The Last Lovely City (20 page)

Out on the beach, Julian is wearing new trunks that he bought for this trip, khaki-colored with a dark blue stripe, conservatively cut; they are perhaps a fraction too large. Helen’s suit is black, cut fashionably high up on her good firm thighs, maybe a little tight across her unfashionably large breasts. But Julian and Helen both look good. Seen among the other tourists scattered about that beach, other Americans, Germans, French, people of varying ages, varying degrees of health and conditions of weight, these two Californians are considerably above average, in terms of general attractiveness.

And the sand around their chairs is very white and smoothly groomed, the sea before them lovely, with its bright gentle waves that swell out to the distant horizon, where the bay is marked by graceful hills on either side, where each evening a new sunset silhouettes the fine-drawn black trees.

But everything is wrong with this picture.

Julian would say that if he could. He would say, Everything is wrong. Worse than in most of my patients’ lives.

This is not even the resort that he meant to come to, an error compounded of other errors, almost impossible to explain and, worse, unrectifiable, probably.

To try to put it in order, to speak sensibly of what is senseless: Julian first heard of a Mexican resort from a woman named Lila Lewisohn, also a psychiatrist, and Julian’s former colleague-friend-lover—Julian has no way of describing his present relation to Lila, and this in itself is a source of general terribleness, of mess.
Estranged
is the coldly accurate word that presents itself; they have been slipping apart for no clear reason ever since his divorce.

In any case, while she was married (while she was Julian’s lover) Lila used to come each winter to Mexico, alone. She looked forward to Mexico all year; she spoke of butterflies and
flowers, seafood and swimming. Some town with an Indian-sounding name, as this town has, on a bay. A name something like Margarita. However, there the descriptions parted: Lila’s hotel was up on a bluff above the sea, whereas this one is emphatically at sea level. Lila’s was old, slightly shabby, she said; this one is most garishly, horrifyingly new.

Has Julian come to Mexico in search of Lila, if unconsciously? And come to the wrong place, and with the wrong woman? All this seems quite possible to Julian, now.

His connection with Helen began with the initially innocent habit of fruit juice at a health bar, after tennis; they played at the same Mill Valley club. And a couple of times when Julian had no patients for an hour they went on to lunch. Sandwiches on the Sausalito waterfront, and pleasant talk. And this woman seemed so unshadowed, her life so simple and sunny, despite an alcoholic former husband, a divorce, that to Julian she was exotic. More usual in his life were the infinite troubles and suffering of patients, and his own infinitely troubled former wife, an alcoholic. Not to mention the complexities of love with Lila, who was intense and subtle, complicated. Julian was drawn to Helen, this generous-bodied woman (both he and Lila tended to be too thin). A blond who was sort of pretty.

Naturally enough, in the course of things, Helen invited Julian to her house for dinner, a nice big open redwood house, on Cloudview, in Sausalito. She barbecued chicken in her vine-sheltered patio, played Mozart, and poured a lot of good chardonnay. Nothing original, but all so nice, so reassuring to a man who lately had been feeling old and tired and cold, and almost sexless. And so in what seemed a natural way he and Helen went off to bed that night (her kids were all conveniently away with their father, now an A.A. success), and there Julian experienced a happy sensual exchange. It was nice.

And the next morning Helen said, “I’ve been wanting to go to Mexico. How about you?”

The only way to explain this to Lila (though “estranged” as lovers, they still talked a lot, mostly on the phone) was just to say that he was going to Mexico with a woman with whom he might, or well might not, be “in love”—or so he had insanely believed at the time. He now thinks that he could as easily and far more truthfully have said, I feel restless and sad, inadequate. I am middle aged, in crisis, and now this nice woman has asked me to go to Mexico with her. I am almost severely depressed.

He could surely have said all that (it would have explained their estrangement as well), but he did not. He said “possibly in love.” And Lila, very hurt indeed, and angry, said, “Well, okay. And no, I don’t particularly want to see you. No, we’re not exactly friends.”

And so, there is Julian, desperately missing Lila and certainly not in love with Helen, to whom he is utterly unable to make love. (“My cock is dead,” a patient once memorably, terribly said to Julian.)

And there is Helen, who believed that she was going off on this sexy Mexican trip with a nice psychiatrist, finally a man she could talk to, a man who would listen and maybe tell her what to do.

Helen is worried about her children. That came out in their first night’s conversation—somewhat drunken, at the bar. Something wrong in the kitchen, dinner was announced as late, and then later still.

Especially her oldest daughter worries Helen, a girl named
Robin, who Helen believes—well, she knows that Robin does drugs. And drinks too much. And has friends who steal cars; for all Helen knows Robin steals cars too.

“At the meetings they say detach. Detach with love. But how? And even if you really do the first step and admit you’re powerless. You’re still a parent. You can’t really be sure you didn’t cause it. I mean, Freud? And I don’t really like the meetings, they make me feel old. All those kids going on about parents who drink. Robin used to go to the A.C.A. meetings herself. Her father’s idea, but you can’t exactly say it worked, I don’t think.”

At that point Helen’s face had begun to blur, for Julian. “No,” he said.

“Well, what do you really think, Julian? Do you think a regular old-fashioned psychoanalysis would do her any good?”

“Well. Well I don’t really know.”

Julian was feeling at that moment the infinite sadness of Robin. Rather drunkenly he thought, Poor Robin, and poor Helen, who he was sure was a very nice if somewhat mixed-up woman. And poor himself, he who had really fucked things up, bringing this nice woman to this awful place, and under pretenses that became more false with every tropical, sweaty minute. As false as the plastic birds-of-paradise behind all those glistening bar glasses—although for all he knew the horrible flowers were real.

The bar was open to the sea. Thus from high uncomfortable stools Helen and Julian were confronted with all that water, a dangerous, deathless black expanse, the sand before it gray and damp. And the night itself was damp, and hot, the air black and thick and heavy. The jungle might at any moment descend upon them, Julian felt, with all its myriad lurking dangers.

And the noise: a defective speaker system jolted out old sixties songs, Beatles and Stones and Beach Boys, all sounding exactly alike, all loud. And everyone else in the bar, all those
other hungry guests were more and more drunkenly, loudly talking. Arguing. Shouting.

It was hardly the time or place for Julian to give out a professional opinion, even had he had one. He knew nothing whatsoever—least of all about himself, and why he had made this incomprehensible journey, with a woman who was not and would not turn into Lila.

Years ago Karen, to whom Julian was married, used to make fun of Lila’s trips to Mexico. “I personally hate the very idea of Mexico,” Karen said. “Dirty. Everyone so poor that you have to feel guilty all the time. I hate countries like that; you couldn’t pay me to go down there. Yuck!”

And how idyllic now even those bad old days with Karen seemed; even then there was always the refuge of Lila. Of love.

And so why, after Lila’s divorce, and then Julian’s, did they begin to see each other less, rather than the more often that might have been expected? Why did they allow themselves to “drift apart”?

Because we were both too tired to make a commitment, has been one answer.

Or because we had got so used to being married to others, to illicit love.

Or (now thought Julian) because I was gradually going into a depression, into this depression.

Now the sea like the jungle seemed to threaten. Julian imagined huge sudden walls of waves, engulfing, overwhelming. He shivered, terrified.

“You can’t be cold?” Good, maternal Helen. “Darling, you’re not coming down with something bad?”

How dare she call him darling? Julian irrationally thought that. And yet he did think it:
How dare she?

The dinner that was served at last was, as everyone in one way or another remarked, not worth waiting for. Pale under-cooked fish and canned peas. “I don’t think I’ve had canned peas since college,” was Helen’s remarkable pleasant comment. She was trying; heaven knows she was trying.

From dinner they went immediately to bed. What else? And there they both tried hard, tried for love and ease and simple satisfaction. But nothing worked, no gesture or effort on either of their parts. (My
cock is dead
. Julian thought of saying that, a last desperate wild effort at something like a joke. But did not.) And poor Helen probably felt that it was all her fault, despite all the good advice she was getting at those meetings: you didn’t cause, you can’t cure.

Together they pushed the coarse sheets back from their sweaty bodies, and tried to sleep.

The next day was very much the same as that one. Bright talk at breakfast, Helen being jocular about the other guests. And then they went out to the beach chairs, the glaring sand, and the too-bright sea.

Helen swam a lot, and surely, Julian hoped, that part of this nightmare trip was good for her, a pleasure? He sat heavily on his chair while she swam. Rooted. Too heavy to move, although in fact he was losing weight, was visibly too thin. But he was too heavy to swim, he felt. His head would weigh him down.

Julian diagnosed himself: this is at least a medium-severe depression. And he made his recommendations: work on fighting it off, do not just sit around and let it get worse.

But he did nothing of the sort. He did nothing.

And now, like a large slick blond sea creature, Helen comes back from the ocean, walking across the stretch of beach to Julian’s chair. Helen, gingerly stepping, the sand must be terrifically hot. Sitting down she winces at the contact with hot plastic.
Then she smiles and tosses her long wet hair. “It feels great,” she says. “You really should try it.”

“I know.”

“I was talking to a woman out there about Oaxaca,” Helen then tells him. “She says you can get a small plane from here and I’ve always wanted to go there.”

Does she really imagine that he can take still another Mexican trip? Surely not. “Oaxaca,” Julian repeats, heavily separating the unfamiliar syllables.

Amazingly, surprising him utterly, Helen then laughs. “Come on, I know you don’t want to go there. Why don’t you come along in a couple of days if you feel like it? And if not, not. I’ll see you back in California.”

Searching her face for strain, or some falsehood, Julian finds neither: this good woman really wants to go to Oaxaca, and she has decided to leave him alone.

And so, miraculously, Helen packs for the afternoon plane, the small one to Oaxaca. “I sort of think you need to be by yourself for a while,” she murmurs, kissing him good-bye up near the front desk. No point in his coming to the airport, Helen says.

Left alone, Julian feels—not exactly better, but just slightly less heavy, the burden of Helen gone, and the even greater burden of pretending to be all right.

But how incredibly nice she was, after all. She did in fact manage to detach with love. What a kind and understanding woman. Sane. Her daughter will be all right, probably, eventually, Julian thinks. She’s just being an adolescent in Marin County, in the terrible late eighties. He should have said something of the sort to Helen, Julian thinks, and he determines that he will do so on his return to California.

And with that determination Julian reaches several conclusions. One (no doubt this was obvious all along, to Helen too), he has no intention of going on to Oaxaca. He will fly back to Mexico City and then on to San Francisco, where his car is. Where Lila is.

And, two, even that tiny bit of professional thought, of work, about Helen’s child has made him feel the tiniest bit better.

Among Julian’s professional colleagues, local psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, three men in the past two years have committed suicide, in severe depressions. And the overall suicide rate for shrinks is not encouraging; in fact it is terrifying to Julian, a depressed psychiatrist.

What laymen say about shrinks is largely true, he believes. We’re all nuts.

And in panic he thinks, I have got to get out of this. (It is unclear to Julian whether he means out of Mexico or out of his depression: out of both, probably.)

And so Julian makes an effort, a desperate effort, in fact, to treat himself as a patient, to be gentle and understanding and at the same time firm, making certain demands. The good-parent model. And to do as he often tells patients to do: exercise, almost any activity is preferable to doing nothing.