by Alice Adams
And a quick spot of necking with Phyllis? Megan wonders; but that is unfair, she knows, unfair and ungrateful to kind, on-the-whole fastidious Simon.
She then wonders about train tickets: how much do they cost, and is she supposed to pay for hers? These worries make her tentative, as she says, “Well, that sounds really nice—”
“Megan, come on, it’ll be terrific, and it’s all arranged. I got our train tickets and I called the Marlton. You’ll love it, and we have a suite.”
“A suite?”
He laughs. “A couple of rooms, with a kitchen we won’t use. And you’d laugh if you knew how much it costs. How little, I mean.”
Megan does laugh, from sheer relief, and pleasure at the prospect of New York.
The train trip, the five hours from South Station, Boston, down to Grand Central, is all new to Megan, exhilarating: the lovely New England countryside, the fields and woods of Rhode Island, Connecticut, the vistas of sea and seashore, lined here and there with clusters of gray battleships. And the shirt-sleeve summer dusk of industrial cities, all revved up for war.
Megan is headily aware of possibilities, as on the verge of love. Cambridge recedes, now as invisible to her as California is, and she thinks, New York!
In the train’s jolting club car they drink old-fashioneds, and then they have another in the dark bar of the Hotel Commodore, in the lower reaches of Grand Central—in the glamorous wartime atmosphere of reunions, dramatically heightened moments just prior to perhaps-final partings.
Megan watches everything, intensely feeling it all, drinking everything in with her strong sweet fruity cocktail.
From Grand Central they take a cab down Fifth Avenue to the Marlton, on Fifth and 8th Street. As the cab hurries downtown Megan never turns from its window; she is dizzy with the excitement of those moments, breathing an air that is absolutely new to her: the thick hot New York June night air, an element entirely unlike that of San Francisco on summer nights, with its foggy gusts and salt hints of the sea. Unlike Palo Alto (very), unlike even Boston, or Cambridge. The white or colored neon lights are more brilliant here than anywhere else, more violent. The people on the sidewalks walk much faster.
Megan for the first time in her life is aware of being in a city.
The Marlton: big shabby rooms, a small kitchen which, as Simon predicted, they will never use. A high, wide, lumpy-looking bed.
They do not, however, linger in the room; Megan’s impatience carries them both outside. “Can’t we just walk on the street—I mean avenue, Fifth Avenue?”
“Sure, and I have a great idea. Where we’ll have dinner. It’s right on Fifth Avenue.”
They go outside, and he leads her up a few blocks, and across the street to a terrace that is sheltered by an awning, and surrounded by low boxwoods. The Brevoort. That night, a Saturday, it is crowded with uniforms, ribbons and decorations, braid; and with women both beautiful and chic beyond the dreams of San Francisco, the capacities of Boston.
Dimly, fleetingly, Megan wishes that her white linen dress were black; she feels, though, that she is an invisible observer, and thus a participant in all those vivid lives around her.
The men on that terrace who are not in actual uniform wear a uniform of their own: dark blue blazers, white shirts, and dark striped ties, Simon like all the rest. Very much at home in that expensive atmosphere, he achieves a corner table with a view of both the terrace and the throbbing adjacent sidewalk, the traffic of the street. He asks Megan what she would like to eat, and at her look of utter confusion, smiling solicitous Simon competently orders vichysoisse and lobster salad.
If, at just that moment, he had told Megan that he could not, after all, possibly marry Phyllis, and if he had asked her, Megan, to marry him, then and there, that night (as in many ways he would strongly like to do), Megan would have said yes; she would like to marry New York—she would have said yes, at that moment, to anything at all.
After dinner, another taxi takes them up Fifth Avenue, through thicker, faster crowds, sounds of horns and music from car radios, blaring from the wide-open doors of bars, and clubs. Shouts, and the loud murmur of a thousand cars, all driving all over the city.
Fifty-second Street. They go down a few steps, into a narrow, black, and entirely packed room, what looks to be a hundred people, all crammed around tiny tables, in the din, the smoke, and the wild hot crazy sound of a trombone solo. The man out in front, playing in the spotlight, is so tall and lithe, swaying, dancing as he plays, thrusting out his long silver horn into the black smoky air—air smelling of gardenias and bad Scotch and mingled perfumes and sweat. The man thrusts and raises up his bright trombone, blasting out his passionate sounds.
Just as Megan and Simon are being seated, then, their two small chairs jammed together at a table already occupied by six other people, strangers, just then that man, the trombone player, puts down his horn, and he comes over to the mike to sing. He is still swaying, dancing; the movement is all over his body, even his hands move, dancingly. When he sings his voice is somewhat high, and husky—a seductive voice, its range insinuating. “I want you, baby, You the one for me, baby—”
Fully visible now, in the spotlight, he has brownish-yellow skin and wide-apart dark slightly drooping eyes, eyes that look directly at Megan, she feels—into and all over her. “I know you, baby, You are meant for me, baby—,” he sings, directly to her. He stops and smiles—at Megan, a wide flashing grin that goes pointedly to her, eyes washing over her, saying more than any words she has ever heard. And then very slowly, gracefully, he moves offstage, to the sound of frantic applause; Megan is clapping until both her hands and her wrists are sore.
When it is possible to speak she asks Simon, “Who is that?”
“That’s Jackson Clay. He’s really good, isn’t he. He used to play with Lunceford, and then Goodman for a while, I think.”
Megan is transfixed, wholly concentrated on waiting for him to come back—Jackson Clay; she is almost holding her breath.
She would not, even then, have called that seizure falling in love; this is not like looking up to the sight of George Wharton, in the Stanford Bookstore, and realizing that George is going to speak to her. This is an excitement and a compulsion of quite a different order; if fewer imaginative emotions are involved, her eyes and ears, her breath and her breasts, her arms and her legs and her place all yearn toward his absence.
Suddenly, then, she sees him, sees Jackson Clay, not on the stage but just standing there in a doorway, lounging; is he staring in her direction, looking for her? The doorway in which he leans leads to a staircase, up which there is (there must be) the ladies’ room. And so that is where Megan says she is going. “I’ll be right back,” she tells Simon.
She pushes through tables, past knees and elbows, past waiters and an ugly, pushy flower vendor, to where he is standing, as though in wait for her. “I think you’re wonderful,” Megan says, with what is almost her last breath, and she hears her own high strained voice.
“You do, now? That’s real nice.” Jackson Clay’s dark look takes her all in, his white smile dazzles her, as he reaches for her arm. They start up the stairs together, he guiding, propelling her, until he turns her toward a door, which he opens. An empty room—lockers, chests, suitcases. He closes the door. Pulls her body to his, their entire lengths touching, merging, melting. His mouth and his tongue incredible—all new. Jackson Clay.
When at last they break apart he is out of breath too; he can barely say to her, “You are some beautiful girl, you know that? Say, when can I see you, you ever free?”
“Well—” Megan gets out. “Tomorrow—”
He grins; in that darkness she can see the white shine of his teeth, just tasted. “Well, tomorrow, that is the greatest. Tomorrow is my night off, Sunday night. How about you meet me here? Out front, say, nine o’clock?”
They kiss again. Prolonged.
At the head of the stairs at last they separate, touching hands. They both whisper, “I�
��ll see you tomorrow.” And Megan sees that there is indeed a ladies’ room, where she goes to rearrange her disordered face. She is quite oblivious of anyone else who might be in the room.
Simon asks her, “Want to stay for another set?”
Sharply torn—she is dying to see and hear him again, hear him sing and play, to her—Megan at the same time feels that that would be dangerous, and so she asks, “Couldn’t we walk home, down Fifth?”
And that is what they do; they walk all those brilliant hot early summer blocks, late Saturday night, down to 8th Street, to the Marlton.
The long walk, though, has done nothing to exhaust what Megan feels, to quiet her blood. In the high wide lumpy bed she and Simon fall upon each other, almost impersonal in their furious need. If Jackson Clay is present in Megan’s wild state of arousal, it is also possible that Phyllis exists, at these moments, somewhere in Simon’s consciousness.
“There’s too much—I don’t know what to show you,” Simon tells Megan at breakfast the next day, Sunday, at Schraffts’, on Fifth Avenue and 14th Street.
“But I want to see everything!”
He laughs at her; then suggests, “In that case the boat around the island?”
“Oh, wonderful!”
Jackson Clay of course has no intention of coming to meet her, Megan tells herself, on the deck of the excursion boat—at the railing, as fresh salt winds and spray lash her face and flatten down her hair, as she stares and stares at the kaleidoscope of skyline and wharves, traffic, trains, cars, boats. The brown river, and lost dipping sea gulls. She was just a dumb girl with big breasts, a hick from out of town, whom Jackson Clay kissed just because she was there.
“That’s New Jersey,” Simon tells her, pointing to rocky white cliffs. “The Palisades.”
Megan has, however, invented a California friend who she will see, she says, after dinner tonight, when Simon has to go up to see his parents. She has even said that he might as well spend the night “at home.” “I mean, won’t they think it’s sort of funny if you don’t?” Aware of extreme disingenuousness, Megan widened her blue eyes very consciously, saying this.
“Well, actually they would. It’s nice of you. We’ll meet at Grand Central in the morning, then?”
But Jackson has no intention of meeting her at nine, on 52d Street, in front of the club.
They have dinner in a Village restaurant called the Jumble Shop, where everyone looks—to Megan—“literary,” vaguely foreign, and all absorbed in conversations that she yearns to be a part of, or simply to overhear. “This is wonderful, I love it here,” she whispers to Simon, her eyes pursuing a tall man in a black beret, with a woman in a violet feather boa, just leaving.
But Megan can barely eat.
“Shall we, uh, share a cab partway uptown?” Simon asks rather tentatively, after dinner. Megan’s “California friends” are staying in a hotel near Times Square, the Woodstock—a name she picked from the phone book as she thought, What a waste, all this cleverness and ingenuity wasted on a man who won’t even be there.
But: “Oh no,” she says to Simon. “I think I’ll walk for a while. There’re lots of cabs,” she adds vaguely.
“Okay, then. Grand Central tomorrow, at ten, at the Information Booth.”
Both guilty, in separate ways, they kiss and separate.
Unsure how much a cab will cost—and then suppose she has to take another one, back to the Marlton, when he isn’t there?—Megan does walk about ten blocks uptown, up breathtaking, dusky Fifth Avenue, with her heart at the top of her throat.
At a quarter to nine, at the corner of Fifth and 21st Street, she does hail a cab, and she gives the address on 52d Street—where Jackson Clay, who by now has forgotten that he ever saw, much less kissed her—where Jackson Clay surely will not be.
But he is! He is there, he is early, it is only five of nine when Megan’s cab arrives. Jackson, tall and wonderful in a long polo coat, standing there, looking around; he is waiting for her.
He gets into her cab as they pull up—and among other things Megan thinks, Oh good, I won’t have to pay.
Jackson smiles. “You here! I was scared you’d forget, that you hadn’t meant about coming to meet me.”
He was scared. Megan smiles weakly, as he takes her hand and gives an address to the driver. And, as the cab rushes back up Fifth to the park, in the black night, winding, they begin to kiss. There has never been the slightest question of their intentions toward each other; this is not a date in the ordinary sense.
Jackson Clay lives in Spanish Harlem, 110th Street. The other side of the park.
His building has a small dim strange lobby, and the elevator is small and creaking. Jackson leads Megan down a hall, to a door. She is a little surprised, at first, by the nondescript dinginess of Jackson’s apartment, until she thinks, He must spend hardly any time here, none at all, it’s just a place to keep things.
He asks her, “You like a drink? You smoke?”
Okay, she would like a drink, Megan says.
As he leaves she sits down primly on a large, wide, fairly lumpy sofa; crossing her legs she senses heat there, and wet—oh, what will he think?
Coming back into the room, Jackson Clay puts their two drinks on the coffee table, he sits down and takes Megan wholly into his arms. She feels herself leaping against him, like a fish.
The most unusual feature of their actually making love, to Megan, is the way Jackson uses his tongue, his tongue all over her, beginning with her hands. He kisses the sensitive palms and in between her fingers.
At some point, when she has cried out over a “kiss,” in a gentle way he says to her, “And I’d really like it if you’d kiss me too.” But surely that is what she has been doing?
In a few intervals of exhausted cessation they drink their drinks, and they talk, a little. Jackson is from Oklahoma, he tells her; he is half Indian, Cherokee. He grew up on a reservation. (Megan can imagine none of this, Indians, a reservation, but she listens with awe and total interest.) He has been married four times. “The last one, she really embarrassed me, the way she talked,” he says. “You talk so nice, like somebody English.” (As Megan thinks, Well, I must have changed, I have picked up a Harvard-Cambridge accent, without even noticing.)
Out of the 52d Street club Jackson himself speaks differently; now he uses a normal, somewhat Southern speech, whereas in the club, in the clowning asides between songs, he was heavily “Negro.”
They do not talk very much, but Megan receives a strong and certain sense of his niceness; Jackson is a genuinely kind, nice man, perhaps the nicest she has ever met. And she wonders: Maybe they should marry? (In 1944, there are not many alternatives available, to marriage, for nice young middle-class girls.)
Jackson has the same idea. As he takes her home, somewhere near dawn, Jackson says, “If you find out you pregnant, I’ll marry you, quick as a flash. But you know, I was real careful.” (She had not known that, actually; he did not use rubbers, as Simon carefully does.) Jackson says, “I’d like that, being married to you, I really would. But marriage with a musician is real tough on a woman. Always on tour. Out late. Women can get real restless.” He laughs, but in a kindly, sympathetic way.
By then too tired for further speech, as they part Megan breathes out, “I love you, Jackson.” “Me too, baby. I love you too, I surely do.”
• • •
Although she knows that she is not in love with Jackson Clay, back at college Megan gives a fair imitation of someone in love. She buys all his records, all the money from a birthday check from Florence (who seems to be getting rich!). She plays the records, she listens in a sort of swoon.
She writes him long letters; she plans and fantasizes about their next meeting; she sees herself walking into a club where he is playing, and his startled look of recognition.
But there is no urgency or anxiety in her obsession with Jackson Clay. It does not bother her that he does not answer her letters; she would not have expected him to. And it do
es not matter, to Megan, just when their dramatic reunion will take place; she sees it as simply (and wonderfully!) somewhere ahead.
10
Because of the war, at Radcliffe it is possible to stay in school all year round, several terms in a row, and thus graduate in a shorter time than the usual four years. This process is called Acceleration, and it is viewed with enthusiasm by most of the girls. The dean is against it; she has stated that four terms in a row is too much for anyone, and is quite possibly deleterious to young women’s health.
Megan and Lavinia, Cathy and Peg are among those who think that Acceleration (any acceleration, probably) is a very good idea. Although none of them could have said just why, they think that getting out of college in three years instead of four is wonderful—despite the fact that all four of them are enjoying their Cambridge lives, in one way or another.
Megan has the most (perhaps the only) practical explanation for this haste, which is quite simply that less time in college for her will mean less expense for her parents. She is also drawn to acceleration because of the decreased time at home on vacations; these days she hates the very idea of California, most especially (if half-admittedly) she hates her mother’s job, hates seeing Florence as a carhop, in her perky uniform, looking not many years older than Megan does, and thin, and blond. Talking that way.
In any case, all four of them elect to spend the summer term in Cambridge, in school. The summer of 1944.
On a hot morning in July, Megan and Peg find themselves alone in Hood’s, having coffee. Theirs being the thinnest wire in that finely balanced four-way friendship, it is odd that this has came about; they are slightly awkward with each other. And it seems to Megan that Peg, who at best is not notably attractive, now looks quite terrible. Her skin, which is too pale but generally clear, is blotchy now, and her big blue eyes are dull. And instead of her usual hearty, blustering self, this morning Peg is very quiet, subdued, and somewhat unnecessarily polite, as though Megan were someone whose approval (or possibly advice?) she sought. Peg urges Megan to eat the bran muffins which she, Peg, has ordered and paid for, and she goes up to the counter to get more coffee for them both.