Second Chances (21 page)

This is a familiar sense, for Sam: that of having said everything quite clearly but in such a way that no one, not even Dudley, could understand. And to Sam his own meanings are always so clear. Obvious, even. This Bill (will they always call him “this Bill”?)—this person, Bill, does not really look much like old Charles. They are merely about the same size, with faces shaped the same. All of the
more important aspects of impression are very unlike, though; it’s that simple. Annoying to be asked.

More pressing and far more severe just now than that annoyance, though, is a dizziness, quite physical, concrete, that Sam at this instant experiences. The party seems so hot, all those candles, they seem to emit more heat than light. He feels swollen with heat. If he took one bite of Celeste’s quite predictably elaborate buffet, he would burst, an obscene display of guts all over Celeste’s too lovely house.

He feels drunk. Drunk and sick, after one long glass of club soda.

Dudley will think he just doesn’t like the party if he tells her that he is going home—as Sam now sees that he must, and soon. Well, better for her to think that. She can deal with Sam-the-bad-sport much better than she can with sick Sam, he knows. Or maybe she is right, and it is not real, what he feels. He is not sick, only bored.

Reconnecting with Dudley—not easy: the rooms are so full of silk- or satin-straining flesh, with a few thin wraiths in black, like dead trees; getting through them all has been like traversing some horrible surreal forest, for Sam—he tells her that he has a headache. Nothing serious, and clearly having to do with an ugly note that afternoon from his former dealer. He doesn’t really feel like being at a party, okay? Edward and Freddy can drop her off later, on their way home.

He will not seek out Celeste. He will simply, quickly, get out as soon as possible. Before he is sick, or sicker. Before he bursts.

And he almost makes it. Just at the final door, however, coming out of the powder room is Bill, and since they have barely met, some conversation seems required.

“Oh, you’re off?” from Bill.

“Yes, unfortunately a headache. But I couldn’t seem to find Celeste. Would you—? If you could—”

“Oh, sure. Don’t let it make you uncomfortable. Can I get you anything though, like aspirin?” Making this vague offer, Bill smiles, so very unlike Charles.

“Oh, no. Thanks.” In fact, an aspirin would have been a good idea, but Sam simply wants to get away. Right now.

“Well, I hope we get a chance to talk sometime,” says Bill. “Celeste feels so close to you, you and Dudley.”

“Me too! Great!” Haste fuels an insane enthusiasm in Sam—just before he rushes through the door. He is propelled by pain: a worse
pain has attacked him, encircling his chest. A heart attack? No, heartburn. Gas. He has had this before. As he runs toward his car, impeded by his pain, and his very weight, his heavy old misused body, Sam still quite consciously thinks: This Bill, who does not sound or really look like Charles, who
is
he?

Amazingly, to Edward, who is fussy in these matters, Sara looks almost beautiful tonight, at this party. It is quite as though, Edward thinks, Celeste-the-strong has willed her to be so, like a fairy godmother. “Be beautiful for my party,” Celeste could have commanded. (Edward would not put that past her.) It is clearly not a matter of clothes, though; had that been the case, a discreetly expensive “wonderful” dress, Celeste’s urgent, controlling hand could have been clearly implicated. But Sara is only wearing some gauzy white “import” thing, most likely from Cost Plus.

In this cheapo dress, though, tonight Sara is beautiful. And Edward in his mind ticks off the virtues that make her so, in a visual way: good skin, if a little on the dark side; a long, strong-looking neck (it could be a little thinner, but no matter). Heavy, almost straight-across dark eyebrows. And her eyes: no qualifications there, her eyes are wonderful, so large and dark, with those (naturally) heavy lashes. Really clever of her to add nothing to them, no touch of mascara, even. Another woman, aware of such beautiful eyes, would have made them up, and made too much of her eyes. Whereas Sara looks as though washing her face and her hair had been the sum of her effort.

They have of course been discussing Bill. “This Bill.”

“She hadn’t said a thing before about getting married,” Sara has earlier told Edward—to his considerable surprise: such a step should surely have been discussed with someone? “Honestly,” continues Sara, “I was as startled as anyone.”

“Do you think it could have been a last-minute decision on her part?”

“Possibly.”

And since that initial flurry of conversation they have managed as best they can to continue above the din of the party. But by now some taped music is issuing from loudspeakers, which is no help at all.

“God, what is this music?” asks Sara.

Older, more knowledgeable Edward laughs. “It’s from way before your time, my dear. All forties classics. That hoo-ha trombone sound was very big in those days. What we’re hearing at this precise moment is called ‘Moonlight Serenade,’ by Mr. Glenn Miller.”

“It’s kind of dull, don’t you think? Sort of slow, repetitive?”

“Oh, indeed. But Celeste really loves this stuff. Come to think of it, so did Charles. I think she played these same tapes at a party about ten years ago, and everyone went mad. All us oldsters.”

“I like this one better. What’s it called?”

“This, my dear, is ‘Little Brown Jug.’ Played by, I think, Mr. Jimmie Lunceford.”

“At least it moves along. Edward, you see that young man across the room?”

Edward hesitates. “You don’t mean Freddy?”

“Of course not. David, the guy from the diner. Celeste asked him here tonight
for me
, can you imagine? She said I should see more people of my own age, and she doesn’t know anyone.”

Not at all wanting to go into this, Edward tries for another gambit. “It is quite remarkable,” he tells Sara, “how this Bill resembles our Charles. Quite striking. Startling, really.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I hardly knew Charles. I probably didn’t really look at him,” and Sara laughs. “I was probably too busy fighting him. His politics were so, so retro, I thought. But this Bill does look like someone I used to know. A long time ago.” She laughs again. “His last name was Priest, so we always referred to him as Judas.”

Typical Berkeley sort of joke, thinks Edward, who has begun to feel that Sara talks too much, once she starts.

“In fact, it’s a little creepy,” Sara tells him. “Very unnerving. My past all crowding back,” she continues, quite unaware that Edward is no longer listening.

The most observable fact about Bill—and he is most meticulously observed, by a number of people—is his excessive animation. “The man can’t seem to stop,” Brooks Burgess noted to a friend from Ross.

And his conversation, as with most non-stop talkers, is mostly about himself. He seems to have a curious knack, though, for relating
phases of his own history to that of his audience-of-one. (Bill can be seen to shy away from groups, clearly preferring an intimate
tête-à-tête
.) He has told Freddy about a town just south of Oaxaca, in the mountains, where he, Bill, found the most extraordinary pottery, much more remarkable than anything in Oaxaca itself. He speaks feelingly to Polly about the plight of the San Francisco poor: some people he knows, he says, have a plan for “creating a space” where all those people could go for food and shelter. He announces to Dudley that he has never before felt comfortable with anyone from Boston; he feels that he and she should spend more time together, should really talk.

Watching him as best she can while maintaining and continuing her hostess chores, overhearing what she can, Celeste wills herself to believe that all this is Bill’s way of ingratiating himself to her friends. He is simply very eager to please.

A darker inner voice, however, insists that there is something more than a little wrong: he does not quite look at the person he’s talking to, he does not quite make sense. He must have drunk too much. And Celeste thinks, Oh dear, I never should have said that about getting married, which was really a sort of joke, a Valentine’s joke. (Wasn’t it? She makes this inquiry of herself and comes up with no answer.)

Others in the room, for the most part fairly heavy drinkers themselves, of an old-fashioned sort, Scotch and gin and vodka drinkers (Sara is the only white-wine consumer present)—those people have come to much the same conclusion: this Bill has drunk too much, it’s made him gabby.

Dudley, who in some ways is more “in touch” than the rest, has come to another conclusion, which is that Bill must have done time in est or some similar self-realization enterprise. She thinks she can recognize the vocabulary: his “comfortable with,” his “spaces.” And she too believes that he must drink a great deal: he is not as comfortable in this particular space as he says he is; in fact he has begun, observably, even from a distance, to perspire.

To Sara, who has been watching Bill with possibly the coolest, clearest eyes in the room (she is also the lightest drinker present), it is obvious that he is doing a lot of coke. She knows the signs, and she is also sure (she would make book on this) that he is either getting
close or perhaps has already come to the end of his stash. And so she plans to continue to watch. To see what happens. She is fairly certain that something will happen.

This party, though, by almost any definition is not a success. Except in a purely visual way: on the surface it looks quite wonderful. But in more rudimentary ways it could be described as a bust: most people ate and drank too much, and around eleven they began to start off home.

Anxiety about the weather, that seemingly unabating, lashing storm could indeed be blamed; certainly that was the given excuse as guests began to reclaim their wraps. But at another, better party the bad weather could have played quite another role: everyone could have chosen to wait it out, which as things turned out would have been the wiser choice: by midnight this storm was dead and gone.

Quite depressed, for a number of related and unrelated reasons, Sara starts toward her own rooms, her bedroom and bath. The bedroom door is open, she sees from the hall, although she knows she left it closed, and just as she has thought,
Shit
, some old drunk using my bathroom, a tall thin person comes out. A man. “Bill.”

So startled that she almost screams, Sara cries, “What in hell! What do you think you’re doing in my room?”

She pushes past him so that she stands in her doorframe, then turns to stare up at him.

Bill’s face is very white, and sweat runs down the narrow indented cheeks as he tries to smile. “Baby, you’re someone I can relate to, I can tell. The truth is, I thought you might have something for me.”

“Asshole! I don’t do any dope.”

“Look, I’m serious.” His face has entirely changed, all attempts at ingratiation vanished. “I have to connect,” he tells her.

“That’s your problem, creepo.”

“But I don’t even know this town. I’ve never been here—”

“Get out of here. Get lost.”

Staring at him with almost the purest hatred she can remember, Sara still does not quite dare to say his name, what she believes to be
his name. She does not say, Priest, you goddam Judas Priest, although those words are pounding in her brain so loudly it seems impossible he cannot hear them.

And perhaps he does, for with yet another shift in expression, a muttered “Bitch, fucking bitch,” Bill turns and leaves, rushing not toward the bedroom that has been prepared for him, for his comfort, but toward the front door. Unseen by Celeste, who is helping the maids clean up in the kitchen.

He is out the door. Gone.

Celeste’s tired voice shows strain. And with an uncomfortable lurch of affection for this woman whom half the time she doesn’t even like—deploring her vanity, what could even be called shallowness—Sara now thinks, Oh, why couldn’t you just say that you wonder why the party didn’t go? Or that you really wonder what everyone thought of Bill?

Instead, sitting edgily forward on the deep white sofa, her chin at its accustomed forward angle, Celeste speaks of Charles. “We often quarreled, Charles and I,” she tells Sara. “Sometimes for days at a time. But then in some very sweet way we’d make it up. And I think he kept up with a few old girlfriends—you know Charles was always just catnip to women, they were all crazy about him. He probably even saw his old girls, you know, even spent time with them when he went on his trips.” She laughs shortly, sharply, and shrugs. A large shrug. “He could even have, uh, made love to them, for all I know. But still he always came back to me, and we had each other. We were always in some way in love. And then when he died I simply couldn’t accept it. I kept thinking we’d had a fight, or he was off on some trip and he’d come back. The finality—I couldn’t believe it. But you see how silly old people get, dear Sara?”

“How long was it before you met Bill?” Sara knows her question to be brusque, but she has said it deliberately. We might as well get right to it, is what she thinks.

But she has reckoned without the practiced evasions of Celeste.

“All the beaux I had,” Celeste now ruminates, “they never took care of things, or maybe sometimes one of them might fix a radio, or something, might carry something upstairs for me. But Charles did
everything. I got so spoiled! I got so I just couldn’t cope with insurance forms and all that, the IRS things, all that mess.”

“You really met Bill at the IRS, in San Francisco?” Sara persists, determined at last to get the whole story. “When?”

Celeste frowns, then shivers, recollecting. “Since you ask, it was last November, after Charles died. And such a terrible cold day. I had a lot of trouble parking, that awful Polk Street neighborhood. I had to walk a long way, and then at the Federal Building there were all these pickets, all kinds of people with placards. Big signs about Nicaragua, about not fighting there. Big anti-Reagan signs. But these terribly friendly people, and a lot of them quite well dressed. I was really surprised.” She laughs, a small mild laugh, apparently at herself. “They thought I had come to be part of them, or else they pretended they did. ‘Come on in,’ they kept saying, and they’d hold out their hands. ‘We can use you,’ they told me. They were all singing some song I didn’t know. But you know I was really tempted, in the craziest way. I thought I’d just join them, and not bother with the IRS.”