Islands: A Novel Part 3

I did. From his Boston Whaler on the river and along the narrow tidal creeks, and in the jerry-rigged tractor affair he used in the brush and hummocks of the swamp, I saw his world of shimmering earth and still water, of cordgra.s.s and bald cypress and overarching live oaks and pines. I saw the life that lives in that incredible water world: water snakes and once or twice the big, brutish rattlesnakes of the Low Country; alligators large and small, submerged like logs near mud-slicked banks, only their eyes saying that they were not made of wood.

I saw the nursery that he had mentioned, a small, sunny pond fringed with reeds and cordgra.s.s where the mothers brought their young to mature, safe from whatever preyed on small gators. The young were beautiful, striped yellow and green and black, with cold amber eyes, and they lay in the water like little branches of the same tree, though they were all ages of baby. One or two big, lazy, malachite-and-obsidian mothers lay immobile on the banks in the sun, seeming to sleep rather than to guard. But, Lewis said, make a move toward one of the babies and they would be up on the bank and after you in a heartbeat.

"We lose a good many stupid dogs that way," he said. "Along with the wild pigs and the racc.o.o.ns and whatever else prowls around here. You'd think they'd learn. I hear that over on Kiawah and down at Hilton Head the shelf life of poodles and shih tzus is not long."

I felt the hair rise on the nape of my neck. They were simply so old, so primal, so implacable, the color of stagnant water, of muddy death. I did not think I would ever learn to love the alligators of Edisto.

But the other live things-my heart lifted up to meet them. An eagle took off from its nest on a dead pine and swooped down over the water. Ospreys wheeled and whistled in the arch of the sky. Turtles sunned themselves on reed-grown banks; a white-tailed deer flashed his ensign far off on a lightly forested hummock; the explosions of cinnamon and resurrection ferns burned brilliant green; the green seas of cordgra.s.s rippled in the light, clean, fish-smelling wind; the great, primeval towers of the bald cypress dwarfed all else. By the time we got back to the dock, in the late afternoon, the sun was dropping rapidly over the line of trees across the river and a small chill was stealing into the air, along with the phalanxes of mosquitoes.

"Let's eat inside," he said. "I'd thought we might put up a little table on the end of the dock; the stars out here are incredible, and the night sounds are something to hear. And there's somebody I want you to meet. But we'll come out later, about eleven. The wind picks up about then, and the mosquitoes will be gone."

"That's pretty late, isn't it?" I said. "It's at least an hour back to Charleston."

"I hoped you'd stay," he said simply.

I took a deep breath and turned to face him.

"Lewis," I said, "why me? There must be a hundred women in your life more interesting than I am. There must be fifty who'd sleep with you in the middle of Broad Street if you asked them. I don't...I can't just have some kind of fling with you, and then be crumpled up and tossed away like a Kleenex. I don't have time for that, and it would hurt me badly because I like you a great deal. So this simply cannot go any further than it has. Let's be friends. I make a wonderful friend. I think you would, too."

He leaned over and pulled me up out of the Whaler and into his arms. He rested his chin on the top of my head, a favorite resting place, obviously. I could not even think of the glossy heads that had felt that pointed weight.

"I don't want a fling with you," he said. "I want you to be part of my life. I don't know how; that depends on you, but I will know. Why you? Because you're good, Anny. You're a good person through and through; I knew that about you the minute I laid eyes on you. I love what you do. And you're funny and sweet and you're not one of those hundred women, or the fifty. I've been there. I've done that. That's not what I need; it never was. I need this. I need to work and talk and laugh and be laughed at, and dance, and hold on to somebody soft and round and smaller than me. What I need is you. What will it take to make you believe it? I'll do whatever it is."

"Then let me take it slow," I said. "Don't talk about staying the night with you. Don't talk about seducing me, even if you're teasing me. I'm new at this, Lewis. I know it sounds ridiculous, for somebody thirty-five years old to be new at anything, but this is...not like anything I've done before. You must be fifty; you know so much more than I do. There's so much more in your life than there is in mine. If it turns out that you still want me around after some time has pa.s.sed, we can think about what comes next. But tonight, I want to go home."

"You got it," he said. "But I still want you to hang around till about eleven. You've got to meet this friend of mine."

We ate sweet, rich she-crab soup in front of the fireplace, where pungent cedar and pine burned, and drank a wonderful white wine, like flowers, and mopped the soup up with homemade bread from Linda Cousins's oven, and followed it all with Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

"I make good pies, but it don't get any better than this," Lewis said. He ate three bowls of Chunky Monkey. I ate two.

We listened to music before the fire-Pachelbel, Otis Redding-but we did not dance, and he did not touch me. I felt drowsy and calm and cosseted, shut away, somehow, from my own life. He had to shake me awake when eleven o'clock was near.

"Out at the end of the dock," he said, pointing me toward the door. "I've brought a blanket and a sweater for you. We may have to wait a little while."

"Who is this friend who can't just come in the d.a.m.ned house?" I groused. I was chilly and sleepy.

"You'll see."

We sat out at the end of the dock on the blanket he had brought. I wore the big Shetland sweater gratefully, and wished for thick socks. We did not talk much. Overhead the stars wheeled, blazing and crystal; I have never seen so many. I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald: "Stars like silver pepper." Where had I read that? Under the dock, water slapped, and the cordgra.s.s on the solid little hummock just to the side of the gangway down to the Whaler rustled and whispered. I was drowsing again when he shook me lightly.

"Look," he whispered. I looked where he pointed, down on the hummock just beneath us. Yellow eyes stared back, and in the starlight great tufted ears were silhouetted. A cat, but no house cat I had ever seen; this was truly a great cat.

I held my breath. The yellow eyes held mine, and then they simply vanished, melting away in the darkness. There seemed a darker s.p.a.ce where the cat had been.

"Bobcat," Lewis said. I could feel him smiling in the dark. "Comes most nights at eleven. I wait for him if I'm here. I don't know if he comes when I'm not here; probably, but I like to think he comes just to pa.s.s a little time with me. I've been seeing him for a couple of years now."

Something broke open within me, something knotted and deep that I had not known was there. So wild, the bobcat was simply so wild, and had made me such a priceless gift of his wildness...I began to cry. Lewis put his arms around me and pulled me against him, and when I finished crying he kissed me, a deep, complex kiss with nothing of flirtatiousness in it, and time, after all, did not pa.s.s, and what came next, came there in the starlight on the end of Lewis's dock, with, perhaps, a bobcat to bear witness.

3.

THE NEXT WEEKEND Lewis took me to the beach house for the first time. It was a cool, clean-washed day with tender blue skies, and the water in the harbor, where the Cooper River met the sea, glittered like crumpled foil in the light wind.

The great, double-humped twin bridges arch like the skeletons of giant water snakes over the wide river mouth, dizzying in their stark suspension and swaying height. The older one, connecting the peninsula to Mount Pleasant, is a terrifying carnival ride with two narrow lanes and a vertiginous lack of side railing. There is railing, of course, but it seems, when you are in an automobile climbing its heights, that there is virtually nothing between you and the water's surface, nearly one hundred feet below. The newer bridge is wider and better railed, but it still leaves me dry mouthed and sweaty palmed when I cross it. The newer is the only one I can drive over. The older is a more direct route to East Bay and my apartment, but I always take the new one, happy to drive the extra looping curves to Meeting Street, in exchange for an ersatz safety. In all the times after that day that we went to the house on Sullivan's Island, I never failed to breathe deeply only when we reached the level of the surrounding marshes once more.

"You're going to have to get over that," Lewis said as we swept down off the last height. "I can't stop and wipe your palms every time we go to the island."

"I'll try," I said, smiling at the implied infinity of visits stretching into my future. But I never managed to quell the fear. Perfect things must be paid for.

When I first saw it on a map, Sullivan's Island looked to me rather like an inflamed appendix. On its landward side it is wrapped in marshes and indented with cays and pierced by small tidal creeks. Coming off the Ben Sawyer bridge from Mount Pleasant onto the island, across the inland waterway, it always seemed that you were entering an enchanted, old-fashioned scene, like an impressionist painting. The great salt marshes, the broad ribbon of glittering waterway, the fringe of low-lying cottages studding the inner sh.o.r.e, with small docks and bobbing boats, and beyond it all, the great amplitude of the blue Atlantic...It was a Cezanne seascape. I had visited the island before, many times, but it was to make my way through the dunes on one of the few beach-access paths, to lie on the flat, tawny beach on a damp beach towel with one or another friend, looking out at the sea and back toward the row of old cottages that lay behind the dune line, sheltered from our view by waving, rattling sea gra.s.s. I would not be visiting any of those houses, I knew; they had, since the late nineteenth century, been the retreats of the old Charleston families who migrated there in search of sea breezes and rustication in the long, sweltering summers. Often, I heard, they brought their household goods and their servants, and sometimes the family cow. The houses were seldom rented, and there were no motels or inns on the island. It was clear to such as me that this was in the broadest sense of the word a private island. Plain and a little shabby, with only a few seafood shacks and a convenience-store gas station, the loudest thing on Sullivan's Island seemed to be the cries of children and seabirds, and the fastest thing the ubiquitous golf carts the summer residents used to putt up to the store to get the New York Times, often accompanied by children and large, tongue-lolling dogs. Lewis called it, that first day, a sandy-rumped, old-fashioned family place. But I knew who those families were.

If you wanted livelier, more egalitarian beaches and rowdier evening action, there was Folly Beach to the south and the Isle of Palms to the north, both of which teemed and boomed in summer. Or if you wanted gated insularity and a sea viewed through great, three-storied Palladian windows, there was always Kiawah or Wild Dunes, across the Breach Inlet on the east tip of the Isle of Palms. You could, if you had the where-withal, buy into those places. You had to be invited to Sullivan's Island, and even then beach properties for sale were as rare as igloos. Sullivan's was the oldest beach resort in the Charleston area, and I was scared to death of it.

"Why?" Lewis asked when I told him once again on that first day that perhaps it would be better if I waited a little while to visit the beach house where his six closest friends spent weekends and sometimes weeks at a time.

"I'm not one of you all. I'm not born to this. I'm not really a Charlestonian; I just live here. They'll undoubtedly be perfectly charming to me, but there's bound to be a wall of some kind, and sooner or later you're going to resent me for it."

"A, I'll never resent you for anything. Period. End of discussion," he said, ruffling my salt-stormed hair. "B, some of them aren't from Charleston, either, and n.o.body resents them."

"But they married Charleston people early on. You met some of them right after med school, didn't you? And you were brought up from your playpen with the others. You're really a family. It's such a downtown thing. I'm just not able to do that."

"Anny, what the h.e.l.l is 'that'? What do you think we do downtown? What do you think we do out here? Druid rites? Animal sacrifices? Ethnic cleansing, to keep the gene pool pure?"

"It looks pretty pure to me."

"Then you've got either a big surprise or a big disappointment coming. You're better looking than most of them and smarter than any of them. They're going to love you."

"Lewis-"

"Put a sock in it," he said, grinning, and swung the Range Rover right onto the pocked, heat-shimmering middle road that ran the length of the island. I was silent for a s.p.a.ce of time.

We pa.s.sed the gra.s.sy swell of Fort Moultrie, which I had seen before, but never investigated. It looked like an ancient tumulus containing the remains of a giant, or a great king.

"Sullivan's was a war island before it was anything else," Lewis said, gesturing at the fort. "Fort Moultrie stopped the first Charleston incursion by the British in the Revolutionary War. There are fortifications and bunkers all over the island; you can see them back in the middle rows, along the stations. Henry and I used to prowl through them all the time. We'd take off everything but our trunks-and sometimes everything, once we got inside-and stripe ourselves up with mud or shoe polish, and stalk each other through the tunnels with sharpened sticks. I don't know why we didn't kill each other. Once we stalked the McKenzies' dog Scout, and he got lost way back in the tunnels and we couldn't find him for two days. Henry's dad almost throttled us. I think he liked Scout better than us."

"You all must have been menaces," I said. "Did you just run wild on the island?"

"Oh, yeah. All the kids did. Back then there was nothing to hurt you except the tides at Breach Inlet and whatever snakes were around. Kids knew about those by the time they were two or three. Come to think of it, there still isn't anything much here to hurt you. I've been coming out here since I was eight years old, and this island hasn't changed essentially since then."

"It sounds idyllic," I said. It did. A gentle, sunny kingdom of surf and sand and creeks and inlets, an island fiefdom ruled by children.

"Did your family have a house here?" I asked.

"No. My mother was scared to death of open water. Waves made her crazy. I don't know how she survived on the Battery; she'd go into the very back of the house when the surf was high, and close the shutters. My parents always went to the Edisto house. I loved messing around out there, even when I was small, but there was n.o.body much but my sister and a few of the hands' kids to play with. So I spent weeks and sometimes months on Sullivan's at Henry's folks's house. He had two older sisters who spent most of their time doing their nails and parading by the Coast Guard station, so I think I was like another younger son to Mrs. McKenzie. She and the kids came out for the summers, like a lot of Charleston families then. I never remember her treating me any way except exactly like Henry. Kind of a fond, benign neglect. She knew we were safe, and we were mostly out of her hair. I really loved her."

"Did she know about the tunnels and all that?"

"I don't think so. Maybe a little. But I know she didn't know about some of the rest of it. Like diving off the Ben Sawyer bridge into the inland waterway-not that there was much boat traffic then. But it was deep and fast. We scared ourselves. And we did try to swim Breach Inlet once, and ended up halfway up the Isle of Palms. We had to walk home so n.o.body would know. And the time we took Mr. McKenzie's johnboat out on the cove in a thunderstorm, with lightning hitting all around us. Or the times we smoked behind the dunes, or took some of Mr. McKenzie's rum to the beach at night and slept out there because we couldn't walk home."

"Didn't she miss you?"

"Nope. We told her we were camping out. We did that a lot, in back of the dune line or over on Little Goat Island. Sometimes we wouldn't see her or Henry's sisters for a day or so at a time. She knew that if our bicycles weren't there, we were off somewhere in the neighborhood. We used to go over to Camilla's house on the beach a lot. Henry lived on the cove. We had the best sailing and crabbing, but Camilla had the beach and the ocean. We had to let her do whatever we were doing in exchange for the use of her beach, but it was worth it. Camilla was one of the few girls we could tolerate. She was a great tomboy; she could swim and sail better than we could. And her sister was much older, so her mother and grandmother were glad she had some company, even if it was us. I think they'd have drowned us if they'd known what sort of things we got her into. But like I said, Sullivan's was the safest place in the world then. And Henry adored her. Always did, from kindergarten on. They were a pair by the time they were ten years old."

"But he didn't marry her," I said.

"No. Charlie Curry came to the hospital right after her deb year, and she dropped old Henry like a hot rock and was married to Charlie by Christmas of that year. One of the biggest weddings Charleston had ever seen. Henry didn't go; he took off back to Hopkins early."

"Poor Henry."

"Yeah, well, by that time Fairlie had come along, and before long Henry was a goner. Man, she was something else. Well, you'll see."

"Where did she come from?"

"She came down from Kentucky to study dance at the College of Charleston. Henry met her at a party that his mother gave for the troupe. She was a good bit younger than we were, but Henry couldn't have cared less. Only his mother cared; she'd had her sights set on Camilla all along. Two of the great old Charleston families and all that s.h.i.t. But even she bowed to the inevitable. Fairlie was gorgeous. Still is, but when she was that young...G.o.d, she was like a lit candle."

My mouth was dry. I was not like a lit anything, except maybe a squat emergency candle.

"Tell me about the rest of them," I said. "Tell me about the Scrubs."

"I have. A hundred times."

"Tell me again. Tell me why you call yourselves the Scrubs. Tell me how they look. Tell me what makes them laugh. Tell me what they love."

He stopped the car to let a small procession cross the road, toward the beach. A youngish woman in a man's shirt and sungla.s.ses came first, followed by two towheaded, brown children in swimsuits and flip-flops. Bringing up the rear was a young girl in a modest bikini, her arms piled high with towels, a cooler, an umbrella, and beach toys. She was barefoot, and pranced skittishly across the hot pavement.

"They look like a family of ducklings," I said.

"Typical Sullivan's Island nuclear family," Lewis said, grinning. "Mama out from Charleston for the summer, while Daddy stays home on Tradd Street and works at the bank and comes out on weekends. The kids. And the nanny. You know the nannies by the number of things they carry, and the fact that they always bring up the rear. There weren't any in our time. I don't know if kids have gotten much worse since then, or mothers have gotten less able to cope. If Henry and I had had a teenager in a bikini in residence, we'd never have left the front porch."

"You sound like you were a juvenile s.e.x fiend," I said.

"And never grew out of it," he said, putting his hand on my bare knee. I could feel the heat of it all over me. I thought of the weekend just past, and felt my arms and legs go slack and heavy. We had seen each other every night since then, but we had not made love again. I had waited for it, first in an embarra.s.sed shyness, then in puzzlement, and finally with an impatience that I could feel in the pit of my stomach. Did he regret the night on the dock, then? But if he did, why did he continue to see me? Why did he bring me to this place that was, I knew, deep in one of the central chambers of his heart?

As if he had read my mind, he said, "I can't wait to get you on a sand dune. It's an unforgettable experience. The moon, the stars, the sandspurs, the ghost crabs..."

"You'll be waiting a long time," I said, but something in me relaxed and stretched itself. There would be another time, then, even if it wasn't on a sand dune. And then I thought, What's the matter with me? Can you turn into a hot number at age thirty-five?

And I knew I could.

He started the car again, driving slowly west. On each side of Middle Street there were modest cottages and bungalows, many on stilts. They were well kept and many had flourishing gardens, but they were a long way from grand.

"Where are the big old cottages?" I said. "I know they must be along the beach, but I've never seen any."

"They are. They're on what we call the first row. That's the first row from the beach. There's a second row, and a third, and a fourth, and so on. The little streets that cut through them to this one are called stations, because they used to be stops on a trolley line that ran along the island. Things get a little rattier as they get farther from the beach."

"Not very democratic."

"We never thought it was."

"All right, the Scrubs."

"That's simply because all of us are, in one way or another, connected to medicine. Henry and I went to Duke and Hopkins together. Charlie's always been in hospital administration. Simms's father owned a medical supply business that served the whole South, and Simms has built it up into a national concern. Second or third largest in the country, I think. Simms and Henry and I were born here, and grew up together, along with Camilla and Lila. We had the start of a core group, and then Charlie and Fairlie came, and somehow we just...clicked. Over the years we got close, closer than with some of our families. In a way, you're right. They are my family."

"Your wife...," I said tentatively. "Was she part of it?"

"No." He looked straight ahead. "Sissy was never part of it. She thought Sullivan's was sticky and sandy and shabby and she didn't like any of the women. Oh, maybe Camilla, a little...at least she liked her family tree, and it's hard not to like Camilla no matter what. But she really disliked Fairlie and Lila. Too good looking, I think."

"She didn't have any worries on that score," I said, thinking of the radiant young woman in her wedding dress.

"Sissy always hated having sand in her shoes and wind in her hair. And the accommodations at the house are less than palatial, to say the least. Mostly she stayed in Charleston and went to parties, and took the girls shopping and to their own parties."

"And they didn't like the beach?" I said, wondering what sort of children wouldn't love surf and sand and endless blue.

"Well, we all came out once in a while when they were very young, but Sissy didn't care for the other kids, thought they were rowdy little hoodlums who simply ran wild. And they were, just like their parents had been. And the girls got so sunburned one summer that we had to take them to the hospital, and that was that. She loved Sweetgra.s.s, though, and we spent a lot of time out there. She liked being able to ask her friends to the family plantation, and later to the Battery house. When I came out here, I came alone."

"I think that's terribly sad," I said, dipping my head to his shoulder briefly. He reached over and touched my hair.

"Well, anyway, the rest of us finally worked out a sort of system with the beach house. Camilla's mother wasn't interested in it after her husband died, so we all got together and pooled our pennies and bought it. It belongs to all of us. Whoever wants to come out every weekend, or spend longer here, can do it. And they can bring anybody they want to. Some of us have other places to go, like I have Edisto, and don't get here as often as the others. But once a month, we all meet here for a day and sometimes two. n.o.body misses it. Children used to come, but now it's mostly just us again, like in the beginning. You asked what we laugh at? Everything. And what we love? Many things, of course, but high on the list is the ocean, and that house, and...us. It's odd, but the beach has always been the thing that held us together. The water is like blood to us, I guess."

I was silent. I thought that there was no way they were going to enfold me in that complex web of loves and laughter, no matter what Lewis said. I had never even known such friendship existed. Suddenly I wanted, more than anything in the world, to tell Lewis to turn the car around and take me home.

"We're here," he said, turning the car off onto a rough, sandy track that led through a forest of scrub pines and palmettos and an occasional stunted live oak, flanked by dunes. It seemed to me that we drove for a long time. There was nothing on either side of us but sand and scrub.

"This is definitely the inelegant end of the island," Lewis said. "Most of the fancy cottages are up toward the east end. But I've always been glad of that because we have relatively few neighbors. The beach along here is sort of skimpy, and the dunes are high and shifty. It's kept the property pretty wild."

And then we were through the undergrowth and out into a glaring, sandy s.p.a.ce beyond which the dunes rose high, fringed with waving sea oats, and the sound of the hidden ocean boomed in my ears, and I saw the house for the first time.

It was a hybrid of a house, to put it kindly. It stood unshaded in the middle of the blinding-white clearing, and its peeling gray shingles threw off heat like a hot pavement; you could see the shimmering waves of it. The central portion was square and two storied, with many small windows where I could see curtains blowing in the sea wind, and startlingly, a widow's walk atop it, like a church hat on a dowager. Various shingled wings and ells had been added, obviously later, and a screened-in porch surrounded it. The house sat high on its pilings, and there was a pool of dense, dark shade underneath, where I could see a couple of cars and a lawn mower and what looked to be a volleyball net draped over a Ping-Pong table. Down in the yard, or whatever they called the scorching-white area surrounding it, the noonday heat must surely be close to unbearable. But I had seen the flutter of the curtains, and heard the snap of what must be a flag in the wind. All the living in this house would be done in the air.

"I need to be here," I said stupidly to Lewis, hardly aware that I spoke. The house sang to me as my mother never had.

"I know," he smiled. "And here you are."

A long flight of wooden steps led up from the sand to the porch in back. They were railed and stout looking, but needed paint badly. The rest of the house did, too. I loved every chip and gouge. This beautiful house was nevertheless a hoyden in torn clothes, and would demand nothing from you except allegiance. It had mine before we got out of the car.

"It's wonderful," I said to Lewis, trudging across the sand to the steps. Sandspurs p.r.i.c.ked at my legs, and small, vicious insects homed in on me.

"Yes, it is," he said. "There's nothing about it aesthetically right; it started life as a New England saltbox because Camilla's father had visited Nantucket and fell in love with the old seafarers' houses there. Most of the other houses are low, behind the dunes, but he said that if he had a house on the beach, he, by G.o.d, wanted to see the beach. This house is on one of the highest points on the island, and it's raised another story by the stilts. He bought up all the land down to the primary dune line, because he said he didn't want to be looking into anybody else's bathroom window. Once you're in the house, it's like being on a ship at sea. You look straight over the dunes to the beach and the ocean; the tops of the palms are about level with the porch. Whoever added the wings and the porch didn't require anything but bedroom s.p.a.ce and a place to sit outside. None of it's ever going to make Architectural Digest. But somehow it works. Even if the bedrooms are the size of a Legare Street closet and the walls are so thin you can hear your neighbors...snore."

He leered at me.