by Alice Adams
In any case, Lila now prays to all those on her list, and especially to Julian, to whom she says, I’m just not up to all this; I’m really running on empty. Please.
Her meetings, held in the new Harbourfront section of Toronto, in an excellent hotel with lovely, wide lake views, were no more than routinely tiring, actually; Lila was forced to admit to herself that it was the theme of the conference that afflicted her with a variety of troubled feelings. It was a psychiatric conference on the contemporary state of being single, though of course certain newspaper articles vulgarized it into “A New Look at Singles,” “Singles: Shrinks Say the New Minority.” Whereas in fact the hours of papers and discussion had ranged about—had included the guilt that many people feel over their single state; social ostracism, subtle and overt; myths of singleness; the couple as conspiracy; plus practical problems, demographics, and perceived changes over the last several generations. And Lila found that she overreacted—she was reached, touched, shaken by much that was said. She had trouble sleeping, despite long lap swims in the hotel’s glassed-in pool, with its views of Canadian skies across Lake Ontario.
Now, very tired, she braces herself against the turbulence, and against certain strong old demons in her mind. And then, as though one of those to whom she has prayed were indeed in charge, the turbulence ends. The huge plane zooms peacefully through a clear gray dusk. Westward, toward San Francisco. A direct flight.
Lila must have fallen asleep, for she is startled awake by the too loud voice of the pilot, over the intercom: “Sorry, folks. We’ve just had news of a very mild earthquake in the San Francisco area, very mild but a little damage to the airport, so we’ll be heading back to Toronto.”
An instant of silence is followed by loud groans from the rows and rows of seats behind Lila’s bulkhead. Groans and exclamations: Oh no, Jesus Christ, all we need, an earthquake. Turning, she sees that a great many people are standing up, moving about, as if there were anything to do. One man, though—trench-coated, lean, dark blond, almost handsome—makes for the telephone up on the wall near Lila’s seat. Seizing it, he begins to dial, and dial and dial. Lila gestures that he can sit down in the empty seat, and he does so, with a twisting grimace. Then, “Can’t get through, damn,” he says. “My family’s down on the Peninsula.” He dials again, says, “Damn,” again, then asks Lila, “Yours?”
“Oh. Uh, San Francisco.”
“Well, San Francisco’s better. Guy with a radio said the epicenter’s in Hollister.”
“I wonder about that ‘mild.’ ” Lila leans toward him to whisper.
“No way it could be mild. They’re not closing down the airport for any mild earthquake.”
Which is pretty much what Lila had already thought.
“Well, I guess I better let someone else try to phone.”
“There’s one on the other side,” Lila tells him, having noticed this symmetrical arrangement on entering the plane.
“Oh, well then.” But after a few minutes, muttering, he gets up and goes back to his seat, as Lila realizes that she wishes he had stuck around—not that she was especially drawn to him; she simply wanted someone there.
People are by now crowding around the two phones, pressing into the passageway between the aisles. A man has managed to get through to his sister-in-law, in Sacramento, and soon everyone has his news: it is a major quake. Many dead. The bridge down.
At that last piece of news, about the bridge, Lila’s tired heart is drenched with cold, as she thinks: Julian. Julian, who lives in Mill Valley and practices in San Francisco, could be on the bridge at any time. Especially now, just after five in San Francisco. Commuter time.
On the other hand, almost anyone could have been on the bridge, especially anyone who lives in Marin County. Fighting panic, Lila says this firmly to herself: anyone does not mean Julian, necessarily. A major disaster involving the bridge does not necessarily involve Julian Brownfield. Not necessarily. She is gripping her knees, as during the turbulence; with an effort she unclenches her fingers and clasps her hands together on her lap, too tightly.
“How about the game?” someone near her is saying.
“No stadium damage, I heard.”
“Lucky it wasn’t a little later. People leaving, going back to Oakland.”
As, very slowly, these sentences penetrate Lila’s miasma of anxiety, she understands: they are talking about the Bay Bridge. The Bay Bridge was damaged, not the Golden Gate. Traffic to the East Bay, not to Marin, Mill Valley.
What Lila feels then, along with extreme relief, is an increase of exhaustion; her nerves sag. And she has, too, the cold new thought that Julian, an unlikely fan, could well have gone to the game. (Taken Karen to the game?) Could have left early, and been overtaken by the earthquake, anywhere at all.
Rising from her seat, intending to walk about, she sees that everyone else is also trying to move. They all seem to protest the event, and their situations, with restless, random motion. Strangers confront and query each other along the packed aisles: Where’re you from? Remember the quake last August? The one in ’72? In ’57? How long were you in Toronto? Like it there? But not enough to make you want to go back right away, right?
At last they begin the descent into Toronto, strapped in, looking down, and no one notices the turbulence that they pass through.
In Julian’s house, high up on the wooded crest above Mill Valley, there is total chaos: in the front hall, two large suitcases lie open and overflowing—a crazy tangle of dresses and blouses, sweaters, silk nightgowns, pantyhose, and shoes thrown all over.
“Anyone coming in,” Julian comments from a doorway, “anyone would think the earthquake, whereas actually—”
“Well, in a way it is the fucking earthquake,” Karen unnecessarily tells him, in her furious, choppy way. “Closing the fucking airport.”
“Whereas, really, we were lucky,” Julian continues, more or less to himself. He is tall and too thin, gray-haired. His skin, too, now looks gray: three weeks of Karen have almost done him in, he thinks. In character, she has alternated her wish to leave with a passionate desire to stay with Julian—forever. Only a day ago she had decided firmly (it seemed) to leave. And now, on the verge of her departure, an earthquake. “The airport might open in a couple of hours,” Julian tells Karen, and he is thinking of Lila, the exact hour of whose return he is uncertain about. Perhaps she is already here? “Or tomorrow,” he says to Karen, hopefully.
“But how would we know, with the phone out?” Karen complains. “It might be a couple of weeks.” She is visibly at the end of her rope, which is short at the best of times. “A couple of weeks with no lights or electricity!”
It is clear to Julian that whatever controls Karen has managed to place on herself for the course of her stay are now wavering, if not completely gone. She has not behaved badly; she has not, that is, got drunk. He himself, at this moment, acutely longs for a drink. An odd longing: Julian is generally abstemious, a tennis player, always in shape. And he wonders, is he catching Karen’s own longing, her alcoholic impulse? Karen, opposing A.A. (she did not like it there), believes that alcoholics can cut down, citing herself as an example—every night she has one, and only one, vodka martini.
Karen is very beautiful, still. All that booze has in no way afflicted the fine white skin. Her face shows no tracks of pain, nor shadows. Her wide, dark-blue eyes are clear; looking into those eyes, one might imagine that her head resounds only with Mozart, or Brahms—and perhaps in a way it still does.
“Well, come on, Julian, let’s find some candles. You know perfectly well that this is the cocktail hour,” she says to her former husband, and she laughs.
Down on the ground in Toronto, disembarked, all the passengers from the flight to San Francisco are herded into a room where, they are assured, they will be given instructions. And in that large, bare room rumors quickly begin to circulate, as people gather and mutter questions to each other.
No one is sitting or standing alone, Lila
notices, although surely there were other solitary travelers on that plane. And she finds that she, too, begins to attach herself to groups, one after another. Is she seeking information, or simple creature comfort, animal reassurance? She is not sure.
Three businessmen in overcoats, with lavish attaché cases, having spoken to the pilot, inform Lila that it may be several days before the San Francisco airport opens. And that the reason for not going on to L.A., or even to Reno or Salt Lake City, has to do with flight regulations—since theirs was a Canadian carrier, they had to return to Canada.
In an automatic way she looks across to the man in the trench coat, at the same time wondering why: Why has she more or less chosen him to lead her? She very much doubts that it is because he is almost handsome, and she hopes that it is not simply that he is a man. He looks decisive, she more or less concludes, and then is shaken by a powerful memory of Julian, who is neither handsome nor decisive, and whom she has loved for all those years.
The trench-coated man seems indeed to have a definite group of his own, of which he is in charge. Lila reads this from the posture of the four people whom she now approaches, leaving the didactic businessmen. But before Lila can ask anything, the loudspeaker comes on, and a voice says that they are all to be housed in the Toronto Hilton, which is very near, and that the airline will do everything possible to get them to their destination tomorrow. A van will pick them up downstairs to take them to the hotel. Names will be called, vouchers given.
Lila has barely joined her chosen group when she hears her name called; they must be doing it by rows, she decides. She is instructed to go through a hall and down some stairs, go outside, and meet the Hilton van there.
And after a couple of wrong turns Lila indeed finds herself outside in the semidark, next to a dimly lit, low-ceilinged traffic tunnel, where a van soon does arrive. But it is for the Ramada Inn, not the Hilton.
And that is the last vehicle of any nature to show up for the next ten or twelve minutes, during which time no people show up, either. No one.
Several taxis are parked some yards down from where Lila has been standing, pacing, in her boots, by her carry-on bag. Drivers are lounging on the seats inside. Should she take a cab to the Hilton? On the other hand, maybe by now everything has been changed, and no one is going to the Hilton after all.
It is very cold, standing there in the dark tunnel, and seemingly darker and dingier all the time. Across the black, wide car lanes are some glassed-in offices, closed and black, reflecting nothing. Behind Lila is the last room through which she came. It is still lit, and empty.
Something clearly is wrong; things cannot be going as planned. Or, she is in the wrong place. Then, dimly, at the end of the tunnel, she sees a van moving toward her. It will not be a Hilton van, she thinks, and she is right: HOLIDAY INN, its sign reads. It passes her slowly, an empty van, its driver barely looking out.
Lila is later to think of this period of time as the worst of the earthquake for her—a time in which she feels most utterly alone, quite possibly abandoned. It is so bad that she has forgotten about the earthquake itself almost entirely; she is too immediately frightened and uncomfortable to think of distant disaster.
After perhaps another five minutes, during which everything gets worse—the cold and the darkness, Lila’s anxiety and her growing hunger—she hears voices from the room behind her. Turning, she sees what she thinks of as her group: the trench-coated man and his charges, followed by the other passengers, all coming out to where Lila stands, shifting her feet in boots that no longer seem to fit.
As though they were old friends, Lila hurries toward him. “Where’ve you been? What happened?”
“Bureaucratic foul-up,” he tells her. “Some stuff about whether or not the airline would spring for the hotel. Who cares? And some confusion about whose flights originated in Toronto.” With a semismile he adds, “You were really lucky to get out first.”
“Was I? I don’t know.”
“Anyway. Look, there’s our van. Toronto Hilton.”
In the candlelit kitchen of Julian’s house, Julian and Karen are drinking vodka and orange juice, Karen’s idea being that they have to use up the orange juice before it goes to waste in the powerless refrigerator. “Besides, the C makes it good for you.” She laughs, and Julian hears a sad echo of her old flirtatiousness as she adds, “But why am I telling a doctor anything like that?”
He sighs. “Yes, I am a doctor.”
This is not a room designed for such romantic illumination. The shadows on the giant steel refrigerator are severe, menacing, and the flickering candlelight on the black-tiled floor looks evil—they could be in jail. Julian feels nothing of the vodka, and Karen’s face, across the round, white, high-gloss table, shows mostly fatigue. She looks vague, distracted.
In a sober, conversational voice she remarks, “Funny to think back to old times in this kitchen. With Lila and old Garrett.” Garrett: Lila’s former husband, a mean and somber lawyer.
“This kitchen?” asks Julian. “I don’t remember …”
“Sure you do. We were all drinking champagne, and later I broke a glass.”
“I think it’s Lila’s kitchen we were in.” The whole scene has indeed come back to Julian, a flash, immobilized: the other kitchen, so unlike this one, all soft wood, some copper bowls, blue pillows on a bench. Prim, pale Garrett—and Lila, her gray hair bright, brushed upward. Lila laughing and talking, he (Julian) talking, each of them, as always, excited by the other’s sheer proximity. “It was somebody’s birthday,” he tells Karen, knowing perfectly well that it was Lila’s. “You had on a green dress.”
“Well, you sure do have a great memory for details.”
“I have to, it’s my job.” And you always broke glasses, he does not say.
“You mean, my green dress is what you might call a professional memory? Holy shit, Julian, holy shit, you’re, you’re …” She begins to cough, unable to tell Julian what he is. He gets up and moves to pat her back, but Karen gestures him away.
“Don’t, I’m okay, don’t hit me!” She laughs a little hysterically, as Julian, too late, realizes that she is getting drunk. Is drunk. “You know what the earthquake was like for me?” She is looking blearily across at him, tears pooled in those great, dark-blue eyes. “Fun. The most fun in the world. I loved it.”
“Good, Karen, I’m glad.” It no longer matters what he says, Julian knows, as long as it is fairly neutral. “I thought it was more like turbulence in an airplane,” he mutters, more or less to himself.
At which Karen giggles. “I like turbulence,” she tells him. “Remember? I think it’s a kick.” And then, quite suddenly, she bursts into tears. “Julian, I’ve never loved anyone but you,” she sobs, reaching out to him. Blindly.
Descending from the van at the Toronto Hilton, Lila and her new friends see that the lobby inside is very crowded. Everyone is gathered around a single small television screen, and in a room beyond there is a coffee shop, apparently open. “Hundreds killed,” the announcer is saying. “Devastation.”
“The restaurant’s out of food,” someone says.
There is a line at the reception desk, but it seems to move quickly; within minutes Lila is being assigned a room. “I wonder about phoning,” she says to the man in the trench coat, Mark. They have all introduced themselves.
Lila’s room, at the top of the Toronto Hilton, is actually a small suite, to which she pays no attention as she heads for the phone. Without considering consequences (Karen could easily answer), she dials the familiar Mill Valley number. Dialing directly, not bothering with credit cards or operators, she gets at first a busy signal and then an operator saying that she is sorry, all the circuits are busy. Lila dials again, gets more operators who are sorry, more busy signals. She goes into the bathroom to wash up, comes back and dials the number again, and again. She orders a sandwich from room service, and continues to try to phone.
A couple of hours later, in Mill Valley, Julian awakes wit
h a sudden jolt: he is in his kitchen, still, and every brilliant light in the room is on, as is the television. Bottles and sticky glasses on the table. Gradually he remembers carrying Karen into the guest room. She is light enough in his arms, but a total dead weight; his back feels strained. And then he came back into this room. Surely not, he hopes, for another drink?
The TV screen shows a very large, white apartment building that has buckled and is rent with cracks and gaps. A background of black night sky, and a cordon of police. Cars, flashing lights. Dazed people standing around in clumps. Julian gets up to turn it off when, at that moment, the phone rings. In his confusion, he stumbles, just catches it on the third ring.
“Lila? My darling, my Lila, wherever …? We’re here, I mean I’m here, no damage, really. Well, I imagine I do sound odd, but no, of course I’m not drunk. Karen was just on the point of leaving—actually packed, then the damn thing hit. I guess she’ll go tomorrow; by now I suppose I mean today. And you? You’ll be back today! For sure?”
Smiling, still breathing hard with the effort of so much futile dialing before at last getting through, Lila offers a silent prayer to all those on her curious private list: she prays that she can fly out of Toronto tomorrow, or whatever day this now is—and that Karen can fly, finally, out of San Francisco.
She sleeps fitfully and wakes early, knowing that she is awake for good. She thinks of telephoning Julian again, but does not. She showers and dresses as hurriedly as possible, and goes down to the hotel lobby.
There people are sitting around, or milling about, aimlessly. The TV seems still to be showing the news from the night before; Lila glimpses the same bridge shots, fire shots, the broken apartment house. All around her in the lobby the faces are pale, clothes a little disheveled, as hers must be. From a small, plump woman who is sitting near the front desk she hears, “They say we’re getting out today, but I don’t believe it.”