The Last Lovely City (19 page)

Possibly because it is to be their last day in Maine, Karen, on that keenly bright Sunday morning seems considerably better (this is Julian’s interpretation). She seems more alert, if not genuinely happy. On their way along the trim, newly graveled pathway to breakfast, in the main lodge, she exclaims at the smells. “It’s so clean here,” she says. “Smell the sea! I think I actually may go swimming later.” And she smiles up at Julian, brilliantly, all pearl teeth and pale pink mouth, and warm blue eyes. “And what’s that other smell?” she asks him. “It’s so sharp and familiar. Nice. Oh, I know, it’s tan bark, see? all around the flowers. Like children’s playgrounds.”

At breakfast, Karen decides that she won’t after all go swimming, though. “But you go, Ju. You’ve hardly at all.”

“Do you still feel like Portland for lunch?”

“Oh sure, that could be fun. In the meantime I’ll be deciding what to wear.” That last is their version of a family joke: Karen indeed spends a lot of time deciding what to wear.

And so, an hour or so later, Julian heads out over the slatted wooden walk that protects bare feet from the heavy, rough sea grasses. To the beach. And as though he would not have a lot of time he quickly drops his towel on the sand and starts to wade out, moving strongly in the cold, most beautifully clear green water. Beginning to swim, he is instantly exhilarated, feeling power, a muscular, cellular excitement. His whole long, strong body is involved in the pull, the stretch and forward thrust of his motion through the waves. His pleasure is almost sexual in its intensity, its totality. He imagines Lila’s body all stretched in the act of swimming, or of love. In Mexico. Wherever.

He swims out in the direction of the small darkly wooded islands, which turn out to be considerably farther away than they looked to be from the shore. He would have liked to reach them, in a small way to explore; however, at the point that he
judges to be about halfway there, he also decides that he has swum about half as far as he can (besides, there is the question of Karen, who is alone. Who has recently been depressed. There is always that: Karen alone). Treading water for a moment or two, reestablishing breath, Julian still looks toward those islands. “I almost swam out to some wonderful small islands,” he will say to Lila. “The story of my life.”

Back on the beach he towels himself—more pleasure, the rough sun-warmed toweling on his lively awakened skin.

Suicide: this has always been an issue, a fact of Julian’s life, long before Karen and her perilous depressions. There was an uncle, and then a college friend. And an early patient, for whom Julian “did everything,” for whom nothing helped, who escaped from Presbyterian Hospital to the Golden Gate Bridge. And with Karen it is simply there, her possible death in that way, a horrifying constant, of which he does not any longer so much think as feel.

It was of course much worse, say ten years back, when both Karen’s drinking and her depressions began to get out of hand.

But he still feels, always, horribly, that he might come back to wherever Karen is, and find her dead. Or simply gone (that has happened a couple of times). He does not think of this in a conscious way anymore. Or, not often.

Nevertheless, he finds himself hurrying toward the wing of the hotel in which their rooms are. Up the flight of stairs to their suite, to the door. Unlocked.

Entering, he instantly knows that their rooms are empty, although still he calls out,
Karen
, several times, as he walks through the downstairs living room and small useless kitchen, the tiny bedroom in which he slept. He goes upstairs, hearing more silence, to the large room that was Karen’s, that looks out to the sea grass and dunes, the beach and the sea, the small
islands to which he almost swam. Had she looked out (unlikely somehow that she should have), Karen could have seen him there.

He looks at the unmade bed, the big floppy pillows, and sees a note, a large white sheet of paper, displayed there. (On other occasions Karen has chosen the unmarked exit, no explanatory notes in her wake. Lila: “Do you have any idea how incredibly inconsiderate, among other things, that is?”)

This note is fairly long, for someone who dislikes and on the whole distrusts the written word.

Entirely missing, Julian observes, is Karen’s usual unspoken threat, the suicide blackmail. She sounds, one could almost say, lighthearted. However, it is annoying, still, on some levels. Annoying and more: Roger is or has been (probably) a love of Karen’s, at least someone on whom she had a sort of crush. Also, Julian suspects that he is alcoholic. And usually broke.

Closer to the surface, there is the aborted plan for lunching in Portland. A tour of the new art museum, and the new waterfront development, both supposed to be handsome, innovative. But that excursion, Julian in a moment decides, is precisely what he will do. Portland by himself. Why not?

But first he will call and check on planes to San Francisco for tonight. With the time difference he can probably arrange to arrive fairly early in the evening.

He will go directly to Lila.

“I do wonder what we’ll do next, don’t you?” It is Julian who has said this, to Lila, on the morning after his return from Maine. But even as Lila smiles at his phrasing, at the implication of their being watchers rather than participants, in fact protagonists, she reflects that it could have been she herself who spoke. She too wonders what will be next, for them. However, she only murmurs (somewhat falsely), “Do we have to do anything?”

They are still in bed, Lila’s bed, in her fairly crowded bedroom (piles of books, too many clothes). Julian, still on Eastern time, Maine time, has awakened early, and Julian awake tends to be restive. Lila wishes that they could simply go back to sleep; this is surely not a moment for decisions, or plans.

This room, in the back of Lila’s small house, has views only of trees, and ferns, all at the moment dripping with fog, nothing visible but leaves and fronds and fog, as though the house itself were suspended in a forest, a California maze of redwoods, eucalyptus.

“If Karen decides to stay away this time, as I quite think she might,” now says Julian, very alert, “that will make a difference. With us. I mean, of course it will.”

“Of course,” echoes Lila.

At that, at her sleepy voice, he very gently laughs, reaching to touch her shoulder. He asks, “If I left now could you go back to sleep?”

“I doubt it.” She gives it a moment’s thought. “And I don’t really want you to go. I must not be feeling very intelligent.” (“Resistance,” some part of her mind labels what she is feeling.)

“On the other hand,” Julian persists, “Garrett’s going has not made a great deal of difference to us.”

“No.” Of course she cannot go back to sleep, and of course he has to go on talking.

“It’s odd how passive we both are,” Julian next says. “We’ve waited for them to act. For Garrett and Karen to leave us. Do
you think it’s because we’re the guilty parties? Or could it be connected to what we do?”

“The way we sit around listening all day, watching people? I suppose. Maybe.”

“Or, more likely our passive characters chose that profession in the first place?”

“Julian, would you like some breakfast?”

He kisses her, soundly but somewhat hastily. “As a matter of fact, I’m quite starved. My Maine appetite, along with the time.”

That cold and foggy California August is succeeded, as sometimes happens out there, by a warm and golden fall that lasts and lasts, until the dread word
drought
begins to be spoken in some quarters. Even November of that year is bright and soft, the nights just barely cool.

The predictions that Julian made on the morning after his return from Maine (the morning he couldn’t stop talking, is how Lila remembers it)—all that has turned out to be true: Karen, in the course of various phone calls, has announced that she does plan to spend at least the winter in Boston. Roger is almost always away somewhere; she can use his place in Water-town, so handy to Cambridge where she has friends. She is working in Braintree. Could Julian send a few clothes? Julian does send clothes, being more or less used to doing just that, but he does not go back there to see how she really is, as he used to do. He tells her that he believes they should have a more formal separation, and Karen says,
Why?
but she does not disagree.

And none of this with Karen has much effect on Lila and Julian, their private connection with each other. They are together rather more than before, but not as much as might under the circumstances be expected. Both are busy and often
tired at night, and they do live more or less at opposite ends of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Sometimes they go to the same parties, with mutual friends, other shrinks, some professors, their old mix—but then they always have. Lila Lewisohn and Julian Brownfield have always been known to be friends.

Garrett telephones to say that Phyllis is in therapy, and seems to be doing somewhat better. They have not had a dinner party for almost two months. He hopes that he and Lila will run into each other, at least. Somewhere.

An odd series of circumstances has increased Lila’s patient load: a colleague’s illness, a referral from a valued doctor friend. So Lila is working longer and harder than usual. And even when she is not actively with patients she finds her mind reverting to them, to their concerns, hardly ever to her own. Which was not always the case with her, she reflects. Some balances, she senses, have been shifted. And quite possibly high time that they should, she concludes.

On the whole she is fairly content with her life and her work, with Julian.

But she senses that he is not; he seems to push for change. She sometimes feels that he would welcome almost any change.

First he begins to argue that now, this year, he could go along on her annual January trip to Mexico.

And as soon as he has made this suggestion Lila knows that she really wants to go alone to Mexico, as she always has. She tries to explain. “I’m so used to thinking of it as time alone. You know? No patients or friends. No husband.”

“No lover,” Julian supplies, with a smile that indicates understanding, if not pleasure.

“No one I know,” Lila puts it, very much wishing that he had not brought this up.

“Sometimes I feel terribly odd,” Julian tells her, on a somewhat later occasion. “Much odder than usual, I mean. I feel inhabited by Karen, curiously. With you I sometimes feel as though I were Karen, and you were me. And I want to complain, as she did to me, that you only care for your patients.”

“And of course in a sense you’d be quite right, as she was,” Lila tells him, uneasily, for she has had the same sense of increased dependence on Julian’s part, which she is not at all sure that she likes.

They are seated during this particular conversation in Lila’s kitchen, where Julian is making dinner. It has been established between them that Julian likes cooking more than Lila does, possibly because he has done somewhat less of it, in his masculine life. In any case, salmon steaks and polenta, with an interesting salad.

Watching him, his long clever hands and worried eyes, his tired face, Lila has then a curious vision, which is of Julian with another woman. Someone younger, more beautiful and more needful than she, Lila, is (not so needful as Karen though, and not alcoholic). Lila sees this clearly, although she knows that Julian loves her very much.

Yes, she thinks, Julian will fall in love with this other woman, who needs his care, Julian the caretaker, the generous protector.

Lila wonders next, of course, just what will happen to her, along those lines. Another love affair, or affairs—or, could she possibly marry again?

And she smiles, having realized that as to her own future she has not the slightest idea.

There they are, lying just apart on pink-striped plastic mattresses: Julian Brownfield, a lean, tanned, fiftyish Marin County psychiatrist, and Helen Eustis, a trim, tennis-playing mother of four, a barely gray California blond. Helen is Julian’s very new lady friend, and they have traveled together to this smooth white Mexican beach that curves beautifully around a bay of glittering blue-green water. In front of Helen and Julian, then, is white sand and the sea, behind them the very snazzy new German-built and -owned resort in which they are staying, the Margarita, which is mostly pink, whirls and curlicues of pink stucco, and vast areas of glass (unusual, so much glass in Mexico; these huge panes were imported from Germany). Each guest room has its own small patio, with flowers, and each room faces out to the sea, as Julian and Helen are facing out now, from their plastic.

A few yards behind the Margarita the jungle begins to rise, thick and mysterious, a rich, impenetrable mass of greens, every possible shade of green. Mountains of jungle, the start of a range that extends far north of this resort, almost all the way to Mexico City.