Second Chances (12 page)

Which allows her to become quite brisk—an adult. “Well, now about our party,” she says. “I do think it’s a good idea, even if Edward keeps saying he hates all the fuss and attention. It’ll be a way of congratulating him.”

“And cheering up ourselves,” offers Charles.

More shock waves assault Celeste, but she manages a silly laugh as she says, “As though we were ever depressed. In our beautiful house.”

The house—most of the remodeling of which was grandly, if somewhat vaguely planned by Charles—was supervised minutely by Celeste and carried out by a talented local contractor. It is loosely Mediterranean in style: a sprawling, ocher-colored stucco villa, red-tiled
roof—its wings spread across the top of a hill. The house’s center, the focus of those clustered wings, is a glassed-in courtyard—the “atrium,” in Charles’s parlance. Heated by strong overhead lamps, yet still open to the view of hills and (sometimes) the sea, this space is filled or nearly filled with enormous plants—exotics, their names known only to Celeste—all glossily thriving, with thick heavy slick green leaves. And giant ferns, with leaves of a lighter, lacier green. “The damn place looks more like a rain forest than a house,” well-traveled Charles has more than once been heard to remark. “Sometimes I think my angelic Celeste prefers plants to human beings.”

Well, the truth is that I do, Celeste does not say. I adore my plants, every leaf and frond and tiniest flower of them all, and I adore my handsome Charles, and I love my friends. I love Dudley and Polly, and sometimes Sam, and sometimes Edward and Freddy, and that’s about the end of it—as brilliant Charles has pointed out.

And how sad that Charles never got around to writing his book about the war, his war. What a terrible waste. But surely even now it is not too late?

Basically indifferent to people or not, Celeste gives superior parties; they are beautiful, exciting, generous, memorable parties. And behind all the wonder of flowers and candles, silver and linen and crystal, the always exceptional foods and wines—behind all these voluptuous effects lies the steel efficiency of Celeste.

“Oh, why am I such a perfectionist? What does it matter?” she sometimes cries out, to no one. Knowing, though, that her very efficiency, the apparent ease with which she “brings things off,” is a quality much valued by Charles, who in small matters is somewhat careless. Who tends to be vague.

And so the meticulously planned party indeed takes place, and everything is as beautiful as at all parties given by Celeste, by Celeste and Charles. Even the weather seems to yield to the will of Celeste, which is no surprise to her. Having planned a fairly elaborate cold buffet, seafood platter, everything beautiful and cold, Celeste is rewarded with exceptionally warm weather: one of those rare end-of-October
nights that can occur in northern California, much more like full summer than autumn. And the weather seemed to increase the air of festivity, of heightened celebration.

Which was exactly what Celeste had in mind.

Her perfectionism of course extends to her dress, her wonderful “looks,” or perhaps that is where it all begins. On the night of the party she is in palest yellow silk, of which she says, deflecting compliments, “Oh, but it’s so old, actually. Charles bought it for me on our honeymoon, in Venice. Ten years ago, can you believe it?” And for an instant she widens her eyes quite boldly, before she smiles.

Dudley, who has just praised the dress—“… and in this room, in this wonderful yellow weather, Celeste, it’s perfect”—Dudley, though tall and thin, with her beautiful proud carriage, still does not look especially well. Dudley is not at her best in evening clothes, Celeste decides, privately thinking that the “interesting” batik caftan might be much better on a smaller, younger person. And she further laments the fact that Dudley waited so late in life before stopping smoking—as though giving up the one thing, drink, were all she could manage. Admirable of course only last year for Dudley to stop smoking, at what must have been her mid-fifties; still, the damage to her skin was done already: Dudley, despite her brilliant azure eyes, looks withered, looks older than she is. At which Celeste catches herself with a start. We are all older than we look, than we
feel
, she hears, from some rude interior voice. We are older than middle-aged. We are almost
old
, we’re a party tonight of nearly old people. We are the sort of people I used to look at and wonder why they even bothered getting so dressed up.

But these thoughts are so new and at first so ludicrous that Celeste lets out a small laugh.

So that Polly, standing near her, asks why: “Whatever struck you so funny, Celeste?”

“Oh, nothing really funny. I was just thinking how
old
we all are.”

Strangely, though almost bald, Polly herself does not look old—or not very old. Scorning wigs, instead she wraps her proudly molded skull in scarves, tonight a very fine, very soft white linen, faintly threaded in pale blue. With her strong, clear lightly weathered skin
(Polly is always off on her bike somewhere) and her violently bright pale blue eyes, Polly in her way looks better than anyone—her own highly original and somewhat peculiar way. She looks younger and better than I do, is what Celeste now thinks, observing Polly. And I work so hard at these vestiges of beauty. (But really I do that for Charles. For myself I don’t care so much—or do I?)

“It’s lucky you think old age is so funny, dear Celeste,” says Polly. “Many don’t.” But she smiles, mitigating what has been gruff.

“Well, I simply don’t think old age is funny at all.” This has come from Dudley, now moving closer to stand between her two friends. She has laughed a little as she said this, even as she adds, “I hate it, I really do.”

The three women stand there together for a moment, each smiling a private smile, each with thoughts of her own.

Until Celeste, considerably the smallest of the three, reaches suddenly to touch first Dudley’s shoulder and then Polly’s, abruptly, and in a rushing way she says, “Oh, why don’t we spend more time together? Just we three.”

“Do you mean, Celeste, spend more time together while we’re still around to do so?” Ironic Polly.

“Oh, no, I just mean that I love you two, and there’s always something else that one of us has to do. Like now. I have to go and be a hostess. Charles’s friends.”

A somewhat odd line of reasoning has indeed led Celeste to invite many of the group whom she thinks of as Charles’s old friends, the couples from Woodside and Atherton, from Ross and Kentfield, many of whom were at their wedding. Aside from the fact that in a social way she “owes” these people, Celeste has thought it out in the following way. If the party is to be, in spirit, a coming out for Edward, a celebration of triumph over mortal illness, the effect will be both stronger and more subtle if the party is not limited to Edward’s intimates—and besides who would those intimates be? Young poets, with whom he is known to correspond? His old professors, of whom the same is known? His recent doctors?

If most of the guests do not even know what they are celebrating, so much the better. Celeste has tried without success to explain this
to Charles. “If they all follow my intentions without having even been told to do so, it will be all the more effective,” Celeste has said.

“It sounds very much like witchcraft” was Charles’s comment. “Some propitiatory rite that you’ve made up.”

“Oh, Charles.”

Encouraged, he carries it further. “If you really wanted to get into exorcism, as it were, why didn’t you invite some contingent of fagolas down from the city? Some pretty boys for Edward?”

“Oh, Charles,” Celeste repeats, more severely. Sometimes she does not think Charles is funny at all. “I love Edward very much,” she now reminds Charles. “And he could have died. It all could have metastasized. We have to celebrate his being well.”

And so the party is not announced as having anything to do with Edward, nor his illness—not to Charles’s friends, that is; Celeste more or less whispered her intent to Dudley and Sam, to Polly. And to Freddy. To Edward she flatly said, “It’s your coming-out party. So you simply have to come. It won’t be strenuous, I promise. You can leave whenever you want.”

“Darling, dear Celeste, do you know that ‘coming out’ has a somewhat new meaning, these days?”

“Oh, Edward, of course I know that. Who doesn’t?”

Charles doesn’t, is one of the things that Edward thinks. And very possibly not Celeste either.

At his actual party, though, Edward is one of its least lighthearted guests. He is sad, a sadness caused not primarily by his recent surgery, that whole trauma (although the episode did leave him feeling older, weaker and more frightened; he sometimes dreams of those horrible hospital nights, the bright lights and noise from the corridor, himself in pain).

But far worse than all that for Edward, and lodged in the forefront of Edward’s mind is Freddy, the new Freddy with whom he lives. Whom he loves, in a seemingly permanent way.

Did Gay Liberation and Freddy’s midlife crisis have to coincide so precisely? This is how Edward states the main source of his own unhappiness to himself. For Freddy, who became forty the previous
June, had (not coincidentally) spent a great deal of the summer at a beach just south of San Francisco, a beach known for nudity and known too for being gay (and oh Christ, how Edward loathes and despises that word, in its current application). After years of discretion and relative monogamy (only a few quick encounters in Freddy’s case, which Edward could suspect with some certainty but also pretend to ignore; Edward himself was faithful, absolutely), Freddy, at forty, decided that he should “come out.” To do otherwise was to be hypocritical, if not downright reactionary, retrogressive. Freddy also began to feel that only gay men were truly sympathetic, and only gay restaurants permissible. Easy enough to find lots of both in San Francisco, in the seventies. But sometimes a great bore for Edward, who yearned for a good old-fashioned dinner out, in a straight place like Jack’s, or Sam’s.

And gay beaches.

Freddy’s idea, at least at first, seemed to be that Edward should come along; he encouraged a view of the two of them as sexual adventurers on a quite equal footing: loving friends who could also, if fleetingly, love others. However, Edward’s first exposure to that beach was a nightmare, and his second worse: lying there all stripped in the cold June California fog, his pale, scaly sixty-year-old flesh, with his paunch and his graying, thinning body hair. Edward felt his very sex shriveled down to snail size, a small cold gray slug between his ropy old legs: incompetent, entirely undesirable. As, somewhere near him, tautly muscled, small brown Freddy, who seemed destined by nature for nude beaches, cavorted and laughed with new friends, themselves all athletically lithe and firm and warm, eager-blooded. The genuinely gay, those already “out.” All in all a most horrible summer for Edward, one from which he has in no wise recovered. (Indeed his cancer surgery seemed at times a continuation of that nightmare—having to do, as initially it did, with formerly erotic areas of his body.)

He still has nightmares of those nude-beach afternoons, in which he is either there alone with Freddy, or else Freddy is there, and hardly alone, and he is not. All equally horrible, and a persistent vision—even now, in this strange warm October. He might be going mad, thinks Edward, forcing himself off in the direction of the bar for another drink. Or maybe it is really a Valium that he needs. Or a shot of Demerol, the hospital’s sole blessing.

*  *  *

It seems, though, that there really is some madness prevalent that night, at the overheated, crowded but beautiful party. It is as though Celeste’s ideas about age and exorcism had become actualized, made manifest. As though everyone present had been infected with Celeste’s earlier notion of the lateness of all their lives, their being past middle age. Of the propitiation of lurking disease.

By midnight these unconscious rites have taken the form, in some of the assembled guests, of an unaccustomed, heated sexual urge. The mouths of many people, mouths that for years have just not met, in dry, cool, “social” kisses—those mouths now part to each other, wetly, avidly, searchingly, in darkened corners of terraces, in small barely candlelit rooms.

Dudley, coming from the downstairs powder room, finds herself accosted, quite stopped in her tracks—“Say, Dudley, I’ve been looking all over for you”—by one of Charles’s Ross retiree friends, a man whom she has always half secretly liked. Brooks Burgess. Sam has joked that Brooks has a crush on Dudley—very funny, Sam seems to think this is. They now come upon each other in that small darkened passageway, Dudley and Brooks Burgess, and they fall upon each other like randy adolescents, kissing and groping. They remain upright, more or less, prep-school kids at the door of the dorm at curfew time. In some exhilarated corner of her mind Dudley thinks of this, remembers—as the genital area of Brooks Burgess thrusts against her, and Dudley comes, and comes.

Half an hour or so later Edward, also leaving what has been designated as the men’s room, has a similarly (for him) unusual and happy encounter: thank God he was not successful in persuading Freddy to come along home! This meeting is with a young man all in white whom Edward at first takes to be one of the waiters, as that man’s strong and very firm hands make his intentions absolutely clear. Edward first thinks, No, this is wrong, it’s condescending to have sex with working-class people, remember poor Forster. And he next thinks, For God’s sake, it’s Russell Carter’s nephew, out from Princeton.
And really why does that make it any better, morally? He next laughs to himself in sheer pleasure, and follows the young man (who is neither a waiter nor Russell Carter’s nephew but a local boy gatecrashing, just for fun). This young man has apparently worked out a more private destination for the two of them. Edward goes along, he stops thinking at all. He enjoys, enjoys.

Unaware of course of what her guests are up to, in any detail, Celeste moves from group to group like a small yellow bird, the center of her party, the very source of all its mysterious energy.