The Last Lovely City (18 page)

No longer weeping, Phyllis says again, “I’m sorry. Just think of it as a bad joke. Okay?”

Lila smiles. “I’ll try to. In any case, good luck.”

“Thanks, Lila.”

Karen and Julian Brownfield’s hotel on the coast of Maine is new: pale blond-paneled rooms with accents of blue: blue painted fish, blue flowers here and there. The long wide windows look out to the grassy dunes, and to the sea, now a dark azure, with white-capped waves. Two small dark-wooded islands are juxtaposed, out there in the Atlantic.

More immediately in the foreground are a smooth new lawn, very green, and a modest circular blue swimming pool, now populated by two young families, with children. On the lawn another young father is running back and forth with a kite that will not rise—probably he is doing something wrong. His small daughter runs just behind him, laughing in the sun, not at all worried about the kite. So far whatever her father does is wonderful.

Julian and Karen have remained in their rooms, their two-story “suite” from which Julian at the window now worries about the kite, and that father. Sad Julian, who has just said to Karen, “You know you’d feel better if you could swim a little.” He was unable not to say this, as earlier he could not help advising breakfast, and a walk—all declined, as he knew they would be.

Looking at Karen, Julian thinks it is the round curve of her forehead that most nearly breaks his heart. She has got so thin, with no booze and rather little food, that all her bones are apparent, and especially that child-shaped skull, with its curves and deep wide eye sockets. Her delicately indented chin is sharper now, and her cheekbones protuberant. Possibly she has never seemed so beautiful.

The clinician in Julian reminds him that when Karen’s looks
at long last go, when no one falls in love with her for months, and then years, she may indeed be in serious trouble. A major depression, massive. So far, though, no loss of looks has even begun. Through the ravages of love affairs (two that Julian knows about, has picked up the pieces after, so to speak), through God knows how many drinks—through all that Karen has remained very, very beautiful. Vicissitudes, it would seem, have only added variety to her beauty. Indeed, Julian has been presented by his wife with a spectrum of lovely, red-haired women, from plumply voluptuous to just-not-gaunt, from warm and radiant smiles to the most poignant melancholy. Julian has had a succession of love affairs and marriages with all these women, all of whom are Karen.

Which is one of the reasons why they are still together, Julian believes. Another reason being the fact that he himself is the perfect, paradigmatic co-alcoholic.

He is also the perfect example of what people mean when they say that all shrinks are nuts. Julian knows this, and it affords him a certain bleak amusement: a successful (in his work, very successful) psychiatrist, who remains married to a beautiful, promiscuous alcoholic. Pretty funny, all around. It is quite true, psychiatrists are more truly mad than their patients are.

At the moment Karen is deeply engaged in doing her nails, in painting each long oval a glossy wild bright pink. One of the wonderful perks, as Karen has put it, about her “retirement” (she has given up the piano altogether; no concerts certainly and now no practicing either) is that now she can have marvelous long nails. And her nails would seem to have responded to this wish: they are indeed extremely long, and they look to be steel hard.

If Karen were as depressed now as in some ways she presents herself as being, would she be doing her nails? Would she
care, still, for such a surface of perfection? Well, actually she might.

As though to answer him Karen holds up her hands and laughs. “See? Wild Pink. It’s wonderful not even to have to look like a pianist. Who’d guess? Now my toes.” And she starts to remove her sandals, to inspect her feet.

“I wonder why really we came to Maine.” Julian had not meant to say this, and he prevents himself from adding: If you don’t want to swim or even go for walks. He does say, “I don’t think you much like it here.”

“I don’t like the inside of my head, that’s the problem. As you know.”

“Well yes, I do know.”

Karen’s toenails, which she has begun to wipe clean with a washcloth, then dry tenderly with a linen towel—all that will immobilize her for almost another hour, Julian knows. Which suddenly fills him with the most impossible impatience. He asks her, “You don’t mind if I go for a walk?”

“Darling, of course not.” This has come out deep-Southern, an accent that Karen for reasons of her own affects occasionally. Since her one visit down there: a canceled concert, in Atlanta.

“Sometimes I think you only like it in New York, or Boston.” Again, Julian has spoken without quite meaning to. Without weighing words, that is.

Karen giggles, a nondepressed sound. “Well, indeed I do. I just might decide to live in one of those cities. Sometimes.”

Julian walks along the beach, squeaking the fine white sand with his California running shoes. Tall and bent, walking slowly, he is considering yet again his wife of almost twenty-five years. And two things occur to him: one, Karen is not as depressed as she sometimes has been (and will be again, if his prediction for her old age holds true). And, two, it is possible, at least possible, that
he, Julian, the husband-lover-custodian—that he is not doing her any good, in any role.

None of these thoughts is exactly new. God knows they are not, but Julian knows that he has resisted the latter perception, that of his own uselessness, partly out of what could be labeled misplaced professional pride.

Also, in the bright, very clean Maine air every thought has greater clarity. His whole mind seems to have been exposed to new light.

Concentrating mostly on the sand, along with his meditations, Julian now looks up to see a phone booth incongruously lodged against some sand dunes, sharply tilted but with a look of functioning.

His watch informs him that it is ten-twenty. In San Francisco three hours earlier. He could just catch Lila at breakfast, before her first patient.

He was right. The phone works.

“What a lovely surprise,” Lila tells him, her voice warm, a little hoarse, and infinitely familiar. And startled: she would not have expected to hear from him at all.

Julian laughs, mostly from the sheer pleasure of being in contact with her. “Funniest thing,” he tells her. “I was walking along the beach with my heavy thoughts and there before me was a functioning phone booth. Like a signal.”

“Oh. Well, how good.” Lila pauses, then asks, “Well, how’s Maine?”

“Maine is beautiful. So clean. Even the water tastes terrific.” He adds, “Karen hates it, I think. I wonder if I brought her here for some kind of punishment.”

“I doubt that.” Supportive Lila.

He asks, “What’s going on with you?”

She seems to hesitate, then laughs a little. “An odd thing, actually. Garrett’s new wife, the Phylly, came to see me more or less disguised as a patient.”

“Well. What’re you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to have a talk with Garrett. I guess I’ll have to. She’s in bad shape.

“Darling Julian, I have to go. How wonderful that you called.”

“Lila, I love you. Seriously.”

She laughs. “Me too.
Seriously
.”

And Julian emerges from the leaning phone booth, out into the pure bright sunshine, the slowly warming day.

A week or so later, having just come in from her studio after a very long day of patients, Lila sighs, and shivers. Her small house feels chilled, slightly damp, as though the blanketing fog that all day has lain so heavily over the city had penetrated her house, seeping through window cracks and under doors. She can almost imagine her house to be filled with fog.

Going over to light the fire, she is aware of an unpleasant anticipation, of not looking forward to the next hour or so. Garrett Lewisohn is coming by after work to have a “brief chat” (they both have used this phrase) about Phyllis. The Phylly.

Living here, Garrett always disliked this house. It was not at all a part of what he believed he had married, in Lila: a woman out of Atherton, a woman of substance. A woman far more like Lila’s mother, actually—formidable, austere Henrietta—than like Lila herself. Henrietta had died before Garrett’s entrance into Lila’s life; still, he saw the house. It is almost too perfect that he should now have an Atherton house of his own—a house that is driving his young wife mad.

And it is perfect that Lila should be living alone in her own small, cozy, shabby house, with its drafts and creaks, and its magnificent surrounding grove of redwoods and eucalyptus. Its views of the bay and the bridge, the billowing green hills of Marin.

Lila has counted on the established fact of Garrett’s punctuality, and thus by the appointed hour she is entirely ready, at least superficially: her hair combed, face powdered (a little). She has even changed her shoes, discarding the flat-heeled comfort necessary to hours of listening for some slightly smarter pumps. Waiting, she uneasily wanders—reflecting on the annoyance of waiting for someone you don’t really want to see.

In the instant of entertaining that thought, however, there is Garrett, his car going just too fast in her drive. Brakes, a slam. Light racing footsteps, over gravel, then his knock.

On previous occasions, they have resolved the question of an appropriate gesture for a greeting; they shake hands. It was Garrett who instigated this, to Lila’s considerable relief. Under these circumstances, the brushing, social kiss so promiscuously in vogue would seem even more false than it usually does.

Garrett, in his narrow dark suit, pale shirt, and heavy striped silk tie looks elegant and tired, harassed. As usual, in a hurry. But what he first says is, “Lila, you look great. Better than ever,” which is not at all a usual remark for Garrett. “Not living with me would seem to agree with you,” he adds, with a smile.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Perrier?”

“Calistoga okay?”

All that dealt and dispensed with, they settle in Lila’s living room, rather consciously not in their usual places (what was usual when they were together): Lila is on the edge of the leather sofa rather than in her habitual comfortable chair, and Garrett stands, having explained, “I’ve been sitting all day. Depositions.”

“Actually me too.” And looked up at Garrett, although she smiles, Lila thinks, How could we ever have married? how could
I?
As she has thought before.

“You do know,” Garrett next tells her, “it was not my idea. Phyllis coming to see you.”

“I really didn’t think it was.”

He frowns, looking out at the fog, fog that seems wind-propelled, pushing against the long windows.

“She is in bad shape though,” says Garrett. “As you must have seen. She cries, she really cries a lot.”

This has been said less by way of complaint, though, than in a sort of appalled sympathy, or so Lila hears it, and she is touched, Garrett not being a generally empathetic person. She tells him, “I think she’s extremely tired, for one thing. Sometimes very tired people just cry.”

“But we have, we have what I thought was a lot of help. Can you imagine the bills?” He pauses, perhaps feeling that that last was a mistake. “Well,” he concedes, “maybe not enough help.”

“Why don’t you give her three months of no dinner parties?” Lila was unable not to say this, although she had earlier resolved against any specific suggestions—or any suggestions at all.

“But,” says Garrett, with his small familiar frown, “but just now—” And then he subsides, allowing his seasonal objections to lapse (Lila knows that he is thinking of the coming fall, which is opera and large-party time, in San Francisco). “That’s not a bad idea,” he surprisingly grants.

Digesting this unusual docility, in Garrett, who likes a fight to the finish, generally, Lila concludes that he must be seriously concerned about Phyllis. For which she likes him better than she often does.

“Tell me something,” Garrett asks next, with his thin-lipped, slightly sneering smile (except that now the sneer seems directed at himself, Lila feels). “Do you think I’m exceptionally selfish? Do I really never listen? I know you’re a fair-minded woman.”

Trying at first not to smile, Lila then does smile. Well, why not? But she feels that he deserves a serious answer. “You’re
pretty selfish,” she tells him. “Of course most people are. And it’s true, you’re really not a very good listener.”

“That’s what I’ve been told.” The sneer has become a scowl, intensely self-mocking.

He then asks her, “Do you think you might marry again?”

“Lord no.” Lila laughs at her own vehemence. “I’m sure twice is enough. Probably some people shouldn’t marry at all.”

“I could be one of them.” Garrett sighs deeply. “Sometimes I think men need marriage more than women do. Am I becoming a feminist?”

“I hope so.” Lila laughs again. And then, knowing that she must, she says, “About Phyllis, though. Do you want me to give you some names? People she could see?”

Garrett stares at her, clearly not thinking about Phyllis. After a moment he says, “This may sound foolish, or impertinent, but what I would really like would be to take you to bed. Right now.”

After a moment of another sort of staring on her own part, Lila flares out at him. “That would really help Phyllis a lot. Honestly, Garrett. Even if I—”

“Don’t get mad. I’m harmless.” Garrett attempts a smile.

“No you’re not.” Lila’s face is heated, she hopes invisibly. She is indeed very angry.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It was just a thought. You do look great. You know you could be flattered.”

“But I’m not.” Standing up, Lila goes over to her desk, where she finds a pad of paper, a pen. Quickly she writes three names, and hands the list to Garrett.

It is obvious that she wishes him to go, and Lila does not choose to pretend otherwise. She simply says, “Well, I hope something helps.”

“Christ, me too.” He extends his hand to her. “Well, Lila. Thanks.”

They shake hands, and Garrett is gone. Again.