by Alice Adams
“Should I call Dave?”
Unaccountably to Matthew, they both laughed at this suggestion.
To him the soup smelled marvelous, of fish and garlic and onions, and somehow of lemon. All his favorite smells, and he must have looked hungry for Felicia said, “Well, Matthew, it’s up to you. My freezer’s almost full and it won’t last forever. It’s up to you to come and help me out with the soup.”
And so Matthew did. He carried the big black cast-iron pot out to her car and he held it steady as Felicia drove down to her house, and when they got there he carried it inside, into the small pretty house, the red-and-yellow kitchen. And while Felicia was heating up the soup, warming bread and bowls and tearing lettuce for a salad, Matthew sat at the butcher-block table and drank some nice chilled white wine.
Too much wine. By the time the food was ready, Matthew had drunk an oversized wineglass full, plus the wine he had already had at Molly’s. All in all, a lot more than he was used to. He did not feel drunk so much as very slightly unreal. What was he doing here in this strange, rather disheveled but attractive small house, with this strange and extremely attractive large blonde woman?
She had drunk a fair amount too, and the wine seemed to make her talkative, or maybe she too was a little nervous. She said, “Molly looks so much better, don’t you think? She had got so thin and that stupid Dr. Dave kept feeding her steak that she couldn’t eat. It’s so good that she got rid of him, at last. I thought the way she up and left Alta Linda was marvelous—such fun for us both! But sometimes she sort of regresses, and doesn’t feel too great, but that gets less and less often. And I do think finally getting Dave out of her life was a great step forward.” She paused to sip more wine, and then to laugh. “It’s funny, we both seem to have got rid of doctors at more or less the same moment. Which wasn’t easy, in either case.”
By now they had finished bowls of soup, some bread and salad, and a considerable amount of wine.
The night outside was dark and rustling, breezy. Full of the sound of leaves, and boughs. But Matthew heard then another sound, footsteps on gravel, slow but definite, purposeful. Still, he couldn’t be entirely sure of what he heard, what with all the other night noise—and all the wine.
He looked across at Felicia, and saw that she had heard it too.
Not lowering her voice, she told him, “Almost every night he comes here. At about this time. Now he’ll pee.”
And so he did. There was the tiny trickling sound of water, or whatever, against dry leaves.
Felicia said, again, that she didn’t know, really, who was out there in the dark. “I thought I did but now I’m not so sure,” she said. And, in what he felt to be an abbreviated way, she told him about her long and, he gathered, intense involvement with a local surgeon. Specializing in heart surgery, she said. Well known, “prominent.” Married, of course. “I was sure it was Sandy out there, sort of stalking. Like O.J. But lately I’ve wondered. It could be almost anyone, which is a lot scarier.”
Agreeing, Matthew added, “It’s not necessarily the same person every night either, is it?”
“No.” She seemed to consider this. “No, of course not. I’d just sort of assumed that it was. The peeing seemed a sort of signature, you know?”
They were now sitting in a shadowy half-light. Attentive to Felicia, who was staring out the window, Matthew observed that in profile her face was both stronger and less beautiful than earlier, before the dark. Her nose was long and straight, a forthright, purposeful nose, and her forehead straight and commanding, like a prow. Her mouth was strong and firm. But then she turned to him, and she smiled, and everything softened. Her eyes glistened, so blue, and her voice shook a little as she said, “I know this sounds crazy, but would you just stay and sleep with me? I mean”—she looked down, and away—“we don’t have to do anything. I just don’t feel like sleeping by myself.”
Matthew, his heart jumping wildly, spoke as diffidently as he could. “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”
“I was what they’re starting to call an Avoidance Addict,” said Henry Starck, with his small dry laugh. “Or that’s what Gloria kept telling me. Whereas she was a Love Addict, and so it was hopeless. And fatal.”
“I don’t think I’m a Love Addict,” Connie mused aloud—as she thought that actually that was a fair description of her old self, with Raleigh. And so she added, “But maybe I was.” She also thought, To some extent I still am. In a way. I am crazy about this Henry Starck.
However, even though she had determined to be honest, she did not add that thought. Certainly not. Undoubtedly he more or less knew what she felt, and if he still was at all what they called an Avoidance Addict, her intensity would make him uneasy. She would have to watch it.
But Henry was deeply familiar to Connie, whereas Raleigh had always been somewhat alien, strange. Although much younger (she had to remind herself at times how young Henry was), he still could have been one of the boys she went to parties with a long time ago. Dancing on the Ritz roof, in summer, after an Esplanade concert, or drinking and necking (mildly) in the darkened bar of the old Lafayette. Henry still had the slightly stiff prep-school posture of boys from those days. She was moved by the set of his shoulders, and by his New England vowels.
Henry, true to type, seemed to feel that they should not actually make love. This was not explicitly stated; they just did not. They fervently kissed, and then they left it at that. They rose from the couch, or wherever they had been, and they said good night very lovingly.
Connie was slightly puzzled at first by the fact that she did not find this upsetting, or even odd—unless she gave it too much thought. She was even relieved, in a way, and she very well understood her own relief: sex with Raleigh had been so—so terrible for at least the last ten years or so, that she was just as glad not to have to do it.
The words “making love” in fact did not apply to what she and Raleigh did. As he himself put it, he fucked her. In recent years, he did this once a week, punctiliously. She imagined him saying to himself, with mad male pride, I fuck my wife at least once a week. It was usually very quick, on Saturday mornings, the first chore of the day got through early. Sometimes he even whispered complaints, “You’re not helping much, how can I come?” But he always did, whether or not she even bothered to pretend.
For a long time she knew that this was all her fault; her “frigidity” was to blame for everything, including Felicia Flood. And then when she started in serious drinking, she knew that she was to blame; who would want to make love to or even to “fuck” a fat old drunken woman? Forgetting the years when she was thin and hardly drank at all, when Raleigh made love to her, although he liked to call it fucking even then, and she never had to pretend, but rather to stop herself from letting him know how eager, how aroused she was. To stop herself from coming too soon, before he did. Although when that happened he didn’t seem to mind. He only minded “frigidity.”
Connie knew that Raleigh was not responsible for her “low self-esteem,” so much mentioned and discussed in meetings. That had evolved over many earlier years. However, she did feel that he had certainly not improved how she felt about herself. For years she had thought that if she had been a really attractive, worthwhile woman he would not have been so often, so flagrantly untrue, although in a textbook way she knew that logic to be wrong; unfaithful men (or women, very probably) were unfaithful for reasons having little or nothing to do with their victims (look at O.J.’s wife, Nicole, the perfectly beautiful blonde, and he was not only unfaithful, he killed her, probably).
To Henry, Connie now said, and the words came from nowhere, really, “I’m sort of afraid of Raleigh, these days. I know it’s irrational, but he seems so—so desperate.” She did not add, If he knew you were here and that we had been kissing, he’d shoot us both—although she felt that to be true. Instead she said, “He’s not supposed to come over without calling first, but then he’s never been notably obedient. And he can’t stand lawyers.”
> They were that afternoon having their own version of the cocktail hour. Connie and Henry, drinking Clamato with lemon. In Connie’s highly polished, antique-thronged living room, a room that she no longer liked at all, but she was not quite sure what to do about it. Her lawyer had said that since the furniture came from her family it would be hers, and she had tried giving some of it to her children. “Mom, come on, can you see any of that stuff in Oakland?” Some vestigial New England thrift prevented her from just calling the Goodwill to haul it away. She would simply sell it, at times she decided, and take whatever she could get for it, and donate the money to St. Anthony’s, or Open Hand. And if Raleigh kicked up—well, tant pis.
But she should not dwell on such problems now. She should take it a day at a time, as she had tried to learn to do, and today she is with this nice young Henry Starck, from Portland, Maine, who is so attractive to her. She would tell him something sort of funny, she decided.
Raising her small pointed chin, Connie laughed a little as she began: “You remember Jane, from meetings, don’t you?”
Henry smiled, and nodded.
“You remember, in some of her ‘shares’ she was talking about leaving her husband, who was this really mean little doctor? Well, it’s too funny. She had flu, and went to this doctor in Mill Valley—I think her new landlord recommended him—and the doctor gave her some new antibiotic that cured her flu right away. And then he kept calling to see how she was. And then he told her she didn’t need a doctor anymore, and would she go out to dinner. Actually, I’ve met him. An internist, Dave Jacobs. I didn’t like him very much, I thought he seemed mean and bossy, but Jane seems really pleased. Maybe she can handle him. I told her she was addicted to doctors, but I’m not sure how funny she thought that was.”
“I think it’s very funny.” Henry laughed, and he added, “I’m very glad you’re not, though.”
She smiled up at him. “So am I. Very glad.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“You’re really lucky to be alive,” said Dr. Douglas Macklin to Molly Bonner. “After all that.”
“Tell me something I don’t know!” But even as she spoke Molly knew that this was rude, and not at all in the right tone for this visit. And so she apologized (she had a definite agenda). “I’m sorry, it’s just that I have heard that so much, and in a way you could say it to anyone. Bill Clinton or Magic Johnson. O. J. Simpson. Anyone. And I’ve especially heard that a lot from doctors.”
But despite all her efforts Macklin seemed not to be listening. “Lucky!” he repeated somewhat dreamily. And then, with a big grin, he told her, “I’ve had some good luck too, you might say.”
A quickie divorce, with no trouble? Molly’s agile mind had raced ahead to that possible news, which would perfectly coincide with her own plan: she meant to retract her earlier scruple about their going out. The more she had thought about it the more foolish her position had seemed to her. They obviously liked each other; why not? Besides, how many attractive and intelligent, straight, single men did she or anyone know? Plus kind, and funny. Douglas Macklin was all these things, and possibly more; she would be a fool to turn him down completely. She could always find another doctor somewhere. (She would only go to women doctors from now on, she had sometimes thought.) And so she smiled across at Dr. Macklin, Douglas, warmly. Maybe sexily.
He smiled back, warm and friendly. “I knew you’d be pleased to hear this,” he said. “As you know, you’re really more than just a, uh, patient.” Was he blushing a little? And then he said, “I thought you’d want to know”—God, why didn’t he get on with it?—“that Claire and I, well, we’re not divorcing after all. We got back together.”
A simple enough statement, but his delivery had been so laborious that it took Molly several seconds to take it in. Also, that was not exactly the message that she had wanted to hear.
However, she managed to beam in response, and to tell him, “Well, that’s really great. Terrific.”
“Yes.” He continued, smiling, “I think things will be better than ever now. I guess we just needed a little shaking up, you know. But I think once we both faced the prospect of living apart, we were truly appalled. We couldn’t do it. Gee, I met Claire back in high school, when I was playing baseball.” A triumphant smile. “So now we’re going to celebrate with a snow-climbing trip in the Andes. You know it’s spring down there, and we’ve always wanted to do this.”
One of the things that Molly thought, on leaving Macklin’s office, was, Thank God I don’t have to go climbing around in the snow, in the goddam Andes. But then she thought, It’s not as though I’d had a choice, actually. He did not exactly ask me, not at all. One chance at dinner was all I got, and even that I’m sure he would have retracted. He wants to be married. To Claire.
The San Francisco day into which she walked out, though, was ravishingly lovely: a clear blue sky, and golden warmth. Later there would be drought alarms, undoubtedly, and threats of water rationing. Dead lawns and slowly dying flowers. But for the moment it was hard not just to accept this beneficent, gorgeous weather as a gift—unless you gave serious thought in a general way to the weather of the world. As Molly tended to do. It seemed to her that every season was unseasonable now, floods in Norway, heat waves in England and Italy. Tornadoes in Georgia, and earthquakes everywhere. Did the fact of global warming explain any or all of this?
And just underneath, or perhaps behind, this local, unnatural warmth was the faintest, slightest chill, like a very pale shadow, a whispered rumor of fall.
In part because of the weather, Molly had chosen to walk to Dr. Macklin’s office from her apartment—though in quite a different mood. Then, an hour or so earlier, she had felt a mild excitement, and some small nervousness about her plan: to say, in effect, to Douglas Macklin, Let’s do go out, and see what happens. Now, not quite defeated but almost, she was aware of some little embarrassment, as though Macklin had read her mind, had seen or felt her intention. More reasonably she decided that this was impossible. Also, with yet more reason, and sense, she could see that things were better all around for everyone. For Douglas Macklin and his Claire, and for herself; she needed at least one good, reliable, and fairly sensitive doctor. She even further thought, and this was somewhat less rational: I really feel too well these days to hang out with doctors.
But it was true; she did feel extremely well, healthy and strong, walking fast in that euphoric, brilliant air. She did not need to be “involved” with anyone at all. She needed sunshine, and long fast walks in this clean fresh lively wind.
Across the Golden Gate Bridge, in Sausalito, on the other side of all that bright choppy blue bay water, but in much the same weather, Jane Stinger and Connie Sanderson, as they often did after their Mill Valley AA meeting, were discussing their own lives in greater detail than either had offered in the more public “sharing.” And they had come to rather different conclusions about life and love from those reached by Molly Bonner.
“Do you really think I’m a doctor junkie?” Jane asked Connie, half laughing. “Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me, and sometimes seriously. But I don’t think so. God, they’re so unlike each other. Mark and Dave. Dave can be irritating too, God knows, but he’s just so—so incredibly sexy. I mean, all the time. He says that Molly Bonner used to complain about too much sex. God, some complaint.”
Connie smiled, hoping that her expression successfully concealed certain reactions that she felt to be impermissible.
One, she was embarrassed. She was simply not used to that sort of conversation, even after all the AA shares and all the making friends over coffee with Jane, she still was bothered by such personal revelation. No one she had ever known before had talked about her intimate (sexual) life. Nor for that matter had she and Raleigh talked about it, ever. And as a matter of fact Connie had had something of the same problem with Raleigh that Jane had described with Dave Jacobs and Molly Bonner. Hyperactivity. At first—that is, a long time ago.
And, two, she was j
ust a little envious. Hyperactivity in that area was not an accusation that she would make of Henry Starck. He did not exactly conform to the stereotype of the young lover, in that regard—although he had managed to overcome his early scruples about actually making love; now they spent long nights together. But, if anything, Connie was the more eager, the more passionate. Embarrassing to think of it that way, but there it was; she had to be honest and face things, at least with herself. She did not, though, see any necessity for sharing details of her sexual life with Henry—with Jane. She didn’t need to, and what good would it really do anyone? She loved Henry in her way, and he loved her in his, and his presence in her life made her much happier than she had been before. As did hers in his, she was sure; he had even said so, in his way.
“Dave doesn’t have the greatest manners in the world, though,” Jane continued. “I have to admit, he’s pretty pushy and he makes a sort of point of saying the wrong thing to people. I’ve tried to tell him, and I think he really wants to change, and I can help him. I know I can.”
Connie reacted to all this in several separate ways, most of which she kept to herself. First off, she thought just a little smugly that Henry was really the least rude, least pushy, and most courteous person she had ever met. She thought too that Jane had certain tendencies toward pushiness herself, and she wondered how this would come out, Jane Stinger and Dave Jacobs, each pushing in opposite directions. She did not think that Jane would succeed in changing Dave, certainly not much. Conventional wisdom, and received opinion would apply, she thought: people don’t change. And especially not a rather stubborn older man. A doctor.