Second Chances (31 page)

“He’s in something called ISA. Intelligence Support Activity. Quite an ominous title when you think about it,” Alex tells her.

“I won’t ask how you managed to find this out.”

“Well, don’t.” Alex goes on, “The ISA is bad news. They don’t just collect intelligence, they come up with arms and supplies for their chosen causes. Guess which. They’ve done a lot of damage in El Salvador, and they’re keeping right on at it.”

“If they’re so high-level I’m surprised they took on our Priest.”

“He’s a lot more popular than he was at one time.”

It is as though, at that moment, both the dawn and the sea and the invisible goats disappear from Sara’s mind, and she is back in her more customary inner landscape: bloody deaths in teeming, fetid jungles; small straw villages bombed and burning; children maimed and screaming, screaming. Men and women screaming, weeping, moaning. Her own total helplessness, rage. “Jesus Christ,” is what she says, thinking less of Bill Priest, an unimportant person, really, than of the others, the big-money people in New York and Washington. The power brokers, manipulators, with their cold, cold blood, their discreet paunches, withered genitals.

This is what Sara has seen and felt for what now seems forever, as though there had been no lapse, no gap between Vietnam and Nicaragua.

“You aren’t listening,” Alex tells her. “Still asleep?”

“No. Yes.”

Alex continues, going on about the odd career of Bill Jones Priest: fag-bashing in Hollywood, in the days when this was an approved
activity. (Somehow this is not much of a surprise.) The FBI in Berkeley, the IRS in San Francisco. CIA. ISA. Nicaragua.

Sara listens, her mind or part of her mind recording all that he says—but actually she is considering the dull, implacable familiarity of it all, the terrible predictability of contemporary evil. It is as though all the people you most dislike turn out to be related to each other, is one way to think of it.

Alex is saying, “You know, I’d really like to see you.”

“Oh, Alex, me too. But I’m almost scared to. I don’t want to risk—oh, you know.” She almost says, We’re getting along so well the way we are.

“Sure, I know. Or I guess I do.”

As Sara hangs up, she is thinking that, really, neither of them knows anything at all about the other. “Knows” in the sense of being able to predict the behavior of. But does anyone, in that sense, ever know another person? Sara has no idea.

Sara goes back to her dream.

A long time ago when Alex and Sara made love, acid-high or stoned on grass or even straight, their two bodies seemed sometimes to become submarine aquatic plants, all wet and wavering together. No more private shapes, or parts. Even what Sara had experienced as his extreme blond beauty, as opposed to her own heavy darkness—all that was lost in their merging.

She remembers this, she thinks of it now, recalling the sensations, the very aura of sex with Alex, far more vividly than people are supposed to be able to remember sex.

And she knows that one of the reasons she puts him off is her fear that they will fail—will have tried, as of course they must, for repetition, and not made it. That now they can only come up with an ordinary sexual exchange.

And Sara lacerates herself for this fear of sexual failure. What a coward she is, after all!

Or, she also thinks, I am really worse than Celeste could possibly be. Talk about a stupid, a totally retro-romantic.

*  *  *

Missing Freddy, Edward is genuinely frightened by the intensity of his feelings: such a heavy, pressing vacancy within himself, such real derangement. He misses Freddy so badly, is so wholly caught up in Freddy’s absence, his lack, that the smallest decisions for himself have become impossible: which tie to put on in the morning, whether to have a piece of fish or a chop for dinner. Whether to go upstairs and lie down or to read the paper in the living room.

The problem is, he really doesn’t want to do anything, for nothing that he does will bring about Freddy’s return.

Remembering Freddy is as constant in his life as breathing is. Thirty years of Freddy’s face, his mouth, his walk. His most intimate smells. All that is as close to Edward as his own breath, as much a part of him.

Plus which, Edward is running out of money. He has done nothing with real estate (could not bring himself even to think of it) for many months, and in ways that he cannot focus on his investments have all gone bad. When he is able to think at all in that direction, Edward believes that a crash is coming, that the economic world as rich people like himself have known it is coming to an end. And he simply could not care less.

In a year or so he will probably have to sell his house, Edward thinks, and then live God knows where. Be a street person, like those he has seen all over San Francisco, these days.

And who cares? Who gives a flying fig or a doughnut hole what happens to a silly old queer, who is almost dead, who is felled by the loss of his love?

Victor says, “But, my dear, my most esteemed Polly, quite naturally everyone knew.”

“But, Victor—oh, my God! How incredibly embarrassing! What a total fool I feel.”

“You should not feel a fool. They all respected you deeply, and they felt most grateful for all the good that you did. So much money!
To find it carefully on one’s doorstep. Your reasons for doing it as you did are your own, no single person of our town would presume to question your right to do as you did.”

“Oh—”

“And everyone—most especially myself, I should tell you—appreciated the dangers in which you placed yourself on those nights.”

“Oh, Victor, dear God!”

“However, my dearest, it is no longer necessary that you carry out your wishes in a fashion quite so extreme. And so dangerous to yourself. I can most easily leave an envelope or a package beneath any door or upon any steps that you should specify to me. And in such a way that what I have done will be known to no one.”

“Victor, I have never in my life felt such an ass.”

At this Victor looks so shocked that Polly wonders if her Spanish has been at fault. He only says, however, “We must not think of it in this way. There is no reason for shame.”

Polly sighs against his naked chest. “Maybe we could just turn out the light.”

“If you wish. I had wanted though to speak further of our trip. I think that from Barcelona we go by train to Zaragoza, do you agree?”

“I want to be sure that you understand absolutely everything,” the young doctor tells Celeste, who is not listening, really, to a word he says. Not listening to the words themselves, that is, but quite clearly hearing a voice and seeing a person: Dr. John Bascomb. A small wiry man with the nervous look of a tennis player. Very crinkled (well, kinky) short red hair, darting light blue eyes. So much like Celeste’s very early husband, Bix Finnerty, who must be dead by now; he could be Bix’s son, and of course is not.

But it is odd, this recurrence of physical types in one’s life, Celeste has thought. First Charles comes back as Bill, and now here is Bix again, or almost, as Dr. Bascomb. Who at least is trying to be considerably nicer than Bix was.

“It’s not exactly a complicated procedure, Celeste,” this doctor continues. “But it could make you a little uncomfortable. That’s why we give you something intravenously.”

“What?” asks Celeste, who in her hospital gown, back opening, is perched on the edge of the examining table. Under these conditions, and since he seems to insist on using her first name, and especially in the light of all the extremely ugly things she has told him—Celeste now sees no point in verbal formalities. “What, intravenously?” she asks.

“Ah, Valium, probably. It won’t put you out, I need you to be awake so that you can follow certain directions. And any discomfort you’ll share with me right away.”

“I’d be delighted.”

This small joke does not especially amuse either one of them;
uneasily, distrustfully they regard each other. Doctor and patient. John Bascomb and Celeste.

To regain control, perhaps, he goes on talking. “As I’ve tried to explain, I find nothing intrinsically alarming in your symptoms. Nine times out of ten, just an innocent polyp. Of course our President was not so lucky, but then he’s done remarkably well ever since.
Remarkably
.”

“To think that I would turn out to have something in common with our President.” Celeste widens her eyes in a way that would have signaled heavy irony to any of her friends, had any friend been present.

“Well, my hunch is that you don’t. My educated guess is that—well, we’ll just see. Of course we plan to do a biopsy on whatever we find up there—”

At his “up there” Celeste involuntarily shudders, controlling the small spasm as best she can—and quite stops listening.

She has become extremely calm, she observes of herself. The calm of death, or almost. Her true idea, though, is that this examination, which the doctor continues to describe in such detail (he must at some point have been instructed to “share” with patients, to let them in on things, not to be just an inhuman doctor), including the horrifying preparations that Celeste must begin (if she is to make them at all) tomorrow—all this will very likely kill her off right away. And this idea has served to banish her ancient fears of malignancy: it won’t matter at all (to her) what it was; she will be safely dead.

“… anything you’d like to ask?” Poor anxious Dr. Bascomb, who is visibly not enjoying this either, who never chose this role of explainer, teacher.

“Do you lose many patients in this process?”

“
Lose?
” He looks stricken. “Oh, no, never lost one yet.” He has quickly recovered. “Not doing a colonoscopy. Angiograms, now, they can be a little dangerous.”

“I suppose there’s always a first time,” Celeste tells him, unhelpfully.

In a way she was right, Celeste thinks: she is much too old and too fragile, really, to have withstood such treatment—nevertheless, withstand
it she did, and the bed in which she lies is her own. Her own bed, own room, own beautiful and familiar home.

Though her entrails—everything inside her was mauled and pummeled; she feels battered and bruised. The nice bowl of consommé that Sara brought her cools on her nightstand—impossible even to sip.

However: there she is, alive. And
SHE DOES NOT HAVE CANCER
. There was indeed a small polyp, the source of bleeding—but
BENIGN
, removed then and there, biopsied.
OKAY
.

“Well, lady, you seem to be okay” is what Dr. Bascomb said, in the course of things looking less and less like Bix. “Very good you came in when you did, though. Those little devils can change, we never know just when. Or God knows why.”

I could live forever now, is what Celeste is thinking, if only I were not so tired. However, perhaps, say, ten years more? She smiles to herself. I am fated to live, Celeste thinks.

Outside it is raining and terrible, dark November weather. Heavy unrelenting rain that could last all winter, from the sound of it. How lucky she is! Celeste almost prays as she says this to herself. How warm and safe her room and, seemingly, her life.

Sara must be off somewhere eating her own dinner, reading, waiting for Celeste to go to sleep—so that she can make one of her interminable phone calls, Celeste imagines.

Thinking for a moment then of Sara, Celeste is informed by a sudden, very sure instinct that very soon Sara will move on. Celeste has no idea where, or with whom, if with anyone. She is only certain that whatever Sara has been waiting around for, which was very possibly Celeste herself, her “health”—since all that is resolved, is all right, now Sara will go.

And how I will rattle around then, thinks Celeste, but entirely without self-pity. It could be fun! She does, though, experience a fairly large pang of guilt: the very idea of having such a very big house, all to one’s self, in these times.

She does not yet think about possibly missing Sara.

She is really thinking, and it is less thought than feeling, sensing, exploring—she is “dealing with” the huge and quite overwhelming
fact of no cancer. Only a polyp, innocently bleeding and now removed. No more blood.

She is not going to die for a while.

“
His
polyp was malignant, though, Ronnie-babe’s,” Alex reminds Sara, on the phone, somewhat later that night. “Remember, last summer? But of course the surgery involved is pretty much risk free. He’s going to be perfectly all right. No problem, as we keep on saying.”

“He probably will be all right, the old bastard,” Sara mutters.

So many of these late-night conversations, Sara thinks: how many must we have had, by now? And just what was it that she managed to set in motion when in that quite odd way she telephoned to Alex when she was in New York, and saw him, though inconclusively, there?

For one thing, there is something very sexy about their talking in this way, both alone, and in widely separated places. Each imagining the other. And, lacking vision, they both play tricks with their voices, Sara has noticed. They exaggerate the male-female difference, both of them do this: his voice deepening, hers rising. And both their voices full of breath, depth, range. Voices, their only (at the moment) instruments of sex.

“Well, as I’ve told you, I have been really worried about Celeste,” Sara tells him. “She thought she was going to die, I know that. And she has such a
will
, I thought she’d decided to die, and that she would.”

A pause. Silence, breath withheld, and then Alex says, “Well, now you can leave anytime you want to.”

This is jolting—going so much farther ahead of anything that Sara has so far thought. Tight-voiced, she asks him, “You’ve got something in mind?”

“Yes.” A small pause. “I think you should come with me to Managua. To Nicaragua.”

Sara says the first silly thing that occurs to her. “You mean, go chasing after Bill?”

“No. Actually nothing to do with Bill. He’s what you might call a coincidence.”

“He always has been.”

“Right. But something’s come through. What I’ve wanted. Some work. And I want you with me.”