Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  Some odd fate must have been at work, at just that moment, Megan thought: in the instant when Barbara had finished making her offer, across the fancy restaurant she, Megan, looked up and saw Lavinia—Lavinia out to lunch with a young blond woman who looked rather like herself, both so carefully, expensively gloved and coiffed, bejeweled. Catching sight of Megan, Lavinia smiled brightly and waved. But Megan could feel Lavinia taking in Barbara, could see Lavinia’s quick appraising glance, and could almost from across the room read Lavinia’s mind, her summation of Barbara: a real career woman, Jewish, looks aggressive, overweight, her suit needs pressing. Which of course would leave out almost everything of importance concerning Barbara.

  Aware that her attention had wandered (when it perhaps should not have), Megan explained, “That’s an old friend of mine from college. I don’t see her very much anymore though. You know how that goes.”

  Surprisingly Barbara commented, “She looks so much older than you do.”

  “Really? Beautiful Lavinia? Actually we both turn thirty this year—she already has, I guess.”

  “She looks so much more—more rigid than you do. More set in her ways.”

  “Well, I guess she is.” Understandably pleased, Megan smiled.

  Barbara inhaled, then stubbed out the long cigarette. “I’ve got to stop this,” she said. “I cough.” And then, “Take a lot of time, Megan dear, but please give me some thought. I think you’d like the business.”

  And so on the extraordinarily beautiful coastal drive, sitting beside silent, opaque Cathy, there is a great deal for Megan to think about: Janet and Adam. Her job. Biff. Barbara Blumenthal. And the rest of her life.

  She observes with something approaching shock that not a single one of her concerns at this moment has to do with a love affair, not even remotely. She has not seen Jackson Clay for, dear God, a couple of years; there has been no one else. A few months back she had lunch with her old friend former section man Simon Jacoby, now married to Phyllis and working in his father-in-law’s investment firm, and Simon suggested that it might be nice if they “saw each other a little more.” But Megan said no, she was just too busy, just now.

  She tells Cathy a great deal of what she is thinking, and is unable to resist adding, “Can you imagine? Barbara Blumenthal thinks I look younger than Lavinia does. I have to admit, I was sort of pleased when she said that.”

  “Well, of course you were pleased.” With a visible but honest effort Cathy adds, “I think probably you do. To me you look about seventeen.”

  • • •

  The Mission Inn, where Megan and Cathy have chosen to stay, is at the farthest, southern end of town, past the English cuteness of the shopping area, and the expensive, dangerously dramatic houses that perch out on the rocks, above the violent sea.

  The Inn itself is rather shabby, low-key: a cluster of cottages, overlooking a pleasant meadow of wild flowrers, where horses amble about and graze. A slow river winds through the meadow to the sea, where there is a wide sandy beach, at the river’s mouth. Families picnic there with their dogs and children; they swim in the river or in the sea, which is bright and cold.

  All this is visible from the little cottages: the meadow, with its flowers and grazing horses, some cows, and the river. The bathers and picnickers, dogs, and the sea. And further along, the stark silhouette of Point Lobos, a cliff of sharp rocks, harsh dead trees, and large black birds, swooping down.

  Megan and Cathy have the cabin that is farthest from the central lodge, closest to the meadow and the sea. There is a narrow porch, a small living room, and smaller bedroom. Tiny kitchen, tinier bath. Megan insists that Cathy take the bedroom, she will be fine on the studio couch in the living room, she says. For an instant, then, as Cathy is putting her things away, Megan strongly wishes that she were there with a lover, not with Cathy. The cabin’s very shabbiness seems to Megan highly romantic: love stripped down to its essentials—privacy, quiet, and a bed, with the further bounty of that view.

  And very possibly Cathy could have just the same wish? It is impossible to tell, with her. Also loneliness of that sort is seldom if ever mentioned, in 1956—much less straight lust, a sense of sexual deprivation.

  Cathy has brought along a bottle of Irish whiskey. “Actually a contribution from a friend of mine,” she explains, her mouth small and ironic. And her quick glance at Megan admits that “friend” does mean lover. The glance though also says that she does not want to talk about him, not now, and maybe never.

  They have drinks on the rickety porch, seated on hard warped and rusted aluminum chairs; they watch the big horses who now lumber playfully, ludicrously, in the summer dusk, among the flowers near the river. And they talk about money.

  “It’s very tempting,” says Megan, who has been speaking of the offer from Barbara Blumenthal. “I could end up rich. Biff says Barbara is really rich, although I must say she doesn’t look it. But somewhere along the line I picked up some puritanical prejudice against richness. I thought good people were poor. Which probably is true.”

  “Some of us Christians tend to believe that,” says Cathy, with her small smile.

  “Yes, that too.” Megan is quiet, musing, before she goes on. “And all that exposure to Lavinia certainly had its effect. Not to mention Henry James. I got the idea that being rich was a sort of state of grace, only all right if you didn’t work for it. If you have money at all you’re supposed to have inherited it.”

  Cathy laughs. “But you’re tempted.”

  “I really am. The truth is, I’m so tired of being broke, and that stupid old room, and old clothes. And New York, Lord, it’s so full of things to buy, it’s so tempting.”

  “Even San Francisco is, these days. Not that I get up there much.” Cathy’s tone is level, hard to read.

  After a small pause Megan says, “I’m very glad we came here. It’s so beautiful. And look at those silly horses.”

  “They think they’re elephants.”

  They laugh, and just at that moment the horses become quite still, as though suddenly self-conscious.

  Cathy laughs again. “Can they possibly have heard us, do you think?”

  “Well, maybe they’re especially sensitive? They felt something?”

  Although Cathy is appreciably more relaxed now, with the drinks and the foolish familiar talk, to Megan she still looks and seems not well. In repose her face is pinched and sad. And it is still impossible to ask her what is wrong.

  Megan wonders about the donor of the Irish whiskey, who is presumably Cathy’s lover. And it comes to her that, of course, Cathy must be involved with a man who is married. No wonder she is upset, what a mess for Cathy to be in. Megan has seen several New York friends through such affairs, lonely girls in offices, and she thinks, Oh, poor Cathy, to go from Phil-Flash to a sleazy arrangement like that. Oh, how unfair.

  They have more drinks; they decide to have dinner in the Inn’s dining room, not many yards away.

  In the candlelight, at their small window table, Cathy looks even worse, so that at last Megan is unable not to say, “Cathy, you just don’t look awfully well. You’re okay?”

  Cathy gulps at her wine, then quite deliberately she puts down the glass. She does not quite look at Megan as she says, “It’s a slight case of being pregnant, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh.” Megan in her turn gulps down some more wine. The baked potato on her plate looks suddenly unsightly, all packed with sour cream and chives—and the rare beef looks painted, something unnatural.

  “And, as a Catholic,” continues Cathy, in her high, thin voice, “I can’t even consider an abortion. Besides, it’s too late.”

  Much more wine will make her drunk, Megan knows, if she doesn’t eat; on the other hand, why not get drunk? She asks, “Do you know what you’re going to do?”

  They are sitting next to what has been the same view of meadow and river, the sea, that they saw from their cabin, but now the dark has blotted everything out. If the horses still are there they
are invisible. But through the night air, through the just-opened window there comes a heavy sound of waves, pounding the sand. Megan shivers, thinking of so much water, the sea, the cold.

  “I’m, uh, going to a place in Colorado, when it’s time,” says Cathy. “People who, uh, place them.”

  “Oh, Cathy. Jesus.”

  “Precisely.” A wan smile.

  Megan then asks, “The friend who gave you the Irish, uh, you still see him?”

  “Oh yes.”

  That emphatic word says almost everything to Megan; saying it, Cathy has looked almost happy.

  And so Megan is compelled to ask, “But Cathy, couldn’t you somehow get married, or live together? All of you? Almost everyone can get a divorce these days, somehow.” Tears of earnestness well up in her eyes; she is getting drunk.

  Cathy looks at her. “You haven’t guessed what’s wrong?”

  “He’s married, I guess. His wife is sick, or crazy? Mrs. Rochester, locked up?”

  Oh, if it were only that, is what Cathy’s faint smile implies, as in a high dry voice what she actually says is, “He’s a priest.”

  In all her thirty-year life, this is the single most shocking sentence (so far) that Megan has ever heard; her mind balks at it, her imagination stops. She closes her eyes, sees long black skirts, naked male legs. A priest.

  Cathy is saying. “I thought you would have figured that out.”

  “No, I would never have thought of a priest. Everything else, but not that. For one thing, I’ve never even met a priest.”

  For some reason this last remark strikes both of them, Cathy and Megan, as being extremely funny. In a soft, hysterical way they begin to giggle; they laugh until tears run down their faces.

  And that is the sum of the conversation that weekend, between Megan and Cathy on the subject of Cathy’s “friend.” The priest.

  26

  By 1960, Megan has been associated with Barbara Blumenthal for just over three years, and she is earning well over five times what she did at the publishing house. She is sometimes dizzy with all the money that she now has; having so much within her reach, such a lot of choices, makes her even greedier, she finds. She considers the proverbial greed of the very rich, and believes it to be true, even if the riche is very nouveau, as in her case, and by most standards not really rich at all.

  Taking Barbara’s advice, she has put a lot of money into Xerox, but that money only earns more money, giving Megan more choices, more possibilities.

  She would like to send money to her parents. She hinted at this, and was roundly, almost angrily, turned down by Florence. And so instead she sends them “things,” coats and dresses for her mother (does Florence wear them? She never says). A stereo.

  Megan has discovered, though, one source of financial pleasure so intense that it troubles her, which is the pleasure she derives from handling her bankbooks. She keeps that information meticulously up to date, immaculately accurate: her checking and savings accounts, records of stock transactions. She even keeps track of her cash on hand, the amounts of money in her purse, in two separate drawers in her bedroom. All that adding and counting takes up a lot of time, which Megan enjoys, terrifically enjoys, and that enjoyment strikes her as highly suspect. If she heard it described as a habit, a secret pleasure of someone else’s, she would find it repugnant. Obscene.

  But on the whole it has worked out extremely well, the association between Megan and Barbara Blumenthal. As never-married Megan has sometimes thought, they are rather like a good marriage; they complement each other, in the way of some married couples. Barbara, although basically a very kind person, tends to be brusque; she can’t help it, she is simply not “good with people.” She is perhaps good only with her husband; she has been married to Norman, a corporation lawyer, since high school, and they seem to get along well. Barbara is at her best with contracts, figures, percentages, whereas Megan can handle money only in a private way.

  Megan, on the other hand, is good with people, she finds. She is tactful, she manages to make both writers and editors feel sufficiently important and admired. Everyone likes her, which makes Megan almost as dizzy as being rich does, so unaccustomed is she to anything like large-scale popularity.

  “You talk to her,” Barbara will say, clutching at her straw-dry blond, uncontrollable hair, gulping smoke from her cigarette: the secretary, paper-thin Leslie DuVal, has just announced that Jane Anne Johns is on the phone, and Jane Anne is upset.

  Soothingly, but with a sound of honesty, Megan will come on the line. “Jane Anne, you’re absolutely right, they did say they’d get back to us this week. I’ll call them the minute we hang up. No, I’m not at all worried that they won’t like it. If they don’t it only means we can go somewhere else with it, and in the long run I’m sure you’ll be much happier.”

  And Jane Anne Johns, a Gothic novelist, calms down. She loves to talk to Megan. She is a very nice, now very old woman, with blue rinsed hair and a French château in Miami. She is given to diamonds and orchids and white mink coats. She is a great success. Her novels are consummate trash, a fact Megan tries not to think about; she is thankful that she does not have to read them, she only sells them, serialized, to magazines. Barbara handles the book and movie and TV contracts, and presumably she has read the books, although Megan seriously doubts that she bothers anymore.

  “Ah Megan, you’re great,” sighs overweight Barbara, as Megan hangs up the phone—smiling Megan, successful (again) with Jane Anne. “Let’s face it,” Barbara goes on, “how could we pay the rent without Jane Anne? Megan, if you run off and get married I’ll shoot myself,” and she laughs, in her hoarse, barking way.

  This is an old joke between them, Barbara’s joke, actually, and Megan has worked it out that Barbara would not make the joke if she, Barbara, thought there were even a chance that Megan would leave her to get married. And, Megan has further concluded, Barbara herself is quite unconscious of her own certainty as to Megan’s matrimonial prospects; she is just making a tired joke and at the same time telling the truth, that she does not want Megan to leave.

  But, although there is certainly no one whom Megan wants to marry, Barbara’s assumption is a small needling irritation to Megan; is she so clearly unmarriageable? She knows better, of course, than to make the old connection between unmarriageable and unattractive. Still. And then it occurs to her that perhaps she is perceived as unmarriageable for the simple reason that she does not wish to marry? She would like to think that this is true, and it sounds quite true, to her.

  Leslie, the secretary, does not seem to share Barbara’s cloistered view of Megan, though. She announces phone calls for Megan, when they are from men, with a thin, derisive smile, as though to say, Of course I know what you’re up to, with your friends, even if you never confide in me. Leslie is given to long conversations about her own life. Megan believes that Leslie sees her, Megan, as an essentially nonserious person. And very likely Leslie, who is ambitious, hopes that Megan will leave, married or not. In any case, it is with particular derision that Leslie announces, one August afternoon, that a George Wharton is on the line, for Megan.

  Incredibly enough, as she later thinks of it, for a moment Megan is not entirely sure who that is. Then, largely from sheer surprise, she gasps into the phone, “Oh, George,” in what must have sounded very much like her old tone, with him. She has undoubtedly given an impression of much warmer enthusiasm than in fact she feels, both to George and to her audience, Barbara and Leslie.

  She then hears an embarrassed laugh from George, on the other end of the line, and she realizes that it would have been better if she had told the truth: For a minute I didn’t know who you were.

  “You sound so, uh, like yourself,” he tells her. “I, uh, got your number from Lavinia.”

  “Oh, of course.” And of course it was Lavinia who told Megan a few years back that George’s wife Connie had left him, and that she, Connie, had a crush on Henry Stuyvesant. And Lavinia had further said that George h
ad moved from Mass. General Hospital to Columbia-Presbyterian. And how natural, Megan now thinks, that George should be a friend of Lavinia and Potter’s. Rich people always seem to know each other.

  “I don’t suppose, could you possibly, uh, be free for dinner?” George asks.

  “Oh, I’d love that. Terrific.” Megan hears her own voice, sounding as she must have sounded fifteen years or so ago, when she so warmly, eagerly rushed out to him; whereas now, as she thinks of it, she would actually much rather stay at home and read manuscripts, as she had planned to do. As she usually does, these days.

  “You look a little rattled,” is Barbara’s comment, as Megan leaves the phone.

  “Well, it’s just an old friend. Whom I’m not sure I especially want to see. But when I was sixteen I was out of my mind about him. He changed my whole life.”

  Barbara laughs, and coughs. “You must have changed quite a lot. That doesn’t even sound like you. Out of your mind, my sane old Meg?”

  “I have changed a lot.”

  Instead of moving uptown, which with a job in the East Fifties might have seemed more logical, newly prosperous Megan has simply moved downstairs, to a fairly large apartment in her same old building on West 12th Street. She now occupies a long narrow space; “Procrustean, it must be,” Biff has remarked. “It’s making you so thin!” Her living room faces the street; she has a small, rarely used dining room, a kitchen, bath, rear bedroom. The bedroom has of course the view that she has always had, more or less, when she lived upstairs, and partly for that reason, perhaps, she tends to spend most of her time there. Her bedroom is where she works or reads, looking out to the same old fire escape, same trees.

  She likes her living room least; it is overcrowded and cluttered, and always a mess. Her fault, of course, but she cannot seem to clear it up, nor can she somehow bring herself to hire someone, a maid, to clean up her messiness. Tonight, though, as she surveys the disordered room in which she will soon receive George Wharton, she feels an annoyance with herself for that foolish scruple: she is busy, she needs a cleaning person, other people need jobs. Too late, in a frantic way she begins to pile the coffee table’s books and magazines into tidy stacks, to put her records back into their jackets, on their shelf; but it is hopeless.