Second Chances (11 page)

Their habitual political controversy abated too: Alex stopped describing the Socialist state of Sara’s dreams in terms of horror, he stopped telling her how she would hate the actuality of Socialism. And Sara did not mention Vietnam, not once.

Everything was fine, until the morning that began with margaritas at the appointed hour, at the bar of the Oceana Hotel, with its louvered view of the sea, its seedy American drunks. The day began there and ended in jail—all clearly Sara’s fault, she having made the contact, all the arrangements.

Once we are out of here Alex will never speak to me again, Sara now thinks, in jail. Well, fuck him, I won’t care. And she knows that for the rest of her life this room will inhabit her mind: the slick dirt floor, here and there worn down to paths, long indentations and holes like basins of dirt. The dim, never varying day or night light. The smells, and the huddled prison population: a legless man with furious, malevolent eyes; skinny ragged women, some with children. Americans, Mexicans, a couple of German kids. The boy and the Florida girl, there fucking. All of that in her mind forever. Becoming her mind. Her unconscious.

In Venice, where Celeste and Charles are spending a week, a part of their glamorous, amazing, beautiful (oh, wonderful!) honeymoon, at American Express Celeste receives a letter from Sara, which she instantly (or almost instantly) decides not to read to Charles.

The end of May: Venice is still all raw with rain, and gray and cold. On the Piazza San Marco, plank walks have been erected to keep all the tourists clear of the water lying there. Lines of tourists: the practical Germans and English who thought to bring raincoats; wet, shivering American kids in their trusting jeans, “hippies,” long-haired
boys and girls with flowers in their hair, even here in Venice, out in the rain. And Charles and Celeste, in their new London-purchased Burberrys. Small, perfectly erect Celeste, taut-faced, her smile a stretch of skin. And loose, comfortably ambling Charles, securely handsome—Charles, who, if bothered by anything relating to his honeymoon, does not look bothered.

In any case, returning from American Express, alone, as she makes her way over small arched bridges, through narrow stone passages that open out onto miraculous squares, stones, tracery, Celeste thinks of the just read letter, now well hidden in her passport case. She thinks of the letter even as almost despite herself her whole soul responds to the beauty, to the sensual complexity of Venice. (Over-stimulated, she thinks, not smiling. Wryly thinking: The irony.)

“I am living with a group of friends here in Berkeley now,” Sara has written. “We are a commune, in the truest sense of that word. We are working together against the war.”

Reading, Celeste for a moment thought, What war? But then quickly remembered Vietnam. Of course Vietnam, where Charles believes that “we” are performing a sad but necessary duty. “What we are doing may at times involve violence,” Sara’s letter continued (so curiously sounding like Charles, whom she has never met). “But whatever happens, Celeste, I want you to know how much I have always appreciated your unfailing generosity to me, and your wonderful love and support when mother was sick. I want you to know that I love you, Celeste. Sara. P.S.—Mexico was awful. It is a beautiful country, with beautiful people, but the man I was with and I did not get along well at all. Basically we have political views that are totally opposed. In fact, I think he is trying to get into the army.”

A strangely stilted letter, Celeste is thinking as she approaches their hotel: the Fenice; they have the most wonderful penthouse suite. It is as though Sara’s whole commune, solemnly, all together had written this letter.

But it is certainly not a letter to read or even to mention to Charles, who at this moment is no doubt lounging in his bath. It is already established between them that Celeste is the early riser; especially in foreign cities, she can barely contain her morning eagerness, her passion to be out, to walk around and to see.

Charles is in his bath, in their bedroom. Naked Charles. Hidden. Forbidden.

They sleep in marvelous silks, the two of them, between clean crisp linen sheets. They kiss affectionate good-nights, not quite turned toward each other, their bodies not in contact. They murmur temperate endearments.

Lying awake at night, Celeste wonders: Is this, then, the end of my sexual life? Did she “fall in love” and marry for these nights? And in that case, what about all the passionate kissings and heavy breathing, the heartfelt (she supposed they were) sighs, in the months and weeks before this marriage—Charles’s kissings and sighs?

Well, she supposes that this is it. After all, she is fifty-five, though her body seems to believe itself some other age; it stays thin and smooth, and it demands, it
wants
. Sometimes aching with wanting.

Their wedding was in San Francisco, less because Celeste’s dearest friends Dudley and Sam live out there now (nor because Celeste, after all, began her life as a Californian) than because Charles adores that city. “I’ve always wanted a wedding breakfast at the Palace,” Charles confided to Celeste, in his laughing, bantering way. Celeste would have been happy with a wedding breakfast almost anywhere at all, with Charles.

However, it was finally Celeste who made all the fairly complex arrangements: the suite at the Huntington (Charles’s favorite hotel), wedding breakfast at the Palace. Dinner at Trader Vic’s. And before that the federal judge in his Montgomery Street office.

“But what will we do all day, between breakfast and dinner?” Celeste had half laughingly, half shyly inquired.

“My darling, wait and see.” Suggestive, sexy Charles.

At the wedding breakfast, then, in the huge vaulted green dining room of the Palace, there were Dudley and Sam—very thin and healthy-looking, both of them; Dudley had written that they had
pretty much stopped drinking. And Dudley’s old friend Edward, now living out here too, and whom Celeste had always rather liked. And Edward’s young friend, Freddy something.

But why Edward and Freddy at all, at Celeste’s wedding to Charles? Celeste herself wondered this, later on, and she concluded that she had simply needed to swell her own ranks, as it were, there having been so many friends of Charles’s, from all his prior visits to San Francisco: the slightly overdressed people. (Overdressed to the very practiced eye of Celeste, but perhaps that is how San Franciscans are, these days?) All very prosperous people, up from Atherton, Hillsborough, Woodside, or down from Ross and Kentfield. All Charles’s friends. Now here.

There was no real time or place to talk to Dudley, for which Celeste had longed; she yearned to ask Dudley, How are you now, really? Are you and Sam really happy—really getting along all right? But they could only press their cheeks together, almost meaninglessly, and Celeste could only observe that Dudley was perhaps a little too thin. Her neck looked strained, and her eyes.

Sam did not look thin, or strained, but neither did he look particularly happy. And Edward was as elegantly trim, as punctilious, almost pompous, and going bald, as ever; and his young friend, Freddy, was very dark and handsome—perhaps a shade too handsome? They all talked a lot about the new place where they were living. San Sebastian. “I think I’ve talked Polly into coming out here,” Dudley whispered to Celeste.

“Oh, how very nice for you—for all of you.”

“San Sebastian. Well, I sure like the name,” Charles informed them all. “I have some fond and exciting memories of the one in Spain. From the war.” Nostalgic Charles.

What they did between breakfast and dinner, Celeste and Charles, was to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge for lunch, in Sausalito. They sat out on a wooden deck, above the churning oily water of the bay, before a misty view of the pretty pastel city, San Francisco. They threw scraps of bread to a gnarled old sea gull perched on one of the rope-bound pilings that lined the deck, in the gentle April California sunshine.

And handsome Charles talked to his bride, Celeste, about their honeymoon. Where they would go.

Especially he talked about Venice. “What with one thing and another, I never got there until after the war,” Charles told her, his sincere blue eyes taking on the particular light that any mention of that war—what Celeste has come to think of as Charles’s war—seems to bring.

“Curiously enough I first saw Venice from a boxcar,” says Charles, with his famously attractive smile. “In the summer of ’47. I’d been up in Salzburg, checking out the festival and a seminar that Harvard was running in Schloss Leopoldskron, Max Reinhardt’s old digs. Anyway, our train crossed the border at Innsbruck, and headed down toward Venice. A very hot, misty afternoon, I can see it now. Then at Mestre the train simply stopped, and we were all herded into these boxcars. So right for 1947, right? As the train crossed the causeway, we all peered out. We were standing, of course, holding on and craning our necks, and all over the lagoon there was this incredible rosy light. A pink dusk. And then that magical city, rising up from sea fog. I can’t wait to take you there, my lovely Celeste. To see you there.”

Smiling, widening her dark eyes in his direction, against the sun, behind those eyes Celeste is wondering, is asking: Will you make love to me there? Is that what you mean by seeing me in Venice?

And how about this afternoon? she wonders. Later on, will we take a nap, for love?

But they do not.

The war, that war, Celeste very soon and increasingly comes to understand, was for Charles his own heroic time, his prime time. Charles was too old for active service; also, a prep-school football injury had left him deaf in one ear. However, participate he did: as a correspondent he was vividly everywhere. Following Montgomery across the desert, with Ike all over Europe. And not only did the exotic glamour of those places arouse Charles’s susceptible heart, he was thrilled by the cause itself, Celeste, listening, realized: the Allies were right in some absolute way and Hitler was wrong, in a sense that nothing would ever be quite so right and wrong again, and Charles was not a man at home with ambiguity.

And he now believed in “police actions.” Korea. Vietnam.

Celeste will neither show Charles the letter from Sara nor mention it, ever.

From Harry’s Bar, that day at noon they take the speedboat to Torcello, crossing the May-blue choppy lagoon, past small fishing boats and little islands with single houses, a dock, down near the edge of the water. With sometimes a shrine.

And arrived at the actual, ancient island, Torcello, the boat that carries eager Celeste and proud Charles and the other tourists to whom Celeste, at least, has paid no attention whatsoever—the heavy dark boat with all its polished wood heads up a narrow canal. Past old, old peeling red plaster houses, with spiky flowers and an occasional bandy-legged, decrepit cat.

And Celeste falls in love, in love with Torcello. She might stay there forever, she thinks, like a nun, in one of those houses. She would grow more flowers, and have more and younger cats, but no one would come to disturb her. No more tantalizing proximity of Charles, with his false male scents, and the strong, passive sculpture of his body. She could just live there in Torcello, perhaps sometimes sending for books, magazines from the mainland. From Venice, to which she would never return. She would never emerge from her island.

Charles’s warm, practiced fingers barely graze her naked neck, just then—causing Celeste to shudder, mildly. He asks her, “Whatever are you thinking, my serious darling?”

Aware of her own enormous dark eyes, now turned fully on Charles, “I was thinking that this is the most perfect honeymoon possible,” Celeste tells him. “It’s divine.”

Tawny yellow is the color of fall in northern California: the wrinkled, rounded hills near the sea are crouched there, leonine; on either side of the coastal highway yellowed cornstalks straggle upward from the fields. And near Half Moon Bay, just below the town of San Sebastian, the yellow becomes bright orange, in hundreds and hundreds of pumpkins, lying all carelessly across the fields in late October.

Much of this spectrum of color is visible from the small enclosed deck that Celeste and Charles (her design, actually) have had built just off their bedroom, where on sunny days they often have breakfast as they observe the view: the hills, fields, and the somnolent, bland blue sea.

At the moment, they are discussing a projected party, theirs, with a somewhat odd raison d’être: it is to be a coming-out party, of sorts, for Edward, who has been operated on for an intestinal polyp, “not benign,” as the doctors delicately phrased it, but they also said that “they got it all”; Edward is all right now. (Edward, somewhat to the surprise of Charles and Celeste, found the idea hilarious: “Really? my coming out? I can hardly believe it.” Amid gales of most un-Edward-like laughter.)

“Yes, it is somewhat macabre, as a reason for a party,” Charles agrees, as though Celeste, whose idea the party was, had used that word. “However, however. I like it. I assume you’d do the same for me, my darling.”

“Charles!” Celeste feels genuine shock waves through her narrow chest; it is her first instant of imagining an illness, possibly mortal, of
Charles’s. And she thinks: I could not bear it. But in the next instant she amends this, thinking: After all, I may have to.

In the meantime she waits for Charles to laugh, to make the terrible thing he has just said an innocent joke.

But Charles does not laugh. He frowns. “My darling, please don’t be quite so, so sensitive.”

“Oh, Charles.” Celeste hears her own small hopeless voice, not quite controlled.

The air of this day is not clear, although on the deck where they now linger over cooling coffee there is a little sunshine; below them, across the hills and closer to the sea, the morning fog remains—gray and thick, inimical. However, what Celeste next says is “How beautiful all this is. I think this place will always seem utterly magical to me.”

And now Charles does laugh. He likes to feel himself in a somewhat paternal role with Celeste, and indeed with most women. He always has, like many men of his generation. He is happiest when women are being just a little silly. (A considerable problem with Polly, in the old days, for Polly was never even for an instant silly. Charles these days manages, though, never really to think of Polly as a former lover, since Celeste must never know, and he is aware that Celeste, despite her silliness, is frequently able to read his mind. So he simply does not think of Polly in that way.) “Such a romantic,” he now says, smiling, to Celeste, his wife.