Outer Banks (41 page)

I pulled on sweat pants and shirt and went barefoot into the kitchen where the wall phone was. I was pulling my tangled hair up into its knot with automatic fingers when I entered, and Paul said, “Leave it down. I want to see if there's any gray in it.”

He grinned. It was a pleasant, light little grin. He wore gray flannel slacks and a crisp blue oxford shirt under a gray crewneck sweater, and his hair had damp comb tracks in it. His sharp-planed tanned face glowed from the razor. His eyes were clear and mild. He held a spatula in his hand. At the butcher block table Cecie and Fig sat, eating pancakes. Ginger was nowhere in sight.

He pointed the spatula to the phone and I picked it up. “Pancakes?” he mouthed, and I nodded.

“Alan?” I said.

“Kate,” Alan said, in the clipped, no-nonsense voice he used when he was full of plans and arrangements and the sweetness of controlling things. It was the voice I liked least. “Kate, I want you to come home today. This morning. Start as soon as you can. I
want you back as soon after dark as you can get here, and with that storm…”

“Well, good morning to you, too, darling,” I said. “Yes, thank you. I'm having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”

“Oh, for God's sake, Kate, I'm sorry, but I'm in Manhattan, and there's somebody waiting for the phone, and I don't have time…can you get on the road by ten? It's past nine now.”

“Why, I suppose I could,” I said languidly. “But why on earth should I?” Alan knew I hated it when he hustled me like this. What was the matter with him?

“Because there's a goddamned hurricane or something headed right straight for you—A. And because I have an appointment for you with Carter Hilliard at noon tomorrow, in his office—B. It's the only time he can see you until late November, and we're not going to wait that long.”

“Carter Hilliard…no. I'm not coming,” I said. “I'm not going to see Carter Hilliard. It was John McCracken I'm supposed to see, and not till the middle of next month. You had no right to make any appointment for me with Carter Hilliard…”

“I ran into John at lunch yesterday at the Yacht Club, and I told him about this foolishness with…the stuff coming back,” Alan said. His voice smoothed into the one he used when he thought I was being a fractious child. I like it second least. “He said he thought it was just that, too: foolishness, but he wanted you to see Carter anyway, instead of coming to him first. Said sometimes these vague feelings had a kind of body wisdom behind them. So he called Carter, and Carter said he could see you, but only tomorrow morning. He's going on vacation the day after. So get it on the road and let's get this thing behind us, Kate. I'll be at the house when you get in tonight. I'll take you in in the morning.”

“I'm not coming,” I said. “Not for another three days. Nobody else is leaving; I can't just run off…it's not going to be a bad storm. Nobody around here is worried…”

“Carter can't see you after tomorrow, Kate; didn't you hear me?”

“Then I'll wait and see John when I was supposed to,” I said. “I don't understand you, Alan. You weren't worried; you said you were sure there wasn't anything, and now you're jerking me out of here like my life depends on it…”

And it does, I thought. Just not the way you think. I thought again of the bridge, the bridge in the rain, the bridge in the wind, the bridge in the pink of dawn, and beyond it, the wild, sour-honey sweetness of space….

Not now, the new woman said to me and to the man on the telephone. Not now. Not before I've lived once more, and burned up with living and blazed out with it. Not until then…

“I want to stay until Saturday,” I said. “I meant to stay until then, and that's what I'm going to do. I'm sorry. Call Carter back, or I will.”

“Is that how long he's staying?” Alan said.

“Who?” I said, honestly.

“Come on, Kate. Your old friend there. The one with the voice, who answered the phone. Little Beaver, or Paul Perfect, or whoever. I thought he wasn't going to be in residence. I gather he changed his mind. I wonder if you have.”

Rage flooded me. My eyes filled with angry tears.

“I hadn't, no. But I have three days to decide, don't I?” I said furiously, and hung up the telephone. I turned to face Paul and Cecie and Fig.

“Sorry,” I said. “He wants me to come home this morning, and I really don't want to. What a charming little marital vignette to treat you to before breakfast…”

“Compared to Vinnie and me when we disagreed, it sounded like a Japanese tea ceremony,” Cecie said comfortably. She was eating pancakes and drinking hot chocolate.

“Hand me that plate, Kate, and I'll dump these new ones on
it for you,” Paul said. “I think he's right. You ought to get cracking right after breakfast.”

I ate the pancakes and drank coffee, not looking at him. Fig sipped coffee and looked around at us raptly. She still moved in the shimmer of something…barely contained, licking at her like heat lightning…that had played over her the night before. She was humming something this morning, over and over, just under her breath. When I had hung up the phone she had smiled at me as brilliantly as if I had done something lovely for her benefit, something delicate and special. When Paul spoke, she nodded enthusiastically, tossing her head up and down so that the heavy palomino hair swung up and down, as a child would nod.

“You listen to Paul, Effie,” she burbled. “You listen to your husband. We love you dearly, but you need to beat this storm home. That silly little car will float away if you wait much longer. Listen, the wind's picking up.”

It was. Outside, a spume of sand rose off the top of the dunes and whirled away on a gust. A violent spatter of rain followed. Then it subsided. But I could still hear the strange little moan that had begun last night. The sea was still flat, dimpled now with rain, but it was moving in great, slow, roiling heaves far out, as though, down deep, something monstrous struggled to be born.

“What about you, Cece?” I said. “How do you vote?”

“Stick around,” she said. “This will be over by this time tomorrow. I'll beat you at chess this afternoon and make you pasta a'fagioli tonight.”

I looked back at Paul. He smiled at me pleasantly, and took my empty plate.

“Up to you,” he said. “You know what I think. Well, ladies, I've got to get out of here if I want to beat the worst of it inland. I'm not going to say goodbye, because I hope this is the first of many such. I'll collect a smooch from you, though. For the road.”

He walked from one to the other of us, kissing us lightly, hugging us. Cecie smiled and averted her head very slightly. Fig's
face, as she held it up, made me think of a young novitiate's as she became the Bride of Christ. Or of that young Fig, holding her face up to me during her doomed initiation into Tri Omega. It burned with transcendence, with a still, fierce flame. His lips brushed hers and she closed her eyes.

He came to me, and hugged me, and kissed the top of my head. “See you, Katie Lee,” he said, and patted my behind, and picked up his raincoat and briefcase and went out of the kitchen. In a moment we heard the big Mercedes purr into life and bump away down the rutted drive.

We looked at each other in the quiet, bright kitchen. We smiled. There was a sense of atoms torn out of their orbit, rearranged, by something enormous and elemental that had swept through and passed on.

“ ‘When I'm calling you—ooo-ooo,' ” Fig shrilled out suddenly, in a tremulous soprano. “ ‘Will you answer tru-uuu-uue?' ”

She looked around at us and smiled enigmatically.

“I have heard the mermaids singing,” she said. “And so have you. So you be careful going home, Effie Lee. Don't get shipwrecked.”

She giggled. Then she laughed aloud.

Ginger came shambling into the kitchen. She wore the silk caftan over nothing; you could see the softness of her big body bobbling beneath it, and the big, dark aureoles of her nipples. Her hair was wild and her face puffed and pale. She wore sunglasses. The odor of stale whiskey was powerful in the thick air.

“Has Paul gone?” she mumbled, opening the refrigerator door and looking in. She did not look at me. She did not look at any of us.

“Yes. You just missed him,” Fig said. “And we're trying to persuade Effie Lee she ought to get going, too. Alan called her and practically ordered her home.”

“Good move,” Ginger Fowler Sibley said, her head still in the refrigerator.

There was a little indrawn breath from Cecie, and a wider, even more beatific smile from Fig. I felt my face go stiff and hot. She could not have heard, last night. She could not have…

I turned and went into my room and packed. It took me only a few minutes. When I came out again, Ginger was gone.

“She got sick,” Cecie said, looking at me worriedly. “I told her to go on back to bed, you'd understand, and you'd call her when you got home. You will, won't you?”

“Of course,” I said. “It may be a few days, though. Alan has an appointment for me in Manhattan first thing in the morning, and I'll be very late getting in.”

Fig hugged me hard and kissed me quickly on the lips when I left the kitchen. I felt her nails go deep into my ribs, and her lips part slightly against mine. Then she stood back, smiling, shimmering, humming.

“Godspeed, Effie Lee,” she said. “Now that we've found you, we'll never let you go.”

Cecie came into my arms and we stood holding each other silently. My chin rested in the white curls on top of her head.

“Toujours gai,” I said into her hair. I tasted the sun in it, and the salt of my own tears.

“Toujours gai,” she said. “And all that. Call us. And be careful, old Kate. It's a long trip.”

“Tell Ginger goodbye,” I said, and went out of the kitchen and around the deck and down to the car. The rain and the tears were warm on my face, and the wind sang. I could not see the horizon now. That far out there was no way to tell the sea from the sky. I tossed the bag into the back of the car and stood for an instant, looking up at the big black house. Except for the bright kitchen, no lights burned. Standing this close, it shut out the sky.

I got into the Alfa and drove out of the driveway and down the sand track to the road. And there, instead of turning right for the mainland and the Interstate, I turned the car to the left, down the old coast highway, toward the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

I
T
should have taken me about four hours to get there. It is seventy-eight miles from Nag's Head to Avon on the narrow blacktop National Park road, and the rain was gusting horizontally by then, so hard that the windshield swam continually, the little wipers laboring at top speed just to keep a thread of vision possible. The wind prowled high overhead, and the moaning rose occasionally to a keen. It was not dark, but rather strangely bright; it was as if the entire world was immersed in a radiant, flying spume. There must have been sun somewhere out to sea, but the storm, coming in from the east, was eating it alive. It was another element entirely, not wind or water or air, but a crooning melding of the three. I could see little but the teeming silver-pewter and the occasional white shafts of oncoming headlights, and could hear nothing but the roar of the storm and the hollow boom of the surf, hidden by the dunes to my left, and the frying static of the Alfa's
radio. Those, and the profound staggering of my heart. I should have been afraid; I should have hugged the right shoulder and crept along, and stopped periodically to clear my windshield. I should, of course, have turned around and gone back. But I did none of those things and I was not afraid. I made the trip, finally, in two hours and fifteen minutes, and I drove those howling miles in a consuming and immutable flame of rage as bright and hot as the vanished sun.

There were two of us in the car that morning, and the rage belonged to the new woman. The old Kate hung on and whimpered and begged ineffectively for her to stop, to go back, to turn around, to go back along the coast road to the quiet bridge and the quiet dawn and the quiet death. But the new woman, sizzling and shimmering with the delectable rage, overrode her.

I was angry at my whole life, of course, angry at my father and mother, angry at that young Paul, angry at Ginger, angry at Stephen for dying, angry at Cecie and angry at my vanquished, never-born self. The anger filled the world and the car and my head. I did not attempt to understand it, or to mitigate it. Anger is its own excuse and its own reward, and needs no assistance from its owner. It was all the anger I have never felt, all the anger I had been afraid to own, all the anger I had abjured for my cherished timelessness and peace. Over it all rode the two great, sustaining tides of this rage. Anger at death. Anger at Alan.

I flew down the wild coast road on invulnerable wings of anger. I could, that morning, have driven the Alfa Romeo into and through hell.

Madness rode with me, singing; oh, yes, I knew that. I knew that it was never far from the two Kates. It rode the wind over the little car like a stormy petrel. It set us, the old woman and the new, to humming and singing through the lava of anger, and to speaking aloud to each other, and even, once or twice, to laughing.

We sang “Waltzing Matilda” and “Once I Had a Secret Love”
and “Ebbtide.” We sang, choking and gasping with secret laughter, “The Man That Got Away” and “Stormy Weather.” We shouted Yeats and Dylan Thomas, and Dorothy Parker:

and:

We conducted Wagner, the great, booming storm overture from
The Flying Dutchman,
and sang wordlessly along with it. We shouted aloud, from
Ulysses,
Molly Bloom's wild, joyous cry of surrender:

And from Shakespeare:

“You're nuts,” we said to each other. “Certifiable. Where are you? What is the date? Who is the president?”

But under and over and through it all, the blazing, sustaining anger.

“Why are you so mad at Alan?” I said to the new woman.

“Because he didn't come and get you, if he wanted you back so damned bad. Because he didn't stop you from coming here. Because he didn't stop Stephen from dying. Because he didn't stop you from getting cancer. Because he can't stop you from…”

“What?”

“You know.”

“Say it.”

“Dying, then. Dying.”

“It's not his fault…”

“It's not yours. To hell with him. To
hell
with him. He can't even make you come.”

“That's not him. That's the Pacmen. You know it is. They eat the sperm, they would eat him…”

“Bullshit. It's him. You can have that again. You can have that for as long as you want it. We're going down there now, to get it. That's what this is all about…”

“I can't go down there. I have to go to the bridge. You know that…”

“Then,” shouted the new woman, “go to the goddamned bridge fucked like a lioness or a cat! Go fucked like a whole woman, one more time!”

“I've never been that, have I? Whole?”

“We're going to get that now.”

Far ahead, through the solid, radiant rain, I saw the frail flashing of red lights. We were coming up on the narrow spit of land where Oregon Inlet poured through from the sea to Pamlico
Sound, and I slowed the Alfa automatically. With the dropping of the engine, I heard a new sound: the deeper, wilder boom of angry surf, near at hand, of furious water crashing on concrete, instead of sand. I inched the car closer; without the forward motion, the rain was a solid, impenetrable sheet on the windshield; it was like being totally submerged in a maelstrom.

I got out of the car and shielded my eyes with my hands and peered ahead. The force of the wind pressed me against the car and drove stinging needles of rain and spray into my face and arms. The wind was still erratic; when it steadied into its storm force, I knew the car could not go forward through it. Ahead, dimly, I saw that the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge over Oregon Inlet was two or three inches under white water, and that every third or fourth wave that broke on the piling seas trying to crowd through the inlet surged over as though no bridge existed. The sea was a great, gray and white animal battering at the bridge. There was no one about, no police or emergency vehicles. Just the lights, on their sawhorses, flashing in the rain.

I got back into the car. I was sodden with rain and spray. I tasted salt. Standing still as it was, the car was rocked by the wind erratically, like a demented child with a rocking horse.

“I can't get this little car over that,” I said to the new woman. “I could get washed right off that bridge if one of those big waves hit while I was on it. At the very least the engine is going to drown out.”

“What difference would it make if you did?” she said. “You were going to go into the water anyway.”

“It has to be the other bridge,” I said. “The one over the Chesapeake.”

“Why? A bridge is a bridge is a bridge.”

“I have to choose. It has to be my choice.”

“Go on. Ram the gas and take this thing over.”

“No.”

“Go on!” she shouted. “Go on! Who knows, maybe this man
can do it, maybe this man can fuck the Pacmen right out of you! Alan Abrams couldn't do it; what have you got to lose by trying? This man…this man just might scourge you clean inside!”

I knew we were at the heart of it. For this I had come to the Outer Banks, for this I drove the coast road in a raging storm. For this. To be purged empty of death and filled with life.

Paul Sibley owed me a life.

The surf crashed over the bridge and withdrew, leaving a sucking wash of white bubbles. The wind keened. I revved the powerful little engine up as high as it would go. I closed my eyes. And I heard the singing.

I was mad; of course I was. At that moment, I was madder than a March hare. But I heard it. Far out at sea, pure and clear and impossibly thin and high, it floated over the storm like a white bird, the voices of the mermaids, singing to me.

“ ‘Human voices wake us, and we drown,' ” I whispered, and rammed the car forward. We hit the sheet of water on the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge like a small red projectile, and then I felt the Alfa fishtail, lift, plane, and soar, riding the water like a racing shell. We crossed the bridge to the sound of the silvery singing out at sea and the scream of the wind and the shrieking laughter of two women who became, finally, one.

I was still laughing, off and on, an hour later, when I parked the car beside Paul's Mercedes behind the end cabin of the Carolina Moon Motel.

He had the door open before I knocked. I stumbled in on the wings of the wind and a fierce spatter of cold rain, and he caught me in his arms and drew me away from the door.

“God, look at you, you look awful, you look beautiful,” he said, holding me against him and rocking with me. He kicked the door shut and the tumult outside dropped to a low, dreamy roar, like a waterfall. In the silence I heard my heart, a rapid triphammer, and his, deeper and slower, and a little crackle of static and jazz from his transistor radio, and the soft snicker of a wood fire. I heard
my own breathing in my ears, and the little puff of his breath on my wet face. I heard the rhythmic, faraway bronze lament of a bell buoy out at sea. I heard the little liquid chuckle as ice shifted in a bucket, and the spatter of rain on the small-paned windows of the little cottage. I heard the occasional secret sigh of the fire as a raindrop from the chimney found it. They were the sounds of peace and safety, profound and enfolding. I sighed, a long, bleeding sigh, and ground my face into his soft sweatered shoulder.

“Hold on to me,” I said. “I almost didn't get here. The bridge is under water up at the Inlet. I haven't seen another car since I came over it.”

He held me away from him and looked at me.

“How'd you get through?” he said. “They close it once the water comes over the road.”

“I just came through. I put the pedal to the metal and came on through like gangbusters,” I said, and began to laugh. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

“I was going to give you a drink by the fire,” he said, turning me toward the bathroom. “But first, I'm going to give you a hot bath. You're about to lose it, Katie Lee.”

He walked me through the crowded little room and into the tiny bathroom. He turned on the shower and it coughed and bucked and spat, and then hot water streamed out in a comforting shower and dimpled into the bathtub. The tub, washbasin, and toilet were a violent pink, and the tiny-tiled floor was pink and burgundy. The shower curtain swarmed with Disneyesque roses. The ruffled curtains that shut out the wild sea beyond the little window were filmy pink net over deeper pink vinyl. The thin chenille bath mat and towels were faded candy pink. I laughed harder. By the time he had peeled the sopping clothes off me, the bathroom was swirling with steam and I was weeping with laughter.

“I'm going to wring your clothes out and put them by the
fire,” Paul said. “When you've finished, yell. You can have my bathrobe.”

He opened the door and the steam gushed out and cool air streamed in.

“Paul,” I said. He turned back to me.

“Wash me,” I said. I stood in the swirling steam, still gasping with laughter, my legs and arms weak from it and from other things, and held my arms out to him.

“Oh, yes,” he said, and came into them.

I ripped the soft sweater dragging it over his head, and I ripped buttons getting his shirt off him. I whimpered and pulled at him while he struggled out of his socks and shoes, and I had him in the shower with me while his shorts still clung about his knees. I met him as he came to me and climbed up his body and wrapped my arms and legs around the warm, wet length of him; I pulled his hair and bit his mouth and clawed his back and shoulders and left deep scorings from my fingernails on his buttocks as I pulled him into me. I could not be still and I could not wait; I found his center and opened myself to it and thrust myself up to him to take him inside me; I screamed out like a falcon when I felt him slide deep, and felt the hot water pound and pound, and fought and clung and bit and licked him. He braced himself against the wall and I rode him like a tiger, clawing and screaming. We slid down the wall and into the tub, water pounding down over us, and finished it there, thrashing, screaming, exploding. I felt the molten core of me surging out into the water, and felt the life and heat of him pounding into me. When at last we lay still, I was bobbing slightly between his opened legs as he lay back in the cooling water; I said: “ ‘Would you like something to read?' ”

He lay back, laughing, his hands covering my soap-slicked breasts from behind. We bobbed there for a little time, until the water began to be uncomfortably cool. Outside the storm lifted a notch or two in intensity, and the lights flickered.

“Dylan Thomas. I remember,” he said. “You know, that's
what I missed, that I never knew I did. That's what I haven't had in all these long years. Besides your incredible long, skinny body, I haven't had your poetry and your laughter, to light me up. I haven't had laughter and love at the same time since you.”

“How could you live with Ginger and not have laughter?” I said.

“You can laugh at Ginger,” Paul said. “It's hard to laugh with her.”

We got out of the bathtub and he wrapped me in his big terry robe, and I bound my hair in a flimsy piglet-pink towel and we sat on the heart-shaped braided rug in front of the miniature fireplace and drank the wine that he had chilled in a plastic motel bucket. He had brought cheese and a baguette and some good pâté from somewhere, too, and we ate that, and fed lumps of coal from the dingy scuttle to the sputtering fire, and listened to the storm take the Banks in its teeth and shake them. We did not talk much, not then. I knew we would, but not yet. It was like the beginning of the week, when I had just come to Nag's Head, and the four of us women had talked little of ourselves and our lives. I had the sense that should we start to talk, Paul and I, we would talk until dawn broke the next day. I thought we would say, must say, things that would change things, things that would start engines that could not be stopped. Somehow I shrank from that. What we had done together already had the force of an inexorable phenomenon, like the storm; words that we chose and set adrift into the air were acts of deliberation, of affirmation and intent. Later for those. For now, peace and depletion and languor; wine and wind and fire and perhaps sleep; cleanness and lightness and rest. For now…now. I could not hear the Pacmen and I could not feel them.