Till We Meet Again (82 page)

“Give me a kiss, Swede.”

“Your big toes look pretty good to me.”

“I knew you’d find a place.”

Eve persuaded Freddy to take Annie out of school early, so that she could fly back to Europe with her granddaughter, and leave her with Tony in London, before she continued to Paris. Eve was badly needed back in Champagne, where the full cycle of hospitality couldn’t properly begin without her. She had already spent far too much time away from Valmont.

Jock drove them to the airport to catch the plane for New York. While Annie explored the airport as they waited for their plane to board, Jock sat morosely with Eve, reluctant to see her go.

“Damn it, Eve, I’m going to really miss the hell out of you,” he said, grabbing her hand and squeezing it.

“Darling Jock. All those dinners, all those movies, those weekend drives—what would Annie and I have done without you? You never let us feel alone for a minute. You’re the most wonderful friend. You have a permanent invitation to come and stay with us in Champagne for as long as you like, whenever you like.”

“Maybe someday. Eve, listen, about Freddy—”

“I tried, Jock, you know I did, several times, but she just doesn’t want to see you. I thought … possibly she’s waiting until she looks better. Maybe it’s just vanity.”

“How vain is Freddy? Come on, Eve, you know that couldn’t have anything to do with it.” Jock’s insubordinate features were set in a mask of hopeless misery.

“You’re probably right,” Eve sighed. “But she wouldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t pry a single reason from her. Freddy doesn’t tell me about a lot of things, we never had that sort of relationship … both of my daughters always kept a lot of secrets. And I … well, I had my secrets too. We’re that kind of family. Now, with Delphine, it’s different—we talk to
each other a lot—but Freddy—” Eve shrugged her shoulders. Freddy, even in her wounded, weakened state, wasn’t one to confide in her mother.

“That bastard Weitz, I know he’s going to try and make time with her,” Jock said in gloomy suspicion. Even the golden hair that fell over his forehead seemed to have darkened with his mood of despair.

“Jock, really! Aren’t you letting your imagination run away with you? Poor Freddy’s hardly an object of desire at the moment.”

“You’re her mother, you can’t understand about Freddy. It’s her … her
spirit
 … that’s what he’ll go for.”

“Freddy is Doctor Weitz’s patient. His interest is in making her well. Doctors don’t ‘make time’ with every female patient in their care.”

“She’s different from every female. She always was. No other girl ever came close.”

“I won’t argue that with you, Jock. Look, once she’s out of the hospital, once you can talk to her, things between the two of you can change. But whatever the problem is, you can’t do anything about it now. Give it time.”

“Do I have a choice?” he asked, resting his forehead on his hands and shaking his head.

No, thought Eve, no choice at all. Somehow you must have hurt her terribly, Jock, loving, generous, inarticulate, bumbling male creature that you are, without knowing what you were doing. Freddy gives her love so completely, so blindly, so unyieldingly and so
rarely
—but once she’s cast you out of her life, there isn’t much hope. Look at what happened to Tony. She’d never said a word about him. Just like that man McGuire—it’s as if they’d both ceased to exist … had never existed. Eve looked at Jock sitting in a puddle of misery beside her and decided that her beloved, intractable, pigheaded daughter Marie-Frédérique must be certifiable as legally insane. If any man as throughly kind and decent as Jock, any man so disruptively—so almost ridiculously—good to look at had been in love with her for as long as she suspected that Jock had been in love with Freddy, she’d certainly give him a chance, no matter what he’d done. At the very least,
one
stingy, penurious chance. Why not make it a dozen? What was there to lose?

There could be no question that she looked all right now, Freddy admitted, looking in her hand mirror on an afternoon at the end of August. Except for one long, thin white scar that reached from her ear almost to the point of her chin, a scar that would never be hidden by makeup or suntan or an artful arrangement of her hair—she recognized herself. Her physical therapy at the hospital consumed most of her days. She could walk without a trace of a limp; her muscles had regained their former strength.

Why was she still in the hospital? She had no right to be taking up a bed in a private room, when there must be really sick people who needed it. Yet the thought of going home, to a big, lonely house, empty except for Helga and the maid, was chilling, frightening. Her parents had asked her to come to Valmont for the grape harvest. Delphine had invited her to come to St. Tropez, where she and Armand had bought a villa in which they would remain until October.

Even as she thought of these possibilities, Freddy shrank inside herself. She couldn’t possibly venture as far as from her room to the lobby of the hospital, much less travel to Europe. Perhaps Annie could stay in England for the rest of the year. Yes, a year of school in England would be good for her, and she was perfectly happy with Penelope and Gerald and Tony. That way, Freddy thought, she wouldn’t have to leave the hospital; she wouldn’t have to leave her room.

She was safe here at Cedars. There was so hideously little safety in the world. Didn’t Delphine and her mother realize that? Weren’t they aware enough to understand danger? How could they expect her to visit them as if they lived around the corner? Didn’t they know, as she did, that a person
had
to stay in a small, familiar space, a safe space where there were no responsibilities, no decisions, no worries, no terrors, no risks, no surprises? From her room to the physical therapy center of the hospital was as long a journey as she could force herself to take, and it was only the certainty that she could return to her safe room, to the safe hospital bed, that enabled her to make the trip down the long, busy hall and up and down the stairs. She hadn’t used the elevator … she didn’t want to take it … she would never take it, no matter how the stairs tired her … it was a bad place to be … a bad and evil place.

“How are you feeling today, Mrs. Longbridge?” the head
floor nurse asked as she came into the room. “My, don’t you look lovely!”

“I feel terrible,” Freddy said. “I hurt all over. I don’t know why I feel so bad. I won’t have any dinner tonight, Mrs. Hill, I don’t have the strength to eat it.”

“I hear you’ve had a bad day,” David Weitz said quietly. “No dinner?”

“Everything hurts,” Freddy mumbled, curled up in her bed with the sheet drawn up to her chin.

“Absolutely everything? From head to toe?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to give you two aspirin and take you out for a drive. It’s the only known specific when everything hurts.”

“No!”

“You don’t want to leave the hospital, do you, Freddy?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Aha! The sure sign of a well patient. The minute you tell your doctor he’s ridiculous, you’re ready to leave this place. No doctor has ever been ridiculous in a hospital. It’s against all rules. I’ll give you five minutes to get dressed. We’re going to the beach to see the sunset.”

“I can’t. I won’t. I couldn’t possibly put on my clothes. I feel too bad.”

“Five minutes. Or you’ll go in your nightgown and bathrobe.”

“Don’t you have anything better to do than to torment me?”

“Not right now.”

“Shit!”

“You don’t even need aspirin. Five minutes and counting.”

“The lady will have chicken soup on the rocks and I’ll have a vodka martini straight up,” David told the barman at Jack’s at the Beach, as they settled on the barstools facing the sunset.

“Make that two martinis,” Freddy countered. “And make mine a double.”

“My mother says chicken soup,” David protested.

“Her son says I’m well enough to leave the hospital. Did your mother go to medical school?”

“All Jewish mothers are automatically qualified to practice
medicine, even if their sons aren’t doctors. Even if they only have daughters.”

“I can drink liquor, can’t I? It’s not bad for me, is it? Your opinion, not your mother’s.”

“Of course. You can do everything you did before the accident.”

“I was lucky, wasn’t I?” she said soberly.

“Damn lucky.”

“I still don’t remember what happened.”

“That’s typical. A memory loss of the actual event often goes with a closed head injury. It may come back, or it may not. You can’t control it.”

Freddy was silent, looking straight through the enormous plate-glass window, where two men were busy lowering a sheet of thin gray plastic to dim the too-bright rays of the setting sun, as they did every night in this famous seafood restaurant on the pier. At the left of the restaurant, in the distance, was an amusement park with an old roller coaster. She realized that she could clearly pick out the people holding on to the bars in front of their seats. There had been no diminution of her vision. She lowered her eyes quickly. Seeing that far and that distinctly had made her violently nervous. Freddy turned to David Weitz and started to look at him as intensely as he had been looking at her for all these months. Turn about was fair play. Dark hair, well cut, with one or two strands of gray; deep lines on either side of his mouth; a long distinguished face with something in it of a sad clown that disappeared entirely when he smiled, a wide, full mouth, professorial horn-rimmed glasses. She had never seen him without them.

“Do you wear those glasses all the time?” she asked.

“Only when I want to see. If I remember, I usually take them off in the shower, once I’ve located the soap.”

“I don’t know anything about you, except that the nurses think you’re God, which is par for the course, I guess.”

“They tend to exaggerate. Well … only a little.”

“And what does God do when he’s not working?”

“I’m unpredictable, complex, tightly wound, and mysteriously contradictory. Quite fascinating actually. I’m an ex-football player—voted most valuable quarterback in the Ivy League. I’m also a chess master. My hobby is polo and my string of ponies are summering in Argentina. I get my suits made to order on Savile Row and I have a serious collection
of first-growth Burgundies in my air-conditioned wine cellar. I visit them from time to time so they won’t feel neglected. I always read three pages of Sartre in French before I go to sleep, and I can recite from memory the complete works of Tolstoy, the
Kama Sutra
, Jane Austen and Henry Miller.”

“Hmm.”

“Actually I
was
a chess player … in high school. However, I’ve been known to play a fair game of Ping-Pong.”

“What did you do during the war?”

“Medical Corps. Never got overseas.”

“What do you do in your free time?”

“I have a house in Brentwood and I usually stay home when I get a chance. I read a little, listen to music a little, sometimes, on the weekend I might drive out here and walk on the beach, I see a few old friends, I have a few dates-restaurants, movies—mostly I work.”

“If you’re trying to make it sound dull, you haven’t.”

“Compared to what I’ve heard of your life, it sounds about as unadventurous and stodgy as a life can be—however, medicine is never dull, and that’s what I do.”

“Saving a patient every day?”

“Not quite, but it has its moments. What can I tell you?”

“You have. I’m starving.” Freddy preened slightly, knowing that in her high-waisted, full lavender skirt and low-cut, white linen peasant blouse that Eve had hung in her closet before she left, she looked better than she had in many months.

“The specialty here is pompano baked in oiled paper, but I’m in the mood for a steamed lobster. Shall I ask the barman for a menu for you?”

“Lobster too, please,” Freddy said, feeling pleased with herself. Doctors always knew everything about you, and you never knew anything about them, so you were always at a disadvantage. Finally, she thought, she had a few more details about David Weitz. She already knew so many of the important things: his kindness, his patience, his sensitivity to his patients which amounted to a degree of extrasensory perception, and his passion for his work. Now she could imagine him in a tree-shaded, cozy Brentwood house reading a book or walking in the sand at the edge of the waves, barefoot, with his pants legs rolled up. With his glasses on, of course, so he wouldn’t get lost or fall over a starfish.

When their lobsters were ready they moved to a table and
submitted to being enveloped in the large bib that every lobster customer was given whether he asked for it or not. The enormous, two-clawed Maine lobsters—lobsters, Freddy noted to herself, with no interest whatever, that had probably made their cross-country trip courtesy of Eagles—occupied their attention.

It is not possible to eat a lobster with another person with whom you do not feel comfortable, unless you’re willing to settle fastidiously and wastefully for the mere center strips of easily extracted meat, and have no interest in the claws and the legs and all the little nooks and crannies that contain the most delicious morsels. This was Freddy’s first lobster in almost a year, and she set about it with total concentration, using the shell crackers, the long, skinny, pointed fork, and, when all else failed, her fingers and her teeth. Twice she asked for more melted butter, but otherwise she had little to say except “Please pass the lemon.”