The Last Lovely City (22 page)

Not the best time to take to drink, thinks normally abstemious Julian.

And then the phone rings. Julian watches as Hugo picks up the receiver. “Allo? Allo?” And then beckons to Julian, grimacing his version of a smile, as Julian wonders: Is this some cruel joke? Is he drunk?

“Hello, Julian, is that you?”

At the clear familiar sound of Lila’s voice Julian feels not drunk at all; he feels almost sane (though with some fear that he might cry). He says only, “Lila—”

“So there you are. Why on earth the Margarita? I could have told you it was awful.”

“But Lila—” Not saying, But we were not exactly trading travel plans, Julian instead tries to laugh.

“Your message didn’t sound so good, but now you sound better.”

“Well, that’s true. I mean I haven’t been in great shape, but now I’ve been walking, some swimming—”

“Well, that’s good. My own prescriptions.” She laughs, a sound that seems to fade in and out.

“But I think I’ll fly back tomorrow, stay home for a week. Do some reading.” Saying this though Julian recognizes a bleak and bad idea.

As does Lila, apparently. “Why not stay down there a little more? Really swim, walk farther. It might do you some good.”

Wild hope leaps in Julian’s blood. “But would you—? Could you come—”

Very gently she tells him, “No, I really can’t get away right now. But you’ll be okay, I know.” Meaning: you know how to cure yourself, and you can.

“Yes,” Julian tells her. And he manages not to say, Will you marry me? When I come back can we move in together? He only says, “I’ll see you in San Francisco?”

What he meant as a statement has emerged as a question, and Lila answers, “Yes, of course,” very warmly. And then she says, “You could do me a favor, sort of. Walk over to my place again, and really check it out. Find out anything you can.”

“Oh sure. Of course. And I think you’re right about a little longer here. But I do wish—I wish you—”

“So do I, but I can’t. You’ll be okay though.”

“I know.”

“Well—”

They say good-bye, and although the last thing he really wants is the rest of his drink, Julian heads back to the bar.

He is intercepted right off by Hugo though, who jauntily
tells him, “Last chance! I go now to offer the room to a bureau of travel.”

“Oh. Well as a matter of fact I do need the room after all. For myself.”

“Ah good! You learn to like our beaches and our life down here?”

“More or less,” Julian tells him. “I mean, more and more.” Having intended some small irony, the tiniest joke, he is somewhat surprised at Hugo’s enthusiastic response.

“So good! And then perhaps you come here every year,” says Hugo.

“I really very much doubt that,” Julian tells him. And then, more gently, “But of course it’s entirely possible.”

“Very good! And now I buy you a drink. Yes, doctor, I insist! It is not so often that I have psychiatrists for guests.”

Stretching long legs to brace her boots against the bulkhead as the plane heads upward from Toronto into gray mid-October air, Lila Lewisohn, a very tall, exhausted psychiatrist—a week of meetings has almost done her in, she feels—takes note of the advantages of this seat: enough leg room, and somewhat out of the crush. Also, the seat next to hers is vacant. At least, she thinks, the trip will be comfortable; maybe I can sleep.

But a few minutes into the air the plane is gripped and shaken. Turbulence rattles everything, as passengers clutch their armrests, or neighboring human arms, if they are traveling with friends or lovers. Lila, for whom this is a rather isolated period, instead grips her own knees, and grits her teeth, and prays—to no one, or perhaps to a very odd bunch: to God, in whom she does not believe; to Freud, about whom she has serious doubts; to her old shrink, who is dead; to her mother, also dead, and whom she mostly did not like. And to her former (she supposes it is now former) lover, Julian Brownfield, also a shrink.

Lila and Julian, in training together in Boston, plunged more or less inadvertently from a collegial friendship into heady adulterous love—a love (and a friendship) that for many years worked, sustaining them both through problematic marriages. But in the five or six years since the dissolutions of those marriages
a certain troubled imbalance has set in. Most recently, Julian has taken back his ex-wife, Karen, an alcoholic pianist who is not doing well with recovery and has just violently separated from another husband.
Sheltering
might be Julian’s word for what he is doing for Karen—Lila would call it
harboring
, or worse: if Karen behaved well, she might stay on forever there with Julian, Lila at least half believes. She has so far refused to see Julian, with Karen there.

In any case, Lila now prays to all those on her list, and especially to Julian, to whom she says, I’m just not up to all this; I’m really running on empty.
Please
.

Her meetings, held in the new Harbourfront section of Toronto, in an excellent hotel with lovely, wide lake views, were no more than routinely tiring, actually; Lila was forced to admit to herself that it was the theme of the conference that afflicted her with a variety of troubled feelings. It was a psychiatric conference on the contemporary state of being single, though of course certain newspaper articles vulgarized it into “A New Look at Singles,” “Singles: Shrinks Say the New Minority.” Whereas in fact the hours of papers and discussion had ranged about—had included the guilt that many people feel over their single state; social ostracism, subtle and overt; myths of singleness; the couple as conspiracy; plus practical problems, demographics, and perceived changes over the last several generations. And Lila found that she overreacted—she was reached, touched, shaken by much that was said. She had trouble sleeping, despite long lap swims in the hotel’s glassed-in pool, with its views of Canadian skies across Lake Ontario.

Now, very tired, she braces herself against the turbulence, and against certain strong old demons in her mind. And then, as though one of those to whom she has prayed were indeed in charge, the turbulence ends. The huge plane zooms peacefully through a clear gray dusk. Westward, toward San Francisco. A direct flight.

Lila must have fallen asleep, for she is startled awake by the too loud voice of the pilot, over the intercom: “Sorry, folks. We’ve just had news of a very mild earthquake in the San Francisco area, very mild but a little damage to the airport, so we’ll be heading back to Toronto.”

An instant of silence is followed by loud groans from the rows and rows of seats behind Lila’s bulkhead. Groans and exclamations:
Oh no, Jesus Christ, all we need, an earthquake
. Turning, she sees that a great many people are standing up, moving about, as if there were anything to do. One man, though—trench-coated, lean, dark blond, almost handsome—makes for the telephone up on the wall near Lila’s seat. Seizing it, he begins to dial, and dial and dial. Lila gestures that he can sit down in the empty seat, and he does so, with a twisting grimace. Then, “Can’t get through,
damn,”
he says. “My family’s down on the Peninsula.” He dials again, says, “Damn,” again, then asks Lila, “Yours?”

“Oh. Uh, San Francisco.”

“Well, San Francisco’s better. Guy with a radio said the epicenter’s in Hollister.”

“I wonder about that ‘mild.’ ” Lila leans toward him to whisper.

“No way it could be mild. They’re not closing down the airport for any mild earthquake.”

Which is pretty much what Lila had already thought.

“Well, I guess I better let someone else try to phone.”

“There’s one on the other side,” Lila tells him, having noticed this symmetrical arrangement on entering the plane.

“Oh, well then.” But after a few minutes, muttering, he gets up and goes back to his seat, as Lila realizes that she wishes he had stuck around—not that she was especially drawn to him; she simply wanted someone there.

People are by now crowding around the two phones, pressing into the passageway between the aisles. A man has managed to get through to his sister-in-law, in Sacramento, and soon everyone has his news: it is a major quake. Many dead. The bridge down.

At that last piece of news, about the bridge, Lila’s tired heart is drenched with cold, as she thinks: Julian. Julian, who lives in Mill Valley and practices in San Francisco, could be on the bridge at any time. Especially now, just after five in San Francisco. Commuter time.

On the other hand, almost anyone
could
have been on the bridge, especially anyone who lives in Marin County. Fighting panic, Lila says this firmly to herself: anyone does not mean Julian, necessarily. A major disaster involving the bridge does not necessarily involve Julian Brownfield. Not necessarily. She is gripping her knees, as during the turbulence; with an effort she unclenches her fingers and clasps her hands together on her lap, too tightly.

“How about the game?” someone near her is saying.

“No stadium damage, I heard.”

“Lucky it wasn’t a little later. People leaving, going back to Oakland.”

As, very slowly, these sentences penetrate Lila’s miasma of anxiety, she understands: they are talking about the Bay Bridge. The Bay Bridge was damaged, not the Golden Gate. Traffic to the East Bay, not to Marin, Mill Valley.

What Lila feels then, along with extreme relief, is an increase of exhaustion; her nerves sag. And she has, too, the cold new thought that Julian, an unlikely fan, could well have gone to the game. (Taken Karen to the game?) Could have left early, and been overtaken by the earthquake, anywhere at all.

Rising from her seat, intending to walk about, she sees that everyone else is also trying to move. They all seem to protest
the event, and their situations, with restless, random motion. Strangers confront and query each other along the packed aisles: Where’re you from? Remember the quake last August? The one in ’72? In ’57? How long were you in Toronto? Like it there? But not enough to make you want to go back right away, right?

At last they begin the descent into Toronto, strapped in, looking down, and no one notices the turbulence that they pass through.

In Julian’s house, high up on the wooded crest above Mill Valley, there is total chaos: in the front hall, two large suitcases lie open and overflowing—a crazy tangle of dresses and blouses, sweaters, silk nightgowns, pantyhose, and shoes thrown all over.

“Anyone coming in,” Julian comments from a doorway, “anyone would think the earthquake, whereas actually—”

“Well, in a way it is the fucking earthquake,” Karen unnecessarily tells him, in her furious, choppy way. “Closing the fucking airport.”

“Whereas, really, we were lucky,” Julian continues, more or less to himself. He is tall and too thin, gray-haired. His skin, too, now looks gray: three weeks of Karen have almost done him in, he thinks. In character, she has alternated her wish to leave with a passionate desire to stay with Julian—forever. Only a day ago she had decided firmly (it seemed) to leave. And now, on the verge of her departure, an earthquake. “The airport might open in a couple of hours,” Julian tells Karen, and he is thinking of Lila, the exact hour of whose return he is uncertain about. Perhaps she is already here? “Or tomorrow,” he says to Karen, hopefully.

“But how would we know, with the phone out?” Karen complains. “It might be a couple of weeks.” She is visibly at the end
of her rope, which is short at the best of times. “A couple of weeks with no lights or electricity!”

It is clear to Julian that whatever controls Karen has managed to place on herself for the course of her stay are now wavering, if not completely gone. She has not behaved badly; she has not, that is, got drunk. He himself, at this moment, acutely longs for a drink. An odd longing: Julian is generally abstemious, a tennis player, always in shape. And he wonders, is he catching Karen’s own longing, her alcoholic impulse? Karen, opposing A.A. (she did not like it there), believes that alcoholics can cut down, citing herself as an example—every night she has one, and only one, vodka martini.

Karen is very beautiful, still. All that booze has in no way afflicted the fine white skin. Her face shows no tracks of pain, nor shadows. Her wide, dark-blue eyes are clear; looking into those eyes, one might imagine that her head resounds only with Mozart, or Brahms—and perhaps in a way it still does.

“Well, come on, Julian, let’s find some candles. You know perfectly well that this is the cocktail hour,” she says to her former husband, and she laughs.

Down on the ground in Toronto, disembarked, all the passengers from the flight to San Francisco are herded into a room where, they are assured, they will be given instructions. And in that large, bare room rumors quickly begin to circulate, as people gather and mutter questions to each other.

No one is sitting or standing alone, Lila notices, although surely there were other solitary travelers on that plane. And she finds that she, too, begins to attach herself to groups, one after another. Is she seeking information, or simple creature comfort, animal reassurance? She is not sure.