Second Chances (14 page)

Undoubtedly Dudley has various fantasies about Celeste and Bill; Celeste is quite sure of that. Dudley thinks in those sexual terms, she is given to speculations along those lines, whereas Celeste does not even allow herself to think about Dudley and Sam, or for that matter about anyone, in that way.

And suddenly Celeste comes up with what seems a very good idea: she will tell Dudley that Bill is gay. And then, when Bill comes down for the party, and stays over, as Celeste hopes and believes that he will, everything will be readily explained. No one will think it odd that they don’t sleep together.

And she can also tell Sara that, and Polly. And Edward—or will Edward somehow know? Do they sense these things about each other, gay people?

All of these thoughts and plans are quite abruptly interrupted, though, by the return of Bill. Handsome Bill, in his perfect dark suit. Bill bending in his funny half-mocking way to kiss her hand. “Darling Celeste, whatever have you done to deserve such a rude old bastard?” He laughs and slides in beside her, continuing to talk, to explain. “The truth is, I got hung up on the phone, no way to get off. Business stuff. Oh, Lord, why didn’t you make me something sensible like a poet?” He laughs again.

Celeste just manages a laugh of her own, though she has felt the smallest chill of estrangement. As though Bill for even the tiniest moment was not quite sure who she is. As though Bill, who is always so warmly interested in Celeste, in certain ways, who has encouraged her to talk about herself as no one ever has before (assuredly not Charles, who preferred the silent, listening Celeste, as most men did, in her experience)—as though that Bill had been exchanged for another person, who is talking to himself.

“But where on earth were we?” Bill now asks of someone, possibly Celeste. “I think I was telling you about Deauville, was I not?”

“I think so.” Deauville, where Bill’s parents often took him, long ago, was actually a couple of dinners back, but Celeste doesn’t really care. She likes to hear about this glamorous childhood of Bill’s, just as for the most part she used to enjoy Charles’s wartime stories. And when Bill insists, as he sometimes does, that she in turn tell him about how and where she grew up, she is deeply pleased by his interest. “It’s very important that you tell me all about yourself. I want you to be as open as you can with me. I want you to learn to be open,” Bill has said. No one else has ever asked such questions of her. But at the same time that she is pleased, Celeste is made somewhat uncomfortable—no doubt her own fault: she is not an open person.

First meeting Bill, all those long-short months ago, Celeste was struck—indeed quite stricken—by his really remarkable resemblance to Charles: the high clear brow and those same wonderfully jutting eyebrows, the blue eyes and the nice small nose. (Their mouths are
quite different, though; Bill’s is much smaller, a tighter mouth.) The more she sees of Bill, however, while the likeness still is there it has certainly diminished. For one thing Bill is so much younger even than Charles when they first met, she and Charles. Very possibly Bill looks like a younger Charles? It occurs to Celeste to ask Polly that when Bill comes down for the party; for, after all, Polly knew Charles first.

“Obviously the trouble with such a perfect childhood, or one trouble, is that it quite ill-equips you for life,” says Bill, with what Celeste has come to recognize as his small frown of sincere self-revelation. (He frowns in this way quite a lot.) “You’re not comfortable in what turn out to be reality spaces. Nothing could quite come up to those beautiful old days. The beach, and sneaking around to peek into the casinos, the gaming rooms at night. Oh, I can so easily imagine you there, my lovely Celeste. I can even see you! And how good you are to let me run on and on like this. I tell you things—I feel so free with you, so comfortable sharing space. Do you think it’s possible that in another life—?” He quickly laughs, turning this into a joke. And just now he looks most unlike Charles, this Bill, with his restless, brilliant animation. Charles was almost always serious, and often preoccupied.

“I had no friends at all in Berkeley,” Bill says next, quite as though they had been discussing Berkeley. However, they have talked about Berkeley, at times, so this does not seem to Celeste an unreasonable transition. Bill was in Berkeley during the sixties; he was working for a news service, he has said. And Celeste has told him that her almost daughter, Sara, was there. But of course Bill did not know any students. “Nor I must admit did I want to, although I’m sure your Sara is charming.”

As Bill talks on about Berkeley, his isolation there, those terrible years, Celeste’s own sense of isolation returns. I really can’t hear him, she thinks; he is trying to talk to me, to tell me something, and I can’t hear. How lonely and isolated all people are, though, basically.

And then something quite new and startling comes to Celeste’s mind, really something crazy. She thinks: Suppose we were married? Suppose—well, why not? Bill could just live in my house. We’d be company for each other, and I would leave him everything when I die. He could do whatever he wanted.

Gulping at his coffee, Bill next says, “Now please, don’t let me go
on like this about myself. Tell me about being a little girl, in the Valley. Will you have a brandy? No? But first, one instant. I’ll be back in the tiniest flash.”

A question that Celeste has put to herself more than once is: Just what does Bill see in me? Or, an alternate version: What does Bill
want
of me? The obvious answers being: Money. A house in the country.

Now, though, for the first time Celeste asks this of herself: What do I want of Bill? And the amswer comes quite easily: Companionship. I want to be less lonely.

And so why should they not marry? Marriage would serve both—all their purposes quite well.

Why not?

In the twenty years since she left Berkeley, Sara has lived in approximately as many places—and one of her invariable, by now unconsciously compelling rituals is a fairly long perusal of each new phone book. With more pleasure and interest than she quite admits to herself, she opens each new book, from the very thin, say, in Wheeler, Vermont, to the big thick fats in Pittsburgh or Cleveland. And, at the moment, the very fattest of all: Manhattan.

This fugitive existence has been at times, in fact for several very long periods, exactly that; although Sara herself has not been the fugitive, not “wanted,” she has been shielding, somehow covering, a wanted person. For two years in Cincinnati (of all places, Sara sometimes thought) she lived in a basement apartment on Adams Hill, ostensibly alone, but actually Clyde was there too, in hiding, total hiding. Sara worked, as she usually did, as a temporary secretary, moving from office to office, scrupulously avoiding making friends (rather hard on her, a basically curious, gregarious person). She bought food at various groceries, never establishing herself as a person who shopped for two, not daring even a mythic absent husband. Black Clyde, who had killed one of the three policemen who were coming after him (very likely trying to kill him—they would have killed him, Clyde thought, and so did Sara) during a disturbance at a peace demonstration in San Francisco. Big black gay Clyde, whom no jury would ever credit with having acted in self-defense. (Clyde of course knew that very well, as did Sara.)

Seven months of Boise, Idaho, at times very cold, with Daryl,
from Georgia, whom Sara’s poor judgment allowed her to fall in love with, against all her rules.

Six months in Bishop, California—alone, resting up, which after those strenuous months with Daryl seemed a treat, and even deserved, but which involved more visits with Charles and Celeste.

A year in Memphis—crazy! What on earth was she doing in Memphis, with all those good old boys and girls, and their music, and their churches?

Five months in San Diego.

Et cetera.

It is very suspect, this non-way of life that she has quite deliberately chosen; God knows no one made her do it. She was asked; certain organizations would contact her, but always tentatively, saying, “Are you sure that you really want to take on ——? She [he] can be really difficult?” Clyde, Daryl. Joe, Dick, Luther, Grover, Betsey and some names she no longer remembers, although they belong to people with whom she lived quite intimately, took care of, worked and usually cooked for, discussed basic issues with, endlessly—oh, those labyrinthine, evasive but stubbornly persistent, always present basic issues!

People whom she has laughed and quarreled with, sometimes made love with, sometimes truly loved.

It is very suspect; what kind of gratification does she get out of all this semi-dangerous, often arduous, often downright unpleasant taking care? Sara has asked herself this hard, not pleasant question, has too often been asked it by others—including some supposed well-wishers: “open” people, friends. And she has come up with nothing. Surely no explanation so trite as a lack of children of her own would suffice, Sara tells herself; she is not even especially fond of children, and on the two occasions when she found herself pregnant, all the circumstances (including the fathers, who were surely a part of those circumstances) made bearing those children quite unthinkable, and the two abortions (especially the first, without anesthetic, in Seattle, in 1967) seemed necessary ordeals. Possibly even punishments that she deserved.

To Sara it has rather seemed that she has done whatever she has because whatever it was was there, something to be done, like Everest,
to be climbed. If someone did not hide and succor those movement fugitives, they would be arrested, and so certain people like Sara took on that role. It was simply what she did, as another person might dance, or do accounting.

Was it also some form of competition with Emma, her politically correct but most non-maternal mother? Sara has wondered that too.

Even, Sara has felt, her body has had its part in the shape of her destiny: she has always been a large dark person, with big soft breasts, big thighs and legs, broad shoulders and heavy black-brown hair. A couple of men who have loved her have found her beautiful: sculptural, statuesque—“So generous, your body, it is like you.” Those are the words of love and praise she sometimes heard. But then all women have some sort of hoard of love words, don’t they? Sara very much hoped so, for even the most impoverished. She surely did not see herself as a beautiful woman. Just a very strong one, a woman built for a life that required great strength.

In any case, leafing through phone books in any new city or town, she looks for familiar names: the names of the people she has cared for, or known in that life. And she looks despite her knowledge that most or all of those people, those still at semi-liberty, even if they surfaced would not be likely to have a phone in their own names.

New York is almost the only city to which Sara has not been, not once, in those years since Berkeley. And she is only here now, in this oversized, vast upper Fifth Avenue apartment, by a fluke: the place belongs to the parents of Nancy, and after Nancy quite carelessly surfaced (she was got off charges by the parental lawyer, her parents being good old checkbook radicals), she got in touch with Sara. The family’s “second home” is in Bermuda, and so when a long vacation was contemplated, grateful Nancy, who is a nice young woman, despite where she comes from—good Nancy asked Sara if she wouldn’t like a week of privacy and some rest. Which perfectly coincided with Sara’s California plans. A place to get herself together, peacefully, before the big move: the new life in California with Celeste. The
interval between taking care and whatever it is that she does next. Or the interval of taking care of Celeste, after Charles.

Also, Sara has just risen from two months of flu in Ithaca, New York—but apparently not quite risen: every time she gets up, it seems to knock her down again. Illogically, perhaps, when Nancy’s offer came along, Sara felt that the apartment would be large, warm and quite safe (if anything is safe, these days)—as if Nancy’s proffered rooms would be therapeutic.

Sara now contemplates enormous windows, and beyond them Central Park, lashed with February rains, unceasingly. Trees billowed and bent with wind and rain. Rain, and the wild shades of green in the trees, the thin yielding leaves: that is what Sara looks at from her unwontedly luxurious spaces—the depths of leather and velvet, heavy folds of linen, palest wool carpets.

If she closes her eyes—as Sara at intervals does, for long, meditative stretches—she notices that the sound of rain on glass is like that of thrown sand; and she wonders about desert storms, sandstorms, and tents, and refugee camps. Would this be the sound that they too hear, are now hearing, in Africa?

However, Sara has disciplined herself (or tried to, very hard) not to spend time worrying about conditions that she herself is not immediately addressing; since she is not at the moment actively working on aid to African famines, African refugees from everywhere, and not doing one damn thing (now) about the hungry, the cold and wet street population of New York, she will not (non-constructively, sentimentally) brood about them. You do not do anyone any good by just crying over them, is one of her firmest tenets.

And so she opens her eyes, sees rain now pouring in long sheets down the window before her, no longer even sounding like sand. No longer connecting Sara to deserts and windstorms, or to plague- and famine-ridden multitudes.

She picks up the phone book again with, as always, the same pleasurable expectation that a heavy novel by a favorite author might arouse, and she starts on her list of names—all memorized, all summoned
up at random, varying according to mood and to the vagaries of remembrance. In a sense there is no list.

One of the names that appeared from time to time, thinly threaded to all the other names, is that of Alex Crispian, the once-lover, then furious prison companion of Sara’s in Mexico. Green-eyed Alex, so tall, so extremely thin, with that huge tangled mass of white-blond curls, that scraggly reddish-blond beard. Alex who after Mexico, all that horror and quarreling, went off to wherever he came from (it turned out that no one, not even Sara, his lover, was ever quite sure), and no one heard from him again, least of all Sara.