Louisa Hall - Trinity

I asked Opje if he and Kitty remembered that house, and if they remembered driving back there after the strike, and how we all ate that Chinese supper Barb made, with the salty mandarin oranges. Poor Barb! She was such a bad cook. But even so, we always had a good time bringing friends back to that house. Even all those years later in Paris, I still remembered how much fun we had that night after the strike.

We stayed up late drinking martinis, thrilled by the progress we’d made at the docks, and by the time we’d finished that Chinese supper we were so exuberant we ran out into the darkness and threw off our clothes and swam naked in the big tiled pool.

That pool! I’ll never forget it. It was heated, and there were lamps on the sides, and the light swung through the water in nets. Outside, that pool was surrounded by shaped cypress trees standing sentry, and those enormous stone sphinxes that stared duskily at us while we swam, resting their chins on their crumbling forepaws.

I told that story while Jacqueline changed the record again, and everyone just split their sides laughing. We were having such a fine time together, remembering those nights back in Berkeley, while the candles Jacqueline had bought burned down to the wicks, and her white tulip arrangement, lit from below, began to look as if it, also, was melting. And then, out of the blue, I remembered that I still had three of the good bottles of port I’d salvaged from my marriage to Barb. I went into the kitchen and pulled them out of the back of the cabinet, and as soon as I uncorked the first one, I could smell California.

There it was, at the back of my palate: the warm earth, and the dusty spice of eucalyptus, and the ocean blowing in from the coast.

It stopped me in my tracks. For a moment, in the kitchen, I stood there with tears in my eyes.

Then I brought the bottle out to the table and we all drank it down to the dregs, talking about the old days on Shasta Road. We didn’t even realize how much time had passed! We stayed up so late that at some point, Jacqueline went to the couch and yawned like a kitten. Then she wrapped herself in a blanket, and later, she started reading a book.

And later, Kitty went to the balcony to smoke another cigarette, but Opje and I were still laughing about the struggles we had with that teachers’ union, so I went to the kitchen and opened another bottle of port.

Then I realized it was the last bottle I had from that case I’d salvaged from the wine cellar at Barb’s house. Then I hesitated for a moment, but what better time to finish that bottle than with my good old friend Opje? So then I pulled out the cork, and back at the table, Opje and I started talking about the time Barb and I visited him and Kitty at that cabin in New Mexico.

Then I remembered how Barb and I had made love all night in that bare little bedroom, with its four-poster bed and the wood beams, and it filled me with love, remembering that.

And then I thought again about that night when we all went swimming, after we’d come back from the dockworkers’ strike.

And Opje said, we were good in those days. And I said yes, that’s what it is. We were all so good in those days.

Then we toasted to that, and poured ourselves another glass, and I kept saying, “Do you remember this?” and “Do you remember that?” and then Kitty came in from the balcony and said it was time to go home. They had an early flight back to the States, so Opje helped her back into her mink, and he put on his overcoat, and we clapped each other on the back one more time, and for a moment I almost imagined I was saying goodbye to him at that pass in the mountains, as if he were going on in the hail and I were turning back to go home.

One of us heading west, the other going back east.

And I almost cried, to think of everything that had happened since Opje and I rode over that pass, and how much more time might go by before we met again at those mountains.

WHEN I WENT BACK INSIDE, JACQUELINE HAD GONE TO SLEEP.

She’d left all the dishes out on the table, which annoyed me for a moment, but then I went to the balcony and finished the port, and then even though it was cold, and the rooftops were steely and wet, I was in California again. I could even smell eucalyptus, and the desk lamps that were switched on in people’s apartments were like little oranges, looming in the dusky groves, and I felt such fondness for Opje as he was in those days in Berkeley, and also for those boys he taught, and for Bernard Peters and even for Barb, who was so pretty back then, with her blond hair and her brown shoulders.

Sitting there on the balcony, I was swept away by my fondness for Barb, with her disorganized American laugh and that sprawling house she inherited from her parents and didn’t know how to look after, with the tiled swimming pool and the shaped cypress trees, and the way we all rushed out together, caught up in that moment of unbridled youth, and stripped off our clothes and swam naked.

I felt so fond of everyone in those days that I decided, right then and there, to write a letter to Barb to ask her if she remembered that night. So then I went inside and got a pencil and paper, and came back out and sat down at that table, the one Jacqueline had decorated with a blue porcelain cat, and I wrote to Barb and told her about our excellent night, drinking Opje’s martinis and catching up on the old days.

I told her Opje and Kitty seemed happy together, and I said it made me remember how happy we all were in Berkeley: driving back up from the strike, eating that Chinese supper, and throwing off our clothes to go swimming.

Then, carried away by my fond feelings, I told her I remembered how generous she always was, how loved she made me feel, especially in the beginning. I told her how beautiful I always found her, particularly on that night, her wet hair streaming behind her, her shoulders bare, her eyes shining toward me in the darkness.

I went on and on. I told her, joking, that I remembered how bad her cooking was, and how she never really knew the meaning of money. But I told her that now, after all, none of that mattered. None of the unpleasant things mattered, I wrote. I’d forgotten them all.

I couldn’t even remember, I said, what we fought about in those days, and all that remained still in my mind was how beautiful she was in the water, and how much I loved her, and what a gift it was to me to have known her.

Then, feeling warm and happy and satisfied with the generous spirit that had caught me in its arms since Opje walked in the door, I cleaned up the dishes. And I realized that Opje and Kitty had forgotten to take their big salad bowl with them. And I’ll tell you what, even that was just exactly like Opje!

He was always forgetful. His mind was hung up on bigger concerns, like solar decay and permanent free fall. So that salad bowl made me smile, and I smiled again whenever I saw it sitting there on our shelf, even though for a few days after that party, Jacqueline was in a bad mood, one of her inexplicable sour ambitious phases, when she worked on her dissertation all day and snapped at me if I interrupted.

But even so. I was in a high state all week, and well into the next one, when unfortunately I received one of Barb’s tiresome, embittered responses, saying she didn’t remember that night the same way that I did.

She told me she remembered that I’d pressured her to get naked, and that she’d been excruciatingly self-conscious, even under the water.

And even so, she said, despite her repeated objections, I’d insisted on turning the lights on.

Later, she said, in the following months, she’d been mortified whenever she ran into our friends, not because of how we’d all gotten naked, but because they’d heard me ignore her when she asked me to not turn on the lights.