Grow up in North Carolina and it’s hard to get too attached to a beach house, knowing, as you do, that it’s on borrowed time. If the hurricane doesn’t come this autumn, it’ll likely come the next. The one that claimed our place—the Sea Section—in September of 2018, was Florence. Hugh was devastated, while my only thought was: What’s with the old-fashioned names? Irma, Agnes, Bertha, Floyd—they sound like finalists in a pinochle tournament. Isn’t it time for Hurricanes Madison and Skylar? Where’s Latrice, or Category 4 Fredonté?
Florence, it was said, gave new meaning to the word “namaste” along the North Carolina coast.
“Are you going to evacuate?”
“Namaste.”
Hugh and I were in London when the hurricane hit, and was followed almost immediately by a tornado. Our friend Bermey owns a house—the Dark Side of the Dune—not far from ours, and went over to check on the Sea Section as soon as people were allowed back onto Emerald Isle. He found our doors wide open—blown open by the wind. A large section of the roof had been ripped off, and the rain that had fallen in the subsequent days had caused the ceilings on both floors to cave in, the water draining, as if the house were a sieve, down into the carport. Bermey took pictures, which looked so tawdry I was embarrassed to share them. It seems that rats had been living in the second-floor ceilings. So there were our beds, speckled with currant-size turds and tufts of bloated, discolored insulation.
All the interior drywall would need to be replaced, as would the roof, of course, along with the doors and windows. We were left with a shell, essentially. Had ours been the only place affected, it might have been easy to have the repairs done, but, between the hurricane and the flooding, thousands of homes had been either destroyed or severely damaged—and that was just in North Carolina.
Our other house, luckily, was relatively unscathed. It’s next door to the Sea Section, and when it came up for sale, in 2016, Hugh disregarded my objections and bought it. His argument was that if he didn’t get it someone would most likely tear it down and construct the sort of McMansion that has become the rule on Emerald Isle rather than the exception. The size of these new houses was one thing—eight bedrooms were common, spread over three or four stories—but what came with them, and what you really didn’t want next door to you, was a swimming pool. “It happened to us ten years ago,” moaned my friend Lynette, who owns an older, traditionally sized cottage up the street from us. “Now all we hear is ‘Marco!’ ‘Polo!’ over and over. It’s like torture.”
The place that Hugh bought is ancient by Emerald Isle standards—built in 1972. It’s a single-story four-bedroom, perched on stilts and painted a shade of pink that’s almost carnal. Like the Sea Section, it’s right on the ocean, but unlike the Sea Section it’s rented out to vacationers. At first, Hugh went through an agency, but now he does it himself, through a number of Web sites. Our friend Lee across the street rents out his place, Almost Paradise, as do most of our Emerald Isle neighbors, and all of them have stories to tell. People leave with the pillows and coat hangers. People grill on the wooden decks. They bring dogs regardless of whether or not you allow them, and small children, meaning all sorts of things get flushed down the toilets: seashells, doll clothes, dice. And, of course, people complain about absolutely everything: The TV only gets ninety channels! There’s some missing paint on the picnic table!
Lee once got a comment from a renter that read “I was shocked by your outdoor shower.”
“I was thinking, How surprising can it be?” he told me. “I mean, you’re at the beach, for God’s sake. Then I went out to wash up, and when I touched the handle for the hot water I got thrown clear across the room.”
Hugh bought the second house with everything in it, and, although it’s a bit heavy on the white wicker, the furniture is far from awful. He drew the line at the art work, though. It was standard fare for a beach house: garish pictures of sailboats and sunsets. Signs reading “If You’re Not Barefoot, You’re Overdressed” and “Old Fishermen Never Die, They Just Smell That Way.”
If he wanted to, Hugh could work as a professional forger. That’s how good he is at copying paintings. So for the rental house he reproduced a number of Picassos, including “La Baignade,” from 1937, which depicts two naked women knee-deep in the water with a third person looking on. The figures are abstracted, almost machinelike, and cement-colored, positioned against a sapphire sea and an equally intense sky. Hugh did three others—all beach-related—and got a comment from a renter saying that, although the house was comfortable enough, the “art work” (she put it in quotes) was definitely not family-friendly. As the mother of young children, she had taken the paintings down during her stay, and said that if he wanted her to return he’d definitely have to rethink his décor. As if they were Hustler centerfolds!
“Can you believe that woman?” Hugh said, almost a year after the hurricane hit, when we arrived to spend a week on Emerald Isle. It was August. The Sea Section was still under construction, so we stayed at the rental house, which he was calling the Pink House, for reasons I could not for the life of me understand. “It’s just such a boring name,” I argued.
“It really is,” my sister Gretchen agreed. She’d pulled up an hour before we had, and was dressed in a fudge-colored tankini. Her long hair is going silver, and was gathered in a burger-size bun, not quite on the back of her head but not on top, either. She had turned sixty earlier that week and looked as if she were made of well-burnished leather—the effect of age and aggressive, year-round tanning. The skin between her throat and her chest had gone crêpey, and it bothered me to notice it. I cannot bear watching my sisters get old. It just seems cruel. They were all such beauties.
“Calling this the Pink House is just nothing,” she said.
The best name, in my opinion, considering that the rental was next to the Sea Section, was a choice between the Amniotic Shack and Canker Shores. Both had been suggested by a third party and were far better than what I’d come up with.
“And what was that?” Gretchen asked, opening a cabinet in search of a coffee cup.
“Country Pride Strong Family Peppermill,” I told her.
“Not that again,” Hugh said.
“It’s not a pun, but I think it has a nice ring to it.”
Hugh opened the refrigerator, then reached for the trash can. Renters aren’t supposed to leave things behind, but they do, and none of their condiments were meeting his approval. “It sounds like you just went to the grocery store and wrote down words.”
“That’s exactly what I did,” I told him.
“Well, too bad. It’s my house and I’ll call it what I want to.”
“But—”
He tossed a bottle of orange salad dressing into the garbage. “But nothing. Butt out.”
“C-R-A-B,” Gretchen mouthed. I nodded in agreement, and made pinching motions with my hands. It can sometimes be tricky having Hugh around my family. “What is his problem?” each of my siblings has asked me at one time or another, usually flopping down on my bed during a visit.
“What is whose problem,” I always say, but it’s just a formality. I know who they’re talking about. I’ve heard Hugh yell at everyone, even my father. “Get out of my kitchen” is pretty common, as is “Use a plate,” and “Did I say you could start eating?”
I’d like to be loyal when they complain about him. I’d like to say, “I’m sorry, but that’s my boyfriend of almost thirty years you’re talking about.” But I’ve always felt that my first loyalty is to my family, and so I whisper, “Isn’t it horrible?”
“How can you stand it?” they ask.
“I don’t know!” I say. Though, of course, I do. I love Hugh. Not the moody Hugh who slams doors and shouts at people—that one I merely tolerate—but he’s not like that all the time. Just enough to have earned him a reputation.
“Why did you yell at Lisa?” I asked, the year that three of my sisters joined us for Christmas at our home in Sussex.
“Because she came to the dinner table with a coat on.”
“So?”
“It made her look like she wasn’t staying,” he said. “Like she was going to leave as soon as her ride pulled up.”
“And?” I said, though I knew exactly what he was saying. It was Christmas dinner, and it’s a slippery slope. One year you wear a down coat at the table, and the next you’re dressed in a sweatsuit eating cold spaghetti out of a pan in front of the TV. My sisters can say what they will about Hugh’s moodiness, but no one can accuse him of letting himself go, or even of taking shortcuts, especially during the holidays, when it’s homemade everything, from the eggnog to the piglet with an apple in its mouth. There’s a tree, there are his German great-grandmother’s cookies, he will spend four days in an apron listening to the “Messiah,” and that’s the way it is, goddammit.
Similarly, he makes the beach feel the way it’s supposed to. A few years back, he designed a spiral-shaped outdoor shower at the Sea Section that we found ourselves using even in the winter. He grills seafood every night, and serves lunch on the deck overlooking the ocean. He makes us ice cream with fruit sold at an outdoor stand by the people who grew it, and mixes drinks at cocktail hour. It’s just that he’s, well, Hugh.
When I get mad at someone, it’s usually a reaction to something he or she said or did. Hugh’s anger is more like the weather: something you open your door and step into. There’s no dressing for it, and neither is there any method for predicting it. A few months after we met, for example, he and I ran into an old friend of mine at a play. This was in New York, in 1991. We thought we’d all go out to eat, then Hugh offered to cook at his apartment. Somewhere between the theatre and Canal Street, his mood darkened. There was no reason. It was like the wind shifting direction. The making of dinner involved a lot of muttering, and, when my friend sat down to eat, his chair gave way, causing him to tumble onto the floor.
I apologized, saying that the chair was already broken, and Hugh contradicted me: “No, it wasn’t.”
“Why would you say that?” I asked, after my friend had hobbled home.
“Because it wasn’t broken,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I explained. “The point was to make him feel less embarrassed.”
“Too bad,” Hugh said. “I can’t hide who I am.”
“Well, it’s really important to try,” I told him. “I mean, like, really, really important.”
“Let me ask you two a question,” Hugh said to Gretchen and me, on our first afternoon at the Pink House in August. He opened the sliding glass door to the deck and invited us to sit on the rocking chairs out there. The nails that held them together had been weeping rust onto the unpainted wood for so long that I put a towel down so as not to stain my white shorts, and got snapped at for it.
“Now, please.”
I took a seat. “Ready.”
“O.K., do you think those are rickety? That’s what the renter who hated the paintings called them.”
I settled in and swayed as much going side to side as I did going back and forth. “Yes,” I said. “ ‘Rickety’ is probably the best word for this, possibly followed by ‘kindling.’ ”
“This one, too,” Gretchen said.
“Well, you’re just spoiled,” Hugh told us. “There’s nothing at all wrong with those rocking chairs.” He stormed back into the house, and I heard the click that meant he had locked us out.
“Goddammit,” Gretchen said. “My cigarettes are in there.”
Lisa and Paul and Amy couldn’t make it to the beach this time. It was sad being on the island without them, but at least it left fewer people for Hugh to crab at. “If you want to raise your voice to someone, you might consider the contractors,” I said in the living room the following morning, looking next door at our empty driveway, and not hearing what I heard coming from other houses: the racket of hammers and Skilsaws.
“Why don’t you call them?” Hugh asked. “I filled out all the insurance forms. I see to all the bills and taxes, so how about you take care of something for a change?”
I didn’t respond, but just sighed, knowing he wasn’t serious. The last thing Hugh wants is me taking care of something. I wouldn’t have paid him any mind, but Gretchen was in the room. I don’t like seeing my relationship through her eyes. That said, I do like seeing my family from Hugh’s vantage point. To him, we’re like dolls cut from flypaper, each one of us connected to the other and dotted with foul little corpses.
“What is with men adjusting their balls all the time?” Gretchen asked, staring down at her phone.
“Are you talking about someone specifically?” Hugh asked.
“The guys that I work with,” she said. “The landscaping crews. They can’t keep their hands away from their crotches.”
“It could be due to heat rash,” I suggested, adding that touching your balls in public is now illegal in Italy. “Men did it to ward off bad luck, apparently.”
“Hmmm,” Gretchen said, turning back to her phone. “I was in a meeting a few weeks back, and when I took one of my shoes off a roach ran out. It must have been hiding in there when I got dressed that morning.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Hugh asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Does it matter? It’s always time for a good story.”
“Your family,” he said, like we were a bad thing.
That afternoon, I watched him swim out into the ocean. Gretchen and I were on the beach together, and I remembered a young woman earlier in the summer who’d had a leg bitten off, as well as a few fingers. Squinting at the horizon as Hugh grew smaller and smaller, I said that if the sharks did get him I just hoped they’d spare his right arm. “That way he can still kind of cook, and access our accounts online.”
It’s hard to imagine Gretchen’s boyfriend crabbing at anyone. She and Marshall have been together almost as long as Hugh and I have, and I can’t think of a gentler guy. The same can be said of Paul’s wife, Kathy. My brother-in-law, Bob, might get crotchety every so often, but when he snaps at Lisa for, say, balancing a glass of grape juice on the arm of a white sofa, we usually think, Well, she kind of deserved it. Amy’s been single since the mid-nineties, but I never heard her last boyfriend, a funny and handsome asthmatic, yell at anyone, even when he had good reason to.
Gretchen and I had been on the beach for all of twenty minutes before she did what she always does, eventually. “I went online recently and read all sorts of horrible comments about you,” she said lazily, as if the shape of a passing cloud had reminded her of it.
I don’t know where she gets the idea that I—that anyone—would want to hear things like this. “Gretchen, there’s a reason I don’t Google myself, I really don’t want to—”
“A lot of people just can’t stand you.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s a consequence of putting stuff out there—you’re going to get reactions. That doesn’t mean I have to regard them all.”
Jeez, I thought, sprinting back to the house over the scorching sand and wondering which was worse—getting snapped at by Hugh or having to endure what Gretchen was doling out. Although it’s true that I don’t read reviews or look myself up, I do answer my mail. A few months earlier, I’d been given two hundred and thirty letters sent to me in care of my publishing house. I had responded to a hundred and eighty already, and brought the remaining fifty to the beach, where I figured I’d see to ten a day. Most were just what I’d always wanted: kind words from strangers. Every now and then, though, a complaint would come along. I’d like to say I brush them off, and I guess I do, in time. For days, though, and sometimes months, I’ll be bothered. For example, a woman sent me her ticket stubs, plus her parking receipt, demanding that I reimburse her. She and her husband had attended a reading and apparently objected to my material. “I thought you were better than that,” she scolded, which always confuses me. First off, better than what? I mean, a clean show is fine, but no finer than a filthy one. Me, I like a nice balance.
That aside, who doesn’t want to hear about a man who shoved a coat hanger up his ass? How can you not find that fascinating? “What kind of a person are you?” I wanted to write back.
Sometimes after a hard day of angry letters or e-mails, after having an essay rejected or listening to Gretchen tell me how much a woman she works with thinks I suck, I’ll go to Hugh and beg him to say something nice about me.
“Like what?” he’ll ask.
“I shouldn’t have to tell you. Think of something.”
“I can’t right now,” he’ll say. “I’m in the middle of making dinner”—as if I’d asked him to name all the world capitals in alphabetical order. I feel as though I’m always complimenting him. “You look so handsome tonight.” “What a great meal you made.” “You’re so smart, so well read, etc.” It’s effortless, really.
“I don’t want to give you a fat head,” he’ll tell me, when I ask for something in return.
“My head is, like, the size of an onion. I’m begging you, please, enlarge it.”
He says I get enough praise already. But it’s not the same thing.
“O.K.,” he’ll say, finally. “You’re persistent. How’s that?”
I like coming to Emerald Isle in May. It’s not too hot then, and most everyone in my family can take a week off. Ditto at Thanksgiving. August, though, is definitely something I do for Hugh, a sacrifice. The heat that month is brutal, and the humidity is so high my glasses fog up. At home, in Sussex, I’d happily be walking twenty-two miles a day, but at Emerald Isle, at the height of summer, I’m lucky to get fifteen in, and even then I really have to force myself.
I don’t like to aimlessly wander, especially in a place where thunderstorms can appear without warning. I need a destination, so I generally go to a coffee shop near the grocery store, usually with a couple of letters to answer. Back and forth I’ll walk, making three or more trips a day. When Hugh and I lived in Normandy, he heard a local woman telling a friend about a mentally challenged man she often saw marching past her house. He wore headphones, she said, and looked at pictures while talking to himself.
That, of course, was me, but they weren’t pictures I was holding. They were index cards with that day’s ten new French vocabulary words on them.
In Sussex not long ago, an acquaintance approached me to share a similar story. Again I was identified as mentally challenged, this time because I was picking up trash and muttering to myself. Only I wasn’t muttering—I was repeating phrases from my Learn to Speak Japanese or Swedish or Polish audio program. “The woman who saw you said, ‘I just hope no one tries to take advantage of him,’ ” the acquaintance told me.
On Emerald Isle this August, it was German I was muttering. I might have picked up an occasional bit of trash, but I wasn’t carrying any equipment, just ziplock bags of hot dogs or thick-cut bologna to feed the snapping turtles in the canal.
We’d been at the beach for four days when I noticed a great many ant colonies in the dirt bordering the sidewalk between the strip mall the CVS is in and the one the grocery store is in. The ants were cinnamon-colored, hundreds of thousands of them, all racing about, searching for something to eat.
“Excuse me,” I said that afternoon to the guy behind the counter at the hardware store. “I was wanting to feed some ants and wonder what you think they might like. How would they feel about bananas?”
The man’s face and neck were deeply creased from age, and the sun. “Bananas?” He took off his glasses and then put them back on. “Naw, I’d go with candy. Ants like that pretty good.”
I bought a bag of gummy worms from beside the register, bit them into thirds, and, on my way back to the house, distributed them among the various colonies as evenly as I could. It made me happy to think of the workers, presenting their famished queens with sugar, and possibly being rewarded for it.
“You’re out there feeding ants candy?” Hugh said that night at the table, when we were all discussing our day. “They don’t need your help, and neither do the stupid turtles. You mess these things up by feeding them—you hurt them is what you do.” It wasn’t what he said that concerned me but, rather, his tone, which, again, I wouldn’t have noticed if my sister weren’t there.
“Well, they seemed pretty happy to me,” I said.
Gretchen patted my hand: “Don’t listen to Hugh. He doesn’t know shit about being an ant.”
This was a relatively short beach trip. Renters were arriving on Saturday, so the three of us had to have the house clean and be out by 10 a.m. Gretchen left a bit earlier than we did, and, though I was sorry to see her go, it was a relief to escape her judgment regarding the life I have built with Hugh. As it was, whenever anything good happened during that week, whenever he was cheerful or thoughtlessly kind, I wanted to say, “See, this is what my relationship is like—this!”
It was a three-hour drive to Raleigh. I had work to do, so while Hugh drove I sat in the back seat. “Just for a little while,” I said. I must have fallen asleep, though. After waking, I read for a bit, and the next thing I knew the car wasn’t moving. “What’s going on?” I asked, too lazy to sit up and look out the window.
“I don’t know,” Hugh said. “An accident, maybe.”
I righted myself and was just attempting to hop into the front seat when Hugh advanced and tapped the car in front of us. “Now, see what you made me do!”
“Me?”
I don’t know anything about cars, but the one he’d hit was bigger than ours, and white. The driver was husky and pissed-off-looking, with the sort of large, watery eyes I’d expect to find behind glasses. “Did you just hit me?” he asked, walking toward us. He bent to examine his bumper, which seemed to be made of plastic and had a pale mark on it, possibly put there by us.
Hugh rolled down his window: “I maybe did, but just a little.” The man glared at what he probably assumed was an Uber driver making extra money by taking people to the airport, or wherever that gap-toothed dope in the back seat was headed. He gave his bumper another once-over, then the traffic started moving. Someone honked, and the man got back into his car. “Hit him again,” I said to Hugh. “But harder this time. We need to show him who’s boss.”
“Will you please shut up,” he said. “As a favor to me. Please.”
When we first got news that Hurricane Florence had all but destroyed the Sea Section, I felt nothing. Part of my indifference was that I’d expected this to happen. It was inevitable. Then, too, I wasn’t as attached to the place as he was. I wasn’t the one who’d be contacting the insurance company. I wouldn’t be dropping everything to fly to North Carolina. It wouldn’t be me picking turds off our beds, or finding a contractor. In that sense, I could afford to feel nothing. After looking at the pictures that Bermey had sent, I shrugged and went for a walk. At dusk, I returned and found Hugh in our bedroom, curled up with his face in his hands. “My house,” he sobbed, his shoulders quaking.
“Well, one of your houses,” I said, thinking of Florence’s other victims.
Some, like Hugh, were crying on their beds, far from the affected area, while others were on foldout sofas, in sleeping bags, in the back seats of cars, or on cots laid out like circuitry in public-school gymnasiums. People who’d thought they were far enough inland to be safe, who’d had real belongings in their now ruined houses: things that were dear to them, and irreplaceable. The hardest-hit victims lost actual people—mates or friends or family members swept away and swallowed by floodwaters.
Then again, this was something of a pattern for Hugh. So many of the houses he’d lived in growing up had been destroyed: in Beirut, in Mogadishu, in Kinshasa. He’s actually sort of bad luck that way.
I put my arms around him, and said the things that were expected of me: “We’ll rebuild, and it will all be fine. Better, actually. You’ll see.” This was how I always imagined myself in a relationship: the provider, the rock, the reassuring voice of wisdom. I had to catch myself from saying, “I’ve got you,” which is what people say on TV now when they’re holding a distraught person. It’s a nice sentiment, but culturally speaking there was only a five-minute period when you could say this without sounding lame, and it has long passed.
I do have him, though. Through other people’s eyes, the two of us might not make sense, but that works in reverse as well. I have a number of friends who are in long-term relationships I can’t begin to figure out. But what do I know? What does Gretchen or Lisa or Amy? They see me getting scolded from time to time, getting locked out of my own house, but where are they in the darkening rooms when a close friend dies or rebels storm the embassy. When the wind picks up and the floodwaters rise. When you realize you’d give anything to make that other person stop hurting, if only so he can tear your head off again. And you can forgive and forget again. On and on, hopefully. Then on and on and on. ♦
