The Last Lovely City

by Alice Adams

  Looking at Dolores then, the old doctor is seized with rage; he stares at that puffy, self-adoring face, those dark and infinitely self-pitying eyes. How he longs to push her against the railing, down into the sand! How he despises her!

  “My darling, I believe you’re really hungry after all,” is what Dolores says, but she may have felt some of his anger, for she deftly steps sideways, on her high, thin, dangerous heels, just out of his reach.

  “Not in the least,” says Benito rigidly. “In fact, I think I’ll go for a walk on the beach.”

  Down on the sand, though, as he walks along the dark, packed strip that is nearest to the sea, Benito’s confusion increases. He feels the presence of those people in that rather vulgar, glassed-in house behind him—of Dolores Gutierrez and Herman Tolliver, and God knows who else, what other ghosts from his past whom he simply failed to see. As though they were giants, he feels their looming presences, and feels their connection to some past year or years of his own life. He no longer knows where he is. What place is this, what country? What rolling gray-green ocean does he walk beside? What year it this, and what is his own true age?

  Clearly, some derangement has taken hold of him, or nearly, and Benito is forced to fight back with certain heavy and irrefutable facts: this is September, 1990, the last year of a decade, and the year in which Elizabeth died. He is in Stinson Beach, and if he continues walking far enough along the coast—he is heading south, toward the Golden Gate—he will be in sight of beautiful, mystical San Francisco, the city and the center of all his early dreams, the city where everything, finally, happened: Dolores Gutierrez and his medical degree; Herman Tolliver and those hotels. His (at last) successful medical practice. Elizabeth, and all that money, and his house with its fabulous views. His fame as Dr. Do-Good.

  His whole San Francisco history seems to rise up then and to break his heart. The city itself is still pale and distant and invisible, and he stands absolutely still, a tall figure on the sand, next to an intricate, crumbling sand castle that some children have recently abandoned.

  Hearing running feet behind him, at that moment the doctor turns in fright—expecting what? some dangerous stranger?—but it is Carla, out of breath, her hair streaming backward in the wind. His savior.

  “Ah, you,” he says to her. “You ran.”

  “And these are not the greatest running shoes.” She laughs, pointing down to her sandals, now sand-streaked and damp.

  “You came after me—”

  She looks down, and away. “Well. It was partly an excuse to get out of there. It was getting a little claustrophobic, and almost everyone I talked to was hard-of-hearing.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Well, shall we walk for a while?”

  “Yes.”

  Walking along with Carla, the doctor finds that those giants from his dark and tangled past have quite suddenly receded: Dolores and Tolliver have shrunk down to human size, the size of people accidentally encountered at a party. Such meetings can happen to anyone, easily, especially at a certain age.

  Benito even finds that he can talk about them. “To tell you the truth”—an ominous beginning, he knows, but it is what he intends to do—“I did some business with Herman Tolliver a long time ago, maybe forty years. It came out very well, financially, but I’m still a little ashamed of it. It seems to me now that I was pretending to myself not to know certain things that I really did know.”

  “You mean about his hotels?”

  “Well, yes. Hotels. But how do you—does everyone know all that?”

  “I’m a reporter, remember? Investigative.” She laughs, then sniffles a little in the hard, cold ocean wind. “He had an idea a few years back about running for supervisor, but I’m sure he was really thinking mayor, ultimately. But we dug up some stuff.”

  “Here, take my handkerchief—”

  “Thanks. Anyway, he was persuaded to forget it. There were really ugly things about preteenage Asian girls. We made a bargain: the papers would print only the stuff about his ‘tax problems’ if he’d bow out.” She sighs, a little ruefully. “I don’t know. It might have been better to let him get into politics; he might have done less harm that way.”

  This walk, and the conversation, are serving both to calm and to excite the doctor. Simultaneously. Most peculiar. He feels a calm, and at the same time a strange, warm, quiet excitement. “How do you mean?” he asks Carla.

  “Oh, he got in deeper and deeper. Getting richer and richer.”

  “I got richer and richer, too, back then. Sometimes I felt like I owned the whole goddam city.” Benito is paying very little attention to what he is saying; it is now all he can do to prevent himself from speaking his heart, from saying, “When will you marry me? How soon can that be?”

  “But that’s great that you made so much money,” Carla says. “That way you could start those clinics, and do so much good.”

  Barely listening, Benito murmurs, “I suppose …”

  She could redecorate the house any way she would like to, he thinks. Throw things out, repaint, reupholster, hang mirrors. His imagination sees, all completed, a brilliant house, with Carla its brilliant, shining center.

  “How did you happen to know Dolores?” Carla is asking.

  By now they have reached the end of the beach: a high mass of rocks left there by mammoth storms the year before. Impassable. Beyond lies more beach, more cliffs, more headlands, all along the way to the sight of the distant city.

  “Actually, Dolores was an old girlfriend, you might say.” Since he cares so much for this girl, Benito will never lie to her, he thinks. “You might not believe this, but she was quite a beauty in her day.”

  “Oh, I believe you. She’s still so vain. That hair.”

  Benito laughs, feeling pleased, and wondering, Can this adorable girl be, even slightly, jealous? “You’re right there,” he tells Carla. “Very vain, always was. Of course, she’s a few years older than I am.”

  “I guess we have to turn around now,” says Carla.

  “And now Dolores tells me that she and Posey Pendergast were at one time, uh, lovers,” Benito continues, in his honest mode.

  “I guess they could have been,” Carla muses. “On the other hand, it’s my impression that Dolores lies a lot. And Posey I’m just not sure about. Nor any of that group, for that matter. Tolliver, all those people. It’s worrying.” She laughs. “I guess I sort of hoped you might know something about them. Sort of explain them to me.”

  Not having listened carefully to much of this, Benito rephrases the question he does not remember having begun to ask before, which Dolores interrupted: “How do you know Posey?” he asks Carla.

  “It’s mostly her son I know. Patrick. He’s my fiancé, I guess you could say. We were planning to make it legal, and I guess we will. Any day now.” And she goes on, “Actually, Patrick was supposed to come today, and then he couldn’t, and then I thought—I thought of you.”

  The sun has sunk into the ocean, and Benito’s heart has sunk with it, drowned. He shudders, despising himself. How could he possibly have imagined, how not have guessed?

  “How nice,” Benito remarks, without meaning, and then he babbles on, “You know, the whole city seems so corrupt these days. It’s all real estate, and deals.”

  “Get real,” she chides him, in her harsh young voice. “That’s what it’s like all over.”

  “Well, I’ll be awfully glad to get back to Mexico. At least I more or less understand the corruption there.”

  “Are you going back for long?”

  The wind is really cold now. Benito sniffs, wishing he had his handkerchief back, and unable to ask for it. “Oh, permanently,” he tells Carla. “A permanent move. I want to be near my clinics. See how they’re doing. Maybe help.”

  The doctor had no plan to say (much less to do) any of this before he spoke, but he knows that he is now committed to this action. This permanent move. He will buy a house in San Cristóbal de las Casas, and will bring
his mother there, from Oaxaca, to live in that house for as long as she lasts. And he, for as long as he lasts, will work in his clinics, with his own poor.

  “Well, that’s great. Maybe we could work out a little interview before you go.”

  “Well, maybe.”

  “I wonder if we couldn’t just bypass the party for now,” says Carla. “I’m just not up to going in again, going through all that, with those people.”

  “Nor I,” the doctor tells her. “Good idea.”

  “I’ll call Posey as soon as we get back. Did she tell you the house was up for sale? She may have sold it today—all those people …”

  Half hearing her, the doctor is wrestling with the idea of a return to the city, which is suddenly unaccountably terrible to him; he dreads the first pale, romantic view of it from the bridge, and then the drive across town to his empty house, after dropping Carla off on Telegraph Hill. His house with its night views of city hills and lights. But he braces himself with the thought that he won’t be in San Francisco long this time. That as soon as he can arrange things he will be back in Chiapas, in Mexico. For the rest of his life.

  And thus he manages to walk on, following Carla past the big, fancy house, for sale—and all those people, the house’s rich and crazily corrupt population. He manages to walk across the sand toward his car, and the long, circuitous, and risky drive to the city.

  The Islands

  What does it mean to love an animal, a pet, in my case a cat, in the fierce, entire, and unambivalent way that some of us do? I really want to know this. Does the cat (did the cat) represent some person, a parent, or a child? some part of one’s self? I don’t think so—and none of the words or phrases that one uses for human connections sounds quite right: “crazy about,” “really liked,” “very fond of”—none of those describes how I felt and still feel about my cat. Many years ago, soon after we got the cat (her name was Pink), I went to Rome with my husband, Andrew, whom I really liked; I was crazy about Andrew, and very fond of him too. And I have a most vivid memory of lying awake in Rome, in the pretty bed in its deep alcove, in the nice small hotel near the Borghese Gardens—lying there, so fortunate to be in Rome, with Andrew, and missing Pink, a small striped cat with no tail—missing Pink unbearably. Even blaming Andrew for having brought me there, although he loved her too, almost as much as I did. And now Pink has died, and I cannot accept or believe in her death, any more than I could believe in Rome. (Andrew also died, three years ago, but this is not his story.)

  A couple of days after Pink died (this has all been recent), I went to Hawaii with a new friend, Slater. It had not been planned that way; I had known for months that Pink was slowly failing (she was nineteen), but I did not expect her to die. She just suddenly did, and then I went off to “the islands,” as my old friend Zoe Pinkerton used to call them, in her nasal, moneyed voice. I went to Hawaii as planned, which interfered with my proper mourning for Pink. I feel as though those islands interposed themselves between her death and me. When I needed to be alone, to absorb her death, I was over there with Slater.

  Slater is a developer; malls and condominium complexes all over the world. Andrew would not have approved of Slater, and sometimes I don’t think I do either. Slater is tall and lean, red-haired, a little younger than I am, and very attractive, I suppose, although on first meeting Slater I was not at all drawn to him (which I have come to think is one of the reasons he found me so attractive, calling me the next day, insisting on dinner that night; he was probably used to women who found him terrific, right off). But I thought Slater talked too much about money, or just talked too much, period.

  Later on, when I began to like him a little better (I was flattered by all that attention, is the truth), I thought that Slater’s very differences from Andrew should be a good sign. You’re supposed to look for opposites, not reproductions, I read somewhere.

  Andrew and I had acquired Pink from Zoe, a very rich alcoholic, at that time new neighbor of ours in Berkeley. Having met Andrew down in his bookstore, she invited us to what turned out to be a very long Sunday-lunch party in her splendidly decked and viewed new Berkeley hills house. Getting to know some of the least offensive neighbors, is how she probably thought of it. Her style was harsh, abrasive; anything for a laugh was surely one of her mottoes, but she was pretty funny, fairly often. We saw her around when she first moved to Berkeley (from Ireland: a brief experiment that had not worked out too well). And then she met Andrew in his store, and found that we were neighbors, and she invited us to her party, and Andrew fell in love with a beautiful cat. “The most beautiful cat I ever saw,” he told Zoe, and she was, soft and silver, with great blue eyes. The mother of Pink.

  “Well, you’re in luck,” Zoe told us. “That’s Molly Bloom, and she just had five kittens. They’re all in a box downstairs, in my bedroom, and you get to choose any one you want. It’s your door prize for being such a handsome couple.”

  Andrew went off to look at the kittens, and then came back up to me. “There’s one that’s really great,” he said. “A tailless wonder. Must be part Manx.”

  As in several Berkeley hills houses, Zoe’s great sprawl of a bedroom was downstairs, with its own narrow deck, its view of the bay and the bridge, and of San Francisco. The room was the most appalling mess I had ever seen. Clothes, papers, books, dirty glasses, spilled powder, more clothes dumped everywhere. I was surprised that my tidy, somewhat censorious husband even entered, and that he was able to find the big wicker basket (filled with what looked to be discarded silk underthings, presumably clean) in which five very tiny kittens mewed and tried to rise and stalk about on thin, uncertain legs.

  The one that Andrew had picked was gray striped, a tabby, with a stub of a tail, very large eyes, and tall ears. I agreed that she was darling, how great it would be to have a cat again; our last cat, Lily, who was sweet and pretty but undistinguished, had died some years ago. And so Andrew and I went back upstairs and told Zoe, who was almost very drunk, that we wanted the one with no tail.

  “Oh, Stubs,” she rasped. “You don’t have to take that one. What are you guys, some kind of Berkeley bleeding hearts? You can have a whole cat.” And she laughed, delighted as always with her own wit.

  No, we told her. We wanted that particular cat. We liked her best.

  Aside from seeing the cats—our first sight of Pink!—the best part of Zoe’s lunch was her daughter, Lucy, a shy, pretty, and very gentle young woman—as opposed to the other guests, a rowdy, oil-rich group, old friends of Zoe’s from Texas.

  “What a curious litter,” I remarked to Andrew, walking home up Marin to our considerably smaller house. “All different. Five different patterns of cat.”

  “Five fathers.” Andrew had read a book about this, I could tell. Andrew read everything. “It’s called multiple insemination, and occurs fairly often in cats. It’s theoretically possible in humans, but they haven’t come across any instances.” He laughed, really pleased with this lore.

  “It’s sure something to think about.”

  “Just don’t.”

  Andrew. An extremely smart, passionate, selfish, and generous man, a medium-successful bookstore owner. A former academic: he left teaching in order to have more time to read, he said. Also (I thought) he much preferred being alone in his store to the company of students or, worse, of other professors—a loner, Andrew. Small and almost handsome, competitive, a gifted tennis player, mediocre pianist. Gray hair and gray-green eyes. As I have said, I was crazy about Andrew (usually). I found him funny and interestingly observant, sexy and smart. His death was more grievous to me than I can (or will) say.

  “You guys don’t have to take Stubs; you can have a whole cat all your own.” Zoe Pinkerton on the phone, a few days later. Like many alcoholics, she tended to repeat herself, although in Zoe’s case some vast Texas store of self-confidence may have fueled her repetitions.

  And we in our turn repeated: we wanted the little one with no tail.

  Zoe told us tha
t she would bring “Stubs” over in a week or so; then the kittens would be old enough to leave Molly Bloom.

  Andrew: “Molly Bloom indeed.”

  I: “No wonder she got multiply inseminated.”

  Andrew: “Exactly.”

  We both, though somewhat warily, liked Zoe. Or we were both somewhat charmed by her. For one thing, she made it clear that she thought we were great. For another, she was smart; she had read even more than Andrew had.

  A very small woman, she walked with a swagger; her laugh was loud, and liberal. I sometimes felt that Pink was a little like Zoe—a tiny cat with a high, proud walk; a cat with a lot to say.

  In a couple of weeks, then, Zoe called, and she came over with this tiny tailless kitten under her arm. A Saturday afternoon. Andrew was at home, puttering in the garden like the good Berkeley husband that he did not intend to be.

  Zoe arrived in her purple suede pants and a vivid orange sweater (this picture is a little poignant; fairly soon after that the booze began to get the better of her legs, and she stopped taking walks at all). She held out a tiny kitten, all huge gray eyes and pointed ears. A kitten who took one look at us and began to purr; she purred for several days, it seemed, as she walked all over our house and made it her own. This is absolutely the best place I’ve ever been, she seemed to say, and you are the greatest people—you are my people.

  From the beginning, then, our connection with Pink seemed like a privilege; automatically we accorded her rights that poor Lily would never have aspired to.

  She decided to sleep with us. In the middle of the night there came a light soft plop on our bed, which was low and wide, and then a small sound, mmrrr, a little announcement of her presence. “Littlest announcer,” said Andrew, and we called her that, among her other names. Neither of us ever mentioned locking her out.

  Several times in the night she would leave us and then return, each time with the same small sound, the littlest announcement.