Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  Perhaps fortunately, at that moment Adam and Megan are interrupted; someone, a man, has come up to their table. Tall, extremely tall and thin, and dark, with large dark nearsighted eyes. Henry Stuyvesant. Of course, and with a surge of warm liking, Megan remembers meeting him at Adam and Janet’s White Plains house, all those years ago.

  Adam stands, the two men shake hands, they make hearty sounds of greeting, as Adam asks, “Do you know Megan Greene?”

  Henry and Megan reach toward each other to shake hands, at the same moment they both say, “But we met—” and they laugh. As Megan thinks: he liked me too?

  “You never sent me the Lincoln Brigade book,” Henry then reminds her. “You said you would, and all these years I’ve been waiting. You’d just published it, remember?”

  “Oh, I know I meant to. Maybe I could find it.” She did not send it, Megan now remembers, out of sheer shyness; she was so afraid that he had not really wanted the book, that he had been merely polite about it, and would misinterpret her gesture of sending him the book.

  “That’s a splendid tan, old man,” Adam intervenes. “Good summer at the Vineyard?”

  “Uh, no. Actually I’m just back from Georgia.” Henry smiles, curiously apologetic, or embarrassed, and then he turns back to Megan. “Funny, I met a friend of yours down there. Peg Sinclair. We mentioned you; I mean I told her I remembered meeting you,” and he smiles. “She’s so nice,” he adds. “I really liked her.”

  “Oh, Peg—how strange. I’d heard from Lavinia that she’d gone there. But how is she?”

  “Well, she’s okay. We got to be quite pals, down there. And then funnily enough, it turns out that we’re distant cousins.”

  “All rich Eastern Protestants are distant cousins,” Adam intones, and then he laughs, as though this was a joke.

  Still looking at Henry, Megan thinks, Suppose I call him tomorrow and say that I have that book, which I can probably get, and to please come over for a drink? Please make love to me?

  “You’re probably quite right,” Henry is saying, to Adam. “Although if I were really rich I don’t think I’d be staying at the Gramercy Park.” And then, “Well, I’m awfully glad to have met you again, Megan Greene. I hope it won’t be so long before the next time.”

  They exchange a smile, a look; then he is gone.

  As though Henry’s presence had in some way been constraining, Adam in his absence becomes very garrulous. Gossipy. He asks Megan if she knew that Price and Lucy Christopher had just had their fifth child. “Very curious,” he says. “Almost every one of their kids has been born exactly nine months after one of mine. He’s still competing with me, I swear he is. Or actually fucking me, through Lucy, poor woman. And I understand quite a lot of other ladies too. But he doesn’t really have the courage of all those erections. Price is a tease.”

  Half listening, still thinking strongly of Henry—the puzzle of his extreme attractiveness, to her; is it simply that she hasn’t been with anyone for so long? is hard up?—in an idle, careless way Megan remarks that she didn’t realize Adam had five children.

  “Well, of course I do. Janet didn’t tell you? Fusai is marvelous, the best one yet. Shit, I think I knocked her up the first night we met. And the kids are beautiful.”

  Megan does not tell him that Fusai is a whole chapter of his life that she has missed, nor that she and Janet do not talk about him very much, anymore. When they do meet, which is rare, both being busy, they talk about their work. Janet is doing cancer research. Megan talks about her books and writers, her growing unrest with her professional life. Not Adam’s marriages and children.

  Even the conversation about Aron’s homosexuality was unusual, for Megan and Janet; it only took place because Janet’s conversation with Adam had been the night before.

  “In fact the Nip is a great woman,” Adam continues (as Megan wonders: does she know you call her that?). “Sometimes I think she could be my final wife, but then I start to fantasize about number six, or seven.”

  Adam grins his corrupt-priest grin, which is very appealing, and Megan laughs. Seeing Henry Stuyvesant has made her light in the heart somehow.

  After lunch Megan and Adam separate, near the fountain in front of the Plaza; he gets into a cab, going off fast, and Megan in a leisurely way starts walking down Fifth Avenue, toward her office.

  The day has turned very warm; most people look uncomfortable, the businessmen in their suits, the women in from the suburbs in silk dresses and light wool coats. But there on the corner of Fifth and 57th is a group of hippies, in their ruffles and rags, bare arms and feet. Several of them have bad skin and vacant stoned eyes, hollow smiles. But Megan notices that one of them, a boy who seems to be their leader, looks clean and alert, and happy, not just doped. He is tall and dark and nearsighted, in rimless glasses, but he looks, astonishingly, very much like Henry Stuyvesant. He is carrying a sign that says MAKE LOVE NOT WAR, of course. As Megan goes by, he gives her a friendly, sexy wink, to which she finds herself responding, and smiling, smiling.

  • • •

  That hippie boy is the start of a curious phenomenon, in Megan’s life, one that persists for several days: she sees men who might be, who almost are, Henry Stuyvesant, everywhere. This is especially strange in that Henry’s face and his stance, his way of walking, are all quite unusual: how is it possible that she sees that many men who are that tall, dark, wide-eyed, serious, with strong wide mouths? But the delusion is so strong that Megan begins to fear that she well might see the real Henry and dismiss him, not speaking, as one more figment of her seemingly deranged imagination.

  Idling in Barbara’s office, one day after lunch in early October, Megan asks, “If you saw the same face and body, on a great many different people who actually have other faces, what would you do—would you go to a shrink?” (This is odd: in her own tight voice Megan has heard an echo of Cathy’s voice.)

  Barbara laughs, then coughs. “I assume somehow you mean a man’s face? Someone you know?”

  “Well, yes. But not very well.”

  “I’d call him and take him out to lunch. Or invite him to dinner. I think maidenly modesty is going out of style. Thank God.” She coughs again. “Is that what you wanted me to say?”

  In a happy way, Megan laughs.

  But first she makes a call to Biff, who is still at the publishing house near Union Square. Biff is now plump and sleek with success, terrifically busy, in a professional way, but he always has time for a chat. His voice, along with his girth and his worldly success, has grown; it is not so much larger as deeper, more resonant. And his laugh too is richer and deeper.

  After some preliminary bookish gossip, Megan asks if he remembers a book they published in the early fifties, on the Lincoln Brigade.

  “But of course I do. Its total sale was something under six hundred copies. How could I forget a sales figure like that?”

  “Well, the point is, I really need a copy. Do you think there is one, somewhere around?”

  “One can only look.”

  “The thing is, I’d like it as soon as possible.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t dare ask why. I only remark that it’s a curious book for which to develop a sudden raging need.”

  Megan laughs. As she often does, she is thinking how much she likes Biff.

  “However,” Biff continues, “by an odd chance I have a necessary party to go to, in your neighborhood. If you could give me a drink quite promptly at six, I would come by with the book. If I find it. Shall I call you?”

  “No, of course not. Come anyway. I haven’t seen you forever.”

  “Perfect.”

  Knowing Biff, Megan knows that “promptly at six” will mean sometime near seven, with luck; nevertheless, herself a prompt person, she begins to wait at six. And she nervously plans the phone call to Henry, in case Biff does not bring the book, has not found it, or has possibly forgotten all about it. Biff is well-intentioned, at least in her direction, but often overcommitted, a little scattered.r />
  And without the book, just what will she say to Henry Stuyvesant? She knows that a simple invitation to dinner is what she should do, that would be “correct,” and liberated. But still. She then comforts herself with the thought that she may not even be able to get in touch with Henry; he was staying at the Gramercy Park that day, he said, but she believes that he usually lives somewhere in the South, is teaching there. And she will not call Adam to find out Henry’s whereabouts.

  However Biff does arrive at six fifteen; a record, of sorts. And he brings the book. Biff, pink-faced and puffing, in a splendid new-looking checked gray suit. “Darling, your stairs are more and more too much for me,” he wheezes. “Either you must move or I must lose some weight. Perhaps both? You don’t see yourself in something really smart, uptown? With an elevator, for the dear Lord’s sake? For my sake, for that matter.”

  “You’re an angel to bring the book. Let me get you a drink.”

  “You note how wonderfully I do not ask why you wanted it.” Biff’s large blue eyes blink soulfully at Megan.

  “You are wonderful, I always say so,” she counters, and she goes off into the kitchen.

  Henry Stuyvesant is immediately reached at the Gramercy Park.

  “Uh, Henry? This is Megan Greene. We, uh, met with Adam Marr—”

  “Megan! of course, it’s really good to hear from you. And odd that you should call at just this moment: I got in ten minutes ago, I’m up here for some meetings.”

  She tries to laugh. “Well, I know it’s several years late, but I did get the book for you. The Lincoln Brigade one.”

  “Oh, that’s really good of you. I’d almost forgotten, but you’re kind.”

  Naturally enough, Henry has sounded a little surprised, Megan thinks—both at hearing from her, she assumes, and at her bothering to get him a book which he cannot really have wanted very much, ever. And so it is hard for her to continue with her plan; she has to force herself to plunge ahead. “How about your coming for dinner, here?” she asks abruptly, and then begins to explain, “I haven’t cooked for a while, and you get so tired of going out, and that way I could give you the book. And where I live is very easy to get to. It’s just off Fifth. As a matter of fact when I used to work near where you are, I always walked.” At the end of all this she is out of breath.

  “That sounds really swell. No one has asked me to dinner for ever so long.” A pause. “But I do hope you mean very soon? I have to get back down to North Carolina in a couple of days.”

  They settle on the following night, at seven.

  • • •

  Megan spends an inordinate amount of time planning and changing menus, and planning and changing her plans for her clothes, for that projected evening. She finally forces herself to desist from both preoccupations, and she tells herself that any good dinner will do, or any dress (but: short dress or long? or velvet pants? silk shirt or sweater?).

  It is the hottest October on record. What summer leaves are left on the city’s trees go limp; in the narrow concrete-floored garden behind the building where Megan lives, in the Village, the big ferns droop dustily to the paving, in their death throes. On such a night, eight or ten years back, she would have sat out on the fire escape, two floors up from where she lives now; she would have sat there praying for a breeze, and envying rich people who will sit out the heat in air-conditioned restaurants or hotel rooms. Now she herself has an air-conditioned bedroom, to which she has repaired from time to time, that day, between frenetic intervals of food preparation, of polishing wine glasses and silver. Of killing time.

  Henry is mercifully prompt, for which he gracefully, laughingly apologizes: “I’m sorry, I can never manage to be late,” he tells her, at the door. “Always boringly on the nose.” And he adds, “You won’t mind my state of undress.” He is so tall, entering her room, just slightly stooped. He carries his coat, a striped seersucker. He is also carrying a brown paper bag: white wine that turns out to be miraculously still cold.

  Greeting him, taking the wine—“Oh, lovely, thanks!”—what Megan most clearly reacts to is his face: she sees that she was wrong in imagining that anyone else could look like Henry Stuyvesant. His is the strongest, the most original and interesting face that she has ever seen. Its planes are as balanced as chords, its black eyebrows authoritative, mouth wide and firm. His expression is intent, highly serious. He is just now seriously concentrated on her, Megan feels.

  And now, she thinks, we will go through an evening of silly conversation; it will be hours before I can even think of touching his mouth.

  She takes the wine into the kitchen and stands there for a minute, catching her breath, as she continues to think about the evening that stretches ahead, on this hottest and heaviest of nights. And quite suddenly, although she likes Henry very much, it all seems unbearably depressing: the drinks she is about to make, the obligatory talk about mutual friends, it having been established that Henry knows both Peg and Lavinia, and Adam and Janet—quite possibly there will be quite a lot of Adam. They will talk about some books, and his summer in Georgia. And, being both more intelligent and more polite than most men are, and more truly fond of women, Megan senses, he will ask her about her work, and she will say what she has just begun to think: that she doesn’t like it, much.

  And maybe, at the end of the evening, after too much to drink, there will be some exhausted, half-drunken exchange of love. That is how it goes, these days, when you ask a man to your apartment for dinner. It is what you both expect. Whereas Megan would give anything in the world for some permission, now, simply to trace the shape of Henry’s wide mouth with one forefinger. Just to touch his mouth, right away.

  She returns to the living room with the requisite tall cold glasses, gin and tonic; she hands one to Henry and she sits down near him, on her broad smartly and newly upholstered sofa. And then she smiles; she can feel the smile involving her whole face, her mouth and eyes. She looks at Henry. What she has just thought is, Why do I need permission though? Why not just touch him?

  Henry smiles too, of course. He sips at his drink, though, before he says, “I insist that you tell me what you just thought, to make you smile like that.”

  Megan puts down her glass. She reaches toward him, and with one chilled wet finger, very slowly she traces the outer line of his mouth, that small firm ridge, as delicate and sensitive as a vein. As lovely to her touch as she knew it would be. “There,” she says. “That’s what I just thought of doing.”

  He reaches then and does the same to her, touching her mouth as slowly, as lingeringly. His finger also cold.

  A little later, after kissing, Megan murmurs, “My bedroom’s air-conditioned, actually,” and then she laughs, very quietly, as he does.

  They get up, and Megan starts toward the hall, her bedroom, but Henry stops her for a moment, holding her arm. “You make me so happy,” he tells her. “The way you are. Already. You really do.”

  That promising mood, of a rich and happy leisurely time, remains with them all night, in Megan’s big cool room, her wide bed; her room seems an island, remote, in the surrounding sea of heat, the thick black night.

  “The way you come to me,” Henry tells her, at some point. “It’s just extraordinary.”

  “Well, it is for me.” She is shy, pleased.

  “And your breasts. I never met such a generous woman.”

  In that chilly room sweat cools on their wet, slick bodies. In an interval of rest Megan pulls up a sheet and the nearest light blanket, covering them both. Some weird half-light from the pre-dawn city beyond her delicate curtains has made Henry just visible to her, but only his face, and already she misses that long strong pale body.

  Somewhat later, simultaneously awake, they both look at their watches; it is almost five, on the following morning.

  “Lord, no wonder I’m starved.” It is Henry who says this, but it could as easily have been Megan; she is suddenly awake, and she has never been so hungry.

  Foolishly, she says
, “What a hostess I am. Now you’ll never come again for dinner.”

  “Oh, will I not.”

  They laugh.

  Megan offers, “I’ll bring things in. You stay here.” For a moment she has liked the notion of serving him in bed.

  “No, don’t be foolish. We’ll forage, rustle it up together, okay? I’m a handy man in the kitchen.”

  Megan likes this even better.

  In an amazingly familiar way, for comparative strangers, they get up. They go into Megan’s kitchen, they set about making huge sandwiches from her carefully prepared dinner. Greed and sexual exhaustion combine to make them dismissive of nonessentials, like tidiness.

  At Megan’s round pine table they sit drinking wine, eating messy chicken and cheese and avocado. An unreal pale light comes in from the street, making paler their drained, pale faces.

  Very solemnly Henry says to her, “I think maybe this is the favorite night of my life.”

  Not considering what she is going to say, Megan answers him seriously. “Do you realize that in less than two years I’ll be forty?”

  30

  In some stupid movie that Lavinia and Potter once saw together, a man prefaced his advances to a lady (although they were already in bed) by saying, “My dear, would you consent to do me the greatest honor—”

  It was fairly funny at the time, Lavinia thought, but to Potter that line was hilarious, excruciating, hysterical, to a degree that he repeats it all the time. In bed with Lavinia, fumbling at her nightgown, Potter will stage-whisper, “My dear, would you consent—” Fumbling, reaching with his dull, hot, unarousing fingers.

  No, she has wanted to scream at him; no, don’t touch me, I have the curse, I’m bleeding a lot, my head aches, I hate you. You never make me come. She does not say any of these things, of course not, not even the ones that are true.