Second Chances (15 page)

And now there he is in the Manhattan phone book, at an address quite unfamiliar to Sara, but then most of New York is unfamiliar to her. She knows no one here. Except Alex, as things turn out. And even after so much time she experiences a certain excitement at his proximity, at the possibility of Alex, a person with an address, and a phone number that could be called.

She remembers, though, all their quarrels over Vietnam; sometimes Alex threatened to go, or to let himself be drafted. Suppose he did that, suppose now he is permanently, hopelessly damaged in some way, a Vietnam vet? Alex in prison was certainly enraged, but boyishly so; he was still a kid to whom something bad had accidentally happened. And all Sara’s fault, as he saw it then.

Does Sara really want to risk it now, a grown-up, damaged and possibly still angry Alex?

She wishes the rain would let up. She very much needs some air, exercise, a change of scene. And at the same time she does not really feel well enough to go out. She continues to leaf through the phone book, searching out names quite at random.

To judge by appearances, an hour or so later, Alex is neither damaged nor visibly enraged. Nor is he down-and-out. He is only very wet, the rain not having let up for an instant—but he is laughing in apology for his condition. Handing his dripping raincoat to Sara, he props his wetter umbrella in the stand, in the marble foyer of her temporary quarters, which have turned out to be familiar to Alex. Over the phone, being given her address, he told her that some friends of his
lived upstairs in this same building—or maybe down, he can’t quite remember. People he knew some time back.

“New York is a smaller town than you’d think,” he said. “The apple within the apple.”

Now divested of encumbrances, he says to Sara, “You look so good! Just the same.”

Knowing herself to look not the same at all (well, hardly, after twenty years—and not especially good: the siege of flu has left her looking older, Sara thinks, and visibly tired), Sara is mildly annoyed by this
politesse
. Does he believe women have to be told that they look good, that they haven’t changed?

“Would you really like tea?” she asks, since that has been her offer, over the phone. “There’s wine, there’s some Scotch—”

A bright flashed smile. “Then there must be Perrier,” he says.

Alex himself does not look much the same: he looks (so irritating) considerably better. His rain-wet, well-brushed hair is still a shade too long, but, as he must know, it is very attractive, a darker blond than before, waves rather than tangled curls. And the scraggly beard is gone. The few pounds that he had put on have made him look stronger, more in control, more at peace. His tweed coat is a little shabby, but still a very good tweed; his gray flannels bag at the knees—attractively.

So minutely observing this new grown-up Alex, Sara thinks,
Shit
, he looks great. He always will, no matter what happens to him.

Now, relieved of not having even the small task of making tea, Sara understands that she is more than flustered (that quaint word being the one that comes). She is more upset than she should be, much. In the kitchen, simply coping with ice, Perrier, she assures herself that she is simply feeling the effects of flu, she is not up to much.

And why, then, did she even ask him over for tea? But that question instantly answers itself as she recalls: I didn’t actually ask him, he invited himself. He said he had an appointment in this neighborhood. (This neighborhood? With Nixon? With Mrs. Onassis?) An appointment at five-twenty, could he possibly come up? He’d like to see her. And so Sara had said tea.

Returning to the living room, the room termed the library by Nancy’s parents, with her tray of Perrier, ice, glasses, wedges of lemon (it
turned out to be more trouble than she had thought, after all), Sara observes how perfectly in keeping with this room Alex has proved to be—and she wishes she had changed her clothes. And she chides herself:
Changed clothes?
And for what purpose, exactly? However, there is Alex, clearly at home in that heavy aura of expensiveness (but from what is called old money: old books, embossed in gold, leather-bound. Old money). He has made her feel shy, in her old denim skirt, her silly faded T-shirt (
A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A MONKEY NEEDS A MUSHROOM
, fortunately hard to read). And she hates herself for that shyness.

“Well, you’re not exactly the Vietnam vet I thought I might see,” she blurts out, defiantly, even before setting the tray down.

Alex laughs, a warm light sound that Sara remembers, but does he also, very slightly, blush?

“I didn’t go,” he tells her. “I don’t think I ever really meant to. I was just a silly kid, sounding off.” He seems then to wince at this memory of himself. “Besides,” he adds, “I was getting a lot of static from my parents that I didn’t tell you about. How could I? They wanted me to go to Vietnam. You see? You look shocked.”

“I guess I am, a little.” Oh, poor Alex, is what Sara just prevents herself from saying.

“But now tell me what you’ve been doing,” Alex commands her. “I really want to know.”

At which they both laugh, acknowledging the sheer impossibility of bridging twenty years.

But Sara tries. “I’ve moved around a lot,” she tells him. “Different jobs. Different people. Nothing very conclusive. But now I’m going out to California.” Wryly: “A fresh start.” And she explains a little about Celeste, and the death of Charles. San Sebastian. “But what about you?”

Poor Alex blushes again as he tells her, “I have a feeling that you didn’t know much about me at all, in Berkeley. I mean, where I came from, anything like that. Well, I guess in a way none of us did, it wasn’t what we were talking about. We barely knew each other’s last names.”

Sara laughs, suddenly liking him a lot. Suddenly feeling him as a trusted, interested old friend. “I guess I just thought you were ‘Eastern,’ ” she says. “I guess from New York.”

“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.” His look at her then is very intent, and worried. “I didn’t know how to say it to you. How to say, ‘Look, Sara, by the way, my dad is really rich. And he’s also CIA.’ Because that’s how it was. Is.”

He has so perfectly imitated a Berkeley sixties voice (his own) that Sara laughs, even as she says, “But how come I didn’t know any of this? I mean, no hints?”

He too laughs. “I can be very cagey. It’s an inherited trait.” And then he continues: “I don’t mean the CIA is how my father made his money. You know, the other way around. He’s just the kind of guy they used to recruit back then. A rich boy, from old money. Princeton. For what he is, he’s an okay person, really. Sort of idealistic. Of course we still fight a lot.”

Alex is more or less between jobs, Sara gathers. He describes himself as a free-lance editor, naming magazines; he also says that from time to time he has taught at community colleges. He does not say that he lives on money from home, which may well be the case. He is studying Spanish. When he gets it together (“as we used to say”), he plans to go to Nicaragua.

Sara finds much of this, his job trouble, fairly familiar. Theirs is not exactly a work-oriented generation, she has thought. She files his Nicaragua plan in her mind for future conversations, noting as she does so that she must have decided that they are friends now, he and she.

And for the moment she is most interested in what she did not know before: his family. Money, the CIA. “I still can’t quite believe it,” she repeats. “And if you’d told me I would have been sympathetic, I think. Your arguments with your father. I could have identified with that, all my fights with Charles.”

“But I was really intimidated by you,” he tells her. “You and your friends. I remember when you told me your mother wasn’t married, plus being a Trotskyist—I didn’t even know what it was until I got up the nerve to ask someone.”

“
You
were intimidated,” Sara gets out weakly, feeling herself to be in some area past irony, even past laughing. “I thought you were the sun-god.”

“Well, you see? If you’d known I had money too, it would have
spoiled everything. But I did feel cheap when you paid for that trip to Mexico. I think that’s one of the reasons I acted like such a shit. A guilty shit.”

They laugh quite amiably. And then, quite as though she were alone, Sara closes her eyes, and hears the rain, and whine of wind.

What has been entirely left out of the story of Alex’s life is any hint of the personal: no friends have appeared, much less any lovers, girlfriends. Maybe even a wife or two, why not? Most rich and handsome men have married at least once or twice by forty, Sara thinks. But then so of course have most women, most women at forty.

In the abrupt way that she recognizes as rude but can no longer control, Sara asks him, “What about girls, though? Women. You didn’t mention at all—”

At this Alex blushes, but he gives a sober, even rational (for a while) romantic history. “I got married just out of school. Blonde beautiful Cecelia. Now she’s a tap dancer, a teacher, in Tenafly, New Jersey. Where she’s from. We lasted a year. I don’t know why. Why we lasted or why we broke up either. Then, just women, a sort of line of them. Some lasting longer than others. It got sort of frantic. Meeting people, drinking, getting high. Doing some coke, a couple of other drugs. Someone’s bed. All faster and faster. I began to think, If I could just spend some time alone. Get off. Maybe, even in some religious way, I could find a retreat. I’ve got a friend, a guy I grew up with, who’s an Episcopal priest. I thought he could help.” He laughs. “You see? I’m desperate.” He has looked away from Sara in the course of all this; now he turns back to her, and in a resolute way he says, “I think I just don’t want anything close with anyone, you know?”

“That’s pretty much how I feel, though for sort of different reasons,” Sara says—to reassure him? Maybe, she decides. But what she says to him is true: for almost a year now she has felt herself as an asexual person, and she has wondered, Is this how it is to be forty? Is this for good? What’s all this I hear about geriatric sex: does that come later?

“Oh Jesus,” Alex suddenly cries out. “Do you know it’s after six-thirty? Holy shit.”

“You missed your five-twenty,” unnecessarily Sara comments. “Something important?”

Alex starts to laugh. “Just my shrink. Honestly. I’ve never done this before, missed an hour. It’s sort of funny. But she might not think so.”

“You could send me the money instead.”

“One fifty? I’ll have to pay her anyway, the stingy bitch.”

“Is that what it is these days? Good God. Well, direct your check to some shelter.”

“That’s the price for us rich,” Alex tells her. “And of course I send money to shelters. But couldn’t we go out to dinner? First let me make two phone calls. I have to let her know I’m not dead.”

Digesting the information that Alex, so tired of women, of “relationships,” would still choose to go to a woman psychiatrist, Sara asks him, “Do I have to change?”

“Not unless you want to.” He hesitates. “But maybe. Well, yes.”

“I don’t know,” Alex ponders, somewhat later in the restaurant. His attention is now directed to Sara’s immediate future. “I don’t know,” he repeats. “What I’m not really clear about is how you feel about Celeste. I mean beyond gratitude, old loyalty. All that.”

“But all that’s quite a lot.”

“Oh, of course. I just meant in terms of getting along with her. The day-to-day rub. Small conversations. You know.”

Sara laughs. “Not to mention basic issues.”

“Oh, right, those crucial basic issues. But honestly, Sara, for all you know she could be really right wing. Lots of people are these days.”

“Well, I know she’s too snobbish to have gone for Nixon. I’m sure of that. Also she’d hate a scandal. Publicity. Which pretty much cuts out Ronnie-babe too. But of course I have thought, and worried.”

“You really don’t know her very well,” Alex unhelpfully sums it up.

“That’s true, I don’t.”

But who, as far as that goes, who do I know very well? Including you, dear beautiful Alexander. Sara asks herself this, and then smiles at an odd new thought, appearing not quite for the first time in her mind. Men are much more at ease when you’ve made it clear you don’t want them, is what she thinks. So odd, and really quite a change.
Previously, in the old sexual mythology, men were always eager and women the ones who had to be lulled into ease. A theory sometimes employed to get someone, some woman into bed, a lulled woman being an unsuspicious one, in theory.

But that is not what she is doing with Alex; this is not the lull before a seduction, it really is not. Sara even wonders how much longer she can sit up in this restaurant. She feels very, very weak.

The restaurant itself is very pleasant, a good choice on Alex’s part: a converted brownstone, up in the East Eighties, more or less around the corner from Sara’s borrowed digs. Alex and Sara have a small room entirely to themselves, all dark and severely paneled. Old wood that gleams in the candlelight, from their pale blue linen table.

We are always in the most romantic places in the most non-romantic circumstances, is one of the things that Sara has thought, from time to time.

But the food is very, very good, the first that she has been able to taste for some time, the flu having deadened all her senses. But still she thinks, When I was in love with Alex, and maybe he with me, in his way, we spent all our time in dirty coffeehouses, and made love on broken boardinghouse beds—or sometimes, a big treat, we would go to some seedy motel down on University, smoke dope and drink awful wine and ravage each other’s bodies, endlessly. And we ended up in jail, in Mexico, hating each other—as we watched that other couple, the dirty Florida blonde and the Mexican boy, humping, humping. Filthy, empty-eyed.

Whereas now, nowhere near in love, we bask in glamorously suggestive privacy and, both almost middle-aged people, we discuss the new directions our lives are taking.

“Well, I really hope it works out for you,” Alex tells her, with his instant, still very boyish smile. “I might even come out to check up on you.”