Outer Banks (16 page)

Across the street, Harry's glowed bright with supper lights, and the marquee on the Tiger Theatre advertised
La Strada.
In the coin laundry I saw a few figures, the faceless shadow band, none of whom I knew, who did not go home between quarters. It was a desolate and banal little street scene; but suddenly as dear and precious and full of splendor and nuance as any I had ever seen. This was home. That other place, on the Santee River, was…anathema. I felt a surge of simple longing that hurt my heart and brought tears scalding to my eyes. They ran over and down my face, and I tasted the salt of them. I could feel my mouth working. I pulled the MG into a parking place in front of Harry's and got out and ran across the street to McCandless, and up the dark, echoing concrete stairs to the third floor where the architecture lab was. At first I thought it was empty, but then I saw his dark head bent over his board, far in the back of the room. The only light came from the drafting light clamped to its edge.

He raised his head and looked at me. We had said our carefully casual goodbyes earlier, over coffee, but somehow I did not think he was surprised to see me. He stared at me levelly. I stood in the doorway feeling as foolish as it was possible to feel, trying not to cry.

He grinned then, and gestured me to him with his T square, and before I knew it I was sitting in my accustomed place on the stool next to his, and he was leaning on his board and grinning the
white grin at me. His hands were in his pockets, and his head was cocked to one side. The comma of hair fell into his eyebrows. I did not think I had ever seen so wonderful-looking a man. I grinned back, feeling the color rise from my collar.

“Forget something?” he said.

“Nope. Remembered something,” I said, trying to match his tone. “I remembered you'd never seen
La Strada
and it's on over at the Tiger, and I came to take you to the movies.”

He did not move, and the grin did not fade.

“Want to go over to Harry's and call home first?” he said.

“They aren't expecting me till…later,” I said, face beginning to burn like fire. “I can be home by midnight.”

In truth, I did not think they were expecting me at all. I had not talked to my mother in weeks. She probably did not even know the date of school's closing. Before I had always called and told her when I was coming home; this time I had not. I did not want to examine my reasons for that.

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Let's go, then,” he said, and switched off his desk lamp and followed me out of the dark lab. He did not touch me, but I could feel his presence behind me as palpably as if he had both hands on my shoulders. He was so close that I could feel his breath on my hair.

I think
La Strada
is my favorite movie of all time; I had seen it twice then, and I try to see it whenever there is a revival in Manhattan. But that night I sat in the darkened, near-empty theater next to Paul Sibley and saw almost nothing but flickering idiot images. He did not talk to me, or even move often; he seemed totally absorbed in the drama unfolding on the screen. But his physical presence consumed me. My flesh seemed to pull toward him of its own accord; my head inclined toward the dark bulk of his shoulder; my very blood seemed to flow toward him. Every atom in my body whirled toward the answering atoms in his flesh;
I became aware, about the middle of the movie, that I was breathing in unison with him.

Toward the end of the movie he took my hand. Fire seemed to leap from his fingers to mine. I would not have been surprised to see a spark arc through the darkness, as from the end of God's finger to Moses' on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. All sensation left my body and flew to dwell in the hand that his held. For the rest of the movie I sat breathing lightly and quietly, my hand in his as hot and heavy as if it had been fresh cast of lead…seeing nothing, hearing nothing.

When it ended and the house lights came up, he dropped my hand and we walked silently out of the movie house and into the fragrant, mothy dark of late May. Honeysuckle poured its scent like a river from the banks of privet hedge behind the parking lot, and over that the light, heart-shaking smell of mimosa swam from somewhere near. Katydids called off in the thick, warm darkness. Otherwise there was little noise. The campus seemed suspended at the bottom of a dark, still sea. We reached the MG before he spoke.

“That's the saddest movie I ever saw in my life,” he said quietly, and I looked up and saw the silver tracks of tears on his dark face. I thought of the movie: loss and poignancy, innocence shattered and dead, remorse and heartbreak on the shores of a dark ocean. I thought of his dead young wife. I did not think I could bear, for him, whatever brought the tears to those dark Indian eyes.

I reached up with both hands and took his face in them, and kissed him. It was, in the beginning, a soft kiss, but it turned to fire and thunder under my mouth, pure, tearing need. I was totally without wits or breath when he finally let me go. We looked at each other silently, and then he said, softly, “Oh, shit. Let's go.”

“Where?” I whispered. I hadn't enough breath for anything else.

“To my place. I'm going to cook dinner for you. You can call your folks from there.”

“Okay,” I said. But I knew that I would not.

I fished the car keys out of my purse and handed them to him. My hands were trembling; I knew I would drive badly.

“Would you mind driving?” I said. “I don't know where you live.”

In the darkness he laughed softly.

“Yes, you do,” he said. “I've seen your car go by about a million times. I thought you were looking to buy the place.”

“It's a shortcut to Dairyland,” I muttered.

“One thing you don't ever have to do with me, Kate, is lie,” Paul said. “I'm not going to lie to you and I don't want you to do it to me. You don't need to. God, what a grand little car. I haven't driven anything like it since France. I had a wonderful old Citroën touring car, about a thousand years old. We…I drove it all over Europe before it finally died on me, in Grenoble.”

I thought of him in the big car, top down, the black hair blowing in the high, pure sunlight of the French Alps, laughing down at a dark, vivid girl beside him. Somehow I could see her plain: small, sharp-featured, doe-eyed, graceful as a new fawn. It was only later that I realized the ghost wife in the car beside Paul was Audrey Hepburn. Cecie and I had both agreed that she was the one woman in the world we'd most like to resemble. I said nothing on the drive over to Scofield Street. Audrey sat in the space between Paul and me.

Paul cut the motor of the MG when we reached the driveway and coasted down it to the backyard, where the forlorn little two-story garage peered out of its thicket of kudzu and honeysuckle.

“We'll have to be quiet,” he said. “My landlady has suffered keenly all summer because she hasn't been able to catch me with a woman back here. Once we're in, it's okay, though. She's used to lights and music at all hours.”

“I'm signed out for home, anyway,” I said, and then wished I could have bitten out my tongue. Now he would think I had planned this night, even if he had not before.

He laughed again, and opened the door for me very quietly, and motioned for me to go ahead of him up the perilous-looking wooden stairs. The night around us was very black, and the smell from the honeysuckle thicket was overpowering; it was like breathing wine or honey.

“I can feel you blushing in the dark,” he said. “You put out heat.”

“I'm really not accustomed to going home with boys late at night,” I whispered, wishing someone, something, would stop my idiot mouth. He was light years, millenniums, away from being a boy.

He stopped on the little porch and turned me to face him. I could see only his outline, and the gleam of his eyes in the warm dark.

“When I said I was going to cook dinner for you, I meant just that,” he said gently. “I'm not going to seduce you. I'm not going to put the make on you. Later, almost certainly, but not until you're ready for it. My self-control is legendary. You're going to have to ask.”

The sucking, shimmering apprehension died in my chest, but under it flickered a feeling that I recognized as loss.

“What if I don't?” I said.

He pushed the hair off my forehead very gently, and smiled. His teeth flashed white in the dark.

“You already have,” he said.

I said nothing. We stood silent as he fumbled for his key.

“It ain't much, but it's home,” he said, and ushered me into his apartment and closed the door. I stood still as he went around pulling shades. Then the room bloomed into light, and I gasped in surprise and delight.

The little room was exquisite, as compact and jeweled as a
pomegranate, as exotic as a miniature seraglio. At first glance it was overwhelming; pure, deep colors flashed and swam in patterns like a kaleidoscope, and fabric and texture shimmered so richly that I could not take it in. I simply stood and stared. It was a small room, low-ceilinged and beamed, and he had stuccoed the walls and painted everything structural…walls, beams, ceiling…a pure and shadowless white. But floors and walls and furniture teemed with color.

The floor was completely covered with as magnificent an Oriental rug as I had ever seen, even in the homes of my friends from Randolph Macon and Cape Cod. Its stained-glass colors actually pulsed in the light: deep crimson, azure blue, jewel green, cream, and gold. There was a daybed covered with another rug in softer colors, those of the desert; a tall Gothic armchair of black wood, covered in lovely, faded old green damask. A magnificent black leather Eames chair and ottoman sat beneath one of the room's two windows, with a rough white wool robe thrown over it. Beneath the other window, a white built-in desk and shelves held books and models and pottery in the same jewel tones as the rug, and a table board and drafting lamp. Enormous patterned pillows littered the floors, and the white walls burned with prints and paintings with the stark, sun-smitten look of Italy, Mexico, and Spain about them. The windows were covered only with pleated white parchment-paper blinds, and hanging white pleated paper lamps provided the only other illumination besides the drafting lamp. But the room was not dark. It seemed to swim in pure, concentrated light and color. At the far end, a massive painted screen depicting a medieval hunting scene half hid a rudimentary kitchen. I saw bits of an ancient gas stove, a sink, an oilclothcovered table on which sat a laboring pint-sized refrigerator, and a lone shelf that held plates and cups and a great, trailing fern. Other plants rioted in the room from ceiling brackets, tables, the bookcase, the desk; a growing tree of some sort dominated one corner, behind the Eames chair. I did not see a separate sleeping
alcove. I supposed that he slept on the daybed. A great, dark armoire, by far the largest piece in the room, undoubtedly housed his clothing. It, too, looked Mediterranean, and very old.

He turned to me, smiling, and I said, “It's absolutely beautiful. I never saw anything like it. It's like finding a Fabergé egg in a garbage can…” and then I stopped, and reddened again. I could scarcely have found a more insulting analogy.

But he laughed.

“I may not have a pot to piss in, but I refuse to live like an animal or a fraternity boy,” he said. “I'm glad you like it. I do, too. This stuff needs a room at least twice this size, but I could barely afford this dump, and I'm sure not going to store it or give it away. Not after dragging it all over Europe and the southern United States.”

“Oh,” I said. Of course; this was the furniture of his marriage, his and the French girl's; I kept forgetting that he had had another life, another context entirely, than that of impoverished student. His sophistication was real, acquired by living his way into it. I thought, bleakly, that I could not hold a candle to the cultivated ghost who had chosen these beautiful things, lived among them with him.

“Did you buy it all abroad?” I said, as much to break the silence as from a desire to know.

“No. I was as poor there as I am here. I can't remember a time I wasn't in school of some kind, except the Army. All this stuff was my wife's. Her family's, that is. They had money. I should have given it back to them when she…died, but by that time they hated my ass and I theirs, and it gave me no end of pleasure to abscond, as M. Foucald put it, with this stuff. It was wasted on them, anyway. They didn't pick it out; some designer did. It came from their place in Marrakesh.”

The fabled name swam in the air between us.

“It must be a great comfort to you, to have these things to
remember her by,” I said. It sounded like a line out of a bad movie. Even Deborah Kerr couldn't have done it well.

He laughed again, wearily.

“It's a great comfort to have these things, period,” he said. “She didn't like me a damn bit better than her family by that time; she had already filed for divorce when we had the accident. I'm sorry she's dead, but I'm not a bit sorry she isn't in my life anymore. We were both stupidly young when we married; I was a skinny, arrogant kid and she was a fat, spoiled one. By the time we'd grown up another year it was apparent to everybody that it was a marriage made in hell. I consider these things payment in full for some very bad years. She was just as impossible to live with as I was.”

Again, I could think of nothing to say. We were quiet for another space of time.

“I just don't want there to be any false sentiment between us,” he said presently. “It was a bad marriage. She wanted a husband to take care of her and show off in Orléans, and her family wanted the same thing, and about that time I discovered Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and decided to be an architect, and it all went to hell about then. She never would have come to America, and McKim made it plain I had to come back if I wanted the job. They won't hire foreign-educated architects. But it would have unraveled sooner or later, anyway. Berthe was about as unlike Leslie Caron as anybody you ever saw.”