Second Chances (26 page)

“Of course I’ve been crossing my fingers that something would send me back to California, but no such luck. I have to go way down south, and I don’t mean Dixie. But I’ll be thinking about you, Celeste, and your lovely home, and your friends and your ‘niece.’ ”

Celeste, fastidious about the written word, as indeed she is in most areas, is fairly appalled by this letter, her first from Bill. Sent, she notes, from Washington, D.C. One of Charles’s great charms for Celeste was his prose style, which she considered exemplary, of its kind: clean and clear and vigorous—even elegant, at times.

Whereas that of Bill is simply vulgar, she concludes. Is even more than a little disjointed, and in her view patently insincere. She knows that many people have trouble with the written word, one should make certain allowances, but still: this is an awful letter. He even
sounds slightly crazy, Celeste decides, and she thinks, I only cared about him, to the extent that I did care, because I am actually not in the best of shape myself.

She does not show the letter to Sara (certainly
not
), nor to anyone, ever. Over breakfast she only says to Sara, that next morning, “Oh, I heard from Bill. Finally. I forgot to tell you.”

“Really?”

Sara does not do well at trying to appear casual, in Celeste’s opinion.

“Yes, I think he must be off to South America,” Celeste throws out, herself very casual.

“
Really?
What country, do you know?”

“I’ve no idea.” With some satisfaction, Celeste notes Sara’s totally thwarted look, her outraged curiosity.

She observes too that Sara looks—well, “pretty” is actually the most descriptive word, odd as it may seem for bold Sara. Her face looks all smoothed out, her skin very lightly tanned, perhaps from all those walks with Dudley, in this unusual warm clear weather. Her hair too is smooth, pulled becomingly back in a way that Celeste herself suggested, and was quite startled to see that Sara in fact adopted.

“He just said South America?” Sara now pursues.

“Actually not even that. I just put things together from what he did say.” Celeste purses her mouth, and is silent. And then suddenly, for no good, discernible reason, she thinks: Sara is having a love affair with that David, it must be David, there’s no one else around. And she’s always out.

“Well, that’s very interesting,” Sara comments, still going on about Bill. “Horrible, isn’t it, how things fall into place?”

“They do?”

“I mean, so much turning up in South America. Bad loans, guns, coke, along with their usual earthquakes and floods and buses falling off cliffs? Have you noticed how natural disasters almost never befall the rich?”

“Sara, I do not see Bill as a natural disaster. Nor as evil as you seem to insist on believing.”

“Well, maybe not.” Sara looks at her watch, not the present from
Celeste but a large practical one that she boasts about having found at Walgreen’s. “It’s such a terrific day, I think I’ll go for a walk.” (As though she had no appointment! Were meeting no one.)

Once Sara is gone, precipitately out the door, Celeste begins to reflect, seated in her sunny boudoir, at the small carved desk. And one of the first things that occurs to her is Sara’s singular lack of any acting ability; she has none at all, not an ounce.

And it was very wise indeed of her, Celeste, not to show Bill’s letter to Sara; with Sara’s very melodramatic tendencies—“paranoid” seems the fashionable word, in some circles, these days—God knows what Sara would have made of it. Recently Sara has even asked Celeste if Celeste thought their phone could be “bugged.” Imagine! The Timberlake phone, Charles’s phone. No doubt Sara imagines that Bill is bugging their phone, somehow.

“But why did you tell us he was gay?” is one of the things that Sara has asked Celeste, about Bill.

“Oh, that was just my little joke.” Celeste laughed.

Her own reasons for that “joke” were fairly complicated, actually, and included a genuine confusion as to the sexual direction of Bill. They used to kiss a lot, he and she, but not in what Celeste considers a passionate way. They were like adolescents, but very early adolescents—these days, that would be about nine years old, from what Celeste has gleaned from various articles she has read. But the impulse to state that Bill was gay also sprang from a desire to get there first, so to speak: if anyone else should happen to take that view of Bill, Celeste would want to appear to know already.

Now, though, as she watches the creeping of sunlight into and across the polished floorboards of her bedroom, Celeste feels incredibly remote from Bill; he now seems to have come and gone in her life without leaving a trace. How difficult now even to recall all that emotion, all that tremulous waiting for phone calls, those delicately stirring kisses.

But she actually feels both remote from Bill and from everyone she knows, from even those near at hand. From Sara, from Dudley, from Edward and Freddy, who are coming over for dinner tonight.

She wonders if this is a part of getting ready to die. Could this be what the approach of death is like, this calm, this passive sadness?

Very likely so.

Celeste has to absolutely force herself to do her exercises. First the Yoga, then some mild aerobics.

Contrary to Celeste’s somewhat retro-romantic view, as Sara herself might put it, Sara is certainly not “having an affair” with David, nor with anyone else. What she is doing, and what must in large part account for her look of much-improved health, of looking “pretty,” is following Celeste’s own prescription for strenuous exercise. Which she would not have admitted to Celeste. “Oh, Celeste, you’re so right, I’ve been walking ten or twelve miles a day really fast, and I feel a hundred times better.”

Never, never would she have said such a thing, although that statement expresses the literal, simple truth. And furthermore she would have liked to make that acknowledgment to Celeste, as a sort of present, a way of saying, “You’re really great. I do what you say, sometimes.” But she cannot.

But she does walk. She walks all the way to the coast, where she stands up on those bluffs, and she breathes, and contemplates. And she speaks very firmly to herself, at those moments. She says, “You don’t have to be afraid anymore. You’re all right now, you’re much better.” And she wrestles with the problem of whether or not she should tell Celeste what she actually knows about Bill. Bill the cokehead, Bill of the CIA.

In the early hours, which are Sara’s chosen time for walks, the pale gray June fog banks that linger above the sea are delicate, thin veils. Wafting, ephemeral. The sea distantly shimmers. “It’s all so beautiful that even I find it hard to be depressed,” Sara has said to Alex, in a recent phone call. (He had called her late one night, her usual hour for ringing him: he had been down in Washington, he said, sort of poking around, and he thought she might have tried to call him. Well, no, she actually hadn’t, Sara lied.)

She told Alex then about the peace rally, the old-new faces of infiltrators, informers. She said how afraid she sometimes is. “It’s like
running through some terrible woods and making it out, and then you stop to be afraid” is how she put it.

“That’s just right, how it is.” (Good, kind, responsive Alex.) “But the point is,” he continues, “you are out. That’s what to keep in mind.”

“I’m not always sure. This fucking phone sounds bugged.”

“Well, what if it is? You’re Sara, and you’re staying with Celeste. You went to a peace rally with Dudley. You make phone calls to me in New York. Sometimes. Big fucking deal, as we used to say.”

Sara laughs. “Well, when you put it like that.” And then she tells him, “I even worry about that dopey David. The waiter guy I told you about. With the beard and yellowish eyes, who was such a jerk at Celeste’s big party. But he follows me around, or I think he does. I run into him a lot.”

“He’s probably got some kind of a crush on you.
I
used to follow you around.”

“Oh, you never did. I would have known.” Not saying, I was following you, I was the one with the crush.

“Oh, did I not. You had a class in that building with the funny name, up by the campanile. Birge. I used to sit so casually on one of those benches at the side, trying to look at the saucer magnolias, to think hard about magnolias. And sometimes you’d really mess me up, leaving by another door. And I’d have to tell myself it wasn’t deliberate, you weren’t avoiding me.”

Inordinately pleased, Sara laughs—she is half-ashamed of such pleasure.

“You seem to think anyone who likes you is some kind of a freak. Or a spy, for God’s sake.”

This is so accurate, and so awful, so mentally unhealthy, as Sara knows perfectly well, that she has no answer other than her convenient old irony. “Well, maybe I’ll confront this David, and see what he has in mind, since I’m so devastating that he can’t possibly hurt me.”

“Do that. But if something comes of it just don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear about it.”

*  *  *

Alex too is certainly “much better.” Sara had this thought on seeing him in New York, and she thinks this increasingly as they talk, and talk. He is more his own person, is “stronger,” more defined.

Alex himself tends to attribute any changes in himself to his shrink. “She’s a most unusual woman.”

But he has also pointed out, “I’m really only okay by myself. It’s ‘relationships’ I can’t seem to handle.”

“Except by long distance,” Sara has to add.

He laughs, a little embarrassed, but then he reminds her, “It’s you who won’t let me come out there. And if you say you’re afraid of me too, I’ll know you’re lying.”

“No, it’s not that. I’m not.” I’m not quite ready to see you yet, is what Sara actually means, and is quite unable to say. For one thing, she worries about what will actually happen, what must happen, when they do see each other again. Suppose the sex is not as great as the friendship they seem to have developed?

Alex continues to talk about his Spanish studies—enthusiastically. He is now meeting every week with a group that includes a poet from Nicaragua. “In fact, it seems more or less a country of poets. I think I should have that trip pulled together in a couple of months.”

On some days, turning her back on the sea, Sara heads down the overgrown, rutted path, now never used, leading past Polly’s small house and eventually to the town (this being, among other things, the one road on which Sara has not run into David). She would never have simply dropped in on Polly, but she liked the idea of Polly’s nearness. Sara liked Polly, though she barely knew her, always smiling as she passed that house.

The inevitable day arrived, however, when Sara’s smile and her glance toward the vine-covered, stucco box encountered Polly herself, seated—or rather, sprawled—on a tattered rug, on the patchy grass. Polly apparently digging in her garden.

Sara waves, half-intending to continue, but Polly stops her. “Just stay here for one minute, which is all I’ve got. But I have something to say.”

Coming in through the broken, slatted gate, approaching Polly, Sara is not at all surprised to hear Polly’s message. Polly, with no
preamble, says to Sara, “I’m more than a little worried about Celeste. You’ve got to get her to see a doctor.
Make
her go.”

“Really? It’s that bad?” Even an expected message can be very shocking, as this one is.

Near Polly’s sandal-shod feet is an oblong package, newspaper-wrapped. (“It looked like money, honestly, a packet of bills she’d just dug up,” Sara to Alex, later. “Talk about eccentric.” Alex: “Well, the banks aren’t doing too well, she may be quite right.”)

“She throws a few symptoms at me from time to time,” explains Polly, her pale brilliant eyes squinting up into the sun, and at Sara. “I knew what was wrong with Charles, so she overrates my diagnostic powers. He had the same thing I’d had, though, for Christ’s sake. The old big pancreatic C. And Celeste may be okay, but someone other than me has to check her out.”

Picking up her trowel then, returning to dirt, Polly further admonishes, “Well, you do what you can.”

Thus dismissed, Sara promises, “I will,” and gestures goodbye—although she would have given a good deal to stay and talk to Polly. What symptoms does Celeste now have,
how
serious are they?

The thought of a serious illness—well, cancer—and a terrible slow death for Celeste is entirely horrifying to Sara.
Horrifying
, and at the same time, along with the horror, Sara experiences a sort of rage: How could you, Celeste? I didn’t come out here to watch you die, I already did that with Emma. I love you, you have to stay around. We’ve just begun to talk, and I need you.

Continuing down the road, that day, she does not run into anyone. She does see Victor Lozano, the heavyset, dark, quite bald repairman from the local garage. Who is pushing along a battered bicycle, one of Polly’s that he must have repaired. He and Sara exchange the muted hellos of people who almost but not quite know each other, and Sara thinks, Now, there’s a really sexy-looking man. That Victor is something else.

“One absolutely horrible thing, of course,” says Freddy quite loudly to Edward, as in adjoining rooms they dress to go to Celeste’s for
dinner, “one awful thing that must affect everyone is that every goddam cold makes you think you have it. Have AIDS.”

Curiously, perhaps, this is the first explicit mention between them of the possibility of AIDS for themselves. And the implications, none of which he has not already considered, are, to Edward, staggering. He is barely able to ask, with what he believes to be a suitable lack of concern, “You’re getting a cold?”

“Yes—no, I don’t know. I think so. I feel terrible. Probably I’m just tired.”

Edward smiles as Freddy, fully and perfectly dressed, appears. Edward says, “You don’t look tired, but then you never do. Ah, youth.”

Freddy in fact has never been more beautiful, in Edward’s view. Once a pretty boy (“that pretty boy of Edward’s”), he is now a beautiful, thoughtful, intelligent, somewhat saddened man. With his dark cat sleekness, his wry mouth and delicately pointed chin, Freddy looks simply extraordinary, Edward thinks. Even in the most conventional clothes, as tonight: black blazer, pale yellow shirt, black knit tie. “I like that blazer on you” is what Edward says.