Second Chances (3 page)

Dudley believes that men are more irrational than women are: what do they want?

However, both Sam and Dudley continue on the whole to be fond of their house, as they are generally content with their life in San Sebastian. Their friendship with Celeste has continued and deepened, and while Charles was alive he too was very much their friend; Dudley especially took to Charles, a most attractive man.

And it was Dudley who, a year or so after they had moved in, wrote to her closest, oldest friend, Edward Crane, and said that he must come out there; she and Edward had always half jokingly said that they would retire together. And, quite coincidentally, about that time Freddy was offered a teaching job in San Francisco. And so there they all were, plus Polly Blake, who was (or perhaps she was not, not at all?) one of the reasons for Charles and Celeste settling there in the first place.

No longer drinking (or hardly ever drinking), Dudley and Sam still have what they think of as their cocktail hour; what is actually drunk varies from time to time, their current favorite being a mixture of clam and tomato juice. Sometimes during these hours they talk, at others they both leaf through magazines, reading bits aloud to each other; it is Sam who is more apt to read, seemingly unable to remember that Dudley dislikes being read to. At other times (at worst, in Dudley’s view) she talks, and Sam looks both at her and at his magazine, unseeingly. A man of exceptional, extreme politeness, generally, Sam is possibly then at his very rudest, and so Dudley refrains from complaint.

At the moment, though, Dudley is talking and Sam is listening in an interested, quite alert way.

“It’s curious how rarely Edward mentions Freddy these days” was her opening salvo. “Really, in the couple of hours we spent together, I don’t think once.”

Sam laughs. A green-eyed, white-haired, considerably overweight man, he is still very handsome. And very confident. “You talk a lot about me?” he asks.

“Well, no, actually not. Or I don’t think I do. You’d have to ask Edward.” Dudley laughs. “I must at least have said your name.”

Sam makes an assenting sound.

“Not that any of us do. Talk about Freddy, I mean. And I guess it is sort of embarrassing to poor old Edward, these days. All those years in the closet and then there’s his lover out carrying placards. Heading Harvey Milk parades.” Dudley sighs, mostly out of sympathy for Edward but also for Freddy, of whom she is fond. And she admires his recent stand.

“Poor old Edward.” Sam’s chuckle is affectionate; he too is very fond of Edward, and of Freddy.

Their voices, Sam’s and Dudley’s, both in tone and accent present extraordinary contrasts. Being so used to each other, to years of private conversations, this is not something of which they are conscious, but another person hearing them would be aware of an odd antiphony. Dudley’s voice is both higher and softer, a sweet voice, really, more so than her somewhat weathered exterior would suggest. She sounds considerably younger than she is, and so Bostonian—still. Whereas Sam’s voice is closer to what his appearance would suggest, the deep, raspy voice of a very large, aging man. His deep-Southern accent is as slow and courtly as Dudley’s is pure Yankee.

“Oh dear,” now quite suddenly says Dudley. “I’m doing exactly what I accused both Edward and me of doing this afternoon. I’m sounding so smug, I’m taking such pleasure in worrying over Edward.”

“I think you’re what Catholics call scrupulous.” Indulgent Sam.

“Well, that can’t be the worst thing to be.” In a pleased way Dudley bridles; she likes this sort of teasing attention from Sam. And then, with a certain bravado, she tells him, “He and I were worrying over Celeste, naturally.”

Sam’s answering sound is wholly ambiguous.

“More of the same about ‘Bill.’ ” Dudley telegraphs, meaning: None of us can understand what’s going on, if anything. Who is this Bill?

“I guess we’ll meet him sometime.” Sam’s voice is even vaguer than his words.

“Or maybe not? Maybe there isn’t any Bill? Edward and I both thought of that.”

Sam laughs at her. “You do make mysteries sometimes.”

“Oh, that’s just what I accused Edward of doing.”

We are getting along better than usual, is one of the things that Dudley is thinking as they talk. We’re in a good phase, she thinks. But is any phase, ever, final? She bears scars still from some of their worst old times, from horrifying words voiced violently between them, ugly drunken scenes. Dudley sometimes recalls all that with genuine fear, which is not exactly to say that she chooses to dwell on an ugly past (as Sam might say if he knew how often she thinks about all that); it is simply hard for her to believe that they are home free, as it were, that they have finally settled into a peaceful old age, as people are supposed to do. (Sam probably believes that they have. Of a happier disposition, generally, than Dudley is, he does not tend to “borrow trouble”; he even forgets that things ever have been bad.)

Neither Dudley nor Sam is drawn to explicit conversations about the nature of their “relationship” (a word that neither of them would ever use); their temperaments, though quite unlike, their early training and the fact of their generation all conspire to prevent confrontations—and just as well, either of them might easily say. Dudley would never, even now, for example, ask Sam: Well, were you and So-and-So ever actually lovers?—although she would surely have been interested in a true response. But, temperament and habit aside, several sound reasons argue against such a question. First, Sam would be genuinely shocked. And, second, if he did in fact have affairs with any of the women they both knew (which was highly possible, during or just previous to one of their many impassioned, horrendous separations), Sam would still say that he had not, his code being Southern-chivalric, at least in part.

Even, sometimes, with her own particular black self-torturing logic, Dudley has imagined that Sam and Celeste were lovers, in the old
days, in New York. Well, why not? It was certainly impossible to deduce anything from their later relationship; Celeste treated Sam with the same friendly flirtatiousness that she used with all the men she liked. And Sam with Celeste was affectionately courtly.

Some time ago Dudley even considered or fantasized having an affair with Charles Timberlake, husband of Celeste, as a sort of rounding out of (possibly imagined) sexual connections. Also, more to the point, Charles was extremely attractive, though perhaps a shade too attractive? Lean dark elegant Charles, with his famously jutting eyebrows, was surely an antithesis to Sam, who tended to be messy, given to ragged sweaters, shabby tweed and baggy flannel. But nothing came of that plan, that fantasy—well, of course not, and how ridiculous, really, to have thought of it at all.

“Just when is Sara coming, actually?” Sam now asks. A slight surprise; Sam is apt to wait and more or less see what happens.

“Oh, well, that’s another thing, Celeste’s so vague about it all.” Dudley finds herself a little breathless, and conscious of an oddity that she has observed before: these non-alcoholic cocktails still can make her a little drunk. “I think maybe she doesn’t know when Sara’s coming. Sara will simply arrive. You know how young people are.” Dudley refers to Sam’s four daughters by two earlier marriages. All four, no longer children, closer to middle age (and all four, curiously, lawyers), still tend to arrive inconveniently, to be vague as to plans.

“But Sara’s not all that young,” says Sam. Meaning, no doubt, that he
knows
his own girls are too old to behave as they do.

At just that moment, as Sam and Dudley regard each other for an instant, slightly unwelcome thoughts on both their faces, into their silence the phone begins to ring. As always, too loudly. Jarring.

Sam says, “I’ll get it,” and he lumbers toward the hall, just catching it on the third loud ring. “Oh, hello, honey. Well, honey, how’ve you been?”

Celeste. Sam calls her honey because she says she hates it, or so Sam says; Dudley believes that it is really because he likes her so much. As he speaks, Dudley hears the familiar teasing in his voice, the old affection—although he says very little beyond “Yes,” “Yes,” and, once or twice, “Oh, really?”

Looking out into what is now pure blackness, beyond the glass, Dudley thinks that she should go in to baste her chicken; she can
just catch its garlicky aroma. But phone calls are rather like visits, she reflects; they make you less lonely, even when you are two people, who in theory should never feel alone. And then she has a fearsome thought, the most impermissible thought of all. She thinks, Oh, what will I do if Sam should die before I do? She prays, she murmurs (to no one), “Oh, please, couldn’t we just go together, please? Don’t let Sam leave me again.”

Because, in their worst times, that is what Sam always did: he left her. In the middle of a quarrel, he would rush to the door, rush out into the night and away, away for days, weeks, months. And this leaving came to be Dudley’s greatest fear—although when they spoke of it Sam claimed it was the sensible thing to do: “Why stick around to get hit? You can look pretty dangerous when you’re angry, lady.” He did not always leave when they fought; more often he stuck around for his own share of shouting, accusations. But those quick and total departures haunted Dudley. As sometimes, these days, she is haunted by fear of his death.

Returning from the phone all smiles and affability (this is an effect that Celeste often has, on many people), Sam announces the news: “Well, some of your mysteries seem about to be cleared up. Sara is getting here next month. In early February. And Celeste is giving a Valentine’s dinner for her. Why Valentine’s I’ve no idea.”

“Oh, you know Celeste. She likes holidays. Celebrations.”

“Sure, but why Valentine’s? Anyway, she said that the person you refer to as ‘this Bill’ will be there too.”

Startled, Dudley nevertheless at that moment remembers, again, her chicken. And gets up and starts toward the kitchen.

Sam follows her, still talking. “So you see? We do get to meet him, after all.”

Bending down to the oven, breathing in steam along with the heavy aroma of herbs, the rosemary and lemon along with the garlic, Dudley just gets out “He might always be somehow not able to come.”

Sam again makes an ambiguous sound. He has begun to put some dinner things on the round oak kitchen table, where they always eat when they are alone—stainless-steel cutlery, very bright and plain,
and bright cotton napkins, unironed. And the room itself is large and bright and rather plain: gently weathered bare wood on walls and shelves and counters. Wide windows. It could all have been calculated (possibly unconsciously) to look as little as possible like the houses in which Dudley and Sam grew up: her parents’ narrow Georgian, with its lavender leaded windows, rooms filled with mahogany and cut glass and heavy silver; Sam’s family’s drab Victorian country farmhouse, up the river from New Orleans, bayou land.

Standing up, Dudley is aware that sudden shifts in position are harder for her these days; in her back something suddenly hurts. But as usual she manages to speak banteringly. “I’ll make you a small bet,” she says to Sam. “ ‘Bill’ somehow won’t show up. There’ll be something about a business trip. A suddenly dead relative, or something. So there’ll be just us.”

“And Sara,” Sam reminds her.

“Well, Sara’s one of us, isn’t she?”

“Well, I suppose she must be. She’s probably Celeste’s heir, in fact.” Saying that, Sam grins with what Dudley recognizes as his look of provocation. “Unless there really is a Bill, this person you seem to think Celeste’s made up. A real Bill, whom Celeste has it in mind to marry?”

So that Dudley remembers. One day, not long after Charles died, Dudley and Celeste ran into each other at the local post office—a common enough occurrence in small San Sebastian. They stood there in line together, wanting stamps; Celeste had a letter to be registered. “I always register letters to my lawyer,” she distractedly whispered to Dudley, in her way. (As though anyone in town would care about or understand her dealings with her lawyers, Dudley not very kindly thought.) And then, pushing at some vagrant strand of hair, her eyes raised to meet Dudley’s eyes, Celeste, still in a whisper, said to Dudley, “Of course now everything will go to you and Sam. And Sara. So be sure to outlive me, darling Dudley.”

An impossible statement to respond to. Dudley made a sound of embarrassment, confusion. Denial. She changed the subject to the weather, the lovely fall that they just then were having. How long could it last?

*  *  *

But now all that she did not report back to Sam comes vividly to Dudley’s mind, and in a horrified way she thinks, Have I been denying the existence of this Bill because I want to inherit from Celeste? To get half, of whatever? An intolerable thought, at which she frowns—she makes a small involuntary sound, an
oh
, which in her connotes extreme embarrassment, self-censure.

Sam so often reads Dudley’s mind (or they so often seem to have thought of precisely the same thing at the exact same moment, as must be true of many people, long together) that Dudley sometimes takes steps to avoid just this process of thought transference, or whatever. Not wanting Sam to know that she has even considered inheriting from Celeste, she says to him, “We really know so little about Celeste, when it comes right down to it.” She has thought and quite possibly said just this before, surely to Edward, who speaks her language, and maybe also to Sam. However, no matter.

“You mean, who her people were?” This is said teasingly: Sam teasing Dudley’s Boston past, where certainly one would have known. But the same could surely be said of Louisiana.

“Oh Sam.” Dudley’s standard response to teasing. “I suppose I do mean that. But she’s as mysterious in her way as this Bill. But tell me more about the party. Edward and Freddy?”

“Yes, she said she was just going to call them. But I think she plans some really big old bash. Maybe sort of like the last one.” At this he gives Dudley a look that is not exactly of accusation but rather a reminder that at the last big party of Celeste’s, while Charles was still alive, Dudley drank, drank much too much, and was up to some sort of mischief (Sam has never actually said this, but Dudley can read him) with a fellow down from Marin, guy name of Brooks Burgess. A damn silly name, in Sam’s view.