The Last Lovely City (5 page)

And was it, after all, that old man who took the bag, or someone else, some other stroller on the beach who had vanished in another direction before Penelope got out of the water?

That night in the bar a young woman, another American whom they have seen around, with her fat young husband and two very fat small children, comes up to them to say, “Are you the guys who lost a blue flight bag, with your room key? My husband found it, in back of that Tourist Market, and he couldn’t find
anyone to claim it, so he turned it in at the restaurant there. Just go and tell them it’s yours.”

The next morning Penelope, dressed, sets out for the Tourist Market. She approaches it from a back road she knows that passes Rosa’s and leads to the corner where she and the ragged old man confronted each other. Where now for a moment she pauses, imagining him, and she looks around, as though he might have come back and been lurking around. But of course he has not; there is only the road, and back of the road the yellowing jungle brush, in the beating Mexican sun. Penelope continues to the restaurant.

A pleasant-faced, plump young woman tells her, “Oh yes, your bag. Right here.”

Penelope thanks her very much, gives her some pesos, and walks on with her bag, in which she can feel the room key, still there. And she thinks again of the old man, how angry he must have been to find only a key. Crazily, for a moment this seems to Penelope unfair; she even thinks of trying to find that old man, to give him some money—and she smiles to think of what Ben would make of that gesture, combining as it would two of her (to him) worst qualities: thriftlessness and “irrationality.”

She continues through the booths, until she is stopped by a display of rings. She bends over, as always hoping for opals—and sees that there are several: opal rings of just the sort that she likes, the lovely stones with their fiery interiors.

A pretty Mexican woman in a yellow sweater, dark skirt, asks if she can help. These rings are about twenty-five dollars for two, but still so cheap! and so pretty. Penelope feels a great surge of happiness at having found them. The rings seem a good omen, somehow, though she is not sure of what: of this trip? that she was right, after all, to come back to Mexico, and to this particular place?

Negotiations with the young woman concluded, rings chosen and pesos paid, Penelope then asks her, on some whim, “Did you ever know a very nice woman who used to sell jewelry along the beach, named Augustina?”

“But I am Augustina!”
Yo soy Augustina
. The woman laughs, and the two of them embrace.

“Ah, amiga,” says Augustina.

“I didn’t recognize you; you always wore that white uniform,” Penelope tells her. “I bought these rings from you!” and she shows Augustina her hand.

“Amiga, this time you come back very soon,” Augustina says.

“Oh, I will. Very soon. Augustina, thank you.” And with her rings, and the bag with its key, Penelope walks back to the hotel.

Their new room, she realizes as she goes out onto the balcony for a dry bathing suit, directly overlooks the old tier of rooms, where once she stayed with Charles, next door to the Farquhars.

On their last night in San Bartolomeo, Ben and Penelope have dinner in the hotel dining room, where, as always, the food is very bad—and the view magnificent; glittering black water, down through palm fronds. Stars, and a partial moon.

“Well, it’s not the worst place I’ve ever been,” is how Ben sums up their trip. Judiciously.

“It was really okay,” Penelope tells her closest friend, a couple of days later, on the phone. “I’m glad we went. As a matter of fact, I hardly thought about Charles. He wasn’t there.” Then she laughs. “Actually I didn’t think much about Ben either. I don’t think he liked it very much there. But I thought a lot about
Mexico.” And then she adds, “But not thinking about Charles is the same as thinking about him all the time. If you see what I mean.”

The friend does see.

“Anyway, the trip made me feel a lot better,” Penelope continues. “About everything. More free.” She adds, with a laugh, “I can’t think why.”

“And then of course there was, uh, great sex,” says Sheila Williams, a young pediatrician, to her friend Alison Green. She is trying to explain the long presence in her life of a man who in many ways made her unhappy. Dick, a very smart, politically visible young lawyer, with whom she has just broken up. Dick is white, Sheila black. Small and neat and trim, from Roxbury, Massachusetts, Sheila is from a religious family, and tends to be somewhat prim; this conversation is unusual for her.

Alison is also young, although her long dark-blond hair, knotted up, is streaked with white. She edits a small art magazine, which does not take up a lot of her time. She is also an unmarried mother (Jennifer is four), which does take time. She has reacted to her friend’s last remark, about great sex, in several ways: relief that Sheila is no longer seeing Dick, who sounds mean, and some surprise at the last phrase, “great sex”—that not being taken for granted by herself, or by anyone she knows. She further observes that “great sex” has become in some instances one word. “We had greatsex,” some people say.

The two women are seated in a pretty, still-cheap French restaurant out on Geary Street, in San Francisco. Drinking white wine, as they wait for their dinner. They are long-term
friends, with a shared Berkeley past, but busyness now prevents their seeing much of each other, and so their visits always have a catching-up quality; they discuss work, love affairs, Alison’s daughter, and sometimes Sheila’s two dogs—in a usually jumbled order; the categories overlap. Sheila, who is basically shy, reluctant as to personal revelation, has a lot to say about her work, which is at the San Francisco General Hospital and also involves the parents of her patients, most of whom are poor: black, Asian, or Hispanic. Some battered mothers. They do not ordinarily talk, Alison and Sheila, even generally about sex. It was unusual for Sheila to say what she had. But breaking up with Dick has made her more vulnerable, more open, perhaps.

Earlier they had been comparing their just-passed day; a bad one all around, they had agreed, bad for them both. Alison that morning had taken Jennifer to the airport, for a weekend in Santa Barbara with Alison’s mother, the grandmother whom Jennifer adores. A friend of Alison’s had been going there too and offered to escort Jennifer, who was thrilled at the whole prospect. But the planes were all delayed because of fog—planes to anywhere, Paris or Jakarta, Singapore or just Santa Barbara. Sheila had had terrible, terminal trouble with her car.

Nothing earthshaking for either of them, solvable problems, just annoying. Alison called and canceled her appointments, told her assistant to reschedule, and she finally put a very excited Jennifer on the plane. And Sheila called Triple-A for rescue, and in the meantime got a cab to her office.

But now, with the wine, Sheila’s phrase about great sex begins to reverberate in Alison’s brain. She has not been “seeing” anyone for at least a couple of years, and perhaps for that reason her mind returns to three instances of sex that was the greatest.

“Holy screwing,” was how her first lover used to put it; he was a grad student at Berkeley, in mathematics; they smoked a
great deal of pot together and made love effortlessly, wonderfully. Later, somehow, their connection fell apart, and he went East to a teaching job.

After that, graduated, Alison worked at part-time gallery jobs in San Francisco, and tried for journalism assignments. In that uncertain period of her life she fell in love with an older (twenty years older than she was) sculptor, semifamous, and with him too the sex was—great. An earthquake, with deeper aftershocks.

Out of bed they also got on well; much talk, many small jokes, and some glorious High Sierra hikes. They moved in together and planned to marry, “sometime, when we get around to it.” But then he was killed, at the corner of Market and Franklin Streets, “senselessly,” by a hit-and-run red-light runner, who was never caught but whom Alison, even now when she is “better,” dreams of killing.

After that, for Alison there was hard work and some slow success—publication of articles in increasingly prestigious art magazines. And scattered, occasional love affairs. Sometimes great sex, sometimes not so great. And then, all inner wisdom notwithstanding, she fell in love with a man who was married—“happily,” or at least comfortably enough, conveniently, so that he told her from the start that he could not, or would not, dislodge himself. Besides, there were three children. But with him, once more, there was holy, earthquake sex. She liked him very much, and he her. He worked in Washington, D.C., in an environmental agency, and often came to San Francisco—sometimes alone, sometimes not. Seeing each other was often difficult, but for a time they managed. Alison lived on Potrero Hill, conveniently near the freeway. And even an hour together was worth anything, they felt.

When Alison became pregnant, Jack was sympathetic: bad luck, he saw it as, and of course she would have an abortion.
Of course he would pay, and he would do everything possible, supportively.

But Alison could not. She had had one abortion, the result of carelessness during a somewhat feckless affair. She had voted and marched for women’s right to choice. But this time she could not, not possibly. Jack quite reasonably argued that he too should have a choice, since the baby was also his—and Alison saw that this was true. Still, she had to go ahead with this pregnancy. And she did, and lovely Jennifer was born; sometimes Alison even thought that she had somehow known that this baby would be
Jennifer
, so beautiful, so loved.

Sheila, her friend, just then starting in pediatrics, became their doctor.

Now Sheila, really out of character, is still talking about great sex. And Dick, the man she no longer sees, who was an ungiving, emotionally stunted person, as Sheila had always known. “Sometimes I thought he got some sort of charge out of having a black girlfriend,” Sheila said. “A liberal credential.
So
correct. But there were other sides to him. Moments of kindness, generosity, and these flashes of amazing insight. Enough of all that to make me stick around. What I’m saying is, he’s not all bad.” Sheila laughs, but her dark-brown eyes are wide and serious.

“We’re supposed to think that no one is, aren’t we?” Alison laughs too.

The waiter brings their food; they seem to have ordered a lot.

Somewhat later Sheila more or less continues. “I think it’s these moments of nice, of goodness, that all men have, or almost all, and that’s what keeps us around. We all think that that’s the real person. That what we’re seeing is a window into who he really is.” She adds, “I mean it’s one of the things. With really
battered women of course there’s also fear, no self-esteem, and often no money.”

“Oh, you’re right,” Alison tells her. She is struck by what sounds wise and accurate, although she herself has not experienced much meanness from men.

“Battered women,” Sheila now says. “People think, or some people think, they hang around for sex, but it’s not that, mostly. I was always hoping that Dick would turn into the person I sometimes saw.”

Alison finds herself very moved by the fact of Sheila saying all this; it is so unlike her to talk of intimate matters in this way. She is in fact more moved by Sheila herself than by what Sheila is saying, although she sees its truth. But possibly, also, Sheila is theorizing in part as a way out of pain?

Sheila now asks Alison, “You’ve got plans for your childless weekend?”

“I’ve got to work,” Alison grins. “Probably I should have planned more.” And indeed she should have, she now thinks. She is unused to weekends without Jennifer; it is not as though she had longed for such unfettered time.

The somewhat antiquated or at least other-era impression made by this restaurant, with its worn white linen tablecloths, white ruffled curtains, and fake white daisies in the decorative fake-brick windows—all that is increased by the music, which is thirties and forties; at the moment Charles Trenet is singing, “Vous—qui passez sans me voir—”

The room at this hour, about eight, is filling up. Alison, absorbed in their conversation, and then her food, has not paid much attention to the other guests.

But she looks up just in time to see a new couple come in, a short plump woman in black, a tall thin man with familiar shoulders. They come in slowly, as though in a horror film. Alison’s own oft-imagined worst dream: Jack and his wife. At the instant in which she recognizes him he turns and sees her, and starts
toward their table. As his wife, long bright blond hair swinging, goes on to a table across the room.

Smiling widely, as Alison also is, he arrives. He bends toward her—can he have meant to exchange a social kiss? Alison extends her hand, as she says, “How nice to see you. You remember Sheila?”

“Yes of course.” He shakes hands with Sheila too, and says, “Nice place!”

They have been there together several times.

“Oh, very.”

“Well, uh, everything okay?”

He must be asking, Is Jennifer okay? Alison nods, and then he is gone, and Alison feels the crocodile smile which has stretched her face recede.

She looks down at all the food on her plate, says, “I can’t eat this,” and she adds, “Oddly enough,” with a very small laugh.

“Of course not.” Understanding Sheila. “Take some deep breaths.”

Alison does breathe deeply, managing too to glance across the room. At her. And she thinks, I’m prettier than she is. An out-of-character thought: Alison is not especially vain, nor for that matter is
pretty
the word for her, as she knows. She is often described as attractive, tall and thin, with an interesting, angular face. Good bones. But Jack’s wife is too old for her very bright long blond hair, and too plump for her very short black dress.

Sheila, who has also managed a look, now whispers, “Could it be a wig?”

Alison laughs softly. “I suppose, but I doubt it.” She adds, “Jesus, the end of a perfect day.”

Four years ago—or five by now, it must be five—when Alison was pregnant, she and Jack quarreled a lot, and each said melodramatic, bad things to the other.