Second Chances (20 page)

Sam frowns and, as though she had not spoken, he says, into space, “Fucking galleries.”

Polly, having walked the uphill miles from her house to Celeste’s, in a gusty, cold, directionless rain, arrives at the Valentine’s party wet and disheveled, and late. She waits for what seems a long moment at the door, and then is simultaneously greeted by three small maids, who divest her of her outer garments. Did it really take all three of them? Polly feels not quite in focus, not quite all there. But before her, against the background of crowd, noise, party mess, is impeccable Celeste, in ice-blue silk. Celeste, saying to Polly, with her most sinuous, social smile, “And this is Bill.”

As she introduces: Charles.

For there before Polly is Charles, reincarnate. But not Celeste’s Charles, not the elderly man who died, but Polly’s Charles: a just-graying, fiftyish man, immensely tall and thin, a narrow face, small nose, with the famous flaring eyebrows. Charles, bending now to shake her hand, saying that he is glad to meet her.

Celeste laughs a little meanly—triumphantly? “Quite a resemblance, isn’t there?” She is clinging to Bill’s arm.

“Yes,” says Polly. “Quite.”

“You still look cold,” says Bill. “Come on in, get comfortable.” And in that instant of his speaking he is not at all Charles; he is in fact so unlike Charles that Polly wonders at the power of that first delusion, that summoned presence of Charles, her Charles. The life within this frame, this skin, whatever its animating force, is quite other than whatever animated Charles, so that Polly is violently aware of the sheer strength of human difference.

This Bill is constantly in motion, gesturing, shifting expressions, whereas Charles tended to be—well, rather passive. “Charles’s face always makes me think of what Forster said about Walter Scott,” Dudley once said, in her musing, slightly musty schoolgirl way. “A landscape that cries out for passion, or something like that. And no passion there.” Well put, Mr. Forster, was Polly’s thought.

Celeste now leans forward to whisper, so that Polly breathes in light sweet French scent. “… getting married,” Celeste murmurs to Polly’s ear. “Or I think we are. At least I’ve asked him. Don’t you think I’m brave?”

“Brave. Yes, you’re very brave,” Polly tells her. And stark raving, out of your bloody mind, she does not also say.

Bill, who has either not heard or pretended not to hear Celeste, now says to Polly, “I do hope we get a chance to talk sometime. Celeste has said all these great things about you. I really want to get to know you.”

“I hope so too,” Polly tells him. She is already longing, miserably, to be away. Even back out in the rain.

Looking around the room (which is not, thank God, decorated with Valentines), she sees a corner with a chair, where surely she could sit down? Surely, after such pounding blows to what passes for her sense of reality, these days?

Celeste and Bill are now off, swept back into the party, and Polly goes over to her corner, out of the fray. She sits down and closes her eyes, and she lets the sounds and the smells of the party wash over her. She feels weak, almost drowned. But she knows that it is necessary to make an effort of some sort. In order to force herself to concentrate she tries making a list of worrying topics, starting, as is her habit, with the worst, the darkest of her thoughts. She thinks, If Celeste is even considering a marriage, she must be all right? The blood she was worried about was minor, innocent?

Then, scurrying off from that issue, the health of Celeste, she next wonders: Could this young man, this Bill, be what was once called an adventurer, just after Celeste’s possessions? She chides herself for this thought instantly, though: as if things were all that would draw anyone to Celeste, her beautiful, strong, superior Celeste.

And lastly she thinks, Oh Christ, a wedding. How many fucking parties am I supposed to survive?

But slowly digesting this series of powerful notions, as she might the courses of an overrich meal, Polly begins to relax a little. She feels overfed, quite stuffed with new information, new ideas. Her very body sags with spent energy, the weight of absorption.

A little later, however, a much simpler thought comes to her. She thinks, Well, of course. It is marriage much more than the actual Charles that Celeste has missed; along those lines old Charles was probably not much to mourn. It’s the marriage that she feels the lack of, and what could be more logical, more perfectly Celeste-like (so practical, so efficient) than to do it again? To go out and find a brand-new Charles. This Bill could even be an actor, impersonating Charles. A new edition, as it were. After all, Polly thinks, we’ve got an actor in the White House. Impersonating a President.

Dudley too has reeled from this whispered announcement from Celeste, which she also was given on arrival. But the effect on Dudley has been quite curious, once those odd words (“I’m getting married”) were absorbed. Dudley has been thrown into a kind of mania. Overexcited, she can’t stop talking, chattering. And all her chatter is a substitute for talking to Celeste, she knows that—a very poor substitute for the deep, long conversation for which she yearns. A conversation that is absolutely out of the question now. But even if she could have this talk with Celeste, Dudley reflects, most of the questions that she would like to ask are inadmissible.

She would like to ask, and she will!
Why didn’t you tell me?
I had no idea that things were so serious with you and this Bill. And I couldn’t quite hear when you said what he did. Did you say doctor, or actor? Or was that some kind of joke? And how incredibly he does look like Charles! At least you could have warned us all about that, Celeste.

Even these more or less conventional questions and responses, then, are not to take place for the moment, despite close friendship, true intimacy. And how much more forbidden are the deeper questions plaguing Dudley’s overheated brain. The sexual questions. The life-and-death questions. The prurient, the essential.

*  *  *

The weather that night has for once not conformed to the wishes of Celeste, who would surely not have chosen such a storm, such lashing gales, wild rains, such violent gusts of wind each time the door is opened, as repeatedly it is. People keep arriving late, from everywhere. Delayed by weather, saying, “Well, you would not believe the Bayshore. An absolute flood. I thought we’d never get here.”

Brooks Burgess and his group from Ross, the farthest away, have been especially late. Passionately observed by Dudley, they enter at last, five people—all shedding wet slickers, Burberrys, dark wet furs smelling of animals. All shed onto the strong dark dry arms of the maids. (Dudley, watching so intently, sees no flicker on those impassive Indian-Spanish-Mexican faces, but how can that be, Dudley wonders. Such wetness, so heavy.)

And although she is standing some distance from them, from that new wet group, Dudley could almost believe herself among them, so clearly does she see and feel the vibrations as Celeste breathes her secret to a chosen one of them, a beautiful dark young woman—someone’s daughter, probably. Dudley feels it as that young woman in her turn reels, as she tries to hide her shock, as she murmurs, “Oh, wonderful.”

And Dudley can hear Celeste as with an out-of-character trilling laugh she tells this daughter (possibly of Brooks Burgess?)—as Celeste says, “In a year, if I’m still alive.”

Chilling! Those words have shivered through Dudley, who quite suddenly, acutely longs to be with Sam, to be with him alone. Sam, who is perversely nowhere to be seen.

Only, there is Brooks Burgess, to whom she had so girlishly looked forward, until this moment of actually seeing him.

Brooks is approaching her now, all purposeful, with an expression that Dudley in one quick instant dislikes. He looks so, so exactly what he is, she thinks: an elderly investment counselor, a senior money man, all slicked steel hair and narrow mercantile eyes. And even though his general look is very sad, and he has visibly aged, Dudley still is hardened toward him.

However, she chimes into his hearty “How great to see you! Much too long” with her own “Marvelous! You haven’t changed!” And she wonders, Is there any way to speak politely without quite so many total lies?

Standing there together, separated for a moment from the party, Dudley and Brooks regard each other with looks that are almost hostile—is each of them, then, so much less than the other expected? Or has that extraordinary announcement of Celeste’s thrown everything off balance, unhinged the whole atmosphere of this party, a sort of greenhouse effect? Wondering all this, Dudley concludes that any explanation at all might do; the important thing is they not remain alone, isolated in this way, for very long, he and she, who have less than nothing to say to each other.

And how adolescent this all is, Dudley next thinks, this quick descent from lust, from sexiness to enmity. And, as she has before, she wonders if old age is indeed, in its way, to be a repetition of adolescence. And she thinks, Oh
dear
, I cannot go through all that again.

Oh, where is Edward? Just now when she needs him, where is he? For it is to Edward, and to Edward alone, that she could voice such a probably preposterous notion.

Edward, though, is across the room, she can see him. In an almost cloistered corner he is talking to Sara. And there (oh dear!) not far from them is Freddy, who is talking to the young man from the diner whom Sara so much dislikes. That David—and how very odd indeed of Celeste to invite him. Celeste’s fantasy of “fixing up” David with Sara persists.

“Well, how’ve you been?” Brooks Burgess asks her.

But just at that moment they are saved from each other by, of all people,
Sam
, unruly, unreliable, most inefficient non-businesslike Sam, arriving so punctually in response to Dudley’s need of him. “Darling, you remember Brooks Burgess?” (She can hear a small tremor in her own voice.)

“Oh, of course. How’ve you been?”

The two exchange hearty handshakes.

Sam in fact has been watching Dudley for some time; deliberately he positioned himself so that he could see her perfectly, whereas to her he remained invisible. (He knows himself to be good at this: I am an artist of camouflage, he has said to himself.) She was hidden by the
corpulent bright madras body of some old pal of Charles’s from Woodside, a former Stanford football great. A conveniently huge man.

Sam could watch, then, the greeting and the ensuing scene between Dudley and Brooks Burgess. A scene of which Dudley has dreamed for years, Sam knows: since that party, which must now be ten years back, the golden harvest moon party, the sultry sexy party at which everyone seemed to have taken some sort of erotic energy pill, Sam thought, some sexual spike in the punch. And since then all Dudley’s sexual fantasies have had Brooks Burgess’s name on them. Impossible to say how Sam knows this: surely not from anything said by Dudley. He simply knows, and he is always right, about Dudley.

Observing Dudley, Sam is also as acutely observant of himself, and he inwardly remarks: Twenty years ago, or thirty—and good Lord, I’ve spent most of my life with this woman, this crazy foreign Bostonian, this Dudley—in those days I would have been watching her hot and sick with jealous blood, my whole body poisoned, enflamed, and very likely I would have made some god-awful scene about this, big shouting, schoolboy words thrown out like garbage. Not hitting anyone, at least I never hit, but a lot of ugly noise, and then lurching out. With or without Dudley. Blind crazy drunk.

And now, he thinks, now I am old and sober, and instead of jealousy I feel the most excruciating tender compassion for my wife, who is also old and sober and sometimes very silly. And I hardly know which emotion is the more difficult to bear.

He sees then, from her gestures and her posture, that Dudley is no longer interested, not in any way, in Brooks Burgess. But there the two of them are, in a social trap of their own making: they are standing alone, they have to talk for a while. It’s enough to make Sam laugh a little, which he manages not to do: invisible people don’t laugh; it’s one of the rules of camouflage.

He sees that Dudley would very much like him to come to her rescue, even though she cannot see him, and after a few more minutes, which he has to admit he enjoys, Sam does just that: he goes over to where Dudley stands with that Brooks Burgess.

And when Dudley says “Darling, you remember Brooks Burgess?” that fellow soon takes himself off. He is not all bad, Sam judges; he knew when to go.

Brilliant-eyed, as though she couldn’t wait to speak, Dudley asks
him, “But what do you think?” She holds his arm as she whispers. “Celeste,” she breathes. “Getting married!”

“I think it won’t happen,” Sam tells her. Until the words appeared he had not known that that was his thought.

“Oh, Sam, how can you say that? What do you mean, it won’t happen?”

He does not know what he means, nor does he want to explain, not even to try. And this is a familiar stance of his, quite enraging to Dudley, he knows that. But he can’t, he can’t help it. “I could be wrong,” he temporizes.

“You’re never wrong, that’s what’s so irritating. Oh Sam! But where did she find him, do you know? So amazing, the resemblance to Charles.”

“I think she said they met at the IRS,” says Sam in a deliberate, factual way.

“The IRS? Darling, what an awful joke. You’re losing your hearing. I can’t believe Celeste would have said that. I thought he was an importer.”

“You mean, even if it were true Celeste wouldn’t say it?”

They both laugh at the accuracy of this: impossible to imagine Celeste ever saying, Actually I met him at the IRS.

“But actually,” Sam tells Dudley, “they don’t look so much alike, this Bill and Charles. It’s more like someone just wearing Charles’s clothes.”

“Darling, whatever do you mean?” (She is always asking him this, Dudley knows—hopeless, he hates explanations.)

“Just what I said. Don’t ask me to explain.”

“But Sam.”

However, at that moment, some beautiful woman from somewhere, someone they both know, arrives with flurries of kisses and greetings for them both, thus occupying Dudley, so that Sam doesn’t even have to pretend to explain what he means.