Families and Survivors

by Alice Adams

  (In fact during these personally lively years, he almost stops thinking about writing.)

  By day he teaches his classes, and at night he stays at home with his guilts. (Guilt was the phase that succeeded surprise, that preceded rage.) Trying to read, staring across the spangled city, he considers his failures as a husband. He wanted her to read all his books. He insisted on making love even when she was tired or had a bad cold. He did not teach the boys to play baseball. He talked too much. “You filled up all the space,” Sally has said, in one of those penultimate conversations. “There was no room for me.” And so she is marrying silent Alex, the Westerner.

  Andrew drinks too much.

  One night, in the midst of his second brandy, Alex telephones. He sounds very like himself. “I—uh—wondered if perhaps we shouldn’t get together, talk a few things over.”

  “Why?” Andrew realizes instantly that he does not in the least want to see Alex, or to talk things over.

  “Well—uh—if that’s how you feel—.”

  “Alexander, I just don’t see the point. What’s to say?”

  “Well—uh—no hard feelings.”

  “Well, perhaps a few.” Andrew hangs up, and thinks: You stupid bastard, I have plenty of hard feelings. And a not startling but new insight occurs to him: Alex speaks so tritely because his mind is trite. Alex is basically an ass.

  Then he begins to be angry at Sally. The ungrateful bitch.

  There is a period of voluptuous fantasies, a period during which, with liberated eyes, a freed libido, he observes all his girl students—in fact all girls. And here again, new cause for anger at Sally: he has been such a faithful husband that he has almost never thought of his students “in that way”—despite all the enticing literature on the subject, the proliferation of good-to-bad novels and stories on student-professor affairs.

  For instance, Miss James, in the front row of his American Literature course. Miss Isabel James. Her name delights him; he hopes that none of her friends call her Iz. She has pale blue eyes and darkening blond hair, and small pretty legs. He has never allowed himself to think for long about Miss James. But now, why not?

  Jill turns out to be why not, picking him up in City Lights Book Store, in front of Poetry. “Mister, would you mind driving me home? I’ve been celebrating a suicide and I really feel rotten.”

  A preposterous request, and so he asks, “Where do you live?”

  “Potrero. Really—thanks.”

  As though he had said yes, she starts across the basement floor, and so he follows her. He notices then that her feet are bare and that she is extremely fat. She pauses at the counter upstairs to pay for a thick paperback called Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and Other Tales of Ordinary Madness. Christ, where is he?

  She and the thin black who takes her money discuss the book.

  “Bukowski. Yeah, wow.”

  “I really dig him. Really.”

  “Did you hear about Bill?”

  “Yeah, too bad. They find his body?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Too bad. I wonder what happened to his paintings.”

  “He’d burned them all.”

  “Wow.”

  Her feet are rather small for such a big girl, and delicately arched. Dirty, of course, on the soles, with the dirt seeping upward, up the slightly calloused pink sides. Spiky blondish hairs stand out from the sides of her legs. Observing this last, Andrew thinks of two separate things simultaneously: the hairs remind him of the here-and-there spiky down on Sally’s chin, and he wonders if this girl shaves under her arms. The idea that she might not is suddenly erotic.

  Following her out to the sidewalk, he is very aware of how they must look. Himself middle-aged, dark, trim, a man handsome in a not quite usual way, in conventional clothes: old tweed jacket, turtleneck, gray flannels. And this big blond barefoot girl, who looks dirty and exhausted. Does anyone imagine her to be his daughter? Does everyone think they are going off somewhere to make love?

  Is that what they are going to do?

  Across Columbus Avenue, at the Broadway intersection, hawkers announce the garish start of the topless era. Big live breasts! Real ones! On girls, all kinds of girls. Even college girls. There is a place that specializes in college girls. Folks—step right up? Andrew has the quick and absurd fantasy that he does step right up and finds, in the college-girl place, Miss Isabel James. Topless. But he is with another girl.

  “I’m Jill,” the girl says, settling back in his car. “Say, this is really nice of you. I wouldn’t have asked but this afternoon a friend of mine—I guess a former friend—jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Do many people jump off the Bay, do you know? He wasn’t anyone I liked any more, but it upsets me when someone dies that I ever made it with. It makes me feel a little dead. Does that make any sense? You’d better turn left at the next light.”

  She talks almost all the way to her house on Potrero Hill, and by the time they get there Andrew has heard a lot of crazy stuff. She used to make it with her brother, as she puts it. George. In fact she also has several friends named George. She grew up in Hollywood, and she has reason to believe that George, or someone named George, was or is also making it with her stepmother, or is it her mother? George has this curious quirk: he likes to do it standing up, and really best in a shower.

  She is much too crazy; never mind what she does under her arms.

  Outside her house, still in the car, he says good night to her. He asks her, “Are you okay now?”

  “Yes, but come on in. I’ve got sort of a nice place.”

  And so, again, he follows her.

  Into a small low house, which, when she switches on a light, appears to be entirely inhabited by ferns and some other indistinguishable fernlike plants. Everywhere rows of small wrinkled or curly leaves, a feathery profusion of fronds. Andrew is somehow touched: how she must care for her plants! (He is later to see her make slow gestures over them, blessing them, saying good night.)

  Now she turns to Andrew. Reaching, she takes his face in her small firm hands. She takes his mouth with hers.

  “I’m very square; I really like to do it best in bed, do you? Come on, put your clothes over there. Do you want the light off? Take it easy; we have all night, at least, don’t we? You’re not married or shacked up or anything? Do you like me to kiss you there?”

  By the time Jill has said all that, they are in bed, and Andrew is discovering the firmness of all that flesh, how smooth she is, and her sweet clean unexpected smell of baby powder.

  Propped on an elbow, she later says, “You know, this isn’t a criticism or anything, but when you kiss me here if you’d touch me there at the same time I’d really like it.” Taking his hand, she illustrates, and then she says, “Poor Bill—the guy who committed suicide. I honestly think he hated sex, another person’s body. God knows he liked his own, but he didn’t have the guts to be a fag. Always wanting to be kissed, giving it to me like some kind of prize. An honor. But it really is interesting, isn’t it, the different things different people like to do. I’m absolutely fascinated.”

  Andrew sleepily agrees that he is, too. He is glad she could not know how few girls actually, he had any experience of—merely a handful of college affairs, then years of Sally.

  “Would you like to do it again? Well, I guess you would. You know, you’re really cool.”

  That night, waking in some small hour next to Jill, Andrew experiences a kind of delusion, almost hallucinatory in its intensity—and it is only the first in a series of identical delusions. Simply, he believes that Jill is Sally. He is sufficiently awake to know that this is not true—he knows who Jill is, more or less—but the message that his flesh receives is a message from Sally’s sleeping flesh, dry flesh, so dissimilar to Jill’s. It is almost as though Jill were somehow inhabited by Sally. Or perhaps as though he were.

  Then, and relevantly, he remembers that often in dreams he still lives in his parents’ house, the Long Island home of his boyhood;
in dreams he spends rainy afternoons on the glassed-in veranda, watching the lashing gray Atlantic. In dreams he still quarrels with his parents, at their formal dinner table.

  In the morning he and Jill make love again and then from the bed he watches her beneficent gestures over her ferns, and he feels great tenderness for this fat, improbable, and generous girl.

  At breakfast (delicious eggs, tasting mysteriously of curry and onions and cream cheese and sherry) she tells him more of her experiences, all sexual, some fairly bizarre.

  Andrew observes his own reactions curiously; this is a conversation that normally he would find unattractive. But he finds this one simply interesting, and often very funny.

  Jill’s attitude (he thinks), despite an impressive bulk of experience, is childlike still; she is never worldly or weary about it all. (Only much later does he wonder how much of what she said was true.)

  Nor, strangely, does it then occur to Andrew to wonder what she would find to say about him. He is too replete, too proud. He asks, “Can I see you tonight?”

  “Oh? Well, sure.”

  Partly because he is used to monogamy, Andrew falls into a pattern of seeing Jill every night, or almost every night. They do not see each other on the weekends when he has the boys. If you sleep with someone, you sleep with them every night, he not quite consciously thinks.

  He brings food and wine and sometimes flowers—he knows flowers are superfluous in that ferny bower, but he likes to bring flowers to a girl—and together they cook and eat and make love among the ferns, in that small hillside house. A pleasant pattern—it resembles love.

  Andrew (the professor) examines cautiously what it is that he does feel for Jill, and finds affection, gratitude, occasional irritation. She reads only crazy books, she is messy, she would much rather discuss sex than politics. (Politics?) He likes her, and he doesn’t like her, and he loves her in bed. As simple, as complicated as that.

  But one thing that (then) very much pleases Andrew about Jill is what he feels to be the originality of his choice of her—in fact the originality of Jill. So much about his life, especially the episodes surrounding his divorce, has struck him as trite, as more banal than tragic, or even sad: Sally’s announcement at breakfast, and so on, up to and very much including the wooden phone call from Alex Magowan. It is also trite that he is now with a much younger woman. But not Jill. She is as far as possible from the stereotype, the Bunny. He is grateful for her dirty feet and her fat, her eccentric ferns and her crazy conversation.

  …

  But again and again in his dreams he is married to Sally. It is neither terrible nor marvelous: they are simply married. For good.

  One night at dinner, a Monday night, Jill is talking about her brother George, who is back in town. She mentions his shower fixation. “He’s sort of a fanatic,” Jill says. “But good.”

  “He must be terribly clean.”

  But as she goes on a single fact slowly and surely intrudes on Andrew’s love- and wine-happy mind: she is not discussing the past; she is talking about what she and George did on the weekend immediately past, and almost certainly in this very room. Andrew looks at the rumpled bed from which they have just arisen.

  Tightly he asks her, “You spent a lot of time with George last weekend?”

  Of course his tone makes her defensive, and she tightly answers, “Yes.”

  They both know exactly what has just been said, and they sit together in a silence that is like smog, heavy and oppressive and hard to breathe.

  It is Jill who breaks into it. “Look, do I ever ask you anything? How do I know what you do on weekends with your wife?”

  “I don’t see her on weekends, just the boys. Besides, she’s not my wife.”

  But she has touched a nerve. He has had fantasies of making love to Sally again, and, cruelly, in the fantasies she is always the slender haunted girl he has just married, Sally warm with delight; she is not his dry exhausted wife, speaking of headaches in a voice he can hardly hear.

  He has, of course, had fantasies of Alex with Sally.

  “She’s not my wife—we’re divorced,” he repeats, out of varieties of anger and frustration.

  Jill has warmed to another issue. “Besides, I really don’t see this fidelity bit. I never have. Why do people have to own each other? Sex is the way I communicate with people. Why should I only talk to one person?”

  He has no answers.

  “Who do I hurt by being with a lot of guys? What’s bad?”

  What she says is absolutely true; she is not hurting anyone. Except possibly Andrew, and he can fasten onto no right that he has over her, not even the right to be hurt.

  Very gently she says to him, “You’re not quite ready for that, are you? Don’t feel bad, a lot of guys aren’t.”

  Very confused, but dimly aware that he is being dismissed, Andrew stands up to go.

  “Call me,” Jill says—very friendly. “I’d really like to see you sometime.”

  Andrew does not call Jill. He thinks about her instead, and finally he realizes that not seeing her is, curiously, a relief to him.

  He begins to think again about Miss Isabel James, who is not registered for classes this quarter. It occurs to him that she might be in the phone book, and she is—she even lives nearby, on Russian Hill.

  Of course she remembers him. Dr. Chapin; in fact they fall in love with each other and within a short time they marry. Isabel James Chapin.

  Andrew rarely thinks of Jill, the post-beatnik, early flower and fern girl. However, a few years later, during a time when much is written and said about “hippies,” with a certain disappointment Andrew recognizes Jill in every paragraph; he sees her vaunted freedom as programmatic—and thus he is able to dismiss her from his mind, for good.

  But, married to Isabel, living in a new house in Sausalito, he dreams still that he is married to Sally. And he lives in his parents’ old house on the distant Atlantic.

  And, inexorably, he and Isabel have three children, three more boys. At some point it occurs to Andrew’s quirky mind that he is producing sons instead of literature—as, often, women are said to do.

  But this bothers him less and less.

  Ten / 1966

  Flowering privet still surrounds the pool, where so long ago Louisa and Kate arranged themselves in those poses (sex appeal!) and where, on a May afternoon, they both now sit. An afternoon a few days after Jack Calloway’s funeral. (Curiously, since they could not have been described as close, Jack and Caroline died within three years of each other. And, further irony: Jack died of lung cancer, having for years fought “rumors” linking tobacco and harm to the lungs.) Louisa has come for the funeral, and to settle possessions.

  And Kate has come in time to visit her old friend—just not in time for Jack’s funeral; she never liked Jack at all. This is her vacation from her Berkeley family; after leaving Louisa she will go on to see her own parents, Jane and Charles Flickinger, who are still alive, in New Jersey.

  Although Louisa came for her father’s funeral, what has happened has been something astounding: she has remet and fallen in love with John Jeffreys—John from her (and Kate’s) early past. It is as though John were the true purpose of her trip—in fact that is how she comes to see it.

  …

  Standing near her father’s grave, looking out into a crowd of familiar and half-familiar faces, she is caught by a pair of dark, pained, and intelligent eyes that have sought her eyes. John Jeffreys. (But with white, white hair. He is very striking.) Before looking down (she feels that she must not stare, not here) she is struck with a curious thought: she thinks, He knows everything about me.

  That night, having contrived to be alone (with difficulty; everyone means so well), Louisa responds to a knock at the door.

  John says, “You don’t mind?” Serious, tentative.

  “No, of course not. Come in. You can be my excuse for having a drink.”

  (These are two very Southern people.)

  They have
drinks, they talk without saying very much. Then Louisa says, “God, what a hot night! Why don’t we have a swim?”

  “Great.”

  As simply as that they leave the house; they walk across the lawn, past looming abandoned stables and the huge formally trimmed boxwood.

  At the edge of the pool, not quite looking at each other, they take off their clothes; they slip slowly into the cool receiving water. They swim around, they exclaim, “It feels marvelous!”

  They get out.

  Naked, in the warm black night, in the sweet smells of privet and of spring itself, they turn toward each other. They kiss, they begin to touch each other’s smooth and supple skin.

  They have fallen in love.

  …

  But for a while it seems to Louisa that what has happened between them is symbolic, rather than actual—that “Louisa” and “John,” of a certain time and place, are “in love.” It is at first too easy, even too appropriate. What is needed is a melting down, a diffusing of all the elements involved, and eventually that, too, takes place.

  (Just as, some years later, when Louisa and John, very high on grass, make love, she has the sense of watching two puppets, two white stick figures, who are making love—all of whose violent sensations she herself experiences. And later she tries, and fails, to draw those figures.)

  Now Louisa’s conversation leaps about, as she tries to explain to her old friend all the recent and violent events of her life, there on the familiar edge of the pool.

  The two women’s bodies have changed with age (of course) and in opposite directions: Kate’s is fuller, softer, whereas Louisa’s has hardened; she is bony, perhaps too thin.

  “Well?” Louisa asks, as though continuing a logical sequence, which she is not. “How should I feel—could I feel? He did behave so badly, really dishonestly.” She is speaking, Kate understands, of Jack, her father, and his attempt to contest her mother’s will, in which Caroline left all her money to Louisa.

  “What’s strange, in a way,” she continues, with her own illogic (which makes sense to Kate), “is that I feel as though I’d come to my mother’s funeral. To bury Caroline. In fact during the service that’s what I was thinking, that it was Caroline in the coffin. In the earth.” A pause. Then, “You know, when she actually died I was still in mourning for Bayard. Not to mention laid up with colitis. I somehow missed her death.”