Authors: Alice Adams
Because of the weather, possibly, at first there are more police than demonstrators, a great cordon of helmeted police, at the plaza of the Federal Building: a rally against U.S. involvement in Central America. The demonstrators are simply a small circle of people who have joined hands around the fountain. They have laid aside their placards in a tidy pile; they are slowly moving around in their circle, and they are singing. Something Spanish that Sara does not recognize. Her practiced eye does, however, take in certain facts about that group, to her a familiar mix of poor radicals, mostly young; and middle-aged, middle-class “liberals,” their faces lined with intelligence, anxiety and guilt, their smiles barely hopeful.
Sara and Dudley have driven up from San Sebastian, in the wet-cotton, dark gray fog, the wind and cold. “Strictly speaking, there is no spring in California,” Dudley has explained, as though Sara might have forgotten. Dudley’s spring longings for New England are as sharp and terrible as her pangs for love—for Sam, for being young. For everything now irrevocably missing from her life.
They had to park some distance away, and then to walk along grimy Polk Street, among grim-faced young lawyers, federal office workers. Past seedy dark small stores, trashy sidewalks. They become confused, they have to stop someone and ask, “Which way to the Federal Building?”
They arrive a little late, then, and thus do not join the group whose hands are joined, who are singing. They stand there isolated in the cold, both watching: Dudley the journalist, and Sara the (perhaps former) activist.
Apart from the demonstrators and the police, standing near the cordon is a third group, who could be taken for tourists: “casual” clothes, mostly synthetics. Middle-aged, sharp-eyed men, some with cameras. Sara, who does not take them for tourists, stares fixedly in their direction. She is breathing tightly, her gaze is forced ahead. And to herself she acknowledges that she is afraid—as she used to be so often, almost always, she is terrified. And, as she has trained herself to do, she examines that fear: she looks at it in a practical way, asking herself just what could happen to her, actually.
There is nothing anyone can do to you now, she says to herself. You do not interest any given agency (probably). Anyone would have a hard time proving any wrongdoing on your part (except for harboring fugitives). You are a tall, confident woman of middle age, in dark pants, a dark red sweater. The heavy, anxiety-choked, shabby girl of twenty years back is invisible now.
Perhaps illogically, though, the revelation from Alex that “Bill” really is Priest, and is and was CIA, has scared her badly. It is as though, with that confirmation of her darkest instincts, everything else that she most fears and half believes has also been proved true. As though most of the world were indeed in the hands of criminals. Of organized crime. Drug kings. Old, quite mad deposed movie stars, from Grade B films.
At that moment, though, as if to bring cheer, and strength, there is an actual parting above of clouds and fog, and a burning white sun shows through. And, possibly even more remarkable, at that very same moment reinforcements appear: a small troop of new people with placards:
NO MORE VIETNAMS, U.S. OUT OF NICARAGUA, STAY OUT OF REAGAN’S WAR
. These people all cluster around the other group. Joining forces.
“Sam and I always got really dressed up for peace marches, in the sixties,” Dudley tells Sara, once they have started back on the long drive to San Sebastian. “I’d wear my best skirts and shiniest boots, and Sam would actually put on a coat and tie. We thought we should
look respectable. Not try to look like hippies.” She laughs. “As though we could have. But it’s odd how much fun those marches look like from here. In retrospect, I mean.”
“I guess I was one of the hippies.”
“I used to wish I were,” confesses Dudley. “So many middle-aged people did wish that, you know. But at least I didn’t try to look like one. And Sam …” She trails off, as she catches herself often doing these days, as she tries to speak of Sam.
Do not speak ill of the dead
. Surely one of the strongest, earliest, never-ever-mentioned prohibitions, Dudley has recently observed to herself. Since Sam’s death—his departure, as she thinks of it. She has spoken, so far, only good of him, she has presented the two of them as an only happy couple. Especially, she is aware, she has done this with Sara, whom she very much likes, with whom she would like to have an honest friendship, more honest than would be possible (she thinks) with Celeste, for example. She would like to be more “open,” less New England. However, as she talks about peace marches with Sara, she wonders if there would be any point, really, in continuing with the truth: “Sam always managed to wander off somewhere, though, and show up much later, really drunk. Not just peace marches, he liked wandering off from anything, anything organized. Including me, an essentially organized, tidy person. He was crazy about bars, especially of course the Cedar. I have no idea what anyone means by love. I felt quite as much rage and even hate for Sam at times. In these last years, living out here in San Sebastian, when I could make Sam laugh I would think, Oh good, he likes me. But at least at the start of peace marches we always looked good. Successful and happy.”
Naturally she says none of this aloud to Sara. Naturally not, and so the drive home, over fog-shrouded hills, past mist-concealed fields and woods, is quiet, for the most part. Not saying what is most on her mind, Dudley experiences a familiar wave of loneliness, and she wonders: Does Sara ever feel so isolated? Does she too wish, at times, to say what she does not? More likely, Dudley believes, Sara says more or less what is on her mind.
* * *
“Such a terrible day” is the first thing that Celeste says to Sara, as Sara comes into the living room, around teatime. Then, seeming to remember, she asks, “How was your peace march?”
“Really more of a rally than an actual march,” Sara can’t resist saying. “But it was okay. I was glad we went.”
“I’m sure you’re such a comfort to poor Dudley.” Saying this, Celeste looks so very sad, so in need of comfort for herself that Sara is very moved. And worried.
And helpless. How to comfort heavily guarded, tightly controlled Celeste, with her scornful nose, her rigid, upright posture? “It’s hard to tell how Dudley does feel,” she attempts. “She’s so, so New England.”
“I suppose.” But Celeste’s interest has seemed to subside. Her huge black, black eyes shift their focus, and she returns to herself, her own pain.
And Sara sighs, and gives up. She feels with Celeste less a generation gap than an unbridgeable gap in concerns, Celeste’s being wholly personal, narrowly “social,” in some ways aesthetic. In no possible sense “political.”
Celeste knows that she almost assuredly has something quite terribly wrong: well, she has the most wrong thing of all, the unmentionable horror, of which almost everyone finally dies. Daily she studies and considers her symptoms: blood.
On a very occasional more cheerful day she thinks it could be an ulcer, but from what Polly has said the color of her blood is wrong. Not an ulcer.
Death, the idea of death, is not what she so much minds, Celeste has worked out; dying will be a fairly simple matter, she believes, a losing of consciousness, quite possibly welcome, like sleep. But the stages on the way to death, the ways that the world has now worked out for people to die, there’s the real horror: hospitals, surgery, anesthesia. Terrible nurses, mean doctors. Pain, indignity. Reduction of one’s self to a degraded, helpless and unclean infancy.
Celeste has had certain operations—gall bladder, a hysterectomy; she knows the hospital, the surgical experience, and she cannot, cannot
go through any of that again. Much less the further horrors of chemotherapy, radiation—whatever they choose for her. She cannot even go to a doctor to describe her present symptoms. She does not want to see a doctor, to be operated on. To be fixed, maybe even cured. She is too old for all that.
She would rather die.
And on her way to dying, should she arrive at a time of awful pain, there are pills one can take. One can choose to go to sleep, for good.
Celeste believes that she is making a rational choice. She knows what she is doing; it is her privilege not to have medical care if she doesn’t want it. No surgery, no long painful bright sleepless hospital nights.
At times she feels quite rational about it all.
At other times, though, she inwardly rails against what is wrong with her, and especially against its location: humiliating.
Ugly
.
No wonder Bill left, she thinks. And while of course she did not breathe a word of her affliction, ever, to him, very likely he sensed something wrong with her. He smelled illness, along with her appalling age. He may even have thought her joking when she said to him (and oh! no one would ever know the courage that took), when she said, “Bill darling, I’d really like us to be married.”
He laughed, of course they laughed together, seated side by side at a corner table at Vic’s, over the specially ordered salads. But Celeste was serious; she would never have said such a thing as a joke, no one would, no woman. And then when he overheard her whispering at her party to her friends, though, confiding her secret, their secret—well, no wonder he ran, ran out on her.
And how could she ever even have thought of another life, with Bill? After Charles, a second chance?
How
, when beneath her clothes she is withered, dry, terrible, old? She is bleeding almost every day, she is probably dying.
If only Celeste would go to bed earlier, then Sara would not have to use the phone at such odd hours, so very late, waking Alex in New York, where it is often almost morning.
However, there is a certain sexiness to these strangely timed calls;
it is even sexy, in a way, that she, Sara, almost always makes the calls. Aggressive Sara, strong Sara, reaching out for Alex, touching him across three thousand miles. She sits curled on Celeste’s white linen sofa, in her old flounced flannel nightgown, her wool robe and sheepskin slippers. She is cold, hearing the drip of fog in the night outside. Shivering, thinking of sex. Calling warm Alex, and smiling to herself at the prospect of his voice.
She even postpones, momentarily, the actual placing of her call, the light touch on the now familiar numbers, their tinny music. As she savors what seems a new sense of herself.
Years back, despite knowing this to be unhealthy, if not actually “sick,” Sara used to speculate as to what, possibly, Alex could “see” in her. And none of her conclusions then were politically acceptable. Because I make love to him, she thought, and he’s probably only had fairly passive, timid girls. Or because he has no idea how beautiful he is, he does not especially value himself in that way.
Now, however, Sara’s overriding sense of herself is one of strength. I am an exceptionally strong woman, she thinks. I have withstood a great deal, every fact of my life proves strength. No wonder Alex, who is genuinely good (I think) and intelligent and kind but hesitant to act—no wonder Alex should be drawn to me. To strength. He sees someone who will act for as well as with him.
Smiling now at her own unwonted self-approval—is the sin of pride politically incorrect, or are you supposed to think well of yourself, these days? (she believes that you are)—Sara then pushes the telephone buttons, and leans back into the sofa to listen to the ring.
Poor Alex, she always wakes him, and always she is torn between guilt and affection, sheer fondness for his sleepy, fumbling voice.
However, tonight the phone continues to ring and ring, and no Alex, sleepy or otherwise, comes on the line.
Outrageous: how dare he not be there? Thinking that, reacting in that quick and primitive way, Sara further thinks, He’s out with someone—or, rather, he’s there in the apartment, he is listening to the phone and knowing who it is—with some beautiful passive blonde, who barely touches him.
And Sara also thinks, This stupid fantasy is sheer regression. I could have thought of it twenty years back.
But that hot jealous flood is not so easily halted as Sara even
thinks, I could go to bed with that silly David, he’s handsome enough, in his way, and I could somehow let Alex know. If we’re supposed to be such honest platonic old friends.
Curiously, perhaps, these strenuous emotions have the effect at last of wearing Sara out, and she falls asleep, curled there in her bedraggled flannel gown, in the deep white linen.
Waking to blackness, still, she looks at her watch—tiny, very pretty, a recent present from Celeste. (“I never use it, my darling, and you’ll have it someday anyway. Might as well now.”) It is just after 4 a.m., that classic hour for insomniacs, for crazies. However, not in New York, where it is just after seven, and time to get up.
Wanting then more than anything to talk to Alex, to tell him about the march, and the new-old infiltrators there, and how frightening she finds the information that Bill indeed is Priest, is CIA—wanting so badly to tell Alex all that, which Alex alone could hear and understand, Sara still does not make the call.
She is wide awake now, and absolutely clear in her head, and she thinks, I cannot call Alex now, at seven-fifteen, and not find him in. I simply cannot take that risk.
Sara gets up from the sofa and heads off to her room, to bed, as, with the most wry of inward smiles, she mutters to herself, “Well, so much for strength.”
“Dear really beautiful Celeste. Where has all this time gone? I can tell you, I really had some trouble getting up for writing to you. The way I cut out could really have ticked you off, I wouldn’t blame you. I didn’t even get to tell you how I appreciated your little ‘joke,’ even if I was sort of the butt, in a manner of speaking. Anyway, your party was super, some fancy blast, and I really got a big kick out of meeting all your friends. And especially that niece, or is she a niece? of yours. Was her name Sally? Give her my best regards.
“You probably wouldn’t believe what I’ve been up to, and into these past four months. All business, unfortunately. But among other things I have been going to Berlitz (now there’s an experience I could have done without, talk about a bunch of creeps) anyway, I took this crash course in Spanish, and now I can really
hablar
.