raised, front lowered, and with an expression of ludicrous complacency. “You know what you need? You need a little religion in your life. Why don’t you come to church with me sometime?”
“I’m too tall to get in the door.”
“If only you could see it, my wonderful megachurch. Three thousand terriers, all clapping and howling and standing on their hind legs together—I tell you, it’s a miracle, that’s what it is.” I drum my fingers on the arm of the rocker and wait for his ecstasy to wane. “I’ll pray for you,” he says.
“You do that.”
Across the creek, the Mexicans have added the screech of an electric saw to the symphony of their hammering. One of them is singing, “Yi yi yi yi, in China they eat it with chili”—for my benefit, I am certain. Hector’s ears snap up at the “music,” and he decides to compete with it, also for my benefit. He has a terrible singing voice, all sharps, and loud: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…”
“Do you mind!”
“Oh, so you’re the only one who can sing around here?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
He turns his back on me and kicks sand in my direction.
I confess, there have been times in the past few days when I have thought of not going through with either the lecture or the Da Vinci. So much to risk, so much to lose. Retreating tothe suburbs of thought, I figured, why bother, and began to listen to the blandishments of a coward’s conscience. But this morning my resolve is unbending. Somewhere beneath the noise and the smoke and the blight and the barbaric squalor lies a world worth excavating—a world worth fighting for. One must try, don’t you agree? One must make the effort.
“I just love the Hamptons.” Hector heaves an ingenue’s sigh to ensure I’ll notice. He fears that my plot will jeopardize our ability to keep living out here, and he is right. Now he is beside me on the porch, his muzzle raised toward the sky, his eyes closed in a demiswoon.
“And why is that, Mr. Tail?”
“‘Why is that?’ Only you would ask such a question. The ocean, the beaches, the history, the light! God’s bounty everywhere.”
“And the traffic?”
“That doesn’t bother me.”
“And the fakery? The empty chatter? The gossip? The ostentation? The excess?”
He has mentioned history not because he knows any, ancient or modern, but because he thinks it will appeal to my backward-leaning disposition. It does not. My assessment of people in every century, with the glorious exception of the moderate, modest, enlightened, levelheaded yet courageous eighteenth, is equally unfavorable. All eras, I am certain,have produced the same proportion of goofs, dunces, and malefactors—87 to 91 percent—no matter whether they were adding a fourth floor to their summer palace or a fourth outhouse to their dingy saltbox. Only the Indians, who constituted the Hamptons’ history until the Dutch and English civilized them to death, showed signs of having any sense or wit. In what was clearly a blast of clairvoyance, they named the settlement around Bridgehampton Saggabonac, which means “the place of nut grounds.”
Yet he is right about the beauty of the area. If it were possible to subtract people like the Laphams from the Hamptons, this would be quite a pleasant place. Those ducks, for example, that whet out in arrowhead formations over the Atlantic, and the glib gulls, and the oaten dunes flecked with tufts of sea grass grading into gold, and the ocean herself that gushes in response to approaching rain, and the beach that contorts to the shapes of angels on tombstones, awls, hunchbacks, lovers lying thigh to thigh, and the flotsam from a mackerel schooner that still bears the stench of the catch…
The red sky has paled to a Wedgwood blue, but it is fooling no one. There will be a storm this evening, bet on it. It will be a lollapalooza. We islanders can always tell. We can tell because they said so on morning TV. Between the news bulletins
“I’m too tall to get in the door.”
“If only you could see it, my wonderful megachurch. Three thousand terriers, all clapping and howling and standing on their hind legs together—I tell you, it’s a miracle, that’s what it is.” I drum my fingers on the arm of the rocker and wait for his ecstasy to wane. “I’ll pray for you,” he says.
“You do that.”
Across the creek, the Mexicans have added the screech of an electric saw to the symphony of their hammering. One of them is singing, “Yi yi yi yi, in China they eat it with chili”—for my benefit, I am certain. Hector’s ears snap up at the “music,” and he decides to compete with it, also for my benefit. He has a terrible singing voice, all sharps, and loud: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…”
“Do you mind!”
“Oh, so you’re the only one who can sing around here?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
He turns his back on me and kicks sand in my direction.
I confess, there have been times in the past few days when I have thought of not going through with either the lecture or the Da Vinci. So much to risk, so much to lose. Retreating tothe suburbs of thought, I figured, why bother, and began to listen to the blandishments of a coward’s conscience. But this morning my resolve is unbending. Somewhere beneath the noise and the smoke and the blight and the barbaric squalor lies a world worth excavating—a world worth fighting for. One must try, don’t you agree? One must make the effort.
“I just love the Hamptons.” Hector heaves an ingenue’s sigh to ensure I’ll notice. He fears that my plot will jeopardize our ability to keep living out here, and he is right. Now he is beside me on the porch, his muzzle raised toward the sky, his eyes closed in a demiswoon.
“And why is that, Mr. Tail?”
“‘Why is that?’ Only you would ask such a question. The ocean, the beaches, the history, the light! God’s bounty everywhere.”
“And the traffic?”
“That doesn’t bother me.”
“And the fakery? The empty chatter? The gossip? The ostentation? The excess?”
He has mentioned history not because he knows any, ancient or modern, but because he thinks it will appeal to my backward-leaning disposition. It does not. My assessment of people in every century, with the glorious exception of the moderate, modest, enlightened, levelheaded yet courageous eighteenth, is equally unfavorable. All eras, I am certain,have produced the same proportion of goofs, dunces, and malefactors—87 to 91 percent—no matter whether they were adding a fourth floor to their summer palace or a fourth outhouse to their dingy saltbox. Only the Indians, who constituted the Hamptons’ history until the Dutch and English civilized them to death, showed signs of having any sense or wit. In what was clearly a blast of clairvoyance, they named the settlement around Bridgehampton Saggabonac, which means “the place of nut grounds.”
Yet he is right about the beauty of the area. If it were possible to subtract people like the Laphams from the Hamptons, this would be quite a pleasant place. Those ducks, for example, that whet out in arrowhead formations over the Atlantic, and the glib gulls, and the oaten dunes flecked with tufts of sea grass grading into gold, and the ocean herself that gushes in response to approaching rain, and the beach that contorts to the shapes of angels on tombstones, awls, hunchbacks, lovers lying thigh to thigh, and the flotsam from a mackerel schooner that still bears the stench of the catch…
The red sky has paled to a Wedgwood blue, but it is fooling no one. There will be a storm this evening, bet on it. It will be a lollapalooza. We islanders can always tell. We can tell because they said so on morning TV. Between the news bulletins
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