by Alice Adams
Lila has made coffee and heated two bagels. With this small nourishment they are perched at Lila’s round kitchen table. It would be pleasant simply to enjoy the moment for what it is, but the fact of what they are, what they do, prevents an avoidance of the subject. Of Karen.
Julian. “Amazing, really amazing. I still feel a certain amount of guilt over not going to Atlanta.”
Lila. “Julian the caretaker.”
“I know; we seem to have struck a perfect balance, she and I.”
“Right. Whereas Garrett and I were so unbalanced that he had to leave. Or one of us did and it turned out to be him.” But they have already talked a great deal about Garrett—of course they have. They have even discussed at some length the possibility of their needing Garrett for some balance of their own: Since Julian is married to Karen, how will things work out in terms of Julian and Lila, now that Lila is unmarried? They talk a lot, they speculate.
Not so long ago, all four of those people sat at that same round kitchen table, Lila and Garrett playing host to Julian and Karen. All drinking champagne, good French stuff bought by Garrett. And they were eating something fancy that he had whipped up, crab and mushrooms. After a concert of Karen’s, in Berkeley.
Karen had played beautifully. Brahms, Mozart, Debussy. A silly Satie. A safe concert, as reviewers would hasten to point out (Karen was unpopular with local critics; her habit of cancellation did not win friends), but still, Karen’s particular lyric flow was present. Playing, she sang. Wonderfully.
That night Lila, as she looked at Karen, the small exhausted woman hunched over the table, her fallen silk hair a mess, white hands gripping the stem of her glass (Karen tended to break glasses; she did so later, a good glass from Lila’s mother; Garrett was angry)—watching Karen, then, it seemed astounding to Lila that she could have played at all.
Karen’s beauty, too, was always astounding, even totally disheveled, entirely tired. That white, translucent skin, the very wide, dark-blue eyes, small nose, and long delicate mouth. The amazing long red silk hair.
Sometimes, envisioning Karen, Lila has thought, Well, no wonder. No wonder Julian wants her around just to look at, even if she is so often drunk, impossible. She is so beautiful, and impressively talented. He feels what I would feel, probably.
“I have this really wonderful group of friends at home,” Karen now remembers telling Hal, once they were up in her room and she had made the phone call. “All people who like to drink, well, you know, too much. And who’ve tried the shrink route, A.A., Betty Ford, all that grim stuff. Well, we all got together and we formed this little club, we called it the Drinking Club. We meet every now and then and we really drink, I mean we just drink up a storm. But the rest of the time, stone-cold sober.”
By the time she had finished all this about her club, both Karen and Hal were laughing so hard they were crying, she sitting up on her big pink bed and he in a chair near the window—a huge piece of floor-to-ceiling glass that seemed to slant into the room.
“Only trouble was,” Karen continued, “we got to having our meetings all the time.”
“You know what?” Hal said, when either of them could speak. “You know what, I’m going to start me a branch of your club right here in Atlanta, and I’m going to start promoting the first meeting right here in this room, right now.”
And Hal picked up the bedside pink princess phone and began to tap out numbers, and to talk. In the mirror across the room Karen could see herself as he did so: a pretty little woman lying back on the bed, her loosened hair fanned out, prettily (the same bed which is now such a horrible mess).
Yesterday afternoon? Last night? As Hal talked and talked on the phone Karen lay back and laughed and laughed, his voice sounded so funny to her, just killing. And his fat was so nice, so reassuring.
After that her memory is vague, more spotty.
Other people came to her room. All men? Karen thinks so, but just as she thinks, All men, she remembers a woman. Was that a maid, with more drinks, bottles? Ice?
Drinking. Smoking. A lot of them smoked, a lot.
Then something about the air conditioner not working. Too hot.
People undressing?
But no sex. Nothing like that.
Or was there?
At that moment, two things happen to Karen simultaneously. Her memory closes down. Black. Blank. And her stomach lurches, then tightens like a fist.
In the bathroom nothing comes to her mouth but bile, thin and bitter, greenish. Her stomach contracts again, and again. More bitterness, more thin bile.
Very clearly then, to herself Karen says, This must never happen again. Not any of it. Not ever.
She begins to repeat, “I am an alcoholic. I am not in control of my life.”
In San Francisco, in the heavy early-morning fog that will probably last all day, the trees around Lila’s house drip moisture, water running down pine needles, slow drops from eucalyptus leaves. And from out in the bay comes the heavy, scraping sound of foghorns.
Lila has pulled a dark gray sweater over the silk shirt that she wore to dinner last night, with Julian, but even so she is cold as they stand there in her doorway, saying good-bye.
“Well, in any case, tonight, okay?” asks Julian. “We’ll stay here? Do you want to make dinner, or should we go out, do you think? It might be better—”
This tentativeness of Julian’s tells Lila that he is not at all sure what to do about Karen, who might telephone—anywhere.
Surprising herself—she, too, had assumed this night for them together—Lila hears her own voice saying, “Well, maybe not? I mean maybe not tonight at all?” She laughs to lighten the effect of what she has said: they have never before not seen each other when they could. “Let’s talk on the phone instead.” She laughs again.
“Well. Oh. Well, okay.” Looking hard at Lila as he says those few words, Julian too seems to strive for lightness. But then he says, “Or I could make dinner at my house? We haven’t done that for a while. I’ll bring you home early, I promise.”
Meaning that he can’t quite let her go, not now? He needs some sort of help from Lila?
No time for talking about it, however, and so she temporizes. “Well, let me call you later, okay?”
They kiss, both with the thought that they will see each other that night after all. Probably.
Julian walks over to his car, and Lila goes back inside her house, where she will clean up their few dishes before heading over to her study, ready for the day’s first patient.
Cleaning up her room, which seemed to Karen a first step, is not quite as terrible as she imagined it would be. To start with, there are not as many sheets lying around as she thought there were. She pulls the sheets and a couple of towels into a bundle that she then thrusts out into the hall—seeing no one in the corridor, luckily.
She empties the ashtrays into the toilet, along with the inches of booze in the several glasses. Flushes it all away. Gone. She considers washing the ashtrays and decides against it, imagining that wet-ash smell. She just stacks everything there in the bathroom and closes the door.
Well. Already a huge improvement.
She will call her agent and apologize; in fact she will call a lot of people, explaining, apologizing. But there is no way, not now, that she could go on to New York today, as she was meant to do.
She will call down for some food, a tray of tea and eggs, some yogurt, all healthy stuff. Maybe that nice black man will bring it up to her, the one who brought the wine. (Wine. She will never drink wine again, or anything else.) How surprised and pleased he will be to see how she has tidied up the room! And to see her looking so much better! How surprised everyone will be when they see her.
She very much hopes it will be the same waiter. She really liked him. If only she could remember his name.
Patients
The young woman in the chair across from Lila’s (Dr. Lewisohn’s) chair, the new patient, who is shredding Kleenex into her smart black leather
lap—that young woman in some general, overall way is lying. All Lila’s instincts inform her that what she is hearing now from this young woman is false. Not the specifics: the busy, older husband impatient with the new baby and still wanting to have a lot of dinner parties; the baby herself with colic; and this sad, pretty red-haired girl trying hard to balance it all, in a too-large, too-fancy new house. All that is undoubtedly true, but at the same time some large-scale lie is there. What is wrong with this big picture?
Lila regards her patient, and she sees:
Short, very curly red hair and pale friendly freckles across a small nose. Small stubby nervous hands. Perhaps she is an alcoholic? This could be the significant, hidden fact. It is possible, but Lila now identifies a false association of her own: Karen Brownfield, the red-haired wife of Julian Brownfield, who is Lila’s lover and also a psychiatrist, is an alcoholic. Apart from the red hair this woman, this “Jane Bates,” does not look at all like Karen, who is beautiful, not pretty, pale and unfreckled.
“Uh, John,” says Jane Bates. “When we were going together he was so great. Exciting. Uh, incredible in some way. You know, uh, sex. But now—” All that was said rather hesitantly, and now Jane bursts out, “Oh Jesus, it’s all so trite, you know? I can’t stand it. The big romance that goes stale once you’re married. Everyone knows that story. Why do women keep getting married? Are all of us crazy, do you think?”
“Surely no crazier than men are.” Lila smiles. “But that does seem a fairly familiar pattern.” Precisely her own pattern, she is thinking: her very rash first, young marriage, and more recently, less forgivably, her supposedly mature, considered marriage to Garrett, a lawyer—an incredible illicit lover, a bored and boring husband, who recently left Lila for a younger woman. An even more trite story.
But what is the major lie that Lila is being told by this new patient, Jane Bates? Is she possibly a rock star, someone famous in a world that Lila might well not know? This seems unlikely; nothing in this sad, mild young woman’s demeanor suggests fame, or success. However, Lila now feels that she has picked up some as yet unconscious clue to her own certain sense of distrust. Could it have to do with the patient’s blank, too-ordinary name?
“This room is so nice and small,” says the patient. “It’s where you live?”
“No, this is my office. My study. I live in the small house where you parked.”
“Oh of course. You live alone?” is the next question, then covered over with a hurried, “I guess you don’t tell patients much about yourself.”
Neutrally: “No, I don’t. But do you want to tell me more about your house?”
Six bedrooms. An acre of gardens, or maybe two acres? Jesus, Jane doesn’t even know. Supposedly two gardeners, and a housekeeper and a baby nurse, and a janitorial service. So much, just keeping track of all those people. Plus baby doctors. Caterers for parties. And the husband, John.
All this is in Atherton where, a minor coincidence, Lila herself grew up, in a somewhat similar though even grander older house—it now seems a hundred years ago. Lila’s house has recently been sold (at last, thank God) and so she knows about Atherton real-estate values.
The weather outside the long windows of Lila’s office is menacing, dark gray and cold. Heavily fogged. August in California, Lila’s most hated month. But for whatever private idiosyncratic reasons she resists taking off the month that most psychiatrists choose to take. (“You stick around to suffer,” Garrett sometimes accused her.) In any case her mind now wanders—with more than one variety of envy—to Julian Brownfield, her lover, who is now in Maine, with beautiful Karen, formerly a concert pianist, now drying out from her many years of booze.
But, Maine. As Jane the patient goes on and on about her baby’s colic, her husband’s inability to hear her, Lila remembers Maine: clean white silky beaches and small dark intimate islands, far out in the water. Clear bright days in August, and cool clear starred nights. The Northern Lights. Shooting stars.
She is jolted from such thoughts, though, by a single word, a name, clearly spoken in error. Garrett. Her new patient, “Jane Bates,” though speaking of her own husband, “John,” referred to him as Garrett.
So, Lila’s mind whirls. This is not Jane Bates, of course not. This young woman is Phyllis, new wife of Garrett. New wife, new baby, Atherton house. Of course.
Furious, even angrier than such an imposture has given her every right to be, Lila breathes deeply, willing control. She is aware that she is staring, clutching her chair—and wills herself to stop. “You’re Phyllis,” she finally (unnecessarily) says.
Phyllis, referred to by Garrett as Phylly (once Lila had smiled at the silly pun: the silly Phylly)—Phyllis now brings the useless Kleenex up to her eyes. She has begun again to cry. “This was all my idea, not Garrett’s,” is the first thing she is able to say.
“I’m sure.” Dry-eyed, still-angry Lila. “But you know of course that it is out of the question for me to see you as a patient.”
“I knew that, I just—” More sobs take over.
There is nothing for Lila to do but sit this out, as it were, she feels. At the end of this hour another patient will come to save her from poor weeping Phyllis. And in a coolly objective way, Lila now congratulates her own unconscious for having recognized this deception, really from the start.
“I just had to see you,” Phyllis tells her, when she can speak. “Garrett talks about you. Comparisons. Your dinners. I guess I thought in a way he’d be sort of pleased. I mean if I’d got away with it. A joke on you.”
Lila is aware of a half smile on her own face. “Well, I guess it didn’t quite work out.”
“No. But I do need a shrink. Very much. Obviously.” More tears.
Lila hesitates. “I don’t think I should be the person to recommend one. But the Psychoanalytic Society—” Her voice has become brisk, depersonalized.
Surprisingly, as Lila is speaking, Phyllis abruptly gets to her feet, so that Lila notes how small she is (well, of course Garrett would choose to follow an over-six-foot wife with one barely five feet tall). Phyllis is small and determined, probably bossy at times. And Lila sees that her resemblance to Karen Brownfield was not only red hair: Karen too is a small and willfully determined person.
No longer weeping, Phyllis says again, “I’m sorry. Just think of it as a bad joke. Okay?”
Lila smiles. “I’ll try to. In any case, good luck.”
“Thanks, Lila.”
Karen and Julian Brownfield’s hotel on the coast of Maine is new: pale blond-paneled rooms with accents of blue: blue painted fish, blue flowers here and there. The long wide windows look out to the grassy dunes, and to the sea, now a dark azure, with white-capped waves. Two small dark-wooded islands are juxtaposed, out there in the Atlantic.
More immediately in the foreground are a smooth new lawn, very green, and a modest circular blue swimming pool, now populated by two young families, with children. On the lawn another young father is running back and forth with a kite that will not rise—probably he is doing something wrong. His small daughter runs just behind him, laughing in the sun, not at all worried about the kite. So far whatever her father does is wonderful.
Julian and Karen have remained in their rooms, their two-story “suite” from which Julian at the window now worries about the kite, and that father. Sad Julian, who has just said to Karen, “You know you’d feel better if you could swim a little.” He was unable not to say this, as earlier he could not help advising breakfast, and a walk—all declined, as he knew they would be.
Looking at Karen, Julian thinks it is the round curve of her forehead that most nearly breaks his heart. She has got so thin, with no booze and rather little food, that all her bones are apparent, and especially that child-shaped skull, with its curves and deep wide eye sockets. Her delicately indented chin is sharper now, and her cheekbones protuberant. Possibly she has never seemed so beautiful.
The clinician in Julian reminds him that when Karen’s looks at long
last go, when no one falls in love with her for months, and then years, she may indeed be in serious trouble. A major depression, massive. So far, though, no loss of looks has even begun. Through the ravages of love affairs (two that Julian knows about, has picked up the pieces after, so to speak), through God knows how many drinks—through all that Karen has remained very, very beautiful. Vicissitudes, it would seem, have only added variety to her beauty. Indeed, Julian has been presented by his wife with a spectrum of lovely, red-haired women, from plumply voluptuous to just-not-gaunt, from warm and radiant smiles to the most poignant melancholy. Julian has had a succession of love affairs and marriages with all these women, all of whom are Karen.
Which is one of the reasons why they are still together, Julian believes. Another reason being the fact that he himself is the perfect, paradigmatic co-alcoholic.
He is also the perfect example of what people mean when they say that all shrinks are nuts. Julian knows this, and it affords him a certain bleak amusement: a successful (in his work, very successful) psychiatrist, who remains married to a beautiful, promiscuous alcoholic. Pretty funny, all around. It is quite true, psychiatrists are more truly mad than their patients are.
At the moment Karen is deeply engaged in doing her nails, in painting each long oval a glossy wild bright pink. One of the wonderful perks, as Karen has put it, about her “retirement” (she has given up the piano altogether; no concerts certainly and now no practicing either) is that now she can have marvelous long nails. And her nails would seem to have responded to this wish: they are indeed extremely long, and they look to be steel hard.
If Karen were as depressed now as in some ways she presents herself as being, would she be doing her nails? Would she care, still, for such a surface of perfection? Well, actually she might.
As though to answer him Karen holds up her hands and laughs. “See? Wild Pink. It’s wonderful not even to have to look like a pianist. Who’d guess? Now my toes.” And she starts to remove her sandals, to inspect her feet.