The Last Lovely City (21 page)

Walking along the beach, as he begins that afternoon to force himself to do, he observes that the jungle hills are at their lowest just behind his hotel. Farther along, small overgrown ridges rise up from the edge of the beach, a tamed area of jungle. There are even a few small houses and civilized paths. Palm trees, climbing bougainvillea, in marvelous shades of pink-red-purple.

If Lila would “take him back” he would be instantly all right, thinks Julian the patient.

If they could be lovers again, he and Lila, he would be okay, or nearly, thinks almost totally irrational, almost helpless Julian.

All of which wise Julian the therapist knows to be untrue.

The calves of his legs have begun to ache from trudging through the sand, and so Julian heads down to the edge of the water—where, he observes, looking downward, the small waves have left lovely and complicated patterns, curves upon curves, on the dark wet packed sand. Ridiculous sandpipers run along there, rushing suddenly inland, as though they had never seen a wave before.

That night from the bar and later from his solitary room Julian can see strings of lights from a cruise ship anchored out there in the harbor: false glamour on false masts, thinks Julian, sourly. Love boats.

And the next day, as despite sore legs he forces himself to walk again, the beach is all taken up, crowded with what must be people from that boat, in their bright cruise clothes, their Frisbees and cameras.

To avoid those crowds, he begins to walk at the upper edge of the beach, the jungle edge, except that he has come to a place that is relatively cultivated, bougainvillea streaming in vines and bursts of bloom, and a path that leads upward. A path that on a random impulse Julian takes, and climbs. Although it is not very steep he is forced to stop several times to breathe, as he thinks, I’m not in the greatest shape, I’m really not.

But each step affords a new view, immediately of flowers and hummingbirds, and butterflies, small and yellow among the
profusion of petals—and, farther out, a new glimpse of the sea, just now in all its brilliant midday glitter. Then as he climbs on, a giant clump of coconut palms obscures his view, waving thick green fronds, gray trunks that very slightly sway in a fresh new morning breeze.

At the top, the first structure that Julian sees is a sort of wooden platform, over at the farther edge of this small cliff. A platform whose sides are roped off from the precipice. A place that Julian has heard described by Lila. Quite clearly he hears her voice as she tells him, as she has told him, “The bar is quite wonderful, although I don’t spend a lot of time there. It’s very glamorous; you look down at the sea and the sand through all those palm trees.”

And he hears himself: “Couldn’t I come down there with you? Or if not with, at the same time you go?” Pleadingly.

“But that would be with, Julian darling.” And her laugh.

Magically, as in a fairy tale, he has come to Lila’s place—and how very beautiful it is. Just as she said. How very unlike where Julian has been, the low-down swamp-level Margarita. Straightening up, standing as tall as he can, Julian breathes the new air. The higher, clearer air. Although the thirty or forty feet that he judges the bluff to be should not make a difference in the air, it does.

Closing his eyes for a minute, Julian thinks that if this were indeed a fairy story, Lila would at this moment magically appear. Lila, forgiving all. Recalled to love, magically.

Opening his eyes Julian sees, of course, no one. No one whatsoever. In a desultory way he begins to walk about, over toward the bar and then toward a blue plaster structure: steps, pillars, a porch open to some very large rooms beyond. All quite deserted, and Julian sees then that no one has been around for quite a while, that Lila’s retreat is now defunct, in the process of being swallowed by the jungle. Heavy encroaching vines are
now in charge. Vines have almost closed off windows and pulled down a corner of the roof. A deserted place, dead. But as Julian thinks that,
dead
, he sees a tiny quick bright lizard flash across the blue plaster and vanish into a crack.

This is something to telephone Lila about, Julian boyishly, idiotically thinks. An excuse to call her.

“Oh yes,” says the youthful German owner-manager of the Margarita, that night at the bar. “Once a place possessed of a certain charm. Quaint.” Hugo is proud of his English, learned at Stanford. “First built by Mexicans, and, you know how that goes. And then owned by certain not-attractive compatriots of my own. There were scandals concerning certain contraband substances. And then a charming Mexican fellow managed to buy them out, quite competent as an owner, I believe. But a Swedish wife who made perpetual trouble. As a combination impossible, a Mexican and a Swedish. Imagine yourself. In any case as you see now quite finished. An eyesore you might say.”

Julian, who has put in a call to Lila, in San Francisco, has found the sheer length of this spiel quite intolerable. He stares at the wall phone, that small black instrument of torture. His enemy. The perfect objective correlative for his angst. Already it has rung twice, loud sudden bursts to which Hugo has responded in shouted German—for so long! so that now, as Hugo goes on and on with his gossip, Julian stares malevolently, hopelessly at the black plastic shape, until it distorts, becoming a giant spider on the wall.

It has occurred to Julian, too, that all that he will have to say to Lila will necessarily be also for the large ears of Hugo, and he imagines how Hugo later can tell the story: the crazy man who came there, an American, a
psychiatrist
(all the funnier, everyone
knows that shrinks are very funny). The crazy man who came there with a woman whom he then sent away, although she was a blond and quite attractive, for her age.

But what then? How will the story finish off? Julian has no clear idea, none at all, about what to say to Lila. About what to do.

“Although there is a rumor that a certain relative of Señor de la Madrid has an interest in that location,” Hugo more or less winds up, and then is mercifully summoned to the kitchen by a beckoning waiter.

At which moment the phone begins to ring, shrill and far more loudly than before. Or so it seems to Julian.

Anxious, in fact desperate to stop that sound, though once more certain that the call will not be his, Julian picks up the receiver, into which he says, “Hello.” He can hear a lot of indistinguishable background noise.

A high-pitched voice comes on, speaking in Spanish, of which Julian understands very little. He is about to call out for Hugo when he clearly makes out the words, “Estados Unidos” and then, “San Francisco.” As loudly and clearly as he can he shouts into the receiver, “Sí! Sí … Sí!”

A silence follows, broken only by various small mechanical sounds, all to Julian ominous.

But then there is the very distinct ringing of a phone, Lila’s phone (it must be Lila’s) in the house in San Francisco. An empty house; it has that sound, and Julian’s heart too feels empty, vacant, hollowed out.

Then: “This is Dr. Lewisohn. I will be in my office tomorrow at 8:30. If you wish me to call you before that, please leave your name and telephone number.”

Beep.

With no idea whatsoever what to say—he had not thought of her answering machine as a possibility—Julian starts in anyway. “Lila it’s me. I’m in Mexico. I think I’ve been sick. I mean a
depression. Crisis time. What I told you wasn’t exactly true; I’m here by myself. I’ll explain all that but it’s not important. And I think I must have come here looking for you, but it’s not the right place, and I think I found your place, but it looks all closed. This place is horrible; it’s called the Margarita. Lila, just talking to you, you can’t imagine—” Out of breath, and afraid that his voice will break, Julian pauses, and then hears again, Beep.

He considers placing another call, but what would he say? Does she need to hear further explanations? “I was with someone here, a perfectly nice woman, just an awful mistake. In fact horrible white nights and a couple of terrible days that wouldn’t end. So she left. I’m trying to treat myself for a bad depression and in a way I think I’m doing fairly well.” Not exactly a message to place between beeps, even assuming that he could get her number again. The answering machine of Dr. Lewisohn.

“How very fortunate to have after all a call that comes through. So often not the case,” pronounces Hugo, returned to Julian’s side at the bar. How long had he been there? Heard how much? Julian has no idea. “Mexicans,” Hugo continues. “A lovely people, very gentle, but not gifted in things mechanical.”

“I think I’ll go along to bed now,” Julian tells him.

It is only when he is lying in bed and wondering if he will ever sleep that Julian remembers that he has skipped dinner. He did not even think of dinner.

An hour or so later he is wrestling with the idea of a sleeping pill. On general principles he resists, when he can. However, a 15
Dalmane would at least give him a couple of hours, and probably spare him several hours of this ghastly wakefulness.

With Helen, Julian took breakfast in his room, their room. But today, as though to emphasize his new status as a person alone, he orders coffee and rolls in the bar (where the telephone is).

A strange day. The sky is a curious yellow, hazed over, but the lifeless air is still extremely hot, and no breeze disturbs the green glass Pacific. Despite this uninviting weather the beach looks more crowded than usual, even—not with love-boat tourists in their terrible bright clothes but with Mexican families, dark plump young mothers and round brown babies, thin strutting young men and boys, now in full possession. They have now reclaimed the land for their own, as it surely should be—as the vines and flowers have reclaimed the place that used to be Lila’s private resort. Still semidrugged, romantically Julian thinks, Ah, good.

“Sunday,” Hugo sighs, on his way through the bar, having uninvitedly paused at Julian’s table. “They come like flies, all the villagers. As though the beach were theirs.”

“Well isn’t it, really?”

Hugo frowns. “Well in a strange quite antediluvian way you are correct. The rights of Indians. Property laws, quite obscure but on occasion still invoked.” He sighs again, and even more hatefully asks, “You again await a phone call?”

“More or less.”

By noon, though, after several hot and distractingly noisy hours, on his single mattress, Julian is not at all certain just what it is that he waits for. He has begun to suspect that it is the arrival of Lila herself that in some part of his disordered mind he anticipates. She must know how he needs her!

At each sound of traffic, of taxi horns, slammed car doors, Julian imagines that it is in fact Lila, simply there, and he thinks, If she would just
arrive
we could simply be here together. Swim and take walks, for a while not talk. Perhaps eventually make love.

However, disturbed as he is, “not himself,” Julian is able to recognize the impossibility of this particular fantasy, to see how unlikely that Lila, having heard his confused and very partial “explanation” on her answering machine (her
machine
, for God’s sake) would pack up and take off for Mexico. As though he were sick, a patient who had to be rescued.

It is utterly out of the question for Lila to just show up, he thinks. But how I long for her to do so.

And there he is on the beach, on his pink-striped mattress. Pinioned there by his own crazy expectations. This must be one of the ways in which women suffer, Julian thinks. This terrible waiting for phone calls, or arrivals. This desperate passivity. How do they stand it? he wonders.

He forces himself to walk down at least to the edge of the water (where Hugo could easily see him) and then to walk for a while along the sand.

Viewed from close up, the Mexican families do not look so round and smiley as earlier he had imagined. They look like very poor people out for a brief and rather meager excursion, on someone else’s beach. Hugo’s beach.

In a more just world, thinks Julian, returning from a longer walk than he intended—he managed to force himself along—he should now be rewarded by at least some sign from Lila; if not herself, then a telephone message, a cable. Fax. Whatever people send these days.

And indeed as he approaches the bar he sees Hugo there, gesturing in his direction. Julian hurries toward him.

But, “I have just to receive a cancellation,” Hugo tells him, eagerly. “And I thought perhaps you prolong your stay? A week more?”

“Oh Christ. I mean no. No thanks.”

Going to the bar, Julian desperately orders a margarita.

He should, he thinks, make plans to fly home tomorrow. However, since he arranged (before this lunatic trip) to see no patients for another week, that means seven days alone in Mill Valley. Trying to pull himself together and get some sleep. Trying not to jump off the bridge. Trying not to call Lila.

He stares with horror at the plastic birds-of-paradise on the bar, and at the fat blond couple from Texas who are necking in a darkened corner of the room.

Sipping at his very strong, sweet drink, though, Julian notes that it is making him feel the very slightest shade better. It might even be possible to eat some dinner, later on, and to tell Hugo to telephone about his tickets. But the face he sees, his own, reflected in the mirror above the bar looks seriously disordered. Pale, unbalanced: the clinician within him makes that judgment.