Outer Banks (39 page)

“There's no tomorrow,' ” I sang. “ ‘There's just tonight.' ”

“Thank you, Jean Paul Sartre,” Cecie said sharply. “A nice existential philosophy. Only aren't you curious? Don't you want some say in tomorrow?”

“I'm not awfully sure there's going to be much of a tomorrow,” I said. I meant it lightly, but it did not sound that way here on the darkening water.

She shook her white head.

“There were people like you in the hospital,” she said, “and they scared me to death. Well, not like you, but they said the same thing. They didn't live one minute ahead, not one second. They had no stake in the future. Didn't want any. And that did scare me. And you scare me when you say that.”

“Just tell me what's so hot about tomorrow,” I said. “What's tomorrow got that right now doesn't?”

“Tomorrow is when I might see a Canada goose up close, or win the lottery, or one of the boys might marry Brooke Shields, or a man from Venus might land in my thyme patch,” Cecie said. She said it intently. “Possibilities, Kate. Tomorrow is about possibilities.”

“No, it isn't,” I said in a low, furious voice. “It's about death. If there's a tomorrow, then there's death in it somewhere. Tomorrow won't bring back Stephen. Or Vinnie.”

“How the hell do you know?” she said, just as vehemently. “It might. You don't know. You never will. You don't have to worry about death, Kate, because you've already had yours…”

Something bumped the boat. It bumped again before I could jerk my head around to look. I heard Cecie draw her breath in in
a soft little gasp, and then I saw them. The boat was ringed with big, sleek, wet, gray seal-like heads, nudging and bobbling and splashing. I started to scream and Cecie laid a hand on my knee. Two of the heads came out of the water and stared over the gunwale of the boat directly into my eyes, and I saw the bright, wide-set black button eyes, and the upcurved snouts, and the smiles; heard the strange, wet little breathy exhalations from the blowholes, smelled the sea strong on them. Dolphins. We were surrounded by dolphins.

I drew in my breath again, and Cecie said in a low voice, “They won't hurt you. They're the sweetest, friendliest things in the sea. They're curious, and they want to play. Sit still and see what happens.”

I did and it was incredible. It was like something out of a wonderful childhood dream, or a fairy tale. There was an element of fright in it, of eeriness, because they were so big and so close, and so wild, for all the bumping, nudging friendliness, and the clowns' antics. These were sea creatures, things of myth and legend, born of wildness and a different element entirely. But mostly it was simply…enchanted.

For they did play. There were, we counted, twelve of them, twelve enormous, shining creatures with sleek skins like wet gray inner tubes; I know because I touched one. Reached right over and touched him as he reared himself up out of the sea to look at me, grinning his greetings. He felt sleek as glass and firm and alive, yet unlike anything I had ever touched. He felt…transcendent.

“Oh,” I said softly. “Oh. Oh.”

For fully half an hour, until the last green light began to fade, they put on a show for us. They swam in formation around the boat and then away from it; fell into a straight line and porpoise-dived toward us like swimmers in a water ballet; leaped in pairs and threes far out of the water, sometimes completely, tossing their tails, and splashed down again, still in their sets. They swam backward in formation, their bright faces staring at us; I had the
sense that if they had been on land they would have been dancing backward on their tails. They dived and surfaced directly under and around us, smacking the water with the gray, rubbery tails; they arced and capered and soared, and slapped the water flat with their beautiful big bodies, sending silver sheets of it over us in the boat. If we clapped our hands, they shot out of the water in unison, like underwater missiles. If we shouted and applauded, they raced away and came booming back down the Sound in twos, fours, sixes, and once, all in a line. Twelve of them. They put their faces up to ours, and squeaked and whistled and chittered their strange, unearthly little cries, and sometimes lay still in the water with just their heads on the boat, gazing soulfully at us. If we had wanted, I think we could have slipped out of the boat and mounted them and ridden away. We laughed and sang to them, we shouted and clapped, we whistled and petted them, and once Cecie reached over and hugged a massive gray head. “Ondine,” I thought. “She is Ondine.”

And just as suddenly they were gone. There was a last fillip of tail, and they submerged, and in a moment the dark, satiny sea was as still as if they had never been there. We looked at each other. Neither one of us had said a word. Both of us were crying, silently.

“That's why tomorrow,” Cecie sobbed. “That's why.”

“I love you, Cecie,” I said, and reached over and kissed her, and hugged her close.

“I love you, too,” she said. We sat for a moment with our wet cheeks pressed together. We had never said it to each other before. I felt an enormous sense of peace.

She flicked on the motor and the running lights, and we headed up the Sound toward the dock in Nag's Head. We said very little on the silent, deep-blue trip back. Soon the lights of Nag's Head began to appear on either side of us, and the world of people leaned in close once more.

“Shall we tell them?” Cecie said, as we turned east and began to cut in toward the dock.

“No,” I said. “I don't think so. I think I want to keep this for us.”

“Me, too,” she said.

She began to whistle through her teeth, and then she chuckled, in the dark.

“You know Maslow? The peak experience guy? What he said about a real peak experience: that it told you something about your relationship with the harmony of being? He'd have loved those guys,” she said.

“That's nice,” I said. “That's a nice thought.”

“Fuckin' aye,” Cecie said.

As we drew close to the dock, she pointed up toward the east.

“See that light? That top one? That's in the studio at the cottage. Ten to one old Fig's up there with the telescope, looking at us. Hi, Fig!” And she waved gaily into the darkness.

I laughed.

“That's ridiculous. How do you know? Why would she do that?”

“Because I went up there and looked one day when she wasn't there, and she's got Paul's telescope pulled over to the window where she can see the house and the yard and the road and the dock. And because that's what Fig does. She looks at you. She watches you. Stand up, Kate, and let's give her something to look at…”

“What on earth…” I said.

“Stand up!” Cecie shouted, and I did. The boat rocked wildly. I staggered, and braced myself.

Cecie threw her arms around me and kissed me on the mouth and hugged me hard, and then turned to face the light and shouted, “Looky, Fig! Kate and I are queer for each other! Queer
as three-dollar bills, gay as geese! Just what you always thought! Look ahere, Fig Newton!”

And she held up her hand and shot a bird into the darkness.

I began laughing. I laughed so hard that I could not stand, but slumped, my arms still around her, back down onto the seat, pulling her down. The boat wallowed wildly. She was laughing, too. We wept and howled and roared. I had not laughed so hard since those nights at Randolph so long ago, and then it was, as it was now, at Fig Newton.

“L'chaim, old Kate,” Cecie gasped as the dock rose up before us in the darkness.

“L'chaim, old Cece,” I said.

When we got out of the Land Rover in the sandy yard of the cottage, still giggling, Ginger came unsteadily down the wrought-iron staircase from the studio to meet us. She wore the yellow silk caftan that she had on when I had first gotten there, and her hair was snailed and lacquered into a gleaming helmet atop her head, and vermilion lipstick leaked crazily up the small furrows around her lips. She carried a full glass, and she stumbled twice.

“In the bonds, Tri Omegas,” she said, slurring, and giggled. “I have a surprise for you. Come on up and see.”

Something prickled at the back of my neck. My skin felt as if a little cold wind had rippled over sunburn.

“What?” I said.

“Paul. He came in while you were gone,” Ginger said merrily. “He's waiting for you in the studio. For y'all, I mean. Of course.”

And so it ended.

L
ATE
that night the outriders of the storm came in. I saw them stream slowly across the high white moon, the mare's-tail clouds that Ginger's father had shown us long ago at just this time, in just this sky. From where I lay, my face turned on the hot pillow so I could see the sky and sea, they looked like long, wind-blown tresses of silver hair flung across the sky. Mermaids' hair, maybe. Paul had said, as we all left the studio for bed, that the mermaids had gone from the Outer Banks, but perhaps, after all, they had not. Surely, if you were to hear them singing, it would be on a night like this, riding the slow silver sea before a storm. I rolled over on my other side and then back to the window, and flung the covers off me. The night was thick and still, even with the window wide open. There was no wind off the sea. The moon-bright room was airless. I had been lying awake since before eleven. I knew by now that I would not sleep.

The week was over, of course. The girls of September were scattered even before we parted physically. We might stay on for our appointed three more days, but now it would be middle-aged women who slept and ate and drank and laughed in the big house on the Outer Banks. Other people entirely. Well, I thought, surely it would have ended before it ended, anyway. I can't imagine how we carried it as long as we did. The center could not hold, and didn't. I lay under the weight of the moon, not young Kate Lee anymore, and not Kate Abrams, either. I did not know this woman…for woman she was. Desire dark and mature and fierce flamed along her veins and made her toss in the hot bedclothes, desire with nothing in it of tenderness or wit or subtlety. Simply, I wanted to go up to Paul Sibley in his dark studio and make love to him until there was nothing left of either of us. Until we were consumed and gone.

If it had not been for the utter shock of seeing him when I had thought not to, I think I could have kept the fragile skin of timelessness and content around me. I think, if there had been any warning, I might have kept it intact no matter what. But I had had no warning at all. Ginger's words shattered the shell, and the sight of him blew the shards away. And ever since I had been as I always had in his presence: naked, skinned, vulnerable to anything and everything in the world. Vulnerable to death: the Pacmen and the waiting bridge shimmered and sang. Vulnerable to the life I felt leaping in his flesh when he touched me. Vulnerable to the answering thunderclap of life in my own.

He had only kissed me lightly on the cheek, as he did Cecie; brushed my burning cheek with his mouth and said, in the voice that I had not remembered except in the marrow of my bones, “My God, Kate, you've struck a deal with the devil. Get out of here and age twenty years before you come back.”

And I had said, my ears roaring, “Well, hey. Fancy meeting you here.”

And he had laughed, because after all, where else should I
meet him but in his own white room above the sea, even if it was no longer white? And I had blushed because it had been a stupid thing to say, and he had said, still grinning, “You still do that, don't you?,” and gone back to his seat in the wing chair by the fireplace. And this new woman was born, whole and vivid and hungry, and I feared and hated her. She was all hunger and thirst and fear and anger; she gnawed and raged and shrieked inside. Outside her, I smiled cheerfully and chattered, and drank my scotch, and laughed as Cecie and Fig and Ginger told him about our week. And sat as far across the room from him as I could get, in a deep leather armchair, with my knees drawn up against my chest and my arms wound tightly around them so he would not see the beating of that other woman's heart.

I watched him as he listened to us, amused and attentive. He had changed; you would not mistake this man for the hawklike young architect I had left behind at Randolph. He was heavier, massive, now: it was as if even his long bones had thickened. But he was not fat. Muscle played along his forearms and in his neck. There would be enormous power in his grasp. He was deeply tanned, as tanned and leathery as Ginger, but of course it looked right on him, and the Kate I had known felt a flicker of annoyance at the unfairness of that. His thick black hair was striped with pure white. It was startling and theatrical; you would remember him. He would stand out in any crowd now. Well, he always did. That had not changed. The presence of him smote the air around us four women like something not heard, but felt: the percussion of an explosion.

“You look like an aristocratic skunk,” Cecie said.

He laughed. His teeth gleamed white. There were deep, sallow circles under his eyes, and long furrows in his forehead and cheeks, but he was, somehow, still the young Paul who had overwhelmed them all with French cooking and wine and music at that long-ago dinner for them. It was, I remembered, when Ginger
and Cecie and Fig had first met him. It changed a lot of things, that night.

“And you look like Peter Pan grown a little older but still not up,” he said. “You look just like I thought you would. You and Kate. Me and Ginger, we haven't managed so well. And Fig…what can I say? Is this a Fig I see before me?”

“In the flesh,” Fig said. It was the throaty purr she had used with Poolie Prout, and Cecie grinned at me. I made myself grin back. I wondered where Poolie was, and in what condition. Fig looked languid and creamy.

“In the very considerable flesh,” Paul said. “I was prepared for you, though. I've seen you on about a million book jackets and talk shows. But Cecie and Kate…”

He looked from her to me. His eyes stayed on me.

“Fix us another round, honey,” Ginger said. “I'll go get some munchies.”

He looked levelly at Ginger, and I did, too. Somehow it was hard to do it. Looking at her was not good; looking at Ginger had always given me a little surge of warmth and safety, but there was nothing of that Ginger here. Even less than there had been of her when she had met me on the stairs. Was it only a few days before? I had thought we had lost that sad, wrecked, lacquered woman for good, but here she was back. She smiled widely and fixedly at her husband, her jewelry flashing in the firelight, her heavy face painted and strange, her hair impenetrable and dreadful. Her eyes glittered under the beading of mascara, and there was sweat on her upper lip and forehead, and crescents of it stained the yellow silk caftan under her arms. She swayed slightly on the gilded sandals.

“I'll go get the munchies,” Paul said. “I don't want you taking a header down the stairs. We just got your leg out of a cast after the last one. Fix yourselves another, girls; I think I'll pass. I have to get up early tomorrow; I've got a long drive ahead of me.”

“You're not staying?” It was a wail of disappointment, from Ginger. I thought that tears as well as liquor glistened in her eyes.

He shook his head. “Can't, I'm afraid. I've got to be in Alabama for a directors' meeting day after tomorrow, practically at dawn. I just came by to get some proxy forms. I'll be driving till midnight tomorrow night as it is. And the weather doesn't look good; there's a tropical something or other coming across the Carolinas from the Gulf, that should hit in the afternoon. They thought it would go the other way, but it didn't. You all might think about cutting it short and leaving in the morning, if you can bear to; it could just be a day's blow, but then again, it could hang around for two or three days and kick up all kinds of fuss. You never know about the Banks in September.”

“Oh, no! Oh, don't any of you go,” Ginger cried. “Even if it lasts, we could just dig in with the fire and the booze and the records and have a wonderful time. The Banks are famous for their hurricane parties…”

“I'm not going anywhere,” Fig said languorously. “I'd love to see a real storm from this room. Or some room.” And she smiled, silkily.

“Fig has become a close personal friend of Poolie Prout,” Ginger giggled. It was a silly giggle, high and artificial. “I do believe it is to him she refers.”

“My God, Fig, Poolie Prout is pond scum,” Paul grinned. “The surest way I know to get busted for something unfunny and unsavory is to hang around him. He's been flirting with the Feds up and down this coast for years. It's only a matter of time.”

“I like a little salt with my…ah…meat,” Fig said.

“So I hear and read,” Paul said, the grin widening. “Well, on your head be it. Whoever doesn't have a big, solid car better skedaddle, though. Whose Alfa is that?”

“Mine,” I said. “But I really don't think…”

“You'd better be on the road early, Kate,” he said, and he was not smiling. “I'm not kidding. I've seen the coast road three feet under surf in bad storms, and as it is it'll be following you up the coast if it doesn't blow out to sea…”

“I'm not leaving,” I said loudly. My heart was pounding, and my ears rang with pure fright. I saw, as clearly as I saw him across the room, watching me, the great bridge arching into air in the dawn over the Chesapeake Bay. The bridge, and rain blowing straight across it…The girl who had not feared the bridge, who had been half in love with it, was gone now. The new woman went cold at the thought of it. No, I would not leave. To leave would be to go to the bridge…

Deep inside me the Pacmen gobbled and gnawed.

“No,” I said.

“Oh, it is going to be just so perfect!” sang Fig in a new voice. We all stared at her. Her face was radiant, and her eyes glittered; her whole small, carved body seemed to vibrate, to shimmer. You could practically feel the heat coming off her. No one spoke.

“So wonderfully, totally perfect; just like at school in winter, all closed in, just the four of us sisters, remember, Effie, the time we had the ice storm and we couldn't even leave the house, and we didn't have any power, and we wrapped up in blankets in yours and Cecie's room and ate apples and drank tapwater coffee and you read poetry to us by a flashlight…”

It was Fig's voice. Not Georgina Stuart's, but Fig Newton's. Long-ago Fig, shrill and skewed and…wrong. What had called her back, I wondered? The storm? No, of course, it was Paul. I thought then that she was probably still in love with him. Why, I thought bitterly, should that change?

“Well, then, it's settled. Let's drink to that,” Ginger chortled, and snatched up the heavy Waterford whiskey decanter and dropped it. It flew into a cloud of stinging crystal shards, and amber liquor splashed everywhere. I saw it spatter over Fig's white silk breasts, and drip slowly off Paul's brown face. The silence was long and terrible. I saw Cecie close her eyes. Fig smiled and smiled, looking about her interestedly. Ginger began to cry.

“I'm sorry,” she whimpered, her eyes on Paul's face. “I'm so sorry…”

“Come on, Gingerpuss,” he said neutrally. “Let's get you to bed before you wreck the joint.”

“Oh, no, please…”

“Come on. Party's over,” he said, and took her forearm in his brown hand. I saw Ginger wince, but she did not pull away.

“I'll probably read a little and turn in, too,” he said, looking around at us pleasantly. “You all carry on. I'll make pancakes in the morning if anybody's up early enough. Specialty of the house.”

“You got a deal,” Cecie said, and I nodded. Relief flooded me; under it, the new woman wailed, “Don't go!”

“Do you remember the mermaids?” Fig said in her old-new voice. “Remember, Ginger, about the mermaids who sang in the storm, for sailors who were going to wreck? Maybe we'll hear them. Have you ever heard them, Paul?”

“Nope,” he said. “Nary a trill. I think they must have relocated. Maybe up to Long Island. What about it, Katie? You ever hear the mermaids?”

“Nary a trill,” I said.

He turned and was gone down the outside stairs, marching Ginger before him. I heard her voice all the way down, pleading like a small girl's. I did not hear him speak at all.

“Anybody for a nightcap?” Fig said brightly.

“Maybe I will, just one,” Cecie said.

I was surprised; she drank seldom, and I had never known her to seek out Fig's company. But the surprise was dulled and blunted under the howling of the new woman.

“Shut up,” I said to her aloud, out in the still, thick night, and went into the big house and down the hall to my bedroom, and shut the door, and crawled into my white bed without washing my face or putting on my nightgown. I did not sleep. I did not think I would.

At three
A.M.
I got up and slid into my robe and went out onto the deck. I know it was three because I heard Ginger's foolish little cuckoo clock strike the hour in the kitchen as I tiptoed past
Cecie's bed. She had come in an hour or so earlier, and had whispered, “You awake?”

I had not answered. Neither young Kate nor the new woman had anything to say about this night. Over, just let it be over…Cecie slid into her bed and did not speak again. Presently I heard the familiar small sigh that meant she had slipped into sleep. Now, as I went softly past her bed, she stirred but did not waken. She usually did not, once she slept. I wondered how Cecie handled those heart-sickening, breath-sucking night horrors of middle age, whether she simply made dreams of them, or even if she had them at all. I thought that if anyone could avoid them, it would be Cecie Hart Fiori. The night horrors are about death. Cecie was more about life than anyone I have ever known.

Out on the deck, the night was dark. The clouds had curdled over the moon and cobbled the entire sky now, flying, ragged gray, shot with silver from behind. Where the sea had been burning cold silver it was now leaden, pewter, tossing. The wind was strange; it whispered and moaned, then fell still, then crooned again. The night air was chilly, but the wind was warm and thick with wetness and, somehow, the odor of tropical trees.

I had thought I might walk down to the edge of the sea, but with the moon gone and the rags of gray clouds flying and the eerie little moan of the warm wind the beach was suddenly a fearful place. I remembered a strange little horror movie I had seen when I was a child, called
I Walked With a Zombie;
through it all a warm wind keened over a black tropical sea, while a giant emaciated black zombie came on and on down the silent beach, his monstrous feet dragging in the sand. This wind was like that. I turned away from the dunes and the sea and went around the end of the deck to where the big hammock hung, far under the porch eaves. I would finish the night there, and wait for the morning.