Outer Banks (40 page)

He was there, of course. I had known he would be; or at least the new woman knew; knew it on the backs of her hands and in the loosening joints of hips and knees. I saw only the bulk of him,
black against the blackness, and the slight motion of the hammock. But there was no doubt who it was. I turned to go back into the house, in blind flight, but my naked feet hung back, and he saw me.

“Don't go back,” he called softly. “I've been sitting here for two hours, willing you out here. Stay and talk a little while.”

“I can't, really,” I said. “I was just…I was on my way…”

“You were on your way here, and here you are,” Paul said, smiling. I saw the gleam of his teeth in the dark. “Come sit. I'm not going to molest you. No nose dives out of hammocks this time. It's a different hammock.”

I went over and sat down in an old green-painted Boston rocker across from the hammock. He was stretched out full length, his arms crossed beneath his head. He wore shorts and a white sweater, and was barefoot. In this thick darkness, he looked perhaps thirty years old. He did not sit up, but he turned his head to face me.

“You couldn't sleep,” he said. It was not a question.

“No. It's sultry tonight, and the wind sounds funny. It's the first time since I got here I've been too warm.”

I thought that that sounded suggestive, and reddened. He could not have seen the color, but I heard him laugh softly.

“It's the tropical air coming in from the gulf,” he said. “It always leads a storm about twelve or fourteen hours. This one doesn't smell like a big one, but still, I wish you'd get on out of here in the morning.”

“I'll be okay,” I said. “I can always wait it out here with the others. But I can drive that car in anything. We have some pretty hairy Nor'easters on Long Island.”

“You and your sports cars,” he said. “I've never forgotten that little MG. Long Island…somehow I never really pictured you in that part of the world. You were always the quintessential Southern woman to me. But at least you got your ocean, didn't
you? And your house beside it. I'm glad I didn't do you out of that, too.”

“Paul…”

“Don't worry, Kate. I'll keep my mid-life crisis to myself. I just meant that I'm glad you've had the life you deserve. The man you deserve. From what Ginger tells me, you've made it all work for you. I'd like to know your Alan. I see your credits and your awards: Abrams and Abrams. It's really nice stuff, Katie Lee. Way beyond nice. You know, for the longest time, I didn't know that the second Abrams was you? I'd lost you completely…”

He broke off. Then he said, softly, “Completely.”

Warmth flashed in my groin and ran along my legs and up into my arms. My wrists felt heavy. His voice had always done that to me.

“How did you find out?” I said chattily. Stay away from that…

“Oh, I guess Fig told Ginger and Ginger told me. Fig's been tracking you for a while, I think.”

“What do you think of her?” I said brightly. This was safe. “Of Fig as a living legend?”

“What is there to think about a woman who completely made herself over from scratch, including your nose? It is, you know. I think that on the eighth day she rested. I think, in a way, you have to admire it, but in a way it scares me. She's so totally singleminded. She always was…inexorable, I guess. I never doubted that she'd get just what she wanted.”

I laughed. It sounded almost natural.

“She didn't always,” I said. “For a while there, she wanted you more than anything else. From the way she carried on tonight, I think she still does. I thought she was going to jump your bones in front of all of us.”

He laughed.

“So did Cecie,” he said. “She sat up with old Fig until close to two, just to keep her in line.”

Revelation and amusement and new love for Cecie flooded me.

“She did, didn't she?” I said. “I wondered about that. Little old Cece, sitting up there choking down booze and trying not to fall asleep, looking out for Ginger's interests.”

“I don't think,” Paul said, “that it was Ginger's interests she was looking out for.”

“I don't want to do this, Paul,” I said.

“I know, I'm sorry,” he said. “Tell me about your life. Tell me what you're like now.”

“What you see is what you get,” I said. “Nothing much has changed.” I was having difficulty breathing. His body, barely visible in the dark, was like a magnet to my flesh. The space between it and my hands felt huge and cold and alien.

“Oh, Katie, it has,” he said. “It has all changed.”

“Tell me about you,” I said desperately. “Tell me what you do. Besides being a captain of industry, I mean. Ginger has told us about that. You've just about tripled the mill operation, she says. Are you terribly rich?”

“Terribly,” he said. “What do I do? Well, when I'm not in Alabama or Norfolk, I do things around here. I do an awful lot of fishing and hunting, and I run on the beach, and I hang-glide up at the ridge, and I stay out on the water a lot. Mainly, I fish. You remember that old motel we saw the first time we came up here?”

“The Carolina Moon,” I said.

“Yeah. Well, it sits right in the middle of the best fishing banks on the East Coast. People come from all over the world to fish Pamlico and the ocean there. I have a permanent room at the Carolina Moon, and I come and go when I please. There's really nothing else in the area. There are guys from Miami to Bangor who'd kill me for the key to that room.”

“The Carolina Moon has loomed large over my stay here,” I said lightly. “The incomparable Poolie Prout said this morning he has a permanent room there, too.”

“Yep,” Paul said. “Nobody pays any attention to him; Ed Tinsley, the owner, knows damned well what he's hustling in and out of there—besides women—but he's not about to bother him. Half the time Ed isn't even there. We just come and go when we want to, and pay him a chunk annually. I'm just as glad I'm at the other end of the crescent from Poolie. I don't even want to know about it when the Feds finally get him.”

“It's hard to think of you as a sportsman, a hunter or a fisherman,” I said. “You were so absolutely singleminded in school. Talk about Fig…”

“Well, you know us Native Americans,” he said. “We got it in our blood.”

“Do you design at all any more?” I asked.

He was silent for a while, and I knew that I had reached inside the dark, weathered skin and put a finger on the heart of him. I could have bitten out my treacherous tongue.

“I never could, after I had money,” he said. His voice was remote, and he had turned his head out to sea. “It took me a long time to get over the realization that I was on fire to make money, not buildings. I was pretty bitter for a while; I blamed everybody else. I blamed Ginger for a while. It was hard on her. I blamed the girls. It wasn't easy on them either. But I finally worked the blame around to where it belonged. I only wish I'd known myself better earlier. I could have studied accounting and saved us all a lot of grief.”

His voice was dry and somehow dead.

“I think you knew yourself pretty well,” I said. The dead voice sent pain flooding through me. “You were the best natural architect I ever saw.”

“I'm better at making money,” he said.

We sat silent. I cast about frantically for something to say that did not lead down into that warm, sucking darkness at the core of me. I could think of nothing safe. But it was even less safe to sit here silent together, in the darkness and the sea-sound.

“It isn't enough, you know,” he said presently. “It never has been.”

“Don't…” I whispered. He could not have heard me.

He turned his face to me and smiled. I saw his teeth flash again, and I saw something else: the glimmer of tears on his face. I was beside him in the hammock before I even realized I had left the rocker. I put my arms around him and pulled his face down against my breasts, and he simply put his hands on them, through the thin stuff of my robe, and sat still. I felt his mouth pressed to my skin, and his hands, moving slowly at my nipples, and I thought that I would die from the utter exquisiteness of the feel of him. I remembered this feeling; it had never left me, but had lain at the core of me, like the bulb of a plant that blooms many, many years apart. I felt his breath in the hollow of my neck and smelled the dark, warm smell of him, and felt everything inside me loosen, go liquid, begin to burn.

“I made the worst mistake of my life when I let you go, and I've paid for it every minute of every day since,” he said. His voice was thickened by my flesh, and I could feel the little puffs of breath as he spoke. Don't-don't-don't, the Kates I knew keened. Yes, the new woman screamed, in ecstasy and triumph. Yes.…

“I tried to make Ginger into you,” he said. “I tried to make her be to me what you were, but she couldn't; she can't grow up, Kate. I can't make her. It's nearly killing both of us, and I can't seem to stop riding her. Look at her; see what I've created, trying to get you back? And on some level she knows it; but she can't let herself, and so she drinks, and she drinks…if she stops, if she grows up, she'll have to know who it was she married, and why he married her…”

He raised his head and looked at me.

“I would give the rest of life on this earth simply to fuck you right now,” he said.

I leaped out of the hammock and backed against the railing
of the deck. My robe fell away from my body, and he looked at it. I could feel the impact of his eyes.

“My God,” he said. “My God.”

My rubbery legs would not hold me up. I hugged the robe around me. I could have pulled him down onto me on the rough boards and taken him into me at that moment, and died of the shuddering completion on the instant; I wanted it so violently that I shook all over as in a bone-deep chill. But my voice, hoarse and cracked, seemed to come through my hot throat from somewhere else.

“No. I'm going back inside. This is wrong. I'll go home…You forfeited this almost thirty years ago, Paul. I have a man I love. You have a woman you love. You can't go back…”

“No,” he said, his voice coming out on a long breath. “I can't go back. But we could go forward, Kate. We could do that. We could…I've lived thirty years without living. What the hell do you think Ginger can give me? Money? I don't want any more money. Whatever time is left, I want to live it. I want to live it with you…”

“No.”

“I know you want me like I do you. I can feel that in every inch of your body.”

“No.”

“You do. At least one night, then, Kate. At least that. Something I can live on the next thirty years…”

“No. No. No.”

“Listen, Kate. Tomorrow morning…I won't go to Alabama. I'll call them and tell them I can't get through the storm. I'll go down to Avon, to the motel. I'll leave early; everybody will think I'm going on to the mill. You tell them you've decided to beat the storm, and leave about noon, and come there. It will only take you a couple of hours; the storm shouldn't be too bad by then, only some rain…come, Kate. Come to the Carolina Moon with me. I meant to take you there on our wedding night. We'll have this
night instead. This afternoon and night, and the next morning, in the storm, all alone…”

“I won't do it,” I said.

“Pull around to the last cottage toward the ocean,” he said. “You'll see my car. You don't have to go by the office. Ed won't be there, anyway. He always goes inland and drinks when there's a blow. Probably nobody else will be, with the storm. I'll be waiting for you.”

“No.”

“I'm going anyway,” he said. “I'll be there by eleven. I'll go, and light a fire, and chill some champagne, and I'll bring some sandwiches and a radio. And I'll take off my clothes and get in the bed and I'll wait for you. And when you get there…do you remember, Katie Lee? You used to scream out like a crazy woman. I'll bet you don't scream anymore. I'll make you scream, Katie Lee…”

I turned and ran into the house and down the hall.

“Come, Kate,” I heard him call, softly, behind me.

I got into bed and pulled the covers over my head and lay there, rigid as a wood log petrified, body racked by shudders and the simple, terrible wanting of him. I sweated profusely in the still, hot night, and I think that I cried, but I did not move from beneath the covers. Beside me in the other bed Cecie slept gently, turned toward the sea with her fist beneath her cheek. I would lie there, I thought, until she dressed and left the room in the morning; I would feign sleep; I would not move. I would continue to lie there until past the time he would leave. I would not respond if anyone called me. I would lock the door after Cecie, so that no one could come in to wake me. Only when I knew with utter certainty that he was gone would I get up and dress and come out into the house. And then I would pack and go home. Or…to the bridge. All right, then, to the bridge. This trip was over.

I did not think that I would sleep, but finally, in the gray dawn, I did.

*   *   *

I waked to gray light and erratic rain peppering the roof, and a knocking on the door, and Paul's voice calling, “Kate.
Kate!
Dammit, get up! You have a phone call…”

His voice was both annoyed and amused, an ordinary morning voice. I stretched every inch of my body, cracking the cartilage luxuriously, smiling, my eyes still closed. Paul's voice in the morning, and rain on the roof…

I came awake.

“I don't want any breakfast,” I called, my heart beginning to pound. “I want to sleep some more…”

“Your husband is on the phone and he's not calling from home,” Paul shouted. “He said to drag you out. He needs to talk to you.”

“Oh…just a minute,” I said, annoyed and frightened. I did not want to see Paul. I did not want to talk to Alan. Alan…