To See You Again (11 page)

A perfect trip, except that from time to time Yvonne was jolted sharply by a thought of that girl, Susanna. And, looking at Matthew, she wondered if he, too, thought of her— with sadness, regret? The question hurt.

She would have to ask Matthew, and deliberately she chose a moment of pure happiness. They were seated on a vine-covered terrace, at Orvieto, across the square from the gorgeously striped cathedral, drinking cool white wine, having made love early that morning, when Yvonne asked, “Do you ever wonder what happened to that girl, Susanna?”

Genuine puzzlement appeared on Matthew’s distinguished face, and then he said, “I almost never think of her. I don’t have time.”

Knowing Matthew, Yvonne was sure that he spoke the truth, and she wryly thought, I undoubtedly think more often of that girl, that episode, than Matthew does.

And so she, too, stopped thinking of Susanna—or almost, except for an occasional reminder.

Leaving Rome, they traveled up to Florence, then Venice, Innsbruck, and Vienna.

That was the first of a succession of great trips.

Yvonne and Matthew remained, for the most part, very happy with each other, and over the years their sexual life declined only slightly. Then, in her late fifties, Yvonne became terribly sick, at first undiagnosably so. Surgery was indicated. On being told the probable nature of her illness—she had insisted on that—Yvonne remarked to her doctor, one of the chief surgeons at Massachusetts General, “Well, my chances are not exactly marvelous, then, are they?”

He looked embarrassed, and gazed in the direction of the Charles, just visible from his high office window. “No, not marvelous,” he admitted.

After surgery, oppressively drugged, Yvonne was mainly aware of pain, which surged in heavy waves toward her, almost overwhelming her, and very gradually receding. She was aware, too, of being handled a great deal, not always gently, of needles inserted, and tubes, of strong hands manipulating her small body.

Sometimes, half conscious, she would wonder if she was dreaming. But at least she knew that she was alive: dead people don’t wonder about anything, she was sure of that.

The first face that she was aware of was her surgeon’s: humorless, stern, seeming always to be saying, No, not marvelous. Then there was the face of a black nurse, kind and sad, a gentle, mourning face. At last she saw Matthew, so gaunt and stricken that she knew she had to live. It was that simple: dying was something she could not do to Matthew.

“She’s got to be the strongest woman I’ve ever seen, basically,” the dubious surgeon remarked later on to Matthew, who by then could beamingly agree.

Chemotherapy worked; it took most of her hair but fortunately did not make her sick. Yvonne very gradually regained strength, and some health, and with a great effort she put back on a few of the many lost pounds. Matthew learned to make a superior fettuccine, and he served it to her often.

After her illness and surgery, they did not make love anymore; they just did not. Yvonne missed it, in a dim sad way, but on the other hand she could sometimes smile at the very idea of such a ludicrous human activity, to which she herself had once devoted so much time. She was on the whole amused and a little skeptical of accounts of very sexually active seventy- and eighty-year-olds: why did they bother, really?

While she was recuperating, Yvonne finished a study of Marie Laurencin that she had been working on for years, and her book had considerable acclaim, even reasonably good sales. Matthew did not finish his Boccherini study, but from time to time he published articles in places like the
Hudson Review, the Harvard Magazine
.

A year ago, they left Cambridge and moved to the pleasant flat on Green Street, in San Francisco.

  •  •  •

Now, on the porch in Mendocino, thinking of the girl across the room at dinner, and remembering Susanna, all that pain, Yvonne has a vivid insight as to how it would have been if she had abandoned Matthew to Susanna all those years ago. Matthew would, of course, have married the girl—that is how he is—and they would have been quite happy for a while. He would have gazed dotingly upon her in restaurants, like the man in the dining room, with his Susanna. And then somehow it would all have gone bad, with a sad old age for Matthew, the girl bored and irritable, Matthew worn out, not understanding anything.

But what of herself? What would have happened to her? The strange part is that Yvonne has never inquired into this before. Now, with perfect logic, she suddenly, jarringly sees just what would have happened: for a while, considerable unhappiness for her, a slow recovery. And then she would have been quite herself again, maybe a little improved. She would have remarried—amazing, she can almost see him! He is no one she knows, but a man much younger than herself, very dark. In fact, he is French; they have many intimate things in common. He might be a painter. He is very unlike Matthew. Would she still have had her great illness? She is not sure; her vision ends with that man, her marriage to him.

Something in her expression, probably, has made Matthew ask a question never asked between them, a question, in fact, for adolescent lovers: “What were you thinking about, just now?”

And he is given, by Yvonne, the requisite response: “I was thinking, my darling, of you. At least in part.”

The air on the porch is perceptibly chillier than when they first came out from dinner. Time to go in, and yet they are both reluctant to move: it is so beautiful where they are. In the distance, gray-white lines of foam cross the sea, beneath
a calm pale evening sky; closer to hand are the surrounding, sheltering pines and cypresses.

Then, from whatever uncharacteristic moment of strong emotion, Matthew says another thing that he has not said before. “I was thinking,” he says, “that without you I would not have had much of a life at all.”

Does he mean if they had never met? Or does he mean if he had left her for that girl, for fair Susanna? Or if she had died? It is impossible to ask, and so Yvonne frowns, unseen, in the gathering dusk—both at the ambiguity and at the surprise of it. And she, too, says something new: “Ah, Matthew, what an absolute fool you are.” But she has said it lightly, and she adds, “You would have got along perfectly well without me.” She knows that out of her true fondness for Matthew she has lied, and that it is still necessary for her to survive him.

I can only explain my genuine lack of concern, when I first realized that my suitcase was missing, not coming up with the others off the plane, by saying that at that moment I was in a mood of more than usual self-approval; you could call it pride, or maybe hubris, even: I had just managed to enjoy a vacation alone—to come out unscathed, anyway—at a Mexican resort where I had often gone with my recently dead husband, a trip warned against by my children and well-meaning friends, of course. But it had been all right; I was glad that I had gone there. My other source of pride was sillier but forgivable, I think; it was simply that I was looking very well. I was tan, and the warm, gentle green Mexican water had been kind to my hair. I was brown and silver, like a weathering country house, and I did not mind the thought of myself as aging wood.

In any case, I watched the procession of luggage as it erupted from the maw of the baggage area in the San Francisco terminal, up from the Toltec Airlines plane that I had just got off; I watched each piece as it was claimed and lifted off the treadmill and taken away. With no sinking of my
heart (that came much later), I waited until all the other bags were gone, as the empty treadmill moved in its creaking circle, and I realized that that was it: no more bags. An official-looking person confirmed that view: my suitcase was somewhere else, or lost, or irreparably smashed. And I was not at all upset.

I had not been so foolish as to take anything valuable (had I indeed owned anything of that sort of value) to a somewhat ratty resort, on a Mexican beach, and I even thought, Oh, good, now I won’t have to wash out that robe with the suntan-lotion stains.

A pretty black girl in the uniform of the airline gave me a form to fill out, describing the suitcase, and giving my name, Janet Stone Halloran, my address and phone. She gave me a claim number, and she said, “You’ll be given twenty-five dollars for makeup and drugs, you know, for tonight.”

Good, is what I thought again. Very good. I can take a cab home and buy some toothpaste, a brush, astringent, cream. For various reasons, mostly having to do with pride and with my new role as a single woman, I had spent too much money in Mexico, paid for too many rounds of margaritas, so I was quite conscious of even small sums of money. I assumed then that a check for twenty-five would come to me automatically, probably tomorrow.

The truth is that I was quite broke; I needed to get a job as soon as possible, Walter not having believed in insurance, but I wasn’t dealing with that problem yet. I had dealt as best I could with Walter’s death, I had successfully gone to Mexico. I would think about money and jobs tomorrow; I would go out looking while I still was tan.

Actually, and this did not make his death any easier, Walter and I had not liked each other much lately. We had married young, for love (well, sex, really); in our day that is what you did when strongly attracted. And as the physical
intensity calmed down, diminished, all our other energies seemed to go in opposite directions. A familiar story, I guess, but that made it no easier to bear.

Like many lonely women, I became bookish, an obsessive reader, my favorites being long Victorian novels. (Once, reading
The Egoist
—Meredith’s best, I thought—I started to recommend it to Walter, such a wonderfully funny book. But then I recognized that Walter would not think it was funny at all.)

Walter’s major passion, his obsession, turned out to be cars: even after professionally he went from selling Fords to selling life insurance, he was constantly buying, selling, trading, trading in cars. We must have averaged four or five cars a year, and last year, the year he died, we went through seven. And always terrifically fancy ones; I now have a 1935 Franklin, in mint condition, up for sale. I hated to be unsympathetic, but I found all this car business scary, something we couldn’t afford, and I sometimes said as much. But Walter, a fast-talking red-haired Irishman, a looker, a flirt, was not much of a listener, or not to me. He would frown distractedly, and go on with his dreams of cars.

None of which helped when he died. Along with natural grief and shock, I felt guilty as hell: why couldn’t I have been nicer about a relatively harmless habit? He could have been “sleeping around,” as we used to say; well, maybe he was doing that, too. In any case, his death was a dreadful—an appalling—event.

None of our friends knew how little money Walter and I had (no doubt misled by all those fancy cars), any more than they knew how little we liked each other. Neither fact had been something that I could ever speak of, or maybe I had long ago got used to not saying those things—a New England habit of reserve. And there was a connection between those conditions: if we had had money, especially if I
had had a little of my own—that enviable condition—we could have split up; but no, we had children very early on (red-haired, all of them, of course), four children who seemed to stay young forever as we aged. Now they were all away at school, except our oldest daughter, who was married, and when I say that I had no money I mean that I had barely enough to keep them there, and not enough to live on much longer by myself. Probably we would all have to go to work. I didn’t think it would hurt us much; more New England Puritanism, I guess.

And my choice of the Mexican beach had been connected with both of those unmentionable facts, lack of money and not getting along with Walter. It was extremely cheap, and it was where Walter and I had got along least well. I always loved it; he hated it there, and went along as a concession to my poor taste, if grudgingly. For one thing, there were no tennis courts within miles, and Walt was an impassioned tennis buff. (He died on the courts, in fact, after what I was told was a magnificent overhead smash. A good death, in that way, I guess you could call it.)

To a degree, naturally enough, my friends and children were right; it was lonely being there without even an unloved, quarrelsome Walter. And, as widows will, or anyone will just after a serious love affair, for a while I found it hard to remember anything but the good times between us, the early years when we both had jobs with conflicting schedules, his selling Fords, mine doing research for some lawyers; and so whenever we were even briefly at home together we would make love, as instantly and happily as mating birds.

Also, as I sat alone on my terrace, watching one of those incredible tropical sunsets, the whole sky covered with bright rags of clouds, I would feel really frightened, and not unreasonably so. There was not exactly a superabundance of jobs around, and suppose I couldn’t find one, or not for
years? I was well trained, I’d had occasional research jobs along the way, helping out with family money, and I knew a lot of people; still, I was quite a few years over twenty-five, or even thirty. What would I do? (I know, nowhere near the poverty level; but still a cause for concern, I thought.)

At other times, however, down there in the balmy breezes, I would experience an exhilarating sense of adventure. I knew myself to be a strong woman: surely I could turn my life around? I was not really dependent on a middle-class support system, on certain styles of dress and entertaining, on “safe” neighborhoods. I could even, I imagined, find a big house to share with some other working women, about my age—not exactly a commune but a cooperative venture. Such prospects excited and to a degree sustained me.

And there was always the extreme beauty of the place itself, the big horseshoe cove of lovely water, with its white, white beach and rocky promontories at either edge. The green tropical growth that rose from the outer edge of sand into hills. And the clear enormous sky, its brilliant blue, then gaudy sunsets, and, later, billions of stars. Not to mention the flowers spilling over everywhere—the profusion of bougainvillea, of every shade of pink and orange. I could feel it all seeping into me, with the stillness, the peace.