by Alice Adams
Biff must of course perceive what is going on between Jackson and Megan, although there would seem to be a tacit agreement among the three of them that nothing be made explicit. Never does Megan abandon Biff at the end of the evening in order to meet Jackson after the show (although Biff may have expected, at first, that that would happen, and would probably not mind). But for one thing, in a practical way, that would keep them there much too late. But more important, it strikes Megan as a very rude thing to do to a friend.
Also, as Megan gradually comes to understand, as she knows Biff better, he does not at all want to hear about her romantic or sexual life—any more than he would recount his own to her (assuming that he has such a life, which Megan sometimes wonders). Instead, in her room, to which he brings an occasional bottle of wine, or in his Horatio Street apartment, where he sometimes cooks supper for her, they discuss Proust, or Elizabeth Bowen, or E. M. Forster, all old favorites of Biff’s, and more recently of Megan’s. And of course there is always the endless bond of Henry James, their household god, as it were.
In terms of food, as well as of literature, Biff is innovative in Megan’s life. His specialty is small rich stews of innards—tripe or kidneys, liver—which, under Danny’s tutelage in Paris, Megan has tasted but not quite learned to like (at home in Palo Alto, Florence would never have cooked such things, of course not). But Biff’s stews all taste quite wonderful to Megan, no doubt in part because they provide such a contrast to all her other meals, the bland overcooked canned meats which she heats up on her hot plate, or even the occasional restaurant steaks, with Jackson, late at night, in some Village bar and grill.
“Leopold Bloom food” is what Biff calls what he cooks, and he often adds, “That crazy mick. Although I suppose actually more Jewish. And how I wish I shared that particular strain. I might have been another Proust.”
“That’s interesting. I’ve often wished I were Jewish,” Megan tells him. “In fact I do wish that.” (Wonderful exotic Jewish parents, instead of so-ordinary Florence and Harry, she is thinking, disloyally.)
“It would be interesting to know how many people share our wish,” says Biff, and they laugh: good friends, who trust each other.
Partly because she has no phone at home, in her “apartment,” Megan is fairly often called at work. She discourages any but the briefest, arrangement-making calls, partly because of the geography of the large room in which she works: she and Biff, the underlings, are out in the middle, at wholly unprivate, totally exposed desks; upper editors are lodged in cubicles, which afford a minimal privacy, despite the lack of doors. Only the president and the financial vice-president of the company have proper offices, with doors and chairs and windows.
However, sometimes Megan is caught by a phone call—as one morning she is, most strangely, by a call from Midland, Texas.
First a long distance operator asks for her by name, and then, over humming, buzzing wires, an unfamiliar male voice says an unfamiliar name. “Cameron Sinclair.”
Megan asks, “Uh, do we know each other?”
“I think we met at Barnard Hall. Briefly. I married Peg, Peg Harding. In fact we still are married. I’m calling from Midland, where we live.”
“Oh? Well, how is Peg?”
“Well, not so well, actually. I think maybe overtired. Four children. A lot of work. You know. I, uh, wanted to ask you, if you wouldn’t mind, about her letters to you. The doctor thought maybe, uh, if you wouldn’t mind. They might shed some light.”
“Letters?” Some urgency in his voice has made Megan feel that she should remember something that is nowhere in her mind. “I don’t have any letters from Peg,” she says, as she wracks her brains: has Peg ever written to her? She believes not. Lavinia has, certainly, and of course Cathy, but she is sure that Peg has not.
In an anxious voice “Cameron Sinclair” asks her, “You’re sure you didn’t get any?”
“Well yes, I’d remember. Honestly, I don’t even remember a postcard from Peg, when we all took terms off from school.”
“Oh, well. If you’re sure. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Sorry.”
Still sounding unconvinced, he has hung up, as Megan was in the midst of telling him that it was all right, he really hadn’t bothered her at all—although of course he had. She is bothered, partly because she has the sense that he believed her to be lying. She is sufficiently bothered to find it necessary to call Lavinia, right away.
“I had the strangest phone call from Peg Harding’s husband,” Megan begins.
“Oh, poor Cameron. Well, actually poor Peglet. She’s had a complete breakdown, she’s been having shock treatment, oh, it’s so awful I can’t even think about it. Honestly, Megan, I always said you were awfully hard on her. You had no idea how much she admired you, how important you were to her.”
“But what does that have to do—”
“Oh, I’m not making any connection. I’m not blaming you. Honestly, baby Megan, what a thin-skinned baby you always are. I just meant that I didn’t think you understood poor Peglet at all. How complicated she is. How fond of you. Cameron told me she was always writing to you. He found a whole pile of letters to you. That’s why he called me to get your number.”
“But Lavinia, I never got a single letter from Peg. Honestly.”
“You see? She never even dared mail them to you. Well, we’ll just see how the shock treatment works. God, what a thing to think about.”
“Yes.”
“God,” Lavinia repeats, “I’ve had nothing but bad news lately. You remember that ugly little Connie Winsor? Of course you must, she married your old flame, George Wharton. Well—” Lavinia drops to a whisper. “She’s leaving George, the first divorce in our group. And everyone says she has this terrific crush on someone named Henry Stuyvesant. I’m sure there’s nothing to it on his part, he’s terribly attractive and I don’t think he’d give her the time of day.”
Biff at that moment begins to signal to Megan that she had better get off the phone; a senior editor approaches.
But not before Lavinia gets in a few more digs at Connie (interesting, as Megan and Biff observe to each other in a later conversation, how the rich are always most anxious to criticize those richer than themselves). “Some rich girls think they can buy anything they want,” Lavinia sniffs. “Well, actually I have to go too. Funnily enough I’m having lunch with Henry Stuyvesant today. We’re becoming the most terrific friends, and he’s taking me to the Plaza.”
19
The house near Fredericksburg is on a bluff above the Rappahannock, that house where once Lavinia hated to go, which now she is crazy about, she cannot spend enough time there. The blurred, once symmetrical shapes of a once formal, now ruined garden lead down to the river. Those blurred terraces are all overgrown, reclaimed by natural vines and grasses, wild and luxuriant, powerfully green—which Lavinia has had the great good sense to leave alone.
From the house, the view of broad brown water is sometimes obscured by so much growth, but from out on the terrace, its ancient brick now restored by tasteful Lavinia, from the comfortable new wicker chairs and the deep wide sofa, you can see both the river and its opposite small sandy shore, and sometimes boats; people in canoes or small motor launches can be seen to look up curiously at what must be a house, high up there on the bank (surely that was a flash of glass, some windows?). But so many trees and vines prevent any accurate view; no person is ever clearly visible there, or even the shape of the house. It is perfectly private—a lovers’ house.
It is the perfect house for Lavinia and Henry Stuyvesant, who have been lovers for almost a year, by the spring of 1952. This house, this former “plantation,” which was built by some original Harcourt, has in effect become their house. “Lavinia’s retreat” is how both Potter and her father, Mr. Harcourt, think of it.
For tax purposes the house was always in Mrs. Harcourt’s name, and when she died, one Christmas a couple of years after Lavinia’s marriage to Potter, the house went to Lavin
ia. And Lavinia simply left it there, not even wanting to think of that drafty, creaking wreck until one night she suddenly thought of the house (actually on the evening after her first afternoon of love with Henry, while she was having dinner at home with Potter). In that illuminated instant, her enraptured fatigue, she saw a perfect use for the Fredericksburg house; she saw days there of absolute privacy, with Henry. And in the same enlightened instant she was able to think very clearly that the house would have to be redone, of course; she even imagined the wicker furniture that would be perfect on the renovated old brick terrace, the soft chintz pads to be taken in at the end of weekends, or when it rained.
To Potter at that time she only said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about the house in Fredericksburg. It seems so wasteful. Just letting it sit there and fall apart.”
“You’re right there. If you wanted to sell it, well, with capital gains we’d have to buy something though. How about a nice place on the Cape?”
“No.” Lavinia spoke musingly, in her way; she was visibly not listening to Potter, but he is fairly used to that. “I don’t want to sell it,” she told him. “I want to remodel. Maybe try my hand at decorating.” And she laughed, her pretty old half-self-deprecating laugh. “I certainly can’t make it look any worse than Mother did. In fact I think I’ll go down for a couple of days next week.”
“But I don’t think I can get away—”
“Darling, that’s perfectly all right. I’ll stop off and see Daddy, and then I’ll just push along in the station wagon. I can think better when I’m alone,” and she laughed again.
Potter leaned slightly forward, intent on her face, “You look, uh, really pretty tonight,” he said, with slightly drunken emphasis.
“That can’t be true. I’ve got the filthiest headache, actually. That wicked Henry plied me with wine, at lunch.”
“Oh, I forgot you had a lunch with Henry. How is he?”
“Oh, fine. We did the Oak Room.”
“He’s still seeing Connie a lot?”
“Oh, you know Henry and his girls. I don’t think he was ever really serious about Connie. And she may just have needed an excuse to leave that dreary old George.” Lavinia frowned, her interior look, which served to finish Henry as a topic for that night, at least with Potter. “I really think I’ll go up to bed very soon,” she said. And she went upstairs to lie awake for hours, with her thoughts of Henry.
Naturally, Lavinia had all along been aware of their true direction, hers with Henry, through all those jovial, pseudo-friendly phone calls: “Well, I finally told Connie that I thought I was wasting her time. Lavinia, tell me I’m not a total shit.” “But of course not, but must you use those words? You sound like that horrible pal of yours, that Adam.” (Inexplicably to Lavinia, Henry and Adam Marr have indeed become good friends; they too have lunch at the Plaza, and Henry goes up for weekends in White Plains.) “I feel like a shit,” says Henry. “Will you have lunch with me, anyway?” Lavinia knew what was going on, really, during those phone calls, and the long, rather winy lunches, at which their hands so often touched, lighting cigarettes, as their fingers lingered, exploring, promising. It was all leading to the afternoon when over coffee Henry simply took her hand in his, no cigarettes involved, and he said, very firmly, “Come on. I’ve taken a room for us at the Wyndham. It’s just across the street.”
“But—”
“Don’t be silly. No one cares who we are, and we won’t see anyone. I’ve got the key.”
The elevator is small, operated by an aged, limping black man, trimly uniformed—behind whose back for the first time Lavinia and Henry hold hands in a serious way, not looking at each other.
They arrive at a large, pleasant-but-not-smart room, overlooking 58th Street, in which they for the first time kiss, very seriously, and then violently, their hands groping, grasping, Henry saying, “Christ, Lavinia, so many clothes—”
Henry’s body was a great surprise, so much dark hair, everywhere, such powerful thick dark hair, such power. And later, his beautiful eyes, larger and darker and moistly deeper now, his beautiful eyes meeting hers, as they lie back for a moment on a pillow. His smile, their smiles.
And even later, as they lay there in the vast tangle of sheets, in the late afternoon sunlight, hearing the increased momentum of cabs, the distant clop of horses’ hooves—even then, as Lavinia lay in a dizzied, sensual swoon, a funny cool part of her mind was calculating, Oh, I must have come four times, at least, which almost makes up for the years of nothing—but is that a record, for an afternoon? Could Megan—ever?
“You can’t go home now, it isn’t even civilized,” Henry told her. But Lavinia, who believed that her sense of him was absolutely accurate—she had after all put in a lot of time studying him, his moods and tastes—Lavinia believed that just to please Henry she must go, that going home was the civilized thing for her to do. She must bathe immediately, must reemerge from the bathroom all crisp and madeup and new. She must say goodbye to him sadly but with a very slight coolness, as though just possibly they might not meet again. As though she were not so seriously in love.
And Lavinia did all that, and all so quickly that Henry could hardly believe that she was gone (for tactical reasons they agreed that she was to go down in the elevator first), and she felt that he could hardly wait to have her back again. Just as she had planned.
The sad part is that for all her cleverness, her assiduous scholarship, in terms of Henry, Lavinia was absolutely wrong. Lavinia had created a certain “Henry” as her lover from scraps, and from her own demanding imagination.
She could not know that as Lavinia left him that day, Henry sighed for the lack of a woman who would stay with him, one who would not rush off to a husband, or even off to bathe. One who would not require an uptown hotel room, which he could not afford, not often.
In the meantime, he enjoyed her beauty, he enjoyed making love to her—and her evident enjoyment of himself. And he enjoyed watching Lavinia at her games. Women are much more complicated, more interesting than men are, Henry believes. He loves their complexity.
• • •
Now, on the terrace of the house that she has perfected for them both, on that misted April day, Lavinia is perfect. In a soft robe, she pours strong hot coffee into the gold-bordered (antique) French cups, she passes fresh croissants and sweet butter. In two pewter bowls tiny wild strawberries nestle against pale brown sugar.
Henry is not handsome, actually; his nose is too long, his mouth too wide, and he is so nearsighted. But just now, with his dark hair a mess and his glasses off, with his beautiful dark-thick lashed eyes (well, it’s true, as he says: they are like a giraffe’s), his face is perfect, Lavinia thinks. He must look like some remote Dutch ancestor, some brilliant brave captain, Lavinia imagines (although Henry has told her that all his people were farmers).
But Henry’s looks can only improve with age, Lavinia is sure. Thick gray hair will distinguish him. She does not understand why so often he looks so sad—but perhaps she misreads his expressions, she tells herself.
It rained all last night. A soft, insistent intimate rain that drummed lightly on the roof, above the room where Lavinia and Henry thrashed about, a little drunkenly—more than their usual wine at dinner, and then with dessert some champagne. In their wide soft bed, in the rainy dark. And they woke to make love again, very slowly and soberly, in the silvery cobwebbed morning.
Now from the terrace the weather is seen to be clearing; there is even some pale sunlight on the long wet grass, beyond the tidy bricks, their island of order. And far down below the river gleams, through light mists.
“Curiously enough I know Governor Stevenson slightly,” Henry is saying, looking up from the paper, his glasses back on and pushed down his nose. “And I must say, a perfectly delightful fellow. But then, so was poor Alger.” With an unhappy smile he sips at his coffee, and then, looking up at Lavinia, an entirely different smile takes over his face.
He then says, “You
know, I think I’ve never seen you so beautiful, Lavy? No makeup, I don’t know why you bother. But just at this moment—honestly—”
He is quite right, she has never been prettier; and Lavinia even knows just how she looks. Normally pale, she now is faintly pink across her delicate cheekbones; her gray eyes which can be cool are now warm, almost blue. And her light, somewhat flimsy hair is softer, and full, in the light, moist April air. She feels beautiful, she feels the new color of her skin, and her eyes. Her hair. Her whole body.
Henry, in the daylight, rarely speaks in that way, and so Lavinia blushes, making herself even prettier, and rather recklessly she says the first thing that comes into her mind: “Really? I look different. Heavens, I must be pregnant.”
Henry stares for a moment. Then he laughs, and he says, “You’re joking, of course.”
“Of course I am.”
“But if you were, you know, I suppose you’d leave old Potter and run off with me.”
“Oh no, I wouldn’t do that. I could pass it off as Potter’s. My father used to be quite dark. And when he was young he had terrific bones, like yours. Before they got all blurred.”
Henry laughs again. “I suppose. Well, I guess that takes care of that. How quickly you work things out.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I never know what you’re thinking when you frown,” he says.
“Just concentrating,” she tells him, as the tiny frown disappears. But what came out as an idle remark in the last few minutes has become a strong conviction: she is pregnant, by Henry. Of course by Henry; she and Potter haven’t done it for several months—he is usually too drunk, and besides, she hasn’t wanted to. She next thinks, As soon as I get back to New York I’ll have to get Potter back into my bed. And she frowns again.
“Well, if you’re not with child,” says Henry, “then we don’t have to have a sordid conversation about divorce. But tell me, do you really think I’d be such a terrible husband? Was Connie right, after all, not to marry me? I think I’d really like to get married, someday.”