To See You Again (10 page)

Looking up at him, Claire sees that he is especially drawn to her at that moment (he likes women who cry?); and his kindness and empathy so move her that she is afraid of losing control. If she begins to cry seriously he will touch her, one thing will lead to another, and the last thing she needs, just then, is an affair with Dan Breckenridge. And so, with all the sobriety that she can muster, she gets up and says she’s sorry she’s so tired, the dinner was terrific—thanks.

Customarily, although affectionate in a verbal way with
each other, Claire and Dan are not physically so; they almost never touch, and they do not do so now. They do not kiss good night after Dan has walked with her the two blocks from his house to hers, in the cool, very clear starred night. But at her door, he gives her a longer, more serious look than usual.

Can she have fallen in love with Dan? That is what some of the symptoms with which Claire wakes up the following morning suggest: a nervous lassitude, some fear of the oncoming day. However, she gets up and drinks a lot of tea; she concludes that she has a slight hangover; and she tries to get to work.

Around noon Dan telephones. That is not a usual time for him to call, and at first Claire thinks, Oh, I must have sounded terrible last night, and worried him.

He asks how things are going, and she tells him that, curiously enough, they seem to be going a little better. She is getting somewhere, at last, with whatever the problem was.

And then, in an odd, abrupt way, Dan says, “Well, how about tonight? Can we see each other?”

“Uh, sure. I’m not doing anything. Should I cook?”

“No, don’t be silly. You’re working. I want to take you out. Let’s drive to Sausalito, okay?”

“Well, sure.”

Claire hangs up, more puzzled than she is pleased. Nervous, apprehensive. She even thinks of calling Susan; she can hear herself saying, “Well honestly, now I’ve done something really dumb, I think. I’ve fallen in love with an old friend, Dan Breckenridge, and I think he feels that way too. And he’s just my type, mean and selfish and elusive.”

And Susan will laugh and say, “Well honestly, that’s really too bad.”

It is true, though, that she has begun to feel considerably better. After Dan’s call she goes into the kitchen and heats up a can of tomato soup, with a lot of Parmesan, for nourishment. And she makes more tea.

Back at her desk, the beautiful bright familiar view is reassuring; this is, after all, where she has chosen to live—at the moment it seems a good choice.

However, instead of finally getting down to work on the serious article that is her assignment, in a dreamlike way Claire sits back in her chair, and she begins, rather, to recall the particularities of her trip. She remembers certain accents, heard on streets, in restaurants, in Atlanta and Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans—and gestures observed, both unique and indigenous to that region. And she sees again the colors of earth and leaves which, at certain times of the year, in a certain place, are absolutely unmistakable.

Yvonne Soulas, the art historian, is much more beautiful in her late sixties than she was when she was young, and this is strange, because she has had much trouble in her life, including pancreatic cancer, through which she lived when no one expected her to. Neither her doctor nor her husband, Matthew Vann, the musicologist-manufacturer, thought she would make it, such a small, thin woman. Make it she did, however, although she lost much of her hair in the process of treatment. Now, seated with Matthew on the porch of an inn on the northern California coast, her fine, precise features framed in skillfully arranged false white waves, she is a lovely woman. In the cool spring night she is wearing soft pale woolen clothes, a shawl and Italian boots, daintily stitched.

Matthew Vann is also a handsome person, with silky white hair and impressive dark eyes, and he, too, wears elegant clothes. His posture is distinguished. Yvonne has never taken his name, not for feminist reasons but because she thinks the combination is unaesthetic: Yvonne Vann? Matthew looks and is considerably more fragile than Yvonne, although they are about the same age: that is to say, among
other things, of an age to wonder which of them will outlive the other. The question is impossible, inadmissible and crucially important. Matthew is frailer, but then Yvonne’s illness could recur at any time.

They have been married for a little over thirty years, and they live, these days, in San Francisco, having decided that the rigors of New England winters and the overstimulation of Cambridge social life were, in combination, far too much for them. Trips to Europe, also, formerly a source of much pleasure, now seem, really, more strenuous than fun. And so Yvonne and Matthew have taken to exploring certain areas of California, beginning with the near at hand: Yosemite, Lake Tahoe and now this extraordinarily beautiful stretch of coast at Mendocino, where rivers empty into the sea between sheer cliffs of rock.

They are sitting at the far end of the white railed porch that runs the length of the building in which they are lodging. They have had an early dinner, hoping for quiet, and they are tired from a day of exploring the town and the meadows high above the vibrating sea. The other guests are almost all golfing people, since there is a course adjacent to the inn. They are people in late middle age, a little younger than Yvonne and Matthew, mostly overweight, tending to noise and heavy smoking and excessive drink. Not pleasant dinner companions. And Yvonne and Matthew were successful: they finished a quiet dinner of excellent abalone before the boisterous arrival of the golfing group. There was only one other couple in the dining room. That other couple had also been distinctly not a part of the golfing group, and they were as striking, in their way, as Yvonne and Matthew were in theirs. Yvonne had been unable not to stare at them—the girl so young and perfectly controlled in all her gestures, the man much older than the girl, so clearly and happily in love with her. It won’t end well, Yvonne had thought.

Everything is fine as they sit now on the porch. This place to which they have come is very beautiful. The walks through wild flowers and the views back to the river mouth, the beaches, the opposite banks of green are all marvelous. Everything is fine, except for a nagging area of trouble that has just lodged itself somewhere near Yvonne’s heart. But the trouble is quite irrational, and she is an eminently sensible woman, and so she pushes it aside and begins a conversation with Matthew about something else.

“A thing that I like about being old,” she observes to him, at the same time as she reflects that many of their conversations have had just this beginning, “is that you go on trips for their own sake, just to see something. Not expecting the trip to change your life.” Not hoping that the man you are with will want to marry you, she is thinking to herself, or that Italy will cure your husband of a girl.

“Ye-e-es,” drawls Matthew, in his vague New Hampshire way. But he is a good listener; he very much enjoys her conversation. “Yvonne is the least boring person in the world,” he has often said—if not to her, to a great many other people.

“When you’re young, you really don’t see much beyond yourself,” Yvonne muses.

Then, perhaps at having spoken the word “young,” thinking of young people, of herself much younger, the trouble increases. It becomes an active heavy pressure on her heart, so that she closes her eyes for a moment. Then she opens them, facing it, admitting to herself: That girl in the dining room reminded me of Susanna, in Cambridge, almost thirty years ago. Not long after we were married, which of course made it worse.

  •  •  •

What happened was this:

In the late Forties, in Cambridge, Yvonne was viewed as a smart, attractive but not really pretty French woman. A widow? Divorced? No one knew for sure. She had heavy dark hair, a husky voice and a way of starting sentences with an “Ah!” that sounded like a tiny bark. Some people were surprised to find her married to Matthew Vann, a glamorous man, admired for having fought in Spain as well as for his great good looks, a man as distinguished as he was rich. Then a beautiful young Radcliffe girl who wanted to become a dancer, and for all anyone knew eventually became one—a golden California girl, Susanna—fell in love with Matthew, and he with her. But Yvonne wouldn’t let him go, and so nothing came of it. That was all.

Thus went the story that circulated like a lively winter germ through the areas of Cambridge adjacent to Harvard Square, up and down Brattle Street, Linnaean, Garden Street and Massachusetts Avenue, and finally over to Hillside Place, where Yvonne and Matthew then were living.

But that is not, exactly, how it was. It went more like this:

“You won’t believe me, but I think a very young girl has fallen in love with me,” Matthew said to Yvonne one night, near the end of their dinner of
lapin au moutarde
, a specialty of Yvonne’s which she always thenceforward connected unpleasantly with that night, although she continued to make it from time to time. (Silly not to, really.) Then Matthew laughed, a little awkward, embarrassed. “It does seem unlikely.”

“Not at all.” Yvonne’s tone was light, the words automatic. Her accent was still very French. “You are a most handsome man,” she said.

“You might remember her. We met her at the Emorys’. Susanna something, from California. I’ve kept seeing her in
Widener, and now she says she wants to help me with my research.” He laughed, more embarrassed yet.

Yvonne experienced a wave of fury, which she quickly brought under control, breathing regularly and taking a small sip of wine. Of course she remembered the girl: long dark-gold hair and sunny, tawny skin; bad clothes, but not needing good clothes with that long lovely neck; a stiff, rather self-conscious dancer’s walk; lovely long hands, beautifully controlled. Anyone would fall in love with her.

In those days, while Yvonne did her own work at the Fogg, Matthew was combining supervision of the factory he had inherited, in Waltham, with the musicologist’s career that he had chosen. The research he had mentioned was for his book on Boccherini, for which they would later spend a year in Italy. They had married after a wildly passionate affair, during which Yvonne had managed to wrest Matthew away from poor Flossie, his alcoholic first wife, now long since dead in Tennessee.

And, thinking over the problem of Susanna, one thing that Yvonne said silently to her rival was: You can’t have him; I’ve already been through too much for Matthew. Also, in her exceptionally clearheaded way, Yvonne
knew
Matthew, in a way that violent love can sometimes preclude. She knew that he would not take Susanna to bed unless he had decided to break with Yvonne—this out of a strong and somewhat aberrant New England sense of honor, and also out of sexual shyness, unusual in so handsome, so sensual a man. Yvonne herself had had to resort to a kind of seduction by force. But a young, proud girl could not know of such tactics.

Yvonne was right. Matthew did not have an affair with Susanna; he probably never saw her outside of Widener, except for an intense cup of coffee at Hayes-Bickford, where they were noticed together. However, Matthew suffered severely,
and that was how Yvonne treated him—like someone with a serious disease. She was affectionate and solicitous, and very slightly distant, as though his illness were something that she didn’t want to catch.

One March evening, after a bright, harsh day of intermittent sun, rain and wind, Matthew came home for dinner a little late, with a look on his face of total and anguished exhaustion. Handing him his gin—they were in the kitchen; she had been tasting her good lamb stew, a
navarin
—Yvonne thought, Ah, the girl has broken it off, or has given him an ultimatum; such a mistake. She thought, I hope I won’t have to hear about it.

All Matthew said during dinner was “The Boccherini project is sort of getting me down. My ideas don’t come together.”

“Poor darling,” she said carefully, alertly watching his face.

“I should spend more time at the factory.”

“Well, why don’t you?”

As they settled in the living room for coffee, Yvonne saw that his face had relaxed a little. Perhaps now he would want to talk to her? She said, “There’s a Fred Astaire revival at the U.T. tonight. I know you don’t like them, but would you mind if I go? Ah, dear, it’s almost time.”

Not saying: You unspeakable fool, how dare you put me through all this? Are you really worth it?

Alone in the crowded balcony of the University Theatre, as on the screen Fred and Ginger sang to each other about how lovely a day it was to be caught in the rain, Yvonne thought, for a moment, that she would after all go home and tell Matthew to go to his girl, Susanna. She would release him, with as little guilt as possible, since she was indeed fond of Matthew.
Je tiens à Matthew
.

Tenir à
. I hold to Matthew, Yvonne thought then. And
she also thought, No, it would not work out well at all. Matthew is much too vulnerable for a girl like that. He is better off with me.

Of course she was right, as Matthew himself must have come to realize, and over the summer he seemed to recover from his affliction. Yvonne saw his recovery, but she also understood that she had been seriously wounded by that episode, coming as it did so early in their life together. Afterward she was able to think more sensibly, Well, much better early than later on, when he could have felt more free.

That fall they left for Italy, where, curiously, neither of them had been before—Yvonne because her Anglophile parents had always taken her to the Devon coast on holidays, or sometimes to Scotland, Matthew because with drunken Flossie any travel was impossible.

They settled in a small hotel in Rome, in a large romantically alcoved room that overlooked the Borghese Gardens. They went on trips: north to Orvieto, Todi, Spoleto, Gubbio; south to Salerno, Positano, Ravello. They were dazed, dizzy with pleasure at the landscape, the vistas of olive orchards, of pines and flowers and stones, the ancient buildings, the paintings and statuary. The food and wine. They shared a mania for pasta.