I do have some sad news though. You remember my telling you about one of my patients, Alfonso? He died yesterday. It was a blessing really because he was in such discomfort. You could tell that once he would have been the most beautiful man—like Aurelio but blond—but now wasted and covered in lesions. He was good-humored about it until the end. I would joke with him that if he preferred I could get him a handsome male nurse to wash him but he would laugh and say, “No, I’m glad it’s you. I wouldn’t want the sight of my enormous cock to distract him from his duties.” We would laugh about that and he’d make bitchy comments about some of the staff, even some of the patients. He had been an actor (remember?) and had friends coming by all the time. At the end he declined fast. So many of them do. When some first arrive they seem as though they could be here for months, but inevitably the end comes quickly. At night I just sit up and pray and cry for them. I feel so helpless sometimes. It’s like trying to soak up the ocean with a sponge. When I wake up on those mornings it can be quite hard, but I go back and there’s always someone there who needs me urgently. Death is both inexhaustible and impatient.
Everyone else is well. Mare is getting older, of course, but she is still as mad and charming as ever. She keeps promising to come. I see Pare all the time. He lives just outside of the city with his new family. My half sister Eulália is a perfect little angel. I am very fond of his new wife, Anna, too. He is mellowing now and hangs around his house like an old tomcat whose prowling days are over, happy with his memories of all the mice he has consumed over the years. In his old age he is even enjoying a modest kind of celebrity. There was an article about him in El Punt and a local gallery has been selling his work, which makes him very pleased, as you can imagine. Cosmo just keeps doing better and better. Since he bought his house here up the coast I see a lot of him too. When he isn’t on tour we have dinner regularly. I wish he had a girl. Too bad he didn’t meet Kate first. No telling how things might have turned out, eh? Ha! Roger is just the same as always. He’s not much of a letter writer but that’s what Mare tells me.
Well, that’s my news. Write to me and tell me about yourself. There are times I miss Amagansett so much.
Més petons i abraçades,
C
I did write to her, but my own life was, while without drama, unfolding as lives often do, taking natural courses much as water from the spring runoff will flow down a dry streambed. We had our modest bourgeois adventures: Caribbean vacations, dinners with friends, small victories at work. The quotidian yet meaningful bricks that build up most lives. Kate did become pregnant. We moved out of her loft, which was fine for a couple but impractical for a family, and, returning to my roots, even if I had never truly strayed, bought a modest apartment on the Upper East Side.
While we gave up unfettered space and the daily glamour of living in Soho, our new apartment, in a fine old prewar building just east of Lexington, brought us a fireplace, a doorman, proximity to Central Park and good schools, and solid doors that we could close. I was now entering into the adult life, complete with its joys and sacrifices, my youth left behind me like a beacon for those coming after. Time, which I once seemed to have an abundance of, contracted, wearing down imperceptibly, like bone on bone.
I saw Cesca again. It was in Barcelona, several years after my marriage. I had been invited to speak at an architectural conference there. Kate stayed in New York with our son, Mitchell. I had told her I would be seeing Cesca, and she’d voiced no objection. But I still hadn’t told her the whole truth about our relationship. Kate had her baby, after all. That is the purest bond. Everything else is secondary. My father, too, was smitten with his namesake. He and Patty invited themselves over frequently to our apartment, and if we were not regular weekend visitors to East Hampton, my father would call and ask, “When are you bringing my grandson out again?”
When I arrived in Barcelona, I was a more benign, staunch, and devoted man than I had been in my youth. I was moderately contented with my life, my growing family, my career. I was in my mid-thirties, going soft in the middle. I was beginning to notice resemblances to my father from when I was a child. He was about my age when I was born. My legs were his. Sometimes when I passed a shop window, it seemed as though I was seeing him in the glass.
The questions that had once dogged me had grown trivial as more serious matters took their place. When I thought of my youthful ambitions to be a painter, I shook my head in disbelief, barely able to recognize that person in the one I had become.
My hotel in Barcelona was old, elegant, the furniture in need of re-covering. It was the first time I had been back to the city since that August years before when I had slept on Aurelio’s floor. Then it had been summer, now it was winter, the streets outside my room overlooking the Gran Via de las Corts Catalanes were wet with rain, the trees on the wide boulevard barren of leaves. The chairs outside the cafés empty. On the pavement Barcelonans hurried by, wrapped in scarves and heavy coats against what would be back in New York mild weather. I pressed my forehead against the glass, feeling its coolness.
It was my second day after arriving. Until then my time had been taken up with conference matters: meetings, panel discussions, breakfasts, lunches, breakout sessions, an official dinner. I had come with the founder of my firm, an elegant, white-haired man in his late seventies. He was staying in a palatial suite several floors above me. His shirts were handmade in Milan, his shoes in London. Each spring he taught a course at MIT. He served on important committees and boards. The firm was his whole life. It had cost him two marriages. His children barely knew him. Despite his age, he still traveled constantly. Seoul, Tokyo, Berlin, San Francisco. He was one of those men to whom work was a tonic. It kept him young. If he stopped, he would die. I knew I would never be him, even though part of me wished I could.
There was a client dinner that night, and I was expected to attend but had carved out a hole in my schedule in the late afternoon. I had called Cesca shortly after I landed. A woman answered in Spanish, and I asked to speak to Cesca Bonet. “Ah, okay, sí, un momento.” I heard the receiver being placed on its side and the faint tapping of heels on a floor. A few minutes later, I heard a voice say, “Si? Això és Cesca.” Yes? This is Cesca.
The sound of her slightly raspy, amused voice on the phone after so long came as a shock. Real time had passed, but suddenly everything seemed familiar again, as though it had only been a day or so since we had spoken. “Cesca, it’s Wylie.”
“Wylie! Hombre! You’re here! I’m so glad. When did you get in?”
“This morning. Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t have as much time as I had hoped. I’m with my boss, and he has me pretty solidly booked. I do have a window on Thursday in the late afternoon, around five, but I need to be at a dinner at seven. Does that work?” Most Barcelonans didn’t eat until much later, but the hotel was used to accommodating foreign visitors.
“That’d be fine. Five, then. Shall I come to you?”
“Do you know where my hotel is?”
“Of course.”
I was waiting in the lobby bar. Until this moment, I hadn’t been nervous, but now I could feel my heart racing. With my foot tapping, I sipped my scotch and eagerly watched the door. I had been careful in choosing what I wore, my most elegant suit, a new silk tie. In my cuffs, the onyx links she had given me for Christmas years before.
In the past, Cesca would have swept in with a flourish, late, impossible to resist, and somehow managed to upend my world. This time I was prepared for her. My armor was thick. My resolve unbroken. This time the wax was in my ears.
So why see Cesca at all? Why not simply sail around the rocks and stay on the open ocean? I could have easily come to Barcelona without seeing her. In a city of this size, it is entirely possible that I could have spent my three days here without running into her. But it wasn’t a sense of good manners or obligation that induced me to tell her I was coming, the way you might with an elderly female relative. No, when I wrote to Cesca, I co
nvinced myself that my reason for suggesting we meet was entirely innocent. What, after all, could be the harm?
If pressed, I would probably say my reason for seeing her was to declare my manumission from her. To see in her face the realization of what she had lost in me and what I had become. To say: I have become a man, a husband, a father. This is what you could have had. To pay her back in a small way for all the agony she had caused me over the years.
But getting beyond my arrogance and petty pride, there was a deeper reason still. It was the most simple of all: I wanted to see her. With my own eyes. To again put a face I had once so cherished to her letters. To hear the sound of her voice again, the throaty laughter. In truth, I missed her. The way an exile misses his homeland or an old man misses his youth.
The deepest reason of all, as old as the race itself, was desire. Though I did not admit it to myself, there was the secret hope that we were only a short elevator ride to my room, the quick shedding of clothes, the exquisite plunge into what was both known and forbidden, the urgent slap of flesh on flesh. It was a distinct possibility, a rekindling of long-lowered flames. It was the outcome I yearned for, and dreaded, most.
I had been there only a few minutes when, at the stroke of five, a woman appeared in the revolving door that led into the grand lobby. She had a scarf tied around her head and wore a long beige raincoat. At first I didn’t recognize her. But when she removed the scarf, I knew it was Cesca. I came walking toward her, and, when she saw me, her face lit up with a wide smile. Raising both arms, she cried, “Wylie, amor!” I embraced her, inhaling the faint though familiar scent of jasmine and roses.
I led her to my table. “It’s wonderful to see you,” I said. A waiter had appeared, and I asked Cesca what she would like to drink.
“I’ll just have some green tea,” she said and, speaking to the waiter, ordered in Catalan.
There’s something different about seeing someone after a while once we get past the age of thirty. Bodies change, skin begins to sag. For some it happens more quickly than for others. I met an old prep school friend of mine for a drink one evening after work. We hadn’t seen each other since graduation. At school he had been lean, handsome, a gymnast. His hair long in the style that was current then. The man who came up to me saying “Wylie!” could not have been more different. Before me stood a fat, bald man, bearded and wearing glasses. It turned out he worked at our old school’s development office. His purpose was not so much to renew an old acquaintance as it was to hit me up for a donation.
The Cesca who sat across from me now was not the same woman I had once known. The beauty was still there, but it was subdued, like an oil painting in need of restoring, the colors muted, the canvas slightly cracked. She was not yet forty but looked older. Her daily proximity to the dead and dying had leeched some of her natural vitality. There was a grayness to her now, as though she had spent too much time underground, deprived of light and air. She was thin, her jeans hung loosely about her legs. The lines in her face were more pronounced. Her hair was cropped short, and her clothes, I noticed, were worn, practical. On her feet an old pair of sneakers. The only ornamentation she wore was a small gold crucifix around her neck. She could have been a maid on her way home from work.
But time and usage had not damaged the crooked smile, the bewitching eyes. “Let me look at you,” she said, smiling. She shook her head. “I can’t believe it. After all this time. Here you are. You don’t know how much I’ve been looking forward to it.”
She asked to see photographs of my son, and I spent several minutes chattering about the mundane, unexpected joys of fatherhood, as well as the inevitable complaints of late nights, car sickness, the anxiety of getting into the right preschool. Already Kate wanted to have another.
“Is that what you want?” she asked.
“Yes, I suppose so. I never really wanted a child in the first place, but now that I have Mitch I can’t imagine life without him.”
“You’re very lucky. I don’t think I’ll ever have children.” She had told me about what had happened years ago with Blackwood.
“You still could.”
She shook her head and smiled. “No. That’s not God’s plan for me, I think. A child requires a mother’s full attention and love. I have too many other people that need me here. It wouldn’t be right.”
I didn’t know what to say and filled the silence by ordering another scotch. “Would you like something to eat?” I offered. “They have some wonderful tapas here.”
“No thank you. I’m not hungry. This tea is perfect.”
There would be no elevator trip, I knew. The air of license that had once enveloped her like perfume had dissipated. The party was over. The band had gone home.
We talked about her work, where she lived. Her patients. “I don’t go out very much anymore,” she said. “This is a real treat.”
“Are you happy here?” I asked. “Doing what you do?”
She nodded her head. “Very. Why? Don’t I seem it?”
“I can’t tell. You’ve changed so much.”
“Yes, I suppose I have. I don’t think that’s a bad thing though, do you? It’s not like I was happy before.”
“Weren’t you? You always seemed to be having a good time.”
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? A good time and happiness are completely different. The one is a form of restlessness, a kind of fear of inadequacy. The other is its antithesis—peace. That’s how I feel now. At peace.”
I sat there comprehending while she sipped her tea. For some reason, her words made me think of the story of Ferdinand the bull. How he had this powerful body built for fighting, but all he wanted to do was smell the flowers. The paths we follow are not always the obvious ones.
“I’m glad for you,” I said. “So does that mean you won’t be coming back to New York? To Amagansett?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I won’t rule out anything. I don’t miss the city, but I do miss Amagansett. It’s my home more than anywhere else, even if there are so few of us left now. Maybe I’ll go back next year. For Christmas. We’ll see.”
“And you mean to stay in Barcelona and keep working at the hospice?”
She put down her cup. “That’s another question. I feel that I can do so much here, but there is great need elsewhere. It’s no great hardship living in Barcelona. It’s a beautiful city, safe, clean. I’d love to stay, but we’ll see. Maybe there are other places in the world where I’m needed more.” She shrugged and smiled. “Who knows?”
There is something daunting about encountering people more selfless than you are. It is why we show respect to priests, to the sick and crippled, to winners of the Medal of Honor; they have given up more than we ever will. While the rest of humanity tries to figure out how to make our lives easier and more comfortable, they know what it is to suffer; even greater, how to ease suffering. They have come through the refining fire and emerged on the other side, changed, purer.
I didn’t know what to say to Cesca. She had chosen the greatest fight of all: to fight death knowing there was never any hope of victory. From me, though, any encouragement would have sounded hollow, false. I had no basis on which to form a judgment; her world of pain and open sores and daily mortality was far from my hyperbaric world of worrying about elevation heights, courting clients, and commuting to the office. I couldn’t blurt out that her life would be nothing but an endless cycle of pain and suffering. Because, after all, was it? Her choice was the heroic one. There are those people for whom the arduous way is the only way.
I was ashamed that I found such a course unthinkable. But she had always been braver than me. She, like all her family, was a risk taker. Uncowed by second thoughts, willing to dive from the high board on a dare, or climb the tree and leap onto the roof. And I would always be the one wishing I was them.
It was time for her to go. She stood up, gathering her still-damp coat. I didn’t want her to leave yet. There was still so much to discuss. “Wait, stay and
have dinner with me,” I said.
“I’d love to, but I can’t. I need to return to the hospice. One of my patients needs me. Besides, I thought you said you had plans tonight.”
“I do. But I can get out of them.”
She shook her head. “No, but it would be nice to spend some more time.” We were facing each other, and she took my hands in hers and said, “Tricky Wylie. It’s so good to see you again. I see you still have the cuff links.”
“Of course.”
She smiled and rolled up the sleeve of her sweater to reveal the used Cartier watch I had given her years before. “It is the last little luxury I permit myself. It makes me think of you.”
I blushed. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Just be happy. You’ll still write me? I enjoy your letters. I always have.”
“I enjoy yours too. You write a wonderful letter. Too bad I didn’t find that out until recently.”
She giggled. “I know. I was shameful. But I’ve tried to mend my ways.”
“I promise I’ll write. Good luck.”
“Thank you.” She leaned forward and embraced me, and I held her tightly, feeling the warmth of her body, its lean but supple strength. She could live on locusts and rainwater. “Take care, Tricky Wylie,” she whispered in my ear.
“No, you take care.”
She looked at me for a second with the old mischievous flash of fire, the promise of sin in her eye, and released my hand. “I will. God bless you. Adéu.”
I watched her walk away, stopping just before the revolving door, over which sat an ormolu clock and flanked by a brace of massive green marble columns. She turned and, with a smile, gave a final wave before disappearing into the street.
EPILOGUE
THE SKY OUTSIDE WAS TURNING ORANGE AND PURPLE. I had decided what to keep and what to throw out. What I did not want went into the Dumpster. The work was tiring, down four flights of stairs, out to the front yard, and back up again, two steps at a time, empty-handed. Despite the cool, I removed my coat. The exertion made it easier to act though. The only thing I felt when I threw a box over the side of the Dumpster and watched it spill open on impact was the desire to go up and bring back another. There is a strange satisfaction in smashing one’s past. It was liberating even if it hurt. There is no point in being halfhearted about it. Don’t just give them a little shove, take a hammer to them, burn them to the ground. Do the job good and proper.
Girl in the Moonlight Page 30