Second Chances (17 page)

And Sara is frowning, but then Sara seems to frown a lot. Celeste has already noted these frowns; there must be a deep line between her eyebrows.

Minutes later, though, an attractive (despite his beard) young man appears soundlessly before them. So nice-looking, and now Celeste thinks she remembers Dudley mentioning such a person, or was it Edward? Dudley, she decides; it was Dudley, who still has such an eye for handsomeness in men, really more than Edward does. This person looks to be about Sara’s age, although he is clearly in much better shape than Sara is. A young person who takes care of himself: clear smooth skin, barely tan, a soft beard and sad yellow-brown eyes.

“Hi, I’m David,” he tells them familiarly, and Celeste begins to like him slightly less. She knows this to be the current custom; still, they don’t actually have to introduce themselves.

“Is that so?” Sara interrupts both the musings of Celeste and anything else that “David” might have had to say. So rudely! So loud.

“Well, yes, that’s my name,” the poor fellow almost stammers.

“Is it really.” Glaring, terrible Sara.

“Well, we’re very hungry, both of us.” Celeste feels that she must break up this highly unpleasant exchange. And so mysterious: doesn’t Sara know that that is how waiters talk these days? Maybe she never goes to restaurants. “Could you tell us what you have?” Celeste asks David.

The young man, who now uncomfortably blushes, begins to reel off names of dishes. Vegetables, pastas. Cheeses, salads, omelettes.

“Oh, California purism,” Sara snarls.

“Well, uh, yes. You could put it like that. We are vegetarians.”

Anxiety and a strong desire to get it all over with and to leave have combined to deafen Celeste to the list of foods. She orders the last thing she is sure she heard on the list, or almost sure: a cheese omelette. Sara orders the same.

“I gathered you didn’t like him.” Celeste hears her own dry voice, dry and very stiff. It is, she fears, a way that she often sounds.

Sara sighs. “I don’t seem to like many people these days” is her comment. “And he did seem such a type. I hate friendly people.”

Oh
dear
, is the strongest inner complaint that Celeste allows herself as, later that afternoon, she lies at last across her own bed. Their bed, hers and Charles’s. The large window faces west, faces just now into what may be a wonderful sunset; these late-winter or early-spring skies are often amazing, rare luminescent colors. But Celeste is quite simply much too tired to look, and she lies there with her eyes closed. And tries hard not to think of Sara.

Mantra. Mantra. Mantra. She repeats and repeats this word, rhythmically, meaninglessly. Again and again. Because (this is one of her secrets) the word “mantra” is her mantra. Celeste enjoys the small private joke of this.

But it doesn’t work. Or not quite. Sara, who is presumably asleep, or resting in the guest room down the hall, still forcibly intrudes.

After the entire failure of their lunch (Sara’s unabating rudeness, then her silence), Celeste had to fight off sheer despair as they drove home together. Toward Celeste’s house. She will hate it, Celeste was thinking. Probably she always has, every time she visited. And what is worse, she will say so, loud and clear.

She was thinking all this as they rounded the last curve in the pale green hills.

But, “Celeste, it’s so beautiful! I never thought—Celeste, your house is just like you!” was Sara’s exclamation. “That yellow, I forgot how wonderful!” and there seemed to be actual tears in her eyes.

“It’s rather Florentine, actually,” Celeste, very moved, informed her guest.

How strange she is, Celeste now thinks, in the privacy of her room, behind her closed eyes. How contradictory. How very like her mother. She sounds like Emma. Even the smells of Emma. Soap and astringent. Lemon.

But everything will be fine, Celeste assures herself before returning to her mantras. It will all be fine, she says firmly to herself, before sleep.

In February, shortly after the arrival of Sara at Celeste’s, the wind and cold, the winter rains returned to San Sebastian, and the two events, Sara and winter, were not unconnected in the minds of certain friends of Celeste’s, at that time. In a practical sense, it was the weather that kept everyone close to home for those weeks—not entirely at home; they all went out for normal shopping errands, including certain essential visits to their doctors, lawyers, accountants. But by tacit mutual agreement it was established that any real social contact was in abeyance.

Thus no one really saw Sara for a while, and though it seemed eminently reasonable that they should not, still it was also felt as slightly odd.

Dudley especially thought it strange, although she knew better, knew it was actually not strange at all. Of course, she said to herself, given Celeste’s very high regard for formality even among her closest friends, Celeste would not simply come by with Sara along. She would not just call up and say, “Sara and I have an errand in the village. If we came by about five, would you give us a cup of tea?”

No, Celeste would not do that; she would want some ceremony attached to their first visit—or, rather, revisit—with Sara. After all, Dudley had met both Sara and her mother, Emma, years ago in New York.

A skinny, tall, very dark and extremely defiant child, with her small pretty yellow-haired mother—that was Sara then. Their total dissimilarity
to each other, physically, suggested that not looking like Emma was Sara’s first act of rebellion—along with other, darker possibilities.

This was during the bad period when Dudley and Sam were “not seeing” each other, times when Dudley was aware of very little outside her own pain. Horrible: at those times, perversely, her ravaged mind remembered only the best of Sam: Sam’s voice, his face, his jokes. His body, Sam in bed. Not the swollen-faced drunk, the stranger who hated her and whom she hated back (she too being pretty drunk, usually). The Sam whom she had told to leave her life. Recalling only the good Sam, and unable not to think of him, desperate Dudley had had her hair streaked blonde, a great unsuccess. (In an effort to be a woman Sam had never even met? She was never sure.) She continued, mostly, to drink too much, she sometimes fell into bed with other men, too often (oh Christ, the ultimate sordid humiliation) weeping in bed with strangers. She had hardly dared mention his name, Sam’s name, not even to Celeste.

It was during one of those frightful times (dear God, to have had more than one of them, and still survived) that Celeste called and asked Dudley to come and meet her friend from California, Emma. And Emma’s young daughter, Sara. Sara, whose birth Dudley so clearly remembered, since it occurred the day she met Sam. In 1945.

Though, really, she was in no mood for either an old friend or a child. Or even Celeste, who surely meant well, intending distraction. (She must have known or had some idea how Dudley felt.) But still.

Now remembering mostly the pain of that time (how vivid it is, remains), all that pain over Sam (people are quite wrong to say you can’t remember pain, Dudley thinks), Dudley now can recall very little of Emma beyond that California shock of straw-colored hair, and a surprisingly deep gruff voice from such a small woman. And a sense that Emma was somewhat subdued by being with Celeste. (Celeste sometimes had that effect, probably unintended.) And that Emma was afraid of her daughter, somehow guilty toward her daughter, perhaps for providing her with no father? Dudley remembers that Sara made a terrible scene about something. What to wear? Where to go? And that she, Dudley, felt a strange sympathy for the child. How enviable to be able to say, as Sara did say to her mother, “I absolutely will not go. There is no way you can make me.”

Something like that is what Dudley should have said to Sam, she
thought then; she should have said, No, no, you can’t drink that much, you can’t keep drunkenly rushing out of my house as though you hated me, you can’t say the things that you do say when you’re drunk. What she did say, under those circumstances, and always in her crisp New England voice, was “I simply don’t want to see you again.” Instead of a passionate, childish tantrum. Like Sara’s.

Now, with the bad, unexpected weather, which is linked to Sara (in Dudley’s mind, at least), during a short respite from the rain Dudley watches stray sea gulls wheel and soar, as though seeking to lose themselves in clouds. Silently, standing still and alone in the big wooden room, their bedroom, she watches until the rain starts again. A heavy, punitive gray downpour, bleak, imprisoning.

Later that afternoon over tea with Sam, she tells him, “I can honestly see why people move to Florida, or Arizona. The older you are, the worse bad weather seems. Have you noticed?”

“Not yet. Maybe next year, though.” Sam smiles, referring to an old joke: the fact that Dudley is almost precisely one year older than he is.

But his smile is a surface smile, involving only the automatic muscles of his mouth, and Dudley sees the sadness in his eyes. And she knows its focus, its source, which is his present inability to work, to paint. That is what aging means to Sam: not painting. Which is not a fit subject for jokes. Dudley has even caught herself pretending similar problems; she has not yet told Sam, for instance, about a recent offer from a travel magazine that would like to send her to Ireland.

“Poor Sara, though, coming out to visit in this weather,” she brightly essays. “Or, rather, poor Celeste, all cooped up with her.”

“Celeste must like her, though?”

“Well, but it’s been such a distant liking. It’s quite another thing to have someone under your roof.” Can this conversation be of any interest to Sam, though, possibly? It seems to Dudley familiar; they have had this same talk before—but on the whole even talking redundantly seems preferable to not talking at all.

“She’s going to change our lives quite a lot,” Sam suddenly pronounces. Sam, who rarely pronounces, who is rarely portentous.

A thrill of sheer interest seizes Dudley; of course, he must be right. “Whatever do you mean?” she asks him.

He retreats—of course he retreats, how like him! “Well, I probably don’t really know what I mean,” he tells her. “And very likely I’m wrong.” Saying this, Sam sounds much more like himself: mildly ironic, vaguely self-deprecatory. Evasive.

“You must have an idea, though?” Dudley pursues, somewhat aggressive.

“No, I was just talking to hear myself.” His familiar bad-boy grin is nevertheless of some cheer to Dudley, and she thinks, as she sometimes does, How
fond
we are of each other, after all. No wonder we’re still together,
malgré tout
. (At other times, she still is capable of thinking, Oh, how could I not have left him for good, long ago?)

To Sam she says, “One thing I do wonder, though. Have we said this before? I do wonder what Sara will do out here. Visiting Celeste isn’t exactly a full-time occupation.”

“Maybe she’s a painter.” Sam, heavily ironic. “Almost everyone seems to be these days. If they’re not writers. Her form of self-expression—God forbid any self should go unexpressed.”

“I suppose she actually could be.” Dudley had not thought of an artistic endeavor for Sara, but what Sam has said is quite true, of course; it is what everyone seems to be doing—or, if not, feeling guilty about creative lacks. And she thinks, Oh dear, suppose she is a painter. Suppose she’s a good one, quite successful; we might not have heard of her—how awful that would be for Sam. “More likely a writer, don’t you think?” she asks him.

“Who knows?” Sam gets up to kick at the small fire that sputters in the grate. “Wet wood,” he mutters, but his kick has been effective; the flames enlarge, reaching higher and higher up into the chimney, and other logs farther back catch on, joining the conflagration.

“You’re incredible with fires, you really are,” Dudley praises him as she stretches long legs, now in velvet pants and slippers, her evening garb. And then, musingly, “How narrow of us, though, to assume anything ‘artistic’ for Sara. I do think there’s so much pressure on people these days to do that sort of thing. How hard it must be on women who simply want to marry and have a lot of children.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” But Sam has gone vague again. This conversation,
like so many, does not engage him. An essentially practical man, he is made slightly uncomfortable by theoretical talk.

And so Dudley, who is writing an article for a new women’s magazine, called
Women
, on just this issue, the social pressures mitigating against the domestic woman, decides (again) not to mention this to Sam. For one thing he might quite reasonably question her ability to deal with such women: childless Dudley, always scribbling away. She rather questions it herself, but she knows that she has a certain knack for empathy.

“Maybe she’s some sort of spy,” Dudley now lightly, idly speculates. “Gathering information on the habits of the old.”

“Good God, who’d care.”

“Well, people rather seem to, these days. We’re almost a fashionable minority, younger people are a little afraid we’ll try to take over, the way blacks and women are feared. They wouldn’t put it past us to live forever, and what on earth would they do with all of us then?”

“Myself, I’m just afraid the President will live forever.”

“Well, exactly,” Dudley tells him. “Anyway, there’ve been a lot of articles about us. The over-sixty, getting-into-seventies group, I mean.”

“Oh, your ladies’ magazines.”

“Well, if you read them you’d know a little more about the world,” Dudley gently chides, not adding that those very magazines to which Sam condescends have in large part supported them both, over the past ten years of his non-work. “But I doubt that anyone would want to spy on us. Not even the IRS.”

“Maybe Sara has a secret lover stashed away out here, and they plan to settle down. In Celeste’s house.”

Dudley laughs. “How romantic,” but at that moment the phone rings, and she goes to get it.

Sam hears her say, “That’s great. In fact, we’re just having tea.” He can tell from her voice that she is talking to Celeste. “Come on by,” he hears Dudley say. “We’d love to see you. And Sara.”