I took his hand.

"Come on," I said. "I want to show you something before we go in."

And I led him around the house through the pine and juniper windbreak and across the open deck and up to the crest of the dunes.

As it was on that day the spring before, when I had first seen it, the wide, tawny beach was empty. The dunes still soared high and lonely against the evening sky, and the sea oats flattened themselves backward in the steady stream of wind off the Atlantic. The tide was high today, and the white surf creamed at the feet of the first low dunes. The water was very dark blue, and the pale light was so clear that you could see the rippled herringbone pattern of the sand in the shallows of the tidepools, and the bankerly patrols of strutting gulls that must have been two miles away. The air was warmer around us than I remembered from the spring, like warmed honey. But the wind was cool and fresh and tart as wine. We both inhaled deeply at precisely the same instant, and looked at each other. We smiled, but neither of us spoke.

He turned then, and looked back and up at Ginger's great house, dreaming above us in the September sun. I felt his hand tighten almost convulsively on mine, and a tiny, hard tremor go through him, that I felt sometimes at the moment of his orgasm. His face did not change, but I saw the muscles in his jaw clench.

"Didn't I tell you?" I said, loving him for that silent interior explosion.

He did not answer. He continued to stare up at the house, and then along the line of the dunes that fronted it on both sides.

"I'd put it right there," he said finally. "On that highest dune, off the left end, where it would look straight out to sea. That way it wouldn't break the roof line of the house, but you'd have a sense of connectedness. Inside, you'd see water on three sides, all the way to Spain or wherever. I don't know if you could cantilever in sand, though; there are probably ordinances..."

He fell silent. I knew what he spoke of.

"How would it look, all that white concrete connected to that weathered old black?" I said. The words were pedantic and tire-some; I did not know where they had come from.

"I'd use the weathered wood on the outside. It doesn't matter about that; that old sable black is wonderful. Strong, for a strong, cold sea. Inside it would be white. In spirit it would be white..."

"It would be beautiful there, wouldn't it?" I said. "I knew you'd love the Outer Banks, and this house. Of all the people I know, it seems the most like you. It's definitely not contemporary, though."

"No," he said. "I thought that would matter, but it doesn't."

At dinner that night, at the big refectory table overlooking the deck and the moonlit sea, he charmed the Fowlers just as he had Robert. It was a side of him I had not seen before; I was as proud of him as a mother with a precocious child. He said just the right thing to the right Fowler, and I beamed fatuously.

But there was a strangeness, too. The laughing man who knew how to make small talk with a new-rich mill owner and his pretty, fluttering wife was such a different persona from the intense, consumed builder and wildly inventive lover that I had the feeling of sitting in the presence of someone I was supposed to know, and did not. I waited restlessly for the time when we could sit alone in the dark of the porch or walk on the night beach, and the lover would come back to me. I was weary, suddenly, with sharing him.

As Regina Fowler brought in dessert, she cocked her head at us, birdlike, and said, "I gather there'll be a honeymoon here sooner, rather than later."

I felt myself flush, and Ginger said, "As soon as Kate can get him to propose. She won't marry him unless he gets down on his knees."

Fig laughed loudly, and Paul smiled at her, and then, questioningly, at Regina Fowler.

"Kate said last spring she'd like to spend her honeymoon here," she explained. "And of course we said we'd love that. She must have been psychic; I don't think she'd even met you yet."

Paul's smile widened. "That would be as near heaven as I'm apt to get in my lifetime," he said.

"Why not get married here?" Fig blurted. Her face was flushed with wine and something that approached religious rapture. She had changed into a strange garment of flower-printed chiffon, or perhaps polyester, that brushed the floor and tied at her thick waist. I could not imagine where she had gotten it. She looked like a character in a grade B 1930s movie, the comic lead in an all-wrong peignoir.

"Why don't we just ask the Fowlers to deed the house over to us?" I said, embarrassed.

But Regina Fowler took up the cry.

"Oh, wouldn't that be sweet?" she fluted. "I've always thought a summer wedding on that lovely old porch, or maybe at the edge of the dunes...you know, with a little arbor, and simple, old-fashioned flowers, and maybe a little string quartet..."

"Yards and yards of aqua tulle, and big picture hats for the attendants," Fig leaped in. "Me and Ginger, of course, and all the sisters could come...oh, Effie, our first Tri O wedding!"

"Well, I always thought it would be Ginger's, but the way she's going I'll probably be in a wheelchair and we'll have it at the nursing home. So you children have yours here in the meantime," Regina said.

"It's at least a year and a half away," Paul said.

"Well, don't you forget. The offer stands."

"I won't forget," he said.

The Banks and the sea and the September weather seemed in conspiracy to soothe and seduce us. We had arrived planning to sleep until noon each day, but the lambent morning light and the soft sigh of the sea below the dunes sang us out of bed early, and the extravagant show of stars, both fixed and falling, in the great black autumn sky kept us up late, lying in deck chairs under blankets and sweaters, silent with the weight of all that beauty. During the day we lay under the high golden sun, its warmth red on closed eyelids, boneless and near-mindless with the peculiar contentment that comes only beside the sea. It was that September that I discovered the powerful and particular timelessness that is the ocean's best gift. Time stops; it literally does. Beside the sea, hovering at the edge of sleep, its great breath surging in and out with the very rhythm of the blood in your body, the sea will smooth away all but the essences of things, so that you are very near the creatures that crept out of those warm new seas and began life on earth, all those millions of years ago, under that strange, terrible young sun. I knew from that first day on the beach at Nag's Head with Paul that I could not live for long away from the sea.

We did not touch each other in those first days at the cottage, except to join hands as we lay in the sun or climbed the dunes or ran into the surf. It was a kind of delicious postponement; I would look at him, and he at me, and our eyes would grow heavy, and my wrists and knees would buckle with the sweet weight of desire for him. I would look at his strong brown hands and think where they would touch me and what they would do, and I came near to fainting. Once I reached out and traced the line of dark hair that ran from his navel down his hard, flat stomach, down to where it disappeared into his damp trunks. He rolled over on his stomach and smiled at me without opening his eyes.

"Do that again and I'm going to give Fig something to write about in her diary," he said.

"What are you going to do?" I said, my voice soft and thick.

"Do it again and see."

I heard my laugh, low and throaty and feral in my throat.

"Turn over so I can get to it," I said.

"Are you kidding? The lifeguards would come with hoses and water trucks and spray me. Little children would cry out in wonder. Fig would wriggle out of that incredible garment and jump my bones."

Fig had bought, for the trip, a fiercely boned and padded Rose Marie Reid confection with much draping and ruching and puffing of leg, in violent shades of pink and magenta. She had a bathing cap with pink rubber fronds all over it.

"It's a water lily," she said, showing it to us.

"Fig, neck deep in the water looks like a Portuguese man o' war," Cecie said.

"Fig neck deep in the water looks better than Fig out of it," I said. Paul shook his head at me.

"Jesus, that poor girl. With friends like you all, she doesn't need enemies. I'm going to take her swimming."

And he did, towing her far out beyond the line of the breakers, holding her in his arms because she could not swim. Even from the shore we could see that her eyes were shut and her face was still and bone-white.

"Oh, Lord, she's terrified," I said. "He shouldn't have done that."

"She's not terrified, she's having her first and probably only Big O, right there in the Atlantic Ocean," Ginger chortled. "I'd know that look anywhere."

"Ginger!" Cecie and I shouted together. But we laughed.

Paul was as easy to be with on the beach as he was in the car and at the dinner table. He not only swam with Fig, he and Ginger went out beyond the surf line and raced, and porpoise-dived, and rode the combers into the beach. Both of them were wonderful in the water, he like a dark, sleek, lightning-fast otter, she like a sturdy bronze seal. He walked the dune lines with Cecie, quizzing her about the ocean and dune plants, learning what grew where and why. He was intent and interested; she was courteous and pleasant. But I knew, and Paul must have, that she still did not like him. It was the only small, hot point of wrongness in the entire week.

Sometimes Paul and Ginger's father surf-cast, at evening when the blues were running, and Ginger's mother pan-fried them for dinner. Or we went out to eat fish and oysters and clams and endless hush puppies at weathered, screened little seafood shacks up and down the coast highway. Once we toiled to the top of Jockey's Ridge, the highest dune on the East Coast, and watched the kite-flying at sundown; it was an hour woven entirely of wind and sea and space. We were drunk on it. We visited the Wright Memorial atop Big Kill Devil Hill, and all of a sudden the fact of flight seemed simply miraculous, impossible to me, standing there in the teeth of that vast, streaming wind, looking out at the empty, endless sea; to think that two men had hurled their bodies, borne up only by a spidery web of wings, into all that wildness.

We planned, lazily and formlessly, to make side trips: over to Roanoke Island, to see the scruffy little fishing port of Wanchese and eat fresh-caught tuna; up to pretty little Manteo to see the Elizabethan Gardens and Sir Walter Raleigh's stubby, gallant little Elizabeth II. But in the end, for most of the week, we simply stayed on the beach. Ahead of me lay three months of endings: school, the great friendship of my life, my uneasy turn in the South itself. No matter how I looked forward to it-and I did, hungrily-the future was a heavy weight on my heart. The unknown had always frightened me in a profound and atavistic way. I could not control what I did not know. And so I was content, in those last days of summer, to lie in the blue and gold stasis of the sea with all the elements of my life, past and present, close at hand. Time enough for Life to start. Time enough....

On our last full day we took the big Cadillac and rode down Highway 12, that threads the narrow ribbon of the Banks from just below Nag's Head to the Hatteras Ferry over to Ocracoke Island, eighty-odd miles to the south. It was a day so blue and vivid that there were gentian edges to everything, and the ocean was a dazzle of restless light. Ginger's father told us, as we set off, that on the Banks they called such a day a weather-breeder.

"Get a day like this and a storm is sure to follow," he said. "Probably a good thing you all are going back. This time of year the storms tend to be hurricanes."

"I'd love to ride out one of those babies in that house," Paul said. "I've seen what the big winds can do to the 'Glades, but you're on high ground here, and solid as a mountain. It really ought to be something."

"You just think you would," Mr. Fowler said. "Fella told me this summer that in the big blow of '38 the water came up so high a couple guys down the beach there found a porpoise stranded in their living room."

"Oh," I said softly, involuntarily. "Oh, poor thing..."

"Oh, it was all right," he said, grinning his fierce grin. "They were weight-lifters, or something. They just rolled him onto a door and walked him back into the surf. Probably lived a long and happy life right off their beach."

We smiled, charmed with the story.

"This place is under a spell of some kind, no doubt about it," I said. "Everything here has a happy ending."

"Seems like it, doesn't it?" he said, and slapped the fender, and we rolled out onto the coast highway.

Below Nag's Head, past the fishing pier, you come to Bodie Island, and the sea and beach turn wild. The wreck of the Laura Barnes, the last ocean-going schooner ever built in the United States, lies off Coquina Beach, driven aground there in one of the great spring storms in 1918. Across Oregon Inlet, National Seashore land begins, and the wildness deepens and thickens, until it is palpable on the skin, thick on the tongue and in the nose and ears. No houses break the towering lines of the front dunes, not even the ubiquitous fish shack; the sea, glimpsed between breaks in the solid, sunless maritime forests of yaupon, red cedar, live oak, sweet bay, and beech olive, seems fiercer here, and bluer, and somehow colder. The long beaches are wind-scoured and highduned and absolutely empty. It is an impersonal landscape; nothing there speaks to the heart of man. I was aware, as we bore steadily south, that we were talking in hushed tones. I looked at Cecie and then at Paul; both had looks of distance and otherness in their eyes. I thought that this place of storms and emptiness and magical light was uniquely their place. I remembered, suddenly, the night of the storm that first trip, back in the spring, and Cecie's naked figure far below me in the line of the angry white surf, and how she dove into that black devil water and swam straight out into the storm. It seemed so much something Paul would do that I wondered again why they could not like each other; they seemed, in many ways, the most alike of any two people I have ever known.

Below the vast Pea Island Migratory Waterfowl Refuge we flashed past a few perfunctory little towns; mostly matters of gift and tackle shops and a tarpaper, stilted beach shack or two. They had names with music in them...North and South Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo. They looked like places few people lived and fewer stopped; I wondered how they sustained life, and what a life there would be like. The thought was somehow attractive to me; light years removed from New York and the Northeast Coast that I knew, but steeped in the timelessness of the sea that so beguiled me. If you came to one of these places in the fullness of happiness, surely you would keep that happiness forever, be frozen in it...

Far down the highway, nearly to Cape Hatteras itself, just past the tiny hamlet of Avon, we passed a cluster of buildings on the seaward side that made Paul slam on the brakes and back the Cadillac up, to look. We all did, and burst into simultaneous delighted laughter. It was a semicircle of tiny, narrow, black-weathered houses like dollhouses or even fanciful outhouses, with peaked cedar shake roofs and much scrollwork and fake diamond panes and ornate shutters and faded red doors. On each door, and in each shutter, half-moons had been cut. Tiny window boxes filled with straggling geraniums and clumsy stone chimneys completed the look of a demented child's playhouse colony. Each postage stamp yard was encircled with white-painted rocks, and a birdbath adorned the precise center of each.

"Jesus, it's Snow White and the Seven Outhouses," Paul crowed. It was plain he was delighted. We all were. The little structures were the quintessence of all an architect and a designer should have deemed irredeemably tacky, yet somehow they lifted the heart and tickled the funny bone. The fact that they badly needed paint and shingles and repairs did nothing to dim their crazy joie de vivre.

"Whatever it is, I want it," Cecie gurgled in pleasure.

"There's not a sign," Paul said.

"Yes, there is; it's fallen. It's back there on the ground," Ginger said. "I was waiting to show y'all this."

Paul backed the car up further and we saw the sign then: Carolina Moon Motel. Daily-Weekly-Hourly. Magic Fingers.

"What are Magic Fingers?" Fig said, her brow knit.

"It means you put a quarter in the bed and it diddles you," Ginger grinned. "This is the local who' house. It's been here forever."

We got out and looked at the little cottages. All were dark and seemed unoccupied. The slightly larger one that was the office had a sign on the door that said GONE TO LUNCH. BACK 1:00.

"Guess that's tough luck for the nooners," Paul grinned. "God, what an absolutely perfect, glorious, wonderful place. Katie me love, if we do have our honeymoon here, I'm going to bring you here for the wedding night itself. Those magic fingers will make a crazy woman of you."

"I can hardly wait," I said acidly, thinking that I really couldn't.

"Ha, that's rich," Fig shouted nervously. "That's one for the diary."

This time no one even shouted at her. We went on past the Carolina Moon to the great Hatteras Light House and then into Hatteras itself, and had a late lunch of steamed blue crabs and beer, and were back on the road home by four. The Carolina Moon sat as it had that morning, shuttered and promising Magic Fingers to all takers. There had been none since we passed the first time.

"Now that's the place to ride out a storm," I said. "Light your little fireplace and take a bottle of wine and keep feeding the bed quarters. Wow."

Ginger laughed.

"You'd have to be a good swimmer to do that," she said. "If it's a bad enough storm the bridges are under water. Nobody comes down here in a blow. Not even for Magic Fingers."

"Pity," I said. "It would be the perfect aphrodisiac. Oh, Lord, y'all, has this been a perfect day, or what?"

That last night we sat late on the deck after supper. The first of the wispy mare's-tail clouds that preceded the storm Mr. Fowler had promised trailed milky skeins across the clouds of stars, and the ocean seemed stiller than I had ever seen it. It was then that Ginger told us the story of the mermaids that sang the sailors to their fate on the shoals.

"What kind of mermaids would those be?" Fig said earnestly. "The only kind I ever read about were Greek, like the sirens, or German, like the Rhine Maidens. I guess these would be Indians. They'd probably be singing Indian songs."

We were all elaborately silent. None of us dared look at the others. I knew we were struggling, in the dark, not to laugh. We had simply laughed too much at Fig this trip; we all sensed it. But the image her words called up was almost too much for us to handle.

From the open kitchen window, where she had gone to make tea, Cecie's voice trailed sweetly out into the still night.

"When I'm calling you-ooo-ooo," she warbled, "will you answer tru-uuu-uuue...?"

And the laughter exploded out of our mouths and noses into the night. Even Paul laughed. It went on and on, and every time it drifted to a stop a snort from one of us would set it off again.

"Well, I wanted to get it right," Fig said primly. "Y'all are always telling me to get it right."

After everyone had straggled off to bed, Paul and I lingered on the deck, moving finally to the big new hammock Mr. Fowler had hung at the far end, tucked under the overhang of the great roof. We climbed carefully into it, so as not to fall out, and lay as still as we could, and as quietly.

"We really should go in," I said. "We've got to get an early start tomorrow. I haven't packed yet."

"Stay a minute," he said. "I haven't had any time at all alone with you. I've been looking at that body practically naked for five days, and I've hardly touched it."

"Well, don't touch it now," I said, only half-teasing. "If you do, we'll end up doing it in this hammock and everybody will hear us and know what we're doing..."

"They already do," he said, and put his hand on my breast.

I drew in my breath sharply. Fire leaped in my groin.

"Don't," I whispered. "Oh, don't..."

"Then what about this?" he said, and slid his hand down my body and under the waistband of my shorts, and finally to the secret warmth between my legs. I arched my back and opened them for him. I knew as I turned my body and face into his that we were lost.

He was nearly inside me, murmuring, moaning a little, I was blind and fully opened with pure sensation, when it happened. I shifted my weight and the hammock tossed us onto the deck with a hollow thud that sounded as if it might be heard to the mainland. We froze in a tangle of arms and legs and naked skin, hardly breathing, laughter beginning deep inside us, skirling relentlessly up. At the end of the dark house a light went on.

We righted ourselves and our clothing and sat demurely side by side on the steps down to the sand, feeling it snake-cold on our bare feet, shaking with suppressed laughter and the release of tension. Presently the light went off again.

"I guess that was an omen," he said. "But I promise you one thing, Katherine Stuart Lee. The minute I get you here again I'm going to bang you in that hammock. Before we even unpack. Before we even go in the house. I'll drive all night to do it, if I have to."

"You know, if we got married here, you wouldn't have to drive all night," I said. "You wouldn't have to unpack. You'd just have to wait till the last guest left and unzip your fly. It's the best argument for a Nag's Head wedding I ever heard."

"Don't tempt me," he said. "But I'm sure your mother would never stand for that. It's bad enough I'm dragging you away to the Yankees. I know Southern mamas. It's got to be the big deal with the twelve bridesmaids and champagne fountain and an orchestra and a tent and God knows what else. I'll be lucky to get you into that hammock for a week after we're married."

I told him then. I sat in the darkness beside him and told him about my father, and the summers of servitude on the Cape, and the careful, unceasing tutelage, and the money that was not, and the Lee that was not that Lee, and the sad squalor of the old house on the Santee River. And I told him about my father's suicide on its banks.

"I should have told you before, but I didn't really think it mattered," I said. "And I know it doesn't, not to you. But I can't go on letting you think I'm rich. I'm an awful long way from that. It doesn't change anything; I'll still be going to New York and working, and you'll be starting the house and your practice..."

I let my voice trail off so that he could speak. He did not. He sat beside me on the steps of Ginger's big house and stared out to sea, where the clouds had finally eaten the thin moon, and said nothing. I could not see his face.