Second Chances (16 page)

“You would?”

“Well, sure.” But Alex’s laugh is uncomfortable, as though he in some way still wonders why she called him, just what she was up to. For surely she, a woman, must be up to something?

Feeling his unease, and just then liking him very much, despite all his trouble (or because of it? She wouldn’t put that past herself), Sara speculates aloud: “I wonder whether extreme beauty isn’t really
harder on men than it is on women. Oh, poor Alex!” But has she, despite herself, sounded unpleasant. She intended an idle remark—she thinks.

And Alex, though blushing, bears up fairly well. “Just knock it off, Sara, will you? Aren’t we old friends?”

Considerably later, lying in her oversized bed, very much alone, exhausted, sleepless and nervously irritated, Sara castigates herself for what may well have sounded like rudeness. Why tease Alex in that way, about his good looks, which he really can’t help? Alex, a vulnerable, confused but essentially decent person.

Why put him off with dumb jokes, when actually—actually, Sara tells herself, you long for Alex to be here with you now. And he could be, he could easily have come home, come to bed, if you had been even slightly nicer. If you had been the kind, humane woman you always pretend to be. Whereas in truth you are a total, an absolute crude jerk, and no one will ever love you or even like you again. Not ever. You are the fat forty-year-old person whom you have always scorned and dreaded. The fat white middle-class middle-aged woman. The enemy is you.

She is more or less used to these bouts of self-laceration, and they do not keep her awake for very long.

What Celeste first thinks—or, rather, what she feels—on seeing Sara is an impulse to turn and run. Sara, just off her plane and emerging from the flight tunnel in the San Francisco airport. Celeste would like to pretend not to be there, or not to have seen Sara.

Dark, tall, heavy-looking Sara, who is fortyish (that is perhaps the biggest surprise) but still unmistakably herself, in an awful sheepskin coat, a denim skirt and some big old boots, all pale and scuffed. Her hair is long and bedraggled, worn in no discernible style.

Why have I done this?
Celeste cries out, within herself. And, almost at the same time: Whatever will Bill think when he meets her? Her third thought is, by contrast, a pious one: Thank God Charles isn’t here to see her.

“Darling Sara, how wonderful! But you must be exhausted” is what Celeste actually cries out, aloud.

They embrace. Sara smells of shampoo, and some sharp rather lemony astringent. Nice smells, really. A nice surprise.

“Well, I am sort of exhausted,” Sara says, in a voice so familiar that Celeste experiences a rush of affection, despite how Sara looks. If she could just keep her eyes closed, could simply smell and hear Sara, it would be all right, she quite nuttily thinks, and she smiles a little bleakly to herself. Since Charles’s death, Celeste has felt that she is sentenced to private jokes.

“This thing is pretty heavy, though,” Sara continues, shifting the bulging, strapped and patched brown knapsack on her shoulder.

“It’s immense,” marvels Celeste, as though admiring strength. “I wonder they let you on the plane.”

“Well, you have to get on carrying it as though there were no possible question, you have every right to have it with you,” instructs Sara, quite as though Celeste would ever travel with such a burden.

By this time they are walking together along the broad corridor to the terminal—and an odd couple they must make, thinks Celeste. She in her little black Valentino, trimmed with the red silk braid, an old suit but still a Valentino. And Sara in those, those clothes. “We’ll pick up your luggage downstairs,” Celeste chatters, imagining God knows what sort of trunk, probably something with a rope around it. And she thinks again, How fortunate I didn’t ask Bill to come along, or anyone else, for that matter.

Although Dudley offered and seemed genuinely to want to come. “You may need help,” Dudley somewhat ambiguously said: could she have somehow foreseen how Sara would look? Did she mean that sort of help, support? But no, more likely she was thinking of luggage. Carrying things.

“This
is
my luggage,” Sara tells Celeste. “This is it. Funny how traveling light can turn out to be so heavy.”

“Well—” is all that Celeste can manage to say. Trotting alongside big Sara is taking all her breath, although she herself generally walks quite fast. “Well,” she repeats. “How wonderful that we don’t have to go down and wait for luggage. And so often they lose it,” she babbles. “Impossible!”

She must stop talking, she truly must or she will faint. And so Celeste concentrates on looking at the crowds, all those others hurrying toward or past them, or just slopping along in the same direction that she and Sara are moving. And how terrible most people do look, these days, in airports! Celeste, though of course not actually traveling, is dressed quite as she used to believe that everyone should dress for trips: something dark, for practicality. And in those days a hat and gloves.

And how handsome all the men looked then in their hats. Celeste now sighs (a considerable expense of breath) at the sudden vivid picture with which she is assailed: Grand Central Station, the main concourse on a summer evening. All that elegant marble space, all the gilt, and those wonderful-looking men with their summer tans from
weekends, in their linen or seersucker jackets, or dark blazers, their rep striped ties, and their hats!—those wonderful panamas, or dark straws with madras bands. When was the last time I saw a handsome man in a hat? she wonders. Even dear Charles had stopped wearing hats, except for his funny old Irish tweed caps for the country. Would Bill wear a hat if she went to Brooks and found him a wonderful one? Celeste very much doubts it; he just wouldn’t. Bill is too young for hats.

“… so cold in New York,” Sara seems at that moment to be saying. “And rainstorms. From this place I was staying in, the one I told you about, I could watch the storms in Central Park. Really violent.”

“It sounded like such a nice place.”

“Well.” Sara can be seen to scowl. “I have to admit it was comfortable. Physically. Chock full of creature comforts. Christ, I was choking on comfort. Warmth and bath salts. But mostly I hated it there.”

At which Celeste’s strong but aging heart sinks, as at her first sight of Sara, and she wonders how Sara will feel about her house, this time. All the warmth and bath salts. “But in a way you enjoyed being in New York?” she asks hopefully.

“No, I didn’t. I hated it.” Defiant Sara. Always defiant—she hasn’t changed at all.

“Well, darling,” Celeste attempts, “I do hope California will be an improvement. This time.”

A grin. “It’d almost have to be. But remember, Celeste, this is where I come from. I’ve been here before.”

By now they have passed through the main lobby—or lobbies, so confusing. They have reached the parking area. And then, although she has carefully recorded it in her mind, Celeste cannot—she cannot for the life of her remember where the car is. Letters and numbers tumble about in her mind, a hopeless jumble: B one six H G L M N O P. Six—six seven eight nine. Oh, dear God!

However, so that nothing will show, she carefully controls her face; Sara must not begin by thinking she is dotty. (But no one even gets to be dotty these days, they call it Alzheimer’s, a person not knowing where her car is.) Still. Celeste leads the way, toward rows and rows of bright shiny cars that are not her car. Then, when she
can, breathing better, in a casual way she remarks, “My goodness, I could have sworn I left it exactly here.” (She may have sounded silly but surely not senile, not sick. Not exhibiting the panic that she actually at this moment feels.)

Surprisingly, she is rescued by Sara. Sara saying, “I do this all the time. Whenever I have a car. I write down the number of where it is in my head, but never on paper. And then I mix it up.”

Celeste looks up at her. “I’m afraid that’s just what I’ve done.”

“What you have to do is stop and close your eyes. Blank out your mind, and the right numbers will come to you, I promise.”

“Like meditation.” Meditation, her own sort of meditation, is a practice that Celeste has long employed, never mentioning it to anyone. Especially she did not mention it to Charles, after all the silly sixties transcendental business. Charles would have laughed.

“Yes. Like meditation,” says Sara. “I’ve always done it.”

“B. Nine.” These syllables come to Celeste almost the instant her eyes are closed, and she says them aloud to Sara. “B. Nine.”

“Well, look.” Sara points to a big cement column on which is painted, in yellow, a very large B. “You see? We’re in the right place. You really weren’t lost at all. Nine must be right over there.”

And, naturally, there it is, her nice small pale brown Jag. Celeste might have seen it herself. Why on earth was she so worried? Still, she has to admit that Sara was helpful.

“I’m afraid it’s rather a long drive,” Celeste says to Sara as at last they swing out and onto the freeway.

“Celeste, I remember. I know it’s not next door.”

Oh, why must she sound so gruff sometimes? It is frightening to Celeste, the very idea of gruffness. Having such a tone right in her house, for what she had thought might be forever. However, Celeste tells herself, Sara is not always gruff, not solely rude and gruff. And besides, she herself, Celeste, should be more tolerant of differences. (Polly tells her this often, as though Polly were not a mass of prejudices of her own.) Young people simply speak differently, these days.

She will take the long way to San Sebastian, Celeste then decides: over the hills to the coast, and then down. Instead of the freeway route, through ugly, boring San Jose.

*  *  *

“Oh God, it’s so beautiful! How could I ever forget how incredible? That yellow!” Sara cries out, at the sight of a field of mustard: only mustard, but its thick bright color is spread across a billowing green meadow. “And look, there’s the sea! Celeste, it’s too much, I never saw anything so marvelous.”

There are tears in her voice, Celeste is sure that she hears tears. Very moved, Celeste nevertheless controls her own voice as she says, “Yes, it is nice, isn’t it?”

“
Nice
. God, Celeste, you’re really spoiled.” But Sara has laughed as she said that, not really scolding. Celeste only wishes that Sara would be less profane, and she decides—she determines not to mention that wish. After all, Sara is almost forty.

In some of her earliest imaginings of this meeting, her picking up Sara at the airport, Celeste had thought that they would then head into San Francisco, maybe for lunch at the Clift, or somewhere. Maybe, even, Bill would join them there?

It was Dudley, though, who talked her out of this plan. “Honestly, Celeste, you don’t know how tired she may be. It’s not always fun to be met and then just whisked off somewhere.”

“That’s quite true.” And then Celeste acutely recalled Charles’s habit of just such whiskings: her arrivals to meet him in Paris, or for heaven’s sake Dubrovnik, she longing for just a bath and bed, but no, she would have to look perfect, as Charles always wanted and expected her to look. And then he would whisk her off for lunch.

“Besides,” continued Dudley, in her brisk, Bostonian way, “you haven’t seen Sara for quite a while. You hardly know what she looks like.”

Prophetic, really, Dudley has turned out to be. No, Celeste had certainly not been sure how Sara would look, this time, and if she had she would not have thought for one minute of taking her to the Clift. With or without Bill.

However, recalling the conversation with Dudley has suggested an alternative plan, since it is almost lunchtime, and Sara cannot have eaten anything decent on the plane.

“You must be starving,” she says to Sara. “There’s a new place in town that a couple of friends of mine have been raving about. They had lunch there recently, I think. You remember Dudley Venable, and Sam? And Edward Crane? Well, you’ll see them all again soon—in fact I’m giving a little dinner, the week after next. Valentine’s Day. I know it’s terribly silly, and Valentine’s is certainly not the point of it. I just thought—”

Glancing over at Sara, Celeste observes an expression of puzzlement, perhaps annoyance? What has been wrong? Does Sara hate the very idea of a party in her honor—hate Valentines? And why is she, Celeste, talking now about the dinner anyway—what was she talking about before? She is lost!

“I am sort of hungry,” Sara after a pause remarks. “The stuff they hand out on planes. Incredible. Pure shit.”

Back in focus, Celeste registers shock: did Sara have to say that word? However, she manages only to say, “Well, do let’s try this new place that Dudley and Edward seem to have liked so much.”

The San Sebastian Bar and Grill. That is the name of the place, which, without much trouble, Celeste manages to find, where she stops and parks. It looks very much like several San Francisco restaurants that she has seen recently with Bill: a window of ferns, bright brass, white napkins, mirrors. Much more San Francisco than San Sebastian in spirit, is one of Celeste’s reactions; it even strikes her as just slightly presumptuous. And then recognizes that that was a Charles reaction, not at all her own. Why should she care what anyone calls his restaurant? In fact, she does not care, could not care less, as Edward might say. (But she must stop this miming of other people, of men. It is not a good sign.)

As they enter, Celeste opening the door for Sara and Sara then stalking ahead, at first they see no one around, neither customers nor waiters. No help. Murmuring that they might as well sit down, someone will come, and she for one is exhausted, Celeste leads them to a table by a window, near a broad recessed bank of giant, exuberant ferns.

Quickly, though, Celeste begins to feel that Sara is reacting very
badly to this place. She observes the stiffness with which Sara adjusts to the booth. (Celeste has been reading about body language, so interesting, so unconsciously revealing, especially in people whose bodies are entirely untrained. And she thinks of her own very rigorous training, the disciplines of dancing, those early years in New York.)