Return Trips (20 page)

Judson made Margaritas which he served to us out on the porch, as we watched the sunset remnants slowly fade—and then Aurelia brought out our dinner, the first of many wonderfully garlicky fish.

But mainly, for me, there was Elizabeth’s lovely voice to listen to—although for the first time I began to wish she would not smoke so much; I don’t especially mind cigarette smoke, not outside on a porch, but it obviously made her cough a lot.

Elizabeth and I talked and talked, and talked and laughed, and she smoked, and coughed. Judson said rather little, but I had already begun to like him a little better. He had a good, responsive smile, and his occasional laugh seemed warm.

After dinner Elizabeth looked tired, I thought; actually I was too, and I got up to leave.

“Ah! Then Judson will walk with you,” Elizabeth announced.

“Oh no, how silly, it’s no distance—”

“Minerva, there could be banditos.” Elizabeth laughed, then a tiny cough. “But I expect you back here for breakfast, which we eat all through the morning.”

And so Judson did walk back to Del Sol with me, along the shadowy, gray-white sand, beside the black sea. In perfect silence. At my cottage door we stopped, and he touched
my shoulder very lightly. Not quite looking at me (a habit of his) he said, “I’m glad you came down.” Adding, “She’s really been looking forward to you.” Long speeches, coming from Judson.

I was smiling as I went inside to bed.

Although I should admit to being quite as prurient as the next person, that November I did not subject the Elizabeth-Judson relationship to serious scrutiny, having to do with sex. I assumed some form of love to exist between them, and I did not concern myself with determining its exact nature. I saw that Elizabeth’s bright gray eyes were often watching Judson thoughtfully, and that when he spoke she listened with her intensely attentive semi-smile. But then she watched me too, and listened when I spoke, with extreme attention.

My parents (the shrinks) would have said and probably did say that I had fallen into an ideal—or rather, an idealized situation: I was the loved child of loving parents, whose sexual lives I did not think about.

Another explanation for my relative lack of curiosity about them is that I was simply too happy there in Mexico, during that beautifully, caressingly warm November stay for serious thoughts about other people’s lives. (An extreme of happiness can make you just as self-absorbed as misery can; witness people happily in love.) With Elizabeth and sometimes with Judson too I swam three or four times a day, in the marvellous, buoyant water; we walked, and walked and walked along the beach, in the direction of the tiny town, San Angel, or sometimes, more adventurously, we took the other direction: a walk that involved scrambling across small cliffs of sheer sharp rock, clutching in our passage at thin manzanita boughs, until we reached another beach, where we swam and sometimes picnicked.

An abundance of sheer physical exertion, then, was clearly contributing to my new and entire well-being, but I think quite as significant was the extraordinary beauty of the place, the white, white beach with its background of wild, brilliant jungle growth, interspersed with bright flowers. And the foreground of a brighter, greener sea.

And Elizabeth.

And Judson, whom I continued increasingly to like. I even began to think him good enough for Elizabeth, almost. I began to see the attractiveness of his long slow supple legs, as he ambled along the sand, or swam, or led the way across the difficult stretch of rocks, often waiting to extend a hand to me, or to Elizabeth, who lagged behind. As she sometimes said (perhaps too often?) she simply could not keep up with young folks such as we. She was in fact quite often out of breath; she required a lot of rest, which at the time I put down simply to her age, and to smoking so much. But I thought Judson was very good to her.

One of the pleasures of those first, enchanted November weeks in Mexico (as opposed to my second visit, four years later)—a considerable joy for Elizabeth and for me was our shopping from the occasional vendors: Indian-looking, mostly, both men and women of all ages, sometimes with small children. They would hold out bright flimsy dresses to us, trays of silver and jade; they smiled at our greed, and our inability to make up our minds. And at our very faulty Spanish, Elizabeth’s considerably better than mine. Judson watched, and smiled, and seemed to enjoy the spectacle.

Elizabeth bought a long dark blue dress, the blue unusually rich and deep; I bought something white, long and lacy, and we both wore our new dresses that night at dinner.

In those idle, happy ways our days ran past. Sunsets succeeded each other, each brilliant panoply of clouds seemed
new, original and splendid. We watched those displays each night as we drank our salty-sweet Margaritas, served by Judson with his particular Southern ceremoniousness, his semi-bow as he handed either of us our glass. Later, in the near-dark shadows we had our dinner. Later still, in the true dark, the heavy tropical night, Judson would walk down to my cottage with me. Sometimes we talked a little, more often not. He would say good night, perhaps with a quick touch to my arm, or my shoulder; I would go inside, get ready for bed, and read for a little while. And Judson would hurry back to Elizabeth—or so I for the most part imagined.

On my next-to-last night there, the end of my November weeks, at my door Judson turned to me; he took my shoulders in his hands and then, quite simply, we kissed. Or, not simply; it was a complicated kiss, containing as it did so much unspoken between us. In the next instant, that of our separation, I felt dizzied, almost unreal.

Judson touched my face. “You’re lovely.”

“But—” Meaning, as he knew, But what about you and Elizabeth?

“I think you’ve got things a little wrong,” was all he said. So like him; talk about minimalism.

One of the things I had wrong was the time of Judson’s departure, which took place quite early the next day; he was gone by the time I arrived for breakfast.

Actually I was glad, happier to have a final day alone with Elizabeth, and I did not want to face possible complications with Judson. I wanted to thank Elizabeth, to say how happy my time there had made me. And that is how it went; Elizabeth and I talked and talked all day, she in her lovely, amazing voice. And she listened as I talked, with her wide, calm, amused gray eyes.

And the next day I went back to California.

• • •

Not quite predictably (I myself would not have predicted it) things went well with me, over the next months and then years that followed that November visit to Elizabeth. I was on an unusually even keel, for me. I had no major love affairs, nothing marvellous, but then no disasters either, just a couple of pleasant “relationships” with very nice men. I switched law firms, moving to a new one, still in Oakland, but a firm with a feminist-public good orientation.

Elizabeth and I wrote many letters to each other; I’m afraid mine were mostly about myself (Ah, the joys of a good correspondent as a captive audience!). Elizabeth wrote about everything except herself—or Judson, for that matter.

This went on until what must have been a couple of years later, when I got a letter from her that seemed more than a little alarming, though it was couched in Elizabeth’s habitual gentle language. First, the good news that she had stopped smoking. And then this sentence: “Judson was here for a visit, and as I had not seen him for some time I fear he was alarmed by my not-so-good health.”

Violently alarmed myself, I immediately telephoned Elizabeth; she was out at first, it was hours before I could reach her, and then, in character, she apologized for having upset me. “It is just this emphysema that I have,” she said, but I could hear her labored breath. “Nature’s punishment for heavy smokers.” She tried to laugh, and gasped, and coughed.

After that I wrote to her much more often, and I tried to think of presents for her—not an easy task with elegant, apparently self-sufficient Elizabeth, but sometimes I succeeded, I think. I understood that she would write more briefly now, and less often, and that was true; she sent notes and postcards, thanking me for my letters, for whatever book or small Berkeley trophy I had sent (a paper cat, some Mexican-looking straw flowers). She said very little about how she was, but when I pressed her in a specific way (“Please
tell me how you are”) she admitted to not feeling very well. “I have so little strength, much discomfort. At times it seems cruel and unusual, at other times deserved.” She would spend the winter in Mexico. “I hope there to breathe more easily.”

This was the period I mentioned at the start, during which I believed, or perhaps succeeded in convincing myself that my frequent letters and small attentions were more beneficial than an actual visit from me would be.

And that was the theory broken by Judson’s phone call, from Iowa, telling me that I should go to Mexico. “It’s simple, Minerva. If you don’t, you won’t see her again.”

“Will you go too?”

“If I can.”

Those were the first sentences to pass between us since the night of that kiss, I later thought.

Of course I would go, and of course for every reason I did not want to. I made reservations, plane tickets and a cottage at Del Sol. Since Elizabeth had no phone down there I tried calling Del Sol myself, remembering that she received an occasional message through them. At last I reached a person who seemed to know that a Señora Loewenstein lived nearby, but I had no faith in the message, and I wrote to her too.

It was only as I boarded the plane, early one foggy, chilly morning at the San Francisco airport, that it occurred to me that this too was the month of November, that an almost exact four years had passed since my first visit.

However, disembarking at San Angel, the air was as moist, as caressing and fragrant as I remembered, and I began to think or hope that this trip might be all right.

I was surprised to find Aurelia in the terminal waiting room—tall, beautifully smiling Aurelia, who in answer to
my quick question told me that Elizabeth was not well at all. “She lay down, she not get up,” Aurelia said.

My first strong and confused reaction to this shocking news was anger: how could Elizabeth be so ill and not say so? Or, really,
how could Elizabeth be so ill?

In Elizabeth’s old pink jeep Aurelia drove me through the turbulent, violent green jungle, to the glittering sea, waves dancing in the bright mid-afternoon sunlight—to my cottage at Del Sol. I threw my bag onto the bed, threw water on my face and combed my hair, and ran back out to Aurelia, in the jeep.

How like Elizabeth (as Judson and I said later) to have arranged that my first sight of her should be reassuring. She lay on her hammock (Judson s hammock, as I thought of it), Elizabeth, in something pale blue, gauzy, very pretty. At my approach she half sat up, she reached out her hands to me. “Ah! Minerva. How good that you have come.” And she smiled, and said all the rest with her eyes.

I bent or rather knelt to kiss her cheeks, thinking, How could I have blamed her for her illness? as I fought back tears. I asked, “You don’t feel so well?”

“Not too.” Another smile.

We had both begun to sound like Judson, I thought just then; our speech was as stripped down, as minimal as his was.

Elizabeth next asked, “Judson called you?”

“Uh, yes. He did.”

She coughed. “He will come also?”

“He said if he could. He’s really busy there, I think.”

Her eyes blazed at me then, gray fire, for a full moment before she spoke, and when she did her damaged voice was wild. “He must come. You will call to him,” she said.

I was too pummelled by violent emotion to understand, quite. I only said, “Of course. Tomorrow.”

Elizabeth smiled, and she lay back and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, after a short moment, it was as though that passionate exchange had not taken place. She said, “Ah, Minerva. Now you must tell me all about your life.”

Much later, Judson in his way explained, or nearly. “Yes, in love. I think we were,” he said. “But never lovers.”

“But, why not?”

He smiled, not looking at me but at some private interior vision, probably Elizabeth. “Too risky, for one thing. A good friendship at stake.”

By then of course Elizabeth had died, and Judson and I in our own curious ways had “fallen in love” and married. Which is what we both thought quite possibly she had wanted us to do. In a sense I had been “offered up” to Judson, that first November: Elizabeth’s insistence that I visit her just then, her always making Judson walk home with me. Perhaps she thought that if he and I became lovers she would love him less? I don’t know, surely not, nor does Judson. It is only clear that Elizabeth was an immeasurably subtle woman, and a passionate one.

Now, more or less repeating things already said in letters, I told Elizabeth that on the whole my life seemed very good. I was happy in my new law firm, I was even getting along better with my parents (possibly because they had separated and were in that way getting along much better with each other).

Elizabeth listened, and smiled, saying very little. Then Aurelia reappeared, to arrange Elizabeth’s pillows and to say to me, “She very tired now, I think.”

(Aurelia, soon to be the owner of that house; perhaps
something of that showed in her just perceptibly less shy bearing? Elizabeth must have liked to think of her there, of the difference in her life.)

I got up to go, but Elizabeth’s thin hand detained me. “Dinner at eight,” she said, with a smile and a small choked laugh.

It was still not late, not sunset time, and so instead of turning in at Del Sol I walked on down the beach, toward town. And I knew at once that this was a mistake: seemingly overnight (although actually there had been four years), big gaudy condominiums had sprung up, and a couple of huge hotels, towering and bright and hideous, where before there had been jungle green, and flowers, and space. Bodies crowded the beach; even had I wanted to walk much farther that would have been impossible. And vendors: I was almost instantly accosted by a swarm of them, sad-eyed little boys selling Chiclets, thin old men with bags of peanuts, women with the same butterfly-colored dresses as before, some trays of silver and jade, but I thought they all looked suddenly sad and thin, and too eager to sell, whereas before a certain diffidence had prevailed. The town’s so-visible prosperity had not trickled down to these natives, I thought.