Return Trips (14 page)

His wife, Alexandra, is a woman of considerable size—a wonderful size, actually; her height and her general massiveness convey strength and power. She is unaware, though, of the impression she makes—she wishes she were smaller. She has great dark, golden eyes, and black, gray-streaked hair pulled into a knot. A long time ago, in the forties, she was studying Greek literature at Yale; she and Allen met at various New Haven parties—an older (ten years) man, a tall, uneasy girl. And actually she looks better now than she did as a very young woman; then she was awkward with her size, shy, and overeager in her mania for knowledge, her greed for love. Now, especially in her brown, loosely woven dress, with her big purple beads, big gold earrings, Alexandra looks majestic—but at this moment she is thinking that she would give everything she has if she could be young again, even for just a couple of days; then, just possibly, she would be going off to Ixtapa with Hugh, instead of to Mérida with Allen. At this moment she does not see how she can bear the rest of her life with Hugh’s face absent from it.

On second thought, though, she does not really wish that she could go to Ixtapa with Hugh—complications, embarrassments. She would only like him to kiss her, preferably in the dark, where she is invisible.

Alexandra’s quest for love did not end after her marriage to Allen, although she had hoped (they both hoped) that she
would change. At first there were just a few excited flurries, kitchen kisses, some passionate gropings in cars, after summer parties in Vermont, where they and many of their friends had lakeside cottages. Then there was a serious, real affair with a younger colleague of Allen’s, cautiously, rather guardedly begun as a summer romance but continued with frenzied meetings in New York hotels, in motels along the turnpike. This left everyone involved raw and shaken (Alexandra had been forced or felt herself forced to tell Allen almost all about it). After that she “drifted into,” as she put it to herself, a couple of not very serious dalliances; she found the very contrast between these connections and the high seriousness of her first affair depressing, and she resolved not to do that again. But then she did. All of which was at least suspected by Allen, if unclearly.

Her Greek studies have more or less lapsed, although she still tries an occasional translation; some of her translated poems have been published in literary journals.

In what Allen describes as his own “declining years” he has experienced a series of critically painful “crushes” on young women, usually students, always beautiful. Analysis of these feelings has been a source of further pain, a scalpel applied to a wound, but he has achieved a certain understanding of his feelings: he has come to understand that all he wants of these young women is sometimes to
see
them, but “want” is an imprecise word for his wild craving, his need.

The most recent object of this “surely most unwanted affection,” as Allen might say, were he able to talk about it—the most recent “crush” has been on a tall, pale red-haired girl, Mona, from Colorado. Mona, with milk-white, unfreckled skin, wide light-blue eyes, and endless legs, which she carelessly, restlessly crossed and recrossed, all summer long, in her white tennis shorts. Mona was in New Haven visiting the daughter of friends, making everything worse,
more “social.” A feminist, she planned to go to law school, and she liked to talk to Allen about law. “I think she has a sort of crush on you,” Alexandra imperceptively remarked, at the start of summer. “Well, feminists get crushes too,” he limply countered.

Later, seeming to catch some hint of his actual feelings, Alexandra stopped mentioning Mona altogether.

Alexandra and Allen met Hugh because they were all staying in the same hotel in Oaxaca—a beautiful converted convent, with open courtyards full of flowers, lovely long cloisters, and everywhere birds. Arriving there on an early-morning plane from Mexico City, registering at the desk, as they were led toward their room, Alexandra and Allen exchanged smiles of pure pleasure at the beauty of it all, the sweet freshness of the air, such a contrast to Mexico City or New Haven. They liked their room, which was white-plastered, very clean, with a low slant ceiling, a window looking out to an ancient well, of soft gray stone. As they stood there just within the doorway, taking everything in, a young blond American in khaki walking shorts passed by; he looked in, smiled quickly in their direction.

After a little unpacking Alexandra and Allen walked up to the neighboring church, whose annex was a museum of costumes and artifacts, and there was the blond young man again, before a display of ferocious armaments, feathered headdresses. Seeing them, he gave another smile; they all smiled, acknowledging the coincidence.

At lunch, in the sunny, vine-hung courtyard, a haven for butterflies and hummingbirds, there he was again, but at a table some distance from theirs. More smiles.

And late in the afternoon, after more walking about, a little shopping, sightseeing, the blond young man was just across the pool, sunning himself, as he glanced through a
magazine. He waved in their direction; they returned the gesture.

“Odd that he’s alone,” Alexandra murmured. “He’s really quite
beau
.”

“Oh, he’s probably saving himself for something. He looks athletic.”

“I wonder what.”

Allen speculated. “Well, something graceful. Something not, as the kids say, gross. Golf? Maybe tennis?”

That night, after a fairly long siesta—though they were both troubled sleepers, often restless—Alexandra and Allen came into the bar rather late to find almost all the tables occupied, and there
he
was, standing up at the sight of them, saying, “Well, we seem to be on the same schedule, don’t we? Won’t you folks join me for a drink?”

Close up, even in that darkish bar, Hugh turned out to be somewhat less young than they at first had thought; still, he was considerably younger than they were, and his general air was boyish—to Alexandra, privately, he remained “the young blond.” As they exchanged names and certain identifying facts—home bases, previous trips to Mexico, next destinations—professions were brought out last, and Hugh seemed impressed by theirs: a lawyer and a scholar, of Greek! He was very pleased at Allen’s guess as to tennis for himself.

“Allen’s terrifically intuitive,” explained Alexandra.

“Oh, I believe you!” A flash of teeth.

“Mostly I’m very observant.” Dry Allen.

They passed a pleasant, noncommittal evening together, going off early to their separate rooms.

And, the next morning, there was Hugh, arriving for breakfast at the exact moment of their arrival.

Unlike either Allen or Alexandra, Hugh was an intensely physical person, a man much at home in his body, exuding animal energy. He even looked at things in a total, physical
way, as animals do, all his muscles at attention, along with his depthless, clear blue eyes. On their one planned excursion together, in a rented car, out to the ruins at Monte Albán, the ancient pyramids, instead of looking at the stones Alexandra mostly watched Hugh, as he paced and bent and stopped to look, turned and bent down again. (And Allen watched Alexandra, watching.)

And their odd synchroneity continued. Even when Allen and Alexandra slept somewhat late and were late coming in to breakfast, there would be Hugh, saying ruefully that he had overslept. They laughed about it, this coincidence of inner timing, but even as they did so Alexandra felt a tiny chill of fear: suppose they should come into a room, as they surely would, sooner or later, and not find Hugh? Coming into the bar and finding him there at night, smiling and standing up at the sight of them, saying, “This is my first Margarita, honest”—coming on Hugh in that way became for Alexandra like finding a sudden brilliant light, in anticipated darkness.

Now they are drinking what are probably their last Margaitas, in this huge, dingy, crowded area, among their own and other people’s piles of luggage, these somewhat unlikely, not quite friends (although not unlikely to the mostly shabby Mexicans who are with them in the waiting room, who stare and find it perfectly reasonable that these three Hollywood-looking Americans should be together).

In a summing-up way Hugh says, “Well, it certainly was lucky for me, running into you folks down there.”

“Oh, lucky for us!” Allen responds very quickly, with a lively smile.

“Oh, lucky!” Alexandra echoes, her own smile a little uncertain.

Hugh’s face is bright as, having covered that topic, he
moves on to more urgent matters. “I guess planes are always late getting out of here?” he questions. “No counting on schedules?”

Allen answers, “Probably not. Schedules are, uh, almost irrelevant.”

Hugh’s plane for Ixtapa was originally scheduled to leave an hour after that of Allen and Alexandra for Mérida; however, both schedules have continuously changed, so that now the question of who leaves when is quite “up in the air,” as Allen has put it, to a dutiful smile from Alexandra, a brief but appreciative chuckle from Hugh.

Now, though, as they regard the shifting numbers on the elevated blackboard, it appears that Hugh will leave first. Alexandra has all along known that this would be the case.

And, finally, his plane is announced. Boarding time.

In a suddenly awkward cluster the three of them stand up, not quite facing each other.

Allen, as he always uncontrollably does when ill at ease, begins to talk. “Well, I hope your tournament—this short flight—not too late,” he says, almost unheard in the general mounting confusion of people moving toward a just forming, straggling line, Spanish voices raised in prolonged farewells, bodies momentarily clutched in parting embraces.

Hugh grasps Allen’s hand, and presses it for an instant. What he indistinctly says is “
Swell
.”

Turning to Alexandra, so large and helpless, Hugh seems to see or simply to feel some nuance that moves him, somehow. Quickly bending toward her, he kisses her lightly on each cheek (a most un-Hugh-like gesture, Allen thinks) as he says, “Like the French! Well, Alexandra, so long!” and he turns and walks quickly, jauntily, into the crowd, toward the now moving line, in the huge and dingy, barely illuminated room.

Leaving them there.

Accustomed to extremes of mood, which she experienced less as “swings” than as plunges, or more rarely as soarings, Molly Harper, a newly retired screenwriter, was nevertheless quite overwhelmed by the blackness—the horror, really, with which, one dark pre-dawn hour, she viewed a minor trip, a jaunt from San Francisco to Carmel, to which she had very much looked forward. It was to be a weekend, simply, at an inn where in fact she had often stayed before, with various lovers (Molly’s emotional past had been strenuous). This time she was to travel with Sandy Norris, an old non-lover friend, who owned a bookstore. (Sandy usually had at least a part-time lover of his own, one in a series of nice young men.)

Before her film job, and her move to Los Angeles, Molly had been a poet, a good one—even, one year, a Yale Younger Poet. But she was living, then, from hand to mouth, from one idiot job to another. (Sandy was a friend from that era; they began as neighbors in a shabby North Beach apartment building, now long-since demolished.) As she had approached middle age, though, being broke all the time seemed undignified, if not downright scary. It wore her down, and she
grabbed at the film work and moved down to L.A. Some years of that life were wearing in another way, she found, and she moved from Malibu back up to San Francisco, with a little saved money, and her three beautiful, cross old cats. And hopes for a new and calmer life. She meant to start seriously writing again.

In her pre-trip waking nightmare, though, which was convincing in the way that such an hour’s imaginings always are (one sees the truth, and sees that any sunnier ideas are chimerical, delusions) at three, or four a.m., Molly pictured the two of them, as they would be in tawdry, ridiculous Carmel: herself, a scrawny sun-dried older woman, and Sandy, her wheezing, chain-smoking fat queer friend. There would be some silly awkwardness about sleeping arrangements, and instead of making love they would drink too much.

And, fatally, she thought of another weekend, in that same inn, years back: she remembered entering one of the cabins with a lover, and as soon as he, the lover, had closed the door they had turned to each other and kissed, had laughed and hurried off to bed. Contrast enough to make her nearly weep—and she knew, too, at four in the morning, that her cherished view of a meadow, and the river, the sea, would now be blocked by condominiums, or something.

This trip, she realized too late, at dawn, was to represent a serious error in judgment, one more in a lifetime of dark mistakes. It would weigh down and quite possibly sink her friendship with Sandy, and she put a high value on friendship. Their one previous lapse, hers and Sandy’s, which occurred when she stopped smoking and he did not (according to Sandy she had been most unpleasant about it, and perhaps she had been), had made Molly extremely unhappy.

But, good friends as she and Sandy were, why on earth a weekend together? The very frivolousness with which this plan had been hit upon seemed ominous; simply, Sandy had
said that funnily enough he had never been to Carmel, and Molly had said that she knew a nifty place to stay. And so, why not? they said. A long time ago, when they both were poor, either of them would have given anything for such a weekend (though not with each other) and perhaps that was how things should be, Molly judged, at almost five. And she thought of all the poor lovers, who could never go anywhere at all, who quarrel from sheer claustrophobia.

Not surprisingly, the next morning Molly felt considerably better, although imperfectly rested. But with almost her accustomed daytime energy she set about getting ready for the trip, doing several things simultaneously, as was her tendency: packing clothes and breakfast food (the cabins were equipped with little kitchens, she remembered), straightening up her flat and arranging the cats’ quarters on her porch.

By two in the afternoon, the hour established for their departure, Molly was ready to go, if a little sleepy; fatigue had begun to cut into her energy. Well, she was not twenty any more, or thirty or forty, even, she told herself, tolerantly.