'I have the paperwork from Village Hall. We need plans drawn up, and we'll have to get you-know-who to sign off on it.'
'Damn it.'
'No big deal, John. Just send it to him with a note of explanation.' It's hard to argue with a woman to whom you want to make love, but I was going to give it my best shot. 'Can't you find another place for the stable?' 'No.'
'All right.' The idea of asking Frank Bellarosa for a favour didn't appeal to me in the least, especially after I had just told him to take his business elsewhere. I said, 'Well, it's your property and your stable. I'll get the paperwork done, but you take care of you-know-who.' 'Thank you.' She put her arm around me. 'Are we friends?'
'Yes.' But I hate your stupid horses.
'John, you look so good when you're naked. Now that the weather is warm, can I paint you outdoors in the nude?'
'No.' Susan has four main passions in life: horses, landscape painting, gazebos, and sometimes me. You know about the horses and about me. The Gazebo Society is a group of women who are dedicated to the preservation of the Gold Coast's gazebos. Why gazebos? you ask. I don't know. But in the spring, summer, and fall, they have these elaborate picnic lunches in various gazebos, and they all dress in Victorian or Edwardian clothes, complete with parasols. Susan is not a joiner, and I can't fathom why she hangs around with these ditsy people, but the sceptic in me says the whole thing is a front for something. Maybe they tell dirty jokes, or exchange hot gossip, or aid and abet marital infidelities. But maybe they just have lunch. Beats me.
As for the landscape painting, this is for real. Susan has gained some local notoriety for her oils. Her main subject is Gold Coast ruins, in the style of the Renaissance artists who painted the classical Roman ruins, with the fluted columns entangled with vines, and the fallen arches, and broken walls overgrown with plant life: the theme being, I suppose, nature reclaiming man's greatest architectural achievements of a vanished Golden Age. Her most famous painting is of her horse, stupid Zanzibar, who if nothing else is a magnificent-looking animal. In the painting, Zanzibar is standing in the moonlight of the crumbling glass palm court of Laurelton Hall, the former Louis C. Tiffany mansion. Susan wants to do a painting of me, in the same setting, standing naked in the moonlight. But though Susan is my wife, I'm a little shy about standing around naked in front of her. Also, I have the bizarre thought that I will come out looking like a centaur.
Anyway, Susan's clients are mostly local nouveaux riches who live in those tract mansions that cover the old estate grounds. These clients buy everything that Susan can paint and pay three to five thousand dollars a canvas. Susan does two or three landscapes a year and supports her two horses with the money. Personally, I think she could do another two or three and buy me a new Bronco.
'Why won't you pose in the nude for me?'
'What are you going to do with the picture?'
'Hang it over the fireplace. I'll give you another three inches and we'll have a cocktail party, and you'll be surrounded by admiring women.' She laughed. 'Get hold of yourself.' I headed in the direction of Hempstead Bay, where there are a few secluded beaches, on most of which I've had at least one sexual experience. There's something about the salt air that gets me cranked up. I thought about Susan's paintings of the old estates and wondered why she chose to record and preserve this crumbling world in oil, and how she makes it look so alluring on canvas. It struck me that a painting of an intact mansion would be dull and ordinary, but there was an awful beauty to these fallen palaces. On the lands of these estates one can still see marble fountains, statuary, imitation Roman ruins such as Alhambra's, a classical love temple such as we have at Stanhope, gazebos, children's fantasy playhouses such as Susan's, teahouses, miles of greenhouses, pool pavilions, water towers built to look like watchtowers, and balustraded terraces overlooking land and sea. All of those lonely structures lend a whimsical air to the landscape, and it seems as if someone had built and abandoned a storyland theme park many years ago. Susan's paintings make me see these familiar ruins in a different way, which, I suppose, is the mark of a good artist. I asked her, 'Have you ever painted a man in the nude?'
'I'm not telling.'
I noticed the gates to the old Foxland estate ahead, now part of the New York Technical University. A number of these larger estates have become schools, conference centres, and rest homes. A few intact estates are owned by the county, as Lester and I discussed, and some of these have been restored for visitors, instant museums of a period in American history not quite dead yet. Among the most enduring and useful structures of this Golden Age are the gatehouses and the staff cottages for gardeners, chauffeurs, and other servants who did not traditionally live in the great house. These quaint quarters are now occupied by former servants whose masters were good enough to deed them away or give them rent free – as in the case of the Allards – as a reward for past service, or occupied by people who have bought or rented them. They are quite desirable as homes or artist studios, and a stone gatehouse such as Stanhope's can sell for several hundred thousand dollars. If the Allards ever move on to their final, final reward, William Stanhope will sell the gatehouse. An estate's guesthouse is an even more desirable home for a modern upper-middle-class family – perhaps because there are no working-class associations. It is in Stanhope's guesthouse, of course where Susan and I live, which might be appropriate for me, but is a long step down for her. As we came to another new subdivision, Susan said, 'Sometimes I can't remember the names of the old estates or their locations or what they were called, unless the builder uses the same name for his development.' She nodded toward the new homes going up in an open horse meadow surrounded by wrought-iron fencing. 'What was that place called?' she asked.
'That was part of the hedges, but I can't remember the last owner's name.'
'Neither can I,' she said. 'Is the house still there?'
'I think it was torn down. It was behind those blue spruces.' 'That's right,' Susan agreed. 'It was an English manor house. The Conroys owned it. I went to school with their son, Philip. He was cute.' 'I think I remember him. Sort of a twit with terminal acne.'
Susan punched my arm.'You're the twit.'
'I have clear skin.' We headed due west now, and as the last rays of the sun came through the windshield, I put the visor down. Sometimes these rides are pleasant, sometimes they aren't. I asked, 'Have you thought about moving?' 'No.'
'Susan… I give this place another ten years and you won't recognize it. The Americans are coming. Do you understand what I mean?' 'No.'
'The hamburger chains, shopping malls, twenty-four-hour convenience stores, pizza parlours – they're here already. There will come a day when there won't be a secluded beach left for us to make love on. Wouldn't you rather remember everything as it was?'
She didn't reply and I knew it was no use trying to introduce reality into her world.
In some ways, this place reminds me of the post-Civil War South, except that the decline of the Gold Coast is not the result of military operations, but of a single economic catastrophe followed by a more subtle class war. And whereas the ruined plantations of the old South were spread over a dozen states, the ruins of this fabled world are contained within an area of about ninety square miles, comprising about a third of the total area of this county. Most of this surburban county's massive population of a million and a half people are contained in the southern two-thirds, and very close by are New York's teeming eight million. These facts -the numbers, the history, the present realities of population, taxes, and land development – colour our world and explain, I hope, our collective psyches and our obsession with wanting to freeze a moment in time, any moment in time except tomorrow. I glanced again at Susan, who had her eyes closed now. Her head was still tilted back, and those magnificent pouty lips seemed to be kissing the sky. I was about to reach out and touch her when she seemed to sense my look or perhaps my thoughts, and she laid her hand on my thigh. She said, 'I love you.' 'And I love you.'
Susan caressed my thigh, and I shifted in my seat. I said, 'I don't think I can make it to the beach.'
'To the beach, my man.'
'Yes, madame.'
The sun had set now, and here and there I could make out the lights of a big house through the newly budded trees. I got my bearings and headed north through the village of Sea Cliff, then west to Garvie's Point, the former estate of Thomas Garvie, and the site of an old Indian camping ground, now returned again to nature as a wildlife preserve and an Indian museum, which was sort of ironic, I guess.
