by Alice Adams
Close up, even in that darkish bar, Hugh turned out to be somewhat less young than they at first had thought; still, he was considerably younger than they were, and his general air was boyish—to Alexandra, privately, he remained “the young blond.” As they exchanged names and certain identifying facts—home bases, previous trips to Mexico, next destinations—professions were brought out last, and Hugh seemed impressed by theirs: a lawyer and a scholar, of Greek! He was very pleased at Allen’s guess as to tennis for himself.
“Allen’s terrifically intuitive,” explained Alexandra.
“Oh, I believe you!” A flash of teeth.
“Mostly I’m very observant.” Dry Allen.
They passed a pleasant, noncommittal evening together, going off early to their separate rooms.
And, the next morning, there was Hugh, arriving for breakfast at the exact moment of their arrival.
Unlike either Allen or Alexandra, Hugh was an intensely physical person, a man much at home in his body, exuding animal energy. He even looked at things in a total, physical way, as animals do, all his muscles at attention, along with his depthless, clear blue eyes. On their one planned excursion together, in a rented car, out to the ruins at Monte Albán, the ancient pyramids, instead of looking at the stones Alexandra mostly watched Hugh, as he paced and bent and stopped to look, turned and bent down again. (And Allen watched Alexandra, watching.)
And their odd synchroneity continued. Even when Allen and Alexandra slept somewhat late and were late coming in to breakfast, there would be Hugh, saying ruefully that he had overslept. They laughed about it, this coincidence of inner timing, but even as they did so Alexandra felt a tiny chill of fear: suppose they should come into a room, as they surely would, sooner or later, and not find Hugh? Coming into the bar and finding him there at night, smiling and standing up at the sight of them, saying, “This is my first Margarita, honest”—coming on Hugh in that way became for Alexandra like finding a sudden brilliant light, in anticipated darkness.
Now they are drinking what are probably their last Margaritas, in this huge, dingy, crowded area, among their own and other people’s piles of luggage, these somewhat unlikely, not quite friends (although not unlikely to the mostly shabby Mexicans who are with them in the waiting room, who stare and find it perfectly reasonable that these three Hollywood-looking Americans should be together).
In a summing-up way Hugh says, “Well, it certainly was lucky for me, running into you folks down there.”
“Oh, lucky for us!” Allen responds very quickly, with a lively smile.
“Oh, lucky!” Alexandra echoes, her own smile a little uncertain.
Hugh’s face is bright as, having covered that topic, he moves on to more urgent matters. “I guess planes are always late getting out of here?” he questions. “No counting on schedules?”
Allen answers, “Probably not. Schedules are, uh, almost irrelevant.”
Hugh’s plane for Ixtapa was originally scheduled to leave an hour after that of Allen and Alexandra for Mérida; however, both schedules have continuously changed, so that now the question of who leaves when is quite “up in the air,” as Allen has put it, to a dutiful smile from Alexandra, a brief but appreciative chuckle from Hugh.
Now, though, as they regard the shifting numbers on the elevated blackboard, it appears that Hugh will leave first. Alexandra has all along known that this would be the case.
And, finally, his plane is announced. Boarding time.
In a suddenly awkward cluster the three of them stand up, not quite facing each other.
Allen, as he always uncontrollably does when ill at ease, begins to talk. “Well, I hope your tournament—this short flight—not too late,” he says, almost unheard in the general mounting confusion of people moving toward a just forming, straggling line, Spanish voices raised in prolonged farewells, bodies momentarily clutched in parting embraces.
Hugh grasps Allen’s hand, and presses it for an instant. What he indistinctly says is “Swell.”
Turning to Alexandra, so large and helpless, Hugh seems to see or simply to feel some nuance that moves him, somehow. Quickly bending toward her, he kisses her lightly on each cheek (a most un-Hugh-like gesture, Allen thinks) as he says, “Like the French! Well, Alexandra, so long!” and he turns and walks quickly, jauntily, into the crowd, toward the now moving line, in the huge and dingy, barely illuminated room.
Leaving them there.
Molly’s Dog
Accustomed to extremes of mood, which she experienced less as “swings” than as plunges, or more rarely as soarings, Molly Harper, a newly retired screenwriter, was nevertheless quite overwhelmed by the blackness—the horror, really, with which, one dark pre-dawn hour, she viewed a minor trip, a jaunt from San Francisco to Carmel, to which she had very much looked forward. It was to be a weekend, simply, at an inn where in fact she had often stayed before, with various lovers (Molly’s emotional past had been strenuous). This time she was to travel with Sandy Norris, an old non-lover friend, who owned a bookstore. (Sandy usually had at least a part-time lover of his own, one in a series of nice young men.)
Before her film job, and her move to Los Angeles, Molly had been a poet, a good one—even, one year, a Yale Younger Poet. But she was living, then, from hand to mouth, from one idiot job to another. (Sandy was a friend from that era; they began as neighbors in a shabby North Beach apartment building, now long-since demolished.) As she had approached middle age, though, being broke all the time seemed undignified, if not downright scary. It wore her down, and she grabbed at the film work and moved down to L.A. Some years of that life were wearing in another way, she found, and she moved from Malibu back up to San Francisco, with a little saved money, and her three beautiful, cross old cats. And hopes for a new and calmer life. She meant to start seriously writing again.
In her pre-trip waking nightmare, though, which was convincing in the way that such an hour’s imaginings always are (one sees the truth, and sees that any sunnier ideas are chimerical, delusions) at three, or four a.m., Molly pictured the two of them, as they would be in tawdry, ridiculous Carmel: herself, a scrawny sun-dried older woman, and Sandy, her wheezing, chain-smoking fat queer friend. There would be some silly awkwardness about sleeping arrangements, and instead of making love they would drink too much.
And, fatally, she thought of another weekend, in that same inn, years back: she remembered entering one of the cabins with a lover, and as soon as he, the lover, had closed the door they had turned to each other and kissed, had laughed and hurried off to bed. Contrast enough to make her nearly weep—and she knew, too, at four in the morning, that her cherished view of a meadow, and the river, the sea, would now be blocked by condominiums, or something.
This trip, she realized too late, at dawn, was to represent a serious error in judgment, one more in a lifetime of dark mistakes. It would weigh down and quite possibly sink her friendship with Sandy, and she put a high value on friendship. Their one previous lapse, hers and Sandy’s, which occurred when she stopped smoking and he did not (according to Sandy she had been most unpleasant about it, and perhaps she had been), had made Molly extremely unhappy.
But, good friends as she and Sandy were, why on earth a weekend together? The very frivolousness with which this plan had been hit upon seemed ominous; simply, Sandy had said that funnily enough he had never been to Carmel, and Molly had said that she knew a nifty place to stay. And so, why not? they said. A long time ago, when they both were poor, either of them would have given anything for such a weekend (though not with each other) and perhaps that was how things should be, Molly judged, at almost five. And she thought of all the poor lovers, who could never go anywhere at all, who quarrel from sheer claustrophobia.
Not surprisingly, the next morning Molly felt considerably better, although imperfectly rested. But with almost her accustomed daytime energy she set about getting ready for the trip, doing several things simultaneously, as was her tendency: packing clothes and breakfast f
ood (the cabins were equipped with little kitchens, she remembered), straightening up her flat and arranging the cats’ quarters on her porch.
By two in the afternoon, the hour established for their departure, Molly was ready to go, if a little sleepy; fatigue had begun to cut into her energy. Well, she was not twenty any more, or thirty or forty, even, she told herself, tolerantly.
Sandy telephoned at two-fifteen. In his raspy voice he apologized; his assistant had been late getting in, he still had a couple of things to do. He would pick her up at three, three-thirty at the latest.
Irritating: Molly had sometimes thought that Sandy’s habitual lateness was his way of establishing control; at other times she thought that he was simply tardy, as she herself was punctual (but why?). However, wanting a good start to their weekend, she told him that that was really okay; it did not matter what time they got to Carmel, did it?
She had begun a rereading of Howards End, which she planned to take along, and now she found that the book was even better than she remembered it as being, from the wonderful assurance of the first sentence, “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister—” Sitting in her sunny window, with her sleeping cats, Molly managed to be wholly absorbed in her reading—not in waiting for Sandy, nor in thinking, especially, of Carmel.
Just past four he arrived at her door: Sandy, in his pressed blue blazer, thin hair combed flat, his reddish face bright. Letting him in, brushing cheeks in the kiss of friends, Molly thought how nice he looked, after all: his kind blue eyes, sad witty mouth.
He apologized for lateness. “I absolutely had to take a shower,” he said, with his just-crooked smile.
“Well, it’s really all right. I’d begun Howards End again. I’d forgotten how wonderful it is.”
“Oh well. Forster.”
Thus began one of the rambling conversations, more bookish gossip than “literary,” which formed, perhaps, the core of their friendship, its reliable staple. In a scattered way they ran about, conversationally, among favorite old novels, discussing characters not quite as intimates but certainly as contemporaries, as alive. Was Margaret Schlegel somewhat prudish? Sandy felt that she was; Molly took a more sympathetic view of her shyness. Such talk, highly pleasurable and reassuring to them both, carried Molly and Sandy, in his small green car, past the dull first half of their trip: down the Bayshore Highway, past San Jose and Gilroy, and took them to where (Molly well remembered) it all became beautiful. Broad stretches of bright green early summer fields; distant hills, grayish-blue; and then islands of sweeping dark live oaks.
At the outskirts of Carmel itself a little of her pre-dawn apprehension came back to Molly, as they drove past those imitation Cotswold cottages, fake-Spanish haciendas, or bright little gingerbread houses. And the main drag, Ocean Avenue, with its shops, shops—all that tweed and pewter, “imported” jams and tea. More tourists than ever before, of course, in their bright synthetic tourist clothes, their bulging shopping bags—Japanese, French, German, English tourists, taking home their awful wares.
“You turn left next, on Dolores,” Molly instructed, and then heard herself begin nervously to babble. “Of course if the place has really been wrecked we don’t have to stay for two nights, do we. We could go on down to Big Sur, or just go home, for heaven’s sake.”
“In any case, sweetie, if they’ve wrecked it, it won’t be your fault.” Sandy laughed, and wheezed, and coughed. He had been smoking all the way down, which Molly had succeeded in not mentioning.
Before them, then, was their destination: the inn, with its clump of white cottages. And the meadow. So far, nothing that Molly could see had changed. No condominiums. Everything as remembered.
They were given the cabin farthest from the central office, the one nearest the meadow, and the river and the sea. A small bedroom, smaller kitchen, and in the living room a studio couch. Big windows, and that view.
“Obviously, the bedroom is yours,” Sandy magnanimously declared, plunking down his bag on the studio couch.
“Well,” was all for the moment that Molly could say, as she put her small bag down in the bedroom, and went into the kitchen with the sack of breakfast things. From the little window she looked out to the meadow, saw that it was pink now with wildflowers, in the early June dusk. Three large brown cows were grazing out there, near where the river must be. Farther out she could see the wide, gray-white strip of beach, and the dark blue, turbulent sea. On the other side of the meadow were soft green hills, on which—yes, one might have known—new houses had arisen. But somehow inoffensively; they blended. And beyond the beach was the sharp, rocky silhouette of Point Lobos, crashing waves, leaping foam. All blindingly undiminished: a miraculous gift.
Sandy came into the kitchen, bearing bottles. Beaming Sandy, saying, “Mol, this is the most divine place. We must celebrate your choice. Immediately.”
They settled in the living room with their drinks, with that view before them: the almost imperceptibly graying sky, the meadow, band of sand, the sea.
And, as she found that she often did, with Sandy, Molly began to say what had just come into her mind. “You wouldn’t believe how stupid I was, as a very young woman,” she prefaced, laughing a little. “Once I came down here with a lawyer, from San Francisco, terribly rich. Quite famous, actually.” (The same man with whom she had so quickly rushed off to bed, on their arrival—as she did not tell Sandy.) “Married, of course. The first part of my foolishness. And I was really broke at the time—broke, I was poor as hell, being a typist to support my poetry habit. You remember. But I absolutely insisted on bringing all the food for that stolen, illicit weekend, can you imagine? What on earth was I trying to prove? Casseroles of crabmeat, endive for salads. Honestly, how crazy I was!”
Sandy laughed agreeably, and remarked a little plaintively that for him she had only brought breakfast food. But he was not especially interested in that old, nutty view of her, Molly saw—and resolved that that would be her last “past” story. Customarily they did not discuss their love affairs.
She asked, “Shall we walk out on the beach tomorrow?”
“But of course.”
Later they drove to a good French restaurant, where they drank a little too much wine, but they did not get drunk. And their two reflections, seen in a big mirror across the tiny room, looked perfectly all right: Molly, gray-haired, dark-eyed and thin, in her nice flowered silk dress; and Sandy, tidy and alert, a small plump man, in a neat navy blazer.
After dinner they drove along the beach, the cold white sand ghostly in the moonlight. Past enormous millionaire houses, and blackened windbent cypresses. Past the broad sloping river beach, and then back to their cabin, with its huge view of stars.
In her narrow bed, in the very small but private bedroom, Molly thought again, for a little while, of that very silly early self of hers: how eagerly self-defeating she had been—how foolish, in love. But she felt a certain tolerance now for that young person, herself, and she even smiled as she thought of all that intensity, that driven waste of emotion. In many ways middle age is preferable, she thought.
• • •
In the morning, they met the dog.
After breakfast they had decided to walk on the river beach, partly since Molly remembered that beach as being far less populated than the main beach was. Local families brought their children there. Or their dogs, or both.
Despite its visibility from their cabin, the river beach was actually a fair distance off, and so instead of walking there they drove, for maybe three or four miles. They parked and got out, and were pleased to see that no one else was there. Just a couple of dogs, who seemed not to be there together: a plumy, oversized friendly Irish setter, who ran right over to Molly and Sandy; and a smaller, long-legged, thin-tailed dark gray dog, with very tall ears—a shy young dog, who kept her distance, running a wide circle around them, after the setter had ambled off somewhere else. As they neared the water, the gray dog sidled over to sniff at them, her ears fla
ttened, seeming to indicate a lowering of suspicion. She allowed herself to be patted, briefly; she seemed to smile.
Molly and Sandy walked near the edge of the water; the dog ran ahead of them.
The day was glorious, windy, bright blue, and perfectly clear; they could see the small pines and cypresses that struggled to grow from the steep sharp rocks of Point Lobos, could see fishing boats far out on the deep azure ocean. From time to time the dog would run back in their direction, and then she would rush toward a receding wave, chasing it backward in a seeming happy frenzy. Assuming her (then) to live nearby, Molly almost enviously wondered at her sheer delight in what must be familiar. The dog barked at each wave, and ran after every one as though it were something new and marvelous.
Sandy picked up a stick and threw it forward. The dog ran after the stick, picked it up and shook it several times, and then, in a tentative way, she carried it back toward Sandy and Molly—not dropping it, though. Sandy had to take it from her mouth. He threw it again, and the dog ran off in that direction.
The wind from the sea was strong, and fairly chilling. Molly wished she had a warmer sweater, and she chided herself: she could have remembered that Carmel was cold, along with her less practical memories. She noted that Sandy’s ears were red, and saw him rub his hands together. But she thought, I hope he won’t want to leave soon, it’s so beautiful. And such a nice dog. (Just that, at that moment: a very nice dog.)
The dog, seeming for the moment to have abandoned the stick game, rushed at a just-alighted flock of sea gulls, who then rose from the wet waves’ edge and with what must have been (to a dog) a most gratifying flapping of wings, with cluckings of alarm.
Molly and Sandy were now close to the mouth of the river, the gorge cut into the beach, as water emptied into the sea. Impossible to cross—although Molly could remember when one could, when she and whatever companion had jumped easily over some water, and had then walked much farther down the beach. Now she and Sandy simply stopped there, and regarded the newish houses that were built up on the nearby hills. And they said to each other: