The Stories of Alice Adams (v5)

by Alice Adams

  “Not too.” Another smile.

  We had both begun to sound like Judson, I thought just then; our speech was as stripped down, as minimal as his was.

  Elizabeth next asked, “Judson called you?”

  “Uh, yes. He did.” She coughed. “He will come also?”

  “He said if he could. He’s really busy there, I think.”

  Her eyes blazed at me then, gray fire, for a full moment before she spoke, and when she did her damaged voice was wild. “He must come. You will call to him,” she said.

  I was too pummelled by violent emotion to understand, quite. I only said, “Of course. Tomorrow.”

  Elizabeth smiled, and she lay back and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, after a short moment, it was as though that passionate exchange had not taken place. She said, “Ah, Minerva. Now you must tell me all about your life.”

  Much later, Judson in his way explained, or nearly. “Yes, in love. I think we were,” he said. “But never lovers.”

  “But, why not?”

  He smiled, not looking at me but at some private interior vision, probably Elizabeth. “Too risky, for one thing. A good friendship at stake.”

  By then of course Elizabeth had died, and Judson and I in our own curious ways had “fallen in love” and married. Which is what we both thought quite possibly she had wanted us to do. In a sense I had been “offered up” to Judson, that first November: Elizabeth’s insistence that I visit her just then, her always making Judson walk home with me. Perhaps she thought that if he and I became lovers she would love him less? I don’t know, surely not, nor does Judson. It is only clear that Elizabeth was an immeasurably subtle woman, and a passionate one.

  Now, more or less repeating things already said in letters, I told Elizabeth that on the whole my life seemed very good. I was happy in my new law firm, I was even getting along better with my parents (possibly because they had separated and were in that way getting along much better with each other).

  Elizabeth listened, and smiled, saying very little. Then Aurelia reappeared, to arrange Elizabeth’s pillows and to say to me, “She very tired now, I think.”

  (Aurelia, soon to be the owner of that house; perhaps something of that showed in her just perceptibly less shy bearing? Elizabeth must have liked to think of her there, of the difference in her life.)

  I got up to go, but Elizabeth’s thin hand detained me. “Dinner at eight,” she said, with a smile and a small choked laugh.

  It was still not late, not sunset time, and so instead of turning in at Del Sol I walked on down the beach, toward town. And I knew at once that this was a mistake: seemingly overnight (although actually there had been four years), big gaudy condominiums had sprung up, and a couple of huge hotels, towering and bright and hideous, where before there had been jungle green, and flowers, and space. Bodies crowded the beach; even had I wanted to walk much farther that would have been impossible. And vendors: I was almost instantly accosted by a swarm of them, sad-eyed little boys selling Chiclets, thin old men with bags of peanuts, women with the same butterfly-colored dresses as before, some trays of silver and jade, but I thought they all looked suddenly sad and thin, and too eager to sell, whereas before a certain diffidence had prevailed. The town’s so-visible prosperity had not trickled down to these natives, I thought.

  And so I turned back to Del Sol, and it was from my tiny sea-front cottage there that I watched the glorious sunset of that first night, and in fact of all the nights of my stay at San Angel—as from the bar loud hard rock music blared, hits from the States of ten or so years back. I could not decide whether the place had got much noisier in the years of my absence or if it was simply that I had spent so little time there, before.

  At dinner Elizabeth looked rested, animated, though her color was so bad, yellowish, sallow. “I am glad you have come!” she said to me several times—an unnecessary expense of breath; I knew she was glad.

  I went back to my cottage early, and read for a couple of hours, despite the clamorous music—and I tried not to think very deeply about Elizabeth.

  The next morning was overcast, gray. I went in to the office to put in the call to Judson, in Iowa, and I was told that it would probably rain before noon. A surprise: I had thought it never rained in San Angel.

  A further surprise, and a better one, was that I got through to Judson almost at once, with a perfect connection.

  “I really think Elizabeth wants to see you,” I told him. “I think you should come down.”

  A small pause, during which I could hear him thinking, almost. “Not right now,” he said. “I can’t. But tell her I’ll be there before Christmas.”

  “Good,” I told him. “She’ll feel better with something definite.” I added, “She’s pretty bad.”

  “I know.” Another pause, before he asked, “You’re okay?”

  “Oh, sure. But it’s raining here.”

  He made an effort which I could feel to say, “Give my love to Elizabeth.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  “Good-by, Minerva. I thank you.”

  “Good-by!”

  In fact Elizabeth was to die before the end of November. She had what I tried hard to think of as a merciful heart attack a week after I had gone back to Oakland; Aurelia called to tell me. As Judson and I said to each other, how perfectly in character, how exquisitely polite of her to wait for death (for which she must have longed, she was so miserably uncomfortable) until after I had come and gone, and to spare Judson even making the trip.

  Her death, I suppose, is what began to bring me and Judson together, though actually a teaching stint at Stanford was what brought him to California, and to me. Here we began to talk less about Elizabeth, more of ourselves. Very cautiously we began to be in love.

  But that morning in Mexico, when I went to see Elizabeth, walking across the damp gray sand in the gentle rain—when I gave her the message from Judson she smiled as though she had all the time in the world for future visits, for receiving and giving love.

  “Ah! Good,” she said. And, in almost Judson’s words, “I thank you, Minerva. You are good to me, you and Judson.”

  Sintra

  In Lisbon, Portugal, on a brilliant October Sunday morning, an American woman, a tourist, experiences a sudden rush of happiness, as clear and pure as the sunshine that warms the small flowers near her feet. She is standing in the garden of the Castelo de São Jorge, and the view before her includes a great spread of the city: the river and its estuary, the shining new bridge; she can see for miles!

  Her name is Arden Kinnell, and she is a journalist, a political-literary critic, sometimes writing on films; she survives somewhat precariously, although recently she has begun to enjoy a small success. Tall and thin, Arden is a little awkward, shy, and her short blonde hair is flimsy, rather childlike. Her face is odd, but striking in its oddity: such wide-spaced, staring, yellow-green eyes, such a wide, clearly sensual mouth. And now she is smiling, out of sheer pleasure at this moment.

  Arden and her lover-companion—Gregor, the slightly rumpled young man at her side—arrived the night before from Paris, and they slept long and well, after only a little too much wine at their hotel. Healthy Californians, they both liked the long, rather steep walk up those winding, cobbled streets, through the picturesquely crumbling, red tile-roofed old quarter, the Alfama, up to this castle, this view of everything. Arden is especially struck by the sight of the distant, lovely bridge, which she has read was dedicated to the revolution of April, 1974, the so-called Generals’ Revolution that ended fascism in Portugal.

  The air is so good, so fresh and clear! Breathing in, Arden thinks, Ah, Lisbon, how beautiful it is. She thinks, I must tell Luiz how much I like his city.

  Madness: in that demented instant she has forgotten that at a recent party in San Francisco a woman told her that Luiz was dying (was “terminal,” as she put it). Here in Lisbon. Now.

  And even stranger than that friendly thought of Luiz, whom she once loved
wildly, desperately, entirely—dear God, friends is the last thing they were; theirs was an adversary passion, almost fatal—stranger than the friendly impulse is the fact that it persists, in Arden, generally a most disciplined woman; her mind is—usually—strong and clear, her habits of work exemplary. However, insanely, there in Lisbon, that morning, as she continues to admire and to enjoy the marvelous sweep of city roofs, the graceful bridge above the shining water, she even feels the presence of Luiz, and happily; that is the incredible part. Luiz, with whom she experienced the wildest reaches of joy, but never the daily, sunny warmth of happiness.

  Can Luiz possibly just that day have died? Can this lively blue Portuguese air be giving her that message, and thus causing her to rejoice? Quickly she decides against this: Luiz is not dead, he cannot be—although a long time ago she surely wished him dead, believing as she then did that only his death could release her from the brutal pain of his absence in her life.

  Or, could the woman at the San Francisco party (a woman whom she did not like at all, Arden now remembers—so small and tautly chic), could that woman have been mistaken? Some other Luiz V. was dying in Lisbon? But that was unlikely; the woman clearly meant the person that Arden knew, or had known—the rich and well-connected, good, but not very famous painter. The portraitist.

  Then, possibly Luiz was ill but has recovered? A remission, or possibly a misdiagnosis in the first place? Everyone knows that doctors make such mistakes; they are often wrong.

  Arden decides that Luiz indeed is well; he is well and somewhere relatively nearby, in some house or apartment that she can at least distantly see from where she is standing, near the crenellated battlements of the castle, on the sun-warmed yellow gravel. She looks back down into the Alfama, where Luiz might be.

  Gregor, the young lover—only five years younger than Arden, actually—Gregor, a photographer, “knows” about Luiz. Friends before they became lovers (a change in status that more than once has struck Arden as an error), in those days Arden and Gregor exchanged life stories, finding that they shared a propensity for romantic disaster—along with their similarly precarious freelance professions (and surely there is some connection? both she and Gregor take romantic as well as economic risks?).

  “Can you imagine a woman dumb enough to believe that a Portuguese Catholic would leave his wife and children just for her?” Arden asked, in the wry mode that had become a useful second nature to her. “Oh, how stupid I was!” she lamentingly laughed. And Gregor countered with his own sad love adventure; she was a model, Lisa. “Well, can you imagine a photographer who wouldn’t know not to take up with a model?” This was when Gregor, just out of art school, was trying to get a start in New York; Lisa, though younger than he, was already doing quite well. But Lisa’s enchanting liveliness, and her wit, as well as her lovely thin body, turned out to be coke-maintained. “No one then was doing anything but plain old dope and a little acid,” was Gregor’s comment. “I have to hand it to her, she was really ahead of her time. But crazy.”

  Gregor too can be wry, or does he imitate Arden? She sometimes has an alarmed sense that he sounds like her, or tries to. But he is fun to talk to, still, and often funny. And he is smart, and sexy. Tall and light-haired, he is not handsome but very attractive, with his huge pale Russian eyes, his big confident body. A good photographer, in fact he is excellent.

  At moments, though, Arden feels a cold enmity from Gregor, which is when she wishes that they were still “just friends.” And is he an alcoholic, really? He drinks too much, too often. And does he love her?

  Oh, love, Arden thinks. How can I even use that word.

  Gregor and Arden do not in fact live together, and although she sometimes tells friends that she considers this an ideal arrangement, often she actually does not. Her own house in Larkspur is small, but hardly too small for two, and it is pleasantly situated on a wooded knoll, no other houses in sight. There is a pool, and what Arden considers her recreational garden, an eccentric plot all crowded with squash and nasturtiums and various lettuces. Gregor spends much of his time there with her; he likes to swim, although gardening does not interest him—but he also keeps a small place of his own on a rather bleak street near Twin Peaks, in San Francisco, high up in the fog and winds. And his apartment itself is bleak: three small rooms, monastically clean and plain and white. There is also a darkroom, of course, where he often works late at night. No personal traces anywhere, no comfortable mess. Forbidding. Arden has only been there twice. Even when they are in the city it always seems better to drive on back to Larkspur, after the movie or concert, whatever. But Arden thinks of him there, in those rooms, on the nights that he stays in town, and her thoughts are uneasy. Not only the existence of that apartment, an alternative to her house, as well as to herself, but its character is threatening to Arden, reminding her of aspects of Gregor himself: a sensed interior coldness, an implacable emptiness. When she thinks of Gregor’s house she could be imagining an enemy.

  She has never seen any food around, for instance: does he only drink there, alone, in his white, white rooms? She does not imagine that he sees other women, but certainly he could. He could go out to bars, bring women home. This though seems less likely, and therefore possibly less threatening than just drinking alone, so grimly.

  At the end of Arden’s love affair with Luiz there were hints in local gossip columns that he had a “somewhat less than professional relationship” with a few of the subjects of his portraits, and the pain of this information (explaining so much! so plausible!) was a further unbearable thrust to Arden.

  In any case, since Gregor knows about Luiz, including the fact of Lisbon, home of Luiz (but not the possible mortal illness; Arden has not been able or perhaps not seen fit to mention this), does Gregor think it strange that so far in Lisbon Arden has not mentioned Luiz, whom she used sometimes to talk about? Here she has not once said his name, in any context. She herself does not quite know why she has not.

  Still, just now she is happy, looking down to small balconies of flowers, of vines that climb up on intricate iron grillwork. She wonders: possibly, is that where Luiz lives, that especially handsome, long-windowed apartment? with the dark-gray drapery?

  Arden is happy and well and suddenly very hungry. She says to Gregor, “Isn’t that a restaurant over there? Shouldn’t we try it? It looks nice, and I can’t bear to leave this view.”

  “Well, sure.” Gregor’s look in Arden’s direction is slightly puzzled—as well it might be, Arden thinks. She too is puzzled, very. She loves Lisbon, though, and her blood races dizzily.

  They go into the restaurant; they are quickly seated at a white-clothed table, with the glorious Lisbon view.

  “Had you ever, uh, heard about this place before?” asks Gregor, once their wine has come. This is his closest—if oblique—reference to Luiz, who surely might have mentioned to Arden a favorite restaurant, with its marvelous view. But as though realizing what he has done Gregor then covers up. “Or did you read about it somewhere? a restaurant guide?”

  “No, actually not. It just looked good. The doors—” The front door is of heavy glass, crossed with pitted, old-looking iron bars. “An interesting use of glass, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” says Gregor.

  Their eyes regard each other suspiciously.

  Remembering Luiz, Arden sees flat smooth black hair, that shines, in bedside lamplight. She watches him as he dresses, while she lies there spent and languid; she watches everything shining, his hair and his bright black eyes, their dark glitter. He comes over to kiss her good-by, for that day, and then he cannot, does not leave.

  “This is an illness, this endless craving that I have for you. A mania—” Luiz more than once remarked, with an accuracy that Arden could not then admit to herself. She did not feel ill, only that all her nerves had been touched, involved.

  Luiz is (or was) an excellent portraitist. His paintings were both elegant and penetrating, often less than flattering; on the other hand, on
occasion, very flattering indeed. He was at his best with women (well, of course he was, Arden has thought). Once she went to an exhibit of his paintings at a Sutter Street gallery—though not, naturally, to the opening, a social event much reported in the papers.

  In fact they first met at a gallery opening. From across the room Luiz found Arden (that is how he put it, “I found you there”), coming over to talk to her intently for a while (about what? later she could never remember). He called the next day; he called and called, he would not be put off.

  This was in the early sixties. Arden, then much involved in the peace movement, saw his assault on her life as an incursion, an invasion. He attacked with superior weapons, and with the violence of his passion for her. And he won. “I think that you have fallen in love with my love for you,” he once (again accurately) remarked.

  Out of her depth, and dismayed by everything about Luiz—the wife and family at home in Portugal, a fascist country—Arden found some small comfort in the fact that all his favorite writers seemed to be of the Left: Silone, Camus—and that his favorite movie director was Pasolini.

  She pointed this out, rather shyly—the shyness of an essentially defeated person.

  “My darling, I have a horror of the Right, of fascismo.” (But in much the same tone he also said, “I have a horror of fat,” as he stroked her thin thigh, then cupped the sharp crest with his wise and skillful hand.)

  You could simply look at his eyes, or his mouth, Arden thinks now, and know that Luiz was remarkable.

  She remembers his walk. The marvelous confidence in that stride. During all the weeks of suffering so acutely from his absence in her life (classically, Luiz did not get the promised divorce, nor did he defect from the fascist government he railed against; he went back to Lisbon, to his wife, to that regime)—during all that time of suffering, it was the thought of his walk that caused Arden the most piercing pain: that singular, energetic motion of his body, its course through the world, without her.