We walked on in silence, comfortably, companionably. I thought only once of Paul and Ginger, waking up in a tumbled white bed that faced that other beach, on this same sea, and shoved it far down inside me. As well to begin now to bury them.

"Want to buy me some breakfast?" I said.

"In a minute. I want to show you something first," he said.

Down the beach the shoreline curved back into a small bay, and as we reached the curve and came around it, I saw that the tallest dunes of all crowned the beach here, soaring to a height that dwarfed the others around them. Sea oats waved gently against the deepening blue of the morning sky to the east, and behind them a thicket of wax myrtle, bayberry, yaupon, cottonbush, catbrier and beach plum stood dense and green and untouched. It was a beautiful spot, wild and secret and somehow entirely magical. White lines of surf crisscrossed diagonally in the little bay; apparently the tides here were unwilling captives, fighting the enclosure. I thought that in high winds the entire ocean would funnel into this little half-moon, white and furious and glorious.

"How perfectly beautiful," I said. "How...enchanted."

"It's mine," he said, smiling. "I saw it this spring when I first came out to look at the Friedman site, and I mortgaged my soul and bought it the same week. I have two acres. I'm going to put a house here, right along the dune line, with a studio wing that crowns that tallest dune and looks straight out to Madagascar. It will take me about a million years, but I'm going to do it. It's already designed."

I turned away abruptly, and started back down the beach. Water flew under my feet. My heart was triphammering. Whoever or whatever this man was, I wanted no more of this uncanny duplication. Paul Sibley redux would have no place in my life. I would go to Carl Seaborn; I would ask off the project...

He caught up with me and turned me around.

"What's the matter?" he said. "What is it?"

"Paul Sibley wanted the same thing," I said tightly. "You know, Captain Tightass. He's building it now, in fact, on the dunes at Nag's Head. Those interiors Mr. Seaborn told you about, that I did...they were for that house. You knew that, didn't you? Didn't you know that?"

He stared at me, shaking his head silently, no, no, and then he began to laugh.

"Oh, Christ," he said. "Why is it us Jews always get there one step behind the goddamned Golden Goyim?"

I stood still in the climbing sun for a long moment, and then I began to laugh, too. I laughed until I could not stand any longer; I laughed until my sides hurt and I clutched them and sank down onto the sand.

"He ain't your typical Golden Goy," I choked. "He's half Seminole Indian!"

Alan Abrams gave a great hoot of joyous laughter and sank down on the sand beside me, and we laughed and laughed in the new morning, until we were finally able to climb to our feet and make our way back across the dunes to the car. When we rolled out of Bridgehampton toward Manhattan, we were still laughing.

"Okay, Kate Lee," he said, when he let me out at my building. "It's time to go to work."

Chapter Ten.

IT is how my life came back to me that summer, work and laughter. From the first day the Friedman house went so well that I forgot any qualms I had had about being at McKim on sufferance. Ideas and intuitions, colors and textures and details and solutions came bubbling up as they were needed, so effortlessly that I began to get superstitious about it.

"It can't possibly be this good always," I said over and over to Alan as we worked. We worked side by side in his office; he had asked that my board be moved there for the duration of the beach house project, and Carl Seaborn had agreed.

"You're right. It almost never is," he said. "This project makes me nervous, it's going so well. The Friedmans haven't even had a fight since we broke ground. You and I haven't had a fight. Well, not a major one. Carl hasn't yelled. We haven't had a rain delay. The subs are actually fully developed life forms. Let's don't even talk about how well it's going until it's over."

And so we didn't. And the beach house on the dunes at Sagaponack continued to grow under his hands and mine, and I don't think I will ever love another design project as much as that, my first.

I can see now that much of the joy and success of the Friedman house came from the nature of Alan's talent, and how he felt about it. He was enormously talented, perhaps not so much as Paul Sibley, and in a very different way, but greatly gifted, anyhow. It was not a dark, consuming, flaming thing, like Paul's; Alan was always more of the earth than the air. He was easy, methodical, patient, often even plodding in his attention to detail...but he lived his projects in a kind of sunlight of pure delight. Sometimes, when something he had done pleased him, he would whoop his pleasure and glee, and people would come running out of surrounding offices to see what he had done. Alan's designs were a kind of communal thing; like the man himself, they enfolded you, wrapped you in safety and warmth, connected you unalterably to the earth. To live in a house of Alan Abrams's would be to feel always the pulse of the earth and the breath of the sea and the cool shelter of the sky, to rest like a ship on the currents of the very air around you. To live in one of Paul's would be to live with a laboring heart and shuddering breath; to live outside one's very skin, stretched to the outer edge of being. You could not rest in a Sibley house; but you could always rest in one of Alan's, and with Alan himself. It was just where I should have been that summer.

We worked from early morning often until late at night. We talked, argued, fought, laughed, yelled, laughed some more. We ate lunch at our desks or at the coffee shop around the corner, and we spent at least one or two days each week at the site, sweating and peeling with sunburn, hair wet beneath our hard hats, driving the crew nearly mad and driving the Friedmans, whose habit it had been to hang around the construction and second-guess the crew, back to Manhattan for the duration. Alan accomplished this by simply telling them one day in July that if they didn't lay off he would see to it their house never saw the pages of Architectural Digest. The Friedmans flew home in their little airplane from McArthur Field that very afternoon, together for once. I upbraided him for it.

"That's blackmail," I said. "How can you possibly affect what goes into the Digest one way or another? You're not much more senior than I am."

"It's already in, if we can get it done by December," he said. "Carl told me last week. Most of his houses are. The Friedmans know that. It's one reason they came to us. We're probably saving their marriage."

As the house grew, we began to forget which of us had done what to it; it was simply, to us and to the firm, Kate and Alan's house. Carl held us up in a design meeting once as a perfect example of the cooperation between architect and interior designer. We took a great deal of teasing after that, but it was true, and the firm began to pair us on other projects. If I had made the choice myself, I could not have picked a swifter, higher-arcing star than Alan Abrams to whom to hitch my wagon.

I suppose it was inevitable that we would carry the relationship over into the other parts of our lives. I for one had few other parts, and so I was perfectly content to let his presence shape all of life for me. It never occurred to me that he had a life independent of me that summer. He must have; he had family I did not know, and friends, but he seemed to have put them on hold. For those months, that season, we might have been Siamese twins. With the emphasis on twins. Never once in all that time did Alan do more than take my hand, and casually at that. Never once did I do more than throw my arms around him in a transport of discovery and delight.

For that was the summer that he truly gave me New York. That was the summer that I really did, with him, all the things I had been saving to do with Paul. Because I was coming out of pain and all things seem new then, and because Alan's presence beside me gave everything we did the patina of laughter as well as the rich warmth of safety and surety, New York bloomed for me that summer as it never will again. Sometime during those months I put away, in my heart, everything to do with the treacherous South and all I knew of its softmouthed, dreaming, murderous men. I knew that I would not go home again, and I did not. Not until many, many years later.

I can scarcely remember what we actually did: I remember a blur of work and music and food and drink and endless walking, and late nights in odd, smoky places, or exotic-smelling bright ones. We ended up in these spots, usually, to eat and drink coffee and listen to music; after that first night we drank very little. We did not need to.

He showed me all the things he said I needed to see...the Statue of Liberty, the top of the Empire State Building, the Public Library, Carnegie Hall, Central Park, the Zoo, the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn, the Aquarium, the Metropolitan and the Modern and the astounding new Guggenheim; we saw plays and art movies and exhibits and circuses and once or twice the Yankees, at Yankee Stadium up in the Bronx. Alan was an avid sports fan. He took me to boxing matches at the Garden, and the races at Belmont, and to tennis matches at Forest Hills, and once, when we were out at Bridgehampton, we rented a Flying Dutchman and went sailing. He was good, quick, and deft.

"Where did you learn to sail? Not NYU," I said, when we came in at sunset that day.

"No. In France, actually," he said. "Where did you? You're not bad yourself."

"On Cape Cod," I said. "And I've hated it since the first day I set foot in a Beetle Cat."

He laughed. "Me, too. Makes me sick and upsets my precious equilibrium for days. I only brought you because you look like you ought to sail, like Grace Kelly in that movie. You know, where she sings."

"Well, then, let's don't do it again," I said gratefully. "Life's too short."

And we didn't. There was enough of New York to fill many more summers than that one. We went up to the Cloisters and spent an entire Sunday; my passion for medieval herb gardens was born that day. We spent many weekend afternoons at the Museum of Natural History, and at the Metropolitan. We saw Shakespeare in the Park, and heard the symphony there; we prowled through Chinatown and hit every ethnic street festival we could find; we ate at least one meal from every cuisine the city offered, or tried to. In all that time, in all those places we went, at all those hours, among all those peoples, I never remember being afraid. New York was a different city then. And I was with Alan.

He undertook to teach me to cook that summer. He had a small apartment in a stained brownstone on East 18th Street, near Gramercy Park, and we produced, from its scurrilous little kitchenette, a succession of sloppy, highly seasoned, wonderful suppers in the late evenings after we'd finished at our boards. Alan's cooking was, like his apartment, the antithesis of Paul's; profound disorder prevailed, and nothing cost much. But both had the complex, slapdash charm of the man himself. Books tumbled and sprawled everywhere, like the bright pushcart vegetables he brought home, and photographs and posters of designs he particularly admired lined the walls and lay scattered on tables and the floor. There was little glass and steel and concrete; Alan loved wood and stone, and the evidence of that love was everywhere. In the center of the living room, on an improvised stand, stood a scale model of the Friedman house. There was little room for anything else. We ate sitting on cushions on the floor; the sofa was given over to teetering piles of drawings and blueprints.

"Where do you sleep?" I said.

"Under there." He gestured at the piled sofa. I giggled.

"Well, I guess there's no doubt you're celibate," I said. "There's not an inch to ravish a maiden in in here."

"It's hard, but not impossible," he said. "There's always standing up in the shower, or then there's..."

"Okay, okay," I said hastily. For some reason I was blushing fiercely. I thought of that small, beautiful body, glistening with water, entwined with a woman's in the fragrant steam...

"What are we making tonight?" I said.

"Sauerbraten, with gingersnaps," he said.

"Why don't you eat at home more often?" I asked curiously. Alan's father had a kosher delicatessen with his uncle on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, and his mother cooked for it often. She was, he said, a truly wonderful cook.

"Are you kidding? I'd weigh five hundred pounds. My mother force-feeds you her chopped liver like you would a Strassburg goose. Grabs you by the neck and rams it right down you. And then she's usually got Daddy and Uncle Daniel and Aunt Rose and my older brother Eli, the good one, old Eli the rabbi in Astoria, you know..."

"Alan, do you not get on with your family too well?" I asked. "You haven't been home more than twice this summer that I know of. Is it me? Do they dislike it that you're working so closely with a...a goy?"

"They're not crazy about it, but it isn't that," he said slowly. "It's that they can be so censorious of someone that they haven't even met. It's that whole Jewish thing, that dark old weight of it...all the thou-shalt-nots, and the taboos, and the refusal to let any new light in at all...the old ways, always the old ways..."

"Doesn't any of that matter to you?"

"I'm not sure about that yet, Kate," he said soberly. "The religious part of it doesn't, much. Maybe it will later. I have this funny feeling that the other part...the cultural, the heritage thing...will come to mean a lot to me. But it's going to have to come in my own time, and fit into my life. You know, there's room in a good life for chopped liver and gray shingle architecture, too. And for loyalty to a family that might include an outsider, children with blue eyes and names like Sally and Michael, a wife with blonde hair and a nose like a Gainsborough painting. There's just too much world to be satisfied with a tiny snip of it."

"I'd hate to think I'm causing any kind of wedge between you and your family," I said.

"Nah," he said. "The wedge got driven in by my first blonde shiksa, when I was about seventeen. The rest is just a matter of degree."

"Well," I said, somehow stung. "Just so it's not me."

"No," he said. "Mostly it's me."

I did not meet any of his friends per se that summer, but I met several people who, one way or another, had ties to Alan Abrams. I met the old man next door, who came at night to get the plate of supper Alan cooked for him when he was at home. The old man was very shy, and did not speak to me; he took his plate and nodded his thanks and scuttled out. When we left the apartment to go back to mine, the clean plate would be set neatly at Alan's door, with a paper napkin over it, and a peppermint on the napkin.

"His daughter is supposed to bring his meals, but she doesn't do his supper," Alan said briefly. "I found him going through the garbage cans once. What's one plate of sauerbraten, when I've made a whole batch?"

I met the black mailman who came by one evening full of smiles, with a sealed envelope and a photograph of a skinny, beaming young black man in satin trunks, posing with gloved fists upraised.

"I helped his boy get a Golden Gloves scholarship to NYU," Alan said. "Which didn't take a whole lot of doing, since the kid is the best natural boxer I ever saw. And I lent him a little to get him started. He's paying me back on time."

I met the rheumy-eyed, half-crazed old woman from upstairs who brought her sad, malodorous old poodle, who looked amazingly like her mistress, down to Alan's apartment to be walked on weekends, and once to be kept for a week while the old woman visited her house-proud daughter on Long Island.

"Won't let me bring Suzette," the woman whined to me, trailing Marlboro ashes down the front of her negligee and onto Alan's floor. "Says she smells up the place. I tell her Suzette smells as good as her house does, all that fish she cooks, but she still won't have her. But this angel boy, this sweetie pie, he takes good care of my precious. Precious loves him, don't you, Precious?"

Precious sighed and lay down in the corner beside the sofa to wait for her dinner. When the old woman had gone, Alan opened a can of roast beef and she bolted it down so quickly that her scrofulous stomach bulged. She was instantly and deeply asleep. A profound and pervasive odor emanated from her corner.

"Now she'll fart for seven days, on top of everything else," Alan sighed. "But I don't think she gets a square meal until she comes to me. When I walk her on weekends we go by the White Castle and both have burgers."

"You're a terrible softy," I said fondly. "You let people impose on you awfully."

"Nah," he said. "I like this old bitch. The furry one, that is. And she likes me. You should see her when I come in after a day at the office. You'd think I'd been gone for a month. 'Oh, God, you came back, you came back, oh God, I'm the happiest dog in the borough. Oh, God, let me fart for you!' "

I collapsed into laughter. He was essence of dog; he was the best dog I ever saw. His gift for mimicry was fey and dead on the money. The old dog thumped her tail in her sleep.

"I know just how she feels," I said, still laughing. "Safe as a baby, cherished as a lover. You have a wonderful gift for nurturing, Alan Abrams. You take great care of me. How can I show my appreciation?"

"I don't know," he said, looking at me with his bright eyes. "Fart for me, maybe?"

"Hug you," I said, and I did, a hard, long hug. He patted me on the back and pulled gently away.

"Why won't you kiss me?" I teased. Or was I teasing?

"You're not kosher."

"That's not it. Either I'm just not sexy or you're not interested in women."

I did not know why I could not leave it alone.

Alan looked at me for a time, and then he grinned widely. He reached over and picked up my hand and put it on the crotch of his blue jeans. A hard mound strained at the fabric. I jerked my hand away as if it had been bitten. Heat flooded my face and neck.

"Does that feel disinterested?" he said.

Things changed for me after that. We still did the things we had done together: worked, cooked, prowled the city, listened to music, ate, drank, laughed, talked. But I did them, then, with the thought of that warm hardness never far under the light-dappled surface between us. I do not know how he felt. He did not touch me again.

I had told Alan early on about my life in Kenmore, and my mother and father, and about Cecie and Fig and Ginger and Paul. After I did, perhaps sensing that I was done with that part of my life, he never alluded to it. As for me, I cut my ties with care and finality. I canceled the subscription to the Randolph monthly alumni newspaper that came automatically with my diploma. I threw away the appeals for money that came from the development office, and, unopened, the three or four notes from Ginger that came from Nag's Head. When a Tri Omega passing through found my number in the directory and phoned me, I put her off and had my number unlisted. I canceled my subscription to the Tri Omega Alumni magazine. I did not read out-of-town newspapers; indeed, all that long summer, I read few newspapers at all. When my mother phoned in late August and said that she was marrying the deacon in a little ceremony in the Baptist church and would like me to come home for it, I said that I would provided I could bring a friend. My mother said, "Is it that Indian?"

"No," I said. "It's a Jew named Abrams."

"You're obviously doing this just to spite me," my mother said coldly.

"Impossible as it may seem, I never even thought of you," I said, and hung up. I did not go to her wedding; I sent flowers. I knew that I would not go home again to Kenmore, Alabama.

In November, Architectural Digest ran a spread of Paul Sibley's studio addition to the house in Nag's Head. Color photos showed it soaring out heartbreakingly over those old dunes, with the blue sea beyond it, and one of them showed Paul inside it, bending over a drawing, with Ginger, in skirt and sweater and pumps, admiring it from the other side of the board. A fire roared in a great gray stone fireplace, and furniture the colors of the sea and sky and ocean storms sat about in the soaring whiteness. I knew that furniture as well as I did the people in the photograph. I looked up at Alan, who had brought the magazine to show me. We were in his office. Outside, in the twilight, the first snow of the season was falling silently onto Third Avenue.

"Uh huh," he said, smiling grimly. "I noticed. You even got a byline."

I looked closely; in tiny type, at the bottom of the page, a line read, Interiors by K. S. Lee.

"That son of a bitch," I whispered, tears of fury starting in my eyes. "He took my interiors and built them for her."

"I rather think he built them for himself," Alan said mildly. "He'd never have gotten ones as good anywhere else. It's a perfect room, Kate. It doesn't matter who lives in it. Enjoy the byline and forget it. You'll do better ones for a place of your own, some day."

And to my great surprise, I could and did forget it. Both the photographs of the studio exterior and the one of him with Ginger in the room that was to have been ours. Or at least, I almost forgot. Perhaps they haunted me a bit in those soft, new winter days, but distantly. Like very old ghosts.

Just before Christmas the Friedman house was finished, and the Friedmans gave a little champagne party for the firm and a few friends in it. Outside snow blew like white fog around the dunes, and the surf roared on the beach below, but inside firelight and tree light and candlelight and the clear, vibrant, medieval jewel tones I had chosen lit the big, carved room to radiance. It was a lovely party, with a lot of laughter and music and toasts, and even more champagne. The Friedmans were having one of their good nights, and Architectural Digest had indeed been out to photograph just days before, and already four requests had come in from acquaintances and passersby who had seen the house from the beach or from Potato Road, inquiring as to whether the team who had done it was available for consultation.

In the white and gray and sea-green living room, Carl Seaborn raised a champagne glass to Alan and me. We stood in front of the fire simply looking around at the beautiful room we had created, grinning like, as Ginger used to say, 'possums in the middle of a cow plop. We had both had quite a lot of champagne; I could feel it burning in my cheeks, like flags. Alan's eyes were as bright with it as a squirrel's.

"To the very formidable young team of Abrams and Lee," Carl said, "who give new meaning to the old expression, 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.' Long may you be on our team. Long may you be a team, as far as that goes."

Everybody clapped and shouted, and Alan reached over and kissed me. It was not a friendly kiss, or a brotherly one. I was so surprised that I simply stared at him.

"We will be a team as long as Kate will let us," he said. "Like maybe, as long as we both shall live. How about it, Kate Stuart Lee?"

"I'd love to," I said.

When Stephen died, someone gave me a copy of Juliana of Norwich's Book of Hours, intending, no doubt, that I should find comfort in the words of that terrible old abbess. It was a long time before I could read that or anything, but when I did, I opened it to the passage that goes, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all shall be exceedingly well." I threw the book into the fireplace in a cold, trembling rage, and was about to set fire to it when Alan rescued it and read the passage. He cried then, terrible, tearing sobs that went on and on and on, rising sometimes into a kind of wail I had never heard before. It frightened me badly; I had cried, torrents, rivers, seas of hopeless, anguished tears. But he had not, until then.

We talked about it later, after the awful crying had stopped, and he was calm again, limp and somehow clean and light.

"I hated her for saying that," I said, by way of explaining why I had attempted to burn the book. " 'All shall be exceedingly well.' It's horrible. Nothing shall be well. It's the worst thing that ever happened. How can anything be well again?"

"It's not the worst thing that ever happened, Katie," he said. "It's just the worst thing that ever happened to you. To us. And now, nothing this bad can ever happen to us again. I think that's what she meant. She wasn't stupid; she lived a godawful life. And my dear love, for a very long time all was most exceedingly well with us. And may be again, who knows?"

I was angry with him for days. I did not want optimism. It was a long time before I saw that it was not that; it was the only way Alan could stay alive in those unspeakable days. But from the moment he spoke the words, I knew in my savage heart that he had been right when he said that indeed, for us, all had been, until then, exceedingly well.