"He's awfully busy. He's got some kind of monster project going."

"And boy, would you be surprised at what it was," I did not say. Maniac laughter leaped inside me. I bit my lips. Destruction by sheer craziness was never far from me in those days.

Despite the success of my Kate-Career-Girl role, I began having panic attacks in early May. I would be walking home up Third Avenue in the sweet, green spring twilight and suddenly terror of such magnitude that my heart nearly stopped and my legs buckled and sagged and I was drenched in an instant with sweat would sweep over me. I would clutch a lightpost or a store window and presently it would ebb, and I would creep home and shower and turn on the TV and lie watching it, limp as a dishcloth. But it would come again in a day or two, or a week, perhaps at work, and once in the middle of the night. It was indescribable, awful, close to unbearable, but I bore it. I told myself that the attacks were fear of being totally alone, and of losing my job when Carl Seaborn found out about Paul; but somehow, on a deeper level, I knew them for what they were, though we would not have a name for them for many years. Abyss-walker that I was, I knew that they were the price I paid for success in my daytime persona. I had learned that truth early: suppress pain, abandon reality, and you will pay the price in another anguish. Never think that you won't. I handled this monstrous fear the same way I had every other pain: I acted my way through it like Bernhardt.

I went that spring to see the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird. I went right after work, with a girl from my office; I do not remember her name. I am willing to bet, though, that she will never forget mine. Minutes into that ineffably tender, heartbreaking, and evocative little movie I began to cry, and by the time Atticus Finch walked out of the courtroom and the Negroes in the balcony stood silently to salute his passing, I was crying so hard that I had to excuse myself and leave. I mopped my face in the washroom and tried twice to go back into the theater, but it was no good. Gregory Peck's good face on the screen drove me back like the Cross of Jesus would a vampire. Finally I simply went home, without telling my friend I was going, and sat on my sofa and cried for all truths fought for and lost, and all fathers gone, and all strength and goodness never experienced at all. When at last I stopped, I called the girl from work and apologized. She was polite and cool; I did not blame her. I would, I thought, take her to lunch the next day by way of atonement.

Then I called Cecie Hart. This time I did not call the Tri O house but the old house in the Tidewater; I did not dare risk hearing Ginger's voice, or even Fig's. I did not know why I was calling; it had more to do with the movie than with Paul, I thought, but I was simply not clear on that. I knew only that I wanted Cecie.

A very frail, old voice, crazed like an eggshell, answered and said that Cecie was in Boston, and might she take a message?

"This is her friend Kate Lee, from Randolph," I said. "Her roommate. When will she be back?"

"Lee?" the old voice quavered. "Does Cecelia have your number, Miss Lee? What Lee is that? Are you one of our Lees? We have a great many, you know..."

I gave her the number, shouting; I realized that she was quite deaf, and that it was probably useless to try to gain any information about Cecie from her. But Boston? Why Boston, in the middle of a school term?

"Will she be in Boston long?" I tried again.

"Just a little social visit; we have people there, you know," the old lady said. I gave up.

"Please have her call me," I shouted.

"Oh, I will," she said.

But Cecie never did. And I did not call back.

Much later I wrote; she did not answer.

I sat down then and thought about the fear, and the aloneness, and the truth. I saw that I always had been alone, as alone as I felt now that, without Paul's metaphorical and lethal presence behind me, I was in New York. I had just not known that I was. It was all perception; always had been. The truth of the thing changed nothing but the way I felt, but it was enough. The next morning I went into Carl Seaborn's office and told him about Paul and me, and that he would not be coming to work for McKim, Mead and White.

"I know that you might want to think twice now about keeping me on," I said. "And I wanted you to know I would understand if you did."

He looked at me for a long moment, and then he smiled.

"Did you think that I was going to fire you, Kate?" he said.

"Well," I said, "I know that he was the reason you took me. A favor to him. And I know how valuable he was to you. Would have been..."

"What I know mainly is how valuable you are to us," he said. "You have talent and grace and wit and sweetness, and you work harder than any young person I have ever seen. No, I do not want to think twice about having hired you. I am, however, going to move you over into the design department, as a junior associate. I should have done it long before now. We'll do it as soon as I can find the right project for you. Let me look and see what's coming in and I'll be in touch. And Kate...I'm sorry about Paul."

"Thank you," I said. This time I did not cry until I had reached the women's room on the executive floor. When I had finished, and repaired my makeup, I went back over into the drafting department, to make peace with my friend from the movie. I thought then that perhaps I would, after all, live. I just did not know yet how.

One of the odd things about intense loss and pain is that it comes close to blinding you physically. For more than three months I did not see faces. I made friends, or acquaintances, rather; went out with them, lunched with them, laughed and talked with them, spent an evening or two with this girl or that. But I found that two minutes after leaving them I could not have described their faces. Paul's was as vivid and close to me as if he stood two feet away; Paul, whom I would never see again, lived with me permanently, burned into my retinas. But the people with whom I was attempting to make a new life eluded me altogether. It did not worry me, particularly, but it was odd, and gave everything I did in those days an air of even greater impermanence and unreality. I was, I thought, as ready as I would ever be to resume some sort of life, but there simply did not seem any imperative to do so. I paddled in circles in the pain, like a duck, but at least by then I had come to the surface of it.

On the Saturday after Randolph's graduation I went to my office at eight A.M. and stayed there until after eight that evening. I knew that if I did not, I would spend the day in a hell of images: Ginger getting out of her bed for the last time as a single girl, breakfasting with her parents at the big table by the sea; Paul walking alone along the tide line, or perhaps driving far down the National Seashore by himself, trying to avoid seeing his bride until the wedding; the bustle of caterers' trucks and bridesmaids and chairs being aligned on the deck over the dunes; armfuls of white wild flowers and beach grasses being set about in baskets; the little liquid skirl of the string quartet spilling out into the fresh salt air. And the guests arriving, and Paul coming out into the sunset with his best man...who?...from the great house, and finally Ginger, her plain face aflame with love and happiness and the last of the sun, walking to meet him above that eternal old sea....

I worked as steadily as an engine, and as mindlessly, all that day, but the images came anyway. And always, in my mind, it was I who walked to meet him. At eight o'clock, when the twilight that washed Third Avenue was bathing Paul and Ginger in its benediction a scant three hundred miles to the South, I put my pen down and cradled my head in my arms on my board and began to cry. I had meant only to rest a moment, but the tears flooded up and out as though an inexhaustible underground spring had been tapped. I let them come. I was simply too tired to battle them. I had been alone in the great, dim room since mid-afternoon; there was no one to hear me. It did not occur to me to be afraid there, as it might have normally. Bodily harm had been far from my thoughts for months. I had some idea, as I cried, that these tears would be the last; that when the moment of his marriage passed so would some of the pain. I cried and cried and waited for relief, but found only more pain below the first, and more tears.

When a dry voice with the rasp of Brooklyn in it said, "Booze is the answer, but what is the question?" I flung my head up and saw, for the first time since March, clear and whole, a human face. It was sharp and clever and somehow simian, with bright, opaque dark eyes and a long, humorous upper lip and sharply slanted cheekbones. He was smiling through a clipped, short beard, and his teeth were small and white, like a clever carnivore's. He was small and slender and well-muscled, and wore a close-fitting black tee shirt and black jeans and tennis shoes. His face was the peculiar pale olive of the Eastern urban male: very slightly greenish, probably impervious to suntan and sunburn alike. His hair was black and curled closely. I remember thinking two things, sharply and instantly: he could only be Jewish, and his hair under my fingers would feel rough and springy, like the coat of a well-tended terrier.

The third thing I thought, even before he spoke again, or I did, was that I was alone with him on the floor and perhaps in the building and I did not know who he was. He did not look like anyone who would work for McKim, Mead and White. It was not that they did not have Jewish employees, but that all their employees wore the carefully careless khakis and Oxford-cloth shirts of the Ivy League, and all looked as if they would go to Brooklyn only to catch a plane at LaGuardia or a train for the Hamptons. This man wore sinister black like a foreigner, and talked like a mobster from Flatbush, and moved like a cat burglar. Sudden fear made me angry.

"If you aren't out of here in one second flat I'm calling the police," I said, reaching for the telephone on the windowsill beside my board.

"For what, felonious possession of a T-square?" he said, and grinned again. "Take it easy, lady. I've only come to carry you off to Long Island. I can just as well make it another day..."

I stared at him stupidly, aware that my eyes were swollen nearly shut, and my nose ran.

"Aren't you Kate Lee?" he said.

"Yes..."

"I'm Alan Abrams. I work for McKim; I'm an architect. I'm doing the beach house you're starting the interiors for next week; I was in the office and saw that you'd signed in, and took a chance that you might be free to run out to Sagaponack with me and look at the site tomorrow. I could have you back in town by four. But this is obviously a bad time for you..."

"Am I doing a beach house?" I said numbly.

"Carl told me yesterday he was assigning this one to you. Has he not gotten to you yet?"

"No," I said. "He hasn't. I didn't...maybe he's changed his mind. I've never done a design project before, except at school..."

"He hasn't changed his mind," Alan Abrams said. "He told me he'd seen interiors you did for a beach house that knocked him out. He said he thought you'd work well with me and for me to see if you'd like to drive out to the site before we did any actual work. He'll probably tell you himself Monday. I was going to call you tonight, but then I saw your name on the board downstairs..."

"A beach house..." I said again.

"Yeah," he said dryly. "Like a house at the edge of the ocean. Lots of people around here have them. See, there's this ocean...shit, I'm sorry. I come across as sarcastic when I don't mean to. Something's upset you; I'll let you alone till Monday, why don't I? We can have some coffee or something and talk then."

He turned to go, padding silently out in the sneakers. He walked like a dancer. I looked after him. At the door he turned and came back.

"Look, I can't leave you up here in the dark crying," he said. "Go wash your face and I'll buy you a drink and some dinner. Like I said, booze is the answer. I won't even ask the question."

"You don't have to buy me dinner," I said in a small voice.

"I don't have to do much of anything," he said. "I want to buy you dinner. I'm going to be spending a lot of time with you. I want to see what you look like when you're not crying. You will stop crying, won't you?"

"Yes..."

"And you would eat some dinner if somebody put it down in front of you, wouldn't you?"

I realized I had not eaten since a slice of cold toast at breakfast.

"Yes," I said. I managed a small smile. It made my lips tremble, but no more tears overflowed my bottom lashes.

"Come on, then," Alan Abrams said. "P. J. Clarke's for drinks and a hamburger, and then we'll go down to the Village Vanguard and listen to Gerry Mulligan. You like jazz?"

"I love jazz," I said. "But I don't look like going anywhere."

"Are you kidding? You look great. A little wet, is all. Like Ondine. Just the thing for a beach house."

When I came out of the ladies' room he was sitting at my board, doodling on tracing paper. He looked up and smiled at me. It was a singularly sweet smile. You could not help but smile back at him.

"Better and better," he said. "Like Grace Kelly playing Ondine. My goose is cooked. I'll probably propose to you by the time we eat dessert. I never could resist cool blond shiksas. It's the bane of my mother's existence."

"She wouldn't approve of me, I gather," I said, following him out into the warm twilight. The lights were just coming on along Third Avenue; it struck me suddenly as very beautiful. L'heure bleue, the French call it. The term might have been invented for New York. It had been a long time since I had noticed it.

"Are you kidding? She'd hire an assassin to dispatch you," he said, holding up a finger for a cab. One cut out of the river of lights and came sliding over to the curb. "She's already hired a match-maker to fix me up with a nice Orthodox girl. Spent a fortune, she has."

"So has she found you somebody?"

"Nah," he said. "The last one had a mustache."

At P. J. Clarke's we sat on stools at the little bar and ordered gin and tonics. When they came, he lifted his glass and touched it to the rim of mine.

"L'chaim," he said.

"L'chaim, indeed," I said, and took a long swallow. The drink was wonderful, clean and icy. I drank it down and ate my lime, making him wince. He ordered us another, and again I drank deeply, and sighed and put it down on the counter and leaned back on my stool. The edge of the pain was blunted and the wires that had bound my chest for all those months eased a bit.

"You're right," I said. "Booze is the answer. I wish I'd thought of it sooner."

"Then do I get to ask what the question is?" he said.

"Not yet. But one more of these and you can ask me anything."

My head was spinning and my ears rang slightly, but I was not dizzy. I felt more focused and clear than I had in many days; as if a miasma of some sort, a fog, had lifted from around me. The clarity felt delicious.

"Actually," he said, looking at me obliquely, "I know what the question is. Or at least, I think I know what the matter is. I don't want to start things off between us under false pretenses. Carl told me about your chickenshit boyfriend, the man with the golden arm, as it were."

"He had no right to do that," I said, the gin-induced well-being vanishing. "That was a very private thing."

"He had every right, even a responsibility, to tell his architects that Mies Junior wasn't coming on board after all," Alan said mildly. "We've all been living under that sword of Damocles for two years now. A cheer went up you could have heard in Newark. Most of us met him when he came up for his interview with Carl. Captain Tightass, we called him."

"You didn't have a chance to get to know him," I said in a low voice. And then I stopped. Why was I defending Paul Sibley?

"Chance enough to tell that he'd have screwed Carl and the firm and taken off with as many clients as he could, as soon as he could," he said. "I have an infallible radar for assholes. I know I'm right, too. Carl told me what he was doing instead. Marrying your rich buddy, I mean. He didn't tell anybody else, but he thought I needed to know it, since we were going to be working together. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell anybody else. For one thing, they'd be all over your bones the minute it got out. This gives me a leg up, you should pardon the expression."

"Well, we don't have to talk about it anymore, then, do we?" I said. Far down, I could feel the tears gathering once more.

"Nope," he said. Then he looked more closely into my face.

"The wedding was sometime this weekend, wasn't it?" he said.

"Just about an hour ago," I said, trying for an ironic smile. I didn't do too badly. "About the time you were saying booze was the answer, he was saying I do. That's all, now. I'm not going to talk about it anymore. It's done."

He was silent for a while, sipping his drink, and then he reached down and took my hand and held it lightly in his, in my lap. His hand was small and hard and warm.

"Tough," he said. "Tough."

We drank a great deal that night. I don't remember how many we had. P. J. Clarke's gradually filled with the kind of crowd a summer Saturday night brought out in those gentle years: well and casually dressed, handsome, young, laughing, laughing. I remember that mostly, from that warm, long night: the succession of clean white drinks and the laughter. I laughed as I had not since I laughed in the nights with Cecie, and I laughed at the same kinds of things. Alan had a sharp, clever, and self-deprecating tongue; sheer kindness saved it from malice, and sheer intelligence gave it wit and focus. He had read the same writers Cecie and I read, and liked much the same music and art and drama and architecture and furniture, and most important of all, disliked the same things. We talked of them all that night, and laughed at most of them. I knew by the time my hamburger came that I was very drunk, but it was not the kind of slurring, stumbling drunkenness that shames and incapacitates. Everything sharpened, glowed, was enhanced. I did not see how he could have escaped being drunk, too; he had had even more than I, but he did not seem so. His hand under my arm, as we got into a cab to go down to the village to the Vanguard, was light and steady, and his step was still lithe and quick and sure.

"Are you a dancer?" I said to him, getting out in front of the Vanguard, watching him climb out behind me. "You walk like a dancer. You have a dancer's nice, tight little behind. Whoops. You didn't hear that. I don't say things like that."

"I'm a boxer," he grinned. "Welterweight at NYU. Golden Gloves welterweight in the Army, in France."

"Ah, France," I said. "Very popular with architects, France is. Must be something in the wine."

"That's right," he said. "That's where Carl first got Captain Tightass, isn't it? Well, never mind, he couldn't have gotten his fingerprints on all of it. Enough left for us common folk to enjoy."

Soon after we sat down in the smoke-blued dark of the big, subterranean room, and Mulligan swung into his first skittering, dissonant set, I began to black out, and from that point on, remember only chiaroscuric flashes and snatches of sight and sound. I remember standing on my feet clapping and yelling, with everybody else in the room, as the trio, with Mulligan on baritone sax, romped coolly and fluently through his classic "Walking Shoes." I remember a bit later, standing on the sidewalk outside the Vanguard, holding hands with Alan and singing, loudly, "On the Street Where You Live." Even later we were in a car, humming along a dark, deserted, seemingly endless highway, the light from the dashboard radio glowing green and throwing his slightly Oriental face into Mongol relief, and I was quoting Dorothy Parker to him. I have the impression that he quoted a lot of it with me; at any rate, he told me later that I must have parroted, fairly accurately, almost everything she ever wrote.

"I'd like to meet this Cecie of yours, that you keep talking about," he said at the time. "From what you said about her, I fully expect holy miracle rays to shoot out of her ears."

But I did not remember, that night, speaking of Cecie at all. There was a long, dark space in which I remembered nothing more at all, and then a very clear and somehow delicate memory of waking up on an empty beach at dawn, the sand cold under my legs and feet, the sea silver-pink and perfectly flat and still. I lay on my side, curled up fetally on a beach towel, and a man's tweed jacket was spread over me. The first thing I saw was the flat silver sea, and then a flock of small, stilted seabirds skimming the creaming shallows, and then, beside me, Alan Abrams, sitting with his arms around his knees, looking straight out to sea. I heard the soft, sibilant husshhhh of the tiny surf, and the rattle, in it, of shells and pebbles, and the cry of gulls, and far away, on the horizon, the muffled chug of a fishing boat heading out. I heard Alan's soft, even breathing. I felt the wet cool of dawn sea air and tasted salt on my parched lips and felt the pounding in my sinuses that signals, as soon as sensation hits fully, the hammer of hangover. I struggled to sit up, tangled in tweed. I did not know where I was, on what beach. But I never for a moment did not know who Alan was.

He turned to me and smiled. Incredibly, he looked as fresh and clear-eyed as when I had first seen him, the night before.

"But soft, what light from yonder window breaks?" he said. "It is the East, and Juliet is the sun."

"Where are we?" I said. "What time is it?"

"We're on the beach at Sagaponack," he said. "It's five fifty A.M. Before you say another word, let me assure you that the whole thing has been as excruciatingly proper as dancing school. You insisted on coming out to see the sun rise and looking at our site, and you went to sleep the minute we hit the beach, and that's where we've been ever since. Except to cover you with my coat, I have not laid a finger on you. I have, however, had three hours' worth of improper and unclean thoughts, watching you sleep."

"If I don't get a cup of coffee and some aspirin, and go to the bathroom, I'm going to die," I said. "And I think, in a minute, when I remember everything, I'm going to wish I would die. I sang, didn't I?"

"You did," he said. "Well and loudly. Thousands cheered."

"Oh, God," I said.

We found an all-night diner on the Sunrise Highway outside Bridgehampton and I washed my face and scrubbed my teeth and we got paper cups of coffee and carried them in the car back to the beach. I remembered the town from Christmas at the Seaborns', but it had been closed and silent with snow then. Now it was green and fresh and vibrant with full summer, and the flat black and green potato fields and gray barns and small, still ponds and straight little roads that led toward the beach charmed me, reminding me as they did of the country outside Nag's Head. When we came out to Sagaponack and turned onto Potato Road, and I saw the high, ragged, grass-crowned line of the dunes against the pale sky, my heart contracted painfully. So like the Outer Banks, it was, so like....

We parked the car beside the road and walked through the shifting sand and the thickets of sea oats, beach grass, primrose, sea spurge and beach pea to the top of the dune line. I drew in my breath. Below the high dunes beach grass and sea oats ran thick and wild down the steep slopes to the tawny sand, and beyond it the flat beach disappeared into a sheet of vivid pink fire. The sun, at that precise moment, broke over the sea, and set the earth aflame with dawn. I closed my eyes against it, and felt tears start behind the lids. In its wild aloneness and its great and timeless peace, it was Nag's Head all over again. Its beauty pierced me like an arrow.

Beside me, Alan said, "Do you know that poem of Eliot's? 'I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.' Prufrock, I think it is. This reminds me of that."

I turned and looked at him. Who was this man?

"I know it," I said. "I hate it."

We were silent for a bit, sipping our coffee, and then I said, "Why did you bring me out here? Really?"

"Because I wanted to see how you felt about the ocean," he said seriously. "This beach house is very important to me. Any house by the ocean is. I love the sea better than just about anything on earth, and I don't think I could work on a seaside project with someone who didn't."

"And what do you think about me?" I said.

"I think you do, too," he said. "You can't fake much of anything when you first wake up with a hangover. I saw your eyes light up."

We walked down the beach a way, the cool water lapping at our ankles. The sand was like that of the Outer Banks, too; almost too soft to walk in, so that you had to walk at the tide line. He pointed to a tall white silolike shape in the distance.

"Our site is next to that abomination," he said. "Of all the unspoiled coast along here, the Friedmans had to buy right next to the Maginot Line there. Maybe they felt it was appropriate; they fight all the time. He gets mad and flies the private plane home to Sneden's Landing, or she gets mad and calls the pilot to come get her and fly her home. At this rate we'll never get the house done, but at least they're pretty good about letting me do what I want to. They'll probably let you have free rein, too. We ought to break ground this week."