Second Chances (29 page)

No, neither illness nor the weight of ownership will stop Freddy or even cause him to delay, not now. And at times Edward would like to shout at him, “Well, then go! If you’re leaving, don’t hang around. Just seeing you every day is a torment to me now. You constantly remind me of your absence.”

Celeste, who just now wants very much to see Sara, waits disconsolately for her, hearing wind and rain, aware of cold, in her supposedly weatherproof boudoir. These concrete discomforts are so minor, though, as to be almost unnoticed, so preoccupied is Celeste with the larger issues that confront her: her secret illness (daily, increasingly, she knows what it is, what it must—can only be), and an extremely
upsetting talk with her lawyer, who has just told her (in his own words) that she had really better cool it, spending-wise. Or that is what it comes down to, finally. He talked in an elaborate (to Celeste, almost incomprehensible) way about interest rates, the gross national product, treasury bills, gold, futures—as Celeste understood the simple fact that she now has less money than she used to. Less than she thought she did.

For herself she does not really, honestly mind. She is not so silly as to imagine that she is poor, and, for her, money seems an abstraction, really. She would like to divest herself of everything, she sometimes thinks. She thought this just after Charles died; she would like to strip her life down to one room somewhere, a few dollars a day for food, and a library card. She does not need all this encumbering property, this weight of a house and furnishings, clothes and jewelry, silver and china, crystal. But (and this is what she does mind) she had meant to give it away herself, to leave almost everything to Sara, who needs money; Sara will need money for whatever she plans to do next, Celeste is quite sure of that. Celeste had meant to leave it all to Sara, with a few bequests to friends, mainly Dudley.

And she wanted to leave a little money to the animal shelter. Charles’s allergies to both cats and dogs made having pets impossible; before Charles Celeste had always had cats. And she thought of the animals that she and Charles might have had (rather like imagining unborn children); her notion of living in the country had always included a lot of animals, even a horse, some goats. She imagined four or five lovely fat brown Burmese cats, like Polly’s, and a pair of Dalmatians. And strays, shy at first, nervous and hungry, whom she, Celeste, would feed and curry and pet back into sleekness, to pleasure in life. She even felt a sort of guilt toward these imagined creatures she has not taken in, not saved. (Not having children has never bothered her at all; as she sees it, the world is a decreasingly fit place for humans, and heaven knows there are already far too many of them—of us.)

But she has very little money, it now turns out, to leave either to Sara or to the unknown animals. And since she is dying (surely) it is too late now to rectify anything: too late to take in strays, or to be of much real help to Sara.

How did I ever get to be so old, Celeste wonders, helplessly regarding
her dry pale lined face in the mirror as she waits there for Sara.
How?

She is not even entirely sure what it is that she wants to talk to Sara about. She only feels an urgency to be clear, at last, with at least one person. With Sara, whom she has chosen to love.

She does want to talk to Sara; however, before she knows it Celeste has fallen asleep.

And so it is not until the next day that she has Sara alone—by which time she has decided not to mention money to Sara at all.

The next day at breakfast (yogurt and brown rice and tuna: Celeste’s prescription for a healthy start to the day) she remarks to Sara, “I do sometimes wonder if I haven’t been a little harsh, after all, in my judgment of Bill.” She had not meant to say this (perhaps the healthful food induced such positive thoughts?).

Sara mutters unintelligibly.

And so Celeste continues, “I do think, my dear Sara, that it’s best to try to accept people more or less as they are. Not trying to make them into other people.”

“Actually I’m pretty sure I was right about Bill. In fact, I’m quite sure. He was in Berkeley and he used another name.”

Celeste’s worst laugh is a harsh, curt sound, almost a snort. She does this now, before saying, “I think Bill just didn’t want to get married, and when he heard me saying that we were he ran off. Not exactly elegant behavior. However.” She sniffs conclusively, obviously wishing to have the final word.

“I know I was right about him,” Sara mutters.

Just outside the windows of their small breakfast patio, the dark green leaves of some newly potted plants now drip cold rivulets from the heavy, enveloping fog. However, high in the sky are thin pale yellow patches, faint clues that later on the fog will burn off, leaving in its wake a bright, possible new day. And this promise serves to lighten and brighten, a little, the tight dark mood into which Sara and Celeste have quite suddenly fallen.

“In fact, I think I’ll go and walk right now,” announces Sara.

Celeste’s smile is infinitely tolerant, infinitely wise and knowing, as she says to Sara, “Well, very well, my darling. Off you go.”

After many long phone conversations during which various trips were projected, discussed, with alternatives suggested (Carmel? Tahoe? Mendocino?), Brooks Burgess and Dudley have gone to Houston, Texas—“of all places,” Dudley has just managed not to say. It made a certain sense, though: Brooks had business there. (“What’s left of the business in those parts,” he told Dudley; “you wouldn’t believe what’s happened to oil.”) Also, he knew of a first-rate hotel. (“It’s even quite beautiful, you’ll like it.”) And, as neither of them did say, they were most unlikely, in Houston, to run into anyone they knew.

Somewhat to Dudley’s surprise, Brooks has turned out to be quite right about the hotel. Their room is beautiful, a large, irregularly shaped space, the far end of which is all glass and faces out into some woods, all cool and green, dark boughs, ferns—as though the room itself were suspended out there, hung from trees.

Inside, it is all very underplayed, discreet, pale “natural” fabrics, “understated” furniture. Pale brown sheets on the king-sized bed, on which Dudley now lies, trying to plan what to say next to Brooks, who will be done with some sort of meeting in an hour or so. Whom she is to meet for lunch in the bar, and to whom she must (obviously) say something.

“It doesn’t matter,” she would like to say, but that is a patent lie: sex does matter quite a lot, everyone knows that now. And so she amends or edits to “We don’t have to let this matter.” However, they do have to let it matter, of course they do: their failure at love (a quite mutual failure, in Dudley’s view, although poor Brooks no doubt
blames himself alone, as nice men of a certain generation will)—
their
failure will profoundly affect whatever relationship exists between the two of them, if it does not end it once and for all, for good, today.

Suppose she said something to the effect that “I like you anyway”? But no, that is an impossible sentence to say, considerably worse to hear. The point is, she hardly knows Brooks Burgess, and the naked, strenuous tussles undergone by their proximate but unjoined bodies have not served to increase their intimacy.

Dudley sighs as she considers how old age becomes more and more unfair to the old, instead of less so. As if things were not always bad enough, in terms of incapacities, weakening of most of one’s faculties, not to mention certain aesthetic losses, now, in addition to all that, these days one must contend with a new mythology holding that most old people—most normal old people, that is—are still sexually quite all right; they are (they are supposed to be) capable of doing everything they did before, if (possibly) a little less lively and speedy about it all.

This is not fair.

What she and Brooks will actually do, Dudley in a very quick flash perceives, is pretend it never happened. And what she can most kindly and tactfully do is aid and abet that pretense. She is sure of this; in fact she sees no other course as remotely possible.

In the meantime she gets up and gets into her shower.

Or, she thinks, under the shower, she sees no other course for people of their age and generation and general “background.” If they were twenty or thirty years younger, she thinks, in the course of a very long shower (noting too that her body is really okay for sixty-five: surely scrawny is better than fat? Even visible tendons are preferable to sags?), then perhaps some sort of discussion would be in order: openness, confrontation, whatever.
Perhaps
. Dudley is actually quite unable to imagine such a conversation, nor is she convinced of the efficacy of such talk. God knows it would never have worked with Sam, with his eternal Southern politeness, his acres of reserve, his puritan depths.

But isn’t there, really, still much to be said for simple tact and politeness, even for the avoidance of certain painful issues?

Dudley wonders about all this, is not at all sure what she actually thinks. In the meantime, out of her shower, she creams her face with
moisturizer, deodorizes her already odorless body, and clothes herself in immaculate silks. Adds perfume, and is ready for lunch with Brooks, who is technically not her lover. Not yet.

The bar, where Brooks has as yet not arrived, is also a pleasant, airy-looking room, deceptively cool. Sipping her Perrier, then, for no reason, or no reason that she can think of, Dudley is stricken with the most acute and painful longing for Sam. Ah, if only it were he, her old Sam, who would at any moment now walk through that wide, brass-fitted door, past the hostess (pout-mouthed, blonde) and over to her, to Dudley. His wife.

What she feels at this moment is the simplest, purest and most unbearable sense of loss: no more ambivalence, mixed memories, just loss. And she thinks of her joyless striving with Brooks, in bed, and experiences an awful wave of guilt for that most terrible act of treachery to Sam—poor dead, defenseless Sam.

Unhappily, for well over half an hour Dudley is quite alone with such thoughts—and how unlike Brooks to be so late, she also thinks. Is it possible that he has simply fled, hating failure and thus hating her by association? Leaving her there in Houston, of all unlikely places?

Since Dudley has not been outside, she is used by now to the air-conditioned cool; she even wears a light sweater draped over her silk-linen shirt, her extravagant (futile!) purchase for this purposeful trip. Other people, however, those just entering the bar, show marked effects of the heat outside. In their barest clothes, their naked shoulders or rolled-up shirt-sleeves, they enter shivering, but smiling: ah! delicious cool.

Several people, Dudley has noticed, have come in as though in shock, their faces seeming to register some disaster. Or has she imagined this? Recently, especially since Sam died, she has felt so often a sort of weight of sorrow, of generalized misfortune: Ethiopian ghosts, the hungry homeless everywhere. Bomb testing. Arms. Is it her own distracted imagination, then, that she now sees reflected in these faces from outside?

So absorbed in watching, wondering, Dudley for an instant does not register the fact of Brooks, who is approaching. Unsmiling, and
also with a look of catastrophe. Who hurriedly kisses her cheek (a husbandly kiss, it occurs to Dudley). Who says, “Really ghastly news. An earthquake in Mexico City. So close, really. Some people around here felt it.” And he goes on to tell her: hundreds killed, buried, lost. Buildings crumbled, toppled. Looting. Fires.

As if they too were victims (and, in a sense, ultimately they are, Dudley believes), they stare at each other, in genuine fear, near panic. Dudley and Brooks Burgess.

It is Brooks who says, “You know that feeling, that inner voice that says we’ll be next?”

Dudley answers him, “Very well.”

One of the things that Dudley is later to remember about that moment is her very conscious thought that now Freddy will leave Edward: in a few weeks, after the aftershocks, when the scope of the disaster is plainer, the needs of its victims clearer, Freddy will simply go down there. He will find for himself some extremely useful function; he will in effect lose himself in helping. From time to time he will write to Edward, perhaps to all of them. But neither Edward nor any of them will ever see him again.

And Dudley thinks, Ah, poor poor Edward, poor old dear. Maybe he and I should move in together, somehow? Try it out? And then, at that moment, she laughs a little at herself for such a visionary, such an entirely unrealistic program—at such a moment.

She is also to remember the day of the earthquake, with a twinge of very New England guilt, as the day on which she and Brooks first successfully made love. That afternoon, as though they had been doing it all their lives, they very gently caressed, their essential parts joined and quickened. They enjoyed.

In Houston, Texas.

Polly and Celeste, having met for coffee in the diner where irritating David once worked (David having suddenly disappeared), could not have presented a greater contrast in style: Celeste in her old red Chanel,
Polly in something black from either Cost Plus or Berkeley (this is Celeste’s assessment). Celeste’s perfect silver-white waves. Polly’s semi-baldness, wrapped in an Indian-looking red-black scarf.

Wryly they take note of each other. No need for either to comment, really, the opposition in costume being too familiar. However, Polly does say, “Well, at least we’ve both stuck to an anarchist color scheme.”

At which Celeste smiles and allows, “Appropriately enough.”

It was Polly, though, who telephoned Celeste and suggested this meeting (“I’ve heard so much about that damn place, how about meeting me there?”), which for Polly was unusual. Clearly she has something of great importance to divulge, which Celeste quite unaccountably dreads, does not want to hear. She has even thought of manufacturing some excuse to leave—she wanted to leave almost as soon as she got there.

And Polly does look rather severe. She has on her lecturing face, which Celeste with some reason has learned to fear.