Lapham Rising (5 page)

“You make too much of Mr. Lapham,” says Hector. “All he is doing is building a big house. Let him alone, and we’ll be at peace again. Blessed are the peacemakers.” I’d love to choke him. He goes on, “I really don’t see what the big deal is. Isn’t Mr. Lapham doing what everyone is supposed to do? Making something of himself?”

“He’s making too much of himself,” I tell him.

“But what’s that to you?”

“You don’t get this at all, do you? You think that Lapham’s construction is limited to Lapham, or even to me and Lapham. Let me give you a lesson in the ripple effect. Already Lapham has invaded my mind. He has invaded Dave’s mind, and Jack’s and José’s, and the minds of the Mexicans, even Kathy’s—though that would be more like Germany invading Austria. Soon his monstrous house will have invaded the minds of all those who look upon it, and who comment upon
it, and who write it up as the place to be for extravagant parties where birdbrains divine one another’s chin tucks late into the night. The attendees at these parties will speak of them, and of Lapham, to others. His name will be synonymous with achievement and magnitude, and people will expect big things of him, as he will of himself. Eventually, everyone on the East End and beyond will be thinking of Lapham at the expense of everything of value. Soon all they will see is Lapham. He will have invaded the minds of the great wide world, as he has invaded my mind, as he has invaded Noman.”

Hector shakes his head to suggest that I am a hopeless case, then walks away. I expected no better.

“Here’s my point,” I call after him. “My island sits in a creek, the creek opens to the canal, the canal opens to the bay, and the bay to the Atlantic. See what I mean?”

“Oh,” he says without turning around. “
Our Town
—right? Loved it!”

H
ombres!” I raise my megaphone and shout to the Mexicans. “How much to stop work on Lapham’s house?” It is high noon. They have been banging all morning.

They shout to me, “You don’t have enough money, Señor March.”

I shout to them: “How do you know?”

They shout to me: “Because we can see you!”

Everyone can see me; that’s the trouble. This state of affairs did not exist before Lapham and his fellow vandals came to the shores across the creek. In those blissful days, there was no one to see me but the cormorants, the egrets, the moles, and the frogs. Now, not a week passes without some stranger’s taking advantage of the sight of me by jumping into any available flotation device and cruising over for a chat. One thing to be said for living by yourself: no one can leave you. But people can visit.

In the past few weeks alone, I have suffered the forays of a string of uninvited guests. In dealing with such people, I have found that the straightforward approach works best, and so I try to be both forthright and as helpful as possible.

A delegation of Shinnecock Indians came over by canoe (as if that touch were necessary) to enlist my support for their plans to establish gambling casinos in Southampton. I gave it gladly. They were very grateful and made me an honorary member of the tribe. My Indian name is Walks Alone Awkwardly. They offered me twenty cartons of Marlboro Lights tax-free, but I declined. I asked if they realized that the land across the creek, on which the big houses are going up, had belonged to the Shinnecocks since 1561, or three hundred and thirty-three years before Southampton was incorporated. They said they were unaware of this. I assured them that the land was theirs and encouraged them to seize it at once. They said they would check their land records, which I knew would prove me right, since at one time or another the Shinnecocks have claimed every inch of the East End from Remsenberg to Montauk. We shook hands warmly and high-fived one another. Then they went home.

They were followed shortly afterward by the Southampton Hurricane of 1938 Society, a group devoted to commemorating everything connected with the hurricane of 1938, and to inserting mention of it in every possible conversation. They
meet twice a week to recall the disastrous event, to look at faded black-and-white photographs of smashed boats and floating houses, and to lament that life in the Hamptons has gone “down, down, down” since those early days. They asked me if there might be some way to drive the Shinnecocks out of town, west toward Mastic and Bellport, or perhaps toward the northern jaw, whence they might paddle over the Sound to Connecticut and link up with their Pequot comrades in craps and blackjack. I told them I would give the matter serious thought and added that I was sure the Indians would not mind being expelled.

The Panel People (one man, one woman) from Panelle Hall in East Hampton came by to ask me to serve on a panel on the topic “Whither Literature?” I declined. How about a different panel, they asked: “Whither History?” The woman’s hair was the color of bubble gum, and the man’s eyelids covered most of his eyes, like the slats of a venetian blind. When I told them I didn’t do panels, he said that gave him a brainstorm: how about a panel entitled “Panels: Good or Bad?” I showed them to their boat and said I’d get back to them.

A seventeen-foot Boston Whaler brought me a lanky, cactus-headed Amherst College English major on summer holiday with his parents in Wainscott. In his forties, he will stand before future students like an interminable book dog-eared to a meaningless page. He motored over to interview
me for the honors thesis he is writing on my work. He told me my short stories have been anthologized for use in many colleges and universities. I asked him if any of those institutions were accredited. With specific regard to my work, he wanted to know if the presence of hats symbolized death. I told him yes. He asked if I deliberately avoided the gerund. I told him I did. He asked if I had been influenced by Salinger or by Eudora Welty. I told him yes, by both. He asked if he might send me his thesis when it was finished. I said, By all means.

“Are you going to read at the summer writers conference?” he asked, referring to a worthy event from which I long ago withdrew.

“No conferences, no seminars, no symposia, no colloquia, no festivals, no slams.”

“Why don’t you write anymore?”

“I forgot how,” I told him, a little too close to the truth.

Two teenage girls from Westhampton High School, fair and skinny and both named Kristen, tied up at my dock but remained in their boat, and giggled. I asked them why they had come. They said they had heard I was a hermit, and they had never seen one before. I asked them what they thought a hermit looked like. They giggled some more. I brought them tall glasses of lemonade. They said thanks, giggled, and left.

Finally there was the FedEx man who delivered the Da Vinci parts, but unlike the others, he came at my insistence.
Initially, his company had rejected my shipment because it weighed three times the per-package limit of 150 pounds. But I found a way around that by requesting that it be delivered in three separate packages. This required the FedEx man to come over by barge on three separate occasions. By the last of these, he was sweaty and disgruntled. He dumped the parts on the dock. I caught him staring at the hole in my shirt. I’m sure he thought it was put there by a bullet. He told me that the next time I had a delivery weighing 435 pounds, I should try UPS.

He’s had it in for me ever since he brought the current iteration of Chloe over on the barge several years ago. She weighed three pounds under the limit. I don’t see what he was complaining about.

Of course, Dave the contractor comes over every so often to ask if I’m OK. I always tell him, “See for yourself.”

With all this, it must be said that my visitors over these months, however noteworthy, did not compare either in number or in exotica to Lapham’s. Mine were merely human. His consisted of objects and materials that were summoned to his ever-enlarging estate. Often I would sit on my dock and take account of them, make an actual list, I don’t know why. But the arrivals constituted such a dazzling array—like foreign emissaries dispatched to state funerals—that, repelled as I was in principle, I nonetheless found myself gazing as
would a child in a street crowd held back by police barricades as the inanimate celebrities made their appearances.

From Dorsetshire came fireplace stones that had been surgically removed from an English country manor built by Henry V for his fourth favorite mistress, Isabel of Rutherford. The gray stones had bloodred veins running through them, and were fabled to have turned this distinctive color when Henry had Isabel stoned to death after a drunken orgy, in which, incidentally, he had everyone stoned to death, including two royal macaws.

From Padua came hand-painted mantelpieces, twenty-four in all, each bearing stories of the Apostles, two mantelpieces for each, and stacked on the grounds like slices of toast. From Jerusalem, tiles inlaid with the faces of the Old Testament Prophets, to be used in Lapham’s kitchen counters and on the backsplashes. From Oppressa, a small farming village outside Damascus, and known widely for its dancing calligraphers, came several precious tapestries with portions of the Koran woven in lavender. (Dave told me Lapham wanted all the major faiths represented in his home, and “a few minor ones.”) From the Hopi came a fourteen-foot-high totem pole depicting various forms of foul weather. From the Pinga-poogoos, a tiny aboriginal sect that broke off from the main tribe in the 1960s, a stuffed kangaroo called Pek, the god of fertility and pugilism.

There was more: a solid piece of oak, oval in shape, fifty-six feet long, eleven feet at its widest, and honed from a single tree in the Black Forest, to be used as the dining room table (seats eighty comfortably). A bidet carved from a single piece of murky pink marble found only in a quarry in Oslo, by the hand of Carmen of Nordstrom. For the flooring in the upstairs hallway, a honey-stained maple discovered by Mrs. Lapham on a flying trip to Tblisi, a wood so strong and impermeable that Stalin had selected it for his casket and sepulcher. A spectacular front gate from the Tuxedo Park mansion of P. Lorilard, the drug manufacturer, which caught Lapham’s eye because of the six-foot-high
L
centered in an iron parenthesis at the top, with molded bars of soap and toothpaste spilling from cornucopias on both sides.

Crockery from Delft; coffee mugs from Quito; theater seats rescued during the demolition of the old Palace on Broadway; and stadium seats from the Polo Grounds, to be set in tiers as grandstands for the grass tennis courts; three scatter rugs made from the hair of a dingo; a pair of combs from the tusks of a dugong; and a set of one-of-a-kind shaving brushes from the whiskers of a dikdik.

More still: maids’ uniforms created in Nagasaki by seamstresses who were maimed but not incapacitated by the 1945 bombing, and which, according to Dave, gave Lapham the inspiration to order up his own underground bomb shelter on
the property, for whose lining six tons of lead arrived in extra-wide loads from Des Plaines, Illinois. And green canopies for the beds from Uzbekistan in the guest rooms. And violet globes from Marseille for the reading lamps in the library, for which sixteen thousand volumes were purchased in bulk from used bookstores in Oxford (England and Mississippi) and Cambridge (England and Massachusetts). And, as of yesterday, painted panels of asparagus done by an artist in Winnipeg known for his renderings of vegetables. These, said Dave, will be hung on every wall of the house.

I don’t know if he was pulling my leg, but Dave also told me that next week an artist from Albany will be arriving to paint the domed ceiling of Lapham’s forty-seven-foot-high living room. Lapham said he wanted to provide a room that both creationists and those he called “evolutionaries” could feel comfortable in. So for his ceiling painting, he commissioned a depiction of Adam reaching out and extending the touch of life to a pollywog. I told Dave I could hardly wait to see the finished product, still thinking he was kidding. But he said, “Me too.”

All such things, great and small, were delivered to the construction site by vans, station wagons, Jeeps, pickups, flatbeds, dump trucks, boats and helicopters, and deposited in their giant wooden crates on the grounds. I would sit and stare at them as, I imagine, the natives of Surinam, Jamaica, or of our own shores stared as warships, with bloated, bragging
sails and teeming with strange men, entered the sky above the horizon and inched toward them, making not a sound and appearing out of nowhere, forever to ruin their lives. I stared as I am staring now, able to note my imminent destruction and unable to do a thing about it. That is, until today.

Suddenly I am aware of a difference in my atmosphere: the banging at Lapham’s has stopped for an entire minute, a full sixty seconds. What has occurred, a peasant revolt? Have the overworked and underpaid Mexicans at last risen up against King Lapham the Striving? Have they tired of carting their tithes of chimichangas and quesadillas to their monarch’s portcullis and decided to storm the castle instead, to stuff Lapham in a piñata and establish a utopian democracy in which all men and women of every race and nationality may live in peace and harmony, lacking neither black beans nor rice?

Has the mainland been hit by a thermonuclear device detonated by a maddened north-of-the-highway former dot-com millionaire who carried the bomb by hand in a Dean & DeLuca shopping bag and slipped it into the gigantic papier-mâché strawberry at the fruit and vegetable stand in Sagaponack? And yet if this is the case, surely the effects of the explosion, radiating from its strawberry epicenter, will reach as far as upstate New York. In which case, I don’t think I shall sweat the Chautauqua lecture after all.

Silence. Even the caterwauling crows are hushed, taken aback by that noise which is the absence of noise. The air gulps. Then this: AAAAAAWWWWWWEEEEEE! Like a lion’s roar amplified over a vast public-address system. A thousand times louder, a million. Never have I heard anything like it. It is as though the great mouth of the earth itself had opened to express the agony that the cauldrons of gravity were inflicting on it. It sounds like the word
awe
: AAAAAAWWWWWWEEEEEE.

My ears are screaming, including the one with the bandage. “José!” I yell. “Please stop that thing!” Hector is barking his head off. I wish.

Dave calls out, “I meant to warn you. Sorry.”

“Sorry, señor,” echoes José, sounding as if he meant it. The noise ceases for a second or two. “But we have to give it a test. Eees very special. Eees turbo. You know.” It cries again: AAAAAWWWWWWEEEEEE.

“What is it?” I shout. At last they stifle the beast.

“Eees a Tilles, a Tilles Blowhard,” says José. “The most powerful air conditioner ever built.”

“A tea-less
what
?”

“Tilles,” repeats Dave. They are passing the bullhorn back and forth. “Rhymes with
Phyllis
.”

“Why does it need to be so loud?”

“Because eet not only cools the house,” says José, “eet cools the whole property. Eees brand-new. Mr. Lapham has the first one in the whole wide world.”

“What do you mean, it cools the whole property? It cools the air outside the house?” I strain to get a better look at the Tilles Blowhard, which is twice the size of my Da Vinci. It consists of an enormous potbelly with a curved smokestack whose opening is facing toward me, something like the Loch Ness monster in a ski mask.

Over the bullhorn, Dave explains that in an ordinary air conditioner, the fan motor and the blower feed the air through the coils of the condenser. But in a Tilles Blowhard, the fan motor operates at three hundred horsepower, and the blower is powered by a turbo engine that, if property angled, could fly of its own accord.

“Isn’t that something!” Dave says. Jack nods rapidly. I cannot tell whether they are impressed or amused.

The grille, Dave goes on, has been replaced by an immense hornlike structure the size of a small cave. The thermostat is so sensitive that whenever the temperature in or around Lapham’s house rises even one-tenth of a degree above the exquisitely calibrated ideal of sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, the blower will pump a rainless hurricane of cold air through the great horn with such brutal force that anyone—say Lapham
himself—who happened to be sitting in it at the time of the machine’s eruption would be rocketed into the sky. Cherish the thought.