For every reason, including conventional wisdom’s dictates that one should not go back to the scene of exceptional past happiness, I did not at all want to return to the Mexican beach at which I had not only been happy, my whole inner balance had seemed restored to me there, there at the extraordinarily lovely beach, with Elizabeth, my friend who now was dying and whom I could in no way restore, or save.
Since Elizabeth is—was about thirty years older than I am you say that her role in my life was maternal; my mother, a psychoanalyst, as my father is, does say just that; she is also aware of her own jealousy of Elizabeth—of course she is, both jealous and aware. To me that is not how it seemed at all; I did not see Elizabeth as “mother”; I simply liked her, and I admired her more than anyone I knew. For a long time I wondered whether my feelings for Judson, to whom I now am married, were colored by the fact that I first met him in her house. I have concluded that yes, they were, and are; after all, they loved each other too. Elizabeth and Judson.
In any case I did not at all want to go back to Mexico, to the beach and to Elizabeth’s house, where now my friend lay miserably dying, of emphysema. And I knew at last that I had to go, although of course Elizabeth did not say so—Elizabeth, the most elegantly tactful, most graceful of all people. I had been conscientiously writing her at least a couple of times a week, since she had allowed me to know of her illness, and for a while I managed to convince myself that that was better; many warm “interesting” letters might be less disturbing to her than an actual visit.
Then Judson, with whom I was not exactly in touch at that time—our connection was tentative, indefinite, perhaps anomalous—Judson telephoned me from Iowa, where he was living and teaching that year (Judson is a poet; I am a lawyer and I live—we live in Oakland, California). Judson said that I had better go down to see Elizabeth.
“It’s simple, Minerva,” he said. “If you don’t you won’t see her again.”
Judson’s poetry is minimalist, nor in personal conversation does he tend to waste words. I probably waste most things, certainly time and energy. Sometimes friendship, or love.
I asked him, “Will you go too?”
“If I can.”
Judson and I had talked a lot, becoming friends, that first summer at San Angel, and once we had kissed. Not what anyone would term an affair, or even a “relationship”; still, the kiss took it a little out of the pure friendship class.
But I think I should begin with meeting Elizabeth, all those years back, the August when I was house-sitting for my parents in the hills of Berkeley. Being shrinks they both always took August off, and they usually rented a house in Wellfleet, Mass., where they got to see a lot of other shrinks. Then as now I was living in Oakland, and at that time I was going to law school, at U.C., in Berkeley. And so it made sense to stay in my parents’ big house during August, to take care of their plants and the pool. They even offered to pay me, which I proudly refused.
At some point, along with various instructions, in an afterthought-sounding way my father said, “Oh. Your mother and I met an interesting woman at the Garsons’. An art historian. Originally Viennese, I think. She’s renting the Jefferson cottage up the street and we told her to come use the pool if she ever felt like it.” Piously he added, “Of course we told her to call you first.”
“Dad. Really.” My father knew perfectly well that I was having a relationship with a lawyer who was married but who spared me an occasional afternoon.
“Well, as you know it’ll probably be cold all August anyway. How often we wonder whatever made us dream of putting in a pool. She might very well never call. Anyway you might like her.”
If anyone else talked like that my father would call it “cross-signalling,” which I believe is supposed to be “schizophrenogenic,” but in himself he does not, of course. And in fact I am not especially schizy, more given to depression, unfortunately—although schizes probably don’t much like their condition either.
“Her name is Elizabeth Loewenstein,” my father added, and he repeated, “I really think you might like her. She has a very beautiful voice.”
Only that last statement came as a surprise. Funnily enough, in view of his trade, my father is not at all a good listener, and so I was struck by the notion of a voice so beautiful that he would listen to it.
As things turned out, he was wrong only about the weather of that August, which was record-breakingly warm and clear, amazing and beautiful. From my parents’ giant picture windows I watched the sun set over San Francisco and the bay, all implausibly gold and glistening.
Elizabeth Loewenstein, the possibly garrulous nuisance whom I had feared never phoned, and it is hard to recall on just what impulse I finally called her and asked her over for a swim. Partly it was because I was lonely—were I a believer, though, I would say that God had instructed me. As it is I see my call to her as a piece of sheer good luck, for me. In any case, I did call, and she said that yes, she would like to come over for a swim.
Elizabeth was small and dark, with short, graying curly hair and gray-green eyes. Lightly lined pale skin, a bony nose. Her manner was tentative, rather shy—and she had the most attractive voice that I had ever heard. (It was almost annoying, to have my father proved so accurate.) A low voice, slightly hoarse, and very slightly accented. A voice with great range: warm brightness, and a complicated depth of shadows. “Your voice has chiaroscuro,” I once said to Elizabeth, and she laughed, of course, but she was pleased. She had a certain, highly characteristic way of saying “Ah!” like a tiny bark. That “Ah” was one of her responsive, listening sounds; she listened more actively than anyone, I thought—I think so still. She smoked a lot.
God knows what we talked about, that first afternoon. I only remember liking her very much and urging her to stay. She left after less than half an hour, and I told her please to come back whenever she could.
Nor do I remember much of the content of later conversations; it is rather the quality of being with Elizabeth that I remember. And her voice, and that tiny barked “Ah!” And her just-hoarse laugh.
Rather little of our talk was personal. Elizabeth almost never talked about herself, and so I was not encouraged to do so—which, that summer, was quite all right with me; I was tired of talking or even thinking about my trouble-some, somewhat sordid love affair. Elizabeth often talked about places, her passion for Venice, and for the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. And she told me about the extravagant, wildly impractical (not even quite legal) gesture of buying a house in Mexico, near the beach.
Once I talked to a Berkeley woman who also admired and liked Elizabeth, and that woman said, “Oh, Elizabeth is so wonderful. You can do absolutely anything you want around her. Say anything.”
Well, that was entirely to miss the point of Elizabeth, I thought. I would never knowingly have expressed a trivial or mean-spirited thought to Elizabeth; her own elegant, supremely intelligent demeanor forbade it. And actually one of the reasons that I so much liked Elizabeth was that she, as the phrase goes, “brought out my best.” With her I was less trivial and mean, and much more intelligent, more finely observant than usual, and if not elegant at least restrained. Judson and I have talked about this, and he says that he felt the same. “Elevated,” is a word he used. “Ennobled, even,” Judson said.
This is the much abbreviated story of Elizabeth’s life, as I pieced it together from stray remarks, tiny glimpses over our years of conversation, and all our letters.
She was born not in Vienna but in Paris, and later, before the Anschluss, she had studied in Vienna. Her parents were deported to camps in Germany, where they died (very little about this from Elizabeth). After the war she studied in Florence, in Bologna, and at Oxford. In addition to those places she had lived in Lisbon and in Cuernavaca, and in her Mexican beach town, San Angel. And in New York and Boston. She had been married three times, twice divorced, once widowed—but of those relationships I know nothing. Once she spent some time at Lake Tahoe with a man who was trying to get a divorce in Reno but did not (out of character, this intimate glimpse arrived in a letter, like a present, when she knew that I was having some troubles of that nature). When I first knew her she was living in Boston, out in Berkeley on a studying visit. Later she moved down to New York. And later still, she moved to San Angel, to her small house in the manzanita thickets. For good.
That first summer in Berkeley Elizabeth and I saw each other mostly for late afternoon swims. We also went to the Berkeley and the Oakland art museums. Elizabeth looked as actively as she listened, as intently. I can see her: a small woman in something elegantly plain, gray linen, maybe brown, bending forward to see yet more clearly, her eyes narrowed in the effort, as she stands before a big canvas of some enormous, primitive animals, by Joan Brown.
Elizabeth was especially fond of that Oakland museum; to my great pleasure she preferred it to the San Francisco MOMA. “So much less pretentious,” she remarked, quite accurately, I thought. “A more real museum, and architecturally it is marvellous, a beauty.”
I have said that most of my talk with Elizabeth was impersonal; however, I do remember one conversation which became intimate, oddly enough having to do with our noses.
I had spent too many hours the week before just lying beside the pool, ostensibly studying for the bar, actually worrying about my life, as I enjoyed the sun. As a reward for that self-indulgence my nose first blistered, then peeled (I have inherited my mother’s white Irish skin, my father’s Polish-Jewish nose).
“I wish it would peel away,” I said to Elizabeth, as though joking. “Peel down to a tiny snub nose, like my mother’s. Why did I just get her skin?”
Elizabeth laughed, accepting my joke, but she said, “You’re too tall for a tiny snub nose, Minerva. Besides, yours is distinguished, like an Italian Renaissance lady.” And then she sighed. “But I know about hating noses. For years I despaired of mine. And Minerva, I had more reason, you will admit. I am a very small woman with a very large nose.”
“But yours is beautiful!”
“Ah! There, you see?”
We both laughed then, in the end-of-August almost cooling air, an hour or so before the sun would set.
In September Elizabeth went back to Boston. My parents came home, and I moved back into my own small Oakland apartment; I studied hard, I spent time with friends and with my lover, with whom I quarrelled a lot—on whom I made, according to him, impossible demands.
And I began what was to become a rich and wonderfully gratifying correspondence with Elizabeth. (I have it still, now boxed and tied up with heavy string. I always mean to take it out for rereading, but so far I have not.) It turned out that for us both letters were a form of conversation. I have sometimes even thought letters more satisfactory and God knows safer than most human contact, and it is possible that Elizabeth felt so too. In any case we wrote to each other quite often, and generally at some length. Only on trips Elizabeth might confine herself to postcards, with beautiful pictures: Venice, Spoleto, Siena.
And even cards from Elizabeth had the unique, quite unmistakable sound of her voice. I have sometimes had quite the opposite experience, very likely everyone has: the stiff, ungiving letters from friends who in person are both warm and amusing; dull letters from people one thought bright. Elizabeth’s letters and her cards were exactly like herself, including her very slight, to-me-delightful mistakes in English.
Then, over the next months and the following years everything in my life went black, and wrong. I had passed the bar, and got a job with an okay firm in Oakland, specializing in labor law; but I felt that I was overworked, too many sudden trips to Chicago or Los Angeles, for depositions. Worse, I began to have serious doubts about the law itself, or rather about its current practice, its practitioners. My lover left for New Haven, with his wife. I got along with my parents even less well than usual, and I quarrelled in a serious way with a couple of longstanding friends. I was very tired. I imagined myself as a piece of old elastic, all gone gray, all the stretch and give worn out.
Well, a classic depression, but no one’s depression seems “classic” to the person enduring it. And in my case, such over-exposure to shrinks made it hard for me even to think, This is a depression, this too will pass. I did not even consider the possible aid of some therapy.
The very weather that year seemed inimical: a long fall and winter of cold rain, ferocious winds, followed by a spring of no respite but more cold and winds, a perpetual black-gray fog, looming up from the bay.
I had not written to Elizabeth that I was depressed, or whatever I was, but she may of course have sensed it. I did write about the frightful summer weather, the dark fog and cold, the perpetual wind.
Elizabeth wrote back that she would be in her house in Mexico for all of November, and that I must get some time off and come to visit her then. “I know how it is with long cold summers,” she wrote. “You believe them to last forever, as sometimes they do. But maybe the idea of a warm white beach and many flowers will help a little to get you through the next few months.” She further explained that she had already promised “such guest quarters as there are” to another friend—“a poet, Judson Venable, you might sometime have read him?” I had not.
But that is how I came to spend two weeks of that November in Mexico, my first trip to Elizabeth’s house. Which in many ways changed my life.
As though to test my stamina, even September and October, which are often the nicest months in Northern California, that year were terrible; black heavy rains, and more rains, with dangerous flooding, mudslides near the coast. Dark, relentless winds. I packed for Mexico in a state of disbelief, jamming the light cottons recommended by Elizabeth into my seabag. And I boarded the plane that dark November morning still unconvinced that weather anywhere would be welcoming, and warm.
After seven hours that were alternately boring and turbulent (more tests!), including a frantic, high-stress changing of planes in Mexico City, in a smaller plane we flew toward a range of sharp green mountains, between perilously rocky peaks and over jungles, levelling at last toward a flat blue sea, and beaches. A white airstrip surrounded by green jungle growth.
Getting off that plane and walking down the ramp was like entering another atmosphere; I swam into warm, moist, delicately scented air, into an embrace of warmth and flowers. I began to smile, and for most of the time that I was there I felt that smile, which was interior as well—that November, and sometimes I did think how strange that it should be indeed November, the dark, funereal month of death and sorrow and ashes, especially in Mexico.
And—there was Elizabeth, small and lightly tanned, reaching up to kiss me on both cheeks, saying “Ah! Minerva, how good it is that you are here. But how thin, how pale! We must work to change you—”
I was embarrassingly close to tears, and only murmured that I was glad to see her too. I was grateful for the activity involved in stowing my bag into her improbably pink jeep. “I had not before driven a jeep, perhaps it is fortunate that it comes in so ridiculous a color,” Elizabeth laughed, very happily.
We jolted over a deeply potholed road, through a shaded stretch of jungle, all wildly, diversely green, toward a small, shabby cluster of buildings, a town at which I barely looked, for there ahead of us was the sea: glinting, green and blue, white-waved, dancing out to a pale-blue sky. And everywhere flowers, bougainvillea, hibiscus, vines and bushes blooming in all possible shades, pinks and reds and purples, other blossoms of the smallest, most delicate yellow white. And butterflies, and birds.
“The place where you stay may not be entirely to your taste,” Elizabeth was saying. “But you will be so little there. Mostly, it is very close to where I am.”
She was right about my hotel, Del Sol: a cluster of bright new cottages around a pool and bar-restaurant—less than entirely to my taste. It was garish and sometimes noisy, populated as it was by young Texans and Germans. None of which mattered at all, as I was almost never there. That first day Elizabeth dropped me off with brief instructions. “You must take what time you need to collect yourself. Then walk out to the beach and turn left. Not too many yards to the end is a road leading up into the woods, and there you find my small house. It is brown, with a porch.”
I collected myself for fifteen or twenty minutes, washing and changing to my lightest cotton dress, wrapping a bathing suit in a towel, and then I walked out to the beach and turned left. It is not too much to say that I already felt myself another person, in that air—Elizabeth’s air.
Her house was not quite as easy to find as she had said. I hesitated in front of a couple of shacky cottages, and then I walked on up into some dark manzanita woods, the trees here and there overhung with heavy moss, thick vines. And there was Elizabeth’s house—it had to be: a small square brown structure, over half its space a generous porch, the wall that faced the sea entirely of glass.
On the porch was a broad woven hammock on which someone obviously had slept (“Judson”?); there were rumpled pillows, a thrown-aside light blanket. Next to the hammock some big dark leather sling chairs.
And Elizabeth, coming out to greet me. “Ah, good Minerva to have brought your bathing suit. Always we have a little swim before our drinks and dinner.”
Going inside, I saw that a large area between the house and the beach had been cleared, giving a branch-framed picture of the sea: sand, small birds, waves and distant headlands. The other walls were filled with pictures, narrow-framed line drawings, a few photographs. A wide low sofa, Elizabeth’s bed (where sometimes she slept with Judson Venable?). Big bright wool pillows. A low tile table. Lamps.
I changed into my suit in the bathroom and we went down to the beach and swam, and I was entirely enchanted. Magic water, I thought, magically light and clear, of a perfect coolness.
I am aware, speaking of Elizabeth and of her surroundings, in San Angel, that I am presenting a possibly implausible perfection. As to Elizabeth herself, I can only say that for me she did seem that impossibility, a perfect person. To put it negatively, she was a person about whom I never felt even slightly troubled, I was never bored with her—reactions that I have experienced at one time or another with almost everyone else I have known very well (beginning, I guess, with my parents). And as for San Angel itself, and the beach there, it was at first perfect, perfectly quiet and beautiful. Later it did change considerably, but that is the later part of my story, of my return visit to Elizabeth, in her illness.
Back in the house, while I dressed Elizabeth began several processes in the kitchen. “My good Aurelia comes later to serve our dinner,” she explained. “And Judson. He will very soon be back, I think.” She added, “I hope that you will like him, as I do.”
Actually I did not like Judson very much, at first. That was in part because I assumed him to be Elizabeth’s young lover, and he seemed neither sufficiently young nor dashing for that role. Also, he speaks very softly, and infrequently, with an almost impenetrable Southern accent, which at the time I took to be a bad sign, suggestive of bigotry, if not downright stupidity.
Also, Judson is more than a little odd to look at. Tall, very thin, with a big nose and big floppy-looking ears (curiously we look somewhat alike, except for the ears; mine, like my mother’s, are quite small), as he shambled up to the porch that first night I thought, Oh, surely not. I even thought, Elizabeth, how could you?
I also distrusted Judson’s protestations as to “their” pleasure at my arrival. He said, “We’ve been most looking forward to your visit,” and the words sounded false and stilted to me: the proverbial Southern good manners. I am not notably trusting, in my reactions to people.
Aurelia, the Mexican helper (“maid” does not seem the proper word, nor did Elizabeth ever refer to her as such) Aurelia next arrived, and I did like her. She was tall and dark and beautiful, evidently deeply fond of Elizabeth; she smiled a great deal and spoke almost not at all. (It turned out later that it was through Aurelia that Elizabeth had bought the house; it was actually in Aurelia’s name, a legal necessity, for beach-front property, but also generous on Elizabeth’s part. Aurelia’s life was to be transformed.)
The sunset that was just then commencing over the far eastern rim of the Pacific was the most splendid that I had ever seen, the wildest range of color; gorgeous, brilliant rags of color hung across the sky.
Judson made Margaritas which he served to us out on the porch, as we watched the sunset remnants slowly fade—and then Aurelia brought out our dinner, the first of many wonderfully garlicky fish.
But mainly, for me, there was Elizabeth’s lovely voice to listen to—although for the first time I began to wish she would not smoke so much; I don’t especially mind cigarette smoke, not outside on a porch, but it obviously made her cough a lot.
Elizabeth and I talked and talked, and talked and laughed, and she smoked, and coughed. Judson said rather little, but I had already begun to like him a little better. He had a good, responsive smile, and his occasional laugh seemed warm.
After dinner Elizabeth looked tired, I thought; actually I was too, and I got up to leave.
“Ah! Then Judson will walk with you,” Elizabeth announced.
“Oh no, how silly, it’s no distance—”
“Minerva, there could be banditos.” Elizabeth laughed, then a tiny cough. “But I expect you back here for breakfast, which we eat all through the morning.”
And so Judson did walk back to Del Sol with me, along the shadowy, gray-white sand, beside the black sea. In perfect silence. At my cottage door we stopped, and he touched my shoulder very lightly. Not quite looking at me (a habit of his) he said, “I’m glad you came down.” Adding, “She’s really been looking forward to you.” Long speeches, coming from Judson.
I was smiling as I went inside to bed.
Although I should admit to being quite as prurient as the next person, that November I did not subject the Elizabeth-Judson relationship to serious scrutiny, having to do with sex. I assumed some form of love to exist between them, and I did not concern myself with determining its exact nature. I saw that Elizabeth’s bright gray eyes were often watching Judson thoughtfully, and that when he spoke she listened with her intensely attentive semi-smile. But then she watched me too, and listened when I spoke, with extreme attention.
My parents (the shrinks) would have said and probably did say that I had fallen into an ideal—or rather, an idealized situation: I was the loved child of loving parents, whose sexual lives I did not think about.
Another explanation for my relative lack of curiosity about them is that I was simply too happy there in Mexico, during that beautifully, caressingly warm November stay for serious thoughts about other people’s lives. (An extreme of happiness can make you just as self-absorbed as misery can; witness people happily in love.) With Elizabeth and sometimes with Judson too I swam three or four times a day, in the marvellous, buoyant water; we walked, and walked and walked along the beach, in the direction of the tiny town, San Angel, or sometimes, more adventurously, we took the other direction: a walk that involved scrambling across small cliffs of sheer sharp rock, clutching in our passage at thin manzanita boughs, until we reached another beach, where we swam and sometimes picnicked.
An abundance of sheer physical exertion, then, was clearly contributing to my new and entire well-being, but I think quite as significant was the extraordinary beauty of the place, the white, white beach with its background of wild, brilliant jungle growth, interspersed with bright flowers. And the foreground of a brighter, greener sea.
And Elizabeth.
And Judson, whom I continued increasingly to like. I even began to think him good enough for Elizabeth, almost. I began to see the attractiveness of his long slow supple legs, as he ambled along the sand, or swam, or led the way across the difficult stretch of rocks, often waiting to extend a hand to me, or to Elizabeth, who lagged behind. As she sometimes said (perhaps too often?) she simply could not keep up with young folks such as we. She was in fact quite often out of breath; she required a lot of rest, which at the time I put down simply to her age, and to smoking so much. But I thought Judson was very good to her.
One of the pleasures of those first, enchanted November weeks in Mexico (as opposed to my second visit, four years later)—a considerable joy for Elizabeth and for me was our shopping from the occasional vendors: Indian-looking, mostly, both men and women of all ages, sometimes with small children. They would hold out bright flimsy dresses to us, trays of silver and jade; they smiled at our greed, and our inability to make up our minds. And at our very faulty Spanish, Elizabeth’s considerably better than mine. Judson watched, and smiled, and seemed to enjoy the spectacle.
Elizabeth bought a long dark blue dress, the blue unusually rich and deep; I bought something white, long and lacy, and we both wore our new dresses that night at dinner.
In those idle, happy ways our days ran past. Sunsets succeeded each other, each brilliant panoply of clouds seemed new, original and splendid. We watched those displays each night as we drank our salty-sweet Margaritas, served by Judson with his particular Southern ceremoniousness, his semi-bow as he handed either of us our glass. Later, in the near-dark shadows we had our dinner. Later still, in the true dark, the heavy tropical night, Judson would walk down to my cottage with me. Sometimes we talked a little, more often not. He would say good night, perhaps with a quick touch to my arm, or my shoulder; I would go inside, get ready for bed, and read for a little while. And Judson would hurry back to Elizabeth—or so I for the most part imagined.
On my next-to-last night there, the end of my November weeks, at my door Judson turned to me; he took my shoulders in his hands and then, quite simply, we kissed. Or, not simply; it was a complicated kiss, containing as it did so much unspoken between us. In the next instant, that of our separation, I felt dizzied, almost unreal.
Judson touched my face. “You’re lovely.”
“But—” Meaning, as he knew, But what about you and Elizabeth?
“I think you’ve got things a little wrong,” was all he said. So like him; talk about minimalism.
One of the things I had wrong was the time of Judson’s departure, which took place quite early the next day; he was gone by the time I arrived for breakfast.
Actually I was glad, happier to have a final day alone with Elizabeth, and I did not want to face possible complications with Judson. I wanted to thank Elizabeth, to say how happy my time there had made me. And that is how it went; Elizabeth and I talked and talked all day, she in her lovely, amazing voice. And she listened as I talked, with her wide, calm, amused gray eyes.
And the next day I went back to California.
• • •
Not quite predictably (I myself would not have predicted it) things went well with me, over the next months and then years that followed that November visit to Elizabeth. I was on an unusually even keel, for me. I had no major love affairs, nothing marvellous, but then no disasters either, just a couple of pleasant “relationships” with very nice men. I switched law firms, moving to a new one, still in Oakland, but a firm with a feminist-public good orientation.
Elizabeth and I wrote many letters to each other; I’m afraid mine were mostly about myself (Ah, the joys of a good correspondent as a captive audience!). Elizabeth wrote about everything except herself—or Judson, for that matter.
This went on until what must have been a couple of years later, when I got a letter from her that seemed more than a little alarming, though it was couched in Elizabeth’s habitual gentle language. First, the good news that she had stopped smoking. And then this sentence: “Judson was here for a visit, and as I had not seen him for some time I fear he was alarmed by my not-so-good health.”
Violently alarmed myself, I immediately telephoned Elizabeth; she was out at first, it was hours before I could reach her, and then, in character, she apologized for having upset me. “It is just this emphysema that I have,” she said, but I could hear her labored breath. “Nature’s punishment for heavy smokers.” She tried to laugh, and gasped, and coughed.
After that I wrote to her much more often, and I tried to think of presents for her—not an easy task with elegant, apparently self-sufficient Elizabeth, but sometimes I succeeded, I think. I understood that she would write more briefly now, and less often, and that was true; she sent notes and postcards, thanking me for my letters, for whatever book or small Berkeley trophy I had sent (a paper cat, some Mexican-looking straw flowers). She said very little about how she was, but when I pressed her in a specific way (“Please tell me how you are”) she admitted to not feeling very well. “I have so little strength, much discomfort. At times it seems cruel and unusual, at other times deserved.” She would spend the winter in Mexico. “I hope there to breathe more easily.”
This was the period I mentioned at the start, during which I believed, or perhaps succeeded in convincing myself that my frequent letters and small attentions were more beneficial than an actual visit from me would be.
And that was the theory broken by Judson’s phone call, from Iowa, telling me that I should go to Mexico. “It’s simple, Minerva. If you don’t, you won’t see her again.”
“Will you go too?”
“If I can.”
Those were the first sentences to pass between us since the night of that kiss, I later thought.
Of course I would go, and of course for every reason I did not want to. I made reservations, plane tickets and a cottage at Del Sol. Since Elizabeth had no phone down there I tried calling Del Sol myself, remembering that she received an occasional message through them. At last I reached a person who seemed to know that a Señora Loewenstein lived nearby, but I had no faith in the message, and I wrote to her too.
It was only as I boarded the plane, early one foggy, chilly morning at the San Francisco airport, that it occurred to me that this too was the month of November, that an almost exact four years had passed since my first visit.
However, disembarking at San Angel, the air was as moist, as caressing and fragrant as I remembered, and I began to think or hope that this trip might be all right.
I was surprised to find Aurelia in the terminal waiting room—tall, beautifully smiling Aurelia, who in answer to my quick question told me that Elizabeth was not well at all. “She lay down, she not get up,” Aurelia said.
My first strong and confused reaction to this shocking news was anger: how could Elizabeth be so ill and not say so? Or, really, how could Elizabeth be so ill?
In Elizabeth’s old pink jeep Aurelia drove me through the turbulent, violent green jungle, to the glittering sea, waves dancing in the bright mid-afternoon sunlight—to my cottage at Del Sol. I threw my bag onto the bed, threw water on my face and combed my hair, and ran back out to Aurelia, in the jeep.
How like Elizabeth (as Judson and I said later) to have arranged that my first sight of her should be reassuring. She lay on her hammock (Judson s hammock, as I thought of it), Elizabeth, in something pale blue, gauzy, very pretty. At my approach she half sat up, she reached out her hands to me. “Ah! Minerva. How good that you have come.” And she smiled, and said all the rest with her eyes.
I bent or rather knelt to kiss her cheeks, thinking, How could I have blamed her for her illness? as I fought back tears. I asked, “You don’t feel so well?”
“Not too.” Another smile.
We had both begun to sound like Judson, I thought just then; our speech was as stripped down, as minimal as his was.
Elizabeth next asked, “Judson called you?”
“Uh, yes. He did.”
She coughed. “He will come also?”
“He said if he could. He’s really busy there, I think.”
Her eyes blazed at me then, gray fire, for a full moment before she spoke, and when she did her damaged voice was wild. “He must come. You will call to him,” she said.
I was too pummelled by violent emotion to understand, quite. I only said, “Of course. Tomorrow.”
Elizabeth smiled, and she lay back and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, after a short moment, it was as though that passionate exchange had not taken place. She said, “Ah, Minerva. Now you must tell me all about your life.”
Much later, Judson in his way explained, or nearly. “Yes, in love. I think we were,” he said. “But never lovers.”
“But, why not?”
He smiled, not looking at me but at some private interior vision, probably Elizabeth. “Too risky, for one thing. A good friendship at stake.”
By then of course Elizabeth had died, and Judson and I in our own curious ways had “fallen in love” and married. Which is what we both thought quite possibly she had wanted us to do. In a sense I had been “offered up” to Judson, that first November: Elizabeth’s insistence that I visit her just then, her always making Judson walk home with me. Perhaps she thought that if he and I became lovers she would love him less? I don’t know, surely not, nor does Judson. It is only clear that Elizabeth was an immeasurably subtle woman, and a passionate one.
Now, more or less repeating things already said in letters, I told Elizabeth that on the whole my life seemed very good. I was happy in my new law firm, I was even getting along better with my parents (possibly because they had separated and were in that way getting along much better with each other).
Elizabeth listened, and smiled, saying very little. Then Aurelia reappeared, to arrange Elizabeth’s pillows and to say to me, “She very tired now, I think.”
(Aurelia, soon to be the owner of that house; perhaps something of that showed in her just perceptibly less shy bearing? Elizabeth must have liked to think of her there, of the difference in her life.)
I got up to go, but Elizabeth’s thin hand detained me. “Dinner at eight,” she said, with a smile and a small choked laugh.
It was still not late, not sunset time, and so instead of turning in at Del Sol I walked on down the beach, toward town. And I knew at once that this was a mistake: seemingly overnight (although actually there had been four years), big gaudy condominiums had sprung up, and a couple of huge hotels, towering and bright and hideous, where before there had been jungle green, and flowers, and space. Bodies crowded the beach; even had I wanted to walk much farther that would have been impossible. And vendors: I was almost instantly accosted by a swarm of them, sad-eyed little boys selling Chiclets, thin old men with bags of peanuts, women with the same butterfly-colored dresses as before, some trays of silver and jade, but I thought they all looked suddenly sad and thin, and too eager to sell, whereas before a certain diffidence had prevailed. The town’s so-visible prosperity had not trickled down to these natives, I thought.
And so I turned back to Del Sol, and it was from my tiny sea-front cottage there that I watched the glorious sunset of that first night, and in fact of all the nights of my stay at San Angel—as from the bar loud hard rock music blared, hits from the States of ten or so years back. I could not decide whether the place had got much noisier in the years of my absence or if it was simply that I had spent so little time there, before.
At dinner Elizabeth looked rested, animated, though her color was so bad, yellowish, sallow. “I am glad you have come!” she said to me several times—an unnecessary expense of breath; I knew she was glad.
I went back to my cottage early, and read for a couple of hours, despite the clamorous music—and I tried not to think very deeply about Elizabeth.
The next morning was overcast, gray. I went in to the office to put in the call to Judson, in Iowa, and I was told that it would probably rain before noon. A surprise: I had thought it never rained in San Angel.
A further surprise, and a better one, was that I got through to Judson almost at once, with a perfect connection.
“I really think Elizabeth wants to see you,” I told him. “I think you should come down.”
A small pause, during which I could hear him thinking, almost. “Not right now,” he said. “I can’t. But tell her I’ll be there before Christmas.”
“Good,” I told him. “She’ll feel better with something definite.” I added, “She’s pretty bad.”
“I know.” Another pause, before he asked, “You’re okay?”
“Oh, sure. But it’s raining here.”
He made an effort which I could feel to say, “Give my love to Elizabeth.”
“Oh, I will.”
“Good-by, Minerva. I thank you.”
“Good-by!”
In fact Elizabeth was to die before the end of November. She had what I tried hard to think of as a merciful heart attack a week after I had gone back to Oakland; Aurelia called to tell me. As Judson and I said to each other, how perfectly in character, how exquisitely polite of her to wait for death (for which she must have longed, she was so miserably uncomfortable) until after I had come and gone, and to spare Judson even making the trip.
Her death, I suppose, is what began to bring me and Judson together, though actually a teaching stint at Stanford was what brought him to California, and to me. Here we began to talk less about Elizabeth, more of ourselves. Very cautiously we began to be in love.
But that morning in Mexico, when I went to see Elizabeth, walking across the damp gray sand in the gentle rain—when I gave her the message from Judson she smiled as though she had all the time in the world for future visits, for receiving and giving love.
“Ah! Good,” she said. And, in almost Judson’s words, “I thank you, Minerva. You are good to me, you and Judson.”