks (17 page)

I put my face into my hands and shook my head. Helpless laughter bubbled through my fingers. My heart soared.

“I was thinking Audrey Hepburn,” I whispered.

“Not on her best day.” He laughed, too. “And the worst thing was, she never cooked a meal the entire time we were married. At least I can thank her for being probably the best cook you've met in your young life. Wait until you taste my
cuisine française.”

He disappeared behind the carved screen and I heard the
creak of an oven door. A rich, deep, winy smell curled out and into my nostrils, and I felt saliva start. It was past nine, and I had not eaten since lunch at Dairyland with Cecie. That seemed, as Hemingway said, long ago and in another country.

“That smells heavenly,” I said, looking into the wretched little kitchen. “What is it? When on earth did you start cooking it?”

“It's coq au vin,” he said, lifting out an earthenware casserole and slamming the oven door. He was as deft as a cat in the kitchen. “Otherwise known as chicken in wine. It's got chicken, ham, little white onions and garlic, seven herbs, mushrooms, and a slosh of red wine. Chambertin is best, but I can't get that here, so this is plain old Taylor's table. You flame it with a little cognac and then stick it in the oven for as long as you feel like it. I put this on about five this afternoon.”

“How on earth did you know…” I began, and stopped in confusion. Of course he could not have known I would appear in his lab.

“I eat well,” he grinned. “And I can do it cheaper than eating at a dining hall or boarding house. If you can call it eating. I make this, or some other kind of stew, once a week and eat on it for days. The only real expense is the cognac, and I've had this bottle for six months. The temptation to scarf it down by itself is great, but I'm only a so-so drinker, and I am a devoted, fanatical eater.”

“I've never even tasted cognac,” I said.

He looked at me and lifted a dark eyebrow.

“What? A rich little girl like you?”

I started to protest, and then did not. All of a sudden, in the midst of all this rich, careless beauty and exotica and worldliness, my phony wealth seemed almost all I had going for me.

“My father was a martini man,” I said lightly.

“Was?” he said.

“He died,” I said neutrally. “At the end of my first year at Randolph Macon.”

“And you came back to be closer to your mother. I wondered what you were doing at Randolph.”

“You're here,” I said carelessly, hoping he would drop it.

“I have to be. You don't,” he said. “Well. I'm sorry about your father. Shouldn't you call your mother, then? I don't want to get on her bad side before I've even met her.”

“She really isn't expecting me until tomorrow,” I said, not looking at him. “I'm going to go back and sleep at the house tonight. I don't have to sign in, and there's a basement door that's always open.”

He laughed.

“Always leave yourself an escape hatch,” he said. “Well, in that case, let's eat.”

It was an enchanted meal. Probably as near a perfect one as I have ever had. I have never forgotten it, and I know that I never will. Partly it was the strange and wonderful food; strange at least to me. Besides the coq au vin he produced a crusty loaf of walloping chewy bread that he said he had made himself, and a platter of apples and grapes and an odd, soft, nutlike cheese for afterward, and kept our stemmed glasses filled with the tart, dry red wine. We ate on lacquered trays in the living room, I in the armchair and he in the Eames. He put a stack of records on the hi fi set he had assembled in the bookcase, and soft, sensuous music with the sun and sea in it swam through the room. A candle burned in a beautiful pottery candlestick on the bookcase, and he lowered the lamplight with a rheostat. After dinner he brought us each a tiny, jewel-like glass of the cognac, and made bitter, smoky espresso on a battered copper machine he pulled out from under the kitchen counter. I was more than slightly drunk on the wine and music and strangeness and his physical presence, and felt both serene and detached, and reckless and clever and worldly. I laughed a great deal, and tossed my head to feel my hair swing against my cheek, and felt about thirty-five years old and incomparably chic in the sun of his lazy grin.

He got up to clear the dishes, flicking on an Edith Piaf record as he went. The dusky lament overflowed the room. I got unsteadily to my feet, almost losing my balance.

“Whoops,” I mouthed silently, balancing against the rough white wall. I peered in to see if he had noticed; he had not. Laughter welled up in my chest. I remember thinking, if this is what it is to be drunk, I see why people do it.

My eye fell on a framed sketch, and I leaned closer to look at it. All senses opened and heightened by the liquor and the man, I stared at it, widening my eyes to focus it. It swam into sharp focus and I drew in my breath, as I had when I had first seen the room. It was a watercolor sketch of a low, carved white building spilling down a rock ledge over a burning blue sea. One graceful, gull-roofed wing of it soared out over the rock and hung over the sea itself; its seaward wall was a long curve of glass, and its roofline made a sweeping, carved overhang, so that the sea light would flood in, but not the fierce, remorseless sun. It was purely, absolutely beautiful; it looked like a seabird just lit on the cliff. I knew with certainty that he had designed it.

I felt him behind me and turned. He was looking at it impassively.

“It's incredible,” I said. “It's yours, isn't it?”

“It's my design,” he said. “It never got built. It was going to be a house in Morocco. The cantilevered wing is a studio.”

Light dawned. It was to have been his house, his and the dead Berthe's.

“I'm sorry you never got to live in it,” I said. I was. The simple sadness of it brought tears to my eyes.

“I will,” he said. “I may be eighty years old, and I may have to rob or commit murder, but I will live in that house. It's a condition of living at all, that house.”

He laughed then, and I looked over my shoulder at him again. It was not a laugh I had heard before.

“It was a condition from the very beginning,” he said. “It was
a condition of staying in France and being a good little bourgeois husband and son-in-law. I would stick around Orléans with Berthe half the year and my prince of a father-in-law would finance this house for us, and we could spend the other half in it. I can't tell you how close I came to accepting that condition. To paying that price. I might have done it, if the thing with McKim hadn't come up.”

“You'll build it, on an American beach,” I said around the lump in my throat.

“Yeah, I will,” Paul said. “But when I think how long it's going to take to be able to afford it, I get a little crazy. So I just try not to.”

“Could you…can you, you know, scale it down a little? Build it somewhere else, build it cheaper?” I said, “Not so big, and so
avant garde
? Almost every inch of that house would have to be custom…”

“No, I can't,” he said. “I'm surprised you don't understand that I can't.”

His voice was cold and flat, as if he stood a far distance from me. I felt the tears slide over the rim of my lids and start down my cheeks. I shut my eyes and prayed that I would not cry with the hurt.

I heard him sigh, and he took me by the shoulders and led me to the daybed and pulled me down on it, beside him. He held my hand loosely in his, and looked off into the middle distance, while I struggled not to yield to the tears.

“I want to tell you something, so you'll understand, and then we won't have to talk about it again,” he said. “I don't tell people this because it sounds like I'm trying for sympathy, and there's nothing I hate more than that. But I need for you to understand about the architecture and about that house, because until you do you won't understand me. And nothing at all can work for us until you do.”

He looked at me and made a half-exasperated, half-amused
sound and reached over and thumbed the tears off my face.

“Shit, Kate, don't turn into a cryer on me,” he said. “I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I'll try not to snarl if you'll try not to cry. Deal?”

I nodded, unable to look at him.

“Okay. My mother was a Seminole Indian from the Everglades outside Miami. She was born in them and she died in them. I don't know if you've ever seen the Everglades, but it isn't fit country for anything but rattlesnakes and alligators and, of course, Seminoles. There was a settlement of 'Noles back in there, in tarpaper shacks on stilts, so far back that the water was always black and the air was always gray and the sun never got through the moss and trees. The mud stank and the mosquitoes never stopped and the heat never let up. Some of the old people had spent their whole lives there. I was born there, and lived there for the first seven years of my life…” He paused, and then laughed the tight, bad laugh I had heard before.

“You know, people are always pissing and moaning about the fires in the Everglades, and the droughts, and the poaching, and how they're a national treasure and we've got to save them for future generations. But I tell you, if mine could be the hand that lit the fire that burned that fucking murdering swamp to hell I'd die a happy man.

“Anyway, my mother was a squatty, dark little lady with no schooling and no skills and no maternal instincts to speak of. She lived to drink, and to drink she had to hook, and she did hook, whenever she ran out of booze. She'd bring her gentlemen friends back to the shack, or they'd show up sniffing around it, and they'd go at it with me on my little pallet in the corner. I had standing orders to turn my head to the wall when she brought a date home. That's what she called them, dates. Until I married, I thought you couldn't fuck without yelling like a wildcat or a Seminole. I never knew who my father was because my mother didn't. It could have been one of those guys who came to the 'Glades, for all I know.
Most of them were crackers. I know I've got a lot of white blood in me.”

I made a small sound of horror and he waved me quiet.

“It wasn't all bad,” he said. “I had an uncle, Uncle Jimmy, her older brother, and he was good to me. After she got to drinking so bad he used to take me to work with him sometimes. He was a framer for construction companies, and a good one. He always had work. He was little and dark and catlike, like her, and there wasn't anywhere he couldn't go, hand over hand, like a monkey. I'd sit on the ground under a tree being real quiet and watch him. He worked for Sibley Construction the year I was born, and that's how I got my last name. My mother just told them that at the county hospital and they put it down. Hell, who cared about one more skinny, squalling little 'Nole?

“The year I was six Uncle Jimmy was working on a big house out on the ocean, one of those fifty-room jobs with the big stone fence and the iron gates and the pools and the fountains and tennis courts. He took me out to see it on a Sunday, when there wasn't anybody else around. We walked all through it, and my eyes were just getting bigger and bigger, and something was happening to my heart, and I could smell the wet concrete and the plaster dust and the sand and black earth in the sun, and see the ocean beyond, cool and clean and free, and it just came to me that I was going to build those babies, too. Design and build them, I mean. I think I can remember having this distinct sense even then about how you would do it. And then he took me out back to this kind of white tower that stood all by itself in a grove of palms, and we climbed up the outside steps and at the top there was this round white room with glass on all sides, looking straight out to sea over the top of the palms. All you could see was clean blue sky and clean blue sea and gulls, and way off in the sea, little white sails. Christ, it was so
clean
up there. That was the thing that got me. I'd never seen clean like that before, or light, or space. And the wind flowed through singing like a river. The floor was white tile,
and the walls white stucco, and the ceiling…white. White and empty and cool and clean. And beyond it more clean blue, clear to the end of the world.

“I remember that I said to him, ‘I can do this.' And he just looked at me and said, ‘Yes, you can, and you do it, Paulie. You get out of there and you do it.' ”

He was quiet for so long that I thought that was the end of the story. I felt that my heart would burst with sorrow for him.

“And you did do it,” I whispered.

“Yeah, sort of,” he said, smiling down at me. “At least I got out. He fell off a scaffolding the next winter and crushed his spine and went on disability, and she died of cirrhosis the next spring, and the county came and got me and put me in foster homes, and I did okay. Hell, I would have gladly become a Filipino houseboy if it would have gotten me out of the ‘Glades. I worked hard and minded and studied and got good grades and joined the army when I was eighteen, and the army sent me to France, and I toured around Europe looking at buildings until I got out, and then I took what I'd saved and started at the École and met Berthe and…the rest, as they say, is history. So, yeah. I did do part of it. But I missed on the house. I missed out on the house.”

I looked up at him. The tears overflowed, and through them I saw both the tall man who sat beside me in a garage apartment in Randolph, Alabama, and a dark-eyed, thin little boy in a white tower by the sea, his heart bursting with an epiphany of light and air and cleanliness and blue water. I wanted nothing on the earth at that moment but to give it to him, to hand him with both hands his house by the sea. And then I thought, in simple joy, I can do that. I can.

I turned to face him squarely. I put my hands on him; I touched his face and his hair, and his mouth, and I wept, and I laughed, and I fell over my own words as you do, sometimes, your feet.