Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  But do you want to, Peg would like to ask; did you ever enjoy it, really? Or do you feel, possibly, as I do, that it’s something you have to do for men?

  Cornelia gives her a look of sheer disbelief, in which there is some anger, as though Peg were willfully misleading her, one more treacherous white person, meddling where she has no business to be.

  Peg touches her arm. “Cornelia, look, I’ll come back tomorrow, okay? And you be thinking about what you need. Cornelia, tell me, what’s the name of your doctor?”

  “But if the tumors weren’t malignant, I don’t quite see—” Lack of medical information makes Peg stop, and she wonders, how can women know so little about their bodies? Or, do men really know much more about theirs—or ours?

  Ignorance, coupled with habitual shyness, awkwardness, make this phone conversation with Cornelia’s doctor almost impossible. But Peg is forcing herself, very hard. She feels herself to be Cornelia’s champion, her only possible savior.

  The doctor snaps, “Fibroid tumors. Besides, do you want her to have fifteen children before she’s forty? Some of them do, you know.”

  Hanging up, some minutes later, without much further enlightenment, Peg thinks, I only want her to get well and stay with me forever. I love Cornelia.

  24

  “Darling, you must tell me, how do you like our house now?” asks Lavinia of Henry Stuyvesant, on a Thursday afternoon, near the end of a remarkably hot and wet month of May. This particular day has been clear, but billowing heavy gray clouds hang just above the fields across the river, the Rappahannock, and the light is unnatural, too bright, so that the meadow grass even from this distance looks unreal, its green bright and poisonous (or is it simply that my mood is poisonous? Henry wonders, focusing on the meadow).

  On the terrace, where they now sit sipping lemonade from fluted champagne glasses (why champagne glasses? Henry has never asked Lavinia this, but now he wonders), the scent of roses and wisteria is almost overwhelming, like spilled perfume. The very air is burned out, decadent (to Henry).

  Trying to remember what Lavinia has just said, Henry replays her last sentence in his mind, a trick he has taught himself at political meetings; it works, thank God, “… do you like our house now?” He rehears her sentence, with its light but marked, ironic emphasis on our, and now. It is her special tone, and in his own, expected voice he answers her, “Oh, it’s absolutely splendid, never better.”

  Looking around, Henry tries (and knows that he will fail) to notice what she has done to the place since they last were here; she is always doing something. He cannot even recall, precisely, just when they were here last, and the effort of trying to remember everything exhausts him. Which adds to the weight of another worry growing in his mind, just now, having to do with the night ahead, and Lavinia’s clear anticipations, her preconceptions, as it were, of their “love,” of how lovers behave, what they do. Henry smiles at what he perceives, now, as the absolute inappropriateness of all the words that he and Lavinia ever use, talking together.

  Involuntarily he then thinks of Adam Marr, his sometime friend, who would inevitably say to him, “What’s bugging you, man, is if you can get it up or not,” and he can hear Adam’s “Negro” laugh. And his own hyperstilted, impossibly refined response: “Well, old man, it isn’t quite all that simple. This particular situation requires, well, considerably more than my simply ‘getting it up.’ You’d have to know Lavinia.” He smiles again, aware of irony, and pain.

  “Darling, whatever are you thinking?” asks Lavinia, smiling to his smile, speaking in her reasonable voice. She is almost always reasonable—the most reasonable, rational living romantic, he has always said.

  And so he answers reasonably, and truly. “I was wondering if it would rain.”

  This simple statement has an unlooked-for success, however; Lavinia, ardently gray-eyed, picks up his nearest hand with hers, hers so tended and ringed, and so talented, in some ways. She says, “Darling Henry, I was thinking of that too, that night. And I now forgive you for not noticing the new awning.”

  Henry smiles warmly, as though also remembering a certain romantic night, presumably of rain, and then mercifully he does remember: a night in this house, “their” house, a windy night of wild crashing flailing rain, an overstimulated night (were they drunk?) of making love wildly, repeatedly. He remembers how they stared at each other, amazed, in the intervals of lightning, at each other’s white naked bodies, flashed into exposure, and at that time so passionately new.

  And he understands that for Lavinia it could have been the night before, or last week; her memory is less sullied than his, by far, and her high notion of love does not admit of change. She retains her view of their love, of him and of herself; it is necessary for her to do so. She even believes that Amy is “their child,” and that Amy was conceived, now that Henry fully recalls it, on that particular rainy April night.

  Because he chooses to, perhaps, Henry believes that the child is Potter’s. Certainly that tiny girl has no look of him. In any case, in a legal sense she is Potter’s child, and for the child herself that is the emotional reality. It is also, from Henry’s (Marxist) point of view, the correct position.

  Lavinia sighs. “If only we had the whole weekend. If I didn’t have all those people coming tomorrow.”

  “You mean, all your new best friends?”

  Teased, Lavinia turns girlish, daddy’s girl; she almost pouts as she pleads, “But I have to have friends. You’re never around, you’re always down at your precious Chapel Hill, with all your new best friends.” She adds, half seriously, “All Communists, I suppose.”

  Lavinia, I am a Communist. Henry does not say this, although he would like to, since it is the truth.

  Driven, as he sees it, from elective political office by the McCarthy committee, Henry continued his graduate work in history at Columbia, and he then became an instructor in the department at Chapel Hill. Offered several choices, his record having been outstanding, he chose North Carolina with an informed and calculated look at the civil rights movement, his new passion. Once down there, Henry found, or came to believe, that the most active, the liveliest, and brightest Movement people were party members, and he was urged to join. And so, after some months of indecision, hesitations, he did join the Communist Party—it was all done very discreetly, since the Smith Act had forced the whole party underground, at that time. Especially, one did not tell nonmembers of one’s membership, not even sympathizers. (Thus, Adam Marr, a flirtacious nonmember, kept urging Henry to join.)

  To Lavinia, Henry only says, quite mildly, “I do like Chapel Hill. It’s old and very pretty, and I like the people. Most of them.” He adds, “Adam Marr’s speech down there last week was quite sensational.”

  “Oh, I’m sure. If you say, uh, ‘fuck’ every other word, it’s bound to be a sensation.”

  “Actually he was talking about writing plays. We have quite a famous group, the Playmakers, and a wonderful old theater—Greek revival. Where Adam spoke.”

  Lavinia laughs. “Darling, you sound so patriotic. Like a convert. What is it you call yourselves down there, the tar babies?”

  “Tarheels.”

  “Well,” says Lavinia, after a moment, with a small frown at the now dissipating clouds, the clearing air. “I guess it’s not going to rain, after all.”

  “I guess not. But it’s wonderful to have such a handsome new awning.”

  25

  In June of that year, 1956, during which the four friends all turn thirty, Cathy and Megan arrange to spend a few days together, in Carmel, California.

  Megan has ostensibly come out to see her parents; actually she has wanted to see Cathy, but so far that has not worked out very well. Both Megan and Cathy have been constrained, during their lunches; Megan has felt that they were not quite themselves. Her own problem has been quite simply her worry about her parents, who seem suddenly old, or nearly: Florence, still working as a carhop, looking more brazenly dyed, more foolish (to Meg
an) in that perky uniform; Megan is torn between irritation and pity for her. And Harry, her father, still so hopeful that his store will be discovered, or that he will discover among the “junque” a genuine antique.

  Megan does not know what, if anything, is bothering Cathy, but Cathy surely does not look well; in fact she looks so unwell that it has been hard for Megan not to ask her what is the matter. To begin with, she has put on a lot of weight. And she is pale; her always vulnerable skin is blotchy, her dark hair too long, and lank. She looks unhappy and cross, and her manner, even with Megan, has been snappish, stiff.

  At last Megan does bring herself to say, “Honestly, Cath, you look a little pale. Let’s do go to Carmel. We’ll walk on the beach a lot, it’ll do you good, and me too. I need to get away from them.”

  A wan smile. “You’re probably right,” says Cathy.

  And so, having agreed that it would be wiser to avoid a weekend, on a Tuesday morning they head westward, toward the coast. They have also agreed on the shoreline route.

  These days Cathy has an old red Ford convertible—it wildly occurs to Megan that Cathy’s car could once have been Phil-Flash’s; this is an aged, beat-up version of his grand car. And Megan wonders if Cathy thought of Flash, as she chose and bought this car. But she cannot ask; even mentioning Flash would seem a mistake, so great is the contrast between this pale, blotchy overweight Cathy, indifferently dressed, and the Cathy of ten years back, all curled and pretty and proud of going off with Flash. (The fact that Phil-Flash was on the whole a jerk now seems less important than that with him Cathy was confident, and happy. As she so visibly now is not.)

  Taking back roads, they are heading for Pescadero, and all that terrain is deeply familiar to Megan: the rounded hills shaded with live oaks, eroded red clay embankments, the occasional fruit orchards where now, in early June, the blossoms are just wilted, fallen onto the barely yellowing grass. Pine trees, clumps of cypress and manzanita, eucalyptus.

  One clearing, then, in a pine grove just off the road, suddenly looks so familiar that Megan is startled; she might have dreamed of it the night before. But just as they pass she recognizes the place: it is where she and George Wharton used to park and neck, with such passion, such ignorance and frustration. That was almost half a lifetime ago, Megan now thinks, and she considers that sixteen-year-old girl, her former self, with some affectionate pity and some embarrassment, for her intensity, her innocence, her simplicity.

  After the foothills is a pleasant area of farmland: heavy white fences that surround cropped green pastures, large prosperous white houses. And then with no warning they come to the sea: flat blue and shining, lapping against coarse gray sand, against barnacled rocks. In the warm summer air the scents of salt and fish are strong, wafted on a light wind.

  “This was really a good idea, don’t you think?” asks Megan, tentatively, as Cathy turns left, heading south and down the coast.

  “I guess,” says Cathy.

  “My life in New York has been so crazy lately,” Megan tells her; is she explaining the unease that she feels now with Cathy, trying to blame it on New York?

  “Really? Mine too, I guess,” is Cathy’s laconic contribution.

  “I had a really insane weekend up in White Plains with Janet Cohen. Marr.” Cathy’s enclosed silence is making Megan babble, she realizes, and she wonders if this has always been the case, that she talked so much with Cathy for the very reason that Cathy said so little. In any case, she begins to tell Cathy all about the White Plains weekend.

  Part of the craziness was that Adam Marr was present, and Megan soon understood from Janet that this was often the case. Divorced from Janet, and now married to Sheila, Adam still, quite often, arrived for weekends in White Plains—and if Sheila minded she was never heard from to that effect.

  “I can’t exactly not let him come up,” was Janet’s explanation. “You know, because of Aron. And besides, I guess I still do care about Adam, in certain ways. I worry about him. This sounds silly, but I think he’s changing into someone I don’t quite know, and it’s as though I’m trying to stop him.”

  “I see what you mean,” agreed Megan, not quite seeing.

  “I think he’s a little nuts,” Janet added, and then, flushing: “He thinks we should have another child. Together. Really.”

  “But Janet, Jesus, that’s outrageous.”

  “Of course it is. Adam is outrageous, that’s his shtick.” But Janet sighed in an affectionate way.

  Megan considered the implications of this preposterous idea: First, did Janet mean that she and Adam still went to bed together, well, fucked, as Adam would put it, when he spent weekends with her in White Plains? Probably she did mean just that. And Megan further thinks, How can Janet, after the cruel way that Adam left her?

  Not wanting to say that, of course not, Megan asked instead the most reasonable question that came into her mind. “But suppose you get into med school?” Janet had told her earlier that she had applied at Yale. “You can’t have another child, not now.”

  “Oh, I know. The last thing I need is a baby. But Adam has this obsession about having kids.”

  “Let him have children with Sheila, then.”

  “He doesn’t seem to want to, or maybe she can’t? She is so thin.”

  Megan snorted. “He doesn’t want Negro kids?”

  “Oh no, you know Adam’s not like that.”

  “I think Adam’s seriously crazy,” said Megan, seriously.

  “I really hope I get into med school.” Janet’s voice was plaintive. “That would solve almost everything.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you will.” Supportive Megan.

  This conversation took place on the house’s narrow porch, in the long summer dusk, before dinner. Adam had gone off somewhere with Aron, announcing that they were coming back with lobster for dinner, and that some other people would be coming too. He would take care of everything, he said, in an arrogant way that implied that only he could take care of everything. Listening, absorbing, Megan thought, He’s really a fascist, where women are concerned. (The very idea of Janet having another child, with him!)

  And that night at dinner it was exactly as though Adam still lived there; he had in no way given up his territory. Sheila, as a fact, was much less present than she had been on the night when she was so visibly anticipated by Adam; if Adam thought of her now, he did not say so. He was too busy with his party.

  By midnight the rooms were all crowded, people had seemingly drifted in from everywhere, in their flashing foreign cars. The din in the house was cacophonous: people shouting and laughing harshly, too loud, somewhere records playing, hard rock. And everywhere a lot of smoke, clouds of grayish, yellowish smoke, scents of marijuana. Smells of spilled drinks and too much perfume. The sort of party at which everyone screams at once, and all the clothes are much too bright.

  Almost all the guests were celebrities, of one sort or another. Very public people: Megan could pick out many of the faces, actors and actresses, famous directors, blockbuster writers. What later came to be known as media people.

  Scattered here and there were a few exceptionally pretty young women, nonactresses, to whom no one paid the slightest attention. They were unknowns, and no one had time for them, that night. As Megan explained to Cathy, the party was all about ambition, various forms of self-promotion; it was the least sexy party she had ever been to.

  But Adam loved it, every frantic heightened pulsing minute of his party. He was a famous person, among other famous people, and his awareness of success, of arrival, made him raucously jovial, loudly and quite impersonally friendly to everyone—so that Megan wondered if he and she actually were friends, any longer.

  She was slightly disappointed not to find Henry Stuyvesant there again, they could have talked, she thought. But she recognized that Henry was in most ways the direct opposite of these people, a quietly thoughtful person, rather shy, she thought.

  Another thing very much on Megan’s mind, as she and Cathy
speed south on the flat coastal highway, is the fact that the publishing house for which Megan works has just been acquired by a Texas oil conglomerate. And she tells Cathy all about this too.

  Every day, at work, the lesser editors, the salesmen, and the secretaries were assured by the senior editors that this will make no difference; the house will maintain its high literary standards, high quality, etcetera. It will make no difference.

  “Which of course is a patent lie,” as Biff put it to Megan. “Of course it will make a difference. Frankly I find it ominous as hell. But besides being basically lazy, I am also basically a whore, and so I will stay on. But you, dearest Megan—truly, I think you might think about a move. Much as I personally would deplore it.”

  “Oh, I am thinking. Seriously. But for me there’s the problem of women never becoming senior editors anywhere, anyway.”

  “That is absolutely true.” Biff sighed heavily, his whole small body sagging with dismay. “Oh, but I can see the writing on the wall. You’ll leave, and you’ll be a terrific success somewhere else, and then who on earth will I talk to? No more laughs, no one else around who reads.”

  “You’re probably wrong. Where on earth would I go? You know that all the other houses are just as bad, in their ways. But why don’t we leave together?”

  “Holding hands and skipping along, like some comedy team? Well, that’s an adorable idea—but just perhaps not.”

  But then a couple of days later, and not quite coincidentally, Megan had lunch with a literary agent, Barbara Blumenthal, whom she has liked and admired for some time. Barbara is a very successful woman, who manages at the same to be quite simply nice (or, perhaps her niceness is not simple at all). In the course of the lunch Barbara suggested that Megan might come to work for her. (Barbara has heard of the big oil takeover; she heard of almost everything first.) Barbara mentioned a handsome salary, plus percentages and commissions.