by Alice Adams
The heat has gathered and intensified. Phoebe feels that she will burst, her skin rent apart, the way a tomato’s skin will split in heat. What she also feels is a kind of rage, though she tries to tell herself that she is simply hot, that she feels so ill-tempered only because of the weather, the temperature. And, knowing herself, certain bad tendencies, she determines that she will not say how angry she is, and especially she will not take it out on Danny.
I love Dan. The weather is not his fault—nor, really, is absent Ralph. Gross, inconsiderate, totally selfish Ralph. Some friend, thinks Phoebe.
She and Dan are lying across their bed, ostensibly napping, although the turgid air seems entirely to forbid real sleep. Naked, they still do not touch, although earlier Dan has asked, “Can I douse you with some cold water, or maybe an alcohol rub?”
“No thanks, but really, thanks.” (It was at that moment that Phoebe determined not to vent her ire on Dan, who is genuinely kind, well-meaning.)
They have both been whispering, although no one could conceivably hear them, the rooms being so spread apart; Maria’s is several rooms away. “Maria simply clutches that prison experience to herself, doesn’t she?” now whispers Phoebe. “Not that she much wants to talk about anything else either.”
“Except Maine.” Danny tries a small laugh. “Lots of Maine.”
“And the way she eats,” complains Phoebe bitterly. “Just bolting down a few bites and then a dead stop. It’s not exactly flattering. Not that I really care, I mean. Did she always eat like that?”
“I sort of can’t remember. Maybe not. I didn’t notice, really.”
“I have to say, though,” announces Phoebe, “I really think this is a very selfish move on Ralph’s part.”
Dan very lightly sighs, just shifting in bed. “I’m afraid I agree. But people change, I think. Maybe he’s pure L.A. these days. More selfish than he used to be. He’s been seeing some shrink down there for years.”
“That whole culture’s so selfish. Crass.”
“Oh, right.”
Feeling a little better, Phoebe reaches her fingers just to graze the top of Danny’s hand. They look at each other; they smile.
Dinner that night, which again is out on the terrace, is in many ways a repeat of lunch, except of course for the menu; provident Phoebe has made a nice cold pasta, with garlicky brandied prawns. But Maria again eats very little, and that most rapidly.
And again she talks about Maine. “The soil was so rocky around our house it was hard to grow flowers,” she says. “I’ve never even tried to plant anything out here.”
The night is densely dark, pitch black; in an absolute and final way it is still. And heavy; the air seems weighted. Oppressive, stultifying.
“I do wish Ralph could have been here.” It is Dan who has said this, not having at all intended to. It simply slipped out, like a sigh, and now he feels tactless. “But it’s great that he has so much work down there,” he feebly amends.
“I suppose so.” Unhelpful Maria puts her fork down and stares out into the black.
Going about the house, as every night he has—checking door locks, turning off lights—for the first time on this visit Danny has a sad sense of spuriousness: this is not his house, he is much more guest than host. And he recalls now that this place has always been somewhat daunting; its proportions make him feel even less tall than in fact he is. And very possibly Phoebe’s deepest reactions have been similar? She too has been made uncomfortable by the house, in addition to the appalling heat, her enemy? None of these facts augur poorly for their marriage, though, Danny believes. Once they are back in San Francisco, in the cool foggy summer weather, in their own newly painted rooms, then they will be fine.
He admits to himself, however, some real disappointment over what he feels as the failure of connection between Maria and Phoebe. When Ralph called about Maria’s coming up, just out of jail, along with disappointment at the curtailment of their privacy, Danny experienced a small surge of happy expectation. Maria and Phoebe, despite obvious differences of age, career, could become great friends, a complement to his own friendship with Ralph. And now that this rapport seems entirely unlikely, Danny recognizes the strength of his hope—his conviction, even—that it might have taken place.
Before starting his tour of the house, Dan urged Phoebe to go and take a long cool bath. “Do you a world of good,” he told her. And that presumably is where Phoebe is now, in the bathroom down the hall. (The distance between bathrooms and bedrooms in this house seems an almost deliberate inconvenience.)
As Dan gets into bed, he hears nothing, no sound from anywhere. Outside the window the air is motionless, still; the river is soundless, slow. And although he knows that in a few minutes Phoebe will be there with him, Danny experiences a solitude that seems entire, and final.
And then, around midnight, everything breaks. Brilliant flashes of lightning split open the sky, thunder roars—a sound of huge rocks falling down a mountainside. Slits of light, crashing noise.
Entirely awake, and a little scared, Phoebe abruptly remembers Maria this morning as she talked about thunderstorms in Maine. “Actually, I’d be quite terrified, I always used to be” is what Maria said.
To Dan, who is much less fully awake (he seemed to have trouble going to sleep at all), Phoebe whispers, “I’m just going down to see if Maria’s all right.”
Slipping into her sandals, pulling on her light cotton robe—in the new blessed cool!—Phoebe begins to feel her way down the narrow, pine-smelling hall to Maria’s room at the end, the room nearest the river.
Seeing no light beneath the door, she hesitates, but then very gently she knocks, at the same time saying firmly and loudly enough to be heard across the thunder crashes, “It’s Phoebe.”
For a moment there is no response at all; then some faint sound comes from Maria that Phoebe chooses to interpret as assent.
Entering, she sees Maria upright in bed, sitting erect but pressed back, braced against the headboard. “Oh” is all she says to Phoebe.
Coming over to stand beside her, Phoebe asks, “Should I turn the light on?” and she reaches toward the bedside lamp, on its table.
Maria stops her, crying, “Electricity—don’t!”
Recognizing true panic, Phoebe quietly tells her, “I’ll just stay here for a minute, if you don’t mind.”
In the strange half-light between crashes, Maria reaches for her hand. She says, “Thank you,” and can just be seen to smile before quickly releasing Phoebe.
Outside, a heavy pounding rain has now begun, but the thunderstorm seems suddenly to be over; there is only the hard drumbeat of rain on the shingled roof, the thud of water on windowpanes.
Phoebe pulls the small bentwood chair from Maria’s desk over to the bed, and sits down.
Maria says, “It was good of you to remember.”
“I was a little scared,” admits Phoebe.
“The thing about prison,” Maria takes this up as though prison had just then been under discussion, “is that they do everything to wreck your mind. ‘Mind-fuck,’ some of the younger women called it.” A faint, tight smile. “But they do. Rushing you all the time. Starting you in to do something, and then right away it’s over. Even eating, even that horrible food I never got to finish. And they mix up everyone’s mail so you think it must be on purpose. And the noise. Radios. And people smoking.”
“Jesus” is all Phoebe can manage to say.
Maria is leaning forward now, her eyes luminous, deep, immense. “At my age,” she says. “I mean, I often wonder where my mind is going anyway, without all that.”
“That’s frightful. Terrible.”
“Well, it was terrible. I didn’t want to admit it to myself. I got just so plain scared. The truth is I’m still scared.”
“Well, of course. Anyone is scared of jail. I’m not even sure I could do it.”
Maria’s gaze in the semi-dark seems to take all of Phoebe in. “I think you would if you had to, or th
ought you had to,” she says.
“I hope so.”
“But I’m worried about going back there,” Maria tells her. “If for some reason I had to. Again.”
At that moment, however, a new sound has begun, just audible through the steady, heavy rain. And lights can be seen to approach the house, very slowly.
Lights from a car, now visible to them both. Unnecessarily, Phoebe announces, “Someone’s coming. A small sports car. Whoever—?”
“It must be Ralph,” says Maria, smiling. And she exclaims, “Oh, I do think things will be better now. It’s even got cool, do you feel it?” But in an anxious way her face still searches Phoebe’s. “Do you want to turn on the light?”
Phoebe reaches to touch Maria’s hand, very quickly, lightly—before she pushes the switch.
Standing up, then, in the sudden brightness, smiling, as Phoebe moves toward the door she turns back to Maria; she tells her, “I’ll get Danny. We’ll go make sandwiches—some tea? Poor Ralph, all that driving. We’ll celebrate!”
OCRACOKE ISLAND
Tall and too thin, sometimes stooped but now bent bravely forward into the wind, old Duncan Elliott heads southward in Central Park, down a steep and cindery path—his scattered, shamed, and tormented mind still alert to the avoidance of dangerously large steel baby carriages, and of runners (he must not be run down by babies or by runners, he cautions himself). But most of his thoughts are concentrated on the question of comparative evils: of all that has befallen him lately, and particularly today, what is worse—or, rather, which is worst of all? To have been abandoned by one’s fourth and one had hoped final wife, or to have made a total fool of oneself discussing that event—even trying, as it were, to explain it away.
Duncan is a distinguished professor, now an emeritus at a large Midwestern university (for all the good that is doing him now); his wife Cath left the month before, in hot September. Disconsolately traveling to New York, in part to cheer himself up, along with some publishing business, Duncan forgot the possibility of chill late October breezes.
Or—he continues his plaintive litany—is the worst thing of all to have broken off and lost an old, much filled and refilled tooth, leaving what must be a conspicuously ugly black hole in the forefront of one’s mouth? Oh, what matter which is worse! thinks Duncan then. All of these things have happened (the most recent being the tooth, which only came to his attention out here in the cold) and he can stand none of them.
The runners that Duncan encounters along his way are grim-faced, red, and sweaty, and the young mothers pushing those carriages are scruffy, sloppily dressed; and the babies are—well, babies. Where are the handsome, glamorous pairs of lovers that one used to glimpse in New York, in Central Park? Duncan asks this wistful question of himself, and then he answers (insanely!): On Ocracoke Island. For it is to Ocracoke that Cath has run off with her poet, and in his mind Duncan has just seen the two of them, Cath and Brennan O’Donahue (of all corny, false-literary names), Brennan as handsome and fair as Cath herself is—he sees Brennan and Cath and scores of other couples, all young and blond, all healthy and beautiful, and running, running like horses, on a wild and endless beach.
Cath’s gesture—if you call running off to an island with a poet a gesture—was made even less bearable for Duncan by the publicity it drew; she had to choose a famous poet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, brawling media hero of a poet. A small item in Newsweek (Newsmakers) described O’Donahue as having run off to Ocracoke Island “like a pirate, a professor’s wife his plunder.” Very poetic for a newsmagazine, Duncan thought. Perhaps Brennan himself had written the item? In any case, a lot of people seemed to know whose wife was meant.
At times Duncan feels literally murderous: he will go there to Ocracoke and shoot them both, and then himself. He has found the place on a map, and it looks as though you had to take a ferry from a town called Swan Quarter. Swan Quarter? But surely murder would be a more respectable, even a nobler act than a lot of talk, so deeply embarrassing, so sickly humiliating to recall.
Nearing his hotel, and the promise of some comfort, Duncan begins, though, to dread the coming night. He is to dine with Emily, his second wife: his briefest marriage, that to Emily, and perhaps for that reason they have stayed in touch, have remained almost friends. Emily and Cath have even met, Duncan now recalls, on a trip to New York that he and Cath took just before their marriage. Emily is a painter, beginning to be quite successful. She is, as they all have been, considerably younger than Duncan.
(Younger and in one way or another very talented, the first three of them, Duncan reflects. More talented than he? That was surely a problem with Jessica, the first wife, a poet who took a very low view of criticism. Less so with Emily, perhaps because painting is—well, not literary, and they were not together very long. The worst was Janice, herself a professor, a literary critic. Undoubtedly, Janice in her way was responsible for Cath, who is talentless, a born appreciator.)
But unless he exercises the utmost caution, for which he feels himself much too tired, devoid of resources, Duncan fears that he will simply repeat the follies of the day, with Emily, tonight. He will talk again—perhaps even more ridiculously—about Cath; obviously he will do so, since she and Emily have met. Emily by now is probably—is undoubtedly a feminist; she could finish him off entirely.
At the hotel desk Duncan looks longingly toward the cubbyholes of messages. If only there were a pink phone slip from Emily, canceling, for whatever reason. (Or a slip saying Cath had called?) But there is nothing, and heavily now Duncan walks over to the elevator. He rings, ascends.
This making a fool of himself began for Duncan at breakfast, in the somewhat dingy dining room of his hotel, as he talked (or tried to explain) to Jasper Wilkes, a former student, and began to babble. “In point of fact I actually encouraged her to have an affair—or affairs; one can’t say I wasn’t generous. Ironically enough, she could be said to be doing just what I told her to do. In a sense.”
Jasper repeated “In a sense” with perhaps too much relish. A highly successful advertising executive since abandoning academe, Jasper is a prematurely, quite shiningly bald young man, with clever, hooded eyes.
“After all,” Duncan continued, long fingers playing with his croissant’s cold buttery remains, “I’m very busy. And besides …” He smiled briefly, sadly, implying much.
“Of course.” Jasper’s eyes closed, but his voice had an agreeing sound.
Gulping at strong lukewarm coffee—he had just sent back for fresh—Duncan had a nervously exhilarated sense that this was not how men talked to each other, or not usually. Or perhaps these days they do? They are “open” with each other, as women have always been? In any case, he hoped that he had not got out of his depth with Jasper. The coffee had made him feel a little drunk.
And at the word “depth” his mind stopped totally, and replayed, depth, depth. He had suddenly, involuntarily seen Atlantic waves, brilliant and mountainous, quite possibly fatal. He had imagined Ocracoke Island. Again.
But could Jasper be in a hurry? Off somewhere? Duncan was conscious of wanting to prolong (oh! all day) this relieving, if highly unusual, conversation. “Precisely,” he hastened to agree with what he imagined Jasper just had said. “I intended something discreet and, I suppose I also hoped, something minor. A dalliance more or less along my own lines. My old lines, I suppose I should say.” He attempted a modest laugh, but the sound was bleak.
“Right,” Jasper agreed. “Something to take up a certain amount of her time and energy. Rather like going to a gym.”
“Oh, precisely.”
The two men exchanged looks in which there was expressed some shock at their complicitous cynicism, but more pure pleasure—or so Duncan for the moment believed.
The coffee arrived, at which Jasper frowned, conclusively proving to Duncan that he was after all in a hurry; he did not even want more coffee.
“The point is,” said Jasper, in a summing-up way, “whether or not you wan
t her back. One. And, two, if you do, how to get her.”
Unprepared for this précis, Duncan felt quite dizzied.
Nor was he prepared for what came next, which was Jasper’s efficient departure: a smooth rise to his feet, and a firm, sincere handshake. Lots of eye contact. Murmurs of friendship. And then Jasper was gone, last glimpsed as a narrow, animated back departing through the door that led out to the lobby.
Quite disconcerted, and alone with his hot, unconsoling coffee, Duncan looked around. This room had got uglier, he thought, trying to recall what he used to like about it. Surely not the pictures, the big bright oils that all looked like copies of famous works, giving the room a spurious look of “taste”? Never the pictures, he concluded, and surely not the inferior coffee, and fake croissants. Dismally he reminded himself that he had always chosen this hotel for reasons of economy, never for charm.
Now everything seemed to disturb him, though: the room with its awful art, the bad coffee, and particularly his just ended conversation with Jasper Wilkes. And why? Rerunning that conversation, he succeeded in finding nothing truly objectionable. (Unless that crack about going to gyms—would that have been a “put-on”?) Bright Jasper, though. All agreement, stating and restating Duncan’s own views in a clear succinct way. But perhaps that very succinctness was the problem? Especially at the end, just before Jasper hurried off to wherever?
Leaning back into the once pneumatic banquette, for reassurance Duncan stroked his hair, now white but still gratifyingly thick and fine. How Jasper must envy his hair! That in itself could explain quite a lot.
Duncan thought then of the old days, when Jasper as a student came petitioning with his poetry. In conference with Jasper, Duncan might sneak a quick look at his large grandfather clock while pretending to allow his gaze to wander. And apprised of the time, he, Duncan, might then too brusquely sum up his view of Jasper’s poem, or poems: Jasper had been all too prolific. And as Jasper at last got up reluctantly to leave, the also departing Duncan, a man in early middle age, might well be off to visit some pert-breasted, ambitious literary girl, for something “discreet,” and “minor.”