Second Chances (9 page)

And where is Sam?

Seven-fifteen, and he was due at seven. He could have come early, even, were he truly ravenous to see her, as he said. Not able to wait, as she was not.

Overprepared, far too ready, Dudley walks in short rapid spurts from here to there in her apartment, senselessly pausing at one place or another. And wondering: Suppose Sam was killed on the way, fallen under a subway, or even murderously attacked in Isham Park? Or suppose he has decided to go back to whoever he was seeing before they met? Will he phone and say he’s really sorry? Or will he just not show up?

And oh, how she would love, how she needs a drink at this moment! If he doesn’t come, quite possibly Dudley will do what she has never done before, so far: drink alone, get drunk and cry, all by herself, as her parents always say the Boston Irish are prone to do.

Of course he will come, though, a more sensible part of her mind informs Dudley; twenty minutes is really not late at all—unless you are the person waiting for someone you are anxious about, or crazy about, or something. But oh, how a drink would help.
Right now
.

And even if Sam does come, after all this she will still need a drink, Dudley now believes.

But at the sound of the doorbell, a shrill missile going to her heart, Dudley just manages not to run toward the door, and reminds herself that it is to be a sober evening. Lots of food, little drink.

And there is Sam, huge Sam, with his red-brown curls and his
green-eyed grin, Sam gasping, “Oh, beautiful! Oh, my brand-new Dudley! Here, I’ve got to put this down.” And before they can anywhere nearly embrace he deposits on the floor what has been his encumbrance, his burden: a magnum of Mumm’s. All chilled, all ready to drink.

Dudley looks awful, even slightly preposterous, thinks Edward, her oldest and in many ways closest friend. Her dark hair, a few years back just threaded very lightly here and there with gray (and gray hair, or white, would be most becoming to Dudley, Edward believes, would add both distinction and softness)—in any case, that hair is now blonde. Not movie-star blonde, or hooker blonde, but streaky, as though it had happened in the sun and were natural. The effect is neither distinguishing (God knows not that) nor softening. The truth is, it makes her look old, considerably older than she is; which is to say, also older than Edward is.

Dudley is telling him, though, that she feels terrific. So happy, such a relief, at last to be shed of Sam, after all these years. Ten years.

“The point is that Sam is an alcoholic,” says Dudley very firmly. “Purely and simply. A classic. Personality changes. Awful morning depressions that only another drink can possibly cure. God, when I think of the Bloody Marys we’ve consumed, whole days of Bloodys. Bloody days. Not to mention all the champagne Sundays. At first—well, Christ, for years, it seemed so charming. You know, drinks when you’re not supposed to be drinking at all. Well, Edward, imagine. Our parents?”

Edward forces himself to smile, although he knows that Dudley is so caught up, so carried away by what he deeply hopes will not become a total confession that she is quite unaware of his relative inattention. At this particular moment he does not truly care about
Dudley and Sam, or even, frankly (he might as well admit it to himself), does he care about Dudley, his dearest oldest friend.

For Edward is thinking with a difficult-to-bear mixture of passion and anxiety about a very young, an extremely beautiful person with a lovely name: Fernando Fuentes, with whom he is to have dinner, later on.

But, along with the smile that he forces, Edward manages to say, about their parents, “Oh, you’re quite right there. ‘Disapprove’ would be the wildest understatement.”

Dudley laughs a little too loudly. “I guess what I really have to find out, though, is why I went along with it, all that drinking. For so long. And I have to admit, I have pretty alcoholic tendencies too. I must have. I mean, a lot of women would have left the first time Sam passed out on them, not to mention getting really ugly, quarrelsome. Celeste would never in a million years stick around for anything like that.”

“How is Celeste?”

“Oh, beautiful. Successful. Just slightly remote.” A forced laugh from Dudley. “Of course her remoteness makes me a little envious, sometimes. Remote people don’t get into trouble the way we do.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Edward, whose sense of himself in fact includes a certain remoteness—and he knows that he is headed for some form of trouble, probably, with Fernando Fuentes.

But Dudley in her total self-absorption continues: “I’d really rather be like Polly. She seems to pay no attention to her love affairs. Men come and go in her life, and it doesn’t matter much to her. Her mind is always entirely somewhere else. She’s like a man, in a way.”

“Like some men,” Edward murmurs.

“Oh well, dear Edward, I didn’t mean all men, of course not. Even terrible Sam is more sentimental than Polly is, actually, about love.” And (most alarmingly, to Edward) her blue eyes fill.

“You’re certainly right about Celeste looking wonderful,” he improvises (too quickly?). “Her own sense of who she is seems so much more strongly, uh, developed. She knows who she is. For one thing I do think getting out of real estate and into decorating has been on the whole very good.”

“You’re right, she’s become very secure. Very absorbed in her
work. If she’s having love affairs, she never mentions them. She always seems to be with, uh—”

“Homosexuals,” Edward rather dryly supplies. “Yes, she does have a seeming closetful of queer escorts.” He is thinking, I must not introduce Fernando, ever, to Celeste; she would gobble him up. And next he thinks, But this is crazy, what am I thinking of? Introduce Fernando to anyone indeed. I may never see him again after tonight. Unless I am most incredibly careful. Or most fabulously lucky. (In a general way Edward does not consider himself a lucky person.)

It is getting on toward late afternoon, teatime, but Dudley and Edward are drinking instant coffee, in her tired-looking, cluttered living room, which in Edward’s view has not been improved by the addition of several large canvases by Sam. The new Abstract Impressionism, Edward guesses it would be called—all jagged lines and jarring colors.

He looks out instead to the reliable trees of Isham Park, just now, in late November, quite bare and gray, but most beautifully articulated, like line drawings—Edward’s favorite form of visual art. Intricate twigs against a rosy sunset sky.

At this moment, for several reasons Edward would like to ask Dudley about her work, her “journalism”—and he is aware of setting off the word, of the semi-condescension of which sensitive Dudley has more than once accused him. It would be polite now to ask, and also it would serve to change the subject.

However, so embarrassing! He cannot, at this moment he absolutely cannot, recall the name of the magazine for which Dudley now works. Which proves, of course, that all her allegations are correct: it is not simply that she is touchy; he is in fact condescending. He only remembers that she was enthusiastic—at least at first—about her new job, but he finds it impossible now to mention her “work” without the name of the journal.

Another truth, half recognized by Edward, is that his own work, his writing, has recently not gone very well at all. His last book of verse was published precisely ten years ago, a fact that he very much dislikes facing, but there it is. Edward, at thirty, was hailed everywhere as “promising,” even “brilliantly promising.” Since then there have been five poems in
Poetry
—and one each in
The New Yorker
, the
Yale Review
, and
Shenandoah
. All excellent publications (all several
cuts above the magazine on which Dudley now works, Edward is sure of that); still, eight poems in ten years is not exactly promising, much less brilliant. Not to mention the still-unearned doctorate (the unfinished thesis on Forster). The repeated sections of freshman comp. Not what anyone would call a distinguished career, so far. He is not in any position to behave in a superior way to Dudley, nor to forget the name of her magazine.

Dudley sighs. “I really should move from this place. It’s the scene of too much, mostly bad.” And then, alarmingly, her eyes again fill, as her gaze shifts toward the canvases. “What I’ll miss about him most, curiously enough,” she tells Edward, her unwilling, less than half attentive audience, “the big lack for me will be Sam’s talent. My sense of it, when I’m with him. He’s quite simply a genius, I know that. But Christ, he’s so crazy.”

“I’d think twice about giving up this place, though,” counsels Edward. “You know how hard they are to come by, and especially bargains like this one. People are paying the earth. Why, I know a young man, more or less the friend of a friend—or, rather, the student of a friend—doing graduate work down at NYU, and he’s paying I think he told me something outrageous for a walk-up on Bleecker Street. Of course I’ve never seen it, but still.” (Dear heaven, does he have to go on and on about Fernando, in this lunatic way? Perhaps he does, decides Edward.)

At that moment, though, Dudley bursts into tears: loudly, miserably, horribly. A woman in her thirties, just standing there and sobbing like an adolescent, or a child.

His heart racing less in sympathy than in true personal anguish, Edward is transfixed.

And after a long and entirely awful moment Dudley raises her face, all reddened, haggard,
old
. And she tells him, “Edward, dear Edward, would you please just go? We’re not helping each other at all. And, Edward, I’m so
sorry
.”

Of course Edward has given far too much thought, energetic searchingly imaginative thought, to the choice of what is, he hopes, his only first dinner with Freddy, Fernando Fuentes, whom he met and began talking to in a Morningside Heights bookstore. He did not pick Fernando
up. And although he tries to tell himself that there are many, many good restaurants in New York, his obsession persists.

Nothing too grand, too intimidating. On the other hand, a reasonable elegance.
Not
the Village, where Fernando lives. Nothing even slightly, faintly camp, and heaven knows not one of the special haunts of certain people. (A tricky problem, that: such things are so sensitive, subject to such very quick change.) And ideally a place where Edward himself is known, but there again, not too known: an overly familiar waiter of a certain sort could give precisely the wrong impression.

Settling at last on the Café des Artistes, on West Sixty-seventh, Edward calls and makes the reservations. Yet still he wonders: would, after all, the Plaza have been better? Or should he have stretched a point, and gone down to the Lafayette, or the Brevoort?

However, once seated at his really quite ideal corner table, and greeted by an elderly, most dignified and respectful waiter, Edward feels that his choice has been exactly right. The window boxes overflow with fresh, eager-looking chrysanthemums, all white; they impart a light tart scent of fall, hinting at longer nights, warm rooms. More darkness.

And the dining rooms are busy at that hour. Every table seems taken, but the bustle is dignified. No disorganized running around. No mistakes.

But dear God, what an old fart I’m becoming, I sound like my
father
, Edward chides himself. I simply must not talk in this vein to Fernando, he’ll think I’m ancient. I wonder if anyone ever calls him Freddy? Sounds rather sweet.

And just where is the little bastard, anyway?

He is just crossing the room, led by Edward’s waiter. Fernando (Freddy?) dark and shy, taking everything in with darting, slightly scared small glances. Fernando, who is indeed perfectly beautiful. Breathtaking.

Edward stands to greet his guest, and in a manly way they shake hands. They tell the waiter that they will have martinis. Very dry.

“Such a nice restaurant. I have not come to here before,” Fernando volunteers politely.

“I’m glad you like it. I come here fairly often. It is attractive, and actually the food is quite good.” Bored, in fact appalled by the sheer triviality of what he is saying, Edward trails off.

But Fernando seems not bored; quite eagerly he takes up where Edward left off. “Oh, so hard to find places agreeable in this city. In the Village, where I think to have told you that I live, so few that are sympathetic. But of course I am accustomed only to Mexico City.” A modest laugh, as Edward considers all sorts of quite inadmissible questions, in addition to the very basic question, the all-important and entirely forbidden one. In addition to
that
, Edward also wonders, what social class? What, for instance, does Fernando’s father do? Not that it matters, but it is so hard to “place” a person from Mexico City. Still, the extreme good manners must be a sign of something?

“With restaurants it is as it is with people,” Fernando continues, and then he very modestly laughs, as though apologizing for having said so much.

“In a general way you don’t much care for New Yorkers?” Edward ventures as at that moment the perfect martinis arrive.

Daintily Fernando sips at his. “Oh, so very good,” he says, as though this were the first drink of his life. His virgin drink, as it were. And then another sip, and a smile as he says, “I do not so much care for the women of New York.”

Oh, marvelous ambiguity! To which Edward’s lively, overstimulated mind gives instant full play. Does Fernando mean, as opposed to other women, possibly Mexican, whom he does like, possibly quite a lot? Pretty dark young girls? Or is the implication a preference for men?

As neutrally as he can manage, Edward agrees. “They can be difficult. Many women are extremely difficult.”

“Impossible!” Fernando’s laugh just then is a small surprise as he widens his liquid eyes to look at Edward. Complicity? Is that one of the things to be read in his look? Dare Edward hope—?

“Well, I suppose we must decide what to eat” is all that Edward dares just then. But how stuffy he sounds, to himself. How Bostonian. How
old
. “Or maybe another drink?” he daringly suggests.