Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  “But, couldn’t they find someone, anyone more attractive? Lord, even Rockefeller.” Lavinia knows that she sounded a little silly, she could hear herself, but that is how she has always talked to men, beginning with Daddy. (Only Henry, sometimes, drew her into “intelligent conversation.” The kind of talk that she might have had with a woman, even. And see where that got her.)

  Sitting down beside but not too close to Lavinia, Potter continues. “There’s one really mysterious fellow. He’s supposed to be the richest man in Washington, and no one knows where he got his money. Rather odd-looking person, a cripple.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Oh, Harvey something. Rodman, I think.”

  “Harvey Rodman?” Lavinia has spoken much more loudly than she meant to; everything within her is suddenly out of control. Racing pulses, heated blood: her brain has come alive, is galvanized.

  “Surely you don’t know him?” asks Potter, reasonably enough.

  Lavinia can hear the slight frown in his too-familiar voice, as she says, “Uh, no, of course not. But I think he came to our house a couple of times. He was sort of a friend of Daddy’s.”

  “Odd friend for your father to have, even ‘sort of.’ ”

  But Lavinia is not really listening; she does not have to listen to Potter anymore. Her whole life is on the verge of a tremendous change, is wonderfully changing. By now she is perfectly calm and controlled, in charge, as she asks, “But you’ve met this Harvey Rodman, the mystery man?”

  “Just for a minute, one Sunday at the Hay-Adams. He keeps a suite there.”

  Perfect. Good Potter has told her the one thing that she needed to know, which is where Harvey lives. And with a pleased and secret smile Lavinia also thinks, And good for you, dear old Harvey, you’ve improved a lot, the Hay-Adams is so much nicer than the Shoreham. Still: she smiles more deeply, remembering certain afternoons at the Shoreham, in Harvey’s suite there. Lord, how young she was then—and how perfectly beautiful.

  Potter asks, “Is that thunder? You know, it feels like a storm.”

  “Oh, it really does! How terrific.” Lavinia even reaches for Potter’s hand.

  Black rumbling thunder, and then a sudden brilliant crack of lightning illuminates the whole lurid night sky: their majestic green garden, boxwoods, the fountain. For one instant it is like a stage set. Then total blackness again, thicker and darker than before, it seems. And then rain, suddenly heavily pounding, spattering the terrace where Lavinia and Potter still sit beneath their awning, as though transfixed.

  “Oh, it’s so cool!” she breathes.

  “Shouldn’t we go in, though?”

  • • •

  In the course of that night, during that long, wild heavy summer storm, at least two remarkable things occur. One is that Lavinia does not think of Henry, not once. Whereas, for years, any sound of rain and especially a summer storm would bring him back, alive.

  The other exceptional event is that after Potter has murmured, “My dear, would you consent—” and begun to touch her, Lavinia can feel herself “responding.” And yes, she does actually come, with Potter.

  31

  Strangely, and very gradually—and mostly through letters, a long correspondence—after almost twenty-five years of knowing each other, Megan and Peg become good, trusted, and trusting friends. In the mid- to late sixties. Further strangeness is the fact that money, Megan’s money, plays a considerable part in their newly forged rapport.

  It happens in this way: possibly to atone for, perhaps to wipe out the letters that she had written to Megan when she was so sick (although of course Megan never saw those letters), Peg begins to write small news bulletins to Megan, now that she is well and strong. She tells about going to Georgia. She says that the woman who used to work for her, Cornelia, whom she really liked, is in a teachers’ college, and doing well, and Peg is really pleased. She says that since her summer in Georgia she has been involved with various rights groups. She has met Martin King, and Dr. Abernathy. Her kids are all okay, she adds.

  And Megan answers with small news of her own, what’s going on at the agency, her affection for Barbara, her dislike of Leslie, who is now Barbara’s assistant. (“Could it be because she’s so thin?” Megan asks Peg, in a letter; and, “Do you think we were both so drawn to Lavinia because she was so much smaller than we were?”) She tells Peg that she thinks what Peg is doing is really great; could they use some more money? She, Megan—“funnily enough”—is doing very little but work, these days, she earns a lot; she would like to do something good. She sends off checks.

  Peg sends back warm, appreciative thanks, and further news.

  “I feel slightly silly saying this to you,” Peg writes, “but it won’t be a big surprise, I don’t think. I am very much in love, and very happily, with a woman. Vera. She is lovely in every way. For a long time I had an idea that I must be homosexual, but I thought that just meant I should live alone, or not with men. But Vera was there in Georgia, that summer, and we went from being friends to being in love. She is wonderful. She is Mexican, originally, and was a social worker in Los Angeles. Funny, down here a lot of people suspect her of being black. You can see why I am not writing any of this to Lavinia, and I do not know what I am going to do about Cameron. But I think we can work it out.”

  Megan indeed is not wholly surprised; rather, she is very pleased, and she is touched at Peg’s writing to her in that way. She does not call Lavinia, with whom she is barely in touch anyway, but she does call Henry—both because they talk so much, about literally everything, and also because Henry speaks so affectionately of Peg, whom he seems to regard as a sort of sister.

  “Well, that’s really good,” says Henry, informed of the Peg-Vera connection. “And she’s right, Vera is lovely, and nice. She struck me as a little fragile, maybe, but Peg will take care of her.”

  “Yes, it’s what she always does.” Megan sighs.

  “But that’s really okay, don’t you think?”

  “Well, sure. Someone has to.” Megan laughs.

  They talk, and talk, and laugh a lot, about everyone, everything—and so the fact that they have never, or barely, mentioned Lavinia is marked, to Megan, who continues with her old assumption that there was something between Henry and Lavinia; that they were lovers, at least for a while. Not wanting to know, in fact terrified of knowing, she would never ask; also, she would hate to hear chivalrous Henry lie, as he might, if she forced him to.

  And actually they have never gone in for discussions of former lovers; a certain shy delicacy is a shared quality between them, Megan and Henry. They probably and quite correctly assume that for each of them the other is entirely wonderful—a marvel, quite superior to any predecessor (even if Lavinia could be counted in that group).

  Perfect lovers, perfect friends. Why then is she not perfectly happy, spending time with Henry, or even time away from him? Megan ponders this, and she concludes only that no one ever is—perfectly happy. Although absolute misery is a condition that she is fairly sure most people reach, at one time or another.

  Henry’s back is beautiful, the most perfectly beautiful human back, in Megan’s view. Long and hard and smooth, cool to her touch, lovely wide shoulders narrowing down to rise again in a lovely rounded, hard ass. She could stroke his back forever, Megan thinks.

  She bends now to kiss the small knob at the top of Henry’s spine. His skin is fragrant, delicious. She kisses him everywhere.

  How can she even imagine misery, here with Henry?

  And she loves the town of Chapel Hill, in the warm bright blue October air, smelling of pines and leaves, oak and maple and poplar of every possible color, green to yellow, gold and red, bright brown. Megan gives some thought to the difference between a New England fall, and one down here, down South (she leaves out California, where almost nothing happens, to signify fall). It is the difference, she dreamily concludes (she is sitting on Henry’s side porch and drinking coffee, waiting for him to come home from hi
s Saturday morning class), the difference between scarlet and gold: Cambridge is scarlet, the leaves and electric cold brilliant air, whereas this Southern air is golden, with its gentle winds, and slow descent of leaves. The murmurous pines, and the swollen creek, whose rush to the sea she can just hear from where she sits, in the heavy sun.

  • • •

  Henry’s house is small, but it is not precisely a cabin (that was Lavinia’s fantasy of it); it is rather a dignified old structure, one-story, once a farm. It is somewhat south of town, near Morgan’s Creek—down the highway that goes on to Pittsboro, Southern Pines, to South Carolina. And the twin of Henry’s house, just visible from his porch, lies across what was once a cornfield, now plowed over, dead, but the shape of furrows may still be discerned in that rich and crumbling dirt.

  Two of Henry’s closest local friends live in that other house, the Jacobses, Ralph and Irene. They have long been politically involved together (Ralph, an economist who also has a law degree, was largely instrumental in setting up the famous credit union, for Negroes, in Carrboro). Now they all are active in the local anti-Vietnam war movement.

  Megan admires the Jacobses; they are clearly admirable, intelligent, principled, energetic—even handsome people. Small and neat and dark, they look rather alike; they could easily pass for brother and sister.

  But evenings with Henry and Megan, Ralph and Irene never seem quite to work out. In a conscientious way they all four work at being friends, everyone asks polite and interested questions of each other, but there is always a sense of pointlessness in their encounters—or, worse, of something just wrong, barely beneath the surface. (So that Megan comes away wondering why: why do we have to go through this? It isn’t fun, which is surely the point of friends being together? But she cannot quite bring herself to say this to Henry.)

  Adam Marr sometimes provides a moderately successful conversational staple, though, for the four of them. The Jacobses are interested in Megan’s early view of him, the undergraduate fiancé of Janet Cohen. And somewhat to her surprise Megan finds that behind Adam’s back she tends to present his favorable aspects; she defends him, even.

  “In some way he was always really compelling,” she says, of that early Adam. “What you’d call a strong presence.” As she speaks she is seeing that early, young Adam, in his messy khakis, on the terrace of Barnard Hall, in the sunlight; 1944. His intense blue eyes. “He has a wonderful voice,” she tells them. “You listen even when you know it’s total nonsense. And sometimes of course it isn’t nonsense; he’s right at least half the time, and he’s always interesting, I think.”

  “He sure caught on to Vietnam a long time before most people did,” Ralph puts in. “Although I don’t think it’s accurate to call him a radical anymore.”

  “He calls himself a conservative.” Henry is ironic, leaning back in the Jacobses’ best bentwood chair, firelight on his shadowed face.

  “I just see that as part of Adam’s baronial pose,” Megan ventures. “Along with that crazy White Plains house, and his new digs on Central Park West.”

  “Of course you’re right,” Henry agrees. “Surely his ‘conservative’ isn’t anyone else’s.”

  Encouraged, Megan follows her own line of thought; with a heady, slightly guilty sense of betraying an old friend, in the interests of entertaining new ones, she adds, “There’s always been something rather social-climbing about Adam, I’ve always thought.”

  But Megan’s observation does not go over very well, although she believes it to be quite accurate, and believes too that her betrayal of Adam was a generous present to them all. Even Henry looks a little baffled, and Megan then realizes, Well, of course; he would not be sympathetic to a view that at least in part explained Adam’s affection for himself. Henry will not admit that he himself could be socially climbed upon. And the Jacobses’ faces show an even deeper bafflement; social climbing is a sin that they cannot even contemplate, and surely not in an undoubted “genius,” a man whom they have long considered, ideologically, as one of themselves, however he may quixotically refer to himself as a conservative. But, social climbing? Adam Marr?

  Henry and Irene Jacobs (obviously attuned to each other, Megan objectively notes) break the ensuing silence almost simultaneously: Henry saying, “Well—” and Irene, earnest, well-intentioned, “What I don’t see is why he keeps getting married.”

  But this remark does not work out much better than Megan’s did. It brings up what Megan has sensed the Jacobses as wondering: well, why don’t Henry and Megan marry? Are they afraid to?

  Well, perhaps we are, Megan now concedes to herself; heaven knows they don’t discuss it much.

  And then everyone begins to speak.

  Megan says, “Because he really dislikes women, I think.” As she wonders: has Henry never married because he likes women more than any other man does?

  And Henry, “Yes, marriage is how he gets rid of them. You could call it the Blue Beard syndrome.”

  Followed by:

  Ralph. “Interesting, how often anti-Semites marry Jews.”

  Agreeing, Irene names several known couples who follow that pattern.

  That is, then, one of their better, more successful evenings together. However, walking home in the chilled October dark, stumbling across the ancient corn furrows in her smart New York boots, it is clear to Megan both that she has drunk too much wine, in her nervousness, and also that it would have been a better evening for the three of them without her.

  “The three of you get along so terrifically,” she tells Henry later, as they are both quickly undressing, in his unheated bedroom. “It’s like a good triangle,” Megan says. “I throw off the balance. In fact I think they’re both in love with you, in very harmless ways, of course. What we used to call ‘unconscious.’ And they don’t understand the fact of me. They don’t know what they feel.”

  “Will you please stop talking and come to bed? I know what I feel: cold but concupiscent. Is that how you feel? Megan, come here.”

  But how would it be if they were, in fact, actually married? Megan of course has wondered about that, has sometimes mulled it over. Where, for instance, would they live? Would Henry look for a teaching job in New York? They could both easily live on what she earns, and very well, but Megan cannot quite see Henry as “kept,” and besides, what would he do? Or, conversely, what would she do in Chapel Hill? It would seem silly, somehow, to marry and still live in separate places, Megan thinks, despite various recent magazine articles to the contrary. Maybe she could find something useful to do down here? As she thinks this, Megan is stricken with a vast distaste for the work that she does, in New York: all those nonbooks decked out for marketing. So much execrable prose. The sheer unreality of it all.

  She is thinking all this as she lies drowsily, warmly awake, next to sleeping Henry, after love. She wonders about that too: would they make love as often living together, married? Well, very likely not, how could they? every night? But maybe an occasional passionate return to earlier habits and practices?

  In the morning what could be considered an amazing coincidence occurs, which is that Henry, just waking, turns and reaches for Megan to kiss, and then he says, “You know, I really think we should get married. I really want to, don’t you?”

  It is like the several times that they have waked to similar dreams. Only now, to her vast surprise, Megan feels a rush of new blood to her heart, lovely new crisp air in her lungs, as she gasps, and then laughs. “Well, I guess so,” she tells him.

  “I love you, just amazingly,” says Henry.

  32

  However, Megan and Henry do not marry right away, as they might have been expected to do, having once made up their minds and being of certain ages: Megan by now is in her early forties, and Henry is five years older.

  For one thing, the November that follows their October morning of decision is that of Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency. Both Megan and Henry find it surprising that this event should be a factor in th
eir personal lives, but the truth is that they are both so depressed by Nixon that they are stunned into a sort of immobility. “I simply cannot believe it,” they repeat to each other, in a sort of litany with minor variations. “He’s so terribly, transparently dishonest. Self-serving. Creepy. Ugly,” they both say, from time to time.

  Nixon’s election has managed to shatter their personal hopes, along with their wishes for the general future; they do not exactly say this to each other, but that is more or less the case. These days, when they talk about what will happen now, they do not mean to themselves. The Vietnam war will go on forever, they hopelessly say, or at least until everyone is dead—both countries beaten back into the Stone Age, in the immortal words of that general. Civil rights and liberties pushed backward, social progress all shrunken, because of “defense” expenditure.

  Noting the political tone of almost all their conversations, these days, Megan observes to herself that this in itself is very odd. Is it indeed simply because things are so bad? Are she and Henry simply reacting in an intelligent, responsible way? Or, is she herself becoming a more political person because that is what Henry is? Or (yet another possibility) is the personal connection between them now on the wane, as it were?

  And none of the possible answers to any of these questions is cheering, in any way.

  In fact, for Megan this is one of those periods when everything in her life is going so badly, along with everything out in the world that she observes and reads about, that she could almost believe in the onset of some era of plague, of universal misfortune.

  One of these terrible events (perhaps, in its way, the worst) is a call from Cathy—California, where at the time of the call it is only about nine o’clock, but midnight in New York; it is entirely out of character for Cathy to have forgotten. It is also out of character for her to be a little drunk, which almost immediately she announces that she is. With apologies, of course.