After You've Gone (23 page)

“How'd you sleep?” Ralph asked her.

“Pretty well, considering the trip, time zones and everything. I did wake up for a while, but then I must have gone back to sleep.”

“I must say, you did really well on the flight.”

On the first trips, Susan had been an extremely frightened flier, white-knuckled, convinced that any turbulence meant crashing, death. She had been so uncomfortable flying that prior to this trip, which she had wanted to be successful, she took a small seminar for scared fliers. A modest group who met intensively, five nights a week for two weeks, and who were asked by their leader, a mousy-looking but very assured young man, to visualize and then describe the worst of their fears. Susan hated every moment of those sessions; she regarded both the leader and the other students (mostly salesmen, forced to travel) with distaste. It was rather like flying itself, she observed: too much time spent too closely among people whom you did not choose.

However, on this trip, once she and Ralph were on the plane in Los Angeles, strapped in and ready, Susan recognized that she was indeed much better. Not feeling her customary panic.

And she noticed (she thought) a certain disappointment on
Ralph's part. He kept on looking at her in an inquiring, ostensibly sympathetic way;
was
she all right, during the rough moments of ascension through thick dark covering clouds? She was, she smiled to reassure him, but found on his face an expression that was ambiguous.

Congratulating her bravery, though, Ralph at least sounded sincere—and perhaps everything, or at least most things, would work out well on this trip?

Later, Susan was to remember Milan less as the scene of her overwhelming, wild attack of panic (fortunately she thought very rarely of that seizure) than as the place where all the shoes were: thousands, millions of shoes, in every shopwindow. And not just ordinary shoes, but rather very, very high-style shoes: that year high thin heels and pointy toes, in a gaudy spectrum of exotic colors—jungle greens, plumage scarlets, and wild bright pinks. In silks and suèdes and every type of scaly skins. Entirely impractical shoes.

“What on earth do they do with all those shoes next year? They can't possibly sell them all.” This from Susan to Ralph, at lunch.

“That bothers you?”

“Well, yes, actually it does. The sheer waste of it.” Susan was sometimes called a bleeding heart by Ralph, but she kept on with it. “They're such evanescent shoes. You couldn't exactly give them to the homeless.”

“Women should refuse to wear shoes like that in the first place,” Ralph pronounced.

“Well, of course they should.” Susan hoped this would not lead to a discussion of women's roles. “But think how long it would take for manufacturers to get the message,” she added.

“Well, time for the Cathedral?” Ralph asked.

Our conversations never seem to last very long, Susan observed, with a small, interior sigh.

Bergamo. Ralph will remember this as the place where it was impossible to park, Susan thought as he nosed the small white rented Fiat up the narrow, sharp cobbled street to the already filled parking area for their hotel.

And I will remember it as the place with the narrowest, farthest-apart single beds yet, she thought a little later, Ralph having found, as he always did, a handy space, their laborious registration completed. I will remember it as another place where we did not make love, she (correctly) prophesied.

Twin beds. Accustomed to the canopied, carved-mahogany double bed of Susan's rather Victorian quarters, in her college, or to the king-sized mattress swathed in bold “designer” stripes of Ralph's bachelor pad, on Mulholland—or the queen- or king-sized super beds of motels in La Jolla and Santa Barbara, San Diego or Carmel—used to love on those broad, convenient spaces, to having each other's bodies near at hand, available, Ralph and Susan find themselves defeated, always, in terms of sex, by separate beds. Or so Susan has put it to herself.

But she has also thought that in most cases, Bergamo excepted, the beds were not actually insuperably far apart, nor (if you really wanted to be together) impossibly narrow.

In Verona, Susan and Ralph were given, again, a room with twin beds. However, they seemed to be up in a sort of turret,
from which there was a lovely, winding view of the narrow river.

“Then we can't be far from the museum,” Ralph told her. “It's on the river. And if we're lucky the restaurant could be around here too.”

Ralph had been told by a much traveled, important medical colleague that both the museum and a certain restaurant are “absolute musts” in Verona. In fact for that reason, the colleague's insistence, they had veered from their course to Venice. “The game pie in that place is the absolute greatest,” Ralph was told, a set of orders that he relayed to Susan.

The restaurant was indeed quite near their hotel: a dark-paneled upstairs room, not large, fairly crowded with small round tables whose dingy white linen cloths hung limply to the floor. And at 8:30, the hour of their reservation, no other customers. A small cluster of waiters lingered near a far, broad door, presumably leading to the kitchen.

“Good we reserved,” said Susan, intending a small joke.

But Ralph was frowning. “I wonder if it could be the wrong place.”

The waiter who arrived at their side assured them, though, that this was the correct, the internationally famous restaurant. And he led them to a table. “Early yet” was his parting shot, delivered with a crooked grin. He was fairly old, with a dragging limp.

“Well, the food had better be really terrific,” Ralph warned, his words directed to the waiter's back.

“We could go somewhere else. It really doesn't look too great. You know, places change.” This was generous of Susan, who was hungry, afflicted by blood sugar or perhaps the simple fatigue of travel. She felt certain, though, that the food would not be good, clearly not the memorable feast to which Ralph
looked forward. And in his disappointment he would be angry, perhaps abusive—some bad familiar mood.

“No, I promised Bill we'd check it out.” Ralph's tone was ominous, and Susan braced herself.

The first blow, delivered along with their Cinzanos, was the waiter's announcement that there was no game pie. “Famous specialty, but only in the fall. Season of the chase,” he explained, as though they could not have figured that out for themselves, which of course they should have.

But “People do shoot birds in May,” Ralph insisted, with his dark, aggressive scowl.

“No game pie.” The waiter smiled widely, revealing gold, and a few black gaps.

“Well, you don't have to be so goddam pleased about it.” Ralph's loud and terrible voice resonated in the empty room.

For a few minutes the two men simply stared at each other: large, dark, healthy, successful Ralph, who was disappointed, foiled in his immediate plans for game pie and subsequent boasts to Bill, his well-traveled and well-fed colleague; and the smaller, older, less healthy waiter, who was more or less accidentally in charge of the next hour or so of Ralph's life.

In the next instant Ralph would stand up and push the waiter aside. Susan gripped her napkin, waiting. He would pull her up and out of the restaurant.

But she was wrong. Icily, Ralph requested the menu; in a frozen silence he and Susan perused the fare while the waiter stood miserably by. They ordered soup and salad, veal for Ralph, for Susan chicken—with none of their usual food-ordering chatter.

Their waiter served each dish with a sort of meticulous contempt, whether for the food, which he must know to be inferior, or for Ralph and Susan—impossible to tell. Maybe
(Susan thought) he simply hated the situation in which he found himself, an old waiter in a restaurant that had gone very sharply downhill, serving bad food to rich, unpleasant foreigners.

By the time they were ready to leave, several other couples had arrived, and so it took a while to get their check. Insult to injury, for Ralph.

At last, though, check in hand, he stood up and faced the waiter, standing both too close and too far above him. “I would simply like you to know that this is the worst food we have encountered in all of Italy. It is a disgrace. Abominable.” And Ralph peeled off a sheaf of lire, which he then thrust upon their table.

Barely waiting for Susan, he began to stalk from the room, so that she was considerably behind him, and able to hear the waiter in his wake: “Asshole American son of bitch.”

The next morning in the museum, which was indeed a small marvel, most elegantly restored, and arranged, with its overlook of the river—the Ralph whom Susan liked and sometimes loved re-emerged. Following his eager, energetic back, his narrow, dark, intelligent head, Susan was drawn again to his greedy curiosity, his sharp appreciation of what he saw: sculpture and painting, architecture, and feats of engineering, in beautiful stone.

Still, as she thought of the night before she quailed, particularly as she thought of the waiter.

In fact, a few years later, by which time Susan had managed, at last, to sever ties with Ralph for good, she still sometimes
thought of that waiter. She could always see his face very clearly—along with the shoes in the shops of Milan, all those beautiful useless colors.

Heading at last toward Venice on the following day, Susan thought in a general way about trips. Traveling tends to intensify whatever is good—or bad—in any relationship, was one of her conclusions. Two people, generally unaccustomed to spending that much time together, have fewer resources for getting away from each other, for breathing space.

On trips, a very fearful person may develop strange panics in the night.

And an angry person will become even angrier, off home ground. (Susan recognized that she was still trying to forgive Ralph's behavior with the waiter, and recognized too that a fearful person is often very forgiving.)

Venice. Their Venetian hotel room, as though to compensate for all other disappointing, less than beautiful rooms, was (though quite discreetly) perfect. Its balconied window looked out on a small canal, an arched bridge, a tiny park with a single tree, a pine. And the room's regally broad bed lay deep within a curtained, recessed alcove.

Their dinner too was superb (another, luckier recommendation from Bill, the traveling colleague). “This is really the greatest pasta I've ever had,” Ralph pronounced, gazing about the gilt-and-marble room, then returning his look to the long windows adjacent to their table. The view of the brilliant, shadowed, mysterious Piazza San Marco. Across the way a bandstand, and a bright café. Wandering tourists, all of whom from this distance had an air of mystery, even of distinction.

“This is unreal,” Ralph said to Susan, with his smile, across the flickering candlelight. “I don't believe it.”

But did he mean Venice, or the fact that at last they were able to enjoy their trip? Susan was unsure—and she too had sometimes wondered which was the more real, the more significant: fights and trouble, or their occasional rapport, stray moments of love?

After dinner they walked slowly across the piazza to the café, where at small round tables groups of people, or some alone, took coffee in tiny cups, or rich liqueurs, or velvet-colored brandies. Getting into that spirit, festive, celebratory, Ralph and Susan ordered and drank Chartreuse—they drank several, in fact. Both the queer green-yellowish color and the exotic taste seemed perfectly right for that moment.

Having drunk too much, and later made love with a kind of anonymous violence, both Ralph and Susan woke up after a scant few hours of the thinnest sleep, both thirsty, both with incipient headaches. Dosing themselves with aspirin, drinking water, they went back to bed, where nevertheless they fell upon each other ravenously again. Like strangers, in a strange hotel.

The trip home began with a train from Venice to Milan, mostly through an impenetrable fog, so dense that Susan worried about their flight, that night: Milan—New York—Los Angeles.

Ralph reassured her. “Heavy fog over northern Italy does not mean a fog-covered Atlantic. Not necessarily.”

As always, he sounded both reasonable and authoritative,
and Susan decided that (as always) she was worrying too much, foreseeing trouble that would very likely not take place.

But Ralph was wrong.

An hour out of Milan, aloft and heading westward above the Atlantic, the weather outside the windows of the plane looked fierce: dark huge ragged clouds, wind-torn.

And
turbulence.
The
FASTEN SEAT BELT
and
NO SMOKING
signs had never gone off, the giant plane began to be shaken like a toy, a rattle, in the monumental wind. Up and down, sideways, everything jolted and rattling.

Susan felt herself given over to panic, her breath and her heart all awry, all out of control. And nothing worked, no words of wisdom, no practical suggestions for dealing with fear.

Beside her, Ralph lifted her hand from the seat divider, which Susan was clutching. He held it firmly in his larger, stronger hand, smiling down at her.

And as her fingers now grasped at his, as she held to him, seemingly for dear life, somewhere in Susan's tossing, terrified mind was the thought: I can never leave him, I will never find the nerve.

After her husband, Sebastian, had left her, all alone in their beautiful, entirely impractical house (drafty, leaking, often cold and dark), Holly Jones felt loss as something sharp in the cavity of her chest. Her pain was severe, and in those terrible days, and weeks, then months, Holly, a basically friendly, chatty young woman, sought to ease that pain, somewhat, by talk. By trying to talk it out.

Those obsessive conversations went on continuously, like tapes. Some were entirely silent, going on in her head, and those were with—or, rather, to—Sebastian. Sebastian, a handsome, old-family-rich, non-violent alcoholic, often impotent—an unsuccessful though talented painter (so he and Holly thought)—had gone off to New York, it seemed for good. He often used to go there, on gallery or family business, but this time he had been gone for three months, during the last of which he had not communicated with Holly.