To See You Again (14 page)

“How much do you think she’ll get for the house?” asked Margery, who had never seen it, Charlotte not being given to taking friends over to meet Blanche.

“I haven’t any idea. I don’t know about real estate,” Charlotte said. “It’s a big house, though. Sort of spread out.”

“Well, anything in the Berkeley hills is worth at least two hundred grand,” said Margery, who did know about those things.

Two hundred thousand dollars. With even half that, decently invested, Charlotte figured that she could live for the rest of her life. Not worry about selling paintings. Just paint.

But, in a way, the realization that something as concrete as money figured in her pain was comforting; it made her feel less blackly doomed—less crazy.

Margery mused, “It would be interesting to know what she’ll get for it.”

“I can’t exactly ask her, though.”

“Maybe I could find out.”

  •  •  •

As though things in her life were not difficult enough at that moment, Lyman Clay began to push Charlotte toward getting married. Or that is how Charlotte felt: pushed.

Typically, he presented his ideas in a literary way, over a dinner at his place. A dinner that he had cooked. And Lyman’s cooking was another source of amazement and slight suspicion for Charlotte.

“A marriage is like the imposition of form on feeling in poetry,” Lyman said. “Or in painting, for heaven’s sake.”

With a sharp leap of her heart, Charlotte saw what he meant; she felt it, but she was too disturbed—about the house, about Blanche, about Ian—to think in a serious way about what Lyman was suggesting.

And gloomily she foresaw that she and Lyman would eventually come to a parting over this issue, since he was clearly serious in what he said. A year or so later, when Lyman had married someone else (lots of women really want to marry, she knew, and Lyman was exceptionally nice), she, Charlotte, would wish that she were with him; then she would mourn for Lyman, as she had for various other departed men.

It was at Lyman’s that Margery reached her—not wanting to wait to call Charlotte in the morning. She had to tell her the news.

“I can’t believe this,” said Margery over the phone. “The place is going for a hundred thousand. Honestly, Char, it must be a wreck.”

Not grasping the sum of money, her mind instead wandering back to the actual house (a wreck?), Charlotte only said, “Well, it didn’t use to be.”

“Who ever would have thought that a hundred thousand could come to look like a bargain?” said Margery.

Vaguely offended at the word “bargain” being attached to her house, Charlotte murmured, “Not I.”

  •  •  •

An odd lapse, or confusion, of memory had been disturbing Charlotte, along with her other troubles, ever since first hearing from Blanche about the house: simply, she could not remember whether a giant pine that had been near the side porch had been cut down or not. In her earliest memories it was there; as a small child she had played with dolls and Dinky toys among its roots. And she could remember it when, as an older girl, she had sat there on the porch, making out with some boy. But then: had there been talk about cutting it down? Had Ian said it had to go, that it menaced the roof, or the porch? Possessed of an unusually active visual imagination, Charlotte could see the waving heavy-boughed pine, and she could also see its stump, raw and flat and new—or was she seeing the stump from another tree, somewhere else?

Without waiting to show it to Lyman or to Margery—to anyone—Charlotte took the yellow landscape to her gallery, a new one, in Embarcadero Center, and it was sold the next day, for more money than Charlotte could believe: enough to live on for five or six months, she thought.

To celebrate, and because, marriage or not, he was an extremely nice man, Charlotte took Lyman out to dinner, inviting him to a new French place, all polished brass and big mirrors and white linen, which they had sometimes walked past.

Exactly the kind of occasion that should be fun and won’t be, Charlotte thought as she dressed, putting on an unaccustomed skirt and silk shirt and high sandals. Lyman will make some dumb scene about not letting me pay, and
we won’t have anything to talk about except the food, which will not be good.

The restaurant was attractive. And as they sat down, Lyman in a coat and tie, straw hair under control, Charlotte thought, Well, we do make a fairly handsome couple.

Easily, Lyman told the waiter to put the wine on a separate check, he would take care of that.

“
Mais bien sûr, Monsieur
.”

As Charlotte thought, Well, so far so good.

The food, too, was good, but then after a while something in the tone of the restaurant, maybe, began to make them unfamiliar to themselves. Charlotte heard Lyman talking in a new and stilted way—indeed, discussing the food—and she began to think, I was right.

Mainly for something new to say, she asked, “How come you never talk about Portland?” more complainingly than she had meant to. “Did you like it, growing up there?”

He grinned, showing white, white teeth. “Well, I really did,” he said. “It’s still small enough to be comprehensible, sort of. There are even some cobbled streets left. And we lived out on Cape Elizabeth, right on the Atlantic.”

He went on and on about Portland—the coast, the beaches, the rocks—and Charlotte could see it all vividly as he spoke.

But why was this conversation making her so sad? And then she knew: she was hearing the nostalgia in Lyman’s voice; his missing the place he came from was making her miss her own place, her house.

She also took Margery out, for lunch, for further celebration.

“I honestly think I must be going crazy,” Charlotte said. “Lyman could not be a nicer person; he’s kind and smart, and
being five years younger than I am is not important, really. But I keep making trouble. If I had better sense I could be perfectly happy with Lyman. I sometimes am.”

Margery laughed. “If you had better sense you might not be a painter.”

“Well, I guess.”

Margery raised her wineglass in a toast, and then she asked, “What ever will you do with all that money?”

Charlotte frowned, her hands gestured helplessness. “I don’t know, it’s been worrying me. I should do something—sensible.”

“What about our buying the Berkeley house?”

“
What?
”

“Your house in Berkeley. I have some money saved up … and I could … and you could … we could … rent … invest … property values.”

Margery made the appointment and got the key from the real-estate agent—all the negotiations would have to be in her name, obviously—and on a bright October afternoon she and Charlotte drove over to Berkeley: two prospective buyers of an empty house.

They drove up Marin, and up and up, and then turned right on Grizzly Peak, at which point the sheer familiarity of everything she saw accelerated and heated the flow of Charlotte’s blood: how she
knew
all those particular turns of the road, those steep sudden views of the bay. And then there it was, in a clump of tall waving eucalyptus: her house. Sand-colored adobe bricks and a red tiled roof, a narrow wooden porch stuck out to one side like an ill-advised whim, long one-storied wings seeming to wander off behind. Perhaps because of the five years’ lapse since she had been there, or maybe because she was seeing it with Margery, Charlotte thought,
What a nutty-looking house, it’s crazy. But that was an affectionate thought; the house could have been an eccentric relative. In fact, it reminded her considerably of Ian: uncontrolled, given over to impulse. (An adobe house in the Berkeley hills had been itself an eccentric impulse, or a sentimental one: Ian and her mother had spent their honeymoon in Mexico.)

When Margery had parked the car, they got out and walked toward it, toward Charlotte’s house. All the vines and shrubbery had increased considerably in the five years since her last visit; a green growth of wisteria almost covered the porch.

Like a thief, an accomplice in crime, Charlotte followed Margery up to the front door, which, with the real-estate agent’s key, Margery opened, and they walked into an absolutely empty, echoing house.

But why was Charlotte so frightened? She could have been an actual intruder, even a thief, so violent was her apprehension as they walked from room to room, both of them on tiptoe. And along with this fear came a total disorientation: was this small stained room the one that had always been called the guest room but where Ian slept from one wife to another? And was this smaller room her own, in which she had lain and listened to Eugenia’s weeping? Shivering, to Margery she whispered, “It all looks so small.”

“Rooms do, without any furniture. Honestly, they weren’t kidding about its being in bad shape.”

“I’m going back outside,” whispered Charlotte.

Outside was more familiar: the sweeping view of the bay—the water and sky, the darker skyline. The shrubs and trees and vines were all in their proper place, except for the big pine, which indeed was missing. Nor was there any stump where Charlotte thought the tree had been. Instead,
in that spot Blanche (it must have been Blanche) had put in a bed of geraniums, her favorites; in the intense October sunlight they gave off a dusty, slightly rancid smell.

Margery came out at last, and together she and Charlotte walked around the house, Margery stopping to peer down at foundations, to mutter about dry rot.

Once back in the car, seemingly having put dry rot out of her mind, Margery began to talk animatedly about possible reconstruction of the house: “It really has marvelous potential; it needs a lot of work, but I could … knock out walls … open up … a deck.”

By this time they were on the bridge, crossing the shining water far below—that day an interesting slate blue, a color that wet stones sometimes are.

“Well, so what do you think?” asked Margery.

“I don’t know. I guess it really doesn’t seem my kind of thing,” Charlotte said, with a certain effort.

“But I thought you wanted—I thought it would help.” Although clearly intending kindness, sympathy, Margery sounded very slightly huffy: her professional imagination was being rebuffed.

Margery would get over her huffiness in time, Charlotte thought. And while Charlotte could not entirely “get over” her pain at the loss of what she continued to think of as her house, it would perhaps become bearable, little more than an occasional sharp twinge.

She began a new painting, this time all shades of blue, from slate to brightest azure.

When, a few weeks later, a postcard came from Blanche, in Santa Barbara, showing lots of palms and flowers, and announcing that she was going to marry the most wonderful
(underlined) man with a lovely house on the ocean, near the Biltmore Hotel, Charlotte stuck the card in a box with letters that she meant to answer soon.

It was a few months after that, near Christmastime, that, waking with Lyman in his wide, eccentrically carved oak bed—their most recent decision had been to make no decision, no firm plans about legalities or moving in—in a wondering voice Charlotte said, “You know, it’s curious, I don’t dream that I live in Berkeley anymore. My dreams don’t take place in that house.”

“I didn’t know they ever did,” Lyman said.

Feeling sixteen, although in fact just a few months short of sixty, Felicia Lord checks into the San Francisco hotel at which her lover is to meet her the following day. Felicia is tall and thin, with the intense, somewhat startled look of a survivor—a recent widow, mother of five, a ceramicist who prefers to call herself a potter. A stylish gray-blonde. Mr. Voort, she is told, will be given the room next to hers when he arrives. Smiling to herself, she then follows the ancient, wizened bellboy into an antique elevator cage; once inside, as they creakingly ascend, he turns and smiles up at her, as though he knows what she is about. She herself is less sure.

The room to which he leads her is a suite, really: big, shabby-cozy living room, discreetly adjoining bedroom, large old-fashioned bath, on the top floor of this old San Francisco hotel, itself a survivor of the earthquake and fire, in an outlying neighborhood. All in all, she instantly decides, it is the perfect place for meeting Martin, for being with him, in the bright blue dazzling weather, this sudden May.

San Francisco itself, connected as it is with Felicia’s own history, has seemed a possibly dangerous choice: the scene of
her early, unlikely premarital “romance” with Charles, her now dead husband; then the scene of holiday visits from Connecticut with the children, treat zoo visits and cable-car rides, Chinese restaurants; scene of a passionate ill-advised love affair, and a subsequent abortion—all that also took place in San Francisco, but years ago, in other hotels, other neighborhoods.

Why then, having tipped the grinning bellboy and begun to unpack, silk shirts on hangers, silk tissue-papered nightgowns and underthings in drawers, does she feel such a dizzying lurch of apprehension? It is too intense in its impact to be just a traveler’s nerves, jet lag. Felicia is suddenly quite weak; she sits down in an easy chair next to a window to absorb the view, to think sensibly about her situation, or try to. She sees a crazy variety of rooftops: mansard, Victorian curls, old weathered shingles and bright new slate. Blue water, paler sky, green hills. No help.

It is being in love with Martin, she thinks, being “in love,” and the newness of Martin Voort. I’ve never known a farming sailor before, and she smiles, because the words don’t describe Martin, really, although he owns some cranberry bogs, near Cape Cod, and he builds boats. Charles was a painter, but he was rich (Martin is not rich) and most of his friends were business people. Martin is entirely new to her.

And at my age, thinks Felicia, and she smiles again, a smile which feels tremulous on her mouth.

“Wonderful” is the word that people generally have used about Felicia. She was wonderful with Charles, whose painting never came to much, although he owned a couple of galleries, who drank a lot. Wonderful with all those kids, who were a little wild, always breaking arms or heads.

Her lover—a Mexican Communist, and like Charles a
painter, but a much better painter than Charles—Felipe thought she looked wonderful, with her high-boned face, strong hands and her long, strong voluptuous body. She was wonderful about the abortion, and wonderful too when he went back to his wife.