Second Chances (18 page)

Returned to Sam, she remarks, “How odd. Just what I would have sworn she wouldn’t do.”

“She could be desperate. I’ll get some more wood.”

“I’ll make fresh tea.”

*  *  *

“Did this Sara ever have children?” Freddy asks this seemingly irrelevant question of Edward on a Saturday morning as they laze over their traditional large, late breakfast, a meal once invariably preceded by love. Today it is relatively early, nine o’clock, and Edward, not Freddy, has done the cooking. Thus cod cakes (frozen), beans and bacon, instead of the wilder, spicier Mexican treats that Freddy once provided.

However, Sara has suddenly become such an obsessive topic in this small household that no question about her seems irrelevant. “Not that I know of,” now says Edward. “But she could have had several without our knowing. Without even Celeste’s knowing.”

“True enough.” Freddy pours out coffee for them both, in oversized blue pottery cups, at their pretty blue checkered-clothed table. Glassed-in from the rain. All around their cozy porch, winds lash at cypresses, they batter the eucalyptus; rains dash against the glass noisily, threateningly.

“It’s interesting that none of these women in our lives seem to have had any children.” Edward has not quite thought of this before. “Not Dudley, not Celeste or Polly. Not a mother in the bunch. Do you think that’s why we like them?”

“Maybe more why they like us. We’re child substitutes.” But Freddy laughs.

And Edward thinks, How wonderful for a change not to be discussing AIDS, or some aspect of that horror. At least Sara is a sort of diversion for us all.

“Didn’t any of them ever want to have children, do you know?” Freddy now asks. “In my country—” and in a helpless way he shrugs, with the gesture implying the hundreds and thousands of babies born each year in Mexico; as Freddy sees it, born into a relentless wave of poverty, hunger, illness.

“I don’t really know. It’s not the sort of thing that women tell one,” Edward muses. “Even Dudley has never discussed it, as long as I’ve known her.”

“You mean, it’s not fag-hag conversation?” Freddy in his social-political involvements has picked up a lot of argot that Edward could
very well do without, as he does not say to Freddy. The use of the word “poke,” for instance, inflicts true pain on Edward.

Choosing to ignore that particular sally of Freddy’s, Edward continues, “In Dudley’s case, whatever her feelings were, I’d say there just never was an appropriate time for her to have kids. Her first husband died so early on. I mean, they could have but it’s surely just as well they did not. And then with Sam, things were so very turbulent, for such a long time. All that booze. And his kids. Already those four daughters.”

“And Polly’s never been married.” Ironic Freddy then becomes serious. “She’d never let that stop her if she wanted to, though. If she wanted kids. With her it must have been a principled decision.”

“It could well have been that for Dudley.” Edward defends his own true favorite among all women. “One would prefer to think so, wouldn’t one?”

“One surely would,” Freddy says, smiling.

“Even Celeste.” To Celeste too Edward is loyal, a staunch admirer. “With her first husband nothing worked out—he simply dumped her, is the way I hear it from Dudley. Celeste never mentions him at all. And then when she met her true love, Charles, it was quite a bit too late.”

“I still wonder about Polly, though.” Polly is Freddy’s favorite person, inexplicably to many, including Edward, who has had to admit some jealousy to himself. But it must be something other than her fluent Spanish that draws them together? “I can so easily imagine her braving everything, even back there in the forties or fifties, to have the child of the man she loved. As Sara’s mother must have, as a matter of fact.”

“You do romanticize her.” Edward has spoken more dryly than he meant to.

“She’s a romantic woman.” As he says this, Freddy’s eyes enlarge—such intense dark eyes. But then everything about him abruptly changes, eyes, mouth, his voice, as he says, “But how about us, darling old Edward? What do you think, shouldn’t we adopt a kid?”

“You can’t be serious.” This new gay, liberated Freddy is often a person whom Edward is not at all sure that he knows.

“It’s a little tricky sometimes, but it is now an option for gay men. Think what we could do for some dear handsome little boy. The trouble we could save him.”

He is not serious—thank God. “Why not some adorable little girl?” asks Edward. “So much more of a challenge for both of us.”

Freddy laughs. “Well, you’re right there.” And then he says, “Why don’t we just not read the paper at all today?”

“We always say that, especially on Saturdays.”

“Actually it seems less bad to me on Saturdays than on other days. It’s so much shorter. Besides, someone might have died.”

And there they are, Edward thinks. Back to AIDS. Even over-familiar complaints about the
Chronicle
seem preferable, and so he announces, “It’s such an appalling paper that degrees of appallingness hardly seem to matter. If someone we know has died, you will simply have to tell me about it. I’m going to see if Dudley’s game for a nice rain walk.”

Freddy’s estimate of Polly has at least an intuitive correctness; he is right, that is, in believing that (probably) she would have had a child by a man she loved, had she wanted to. Alone. By Charles, for instance: if she had become pregnant while they were lovers, she might—well, she would have, she knows, put up a fight for that child. (In which case Charles and Celeste could have never married, could they? At some point Polly would have had to say to Celeste, “But he’s the father of my child.” Wouldn’t she? Instead of pretending that she barely knew Charles, and thus did not mind tending him in intimate ways as he lay there, dying.)

But Polly did not become pregnant by Charles; she was only pregnant once, and then in her early forties, the early fifties of the century. By a man whom, except in bed, she did not care much about. As it turned out, though, he cared a great deal about Polly, a very great deal: he wanted them to marry and have the child.

“But, aside from everything else, I’m too old to have a child. Especially a first child.”

“But I love you.” The man was a surgeon, quite illogical in matters outside his immediate expertise.

“But, my dear, I don’t love you” was Polly’s counter. “We would not be good parents together.”

“You’re unfair, you want to kill our child.”

Reasonable Polly saw the logic of this; in a sense she was being unfair in refusing to bear a child that was also his. However, as in subsequent arguments, she pointed out with varying degrees of tact and gentleness (not always Polly’s strongest suits) that it was she who would bear it, she who would be ultimately responsible, no matter what he said or believed or promised.

And so, an abortion.

For whatever deep-rooted reasons of her own, quite possibly including some guilt toward “the father,” Polly decided to undergo one of the cheap abortions that poor women had in those days: she went to an Atlantic City chiropractors’ clinic, with two hundred and fifty dollars, in cash.

This is not an event that Polly ever thinks of. And she would certainly have supported, as she does, women’s rights to legal, funded abortions even without such horrible personal knowledge of the alternative.

This strange, prolonged wet spring has been for Polly an exceptional time: as she herself might put it (and she did so put it in a burst of confidence to Freddy, her only confidant: they trust each other), she has taken a lover. A considerably younger, though bald, nice man. (“I quite like bald men, don’t you? No? Well, for me I guess it’s reassuring, it seems to even things out.”) A dark Spaniard, named Victor Lozano, who works in the local garage.

Victor grew up among the poor, in San Sebastian, in the terrible thirties, his family having come from Spain some ten years earlier to work the vineyards of the San Joachim Valley. Generations of passionate proud anarchists, Polly has gathered. Cataláns. He and Polly first became friends on the basis of language; she addressed him formally, always in the purest Castilian, as she biked around the town
on her rattling, failing bike. In her tattered jeans, her own bald head concealed in a red bandanna.

At some point Polly asked Victor if he knew anyone who could fix bikes, and Victor replied that he could, of course he could. He could and also did fix her refrigerator; he fixed, one by one, all the things that broke in her house. At some point, recognizing a mechanical skill that amounted to genius, Polly thought, How sad that he did not become a doctor; later she decided that he was probably better off as he was—he would never have made it in the medical establishment. Only, he was still fairly poor. He was married and had four or five children—at no time did they talk about any of those people.

In fact, they had very little personal conversation until the day, a couple of weeks ago, when Victor arrived to fix Polly’s radio and found her in bed, taking aspirin, fending off (she hoped) a cold. And practical Victor simply joined her there. He attended to her long-weary, long-unloved body with the same gentle care that Polly had seen him lavish on old machines.

And he in turn seemed very pleased by her. “The greatest woman, the most beautiful for fuck,” he told her. (For reasons of his own, Victor always spoke English in bed: perhaps believing that that was what Polly expected?) “I knew it would be so,” he said to her.

What would happen after that? was one of Polly’s concerns, that first time with Victor. Would he want to see her a lot? Or, worse, see her never again? Either would be in its way intolerable.

It soon became clear that Victor chose to see her on Thursday nights. In fact, on each and every Thursday night. And when they saw each other in the village he was as friendly, as courtly as ever. And as slightly distant. Victor, a very formal man.

Thursdays have obviously some special significance, then: his one night out? Or, less likely, his wife’s night out? Polly chose not to inquire. She took what she could of Victor, and gave him as much as he would allow her to. Theirs was not a guilty connection, for either of them; they both felt and expressed the most tremendous affection for each other.

(Still, it would have been more than a little hard to explain to Celeste, or to Dudley, both of whom would insistently have referred to Polly’s “lover.” But Polly had less than no desire to explain.)

Before Victor, in her hazy, infrequent thoughts about a possible
late-life love—or “a little sex in my life,” as Polly would have been more apt to put it—one worry or deterrent to those thoughts was the very fact of her baldness. But Victor touches her bare head with the same gentle tenderness felt on all her bare skin, everywhere. Her whole exposed old self. As she touches him.

And no one knows, except Freddy, who knows that Polly has “someone” but not that it is Victor.

Forced in upon themselves by the wretched, inimical weather, Celeste and Sara are not doing terribly well—as Celeste might have put it, had she been able to discuss the subject. Unused to each other in every conceivable intimate way, most of their daily encounters have been fraught with trouble.

Sara thinks: At least it’s a large house. Suppose we were sharing a bath? The time she takes!

And Celeste thinks: At least we have a maid. At least there is silent, industrious Margarita making our meals, washing up. Although actually Sara is considerably tidier than one might have thought, given her general appearance. And one night Sara insisted on making dinner, a great surprise: just pork chops, simple enough, but very, very good.

What they say to each other, perhaps once or twice too often, is “How nice that we both like to read.” And they add, “Especially in this weather.”

The telephone, curiously, seems to present the most nearly insurmountable problem, trouble lying in the fact that there are two and only two instruments in all that large and sprawling house. This eccentricity is due to an idea of Charles’s that there should be only one telephone in a house, and that in the living room. (What he really liked, Celeste has admitted to herself, with disloyal twinges, what Charles cared about was an audience for his own calls. All their friends knew that there was only one phone, and so, in the midst of a dinner party, when a call came for Charles from the White House—this actually happened; Celeste enjoyed telling Sara—what could he do but take it, right there before them all?)

After Charles died, Celeste had a phone installed in her bedroom. However, now that Sara is here, Celeste reflects that she should—oh,
indeed she should, as she meant to—have had several new instruments installed before Sara arrived. Along with a few other things that she surely meant to do but did not quite get around to.

It is especially bad when she, Celeste, has an urgent phone call to make, one that must not be overheard, as is so at present. (Unbeknownst to Celeste, Sara has just the same problem.) Talking to Bill in the idle way that they do, in range of Sara’s long censorious ears, has been bad enough, along with some friendly, innocent chats with Dudley and with Edward, although these chats sound much less innocent and far sillier when overheard. But the call that Celeste most wants to make demands absolute, strict privacy. It’s a matter of life and death, Celeste inwardly murmurs: I have got at least to call Polly.

At last: Sara is audibly, splashily bathing in the guest bathroom, which is nearer the front of the house than it should be.

With just-not-shaking hands, her gaze fixed on the beautifully massed clouds beyond her gray-linen-framed window, Celeste dials Polly’s familiar number—and gets it wrong: a small child answers, shrieks, “No, no we got no Polly!” More shrieks, and shrill unchildish laughter.

Quite unnerved, Celeste still tries again, dialing very, very slowly. This time she gets it right, she gets Polly. Polly who at some point in her life is known to have had some training as a nurse. Plus Polly’s own intimate experience with major illness; in Celeste’s view that is what most counts.

“Well,” Polly begins, having heard what Celeste has reported. “Well, the color of the blood is very important. Indicative of where it is. Where whatever is bleeding is, if you follow me. The darker it is, the higher up.”