by Alice Adams
Often after Reed had made love to her, she dreamed of flowers: once a branch of almond blossoms, flowering, sweetly scented; and on another night an alpine New England meadow, a Maine meadow of wildflowers, of all colors. The triteness of this made her smile; nevertheless, those were her dreams.
Reed lived in what was a shack, on Stinson Beach—a shack that very few people had ever seen. Eliza had not. “Darling, it’s terribly cold and foggy there most of the summer. We’ll go for a weekend in the fall, when it’s nice. Besides, I love your house. It seems made for us. Perfect,” he had said to her.
The young married woman with whom he had been involved—Rosalyn, who looked so much like Daria—was one of the few people who had ever been there, and that had happened at a time when Reed was short of money, really short; and two or more afternoons a week in motels were too much for him. Perversely, Rosalyn, who was extremely rich, loved it there: the small drafty rooms, the sagging furniture and irremediable smell of must were to her exotic, and aphrodisiac in a way that no posh motel could ever be.
That summer Rosalyn was at Tahoe with her husband and children—happily for Reed, who was wildly in love with Eliza. But Rosalyn phoned a lot, and she had begun to understand that Reed was infrequently at home, no matter when she called. Clever, up to a point, in her own way, instead of accusing him she spoke sadly and tenderly. “Darling, I miss you so badly; nothing is beautiful without you. Sometimes I cry.” This worked; she had some insight into Reed. It worked to the extent that he was prevented from saying, It’s over between us, I love someone else; someone marvelous, someone I really love. He sometimes thought that he would say that, but not now, not when she was crying over his lack.
He felt rather kindly toward Rosalyn, who was very beautiful, more beautiful, really, than Daria was—with whom he had enjoyed many long afternoons of love.
Then Rosalyn began to urge Reed to come up to Tahoe. Her husband traveled back and forth, went everywhere on business. “Darling, it would be so easy. Darling, I can’t wait. It’s been so long.”
Reed made excuses, almost hoping that they were transparent.
He was getting low on money. He was “between trips,” as he put it to himself. He liked to arrange his business life so that profits from one trip would pay for the purchases on the next, which entailed going back to Europe almost as soon as his cargoes had arrived, been sold and paid for. He had waited too long; his last antiques—the silver and brass and pewter, from Verona—arrived and were sold in May. Now, in early August, midstream in his summer of great love, he was running low; he would have to scurry around for advance money for his next trip, which was what he most hated to do. Having grown up in Hollywood, he was used to financial extremes—the son of a sometimes-rich-and-famous movie star, and an equally erratic director. Still, he hated the bottom areas, the lowering, the necessary scrounging.
Of course he told Eliza none of this, any more than he would mention Rosalyn to her.
Eliza was concerned with Catherine’s impending return; the entrance of reality into their life, as she thought of it. What, strangely, did not concern her was the fact that she had done no writing at all over the summer. A few scribbled notes, lines here and there that could be called sketches for a portrait, a portrait not necessarily of a person. Perhaps simply of a state of mind—a summer.
But no poems. She thought of this without worrying about it. She believed that once the summer was over everything would settle down. Poems would surface almost automatically.
Out with Reed in a restaurant, Eliza, although “madly in love,” was not entirely at ease. She was a pretty woman, she knew that, who probably looked five or six years younger than she was, and Reed was only five years younger than she. And why should that matter, which person was older? Perhaps it didn’t. What did matter, and she was sure of this, was his most conspicuous, compelling beauty. Women and men, too, stared at him as though dazzled by the sun. And so Eliza, after all those years, was given a late and terribly pained insight into poor Evan; she could see (she could even feel herself to be) poor doomed Evan, dazzled, following Reed about, not knowing at all what to do with what he felt. (Sometimes she felt the same.)
They did not talk about Evan. Reed hardly knew him, after all, and Eliza had nothing to say. Certainly she couldn’t talk about her sense of being Evan, and in an idle way she wondered if this love affair would end by killing her. Was that why she had met Reed?
Catherine was to come back on a certain day late in August, and so Eliza and Reed decided that he would stay away, in Stinson, for a few days after that. It would be a chance for Eliza and Catherine to see each other and (Reed did not say this) a chance for him to pull his affairs together.
Nothing went according to their plan.
Just as Reed, at Stinson Beach, was sadly distributing some of his effects from the overnight bag that since early summer had been at Eliza’s house, he heard from outside the high whine of a familiar engine (like most Californians, he was sensitive to cars); he heard the slam of a known door, and there was Rosalyn’s brown Jag, and Rosalyn, herself quite brown, and thin and lithe, in crisp sheer white.
He went to the door. They embraced. She was lovely, and there were tears in her gray-green-yellow eyes. How could Reed not be glad to see her?
He was glad, but what she wanted (this was instantly clear) was to make love right away—to reseal, as it were, their being in love. And Reed was not ready for that.
He disengaged himself from her sharp and demanding embrace, and said, “Let me get you a drink.”
Rosalyn smiled mistily. “Okay, but don’t be long.”
When he came back, with tall, postponing gin-and-tonics (her favorite), Rosalyn was stretched out on his lumpy studio couch, her shirt unbuttoned to white net, brown breasts.
He sat beside her, reflecting on the oppositeness of Rosalyn and Eliza: Eliza’s body was generous and warm, voluptuously soft, whereas Rosalyn’s was smooth and cool, spare, firm. He suddenly thought how fantastic it would be to be in bed with both of them. (He had never done this, or seriously thought of it before.) To be made love to simultaneously by two such separately beautiful girls.
In the meantime, Rosalyn unbuttoned his shirt, then reached for the buckle of his belt, and Reed thought, Well, why not? Why not let Rosalyn make love to me?
He did. He was excited by her mouth, her tongue, her fingers probing him. Lying almost still, Reed savored long delicious moments of her caressing.
But he had forgotten Rosalyn, really forgotten her, and she was in her way as spoiled, as in love with herself, as he was. She suddenly, shrilly cried out, “Christ, Reed, you’re so passive! I might as well be screwing a dildo!” In an awful, unfamiliar voice.
So Reed consummated their act, in a conventional and not very satisfactory way.
Five minutes later, the phone rang. Since he had told a prospective backer—and this must be she—that he would be at home all afternoon awaiting her call, he couldn’t not answer.
But it was Eliza. Catherine had come and gone—gone up to Mendocino for a couple of days with some friends she had met over the summer. Catherine was fine, fat but beautiful. Eliza and Reed wouldn’t have to spend the night apart. Then she said, “You sound very strange.”
“I do? I didn’t mean to. That is terrific. I’ll see you about seven.”
Rosalyn said, “You sounded awfully strange.”
“I did? That was a possible business partner. I guess I really don’t like the idea.”
“A woman? Reed, come on, how much am I supposed to swallow?” Rosalyn was again speaking in her alien, harsh voice.
The possible backer was a woman, an antiques dealer, but Reed felt himself in no position to insist on this. Also, he knew himself to be a poor liar; he did better at confessionals.
“You must be having a really successful summer, business-wise. Spending all your time at it, right?” Unskilled in irony (does any impassioned person do it well?), Rosalyn heard her voice crack; it brok
e unattractively, which was too much for her pride, for her totally attractive self-image, and she felt that it was Reed’s fault—Reed was making her be like this (and of course she was quite right).
Pulling her clothes together, seizing her bag, she got up and went into the bathroom, from which five minutes later she emerged with cool and perfect eyes, smooth mouth and smoothed-out voice.
She extended a thin brown hand to Reed, but then it all came apart, all her plans: tears rushed into her eyes, and she screamed, “You rotten fucking bastard!” She ran out to her car, running knock-kneed, like a furious and awkward child.
Reed hated scenes—his mother had thrived on them. Now, sickly shaken, he went in to take a shower. He felt that he had been infected with germs, but that those germs could possibly be washed away.
Eliza, at a little after seven, greeted him, “Oh, darling, what a relief! When Catherine said she was going on to Mendocino, I realized how much I’d dreaded the end of summer, our time together. So tonight seems a marvelous reprieve, a gift. And I made a lovely crab casserole. It won’t matter when we eat it.” All this was said interspersed with kisses, with strong embraces, increasing in intensity, until the words about the casserole that could be eaten at any time informed Reed that she wanted to make love then, right away (as they had often done, near her front door).
Reed did not want to make love. Very gently, he made a slight gesture of withdrawal.
Which Eliza, who was genuinely aroused—for whatever curious reasons—chose to ignore. She kissed him more insistently, touched explicitly.
Reed, more explicitly, withdrew.
And then knowledge, or a vision, exploded like a flash fire in Eliza’s mind, and she thought, or knew, that he had been with someone else that afternoon. With someone when she called. She could even see him pumping into someone else. (Someone dark and thin, in white: she knew or had intuited his true sexual type, and knew it to be not herself.)
In a voice that was not her own, she said, “You sounded so strange when I phoned.”
In fact, she had used Rosalyn’s taut, angry voice. Horrified, and dumfounded, Reed explained, lying exactly as he had to Rosalyn. “Yes, a business thing. I haven’t told you this, but I’ve been looking for a sort of backer. She was there.”
“That isn’t true.” By now they were standing and facing each other like enemies, in the hall where they had so often languishingly embraced. And outside was the heavy, invading fog that had so often over the summer enclosed their house, their love.
“You know that isn’t true,” Eliza repeated in Rosalyn’s voice—so that Reed had a sense of being a carrier of some kind of plague; he had infected these two women so that they had become not themselves; they had become interchangeable, and horrible, two harpies.
Helplessly he admitted, “You’re right, I was with someone else.”
They both understood the sense in which he had meant “was with,” but still, if dimly, Reed hoped that the truth would work, would free Eliza from being Rosalyn, that they could talk and be in love again.
This was not what happened. Eliza screamed, “You bastard!” and pushed him toward the door, toward the cold and threatening end-of-summer night.
16 / Detritus:
After Reed
Harry’s motel room was so wildly flamboyant as to caricature interior design; someone must have been kidding.
The carpet, so thick that it squished beneath bare feet, was a swirl of greens and purples, a pattern and combination of colors that was repeated in the draperies, with the addition of gold threads, and in the bedspread (heedlessly crumpled on the floor). The lamp bases inexplicably were white, but swirly, too, massively so; more predictably, the shades were parrot-green. In huge gilt frames, on canvas, gigantic flowers echoed the color scheme.
The room’s proportions were outrageous, too; it must have been at least a Presidential suite. In fact, the Beatles had once stayed there, or some of them had. And the bed was impossibly vast, was orgiastic in its suggestion.
All in all, it was enough to make anyone laugh, anyone except Eliza, who was lying across the bed with Harry (they were both naked), and she was crying: violently, ragingly, the rage at least in part against the fact of crying. Harry, who was gentle (and at that moment more than a little frustrated), was stroking her shoulder, very slowly.
When she could speak, what Eliza choked out was “That cock-sucking mother-fucking bastard—goddam him, what he’s done to me!”
What had just happened was that midway in the act of love, when Eliza began strongly to respond, something (perhaps the response itself) reminded her of Reed, of his loss and what she still thought of as his betrayal, and uncontrollably she began to cry. And then to curse.
Sententiously, perhaps, but quite forgivably, Harry said, “Sometimes it’s easier to be with someone else when you’re happily involved. Not when you’re missing someone. Once I had an affair with a married woman who would never see me when her husband was out of town. That struck her as unfair, a betrayal—”
But although well meant, this was exactly the wrong thing to say: he could be describing the behavior of Reed, who while happily involved with Eliza went to bed with someone else. And so she began to cry again.
Harry (newly divorced: the Corsican didn’t last long) had just brought out a new movie, a sad grim “realistic” story about adolescents in the desert towns of southern California; they were to see it previewed that night, in San Jose. He listened patiently to Eliza for a while; he patted her shoulder and pulled up sheets and a light blanket, comfortingly. And then he said, softly and sensibly, “Why don’t you talk, instead of crying? I think in the long run it’ll do you a lot more good.”
So, after a few minutes, Eliza did begin to talk. “It doesn’t make sense, my feeling so terrible about Reed. But I have this terrible pain where I think my heart is. Curious: once I missed someone else very badly, The Consul—and my stomach hurt. It’s as though he’d cut something out of me; there’s this dreadful lack. Harry, I didn’t like him all that much! I like you much more, you know that.”
“Sure, baby.” He kissed her forehead lightly, lay back down. “We like each other for good, but I have a curious instinct.” (Eliza looked over at him, in the bright unreal midafternoon sunlight that escaped through a gap in the draperies; as Harry looked off into some inner space, with those violently pale blue eyes.) “I think more was going on between you and Reed than you understood. I don’t think it was just a summer romance, as we used to say. There was a reason for Reed in your life.”
“And I can’t write any more.”
“Well, maybe now you can? Even better? ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.’ ”
“What?” She half sat up to look at him.
“Mr. Auden on Mr. Yeats.”
“Harry, you always surprise me. But I think you’re making another romantic movie. Well, I’m sure Reed would be available.”
Harry laughed at her. “You’re wrong, but it’s not a bad idea. In fact, why don’t you try to think of it as a movie, or a story? For example, would it help to cast Reed as the dumb blond?”
Finally Eliza laughed, too. She said, “Harry, what in the world would I do without you?”
And some sort of circle seemed to have been completed: having gone from failed sex to anguished tears, to rage, to laughing—they returned to sex. In a slow and most friendly way they made love.
Later, with time to spare between dinner and the movie, they went down to the swimming pool—or, rather, to an area containing several swimming pools. And bright striped deck chairs and plastic lounges and palm trees. And people: old fat people in his-and-hers brilliant Hawaiian outfits. His shirt, her muumuu—too sad and terrible to be anywhere near funny, or so Eliza saw it.
Uncomfortably they chose the least populated pool; swimming up to each other, they almost simultaneously said, “Why do we never go back to Mexico?” (Ixtapanejo: they had never been back.)
“San Jose,” lamented Eliza.
“Whatever are we doing here?”
“It’s a great movie-tryout town. It has the most movie houses per capita, or something.”
Harry’s movie was superb—Eliza realized later as it replayed in her mind. For the moment, unhappily and uncontrollably, she had reverted to missing Reed, to his vivid lack. In the darkened, smoky theatre, as Harry craned his long neck about, seeking audience reactions, Eliza listened to the Thirties’ music (Harry’s favorites) from the jukebox, on the sound track. “Body and Soul,” “It Had to Be You”—and although Lena Home, not Billie Holiday (thank God), was singing them, Eliza was thinking, Reed, good Christ, come back, if only for an hour or so.
“Well, how did you like it? Go all right, do you think?” asked Harry.
“Marvelous.” She wept.
Rationally, on principle, Eliza did not believe infidelity to be all that bad. She was thinking of this some days later, as alone in her house she waited for Catherine, after another of Catherine’s increasing absences. One could do worse things to people than be unfaithful to them, Eliza thought. Reed, on a certain afternoon, with another, unknown woman, performed a certain—“a certain act”? At that phrase her mind stammered, and shuddered to a dead halt. It was unthinkable, literally so. She was shivering, as though she had been thrown into a chilly pool, a lake. But nevertheless she made an effort at reason. Well, then, should he have lied? Is that what she was now asking him to have done? Yes. No.
Her blood ran giddily along her veins, and something was pressing down on and enclosing her brain. Her heart hurt, and later, when she could think, she thought that jealousy was as mysterious and as impossible as sex.
Catherine, returned and seated on one of the kitchen’s two comfortable chairs, was fat and fair, her hair bleached, skin browned, blue eyes seemingly bluer from a summer of whatever she had been doing: hiking and camping on Mount Tamalpais and up in Mendocino, swimming—watching dawns and sunsets from high distant places. These were the things she had been talking about, and, in a fond, bright liberal-mother way, Eliza had added: Making love, of course she’s making love. She’s eighteen, probably been doing it for several years by now.