Outer Banks (42 page)

“Down the drain,” I thought drowsily. “Washed those suckers right down the drain.”

“I didn't think you'd come,” Paul said. “I really didn't. I thought I'd just hole up here until the storm was over and go on down to Alabama and that would be that and I'd never see you
again. But somehow when you came I wasn't surprised. God, it was like Easter morning or something, seeing you walk in that door out of the rain and wind. Or no, like watching some amputated part of yourself come back and hitch itself in place after years and years. What now, Kate? Don't you see that things have to change now?”

Fatigue, simple and white and whispering, swept me.

“No talking,” I said. “Later, maybe, but not now. Now I want to sleep, and then I want to drink some more wine and then I want to do that nice thing we just did again, and after that maybe once or twice more, for good measure, and then maybe…
maybe
we'll talk. Although I don't guarantee it.”

We fell asleep spoon fashion, my back fitted into his stomach, with the thin, fuzzy, antiseptic-smelling pink nylon blanket pulled up over us and the fire whispering and sparking in the grate. I slept deeply, thickly, dreamlessly; I do not know how long. Sometime during the afternoon the storm came down upon us in full: the air outside blackened and the wind rose to a shout that reached deep and dragged me up from sleep. Just as I raised my head the lights flickered and went off, and the sound of the surf on the beach outside seemed suddenly much closer. I got up and padded to the window and pulled the curtain back. I could see nothing through the slanting black rain, but the wind was so vast and alive that you could almost see the shape of it, prowling outside. The little cabin shook with it, and the roof squeaked and tugged, and lightning and thunder struck simultaneously. In the constant green light I could see the dark, fussy bulks of the other little cabins and the office, but no lights glowed; lantern, candle, fire, nothing, and our two cars were the only two I could see. I shivered. Kate…young Kate…put her head out momentarily and thought, wildly, what am I doing here alone at the end of this frail earth in this storm, with this man? With that monstrous ocean out there? It's not even the right ocean. Where is my ocean? Where is Alan?

When Paul came and stood behind me, as naked as I was, and
put his arms around me, it was the new woman who turned into his arms and said, “Gentlemen, start your engines.”

We did it again, did it twice and three times, on the bed and on the floor, and before the fire, and even under the silly, ill-made burn-scarred tea table that sat before the windows. We bumped our heads and carpet-burned our buttocks and bruised each other's flesh and rasped our throats. The new woman knew things that Kate did not know, had never known, and did them shamelessly and with joy and greed. The man Paul knew things that the young Paul had not discovered, either. The man Paul did them all to the woman, found new sources of heat and light in her thin body, stroked new chords altogether, called out new urgencies of muscle and blood and pressure. I took what he gave me with absolute, savage appetite, and asked for more, and got it, and when at last we fetched up once more before the fire, hair and faces and necks and legs slick with sweat, bodies emptied out and trembling, it was near eight o'clock at night. I could see the green glow from Paul's Rolex clearly. There had been no abating of the wind and rain and hollow-booming surf, none of thunder and lightning, but it had not risen, either.

“Is it stopping?” I said. My throat was so raw that I could barely whisper the words. I was as sore as if I had been in some physical accident. I remembered that I had felt this same soreness after Stephen was born. Who, I wondered, what, had been born this day?

“No, it'll blow and rain and so forth for another six to twelve hours,” Paul said. “But it isn't going to get any worse. It isn't a real hurricane. The wind will start to drop very gradually now; by morning the bridge will be open. You could probably get through it by midnight in a four-wheeler. But I wouldn't want to try. Does it really matter? We're not going anywhere yet.”

“Not yet,” I said. I drank some tepid wine from the bottle he had just opened, while he built up the fire. The ridiculous, rococo little room leaped into shadowy life.

“I will never, as long as I live, forget the Carolina Moon,” I said, nestling back into the tumbled covers of the bed. They smelled of him and me and salt and love.

“It'll be our place,” he said, smiling and tracing his fingertip lightly from my chin down to my navel, slowly. My flesh rippled like a horse's when a fly lights on it.

“We'll come here at least once a year,” he said.

I did not answer. He pressed close to me in the fire-shadowed darkness. I could feel all the bulk of him, the knobs and long bones and flesh and heat, the fine tangles of dark body hair. He seemed very large.

“Kate,” he said into my snarled hair, “what is it? There's something…I don't know. Something not right yet. What is it? Tell me so I can fix it.”

I sighed. Something inside me that had been knotted and frozen, some last small ice-shut lock, opened. I could tell this man. There was nothing I had held back from him this day. I could tell him.

“You can't fix it,” I said. “Nobody can.”

“I can. I will. Only you have to tell me.”

I stared into the darkness and felt his arms and his weight and his blood, coursing calmly and strongly.

“I'm sick,” I said. It was not at all hard to say the words. Easy, in fact. Easy.

“I've been sick a long time. I don't think I'm going to get well.”

I felt his muscles freeze. It was uncanny. I had the idiotic thought that if I had had my fingers in his hair I could have felt it lift from its prickling roots and stand aloft. I went still, too.

He was out of the bed and around it, standing on my side looking down at me, before I even realized he had moved. I looked up at him, speechless, breathless. His face swam whitely in the darkness above me, and there was white around his eyes. I could hear him breathing, and hear his heart beating fast and hard, even
over the wind and the surf. Beyond us the bell buoy off Diamond Shoals cried and called in the dark.

“What do you have, Kate?” he said. His voice was nearly inaudible. “Do you have AIDS?”

“AIDS?” I said stupidly. “AIDS?”

He looked down at me, my naked, oldest love, and it seemed that despite the fire-red blackness, I could see him very plainly. His spectacular black and white hair was in his eyes, and his mouth was open. I could see the tip of his tongue, moving on his lips. They were bruised and pulpy where I had bitten them. I said nothing; I simply looked at him.

“You do, don't you?” he whispered. “You do, and you let me do that, all afternoon, all night…you were getting even, weren't you? Kate, goddamn you, tell me…”

“Cecie was right,” I said mildly. “You do look like an aristocratic skunk. AIDS. Yes, well, as a matter of fact, Paul, I do. That's just precisely what I do have. AIDS.”

“Christ almighty, Jesus, Joseph and Mary…” He was across the room skinning into his clothes when I began to laugh. It was like vomiting, that laugh; it pumped out of the deepest part of my stomach and flowed out from between my lips, and I could not have stopped it if my life had depended on it. In a way, I suppose, it did. I laughed and laughed; I rolled back and forth in the bed and gasped and wheezed for breath, and when it came I laughed some more. I pulled my knees to my chin and ground my knuckles into my mouth and roared and howled with laughter. I was still laughing when he slammed out of the cabin, his half-buckled suitcase trailing a red and blue striped tie. I was still laughing when the Mercedes roared to life and screed around in the gravel and slewed out into the rain. I had not stopped laughing when he had looked back at me from the door, with a terrible face, old and caved-in, and said, “Kate, you bitch. Even if you're lying you've killed me.” I did not stop laughing until long after the sound of the Mercedes had died in the wind.

But I did stop then. The laughter segued into weeping without missing a breath, and I lay in the bed with the Magic Fingers in the Carolina Moon Motel and cried without stopping and without hope until I fell asleep. The last thing I remember hearing was the clamor of the drowned bell buoy off Diamond Shoals.

 

I was dreaming. I was dreaming that I stood in the shower in the cluttered little bathroom that had served our suite in the Tri Omega house at Randolph, and cold water poured down on me, and I was late for a final examination, but I could not seem to wash myself clean of the stickiness that covered me. I was in a panic about the examination and a sick agony of shame about the stickiness: I knew it was seminal fluid, and I could not let them see it on me, Cecie and Ginger and Fig. But they stood outside both doors and pounded and pounded, and I could not remember if I had locked them…

I woke abruptly, but the pounding went on and on. And the water went on pouring. I pushed myself up on my forearms, the covers sliding off me. It was cold in the room. I shook my head, hard, and my hair flew about my face. The pounding continued.

I realized where I was and that the knocking was at the door at the same instant, and fury flooded me. So he had come back. For what? To apologize? To have the truth out of me? To resume our lovemaking? Let him knock all night, let him pound his hands bloody; let the rain drown him and the lightning char him…I would not unlock the door. I would not answer him if he called out.

“Kate! Kate, are you in there? Open the door, Kate…”

The voice rode eerily over the sound of the wind and rain, but it was not his voice. I stood still, wrapped in his terry robe, and stared at the door. My mind slipped out of its tracks and wandered loosely in time and space for a moment. I could not move or think.

“KATE! LET ME IN!”

It was Cecie's voice. I ran across the room and jerked the door
open and she stumbled in, much as I had done almost twelve hours earlier. The wind drove her nearly to her knees, and the rain poured in as if someone had thrown a bucket of water in at the door. I slammed and locked it and simply stood, looking at her. She looked back, her chest heaving and her breath coming in huge, tearing sobs, unable to speak. She wore her old yellow slicker and rain hat from school, and her face was blanched gray and running water, and the fringe of white hair showing under the hat was plastered to her forehead. Her glasses ran with rain, and blue veins beat in her temples. She made a funny little sound, a whimper like a small animal might make, and her knees buckled, and she would have gone down if I had not caught her. I shoved the flimsy carved chair under her and pushed her head down. The hat slipped off and lay on the scarred yellow pine floor, puddling there.

I brought towels and dried her face and hair, and eased her out of the slicker and draped the blanket from the bed around her shoulders, for she had begun to shiver violently. I saw that she still could not talk, although she tried a couple of times. I looked out the window to see if anyone had followed her there, or come with her, but there was nothing but the cabins and the blowing rain and my Alfa and now the bulk of Paul's big Land Rover. Was he here, then, waiting in his car? But he had been driving the Mercedes…A forked branch of lightning showed me that the Land Rover was empty.

“Is Paul with you?” I said.

She shook her head, but could not manage words. Her breathing was still deep and shuddering, but it was beginning to slow. I built up the fire and gave her a glass of red wine, and when she could not hold it against her chattering teeth, I held it to her mouth and steadied her chin with my hand, and she drank it. I had never seen Cecie in anything remotely resembling this panic. Somehow, incredibly, it did not really alarm me; I observed her with a kind of objective anxiety, and a mild clinical interest. As soon as she could talk, she would tell me about this night, and we
would talk about it. I would understand. All would be revealed.

“Now will the scales fall from my eyes,” I said aloud.

Cecie raised her head and looked at me, and took a deep breath.

“Have you seen Fig?” she said. Her voice was weak and thin, a sick child's. “Has Fig been here?”

“Fig? No. How would Fig get here?” I said. “Did she bring you? Did she drive the Rover, then?”

Cecie shut her eyes and shook her head. Her lips were absolutely bloodless. She breathed deeply again, and said, “No. I drove it.” And then she began to cry.

I knelt beside her and held her like a child, and she cried like a child worn out with terror, her head pressed against my shoulder. I could feel the sobs bucking at her ribs, and feel the racketing of her heart. I rocked her in my arms, back and forth, back and forth, and whispered into her wet, matted hair, “It's all right now. Everything's all right now. You're safe and I'm here and the storm is going to end soon, and we'll stay here safe and warm till it does. We won't go out again until it's gone.”

She shook her head violently against me, and wailed, “No! No! We have to go…”

I patted her back, feeling tears start in my own eyes once more. How much worse those endless miles must have been in the dark, with the full force of the storm savaging her. And the lightning, and oh, God, the surf…the surf at Oregon Inlet…and she could not drive. So far as I knew, she had never driven. To drive that great, plunging car in that…

“Shhhh,” I said. “Shhhh…whatever it is, it's not bad enough for me to make you get in that car again in this storm. Whatever it is, we'll fix it, in a little while…”

Cecie took a great, sobbing breath and pulled herself erect, and fought for control of the tears. She stared into my face and held both my hands in her cold white ones, and said, “Paul's gone.” It was not a question.

I nodded.

“Ah, yes. Like a scalded tomcat, hours ago. Tell me now, Cece.”