Second Chances (5 page)

“But why not? As you always say, it is the perfect apéritif.” Freddy’s tone is teasing but very affectionate.

“Heavens, do I always say that?”

“No, but you used to. It’s something you taught me.”

Their eyes lock: a small moment of great affection.

And as Freddy goes off toward the kitchen for the wine, Edward even thinks, I will tell him about my coming-out dream, my pink tulle nightmare. He will laugh, and we’ll both drink just a little too much wine.

And it will have been a good evening together, after all.

Polly Blake’s house is much smaller and closer to the town of San Sebastian than the other houses of this particular group of friends. Her house in fact looks very much like the poorer houses of her neighbors: a square, vine-covered stucco box, with a falling-down trellis on one side, an even more dilapidated garage where Polly keeps her succession of bikes: Polly does not drive, and her bikes are always fallen apart or stolen, she doing little to prevent either fate.

Inside, the ceiling of her living room is low, and the hardwood floors uneven, but the rugs, if somewhat threadbare, are handwoven and beautiful—a few from the Yucatán, most from Spain. And the exposed wood of what furniture there is, a desk, a table, a couple of chairs, is walnut, old and highly, very lovingly polished. Another large rug covers what serves as Polly’s sofa, which is also her bed. On this rug, this bed, there are usually at least two or three of Polly’s five quite variously handsome cats. All former strays, now sleek with love and good food, and vitamins. Two tabbies, female; a big black tom; a fat brown female, vaguely Burmese; and an orange kitten, the newest addition.

An eccentric house, then, for a woman whom Celeste believes to have come from much more money, originally, than any of them did. But this is simply a theory of Celeste’s, possibly a story she has invented to try to explain Polly Blake.

And some explanation for Polly would seem to be needed: of them all, these close, rather homogenous people, least is known about Polly. She is friendly enough, a “warm” person, who speaks very openly about everything except herself. Why doesn’t she drive, for example?
And when and where did she learn such perfect Spanish? She never mentions having lived in Spain—or, for that matter, Mexico or South America. Has she ever been married, had lovers? Is she “gay”? And if she did have money, as Celeste believes, what in fact has she done with it all?

The only thing known for sure is that Polly had cancer, of a terrible, usually fatal sort: pancreatic. And she survived. (This information was given by Polly to Celeste as a form of present, a true gift, recognized and received by Celeste as such—a kind of palliative to Celeste’s own cancer phobia, which has always been severe, her darkest nightmare. She suffers chronically, acutely from this fear.)

The several unknowns, then, about Polly’s life, about which her friends still sometimes speculate (and Polly, highly intuitive, is aware of those speculations; they amuse her)—everything would be made quite clear if anyone knew about the two years, 1947 and 1948, that Polly spent in Spain as a border-crosser, a smuggler for the Loyalist underground—and as the part-time lover of Charles Timberlake. None of which Polly is about to tell anyone, obviously. Celeste knows that Polly met Charles when Charles lived in Paris with his second wife, rich Jane, but Celeste has been told, by Charles, that Polly and Jane were college friends. And Freddy certainly knows that Polly has traveled and spent some time in Spain, but he has no notion what she was doing there.

None of them can imagine their tall, bony, very eccentric and half-bald old friend, Polly, as a strong, good-looking (not beautiful but very striking), shy, almost silent young woman. With heavy dark hair and pale skin, and remarkably wide, intense pale blue-gray eyes.

There is much to be said against a violent sensual experience that arrives somewhat late in life, especially if it be one’s first: the sex itself is taken much too seriously, is perceived as a cataclysm, and is thought to be love. All this happened to Polly in her late thirties, as she fell in love with clever, good-looking, manipulative Charles Timberlake. Polly made a hero of him, for a while. And, more disastrously, she made the (unhappily fairly common) mistake of believing that Charles felt and reacted to everything that happened between them exactly as she did.

They met at one of those crowded, frantically festive post–World War II parties in New York to celebrate someone’s return from the wars, as it was then somewhat ironically put. The someone in this case was Charles Timberlake himself; he had been in Paris during the war as a news-bureau chief, and was now going back to Paris to work for
UNESCO
. A leftward move, this was viewed as, and thus the presence of Polly, whose small inheritance (Celeste was wrong on that score) allowed her to work, barely paid, for a small left-literary magazine.

But why Charles, why Charles for Polly, who had never “been with” anyone before? And why that particular drab November afternoon? Impossible to work it out; Polly never could, and neither, for that matter, could Charles, the surprised and somewhat reluctant recipient of a major passion, a total dedication, the only form of true love that literary-radical Polly could conceive of.

Charles was only to be in New York for a week on that visit, his wife and children having stayed in Paris. (Jane, the wife, actually had gone to Vassar, as Polly had, but just enough earlier, four years, so that they had not in fact known each other.) Charles counted himself lucky indeed to have met this dark, deep-breasted young woman—if slightly overintense for his taste—with the extraordinary eyes, and the nice big uptown apartment in the East Eighties. Alone. Polly then, as always, lived alone, sleeping in an uncomfortable single bed—a high, spooled bed, from Maine.

From the beginning, the ferocity of Polly’s response to him was startling to Charles. A skillful, highly experimental lover, he was used to more difficult, if not genuinely passive women, hard-to-please beauties, semi-frigid débutante hysterics, or pitifully nervous secretaries. Whereas with Polly—making love to her was like falling off a cliff, Charles sometimes thought. Falling into a thrillingly dangerous void. He was at the same time horrified and deeply flattered to learn that he was the first.

It was Polly’s idea, of course, that she come along to Paris. Charles had said that he was married, being in his way an honest man, and when Polly proposed Paris he reminded her that seeing each other there would present certain problems. However, he also felt himself compelled to show enthusiasm: how marvelous of her to come to Paris, he could not wait to see her there. (He had to say all this; it
was the level on which they spoke.) He was very grateful to discover that his divorcing Jane did not seem to be among Polly’s expectations.

And so Polly came to Paris, and through some college friend she even achieved a borrowed apartment, not far from the Trocadero. Not far from
UNESCO
.

Charles did not—at no point did he—actually suggest the driver job for Polly: transporting certain outlawed Loyalists back into Franco’s Spain, across the just opened but heavily guarded border. He did not, he would not have mentioned all that simply to get Polly out of Paris. Although later it may have struck both of them that Charles did precisely that.

At the time it seemed quite accidental. Charles simply described a man who had been in his office that afternoon, Juan Salido, a refugee from the Generalissimo. Poor, desperately poor, saturnine, embittered but perpetually hopeful Juan, with one leg gone, and a cough. Juan was why Charles was late in coming to Polly that afternoon, which may have led Charles somewhat to overdo this sympathetic description. “The poor man,” he had said, and sighed. “He’d give his life or what’s left of it for a couple of days in Madrid.”

And almost immediately Polly responded, “Well, why don’t I drive him there? He could hide in the trunk of my car. I’ve been wanting to go to Spain.” And Polly’s pale eyes flashed as she thought this out. Aroused, her eyes flashed like opals, Charles had thought, and had said to her: pale fire opals. But this did not seem the moment for repeating that remark.

Instead he said, “But, my darling girl, it would be dangerous. I really couldn’t let you—”

“I’ll be all right. I’m a terrific driver.” And she added—seriously, passionately—“I love you, Charles.”

Along with the use of the friend’s apartment Polly had the use of a large American car, a sky-blue Nash Ambassador, with bulbously swollen sides. And an ample trunk. It was soon decided, though, that the trunk was dangerous: so obvious, in terms of search, as well as extremely uncomfortable for an already sick and miserable man. The three of them discussed all this: eager Polly; worried Charles (had he somehow outsmarted himself? Was the plan a little too good, too
advantageous for himself?); and sad Juan, who was actually about the same age as Charles, in his late thirties, but looking and no doubt feeling at least ten years older.

The experience of driving Juan—and then Paco, Enrique, Andrés, Carlos, until she began to forget the names—of being stopped and each time successfully passing herself off as an upper-class young American, an innocently lost tourist (asking questions in a certain panicked “female” way was a great ploy, Polly soon discovered), but being always so entirely frightened that she developed colitis, as well as mysterious joltings in the region of her heart—all that made Polly come to think of “love” in quite a new way. And sex: there too her views underwent radical change.

She began to feel that the deep, intensifying multiple spasms that she experienced as she received Charles’s member, his hand or his tongue were simply not world-shaking, as previously she had seriously felt that they were: they were simply body-shaking. They had mostly to do with friction, healthy tissues rubbing against each other. Friction and her own romantic preconceptions. She began to recognize that in bed with Charles she did not have mystical experiences, just sexual ones.

Which is not to say that Polly began to dislike either Charles or sex itself. She continued for some time to see Charles, and they continued to make love; and she continued for many, many years with what would surely be counted an active sexual life. However, driving down from San Sebastián (Spain) to Burgos, observing the beautiful changes from mountains to plains, with Juan huddled, blanket-wrapped, coughing, on the narrow back seat, she began to realize that she was more concerned with Juan (or Enrique, or Pablo, none of whom she ever made love to, ever, nor even thought of with “love,” in that sense) than she was with Charles. Whatever was meant by “in love,” and she suspected,
au fond
, very little, she was no longer in love with Charles. Nor did she ever after that in her life imagine herself “in love.”

Some men quite liked this attitude in Polly, her enthusiastic acceptance of sex as a considerable pleasure, her lack of emotional concomitants. It was how they believed that they themselves reacted.
More often, however, the men involved with Polly accused her of coldness: no matter what it was that they themselves felt, they wanted her to be—or felt that she should be—giddily, vulnerably, even demandingly “in love.”

Handsome, fairly spoiled Charles was of course the first member of the latter group.

“I think you don’t love me anymore,” he began to complain. Intending a light, ironic tone, he instead conveyed high seriousness, sincerity—no doubt because he was indeed quite serious, and troubled by this new Polly.

This was a post-Paris conversation, in New York, at Polly’s new apartment, above a liquor store in the then unfashionable East Thirties. A turgidly, killingly hot July afternoon: Charles had not gone out to Long Island (Sag Harbor, before that became fashionable) with Jane, just in order to spend some time with Polly; he was therefore less than pleased when just after making love Polly got up to shower, to start dressing, and announced that she had an appointment. Charles knew his Polly; he knew that the appointment was more apt to be political, or connected with good works, than amorous. But still.

“But I told you you’d have to go. You didn’t believe me.” Her gentle, firmly confident voice.

“You don’t love me,” sweating Charles repeated. “Or not as you used to.”

This was of course acute, and so “Well, maybe not,” confessed honest Polly. “But mightn’t that be just as well?”

And that was more or less the end of Charles and Polly as lovers. They sometimes met at parties, at fund-raisers for Henry Wallace, whom they both supported; at Spanish refugee fund-raisers, the sort of social-political party mix that fairly often occurred in the generally good-hearted, victory-celebrating, getting-rich late forties.

During the Cold War days, starting in the early fifties, Polly’s meetings with friends were necessarily much more guarded. Never even close, herself, to being a C.P. member, she knew quite a few people who had been, years back, and who now were seriously endangered. Her lovers of this time included a physicist who had opted out of the Manhattan Project, a blacklisted screenwriter. A Soviet defector, a Hungarian psychoanalyst.

Whereas Charles’s life took an increasingly safe and “social” direction.
Later he was never sure that he had been told that eccentric Polly had moved to California, after a serious illness: “… lost all her hair—but that’s frightful, I must get in touch with her” had been his reaction, except that he did not get in touch with her, being by then too preoccupied with Celeste—or if not with Celeste yet, with someone, with someone not bald.

And when Charles and Celeste themselves moved to San Sebastian, where Polly was, the coincidence of Charles and Polly’s having known each other before was explained as just that, a coincidence, which of course it was. And their connection was explained as having been through Jane, handy Vassar Jane, Charles’s second wife.

Thus Celeste was allowed her assumptions, and Charles took on his final role, or roles, in Polly’s life: first as the adored and adoring husband of a friend, and then as the terribly ill, soon-to-be-dying friend, to whom Polly behaved with infinite, unsparing kindness, even performing certain nurse chores (well, bedpans), between nurses, that Celeste could not quite bring herself to do.