by Alice Adams
But she has very little money, it now turns out, to leave either to Sara or to the unknown animals. And since she is dying (surely) it is too late now to rectify anything: too late to take in strays, or to be of much real help to Sara.
How did I ever get to be so old, Celeste wonders, helplessly regarding her dry pale lined face in the mirror as she waits there for Sara. How?
She is not even entirely sure what it is that she wants to talk to Sara about. She only feels an urgency to be clear, at last, with at least one person. With Sara, whom she has chosen to love.
She does want to talk to Sara; however, before she knows it Celeste has fallen asleep.
And so it is not until the next day that she has Sara alone—by which time she has decided not to mention money to Sara at all.
The next day at breakfast (yogurt and brown rice and tuna: Celeste’s prescription for a healthy start to the day) she remarks to Sara, “I do sometimes wonder if I haven’t been a little harsh, after all, in my judgment of Bill.” She had not meant to say this (perhaps the healthful food induced such positive thoughts?).
Sara mutters unintelligibly.
And so Celeste continues, “I do think, my dear Sara, that it’s best to try to accept people more or less as they are. Not trying to make them into other people.”
“Actually I’m pretty sure I was right about Bill. In fact, I’m quite sure. He was in Berkeley and he used another name.”
Celeste’s worst laugh is a harsh, curt sound, almost a snort. She does this now, before saying, “I think Bill just didn’t want to get married, and when he heard me saying that we were he ran off. Not exactly elegant behavior. However.” She sniffs conclusively, obviously wishing to have the final word.
“I know I was right about him,” Sara mutters.
Just outside the windows of their small breakfast patio, the dark green leaves of some newly potted plants now drip cold rivulets from the heavy, enveloping fog. However, high in the sky are thin pale yellow patches, faint clues that later on the fog will burn off, leaving in its wake a bright, possible new day. And this promise serves to lighten and brighten, a little, the tight dark mood into which Sara and Celeste have quite suddenly fallen.
“In fact, I think I’ll go and walk right now,” announces Sara.
Celeste’s smile is infinitely tolerant, infinitely wise and knowing, as she says to Sara, “Well, very well, my darling. Off you go.”
22
After many long phone conversations during which various trips were projected, discussed, with alternatives suggested (Carmel? Tahoe? Mendocino?), Brooks Burgess and Dudley have gone to Houston, Texas—“of all places,” Dudley has just managed not to say. It made a certain sense, though: Brooks had business there. (“What’s left of the business in those parts,” he told Dudley; “you wouldn’t believe what’s happened to oil.”) Also, he knew of a first-rate hotel. (“It’s even quite beautiful, you’ll like it.”) And, as neither of them did say, they were most unlikely, in Houston, to run into anyone they knew.
Somewhat to Dudley’s surprise, Brooks has turned out to be quite right about the hotel. Their room is beautiful, a large, irregularly shaped space, the far end of which is all glass and faces out into some woods, all cool and green, dark boughs, ferns—as though the room itself were suspended out there, hung from trees.
Inside, it is all very underplayed, discreet, pale “natural” fabrics, “understated” furniture. Pale brown sheets on the king-sized bed, on which Dudley now lies, trying to plan what to say next to Brooks, who will be done with some sort of meeting in an hour or so. Whom she is to meet for lunch in the bar, and to whom she must (obviously) say something.
“It doesn’t matter,” she would like to say, but that is a patent lie: sex does matter quite a lot, everyone knows that now. And so she amends or edits to “We don’t have to let this matter.” However, they do have to let it matter, of course they do: their failure at love (a quite mutual failure, in Dudley’s view, although poor Brooks no doubt blames himself alone, as nice men of a certain generation will)—their failure will profoundly affect whatever relationship exists between the two of them, if it does not end it once and for all, for good, today.
Suppose she said something to the effect that “I like you anyway”? But no, that is an impossible sentence to say, considerably worse to hear. The point is, she hardly knows Brooks Burgess, and the naked, strenuous tussles undergone by their proximate but unjoined bodies have not served to increase their intimacy.
Dudley sighs as she considers how old age becomes more and more unfair to the old, instead of less so. As if things were not always bad enough, in terms of incapacities, weakening of most of one’s faculties, not to mention certain aesthetic losses, now, in addition to all that, these days one must contend with a new mythology holding that most old people—most normal old people, that is—are still sexually quite all right; they are (they are supposed to be) capable of doing everything they did before, if (possibly) a little less lively and speedy about it all.
This is not fair.
What she and Brooks will actually do, Dudley in a very quick flash perceives, is pretend it never happened. And what she can most kindly and tactfully do is aid and abet that pretense. She is sure of this; in fact she sees no other course as remotely possible.
In the meantime she gets up and gets into her shower.
Or, she thinks, under the shower, she sees no other course for people of their age and generation and general “background.” If they were twenty or thirty years younger, she thinks, in the course of a very long shower (noting too that her body is really okay for sixty-five: surely scrawny is better than fat? Even visible tendons are preferable to sags?), then perhaps some sort of discussion would be in order: openness, confrontation, whatever. Perhaps. Dudley is actually quite unable to imagine such a conversation, nor is she convinced of the efficacy of such talk. God knows it would never have worked with Sam, with his eternal Southern politeness, his acres of reserve, his puritan depths.
But isn’t there, really, still much to be said for simple tact and politeness, even for the avoidance of certain painful issues?
Dudley wonders about all this, is not at all sure what she actually thinks. In the meantime, out of her shower, she creams her face with moisturizer, deodorizes her already odorless body, and clothes herself in immaculate silks. Adds perfume, and is ready for lunch with Brooks, who is technically not her lover. Not yet.
The bar, where Brooks has as yet not arrived, is also a pleasant, airy-looking room, deceptively cool. Sipping her Perrier, then, for no reason, or no reason that she can think of, Dudley is stricken with the most acute and painful longing for Sam. Ah, if only it were he, her old Sam, who would at any moment now walk through that wide, brass-fitted door, past the hostess (pout-mouthed, blonde) and over to her, to Dudley. His wife.
What she feels at this moment is the simplest, purest and most unbearable sense of loss: no more ambivalence, mixed memories, just loss. And she thinks of her joyless striving with Brooks, in bed, and experiences an awful wave of guilt for that most terrible act of treachery to Sam—poor dead, defenseless Sam.
Unhappily, for well over half an hour Dudley is quite alone with such thoughts—and how unlike Brooks to be so late, she also thinks. Is it possible that he has simply fled, hating failure and thus hating her by association? Leaving her there in Houston, of all unlikely places?
Since Dudley has not been outside, she is used by now to the air-conditioned cool; she even wears a light sweater draped over her silk-linen shirt, her extravagant (futile!) purchase for this purposeful trip. Other people, however, those just entering the bar, show marked effects of the heat outside. In their barest clothes, their naked shoulders or rolled-up shirt-sleeves, they enter shivering, but smiling: ah! delicious cool.
Several people, Dudley has noticed, have come in as though in shock, their faces seeming to register some disaster. Or has she imagined this? Recently, especially since Sam died, she has felt
so often a sort of weight of sorrow, of generalized misfortune: Ethiopian ghosts, the hungry homeless everywhere. Bomb testing. Arms. Is it her own distracted imagination, then, that she now sees reflected in these faces from outside?
So absorbed in watching, wondering, Dudley for an instant does not register the fact of Brooks, who is approaching. Unsmiling, and also with a look of catastrophe. Who hurriedly kisses her cheek (a husbandly kiss, it occurs to Dudley). Who says, “Really ghastly news. An earthquake in Mexico City. So close, really. Some people around here felt it.” And he goes on to tell her: hundreds killed, buried, lost. Buildings crumbled, toppled. Looting. Fires.
As if they too were victims (and, in a sense, ultimately they are, Dudley believes), they stare at each other, in genuine fear, near panic. Dudley and Brooks Burgess.
It is Brooks who says, “You know that feeling, that inner voice that says we’ll be next?”
Dudley answers him, “Very well.”
One of the things that Dudley is later to remember about that moment is her very conscious thought that now Freddy will leave Edward: in a few weeks, after the aftershocks, when the scope of the disaster is plainer, the needs of its victims clearer, Freddy will simply go down there. He will find for himself some extremely useful function; he will in effect lose himself in helping. From time to time he will write to Edward, perhaps to all of them. But neither Edward nor any of them will ever see him again.
And Dudley thinks, Ah, poor poor Edward, poor old dear. Maybe he and I should move in together, somehow? Try it out? And then, at that moment, she laughs a little at herself for such a visionary, such an entirely unrealistic program—at such a moment.
She is also to remember the day of the earthquake, with a twinge of very New England guilt, as the day on which she and Brooks first successfully made love. That afternoon, as though they had been doing it all their lives, they very gently caressed, their essential parts joined and quickened. They enjoyed.
In Houston, Texas.
Polly and Celeste, having met for coffee in the diner where irritating David once worked (David having suddenly disappeared), could not have presented a greater contrast in style: Celeste in her old red Chanel, Polly in something black from either Cost Plus or Berkeley (this is Celeste’s assessment). Celeste’s perfect silver-white waves. Polly’s semi-baldness, wrapped in an Indian-looking red-black scarf.
Wryly they take note of each other. No need for either to comment, really, the opposition in costume being too familiar. However, Polly does say, “Well, at least we’ve both stuck to an anarchist color scheme.”
At which Celeste smiles and allows, “Appropriately enough.”
It was Polly, though, who telephoned Celeste and suggested this meeting (“I’ve heard so much about that damn place, how about meeting me there?”), which for Polly was unusual. Clearly she has something of great importance to divulge, which Celeste quite unaccountably dreads, does not want to hear. She has even thought of manufacturing some excuse to leave—she wanted to leave almost as soon as she got there.
And Polly does look rather severe. She has on her lecturing face, which Celeste with some reason has learned to fear.
However, what Polly almost immediately says is (so like her, no preamble): “One thing I wanted to tell you, Celeste, is that I’m planning a trip to Spain.”
And oh, how like Polly to make a stern lecture out of such news, to make a pronouncement of what is so pleasant, such innocent fun! Celeste thinks all this even as she is saying to Polly, “But, darling Pol, that’s really wonderful, you haven’t been back there forever.” Not since you and Charles were lovers, she does not say. But she has the sudden and quite enormous thought that Polly knows, Polly knows that she knows—and somehow over the years they have got past all that; it no longer matters much who did what to and with whom.
“Not since 1948” is Polly’s very succinct summation. “Almost forty years.” She smiles a little grimly, and then continues, “The point is, dear Celeste, it’s not just me going. I mean, I’m going with a friend.” A tiny pause. “A man I know.”
Can Polly be blushing? Quite surely she is. She looks heated, and her pale eyes are paler than ever. They shine.
“But, Pol, how really lovely, and how cozy you are, going out and meeting someone and getting all involved without any of us having the slightest notion.” As Celeste says all this, though, a tiny, very recent memory surfaces (what they say is true; the most recent past is really the first to go): someone seeing Polly with someone, someone “inappropriate,” but that memory refuses to come into focus. “You must let me have you both to dinner, a sort of little pre-farewell party for you both.”
Polly begins then to laugh, her old big full helpless laugh that Celeste always wishes were happening somewhere else. “You already know him,” Polly tells Celeste. “It’s Victor Lozano, the man at the garage.”
“Oh.”
“He’s Spanish,” Polly adds, quite unnecessarily.
For of course Celeste knows who Victor is, everyone knows Victor, and knows him to be Spanish. As well as bald and fat and poor and married and a Catholic, probably. For an instant Celeste wonders if this could be some sort of joke of Polly’s, what young people call “putting you on.” If Polly simply said that she was going to Spain with Victor (of course implying considerably more, much more, that must have already taken place between them)—if Polly said that just to see what she, Celeste, would say? But she next decides that this is not so: it is simply not Polly’s sort of joke.
And so it must be true. Polly and Victor. A fact. A couple.
Well. Celeste with scarcely a thought decides not to give Polly the joy of any show of shock, on her part. “I think your trip should be wonderful,” says Celeste. “Divine. Going with someone who can speak the language.”
In a knowing way Polly chuckles, but she only says, “I think it will be, as you say, divine. I’m very much looking forward.” And then, in an entirely different voice, she says, “Now, Celeste, about your symptoms. This bleeding you’ve mentioned.”
“Oh, that was nothing. And anyway it’s almost stopped,” Celeste gets out, in a rush.
“Almost?” Polly pushes.
“Well, yes. Really not at all now. And, Polly, honestly, what a thing for us to talk about.”
It was you who asked me about it in the first place: Polly’s pale, severe eyes say this to Celeste, no need for the spoken words. What Polly does say is “I think you’re acting very foolishly. There’s a doctor I want you to go to. He’s young, and it’d be less embarrassing for you with someone new. Is that right?”
“Well—” Of course this is quite true: one of Celeste’s large dreads has been the description of such unpleasant (disgusting!) symptoms to dear old Dr. McGillvaray, whom she has known forever, ever since she and Charles first came to California.
“He’s just over in Santa Cruz. Very smart, young but not too young. John Bascomb. Here, I wrote it down for you. Please, Celeste, just go and talk to him.”
To her own considerable surprise Celeste finds this idea appealing. If this doctor is young, even she, hopelessly old and old-fashioned Celeste, can talk to him “openly”: isn’t openness a specialty of the young, along with “sharing”? Well, she will openly share her conviction that she has cancer; she will explain that she is going to die, and he can tell her certain facts that she needs to know—how much time she has, what the last few months of her life are liable to be like. How soon, that is, she should think about taking some pills. Though of course she will not tell any doctor about that plan. “Very well, Polly, I’ll go see him.” Celeste laughs, to herself an unpleasantly artificial sound. “Will that make you happy?”
“Moderately.” Polly smiles.
Partly to change the subject, Celeste now says, “So odd about that young man who used to work here. Did you meet him at my party? Called David. Sara took the most violent dislike to him, really on sight. Anyway, he seems to be gone. So odd.”
“Ah.” Polly
smiles again. “It’s wonderful not to be young, don’t you think so, really, Celeste?”
“Well,” Celeste concedes. “On some days I do.”
“Do you want more coffee? There’s one more thing I really want to ask you.”
Whatever it is, Celeste is sure that she does not care to hear the question, nor assuredly to answer it. But she says, “Oh, yes, I’d love more—the coffee’s so good here, don’t you think?” she flutters.
Polly asks sternly, “Celeste, what’s this about Bill’s being in South America.”
Oh. “Well, that’s where he is, I’m pretty sure. I’m not sure doing what exactly. He’s sounding rather mysterious about it all. The way Charles used to, sometimes.”
“Interesting” is Polly’s comment. But then, as Celeste might have known she would, she probes further, pushing in. “What I really want to know is how you feel about him these days. What was all that about, anyway? Do you know?”
“Oh, Polly, dear Polly. If I knew I’d tell you, really. I would.” And Celeste sighs, almost painfully.
“You could try.” Gentle but very firm, implacable Polly.
“Well.” She might as well try to tell Polly, Celeste decides. There has never been the slightest point in any pretense, with her. “Well,” she begins, “I simply know that it had more to do with Charles than with Bill. You know, beginning with that really uncanny resemblance.”