“Will you ever shut up?”
“When the time comes.”
Sixteen
It is now 6:48. Across the creek, Kathy alights from her cream-colored Mercedes and catches sight of me sitting in a despondent slump on my porch rocking chair. As ever, she is the last person I wish to see (at least at this hour), yet also the one I need. She flashes me a wave that combines a piano finger exercise with the Hitler salute. I do not salute back. A yellow Hummer pulls up, and out slithers a designer-thin middle-aged couple in pressed jeans. They are as stiff as pithed frogs. Kathy exclaims, “Fab, isn’t it?” as she presents the half-completed Attica nearest Lapham’s. He says yes. She says yes.
Kathy watches me watching her. She flips her braid like a horse’s tail in my direction, and I wince. After her clients depart—exclaiming, “Well, you certainly have given us a lot to think about!”—she stands on the shore with legs apart, cups her hands to her mouth like a hog caller, and hollers: “Going-out-of-business sale! One day only!” Her voice is so shrill she has no need of the bullhorn.
“Last chance, Wrinkles! Here comes the countdown!”
I glide in a dream state and run what’s left of my mind over the events of the summer so far.
At the start of the season, on Memorial Day, a dual funeral was held in Wainscott for two women who were killed fighting over a salmon steak. It seems that the salmon was the only one left in the seafood shop after the weekend run, and both women had entered the shop at the same time. They raced over and grabbed the piece of fish, each hanging on to one slippery end as best she could, but their tug-of-war carried them out to the terrace of the shop. There they tumbled over the railing and into a truck loaded with shrimp, in which they suffocated to death before anyone could reach them.
When I read of this, I wondered if, at the funeral, the women had been laid out on beds of lettuce with cocktail sauce on the side, but I failed to inquire.
“Going once…”
Last month, the Kerouac Literary Prize, nicknamed the “Roady,” was awarded in a Nobel-like ceremony in a field of stiff thistles in the town of Flanders. The Roady is supposed to go to an East End writer of distinction (I once declined it myself, having come down with Tourette’s that year), but the selection committee of 207 local watercolorists and poetasters long ago ran out of first-rank candidates, then out of second-rank, then third-, until they began giving away the award to anyone who wrote anything at all. This year’s Roady went to Betsy Betsy, a beat reporter over whose selection there was a brief dustup, since Ms. Betsy also chairs the committee of 207. Nonetheless, everyone much admired her columns on media business transactions in Envy magazine, and thought her Roady was well deserved. A motion to give the award to everyone on Long Island was tabled.
“Going once-and-a-half…”
As August began, Jacob McMinus, the Wall Street mogul who served time for insider trading, threw himself a seventieth birthday-and-parole party at his oceanfront estate in East Hampton. The rumored cost was sixteen million dollars. My invitation must have been mislaid, but I understand that the event was a howling success. Guests waltzed to the string section of the New York Philharmonic and were then treated to a tasteful miniconcert by ’N Synch. Royal Beluga caviar was scooped from hollowed-out softballs (Jake loves the game), and every guest received a goody bag worth thirty thousand dollars, containing ampoules of perfume, quarts of Macallan sixty-year-old single-malt scotch, a gift certificate for a year’s worth of Botox treatments, and a CD of Jake telling funny dirty stories at work. At the end of the evening the revelers repaired to the beach, where they divvied up the five-hundred-thousand-dollar cake and drank themselves witless. The host thanked his guests, by whose friendship he said he was humbled, and added that for him, jail had been a “life-affirming experience.”
On the very same day, a real estate developer who had the misfortune to live north of the highway, and who, for twenty years, had striven to get his name in the “South o’ the Highway” column in Dan’s Paper, without success, hanged himself from the hoop of his backboard, employing the net. He left a note that read: “Now do I make it?” Unfortunately his body, though swaying out of doors in plain sight, was not discovered till five days later by two men from So-Low Waste Management. “We wouldn’t have found him ourselves,” said Lenny Bisselkorf of Swampscut, “if we hadn’t had a scheduled pickup. Who goes up here? No one.” The developer’s death was noted in the “North o’ the Highway” column in Dan’s, but was given a full paragraph.
“Going twice…”
Last Saturday the Paint Stores and Publishers softball game was played in East Hampton. Originally this annual charity event was called the Artists and Writers game. But after a few years, the players on the business side of things outnumbered the artists, so they changed the team names. These folks would themselves be overtaken by the Hollywood people as soon as it became clear that the game had publicity potential for the participants, but the game’s new name would stick. In recent years some of the biggest stars in movies have been seen shagging flies and making crowd-pleasing attempts at the hidden-ball trick. So popular and competitive has the game grown, in fact, that several network crews are always on hand, along with at least one documentary filmmaker who sees the event as emblematic. The media were in luck this year, as over twenty “bona fide superstars” showed up, two of whom were tossed out of the game for sliding spikes-up into second, and another, disputing a call, split open the home plate umpire’s head with an aluminum bat. None of the injured parties complained. They said it was all for a good cause, though at the time no one could recall what the cause was.
“Going twice and a half…”
And then just a few days ago, to round off the summer mummery to date, an auction was held at the Water Mill Center for Self-Help, to raise money for the center to help itself. Among the items up for bid were a barbecue at the Bridgehampton home of Helmut and Greta Lopez, recently of São Paulo and widely thought to be war criminals from Vienna “yet fascinating people” two nights in any Hampton for a couple from one Hampton who wish to see what another Hampton is like; a tour of the U.N. General Assembly conducted by John Travolta; the broken left taillight from the Mercedes driven by a famous socialite several years ago when she backed into the crowd waiting to get into a club (expected to fetch in the high six figures); and best of all, “Your picture with the Laphams at their fabulous new home in Quogue. And a Lapham Aphm written expressly for you.”
So it goes, so it will always go. Shadows cast by Lapham’s twelve virgin chimneys menace the roof, the walls, the green and perfect lawn, and then the water, where they fracture into kaleidoscopic ghosts. I sink deeper into my rocking chair. I am beginning to feel like a notebook dropped into the creek, my handwriting illegible, my pages drowned.
I look at the Da Vinci, then back at Lapham’s house, nearly four stories and growing. The overtime Mexicans are on their overtime evening break. They sit with their backs against Lapham’s front wall, pass cans of beer from hand to hand, and snooze. I look at the bulging clouds that have crushed the sun into a dappled line on the horizon, and at the creek on whose churning waters ducks float and bob, and toward the cranberry bogs and the rolling moors and the marshy banks on which the egrets and the cormorants strut, and then back at my home, which represents three generations of quiet purpose and attempted decency and yet is only property, real estate, after all, and then finally into my heart, which drums and asks, Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?
“Going, going…”
“All right,” I call to Kathy. “You can have the house.”
“And the island?” She is deliberately speaking like a little girl.
“And the island.”
And my life. I wonder if I can lure her over here by agreeing to anything, then greet her on the beach with the ax.
The thought occurs that I can always renege, until I see that she is holding a pocket-size tape recorder high in the air and smiling like a dolphin.
/> “OK, Wrinkles. Here comes the hair.” And so saying, she displays a pair of cartoonishly large shears, which she must have brought with her, certain in the knowledge that I would cave. She cuts off her long braid with one clip and holds it aloft, as if it were the head of John the Baptist.
“What now?” I ask.
“Well, Ah know Ah said that Ah would hand over this prize to you mahself. Person to nutcase? But frankly, Mr. March, Ah’ve been observin’ you lately, and you seem to be about to topple off that rocker of yours. No offense. So for safety’s sake—mah safety, that is—Ah think Ah’ll just scoot the braid over to you by boat.”
“You’re not going to send the Grady White over here without a driver? You’ll crash it.” She cannot be that eager for this deal.
“Oh my, no, silly—this boat!” She holds up Sharon and lays the detached braid in its toy hull. I hobble down to the dock, grab the remote, watch the vessel come toward me, and whisper good-bye to my life.
Terrible images present themselves to me, of strangers tramping over Noman, through the rooms of my house; Kathy sweeping her arms around and saying things like “Fab, fabulous, marvy, marvelous, like incredible, like wow” interested parties making inquiries as to what the previous owner was like, and receiving responses to those inquiries, my name being bandied about by aliens; blueprints being drawn up for changes to the property contemplated by would-be buyers; endless discussions being held regarding the addition of tennis courts, a swimming pool, of course, and a helipad; couples negotiating over the location of the genuine antique jukebox (“We have Eddie Fisher singing ‘Oh My Papa!’”) and the pool table (“Arthur plays a wicked game of pool”); and all their faces, Kathy’s included, lost in moronic reverie.
I try not to, but I cannot help but think of them sorrowfully, all of these people who seek the perfect life and believe that a pool table will put it within their reach. However often I condemn and ridicule them and hope they will boil in their own hot tubs, something in me also wants to comfort them, to put my arm around their exfoliated shoulders and tell them that the pool table, whose green felt now appears as an infinite landscape, soon will feel like an inch-square swath of fabric, as will their lives; that one fine evening, when the din of their schedules has momentarily ceased, and much to their horrified surprise not a single envelope bearing arabesque calligraphy has arrived in the mail, and there is nowhere (nowhere!) for them to go, they will descend to their pool-table room and stare at the soft green rectangle and weep without tears.
Sharon arrives. I extract the braid and unravel it. The hair is just right: strong, heavy, and springy. My triumphs have come to this.
“One question,” I call to Kathy as she opens the door of her car, about to depart. She cups a hand to her ear to indicate that she is listening. “Why is my property so valuable? Anyone who buys it would tear down the house, I suppose, to build something as hideous as the things you sell. The island is inconvenient to get to and from. It’s a poor choice for Hamptons dinner parties, unless one can accommodate a flotilla. It will take much longer to unload than your usual junk. So tell me, why do you want it? Really.”
She stands still for a rare moment, then sighs deeply, as if she has just declared her undying love to a man she now discovers is stone-deaf.
“Harry March, you are an innocent,” she says. “Location, location. Do you know what that means?”
“Neighborhood?” I answer feebly.
“No, poor boy. Not neighborhood. If location location simply meant ‘neighborhood,’ then any old jackass could tell a valuable house from a worthless one. It takes someone with vision to see what you’ve got here. Someone with a vision of himself as well as of everything else. Someone who recognizes his place in the universe. Someone lahk me. Someone lahk…”
“Don’t say it!”
“You know what Ah think? Ah think Mr. Lapham will want to buy your island and flatten your house so that he may enjoy an unimpeded view of the beautiful surroundings to the west. That’s what Ah think. He’s quite the conservationist, you know.” She steadies her gaze. “But he’ll keep your dock, I’m pretty sure. He’ll keep your dock.”
“Why is that?” I ask.
“Because it’s an L, Harry. From his viewpoint, a great big Lapham-size L!” She laughs and drives off.
I read somewhere that Charlie Chaplin once finished third in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest. I know exactly how he felt.
Seventeen
In the bellicose darkness of a summer evening, when the rain clouds inflate like black dirigibles, the wind cleaves the air like a cannonball shot from the deck of a battle-scarred frigate, the creek waves smack the beach like the rattle of a Gatling gun, and I have run out of martial imagery, I prepare for war. An hour from now, Lapham’s workers will have departed the construction site, their day’s mischief done, and I shall christen my Da Vinci at last.
“Finished your lecture yet?” Hector asks. His slim-reed hope is that, having neglected the Chautauqua presentation for most of the day, I will now get bogged down in it and forget my main project. How little he knows me. “Such a fascinating topic, the twentieth century,” he tries. “So complex. So—how do you put it?—layered.”
“I have my theme,” I tell him, indicating Lapham’s house with a flick of my head. “The details are easy.” We are sitting side by side on the dock, listening to the ocean chug in its wash cycle.
It is a little after seven. I know that without having to look. And thanks to Kathy, the torsion spring lies in place, so I have nothing to do but wait. I’ve called the car to pick me up on Quogue Street at 8:45, in plenty of time to get me to LaGuardia for my flight, which I even remembered to confirm. I’ve packed. What have we here? A moment of calm? Hector starts to sing “When you come to the end of a perfect day,” but I shut him up. He stares across at Lapham’s with want and admiration. Yet he cannot help himself; he looks sweet.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
This purple hour, how I reveled in it before the banging started. The almost-night wraps around everything like a complete and airtight thought, an image that works from all sides. And I don’t mean just here on Noman, or here in Quogue. At the hour the sun gets ready to call it a day, even if thunderheads are about to break open at the seams, as they are right now, one can feel a lover’s sigh cover the East End, something unheard for a million years since the Pleistocene glaciers bullied the landmass into shape, and the breakers crashed in on the rocks, rubbing and grinding, until they sculpted a shoreline.
Somewhere at this moment an antiques dealer is hauling in the trestle tables and ladderback chairs from the front lawn of his shop on the highway where they have stood all day on siren display. Bathers (sun and ocean) make their slow processionals up the escarpments, their eyes stunned by the battle fatigue of a day at the beach. SUVs idle in front of the shops, while husbands pick up a last-minute lobster. Cigarette boats, their frantic engines tamed to a purring, slither through the locks of the Shinnecock Canal, and aim for their slips. Mothers in whites, with tennis rackets strapped to their backs like hunting bows, ride their bikes home. Kids, too. Even the estate sections breathe more evenly at this hour, as the sprinklers on timers spume and sputter all at once, and the residents, returned from whatever, adjust their showerheads, spray the salt from their skin, and do not talk. No sound on the fresh-washed streets but the clopping of a solitary jogger. The trophy children in their pj’s read Babar.
Soon the villages will be left to the wheeling gulls and to the police cars crouching in the bushes, both poised for a late catch. Otherwise, it is a wholesale desertion of the out-of-doors, like the beginning of Gray’s “Elegy.” It leaves the world to darkness and to me. And to him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
In the purple hour, my father would recite that poem, Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Formidable piece of work. Eighteenth century, of course. He could do it from memory, because that i
s how poetry was taught back then. One memorized Gray’s “Elegy,” which was incorporated into one’s being, and thus became like an eye or a thumb; one had no choice but to feel improved by it.
Tonight he and my mother lie in the Quogue cemetery (not a churchyard; he never would have agreed to that), where small gray-and-white headstones convene in an eternally unadjourned town meeting. I once had hoped Chloe and I would lie there too, eventually, but I suppose the L.A. bone-yards have more oomph. Great stone Gabriels spread their protective wings over the dust of moguls who denied Dalton Trumbo. Such a strange world.
Which reminds me: I ought to make out a will. I have tried to be careful with tonight’s plan, but I still could wind up in the drink.
“Off to do more writing?” asks Hector. “Good idea. Take all the time you need.”
Inside the house, I retrieve the camcorder that my children gave me for my last birthday. It was sort of a joke. They knew I’d long been of the opinion that the camcorder was responsible for the general lack of modesty abroad these days, that by enabling everyone to appear on television, it had contributed to the death of private life. They also suggested that I use it to record my own life as a warning to others. I’ve never even taken the thing out of its box before, but it seems simple enough to operate, and the kids had the forethought to include a tape. I return to the dock, set the camcorder on a piling, plug it in the outlet, and position myself before the lens, with the Da Vinci behind me. I am certain I look as comfortable as George Bernard Shaw or Arthur Conan Doyle in those primitive movie interviews in which, hands at their sides, they appear to be facing a firing squad. “This is my will and testament,” I begin.
Lapham Rising Page 14
