Lapham Rising: A Novel

One

Bang bang bang bang bang. I start to flip out of bed, forgetting that Hector is beside me. I roll over on top of him. He bites my ear. I attempt to bite his. Another perfect summer day begins in the Hamptons.

Goddammit it, Hector! I slap on a bandage, grab my clothes, and head outside.

Taketh not the Lord’s name in vain, he says, then flattens himself, tail and all, and returns to sleep. Nothing on earth is snootier than a West Highland white terrier, especially a pious one. The Westie in question happens to be a born-again evangelical.

I shamble off my porch toward the beach. Oh, what can that banging be? I do not need to ask as the overtime Mexicans detonate their salsa radios and continue the erection of the House of Lapham across the creek. Outer walls, inner walls, pool-house walls, gazebo walls, atrium, aquarium, arboretum, auditorium walls. Up up up. Bang bang bang. Olé.

And what does Mr. Lapham require today? I call over the water to Dave the contractor and his band of merry noisemakers. When I wish to communicate with them, I employ a cardboard megaphone purchased for that purpose at a junk shop in Eastport. Originally it was used for Harvard crew races in the late 1920s; a white H on a crimson horn. When the men wish to communicate with me, they use a bullhorn. These exchanges constitute most of my social life.

Señor Moment! cries one of the carpenters, always happy to see me for purposes of derision. They call me Señor Moment—senior moment—which I kind of like.

One more floor, Dave says. He shrugs apologetically. I don’t get it either. But that’s what he wants: four floors.

Because no one else has more than three, I suggest.

Dave is too tactful to agree. Sorry for the disruption, Harry. But we’re coming to the end.

You have no idea. That I mutter.

My name is Harry March. I am the last and least of three generations of Marches who have lived year-round on this private and once-tranquil island in once-tranquil Quogue. The first two generations, teachers and doctors, were spared rude awakenings. They reared strong and handsome families in this house, which too was strong and handsome once, as was its current resident. (You’ll have to take my word for that.) Now the old place molts shingles and its shutters tilt into commas and apostrophes. The effort that some people expend to achieve the distressed look in their homes is unnecessary here. Bang bang bang bang bang.

I bet you’ll make a novel out of all this, says Dave. He wants me to start writing again.

"What should I call it, Lapham Rising?"

You can do better than that. He smiles.

Not these days.

It is 5:45 A.M. on my island. If there were justice in the universe at this hour, if there were justice on the East End of Long Island at this hour, I would be alone with the egrets and the cormorants drilling the water in their birdy silence. I would be alone with the tides and the swales of the dunes, also silent, and with the pines speckled by splashes of early sunlight, and with the line traced on the sea by a distant ketch—all silent. I would be alone with the oversexed ducks flying above me in their crazy syntax, and with the streaks of the reluctantly awakening red sky (sailors take warning), silent as well.

But the House of Lapham requires four floors. The House of Lapham requires a movie theater. The House of Lapham requires a state-of-the-art kitchen and a state-of-the-art toilet and a sundeck and a moon deck and a hot tub. Gaah. The House of Lapham requires a master bedroom with a view to die for.

Of course, the view they will die for—Mr. and Mrs. Lapham propped up in their cherrywood sleigh bed, their heads resting against an Alp of fluffed goose-down pillows wrapped in white cases, further supported by yet more pillows encased in white shams, their safely tanned legs stretched out beneath white sheets and a white duvet in their bedroom for the master—is me. Out their Andersen triple-pane picture window they will peer, only to see Harry March on his barren island in his shapeless house, sans air conditioners, sans Belgian tiles, sans everything but life, cracked as it is. The Laphams will die for the view of the one watching them hoping that they will die for the view of the one who likewise has them as a view to die for.

Bang bang bang bang bang. Do not concern yourself. I am not barking yet. Not yet. Hector does the barking around here. Religiously.

Hombres! I cry to the carpenters. Good news! I’ve called the INS. Soon you’ll be able to ditch your girlfriends and go home to your wives and their mothers!

They laugh, as they do every morning. The INS eesn’t up yet, Señor March. They laugh some more. When Latins speak English with that comic lilt, they sound as if they’re making fun of the language. They probably are.

"These early starts weren’t my idea, Dave says. He’s pushing us, and he’s paying for it."

Lapham, I say, my voice as festive as an autopsy.

Lapham, he confirms with a sigh. Ten months is no time at all for a job this big.

Ten months? I spread open my arms in mock wonderment. Has it been only ten months?

Dave’s a good guy. I have known him for some ten years. Local, in his forties; his people once worked as housemaids and chauffeurs for families whose fortunes have long since been dissipated and whose scions, half drunk and half dressed, now shuffle around the Hamptons villages in bedroom slippers, calling to one another in loud, patrician voices absent of gender. When employed, they curate the local whaling museum; the local scrimshaw and plover museum; the paintings of whales, scrimshaw, and plovers in the local art museum; and the museum museum. Their hair is uncut. Their ancestors are recalled only in street names.

Dave, in contrast, has come up in the world, and by his own sweat. Shortish and square, he looks like a substantial piece of rope, the sort of thing mountaineers might use to keep one another alive.

He has his oldest boy, Jack, working on the crew today. Jack flicks me a wave. He is one of the few people around here from whom the mention of a movie made before last week will evoke more than the stare of the dead.

How far away from me are you standing? I ask Dave. It is difficult to determine distance over water.

I don’t know—two hundred feet, maybe two-fifty.

Good.

Why ‘good’?

I pretend not to hear him.

I ought to tell you where we are. Picture Long Island as an overfed alligator in profile, its body extending a hundred miles or so in the waters off New York City, east by northeast. The gator’s jaws are open, its maw forming Peconic Bay. The waters of Long Island Sound burble above the creature’s snout, between it and the Connecticut shoreline. Along the lower jaw are arranged, in an uneven line running from west to east to its farthest reach, Westhampton, my own little Quogue, Southampton, Water Mill, Bridgehampton, East Hampton, Amagansett, Montauk, and all the other towns, villages, and hamlets collectively known as the Hamptons. To the south of them, below the alligator’s lower jaw, is the Atlantic; to the south of that, Brazil.

My island, called Noman, sits in a creek that runs between two mainlands. It is a sandbar, really, with yellow bushes, stunted trees, my humble home and hearth, and a choppy, sallow lawn (a product of the driest summer in memory) leading down to a narrow pebble beach furnished with a chaise, a forest-green Adirondack chair that is slowly but definitely ruining my back, and not much of a dock.

The dock is L-shaped; from my vantage point ashore it forms an upside-down L that juts straight out into the water twenty-five feet or so, then veers to the left another fifteen feet, parallel to the beach, to complete the letter.

Noman itself is shaped like Tennessee, though it is considerably smaller. One could clearly see the outlines of Tennessee if one were to hover over the island in a helicopter or in one of those British Harrier fighter jets that take off vertically. I myself have not done so.

I named my island Noman so that when anyone asks where I live I shall tell them, and they shall say, Where is that? and I shall answer, Noman is an island. To date—and it has been years—no one has asked.

On the mainland to my west is a nature preserve, an open zoo for leopard frogs, box turtles, and blue-spotted salamanders, which, because it is quiet, lovely, harmless, and there, will not be preserved much longer. That is the way in these parts. Last month, the local college was razed to make room for the construction of eighty-eight six-million-dollar homes, a development to be called Higher Education Acres. On the mainland to the east of me lies Lapham’s shore, fronting what were green, moist flatlands until a couple of years ago, when the developers arrived and drooled. In the present context, my house faces the wrong side of the creek, meaning that my days, once spent in earnest if fruitless meditation, are now usurped by the delirious sounds of real estate.

What is that thing? Dave shouts to me over his bullhorn.

I drag the Da Vinci’s pinion wheels from the end of the dock nearer the house, where the parts were dumped, to the far end, where the L angles left. Across the creek, Dave watches me warily. I shove the wheels under the black tarp that mostly conceals the rest of the stash. The tarp gives the Da Vinci the appearance of a large dormant animal with protruding humps and points, its head facing the construction site. The aft and forward crosspiece are sticking out like bandy legs.

"What is that thing?"

Nothing, I tell him. Just some driftwood. I’m thinking of building a picnic table.

For all your formal dinner parties?

Or an all-weather tennis court, or a most-weather patio, I go on. Or I may stand the beams on end and call it Woodhenge.

After speaking with me for a short while, most people stop asking questions.

On the opposite shore, the Laphams’ thirty-six-thousand-square-foot castle rises on eight acres like a mutant flamingo alongside fortifications belonging to other royal pretenders just like them. The Klimers, the Courters, the McWalmarts, the Hooligans, the Caesars, the Wontons, the Rapynes, the Bolognas, and the Bonanzas—ah, the Bonanzas. I have never laid eyes on any of them, including Lapham. But he consumes my special attention because his house is the biggest and gives off the most bang for the buck, and also because his family creeps back into the gothic caves of American history. Third mates on clipper ships, assistants to slave auctioneers, pale and lascivious clergymen, disbarred magistrates, corrupt patroons, embezzler quartermasters, informers for Andrew Carnegie—a genealogy of disappointed ambition. They made money nonetheless. (In 1878, Moses Lapham of Cincinnati, in a failed effort to fashion a tooth-yanking device, inadvertently invented the asparagus tongs, which soon gave rise to escargot tongs, the grape scissors, the lobster cracker, and other instruments associated with dining and grasping.) The family continued to reproduce like inbred collies until their heads became so pointed there was no room for brains, and yet fortunately, no need.

Today, the latest of the breed, still quite wealthy thanks to untouchable trusts and the irrational though lucky investments of his forebears, is not gainfully employed. Lapham’s occupation is a Web site he created, on which he offers America his opinions both on current events and on life in general, called Lapham’s Aphms. He either seems to have misunderstood or misspelled aphorisms. The English language, though his own, presents him with challenges. Yet he shows great self-confidence. One of Lapham’s aphms is: He who does not promote himself will never be promoted. He is currently said to be at work on a memoir titled Lapham Is Here. As if that were in question.

Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys, / The dangers gather as the treasures rise: Dr. Johnson wrote that, and Dr. Johnson was always right.

Señor March!

What is it, José? The day they began work over there, I called out José, figuring that at least one of them had to claim the name. José looks like a young Ricardo Montalban, debonair even in overalls three sizes too big. Today he and I are chummy, a model of exuberant and mutually baffled Anglo-Latino relations.

What happened to your ear? he asks me. The gauze pad I hurriedly taped to it after Hector’s morning greeting makes it appear that I have a brand-new tennis ball wedged into the side of my head.

It fell off from your hammering.

Forgeeve us, señor. When we finish with Mr. Lapham, we will come over and build a house for you.

I already have a house, I tell him stupidly.

Oh, he says with a laugh, staring straight at it. We couldn’t tell.

In short, the situation in which I find myself—as you may have detected—is not yet perfect, a bit up for grabs.

My ear hurts. And my back hurts. And no one plays Blossom Dearie anymore. And no one remembers Junior Gilliam anymore. And I haven’t written a word in eight years, much less eight words in one year, yet I watch Murder She Wrote four times a day when I’m not otherwise occupied, as I currently am. And my wife couldn’t take me anymore and now lives in Beverly Hills with an event planner named Joel. I have memorialized our many happy years together with a life-size stone statue of her seated at the kitchen table reading the New York Times and yet, because she is a statue, never telling me to wait till I hear this, or predicting that I won’t believe that. (The statue was commissioned from a sculptor in New Hampshire, a Hungarian dwarf with massive hands and a hair-trigger temper. I liked him at once.) And my children, who amazingly enough still love me, had the horse sense to grow into adults and move elsewhere. And I look like hell in my ten-year-old rat-gray shorts and my navy-blue polo shirt with the hole the size of a half-dollar where I cut out the polo player and my Tevas with the tired Velcro. And the Da Vinci awaits completion by nightfall. I have a lecture to finish by nightfall as well. And the Mexicans have just turned up the volume on She Bangs.

But at least I have Lapham, my neighbor Lapham, conspicuously consuming my creek, my birds, my salt marshes, my island, my country, my life. Up, up, and up he rises. And I again am reminded, as if I needed reminding, that I do not fit in the world. Good thing I do not live on it.

Two

Nice ear," says Hector. It is 8:23, and he has deigned to uncurl and emerge from the house onto the porch, where I am at work. I creak in my wicker rocker, which sheds flakes with each creak, and take notes on a legal pad, raising it to block his view of my face. I try to ignore him. He doesn’t care.

Why don’t you go and talk to God? I ask him, without looking up or down. He entered the world a Scottish Presbyterian, as I assume all Westies do. But then he found a more personal God in what I have come to think