The City of Your Final Destination

by Peter Cameron

  She waited until all the lights were out in the house until she descended from the attic and crossed the dark courtyard. The fountain had been turned off but the fish moved sleeplessly through the water. She stood for a moment, watching them, and then entered the house.

  It was all still and dark. Her rooms were on the second floor and she had almost passed through the front hall toward the stairs when something made her turn around and study the shadows across the room. A woman was sitting in the dark, watching her.

  “It’s me,” said Arden. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”

  “You startled me,” said Caroline. “I thought you were in bed.”

  “I was,” said Arden, “but I couldn’t sleep.”

  I could say good night and continue up the stairs, thought Caroline. Or I could go and sit beside her. But her pause to think this was somehow decisive; it precluded the first alternative. “Perhaps you should have a drink,” she said. “It may help you sleep.”

  “Actually, I already have one,” said Arden. She raised her hands from her lap, revealing a small glass cupped in them.

  Caroline sat down across the room, on the bottom stair. For a moment, neither of them said anything.

  Then Caroline said, “Did Diego fix the heater? Do we have hot water?”

  “No,” said Arden. “He says he needs another part. He said he would come back tomorrow, if he can get it in town.”

  “How I long for a hot bath,” said Caroline.

  “Yes,” said Arden. “I know.”

  They were silent a moment, and then Arden asked, “How is your painting coming?”

  Caroline made a noise that indicated both impatience and dismissal.

  Arden sipped from her little glass.

  What is she drinking? wondered Caroline. Is she a drunk? Has Arden become a drunk? She bent down and unstrapped her sandals. “Adam has invited us to lunch tomorrow. He wishes to discuss the biography.”

  “I thought you didn’t want it,” said Arden.

  “I don’t,” said Caroline. “But the least we can do is listen to Adam. We owe him that.”

  “Why?” said Arden. “He doesn’t listen to others.”

  Caroline stood up. “Well, I said we would have lunch with him. You can not come if you wish.”

  “Of course I’ll come,” said Arden. “I just wish he weren’t such a bully.”

  “It’s rather pointless to wish that,” said Caroline. “Should we walk down together?”

  “Yes,” said Arden.

  “I’ll look for you about noon, then. Good night.”

  “Good night,” said Arden.

  Caroline turned and went up the stairs. Arden sat alone a while longer, finishing her drink. Then she, too, went to bed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Arden and Caroline walked along the shaded verge of the road. They both wore sleeveless dresses and sandals; Caroline wore a straw hat with a large, sloping brim. It tied with ribbons beneath her chin, but the ribbons were loose and fluttered at the periphery of her gaze.

  It was about a mile downhill from the big house at Ochos Rios to the millhouse. The road was quiet, seldom traveled by automobiles. They walked past a field of wildflowers above which a cloud of butterflies delicately hovered. Then they turned off onto the dirt road that dipped down, shadowed by trees, toward the dell in which the millhouse stood, and the air was suddenly fresh.

  From the window of the study Adam could see two women walking along the road. A little cloud of dust got kicked up around them. Fools, he thought. Mad dogs and Englishmen. He looked again at the women, who had drawn closer. One of them wore a coolie hat, trailing ribbons. And then he thought: Damn it, it’s Caroline and Arden, coming to lunch. I forgot.

  The millhouse was a round stone building that had been rather crudely transformed into a domicile. A large living room and small kitchen and bathroom occupied the first floor, the second floor was a large, unfinished room where Pete stored the secondhand and cast-off furniture he collected and sold to a dealer from New York City. A bedroom and study were on the third floor. Adam went out to the landing and called for Pete.

  “What?” Pete called back up.

  “I forgot to tell you. Caroline and Arden are coming to lunch.”

  “When?” asked Pete.

  “Now,” said Adam.

  “What?” Pete appeared in the open space below, gazing up.

  “I forgot to tell you that I invited Caroline and Arden to lunch. And they are coming up the road. Or actually, they are coming down the road. Do we have anything to feed them?”

  “No,” said Pete.

  “There must be something,” said Adam. “What were you planning for our lunch?”

  “I didn’t know I was planning our lunch.”

  “Of course you were. You always do. Don’t taunt me.”

  “I thought we might have soup. A tin of soup. But it won’t go four ways,” said Pete.

  “There must be another tin,” said Adam.

  “There isn’t,” said Pete.

  “Could we stretch it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Add water till there’s enough for four. What kind of soup is it?”

  “Chicken,” said Pete. “With rice.”

  “Oh, that will be fine,” said Adam. “Just add some water and some milk. You can make it a sort of cream of chicken rice. Those tinned soups are made to be stretched. And we have bread, don’t we?”

  “A little,” said Pete.

  “Well, slice it thinly.”

  “Why did you invite them to lunch? We were just there last night.”

  “In order to discuss this business of the biography. I thought it might help to get them here, on my turf, so to speak. Otherwise they will stay home and plot things. And we don’t want Arden and Caroline plotting behind our backs, do we?”

  “That might be interesting,” said Pete. “I would not mind it so much.”

  “Well, I would,” said Adam. “And remember that you are on my side. You must charm them. I am incapable of that, so I depend upon you.”

  “Should I be charming before or after I make the lunch?” asked Pete.

  “What?”

  “I just want to make sure I understand your orders: feed them lunch and be charming. Anything else?”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Don’t be difficult,” said Adam. “Open the door.”

  “Feed them lunch, be charming, don’t be difficult, open the door. Anything else?”

  Adam laughed. “Not at the moment,” he said.

  Pete opened the door. The two ladies entered and were greeted. Adam descended the stairs, and they entered the living room and found seats, all a little bit away from one another. The act of sitting down and arranging themselves took some time and attention, and was followed by a silence. Then Adam said, “I am sorry to say that Pete has burned the lunch. So I am afraid we have only the soup left to feed you.”

  “Soup sounds perfect,” said Caroline. “I am not hungry for a big lunch.”

  “Neither am I,” said Arden. And then she said, “It’s much cooler down here near the stream. How lucky you are.”

  Caroline said, “I have always loved this room and now, for the first time, I understand why. There is something about a room with rounded walls, with no corners, that makes me feel safe and happy. I suppose it all goes back to the womb.”

  Adam did not like this talk of wombs. “Could I get you an aperitif?” he asked. “I think we have some Cinzano.”

  “We have no Cinzano,” Pete said.

  “Yes, we have no Cinzano,” Adam sang. Then he said, “Well, what do we have?”

  “There is wine, of course, and tomato juice.”

  “Tomato juice would be lovely,” said Caroline.

  “Yes,” said Arden. “Please.”

  Pete stood up.

  Arden said, “Let me help you.” Together they went through the swinging door into the tiny kitchen, a sort of shed that had been b
uilt onto the millhouse at some distant point; it had no windows, just a rusted exhaust fan that no longer worked but through which leaked a little fresh air. A piece of slate, which stood on top of an old kneehole desk, served as a counter. A small, ancient, noisy refrigerator occupied the kneehole. A hot plate and toaster oven stood on the counter. A single spigot in the stone wall emptied into an old porcelain sink that stood on an iron stand beneath it. Most of the porcelain was worn away, revealing an iridescent subderma, smooth and pearly as the inside of a shell, veined with rust.

  Pete rummaged in one of the desk’s drawers and extracted a tin without a label. “This is either tomato juice or lard,” he said, and began to poke a hole in its top with an awl.

  Arden watched him. “Don’t you have a can opener?” she asked.

  Pete looked at her, but did not answer.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Arden.

  “What do you mean, what’s wrong?”

  “I can tell when something’s wrong between you and Adam. Is he still upset about last night?”

  “No,” said Pete. “Or perhaps yes, I don’t know. What he’s really upset about is the lunch.”

  “Because you burned it?”

  Pete was a good cook, and this fiction rankled him. “I did not burn it! There was nothing to burn. He forgot to tell me you were coming until just before you arrived. And so to punish him I told him there was no food. Just one tin of soup.”

  “Why do you want to punish him?” asked Arden.

  The answer was obvious and inexplicable, so Pete merely shrugged.

  “Do you really only have one can of soup?”

  “No. There’s plenty of soup. But I want it to seem a miracle.” Pete succeeded in penetrating the can’s metal skin. He sniffed at the thick maroon juice that spunked from the hole. “It smells bad,” he said. He dabbed his finger and tasted it. “It’s nasty,” he said. “Wouldn’t you rather have a glass of wine?”

  “Yes,” said Arden, “I would.”

  “I think we all would,” said Pete. He extracted a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, deftly opened it, and put it and three glasses on a little silver tray. “Why don’t you take this out and leave me to my soup?”

  “Are you sure I can’t help you?”

  “Yes. And don’t give it away. There was only one tin of soup, remember.”

  Arden liked Pete. Sometimes it was Arden and Pete versus Adam and Caroline. “I saw no tin at all,” she said, with a laugh, and pushed through the door.

  Adam and Caroline were standing by the window, whispering. Arden put the tray down on the low table in front of the sofa and poured wine into the three glasses. “The tomato juice had gone bad,” she announced, “so we decided on wine. Would you like a glass, Caroline?”

  “Yes, please,” said Caroline.

  “Adam?”

  “I could have told him the tomato juice was rancid. It’s been there for a hundred years, if a day.”

  “Then why did you not?” asked Caroline.

  “Because he would have told me to shut up,” said Adam.

  “But you know he is right,” said Caroline. “You really should shut up, sometimes.”

  “Of course I know,” said Adam. “The problem is I have no self-control. I blame it on my parents. I was brought up well enough to know what not to say but not strictly enough to resist saying it. I was indulged and spoiled. Shamelessly. Until a certain age when a certain brother was born and I became unbearable and then I was just ignored. ‘Go and play out of doors,’ my mother would say, pushing me outside and locking the door behind me. They actually locked me out of the house, for hours and hours. In all sorts of weather. Can you imagine?”

  “Yes,” said Caroline. “I can.”

  “I would go to the garage and let the chauffeur interfere with me. Chauffeur interfere. That sounds very nice, doesn’t it? It would be good in a poem. Or as a title: The Interfering Chauffeur.”

  Arden took a glass of wine from the tray and sat on the couch. She felt she wanted to drink it more than she wanted to serve them theirs. I suppose that makes me selfish, she thought, but so be it. She sipped the wine. It tasted very good: cold and clean. She shuddered slightly at the thought of the rancid tomato juice and drank more wine.

  Pete appeared from the kitchen. He began to clear off the round table, which was stacked with books and dated newspapers and magazines.

  “May I help?” asked Arden.

  “No, thanks,” said Pete.

  “How is the soup coming?” asked Adam.

  “Quite nicely,” said Pete, and returned to the kitchen.

  “Well,” said Adam, after a moment. “Perhaps we should talk about this biography.”

  “Jules did not want a biography,” said Caroline.

  “That was my feeling too,” said Arden.

  “While I think it is very noble of both of you to consider Jules’s feelings, I think such consideration is rather beside the point.”

  “Why is that?” asked Caroline.

  “Jules is dead,” said Adam, “as I seem to be constantly reminding you.”

  “I do not need you to remind me of that,” said Caroline. “I know very well he is dead.”

  “Good. I am glad to hear it, as I had begun to wonder. And as he is dead, I think we should stop worrying about what Jules would or would not have wanted.”

  “But isn’t that exactly our role as executors?” asked Arden. “I thought it was.”

  “No, my dear. Your role as executor is to manage his literary estate.”

  “And how can we do that without considering him?”

  “Jules and his literary estate are two separate things. They are not one indivisible entity. He wrote a book. He was not his work. It was not him. It is a product.”

  “I think it is more than a product,” said Arden.

  “But you will admit it is separate from him?”

  “Of course, in the most literal way.”

  “Why don’t you tell us why you want this biography,” said Caroline.

  “Why do I want this biography? It is very simple! It is no great mystery. Let me try to put it simply: this biography, this authorized biography, which is guaranteed to be published by what I assume to be a reputable if somewhat … well, somewhat dingy university press, this biography will help immeasurably in making sure that Jules’s work is not lost or overlooked. For work to survive, it must be read in context of the life. It was fine for Jules to stay private while he was alive, fine for him to want that, but if we don’t allow some public investigation of his life, I am afraid his work will die with him. Disappear. And I do not wish to be responsible for that. I feel I owe my brother that much. That is what I can do for him now.”

  “Even if it is against his wishes?” asked Caroline.

  “He made me his executor. As he did you and Arden. Somewhat perversely, of course, but nevertheless that is what he did. He has entrusted and empowered us. While he was alive it was all right for him to act in other than the best interest of his reputation. That was his decision to make, and I respected it. But he is dead. It is our decision to make now. We must do what we think is best.”

  “I wish I could find the letter he wrote me about this,” said Caroline. “He was reading someone’s biography—I can’t remember whose; Maugham’s, perhaps—and he said he couldn’t bear for his life to be, well, I forget his words, but he compared it to a corpse being publicly exhumed.”

  “But you don’t understand!” exclaimed Adam. “He will not have to bear it. He is dead! He bears nothing now!”

  “Yes, I see your point,” said Caroline. “It must seem foolish to you, but I am afraid I cannot concede. There is so little we can give the dead, beyond respecting their wishes. In fact, it is all we can give. It is all I can give, and I intend to give it.”

  “What about you, Arden?”

  “I see both sides,” said Arden. “I understand—I think I understand—both of your positions. And I think if there is a mistake to be ma
de, the greater mistake would be in disregarding Jules’s wishes. If you’re right, Adam, and it’s a mistake not to take advantage of what a biography would offer, that’s the mistake I’d rather make. That mistake hurts no one, really. It can be changed in the future. But the other mistake is hurtful, and cannot be changed. You cannot take something out of the world once it is put in, but you can add things, later, if you want.”

  They were all silent a moment, and then Pete appeared with steaming and fragrant bowls of soup. They all stood up.

  “It smells delicious, Pete,” said Caroline.

  They sat at the table and began eating the chicken rice soup, to which Pete had added lemon and cilantro and wine. It was delicious. They all agreed on that.

  As it was all uphill, it was a slower walk back to the big house. And the two women were stunned by the heat and the wine they had drunk before, during, and after lunch. They would take naps when they got home, both of them, drowsing on large old beds in bedrooms at different ends of the house. They often did the same thing at the same time, unwittingly, for they were more alike than they cared to know, and there was something real between them, a rhythm, like love, that allowed them to live together as peacefully as they did.

  They walked in silence, the sun on their bare arms and legs. Caroline carried her hat, trailing its ribbons. They passed the field of wildflowers, but the butterflies had disappeared. The flowers were left behind, however, like an image in a mirror that remains reflected after its subject passes.

  “I’m glad that it’s been decided,” said Arden.

  Caroline murmured something.

  “I think we’ve made the right decision,” said Arden. “I don’t think a biography would make much difference anyway. I’m not convinced by that. It’s better to proceed cautiously. I shall tell him we have no interest in a biography at this time.”

  “Yes,” said Caroline. “Tell him that.”

  “I’ll write to him as soon as we get home,” said Arden. “We mustn’t keep him waiting.” As she said this her mind made a little leap, and a field appeared beside the field in which she had been thinking: She could write the biography. They couldn’t stop her from doing that. And what else was she to do with her life? It was the project that she needed, that would give her direction and purpose, save her from this aimless fretting. She supposed she could do it. It was just a formula after all, a gathering of information, a filling-in of blanks, a compiling and arranging of facts. It seemed impossible but it must not be, as biographies were so often written. And with Adam and Caroline around it wouldn’t be difficult to find out what she needed to know. Really, among the three of them, they knew everything. Or everything that would go into a biography. Adam knew about Jules’s childhood and the past, and Caroline knew about the rest. And who better to write it than she? Some graduate student from Kansas who had never known Jules and never set foot in Uruguay? No wonder he wants to pick our brains, she thought. We mustn’t let some stranger do it. I must write him at once and say no.