by Alice Adams
But, after all, she is leaving the next day, and they insisted that she come.
She feels that she and John have put away whatever happened and did not happen a few nights ago; it was unimportant. He kissed her and she threw up.
In her exaggerated way Kate complains, “I don’t know where anything is! I’m lost.”
Affectionately Louisa laughs. “It is confusing.”
“I went by our old house—you know, where we used to live,” Kate tells them. “And it was so strange. I stood there staring at the house, and I got no message from it at all.”
Of course they have understood her.
“Perhaps it’s changed?”
“Too many other people?”
Kate agrees. “But it’s just as well,” she says. “I might have cried.” and then, “Louisa, you wouldn’t believe it, but I had trouble getting back from there to here—how many thousand times—”
At this both women’s eyes tear over for a minute; but then at another memory Kate begins to laugh. She asks, “Do you remember one morning we were riding to school on our bikes, and you told me you’d written a song the night before, and you sang it for me?”
“Sort of—”
“You know what it was? ‘Stardust.’ ”
Louisa laughs. “You hadn’t heard it?”
“No. What a terrible bitch you were.”
…
Later in the evening they are sitting in the living room, that baronial walnut-and-velvet non-intimate room. But the three of them have made an intimate corner for themselves, three deep chairs pulled together near the fireplace—where, instead of a fire, on the cool clean stones (those expensive slabs of granite from Vermont) Louisa has placed a lavish basket of roses from the garden. Petals of every shade, yellow to orange to vermilion. The scent of roses wafts to where they sit, and contributes, perhaps, to the sentimental mood that has settled on the group. (Though, after all, they are old friends.)
They are drinking tall Southern drinks: bourbon with ice and a lot of water.
Each of them has special obsessions:
Louisa would like to say how it feels when parents die, and in the saying perhaps she will find out. On and off all evening she has been attempting this. “There’s a curious near-exhilaration,” she says excitedly. “A release. Of course along with other feelings, loss and anger. All that. But I have this odd sense of being freer now—I don’t mean just the money. Free to do things. The truth is,” she tells them seriously, “I might draw better now. Am I making any sense at all?”
“Of course you are,” they tell her, and John adds, “That’s probably how people should feel all the time.” His voice is both dry and wistful. He is a man who has never been “released.” His talents and most of his feelings, except at moments, remain permanently locked.
In the shadowed room, the lamplit corner, all three people look very young, although possibly Louisa and John have this look because they are “in love.”
Kate is getting drunk—again. The drink makes her perspective maudlin as she looks at her two old friends, who are not really young at all, who have fallen in love late in life. At the moment this touches Kate with sadness, this late love—as though she were the only person who knew how old they are. (A not untrue perception: Louisa and John have indeed forgotten their ages.)
And then she has an even more maudlin thought (or is it that?), a wish for her husband, for David. She thinks, or hopes: I hope you were screwing that nurse. I hope she was lovely and generous and that you had a great time.
Later she is to remember thinking this, with a sort of outraged amazement: Christ, even for a moment, how could she have wished that, even for David? But later still she will come back to it, and will decide that though she could not be that giving for long, that is how she should be all the time. How people should be.
(They have all been quiet for a while.)
John is experiencing a familiar sort of sadness, like sea fog, a brume at the edges of his mind. A heaviness, a dimness where there should be light. What does it matter whose money it is? He knows that that is how to feel; Louisa doesn’t care. But she has her work; she is moderately successful in her work—she didn’t need to inherit money. He needed to and did not, which would seem to be the way of the world. And he knows himself to be a rescuer of women—he can’t help it. This worries him; if once she needed to be rescued, now Louisa has apparently rescued herself. He is not sure that she needs him—or does that matter, any more than the money does?
The next day, which is Kate’s last in town, Louisa picks her up at the Inn and brings her home for a morning swim. They lounge about, as always, or almost so: the pressure of time, a plane to be caught, makes them both more cryptic than usual, and a little tense. Old friends, they are trying to say a lot in a short time—knowing that they will see each other soon, in California, but also aware that this place, this pool, is their scene of intimacy.
And they are both hung over, especially Kate. But from inside her painful head she decides that it is important to be honest with her friend.
“I’m sorry if I’ve been a depressed guest,” she says, “but I’ve been worrying about David.”
“Oh?”
“I think he’s screwing his nurse.”
“Really?” (As she says this, Louisa suddenly realizes that she has never been fond of David—and how odd that she did not notice this lack of affection before.)
“I’m pretty sure. Funny excuses about being late for dinner. Coming home a little gassed. He’s a rotten liar.”
“Oh, Kate—”
“Well, I suppose that beats admitting it? And surgeons are odd about sex, they really are.”
“God, that’s too bad.” (David is a cold person, Louisa is thinking. Why should Kate be married to him?)
Silently they sit there, legs dangling in the warm greenish water, in the once-fashionable shape of the big white pool.
“It could be unimportant,” muses Kate, more or less to herself.
“Oh, yes, it really could. And at least he isn’t making a career of it, like recently deceased Jack Calloway.” Louisa is heavily ironic.
Before she can stop herself, Kate asks, “Did you know about Jack and my mother?”
“My father and Jane Flickinger? Well, no, she’s one I missed. But how on earth did you know?”
“She told me. You know Jane—she drinks a lot. She tells me a lot I’d just as soon not hear.”
Louisa scowls. “Really, that’s terrible—terrible. Of course Caroline would have known about that. It’s frightening.”
Watching her, Kate says, “Probably. But how do you mean—frightening?”
“His power, his devastation. You know—I think I told you—for a long time I thought I’d married Michael to get away from Jack—from his type, I mean. And then there was Bayard, exactly Jack’s type. Although I never even met his wife—but I’m sure he let her know about me.”
Understanding her (and thinking: I have met that goddam nurse), Kate says vaguely, “That’s something, not meeting her.”
Louisa continues intently, “It scares me about John—as though Jack might turn up in him somewhere. Somehow.”
At that, Kate concentrates, and firmly says, “I don’t think so.” (But how about the other night. John and me? Suppose—suppose—And the idea is too terrible for her to finish.)
But then inexplicably Louisa laughs, and says, “Well, at least we like each other, John and I. That’s one difference. I don’t think Jack really liked anyone.”
Kate laughs, too, in a sort of friendly agreement, and simultaneously they fall into the pool.
When they get out, they talk more easily. Kate says, “But it’s not just sex that worries me with David, or an occasional nurse. He’s begun to talk some funny other language—I don’t mean about medicine; I’m used to that. Now it’s so much about money—tax shelters, fiscal responsibility—whatever they are. Of course we’ve never really agreed about politics.”
; “John and I haven’t even got there yet.” Louisa manages to make this comic.
And so Kate laughs. “Well, he’s probably not as Southern and conservative as he sounds.” (She hopes this is true.)
So does Louisa.
“What I’d really like to do,” Kate says, “is to get some sort of degree. Maybe psychiatric social work.”
“As long as you don’t end up sounding like Michael.”
They laugh at this.
“I know it’s corny,” Kate rather shyly says, “but I like kids a lot. What used to be called adolescents. ‘Hippies’ now? Is that what Maude and Stephen are? Anyway, it must be my retarded development.”
“But, Kate, you must do that; you’d be terrific—” Saying this, Louisa has an odd sense that she and Kate have shifted roles: it is unlike Kate to be shy, and ironically self-deprecating—unlike Louisa to be so positive. She is momentarily inhabiting Kate’s mind, and in that moment she feels not only her friend’s strength and generosity, but also some of Kate’s pain. An amazing instant—but it goes, and she is only herself again, looking curiously and with sympathy at Kate.
And then it is time to go. They walk toward the house, past the old stables, the enormous formal boxwood, across the already yellowing lawn.
Eleven / 1968
At a table in the lobby of the Empress Hotel, in Victoria, B.C., a man and a woman sit having their tea. They are both extravagantly well dressed, but that is the sum of their resemblance to each other. She is a huge (really immense), florid, and formerly blond woman. She wears prodigious jewelry, and the dark tweed jacket of her suit is lined with mink. Her blue eyes look out from all that fat and opulence with some surprise: this is not in any sense where she would have expected to be. She, Grace Faulkner (Magowan, Walters), fat and rich?
The man is in a gray suède suit that looks Italian; he is very slender, dark and delicately featured. His eyes are frightened (old permanent fears). And he is not as young as he looks. Martin Walters (formerly Wasserman), who has come a long way from his ugly mother’s dinner table, from Boston.
The other people having tea are a scattering of hotel guests, rather nondescript, and some local regulars, who are very British, old-style, in old tweeds and well-polished boots and shoes, ruddy faces and dowdy graying hair. These people take Grace and Martin to be mother and son; this is a literal interpretation of what seems to be a difference in their ages, if physically unlikely. The more imaginative (and prurient) assume the connection to be somehow scandalous: they are so flauntingly rich.
Actually Martin is only a few years younger than Grace; closer inspection would show that his eyes are lined as well as shadowed. They have been married for ten days; while they travel, their new house in San Francisco is being “done.”
“Or possibly they’re married?”
“But he’s a tearing pansy, from the look of him.”
“Hubert, please! Do you think the scones are a little soggy?”
In her fortieth year far too many things happened to Grace: a daughter was institutionalized, perhaps for good. A rather distant New Hampshire relative died, and she inherited several million dollars that she had never known existed. She gained forty pounds. She met Martin. Grace was not equipped to cope with any of this—but who would be?
She had been such a shining perfect wife, all those bright hand-polished years. She saw the accumulated time of her marriage as a pile of loaves of bread, all the perfect bread she baked herself, a married woman brushing the bread with egg whites to perfect the crusts. And all the homemade clothes, the draperies and slipcovers. Three perfect children, until Allison refused to eat and vomited it all back at them—all the loaves and fish. Nothing was right after that; it was imperfect, flawed. Wrong. Sin is imperfection, and so she had to divorce Alex and to take Allison to New Hampshire, to go for long walks. To hide. But Allison got worse; she took sleeping pills, instead of apples from the hilly orchard. No good came to her from New Hampshire.
Her son Douglas wrote incomprehensible letters from a college in Oregon (Oregon?), all about wars. Wars and skiing. Snow. It made her numb.
Flicking his lashes, looking about, Martin says, “What an extraordinary place. Are you glad we came here? It rather reminds me of Boston.”
“Darling, very glad.” She munches at her cake.
“But I can’t wait for you to see your house.” He says this almost fiercely, fervently, his dark eyes intense upon her.
“Nor I.” But houses are less important to her. Martin is important; she adores him.
All that money—thrifty Grace was shocked at the existence of so much, owned by one man; it was as though Uncle Justin had done something very dirty. She literally did not know what to do with it. Like someone in flight, she left New Hampshire and moved back to San Francisco, but of course the incorporeal money followed her. She moved into an old residential hotel in Pacific Heights—this was safe: Alex, now married to Sally, who was once Sally Chapin, had moved with her to Belvedere. (Sally was an almost perfect wife to Andrew Chapin, but not nearly so perfect as Grace. Sometimes Sally’s bread would not rise, and she only waxed the floors twice a year.) Grace ate in the hotel’s dining room—bland, really awful food—and she took to buying candies and little cakes from Fantasia and Blum’s. She got very fat, and she got lonelier all the time.
Her suite of rooms, a penthouse, was large but drab, depressing. Listlessly Grace decided that she must do something. Buy things. God knows she could afford it: her unspent money kept piling up; larger figures added to larger ones, piling up like snow—as inevitable, as uncomforting.
She went for walks; she stared wistfully into windows, knowing that she could buy anything she wanted and finding nothing to buy.
Until one day, among a stretch of smart antique shops, along Sacramento Street, she saw in a window an ancient wooden doll, bald, in a tattered lace dress. She was seized with a violent and tearful nostalgia. She stood there staring, until from somewhere inside the shop a delicately handsome dark man appeared at her elbow—murmuring, “She’s marvelous, isn’t she?” (Later he is to say to Grace, “I’ve never thought of selling her, but she might be meant for you.” Later still, the doll is a wedding present from Martin to Grace, his wife.)
Martin Walters. After his mother’s death he quarreled (atrociously, and finally) with his father; he left Boston (and left his father’s name). He came to San Francisco and set up shop as an antique dealer, a sometime decorator, for which he had a considerable flair. And he began to move in that curious (and nearly antiquated) social world in which homosexual men are used by rich “social” women as escorts (and they, of course, use the women as invitations—very possibly a fair exchange).
“I’m afraid I really don’t know what I want,” Grace told Martin, as they went into his store, that first day. “I live in a sort of hotel—it needs some decoration.”
“Had you thought of getting a decorator?”
Of course she hadn’t. But did he mean himself?
He did, and somewhat awkwardly they settled that he was to come for tea, and she named the hotel.
“Oh. Someone—a person I used to know lived there,” said Martin.
She bought a lot of pastry, an orgy of small cakes, and some good Scotch, too, in case he would rather drink.
Martin arrived, and gave sensible advice. Concluding (and reminding her) that she would not be there forever, he suggested a few small Oriental rugs, which could be taken anywhere, and a couple of good large lamps. Possibly new draperies.
That business out of the way, they began to talk. Grace said that she had recently come back from New Hampshire, and that led somehow back to her whole New England childhood (and his). Martin kept asking questions; he seemed fascinated by her childhood. Talking to Martin (and later when she was married to him), Grace felt that actually she was a little girl again, blond and frail and doted upon by relatives, instead of a grown-up woman (forty!) accidentally encased in fat.
They talked for hours
. It seemed natural for Grace to skim over the recent unhappy events of her life, and to dwell on the golden autumn leaves of New England Octobers, the bluish moonlit fields of snow.
Later Martin took her out to dinner, to a small French restaurant in the avenues, where they drank a lot of wine and went on talking.
When they got back to her hotel, he kissed her very gently on the cheek. “After you’re grown up, it’s not very often you make a new friend,” he said.
Grace went up to her room and cried herself to sleep, as she hadn’t since she was a child.
They began to see each other a great deal.
At first Grace thought, Well, of course he’s homosexual; and then she thought, Well, perhaps not. And then she more or less stopped thinking along those lines.
Martin told her that for a long time he had been very much afraid of women. “Except for a wonderful friend named Barbara Spaulding. You must meet her, and Eliot, her husband. From Boston.”
Sometimes, in a way that seemed to Grace both mild and sweet, they kissed, and (mildly) caressed each other.
Martin’s favorite line, often quoted to Grace, was from Bob Dylan: “If you’re not busy changing, you’re busy dying.”
Grace at last began to understand that she was madly, totally in love with this man. She wanted to make love to him—yes, that is exactly what she wanted to do. She had what were to her shocking fantasies about his dark thin body. Things that she had never done with Alex.
But it is Martin who finally suggests, as they sit there kissing and caressing (mildly still): “We could get in bed and take off our clothes, you know—under the covers?”
With their backs to each other, standing apart, they do undress. They turn off lights; they meet under layers of blankets in Grace’s not very wide bed. Her hands seek him out—he is soft. Grace finds this reassuring, as his gentleness has always reassured her. He whispers to her, “I’m very slow, are you? I thought you would be.”