Listening to Billie

by Alice Adams

  And she sold them! Not too often: four one year, six the next, but steadily, so that slowly she began to believe that she was a poet; she was not famous, but she was a published poet. And that was a source of steady happiness to her, that work, that small success.

  With the poems themselves she was not entirely satisfied. (But should a poet be satisfied?) They seemed to her, sometimes, too small and cautious, too “well made.” And she had, sometimes, a dizzying sense of other, larger and stronger poems that she could be writing; but perhaps she would. For the most part she was content to work, and to let the direction and the scope of her poetry change as it would.

  Then she and Catherine both had sore throats, requiring doctors and drugs. There were plumber’s bills, an increased property tax. All in all, she was about seven hundred dollars in debt. Not terrifying (not quite), but too much to owe. She went to a temporary-employment agency and got a job. Since she was a Medical Secretary, and had admitted to literary skills (not mentioning poetry), she was sent to “help out” a psychoanalyst named Dr. Bout, who, in addition to his practice, was writing a “psycho-biography” of Douglas MacArthur. Dr. Bout, a tiny, feisty, pale young man, with an energetic, somewhat truculent manner, a pipe—and two thousand pages of manuscript, which his publisher wanted cut down to seven-fifty.

  Eliza would have liked to do the work at home, where she could think about it more peacefully; but no, he wanted her there, installed at a desk in the small room next to his office. She soon understood that he wanted to watch what she was doing, her dangerous activity.

  He also wanted her to empty the ashtray, between patients, and to tidy up the magazines in the waiting room.

  And he wanted his manuscript magically diminished to the proper length without cutting any words from the original.

  She managed to stand two weeks with Dr. Bout. Two hundred dollars.

  • • •

  Four weeks in a Child Guidance Clinic, a much nicer place. Five hundred dollars.

  Out of debt, she was more than ever aware of her luck: her small and almost adequate income, her small and perfectly private house.

  Her sporadic “love affairs” were more like encounters than affairs, and they occurred at increasing intervals as she devoted less and less time to them. Often they left her lonelier than before. She missed Harry very much.

  “I don’t know,” she said to Kathleen, who continued to call her, although often Eliza felt that their rather accidental friendship was over. Still, she had to say something. “I’m always attracted to men, some men, but it doesn’t seem to work out. Maybe I should have married Harry. He’s such a terrific friend.”

  “He would have taken up too much of your time.” Kathleen had met Harry once and did not like him; he talked too much, even interrupting her. (Harry did not like Kathleen, either. “She’s really in love with you, and that’s what makes her so cross—can’t you see that, Eliza?”)

  “How’s Miriam?” Eliza asked.

  “Well, she spent the weekend in L.A., and I have the weirdest feeling that she got together with Lawry. I don’t know why, I’m just sure.”

  “Kathleen, come on, that’s so unlikely—”

  “Well, she was up to something down there, I know that.”

  Not smoking, Eliza was acutely aware of those who did. She had observed that Kathleen’s style of smoking was as hostile as her conversation; she blew smoke everywhere, all over everyone, and she scattered ashes about.

  How had she herself smoked, Eliza wondered, and she concluded that her own style had been simply greedy, a devouring. Josephine smoked in a discreet and ladylike way, while Daria’s smoking was furtive, and ashamed.

  Daria was in a sanatorium in New Hampshire, being treated for a depression that had lasted since her last miscarriage. Josephine and Eliza discussed this on the phone: Daria was their subject matter. Smith commuted from Woodside to New Hampshire to see Daria, and to stop by Washington on some sort of business.

  “I must say that Smith has been a saint” was one of the things that Josephine often said.

  And generally Eliza would murmur some agreement. But on other days she would be disinclined to such ready praise of Smith, and she would say, “He’s almost too good about it, don’t you think? He’s settled too easily into this role, the man with the ailing wife.”

  “Well, what else could he do?” Brisk, practical Josephine, but an edge had come into her voice.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t mean something specific. It’s just a sense I have.”

  “You’ve always been awfully hard on Smith—”

  “When they got married, you said yourself that there was something about him.”

  This conversation, which was begun with good will, and true mutual concern about Daria, ended sourly, almost acerbically.

  Sometimes Josephine would ask how Eliza’s work was going, but that did not turn out well either. She would ask on days when Eliza did not want to talk about it, when it was going terribly—she would never be able to finish a poem again. Or Josephine would forget to mention a poem that Eliza had recently published. “Oh, the Atlantic? I was sure you said it would be in Harper’s.”

  This was the worst, the most overt not getting along with Josephine since Eliza’s adolescence. Was that an effect of not smoking?

  She was also getting along badly with Catherine. Catherine, in her middle teens, passively watching older kids, the hippies. Waiting.

  Eliza’s conflict with Catherine was cruder and more predictable than with Josephine, and it was terrible, frightening to Eliza.

  “One o’clock is much too late for a girl of your age to come home. I said eleven.”

  “Well, the show got out late, and we went—”

  “Catherine! I’m not asking you where you went, or why. I’m telling you to come home when I say.”

  “But next weekend there’s this party, at the Fillmore—”

  “You’re too young for late parties, or the Fillmore.”

  Feeling the heat of her own face, and the rising pressure of her blood, Eliza had a sudden and horrifying sense of being someone else, of being inhabited by another person. Standing there, her arms unforgivingly akimbo, she felt herself to be not Eliza but Josephine: she was Josephine, yelling at herself, Eliza, Catherine.

  “How much longer do I have to do what you say?” asked Catherine.

  Then, as suddenly as it had come, that Josephine-possession left, and Eliza was herself again, in her own kitchen in the sun, looking at Catherine, who was so very serious and young that she was almost funny. (Had Josephine ever mildly smiled at Eliza, at the end of such a scene? Eliza doubted it.) “Catherine, how can I answer that?” Eliza in her own voice, gently, smiling, asked. “Until you start to work, or get married, or something. Catherine, do you know that you’re impossible?”

  “I don’t want to work, or particularly get married. I don’t much like boys. I just want a lot of babies.”

  “Oh, my God—”

  But by now they were feeling better, in the pretty and unusually tidy kitchen, in the April sun.

  Pouring coffee for them both, Eliza (still, almost automatically) began to reach for a cigarette. And then did not.

  Months later, she recognized that she felt better physically than she ever had; the world smelled and tasted much better; she had more energy. But for years, she was sometimes conscious of a lack, a nameless loss, and sometimes she would dream that she was smoking.

  13 / Josephine:

  Notes Toward

  an Autobiography

  I am too old to be so upset about my daughters: don’t children ever stop? Their endless childhoods, and now what seems to me their endless immaturity.

  A terrible mistake, two daughters ten years apart. I was too young for Eliza, too old for Daria, and now I feel punished by them both.

  I have decided that if I write things down in an orderly way, trying to sort them out, perhaps I will see more clearly. (I very much doubt that I will publish th
is.)

  Eliza: The hateful truth is that Eliza has always been at war with me, and always she has known how to make me most uncomfortable. Is it possible that we are secretly alike? Our lives so far might suggest this: (more hateful truth) we both married at twenty, in both cases because we were pregnant, and both our husbands later committed suicide. “Coincidence” does not seem the right word; it looks more like doom.

  I wonder: is it to separate herself from me that Eliza is writing poetry? What she doesn’t know is that I was a published poet for a while. Not in magazines that she would consider good; I wrote light verse for the Post, sometimes a woman’s magazine. It was so easy, so unrewarding that I gave it up. When I contemplate the work of a biography, hours in libraries and museums (my cold feet in the British Museum, pneumonia in Yorkshire: Charlotte Brontë), the correspondence with uncooperative sources—when I think of all that, poetry seems an almost silly exercise, a childish toying with words.

  Eliza’s poems do not seem to me remarkable.

  And I wonder is she writing poetry because it is the literary form I care for least? For which I have really no respect? She should have known some of the poets I have known. Doesn’t she remember them coming to our house on Washington Square when she was a little girl? Narcissistic drunks, most of them.

  Eliza does not understand political reality: since we are not living in a classless society, there is no point in pretending that we are. I would fight for the rights of all minorities, write articles, send checks, but I would not necessarily invite them to parties in my house; they would not like it there.

  Daria: She does not understand about money, any more than Eliza understands social realities. Several hundred thousand dollars just given away before Smith stopped her. She used to weep over every horror story in the news, before Smith stopped her from reading papers, listening to the news. I would have thought that Daria would write poetry, if either of them did, and that Eliza would do something strong, like medicine or law.

  Daria and I both were married in the orchard of this house (our two first weddings, that is), and I rather imagine that Daria, should her marriage come apart, would not remarry—unlike Eliza, who married Evan in City Hall, New York.

  Weddings: The awful thing, at my wedding to Caleb, in the orchard (aside from being pregnant, bad enough), was—that morning, the morning of my wedding, I got a note in the mail, forwarded from the Atlantic, accepting an article, my first, and I thought, My God, why am I getting married? I could have been a writer—only that—without all these intimacies, these debilitating relationships. These daughters.

  But I had to admit to myself: I was pregnant because I had seduced Caleb, much more my fault than his. I was curious, one snowy Thanksgiving when his parents were visiting mine, in this very house. I wondered what it would be like to go on as we were in front of the fire, kissing, “petting,” still wearing our outdoor snow clothes. I was the one who said, “It’s so hot, all these clothes, shouldn’t we take some off? Here, Caleb, you have so many buttons, I’ll help.” I can still hear my disingenuous girlish voice, and see Caleb, his blond face flushed from the fire, not quite sure what to do, but listening to me, and doing it.

  Did Eliza seduce Evan? It seems quite likely to me, such a passive Southern boy, although quite handsome, as her father, Caleb, was.

  My second marriage, to Franz, took place in some unremembered office in Maryland, because he thought the idea amusing. “How amusing to marry a blue-eyed Bostonian American in Maryland,” he said, in his feeling-hiding way, in his beautiful voice. We did not ever talk about love, and I was almost embarrassed by the feelings he brought to my body, endlessly. How beautiful he made me feel; again, and again, without words.

  When Franz was killed—“killed in Spain,” “dead in Madrid,” how horribly romantic those phrases are—then I wanted to die; that also sounds romantic, but it is true. I was depressed, if that is the word, for more than a year. (What can Daria possibly know about depression?)

  Then I met Jason, and he kept saying, “How beautiful you are,” which, since I am not beautiful, should have told me something of his character. But instead I imagined that he could somehow repeat Franz for me, not knowing that he would be an exacerbation of my grief. I married him in the orchard, because he wanted to.

  He only took up my time, and provided me with a tiny daughter who refused to eat. And all the time there was Eliza, watching us hate each other.

  Suicides: It was inexcusable, what Caleb did to me, and I do not believe for a minute that it had to do with the stock market. After all, he killed himself in March, five months after the Crash, when I was four months pregnant. He was angry at me; he hated being married. And none of that was my fault.

  But when Evan Quarles killed himself, my first thought, an absolutely inadmissable one, was this: Ah, so now it’s happened to you. I was deeply shocked at myself, but later I was able to be kind, and at least I was glad that they had done it in such different ways, Caleb’s leap and Evan’s pills and bourbon.

  Naturally enough, I have sometimes worried about Smith.

  Two Acres: Woods, pine and fir, birch, hemlock. In the orchard, grass and apples. Stone fences. The house—granite, oak timbers. The long porch, scraggly lawn, a coarse gray beach. The lake. Water, islands, mountains.

  Where I am, what I have.

  And, having written down all those personal horrors, I cannot say that I feel particularly better.

  I do not think that I will write an autobiography, ever.

  14 / Daria and the

  White House

  We are invited to the White House, and the truth is I find it absolutely impossible to go.

  I try to tell Smith this. He does not believe me, or he thinks I am merely shy.

  I am considering another attempt, a confrontation during which I tell him the truth: I cannot go to the W.H., because if I did I would shoot the President. Would Smith believe that? I doubt it, although it is true. Shoot-the-President is a much stronger inner imperative than any of my old money give-away orders.

  I have even picked out the gun. It is the smallest in Smith’s collection, really tiny. Pretty, even. It will fit into any bag. (Will?)

  What I feel for the P. is a hatred that goes beyond hating; it is a careful, meticulous loathing. His small dishonest eyes and ugly twisted mouth. I visualize him naked: the dark matted body hair and shriveled sex. Most nakedness is human, vulnerable—Smith’s is—but the P.’s is merely hideous.

  Smith has already been to the W.H.; he has met the P. and those other people, although not the P.’s family, those plastic women whom I would not even bother to kill. He did not admit it in detail, but Smith was disappointed. He had, of course, seen the man endlessly on television; nevertheless I am sure he expected some personal grandeur that the cameras had somehow missed—the truth being, of course, that they show him at his grandest, made up for spotlights. What I understood from Smith, most of all from his ultra-Bostonian voice, was a tone of disappointed snobbery. Although P., the P. is visibly, irrevocably and undisguisably lower-class. No matter what he wears or where he goes with whom, as Shady Hill—Groton—Harvard—Fly Club, Smith would be the first to recognize. (Christ, the Kennedys were bad enough, those cheap rich Micks: he has never said that, but I have heard it in his voice.)

  In any case, now we are invited. Do the guards search everyone? Even “attractive young women” who are married to “promising” (very rich conservative) young men? I see myself in something very retrogressively flounced and flowered, perhaps a castoff of Josephine’s; that would be a good joke, but who could I tell? Shy, demure, a little stupid (he’d find that appealing). Until—BANG.

  The truth is I probably lack the nerve, or I would probably explode with pure hatred in the presence of the P. But I like to think about killing him.

  It would—or it might—be different if I had a terminal disease, if I had the disease. But with such small breasts I think the smallest lump would be apparent, and there are no
ne. (Surely this is the truly craziest wish I have ever had, to wish for C?) But I hate the idea of dying “mowed down” by Secret Service bullets, and surely that is what would happen. Or maybe I would be jailed and somehow injected with C, like all those people who killed J.F.K.

  I may tell Reed Ashford, our new old-family-friend, about this; he might help?

  (Smith says that we should invite him to dinner soon with some “appropriate” girl. But I don’t know any girls like that. I will invite him with Eliza. It will be a disaster.)

  • • •

  I am (sadly) not actually going to kill the P.; I only think about it. I am probably going to stay married to Smith, in my own white well-guarded house. But I do not think I will accompany Smith to the White House.

  Too dangerous, all around.

  And Reed is dangerous. Should I shoot him instead? Then, in that caught moment before the shot, would he notice me more? Now he looks at me as though we were much older friends than we are; there is always a suggestion that eventually we will talk, or something, together.

  The P., I am sure, hates fucking. He never fucks. Twice, maybe, those children. But not for fun.

  Would a psychiatrist tell me that my wish to shoot the P. is a “sexual” wish? Maybe; I don’t think so.

  How does Reed feel about sex, fucking? I must find out; I think we feel the same.

  If I shoot the P., I will not find out anything. It is only a joke that I think about, sometimes.

  15 / Fantastic Sex

  “And this is Reed Ashford, whom we met two years ago in Amsterdam,” said either Daria or Smith to Eliza, and Eliza, intent on Daria, who was recently declared “well,” didn’t even try to catch the name. But she registered, as people do, a great deal more than she was conscious of: extreme blond handsomeness, most obviously—a small man, perfectly made. And also a kind of tender gentleness, a desire to please. Some innate loneliness. And a strain of violence, as though he were saying: Come close, and I’ll break you apart. (The two faces that Daria saw in Amsterdam.)