by Alice Adams
Negotiations with the young woman concluded, rings chosen and pesos paid, Penelope then asks her, on some whim, “Did you ever know a very nice woman who used to sell jewelry along the beach, named Augustina?”
“But I am Augustina!” Yo soy Augustina. The woman laughs, and the two of them embrace.
“Ah, amiga,” says Augustina.
“I didn’t recognize you; you always wore that white uniform,” Penelope tells her. “I bought these rings from you!” and she shows Augustina her hand.
“Amiga, this time you come back very soon,” Augustina says.
“Oh, I will. Very soon. Augustina, thank you.” And with her rings, and the bag with its key, Penelope walks back to the hotel.
Their new room, she realizes as she goes out onto the balcony for a dry bathing suit, directly overlooks the old tier of rooms, where once she stayed with Charles, next door to the Farquhars.
On their last night in San Bartolomeo, Ben and Penelope have dinner in the hotel dining room, where, as always, the food is very bad—and the view magnificent; glittering black water, down through palm fronds. Stars, and a partial moon.
“Well, it’s not the worst place I’ve ever been,” is how Ben sums up their trip. Judiciously.
“It was really okay,” Penelope tells her closest friend, a couple of days later, on the phone. “I’m glad we went. As a matter of fact, I hardly thought about Charles. He wasn’t there.” Then she laughs. “Actually I didn’t think much about Ben either. I don’t think he liked it very much there. But I thought a lot about Mexico.” And then she adds, “But not thinking about Charles is the same as thinking about him all the time. If you see what I mean.”
The friend does see.
“Anyway, the trip made me feel a lot better,” Penelope continues. “About everything. More free.” She adds, with a laugh, “I can’t think why.”
Great Sex
“And then of course there was, uh, great sex,” says Sheila Williams, a young pediatrician, to her friend Alison Green. She is trying to explain the long presence in her life of a man who in many ways made her unhappy. Dick, a very smart, politically visible young lawyer, with whom she has just broken up. Dick is white, Sheila black. Small and neat and trim, from Roxbury, Massachusetts, Sheila is from a religious family, and tends to be somewhat prim; this conversation is unusual for her.
Alison is also young, although her long dark-blond hair, knotted up, is streaked with white. She edits a small art magazine, which does not take up a lot of her time. She is also an unmarried mother (Jennifer is four), which does take time. She has reacted to her friend’s last remark, about great sex, in several ways: relief that Sheila is no longer seeing Dick, who sounds mean, and some surprise at the last phrase, “great sex”—that not being taken for granted by herself, or by anyone she knows. She further observes that “great sex” has become in some instances one word. “We had greatsex,” some people say.
The two women are seated in a pretty, still-cheap French restaurant out on Geary Street, in San Francisco. Drinking white wine, as they wait for their dinner. They are long-term friends, with a shared Berkeley past, but busyness now prevents their seeing much of each other, and so their visits always have a catching-up quality; they discuss work, love affairs, Alison’s daughter, and sometimes Sheila’s two dogs—in a usually jumbled order; the categories overlap. Sheila, who is basically shy, reluctant as to personal revelation, has a lot to say about her work, which is at the San Francisco General Hospital and also involves the parents of her patients, most of whom are poor: black, Asian, or Hispanic. Some battered mothers. They do not ordinarily talk, Alison and Sheila, even generally about sex. It was unusual for Sheila to say what she had. But breaking up with Dick has made her more vulnerable, more open, perhaps.
Earlier they had been comparing their just-passed day; a bad one all around, they had agreed, bad for them both. Alison that morning had taken Jennifer to the airport, for a weekend in Santa Barbara with Alison’s mother, the grandmother whom Jennifer adores. A friend of Alison’s had been going there too and offered to escort Jennifer, who was thrilled at the whole prospect. But the planes were all delayed because of fog—planes to anywhere, Paris or Jakarta, Singapore or just Santa Barbara. Sheila had had terrible, terminal trouble with her car.
Nothing earthshaking for either of them, solvable problems, just annoying. Alison called and canceled her appointments, told her assistant to reschedule, and she finally put a very excited Jennifer on the plane. And Sheila called Triple-A for rescue, and in the meantime got a cab to her office.
But now, with the wine, Sheila’s phrase about great sex begins to reverberate in Alison’s brain. She has not been “seeing” anyone for at least a couple of years, and perhaps for that reason her mind returns to three instances of sex that was the greatest.
“Holy screwing,” was how her first lover used to put it; he was a grad student at Berkeley, in mathematics; they smoked a great deal of pot together and made love effortlessly, wonderfully. Later, somehow, their connection fell apart, and he went East to a teaching job.
After that, graduated, Alison worked at part-time gallery jobs in San Francisco, and tried for journalism assignments. In that uncertain period of her life she fell in love with an older (twenty years older than she was) sculptor, semifamous, and with him too the sex was—great. An earthquake, with deeper aftershocks.
Out of bed they also got on well; much talk, many small jokes, and some glorious High Sierra hikes. They moved in together and planned to marry, “sometime, when we get around to it.” But then he was killed, at the corner of Market and Franklin Streets, “senselessly,” by a hit-and-run red-light runner, who was never caught but whom Alison, even now when she is “better,” dreams of killing.
After that, for Alison there was hard work and some slow success—publication of articles in increasingly prestigious art magazines. And scattered, occasional love affairs. Sometimes great sex, sometimes not so great. And then, all inner wisdom notwithstanding, she fell in love with a man who was married—“happily,” or at least comfortably enough, conveniently, so that he told her from the start that he could not, or would not, dislodge himself. Besides, there were three children. But with him, once more, there was holy, earthquake sex. She liked him very much, and he her. He worked in Washington, D.C., in an environmental agency, and often came to San Francisco—sometimes alone, sometimes not. Seeing each other was often difficult, but for a time they managed. Alison lived on Potrero Hill, conveniently near the freeway. And even an hour together was worth anything, they felt.
When Alison became pregnant, Jack was sympathetic: bad luck, he saw it as, and of course she would have an abortion. Of course he would pay, and he would do everything possible, supportively.
But Alison could not. She had had one abortion, the result of carelessness during a somewhat feckless affair. She had voted and marched for women’s right to choice. But this time she could not, not possibly. Jack quite reasonably argued that he too should have a choice, since the baby was also his—and Alison saw that this was true. Still, she had to go ahead with this pregnancy. And she did, and lovely Jennifer was born; sometimes Alison even thought that she had somehow known that this baby would be Jennifer, so beautiful, so loved.
Sheila, her friend, just then starting in pediatrics, became their doctor.
Now Sheila, really out of character, is still talking about great sex. And Dick, the man she no longer sees, who was an ungiving, emotionally stunted person, as Sheila had always known. “Sometimes I thought he got some sort of charge out of having a black girlfriend,” Sheila said. “A liberal credential. So correct. But there were other sides to him. Moments of kindness, generosity, and these flashes of amazing insight. Enough of all that to make me stick around. What I’m saying is, he’s not all bad.” Sheila laughs, but her dark-brown eyes are wide and serious.
“We’re supposed to think that no one is, aren’t we?” Alison laughs too.
The waiter brings
their food; they seem to have ordered a lot.
Somewhat later Sheila more or less continues. “I think it’s these moments of nice, of goodness, that all men have, or almost all, and that’s what keeps us around. We all think that that’s the real person. That what we’re seeing is a window into who he really is.” She adds, “I mean it’s one of the things. With really battered women of course there’s also fear, no self-esteem, and often no money.”
“Oh, you’re right,” Alison tells her. She is struck by what sounds wise and accurate, although she herself has not experienced much meanness from men.
“Battered women,” Sheila now says. “People think, or some people think, they hang around for sex, but it’s not that, mostly. I was always hoping that Dick would turn into the person I sometimes saw.”
Alison finds herself very moved by the fact of Sheila saying all this; it is so unlike her to talk of intimate matters in this way. She is in fact more moved by Sheila herself than by what Sheila is saying, although she sees its truth. But possibly, also, Sheila is theorizing in part as a way out of pain?
Sheila now asks Alison, “You’ve got plans for your childless weekend?”
“I’ve got to work,” Alison grins. “Probably I should have planned more.” And indeed she should have, she now thinks. She is unused to weekends without Jennifer; it is not as though she had longed for such unfettered time.
The somewhat antiquated or at least other-era impression made by this restaurant, with its worn white linen tablecloths, white ruffled curtains, and fake white daisies in the decorative fake-brick windows—all that is increased by the music, which is thirties and forties; at the moment Charles Trenet is singing, “Vous—qui passez sans me voir—”
The room at this hour, about eight, is filling up. Alison, absorbed in their conversation, and then her food, has not paid much attention to the other guests.
But she looks up just in time to see a new couple come in, a short plump woman in black, a tall thin man with familiar shoulders. They come in slowly, as though in a horror film. Alison’s own oft-imagined worst dream: Jack and his wife. At the instant in which she recognizes him he turns and sees her, and starts toward their table. As his wife, long bright blond hair swinging, goes on to a table across the room.
Smiling widely, as Alison also is, he arrives. He bends toward her—can he have meant to exchange a social kiss? Alison extends her hand, as she says, “How nice to see you. You remember Sheila?”
“Yes of course.” He shakes hands with Sheila too, and says, “Nice place!”
They have been there together several times.
“Oh, very.”
“Well, uh, everything okay?”
He must be asking, Is Jennifer okay? Alison nods, and then he is gone, and Alison feels the crocodile smile which has stretched her face recede.
She looks down at all the food on her plate, says, “I can’t eat this,” and she adds, “Oddly enough,” with a very small laugh.
“Of course not.” Understanding Sheila. “Take some deep breaths.”
Alison does breathe deeply, managing too to glance across the room. At her. And she thinks, I’m prettier than she is. An out-of-character thought: Alison is not especially vain, nor for that matter is pretty the word for her, as she knows. She is often described as attractive, tall and thin, with an interesting, angular face. Good bones. But Jack’s wife is too old for her very bright long blond hair, and too plump for her very short black dress.
Sheila, who has also managed a look, now whispers, “Could it be a wig?”
Alison laughs softly. “I suppose, but I doubt it.” She adds, “Jesus, the end of a perfect day.”
Four years ago—or five by now, it must be five—when Alison was pregnant, she and Jack quarreled a lot, and each said melodramatic, bad things to the other.
“You’re ruining your life—”
“It’s my life, you’re completely insensitive—”
“You’re crazy—hysterical—you have no sense—”
“I never want to see you again—just stay away—”
Since then, and since Jennifer’s birth, there has been a polite, somewhat stilted, occasional exchange of notes—Alison’s sent to Jack’s office, of course, as in fact her notes always were. For a while he sent money, checks that in her high pride Alison never cashed. Besides, by then she was doing pretty well on her own. The magazine, though tiny, paid her a good salary; its backer needed the tax loss. And she sold more and more articles.
Jack had never asked to visit, although she assumed that he still came to San Francisco from time to time.
Now Alison asks Sheila, “What shall we do with all this food? Would your dogs eat it?”
“No, the bones are too small. We’ll have the waiter wrap it and we can leave it in a package for some homeless person.”
That night Alison’s sleep is broken, very troubled. She is plagued with dreams that vanish at the slightest touch of her conscious mind. She believes that Jack has been the focus of these dreams, but she is not entirely sure; nothing is clear. And when in her waking mind she thinks of him, his image is confused, as possibly it always was. There is the sensual memory of him, his weight, his bones crushing into hers, the hot smooth skin of his back, in her clutching hands. And then there is the loud-voiced angry Jack, who insists that she have an abortion. She finds, though, still another man, Jack the kind and super-intelligent good friend, with whom for hours she discussed almost everything in life—the environment; their childhoods; Bosnia, Zaire, and Haiti; Jack’s relations with the Sierra Club and other local environmentalists; Alison’s magazine; local painters. And sometimes, even, their own connection (both disliked the word relationship). They alternated between celebration (it was so good; they cared so much for each other) and sadness (it was necessarily limited; they could not, for instance, travel together, or, more to the point, live together).
Alison thinks too of what Sheila was saying, describing those windows of niceness that keep even battered women going (Did even O.J. have moments of niceness? she wonders). As she stuck around with a man who meant to and probably would stay married, for whatever responsible, guilty reasons of his own.
She wonders, What will I do when he calls tomorrow, as he most likely will? She thinks, At least Jennifer’s out of town, I don’t have to lie about that.
At breakfast, raw with sleeplessness, she decides to spend as much of the day as she can on a long city walk. When Jack calls, her answering machine will pick it up, and she can do as she likes. She does walk, in the bright cool windy day, fog lingering on all the horizons of the city. Perfect for walking. She hikes down to the Embarcadero, and along all that way to the Ferry Building, past the new incongruous row of palms, and the old decaying empty wharves.
When she gets home, having walked for a couple of hours, she finds no messages, not one on her machine. Digesting what feels like keen disappointment, not relief, she simply stands there in her kitchen for a moment, looking out to her view of the Bay Bridge, the bay, and Oakland hills. And the Embarcadero, where she just was.
The phone rings. She hesitates, answers on the third sound.
Jack. After a polite exchange of greetings, he says, “In a way I’m sorry about last night. I hope you weren’t as shaken up as I was. But you know, I’ve wanted to see you. To be more in touch. And Jennifer—”
Some honest quality of pain in his voice is very moving to Alison; it was good of him to say that he was upset. She tells him, “I’m really sorry, Jennifer’s down in Santa Barbara with my mother.”
A long pause before he says, “Could I just see you for a little? I really want to.”
She too pauses, and then says, “In an hour. I’ve just got back from a walk. I have to take a shower.”
As he comes into her living room, and they shake hands—again, Alison observes what she had almost forgotten: that Jack is rather shy, and his glasses tend to slip down his longish nose. He is very tall, his posture bad, and he is still too th
in.
He says, “You’re really nice to let me—”
“Well, of course—”
“No, not of course—”
Both wearing their shy smiles, they sit down at opposite ends of her sofa (as they have before). Alison tells him, “Jennifer. I’m sorry she’s not here; a friend was going to Santa Barbara for the weekend, Susan, I don’t think you met her. And it seemed such a good chance for Jennifer, she likes Susan and she really loves her grandmother, and she thinks Santa Barbara is great, the beach and all—”
She is babbling to stave off the sudden and unaccountable tears that threaten her eyes, and her voice. Alison realizes this, but she is afraid to stop. She adds, “She’s really nice—”
Looking at her with his slow shy smile, Jack says, “Of course she is.”
“Well, tell me how your work’s going! You’re still happy in Washington, and mad at most of the Bureau?”
“Well, yes and no.”
He talks for a while, and Alison does not hear a word he says, as she thinks, He’s a very nice man; he really is. It wasn’t “just sex,” whatever that means. I think we can be friends, and he can come and see Jennifer sometimes. Friends. And I’m not going to cry, and we won’t make love.
But Alison is wrong.
After she has made tea, Twinings English Breakfast, which they drink, and after a lot more civilized conversation, Jack gets up to go, and as, staring at her with his very dark, myopic, and beautiful hazel eyes, he starts to say good-bye, Alison distinctly hears the smallest catch in his voice, and she sees the effort at control that he makes.
Which is just enough, at last, to set off her tears—a minute before he truly meant to leave.
Jack puts his arms around her, intending comfort, friendliness, but it does not work out that way.