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.
Out on the beach, Julian is wearing new trunks that he bought for this trip, khaki-colored with a dark blue stripe, conservatively cut; they are perhaps a fraction too large. Helen’s suit is black, cut fashionably high up on her good firm thighs, maybe a little tight across her unfashionably large breasts. But Julian and Helen both look good. Seen among the other tourists scattered about that beach, other Americans, Germans, French, people of varying ages, varying degrees of health and conditions of weight, these two Californians are considerably above average, in terms of general attractiveness.
And the sand around their chairs is very white and smoothly groomed, the sea before them lovely, with its bright gentle waves that swell out to the distant horizon, where the bay is marked by graceful hills on either side, where each evening a new sunset silhouettes the fine-drawn black trees.
But everything is wrong with this picture.
Julian would say that if he could. He would say, Everything is wrong. Worse than in most of my patients’ lives.
This is not even the resort that he meant to come to, an error compounded of other errors, almost impossible to explain and, worse, unrectifiable, probably.
To try to put it in order, to speak sensibly of what is senseless: Julian first heard of a Mexican resort from a woman named Lila Lewisohn, also a psychiatrist, and Julian’s former colleague-friend-lover—Julian has no way of describing his present relation to Lila, and this in itself is a source of general terribleness, of mess. Estranged is the coldly accurate word that presents itself; they have been slipping apart for no clear reason ever since his divorce.
In any case, while she was married (while she was Julian’s lover) Lila used to come each winter to Mexico, alone. She looked forward to Mexico all year; she spoke of butterflies and flowers, seafood and swimming. Some town with an Indian-sounding name, as this town has, on a bay. A name something like Margarita. However, there the descriptions parted: Lila’s hotel was up on a bluff above the sea, whereas this one is emphatically at sea level. Lila’s was old, slightly shabby, she said; this one is most garishly, horrifyingly new.
Has Julian come to Mexico in search of Lila, if unconsciously? And come to the wrong place, and with the wrong woman? All this seems quite possible to Julian, now.
His connection with Helen began with the initially innocent habit of fruit juice at a health bar, after tennis; they played at the same Mill Valley club. And a couple of times when Julian had no patients for an hour they went on to lunch. Sandwiches on the Sausalito waterfront, and pleasant talk. And this woman seemed so unshadowed, her life so simple and sunny, despite an alcoholic former husband, a divorce, that to Julian she was exotic. More usual in his life were the infinite troubles and suffering of patients, and his own infinitely troubled former wife, an alcoholic. Not to mention the complexities of love with Lila, who was intense and subtle, complicated. Julian was drawn to Helen, this generous-bodied woman (both he and Lila tended to be too thin). A blond who was sort of pretty.
Naturally enough, in the course of things, Helen invited Julian to her house for dinner, a nice big open redwood house, on Cloudview, in Sausalito. She barbecued chicken in her vine-sheltered patio, played Mozart, and poured a lot of good chardonnay. Nothing original, but all so nice, so reassuring to a man who lately had been feeling old and tired and cold, and almost sexless. And so in what seemed a natural way he and Helen went off to bed that night (her kids were all conveniently away with their father, now an A.A. success), and there Julian experienced a happy sensual exchange. It was nice.
And the next morning Helen said, “I’ve been wanting to go to Mexico. How about you?”
The only way to explain this to Lila (though “estranged” as lovers, they still talked a lot, mostly on the phone) was just to say that he was going to Mexico with a woman with whom he might, or well might not, be “in love”—or so he had insanely believed at the time. He now thinks that he could as easily and far more truthfully have said, I feel restless and sad, inadequate. I am middle aged, in crisis, and now this nice woman has asked me to go to Mexico with her. I am almost severely depressed.
He could surely have said all that (it would have explained their estrangement as well), but he did not. He said “possibly in love.” And Lila, very hurt indeed, and angry, said, “Well, okay. And no, I don’t particularly want to see you. No, we’re not exactly friends.”
And so, there is Julian, desperately missing Lila and certainly not in love with Helen, to whom he is utterly unable to make love. (“My cock is dead,” a patient once memorably, terribly said to Julian.)
And there is Helen, who believed that she was going off on this sexy Mexican trip with a nice psychiatrist, finally a man she could talk to, a man who would listen and maybe tell her what to do.
Helen is worried about her children. That came out in their first night’s conversation—somewhat drunken, at the bar. Something wrong in the kitchen, dinner was announced as late, and then later still.
Especially her oldest daughter worries Helen, a girl named Robin, who Helen believes—well, she knows that Robin does drugs. And drinks too much. And has friends who steal cars; for all Helen knows Robin steals cars too.
“At the meetings they say detach. Detach with love. But how? And even if you really do the first step and admit you’re powerless. You’re still a parent. You can’t really be sure you didn’t cause it. I mean, Freud? And I don’t really like the meetings, they make me feel old. All those kids going on about parents who drink. Robin used to go to the A.C.A. meetings herself. Her father’s idea, but you can’t exactly say it worked, I don’t think.”
At that point Helen’s face had begun to blur, for Julian. “No,” he said.
“Well, what do you really think, Julian? Do you think a regular old-fashioned psychoanalysis would do her any good?”
“Well. Well I don’t really know.”
Julian was feeling at that moment the infinite sadness of Robin. Rather drunkenly he thought, Poor Robin, and poor Helen, who he was sure was a very nice if somewhat mixed-up woman. And poor himself, he who had really fucked things up, bringing this nice woman to this awful place, and under pretenses that became more false with every tropical, sweaty minute. As false as the plastic birds-of-paradise behind all those glistening bar glasses—although for all he knew the horrible flowers were real.
The bar was open to the sea. Thus from high uncomfortable stools Helen and Julian were confronted with all that water, a dangerous, deathless black expanse, the sand before it gray and damp. And the night itself was damp, and hot, the air black and thick and heavy. The jungle might at any moment descend upon them, Julian felt, with all its myriad lurking dangers.
And the noise: a defective speaker system jolted out old sixties songs, Beatles and Stones and Beach Boys, all sounding exactly alike, all loud. And everyone else in the bar, all those other hungry guests were more and more drunkenly, loudly talking. Arguing. Shouting.
It was hardly the time or place for Julian to give out a professional opinion, even had he had one. He knew nothing whatsoever—least of all about himself, and why he had made this incomprehensible journey, with a woman who was not and would not turn into Lila.
Years ago Karen, to whom Julian was married, used to make fun of Lila’s trips to Mexico. “I personally hate the very idea of Mexico,” Karen said. “Dirty. Everyone so poor that you have to feel guilty all the time. I hate countries like that; you couldn’t pay me to go down there. Yuck!”
And how idyllic now even those bad old days with Karen seemed; even then there was always the refuge of Lila. Of love.
And so why, after Lila’s divorce, and then Julian’s, did they begin to see each other less, rather than the more often that might have been expected? Why did they allow themselves to “drift apart”?
Because we were both too tired to make a commitment, has been one answer.
Or because we had got so used to being married to others, to illicit love.
Or (now thought Julian) because I was gradually going into a depression, into this depression.
Now the sea like the jungle seemed to threaten. Julian imagined huge sudden walls of waves, engulfing, overwhelming. He shivered, terrified.
“You can’t be cold?” Good, maternal Helen. “Darling, you’re not coming down with something bad?”
How dare she call him darling? Julian irrationally thought that. And yet he did think it: How dare she?
The dinner that was served at last was, as everyone in one way or another remarked, not worth waiting for. Pale under-cooked fish and canned peas. “I don’t think I’ve had canned peas since college,” was Helen’s remarkable pleasant comment. She was trying; heaven knows she was trying.
From dinner they went immediately to bed. What else? And there they both tried hard, tried for love and ease and simple satisfaction. But nothing worked, no gesture or effort on either of their parts. (My cock is dead. Julian thought of saying that, a last desperate wild effort at something like a joke. But did not.) And poor Helen probably felt that it was all her fault, despite all the good advice she was getting at those meetings: you didn’t cause, you can’t cure.
Together they pushed the coarse sheets back from their sweaty bodies, and tried to sleep.
The next day was very much the same as that one. Bright talk at breakfast, Helen being jocular about the other guests. And then they went out to the beach chairs, the glaring sand, and the too-bright sea.
Helen swam a lot, and surely, Julian hoped, that part of this nightmare trip was good for her, a pleasure? He sat heavily on his chair while she swam. Rooted. Too heavy to move, although in fact he was losing weight, was visibly too thin. But he was too heavy to swim, he felt. His head would weigh him down.
Julian diagnosed himself: this is at least a medium-severe depression. And he made his recommendations: work on fighting it off, do not just sit around and let it get worse.
But he did nothing of the sort. He did nothing.
And now, like a large slick blond sea creature, Helen comes back from the ocean, walking across the stretch of beach to Julian’s chair. Helen, gingerly stepping, the sand must be terrifically hot. Sitting down she winces at the contact with hot plastic. Then she smiles and tosses her long wet hair. “It feels great,” she says. “You really should try it.”
“I know.”
“I was talking to a woman out there about Oaxaca,” Helen then tells him. “She says you can get a small plane from here and I’ve always wanted to go there.”
Does she really imagine that he can take still another Mexican trip? Surely not. “Oaxaca,” Julian repeats, heavily separating the unfamiliar syllables.
Amazingly, surprising him utterly, Helen then laughs. “Come on, I know you don’t want to go there. Why don’t you come along in a couple of days if you feel like it? And if not, not. I’ll see you back in California.”
Searching her face for strain, or some falsehood, Julian finds neither: this good woman really wants to go to Oaxaca, and she has decided to leave him alone.
And so, miraculously, Helen packs for the afternoon plane, the small one to Oaxaca. “I sort of think you need to be by yourself for a while,” she murmurs, kissing him good-bye up near the front desk. No point in his coming to the airport, Helen says.
Left alone, Julian feels—not exactly better, but just slightly less heavy, the burden of Helen gone, and the even greater burden of pretending to be all right.
But how incredibly nice she was, after all. She did in fact manage to detach with love. What a kind and understanding woman. Sane. Her daughter will be all right, probably, eventually, Julian thinks. She’s just being an adolescent in Marin County, in the terrible late eighties. He should have said something of the sort to Helen, Julian thinks, and he determines that he will do so on his return to California.
And with that determination Julian reaches several conclusions. One (no doubt this was obvious all along, to Helen too), he has no intention of going on to Oaxaca. He will fly back to Mexico City and then on to San Francisco, where his car is. Where Lila is.
And, two, even that tiny bit of professional thought, of work, about Helen’s child has made him feel the tiniest bit better.
Among Julian’s professional colleagues, local psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, three men in the past two years have committed suicide, in severe depressions. And the overall suicide rate for shrinks is not encouraging; in fact it is terrifying to Julian, a depressed psychiatrist.
What laymen say about shrinks is largely true, he believes. We’re all nuts.
And in panic he thinks, I have got to get out of this. (It is unclear to Julian whether he means out of Mexico or out of his depression: out of both, probably.)
And so Julian makes an effort, a desperate effort, in fact, to treat himself as a patient, to be gentle and understanding and at the same time firm, making certain demands. The good-parent model. And to do as he often tells patients to do: exercise, almost any activity is preferable to doing nothing.
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.
Not the best time to take to drink, thinks normally abstemious Julian.
And then the phone rings. Julian watches as Hugo picks up the receiver. “Allo? Allo?” And then beckons to Julian, grimacing his version of a smile, as Julian wonders: Is this some cruel joke? Is he drunk?
“Hello, Julian, is that you?”
At the clear familiar sound of Lila’s voice Julian feels not drunk at all; he feels almost sane (though with some fear that he might cry). He says only, “Lila—”
“So there you are. Why on earth the Margarita? I could have told you it was awful.”
“But Lila—” Not saying, But we were not exactly trading travel plans, Julian instead tries to laugh.
“Your message didn’t sound so good, but now you sound better.”
“Well, that’s true. I mean I haven’t been in great shape, but now I’ve been walking, some swimming—”
“Well, that’s good. My own prescriptions.” She laughs, a sound that seems to fade in and out.
“But I think I’ll fly back tomorrow, stay home for a week. Do some reading.” Saying this though Julian recognizes a bleak and bad idea.
As does Lila, apparently. “Why not stay down there a little more? Really swim, walk farther. It might do you some good.”
Wild hope leaps in Julian’s blood. “But would you—? Could you come—”
Very gently she tells him, “No, I really can’t get away right now. But you’ll be okay, I know.” Meaning: you know how to cure yourself, and you can.
“Yes,” Julian tells her. And he manages not to say, Will you marry me? When I come back can we move in together? He only says, “I’ll see you in San Francisco?”
What he meant as a statement has emerged as a question, and Lila answers, “Yes, of course,” very warmly. And then she says, “You could do me a favor, sort of. Walk over to my place again, and really check it out. Find out anything you can.”
“Oh sure. Of course. And I think you’re right about a little longer here. But I do wish—I wish you—”
“So do I, but I can’t. You’ll be okay though.”
“I know.”
“Well—”
They say good-bye, and although the last thing he really wants is the rest of his drink, Julian heads back to the bar.
He is intercepted right off by Hugo though, who jauntily tells him, “Last chance! I go now to offer the room to a bureau of travel.”
“Oh. Well as a matter of fact I do need the room after all. For myself.”
“Ah good! You learn to like our beaches and our life down here?”
“More or less,” Julian tells him. “I mean, more and more.” Having intended some small irony, the tiniest joke, he is somewhat surprised at Hugo’s enthusiastic response.
“So good! And then perhaps you come here every year,” says Hugo.
“I really very much doubt that,” Julian tells him. And then, more gently, “But of course it’s entirely possible.”
“Very good! And now I buy you a drink. Yes, doctor, I insist! It is not so often that I have psychiatrists for guests.”