Second Chances (2 page)

Farther into the distance lies the town, a farming crossroads: a Safeway, a 7-Eleven, a dime store (these particular people still use that term), and three hardware stores, all specializing in various farm
supplies. The bulk of the town’s population, mostly very poor Mexicans or Portuguese, live in small, bright-painted, mostly peeling one-story houses near the center of town. A few have straggled westward, out toward the coast, and these last are the poorest of all, the desperate, the almost forgotten.

Eastward, between the town and the central valley, Highway 101, there are several quite prosperous farms, herds of cattle and sheep. Thriving orchards, and acres of corn and alfalfa.

But Dudley and Edward from their green hilltop can see neither the town nor the farms and the cottages of the poor. All they can see is more green, brightly flowing across the gentle hills. They see spring, in which they believe.

Just before starting downward on a well-worn, firmer path to the highway, and to the alleged warm diner, their two glances for a moment lock. Affection, concern and a certain wry wit with regard to each other are equally present in their look. It is possible that Edward is more amused by Dudley than she by him. He was quite taken by her notion of prudery as applied first to sex, and then to the truly unmentionable disease—though at the time of its voicing a variety of private anxieties (sexual, rather than concerned with disease, except that these days the two are so linked, so horribly) was all that kept him from a proper response.

Dudley does find Edward amusing, but she really likes him for quite other, more complicated reasons, perhaps the strongest being the sheer longevity of their connection; she revels in the range of their frame of reference. No need ever to go back and explain anything to Edward; he was probably
there
.

Edward, even, was the first person to (almost) reconcile her to her name, which especially as a young girl Dudley felt as a mockery: she was so tall then, so skinny and generally sad; she did indeed resemble quite strongly her rich Uncle Dudley, whose name she bore, with ill grace. But, “I think Dudley has considerable style, as names go,” said nearsighted, bookish Edward, at the summer camp to which the two of them, awkward adolescents from rich but “progressive” families, had been sent. In Vermont, “about a thousand years ago.” At night they would retreat from the campfire into the shadows, the oldest and youngest campers there, those two, while everyone else sat around singing all those horrible songs with great vigor. Dudley then
began to like Edward very much. He is much nicer than the other boys, she thought; and the ones who call him a sissy are really jerks.

Later on in her life, Sam’s deep-Southern (Louisiana) voice further redeemed her name, making it very beautiful, if multisyllabic.

“And then there is Sara,” continues Edward, somewhat later, over hot and exceptionally flavorful coffee.

For along with her love affair with “this Bill,” if love affair is what it is, at this time Celeste had proposed to more or less adopt a young woman named Sara, actually her goddaughter, and the true daughter of Celeste’s own oldest friend, a woman named Emma, from northern California, where Celeste is also from, somewhere north of here. Emma died; they are vague about just when that was—some time before Charles’s death, they think. Celeste always took the functions of a godmother very seriously; she was always very close to Sara until some sort of trouble arose between Sara and Charles, and Celeste (had she a choice?) took the side of Charles. And Sara, who used to visit long ago, is generally acknowledged to be difficult; she even spent time in a jail, in Mexico, during the sixties.

“We are now to see Celeste in her role as mother,” Edward goes on. “She is as you say ‘acting out’ indeed, all over the place.”

“She surely is,” agrees Dudley. “But maybe it’s all just a form of keeping busy, so as not to brood about Charles?”

“Well, yes, of course, Dud darling. The point is, though, the odd forms of her busyness. Some people just do needlepoint.”

Dudley laughs. “Well, yes. But I think really we should all just admire Celeste. You know we always do,
au fond
.” The good coffee has caused her slightly lowered spirits to soar, suddenly: after years of striving to calm these swings of mood Dudley had concluded that she might as well enjoy them. Or that is her conclusion during upward phases. “Worrying over Celeste won’t help her at all—nor us, for that matter. And just think how absolutely furious she’d be if she knew,” Dudley continues excitedly. “She’d feel so condescended to.”

“That’s surely true,” Edward speculates. “That’s really one of the things we all really enjoy the most, though, isn’t it? This worried clucking over our friends. The implication being that our own lives are exceptionally well run. We’re terrific. They’re, uh, fucking up.”

Dudley laughs. Edward says words like “fuck” so very infrequently that they have a sort of comic force, coming from him. “You’re absolutely right,” she tells him. “So wonderful the way we mask our condescension as concern. We do it all the time, don’t we?”

“Of course.”

Like the coffee, the diner has turned out to be a welcome surprise. If either Dudley or Edward or both spent more time in San Francisco, which they do not, they would find its pattern familiar: lots of pale polished wood, bright brass fittings, and many dark red clay pots filled with enormous ferns. As it is, they think all this extraordinary, an unusual and interesting and attractive use of fairly simple materials.

And the young man who brought them their coffee, making offers of cinnamon toast (crumpets? bagels? croissants?), could also be viewed as a recent San Francisco type, with his soft brown beard, sad yellow-brown eyes, and gentle voice: a post-hippie, probably, mellowed out and mildly depressed. To both Dudley and Edward he seems quite remarkably nice: Edward also hopes that Freddy will not meet this person, and he resolves to insure that this will not happen—but how? oh dear, in this small town, just how?

Thinking in that unhappy way of Freddy, and in order to avoid even unhappier thoughts, Edward renews his lecture on Celeste. “The point is” (this is a phrase frequently employed by Edward, especially in conversations with Dudley)—“the point is that we seem to know less than nothing about this Bill. An importer, antiques, but just what on earth does that mean? Greek pottery? Iranian rugs?”

“Maybe something quite contraband. Maybe heroin? Cocaine?” Dudley means to be helpful.

“Darling, you’re such a romantic. I’m sure this Bill is not of an age for drugs.”

“Oh dear heaven, do you have to be young for that too?” Dudley laughs, with a rather stagy, quite false despair: actually she and Sam quite often smoke dope on Sunday mornings; it is one of their happiest rituals. Dope, sex, long naps and then an enormous, slightly exotic breakfast, pasta or something similarly non-breakfastlike, long after noon. Partly to change the subject, for naturally she tells no one of this practice (but now she wonders if Edward could possibly, somehow,
know
; and do he and Freddy, conceivably—?), briskly she says to Edward, “I do wonder what Sara’s like now.”

“Well, she must be thirty-something, mustn’t she?”

Dudley, in many ways given to vagueness, has almost always a quite startling accuracy in regard to dates. “No, of course not. She’s closer to forty—in fact she is forty, or she will be in April. I remember the day she was born. In 1945. It was when I met Sam.” She blushes, aware of the blush and feeling very silly about it.

“Odd that none of us ever met this Emma, Sara always coming alone to visit,” Edward muses. “Even small hints that there was no Emma, that Sara was the result of what we used to call an indiscretion.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” Dudley tells him. “It’s just Celeste making dramas. Besides, she used to read me letters from Emma—she wouldn’t go so far as to make them up. It’s just her revising things again, as you say. Not to mention her somewhat proprietary nature.” She sniffs. “Besides, I did meet her once, in 1951.”

Catching her intensity, although uncertain as to its cause, a little cruelly Edward carries on: “Well, it is strange, still. So much talk about this Emma, whom I at least never saw. And now this Bill, whom very likely we are never to meet at all.”

“Well, it’s a little late for you to meet Emma, she’s dead, and probably we’ll all be forced to meet Bill, and we won’t like him at all. Honestly, Edward, you’re sometimes as bad as Celeste is. Making mysteries when really it’s all so simple. Celeste is just terribly lonely, and has taken up in some way with a man in San Francisco named Bill. And Sara’s had nothing but trouble all her life, all that time in the Mexican jail, and God knows what else happened to her lately—Celeste invites her to come and stay.” She repeats, “It’s all terribly simple, really. You’ll see how it is.”

At that moment, perhaps fortunately, the attractive bearded young man again appears at their booth, announcing himself. “I’m David,” he tells them. “In case you’d like anything else. More coffee?”

Both Dudley and Edward smile with surprise and genuine pleasure. As with the diner’s décor, this custom, a waiter’s proclaiming his name in a friendly way, is quite new to them (though of course very current and sometimes extremely annoying to many people elsewhere, at that time).

What a very nice boy, they both think. And Dudley, not really given to such meddling, generally, further thinks: He should be introduced
to Sara. They must be about the same age, they might get along. Otherwise she could be very lonely here, with just us, and we’re all so old for her.

Leaving the diner a little later, after not much further conversation—the walk has tired them both, indeed much more than either would admit—Dudley and Edward continue along the narrow white highway whose other, eastward direction is Salinas. They are heading westward, toward the coast, where an almost setting sun now blazes, blindingly. After a short walk they reach another, narrower highway, and there, at that crossroads, they separate. As always, with some ceremony.

They kiss
and
shake hands; they both say, “Goodbye, see you soon. Stay well.”

“Oh, it feels like being on a ship!” This is what almost everyone says, with an air of wonderment and pleasure, on first coming into Sam and Dudley’s house. Sam and Dudley are too polite and too tired to explain the obvious, that their house has the feeling of a boat because there’s so much wood, the walls and high vaulted ceiling, everywhere wood. Bare wood, never waxed or polished but sometimes scrubbed, so that by now, some fifty years after the house was built, the effect is mellow, soft and rich. It is indeed like an old, extremely well built boat. A thirties yacht, perhaps.

Some people of course come to see that for themselves. “It’s all the wood,” they say. “Remember wooden boats?”

Polly Blake changed the formula a little by saying that to her it looked like a church, when Dudley and Sam first moved in. But then Polly is thought to be religious, possibly, in some curious, entirely private way of her own, and even Dudley and Sam, agnostics, can see the aptness of the association. Their house has the look of a New England church.

And they had been living in New England, in Maine, before moving out to California. There too, first married, they had fallen in love with a house—or, rather, recognized it as their own. They recognized its small compactness (so manageable) and the much larger barn for Sam’s studio, with the enclosed connecting passageway for the months of deep snow, all perfect for their needs. Also, it was so far from everything in those pre-thruway days that no one else wanted it; it went very cheap, and the low mortgage payments left Dudley and Sam with a little money for time in New York, or Boston. All in
all a good time for them, frequent fun. However, that house and that life had seemingly outlived their function; as they did not quite say to each other, the long, severe winters became more than they could cope with. It was time for a change. And so they came to California, first spending time in San Francisco, where they had fun, but decided it was not their city. And then they found the house in San Sebastian.

They made very few changes in all this wooden space with which they had fallen in love. No real remodeling. What little money they had left after buying it they spent on a big studio, mostly glass, for Sam, adjacent but not (this time) connected to the house. Dudley, a journalist-writer, works at a big desk in the living room, where she is frequently interrupted by Sam, who has just thought of some small thing to say to her. Believing him to be in serious trouble with his own work (he does only charcoal drawings these days, and not many of those; no large oils for years), Dudley for the most part is “nice” about these breaks in her own concentration; occasionally, however, uncontrollably she does snap out, “For Christ’s sake, I didn’t need to hear that right now!”

It depends, she has come to understand, very much on how her own work is going: the better she is doing, the more equable she is able to be with Sam. Still, she very much wishes she had a room of her own.

Sam’s old paintings, all those not sold or currently housed in some gallery, are stored out there in his studio; there are none in the living room or anywhere else in the house, not a single “Sam Venable” on display, as there were none in Maine, this being one of Sam’s somewhat eccentric principles.

In the living room there are, for decoration, only the very wide picture windows, with their peaceful view of green and gently sloping hills—quite a contrast to Sam’s paintings, had there been any: his canvases tended to violence, jarring slashes of color and line.

There is, just now, far beyond the windows and above where the sea would be (had their view included the Pacific), a delicately peach winter sunset, an opalescent glow.

If what could be said to bother Dudley most, in a practical way, in her daily life is her lack of privacy for work, what most bothers Sam
is their distance from the ocean, the ten or so miles, over hills. “
Crazy
,” he laments. “To come all this distance and still be inland. We could be out on a bluff somewhere, overlooking rocks and crashing waves.” However, he has more or less refused to look in a serious way for a seaside house. Nor does he like to drive over to the coast for a hike—one of Dudley’s favorite things to do—on just such a romantic, craggy bluff as he likes to describe.