The Last Lovely City Read online

  From a friend in the law school, Carter got the name of a lawyer, a woman, with whom he spent an uncomfortable, discouraging, and expensive half hour. What it came to was that in order to recover his share in the house, Carter would have to force Meredith to sell it, unless she could buy him out. None of this was final, of course; it was just the lawyer’s temporary take on things. Still, it was deeply depressing to Carter.

  Coming home, in the downstairs lobby of his building he ran into Chase, who was carrying a sack of groceries, which of course he offered to take.

  “Only if you’ll come and have supper with me.” She flashed him a challenging smile. “I must have been thinking of you. I know I bought too much.”

  That night it was he who talked a lot. She only interrupted from time to time with small but sharp-edged questions. “If you didn’t want to go to The Citadel, why didn’t you speak up?” And, “Do you think you trusted Meredith at first because she’s not as good-looking as Isabel?” The sort of questions that he usually hated—that he hated from Dr. Chen—but not so with Chase; her dark, intelligent eyes were kind and alert. He almost forgot his wish to make love to her.

  But then he remembered, and all that desire returned. He told her, “It’s all I can do not to touch you. You’re most terrifically attractive to me.”

  By way of answer, she smiled and leaned to meet him in a kiss. For a long time, then, like adolescents, they sat there kissing on her sofa, until she whispered, “Come on, let’s go to bed. This is silly.”

  Carter had not expected their progress to be quite so rapid. He hardly knew her; did he really want this? But not long after that, they were indeed in bed, both naked. He caressed her soft, heavy breasts.

  Pausing, sitting up to reach somewhere, Chase said, “You’ll have to wear this. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, Lord. I haven’t done that since I was twenty. And look, I’m safe. I never played around.”

  “I know, but Meredith did. A lot.”

  “I don’t think I can—”

  “Here, I’ll help you.”

  “Damn, I’m losing it; I knew I would.”

  Strictly speaking, technically, that night was not a great success. Still, literally they had gone to bed together, and Carter’s feeling was that this was not a woman who fell into bed very easily (unlike—he had to think this—either Isabel or Meredith).

  The next day he had another appointment with the lawyer, who had talked with Meredith’s lawyer, who had said that things looked worse.

  “I don’t know why I’m so drawn to you,” Chase told him, “but I really am.” She laughed. “That’s probably not a good sign. For you, I mean. The men I’ve really liked best were close to certifiable. But you’re not crazy, are you?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  Chase did not seem crazy to him. She was hardworking, very intelligent. Her two sons, with whom she got along well, were off in school, and she was surrounded by warm and admiring friends; her phone rang all the time with invitations, friendly voices. But, as Carter put it to himself, she did sometimes seem a little much. A little more than he had bargained for. Or more than he was up to right now.

  Their sexual life, despite her continued insistence on—hated phrase—“safe sex,” was sometimes great, then not. Chase complained, though nicely, that out of bed he was not affectionate. “I could use more plain, unsexy touching,” she said, and he tried to comply, though demonstrativeness was not at all in his nature.

  Carter’s broker called with bad news, quite a lot of bad news. Carter, like most people in the market, had taken a beating.

  Even Chase would admit that her work habits were a little strange. She liked to get up late and spend a couple of hours drinking coffee, phoning, maybe writing a letter or two. She would then go into her studio (a room to which Carter was never admitted). At times she would emerge to eat a piece of fruit, heat some soup, or, less frequently, go out for a short walk along the graveled paths of old Chapel Hill. Back in her studio, immersed in her work, quite often she would forget about dinner until ten at night, or eleven; she did not forget dinner dates, but she sometimes phoned to break or postpone them.

  Carter argued, “But if you started earlier in the morning you could finish—”

  “I know. I know it’s impractical, but it’s the way I seem to have to work. I’m sorry. It’s not something I can change.”

  Along with feeling some annoyance, Carter was moved and a little alarmed by her intensity, her high purpose.

  Sometimes, in bed, Chase cried out quick, impassioned words of love to him—which Carter did not answer in kind, nor did he take what she said at those moments too seriously. In fact, as he was later forced to recognize, he gave rather little thought to Chase’s deeper feelings. “You didn’t want to deal with what I felt,” she accused him, and he had to admit that that was entirely correct.

  “Adam and I aren’t getting along at all,” said Meredith to Carter, over the phone. “I don’t know—he’s a lot more neurotic than I thought he was.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” was Carter’s response. Not saying, Now you find this out, after wrecking our marriage and costing God knows what in lawyers’ bills.

  “He’s very dependent,” Meredith said. “I don’t really like that. I guess I was spoiled by you.”

  “I don’t know why she’s telling me this stuff,” Carter said to Chase when she called; the old instinct of compulsive honesty had forced him to repeat the conversation with Meredith.

  “I think she wants you back,” Chase told him. “You wait and see.”

  “You think so? Really?”

  “Jesus, Carter, you sound sort of pleased. If she did, would you even consider it?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” As always, the literal truth; he did not know.

  “God, Carter, she slept with everyone. Everyone in town knows that. Why do you think I insisted on safe sex?”

  She was furiously excited, almost hysterical, Carter thought. She was out of control. A little frightening—but he only said, “Oh, come on, now.”

  “How tacky can you get!” Chase cried out. And then she said, “Look, don’t call me, I’ll call you, okay?” And hung up.

  True to her word, she did call him—once, very late at night. “I’ve had some wine,” she said. “I shouldn’t be calling, I mean, otherwise I wouldn’t. But I just wanted you to know a couple of things. One, I was really in love with you. God, if I needed further proof that I’m seriously deranged. I always fall in love with the most unavailable man anywhere around. Emotionally. Mean eyes, good shoulders. Shit, why did I call? Good night!” And she hung up, loud and clear. A ridiculous and quite unnecessary conversation, in Carter’s view.

  Now, in the afternoon sunshine, Carter looks about at all the roses and the scented white wisteria—at their lovely house and at unlovely, untrustworthy, but deeply familiar Meredith. He finds that, despite himself, he is thinking of Chase. Of her passion (those cries of love) and her scornful rage and of her final avowals (but she was drunk). Is it now too late? Suppose he went to her and said that he was through with Meredith, would she take him back? Would she ask him to come and live with her? (So far, she has never suggested such a thing.) Could they marry?

  No is the answer that Carter gives to all these questions. No, Chase would probably not take him back, and no, there is no way he could afford to marry her. Even if he were sure that he wanted to. Chase is crazy—she must be crazy. Look at those paintings. There in the warm sunlight he suddenly shivers, as though haunted.

  “Yes,” he says to Meredith, although she hasn’t spoken for a while. “Yes, okay. All right.”

  The Haunted Beach

  The room, in this old, West Coast Mexican resort hotel, is unspeakably shabby—a window broken, the bedside table precariously leaning sideways—and not entirely clean. Led there by the aging, barefoot busboy, Penelope Jaspers, an art dealer, and Ben Bowman, a superior court judge, both from San Francisco, exchange a heavy look. In th
e bathroom, which is not quite as bad as she feared, Penelope, who had requested this particular room (she has been here before, though not for several years), tries a faucet: no water. And then back in the bedroom she finds no electricity. She can see from Ben’s face, and his stance, that he is prepared to tough it out if she is, but Penelope has more at stake in this trip, for her a possibly dangerous return to old haunts (although she has changed a lot since then, she feels), and so she rather quickly decides that discomfort will be less than no help. She tells the busboy, Alfonso, who does not seem to remember her (or is he being tactful?), “Things don’t seem to work in this room, Alfonso. Could we see another?”

  Alfonso does not recognize Penelope; they look so much alike, these North American women. Pale and too thin, they dress either in pants or in immodest bathing costumes. This particular light-haired woman has a smile more pleasant than the rest, and her voice is soft—he thinks that he may have seen her before, although with a taller husband, who had no beard. North Americans quite frequently exchange their husbands and wives with each other, he has been told. Nevertheless, as pleasantly as he can, he tells the woman, whose Spanish is fairly good, for a gringa, that he will return to the desk for another key; he will show them another room.

  Penelope and Ben smile at each other, quickly, tentatively, and she tells him, with a gesture, “This room, with the Farquhars in it, you can’t imagine the difference. They always came for a month, you know, and put their things around.” Not telling him, And Charles and I were in the room next door. Ben “knows” about Charles, a painter; knows that she came here with him often, and that she felt “terrible” when she and Charles broke up (terrible for a couple of years, in fact; but now she is really okay, she has told him that too). “The room even seemed bigger,” she adds.

  “Empty rooms look smaller.” Ben is given to such stray bits of information.

  “Lucky there’s another room. We hope.”

  “Probably. This is off-season,” he reminds her.

  There is another room, seemingly at the top of the flight of steps they have just come down—and which now, following Alfonso and their luggage, they climb again, in the almost stifling, unaccustomed April sunshine, among the still bravely flowering bougainvillea vines.

  Happily, the new room is extremely nice. A new structure has been built over the old, existing structures, over the tiers of rooms—over all of them, in fact, except the lower row, where the Farquhars, and next door Penelope and Charles, used to stay. This room is large and white, with an alcove for bathing, another space for reading, or lounging about, with two sofas and a table. A king-sized bed, and a broad porch out in front, with a table and chairs and hammocks—and a sweeping view of the bay, the brilliant sea and its enclosing hills of jungle trees. The sea and the view for which they have come, essentially, to this place.

  And how fortunate, really, that they have this room instead of the old one that Penelope asked for, the Farquhars’ room. How lucky that the lights didn’t work, Penelope is thinking, and the water. If things had been just slightly better they would have stuck it out, and suffered. Ben wanting to please her, to be a good sport, and Penelope, for her pride, pretending that everything was fine. But this is perfect, she thinks. Here we are in San Bartolomeo, but not in the same room or near those rooms. It is simply a much better version of what I had before, she thinks. How fortunate, all around.

  She asks Ben, “Do you want a swim?”

  He smiles. “Well, why not?”

  “I’m over him, really, finally, I think. If I just don’t go back to Mexico I’ll be all right, probably.” Penelope said this to her closest friend from time to time, with decreasing frequency, in the years that succeeded her disastrous breakup with Charles, with whom she had lived for five or six years (depending on whether you counted the months of quarrelsome separations). She said it a couple of times after entering into a “relationship” with Ben, a more or less respectable, though bearded, judge. And then this spring, now about three years “after Charles,” as Penelope still thinks of it, she finds herself on a trip with Ben, not only to Mexico but to San Bartolomeo itself, the beautiful scene of too much, the scene of too many scenes.

  What happened was an airlines deal, promotional: Go anywhere in Mexico for $199. Penelope and Ben read this, and they both began to say, Why not? We need a vacation, swimming, warm weather. In San Francisco, a long mild dry winter had been succeeded by a cold wet dark spring. And then they began to eliminate places: well, obviously not Cancún, and Cozumel’s so far away. Acapulco is horrible, and Vallarta’s much too crowded. Until at last Penelope said, more or less to herself, Well, why not San Bartolomeo? It’s so much in my mind, I have to go back there sometime, why not now? with Ben? with whom, on the whole, she got along rather well—though not lately; lately she had felt rough edges between them.

  San Bartolomeo was where every January, for a week, she and Charles struck a truce, or nearly. No really bad fights. Where everything was beautiful: the flowers; the green, encroaching jungle; the white beach and the sea. And the Farquhars, an elderly, distinguished couple, he an astronomer, she an actress, both long retired, were in the cabin next door—unlikely but close, and valued, crucial friends for wild Charles and frightened Penelope. With Carlotta and Travis Farquhar, Charles tamed down, drank less, and shouted not at all; he was, in fact, his best, most imaginative, entertaining, generous, and sensitive self. And beautiful; Charles was always more handsome than anyone else around. Penelope, losing fear, was more friendly and talkative than usual (she felt this to be so, with the Farquhars).

  For those weeks in San Bartolomeo there had been not only the balm of the Farquhars’ company but also that of the place itself, its extreme tropical, flowery, seaside beauty. The long days of nothing to do but swim and walk and eat and take naps. And make love.

  The Farquhars had died a couple of years ago—as a dedicated couple will, within weeks of each other. And why, Penelope wondered in the weeks succeeding confirmation of plans for their trip, hers and Ben’s, why had she so specifically asked for the Farquhars’ room? Did she imagine that she and Ben (they sometimes spoke of marriage) might become, eventually, such a couple? Or did she want to be right next to, but not inside, the room that she and Charles had shared so happily? (It was true, they had been almost always happy in San Bartolomeo.)

  In any case, it does seem fortunate that they are to be in quite another room—although, on the way down to go swimming that first day, and every day after that, they walk right past that well-known row of rooms, the bottom row. Vines and bushes have been allowed to grow up almost to the porches, interfering, Penelope supposes, with the view from those rooms.

  On the plane down from San Francisco, Penelope had chatted somewhat nervously to Ben, extolling the virtues and beauties of their destination—indeed, until he patted her arm and told her, “Pen, it’s okay, I’m sure it will be all right.”

  One of the attractions described by Penelope was Rosa’s restaurant, a beach shack, at the foot of the path up to their hotel. “Rosa is wonderful,” Penelope told Ben. “Very small and dark, this burnished skin. And such a great cook, the best seafood. She’s so energetic! With this slob of a husband who lolls around in very clean clothes that probably she ironed.”

  As they reach the foot of the path, that first day, there indeed is Rosa’s: a concrete floor with a thatched lean- to roof, some tables and chairs. And, swinging out into the breeze, several rickety cages, each housing a drowsy, shabby-looking parrot.

  And there is Rosa! recognizing Penelope. “Ah, amiga!” and rushing toward her, as Ben stands off at some distance, discreetly, on the sand.

  They embrace, as Penelope thinks that she had not remembered Rosa as being so small. Rosa’s head barely reaches Penelope’s breast. And then, still embracing Penelope, Rosa bursts into tears. “My husband!” she cries out. “Now dead two years!”

  “Oh, how terrible. My husband died too,” Penelope lies—a double lie; she and Cha
rles never married, and he did not die but ran off to Turkey, finally, with a pretty boy. She does not understand this lie that she herself has told.

  “Ah, amiga.” Rosa presses her closer, and then lets go.

  “My friend Ben.” Penelope gestures vaguely in his direction, as Ben, who knows no Spanish (and thus did not hear Penelope’s curious untruth), smiles.

  “Ah, good,” says Rosa, vaguely.

  “We’ll see you later; we’ll come down for dinner,” Penelope promises.

  “Good.”

  But Penelope senses that Rosa has already lost interest in her. Rosa only wanted to say that her husband had died, wanted the drama of that moment. Her husband, the slob in his clean freshly ironed clothes, whom Rosa loved.

  Having promised, though, they do go down that night to Rosa’s for dinner, Penelope in her long white flowered dress, bought years ago, down here, in a funny store recommended by Carlotta Farquhar. “You look really pretty,” Ben tells her as they settle into rickety chairs, next to the view of the night-black, half-moonlit sea.

  Rosa’s has all been repainted, a bright yellowish green, but still the room seems much darker than before. At one end, the kitchen end, a large TV set emits a murky light and a lot of noise—a Mexican talk show, dancers in frilly costumes, tambourines, guitars, Rosa and a group of assorted, T-shirted adolescents—her children, now five years older than when Penelope last saw them, all huddled, transfixed. Rosa, who used to be always rushing in and out of the kitchen.

  The food is good, good fresh fish browned in garlic, but not as good as Penelope remembered it.

  Ben asks, “Have you ever been to Hawaii?”

  “No, why?” Not asking, Do you wish we were there instead? already?

  “I just wondered. I used to go there a lot.”

  “You liked it?”

  “Oh yes. With, uh, Betty.”

  Betty is Ben’s former wife, who behaved very badly; she drank, had affairs, all that. Ben almost never speaks of her, conveniently for Penelope, who does not wish to speak of Charles. She asks him, “Do you think of going back there?”