Listening to Billie

by Alice Adams

  Four years earlier, on another fall day, in San Francisco, Daria was standing on a street corner, and she thought of Reed (the family friend). She and Smith had come up to town for the weekend to a view-filled corner suite at the Mark; that morning, coming out into the sunlight, Smith had said, “Reed’s place must be around here somewhere.” “Oh, really?” “Yes, at the end of some alley. Well, there’s my cab. I can’t drop you somewhere?” “No, thanks, I want to walk for a while.”

  And she did; she walked around in the brilliant clear fall sunlight. She looked down Sacramento Street to the Bay, and the Bay Bridge. Everything shone, wherever she looked. The narrow town houses were so elegant, perfectly kept, and the nurses and children in Huntington Park were beautiful, well kempt. Rich tourists gawked from their over-sized cars, but in that heady air everyone looked blessed.

  Aware of a dizzying excitement in her blood, Daria began to walk in a certain direction, as though guided toward an address she did not know. Down a street that led north, looking toward the Golden Gate, Marin County, turning in to an alley. Past some terrible new greenish houses, miserably constructed, to a small and decrepit shingled cottage.

  It was Reed’s cottage; having moved into town from Stinson Beach, he had thumbtacked a tattered white card to the door, bearing his name. Her heart stuck at the top of her throat, but at the same time she was sure of her direction; Daria knocked.

  “Daria, well, what a lovely surprise.” Actually he had meant to go out, but at least Daria had missed the girl who had just left, angrily. At Daria’s knock, Reed had imagined the girl returning to make up. “Well,” he said, with an effort, nevertheless, “may I give you some coffee? I’m afraid it’s sort of a mess around here.”

  Like a polite child, Daria nodded; not seeing anything, really, she was dimly aware of “things,” probably beautiful, darkly cluttered in a narrow room, and she was violently aware of Reed; gleaming sleek blond hair, wide blue eyes, fine mouth. Long perfect hands, small bare feet.

  He was asking her something, from the kitchen.

  “Yes, a little milk, please.”

  He sat down across from her, hiding restlessness. He repeated, “Well, this is a lovely surprise. How’s Smith? He must be pleased about the way things are going.”

  “Oh, yes, very; fine. We’re staying at the Mark.”

  “Oh, really—how nice. You and Smith are sort of my neighbors, then. Temporarily.” What about her was making him so nervous?

  “Reed, I came to tell you. I’m absolutely in love with you. Mad. I can’t live without you.”

  He had heard these words before, several times. Something about him, perhaps some deep passivity, invited them. He was used to women professing love, and also certain men. Evan Quarles following him around, staring and silent. Still, he was not blasé, and he was too kind to take anyone’s love for granted. Daria had touched him deeply, even thrilled him.

  “Daria, beautiful girl, you don’t know what you’re saying, nor what you’d be getting in for, with me,” he said to her.

  She was sitting with her knees close together, hands clasped on her lap. As he spoke, she flinched very slightly, tightening her hands, closing knees; then she said, “I do know, or I can imagine. A lot of trouble, probably?”

  He smiled; how extremely pretty she was! “Trouble, or worse. And there’s your marriage: I like Smith.” As he said this, Reed realized that he did not like Smith very much, not really, but did he really like anyone? He had often wondered.

  “I don’t care. Not about anything.”

  Tears next; Reed knew the sequence. Speaking very kindly, he said, “Look, I’ll go put my shoes on, and we’ll go out and get some air, okay?”

  She was sitting there docilely, not looking at him, and not crying, when he went into his bedroom. He hunted around for his socks, found his shoes, put them all on and then got up and went over to the wardrobe to comb his hair before the mirror.

  Looking into the glass, he saw, reflected from the doorway—Daria, perfectly naked and absolutely beautiful.

  He said, “Daria, good Christ,” and felt tears at his eyes.

  That day ended in a vermilion November sunset; warm color spilled over the western horizon, at the sea, beyond the Golden Gate; the rest of the sky was cool and clear and slowly darkening, flecked with pale evening stars.

  Daria whispered, “Our bed smells of the sea.”

  “Yes,” and Reed sighed, feeling a sort of pity for her—for her innocence, her new love.

  They lay there, their hands clasped limply between them.

  And then, breaking the spell (and destroying his pleasurable moment of pity), Daria laughed. “I’d better bathe,” she said, in a practical way that Reed found upsetting. This lovely, most curious girl will probably hurt me, he thought. And then, for years, he forgot that premonition.

  Years of stray afternoons of love (actually fewer, perhaps, than in most illicit love affairs: in curious ways, they both avoided the real encounter). Breathless and desperate telephone calls, letters, telegrams. Magic and madness. A few laughs. For Daria there was the miracle of novelty; surely no one had ever felt this? For Reed there was a strange sad sense of finality; of being finally and completely “in love.”

  “You’re so beautiful—”

  “Tomorrow, can you—?”

  “No, I guess not until Friday.”

  “Can you wait?”

  “No—”

  “Nor I.”

  “When you laugh, my skin feels lacy, like light through leaves.”

  Until Daria began to tire of the sheer weight of such intensity, and to say that they should stop. End. Not see each other.

  Until Amsterdam.

  • • •

  After dinner, that night in Amsterdam, they took a cab to the Amstel. And they were silent, all that distance, over bridges and canals.

  Reed got out with her, but Daria gestured to the driver to remain. “Reed, darling, I’m exhausted, and you’re a little drunk. Come over for breakfast, will you?” She laughed in a light way that to Reed was alarmingly uncaring.

  He found the only possible rebellious gesture to be a dismissal of the cab: he would walk the considerable distance to his own canal, his small hotel. Also, perhaps he would sober up somewhat (and besides he was really low on money).

  The next day the papers announced that the Vice-President (U.S.) had resigned. Tax evasions. Bribes. All over the Amstel dining room, at breakfast, this news was read and digested, along with the excellent Dutch coffee and rolls and cheese.

  Daria, whose mood that day for whatever reason was very high, was entirely pleased. She and Reed did not have a paper; they did not feel a need for further details. Daria was eating a lot; she exclaimed, “Oh, isn’t this lovely!” looking out through long windows to the strong Dutch sunlight on leaves, and trees and vines.

  “Breakfast is wonderful, or—” Reed had noticed that her golden eyes have flecks of darker gold; were they new? What did this mean?

  “Oh, everything. Breakfast, and that Greek V.-P. He must be like my father, that Greek shit.” Daria laughed—to Reed, chillingly.

  “You dislike Greeks?”

  “Of course not; simply, how could Nixon have chosen a decent person?”

  Curiously: “I didn’t know you cared about politics.” He cannot remember an even vaguely political conversation with Daria.

  “Oh, but I do. I once spent a whole year planning to kill the P.”

  “P.?”

  “The President. Isn’t that funny?” Daria laughed with the relief of one who has made a ludicrous confession: of course no one would believe her.

  “That doesn’t sound like you.” But then, he reflected, neither did what she has more recently been saying: I can’t see you any more; love is not important to me.

  Across the room from them, alone at a smaller table, was an American, probably a businessman, reading the Paris Herald. He was handsome in a burly, weathered way, large and dark; the exact opposite to
Reed’s attractiveness, Daria thought. And she wondered: Would I enjoy a man like that? He me? And she smiled. Am I going to be promiscuous—is that next? But as quickly as she thought all that she realized that she was not attracted to that other man, or really, any more, to anyone. Reed would be her last lover.

  However, she wanted to test her powers, and so she made a small bet with herself: I bet that I can make him turn around, and I will smile, and in a few minutes he will get up and give us (give me) his Paris Herald as he leaves the room.

  The man turned around to Daria, who smiled. In a hurried way he got up and pushed money onto a tray; magnetized, he crossed the room, and he said, “I thought you folks might like to see this paper.” He smiled briefly to Reed, and then fully at Daria. He flashed stained teeth and hard opaque eyes. A man who would murder his wife, for gain, or if he tired of her, is what Daria read in his grimace; perhaps he had?

  “Oh, thank you, how wonderful,” she trilled quickly, icily. Reed looked across at her, puzzled.

  The man, who was also disconcerted, was saying something about good old Ted.

  “Ted who?” Daria asked.

  Reed scowled, and the strange man hurried off.

  “Well, in the first place, I didn’t want the bloody paper,” Daria explained, once he was gone.

  “I wonder why not. More coffee? You did know that ‘Ted’ is the V.-P.?”

  “No. I don’t care.”

  Reed opened the paper, and Daria checked her new pale lipstick in a mirror.

  22 / Eliza and Kathleen

  After their conversation about Miriam and Lawry, and Kathleen’s hurled accusations, Eliza did not call Kathleen; but as though nothing had happened, Kathleen continued, at intervals, to call. Nor did she seem to mind that Eliza didn’t say much; she seemed totally incurious about Eliza’s life, or perhaps to be operating on her old assumptions: sexy rich indolent Eliza would never change. But she, Kathleen, had moved into a women’s commune, in the Mission District.

  And one day—rather a surprise—she invited Eliza to come over. Very curious, Eliza said she would.

  Getting ready, in her bedroom, in a space of faint spring sun, Eliza considered that sometimes what-to-wear assumes the proportions of a much larger problem. In her bra and tights, she could come to no decision. They, the frightening unknown new friends of Kathleen’s, she imagined as stern and judgmental; they would be wearing genuinely old Levis—or, worse, harsh new ones. Should she wear her old Levis—or old gray slacks?

  Kathleen, turned down by all the medical schools of her choice, had furiously decided to be a vet. “Fuck them all, I really dig animals anyway. Fuck people.” She had gone to the school at Davis, and got her degree. She now worked in a pet hospital out on Army Street, and she lived with four other women, feminists, “and some kids and five cats” on a small street in the Mission District. In ten minutes she was stopping by to get Eliza.

  What to wear, going there.

  What would I wear if I were meeting Josephine for lunch? This Zenish question appeared in Eliza’s mind (as those other, not unrelated imperatives once appeared to Daria), and she thought, Of course, my gray suede pants and new gray boots. An outfit of which Josephine would not approve, but in which Eliza felt herself to be defined, established. Just now they were her favorite clothes, and why should she wear less for Kathleen and her friends? Why condescend in the dirty Levis that she wears for refinishing furniture?

  Also, she thought defensively, if there was the slightest hinted remark about the expensiveness of suede, she could tell the truth: the pants cost twenty-five dollars. Bought in Rome, on her last trip with Harry.

  (But Rome?)

  Gray pants, black sweater. Was she trying to look severe? serious? She added a flimsy bright silk scarf.

  And then, since Kathleen was not yet due, she went down to get the mail.

  Bills, advertisements and a letter from the Gotham, a new and highly successful Vogue-Bazaar kind of magazine (more “literary” than either). To whom she had sent a long new poem. “We love it—a full page—five hundred dollars.”

  All her ambivalence about that glossy magazine vanished, and Eliza experienced a moment of pure delight: they loved it—a full page—and so much money—so much more than anyone had ever paid for a poem of hers.

  • • •

  Now it was time for Kathleen, who was always prompt.

  It would be a considerable mistake, Eliza decided, to tell her about the Gotham. Much better not.

  “Well, you do look neat,” Kathleen commented with uncharacteristic friendliness as Eliza stepped into her battered car. Kathleen was wearing the hard dark Levis that Eliza had feared, and a sort of lumberjack plaid coat; she did not look “neat” but she did look content. She looked hard-working. Her graying brown-gold hair was tied back in a bun; her mouth was wide and pale, and firmer than before. Her eyes were lined and tired and at the same time very much alive. She went on, “You are a pleasure to see, Mrs. Quarles. Sometimes I forget how the other half lives, and looks.” But this was said with none of her old anger, and Eliza wondered if middle age, or nearly, was mellowing Kathleen.

  Then all Kathleen’s familiar rage returned: driving across town, she was a continuous explosion of pure fury. “Fucking trucks—buses—cabs—Look, a goddam movie crew. Our fucking mayor can’t get enough of that stuff, can he. Will you look at that building? A bloody packing crate. Manhattan, here we come. Look, lady, move your fucking Cadillac along.”

  The house, finally and violently arrived at, was a rakish small cottage on a steep and narrow cobbled street.

  “It must be the last cobbled street in the city?” asked Eliza, getting out nervously.

  “They’re taking the cobbles out next week. Look your last.”

  Inside the cottage were several small rooms, in total chaos. Clothes books toys cats food. Trash. Cat shit. All scattered everywhere. Following Kathleen, Eliza picked her way through distrustfully, aware (ashamed) of the middle-classness of her reaction, and already somewhat discouraged; she had meant to come and admire a new way of life.

  In the kitchen three people were sitting at a large table. Two women and a little boy. One of the women was wiry, dark-haired; the other was soft and blond. The little boy was wiry, too, and dark; he was visibly his mother’s son.

  Introductions: the dark woman is Lena; Angie, the blond; and Jared, the child. Saying “Hi” all around, Eliza realized that she was very slightly disappointed; having imagined—and, to a certain extent, feared—a larger group, she was braced for just that. She had, in fact, expected a sort of inquisition. (Josephine? She had a quick flash, a film-frame of her mother standing at the doorway, facing out to the porch, in Maine; Josephine severe and censorious. Had she been ready for Josephine?)

  Whereas, the conversation was quite ordinary, rather mild. Where to shop, since the Safeway (cheapest) was being boycotted by the United Farm Workers (Chavez). The pain of IUD insertions (Angie). The inhumane suffering of cats in heat (Kathleen). The novelty of that particular neighborhood, the cobbles (Eliza).

  Only the little boy made a certain amount of trouble; he wanted to go to the park; he insisted that it was time to go. They had promised. He turned to his mother, “Mother—”

  “Lena,” she corrected. “And Angie’s going to take you to the park.”

  “No, I want you to come.”

  “Angie—”

  “No, you, Lena—”

  In the end, all three of them went, Jared between Lena and Angie, holding both their hands.

  “We want him to relate to all of us,” Kathleen explained. “To be all his parents, less of an exclusive thing with Lena.”

  “It must be sort of hard.”

  “It is, for everyone.”

  Another thing that Eliza was slowly reacting to (or recognizing her own reaction), along with the extraordinary mess and the quite ordinarily nice young women, was the visible poverty in which they were living. It was all meager and shabby and uncomfortable;
the kitchen shelves held a sparse array of big dented cans of cheap food brands, and on the floor beans spilled out from large paper sacks. Eliza would have liked to ask about the economics of their life; what she would really have liked was to give them a lot of money. (And, seeing this impulse, feeling its strength, she had a flashed vision of Daria: Daria giving her money to poor women, to everyone, and she felt great tenderness for her sister.)

  “Well,” said Kathleen, “care for more coffee?”

  “Yes.” (Although it has been terrible, weak and bitter.)

  “We’re living in a very ideological way,” Kathleen more or less announced. And she went on to explain some of what Eliza had wondered about. “I’m the only one who really works,” she said. “I mean for money. Lena’s on welfare, she’s a sculptor—and Angie gets unemployment, she wants to be a mail-carrier. We all pool what we have, but then we often take in other women—women who’re just out of jail, or who just can’t find places. Things like that.”

  Rather helplessly, Eliza breathed out, “Wow, that’s really good.”

  Kathleen could no more accept praise than she could (probably) money, and she said, “Well, it’s not all that fucking good. There’s a lot left to do.” And then she asked, “Well, tell me about your people. Harry? Daria and Smith? And Catherine—how is Catherine?”

  Eliza smiled, but rather sadly. “Catherine’s fine, but she’s got two babies now. They all seem terribly happy; she’s down at a place in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but still—”

  “You’ve always been hard on her. You know, you’re more like Josephine than you admit. Catherine was supposed to act out your fantasies, a good college and all that, just the way Josephine was ambitious for you.”

  This was quite true, but Eliza did not like to admit or to talk about it; she was, in fact, terribly disappointed in Catherine. And so she said, “Daria is really terrific now.”

  Kathleen was curiously uninterested in Daria’s being terrific; she frowned and asked, “How’s Smith?”

  “Oh, he’s fine. Busy—you know.”

  “I guess Daria watches him pretty closely?”