Isolation also offered another advantage, albeit slight. They might, when the time came, be able to notice whoever was after them a moment or two in advance.
Lillian’s East Hampton place was situated on the dunes of Georgica Beach. A two-story house, stretched out to make the most of its vantage. Forty of its windows presented the Atlantic, and a wide veranda ran its entire length. It was typical of the summer houses that were built along Georgica by monied people seventy-or-so years ago. Brown shake shingle siding with white trim.
The next, nearest house to it, similar in stance and profile, was five hundred feet down the beach. Between the two were mutual hedges so tall a ladder was needed to shear them.
On the inland side, four acres buffered the house from its town street, Lily Pond Lane. The grounds were not formally kept, or even too neat. There were a few oaks, real heavyweights. Wild flowers were allowed, black-eyed Susans and asters.
A private drive was surfaced with a crunchy, gray gravel. It didn’t run straight in, deviated enough so that only the peaks and chimneys of the house could be seen from the street. In summer, one section of the drive was like a tunnel, the way branches of tall lilacs meshed above it. White lilacs that dipped, bowed to bid sweet welcome, brushed against windshields.
But not now, in January, for Wiley and Lillian.
Now shrubs and trees were skeletal, dark. No way of telling what might be dead. Brambles were more apparent bare. They seemed to be everywhere: thorny wild roses and blackberries, formidable as barbed wire. Miraculous the way sparrows and finches flew so casually into such tangles without being wounded. Or perhaps they were.
Wiley and Lillian arrived from Haiti on the seventh day of the new year. A Saturday afternoon. Over all, the sky was low and leaden. The temperature in the twenties. They had called ahead, been assured the house would be made ready. The caretaker was part-time, a man from the town. The key wasn’t on the door ledge where he was supposed to have left it.
Wiley told Lillian to wait in the car while he searched for a way in. All the windows were shuttered. He went completely around, tried every door. When he returned to the main entrance, he found Lillian had used a frozen flower pot to smash a pane from the door and get to the bolt. She stood in the entrance hall, hugging herself, her head hunched down into her coat collar. She had on a wool cap, over her ears and brows. Only her nose and eyes were visible, watery.
It seemed colder inside. A dankness permeated the place and everything in it. There was that moldy odor the sea inflicts on such enclosed coastal places, actually the smell of deterioration. To counteract the sea, the interior of the house—floors, walls, ceilings—was varnished wood, years and years of coats. White sheets covered the furniture and were gathered and tied around lighting fixtures.
“I guess I should try to start some heat,” Wiley said halfheartedly.
“This wasn’t really such a good idea,” Lillian said.
“Well, we’re here now.”
“Palm Springs would have been better.”
“You have a place in Palm Springs?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Where’s the furnace?”
She didn’t know.
Wiley went looking for it, a door down to the cellar where the furnace would be. All he found were a lot of closets. Perhaps this was purely a summer house, and the caretaker hadn’t turned on the heat because there wasn’t any. However, that didn’t explain the absence of electricity, the dead phone and the lack of water from the faucets.
Wiley thought they should get to a motel and consider another place to make their stand. Lillian was sure to agree.
But Lillian wasn’t where he’d left her in the entrance hall.
He called out. Her answer was from somewhere upstairs, muffled. He went up to a long center hall, found her in one of the bedrooms.
Her clothes were thrown over a chair. She was in the bed beneath several blankets and two eiderdown comforters. All Wiley could see was her breath, a funnel of white. It looked as though the bed was smouldering. He suggested the motel.
“We’re here now,” she said.
“There doesn’t seem to be a furnace.”
“How about food?”
He had looked. The only thing in the pantry cupboards was a dried-up bottle of ant poison. Not even a can of peaches or tomatoes. Houses like this always had a lonely, left-behind can of peaches or tomatoes. “How hungry are you?” he asked.
“Hungry.”
He minded a little, but he was dressed and she wasn’t, and it was only a mile to town. “Will you be all right while I’m gone?”
She stuck her right hand out from the covers, holding the Llama automatic.
“What shall I get you?”
“Tea and anything,” she said.
He drove down Lily Pond Lane to Ocean Avenue. It was dusk and nearly all the nice white family houses had some lights on. Cold and complex as they appeared, Wiley thought they were probably warm within. And uncomplicated. At least compared to what his life had come down to.
What would he settle for now—besides not ever having heard of Argenti and The Concession?
How about Lillian? If the condition was never having known her in exchange for more hopeful circumstances, would he go for that?
Never.
After a short ways Ocean Avenue became Main Street. Stores on both sides. A wide street and very clean. Nothing rundown that Wiley could see. The stores were confidently understated along there and along the only other business street, Newtown Lane.
He parked and went into a supermarket, pushed a cart down the aisle, like a family man.
When he returned to the house, he called out as soon as he had closed the door behind him. To let her know it was him. With the windows shuttered, the house was pitch black. Wiley had to feel his way with his feet, shuffled up the stairs and down the hall.
He had bought four fat candles, which he lighted to place a pair on each side of the bed. They created the impression of warmth.
Lillian sat up for her tea, holding a comforter around her. Tea kept hot in a styrofoam cup. Wiley removed the lid for her.
“Strip and get in,” she said.
“You have everything off?”
“Except my cap and socks. What did you get to eat?” She dug into the bag while he undressed. “Why did you get all this junk?” she asked.
“The rib roasts were too fatty.”
“I mean, you must have been reading my mind.”
She tore the tough cellophane wrapper from a package of cookies. Oreos, of course. She dunked one into her tea. Before she could get the cookie to her mouth the saturated half of it fell into the cup. She tried to get it with her tongue, then her fingers. The tea was too hot. She let it float. Undaunted, she dunked another with more success.
Wiley had also bought Devil Dogs and Twinkies, a Sara Lee cake, Wise potato chips, Cheese Doodles, Fig Newtons, marsh-mallows, Milky Ways, Almond Joys, Butterfingers, french-fried onion rings and a half dozen jelly doughnuts.
Black coffee for himself.
He got under the covers, chilled and chattering.
“They say if two people snuggle they can’t freeze to death,” Lillian said. “Wonder why. I mean, it’s not like rubbing two sticks together.”
Their legs were entwined, thighs to crotches. After a while they were warm enough to move.
They ate themselves to the verge of nausea and moaned about it. Wiley swore that if he ever saw another Twinkie or Devil Dog he’d stomp it. Lillian said she’d felt the same about Oreos at least a thousand times.
Wiley lighted a cigarette.
Lillian read a paperback.
When he exhaled he couldn’t tell what was smoke and what was merely breath, and that subtracted from his enjoyment.
Even with all four candles on her side Lillian couldn’t see well enough. She missed words and skipped entire sentences.
He put out his cigarette in one of the coffee cups.
She fo
lded the corner of page 120 and dropped a Muriel Spark to the floor.
They lay there with their separate thoughts.
The surf was beating time.
She couldn’t see the true color of Wiley’s eyes, but remembered.
She wondered if he blamed her.
She wondered if he really loved her as much as she believed he did.
Among other things, she wondered about the way he’d reacted after he flushed the emeralds down the Caribbean. Why hadn’t he bitched and been bitter? All he’d done was go around with a long face for less than a day. He hadn’t mentioned emeralds since, not once. That blasé about it. Strange …
Wiley came up out of sleep as though he had on six overcoats in a sauna. He was perspiring all over, and Lillian was sticking to him. He fought the blankets off, sat up on the edge of the bed.
The room that had been freezing the night before was stifling now. Wiley felt as though his brain was being baked. He got up, raised the nearest window, unlatched and pushed open the shutters.
Lillian moaned, irritated, hadn’t yet opened her eyes. She shoved and slapped at the heavy covers, as though trying to fend off an assailant.
Wiley left the window open six inches. He put on his trousers and went to investigate. Heat was coming from a metal louvered transom in the floor. He went down the upper hall and the stairs. The entire house was heated. The kitchen sink faucets gave water. There was electricity, and a dial tone on the phone. A bag of groceries and the Sunday Times on the kitchen counter.
Evidently the caretaker had come and gone. The man must have made some noise. It demonstrated how easily they could be caught off guard in this place, Wiley thought.
His watch said ten-thirty. They had stayed awake talking until three. Telling true stories about long agos, avoiding any mention of tomorrows.
One of Lillian’s recollections had been her first pair of grownup gloves, when she was four. White kid antelope, the same-as her mother’s, with a tiny bluebird stitched in the palm. For her, a bird in hand. Wiley had recalled climbing hickory trees as a boy, when the sectional skins of the nuts were bitten open by frost. How he’d scraped his legs and arms on the scales of the bark, climbed as high as possible and shook to make the nuts fall. More hard shell than meat, those nuts, not worth the effort and, yet, each year how irresistible they had been.
He found a pot and made coffee.
Cup of steaming black in hand, he wondered how he could have overlooked the furnace, was about to go try to find it when Lillian came down. Hardly bending her knees as she walked, making no quick movements. There were impressions on her forehead from the wool knit cap. She had on panties and socks, was unaware that she had stepped on a Milky Way wrapper and it had stuck to her left foot.
She came right to Wiley as though he was her destination, put herself against him, her arms folded up in front of her, close to herself so she could be more completely held.
Wiley avoided touching her bare skin with his hot coffee cup. He thought even in her little-girlness she was a desirable woman. She whined a little for sympathy, said she’d had bad dreams. Probably stirred up by the past times she’d talked about. Wiley shaped his hand to fit her forehead and gently, but with reassuring firmness, stroked over her hairline.
She came out of it abruptly, arched back from him and beamed. As though she had taken whatever and all she needed. Asked him to get the luggage from the car.
She made breakfast while Wiley watched and browsed the Sunday paper. It was the first time he’d ever seen her eat bacon. Knowing her health-conscious attitude toward meat, especially fatty kinds, he took this change in her behavior as a sign of her lack of faith in the future. Could eating bacon be existential? Most certainly. It was, he understood now, for the same reason that he’d bought the Twinkies and all that other junk. He didn’t mention it.
She asked for part of the paper, like a wife, he thought.
Out of old habit he looked through the classified section, focused upon those ads under the heading Business Opportunities.
“Hey, listen to this,” Lillian said. An item she’d happened across, a sort of filler on page 18 in the main news section. She read aloud. Dateline Bogotá. It said Colombian federal authorities were cracking down on left-wing activists in Bogotá, Cali and other cities. The push came in the wake of the recent confrontation between government troops and leftists in Cartagena, during which one of the country’s leading radicals, Miguel Contreras, had been killed.
Wiley asked to see it.
Lillian handed it across.
They felt sad about it and somehow, to some extent, responsible.
After breakfast they went outside to learn the lay of the land.
Originally, a hundred feet of lawn had separated the house from the dunes. The way down to the beach had been an easy, sandy incline. Until two years ago there had been a normal amount of erosion. Then the ocean had a sudden turn in temper. All winter long it slashed and beat that section of coastline harder and higher than ever. As though taking out old grudges. Ate away about fifty feet of the dunes and transformed their gradual slope into a sharp thirty-foot bluff.
At that rate, in another year or two, Lillian’s house and most of the others along Georgica would be undermined or toppled over.
Access to the beach now was a sort of bridge built on pilings driven deep into the sand. It extended out beyond the drop-off for about sixty feet—a series of steps and landings with a final flight of twelve steps at the end. Those steps, like a ladder, could be lowered to the beach by a pulley. When it was raised, the only direct way to get from the beach to the house was to shinny up one of the pilings. Wiley doubted anyone would come that way.
He and Lillian investigated the terrain around the house. Went over it thoroughly and made it their territory. They would have at least that slight edge. All in all, the house was fairly well placed for their purposes. On one side was the tight, very high hedge, practically as good as a wall. On the opposite side was an impenetrable thicket of brush, most of it overgrown forsythia that ran all the way to the crumbly edge of the bluff. And there were extensive patches of brambles on the inland ground.
They stood out on Lily Pond Lane and looked toward the house. What approaches were offered to their adversaries? Despite all the natural barriers, there was the drive. Like a long welcome mat. Short of planting mines, there was nothing they could do about that.
They could, however, help their cause to some extent inside the house.
The kitchen was on the extreme east end. One of the rooms adjoining it was a sort of relaxing room. On the second floor, directly above the kitchen, was a bedroom and a spacious sun porch. A solarium actually, comprised entirely of small panes on all three sides and overhead. It was furnished in bent-bamboo lounges, sofas and tables. Thick reed matting on the floor.
Wiley and Lillian would limit themselves to those four rooms, go up and down by way of a flight of narrow back stairs intended for servants. They shut all doors that connected to the rest of the house. Unfortunately, the doors had ordinary old keyholes that almost any old key in the world would fit and anyone with a minimum of patience and dexterity could open about as fast as they could pick their teeth.
They spent most of the rest of that day getting settled in. Not that they expected to be there long, but they might as well be comfortable for the while. Lillian put the kitchen in order. Wiley vacuumed and straightened the relaxing room. It had a fireplace. Wiley opened the flue and started a newspaper fire. In less than a minute smoke had backed up and puffed out into the room. Backdraft, Wiley thought. But when the air was smoky enough to cause tears, he knew it was more than that. Determined to have a fire, he went up to the second floor and, at the far end of the center hall, found a trap door. He used a chair to get to it, pushed the trap door away and hoisted himself up into the crawl-space beneath the roof. A hatch opened onto the roof. He went out, walked along the peak, avoiding icy areas. A heavy metal cover was on the chimney, to prevent bi
rds or wasps from nesting. Wiley lifted it from one side and shoved it off. It fell to the pitch of the roof, slid over the edge to the ground.
Wiley went down and built a fire he was proud of.
There was a built-in vertical tape deck, which he got working. Found some reels, including some Sinatras. Played Frank while he gave his attention to the television, which had an incorrigible vertical hold. Just when Wiley believed he had it, and stepped back, the picture would begin flopping over. He glowered at the set, mentally threatened to take it apart. Rather than be operated on, it behaved, held its picture steady. But the moment he turned away, it flopped contemptuously.
Furnace, fireplace, television—he was having to try for everything. Omens?
He insisted on helping with the upstairs rooms. They made the bed together. Lillian snapped the sheets and made them billow. Wiley was reminded of their parachutes. He enjoyed her efficiency, the way she held the pillow by her teeth while she slipped the case over it. As though she did it every day. Anyway, could.
A slant board was improvised for her. From a pair of dining-table leaves Wiley found in a downstairs closet. She got on it and Wiley sat close by, observing her.
She lay there inverted, eyes closed, perfectly still.
He doubted her thoughts were as tranquil as she appeared. Probably inside she felt the way he did. He pushed a chair and table aside to have a clear wall. Removed a shade from a standing lamp, positioned the lamp. Took off his clothes and switched on the hundred-fifty-watt bulb.
He didn’t limber up. Hesitated a long moment to appraise his shadow, his dark ephemeral creation. It seemed darker than ever. He swayed left and then right and half expected it not to match him. He shifted his stance, distributed his weight properly, bobbed once and threw a left cross—not a flick, but a fast, full-power left.
The following day was a Monday and the stores in town were open.
Wiley bought heavy-duty Segal vertical bolts, which he installed on all the interior doors that led to their four rooms. That left the side door off the kitchen the only quick, direct way in and out of the house. It was already equipped with an adequate lock. Wiley installed another.
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