Islands: A Novel Part 2

"It can't be all that easy to have affairs in Charleston," I said. "You'd be b.u.mping into everybody you knew all the time."

"From what I hear, you'd be surprised by how easy it is," she said. "Either that, or lots of people don't really care who's diddling around with who."

"So why didn't he leave her?"

"The girls, I'm sure. And then I hear he was totally in love with her. I think the divorce almost killed him."

"Why did he finally divorce her?" I asked. I was ashamed of myself, but I could not stop probing for facts about Lewis Aiken. He had seemed so open with me the night before, but I saw now that I had not caught the sense of him at all, and I wanted to know him. I hurt for his hurt.

"She did, not him. They were renovating the house on the Battery-not fancy enough for her, I guess-and she had a really steamy affair with the architect. He wasn't a local guy, but he was a real stud and he had a good practice here. I don't think the poor guy had a chance. They were all over the place with it; everybody was talking. Dr. Aiken moved to the country with the girls and she filed for divorce. He just let her. She was going to marry the guy and they were going to live in splendor in the Battery house-on the Aikens's money. Of course, his family loathed her, and hadn't spoken to her for ages, and she retaliated by not letting them see the girls. I hear he was going to contest the divorce, but when she went after the house, that was it. The architect didn't marry her after all, and she hightailed it home to California, where her parents had moved. I hear they bought her a house next door to theirs. I think she got a generous settlement, but it wasn't what she had had with Dr. Aiken. I'll bet she regrets that little fling. She had it all, and blew it."

"What happened to the architect?"

"He went back home to his wife in Orangeburg."

"What a comedown," I said, laughing. "Marcy, it's incredible to me that you know all this."

"Everybody knows. He's a catch."

Lewis Aiken called the next day and asked me to dinner.

"I hear you're a catch," I said.

"Blue-plate catch of the day," he said. "Wear your jeans and your dancing shoes, and bring some bug spray. This place doesn't have much but mosquitoes and a jukebox and the best oysters in the Low Country. Pick you up at six."

Booter's Bait and Oysters lies at the end of a flimsy dock that stretches out over the marshes to Bohicket Creek, which separates Wadmalaw Island from John's Island. I never could have found it on that evening. It seemed to me so deeply embedded in the wild heart of the marsh and swamp country, so far from even the spa.r.s.e filling stations and cinder-block stores and garages we pa.s.sed on the way, on the little country road, that we were in another country, one that lay a continent away from Charleston. And in a sense it did. This wild, swamp-cradled, salt-infused country had far more to do with alligators and rattlesnakes and eagles and ospreys and the occasional bobcat than it did with men and their doings. The houses we did pa.s.s were shacks and trailers sliding slowly into the tangles of vines and encroaching live oaks. Rusted cars decorated dirt yards; old gut-sprung sofas sat on porches. Skiffs and rowboats had pride of place in what pa.s.sed for most driveways.

"I guess you're sure about this," I said.

"Oh, yeah. Booter and I grew up together, summers. Our place is not so far from here. We ran wild all over the place. There isn't an inch of Bohicket Creek we haven't fished or hunted. He's a better shot than anybody I know, and he's the best fisherman in the Low Country. He keeps boats for some of the guys at his dock, and it got so that people just hung around when they came in, and chewed the fat and drank beer, and finally he put a roof over the end of it and a couple of tables and benches, and got a jukebox and a beer license...though I've never been so sure about that. People come from all around here for the oysters. Oh, not the town crowd that thinks roughing it is the Wreck on Mount Pleasant. But folks around here. The oysters come out of the water the day you eat them, and there's only two ways that you can-roasted and raw. Junior Crosby, an old black man who used to work for my father on the Edisto place, does the oyster roasts. He's got a gallon drum and a sheet of iron and he builds a fire and gets it just right, and then plunks a croker sack full of oysters on it and yanks 'em off when they're ready, and you take the clumps and open them yourself. Somehow I didn't think you'd have one, so I brought oyster knives for both of us."

"Well, I certainly know what an oyster roast is," I said. "I've been to them at some pretty fancy places, at benefits for the foundation. But you certainly didn't have to open your own oysters. There were people to do it for you."

"You'd get thrown in the creek at Booter's if you asked somebody to do that," Lewis said. "But I'll show you how. And if you slice your finger off, there's a doctor in the house."

We b.u.mped down a dirt road so thickly overhung with moss and branches that it was like driving through a tunnel and abruptly came out into a clearing. I gasped. The creek here was just widening out into a sea of marsh gra.s.s, silvered by a small breeze and flushed pink by the setting sun. The line of the trees against the far edge of the marsh was black. Over it all a high white ghost moon rode.

"It's beautiful," I said.

There was a long dock and the promised pavilion at the end, roofed with tin, and a cl.u.s.ter of fishing boats waddled back and forth on their tethers at the platform below. Trucks and old sedans and motorcycles crowded the rutted parking lot. Jukebox music thumped into the quiet twilight, over the whine of insects and the slap of water on pilings.

"Let's do it," Lewis said, and we parked and went inside.

There were no walls, but a central island held a bar and a sink and an old red Coca-Cola cooler the likes of which I had not seen since I was a child. It looked fully that old. Men in dirty jeans and T-shirts and a few women in tight jeans and cutoffs and midriff-baring tees stood at the bar or cl.u.s.tered around the picnic tables on the open deck. They were all laughing and some were doing little cut-up dance steps to the jukebox, and most were drinking beer. Everybody looked up when we entered. My heart dropped. I thought with shame of my ironed jeans and new pink T-shirt, and my new, blinding-white sneakers. I had slumming written all over me as surely as if I had worn satin. Lewis, who wore rumpled scrubs again, and sandals, somehow did not stand out. You could tell by the way he walked in that he was at home in this place.

A chorus of greetings rose to meet us-"Hey, Lewis!" "How you doin', boy?" "Been cuttin' up any more kids?" "Where you been? Thought you'd gotten yourself into that movie they're shootin' downtown!" Fondness and equality swam in the air like the swarm of mosquitoes that had already found my face and arms. No one looked directly at me, but I could feel eyes on me like little pits of fire.

A grizzled, red-brown man at the bar grinned, showing a gap in his tobacco-stained teeth, and pulled a Budweiser out of the cooler and opened it and thumped it down in front of Lewis.

"Hey, Booter," Lewis said. "This is my friend Anny Butler. She takes care of sick kids and we work together sometimes."

Apparently, it was important that I be qualified. Set into the scheme of things. Booter turned his grin on me.

"Get you something, ma'am?"

"Please call me Anny. I'd like a Diet c.o.ke."

The crowd at the bar snickered and I flushed.

"Got Mountain Dew and beer," Booter said. "I could make you some coffee, though."

"Beer's fine."

It was. It was cold and sweating in my hand, and drops of condensation fell onto my arms and hands, cooling them. It was airlessly hot under the canopy of tin. The squadrons of mosquitoes were vicious and relentless. I had lathered myself all over with the strong, piney-green liquid Lewis had given me, but apparently I was fresh meat. No one else at the bar or tables seemed to be bothered. I drank another beer quickly and the bites seemed to sting less.

Junior Crosby came in toting his paraphernalia then, and the steaming of the oysters got under way. The crowd descended on them like locusts, piling the great clumps of adhering sh.e.l.ls onto tin plates and attacking them with oyster knives to pry them open and pop the roasted oyster into their mouths. They tasted wonderful, the few that I managed to get open. By the time I had finished my first plate, everybody else had gone back for thirds and fourths, and the beer flowed. Night fell, thick and black and moon haunted. The creek water was silvered with it out into the marsh.

Lewis finally relented and opened the oysters for me, and bought me another beer, and another. I did not even like beer, but this tasted wonderful, somehow, all of a piece with the salt of the marsh and the scent of the faraway mimosas.

"I'll be drunk," I said.

"Well, I should certainly hope so," Lewis said. "Because I promised you dancing, and dancing out here is far better accomplished drunk."

He went up to the jukebox, a battered old Wurlitzer that looked to me the same vintage as the cooler, and made a selection. All over the dock people were dancing; I had scarcely noticed them, but now I could not look away. Apparently, the only songs Booter had on his jukebox were the old rock-and-roll and country-and-western songs of the fifties, which I barely remembered from my childhood. All around me, burly, light-footed men and willowy, big-haired women were stomping and swaying and undulating to the Platters, Bill Haley and His Comets, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Little Richard, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps.

"It's a time warp," I said. "Where's Elvis?"

"Too upscale for this crowd," Lewis said, grinning. "Fats Domino doing 'Blueberry Hill' is about as highbrow as it gets."

He swung me up and out onto the dance floor, and the music caught me as surely as his red-freckled arms, and I was dancing as I had never danced before, intense, sweating, as sure and light of foot as any of the other women present, utterly lost in the beat and the vibration of stomping feet on the wooden boards. They sounded hollow, as wood does over water; it was all a part of the magic of the night. I have never been so sure, before or since, that I was as seamlessly good at anything as I was that night dancing on Booter Crogan's dock.

Finally, when I was panting and laughing and wilting into his arms, sticky with oyster juice and sweat and wild haired with creek humidity, Lewis put on another record and pulled me against him. This time, it was not rock and roll, but Percy Sledge wailing, "When a Man Loves a Woman." The beat was slow, insinuating, heartbreaking. I put my face into his shoulder and he rested his chin on the top of my head and we swayed close together, hardly moving. I was lost in him, the feel of him, the smell. I did not want the song ever to end.

When it did, I moved back and shook my head as if I was coming up from underwater.

"Let's get a beer and go sit on the end of the dock and put our feet in the water," he said. And we did. My head was spinning so that the moon seemed to double itself, and swim back together before splitting apart again.

"I've had too much to drink," I said. The water was still warm from the day, but just under the surface was the chill of the past winter. It felt wonderful on my burning feet, like bathing them in champagne.

He put his arm around me and I rested my head on his shoulder.

"Why don't you have a boyfriend?" he said. "Why aren't you married?"

"I don't know," I said honestly. "It just never came up. For a long time the only kind of men I knew about were my mother's 'friends,' the ones who came to the house all the time. We had to go to our rooms when they visited, and one night when I was sixteen or so one of them came after me when my mother had pa.s.sed out on the sofa. It was no big deal; he was too drunk to do anything to me, and I hit him with a tennis racquet. My mother woke up and threw him out, and promised me it would never happen again, and it didn't. She drank after that, but she didn't have any more friends, that I know of."

"You hit him with a tennis racquet?" Lewis said, beginning to laugh.

"I'm certainly not helpless," I said. "And I do have boyfriends; I always did. I dated a good bit in school. But I had the kids then, and up until they went away to school, and after that...I don't know. I just wanted to be still and quiet. It got to be a habit."

We were quiet for a while, and then I said, "I heard about your wife. About the divorce and all. I'm really sorry, Lewis."

He didn't speak, and I thought that I had gone to a place where I was not allowed. But then he shook his head and sighed.

"For a long time it was good, at least for me," he said. "She was enchanting. She still is. I wouldn't have let her go if there had been anything left of me in her life. But I couldn't let...all that...go on in front of the girls. And besides, there was always something about our life...it was a picture-book life. It never did seem quite real to me. And I guess it wasn't. Real felt like those kids I saw every Sat.u.r.day. All that pain and despair, no money...not that I wanted that for my family, G.o.d, no, but there was just never any...darkness to us. Any contrast to all that light. Somehow I just couldn't trust that."

"I know," I said. I did. I had it in me, too; I needed it, that interior shadow where I could hide myself sometimes, a cavelike protection against the blinding world. I think it was what drew me to the work I do. I understand darkness.

"Look," he said. "When we get back, I don't guess I can come in?"

"No," I said.

"I didn't think so. So would you like to come out to the island with me one day this weekend? I'll cook dinner for you; I'm a good cook. And I'll show you everything that I love. I'd like you to see it all. There's an alligator nursery you'll flip over."

"You sure know how to show a girl a good time," I said sleepily.

The Ace Basin lies in a great, 350,000-acre wilderness centered by a shallow bay created by the confluence of the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto Rivers. It harbors an estuarine ecosystem so rich in layers and layers of life, so fertile and green and secret, so very old, so totally set apart from the world of men and machines, that there is literally no place on earth remotely like it. It is as far removed from the beautiful, mannerly, infinitely civilized grid of Charleston south of Broad Street, with its verandaed old houses in pink and ocher and yellow and taupe wood or stucco, the colors of soft heat, as Tashkent would be, or Antarctica. Other areas in the Low Country that were once as pristine have irrevocably gone over to man now, and cannot be reclaimed, but a combination of public and private agencies and individuals have set their teeth and shoulders to safeguard the Ace, and now protect sizable swatches of it. In that vast and succoring basin, one third light, one third water, and only one third earth, life in all its abundance has evolved almost unseen for millions of years, infused twice a day by the great salt breath of the tides. I had never really seen it, never really known that it lay there to my south, a dreaming continent, a separate lost world. When I first went there with Lewis, it almost frightened me.

We came off a scabrous paved road onto a dirt and gravel track that seemed to go on forever. There had been no mannerly sign announcing Sweetgra.s.s Plantation, the property's name, as there were for the big stately plantations open to visitors to the west and north-Magnolia Hall, Middleton Place, Boone Hall, Medway. There was not even a mailbox. It was eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning, and already the heat was shimmering off the road and insects were buzzing in the vast stretches of marsh gra.s.s and occasional flashes of black tidal creeks. Lewis did not turn on the air-conditioning in the Range Rover, and my neck and back ran sweat under my shirt.

"I hate air-conditioning," he said, catching me pulling my shirt away from my body. "People ought to sweat in the summer. Makes it real. Makes you slow down and smell the swamp and the pluff mud. Makes you kind of sleepy and s.e.xy. What do you think?"

"I think it makes me sleepy and smelly. And cross as a bear. I don't want to smell the pluff mud," I said, swatting a mosquito that had ridden with us all the way from Charleston. "Where do you get your mail?"

"I don't, out here," he said. "Everything goes to the house or the office. There's nothing anybody needs to tell me that can't wait till I get back to Charleston. I don't even have a phone; I use my cell phone, and I wouldn't bring that if I didn't have patients."

"So you really rough it out here," I said.

"Well, not really."

The road curved, and I looked down a long alley of live oaks hung with gray moss to a gentle bluff on the river, where the house stood. I drew in my breath. Set into the maritime forest of live oak, cedar, loblolly and slash pine and palmettos, the house looked as if it had risen from the damp earth so it could look over the blue river in front of it. It was beautiful.

"I thought it would be.... I thought there would be columns and things," I said stupidly. This rambling, stilted, pavilioned gray cypress house spoke to my heart like no columns had ever done. "This is wonderful."

"Yes," he said matter-of-factly. "I had it built after the divorce, when I knew that I would be spending so much time here. We had the whole column thing before that, a hundred and fifty years worth of rotting stucco and peeling walls and enough mold to keep the Low Country in penicillin for years. My mother adored it, and wouldn't even let me make repairs; she said she wanted it kept as Daddy had before he died. By the time she went to live with my sister in Connecticut, it was downright dangerous, and it would have cost more to repair it than to build fresh. So I had it torn down and built this one. I think it's what a marsh house should be-silvery gray like the marsh gra.s.s, raised so the breezes off the water can come in, cool and shaded inside, high ceilings, lots of gla.s.s in every direction. And a good kitchen. The old one was a horror. I've loved living here, though most of Charleston thinks I've desecrated the family name. My mother doesn't even know the old house is gone."

"Doesn't she come back sometimes?"

"No. She doesn't seem to want to be anywhere she and Dad lived together. After he died she didn't want the Battery house, either. I think she may be going into Alzheimer's. My sister says she's awfully vague and forgetful now."

"How sad, not to want to be in your home anymore. Are you sad?"

"No. This and Bull Street are home now. You're not home, not really. Are you sad?"

"No. But I didn't leave places like a plantation or the Battery house, either. Almost anything else would be an improvement over where I lived. I love my apartment."

"You're going to love this even more," he said, and swung the car into a berth beneath a live oak that literally swept the ground with its branches. I looked up; it was like being in a cathedral. No rain could penetrate that canopy of leaves and moss. After the noise of the car, the water silence was soft and palpable. I could hear the river running a good hundred feet away, at the end of a canopied dock over the marsh.

We went up the steps and into the house. The door was not locked. Inside, I caught my breath again. Beautiful. Simple and light washed and beautiful. The water and the marsh gra.s.s and the air and the sun seemed a part of the fabric of the house. This was a house for light hearts.

He had, I was sure, brought many things from the Battery house here to this one. The wide, polished pine floors were pooled in places with thin bonfires of old orientals. A damask sofa, rump sprung and fading but still grand, sat, opposite a pair of b.u.t.tery, worn-leather Morris chairs, in front of a great stone fireplace. Airy Scandinavian and French provincial pieces melted seamlessly into the whole stew, along with a delicate inlaid escritoire, a formidable partners' desk before one of the river windows, before the other a chintz chaise showing the unmistakable stigmata of cat scratchings on its leg. I don't know why it all worked, but it did. The house lifted you up. It would be hard to stay unhappy here. Maybe, I thought, the sheer fact that you love things makes them fit together.

We walked through a cool, dim central hall and into the enormous stone-floored kitchen. There were a professional gas stove, refrigerator, and countertop appliances among the clutter of dried flowers and hanging herbs and cooking utensils. Something wonderful simmered in a big pot on the stove. A thin brown woman stood stirring it, a caramel child capering about her. The rug before the fireplace was strewn with toys.

"Thought I heard you clomping around in there," the woman said, smiling but not turning from the stove. Lewis went to her and hugged her fiercely from behind.

"Lindy, my love," he warbled. "Come away with me, Lindy...."

"I'm not going anywhere with you, you sorry hound," she said, and did turn then, and offered me her hand. I took it, smiling back at her warm smile. Laugh lines fanned around her eyes, but other than that, the severe brown face was unmarked; she could have been any age at all.

"I'm Linda Cousins," she said. "I'm a nurse at the county clinic on Edisto, but I help Lewis here keep himself decent on weekends. This is my son, Tommy."

"I'm Anny Butler," I said. "I'm a friend of Lewis from my work."

"I hope you're a friend from more than that," she said, the smile widening. "This one needs a good stout friend more than anybody I ever saw."

I felt myself redden, wondering how to reply to this, but at that moment little Tommy Cousins came around his mother's legs and grinned at me. He was an enchanting child, melted chocolate eyes, much like my own, pure, beautiful features. I saw that he wore a slightly built-up shoe, and looked back at Lewis.

"Yeah, he's one of mine, aren't you, champ?" Lewis said, knuckling the child's close-cropped curls. "I fixed him up, oh, maybe five years ago. Before he could walk. Now there's no stopping him."

"You gon' marry her?" Tommy said, looking at me with a.s.sessing eyes.

"Why? You think I should?" Lewis said. My face burned brighter.

The little boy stared at me for another s.p.a.ce of time.

"Yeah, I think you ought to," he said finally. "She's soft, like a pillow. I bet she can sure cook."

Lewis threw back his red head and roared with laughter, and the child joined in. Linda Cousins came over to me and touched my shoulder.

"Don't listen to either one of them," she said. "They're so full of themselves they stink to high heaven. I'd walk right out on them except one belongs to me and the other one would drown in his own sloppiness if I did."

Lewis swung the wiggling child up into his arms.

"Linda and her husband, Robert, and Tommy live on the place, down the river a little farther. Robert's father helped my folks out some, and Robert and Linda do the same for me or I wouldn't be able to keep this place. Linda also makes the best she-crab soup I ever ate, even better than mine. She's making some for us. I asked her and Robert to join us, but she's got some idea that I'm going to seduce you with she-crab soup and wine and I don't know what all, and so they'll take a rain check."

"Lewis, my Lord," I began, red to the roots of my hair, and he laughed and gave me a quick, hard hug around my shoulders.

"Sorry," he said. "But I'm serving you notice right now that she's right. I have never met the woman who could resist Linda's soup...and me, of course."

He was teasing, but his words burned. Linda saw it.

"I haven't noticed any women out here clamoring for either you or my soup," she said severely. "You be nice to this one. She looks too fine for the likes of you, anyway."

"I'll be nice to her," he said soberly. "I'll be nicer to her than anybody I've ever known. I run my mouth too much, but I mean that."

He looked at me steadily with his narrow blue eyes. I turned away. I felt off base and tight around my heart. I did not want a flirtatious, shallow physical relationship with this man, but I did not know what I did want, and did not think that there could possibly be any other relationship with me that he would choose. There were simply too many others of his own world.

"Do I get the tour?" I said.