Return Trips (22 page)

“My darling, I have a horror of the Right, of
fascismo
.”
(But in much the same tone he also said, “I have a horror of
fat
” as he stroked her thin thigh, then cupped the sharp crest with his wise and skillful hand.)

You could simply look at his eyes, or his mouth, Arden thinks now, and know that Luiz was remarkable.

She remembers his walk. The marvellous confidence in that stride. During all the weeks of suffering so acutely from his absence in her life (classically, Luiz did not get the promised divorce, nor did he defect from the fascist government he railed against; he went back to Lisbon, to his wife, to that regime)—during all that time of suffering, it was the thought of his walk that caused Arden the most piercing pain: that singular, energetic motion of his body, its course through the world, without her.

After lunch, much more slowly than earlier they had climbed the streets, Arden and Gregor start down. The day is still glorious; at one point they stop at a small terrace where there are rounded cypresses, very small, and a lovely wall of soft blue tiles, in an intricate, fanciful design—and a large and most beautiful view of sky and majestic, glossy white clouds, above the shimmering water of the sea. From this distance the commemorative suspension bridge is a graceful sculpture; catching the sunlight, it shines.

Arden is experiencing some exceptional, acute alertness; as though layers of skin had peeled away, all her senses are opened wide. She sees, in a way that she never has before. She feels all the gorgeous day, the air, and the city spread below her.

She hardly thinks of Gregor, at her side, and this is something of a relief; too often he is a worrying preoccupation for her.

Their plan for the afternoon has been to go back to their hotel, where they have left a rental car, and to drive north
to Cascais, Estoril, and Sintra. And that is what they now proceed to do, not bothering to go into the hotel, but just taking their car, a small white Ford Escort, and heading north.

As they reach the outskirts of the city, a strange area of new condominiums, old shacks, and some lovely, untouched woods—just then, more quickly than seemed possible, the billowing clouds turn black, a strong wind comes up, and in another minute a violent rainstorm has begun, rains lashing at the windshield, water sweeping across the highway.

Arden and Gregor exchange excited grins: an adventure. She thinks, Oh, good, we are getting along, after all.

“Maybe we should just go to Sintra, though,” he says, a little later. “Not too much point in looking at beach resorts?”

Yielding to wisdom, Arden still feels a certain regret.
Cascais
. She can hear Luiz saying the word, and “Estoril,” with the sibilant Portuguese
s
’s. But she can also hear him saying
Sintra
, and she says it over to herself, in his voice.

A little later, looking over at her, Gregor asks, “Are you okay? You look sort of funny.”

“How, funny?”

“
Odd
. You look odd. And your nose. It’s so, uh, pink.”

Surprising them both, and especially herself, Arden laughs.

“Noses are supposed to be pink,” she tells him.

Normally, what Arden thinks of as Gregor’s lens-like observations make her nervous; they make her feel unattractive, and unloved. But today—here in Portugal!—her strange happiness separates her like a wall, or a moat from possible slights, and she thinks, How queer that Gregor should even notice the color of my nose, in a driving rainstorm—here, north of Lisbon, near Sintra. As, in her mind, she hears the deep, familiar, never-forgotten voice of Luiz saying, “I adore your face! Do you
know
how I adore it? How lovely you are?” She hears Luiz, she sees him.

• • •

Then quite suddenly, as suddenly as it began, the storm is over. The sky is brilliantly blue again, and the clouds are white, as Arden thinks, No wonder Luiz is more than a little erratic—it’s the weather. And she smiles to herself.

Suppose she sent him a postcard from Lisbon?
Ego absolvo te
. Love, Arden. Would he laugh and think fondly of her, for a moment?
Is
he dying?

In Sintra they drive past a small town square, with a huge, rather forbidding municipal building, some small stores. The wet stone pavement is strewn with fallen wet yellow leaves. They start up a narrow road, past gates and driveways that lead to just-not visible mansions, small towered castles. (The sort of places that Luiz might visit, or own, for weekends, elegant parties.) As they climb up and up in the small white car, on either side of the road the woods become thicker, wilder, more densely and violently green—everything green, every shape and shade of green, all rain-wet, all urgently growing. And giant rocks, great dead trees lying beside them. Ferns, enormously sprouting. Arden is holding her breath, forgetting to breathe. It is crazy with green, she thinks, crazy growth, so old and strong, ancient, endless and wild, ferocious. Like Luiz. Like Portugal, dying.

Gregor is making some odd maneuver with the car; is he turning around, mid-road? Trying to park, among so many giant rocks, heavy trees, and brilliant, dripping leaves?

In any case he has stopped the car. On a near hill Arden can see the broken ruins of a castle, jagged black fragments of stone, and in the sky big clouds are blackening again.

Willing calm (though still having trouble with her breath), Arden says, “I think it’s going to rain again.”

Huge-eyed, pale, Gregor is staring across at her. He says,
“You cut me out—all the way! You might as well be here alone!”

He is right, of course; she is doing just that, pretending he is not there. So unfair—but his staring eyes are so light, so
blue
. Arden says, “I’m sorry, really—” but she can feel her voice getting away from her, can feel tears.

Gregor shouts, “I don’t know why we came here! Why Portugal? What did you expect? You could have just come by yourself!”

But Arden can hardly hear him. The rain has indeed begun again; it is pelting like bullets against the glass, and wind is bending down all the trees, flattening leaves.

And suddenly in those moments Arden has understood that Luiz is dead—and that she will never again feel for anyone what she felt for him. Which, even though she does not want to—she would never choose to feel so much again—still, it seems a considerable loss.

In fact, though, at that particular time, the hour of that passionate October storm (while Arden quarrelled with Gregor), Luiz is still alive, although probably “terminal.” And she only learns of his death the following spring, and then more or less by accident: she is in Washington, D.C., for some meetings having to do with grants for small magazines and presses, and in a hasty scanning of the
Post
she happens to glance at a column headed “Deaths Elsewhere.”

Luiz —– —– V. (There were two intervening names that Arden has not known about.) Luiz V. had died a few days earlier in Lisbon, the cause of death not reported. Famous portraitist, known for satire, and also (this is quite as surprising to Arden as the unfamiliar names)—“one of the leading intellectuals in Lisbon to voice strong public support for the armed forces coup in April 1974 that ended half a century of right-wing dictatorship.”

Curiously—years back she would not have believed this possible, ever—that day Arden is too busy with her meetings to think about this fact: Luiz dead. No longer someone whom she might possibly see again, by accident in an airport, or somewhere. No longer someone possibly to send a postcard to.

That day she is simply too busy, too harried, really, with so many people to see, and with getting back and forth from her hotel to her meetings, through the strange, unseasonable snow that has just begun, relentlessly, to fall. She thinks of the death of Luiz, but she does not absorb it.

That quarrel with Gregor in Sintra, which prolonged itself over the stormy drive back to Lisbon, and arose, refuelled, over dinner and too much wine—that quarrel was not final between them, although Arden has sometimes thought that it should have been. They continue to see each other, Arden and Gregor, in California, but considerably less often than they used to. They do not quarrel; it is as though they were no longer sufficiently intimate to fight, as though they both knew that any altercation would indeed be final.

Arden rather thinks, or suspects, that Gregor sees other women, during some of their increasing times apart. She imagines that he is more or less actively looking for her replacement. Which, curiously, she is content to let him do.

She herself has not been looking. In fact lately Arden has been uncharacteristically wary in her dealings with men. In her work she is closely allied with a lot of men, who often become good friends, her colleagues and companions. However, recently she has rather forcibly discouraged any shifts in these connections; she has chosen to ignore or to put down any possible romantic overtones. She spends time with women friends, goes out to dinner with women, takes small trips. She is quite good at friendship, has been Arden’s conclusion,
or one of them. Her judgment as to lovers seems rather poor. And come to think of it her own behavior in that area is not always very good. Certainly her strangeness, her removal in Lisbon, in Sintra, was quite enough to provoke a sensitive man, which Gregor undoubtedly is.

On that night, the night of reading the news item (Deaths Elsewhere) containing the death of Luiz—that night Arden is supposed to meet a group of friends in a Georgetown restaurant. At eight. In character, she gets there a little early, and is told that she will be seated as soon as her friends arrive; would she like to wait in the bar?

She would not, especially, but she does so anyway, going into a dark, panelled room, of surpassing anonymity, and seating herself in a shadowed corner from which new arrivals in the restaurant are visible. She orders a Scotch, and then wonders why; it is not her usual drink, she has not drunk Scotch for years.

By eight-ten she has begun to wonder if perhaps she confused the name of the restaurant. It was she who made the reservation, and her friends could have gone to some other place, with a similar French name. These friends like herself are always reliably on time, even in snow, strange weather.

The problem of what to do next seems almost intolerable, suddenly—and ridiculously: Arden has surely coped with more serious emergencies. But: should she try to get a cab, which at this crowded dinner hour, in the snow, would be difficult? And if she did where would she go?

In the meantime, at eight-twenty, she orders another drink, and she begins to think about the item in the paper. About Luiz.

Odd, she casually thinks, at first, that she should have “adored” a man—have planned to marry a man whose full name she did not know. And much more odd, she thinks, that
he should have publicly favored the ’74 revolution, the end of dictatorship. Opportunism, possibly, Arden first thinks. On the other hand, is she being unfair, unnecessarily harsh? He did always describe himself as anti-fascist. And perhaps that was true?

Perhaps everything he said to her was true?

Arden has finished her second drink. It is clear that her friends will not come; they have gone somewhere else by mistake, and she must decide what to do. But still she sits there, as though transfixed, and she is transfixed, by a sudden nameless pain. Nameless, but linked to loss: loss of Luiz, even, imminently, of Gregor. Perhaps of love itself.

Understanding some of this, in a hurried, determined way Arden gets to her feet and summons the bill from her waiter. She has decided that she will go back to her hotel and order a sandwich in her room. Strange that she didn’t think of that before. Of course she will eventually get a cab, even in the steadily falling, unpredicted snow.

Because of my dreams, I have begun to think that in some permanent way I have been imprinted, as it were, by the house in which I spent my first sixteen years. I have never owned another house (one could also say that I did not own that house either), and since this is true of almost none of my contemporaries and close friends in real-estate-crazed California, it would seem to deserve some explanation. Circumstances aside, is it possible that I have never bought or seriously thought of buying another house because of the strength of that imprinting, and if so, just why has it been so dominant, so powerful, in my life?

In more than half of my dreams I live there still, in that house just south of Chapel Hill. I am visited there in dreams by the present-day population of my life, people who in fact have never been to that hilltop where the house was—where it
is
; I saw it there last summer.

I also, though very rarely, dream of my former—my first and only—husband. But since this occurs only when I am angry with the man with whom I now live, the reasons for those dreams seem fairly clear. However, as with not buying another house, it also seems possible that I have not remarried
because of that early impression of marriage. Californians, or some of them, might say that I avoid commitment, but that is not true. I do not. In fact, I seem to seek it out. I simply feel that first marriages, like the first houses in which we live, are crucially important, that in one way or another we are forever marked by them.

The Chapel Hill house, as my parents first found and bought it in the early twenties, a few years before I was born, was a small, possibly run-down and isolated farmhouse on a lovely broad hilltop. Very likely it was a good buy, cheap even for those pre-boom days; my father, as a just-hired professor at the university, would certainly not have had much money. In any case, my mother and father must have been drawn to all that space, a couple of acres; they may have already been planning the gardens, the tennis court and the grape arbors they were to put in later. And they must have fallen in love with the most beautiful view of farther gentle hills and fields, and a border of creek. They would have placed those aesthetic advantages above the convenience of a smaller lot, a tidier house in town. And along with the space and the view, they chose an unfashionable direction (which would have been characteristic; my parents—especially my mother, a snobbish Virginian—were always above such considerations).