To See You Again (6 page)

Nicholas emerges from the bathroom, looking pale and sober. He takes his leave.

The party, then, from every point of view, has been a failure, neither the loud disaster that Hope and Josiah had envisioned, nor, in anyone else’s terms, a pleasant party. Although just possibly some of the dancers had a better time than they were supposed to.

And although nothing terrible has happened to Clover, except her unhappy perception of her friends, she is suddenly
afflicted with the severest, most terrible cold wave of loneliness, pervasive, penetrating. She almost thinks of chasing after Nicholas, who also looked lonely. The idea of going home alone is quite unbearable, and how can she bear the rest of her life?

Nevertheless, she does go home alone; very soberly she drives across the black night city to her solitary flat on Leavenworth Street.

As she lets herself in and then double-locks the door behind her, the phone begins to ring. She imagines that it must be Josiah, who has sometimes called to go over a party with her—again. And just now not wanting such a conversation, Clover almost does not answer, but then, out of old habit, she does answer, and it is not Josiah but Gregory.

“I do apologize to call so late,” he says. “But my party was so borrrring, and I thought perhaps to save the evening with a small brandy with you, that I bring to your house?”

“Oh Gregory, that’s the best idea I’ve heard for months.”

Hope and Josiah sit in their scarcely furnished living room; the windows still are bare, everywhere exposing the room and its occupants to the windy black night, and the groaning sound of foghorns from the bay.

“Clover is getting to be less and less of a good party person, don’t you think?” asks Hope, in a tentative way.

“She’s becoming very tiresome,” Josiah says, decisively. “I do hope the poor thing doesn’t imagine that not drinking is fashionable.”

“About as fashionable as that dress she wore.”

They laugh, momentarily pleased with each other.

“Actually I’m afraid she’s in pretty bad shape,” Josiah pronounces, professorially. “Did you notice the look on her
face as she was leaving? However, not being,
au fond
, a charitable person, I can’t stand friends in bad shape. Unless, of course, I have put them there.”

Yawning and stretching, Josiah gets up, and Hope follows him toward their bed.

No more phone calls to Clover. Hope and Josiah busy themselves with other people; there is always someone new around, if you look, and Hope and Josiah have little other occupation—although, like many idle people, they always sound very busy indeed.

Sometimes, still, they talk about Clover. They hope she isn’t
too
badly off, they say to each other, in sepulchral voices.

Or, in an opposite mood, Josiah will cheerily announce, “Well, there’s always a great deal to be said for dropping an old friend.”

Being out of touch with her, there is no way that they could know that this is one of the happiest seasons of Clover’s entire life, this finally arrived-at spring. Too busy and happy to know that she has been dropped (such a confusion often seems to exist between the dropper and the droppee), she sometimes says to Gregory, with whom she is living now, “I suppose I really should call Hope and Josiah?”

“As you will, my darling, but don’t think of it as ‘should.’ Call them when you want to see them, and only then.”

She smiles. “That’s just the problem: I don’t want to see them at all.” And then she says, “Gregory, you are the nicest man I’ve ever known.”

He laughs. “Should you say that again I would be in danger of taking you seriously.”

One afternoon in late spring, near Memorial Day, Josiah
comes home to tell Hope that he has discovered the most marvelous bookstore down in the Marina. “And the woman who runs it—well, you’ll have to see for yourself. She’s got to be eighty, if she’s a day, and absolutely mad, surely certifiable. She says she’s related to both Isadora Duncan
and
Gertrude Stein, can you believe it? It turns out that she lives not far from here, and since tomorrow’s a holiday I’ve asked her over for dinner.
Ça va
, my love?”

Hope, who has been relatively happy in the last few months, more or less alone with Josiah, now feels her heart sink, familiarly, and she thinks, as she has too many times before, of suicide: shouldn’t she just leave Josiah alone with his new freak friend?

But then she thinks, Really, why should I bother? I could just go on a nice long trip to Bali, Tahiti, maybe, by myself.

The idea is suddenly terrifically attractive.

Because she looked older than she was, eighteen, and was very pretty, her two slightly crooked front teeth more than offset by wheat-blond hair and green eyes, Dylan Ballentyne was allowed to be a waitress at the Cypress Lodge without having been a bus girl first. She hated the work—loathed, despised it—but it was literally the only job in town, town being a cluster of houses and a couple of stores on the northern California coast. Dylan also hated the town and the wild, dramatically desolate landscape of the area, to which she and her mother had moved at the beginning of the summer, coming down from San Francisco, where Dylan had been happy in the sunny Mission District, out of sight of the sea.

Now she moved drearily through days of trays and dishes, spilled coffee and gelatinous ash-strewn food, fat cross guests or hyper-friendly ones. She was sustained by her small paycheck and somewhat more generous tips, and by her own large fantasies of ultimate rescue, or escape.

The Lodge, an ornately Victorian structure with pinnacles and turrets, was on a high bluff two miles south of town, surrounded by sharply sloping meadows which were
edged with dark-green cypresses and pines, overlooking the turbulent, shark-infested, almost inaccessible sea. (One more disappointment: talking up the move, Dylan’s mother, self-named Flower, had invented long beach days and picnics; they would both learn to surf, she had said.)

Breakfast was served at the Lodge from eight till ten-thirty, lunch from eleven-thirty until two, in a long glassed-in porch, the dining room. Supposedly between those two meals the help got a break, half an hour for a sandwich or a cigarette, but more often than not it was about five minutes, what with lingering breakfasters and early, eager lunchers. Dinner was at six, set up at five-thirty, and thus there really was a free hour or sometimes two, in the mid to late afternoon. Dylan usually spent this time in the “library” of the Lodge, a dim, musty room, paneled in fake mahogany. Too tired for books, although her reading habits had delighted English teachers in high school, she leafed through old
House Beautifuls, Gourmets
or
Vogues
, avidly drinking in all those ads for the accoutrements of rich and leisurely exotic lives.

Curiously, what she saw and read made her almost happy, for that limited time, like a drug. She could nearly believe that she saw herself in
Vogue
, in a Rolls-Royce ad: a tall thin blond woman (she was thin, if not very tall) in silk and careless fur, one jeweled hand on the fender of a silver car, and in the background a handsome man, dark, wearing a tuxedo.

Then there was dinner. Drinks. Wines. Specifics as to the doneness of steaks or roasts. Complaints. I ordered
medium
rare. Is this crab really
fresh
? And heavy trays. The woman who managed the restaurant saw to it that waitresses and bus girls “shared” that labor, possibly out of some vaguely egalitarian sense that the trays were too heavy for any single group. By eight-thirty or so, Dylan and all the
girls would be slow-witted with exhaustion, smiles stiffening on their very young faces, perspiration drying under their arms and down their backs. Then there would come the stentorian voice of the manageress: “
Dylan
, are you awake? You look a thousand miles away.”

Actually, in her dreams, Dylan was less than two hundred miles away, in San Francisco.

One fantasy of rescue which Dylan recognized as childish, and unlikely, probably, was that a nice older couple (in their fifties, anyway: Flower was only thirty-eight) would adopt her. At the end of their stay at the Lodge, after several weeks, they would say, “Well, Dylan, we just don’t see how we’re going to get along without you. Do you think you could possibly …?” There had in fact been several couples who could have filled that bill—older people from San Francisco, or even L.A., San Diego, Scottsdale—who stayed for a few weeks at the Lodge, who liked Dylan and tipped her generously. But so far none of them had been unable to leave without her; they didn’t even send her postcards.

Another fantasy, a little more plausible, more grown up, involved a man who would come to the Lodge alone and would fall in love with Dylan and take her away. The man was as indistinct as the one in the Rolls-Royce ads, as vaguely handsome, dark and rich.

In the meantime, the local boys who came around to see the other waitresses tried to talk to Dylan; their hair was too long and their faces splotchily sunburned from cycling and surfing, which were the only two things they did, besides drinking beer. Dylan ignored them, and went on dreaming.

The usual group of guests at the Lodge didn’t offer much material for fantasy: youngish, well-off couples who arrived in big new station wagons with several children, new
summer clothes and new sports equipment. Apart from these stylish parents, there were always two or three very young couples, perhaps just married or perhaps not, all with the look of not quite being able to afford where they were.

And always some very old people.

There was, actually, one unmarried man (almost divorced) among the guests, and although he was very nice, intelligent, about twenty-eight, he did not look rich, or, for that matter, handsome and dark. Whitney Iverson was a stocky red-blond man with a strawberry birthmark on one side of his neck. Deep-set blue eyes were his best feature. Probably he was not the one to fall in love and rescue Dylan, although he seemed to like her very much. Mr. Iverson, too, spent his late afternoons in the Lodge’s library.

Exactly what Mr. Iverson did for a living was not clear; he mentioned the Peace Corps and
VISTA
, and then he said that he was writing; not novels—articles. His wife was divorcing him and she was making a lot of trouble about money, he said: a blow, he hadn’t thought she was like that. (But how could he have enough money for anyone to make trouble about, Dylan wondered.) He had brought down a carload of books. When he wasn’t reading in his room, or working on whatever he was writing, he took long, long walks, every day, miles over the meadows, back and forth to what there was of a town. Glimpsing him through a window as she set up tables, Dylan noted his stride, his strong shoulders. Sometimes he climbed down the steep perilous banks to the edge of the sea, to the narrow strip of coarse gray sand that passed for a beach. Perfectly safe, he said, if you checked the tides. Unlike Dylan, he was crazy about this landscape; he found the sea and the stretching hills of grass and rock, the acres of sky, all marvelous; even the billowing fog that threatened all summer he saw as lovely, something amazing.

Sometimes Dylan tried to see the local scenery with Whitney Iverson’s eyes, and sometimes, remarkably, this worked. She was able to imagine herself a sojourner in this area, as he was, and then she could succumb to the sharp blue beauty of that wild Pacific, the dark-green, wind-bent feathery cypresses, and the sheer cliffs going down to the water, with their crevices of moss and tiny brilliant wild flowers.

But usually she just looked around in a dull, hating way. Usually she was miserably bored and hopelessly despondent.

They had moved down here to the seaside, to this tiny nothing town, Dylan and Flower, so that Flower could concentrate on making jewelry, which was her profession. Actually, the move was the idea of Zachery, Flower’s boyfriend. Flower would make the jewelry and Zach would take it up to San Francisco to sell; someday he might even try L.A. And Zach would bring back new materials for Flower to use— gold and silver and pearls. Flower, who was several months behind in her rent, had agreed to this plan. Also, as Dylan saw it, Flower was totally dominated by Zach, who was big and dark and roughly handsome, and sometimes mean. Dylan further suspected that Zach wanted them out of town, wanted to see less of Flower, and the summer had borne out her theory: instead of his living with them and making occasional forays to the city, as Flower had imagined, it was just the other way around. Zach made occasional visits to them, and the rest of the time, when she wasn’t working or trying to work on some earrings or a necklace, Flower sat sipping the harsh, local red wine and reading the used paperbacks that Zach brought down in big cartons along with the jewelry materials—“to keep you out of mischief,” he had said.

Flower wore her graying blond hair long, in the non-style
of her whole adult life, and she was putting on weight. When she wanted to work she took an upper, another commodity supplied by Zach, but this didn’t do much to keep her weight down, just kept her “wired,” as she sometimes said. Dylan alternated between impatience and the most tender sympathy for her mother, who was in some ways more like a friend; it was often clear to Dylan that actually she had to be the stronger person, the one in charge. But Flower was so nice, really, a wonderful cook and generous to her friends, and she could be funny. Some of the jewelry she made was beautiful—recently, a necklace of silver and stones that Zach said were real opals. Flower had talent, originality. If she could just dump Zach for good, Dylan thought, and then not replace him with someone worse, as she usually did. Always some mean jerk. If she could just not drink, not take speed.

From the start Flower had been genuinely sympathetic about Dylan’s awful job. “Honey, I can hardly stand to think about it,” she would say, and her eyes would fill. She had been a waitress several times herself. “You and those heavy trays, and the mess. Look, why don’t you just quit? Honestly, we’ll get by like we always have. I’ll just tell Zach he’s got to bring more stuff down, and sell more, too. And you can help me.”