Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  That piping voice, too, is easily overheard, as it pronounces, “I’ve been reading, or rather, rereading—God, it came out while I was still at Hotchkiss—and you won’t believe this, but it’s the most absolutely perfect, wonderful novel. I am totally serious, and I am talking about The Fountainhead. The scenes in that book, the strength—”

  Unable to comment, Megan veers instead toward the bar, where she is given a double martini, a drink that she has not had for almost twenty years, since early Village days with Jackson Clay, she recalls, with a vaguely painful pang.

  “Of course I’m not really interested in films made since 1951,” is the next full sentence that reaches Megan. “My all-time favorite is The Red Shoes. What’s your favorite, darling Megan?”

  “Oh, The Informer, maybe. I guess.”

  “Oh, what an adorable Irish thing you are, dearest Megan.” And off he goes, Benny, the hottest publisher in town.

  To her horror Megan realizes that the strong drink is simply giving her a strong urge to cry.

  She decides that she will not risk talking to anyone else. She will walk around the room very slowly, but as though with some reasonable intention. Always smiling. “Making an appearance” would precisely describe what she is doing.

  “But a seven-figure paperback sale? That’s quite a bundle.”

  “My guess is he’ll never finish it.”

  “Everyone knows, they’re all dykes over there, and even those that aren’t pretend to be, including himself.”

  “But he just left William Morris.”

  “She came back from the Coast with the most heavenly new pills.”

  Megan manages to stay in that overheated, overcrowded room, so full of violent conflicting odors: perfume and the sweat of anxiety, liquors, aromatic foods, plus all the smoke from cigarettes, pipes, cigars—she endures all that, and the noise from those urgent tongues, the hundreds of them, all spouting idiocy, for almost half an hour, without giving way to any of the impulses that almost overwhelm her; she does not throw up, or cry, she does not rush out of the room.

  In a dignified way she finally leaves; outside she finds a cab quickly. From its window she gulps at air, in the rush down Fifth Avenue.

  Back in her own private, welcoming apartment she irons a few things, she sews on a button. She packs, and makes a few obligatory phone calls: breaking next week’s lunch dates, winding up business.

  At last she does call Henry, but no one answers, at his remote Carolina cabin. Megan feels that she can hear the emptiness of his house, in those echoing rings. It occurs to her to try him at the Jacobses’ house, where he well might be. But then she does not.

  She goes to bed and to sleep, having managed to think of Cathy peacefully, unsentimentally. Not having cried.

  The only thing that Megan neglects to do is to call the airport the following morning to check on the time of her flight. And, arrived at Newark, not too surprisingly it turns out that there is a two-hour delay before her plane will leave.

  Panicking, for an instant this seems to Megan the one thing too much for her to bear: two hours in the Newark airport? in this large, confused, and entirely unpromising room? But she cannot afford to panic, and with an effort she brings it under control. She looks around and finds the ticket office of her airline, at which there is another poster beckoning her to Hawaii.

  In a resolute way Megan goes up to the counter, at which, providentially, there is no line. And, a yet greater gift from fate, there is an intelligent, pleasant, and slightly shy young woman, black and plump, softly pretty. With whom, in a remarkably short time, Megan arranges to change her trip: she will fly directly to Hawaii, stopping in San Francisco only to change planes. She will spend five days on Maui, in Lahaina. Then two days in San Francisco, before coming back to New York.

  At the end of all those arrangements (which included reservations at the Pioneer, at Lahaina) Megan thanks the woman who was so helpful. In a conversational way she says, “I can hardly believe this is happening. I’d never exactly meant to go to Hawaii.”

  A slow smile. “Well, I really hope you like it there.”

  “You’ve been?”

  “Well, no.” A slower, fainter smile.

  Megan smiles back and hurries off toward her plane, which is loading now.

  36

  Megan’s flight to Hawaii goes so smoothly that she is barely aware of what is happening. At one instant they are taking off from Newark, then flying over the blood-red fall woods of northern New Jersey, and in what seems almost no time later they are sailing over the endless bright and relentlessly blue Pacific. (Or, perhaps she slept through some of that flight? She made the change in San Francisco as a somnambulist? Megan is aware of some deep, pervasive fatigue, and she wonders, Is tiredness my substitute for mourning Cathy?)

  The small monkeyish steward instructs everyone in some rudimentary Hawaiian words, all of which have a silly, baby-talk sound. He makes rather primitive sexual innuendoes, at which everyone in Megan’s vicinity laughs, a slightly hysterical combination of relief (the flight is almost over) and embarrassment at the sheer idiocy of what is being said.

  For the first time then since seeing the travel poster on Madison Avenue, Megan begins to wonder seriously at what she is doing: is it after all preposterous? Also, it occurs to her for the first time that she has no clothes for Hawaii with her, not even a bathing suit. However, the instinct that has carried her along so far remains strong; doubts do not attack her again until she has taken the small plane from Oahu to Maui, and a taxi to the Pioneer Hotel.

  A pretty boy escorts her up to her room; with an enormous iron key he opens the door. He smiles, pleased at his tip, and leaves her there.

  Megan sits alone then on the white edge of her very wide bed, under the slow, wooden-bladed fan, and she looks out through narrowly louvered windows, to palm trees, blood-red bougainvillea, and the flat blue sea. Closing her eyes against too much newness, she is simultaneously assailed by a confusion of impressions from the past few hours, like a rerun film: she resees the ghastly garish Honolulu airport, wild synthetic tourist clothes on everyone, horrible glutted souvenir shops, dolls, costumes. She sees the light plane shuddering above the shining water. Sees endless golf courses, and the tawdry little town. The lobby of the Pioneer, which is crowded with spacy, sun-bleached kids, and pale middle-aged alcoholics. And she wonders: why? why here? She thinks: I must be having some sort of breakdown. This is craziness. Nothing about where I am makes any sense.

  But, if she sits there alone, if she does nothing for long enough, Megan is aware that she will indeed break down. She will go crazy.

  In a resolute way she stands up. She opens her bag, unpacks a few things; going out to buy some clothes has to be her next step, she thinks.

  Here in Hawaii, so many time zones west of New York, it is still midafternoon—although Megan feels that she has been traveling all day, which in fact she has. It is hardly surprising that she is incredibly tired.

  But then suddenly, like a present from the recesses of her own mind, it comes to Megan (she has stopped even pretending to unpack, to be going out to shop) that somewhere she read that Jackson Clay had moved to Lahaina, and was playing some small clubs there. Clubs here.

  Pleasure at the very thought of Jackson is infinitely soothing to Megan, as though a smooth hand had touched her face; she thinks that even if she cannot get in touch with Jackson, which is highly possible, the very idea of his nearness is comforting. And she thinks too how remarkable it is that even after so much time, over fifteen years, she will feel no hesitant shyness about telephoning Jackson. Picking up the phone book, beginning to look for “Clay,” Megan could almost believe that she came here on purpose to see Jackson, to be comforted by him. (Perhaps after all there is a rational motive to this seemingly crazy trip.)

  In any case, that is what she says to Jackson, a couple of hours later—in the now wildly disordered, sweat- and dope-smelling, sexy bed.

  Exhausted beyond exhaus
tion, lying just away from him, Megan says, “You see? I came to see you. I knew you’d be here.” She reaches to touch his smooth, slightly fleshier yellow-brown chest.

  He says, “You did right to come.” Aside from having put on a little weight, Jackson is unchanged; to Megan, he is no less beautiful. As always, his wide smile involves his eyes, just barely slant; as his mouth widens, white teeth shine—in the darkening, cooling room. He adds, “But honey, you’re way too thin. I don’t think your life is right for you, there in New York. And I know. Me, I had to get out of there.”

  “That’s probably true.” Megan had meant to say something else; she had something more to tell him, but whatever it was she drifts away without having said it, her mind emptied, body drained. She drifts off into a dreamless black space. Rest. Peace.

  The next time Megan wakes up, Jackson is looking at the luminous dial of his watch; he is saying, “Holy shit, I got just ten minutes to get there.”

  But his movements remain deliberate, as he gets out of bed and reaches for clothes, very slowly putting them on.

  He stops to ask, “Baby, you sure I can’t get you something to eat?”

  Megan smiles, and then laughs, though faintly; it is hard to make a sound (they have smoked so much dope!). She feels such pleasure at his niceness, though. It seems to Megan at that moment that no one was ever so simply kind. “Oh no,” she murmurs. “I’m okay. I’ll just sleep.”

  “—lunch,” she believes he has said, as he kisses her mouth, then her breast, as he says, “This’s the only place you not too thin.”

  She would like to laugh, in a grateful, acknowledging way, but she is asleep, before Jackson is out of the room.

  The next morning, though, Cathy’s death rushes back over Megan, like a penance visited upon her for forgetting—for so long. It is overwhelming. In the hot bright white sun-flooded room, in that unreal, entirely unlikely place, she thinks of Cathy, but not Cathy as she knew her, not her brightest, funniest friend. She thinks of Cathy dying, for all that time, alone in her white hospital room, everything smelling of drugs, of death. She hears Cathy’s voice, the familiar, now silenced voice of Cathy’s letters, saying, “If only they would let me go home. Actually any home would do. I am not ‘more comfortable’ here. I hate doctors, everything they do to me. Please come out here. I need to see you.”

  All those words and more play and replay themselves in Megan’s inner ear, in Cathy’s wry, self-deprecating voice—until in a blind way Megan rushes up and out of bed, she gets into her foolish New York silk shirt and skirt. She goes out into the bright flowery air.

  She has breakfast—she eats enormously.

  She buys a bathing suit, some white pants, a couple of shirts. And then it is time to come back to the Pioneer. To meet Jackson.

  To get back into bed with him.

  For that is what they instantly do, all those five days—a time that Megan later sees as a time of true derangement; she was having a breakdown, of some sort, after all. And so was Jackson, he was burning himself out on drugs.

  They make love and smoke dope, and when at some point Megan tells Jackson that she does not feel quite right, quite well, he gives her a small green pill. Which sends her off into crazy dreams: some terrifying, with weird, horrifying landscapes, a Doré Inferno.

  Returned to “reality,” her bed in the Pioneer Hotel, in Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, and Jackson Clay—reality turns out to be as crazy as her dreams. Endless fucking, an endless orgasm, that seems to hollow her out.

  In the rare lucid intervals when she is able to see Jackson with anything like clarity, Megan notes that he does not look well, really. His very wide-spaced, barely slanted eyes are reddened, and smaller in their surrounding fatty flesh, and his skin is darker, a murky yellow brown. His hands shake. She does not dare ask if anything is seriously wrong; the truth is that if there is she does not want to know—not now, she could not bear it.

  She does, though, ask Jackson what the green pills are.

  He laughs and cups her breasts, and he kisses her before he says, “They just called greens, round here. They like some native potion.” He laughs again, an infinitely affectionate sound—but the affection is for the pills as much as for herself, Megan feels.

  She says, “I really don’t think I want to take any more.”

  “Baby, that’s all right. You just don’t.”

  What Megan most would like is just to hear Jackson play again; she realizes this after two or three days of only sex, high doped-up screwing, crazy naps. But Jackson’s music was what drew her so violently to him, at first, all those years ago. On 52d Street.

  And so, Jackson takes her to the club where he sometimes plays, late at night—her last night in Hawaii.

  The club itself is ghastly. Although in a dim way Megan has been aware of where she is, Hawaii, she was not prepared for the parodic Hawaiian-ness of that place: the horrid profusion of gaudy, hideous flowers, the cruelly phallic birds of paradise, the hideous red plastic-looking anthurium, the febrile orchids. And the sick-sweet smells of other flowers, fetid, lurking in that small dark overheated cellar room. Even, as Megan and Jackson descend the narrow stairs, down into the smoke, there is horrible “Hawaiian” music playing, electric ukuleles; and on the small stage a very fat, very dark woman, topless, is dancing in a hula skirt, her big breasts swinging wild.

  It is horrible; as in one of her green pill nightmares Megan, though seated at an inconspicuous corner table with Jackson (at least she does know where she is, and with whom), Megan believes, or feels, that that dark fat undulating woman is herself. There is fat dark old Megan, dancing—dancing in Hawaii, among sickening smells of alien, putrefying flowers.

  But then she is not sitting with Jackson, she is there seated alone, and the dark fat dancing woman has disappeared. But up there on the stage is Jackson, with his horn, and behind him a small upright piano, someone playing, and a big bass, a bass player standing there, providing a gentle rhythmic background for Jackson, who is playing: his fantastic powerful always new sounds! his wild inventions, lovely lyric sweetness, his pure sounds of sex.

  Suddenly sane, Megan thinks, as she listens, I’m really all right, then. In some way Jackson is okay, and so am I. Her eyes fill, at her awareness that he is playing for her; his horn slides toward her, his wide dark brown eyes on her, he is talking to her, saying everything.

  And that is the moment that her trip was all about, she is later, slowly, to realize. She came there to hear Jackson play.

  The next morning she does think of Cathy again, but now she is able to think of Cathy alive, Cathy brighter and funnier than anyone. No longer dying.

  To break the flight back, Megan has, as planned, a twenty-four-hour layover in San Francisco, an expensive room at the St. Francis, which overlooks not Union Square but a curious concrete courtyard, with a small fountain and some small plumy ferns. That look gives her an odd sensation of being already back in New York—or that San Francisco has at last become New York.

  Bracing herself, she dials the number that she has for Mrs. Piscetti, Cathy’s mother. But the phone rings and rings, and no one answers.

  Inwardly promising herself to try again, Megan goes out for a walk.

  On Geary Street, as she passes the theaters, she sees that in one of them Nicaragua, one of Adam’s greatest successes, is currently playing. Thinking of Adam in a friendly way, she smiles, and continues her walk, turning upward toward Nob Hill.

  Back in the hotel, very tired, Megan decides that she will not even call her own parents, but that decision somehow shocks her, and instead she dials the familiar number.

  The phone rings for a long time as Megan thinks, Well, of course, Florence is off carhopping and Harry is off—somewhere. Just what her father does on her mother’s work nights is something that Megan has not considered before, and now she has barely time to, before Florence answers.

  “Hello?” Florence sounds muffled, distant, or sick? But Florence is never sick.

  “
It’s me, Megan.” And Megan tries to explain: between planes, hardly any time. As usual, she notes to herself, she is making excuses, when in fact her mother has asked nothing of her.

  But then Florence does ask something. “I’d give just anything to see you now,” she says, in an almost pleading, unfamiliar way. “We could talk—”

  “I know, I do wish we could,” agrees Megan, meaning: I know I’ve never talked to you, and it may be time. “But now I just can’t, I’m burned out, and I have to get back,” she says. “I’ll call you from New York.”

  “Well, that just might be the very best thing—a long-distance gab can be a real treat.” The old Florence—perky, folksy—and perhaps pretending? Megan resolves to call her soon, for a long conversation.

  She dials Mrs. Piscetti’s number again, and still gets no answer. She concludes that they must be away.

  She orders dinner in her room, with a good bottle of California wine.

  She writes a long letter to Jackson, which she then tears up.

  And the next day she takes an early plane to New York, Oakland to Newark, again.