Second Chances

by Alice Adams

  Naturally she says none of this aloud to Sara. Naturally not, and so the drive home, over fog-shrouded hills, past mist-concealed fields and woods, is quiet, for the most part. Not saying what is most on her mind, Dudley experiences a familiar wave of loneliness, and she wonders: Does Sara ever feel so isolated? Does she too wish, at times, to say what she does not? More likely, Dudley believes, Sara says more or less what is on her mind.

  * * *

  “Such a terrible day” is the first thing that Celeste says to Sara, as Sara comes into the living room, around teatime. Then, seeming to remember, she asks, “How was your peace march?”

  “Really more of a rally than an actual march,” Sara can’t resist saying. “But it was okay. I was glad we went.”

  “I’m sure you’re such a comfort to poor Dudley.” Saying this, Celeste looks so very sad, so in need of comfort for herself that Sara is very moved. And worried.

  And helpless. How to comfort heavily guarded, tightly controlled Celeste, with her scornful nose, her rigid, upright posture? “It’s hard to tell how Dudley does feel,” she attempts. “She’s so, so New England.”

  “I suppose.” But Celeste’s interest has seemed to subside. Her huge black, black eyes shift their focus, and she returns to herself, her own pain.

  And Sara sighs, and gives up. She feels with Celeste less a generation gap than an unbridgeable gap in concerns, Celeste’s being wholly personal, narrowly “social,” in some ways aesthetic. In no possible sense “political.”

  Celeste knows that she almost assuredly has something quite terribly wrong: well, she has the most wrong thing of all, the unmentionable horror, of which almost everyone finally dies. Daily she studies and considers her symptoms: blood.

  On a very occasional more cheerful day she thinks it could be an ulcer, but from what Polly has said the color of her blood is wrong. Not an ulcer.

  Death, the idea of death, is not what she so much minds, Celeste has worked out; dying will be a fairly simple matter, she believes, a losing of consciousness, quite possibly welcome, like sleep. But the stages on the way to death, the ways that the world has now worked out for people to die, there’s the real horror: hospitals, surgery, anesthesia. Terrible nurses, mean doctors. Pain, indignity. Reduction of one’s self to a degraded, helpless and unclean infancy.

  Celeste has had certain operations—gall bladder, a hysterectomy; she knows the hospital, the surgical experience, and she cannot, cannot go through any of that again. Much less the further horrors of chemotherapy, radiation—whatever they choose for her. She cannot even go to a doctor to describe her present symptoms. She does not want to see a doctor, to be operated on. To be fixed, maybe even cured. She is too old for all that.

  She would rather die.

  And on her way to dying, should she arrive at a time of awful pain, there are pills one can take. One can choose to go to sleep, for good.

  Celeste believes that she is making a rational choice. She knows what she is doing; it is her privilege not to have medical care if she doesn’t want it. No surgery, no long painful bright sleepless hospital nights.

  At times she feels quite rational about it all.

  At other times, though, she inwardly rails against what is wrong with her, and especially against its location: humiliating. Ugly.

  No wonder Bill left, she thinks. And while of course she did not breathe a word of her affliction, ever, to him, very likely he sensed something wrong with her. He smelled illness, along with her appalling age. He may even have thought her joking when she said to him (and oh! no one would ever know the courage that took), when she said, “Bill darling, I’d really like us to be married.”

  He laughed, of course they laughed together, seated side by side at a corner table at Vic’s, over the specially ordered salads. But Celeste was serious; she would never have said such a thing as a joke, no one would, no woman. And then when he overheard her whispering at her party to her friends, though, confiding her secret, their secret—well, no wonder he ran, ran out on her.

  And how could she ever even have thought of another life, with Bill? After Charles, a second chance? How, when beneath her clothes she is withered, dry, terrible, old? She is bleeding almost every day, she is probably dying.

  If only Celeste would go to bed earlier, then Sara would not have to use the phone at such odd hours, so very late, waking Alex in New York, where it is often almost morning.

  However, there is a certain sexiness to these strangely timed calls; it is even sexy, in a way, that she, Sara, almost always makes the calls. Aggressive Sara, strong Sara, reaching out for Alex, touching him across three thousand miles. She sits curled on Celeste’s white linen sofa, in her old flounced flannel nightgown, her wool robe and sheepskin slippers. She is cold, hearing the drip of fog in the night outside. Shivering, thinking of sex. Calling warm Alex, and smiling to herself at the prospect of his voice.

  She even postpones, momentarily, the actual placing of her call, the light touch on the now familiar numbers, their tinny music. As she savors what seems a new sense of herself.

  Years back, despite knowing this to be unhealthy, if not actually “sick,” Sara used to speculate as to what, possibly, Alex could “see” in her. And none of her conclusions then were politically acceptable. Because I make love to him, she thought, and he’s probably only had fairly passive, timid girls. Or because he has no idea how beautiful he is, he does not especially value himself in that way.

  Now, however, Sara’s overriding sense of herself is one of strength. I am an exceptionally strong woman, she thinks. I have withstood a great deal, every fact of my life proves strength. No wonder Alex, who is genuinely good (I think) and intelligent and kind but hesitant to act—no wonder Alex should be drawn to me. To strength. He sees someone who will act for as well as with him.

  Smiling now at her own unwonted self-approval—is the sin of pride politically incorrect, or are you supposed to think well of yourself, these days? (she believes that you are)—Sara then pushes the telephone buttons, and leans back into the sofa to listen to the ring.

  Poor Alex, she always wakes him, and always she is torn between guilt and affection, sheer fondness for his sleepy, fumbling voice.

  However, tonight the phone continues to ring and ring, and no Alex, sleepy or otherwise, comes on the line.

  Outrageous: how dare he not be there? Thinking that, reacting in that quick and primitive way, Sara further thinks, He’s out with someone—or, rather, he’s there in the apartment, he is listening to the phone and knowing who it is—with some beautiful passive blonde, who barely touches him.

  And Sara also thinks, This stupid fantasy is sheer regression. I could have thought of it twenty years back.

  But that hot jealous flood is not so easily halted as Sara even thinks, I could go to bed with that silly David, he’s handsome enough, in his way, and I could somehow let Alex know. If we’re supposed to be such honest platonic old friends.

  Curiously, perhaps, these strenuous emotions have the effect at last of wearing Sara out, and she falls asleep, curled there in her bedraggled flannel gown, in the deep white linen.

  Waking to blackness, still, she looks at her watch—tiny, very pretty, a recent present from Celeste. (“I never use it, my darling, and you’ll have it someday anyway. Might as well now.”) It is just after 4 a.m., that classic hour for insomniacs, for crazies. However, not in New York, where it is just after seven, and time to get up.

  Wanting then more than anything to talk to Alex, to tell him about the march, and the new-old infiltrators there, and how frightening she finds the information that Bill indeed is Priest, is CIA—wanting so badly to tell Alex all that, which Alex alone could hear and understand, Sara still does not make the call.

  She is wide awake now, and absolutely clear in her head, and she thinks, I cannot call Alex now, at seven-fifteen, and not find him in. I simply cannot take that risk.

  Sara gets up from the sofa and heads off to her room, to bed, as, with
the most wry of inward smiles, she mutters to herself, “Well, so much for strength.”

  19

  “Dear really beautiful Celeste. Where has all this time gone? I can tell you, I really had some trouble getting up for writing to you. The way I cut out could really have ticked you off, I wouldn’t blame you. I didn’t even get to tell you how I appreciated your little ‘joke,’ even if I was sort of the butt, in a manner of speaking. Anyway, your party was super, some fancy blast, and I really got a big kick out of meeting all your friends. And especially that niece, or is she a niece? of yours. Was her name Sally? Give her my best regards.

  “You probably wouldn’t believe what I’ve been up to, and into these past four months. All business, unfortunately. But among other things I have been going to Berlitz (now there’s an experience I could have done without, talk about a bunch of creeps) anyway, I took this crash course in Spanish, and now I can really hablar.

  “Of course I’ve been crossing my fingers that something would send me back to California, but no such luck. I have to go way down south, and I don’t mean Dixie. But I’ll be thinking about you, Celeste, and your lovely home, and your friends and your ‘niece.’ ”

  Celeste, fastidious about the written word, as indeed she is in most areas, is fairly appalled by this letter, her first from Bill. Sent, she notes, from Washington, D.C. One of Charles’s great charms for Celeste was his prose style, which she considered exemplary, of its kind: clean and clear and vigorous—even elegant, at times.

  Whereas that of Bill is simply vulgar, she concludes. Is even more than a little disjointed, and in her view patently insincere. She knows that many people have trouble with the written word, one should make certain allowances, but still: this is an awful letter. He even sounds slightly crazy, Celeste decides, and she thinks, I only cared about him, to the extent that I did care, because I am actually not in the best of shape myself.

  She does not show the letter to Sara (certainly not), nor to anyone, ever. Over breakfast she only says to Sara, that next morning, “Oh, I heard from Bill. Finally. I forgot to tell you.”

  “Really?”

  Sara does not do well at trying to appear casual, in Celeste’s opinion.

  “Yes, I think he must be off to South America,” Celeste throws out, herself very casual.

  “Really? What country, do you know?”

  “I’ve no idea.” With some satisfaction, Celeste notes Sara’s totally thwarted look, her outraged curiosity.

  She observes too that Sara looks—well, “pretty” is actually the most descriptive word, odd as it may seem for bold Sara. Her face looks all smoothed out, her skin very lightly tanned, perhaps from all those walks with Dudley, in this unusual warm clear weather. Her hair too is smooth, pulled becomingly back in a way that Celeste herself suggested, and was quite startled to see that Sara in fact adopted.

  “He just said South America?” Sara now pursues.

  “Actually not even that. I just put things together from what he did say.” Celeste purses her mouth, and is silent. And then suddenly, for no good, discernible reason, she thinks: Sara is having a love affair with that David, it must be David, there’s no one else around. And she’s always out.

  “Well, that’s very interesting,” Sara comments, still going on about Bill. “Horrible, isn’t it, how things fall into place?”

  “They do?”

  “I mean, so much turning up in South America. Bad loans, guns, coke, along with their usual earthquakes and floods and buses falling off cliffs? Have you noticed how natural disasters almost never befall the rich?”

  “Sara, I do not see Bill as a natural disaster. Nor as evil as you seem to insist on believing.”

  “Well, maybe not.” Sara looks at her watch, not the present from Celeste but a large practical one that she boasts about having found at Walgreen’s. “It’s such a terrific day, I think I’ll go for a walk.” (As though she had no appointment! Were meeting no one.)

  Once Sara is gone, precipitately out the door, Celeste begins to reflect, seated in her sunny boudoir, at the small carved desk. And one of the first things that occurs to her is Sara’s singular lack of any acting ability; she has none at all, not an ounce.

  And it was very wise indeed of her, Celeste, not to show Bill’s letter to Sara; with Sara’s very melodramatic tendencies—“paranoid” seems the fashionable word, in some circles, these days—God knows what Sara would have made of it. Recently Sara has even asked Celeste if Celeste thought their phone could be “bugged.” Imagine! The Timberlake phone, Charles’s phone. No doubt Sara imagines that Bill is bugging their phone, somehow.

  “But why did you tell us he was gay?” is one of the things that Sara has asked Celeste, about Bill.

  “Oh, that was just my little joke.” Celeste laughed.

  Her own reasons for that “joke” were fairly complicated, actually, and included a genuine confusion as to the sexual direction of Bill. They used to kiss a lot, he and she, but not in what Celeste considers a passionate way. They were like adolescents, but very early adolescents—these days, that would be about nine years old, from what Celeste has gleaned from various articles she has read. But the impulse to state that Bill was gay also sprang from a desire to get there first, so to speak: if anyone else should happen to take that view of Bill, Celeste would want to appear to know already.

  Now, though, as she watches the creeping of sunlight into and across the polished floorboards of her bedroom, Celeste feels incredibly remote from Bill; he now seems to have come and gone in her life without leaving a trace. How difficult now even to recall all that emotion, all that tremulous waiting for phone calls, those delicately stirring kisses.

  But she actually feels both remote from Bill and from everyone she knows, from even those near at hand. From Sara, from Dudley, from Edward and Freddy, who are coming over for dinner tonight.

  She wonders if this is a part of getting ready to die. Could this be what the approach of death is like, this calm, this passive sadness?

  Very likely so.

  Celeste has to absolutely force herself to do her exercises. First the Yoga, then some mild aerobics.

  Contrary to Celeste’s somewhat retro-romantic view, as Sara herself might put it, Sara is certainly not “having an affair” with David, nor with anyone else. What she is doing, and what must in large part account for her look of much-improved health, of looking “pretty,” is following Celeste’s own prescription for strenuous exercise. Which she would not have admitted to Celeste. “Oh, Celeste, you’re so right, I’ve been walking ten or twelve miles a day really fast, and I feel a hundred times better.”

  Never, never would she have said such a thing, although that statement expresses the literal, simple truth. And furthermore she would have liked to make that acknowledgment to Celeste, as a sort of present, a way of saying, “You’re really great. I do what you say, sometimes.” But she cannot.

  But she does walk. She walks all the way to the coast, where she stands up on those bluffs, and she breathes, and contemplates. And she speaks very firmly to herself, at those moments. She says, “You don’t have to be afraid anymore. You’re all right now, you’re much better.” And she wrestles with the problem of whether or not she should tell Celeste what she actually knows about Bill. Bill the cokehead, Bill of the CIA.

  In the early hours, which are Sara’s chosen time for walks, the pale gray June fog banks that linger above the sea are delicate, thin veils. Wafting, ephemeral. The sea distantly shimmers. “It’s all so beautiful that even I find it hard to be depressed,” Sara has said to Alex, in a recent phone call. (He had called her late one night, her usual hour for ringing him: he had been down in Washington, he said, sort of poking around, and he thought she might have tried to call him. Well, no, she actually hadn’t, Sara lied.)

  She told Alex then about the peace rally, the old-new faces of infiltrators, informers. She said how afraid she sometimes is. “It’s like running through some terrible woods and making it
out, and then you stop to be afraid” is how she put it.

  “That’s just right, how it is.” (Good, kind, responsive Alex.) “But the point is,” he continues, “you are out. That’s what to keep in mind.”

  “I’m not always sure. This fucking phone sounds bugged.”

  “Well, what if it is? You’re Sara, and you’re staying with Celeste. You went to a peace rally with Dudley. You make phone calls to me in New York. Sometimes. Big fucking deal, as we used to say.”

  Sara laughs. “Well, when you put it like that.” And then she tells him, “I even worry about that dopey David. The waiter guy I told you about. With the beard and yellowish eyes, who was such a jerk at Celeste’s big party. But he follows me around, or I think he does. I run into him a lot.”

  “He’s probably got some kind of a crush on you. I used to follow you around.”

  “Oh, you never did. I would have known.” Not saying, I was following you, I was the one with the crush.

  “Oh, did I not. You had a class in that building with the funny name, up by the campanile. Birge. I used to sit so casually on one of those benches at the side, trying to look at the saucer magnolias, to think hard about magnolias. And sometimes you’d really mess me up, leaving by another door. And I’d have to tell myself it wasn’t deliberate, you weren’t avoiding me.”

  Inordinately pleased, Sara laughs—she is half-ashamed of such pleasure.