To See You Again (16 page)

The next morning, though, she is all right: refreshed, herself again. Even, in the mirror, her face is all right. I look like what I am, she thinks: a strong healthy older woman. She dresses and goes downstairs to breakfast, beginning to plan her day. Both the bellboy and the manager smile in a relieved way as she passes the desk, and she smiles back, amiably.

She will see as much of San Francisco as possible today, and arrange to leave tomorrow. Why wait around? This morning she will take a cab to Union Square, and walk from there along Grant Avenue, Chinatown, to North Beach, where she will have lunch. Then back to the hotel for a nap, then a walk, and dinner out—maybe Sam’s again.

She follows that plan, or most of it. On Union Square, she goes into a couple of stores, where she looks at some crazily overpriced clothes, and buys one beautiful gauzy Indian scarf, for a daughter’s coming birthday. Then down to Grant Avenue, to walk among the smells of Chinese food, the incense, on to North Beach, to a small Italian counter restaurant, where she has linguine with clam sauce, and a glass of red wine.

In the cab, going back to the hotel, she knows that she is too tired, has “overdone,” but it was worth it. She has enjoyed the city, after all.

An hour or so later, from a deep, deep sleep she is awakened by a knocking on her door, just as in her dream, the night before.

Groggily she calls out, “Who is it?” She is not even sure that the sound has been real; so easily this could be another dream.

A man’s impatient, irritated voice answers, “It’s
me
, of course.”

Me? She is still half asleep; she doesn’t know who he is. However, his tone has made her obedient, and she gets out of bed, pulling her pale robe about her, and goes to the door. And there is a tall, red-haired man, with bright blue eyes, whom of course she knows, was expecting—who embraces her violently. “Ah, Martin,” she breathes, when she can.

It is Martin, and she is awake.

The only unfamiliar thing about his face, she notes, when she can see him, is that a tooth is missing from his smile; there is a small gap that he covers with his hand as soon as she has noticed. And he says, “It broke right off! Right off a bridge. And my dentist said I’d have to wait a week. How could I send you a telegram about a goddam dentist? Anyway, I couldn’t wait a week to see you.”

They laugh (although there are tears somewhere near Felicia’s eyes), and then they embrace again.

And at last they are sitting down on the easy chairs near the window, next to the view, and they are quietly talking together, making plans for the rest of that day and night.

Partly because she was so very plain, large and cumbersome, like her name, at first I liked Candida Heffelfinger better than any interviewer who had come around for years. Tall, almost gaunt, she had a big white pockmarked face, lank brown hair and beautiful dark eyes—have you ever noticed how many otherwise ugly women have lovely eyes? Also, she had that special, unassuming niceness that plain women often have; I should know, it was years before I dared to be as mean and recalcitrant, as harsh-mannered as I had always wanted to be.

I liked her as soon as I saw her awkwardly getting out of the red Toyota that she must have rented at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, and start up the pine-strewn path to my (Ran’s) house. And I liked her although I knew that she would want to talk about my legendary love affair, about Ran, rather than about my work, the sculpture. I was used to that; it interested everyone, our “love,” and besides, what can you say about structures almost twenty feet high, some weighing thousands of pounds?

In a welcoming way, and also as a surprise—I would not be the ogress that almost anyone in New York would have warned her about—I went to the door to greet her.

“Miss Phelps?” she puffed out. “Jane Phelps?”

Well, who in hell else would I be? But I said yes, and asked her to come in, and what would she like to drink?

In her dowdy-expensive gray flannel suit she followed me into the living room, and said that she drank bourbon-and-water.

I made the drinks, and we both settled down in that high-ceilinged, glassed-in living room; we stared out at the fading November sunset, against the black lace network of trees. We smoked our cigarettes, and drank, and we made friendly small talk about her flight, the drive from the airport to Hilton. This house, its view.

I not only liked Ms. Heffelfinger; I felt that I knew a lot about her. With that name, and that flat, unaccented voice, she would be Midwestern, as I am, from somewhere in Minnesota, or Wisconsin. I imagined a rural childhood for her, and I saw her as the eldest in a family of brothers, whose care would often fall to her. Then adolescence—well, we all know about the adolescent years of ugly girls: the furtive sexual encounters with boys who later don’t speak to you in the halls at school, who invite small fluffy blondes to their parties. Then college, at a state university, where the social failure would be somewhat balanced by academic triumph, and maybe even a passingly satisfactory affair with a young instructor, although more likely an aging professor, paunchy and grimly married. Next the New York experience, the good job and the lonely love affairs: married men or alcoholics, or both, or worse.

You might ask why such an unattractive girl would be chosen in that way at all, but only if you had never heard the
old saying that ugly women as lovers are fantastic. I remember the first time I heard that voiced, by a short, very truculent and quite untalented painter. I was entirely outraged, as though one of my most intimate secrets had been spoken aloud, for of course it is often true: a beautiful woman would expect to be made love to, we expect to make love.

Ms. Heffelfinger and I said what we could about the town—very old pre-Civil War—and the house, Ran’s house, which was built in the Twenties—and then considered very innovative, all that glass—with prize money from his first symphony. (Ran was once a famous composer.)

Perhaps by way of changing our direction, I asked her if she minded living alone in New York—and I was totally unprepared for her answer.

“Well, actually we don’t live in the city,” she said. “We live in a small town in northern New Jersey. It’s very unchic, but it’s great for the kids, they love it.”

We? Kids? Perhaps unfairly I felt that I had been deceived, or at least misled. I tried to keep surprise and suspicion from my face but they must have shown (everything does), for she laughed and said, “I know, I don’t look married, or much like a mother, but maybe that’s just as well?” And then she said, “Well, we might as well start? It’s okay to turn on the tape?”

I said yes as I noted what nice teeth she had, just then exhibited in her first smile. I thought too that I had better be on my guard, more than usually so.

Now the sky beyond all that naked glass was entirely black, and you would have thought that everything outside was stilled, unless you knew—as I, a night walker, knew—that in those depths of woods small leaves yet stirred, and tiny birds were settling for the night. Ms. Heffelfinger turned on her recorder, and she began to say what I had known that
she would say: a small speech to the effect that she knew very little in a general way about sculpture, “although I am really moved by it, more so than any other visual form.” (Was that true?)

I said I understood, and I gave the snort that over the years I had perfected. “Actually no one knows a damn thing about my work but me, and sometimes I’m not at all sure that I do,” I told her.

She smiled, again those nice teeth, our smoke circled up to the arched, beamed ceiling, and then she made her second predictable speech; everyone said it, in one form or another. “Of course you realize that the main interest, prurient though it may be, is in your relationship with Randolph Caldwell.”

I smiled, showing my tolerant indifference to prurience, to vulgar curiosity. “Of course, the legendary love affair,” I said.

“By now I’m quite an expert on the legend,” Ms. Heffelfinger assured me, looking off into a distance that might have contained her notes. “You came to Hilton not long after Luanda Caldwell died, is that right? Mr. Caldwell at that time was still in mourning for his wife?”

“In his way. Yes. Mourning.” I had never met Lucinda, of course, but I too, in my way, had sometimes mourned for her.

And while I had strayed off in that direction, poor Lucinda’s, Ms. Heffelfinger slowly inserted her knife into my heart.

“One thing I don’t quite understand,” she said, beginning gently, so that I hardly felt it. Then, “About Gloria Bingham.”
In
. “Just when was it that she first came here, and met Randolph Caldwell?”

All the books and articles, if they mention her at all, other than as a footnote, make it perfectly clear that Gloria
Bingham was a totally unimportant figure in Ran’s life, a girl who came after Lucinda, and before me, his major love. But I was unable just then to parrot the legend to Ms. Heffelfinger—or even, had I wanted to, to tell her that it was a bloody lie. I began to cough, passionately, as though I were trying to cough up my heart, that sudden cold stone in my chest.

Candida Heffelfinger looked alarmed, of course. She got up—for a moment I thought she meant to hit me on the back; fortunately she decided not to. She looked wildly about, and at last discovered the bar. She went over and brought me a glass of water, so helpful.

By then I could thank her, weakly. “But I really don’t think I can talk anymore just now. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I told her. “You’re staying at the inn?” In fact, I was not at all sure that I would call her—
why
?

She said yes, fine, and got up to go. I did not rise, I barely could have. I gave her a limp old lady’s hand to shake, and I watched as she walked down the hall to the door, then turned to wave. Her suit was now rumpled, as though that brief encounter with me had messed up her clothes, as well as her good intentions.

It was the maid’s night off, and so I decided not to bother with dinner. I made myself another drink, and then another, and later I had some cheese for nourishment. I watched the stars come out among the blackened pine and oak boughs, and then a waning moon come up, and I thought about life, and truth, and lies, as an old drunk person is very apt to do.

The true story, my—“our”—story, began a long time ago, in the Thirties, my own late twenties, when I came to Hilton to begin an instructorship in the art department. I
rented a tiny house, a cabin, on the road leading up to the Caldwell house, in the deepest, leafiest, most romantic Southern woods. And on that white road I first saw, driving fast in a snappy open car, a handsome man in early middle age, with thick gray hair, dark eyes and a bright red plaid wool shirt. Randolph Caldwell, the composer, I was told when I asked Dr. James, the head of the art department, about my conspicuous neighbor. (This was just after Lucinda Caldwell had died, and no one then had ever heard of Gloria Bingham. So you may conclude, Ms. Heffelfinger, that it was I, not Gloria, who formed the unimportant link, who came between Lucinda and Gloria.)

And later it was Dr. James who introduced me to Ran, in the A. & P., at the vegetable counter.

“I’m delighted to meet a near neighbor,” he said as he took my hand, but his eyes glazed over in the automatic way of a man meeting a not pretty woman, a look I knew.

“I’ve admired your car,” I told him, half-lying, and hoping that he would not imagine I knew anything whatsoever about cars.

But his voice and his eyes were beautiful. I loved him.

Actually I loved the whole town, the crazily heterogeneous architecture of the campus: cracked yellow plaster on its oldest buildings, with their ferociously clinging red Virginia creeper; and the newer brick additions, with their corny Corinthian pillars, which now, several generations later, look almost authentic. I loved my cabin in the woods, on a slope of poplars, looking out to early fall dusks, almost unpopulated hills of black, like a sea, the darkness stippled here and there with straight blue lines of smoke from other cabins, country people, mostly Negroes. The town and its surrounding hills, its woods, were exotic to me; I might have
just arrived in Scotland, or East Africa. And, given my age and general inclinations, that excitement had to find a focus, a sexual object. I had to fall in love, and there was Ran, so handsome and seemingly unavailable, a man of the age I was used to choosing.

The next day I managed to be on the road just before he came by. I thought, even hoped, that he would wave in a friendly way, but he was much too Southern to let a lady walk; he stopped, and elaborately opened the door for me, and smiled, and instantly launched into a complicated monologue about the weather.

I soon worked out his schedule so that I could always be in his path. I would linger there in the smell of pines and leaves and dust and sunlight until I heard the sound of his car, and then I would move on briskly, until he should see me and stop. If he had passed me by, just waving, in a hurry, I would probably have died, my heart stricken and stilled then and there, and with a not pretty girl’s dark imagination I always thought that would happen, but it never did—or never until he had Gloria with him in the car, and then they would both smile and wave, and hurry on.

Until Gloria, he would stop and open the door and I would clumsily get in; I was so dizzy, so wild with love, or lust, whatever, that I could hardly look at him. I am sure that he never noticed then, although much later, after we were lovers, of a sort, he claimed that he had always noticed everything about me. A typical Southern man’s lie.

Now when I try to remember what we talked about, on those short important drives, I come up with nothing. The weather, the passage of time, the changing seasons. But that particular fall, I do remember, was extraordinarily beautiful, with vibrant, brilliant leaves against a vivid sky; it was more than worthy of our notice.

One problem in the way of talk was Ran’s quite impenetrable
accent. You think of a Southern accent as being slow, and lazy; Ran spoke more quickly than anyone I had ever known, and he constantly smoked—all those quick light Southern words arrived filtered through all that smoke. Half the time I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about, but I was excited by his voice, as I was by everything about him, his hair and his sad dark eyes, his cigarettes; his hunting shirts, his shabby tweeds, his snappy car. At worst, you could call it a crush.