After You've Gone

by Alice Adams

  Twin beds. Accustomed to the canopied, carved-mahogany double bed of Susan’s rather Victorian quarters, in her college, or to the king-sized mattress swathed in bold “designer” stripes of Ralph’s bachelor pad, on Mulholland—or the queen- or king-sized super beds of motels in La Jolla and Santa Barbara, San Diego or Carmel—used to love on those broad, convenient spaces, to having each other’s bodies near at hand, available, Ralph and Susan find themselves defeated, always, in terms of sex, by separate beds. Or so Susan has put it to herself.

  But she has also thought that in most cases, Bergamo excepted, the beds were not actually insuperably far apart, nor (if you really wanted to be together) impossibly narrow.

  In Verona, Susan and Ralph were given, again, a room with twin beds. However, they seemed to be up in a sort of turret, from which there was a lovely, winding view of the narrow river.

  “Then we can’t be far from the museum,” Ralph told her. “It’s on the river. And if we’re lucky the restaurant could be around here too.”

  Ralph had been told by a much traveled, important medical colleague that both the museum and a certain restaurant are “absolute musts” in Verona. In fact for that reason, the colleague’s insistence, they had veered from their course to Venice. “The game pie in that place is the absolute greatest,” Ralph was told, a set of orders that he relayed to Susan.

  The restaurant was indeed quite near their hotel: a dark-paneled upstairs room, not large, fairly crowded with small round tables whose dingy white linen cloths hung limply to the floor. And at 8:30, the hour of their reservation, no other customers. A small cluster of waiters lingered near a far, broad door, presumably leading to the kitchen.

  “Good we reserved,” said Susan, intending a small joke.

  But Ralph was frowning. “I wonder if it could be the wrong place.”

  The waiter who arrived at their side assured them, though, that this was the correct, the internationally famous restaurant. And he led them to a table. “Early yet” was his parting shot, delivered with a crooked grin. He was fairly old, with a dragging limp.

  “Well, the food had better be really terrific,” Ralph warned, his words directed to the waiter’s back.

  “We could go somewhere else. It really doesn’t look too great. You know, places change.” This was generous of Susan, who was hungry, afflicted by blood sugar or perhaps the simple fatigue of travel. She felt certain, though, that the food would not be good, clearly not the memorable feast to which Ralph looked forward. And in his disappointment he would be angry, perhaps abusive—some bad familiar mood.

  “No, I promised Bill we’d check it out.” Ralph’s tone was ominous, and Susan braced herself.

  The first blow, delivered along with their Cinzanos, was the waiter’s announcement that there was no game pie. “Famous specialty, but only in the fall. Season of the chase,” he explained, as though they could not have figured that out for themselves, which of course they should have.

  But “People do shoot birds in May,” Ralph insisted, with his dark, aggressive scowl.

  “No game pie.” The waiter smiled widely, revealing gold, and a few black gaps.

  “Well, you don’t have to be so goddam pleased about it.” Ralph’s loud and terrible voice resonated in the empty room.

  For a few minutes the two men simply stared at each other: large, dark, healthy, successful Ralph, who was disappointed, foiled in his immediate plans for game pie and subsequent boasts to Bill, his well-traveled and well-fed colleague; and the smaller, older, less healthy waiter, who was more or less accidentally in charge of the next hour or so of Ralph’s life.

  In the next instant Ralph would stand up and push the waiter aside. Susan gripped her napkin, waiting. He would pull her up and out of the restaurant.

  But she was wrong. Icily, Ralph requested the menu; in a frozen silence he and Susan perused the fare while the waiter stood miserably by. They ordered soup and salad, veal for Ralph, for Susan chicken—with none of their usual food-ordering chatter.

  Their waiter served each dish with a sort of meticulous contempt, whether for the food, which he must know to be inferior, or for Ralph and Susan—impossible to tell. Maybe (Susan thought) he simply hated the situation in which he found himself, an old waiter in a restaurant that had gone very sharply downhill, serving bad food to rich, unpleasant foreigners.

  By the time they were ready to leave, several other couples had arrived, and so it took a while to get their check. Insult to injury, for Ralph.

  At last, though, check in hand, he stood up and faced the waiter, standing both too close and too far above him. “I would simply like you to know that this is the worst food we have encountered in all of Italy. It is a disgrace. Abominable.” And Ralph peeled off a sheaf of lire, which he then thrust upon their table.

  Barely waiting for Susan, he began to stalk from the room, so that she was considerably behind him, and able to hear the waiter in his wake: “Asshole American son of bitch.”

  The next morning in the museum, which was indeed a small marvel, most elegantly restored, and arranged, with its overlook of the river—the Ralph whom Susan liked and sometimes loved re-emerged. Following his eager, energetic back, his narrow, dark, intelligent head, Susan was drawn again to his greedy curiosity, his sharp appreciation of what he saw: sculpture and painting, architecture, and feats of engineering, in beautiful stone.

  Still, as she thought of the night before she quailed, particularly as she thought of the waiter.

  In fact, a few years later, by which time Susan had managed, at last, to sever ties with Ralph for good, she still sometimes thought of that waiter. She could always see his face very clearly—along with the shoes in the shops of Milan, all those beautiful useless colors.

  Heading at last toward Venice on the following day, Susan thought in a general way about trips. Traveling tends to intensify whatever is good—or bad—in any relationship, was one of her conclusions. Two people, generally unaccustomed to spending that much time together, have fewer resources for getting away from each other, for breathing space.

  On trips, a very fearful person may develop strange panics in the night.

  And an angry person will become even angrier, off home ground. (Susan recognized that she was still trying to forgive Ralph’s behavior with the waiter, and recognized too that a fearful person is often very forgiving.)

  Venice. Their Venetian hotel room, as though to compensate for all other disappointing, less than beautiful rooms, was (though quite discreetly) perfect. Its balconied window looked out on a small canal, an arched bridge, a tiny park with a single tree, a pine. And the room’s regally broad bed lay deep within a curtained, recessed alcove.

  Their dinner too was superb (another, luckier recommendation from Bill, the traveling colleague). “This is really the greatest pasta I’ve ever had,” Ralph pronounced, gazing about the gilt-and-marble room, then returning his look to the long windows adjacent to their table. The view of the brilliant, shadowed, mysterious Piazza San Marco. Across the way a bandstand, and a bright café. Wandering tourists, all of whom from this distance had an air of mystery, even of distinction.

  “This is unreal,” Ralph said to Susan, with his smile, across the flickering candlelight. “I don’t believe it.”

  But did he mean Venice, or the fact that at last they were able to enjoy their trip? Susan was unsure—and she too had sometimes wondered which was the more real, the more significant: fights and trouble, or their occasional rapport, stray moments of love?

  After dinner they walked slowly across the piazza to the café, where at small round tables groups of people, or some alone, took coffee in tiny cups, or rich liqueurs, or velvet-colored brandies. Getting into that spirit, festive, celebratory, Ralph and Susan ordered and drank Chartreuse—they drank several, in fact. Both the queer green-yellowish color and the exotic taste seemed perfectly right for that moment.

  Having drunk too much, and later made love with a kind of anonymous violence
, both Ralph and Susan woke up after a scant few hours of the thinnest sleep, both thirsty, both with incipient headaches. Dosing themselves with aspirin, drinking water, they went back to bed, where nevertheless they fell upon each other ravenously again. Like strangers, in a strange hotel.

  The trip home began with a train from Venice to Milan, mostly through an impenetrable fog, so dense that Susan worried about their flight, that night: Milan—New York—Los Angeles.

  Ralph reassured her. “Heavy fog over northern Italy does not mean a fog-covered Atlantic. Not necessarily.”

  As always, he sounded both reasonable and authoritative, and Susan decided that (as always) she was worrying too much, foreseeing trouble that would very likely not take place.

  But Ralph was wrong.

  An hour out of Milan, aloft and heading westward above the Atlantic, the weather outside the windows of the plane looked fierce: dark huge ragged clouds, wind-torn.

  And turbulence. The FASTEN SEAT BELT and NO SMOKING signs had never gone off, the giant plane began to be shaken like a toy, a rattle, in the monumental wind. Up and down, sideways, everything jolted and rattling.

  Susan felt herself given over to panic, her breath and her heart all awry, all out of control. And nothing worked, no words of wisdom, no practical suggestions for dealing with fear.

  Beside her, Ralph lifted her hand from the seat divider, which Susan was clutching. He held it firmly in his larger, stronger hand, smiling down at her.

  And as her fingers now grasped at his, as she held to him, seemingly for dear life, somewhere in Susan’s tossing, terrified mind was the thought: I can never leave him, I will never find the nerve.

  YOUR DOCTOR LOVES YOU

  After her husband, Sebastian, had left her, all alone in their beautiful, entirely impractical house (drafty, leaking, often cold and dark), Holly Jones felt loss as something sharp in the cavity of her chest. Her pain was severe, and in those terrible days, and weeks, then months, Holly, a basically friendly, chatty young woman, sought to ease that pain, somewhat, by talk. By trying to talk it out.

  Those obsessive conversations went on continuously, like tapes. Some were entirely silent, going on in her head, and those were with—or, rather, to—Sebastian. Sebastian, a handsome, old-family-rich, non-violent alcoholic, often impotent—an unsuccessful though talented painter (so he and Holly thought)—had gone off to New York, it seemed for good. He often used to go there, on gallery or family business, but this time he had been gone for three months, during the last of which he had not communicated with Holly.

  These Sebastian talks were a terrible mix of cold analysis and warm vituperation, often with more than a little scalding lust thrown in; Holly had always wanted Sebastian, she did still. But gradually she came to see that all this quiet talk to him, these silent screams did her no good, and she made a serious effort to stop all that. (And she called a lawyer.)

  Her actual, voiced conversations were mostly with her friend Mary, a sculptor, a somewhat older and at least temporarily happier woman, married to a pediatrician. These real conversations were frequent; kindly Mary made a lot of time for Holly. And generally they were helpful, though sometimes not. Sometimes just a heavy dose of Sebastian-talk could throw Holly backward, into tears or worse, back into her wide unshared bed, in the lovely glassed-in bedroom that now, in January, was often freezing cold. In Ross, California, just north of San Francisco.

  Occasionally, in a deliberate way, both Holly and Mary tried to shift the focus of their talk away from Sebastian and onto almost anything else: the weather, Reagan, the contras, the Democratic candidates. Clothes, old friends, gossip. Their friendship predated both marriages. It went back to the days when they lived in North Beach, in San Francisco, and were fairly broke, working at odd jobs. Holly, a leggy blonde, did mostly modeling while she took courses at the Art Institute; and Mary, who cooked in an Italian restaurant, also studied sculpture at the Institute. They had always liked each other, although “when I first met you I thought you were so pretty you had to be some kind of a bubble head,” Mary had confessed. In stages, Mary first, both women had moved to Marin. With husbands. Their social lives had diverged (Sebastian did not much like Mary; as some men will, he suspected the “best friend” of sharing evil confidences concerning himself). But they still knew enough people in common to talk about.

  One of the people they knew and mentioned from time to time was a man named Jonathan Green, Dr. Green, an internist in Mill Valley, to whom they both went as patients. Jonathan was tall and dark and heavy, a serious, kindly-looking man in his middle fifties (Sebastian’s age). Even today, in Marin County, Jonathan made house calls; he seemed to care incredibly for his patients. Some time ago Mary had heard (through Mark, her husband) that Jonathan was getting a divorce.

  And one morning, the day after her annual checkup with Jonathan, Mary remarked rather carelessly to Holly, “You know, I get the impression that Jonathan’s really interested in you.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I really think so. You’re all he talks about, he knows we’re friends. He wanted to know if you felt better now. Really, Holly, he could be in love.” She laughed. “Why not give it a whirl? Why not call him and ask him to dinner?”

  “Oh. Well. Well, really, it seems so unlikely. I mean, I know Jonathan likes me, but I think he likes all his patients. Love! Honestly, Mary.”

  But Holly’s heart, like an uncaged bird, had begun to soar into higher air as ancient, buried hopes revived.

  Just suppose it were true, she thought. Just suppose. Jonathan Green. Well, why not? He was not as handsome or fun as Sebastian at his best could be, but on the other hand not an alcoholic, not vain or irresponsible or mean. A caring person, a man unlikely to hurt her. Someone serious. A doctor.

  Indeed, why not ask him for dinner?

  She telephoned Jonathan, one of whose virtues was phone-availability to patients. She heard his pleasant, soft, somewhat tentative voice almost right away. “Well, I hardly know what to say. How nice” was Jonathan’s response.

  But then a certain amount of trouble set in: finding an evening that would work out for them both. Jonathan was on call a lot, it seemed, he had a medical society meeting, an evening with his kids. Holly had only one date, with an old friend up from L.A. She never broke dates, although this time she was tempted. But at last a night was established, ten days off. Jonathan would come over to her house for dinner.

  “It’s too far off,” Holly complained to Mary. “Too much time for me to think and get nervous. God, a date. I haven’t had a date in ten years.”

  “You already sound better, though. It’ll be good for you.”

  It was true that Holly felt better.

  Married to Sebastian, she had always been aware of his acute, censorious, controlling eye. The look of the house could never be quite right, nor the meals. Nor, God knows, Holly’s opinions. Unstated but heavily, coldly present was the fact that Holly had grown up in a trailer park near Tucson; her father was a Yugoslavian metalworker, a drunk, whose awful name, Jewerelsky, Holly had happily given up for Jones—and for Sebastian. Holly could thus not be expected to do things, anything, correctly, although Sebastian did expect things of her, actually. He expected everything.

  However, there was no reason to believe that Jonathan Green was at all like that. A busy doctor, he might not even notice how his house looked, or not notice in the meticulous, cruel way that Sebastian did.

  Holly went about in a happy flurry of straightening up, cleaning, and polishing. Even rearranging, putting a vase of flowers on the hearth, daring to remove a couple of Sebastian’s paintings (stark steel girders, flying freeways), and substituting an old one of her own, of flowers.

  …

  Sebastian married Holly and bought this house on what now seemed (to Holly) a single impulse, a manic summer whim. “Oh, you’re the prettiest girl in the world. You know what you are? You’re cute, you’re a living doll,” he had crooned to her, that first summer (dr
unkenly, but you had to know Sebastian very well indeed to know when he was drunk. He “drank like a gentleman”). And “I’ll have to buy you the prettiest house in Marin. It’s all wonderful wood, all windows and skylights, and everything around it green, all flowing.” And Holly, tipsy herself on champagne (she did not drink much and, according to Sebastian, did not know how), Holly was charmed into love with Sebastian, and later with the house.

  Sebastian then was in his mid-forties, his dark blond handsomeness in its ripest phase. “My autumn,” he said of himself, one long finger caressing the cleft in his chin. “If I grew a beard it would come out gray. You should have known me when I was young and gorgeous, baby doll.”

  “You’re gorgeous enough. I mean, you’re plenty gorgeous.”

  In those days she could usually make him laugh.

  And Holly did fall in love with the house, along with Sebastian. It was a lovely summer house, built as such near the turn of the century by some San Francisco people seeking escape from the city’s summer fog. There was a single, very large high-beamed room; as Sebastian said, all wood and windows and skylights. A small glassed-in bedroom to one side, surrounded by ancient, giant ferns and live oaks, cypress, manzanita. The house was a dream that Holly herself could have had, in the trailer, in the desert, a dream of hills and greenery, of polished wooden spaces, and no sand, anywhere, to sweep.

  Lovingly, Sebastian chose all the furniture, their bed with its intricate brass headboard was his especial pride, and the track lights installed to illuminate his paintings. His house. And for ten years Holly went along with all that, yielding to his superior taste and wisdom. Wishing he would drink less and make love to her more often.

  Holly was literally crazy about Sebastian, she knew that. She thought he was the most beautiful person she had ever seen. Or touched. These days, she wept to remember the exceptional smoothness of all his body skin, the perfect small patch of hair on his chest, so soft and fine. In the night, when they were together, she used sometimes to reach to stroke his back—to no avail, he almost never turned to her. Or if he did it was with a reluctant sigh.