by Alice Adams
Looking out at the trees, in the sunlight, Sheila experiences a small jolt of pleasure, perhaps even of strength. How very pretty they are! What a nice place to live, after all. And in that happier instant she sees clearly what she should wear to visit Brax, stupid not to have thought of it before. She will wear a new pink silk blouse, bought on sale out on Sacramento Street to cheer herself up, in that long time of hearing nothing from Brax. Of course she should wear it, the blouse is something he has not seen, no associations to any of their troubled history together. And a pricey blouse, even on sale; Brax, who is something of a clothes snob, will recognize its quality. And the blouse is becoming, she knows it is—the famous flattery of pink.
Maxine the social worker has made it clear that you do not take presents, or not the usual hospital offerings, candy and flowers, to the psychiatric ward. And Brax does not read. And so (Sheila hopes this will happen) he might see this offering of herself in something new and “good” as a sort of present.
How Brax himself will actually be is an issue that Sheila is simply not facing. She knows that.
Dressed and standing outside, Sheila again appreciates the trees, and indeed the general pleasantness of her block, the clean bright white paint on the Victorian curlicues of a shining dark blue house, and a bricked-in garden that she especially admires: a profusion of white petunias and baby’s breath, some California poppies, and some small climbing old-fashioned white roses, on a lattice.
So admirable, this gardening impulse, Sheila believes, contributing as it does to the neighborhood and to the pleasure of passing strangers—a positive human instinct to give, to do good. She can even equate this urge with her own wish to look well, visiting poor Brax in the psycho ward.
But while she walks and thinks that phrase, “Brax in the psycho ward,” her small self-congratulatory mood dissolves as she demands (of no one), What will he be like?
She has no clue at all, no one has told her anything about his state, nor why he is there. She has only past performance to go on, and that includes almost everything. Affection, abuse, and humor. Exuberance, despair. Passion and coldness. Brax has shown all those things; he could now be in almost any phase, or possibly a new one.
Sheila is only quite sure that he will hate being where he is. The fact that he hasn’t somehow escaped is amazing—assuming that he has not, that he will in fact be there this afternoon. But proud, rebellious Brax in a common psychiatric ward, with common crazies? He will hate it there, and will this hatred extend itself to visitors, to those outside and free, and presumably okay? Sheila is suddenly convinced that this will be true. He will think, How dare she show up looking perfectly well, in her clearly expensive new clothes?
So sure is she of this idea of Brax that Sheila stops where she is, two blocks from the hospital (and three from her apartment), in a neighborhood far less appealing than her own, with shabbier, untrimmed houses, no sidewalk trees. She stops and turns around and begins to hurry home.
To change her clothes.
She has raced along the street, and now she rushes through the act of changing, as though performing some propitiatory task in which speed is one of the requirements. Out of the new pink silk and into the old gray Shetland, out of good black linen pants and into jeans and worn blue runners. And, redressed and outside again, she hurries along the five blocks to the hospital. As she does so, she tells herself that it doesn’t matter, she does not have to get there at the start of Visiting, necessarily. But she is unable to stop this rush, this racing in Braxton’s direction.
His ward is in a building across the street from the main hospital (more Maxine information). Sheila goes up a ramp and swings through glass doors. Two fair beefy guards (maybe twins?) sit behind a desk; one of them instructs her to sign in. Sheila does so, half wondering as she writes what happens if you forget to sign out. Do they find you and lock you up with the crazies, where you probably belonged in the first place?
In the elevator she pushes the proper button, the ascent begins, and only then does Sheila recognize how acutely frightened she is.
Too late to go back, however. Doors open, and there she is, confronting another desk. This time a pleasant-faced, dark-haired nurse instructs her to sign in. There are two baskets of floral “arrangements” on the desk, and Sheila thinks, Oh, I really could have brought something, but there again, too late.
“He’s down the hall, I think. You’ll see him” is what the nurse has said, and so Sheila starts down the hall.
People. She passes a pretty, thin black woman in perfectly ordinary daytime clothes: a patient? nurse? social worker? A room where five or six men are smoking and watching some game on TV. An old-looking woman with long gray curls, wearing a tattered pink chenille robe and muttering to herself—clearly a patient.
She has almost reached the windows at the end, and has almost thought, with a wild surge of what must be relief, Oh, he’s not here after all, when she sees that the man standing there, standing against the light and thus very hard at first to see—that man is Braxton.
“Hi,” he says. “I see you made it.”
“Oh, yes.” And then, unavoidably, “Well, how are you?”
During this interchange, they have moved together and then apart for the lightest, most fleeting embrace. But even in that brief touch, Sheila has thought, How thin he is, down to bones.
And now, standing back as she looks at him, she sees that he is indeed very thin. Diminished. His old clothes hang on him.
Thin was a condition she had surely not expected. Sheila has hitherto thought of madness as enlarging: Lear, Mrs. Rochester. Recognizing this useless preconception, she begins to fight tears of pity, compassion, maybe—for poor thin Brax, tears of sheer sadness at his diminution.
“I’ve lost a lot of weight,” Brax tells her. “I was up at Tahoe and I got sick and had to go off the sauce, but shit, Sheila, it’s nothing to cry about.”
“I’m not. I’m sorry, but I have been sort of worried.”
He looks at her fiercely, pale-blue eyes now larger in his much less fleshy face—and wild. He asks her, “Is that why you got so dressed up to come to see me? Stunning outfit, kid. Love that gray sweater.”
His tone is so brutally familiar—always, he has bludgeoned her with this heavy irony—that, reeling, Sheila thinks, But he’s really just the same. Has he always been mad?
She would like to ask him what he did that put him there, what act, at last. She decides against asking him anything, though.
Brax says, into their silence, “Same old guy, only worse—is that right?”
I’ve got to get out of here, Sheila thinks, even as she is asking, “Is there anything I could bring you? You know, just five blocks—”
Leaning down to her, he begins to whisper: “You don’t have to bother, I’m cutting out of here tomorrow. An old buddy of mine is sailing me down to Mexico.” And then he says, “Of course he may not show. And in that case—” He looks at her appraisingly, calculating. “If you do come back, wear red, okay? I’ve got my standing in this place to think about.”
Shortly after that, not remembering quite how she left, nor whether or not she signed out, Sheila is walking home. But she is disoriented, uncertain even of the familiar direction. She stumbles on a broken piece of sidewalk, and barely recovers her balance.
People end up in psychiatric wards for all sorts of reasons, she tells herself, not all of them valid. And so, although she would still like to know, it almost doesn’t matter why Brax is there.
She should not go to see him again, though, if a single encounter can make her stumble along the street, and can make her see, as now she does, brutal messages in the hieroglyphic graffiti scrawled on a green post-deposit box.
However, the sudden thinness could mean he is truly ill, needing help?
In any case, if she does go to see him again (if he has not after all got away to Mexico), Sheila thinks, At least I will know what to wear.
TRAVELING TOGETHER
A few years ago, in a relentlessly remodeled hotel in Milan, near La Scala, a young American woman experienced a time of quite unbelievable panic. Susan Quince, a dean in a small women’s college, just arrived in Italy with her lover, at that black pre-dawn hour felt panic as acute and as absolute as it was irrational, worse and more frightening than anything since the terrors of early childhood, which Susan no longer remembered. For that horrifying hour or so in Milan, she believed that she was no longer subject to the reassuring pull of gravity; at any moment she might slip out into space, into blackness. Infinity. Hell.
So powerful was her delusion that she clutched the sheets, knowing as she did so that nothing would work, she would fall away, herself as flimsy as linen sheets. It was odd, she later thought, that she did not grasp the bedframe; she may have believed that the bed would go too, sailing out into night. A child’s nightmare.
Nor, as she might have done, did she reach for and grip the arm or the shoulder of Ralph Truitt, her lover—a Los Angeles doctor, an internist, with whom she was traveling—then.
Least of all did Susan do anything as sensible as going into the bathroom and turning on the light, and finding out the time, a clear fact. Maybe taking a pill of some sort. Even in that strange hotel she could have found the right door—to what she later recalled as an especially ugly room, all glaring bright-red tile, heavy threatening chrome.
She simply lay there in terror, having (she felt) no relationship to the earth, no roots, no worldly weight. And entirely convinced of the reality of her own sensations.
As she thought, This trip is a serious mistake. We should surely have canceled.
And indeed, they had quarreled horrendously during the week just preceding this trip; they had meant to call it off. But at last they decided to go to Italy anyway, saying such things to each other as, We usually have fun on trips. And, It’s just a trip we’re taking, it doesn’t commit us to anything further along (they had earlier talked about moving in together, even of marriage).
None of those things were entirely true, though. They had not always had fun on trips; last summer in England was not a total success, nor was the Dordogne, the spring of their first knowing each other. And the fact of going off to Italy together, their third trip, did have at least an air of commitment. Certainly it was giving themselves another chance.
Quite possibly they were simply too tired, too stressed-out from the fighting to go through all the business of cancellations, making other vacation plans for that particular week in May that they had both, with considerable trouble, arranged to take off. Taking the trip was taking the easy way out.
Certainly both of them, Dean Susan and Ralph the doctor, recognized the seriousness of their quarrel. They were shocked by their own violence, the ugliness of what they said to each other.
The fight. Its simple cause was that Ralph had not shown up at a small but “important” party given by Susan, at her college, the college being an hour or so by freeway out of Los Angeles, where Ralph’s hospital and his small apartment were. Whether Ralph had entirely forgotten the party or simply confused the date was an issue somehow obscured in the subsequent heat; it began not to matter. In any case, Susan’s party was to honor a visiting sculptor, a distinguished elderly woman (does Ralph basically not like or even recognize distinction in women? So many questions arose, all of them unpleasant in their implications). Mid-party, or somewhat earlier, fearing freeway trouble or medical emergencies, Susan telephoned his apartment—and was answered quite cheerily (indeed somewhat drunkenly, Susan thought) by Ralph himself, with a sexy sound of Brazilian music in the background.
And so it began.
Ralph: “No, in fact I was not alone. I’d asked Mrs. Harris—you remember June?—to come by for a drink, we’d been in the O.R. all day and she looked beat, and her husband’s very sick. And no, in point of fact I did not have sex with her. But even if I had, is that the end of the world?”
Susan: “But how could you forget? You knew how important it was to me, I kept telling you. Don’t you care—don’t you listen?”
And so on.
For Ralph the central issue became Susan’s alleged sexual jealousy, her suspicions; that is what he talked about. And Susan, not admitting this to him (she still argued simply that he should have come to her party), in her heart or in some other intensely vulnerable interior place knew he was right, in part. She did worry about Ralph and nurses, about vigorous attractive Ralph, an hour away, with almost anyone. Patients, even.
Unholy passions flared.
At times Susan thought that he must indeed have had sex, as he put it, with June Harris, else why should he be so defensive over his rights to sexual freedom? Hard to believe that his ardor was abstract, defense of a principle. Susan never quite made that accusation; after all, he kept making it himself.
And Ralph thought, and he did say, that Susan made too much of a simple party, which had gone off perfectly well without him, hadn’t it? Of course he was sorry, he did know she had counted on his being there. However, surely she knows by now what a doctors life is like? The impossibility of planning ahead?
And now, for God’s sake, what should they do about Italy?
Well, what the hell, they actually might as well go. Lord knows they could use a rest. They were both too worn down to think of another solution, for anything.
On the morning after her hours of panic, to her great surprise Susan felt much better, better than she would have believed, in view of the night before. Clearly, despite that horrifying delusional hour, she had managed at last to go back to sleep, and had awakened refreshed, barely able to recall the nature of her fear, or its shape. Certainly she did not mention or try to describe it to Ralph, who tended to be intolerant of what he deemed irrational.
“I know, I’ll bet you’re hungry,” he said as Susan emerged all clean and almost dressed from the garish bathroom. “Well, you’re in luck, so am I. I’ll hurry and shave.”
A problem on other trips had been Susan’s waking hungers, since Ralph often liked a good long exploratory walk before breakfast. Susan also wanted an earlier dinner than he did, Ralph liked a long drinking hour. At one point he had even suggested that Susan get her blood sugar checked, there might be some problem. But so far Susan had not, she was sure that whatever problem there was existed only in her head.
Deciding against the hotel dining room, they found a nice open café just a couple of blocks away, in the direction of the Galleria, which was where they had meant to go. Excellent coffee, wonderful fresh rolls. Even fresh orange juice.
“How’d you sleep?” Ralph asked her.
“Pretty well, considering the trip, time zones and everything. I did wake up for a while, but then I must have gone back to sleep.”
“I must say, you did really well on the flight.”
On the first trips, Susan had been an extremely frightened flier, white-knuckled, convinced that any turbulence meant crashing, death. She had been so uncomfortable flying that prior to this trip, which she had wanted to be successful, she took a small seminar for scared fliers. A modest group who met intensively, five nights a week for two weeks, and who were asked by their leader, a mousy-looking but very assured young man, to visualize and then describe the worst of their fears. Susan hated every moment of those sessions; she regarded both the leader and the other students (mostly salesmen, forced to travel) with distaste. It was rather like flying itself, she observed: too much time spent too closely among people whom you did not choose.
However, on this trip, once she and Ralph were on the plane in Los Angeles, strapped in and ready, Susan recognized that she was indeed much better. Not feeling her customary panic.
And she noticed (she thought) a certain disappointment on Ralph’s part. He kept on looking at her in an inquiring, ostensibly sympathetic way; was she all right, during the rough moments of ascension through thick dark covering clouds? She was, she smiled to reassure him, but found on his face an expression that was ambiguous.
>
Congratulating her bravery, though, Ralph at least sounded sincere—and perhaps everything, or at least most things, would work out well on this trip?
Later, Susan was to remember Milan less as the scene of her overwhelming, wild attack of panic (fortunately she thought very rarely of that seizure) than as the place where all the shoes were: thousands, millions of shoes, in every shopwindow. And not just ordinary shoes, but rather very, very high-style shoes: that year high thin heels and pointy toes, in a gaudy spectrum of exotic colors—jungle greens, plumage scarlets, and wild bright pinks. In silks and suèdes and every type of scaly skins. Entirely impractical shoes.
“What on earth do they do with all those shoes next year? They can’t possibly sell them all.” This from Susan to Ralph, at lunch.
“That bothers you?”
“Well, yes, actually it does. The sheer waste of it.” Susan was sometimes called a bleeding heart by Ralph, but she kept on with it. “They’re such evanescent shoes. You couldn’t exactly give them to the homeless.”
“Women should refuse to wear shoes like that in the first place,” Ralph pronounced.
“Well, of course they should.” Susan hoped this would not lead to a discussion of women’s roles. “But think how long it would take for manufacturers to get the message,” she added.
“Well, time for the Cathedral?” Ralph asked.
Our conversations never seem to last very long, Susan observed, with a small, interior sigh.
Bergamo. Ralph will remember this as the place where it was impossible to park, Susan thought as he nosed the small white rented Fiat up the narrow, sharp cobbled street to the already filled parking area for their hotel.
And I will remember it as the place with the narrowest, farthest-apart single beds yet, she thought a little later, Ralph having found, as he always did, a handy space, their laborious registration completed. I will remember it as another place where we did not make love, she (correctly) prophesied.