by Alice Adams
As though Jasper had encouraged him—seduced him, even—into all that talk about Cath, Duncan felt a pained resentment. Especially he resented Jasper’s just getting up and leaving him like that—all at sea, almost drowned in ungovernable feelings.
But at lunchtime Duncan could be said to have done it again.
“It was really the way she left that I so much minded,” he remarked to his lunch companion, Marcus Thistlethwaite, an English critic, a very old friend. They were seated in a corner of a pretty new Upper West Side restaurant, banks of fall flowers in the windows, filtered sunshine. “I would have given a maid more notice,” Duncan added, and then reflected that his analogy had been slightly confused: just who did he mean was whose maid, and who gave notice? He hoped that Marcus had not observed this, but naturally no such luck.
“I’m not sure just who was whose maid,” said Marcus, with his ratchety, cropped-off laugh. “But I believe I rather catch your drift, as it were.” And then, “Is this quite the proper thing to do with lobster claws?”
“Oh yes, you just crack them like nuts,” instructed Duncan, who had just wondered why on earth he had ordered something he had never much liked, and that was at best quite difficult to eat. (And that reminded him inevitably of the seacoast.)
Marcus’s hair is thin and silvery, like tinsel; draped across his bright impressive skull, it ornaments his head. Duncan has always been somewhat in awe of Marcus, of his erudition and his cool, uncluttered, passionless judgments. And so why on earth did he have to make that silly remark about Cath, and the dismissal of maids? “Say what you like about New York,” he then attempted, striving for an even tone despite a certain pressure in his chest, “the autumns here are wonderful. You know, I walked up through the park from my hotel, and the air—so brisk! And the color of the sky, and those flowers.”
Marcus just perceptibly inclined his head, acknowledging flowers, and weather. And then he launched into one of the mini-speeches to which he is given. “An interesting fact, and one that I’ve made note of”—to those who know Marcus, a familiar beginning, very likely boding no good to his audience, be it plural or singular—“and of which you, my dear Duncan, have just furnished further proof, in any case so interesting, is the human tendency in times of distress at some ill-treatment by a fellow human to complain of the method of treatment, the form it took, rather than the actuality. The cruel event itself is not mentioned, even. A man who is fired from his job invariably sounds as though a little more tact would have made it perfectly acceptable. And a fellow whose mistress has taken off—well, I’m sure you quite see what I mean.”
“In my own case, I do think even some slight warning might have been in order,” Duncan bravely, if weakly, managed to say. “And she was not my mistress—my wife. We’d been married for almost three years.”
“My dear fellow, naturally I was speaking in a general way, and you know how I tend to run on. Well, I don’t think I much care for these lobsters of yours. What’s our next course? I seem already to have forgotten.”
What an old bore Marcus has become, so opinionated, so—so insensitive, thought Duncan, once they parted and he began his walk. However, irritation soon gave way to the sound of darker voices, which asked if he himself was not almost as old, and as boring. And perhaps Marcus was less insensitive than he, Duncan, was hypersensitive, an open wound.
At which point he made—or, rather, his probing tongue made—the most unwelcome discovery about his missing tooth.
Back at last in his hotel room, that cold and perilous park walk done with, behind him, Duncan picks up the phone and almost instantly he succeeds (the day’s first small piece of luck) in reaching his dentist. Who is reassuring. Nothing to worry about, the dentist tells Duncan, happens all the time. He adds that it probably does not look as unsightly as Duncan thinks it does; and gives him an appointment for the following week.
The bathroom mirror informs Duncan that his missing tooth, his “black hole,” is unsightly only when he very broadly grins, which he can surely see no reason for doing at any foreseeable time.
Lying at last across his oversized bed, eyes closed, Duncan attempts to generalize about his situation; particulars are what finally do you in, he has found—and so he will not think about Cath’s pretty shoulders, not her odd harsh mountain consonants. He strives instead for abstraction, beginning some mental notes on jealousy in an older person, as opposed to what is experienced by the young.
When one is young, he thinks, the emotion of jealousy is wracking, torturous, but at the same time very arousing (he has to admit), an almost delicious pain. Whereas when one is older, and jealous, there is only deep, irremovable sadness, deprivation, hopelessness.
(So much for notes.)
Cath: just a pallid, slightly gangling, easily blushing, mild-tempered girl from the land of the Great Smoky Mountains, from whence those consonants, those vowels. But a girl with an amazing ear for poetry, and a passion for it. Cath was (she is, oh, surely she still is) literally crazy about the verse of Andrew Marvell, Herrick, Donne. Wallace Stevens (Duncan’s own particular enthusiasm) and more recently some women whose names he now forgets. And most recently of all, Mr. Brennan O’Donahue.
Though at first she did not even want to go to his reading. “It’s too hot to go anywhere,” she complained.
“But you’re crazy about O’Donahue,” Duncan (oh irony!) reminded her, and he added, “He’s just back from Nicaragua, remember? Besides, I do think one of us should go.” Duncan sniffed to emphasize the bad summer cold from which he was suffering (and he now remembers that self-pitying, self-justifying sniff with such shame, such regret). “I’m sure the Taylors would come by for you,” he added, naming a younger, obsequious colleague, with a silly wife.
Cath sighed. “Oh, I’ll go by myself. That way I can come home early. And Bipsy Taylor is such a nerd.” Another sigh. “If I can work out what to wear in this weather.”
It was an especially hot September, everything limp and drooping, or fallen to the ground. Bleached rose petals on yellow lawns, and out in the woods where Duncan liked to walk the silence was thick and heavy, as though even the birds were prostrate, drugged with heat.
Cath chose to wear her barest dress that night, which seemed sensible, if slightly inappropriate for a poetry reading. But Duncan felt that it would not do to object: he was making her go there, was he not? And so she went out alone, bare-armed and braless, in her loose black cotton; her sun-bleached hair loosely falling, her small round shoulders lightly tanned.
You look almost beautiful, is what Duncan thought of saying, and fortunately or not forbore; too often he said things to Cath that he later lived to regret. His suggestion—half-joking, actually—that she could have an affair had aroused real rage. An obscene suggestion, she seemed to take it as; clear evidence of lack of love. Whereas he was not even really serious (God knows he was not). And so as she left that night Duncan only said, “I hope it won’t be too dull for you, my love.”
“Oh no, don’t worry. But you take care of your cold, now. I put the bottle of C pills right next to your bed.”
She came home very late, explaining at breakfast that there had been a party at the Taylors’, who lived out of town. She had not wanted to wake Duncan with a phone call. She had driven O’Donahue back to the Hilton, where he was staying. The reading was good. He was nice. She thought she would go downtown to do some shopping. Would probably not be back before Duncan’s afternoon seminar.
And Duncan returned late that afternoon, after the seminar that included a sherry hour, to find her note. Gone off to Ocracoke Island, with Brennan O’Donahue.
The Village restaurant in which Duncan meets Emily for dinner is a comforting surprise, however; a most unfashionable homey old-bohemian decor, checkered tablecloths and multicolored candles in fat dark green wine bottles, a look dearly familiar to Duncan, who spent feckless youthful years in this neighborhood. Then he was a handsome young man, very easy with women—with a great deal
to say about literature, he thought.
Emily, at least at first, seems determinedly nice. “It’s wonderfully corny, don’t you think?” she says of the restaurant. “But with our luck this look will come back and be madly fashionable. Oh dear, do you suppose it has, and we’re the last to know?” And she laughs companionably. “I’m taking you to dinner,” she tells him. “We’re celebrating a grant I just got.”
“You look splendid, my dear, you really do,” Duncan tells her gratefully as they are seated; he has never been taken to dinner by a woman before, and he rather enjoys the sensation. This is feminism? And it is true that Emily in early middle age, or wherever she is, has never looked better. A tall woman, she had put on a little weight, in her case very becoming (but can you say that to a woman?). Short curled gray hair, gray eyes, and very white teeth. She looks strong, and immensely healthy. “You look so—so very fit,” Duncan says to her. “Do you, er, jog, or something?”
Emily laughs again. “Well, I have, but I didn’t like it much. Now I just walk a lot.”
“Well, I must say, I’m glad to hear that. I find runners such a grim group, they quite scare me,” Duncan confesses.
“Oh, me too, they never smile. But, dear Duncan, why are you smiling in that somewhat odd way?”
“I’ve lost a tooth.”
“Well, we all do,” Emily tells him. “But you don’t have to twist your mouth that way. It’s only a gap.”
Quite amiably then she talks about her work: painting, teaching, a summer workshop in Provincetown—until Duncan suspects that she is being consciously nice to him, that she is purposefully not mentioning Cath (whom he himself has determined not to talk about).
Well, if that is the case he surely does not mind; nice is perfectly okay with him, Duncan decides, and then he wonders, Are women after all really nicer than men are? (He does not voice this question, however, not just then wanting to hear Emily too strongly agree.)
But Emily does at last bring up the subject of Cath, though gently. “I am sorry about Cath,” she says. “That must be rough for you.”
“Well, yes, it is. But it’s nice of you to say so.” Which it was.
“I’m sure your literary friends have been enormously comforting, though,” Emily in a changed tone goes on, her irony so heavy that Duncan is quite taken aback until he remembers just how much she disliked his “literary” friends, especially Jasper Wilkes, who was still a poet when Emily knew him.
Duncan can only be straightforward with her now. “You’re right,” he says. “The friends I’ve talked to have succeeded in making me feel much worse. I had it coming, seems to be the general view.”
Emily smiles, her eyes bright. “Oh, you could say that to almost anyone, I think. It’s even said to cancer patients. But it really doesn’t seem to me that you’ve been any worse than most men are.”
Grasping at even this dubious compliment, Duncan smiles, and then he further complains, “You know, even well-deserved pain is painful.”
“Of course it is.”
Why did he ever leave Emily, who is as intelligent as she is kind—and attractive? But he did not leave Emily, Duncan then recalls; Emily left him, with sensible remarks about not being cut out for marriage, either of them. Which did not stop her from marrying an Indian painter a few years later, and a sculptor soon after that—nor did it stop Duncan from marrying Janice, and then Cath.
In any case, kind or not, right or wrong, Emily is far better to talk to than Jasper or Marcus. Duncan feels safe with Emily—which leads him to yet another confession. “I did one really dumb thing, though. At some point I told Cath that she should have an affair. Of course I spoke in jest, but can she have taken me seriously?”
Emily frowns. “Well, jesting or not, that’s really worse than dumb. That’s cruel. It’s what men say to wives they want to get rid of.”
“Oh, but I surely didn’t mean—” Crestfallen Duncan.
Fortunately just at that moment the food arrives, and it is after some silence between them that Emily asks, “You do know that she’ll be back?”
“Oh no, no, of course I don’t know that at all.” Duncan feels dizzy.
“Well, she will. She’s basically very sensible, I think. She’ll see that Brennan O’Donahue is no one to live with. Running off with poets is just something young women do. Or some of them do.”
“Oh? They do?”
“She’ll come back, and if you want her to stick around you’d better be very kind. Just remember, a lot of women have been really nice to you. Be understanding. Sensitive. You’re good at that.”
He is? Entirely flustered, Duncan gulps at wine, hitherto untouched in his swirled dark blue glass. “I find it extremely hard to believe that you’re right,” he tells Emily, “that she’s coming back.”
“You just wait.” She gives a confident flash of her regular, somewhat large teeth, and then she frowns. “The real problem may be whether or not you really want her back.”
“Oh, that’s more or less what Jasper said.”
Emily’s frown becomes a scowl. “That expert. Well, probably you shouldn’t listen to anyone, really. Just see what happens, and then see what you feel like doing about it. But I’ll bet she does come back. And quite soon, I’d imagine.”
Once more picking up his key at the hotel desk, as he notes the absence of any phone message, nothing pink, Duncan’s tremulous, wavering heart informs him that he has actually feared as much as he has been hoping for a message from Cath. He is so tired, so extraordinarily tired; he has neither the stamina for Cath’s return nor for her continued absence. Which is worse? Oh, everything is worse!
In his room, in bed (so depressing, the great size of hotel beds, when you travel alone), feeling weakened rather than tipsy from the moderate amount of wine that he has drunk, nevertheless Duncan’s imagination begins to wander quite wildly, and he thinks again of assaulting Ocracoke—oh, the whole bloody island, all those couples, the tall blond lovers, all racing around. As waves crash, as winds hurl sheets of sand, maybe even a hurricane.
Sleepless, disoriented, Duncan feels the sharp anguish of someone very young—of a young man whose beautiful wife has been stolen away. The forsaken merman.
He feels in fact as though he had been forsaken by everyone—by Jasper and by Marcus, even by Emily, with her great superior health and all her hoards of female wisdom. By Cath especially of course, and by Brennan O’Donahue. By all the people on Ocracoke Island—that most beautiful, isolated and imperiled scrap of ground, the one place to which he can never, ever go, and for which Duncan’s whole tormented landlocked soul now longs.
ON THE ROAD
BOISE
Some trick of lighting in this particular small, low-ceilinged auditorium makes the audience more visible than most audiences are, here in Boise—but is Boise in Idaho or Utah? The lecturer, a woman named Brendan Hallowell, decides that it must be Idaho; Salt Lake City, Utah, is where she was last night, when, lecturing, she could see no one at all out there. In any case, as she approaches the end of her talk, she can see faces, mostly women’s, all quite rapt, and so—so surprised. She is not what they expected; she does not look like her photographs, does not sound like her published work, which is highly serious, slightly academic. But quite startlingly (especially to herself), now, this year she is widely popular, sought after. A success. On a lecture tour.
Coming to the end more quickly than anyone would have imagined—those sympathetic, slightly startled faces seem to expect more, possibly more than she can give them?—Brendan feels her hair begin to fall down from its knot, her hair slipping down to her shoulders, so straight and slippery, such difficult hair. Red hair, quite unexpected from the black-and-white jacket photos, in which Brendan looks tall and composed, not a small, squarely built red-haired woman, now becoming a mess.
Years back, in her graduate student days, Brendan’s hair was always a mess, and her small apartment, in Madison, Wisconsin, was messy too, quite hopeless, but intellect
ually she was never in disarray. At that time she began a series of scholarly studies of “creative women” (even then she herself winced slightly at the term), mostly somewhat offbeat; avoiding Virginia Woolf, she concentrated on Mrs. Gaskell, Emily Hale, Hepzibah Menuhin, and the almost unknown sisters of Jascha Heifetz. She continued in that vein with occasional articles after her doctorate, her various teaching jobs, her marriage; even married to punctilious, hyper-efficient Tom, for whom she made every effort at neatness, efficiency, Brendan continued to write her feminist but not strident, scholarly but not dry articles. And now her new book is a big success: a sort of collected works, a hotshot young editor’s compendium of many of those articles, entitled (by the editor) Sex and Creativity.
But still her hair falls down, and her new shoes hurt.
“—for the act of creation is, after all, an act of love.” Repeating her final sexual metaphor, her essential message, Brendan tries to remember the hotel room to which here in Boise, Idaho, she will eventually go, to which she will mercifully be released. A Hyatt? She thinks not; no, that was in Salt Lake, in Utah, and before that in Winnetka, Illinois, and Albany, New York. Brendan lives with Tom in Bethesda, Maryland, but sometimes she has trouble remembering that house, and even Tom shifts in and out of focus in her mind.
Tom was opposed to this trip, but he never quite said why. Was he afraid that she would not enjoy it? So far this has certainly been true, as Tom, a lawyer and more experienced in these matters, would have known; still, that seems just slightly unlikely, as does a possible fear on his part that she might “meet” someone, Tom being neither markedly solicitous nor sexually insecure. The point is, she can’t quite tell what he meant, or felt. They do not—ever, quite—communicate.