The Edge of the Gulf

by Hadley Hury

  “I’d say so. Charlie, it really is magnificent. So, now that you’re divesting yourself of your real estate, is this what you’ll be doing?”

  “No, no. I had to have this. But no, I don’t plan to get any more serious about collecting. Don’t need any more. This is the crowning jewel.” Charlie modestly overlooked the fact that here and there, on walls throughout the house, along with a lot of excellent watercolors, oils, graphics and photos by local artists, hung small works and sketches by the likes of Homer, Roualt, Dufy, O’Keeffe, Gorey, Stuart Davis, and Marsden Hartley.

  They had gone from room to room, sipping the Brompton house special Hudson had requested, some dark variant of mai tai, visiting the old pictures like friends, inspecting the new paint job upstairs, a few new pieces of furniture here and there, an old pine table that Charlie had just refinished, looking into the many bedrooms, sitting for awhile in the sunroom that opened onto the east porch and the lagoon beyond as Charlie brought out some photos from a recent party or two that had included a few people of Hudson’s acquaintance.

  At a little after eight, they stood again in the elegantly understated living room, its old mahogany and walnut pieces interspersed with bentwood cane chairs, the broad plank floors dark and lustrous, enlivened by gorgeous kilims. Charlie said: “Shall we freshen these here or have a second one there.”

  “There. You know,” Hudson mused, looking at Charlie’s new painting from yards away at the other end of the room, “it’s odd, but its presence is so strong, it just seems so inevitably there, that I can’t even remember what you had there before.”

  “That portrait of Andrew.”

  Charlie took the glasses to the small bar just inside the door of the library. “I always liked it there. That’s all. Even my more vocal friends who have questioned the taste or sanity of my keeping it there know I’m not a torch carrier. It just worked there, and it was a good painting. We passed by it in the hall upstairs.”

  “Oh, of course.” Andrew had been the great love of Charlie’s life. Hudson had met him only once or twice before his final exit. There had apparently been three during the course of the relationship’s sixteen-year span.

  “But twelve years is long enough. And now I have this, this miracle painting.” He laughed, but Hudson thought perhaps he had detected, in the laugh and somewhere deep in the lively blue eyes, a shadow of uncertainty.

  He wondered why Charlie might feel vulnerable.

  To the past, to Andrew? He thought not.

  But if not that, what?

  Chapter 12

  “Nothing has changed.” Chaz luxuriated in the large chair by the hearth, looking at Sydney, who had nestled into one end of the sofa with her legs tucked up.

  “He didn’t say a word about his will, the land, anything. Zip. It was all very en famille, long walks on the beach, long talks about my father. Long talks about you. He can’t wait for us to come down. But last night over dinner at 26-A, he did say that he had ‘begun to reach some decisions about his life’ that would ‘affect’ me, and that he’d let me know more about it soon.”

  “So we have absolutely no reason to think he knows anything about your father’s unmailed letter, and, therefore, no reason to think that he thinks you suspect anything.”

  “None. Why would he? He knows we were never that close. It was my father he loved and I’m sure he heard for a lot of years what a source of anguish I was to him. Charlie may have felt sorry for me from time to time, but we were never tight. It wouldn’t occur to him that I expected anything much from his will, especially since he’s certain that my father never even let me in on the fact that he was Charlie’s heir…”

  Sydney interrupted smoothly, “…or thought you might possibly be interested in or capable of responsibly disposing of sixty to a hundred million dollars in prime real estate. With advocates like dear old dad, who needs enemies?”

  Chaz looked away, out into the garden, his large, bright eyes haunted for a moment, even glum. His dramatic pale complexion, framed by dark, loose ringlets, looked to Sydney more than ever like the face of a beautiful, slightly dissolute lost boy.

  “It’s amazing what people can do in what they mistakenly assume are someone’s ‘best interests,’” she said. “My mother and that hideous stepfather, for instance. She thought she was doing it for me. That it was in my best interest.” She paused. “I’ve told you how that worked out. And then of course there is my ace former fiancé.” She paused again and then went on, quietly. “You know I had really begun to like your father. We seemed to be getting along so well. It never occurred to me that beneath that elegant exterior and the impeccable manners was a fearful, rather selfish old man, who had not a shred of faith in you. No real feeling for you, no knowledge even of who you really are and what you can really do. Well, my darling, we are looking out for our own best interests now.”

  “Charlie says he’s proud of me.”

  “So did your father. And look what they’ve done, the two of them, to you. Is he proud enough of you to reconsider?”

  “Well, there is some ambivalence there. I think dad’s death has left him feeling older, more vulnerable. I got the feeling he really wants us to be closer. But, no…. He may feel warmly disposed to me now, but I don’t think that’s made him stupid. He knows there are precious few folks around who would hold that land in reserve or only allow a couple of tasteful houses to be built there. He may believe I’ve cleaned up my act and he may be growing sentimental, but he doesn’t mistake me for his more-like-a-brother-than-a-cousin, my sainted father.

  “But I do know that we’ve at least bought some time. His attorney is on some exchange program with a firm in London and he hasn’t told him anything about his intentions. He says he needs to ‘get completely settled in his mind’ about the changes and isn’t going to rush into handling it by phone, fax, and mail. He said that by the time the guy gets back in August, he’ll be certain about ‘all the pieces’ and will sit down with him then. I have the definite impression, though, that he plans to tell us about the house before then.”

  “A wedding gift,” mused Sydney. “So as a public relations venture, an insurance policy, your junket was a success? You left Charlie even more convinced of your respectability and stable course in life.”

  “Right. The house is in the bag, maybe some cash.”

  Sydney smiled. “That’s sweet. Of course, he might live another twenty years. What about the restaurant and the bar? They’re worth another—what?—three or four million? If he’s getting close to really retiring, couldn’t we have a chance at convincing him that his own flesh and blood might want to take them on?”

  “He knows that’s not my thing and that although I think the coast is fine, I don’t love it like he does.”

  “Who does?”

  “The staff he’s gotten into place at 26-A over the past few years. I met them all at the restaurant. They’re confirmed year-rounders, they’re hospitality people just like he is, and they’re hands-on. That’s the real flesh and blood as far as he’s concerned. Except one guy, named Main. He’s manager at the Blue Bar but apparently wasn’t asked into the buyers’ group with the others.”

  Sydney rose from the sofa, stretched, and headed toward the kitchen. “We need to think about all this. But right now we’re going to sit down to the lovely pesto tortellini I picked up at Ciarazzi’s and a good bottle of wine. You’re tired. But I want to revive you enough for us to have wild and imaginative sex. I’ve missed you.”

  ***

  Just before drifting into sleep, two hours later, she nuzzled into his neck, saying, “We need to get on down there, and for more than just a few days.”

  Chaz shifted under the crook of her arm and cupped his hand under her breast. “Okay.”

  Sydney did not so much sink into slumber that night as she was buoyed into it, aloft, as on a gentle but insistent wave. She reached for sleep as if with open arms, desiring rest so that she would be at her best for whatever lay ahead no
w. Beneath her she felt an unaccustomed swell of security in the shape of an annual trust and a house with a market value of more than a half-million.

  But a siren song beckoned to her, drawing her out, out to a wider shining horizon, beyond the shallows of cranking out corporate training videos half the week and keeping the shop accounts for Chaz the other, beyond the endless schmoozing with pretentious clients, be they Atlanta’s clamorous legions of nouveau riche or its disdainfully paranoid old guard, out beyond caring whether she could, indeed, beat the system at its own game.

  Instead of the tiny hotel where they had once stayed in Venice, she saw Chaz in a gracefully cavernous palazzo, padding toward her in pale peach pajama bottoms across pools of summer moonlight. She saw not the frowsy flat in Notting Hill that an acquaintance had condescended to let them have for a few days, but a large house with a garden in a mews in Kensington. She saw the two of them, refining an A-list guest list by the fire as an autumn sunset emblazed their library overlooking Central Park.

  She saw freedom and travel and laughter and great sex and people who came and went as you chose and who were not small and provincial and prosaic and lacking in the sorts of mystery that made life interesting.

  And even with her eyes closed, she could see Chaz, lying close beside her. She saw that, until someone altered a piece of paper a few weeks from now, he was the heir to a fortune that would once and for all allow her to create the only role, in a life of performance, that she had never really played as fully as she would have liked.

  The one role created not as a means of escape, created to satisfy no one’s purposes but her own, no one’s criteria but her own.

  Herself.

  It was the only one now that intrigued and challenged her. She saw this not as a dream, but as a fact, a truth that she could ensure would unfold. She slept soundly, gathering in the darkness her certainty of purpose, her focus and strength for the weeks ahead.

  Chapter 13

  The next morning, Saturday, Hudson walked the four miles up the beach to Seaside. It would be hot again by mid-afternoon, but for now the humidity was still low and the sky and sea were dazzling. Moon ran ahead, bobbing back and forth between the sand and the surf, and bounding back to Hudson now and again to make sure everyone was having a good time. He knew not to run up to the other people they occasionally passed, and when another largish dog was in accompaniment, Hudson put the leash on to discourage any potential rowdiness.

  They crossed Laurel’s beach, one of the widest in west Florida, and headed east. Just beyond the village, Hudson could just glimpse, through the scrub forest, one corner of the upper gallery of Charlie’s house. It angled toward the southwest, facing the Gulf and, for many months of the year, the sunsets, a discreet distance of some three hundred yards, across Laurel’s broadest expanse of dunes, from the sea, nestled among a thick stand of tall pine, oak, and hickory, its east side porch looking across the long lagoon. The original house had been a big old barny thing, built in the ’30s, for many years a rental property, and in dire need of work, when Charlie bought in 1970. Over the years, with restoration, renovation, additions, and much loving care, it had become exquisitely comfortable and graciously grand. A wonderful home.

  Large as it was, there were certainly larger houses to be found along the coast, among the nouveau riche enclaves of Destin, Dune Allen, and Santa Rosa, and in the two or three even newer, planned residential communities like Greenway. And, quite probably, somewhere in the neo-quaint homogeneity of Seaside’s closely controlled architecture, there might possibly be a couple of houses with higher market value. But few homes anywhere in the hundred-and-fifty-mile stretch between the 1920s Italianate Deco mansions of Pensacola’s old East Bay neighborhood and the pretty little 19th-Century restorations in the old cotton port of Apalachicola could touch Brompton House, the name Charlie allowed only a few close friends—and not a single sign—to use.

  He had met Charlie fifteen years ago, when some mutual friends in Memphis had suggested that he call him up during a visit to the coast. In those days, Hudson had been partial to a little rental house over in Navarre Beach. He had driven over one evening, thinking that he would simply have a drink and then stop for oysters or shrimp at one of the good places back along Highway 98. Instead, they became fast friends almost immediately, talking for three hours and drinking nearly two bottles of a very nice Pouilly Fuissé. Charlie had fixed omelets and salad, and, just before midnight, Hudson had been sent off to sleep in one of the guest rooms upstairs.

  The same fondness at first sight struck again when Charlie had met Kate six years ago. After they spent an evening trading bits of Louisville lore, Charlie had drawled, smiling, “Well, now we know what the boy’s been waiting for.”

  ***

  Seaside is nothing if not self-contained. Many of the families with vacation homes there tend not to sojourn on the Gulf for any experience of otherness it may offer them, any influence of place. Solid burghers or striving wannabes, they come, instead—from Memphis and Atlanta and Birmingham—for the low-risk opportunity of extending themselves, only slightly, by means of another highly acceptable address. They tend to bring their own well-marshaled domesticity with them, many of them almost like 19th-Century travelers whose first priority was to carry as much a sense of home as possible to wherever in the world they went.

  Seaside has its share, certainly, of simple middle-class vacationers, who have saved strenuously for a week or two in one of its uniformly cute, vastly overpriced dollhouses, or in one of the two inns. There are some year-rounders, and inevitably a contingent of recently divorced geezers down for their part of the time-share with the much-younger trophy wife or girlfriend. But more often one found on the beach at Seaside the beautifully maintained, youthfully middle-aged mother, passing time with a book until her next tennis game; the father doing business with his cell phone in one hand and, with the other, vigorously playing Frisbee with some combination of children and dogs; nearby, the nanny, either building sandcastles with the younger offspring or trying to pacify them with something from a wicker hamper laid out as if for a Town and Country shoot. Or, at least, that’s the way some of its denizens liked to see themselves.

  The beach to Seaside is not, as it were, “a two-way street,” a cause for rejoicing among Laurel folk. A few people were, like Hudson, walking or jogging east in the brilliant morning, sunglassed, hatted, or capped against the climbing sun. But over the course of the entire three miles he passed only three or four individuals headed west. Aside from a few young bicyclists, only the most adventuresome of Seasiders ever left its tidy environs, for dinner at Criolla’s or a casual meal or drinks at the Blue Bar, perhaps, or a quick poke around the shops just north of the 26-A intersection. When they did sally forth, it was usually by car, more likely than not a BMW, Jag, or Land Rover.

  Of course, Laurel Beach had been discovered. Old Laurel cottages were at a premium and even undistinguished little structures on or near the beach sold for small fortunes. There was no place left on the Emerald Coast to hide, certainly not the oldest beach settlement for almost two hundred miles around. Hudson had already seen, cruising slowly up and down the village streets, often at dusk, the svelte vehicles with dark-tinted windows and out-of-state license plates, slowing or stopping to examine properties and lots for sale. Anybody with cash could build a big, new house, and, fortunately, that’s exactly what a lot of folks wanted to do, but people always want what’s hard to get, and more than a few potential buyers now found a cachet in Laurel’s very limitedness and out-of-the-wayness—not a tennis court or golf course for miles—as well as the patina that only comes with age.

  But there were only so many houses and cottages in Laurel and, through the grace of God and the persistence of a few good citizens, it was surrounded by National Park Seashore, wilderness areas, and state land preserves. Greenway was the closest any new community would ever be. And to the east, Seaside, monolithic and insular as it might be, was, nonetheless, an attra
ctive, stable buffer against any further incursions from the tacky development, uncharitably known as the Redneck Riviera, that spewed up 98 from Panama City.

  ***

  Seaside is twenty years old, the admirable brainchild of a man who had inherited eighty acres on the edge of Seagrove Beach from his grandfather and didn’t want to do just anything with it. With a team of urban designers and architects, he planned a neo-traditional seaside community no point of which is more than a half-mile from any other. To the great surprise of almost everyone, it had caught on. People liked the explicit building codes, which insisted that all Seaside cottages be designed within a set of traditional criteria indigenous to old West Florida: wood frames adapted to the climate, built off the ground with ample windows and cross ventilation, overhangs and porches to hold the shade and breezes in summer. Upper middle-class Southerners, especially, were drawn by the opportunity of creating something in their own desired image. Many, including a number of Memphians, abandoned Destin and Santa Rosa, the tradition of generations, for the new, more upscale architectural fantasy. The goal was instant tradition, a seaside community that would be to the Emerald Coast what Nantucket and Charleston, Savannah, Lewes, and Cape May were to the East. If the result necessarily fell short of those lofty aims, and sometimes resembled a movie set, as, indeed, it had served for one major studio film, it nonetheless carried a charm of its own.

  Having Moon along for the outing, Hudson made fairly quick work of their destination: a look along the newer shops behind the town green, a quick peer into the Sundog bookstore, a hot dog from the take-out window of one of the little sandwich shops in the open-air market along with two large cups of water for Moon, some people-watching from the main pergola overlooking the center of the beach at the end of Tupelo Street.

  Everything, the cottages, in shades of white and pastels, tightly stacked along the narrow lanes lined with hawthorn, flowering succulents, and palmetto, and the beach with its manicured sand and regimentally placed azure umbrellas, everything, and everyone, looked healthy and confident and well turned-out.