After You've Gone

by Alice Adams

  “Oh, that’s okay. Consider this a house call.” He chuckled.

  Holly changed into a prettier nightgown (cotton, nothing sexy), a good robe, and settled in the living room to wait for him.

  By this time she had taken down most of Sebastian’s paintings and stacked them in a closet, and had put books up on the shelves (eccentric Sebastian was fond of bare bookcases, empty shelves). There was a sheaf of magazines on the table, and flowers. Still, the room looked bare and cold, Holly thought. So large, it dwarfed every effort at warmth, and color.

  She heard the car, and then the footsteps of Jonathan Green. A somewhat distant handshake at the door would be right, she thought, getting up.

  Going to the door, extending her hand as she had intended, Holly found herself instead embraced. Chastely, perhaps paternally, but still, there she was, enfolded in the arms of Jonathan. For one moment.

  In the living room, though, he seated himself quite apart from her, choosing the chair adjacent to the sofa where she sat (where they had spent all that time necking, before). And in a kindly, interested way, he listened to her description of her symptoms. He had even brought along some magic remedies, which he took out from a pocket: samples of antibiotics, Tylenol, cough medicine.

  Holly was touched by what seemed simple human kindness. He was nice, after all.

  Their medical business over, Jonathan even seemed inclined to stick around. He was looking forward to the end of winter, he told her, stretching long legs before him. Spring skiing, sailing. Baseball. His wife had not been very interested in those pursuits, and so he hoped that this year he could put in more time in that way. He grinned.

  Had he guessed that Holly was not exactly a sports fan either? She rather imagined that he had, and even that she was forgiven. But she also imagined, or perceived, that he no longer saw her as a woman to kiss on a sofa. However, to some degree Holly dismissed all her crowding intuitions regarding Jonathan. After all, she was sick.

  It was, though, all around a pleasant conversation, far easier than their halting, strained attempts at dinner. And then Jonathan got up to go.

  At the door he embraced her again, more briefly than before. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.

  About what? Holly wondered, as she shivered in bed a short time later. And then she answered her own question, About my flu, that’s what. That’s what he finds interesting in me. What he likes best, now.

  She was then assailed by familiar, painful thoughts of Sebastian. His beauty, and his terrible, implacable indifference to her. But she did not, as she so often had before, engage in imagined conversations with Sebastian. Perhaps she had said it all already? Nor did she cry.

  Jonathan called the next day to see how she was.

  “My fever’s gone down. Your magic pills seem to work.”

  “Good. Well, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  …

  On the night that he came to dinner, when they had sat there necking, why had he not gone on to take her to bed? This was something that Holly pondered, in her illness. Something that she could discuss with no one. Not even with Mary.

  Because she was old and fat, was that it? And Jonathan knew just how old and fat she was, he had seen her, everything about her was down in his charts. That could be the explanation, but in that case why kiss her at all? He didn’t have to, under the circumstances, he could have just been a very polite, onetime dinner guest.

  Or was it because he did not want to commit himself to that extent? In a rational way, this made more sense. It was even a little too rational for Holly, who after all had the flu.

  A day or so later, kind Mary came over with mushroom soup and some home-baked bread, and a basket of fruit, grapes and peaches and papayas. They sat in Holly’s living room, in some rare February sunshine, a brief false spring. They talked.

  And at last Holly asked her friend, “I really wonder whatever gave you the idea that Jonathan liked me.”

  “Well—” To Holly’s surprise, Mary, who never blushed, now did so, a slow red flush that rose on her neck. “Well,” Mary said, “that may have been a small case of wishful thinking on my part. And a little simplistic. You know, someone nice to replace mean Sebastian. And there was Jonathan, just getting a divorce, and nice. I thought.”

  “He is nice, in a way.” He had called every day about Holly’s flu, which was considerably better. Now she was just a little weak, and slightly light-headed. “I still don’t quite see why Jonathan,” she persisted, for no good reason. Giddily, perhaps.

  “Well.” Amazingly, Mary’s flush deepened. “I have to admit I had the smallest crush on him myself. He is sort of, uh, cute.”

  “I guess.” They both laughed nervously.

  “And then,” Mary went on, “there is this sexual fix we all seem to have on doctors. Little kids playing doctor, all that. Even before Mark, I always liked doctors, remember?”

  “Yes.” But Holly found herself uncomfortable in this conversation. It had gone far enough, she felt. She did not want to discuss Mary’s possible crushes—nor, in a general way, sexuality.

  Mary may well have felt the same, for she next asked, “What you have to do now is put on a little weight. Do you know how skinny you are? You look like that model we used to use, remember? Miss Anorexia?”

  “But me? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m not, take a look at yourself.”

  Restored to their more usual tone, both women were happier. “I’ll start by eating that whole loaf of bread you brought,” Holly told Mary. “It smells fantastic.”

  Late one night in March, Holly’s phone rang—shrill, an alarm that cut into her already unsettled sleep.

  “Hello.” A male voice that she did not instantly recognize, but that in a moment she knew could only be Sebastian’s voice.

  “Oh. Hi.” Sitting up in bed, Holly pulled the covers around her shoulders. It was spring, but the nights were still very cold, and damp.

  “Well, you don’t sound too welcoming, but I really can’t say that I blame you. Or not very much. I don’t blame you very much.” The slightest slur informed Holly that Sebastian was very drunk—of course he was, at three in the morning, New York time.

  He laughed, and Holly heard the familiar contempt in his laugh. “I just wondered how you were,” he said. “You and my house.”

  “I’m okay,” Holly told him. “And I guess I’m going to put the house up for sale.” Strangely, she had not known this was her plan until she said it to Sebastian.

  He exploded, as she may have meant him to do. “Christ, do you have any idea how dumb that is? A valuable house, more valuable—Christ, how stupid can you get?”

  “I need the money,” she told him. “And I really don’t like it here.”

  “You don’t even know what you like! Ignorant Slavs—”

  Holly replaced the receiver into its cradle, then reached down to unplug the cord. She was trembling, but only a little.

  Several times later that night, in the course of her troubled sleep, she heard the dim sound of the living-room phone, which rang, and rang.

  Nevertheless, in a way that she could not quite understand, the next day Holly felt considerably better. Even rested.

  “I’m definitely going to move back to the city,” she told Mary, over the phone. “Maybe back to our old neighborhood. I want to go back to school.”

  “North Beach is impossible now.” Unenthusiastic Mary.

  “Well, with the money from this house I could even go to Pacific Heights. Then I’d be close to the bridge. To Marin.”

  Mary laughed. “You’re right. I just don’t want you to leave. But I agree that’s what you should do.”

  For no particular reason—she had not been thinking of their doctor—Holly next asked, “What do you hear these days about Jonathan Green?”

  “Oh, we sort of see him around. Mark and I do. You know, doctor parties.”

  Mary’s tone had been rather studiedly vague, Holly thought, and so she
pursued it. “With whom?” she asked Mary. “Surely not his wife?”

  “Oh no, I think that’s all over. But Jonathan seems to be into the very young. Lord, the last one looked about sixteen.”

  “She’s probably really forty but works out all the time. Plays baseball.”

  They both laughed.

  “What men don’t know,” Mary told Holly, “or one of the things they don’t know is how old those kids make them look. The contrast can be cruel.”

  “I wonder if that’s what Sebastian is up to.”

  “The dumb shit, I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  That conversation took place around noon, a time of day when they often made contact, Holly and Mary.

  In the course of that afternoon, Holly gave somewhat fleeting thought both to Jonathan and to Sebastian.

  Of Sebastian she thought, I haven’t cried for a couple of weeks. I wouldn’t dare say that the pain is absolutely gone, very likely it won’t ever be. It’s something I have to live with, probably, the way some people have bad backs or trick knees. Ten years is just not a dismissible part of my life.

  Of Jonathan she thought, How crazy that all was, pinning all those fantasies on him when he’s just a plain ordinary doctor. But what did he imagine that I would be, she wondered, that I wasn’t? Rich, possibly, in a house that was more to his liking? Better at talking, funnier? God knows he can’t have thought I’d be younger or prettier, Jonathan already knew what I looked like.

  In the later afternoon, near dinnertime, as though telepathically summoned, Jonathan called Holly. She had not heard from him since the end of her flu, a couple of weeks ago.

  And that is what he asked about. “How’s your flu?”

  “Well, it seems to be all better. Just a little cough sometimes.”

  “You’d better be careful, if you’re still coughing. I’ve seen some people down with it for a second or even a third time.”

  “Oh, how terrible.” But why tell me about them? Holly wondered.

  “And then there’s a brand-new strain of flu that we’re seeing. A really bad one. But if you come down with that we’ve got a pill that works.”

  “Jonathan, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “I just meant, if you get this new flu we have a specific for it.”

  “Oh.” Is that what you called about? she wanted to ask. Instead she ventured, “Well, how’ve you been, otherwise?” Was this a social call? Was she supposed to make small talk?

  Apparently not. Very briskly Jonathan told her, “Fine, really great in fact. Well, I just wanted to be sure you’re okay.”

  “Well, I seem to be. As far as I know, I don’t have the new flu. Yet.”

  He seemed to grasp that a small joke had been intended, and gave her a little laugh. “So far so good,” he said.

  And minutes after that they said goodbye.

  It was nice to hear from you, I guess, is what Holly thought.

  And for some minutes she wondered just what had motivated that call. Simple curiosity as to how she was? A medical need to warn her about relapses and the dangerous new kind of flu? Or had he wanted to find her sick, and needing him in that way?

  Any answer to any of those questions was possible, Holly decided, and she thought that Jonathan himself did not know, really, why he had called. In his own mind, probably, he was just a doctor checking on a patient who had been quite sick, with a child-sized fever.

  Fleetingly, she wondered whether he would send her a bill.

  He did. It arrived, perhaps by coincidence, the following day. House call and follow-up treatment. One hundred dollars.

  A Note About the Author

  Alice Adams was born in Virginia and graduated from Radcliffe College. She was the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in San Francisco until her death in 1999.