If one day his life changed and he married, he could always make different burial arrangements.
But he did not believe that he would ever marry. As vivid as his imagination was, he could not imagine a wedding, a wife.
Had his post-Emily friends known of her and of his fixation on making ready for centuries in the same plot, they would think it macabre and unlike him, an emotional overreaction.
They would be wrong. Since having the stone installed nearly a year earlier, he had been more at peace than at any time since that night of hard rain.
Although no names or dates were chiseled into the marker, an epitaph for both Emily and him had been cut into stone, her favorite lines from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18”： Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May And summer’s lease hath all too short a date . . . But thy eternal summer shall not fade.
Even though she was not in this cemetery yet, he took comfort in each visit when he read those lines.
Now he came at last to his pepper-tree-shaded grave site, where in the branches birds trilled as if in celebration of day’s end.
In the plinth on which the gravestone stood, a round recess provided a sleeve in which a container of flowers could be placed.
He had not brought flowers, but someone else had made use of the recess. The milk-glass vase held half a dozen calla lilies, each large white spathe presenting its proud yellow spike, and the bouquet was tied with a length of blue ribbon.
| 21 |
Though blind, Calista lived in the first-floor apartment in a Balboa Island house with a sweeping view of Newport Harbor. She spent a lot of time on the generous deck that came with her unit, for she enjoyed the smell of the sea and the jasmine that grew in her ceramic pots, the warmth of the sun, the freshness of ocean breezes, the sounds of boat traffic, the chuckle and slap of water against dock pilings, the flight calls of the gulls, the mournful warning note of the channel-entrance foghorn on socked-in nights, and the conversations she engaged in with people who strolled or cycled along the public promenade onto which her deck faced.
When David had bought the house eleven years earlier, he had not told her its location. With Emily, he had walked Calista into the first-floor unit, toured it with her so she could feel the comfort of its rooms, and then escorted her onto the deck, where she first realized that she was on the harbor. If he had not presented the apartment as a fait accompli, she would not have agreed to it. Even so, she had been appalled by what the cost must be, and she could not understand why she deserved such generosity.
“Generosity has nothing to do with it,” David had said. “It’s what your daughter wants. Without her, I wouldn’t be a publishing phenom. I was writing short stories for little pay before she gave me the ideas for my first two novels. I owe her more than what this costs. Anyway, it’s a terrific investment.”
This evening, he called Calista en route to ask if he could visit, and she invited him for dinner. “Maria cooked a scrumptious brisket and left a rice-and-beans casserole, and as we speak, I’m making a salad.”
Maria Alvarez shopped and cooked, her sister Josefa did the cleaning, and one or the other of them looked after Calista for a few hours every day, though the indomitable Mrs. Carlino could otherwise take care of herself. In fact, even after all this time, she complained to David that he was pampering her inexcusably by providing this level of care.
When she answered the door, she was wearing white athletic shoes and a white kimono with a spare pattern of red hibiscus. She placed a hand on his chest and leaned in unerringly to kiss his cheek. “What a sweet surprise,” she said. “I’ve missed you, child.”
“I’ve missed you, too, Calista. Very much.”
When he was in Manhattan, he called her once a week, and when here in Newport, he visited often.
Her blue eyes searched his face as though they could map his features and know his mood by some sense other than sight. “Are you all right, David?”
“I’m fine. I should have called you from New York to let you know I was coming, but events got away from me.”
As she welcomed him into the apartment and closed the door, she said, “I was going to eat from my special tray with its separate little compartments, but now that you’re here, we can use plates if you’ll just set the table. It’s warm enough to dine on the deck.”
She had a stainless-steel cart with which she wheeled food and utensils to the table where she was taking her meal. He used it to transport plates and napkins and whatnot to the deck and then to convey the salads, rolls, and wine.