Second Chances Read online

  “Maybe something quite contraband. Maybe heroin? Cocaine?” Dudley means to be helpful.

  “Darling, you’re such a romantic. I’m sure this Bill is not of an age for drugs.”

  “Oh dear heaven, do you have to be young for that too?” Dudley laughs, with a rather stagy, quite false despair: actually she and Sam quite often smoke dope on Sunday mornings; it is one of their happiest rituals. Dope, sex, long naps and then an enormous, slightly exotic breakfast, pasta or something similarly non-breakfastlike, long after noon. Partly to change the subject, for naturally she tells no one of this practice (but now she wonders if Edward could possibly, somehow, know; and do he and Freddy, conceivably—?), briskly she says to Edward, “I do wonder what Sara’s like now.”

  “Well, she must be thirty-something, mustn’t she?”

  Dudley, in many ways given to vagueness, has almost always a quite startling accuracy in regard to dates. “No, of course not. She’s closer to forty—in fact she is forty, or she will be in April. I remember the day she was born. In 1945. It was when I met Sam.” She blushes, aware of the blush and feeling very silly about it.

  “Odd that none of us ever met this Emma, Sara always coming alone to visit,” Edward muses. “Even small hints that there was no Emma, that Sara was the result of what we used to call an indiscretion.”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute,” Dudley tells him. “It’s just Celeste making dramas. Besides, she used to read me letters from Emma—she wouldn’t go so far as to make them up. It’s just her revising things again, as you say. Not to mention her somewhat proprietary nature.” She sniffs. “Besides, I did meet her once, in 1951.”

  Catching her intensity, although uncertain as to its cause, a little cruelly Edward carries on: “Well, it is strange, still. So much talk about this Emma, whom I at least never saw. And now this Bill, whom very likely we are never to meet at all.”

  “Well, it’s a little late for you to meet Emma, she’s dead, and probably we’ll all be forced to meet Bill, and we won’t like him at all. Honestly, Edward, you’re sometimes as bad as Celeste is. Making mysteries when really it’s all so simple. Celeste is just terribly lonely, and has taken up in some way with a man in San Francisco named Bill. And Sara’s had nothing but trouble all her life, all that time in the Mexican jail, and God knows what else happened to her lately—Celeste invites her to come and stay.” She repeats, “It’s all terribly simple, really. You’ll see how it is.”

  At that moment, perhaps fortunately, the attractive bearded young man again appears at their booth, announcing himself. “I’m David,” he tells them. “In case you’d like anything else. More coffee?”

  Both Dudley and Edward smile with surprise and genuine pleasure. As with the diner’s décor, this custom, a waiter’s proclaiming his name in a friendly way, is quite new to them (though of course very current and sometimes extremely annoying to many people elsewhere, at that time).

  What a very nice boy, they both think. And Dudley, not really given to such meddling, generally, further thinks: He should be introduced to Sara. They must be about the same age, they might get along. Otherwise she could be very lonely here, with just us, and we’re all so old for her.

  Leaving the diner a little later, after not much further conversation—the walk has tired them both, indeed much more than either would admit—Dudley and Edward continue along the narrow white highway whose other, eastward direction is Salinas. They are heading westward, toward the coast, where an almost setting sun now blazes, blindingly. After a short walk they reach another, narrower highway, and there, at that crossroads, they separate. As always, with some ceremony.

  They kiss and shake hands; they both say, “Goodbye, see you soon. Stay well.”

  2

  “Oh, it feels like being on a ship!” This is what almost everyone says, with an air of wonderment and pleasure, on first coming into Sam and Dudley’s house. Sam and Dudley are too polite and too tired to explain the obvious, that their house has the feeling of a boat because there’s so much wood, the walls and high vaulted ceiling, everywhere wood. Bare wood, never waxed or polished but sometimes scrubbed, so that by now, some fifty years after the house was built, the effect is mellow, soft and rich. It is indeed like an old, extremely well built boat. A thirties yacht, perhaps.

  Some people of course come to see that for themselves. “It’s all the wood,” they say. “Remember wooden boats?”

  Polly Blake changed the formula a little by saying that to her it looked like a church, when Dudley and Sam first moved in. But then Polly is thought to be religious, possibly, in some curious, entirely private way of her own, and even Dudley and Sam, agnostics, can see the aptness of the association. Their house has the look of a New England church.

  And they had been living in New England, in Maine, before moving out to California. There too, first married, they had fallen in love with a house—or, rather, recognized it as their own. They recognized its small compactness (so manageable) and the much larger barn for Sam’s studio, with the enclosed connecting passageway for the months of deep snow, all perfect for their needs. Also, it was so far from everything in those pre-thruway days that no one else wanted it; it went very cheap, and the low mortgage payments left Dudley and Sam with a little money for time in New York, or Boston. All in all a good time for them, frequent fun. However, that house and that life had seemingly outlived their function; as they did not quite say to each other, the long, severe winters became more than they could cope with. It was time for a change. And so they came to California, first spending time in San Francisco, where they had fun, but decided it was not their city. And then they found the house in San Sebastian.

  They made very few changes in all this wooden space with which they had fallen in love. No real remodeling. What little money they had left after buying it they spent on a big studio, mostly glass, for Sam, adjacent but not (this time) connected to the house. Dudley, a journalist-writer, works at a big desk in the living room, where she is frequently interrupted by Sam, who has just thought of some small thing to say to her. Believing him to be in serious trouble with his own work (he does only charcoal drawings these days, and not many of those; no large oils for years), Dudley for the most part is “nice” about these breaks in her own concentration; occasionally, however, uncontrollably she does snap out, “For Christ’s sake, I didn’t need to hear that right now!”

  It depends, she has come to understand, very much on how her own work is going: the better she is doing, the more equable she is able to be with Sam. Still, she very much wishes she had a room of her own.

  Sam’s old paintings, all those not sold or currently housed in some gallery, are stored out there in his studio; there are none in the living room or anywhere else in the house, not a single “Sam Venable” on display, as there were none in Maine, this being one of Sam’s somewhat eccentric principles.

  In the living room there are, for decoration, only the very wide picture windows, with their peaceful view of green and gently sloping hills—quite a contrast to Sam’s paintings, had there been any: his canvases tended to violence, jarring slashes of color and line.

  There is, just now, far beyond the windows and above where the sea would be (had their view included the Pacific), a delicately peach winter sunset, an opalescent glow.

  If what could be said to bother Dudley most, in a practical way, in her daily life is her lack of privacy for work, what most bothers Sam is their distance from the ocean, the ten or so miles, over hills. “Crazy,” he laments. “To come all this distance and still be inland. We could be out on a bluff somewhere, overlooking rocks and crashing waves.” However, he has more or less refused to look in a serious way for a seaside house. Nor does he like to drive over to the coast for a hike—one of Dudley’s favorite things to do—on just such a romantic, craggy bluff as he likes to describe.

  Dudley believes that men are more irrational than women are: what do they want?

  However, both Sam and D
udley continue on the whole to be fond of their house, as they are generally content with their life in San Sebastian. Their friendship with Celeste has continued and deepened, and while Charles was alive he too was very much their friend; Dudley especially took to Charles, a most attractive man.

  And it was Dudley who, a year or so after they had moved in, wrote to her closest, oldest friend, Edward Crane, and said that he must come out there; she and Edward had always half jokingly said that they would retire together. And, quite coincidentally, about that time Freddy was offered a teaching job in San Francisco. And so there they all were, plus Polly Blake, who was (or perhaps she was not, not at all?) one of the reasons for Charles and Celeste settling there in the first place.

  No longer drinking (or hardly ever drinking), Dudley and Sam still have what they think of as their cocktail hour; what is actually drunk varies from time to time, their current favorite being a mixture of clam and tomato juice. Sometimes during these hours they talk, at others they both leaf through magazines, reading bits aloud to each other; it is Sam who is more apt to read, seemingly unable to remember that Dudley dislikes being read to. At other times (at worst, in Dudley’s view) she talks, and Sam looks both at her and at his magazine, unseeingly. A man of exceptional, extreme politeness, generally, Sam is possibly then at his very rudest, and so Dudley refrains from complaint.

  At the moment, though, Dudley is talking and Sam is listening in an interested, quite alert way.

  “It’s curious how rarely Edward mentions Freddy these days” was her opening salvo. “Really, in the couple of hours we spent together, I don’t think once.”

  Sam laughs. A green-eyed, white-haired, considerably overweight man, he is still very handsome. And very confident. “You talk a lot about me?” he asks.

  “Well, no, actually not. Or I don’t think I do. You’d have to ask Edward.” Dudley laughs. “I must at least have said your name.”

  Sam makes an assenting sound.

  “Not that any of us do. Talk about Freddy, I mean. And I guess it is sort of embarrassing to poor old Edward, these days. All those years in the closet and then there’s his lover out carrying placards. Heading Harvey Milk parades.” Dudley sighs, mostly out of sympathy for Edward but also for Freddy, of whom she is fond. And she admires his recent stand.

  “Poor old Edward.” Sam’s chuckle is affectionate; he too is very fond of Edward, and of Freddy.

  Their voices, Sam’s and Dudley’s, both in tone and accent present extraordinary contrasts. Being so used to each other, to years of private conversations, this is not something of which they are conscious, but another person hearing them would be aware of an odd antiphony. Dudley’s voice is both higher and softer, a sweet voice, really, more so than her somewhat weathered exterior would suggest. She sounds considerably younger than she is, and so Bostonian—still. Whereas Sam’s voice is closer to what his appearance would suggest, the deep, raspy voice of a very large, aging man. His deep-Southern accent is as slow and courtly as Dudley’s is pure Yankee.

  “Oh dear,” now quite suddenly says Dudley. “I’m doing exactly what I accused both Edward and me of doing this afternoon. I’m sounding so smug, I’m taking such pleasure in worrying over Edward.”

  “I think you’re what Catholics call scrupulous.” Indulgent Sam.

  “Well, that can’t be the worst thing to be.” In a pleased way Dudley bridles; she likes this sort of teasing attention from Sam. And then, with a certain bravado, she tells him, “He and I were worrying over Celeste, naturally.”

  Sam’s answering sound is wholly ambiguous.

  “More of the same about ‘Bill.’ ” Dudley telegraphs, meaning: None of us can understand what’s going on, if anything. Who is this Bill?

  “I guess we’ll meet him sometime.” Sam’s voice is even vaguer than his words.

  “Or maybe not? Maybe there isn’t any Bill? Edward and I both thought of that.”

  Sam laughs at her. “You do make mysteries sometimes.”

  “Oh, that’s just what I accused Edward of doing.”

  We are getting along better than usual, is one of the things that Dudley is thinking as they talk. We’re in a good phase, she thinks. But is any phase, ever, final? She bears scars still from some of their worst old times, from horrifying words voiced violently between them, ugly drunken scenes. Dudley sometimes recalls all that with genuine fear, which is not exactly to say that she chooses to dwell on an ugly past (as Sam might say if he knew how often she thinks about all that); it is simply hard for her to believe that they are home free, as it were, that they have finally settled into a peaceful old age, as people are supposed to do. (Sam probably believes that they have. Of a happier disposition, generally, than Dudley is, he does not tend to “borrow trouble”; he even forgets that things ever have been bad.)

  Neither Dudley nor Sam is drawn to explicit conversations about the nature of their “relationship” (a word that neither of them would ever use); their temperaments, though quite unlike, their early training and the fact of their generation all conspire to prevent confrontations—and just as well, either of them might easily say. Dudley would never, even now, for example, ask Sam: Well, were you and So-and-So ever actually lovers?—although she would surely have been interested in a true response. But, temperament and habit aside, several sound reasons argue against such a question. First, Sam would be genuinely shocked. And, second, if he did in fact have affairs with any of the women they both knew (which was highly possible, during or just previous to one of their many impassioned, horrendous separations), Sam would still say that he had not, his code being Southern-chivalric, at least in part.

  Even, sometimes, with her own particular black self-torturing logic, Dudley has imagined that Sam and Celeste were lovers, in the old days, in New York. Well, why not? It was certainly impossible to deduce anything from their later relationship; Celeste treated Sam with the same friendly flirtatiousness that she used with all the men she liked. And Sam with Celeste was affectionately courtly.

  Some time ago Dudley even considered or fantasized having an affair with Charles Timberlake, husband of Celeste, as a sort of rounding out of (possibly imagined) sexual connections. Also, more to the point, Charles was extremely attractive, though perhaps a shade too attractive? Lean dark elegant Charles, with his famously jutting eyebrows, was surely an antithesis to Sam, who tended to be messy, given to ragged sweaters, shabby tweed and baggy flannel. But nothing came of that plan, that fantasy—well, of course not, and how ridiculous, really, to have thought of it at all.

  “Just when is Sara coming, actually?” Sam now asks. A slight surprise; Sam is apt to wait and more or less see what happens.

  “Oh, well, that’s another thing, Celeste’s so vague about it all.” Dudley finds herself a little breathless, and conscious of an oddity that she has observed before: these non-alcoholic cocktails still can make her a little drunk. “I think maybe she doesn’t know when Sara’s coming. Sara will simply arrive. You know how young people are.” Dudley refers to Sam’s four daughters by two earlier marriages. All four, no longer children, closer to middle age (and all four, curiously, lawyers), still tend to arrive inconveniently, to be vague as to plans.

  “But Sara’s not all that young,” says Sam. Meaning, no doubt, that he knows his own girls are too old to behave as they do.

  At just that moment, as Sam and Dudley regard each other for an instant, slightly unwelcome thoughts on both their faces, into their silence the phone begins to ring. As always, too loudly. Jarring.

  Sam says, “I’ll get it,” and he lumbers toward the hall, just catching it on the third loud ring. “Oh, hello, honey. Well, honey, how’ve you been?”

  Celeste. Sam calls her honey because she says she hates it, or so Sam says; Dudley believes that it is really because he likes her so much. As he speaks, Dudley hears the familiar teasing in his voice, the old affection—although he says very little beyond “Yes,” “Yes,” and, once or twice, “Oh, really?”
r />   Looking out into what is now pure blackness, beyond the glass, Dudley thinks that she should go in to baste her chicken; she can just catch its garlicky aroma. But phone calls are rather like visits, she reflects; they make you less lonely, even when you are two people, who in theory should never feel alone. And then she has a fearsome thought, the most impermissible thought of all. She thinks, Oh, what will I do if Sam should die before I do? She prays, she murmurs (to no one), “Oh, please, couldn’t we just go together, please? Don’t let Sam leave me again.”

  Because, in their worst times, that is what Sam always did: he left her. In the middle of a quarrel, he would rush to the door, rush out into the night and away, away for days, weeks, months. And this leaving came to be Dudley’s greatest fear—although when they spoke of it Sam claimed it was the sensible thing to do: “Why stick around to get hit? You can look pretty dangerous when you’re angry, lady.” He did not always leave when they fought; more often he stuck around for his own share of shouting, accusations. But those quick and total departures haunted Dudley. As sometimes, these days, she is haunted by fear of his death.

  Returning from the phone all smiles and affability (this is an effect that Celeste often has, on many people), Sam announces the news: “Well, some of your mysteries seem about to be cleared up. Sara is getting here next month. In early February. And Celeste is giving a Valentine’s dinner for her. Why Valentine’s I’ve no idea.”

  “Oh, you know Celeste. She likes holidays. Celebrations.”

  “Sure, but why Valentine’s? Anyway, she said that the person you refer to as ‘this Bill’ will be there too.”

  Startled, Dudley nevertheless at that moment remembers, again, her chicken. And gets up and starts toward the kitchen.