by Alice Adams
Not crying now, her voice a little sharp, Megan only asks, “Lavinia, do you have any idea at all how totally out of style you are?”
Lavinia is working up to a light, careless laugh, which she will follow by saying, Well, somehow I never thought you’d be quite the person to give out instructions on style.
But it is too late; there is the click, and Megan is gone (for good, as things turn out; that conversation is to be their last).
And Lavinia is left to laugh all alone at the utter hilariousness of a reprimand to her, from Megan Greene, on the subject of style.
• • •
Lavinia does not come down to Fredericksburg again until the following March, and then, once more, her visit is for a recovery, of sorts. This time she has even brought a nurse, an Englishwoman, Miss Riggs, whom Lavinia calls Riggsy—striving for a somewhat warmer, cozier tone, or perhaps to make her sound even more English.
She has been through a lot though, Lavinia has; her poor face is still all swollen and black and blue and yellow, the most horrible bruises, but all that will disappear, her doctor has promised, along with the tiny scars behind her ears. She looks perfectly ghastly, so fortunate that no one but Riggsy is there to see her. However, even Riggsy has a disapproving look, Lavinia has noticed. Odd, in a nurse, who must have seen almost everything; and she wonders, is Riggsy just possibly “gay?”
Her face does not hurt, however, as awful as it looks; it just feels uncomfortably tight. But her breasts do hurt, the most frightful pains there, constantly. For which Riggsy will not give her quite enough drugs; it is really sadistic, Lavinia decides; nurses clearly become immune to pain, they do not care.
Riggsy is large and plain and absolutely shapeless, “my English pudding,” as Lavinia has described her on the phone to a New York friend (she hopes, out of the hearing of Riggsy). Lying back, in such pain! among all her lace and linen, in her bright room full of roses, spring flowers, Lavinia in an idle way wonders just who it is that Riggsy reminds her so much of, and then, of course: it comes to her that Riggsy is Peg all over, a big square unattractive woman whose laugh is too loud, who is (probably) a lesbian.
And who (probably) does not approve of beautiful rich women. Nor of plastic surgery.
The following June, Lavinia and Potter decide to have their thirtieth wedding anniversary party down in Fredericksburg—quixotic, in the view of many of their friends; they have almost never been known to spend any time down there together. However, Lavinia just laughs, and she exaggerates the trace of a Southern accent that is always somewhere in her voice, as she tells her friends, “It’ll do you Yankees good to get a touch of Virginia air in June. You just wait till you smell some real home-grown gardenias, and lilacs.”
And (so typical of Lavinia, everyone feels) it all works out to perfection, a great deal of the perfection having to do with Lavinia’s incredible efforts, her engineering skills. Guests are happily distributed between the Hay-Adams, in Washington, and the Princess Anne, in Fredericksburg. Lavinia has let it be known that she is just not having any house guests; thus no one’s feelings are hurt, no friends are perceived as being more intimate than other friends.
And all of Lavinia’s efforts are rewarded with a perfect June day. Soft, clear, and blue, and everything is in bloom, the lavender wisteria drooping heavily, sensually, everywhere; the roses, azaleas, honeysuckle. And Lavinia’s terrace is literally a bower of potted flowers, all at their most hothouse perfect pitch of loveliness.
Lavinia herself feels quite wonderful, even; she looks better than she has for years, and everyone says so.
She and Potter have an early breakfast that day, just coffee and English muffins and a lot of brewer’s yeast pills, for strength—on the terrace, alone together. And that day Potter looks perfectly all right, not red or swollen, not that hungover look that Lavinia has come to dread, and to hate. He does not say anything mean, as he sometimes does. No nasty cracks about marriage, nothing about how much all this is costing. Nothing has been said about a present either, but that is perfectly all right: Lavinia can pick out her own present later.
In fact Potter hardly speaks at all, at breakfast, which under the circumstances is really quite a relief, Lavinia having so much on her mind.
In all of that long and very strenuous (but wonderfully rewarding) day, Lavinia makes only two mistakes, and both quite unavoidable, actually.
The first mistake is opening a letter from the agency from which she got poor Riggsy (such an error, all around: she was forced to send Riggsy away a week earlier than planned, she simply could not stand that long fat white face around any longer). And so, Lavinia might have known that the letter would contain no pleasant news, or information; she could so easily have simply put off reading it until the next day. However, she did not put it off; she opened and scanned the letter, and instantly realized that she should not have: poor Riggsy had died of an overdose of sleeping pills.
There was nothing accusatory in the letter, of course not; they know who pays for these overpriced nurses. The agency simply wondered if Mrs. Cobb had noticed, had observed, had thought—well, of course she had not, had nothing to say.
Lavinia quickly digests this most unpleasant, really awful news; she decides at once that she will simply not answer the letter—well, why should she? The woman is dead, isn’t she? Too depressing, but she will simply put it altogether out of her mind, as soon as possible, and that is what she does: Lavinia’s control over her own thoughts has always been admirable. She stops thinking entirely about poor Riggsy, but not before she has had this curious idea: Lavinia thinks, Old Riggs did exactly what I had planned to do, she did it for me, so that now I don’t have to. Ridiculous? Well, really. And then she forgets all about Ms. Riggs. For good.
Lavinia’s second mistake is in answering the telephone when it rings, about eleven thirty that morning. Crazy of her, with all the help around, and the help for the help, but Lavinia does, she answers the phone herself and she finds, at the other end, her daughter, who is in Washington, of all places. Of course Amy is quite unaware that it is her parents’ anniversary, Amy would never keep up with anything that reasonable, that adult, that “square.”
“Well, darling, what an absolutely lovely surprise. Oh, we’re just down here for the weekend, a sort of impulse. Well no, angel, it would not be very convenient for you and your friend to come over, it just wouldn’t. Not today. We do have a few friends around, and it just would not work out, they’re just not your type. You don’t mind my being just a little frank? No, Megan Greene is not here, and actually she was rather rude about your friend’s poetry, I thought I told you last fall, or whenever it was. And actually I’ve heard a rumor that her agency is not doing well at all, so I’d just forget all about her if I were you. No, I’ve never heard of the Tabbard Inn. Well, N Street, near Dupont, that’s certainly a good address, it must be a very nice place. Amy darling, if you’re really that hard up I’ll get a check in an envelope right away, and I’ll send it to you by one of our guests. How’s that? a mysterious stranger with money. Someone who’s staying at the Hay-Adams, which is very near you, will deliver it to the Tabbard Inn tonight. Well, darling, that’s just the best I can do, possibly, and to tell you the truth I thought I was being rather hyperefficient. You know you’re not the most appreciative little girl in the world, Amy dear. Oh God, Amy, Jesus, shit—of course I know you’re not little.”
Fortunately Lavinia is so busy that she is able to recover from that conversation almost instantly, and without the headache that communications from Amy usually afflict her with. She only briefly wonders, as always, Why? Why huge-breasted acne-scarred Amy, why Amy, for my daughter?
But she writes out a check (not quite as much as Amy asked for, no point in spoiling her even further); she puts it in an envelope and she remembers to give it to friends who are going back into Washington tonight, at some time or other, after the party.
During all that day, some dream or story or perhaps a literary ref
erence, something she read long ago keeps running in and out of Lavinia’s mind. It has something to do with shoes. She herself is wearing the most beautiful red kid sandals, perfect with the flowers on her dress.
And then sometime during dessert, the peaches floating in champagne, she does remember: of course, she has thought of “The Red Shoes of the Duchess,” at the end of Guermantes Way. Lavinia smiles happily, remembering her old awed affection for Proust. She has always meant to reread him, and now she surely will.
In every particular, her party is a most tremendous success.
39
Hanging up from her conversation with Lavinia, that November afternoon, for a while Megan simply stands there by the window of her small, impossibly crowded office. She looks down into the gray bleak windy street, into light, barely visible flurries of snow, the season’s first. In the sudden, unanticipated cold the pedestrians walk more stiffly, braced against wind, tightened up; they keep their hands in their pockets, chins thrust down into collars.
I can hardly bear the thought of winter, Megan is thinking. And next summer I will be fifty.
And: How could Henry? she thinks. How could he? Lavinia, of all women—all people in the world. The person I most would mind about.
The thought of Henry “with” Lavinia is making her almost physically sick, and her own conversation with Lavinia, played and replayed in her mind, is an endless wound.
And, to make what is already intolerable worse, she is supposed to see Henry that night. He is coming up from Washington to see her, what would have been, without Lavinia, a perfectly natural arrangement between them: Henry driving to Washington for meetings of some sort, the next day driving on up to New York.
(Or, Megan now miserably, horribly thinks, perhaps he has stayed over in Fredericksburg before? I am only now finding out? I am the “last to know.”)
• • •
Of course she could call it off; she could even call Henry now and say that she knows, she never wants to see him again. Henry is visiting some old left friends up on Riverside Drive in the afternoon; she knows how to get in touch with him (she thinks!). But—but; in her present state of mind an evening alone with her thoughts seems almost worse than the forthcoming evening with Henry will be. Besides, she is too old to be so cowardly; she and Henry have had a fairly adult connection, they have in their way been true friends. She has got to face him. Nor can she pretend not to know, which would be another easy way out (the way that Nixon so often liked to boast about not taking).
At least Leslie is out for the day. Thank God, no Leslie to almost bump into, in their increasingly cramped, sometimes suffocating, too intimate space (or is that simply how Megan feels, sometimes?). Leslie has gone up to Connecticut to see—to see whom? Someone important, a writer; Leslie had met her and wanted to go—but who? Megan knows perfectly well who it was that Leslie went to see—and she cannot remember. She is losing her mind; there are flurries of snow in her brain, like a TV screen, forgotten in the night.
Furthermore, on this worst of all days, she is quite hungover, not so much from too much booze as from too little sleep, too many rooms full of smoke, along with all the evening’s too rich food, and wine. Her nerves feel scraped down, raw; her eyes are sore, her stomach uneasy. Her state is not surprising, nor are any of her symptoms remarkable, in view of the night before: for Megan this included a large hotel cocktail party; an uptown bookstore reading, with champagne; a heavy restaurant dinner, French (pre-nouvelle cuisine), oversauced, overcreamed. And as though all that were not far more than enough, Megan then went on to a SoHo loft party, to celebrate someone’s (dear God, again, please, whose?) new book, where she drank one very tiny glass of brandy—which could have been poisoned: at this moment Megan feels that indeed it was.
The fall publishing season, then, was in full swing, despite the economic uncertainties of the late seventies—and it was the sort of evening that makes Megan hate herself, and hate her work. She is sure she must be insane to go through all that.
Biff frequently tells her that she is in fact insane. “You simply don’t have to do that anymore,” he lectures her. “Do you really believe that John will die of hurt feelings if you don’t show up at his reading? Or Betty, if you don’t go along to some ludicrous restaurant bash? You don’t catch Linda at any of those amateur nights, and I can tell you that I’ve heard from someone who’d know that she now makes almost three hundred G’s a year.”
“Linda’s a different kind of agent. Leslie’s going to grow up to be Linda.”
“Well, she’s certainly chez Elaine more than often enough. But dopey Megan, I know, you’re the old-style maternal sort. But couldn’t you modify those instincts just a little?”
“Biff, I am not maternal. Why do you have to call just being nice to some people by a word like that, putting me down?”
“Oh, Meg, you’re so liberated.”
“Of course I am, I always have been, sort of.”
“Well, in that case I wish you’d liberate yourself from some of your imaginary obligations. Let Leslie take over more. God knows she’d like to.”
He is quite right of course, and Megan laughs, and thinks that really she likes Biff better than anyone she knows.
Are gay men really nicer than so-called straight men? At times this has seemed a possibility.
Henry too, Megan has to admit, has pointed out that she expends herself in ways that she does not have to, and does not enjoy, in connection with her work.
“But what else would I do?” Megan has asked him.
And that of course is the problem, to which neither Biff nor Henry nor Megan herself has an answer. She is working too hard at work at which she is only moderately successful—she is not good at contracts, negotiations, all that, in the way that Barbara was, and increasingly she leaves such things to Leslie; other young women, agents (Linda), are better at what she does.
In a word, she finds her work unsatisfying; is this, then, her midlife crisis—is that what she is actually facing?
And, are some of her symptoms (today’s, especially) possibly menopausal? Would that explain the rage that she feels, that no sight of snow or swirling wind can cool, at the thought of Henry spending the night with, making love to, fucking Lavinia? Is this burning anger merely further proof that she is a middle-aged woman, is almost fifty?
Megan’s fury then shifts to that diagnosis itself, to those labels, so useful for dismissing the complaints of women. I would be furious if I were thirty-five, she thinks, with absolute certainty. Or sixteen, for God’s sake. What Henry has done, what I feel about it has nothing to do with my hormonal condition, but rather with my whole life, my history.
Looking down at the flurries of snow, now thicker, coming faster, a fine white cloud in the lowering darkness, Megan thinks, Oh good. Henry won’t be able to get downtown. No cabs. Nothing.
However, Henry not only arrives at Megan’s apartment on time, he arrives with their dinner, cartons and cartons of Italian delicacies from their favorite delicatessen, things to be variously heated or cooled, somehow dealt with, put somewhere. And two bottles of wine, a chilled white, a red to be opened, to breathe. “I wasn’t sure about getting out to a restaurant,” Henry explains, looking kind and tired, his familiar look. “I had one hellish time getting a cab,” he adds.
Guilt offerings, Megan is thinking, and, with some pain. Of course he is tired, a night like that, and then a long day’s drive.
However, fussing with all that food gives them something to do. It is soothing, even, to Megan, who for a moment allows herself the possibility of not confronting Henry with her knowledge; she thinks of the balm of an ordinary evening with him, the good food and wine and random, easy talk. The familiar foolish jokes and distant reliable good music, from NCN. Her clean and comforting bed. Love, if not explicit, simply present, in messages from warm skin and nerves, from flesh to answering flesh.
But that is impossible. Now out of the question. Out.
Do men actu
ally become handsomer with age, or is that a culturally determined view? In the popular mind, do gray hair and lines make them distinguished, whereas women simply age? Megan believes this to be true, one more inequity. However, it is surely true (aesthetically, objectively) that Henry has never looked better. Once a gangling, too tall, nearsighted young man, as he approaches sixty he looks very good indeed. Somewhere along the line his hair has stopped receding; remaining thick, it has turned silvery gray, a heavy ruff, framing that high and noble-looking brow. Without glasses (he has taken them off, being so at home, so familiar with Megan’s kitchen), his eyes are always beautiful, dark and wide, the thick lashes darker in contrast to gray hair. These days no one would think of giraffes when they think of Henry.
It is truly enraging to Megan at that moment that Henry should look so good, only kindness and intelligence in evidence on his face.
“Someone drank your wine.” Henry laughs as he says this, pouring more into her glass.
It is true; by habit a slow sipper of wine, Megan has gulped down her first glass in not many minutes. Faintly she says, “I guess so.”
“This snow reminded me of the time we went up to the Cloisters, and it snowed,” Henry is saying. “Remember? Another November, I think. But was it last year, or the year before?”
Abruptly, then: “Lavinia called me today,” Megan tells him. “She wanted me to know that you, uh, spent the night with her.”
Across the small table, the dishes of exotically, expensively seasoned foods, they stare at each other. Megan and Henry, lovers, now instant enemies.
It is Henry who blushes. “Well,” he says. And then, “What an odd thing for her to do.”