Return Trips (8 page)

Jonathan and Sarah were not invited to the wedding, a fact initially excused (maybe overexcused) by Sarah: “We’re not the Old Guard, not old Hiltonians, and besides, it’s the bride’s list, not Hattie’s, and we don’t even know her, or her family.”

And then two weeks of the McElroy visit had passed, accurately calculated by Jonathan. Which calculation led to his fatal remarks, over all that wine, about the priorities of the McElroys.

On the morning after that terrible evening, Jonathan and Sarah have breakfast together as usual, but rather sombrely. Hung over, sipping at tea, nibbling at overripe late-summer fruit, Jonathan wonders what he can say, since he cannot exactly deny the truth of his unfortunate words.

At last he brings out “I’m really sorry I said that, about Hattie and Hugh.”

Sarah gives him an opaque, level look, and her voice is judicious as she says, “Well, I’m sure you were right.”

One of the qualities that Jonathan has always found exciting in Sarah is her ability to surprise him; she rarely behaves in ways that he would have predicted. Nevertheless, having worried intermittently during the day over her sadness, her low spirits and his own recent part in further lowering them, he is delighted (ah, his old astonishing Sarah) to find her all brushed and bright-eyed, happy, when he comes in the door that night.

“Well, I decided that all this moping around like an abandoned person was really silly,” she tells him, over cold before-dinner glasses of wine, in the bright hot flower-scented dusk. “And so I just called Hattie, not being accusatory or anything. I just said that I’d really missed seeing her—them.”

“Well,
great
.” Jonathan is thinking how he admires her; she is fundamentally honest, and brave. And so pretty tonight, her delicately pointed face, her lively brown hair.

“Hattie couldn’t have been nicer. She said they’d missed us, of course, but they just got so caught up in this wedding business. It’s next Saturday—I’d lost track. They truly haven’t had one minute, she told me, and I can believe her. Anyway, they’re coming for supper on Sunday night. She said a post-wedding collapse would be just the best thing they could possibly think of.”

“Well, great,” Jonathan repeats, although some dim, indefinable misgiving has edged into his mind. How can one evening of friends at dinner be as terrific as this one will have to be? That question, after moments, emerges, and with it a darker, more sinister one: suppose it isn’t terrific at all, as the last one was not?

By mid-August, in Hilton, it has been hot for so long that almost all the flowers have wilted, despite an occasional
thundershower. Many people are away at that time, and in neglected gardens overblown roses shed fat satin petals onto drying, yellowing grass; in forgotten orchards sweet un-picked fruit falls and spatters, fermenting, slowly rotting, among tall summer weeds, in the simmering heat.

The Saturday of the McElroy son’s wedding, however, is surprisingly cool, with an almost New England briskness in the air. That familiar-feeling air gives Jonathan an irrational flutter of hope: maybe the next night, Sunday, will be a reasonable evening. With the sort of substantive conversation that he and Sarah are used to, instead of some nutty Southern doubletalk. With this hope, the thought comes to Jonathan that Hattie imitating Popsie Hooker is really Hattie speaking her own true language. Dare he voice this to Sarah, this interesting perception about the nature of mimicry? Probably not.

Sarah spends a lot of Saturday cooking, so that it can all be served cold on Sunday night; she makes several pretty vegetable aspics, and a cold marinated beef salad. Frozen lemon soufflé. By Saturday night she is tired, but she and Jonathan have a pleasant, quiet dinner together. He has helped her on and off during the day, cutting up various things, and it is he who makes their dinner: his one specialty, grilled chicken.

Their mood is more peaceful, more affectionate with each other than it has been for months, Jonathan observes (since before they came down here? quite possibly).

Outside, in the gathering, lowering dusk, the just perceptibly earlier twilight, fireflies glimmer dimly from the pinewoods. The breeze is just barely cooler than most of their evening breezes, reminding Jonathan of the approach of fall—in his view, always a season of hope, of bright leaves on college campuses, and new courses offered.

• • •

Having worked so much the day before, Sarah and Jonathan have a richly indolent morning; they laze about. Around noon the phone rings, and Sarah goes to answer it. Jonathan, nearby, hears her say, “Oh, Hattie. Hi.”

A very long pause, and then Sarah’s voice, now stiff, all tightened up: “Well, no, I don’t see that as a good idea. We really don’t know Popsie—”

Another long pause, as Sarah listens to whatever Hattie is saying, and then, “Of course I understand, I really do. But I just don’t think that Jonathan and I—”

A shorter pause, before Sarah says again, “Of course I understand. I do. Well, sure. Give us a call. Well, bye.”

As she comes out to where Jonathan stands, waiting for her, Sarah’s face is very white, except for her pink-tipped nose—too pink. She says, “One more thing that Hattie, quote, couldn’t get out of. A big post-wedding do at Popsie Hooker’s. She said of course she knew I’d been working my head off over dinner for them, so why didn’t we just put it all in a basket and bring it on over there. They’d come and help.” Unconsciously, perhaps, Sarah has perfectly imitated Hattie’s inflections—even a few prolonged vowels; the effect is of a devastating irony, at which Jonathan does not smile.

“Jesus” is all he says, staring at Sarah, at her glistening, darkening eyes, as he wonders what he can do.

Sarah rubs one hand across her face, very slowly. She says, “I’m so tired. I think I’ll take a nap.”

“Good idea. Uh, how about going out to dinner?”

“Well, why not?” Her voice is absolutely level, controlled.

“I’ll put some things away,” Jonathan offers.

“Oh, good.”

In the too small, crowded kitchen, Jonathan neatly packages the food they were to have eaten in freezer paper; he seals up and labels it all. He hesitates at marking the date, such an unhappy reminder, but then he simply writes down
the neutral numbers: 8, 19. By the time they get around to these particular packages they will not attach any significance to that date, he thinks (he hopes).

He considers a nap for himself; he, too, is tired, suddenly, but he decides on a walk instead.

The still, hot, scrubby pinewoods beyond their house are now a familiar place to Jonathan; he walks through the plumy, triumphant weeds, the Queen Anne’s lace and luxuriant broomstraw, over crumbling, dry red clay. In the golden August sunlight, he considers what he has always recognized (or perhaps simply imagined that he saw) as a particular look of Sundays, in terms of weather. Even if somehow he did not know that it was Sunday, he believes, he could see that it was, in the motes of sunlight. Here, now, today, the light and the stillness have the same qualities of light and stillness as in long-past Sundays in the Boston suburb where he grew up.

Obviously, he next thinks, they will have to leave this place, he and Sarah; it is not working out for them here, nothing is. They will have to go back to New York, look around, resettle. And to his surprise he feels a sort of regret at the thought of leaving this land, all this red clay that he would have said he hated.

Immersed in these and further, more abstract considerations (old mathematical formulas for comfort, and less comforting thoughts about the future of the earth), Jonathan walks for considerably longer than he intended.

Hurrying, as he approaches the house (which already needs new paint, he distractedly notes), Jonathan does not at all know what to expect: Sarah still sleeping (or weeping) in bed? Sarah (unaccountably, horribly) gone?

What he does find, though, on opening the front door, is the living room visibly pulled together, all tidied up: a tray
with a small bowl of ice, some salted almonds in another bowl, on the coffee table. And Sarah, prettily dressed, who smiles as she comes toward him. She is carrying a bottle of chilled white wine.

Jonathan first thinks, Oh, the McElroys must have changed their minds, they’re coming. But then he sees that next to the ice bowl are two, and only two, glasses.

In a friendly, familiar way he and Sarah kiss, and she asks, “How was your walk?”

“It was good. I liked it. A real Sunday walk.”

Later on, he will tell her what he thought about their moving away—and as Jonathan phrases that announcement he considers how odd it is for him to think of New York as “away.”

Over their first glass of wine they talk in a neutral but slightly stilted way, the way of people who are postponing an urgent subject; the absence of the McElroys, their broken plans, trivializes any other topic.

At some point, in part to gain time, Jonathan asks her, “Have I seen that dress before?” (He is aware of the “husbandliness” of the question; classically,
they
don’t notice.)

Sarah smiles. “Well, actually not. I bought it a couple of months ago. I just haven’t worn it.” And then, with a recognizable shift in tone, and a tightening of her voice, she plunges in. “Remember that night when you were talking about the McElroys? When you said we weren’t so high on their priority list?”

Well, Jesus, of course he remembers, in detail; but Jonathan only says, very flatly, “Yes.”

“Well, it’s interesting. Of course I’ve been thinking about them all day, off and on. And what you said. And oh dear, how right you were. I mean, I knew you were
right
—that was partly what I objected to.” Saying this, Sarah raises her face in a full look at him, acknowledging past pain.

What can he say? He is quiet, waiting, as she continues.

“But it’s interesting, how you put it,” she tells him. “How accurately. Prophetic, really. A lot of talk, and those letters! All about wonderful us, how great we are. But when you come right down to it—”

“The bottom line is old friends,” Jonathan contributes, tentatively.

Pleased with him, Sarah laughs, or nearly; the sound she makes is closer to a small cough. But “Exactly,” she says. “They poke a lot of fun at Popsie Hooker, but the reality is, that’s where they are.”

He tries again. “Friendships with outsiders don’t really count? Does that cut out all Yankees, really?” He is thinking, Maybe we don’t have to leave, after all? Maybe Sarah was just settling in? Eventually she will be all right here?

Grasping at only his stated question, about Yankees, Sarah gleefully answers, “Oh, very likely!” and she does laugh. “Because Yankees might do, oh, almost anything at all. You just can’t trust a one of them.”

As she laughs again, as she looks at Jonathan, he recognizes some obscure and nameless danger in the enthusiastic glitter of her eyes, and he has then the quite irrational thought that she is looking at him as though he were her new best friend.

However, he is able quickly to dismiss that flashed perception, in the happiness of having his old bright strong Sarah restored to him, their old mutually appreciative dialogue continuing.

He asks her, “Well, time to go out to dinner?”

“Oh yes! Let’s go,” she says, quickly getting to her feet.

It is midafternoon, on a brilliant August day, and I am sitting in a darkened bar, here in Santa Fe. I am drinking white wine with Jeffrey, an old friend who at any moment is going to tell me about his new gay life. I do not especially look forward to hearing his story; nothing against gayness, it is just that I have problems of my own that seem to make me selfish, a poor listener—although, being very fond of Jeffrey, I plan to make an effort.

We have a window table, and at this odd hour there is no one in the bar but us and the lanky, bored bartender, who is almost invisible, behind the bar, in the shadowy depths of the room. We can look out across Santa Fe’s central square, the Plaza, where some Indians (“native craftsmen”) have set up tables of brass jewelry, dazzling, flashing white gold, in the violently pure sunlight. On the other side of the Plaza more native craftspersons sit or squat behind their wares, over there mostly silver and turquoise. They are sheltered by the wide, outspread tiled eaves of an ancient Spanish building. And, spreading over everything is the extraordinary, vast Southwestern sky, its white clouds massed into sculptured monuments, incredibly slow-moving, and immense.

Neither Jeffrey nor I is much of a drinker, really; this bar simply seemed the only plausible thing for us to do next. In the morning, after my plane came in to Albuquerque, where Jeff met me and drove me up here, we walked up the Canyon Road; we “did” a lot of galleries there, and shops. We saw nearly the same paintings, same jewelry and rugs and embroidered clothing over and over again, repeated everywhere, until we both felt choked with the sight of so much merchandise. (We are neither of us buyers, or shoppers, really; even rich, or richer, we probably would not be.) We had an early lunch in a place where you have to stand in line, but that was nice, standing in the warm noon sunshine, in a patio of flowers; and for lunch we had something made with blue tortillas—I could hardly believe it, a rich dark blue, blue flour, Jeff said, and delicious.

Then we walked around the Plaza for a while, looking into more stores, but the pause for lunch had not renewed our interest in things for sale, and the day had begun to seem very, very hot. And so, when Jeffrey said, “Well, how about a nice cold glass of wine?” I said, “Great, great idea.” We both knew that sooner or later we would have to talk about things, to say how we both were, and maybe some wine would help.

Jeffrey has had the same thick soft brown beard for the fifteen years that we have known each other (we first met in Berkeley, as students; I was just married then, and very pregnant) but when we were outside, in that merciless bright unimpeded sunlight, I could see some gray threads in the dark of his beard, and a few in his hair, which he still wears almost as long as he did in those old days. At that time Jeffrey was having a relationship (we all assumed) with a friend of his, David; but then, a few years later, he married Susan, a lawyer, blonde and good-looking (sort of). Now, having split from Susan, the new assumption is that he is gay again (David lives here too) and that he has come to Santa Fe to
be gay, as well as to paint. So far, we have only talked very casually about mutual friends; I notice that we have not discussed either Susan or my husband, Rick. And, come to think of it, we have barely mentioned David; Jeffrey has only said that he is not here, he is visiting his mother in La Jolla.