The Edge of the Gulf Read online

  It faced east, the small front yard a half-wild, half-cultivated thicket, and it came alive in the mornings with the bright dappled movement of early light. Through the four tall windows that ran the width of the porch, he stared at the small magnolia that stood in the yard’s one relatively clear space, up near the porch. It was taller now, and thickening up, but was still young enough for its leaves to take on a green iridescence in the sun. Two yuccas, one against the porch and the other over in a corner, seemed larger than he had remembered, and an old Spanish bandolier sustained an erect pride of position halfway down the short walk, though it looked hoarier than ever. Two stubby palmettoss leaned in slightly toward one another on either side of the end of the walk. Three old scrub oaks appeared healthy, bristling with new leaves. They splayed squatly, but managed nonetheless to writhe to eight or nine feet, enough to do their part in shade-bearing. The lion’s share of this job fell to the unremarkable but reliable pines.

  When they bought the house three years ago, Hudson had thought the pines looked wan and reedy, and he had insisted on putting in two new ones almost too large to transplant. But all of the pines, old and new, seemed to have made it well through last year’s big storm and might even be bushing up a little. Reds and longleafs, all dozen or so of them, except for one burly, twenty-five foot loblolly, rather thin, but together sufficient to the yeoman’s work in fending off the sometimes brutal sun of a Gulf summer. Except on the odd, truly oppressive, day, until they handed off guard-duty in the afternoon to the tall stand of old oaks and pines along the small ravine in back, they were just thick enough and tall enough to let the cottage, for a rare couple of hours, float in a dreamy refraction of cool emerald light.

  Hudson did not float with it. But he stood quietly for a long time, looking. He let the dance of light and the occasional morning sounds drift through the windows and the fan lights, let them lap around him, and remembered what Alex had said about living in the moment. Lots more folks talk about living in the moment than actually manage to do it. It’s hard, even for people not dealing with grief. You’re going to have to keep trading on that steely will of yours for a long time to come, I suspect, but I believe you can start just letting yourself be. It’s one of the reasons you’re going down this summer. Trying to plan every moment has been just fine and you’ve done a good job of it, Hudson. You have. But you know as well as I that you’ve got to move on. You have to loosen that white-knuckled grip, just a bit. What you have is so much a part of you that it isn’t going anywhere, so that’s one thing you can scratch right off your worry list, isn’t it?

  Hudson put on some Fauré piano music and began storing the rest of his gear; he unpacked his laptop, and arranged his cache of accumulated magazines, papers, and his fall reading. “Beautiful morning,” he said now and again, at times to Moon and Olive, at times to the bright, swimming air.

  Chapter 4

  They had been married two years when they came down in the spring to close on the house, an Old Laurel cottage that Hudson had lusted after through a protracted estate settlement that had dragged on for years. For Hudson, who had just gone back into the classroom after years in not-for-profits management, it was a leap of faith as well as a dream come true. But with escalating rents, they felt reasonably assured that it could make real as well as dream sense. With Kate’s freelance interiors work, they might have the place to themselves as many weeks as they chose in summer, plus Hudson’s breaks in fall, spring, and winter.

  They spent a month that first summer doing some minor renovation, painting, shingling, having some bookcases built, odds and ends; and they made a start on furniture, pulling in an eclectic range of old West Florida country things, cane and wicker, cool stripes and bold ’40s fabrics on stuffed sofas and chairs.

  When they had left one dawn in mid-August, Kate wept. They stood with their arms around one another, at the end of the walk, all loaded and ready for the return to their parallel realms of clients and deadlines (hers) and hormones, braces and Beowulf (his), and she had finally laughed: “Well, for someone who was never really much of a beach person, I guess I’ve made a decent start.”

  ***

  All things considered, and weather foremost among them, summer is not the ideal season for Laurel Beach. But teachers, profoundly travel-impaired as they are by their school calendars, cannot be choosers. For the very real and innumerable joys of their profession they sometimes pay, particularly in the South, a penalty in too many people and too much humidity. Hudson and Kate had known when they bought the cottage that, aside from some weeks in summer and over Christmas vacation, they would have only two stakes in the real glory time, a week in October and one in March.

  “But there are those two weeks of perfection,” Kate said. “And there is the time in summer. And considering most people’s schedules, wouldn’t we be ungrateful to whine?”

  Although Kate, after a nearly thirty-year residency, was considered a Memphian even by Memphis standards, she was, in fact, from Louisville, and from a family that had an even more northerly orientation. She told Hudson that the one time her family did head south to water was, for no one reason in particular and in every possible particular, a nightmare. In Kate’s lore it lived on as an existential sojourn involving bad plumbing, roaches, sunburn, and near-blindness when she had gotten creosote from a pier in her eye. Instead of the typical Memphis tropism toward the Gulf watering holes, or perhaps the Eastern mountains, she had spent most of her summers visiting cousins in Minnesota and Michigan’s lake resorts.

  Of course, it had become inevitable after she settled in Memphis that she had reason from time to time to discover various spots along the Gulf. But until Hudson took her there for the first time a year before they married, she had never seen Laurel. On the first evening, the images of a heat-prickly ten-year-old girl with wet sand in her suit and a sweaty patch on one eye evaporated, never to return. She fell in love with Laurel first through his eyes and then, almost immediately as though in time-lapse, on her own. Seeing him there she understood what the place meant to him and saw him whole, really, for the first time—all of his dimensions became integrated.

  He had said, “I can’t imagine how I got by all those years with just the odd week or two down here, and all the years I never came at all.” They completed the business, begun when they’d met four years before, of falling in love, and they had returned to Memphis talking, for the first time, of marriage and getting back to the Gulf.

  ***

  They had returned in mid-October and saw the world as if for the first time. Any landscape in the northern hemisphere can attain a certain state of grace in the month of October, but already remarkable places can become transcendent.

  Every morning they jogged through colors of such intensity that they seemed to register in the pulse. “It almost makes you giddy,” said Kate. The water, though still warm, was no longer the translucent celadon of summer, but a flatter, richer color, nearly sapphire out where it met the brilliant cerulean sky. The sea oats waved, luxuriant and bronze, and the long dunes were whiter than at any other time of the year, crisply pleated in the brisk southwest wind. The air was so clear that they imagined they could almost see Seaside, four miles down the beach to the east.

  In the cool morning sunlight they daubed idly about the cottage. Kate lined the kitchen shelves and stitched some throw pillows, Hudson refinished the low table in their bedroom. But they held to their agreement not to watch their week race past as a compulsive checklist of chores and expeditions hither and yon for old furniture or kitchen gadgets or quaint hardware.

  “There will always be something else we need to do, to fix, to have,” said Hudson as they strolled one evening, scotch in hand, up the road toward sunset. “But all we need this week is each other, and our fine cottage, and time.”

  Kate nestled into his sweatshirt and they bobbed along, an awkward four-legged creature, through the loose sand. The air had begun to chill, but the west was molten with the sun. Enormous,
red, it burgeoned on the azure horizon, serene, settling itself grandly, leaving behind, above in the greenish violet evening, reefs of filigreed cumulus clouds casually flung, dark wine and golden.

  “How old were you when you first came here?” she asked.

  “Two, I think.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “I remember my father holding me and the waves breaking around us, and I believe I remember sitting up next to a big pail. Sitting up and falling over, and rolling around. Crawling around in the surf line. How cool the sand was, and the way it drizzled out through my fingers and around my knees.”

  “My little crab.”

  “What does that make me now?”

  “My big crab.”

  “It was thrilling and dangerous. I couldn’t see the horizon so I suppose I thought it was the edge of the world.”

  “You’ve always liked edges.”

  “I thought that was just because I’m a touch claustrophobic. But, yeah, maybe that’s where that started. Feeling that tow, that sucking pull all around, that feeling of the world slipping through your fingers. But knowing you’re on the shore, your mama and your daddy looming up against the sun and spray like gods, their legs right there to grab. Knowing you’re safe, knowing you won’t be pulled off that big windowsill of the world.”

  “Safe excitement.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s the same thing as our fondness for lighted windows in the night, isn’t it? Approaching a house when it’s dark and cold and seeing a warm, cozy interior through paned windows, and a wisp of smoke curling from a chimney.”

  “Exactly. Safe excitement.”

  “That’s what we have, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  They sat against a dune half a mile west of Laurel’s one brief, ragged row of beachfront houses and felt the last light, amber and deep rose, weep down the sky. Due south, on the inky horizon, a solitary thunderstorm flickered, and as they watched, the high silvery tops of the clouds began to blow over, detach from their sagging purple bottoms, and strafe further out to sea.

  Hudson said, “I never expected to find you. I never expected to go back to teaching. I never expected to rediscover through you just how much I love this place.”

  He looked down the beach, where the village huddled in pearly angles against the darkening eastern sky and where, two right turns and another half-mile walk up Pendennis Street, the cottage waited in the fresh twilight among its tangle of scrub oak and pine, lamplight spilling onto the porch.

  “I never expected to live a moment anything so wonderful as this one. This one. Right here.” The splendors of the evening dropped away suddenly and he fell, all at once and never more deeply, all the way, into her eyes. He kissed her warm forehead that smelled of the day’s sun, and salt, and the scent that was only hers and something like rain on clover.

  Chapter 5

  In the small but almost overbearingly chic house she shared with Chaz Cullen in Atlanta’s Peachtree Hills neighborhood, Sydney Baird sat gazing into the chartreuse dusk as the lingering June light evaporated from the room. Before her on the narrow teak table sat a glass, its dregs of iced Earl Grey forgotten and tepid. Beside it several files from the shop lay in neat, alphabetical order, untouched.

  A few last sounds of Saturday domestic industry filtered through the French doors. When she had driven up the narrow, winding road earlier, after a stint at the shop, several people whose early summer determination had not yet wilted had been out mowing and mulching and raking. She had listened as the ancient widower next door zealously attacked their common border of ligustrum, which meant that the branches would be thick and waxily dark in three weeks. It also meant that until then they would have a more unobstructed view of his back yard than they wanted, with its boldly staked tomato plants, the old-fashioned crimped-aluminum bedding edgers, a legacy set forth by his wife no doubt in an effort to contain his energetic mowing technique, the homely garage, sagging clothesline, and a deployment of homemade birdhouses and feeders that looked, when Sydney was in an expansive mood, countryish, and, when she was not, downright tacky.

  Last year, shortly after she had moved in with Chaz, she had witnessed the old man’s ritual with the hope that perhaps he might be soon be ready for a change of life of some kind, and that the rough edges of his property, one of the last on the street in need of upscaling, might pass into more appropriate hands. They had noticed a middle-aged man, apparently a son, briefly visiting every few weeks; perhaps he would take his father in or find a nice nursing home for him when his health began to fail. The seasons had elapsed, however, with no visible abatement of the old man’s hardihood, from his hectic spring weeding to a meticulous hour-by-hour watering system throughout the summer, and a mulching in the fall and a division of bulbs that, in Sydney’s view, approached obsession.

  It wasn’t that she wished him ill. She simply had a passion for things looking their best.

  Caught unaware by the stealth of the twilight, she rose suddenly, the letter still in her hand, and moved about the room turning on lamps and picture-lights. The paintings, kilims, and good simple antiques came quietly alive. She laid the letter on the mantle and went into the little bar just off the dining room and poured a scotch and water. She took her drink and stood for a moment at the doors, looking into the small garden which offered up its last vibration of intense green and immaculate bloom. Chaz’s reformation from his misbegotten years of fast living and substance abuse did not preclude the odd joint now and again for a bit of Sunday afternoon yard work. The narrow length of lawn still glowed in the last light, its vivid fescue anchored to the small gravel patio just beyond the doors with three large urns of red geraniums, cascading purple verbena, and yellow-gold ranunculus. To the right, through the gathering darkness and over the newly lowered level of the ligustrum row, Sydney surveyed a majority of the widower’s yard, unmanicured and eccentrically rural.

  For a moment, she was a cosmically lonely ten-year-old, looking through a screen door at a similar, though even scraggier, backyard in Coweta County, some fifty miles, and what seemed a hundred years, from Atlanta.

  She stared hard at the rear of the old man’s faded blue Chevrolet. The way it protruded from its sagging frame garage annoyed her until, dismissing something so paltry and remembering that soon she would no longer have to look at it anyway, she returned to the mantle and picked up the letter that had repeatedly drawn her attention from the accounts files she had brought home. Reaching for it she looked into the eyes of a framed photograph, the eyes of her recently deceased father-in-law.

  ***

  “You really love him, don’t you?” she could again hear Peter Cullen saying. “He’s been putting his life together, and I can tell you’re going to be good for him—help him keep it together.”

  Another woman might have found this well-intended expression of admiration more self-interested and utilitarian than respectful, but Sydney had understood what Peter meant and she had warmed to it. Indeed, she had warmed to him, and had been sorry when he’d died quite unexpectedly in late February of a massive coronary. She’d never had a father, and he had seemed a good one.

  They had been standing in the side porch of the house in Peachtree Battle on a night not long before Christmas. Peter had given them a small dinner party in celebration of their engagement, and she stood with him while Chaz went to bring the car around. Behind Peter, she saw the glow of the library, the fire still radiating patterns across the bindings of a lifetime’s cargo of books, the good paintings, the good fabrics, the poinsettias.

  “I love him more than I ever knew I could love anyone,” she said, and Peter had taken her into his arms for a hug and then kissed her on the forehead.

  “I can see that, and I am happier about my son than I ever knew I could be. He’s going to be fine. And you two are going to be fine.”

  On the drive home, Sydney had nestled deep into her new Vera Wang jacket, holding Chaz’s right hand and f
eeling the sort of simultaneous rush of emotion and clarity of thought she had previously experienced only when a performance was going exceptionally well. An actor, by nature—and formerly by profession—she had never, like some, distinguished between her art and her life.

  The life that had been handed to her would not have been worth living if she had not, early on, decided to take it in hand and transform it. She was grateful for her talent and saw little reason to be falsely modest with herself about it. She had long ago ceased to wonder whether her emotions, her motivations, or her desire to recognize and use an opportunity were what many people would call true or if they arose from her instincts for acting. The instinct for giving a truthful performance depended fundamentally on being able to believe its truth oneself. That was her constant guide. Some people might prefer to call their barometric readings on their motives and actions morality; she didn’t begrudge them that. By the same token she expected no one to question the strength and confidence that had gotten her through, to question her own unique gifts and instincts for doing the right thing, her perspective on what was real. What was true.

  Chapter 6

  Like so much else, sooner or later he had to do it. Hudson decided on sooner.

  He reached Charlie at home and asked him over for a drink around seven.

  “I won’t promise much in the way of dinner, but how about shrimp and a salad?”

  “Are you sure you even want to bother with that?” asked Charlie. “We can eat here or at the restaurant, or…”

  “No bother. It sounds just about exactly the right level of commitment to break in the kitchen. Two weeks ago I was reviewing The Scarlet Letter and Jude the Obscure with fifty-some-odd adolescent girls. Cleaning off the grill and marinating a few shrimp does not sound like work."