Second Chances (19 page)

“Oh.”

“But look, Celeste. There’re five or six first-rate hospitals in San Francisco. A couple of hundred of good doctors, probably. I don’t like them either, but this is nothing for you to fuck around with.”

“Do you have to use that word?”

“Yes, sometimes I do. I repeat, this is not something for you to fuck around with by yourself. I just don’t know very much. I don’t keep up. And I think it’s to my credit that I know how little I know. Look, Celeste—”

Celeste sighs deeply, a sigh that is infinitely tired. “I’m just too
old for all that. Young doctors, new treatments, hospitals, new machines. Oh, I’d just rather—I’d rather be sick.”

“You’d rather die, are you saying?”

Celeste’s laugh is light and almost convincing. “Darling Polly, don’t be so melodramatic. Please. I could live for years and years. I’m in terrifically good shape, actually.”

A pause. “Sure you are. Except for this bleeding you’re great. And it could be nothing. But, Celeste, you’ve got to find out.”

“Oh, darling Polly, I will. I promise.”

Later that same day, during Celeste’s own bath, which Sara well knows will take at least half an hour, at that time she makes her own phone call. Collect, to Alex in New York. (He has tactfully suggested this arrangement to avoid any possible questions from Celeste about the phone bill; Sara has gathered that money is not among his problems, but she still feels an occasional spurt of guilt over the length of their conversations. Which Celeste would certainly notice.)

“Well, things could be worse, I guess,” Sara now tells him. “But this filthy weather isn’t helping any. California! I’m beginning to feel like I carry some plague around with me, everywhere I go it rains. And Celeste is—well, she’s a very positive thinker. She tries so hard. And she’s got something going with some guy, some ‘Bill’ up in San Francisco. Honestly, she waits for his calls like someone in junior high, and then she just giggles a lot. But she means well, I guess. And I like her friends pretty well, I always have. Dudley, she’s the sort of old but very sexy Boston type. Married to the painter Sam Venable. Remember him? And a great woman named Polly, everyone’s sort of afraid of her, they can’t get a handle on her. And a nice gay couple, two guys. It’s interesting, really. Watching to see what they make of me, for example.”

Alex tells her, “My parents are off in St. Martin. Their idea of what to do in the winter. Retirement is very hard on the rich.”

“This dumb thing has happened, though,” Sara next says. “There’s this stupid guy, in fact he’s a waiter—nothing against waiters of course but he’s the kind who tells you what his name is. So goddam friendly. Hi, I’m David. And everywhere I go I seem to run into him, and this is a very small town. The worst of it is everyone
else seems to think he’s ‘cute’—they use that word. Celeste would like to fix us up, I think.
Jesus
.”

Alex laughs. “It sounds very Californian out there. Oddly enough.” And then he tells her, “Guess what, my shrink set me free. Enough already, she said.”

“Well, that’s good, I guess?”

“I think so. Anyway, it leaves a lot more time and energy for more interesting areas than my psyche. Like Spanish, which is really beginning to come together for me. I’m reading Neruda—fantastic.”

“You can give readings in Nicaragua.”

“Don’t kid, I just might.”

This is more or less the tone of most of their conversations, which take place with increasing frequency. Alex and Sara, long distance.

Dudley and Edward, inveterate old walkers, share a New England commitment to hardiness. In the course of that long, wet, unanticipated season, they take not one but several long rain walks, not always as much for the pleasure of the walk itself (impossible not to get wet, not to feel the penetrating cold, the winds) as for the ensuant sense of virtue, even of moral rectitude. As both Sam and Freddy, though separately, have remarked, they have tended to come home terribly (most annoyingly) pleased with themselves.

On certain other days, though, some sudden shifted view can make it all more than worthwhile, in fact breathtaking, memorable: the wind-pulled skies, and shifting, kaleidoscopic formations of clouds.

As now. They stand on a hilltop, its deep thick green grasses all flattened by winds, even the gray outcroppings of rock lying low, as though worn down by the elements. A moment of clearing: a massive parting of gray clouds to blue skies, the sun. And from where they stand, on that broad smooth flat height, Dudley and Edward can see everything. In the distance, flat and shining, lies the sea, and before the sea, stretching, reaching far out into the water are long green fingers of land, curving to estuaries, descending down to beaches. An enormous view, so much green land, black water, so much gray sky, with its sunny burst of blue.

To Edward it looks like the Algarve, in Portugal, before (he remembers) the Germans came and ruined it all, with their greedy developments, terrible apartment buildings, condominiums. He is thinking fondly and sadly of a now distant trip to Spain and Portugal that he and Freddy took, soon after first meeting.

Dudley thinks that it looks like the coast of Ireland, where she has never been; but all that green, that must be more or less how Ireland looks, mustn’t it? She hopes that she and Sam will make that trip; her magazine still wants her to do it, but she vaguely feels that they will not, that for some reason or other Sam will refuse to go.

However, instead of mentioning these associations, Dudley and Edward continue their already begun conversation, which concerns Celeste and her party. Celeste and Sara. Celeste and “Bill.”

“It is rather scaring, actually,” Edward remarks. “The extent and the strength of the fantasy involved.”

Dudley ventures, “But it won’t necessarily fall apart, do you think? Celeste has the most enormous powers of will.”

“Well, that’s quite true. But I don’t think even Celeste can will herself back to being a young mother. With, as she puts it, a ‘beau.’ ”

Dudley laughs, just barely. “I don’t think it’s entirely motherhood that she wants with Sara. In a way she just wants to like her, and maybe somehow to help her. Of course it’s a way of having Emma back too.”

Edward sniffs, from the cold rather than in contempt. “ ‘Wanting to like’ has always a rather ominous ring, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, would I. It’s what Sam’s girls all said about me, the new Yankee mom. ‘We’d like to like Dudley,’ they said, more or less in chorus. But with Celeste and Sara—well, I do think there’s more good will involved, I mean it’s not just
will
. Sam’s daughters really didn’t want to like me at all. Of course not.”

While they have had this short exchange, the skies have closed again; now everything is gray, and the folded clouds threaten rain.

Edward coughs.

“You do see a doctor sometimes?” Dudley asks him.

A curt laugh. “The irony of it all. Our doctor, Freddy’s and mine, has just died of AIDS. But yes, we’re checking out a new one.” Another laugh. “Not saying so to each other, we’re looking for one who’s not, uh, gay.”

“Lord, Edward.”

“Indeed. Well, time to start back?”

They turn back, heading into light rain.

“I just can’t say that I like Sara very much,” confides Dudley, the
next to speak. Out of habit, and for comfort, she walks very close to Edward, in the scent of his damp tweed. “She’s so, so abrupt.”

Celeste did indeed bring Sara to Dudley and Sam’s house for tea, that day: Sara, now a large and silent young woman who for the most part simply stared at them, or so it had seemed to Dudley. When spoken to, she answered rather curtly. She had lived in a great many places, she told them. None for long. No significant jobs. And then, with somewhat more feeling: Yes, she was genuinely tired of living like that. She liked it here. (This last had, to Dudley, a sound of defiance: I like it here even if you don’t like me to be here, was what Dudley heard.)

And the call on Edward and Freddy was quite similar in effect, at least.

“She stares so,” Edward now remarks to Dudley. “With those quite feral black eyes. If only she’d pick up a little lash-batting from Celeste.”

Dudley giggles. “Oh, maybe she will!” And then, “Darling Edward, whatever in the world would I do without you?”

Edward frowns, a disclaimer, and he tries to take up their talk. “What we are saying—aren’t we?—is that we’re worried about Celeste. Isn’t that about it?”

“Well, yes.” Dudley hurries along beside him. “But since you put it like that, should we, really? Sometimes worry seems a form of condescension toward a friend, you know? ‘Poor So-and-So, she just can’t cope.’ Whereas the truth of it is that Celeste copes better than anyone, ever.” She adds, “Sam hates it unspeakably when I worry over him. It makes him think he must be dying.”

“So does Freddy. But the point is, I think that Celeste has not, as one says, seemed quite herself. Since Charles died. And this ‘Bill.’ You must admit that it’s odd that none of us, still, have met him.”

“Sara did tell me something very strange about him.” Dudley has in fact been wondering whether or not to tell Edward this strange thing that Sara said, one morning when Dudley phoned Celeste and got Sara instead, and they made a sort of conversation—soon getting around to Bill. That is where Celeste was, having lunch in San Francisco with Bill.

Now, in the gathering, thickening rain, she decides that she will
tell Edward what Sara said—what Sara said that Celeste had said to her. “Sara told me that Celeste told her that Bill is, uh, gay.”

“Strange,” murmurs Edward, through rain.

“Well, supposedly we all get to meet Bill next week, at the party.”

“You think he won’t show up?”

“How you do read my mind,” marvels Dudley.

In from the rain, in her own house, even before her awareness of warmth and dryness, Dudley senses the absence of Sam. How she feels it, always, his not being there. And she feels too, quite loonily, after almost forty years of Sam, the familiar clutch of fear: where has he gone off to, and will he come back to her, ever? These days, though, it is less the old primitive fear of abandonment than a new one: that Sam has died. Well, men in their middle sixties, her own age as well as Sam’s, do die; they are simply found dead somewhere, sometimes. Given out.

Stripping off wet clothes and hanging them up to dry, turning on her bath, into which she pours an exuberant amount of bath salts, carnation scented, Dudley tries to remember. Did Sam say he was going somewhere?
Is
she losing her memory?

In the tub, however, in the fragrant steam, all slithery and soaped, Dudley tries not to think so much of Sam as of her own body, and, not unconnectedly, of Brooks Burgess, whom she has not seen since their encounter (so sexy! so promising) at the crazy drunken all-yellow party that Celeste and Charles gave in—dear heaven—1975. Ten years back. When she was only fifty-five—itself a laughable phrase, like “only forty.” And the worst one could charitably say (the worst Brooks Burgess could legitimately say, or think) is that she looks a little scrawny. Too emphatically tendoned, somewhat. Dry-skinned. Too white. But no flab, no (whatever is that new word?) no cellulite.

And Brooks will, presumably, be at Celeste’s party. Her Valentine’s party, next week.

They have not seen each other during all that time; with Brooks up in Marin County they were not likely just to run into each other, and also, sadly and more to the point, for most of those years his wife was very sick, and then dying. Brooks was engaged in her care and
comforting, up until a couple of years ago, when she died. And so presumably Brooks is all right now? Is, more or less, “over it”?

But I would never get over Sam, is what Dudley next thinks. After all, I never have. And in the succeeding instant she remembers in a flash (and how could she have forgotten for several hours?) that Sam was going up to the city, to San Francisco, with some new slides. Oh, poor old Sam, and how could she forget?

She hurries out of the tub, dries, powders and scents herself and takes time over her clothes, choosing things that Sam especially likes. Gray silk and a silver necklace he once gave her. And, like a fifties magazine wife, she is in the kitchen fussing over drinks and dinner when Sam arrives. Except that the drinks are their old tomato and clam juice, with lemon.

Sam looks awful—so bad that Dudley instead of asking how things went begins to babble on her own. “Darling, such a rainy day for your drive! But Edward and I were terribly brave and took our walk anyway. Actually it was quite beautiful, though. Those moments of clearing. The most extraordinary light.”

So used to Sam’s face, Dudley can still be surprised by changes, by new or perhaps simply deepened lines, a slackening of flesh, of tone. He gets no exercise; she has sometimes briskly, imperiously thought that he should take up something. However, at other times she sees that it is of course not that simple: age and life itself have lined Sam’s face. Nothing to do with lack of exercise, or fat.

“Every time I go up to the city, I’m glad we don’t live there, gladder and gladder” is what Sam says.

Which Dudley understands to mean: No luck, no interested gallery.

“It’s getting so much worse, so fast,” Sam goes on. “But I guess most cities are. High rises and dirt. Crowds, panhandlers. But the very visible new poor. That’s something I hadn’t quite seen. Lines of middle-class-looking people at St. Anthony’s Dining Room. I drove by there, not exactly on purpose but there I was. And there they were.”

Dudley shudders. As always, listening to Sam, she has seen what he has just described: a long line of formerly doing-all-right people, with anxious, apologetic smiles, embarrassed small laughs. People
feeling in the wrong, simply being there, where they are. Standing in the rain, the wind and cold.

“It’s horrible,” she says. “Terrifying.”

“It sure is.”

The moment between them then contains such sadness, such vast regret for everything in the world gone wrong. For themselves gone wrong, old and exposed to frightful weather, interior weather. An unbearable moment, which Dudley must break, she thinks, and so she says what she had not meant at all to say to Sam. She asks him, “How would you feel about going to Ireland? The magazine wants me to, they’d pay—”