Lapham Rising

by Roger Rosenblatt

  Hector shakes his head to suggest that I am a hopeless case, then walks away. I expected no better.

  “Here’s my point,” I call after him. “My island sits in a creek, the creek opens to the canal, the canal opens to the bay, and the bay to the Atlantic. See what I mean?”

  “Oh,” he says without turning around. “Our Town—right? Loved it!”

  Six

  Hombres!” I raise my megaphone and shout to the Mexicans. “How much to stop work on Lapham’s house?” It is high noon. They have been banging all morning.

  They shout to me, “You don’t have enough money, Señor March.”

  I shout to them: “How do you know?”

  They shout to me: “Because we can see you!”

  Everyone can see me; that’s the trouble. This state of affairs did not exist before Lapham and his fellow vandals came to the shores across the creek. In those blissful days, there was no one to see me but the cormorants, the egrets, the moles, and the frogs. Now, not a week passes without some stranger’s taking advantage of the sight of me by jumping into any available flotation device and cruising over for a chat. One thing to be said for living by yourself: no one can leave you. But people can visit.

  In the past few weeks alone, I have suffered the forays of a string of uninvited guests. In dealing with such people, I have found that the straightforward approach works best, and so I try to be both forthright and as helpful as possible.

  A delegation of Shinnecock Indians came over by canoe (as if that touch were necessary) to enlist my support for their plans to establish gambling casinos in Southampton. I gave it gladly. They were very grateful and made me an honorary member of the tribe. My Indian name is Walks Alone Awkwardly. They offered me twenty cartons of Marlboro Lights tax-free, but I declined. I asked if they realized that the land across the creek, on which the big houses are going up, had belonged to the Shinnecocks since 1561, or three hundred and thirty-three years before Southampton was incorporated. They said they were unaware of this. I assured them that the land was theirs and encouraged them to seize it at once. They said they would check their land records, which I knew would prove me right, since at one time or another the Shinnecocks have claimed every inch of the East End from Remsenberg to Montauk. We shook hands warmly and high-fived one another. Then they went home.

  They were followed shortly afterward by the Southampton Hurricane of 1938 Society, a group devoted to commemorating everything connected with the hurricane of 1938, and to inserting mention of it in every possible conversation. They meet twice a week to recall the disastrous event, to look at faded black-and-white photographs of smashed boats and floating houses, and to lament that life in the Hamptons has gone “down, down, down” since those early days. They asked me if there might be some way to drive the Shinnecocks out of town, west toward Mastic and Bellport, or perhaps toward the northern jaw, whence they might paddle over the Sound to Connecticut and link up with their Pequot comrades in craps and blackjack. I told them I would give the matter serious thought and added that I was sure the Indians would not mind being expelled.

  The Panel People (one man, one woman) from Panelle Hall in East Hampton came by to ask me to serve on a panel on the topic “Whither Literature?” I declined. How about a different panel, they asked: “Whither History?” The woman’s hair was the color of bubble gum, and the man’s eyelids covered most of his eyes, like the slats of a venetian blind. When I told them I didn’t do panels, he said that gave him a brainstorm: how about a panel entitled “Panels: Good or Bad?” I showed them to their boat and said I’d get back to them.

  A seventeen-foot Boston Whaler brought me a lanky, cactus-headed Amherst College English major on summer holiday with his parents in Wainscott. In his forties, he will stand before future students like an interminable book dog-eared to a meaningless page. He motored over to interview me for the honors thesis he is writing on my work. He told me my short stories have been anthologized for use in many colleges and universities. I asked him if any of those institutions were accredited. With specific regard to my work, he wanted to know if the presence of hats symbolized death. I told him yes. He asked if I deliberately avoided the gerund. I told him I did. He asked if I had been influenced by Salinger or by Eudora Welty. I told him yes, by both. He asked if he might send me his thesis when it was finished. I said, By all means.

  “Are you going to read at the summer writers conference?” he asked, referring to a worthy event from which I long ago withdrew.

  “No conferences, no seminars, no symposia, no colloquia, no festivals, no slams.”

  “Why don’t you write anymore?”

  “I forgot how,” I told him, a little too close to the truth.

  Two teenage girls from Westhampton High School, fair and skinny and both named Kristen, tied up at my dock but remained in their boat, and giggled. I asked them why they had come. They said they had heard I was a hermit, and they had never seen one before. I asked them what they thought a hermit looked like. They giggled some more. I brought them tall glasses of lemonade. They said thanks, giggled, and left.

  Finally there was the FedEx man who delivered the Da Vinci parts, but unlike the others, he came at my insistence. Initially, his company had rejected my shipment because it weighed three times the per-package limit of 150 pounds. But I found a way around that by requesting that it be delivered in three separate packages. This required the FedEx man to come over by barge on three separate occasions. By the last of these, he was sweaty and disgruntled. He dumped the parts on the dock. I caught him staring at the hole in my shirt. I’m sure he thought it was put there by a bullet. He told me that the next time I had a delivery weighing 435 pounds, I should try UPS.

  He’s had it in for me ever since he brought the current iteration of Chloe over on the barge several years ago. She weighed three pounds under the limit. I don’t see what he was complaining about.

  Of course, Dave the contractor comes over every so often to ask if I’m OK. I always tell him, “See for yourself.”

  With all this, it must be said that my visitors over these months, however noteworthy, did not compare either in number or in exotica to Lapham’s. Mine were merely human. His consisted of objects and materials that were summoned to his ever-enlarging estate. Often I would sit on my dock and take account of them, make an actual list, I don’t know why. But the arrivals constituted such a dazzling array—like foreign emissaries dispatched to state funerals—that, repelled as I was in principle, I nonetheless found myself gazing as would a child in a street crowd held back by police barricades as the inanimate celebrities made their appearances.

  From Dorsetshire came fireplace stones that had been surgically removed from an English country manor built by Henry V for his fourth favorite mistress, Isabel of Rutherford. The gray stones had bloodred veins running through them, and were fabled to have turned this distinctive color when Henry had Isabel stoned to death after a drunken orgy, in which, incidentally, he had everyone stoned to death, including two royal macaws.

  From Padua came hand-painted mantelpieces, twenty-four in all, each bearing stories of the Apostles, two mantelpieces for each, and stacked on the grounds like slices of toast. From Jerusalem, tiles inlaid with the faces of the Old Testament Prophets, to be used in Lapham’s kitchen counters and on the backsplashes. From Oppressa, a small farming village outside Damascus, and known widely for its dancing calligraphers, came several precious tapestries with portions of the Koran woven in lavender. (Dave told me Lapham wanted all the major faiths represented in his home, and “a few minor ones.”) From the Hopi came a fourteen-foot-high totem pole depicting various forms of foul weather. From the Pinga-poogoos, a tiny aboriginal sect that broke off from the main tribe in the 1960s, a stuffed kangaroo called Pek, the god of fertility and pugilism.

  There was more: a solid piece of oak, oval in shape, fifty-six feet long, eleven feet at its widest, and honed from a single tree in the Black Forest, to be used as the dining room table (se
ats eighty comfortably). A bidet carved from a single piece of murky pink marble found only in a quarry in Oslo, by the hand of Carmen of Nordstrom. For the flooring in the upstairs hallway, a honey-stained maple discovered by Mrs. Lapham on a flying trip to Tblisi, a wood so strong and impermeable that Stalin had selected it for his casket and sepulcher. A spectacular front gate from the Tuxedo Park mansion of P. Lorilard, the drug manufacturer, which caught Lapham’s eye because of the six-foot-high L centered in an iron parenthesis at the top, with molded bars of soap and toothpaste spilling from cornucopias on both sides.

  Crockery from Delft; coffee mugs from Quito; theater seats rescued during the demolition of the old Palace on Broadway; and stadium seats from the Polo Grounds, to be set in tiers as grandstands for the grass tennis courts; three scatter rugs made from the hair of a dingo; a pair of combs from the tusks of a dugong; and a set of one-of-a-kind shaving brushes from the whiskers of a dikdik.

  More still: maids’ uniforms created in Nagasaki by seamstresses who were maimed but not incapacitated by the 1945 bombing, and which, according to Dave, gave Lapham the inspiration to order up his own underground bomb shelter on the property, for whose lining six tons of lead arrived in extra-wide loads from Des Plaines, Illinois. And green canopies for the beds from Uzbekistan in the guest rooms. And violet globes from Marseille for the reading lamps in the library, for which sixteen thousand volumes were purchased in bulk from used bookstores in Oxford (England and Mississippi) and Cambridge (England and Massachusetts). And, as of yesterday, painted panels of asparagus done by an artist in Winnipeg known for his renderings of vegetables. These, said Dave, will be hung on every wall of the house.

  I don’t know if he was pulling my leg, but Dave also told me that next week an artist from Albany will be arriving to paint the domed ceiling of Lapham’s forty-seven-foot-high living room. Lapham said he wanted to provide a room that both creationists and those he called “evolutionaries” could feel comfortable in. So for his ceiling painting, he commissioned a depiction of Adam reaching out and extending the touch of life to a pollywog. I told Dave I could hardly wait to see the finished product, still thinking he was kidding. But he said, “Me too.”

  All such things, great and small, were delivered to the construction site by vans, station wagons, Jeeps, pickups, flatbeds, dump trucks, boats and helicopters, and deposited in their giant wooden crates on the grounds. I would sit and stare at them as, I imagine, the natives of Surinam, Jamaica, or of our own shores stared as warships, with bloated, bragging sails and teeming with strange men, entered the sky above the horizon and inched toward them, making not a sound and appearing out of nowhere, forever to ruin their lives. I stared as I am staring now, able to note my imminent destruction and unable to do a thing about it. That is, until today.

  Suddenly I am aware of a difference in my atmosphere: the banging at Lapham’s has stopped for an entire minute, a full sixty seconds. What has occurred, a peasant revolt? Have the overworked and underpaid Mexicans at last risen up against King Lapham the Striving? Have they tired of carting their tithes of chimichangas and quesadillas to their monarch’s portcullis and decided to storm the castle instead, to stuff Lapham in a piñata and establish a utopian democracy in which all men and women of every race and nationality may live in peace and harmony, lacking neither black beans nor rice?

  Has the mainland been hit by a thermonuclear device detonated by a maddened north-of-the-highway former dot-com millionaire who carried the bomb by hand in a Dean & DeLuca shopping bag and slipped it into the gigantic papier-mâché strawberry at the fruit and vegetable stand in Sagaponack? And yet if this is the case, surely the effects of the explosion, radiating from its strawberry epicenter, will reach as far as upstate New York. In which case, I don’t think I shall sweat the Chautauqua lecture after all.

  Silence. Even the caterwauling crows are hushed, taken aback by that noise which is the absence of noise. The air gulps. Then this: AAAAAAWWWWWWEEEEEE! Like a lion’s roar amplified over a vast public-address system. A thousand times louder, a million. Never have I heard anything like it. It is as though the great mouth of the earth itself had opened to express the agony that the cauldrons of gravity were inflicting on it. It sounds like the word awe: AAAAAAWWWWWWEEEEEE.

  My ears are screaming, including the one with the bandage. “José!” I yell. “Please stop that thing!” Hector is barking his head off. I wish.

  Dave calls out, “I meant to warn you. Sorry.”

  “Sorry, señor,” echoes José, sounding as if he meant it. The noise ceases for a second or two. “But we have to give it a test. Eees very special. Eees turbo. You know.” It cries again: AAAAAWWWWWWEEEEEE.

  “What is it?” I shout. At last they stifle the beast.

  “Eees a Tilles, a Tilles Blowhard,” says José. “The most powerful air conditioner ever built.”

  “A tea-less what?”

  “Tilles,” repeats Dave. They are passing the bullhorn back and forth. “Rhymes with Phyllis.”

  “Why does it need to be so loud?”

  “Because eet not only cools the house,” says José, “eet cools the whole property. Eees brand-new. Mr. Lapham has the first one in the whole wide world.”

  “What do you mean, it cools the whole property? It cools the air outside the house?” I strain to get a better look at the Tilles Blowhard, which is twice the size of my Da Vinci. It consists of an enormous potbelly with a curved smokestack whose opening is facing toward me, something like the Loch Ness monster in a ski mask.

  Over the bullhorn, Dave explains that in an ordinary air conditioner, the fan motor and the blower feed the air through the coils of the condenser. But in a Tilles Blowhard, the fan motor operates at three hundred horsepower, and the blower is powered by a turbo engine that, if property angled, could fly of its own accord.

  “Isn’t that something!” Dave says. Jack nods rapidly. I cannot tell whether they are impressed or amused.

  The grille, Dave goes on, has been replaced by an immense hornlike structure the size of a small cave. The thermostat is so sensitive that whenever the temperature in or around Lapham’s house rises even one-tenth of a degree above the exquisitely calibrated ideal of sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, the blower will pump a rainless hurricane of cold air through the great horn with such brutal force that anyone—say Lapham himself—who happened to be sitting in it at the time of the machine’s eruption would be rocketed into the sky. Cherish the thought.

  “All eight acres,” says Dave. “It cools all eight acres. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  José chimes in, “The whole enchilada.”

  “Did you really say that?” I ask him. He grins.

  Perfect, is it not? The biggest house with the biggest everything, including a contraption that can alter the very air so it will conform to Lapham’s standards and contribute to Lapham’s comfort. How long before everyone out here wants a Tilles Blowhard of his very own? Can you not see it—all the emerald enclaves of the East End, one vast estate after the other, each securely equipped with the most powerful air conditioner ever built. On the patulous lawns, where once lolled Calders and Henry Moores, will squat the Blowhards. For who could be without one? Gaah. None of the denizens of Gin Lane in Southampton, certainly, or of Lake Agawam. Not a single home on Ocean Avenue in Bridgehampton, or on Sagg Main in Sagaponack, or on Lee Avenue or Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton, that’s for sure. Nary a soul on newly rising Quogue Street, you can bet your bottom dollar. These estate sections that now gleam so demurely in the kingdom of the southern jaw, which already constitute the most desirable clusters of jewels in the most desirable universe, would never forfeit their chance to be cooler than ever.

  The Tilles Corporation, Blowhard Division, will be hard pressed to meet the demand, but it rises to the challenge, because this phenomenon is no mere novelty, no fly-by-night cordless phone or waffle toaster or set of kitchen knives from Bavaria. The Blowhard represents a full-scale revolution in living. Soon it will b
e offered in colors: basic black—or Ice Ebony, if one is to be precise—will always remain a favorite, needless to say, but Frigid Aquamarine will put in a strong showing, as will Norse Coconut and Freeze Fuchsia. And Alaska Eggshell may one day turn out to be the most popular in the line. At parties, guests will survey their host’s property and remark, “You’ve got the Eggshell. Lucky bastard.”

  But I know what you’re thinking. What if all the Blowhards in all the estate sections in the Hamptons go off at the same time, and do it more than once a day, as is likely in late July, when the sun tends to make authoritative statements of its own? Will the decibel level—equivalent to that produced by ten thousand volcanoes erupting simultaneously—finally, when it blasts the buds from the bushes, shakes the ospreys from their nests, and geisers porgies and flounder out of the sea, be deemed too much to bear? Will the Blowhard (anti-ecology, “so yesterday”) be discarded? Don’t be silly. The proprietors will cope. They will wear earmuffs in July, in August even—whatever it takes. For the noise of the Blowhards will be a sign, like Edison’s first incandescent lamps strung in an orange grove of lights along his New Jersey driveway, that the values of progress are in place and all is right with the world. Why, man, it will drown out the world’s lesser, cheaper, more common noises! It will be the noise!

  And dwelling thus in the bliss of a just-so temperature—even as the tumblers quake and tinkle, and the tea lights flicker and die—to whom will each and every Blowhard possessor trace his Fahrenheit Elysium? “You know, Lapham had the first one of these, the very first. You’ve met Lapham, haven’t you? He has that super place in Quogue. A bit of a Blowhard himself—ha ha ha—but one hell of a guy!”