by Alice Adams
“But what will we do all day, between breakfast and dinner?” Celeste had half laughingly, half shyly inquired.
“My darling, wait and see.” Suggestive, sexy Charles.
At the wedding breakfast, then, in the huge vaulted green dining room of the Palace, there were Dudley and Sam—very thin and healthy-looking, both of them; Dudley had written that they had pretty much stopped drinking. And Dudley’s old friend Edward, now living out here too, and whom Celeste had always rather liked. And Edward’s young friend, Freddy something.
But why Edward and Freddy at all, at Celeste’s wedding to Charles? Celeste herself wondered this, later on, and she concluded that she had simply needed to swell her own ranks, as it were, there having been so many friends of Charles’s, from all his prior visits to San Francisco: the slightly overdressed people. (Overdressed to the very practiced eye of Celeste, but perhaps that is how San Franciscans are, these days?) All very prosperous people, up from Atherton, Hillsborough, Woodside, or down from Ross and Kentfield. All Charles’s friends. Now here.
There was no real time or place to talk to Dudley, for which Celeste had longed; she yearned to ask Dudley, How are you now, really? Are you and Sam really happy—really getting along all right? But they could only press their cheeks together, almost meaninglessly, and Celeste could only observe that Dudley was perhaps a little too thin. Her neck looked strained, and her eyes.
Sam did not look thin, or strained, but neither did he look particularly happy. And Edward was as elegantly trim, as punctilious, almost pompous, and going bald, as ever; and his young friend, Freddy, was very dark and handsome—perhaps a shade too handsome? They all talked a lot about the new place where they were living. San Sebastian. “I think I’ve talked Polly into coming out here,” Dudley whispered to Celeste.
“Oh, how very nice for you—for all of you.”
“San Sebastian. Well, I sure like the name,” Charles informed them all. “I have some fond and exciting memories of the one in Spain. From the war.” Nostalgic Charles.
What they did between breakfast and dinner, Celeste and Charles, was to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge for lunch, in Sausalito. They sat out on a wooden deck, above the churning oily water of the bay, before a misty view of the pretty pastel city, San Francisco. They threw scraps of bread to a gnarled old sea gull perched on one of the rope-bound pilings that lined the deck, in the gentle April California sunshine.
And handsome Charles talked to his bride, Celeste, about their honeymoon. Where they would go.
Especially he talked about Venice. “What with one thing and another, I never got there until after the war,” Charles told her, his sincere blue eyes taking on the particular light that any mention of that war—what Celeste has come to think of as Charles’s war—seems to bring.
“Curiously enough I first saw Venice from a boxcar,” says Charles, with his famously attractive smile. “In the summer of ’47. I’d been up in Salzburg, checking out the festival and a seminar that Harvard was running in Schloss Leopoldskron, Max Reinhardt’s old digs. Anyway, our train crossed the border at Innsbruck, and headed down toward Venice. A very hot, misty afternoon, I can see it now. Then at Mestre the train simply stopped, and we were all herded into these boxcars. So right for 1947, right? As the train crossed the causeway, we all peered out. We were standing, of course, holding on and craning our necks, and all over the lagoon there was this incredible rosy light. A pink dusk. And then that magical city, rising up from sea fog. I can’t wait to take you there, my lovely Celeste. To see you there.”
Smiling, widening her dark eyes in his direction, against the sun, behind those eyes Celeste is wondering, is asking: Will you make love to me there? Is that what you mean by seeing me in Venice?
And how about this afternoon? she wonders. Later on, will we take a nap, for love?
But they do not.
The war, that war, Celeste very soon and increasingly comes to understand, was for Charles his own heroic time, his prime time. Charles was too old for active service; also, a prep-school football injury had left him deaf in one ear. However, participate he did: as a correspondent he was vividly everywhere. Following Montgomery across the desert, with Ike all over Europe. And not only did the exotic glamour of those places arouse Charles’s susceptible heart, he was thrilled by the cause itself, Celeste, listening, realized: the Allies were right in some absolute way and Hitler was wrong, in a sense that nothing would ever be quite so right and wrong again, and Charles was not a man at home with ambiguity.
And he now believed in “police actions.” Korea. Vietnam.
Celeste will neither show Charles the letter from Sara nor mention it, ever.
From Harry’s Bar, that day at noon they take the speedboat to Torcello, crossing the May-blue choppy lagoon, past small fishing boats and little islands with single houses, a dock, down near the edge of the water. With sometimes a shrine.
And arrived at the actual, ancient island, Torcello, the boat that carries eager Celeste and proud Charles and the other tourists to whom Celeste, at least, has paid no attention whatsoever—the heavy dark boat with all its polished wood heads up a narrow canal. Past old, old peeling red plaster houses, with spiky flowers and an occasional bandy-legged, decrepit cat.
And Celeste falls in love, in love with Torcello. She might stay there forever, she thinks, like a nun, in one of those houses. She would grow more flowers, and have more and younger cats, but no one would come to disturb her. No more tantalizing proximity of Charles, with his false male scents, and the strong, passive sculpture of his body. She could just live there in Torcello, perhaps sometimes sending for books, magazines from the mainland. From Venice, to which she would never return. She would never emerge from her island.
Charles’s warm, practiced fingers barely graze her naked neck, just then—causing Celeste to shudder, mildly. He asks her, “Whatever are you thinking, my serious darling?”
Aware of her own enormous dark eyes, now turned fully on Charles, “I was thinking that this is the most perfect honeymoon possible,” Celeste tells him. “It’s divine.”
1975
9
Tawny yellow is the color of fall in northern California: the wrinkled, rounded hills near the sea are crouched there, leonine; on either side of the coastal highway yellowed cornstalks straggle upward from the fields. And near Half Moon Bay, just below the town of San Sebastian, the yellow becomes bright orange, in hundreds and hundreds of pumpkins, lying all carelessly across the fields in late October.
Much of this spectrum of color is visible from the small enclosed deck that Celeste and Charles (her design, actually) have had built just off their bedroom, where on sunny days they often have breakfast as they observe the view: the hills, fields, and the somnolent, bland blue sea.
At the moment, they are discussing a projected party, theirs, with a somewhat odd raison d’être: it is to be a coming-out party, of sorts, for Edward, who has been operated on for an intestinal polyp, “not benign,” as the doctors delicately phrased it, but they also said that “they got it all”; Edward is all right now. (Edward, somewhat to the surprise of Charles and Celeste, found the idea hilarious: “Really? my coming out? I can hardly believe it.” Amid gales of most un-Edward-like laughter.)
“Yes, it is somewhat macabre, as a reason for a party,” Charles agrees, as though Celeste, whose idea the party was, had used that word. “However, however. I like it. I assume you’d do the same for me, my darling.”
“Charles!” Celeste feels genuine shock waves through her narrow chest; it is her first instant of imagining an illness, possibly mortal, of Charles’s. And she thinks: I could not bear it. But in the next instant she amends this, thinking: After all, I may have to.
In the meantime she waits for Charles to laugh, to make the terrible thing he has just said an innocent joke.
But Charles does not laugh. He frowns. “My darling, please don’t be quite so, so sensitive.”
“Oh, Charles.”
Celeste hears her own small hopeless voice, not quite controlled.
The air of this day is not clear, although on the deck where they now linger over cooling coffee there is a little sunshine; below them, across the hills and closer to the sea, the morning fog remains—gray and thick, inimical. However, what Celeste next says is “How beautiful all this is. I think this place will always seem utterly magical to me.”
And now Charles does laugh. He likes to feel himself in a somewhat paternal role with Celeste, and indeed with most women. He always has, like many men of his generation. He is happiest when women are being just a little silly. (A considerable problem with Polly, in the old days, for Polly was never even for an instant silly. Charles these days manages, though, never really to think of Polly as a former lover, since Celeste must never know, and he is aware that Celeste, despite her silliness, is frequently able to read his mind. So he simply does not think of Polly in that way.) “Such a romantic,” he now says, smiling, to Celeste, his wife.
Which allows her to become quite brisk—an adult. “Well, now about our party,” she says. “I do think it’s a good idea, even if Edward keeps saying he hates all the fuss and attention. It’ll be a way of congratulating him.”
“And cheering up ourselves,” offers Charles.
More shock waves assault Celeste, but she manages a silly laugh as she says, “As though we were ever depressed. In our beautiful house.”
The house—most of the remodeling of which was grandly, if somewhat vaguely planned by Charles—was supervised minutely by Celeste and carried out by a talented local contractor. It is loosely Mediterranean in style: a sprawling, ocher-colored stucco villa, red-tiled roof—its wings spread across the top of a hill. The house’s center, the focus of those clustered wings, is a glassed-in courtyard—the “atrium,” in Charles’s parlance. Heated by strong overhead lamps, yet still open to the view of hills and (sometimes) the sea, this space is filled or nearly filled with enormous plants—exotics, their names known only to Celeste—all glossily thriving, with thick heavy slick green leaves. And giant ferns, with leaves of a lighter, lacier green. “The damn place looks more like a rain forest than a house,” well-traveled Charles has more than once been heard to remark. “Sometimes I think my angelic Celeste prefers plants to human beings.”
Well, the truth is that I do, Celeste does not say. I adore my plants, every leaf and frond and tiniest flower of them all, and I adore my handsome Charles, and I love my friends. I love Dudley and Polly, and sometimes Sam, and sometimes Edward and Freddy, and that’s about the end of it—as brilliant Charles has pointed out.
And how sad that Charles never got around to writing his book about the war, his war. What a terrible waste. But surely even now it is not too late?
Basically indifferent to people or not, Celeste gives superior parties; they are beautiful, exciting, generous, memorable parties. And behind all the wonder of flowers and candles, silver and linen and crystal, the always exceptional foods and wines—behind all these voluptuous effects lies the steel efficiency of Celeste.
“Oh, why am I such a perfectionist? What does it matter?” she sometimes cries out, to no one. Knowing, though, that her very efficiency, the apparent ease with which she “brings things off,” is a quality much valued by Charles, who in small matters is somewhat careless. Who tends to be vague.
And so the meticulously planned party indeed takes place, and everything is as beautiful as at all parties given by Celeste, by Celeste and Charles. Even the weather seems to yield to the will of Celeste, which is no surprise to her. Having planned a fairly elaborate cold buffet, seafood platter, everything beautiful and cold, Celeste is rewarded with exceptionally warm weather: one of those rare end-of-October nights that can occur in northern California, much more like full summer than autumn. And the weather seemed to increase the air of festivity, of heightened celebration.
Which was exactly what Celeste had in mind.
Her perfectionism of course extends to her dress, her wonderful “looks,” or perhaps that is where it all begins. On the night of the party she is in palest yellow silk, of which she says, deflecting compliments, “Oh, but it’s so old, actually. Charles bought it for me on our honeymoon, in Venice. Ten years ago, can you believe it?” And for an instant she widens her eyes quite boldly, before she smiles.
Dudley, who has just praised the dress—“… and in this room, in this wonderful yellow weather, Celeste, it’s perfect”—Dudley, though tall and thin, with her beautiful proud carriage, still does not look especially well. Dudley is not at her best in evening clothes, Celeste decides, privately thinking that the “interesting” batik caftan might be much better on a smaller, younger person. And she further laments the fact that Dudley waited so late in life before stopping smoking—as though giving up the one thing, drink, were all she could manage. Admirable of course only last year for Dudley to stop smoking, at what must have been her mid-fifties; still, the damage to her skin was done already: Dudley, despite her brilliant azure eyes, looks withered, looks older than she is. At which Celeste catches herself with a start. We are all older than we look, than we feel, she hears, from some rude interior voice. We are older than middle-aged. We are almost old, we’re a party tonight of nearly old people. We are the sort of people I used to look at and wonder why they even bothered getting so dressed up.
But these thoughts are so new and at first so ludicrous that Celeste lets out a small laugh.
So that Polly, standing near her, asks why: “Whatever struck you so funny, Celeste?”
“Oh, nothing really funny. I was just thinking how old we all are.”
Strangely, though almost bald, Polly herself does not look old—or not very old. Scorning wigs, instead she wraps her proudly molded skull in scarves, tonight a very fine, very soft white linen, faintly threaded in pale blue. With her strong, clear lightly weathered skin (Polly is always off on her bike somewhere) and her violently bright pale blue eyes, Polly in her way looks better than anyone—her own highly original and somewhat peculiar way. She looks younger and better than I do, is what Celeste now thinks, observing Polly. And I work so hard at these vestiges of beauty. (But really I do that for Charles. For myself I don’t care so much—or do I?)
“It’s lucky you think old age is so funny, dear Celeste,” says Polly. “Many don’t.” But she smiles, mitigating what has been gruff.
“Well, I simply don’t think old age is funny at all.” This has come from Dudley, now moving closer to stand between her two friends. She has laughed a little as she said this, even as she adds, “I hate it, I really do.”
The three women stand there together for a moment, each smiling a private smile, each with thoughts of her own.
Until Celeste, considerably the smallest of the three, reaches suddenly to touch first Dudley’s shoulder and then Polly’s, abruptly, and in a rushing way she says, “Oh, why don’t we spend more time together? Just we three.”
“Do you mean, Celeste, spend more time together while we’re still around to do so?” Ironic Polly.
“Oh, no, I just mean that I love you two, and there’s always something else that one of us has to do. Like now. I have to go and be a hostess. Charles’s friends.”
A somewhat odd line of reasoning has indeed led Celeste to invite many of the group whom she thinks of as Charles’s old friends, the couples from Woodside and Atherton, from Ross and Kentfield, many of whom were at their wedding. Aside from the fact that in a social way she “owes” these people, Celeste has thought it out in the following way. If the party is to be, in spirit, a coming out for Edward, a celebration of triumph over mortal illness, the effect will be both stronger and more subtle if the party is not limited to Edward’s intimates—and besides who would those intimates be? Young poets, with whom he is known to correspond? His old professors, of whom the same is known? His recent doctors?
If most of the guests do not even know what they are celebrating, so much the better. Celeste has tried without succe
ss to explain this to Charles. “If they all follow my intentions without having even been told to do so, it will be all the more effective,” Celeste has said.
“It sounds very much like witchcraft” was Charles’s comment. “Some propitiatory rite that you’ve made up.”
“Oh, Charles.”
Encouraged, he carries it further. “If you really wanted to get into exorcism, as it were, why didn’t you invite some contingent of fagolas down from the city? Some pretty boys for Edward?”
“Oh, Charles,” Celeste repeats, more severely. Sometimes she does not think Charles is funny at all. “I love Edward very much,” she now reminds Charles. “And he could have died. It all could have metastasized. We have to celebrate his being well.”
And so the party is not announced as having anything to do with Edward, nor his illness—not to Charles’s friends, that is; Celeste more or less whispered her intent to Dudley and Sam, to Polly. And to Freddy. To Edward she flatly said, “It’s your coming-out party. So you simply have to come. It won’t be strenuous, I promise. You can leave whenever you want.”
“Darling, dear Celeste, do you know that ‘coming out’ has a somewhat new meaning, these days?”
“Oh, Edward, of course I know that. Who doesn’t?”
Charles doesn’t, is one of the things that Edward thinks. And very possibly not Celeste either.
At his actual party, though, Edward is one of its least lighthearted guests. He is sad, a sadness caused not primarily by his recent surgery, that whole trauma (although the episode did leave him feeling older, weaker and more frightened; he sometimes dreams of those horrible hospital nights, the bright lights and noise from the corridor, himself in pain).
But far worse than all that for Edward, and lodged in the forefront of Edward’s mind is Freddy, the new Freddy with whom he lives. Whom he loves, in a seemingly permanent way.