Second Chances by Alice Adams

Author:Alice Adams [Adams, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780517699270
Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
Published: 1988-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

This strange, prolonged wet spring has been for Polly an exceptional time: as she herself might put it (and she did so put it in a burst of confidence to Freddy, her only confidant: they trust each other), she has taken a lover. A considerably younger, though bald, nice man. (“I quite like bald men, don’t you? No? Well, for me I guess it’s reassuring, it seems to even things out.”) A dark Spaniard, named Victor Lozano, who works in the local garage.

Victor grew up among the poor, in San Sebastian, in the terrible thirties, his family having come from Spain some ten years earlier to work the vineyards of the San Joachim Valley. Generations of passionate proud anarchists, Polly has gathered. Cataláns. He and Polly first became friends on the basis of language; she addressed him formally, always in the purest Castilian, as she biked around the town on her rattling, failing bike. In her tattered jeans, her own bald head concealed in a red bandanna.

At some point Polly asked Victor if he knew anyone who could fix bikes, and Victor replied that he could, of course he could. He could and also did fix her refrigerator; he fixed, one by one, all the things that broke in her house. At some point, recognizing a mechanical skill that amounted to genius, Polly thought, How sad that he did not become a doctor; later she decided that he was probably better off as he was—he would never have made it in the medical establishment. Only, he was still fairly poor. He was married and had four or five children—at no time did they talk about any of those people.

In fact, they had very little personal conversation until the day, a couple of weeks ago, when Victor arrived to fix Polly’s radio and found her in bed, taking aspirin, fending off (she hoped) a cold. And practical Victor simply joined her there. He attended to her long-weary, long-unloved body with the same gentle care that Polly had seen him lavish on old machines.

And he in turn seemed very pleased by her. “The greatest woman, the most beautiful for fuck,” he told her. (For reasons of his own, Victor always spoke English in bed: perhaps believing that that was what Polly expected?) “I knew it would be so,” he said to her.

What would happen after that? was one of Polly’s concerns, that first time with Victor. Would he want to see her a lot? Or, worse, see her never again? Either would be in its way intolerable.

It soon became clear that Victor chose to see her on Thursday nights. In fact, on each and every Thursday night. And when they saw each other in the village he was as friendly, as courtly as ever. And as slightly distant. Victor, a very formal man.

Thursdays have obviously some special significance, then: his one night out? Or, less likely, his wife’s night out? Polly chose not to inquire. She took what she could of Victor, and gave him as much as he would allow her to.

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