The Stories of Alice Adams (v5)

by Alice Adams

  After lunch, much more slowly than earlier they had climbed the streets, Arden and Gregor start down. The day is still glorious; at one point they stop at a small terrace where there are rounded cypresses, very small, and a lovely wall of soft blue tiles, in an intricate, fanciful design—and a large and most beautiful view of sky and majestic, glossy white clouds, above the shimmering water of the sea. From this distance the commemorative suspension bridge is a graceful sculpture; catching the sunlight, it shines.

  Arden is experiencing some exceptional, acute alertness; as though layers of skin had peeled away, all her senses are opened wide. She sees, in a way that she never has before. She feels all the gorgeous day, the air, and the city spread below her.

  She hardly thinks of Gregor, at her side, and this is something of a relief; too often he is a worrying preoccupation for her.

  Their plan for the afternoon has been to go back to their hotel, where they have left a rental car, and to drive north to Cascais, Estoril, and Sintra. And that is what they now proceed to do, not bothering to go into the hotel, but just taking their car, a small white Ford Escort, and heading north.

  As they reach the outskirts of the city, a strange area of new condominiums, old shacks, and some lovely, untouched woods—just then, more quickly than seemed possible, the billowing clouds turn black, a strong wind comes up, and in another minute a violent rainstorm has begun, rains lashing at the windshield, water sweeping across the highway.

  Arden and Gregor exchange excited grins: an adventure. She thinks, Oh, good, we are getting along, after all.

  “Maybe we should just go to Sintra, though,” he says, a little later. “Not too much point in looking at beach resorts?”

  Yielding to wisdom, Arden still feels a certain regret. Cascais. She can hear Luiz saying the word, and “Estoril,” with the sibilant Portuguese s’s. But she can also hear him saying Sintra, and she says it over to herself, in his voice.

  A little later, looking over at her, Gregor asks, “Are you okay? You look sort of funny.”

  “How, funny?”

  “Odd. You look odd. And your nose. It’s so, uh, pink.”

  Surprising them both, and especially herself, Arden laughs. “Noses are supposed to be pink,” she tells him.

  Normally, what Arden thinks of as Gregor’s lens-like observations make her nervous; they make her feel unattractive, and unloved. But today—here in Portugal!—her strange happiness separates her like a wall, or a moat from possible slights, and she thinks, How queer that Gregor should even notice the color of my nose, in a driving rainstorm—here, north of Lisbon, near Sintra. As, in her mind, she hears the deep, familiar, never-forgotten voice of Luiz saying, “I adore your face! Do you know how I adore it? How lovely you are?” She hears Luiz, she sees him.

  Then quite suddenly, as suddenly as it began, the storm is over. The sky is brilliantly blue again, and the clouds are white, as Arden thinks, No wonder Luiz is more than a little erratic—it’s the weather. And she smiles to herself.

  Suppose she sent him a postcard from Lisbon? Ego absolvo te. Love, Arden. Would he laugh and think fondly of her, for a moment? Is he dying?

  In Sintra they drive past a small town square, with a huge, rather forbidding municipal building, some small stores. The wet stone pavement is strewn with fallen wet yellow leaves. They start up a narrow road, past gates and driveways that lead to just-not visible mansions, small towered castles. (The sort of places that Luiz might visit, or own, for weekends, elegant parties.) As they climb up and up in the small white car, on either side of the road the woods become thicker, wilder, more densely and violently green—everything green, every shape and shade of green, all rain-wet, all urgently growing. And giant rocks, great dead trees lying beside them. Ferns, enormously sprouting. Arden is holding her breath, forgetting to breathe. It is crazy with green, she thinks, crazy growth, so old and strong, ancient, endless and wild, ferocious. Like Luiz. Like Portugal, dying.

  Gregor is making some odd maneuver with the car; is he turning around, mid-road? Trying to park, among so many giant rocks, heavy trees, and brilliant, dripping leaves?

  In any case he has stopped the car. On a near hill Arden can see the broken ruins of a castle, jagged black fragments of stone, and in the sky big clouds are blackening again.

  Willing calm (though still having trouble with her breath), Arden says, “I think it’s going to rain again.”

  Huge-eyed, pale, Gregor is staring across at her. He says, “You cut me out—all the way! You might as well be here alone!”

  He is right, of course; she is doing just that, pretending he is not there. So unfair—but his staring eyes are so light, so blue. Arden says, “I’m sorry, really—” but she can feel her voice getting away from her, can feel tears.

  Gregor shouts, “I don’t know why we came here! Why Portugal? What did you expect? You could have just come by yourself!”

  But Arden can hardly hear him. The rain has indeed begun again; it is pelting like bullets against the glass, and wind is bending down all the trees, flattening leaves.

  And suddenly in those moments Arden has understood that Luiz is dead—and that she will never again feel for anyone what she felt for him. Which, even though she does not want to—she would never choose to feel so much again—still, it seems a considerable loss.

  In fact, though, at that particular time, the hour of that passionate October storm (while Arden quarrelled with Gregor), Luiz is still alive, although probably “terminal.” And she only learns of his death the following spring, and then more or less by accident: she is in Washington, D.C., for some meetings having to do with grants for small magazines and presses, and in a hasty scanning of the Post she happens to glance at a column headed “Deaths Elsewhere.”

  Luiz —— ——V. (There were two intervening names that Arden has not known about.) Luiz V. had died a few days earlier in Lisbon, the cause of death not reported. Famous portraitist, known for satire, and also (this is quite as surprising to Arden as the unfamiliar names)—“one of the leading intellectuals in Lisbon to voice strong public support for the armed forces coup in April 1974 that ended half a century of right-wing dictatorship.”

  Curiously—years back she would not have believed this possible, ever—that day Arden is too busy with her meetings to think about this fact: Luiz dead. No longer someone whom she might possibly see again, by accident in an airport, or somewhere. No longer someone possibly to send a postcard to.

  That day she is simply too busy, too harried, really, with so many people to see, and with getting back and forth from her hotel to her meetings, through the strange, unseasonable snow that has just begun, relentlessly, to fall. She thinks of the death of Luiz, but she does not absorb it.

  That quarrel with Gregor in Sintra, which prolonged itself over the stormy drive back to Lisbon, and arose, refuelled, over dinner and too much wine—that quarrel was not final between them, although Arden has sometimes thought that it should have been. They continue to see each other, Arden and Gregor, in California, but considerably less often than they used to. They do not quarrel; it is as though they were no longer sufficiently intimate to fight, as though they both knew that any altercation would indeed be final.

  Arden rather thinks, or suspects, that Gregor sees other women, during some of their increasing times apart. She imagines that he is more or less actively looking for her replacement. Which, curiously, she is content to let him do.

  She herself has not been looking. In fact lately Arden has been uncharacteristically wary in her dealings with men. In her work she is closely allied with a lot of men, who often become good friends, her colleagues and companions. However, recently she has rather forcibly discouraged any shifts in these connections; she has chosen to ignore or to put down any possible romantic overtones. She spends time with women friends, goes out to dinner with women, takes small trips. She is quite good at friendship, has been Arden’s conclusion, or one of them. Her judgment as to lovers seems rather po
or. And come to think of it her own behavior in that area is not always very good. Certainly her strangeness, her removal in Lisbon, in Sintra, was quite enough to provoke a sensitive man, which Gregor undoubtedly is.

  On that night, the night of reading the news item (Deaths Elsewhere) containing the death of Luiz—that night Arden is supposed to meet a group of friends in a Georgetown restaurant. At eight. In character, she gets there a little early, and is told that she will be seated as soon as her friends arrive; would she like to wait in the bar?

  She would not, especially, but she does so anyway, going into a dark, panelled room, of surpassing anonymity, and seating herself in a shadowed corner from which new arrivals in the restaurant are visible. She orders a Scotch, and then wonders why; it is not her usual drink, she has not drunk Scotch for years.

  By eight-ten she has begun to wonder if perhaps she confused the name of the restaurant. It was she who made the reservation, and her friends could have gone to some other place, with a similar French name. These friends like herself are always reliably on time, even in snow, strange weather.

  The problem of what to do next seems almost intolerable, suddenly—and ridiculously: Arden has surely coped with more serious emergencies. But: should she try to get a cab, which at this crowded dinner hour, in the snow, would be difficult? And if she did where would she go?

  In the meantime, at eight-twenty, she orders another drink, and she begins to think about the item in the paper. About Luiz.

  Odd, she casually thinks, at first, that she should have “adored” a man—have planned to marry a man whose full name she did not know. And much more odd, she thinks, that he should have publicly favored the ’74 revolution, the end of dictatorship. Opportunism, possibly, Arden first thinks. On the other hand, is she being unfair, unnecessarily harsh? He did always describe himself as anti-fascist. And perhaps that was true?

  Perhaps everything he said to her was true?

  Arden has finished her second drink. It is clear that her friends will not come; they have gone somewhere else by mistake, and she must decide what to do. But still she sits there, as though transfixed, and she is transfixed, by a sudden nameless pain. Nameless, but linked to loss: loss of Luiz, even, imminently, of Gregor. Perhaps of love itself.

  Understanding some of this, in a hurried, determined way Arden gets to her feet and summons the bill from her waiter. She has decided that she will go back to her hotel and order a sandwich in her room. Strange that she didn’t think of that before. Of course she will eventually get a cab, even in the steadily falling, unpredicted snow.

  My First and Only House

  Because of my dreams, I have begun to think that in some permanent way I have been imprinted, as it were, by the house in which I spent my first sixteen years. I have never owned another house (one could also say that I did not own that house either), and since this is true of almost none of my contemporaries and close friends in real-estate-crazed California, it would seem to deserve some explanation. Circumstances aside, is it possible that I have never bought or seriously thought of buying another house because of the strength of that imprinting, and if so, just why has it been so dominant, so powerful, in my life?

  In more than half of my dreams I live there still, in that house just south of Chapel Hill. I am visited there in dreams by the present-day population of my life, people who in fact have never been to that hilltop where the house was—where it is; I saw it there last summer.

  I also, though very rarely, dream of my former—my first and only—husband. But since this occurs only when I am angry with the man with whom I now live, the reasons for those dreams seem fairly clear. However, as with not buying another house, it also seems possible that I have not remarried because of that early impression of marriage. Californians, or some of them, might say that I avoid commitment, but that is not true. I do not. In fact, I seem to seek it out. I simply feel that first marriages, like the first houses in which we live, are crucially important, that in one way or another we are forever marked by them.

  The Chapel Hill house, as my parents first found and bought it in the early twenties, a few years before I was born, was a small, possibly run-down and isolated farmhouse on a lovely broad hilltop. Very likely it was a good buy, cheap even for those pre-boom days; my father, as a justhired professor at the university, would certainly not have had much money. In any case, my mother and father must have been drawn to all that space, a couple of acres; they may have already been planning the gardens, the tennis court and the grape arbors they were to put in later. And they must have fallen in love with the most beautiful view of farther gentle hills and fields, and a border of creek. They would have placed those aesthetic advantages above the convenience of a smaller lot, a tidier house in town. And along with the space and the view, they chose an unfashionable direction (which would have been characteristic; my parents—especially my mother, a snobbish Virginian—were always above such considerations).

  Although in those days Chapel Hill was an extremely small town, there was already a row of fairly grand houses on Franklin Street, which continued on to become the Durham Road; whereas the highway running down past our house went on to Pittsboro, which was then a very déclassé town. And although our house became rather grand too in its way, there was always the Pittsboro connotation. “Oh, you live almost to Pittsboro,” early non-driving beaux used to say to me by way of complaint about the distance they had to walk to get to my house, then back into town for a movie or whatever, back home with me, then back to wherever they lived, maybe Franklin Street.

  By the time I was born, a small wing had been added to the old farmhouse, with a large upstairs bedroom for my parents and a small living room below. And that is what I first remember, that slightly lopsided house with the narrow front porch, a new wing on one side and on the other the tiny separate building that housed my father’s study. In early snapshots the house looks bare, rather naked on its hilltop, with new, spindling trees out in front.

  But what I most remember is flowers—everywhere. Roses, pink and white ones, climbed up a trellis and over the roof of the porch, entangled there with thick wisteria vines; rose petals and heavy lavender blossoms brushed the roof’s green shingles and the ground. Over an arbor, next to the red-clay tennis court, more wisteria mingled with the gray-green grapevines—and then there was the garden itself: terraced beds of more rosebushes, crape myrtle and Japanese quinces, tall hollyhocks, sunflowers, cowslips, sweet william and lilies of the valley. Below the garden proper, beyond a green wooden fence, was a small apple orchard. Our family laundry was hung out there, billowing white sheets among the whiter apple blossoms.

  In the side yard grew rows of irises and a bed of jonquils, a flowering plum tree, more quinces. That yard sloped down to a small, much steeper area of pinewoods above the swimming pool that my father put in during the early thirties with his World War I bonus. In those woods bloomed white dogwood and wildflowers—tiny, amazing wild irises and yellow dogtooth violets—nestled down among the dead pine needles and rotting leaves that covered the earth.

  Of course it is highly unlikely—impossible, even—that all those flowers and shrubs and trees came to blossom at anywhere near the same time or even within a single season. But that is what I remember: the flowers all in bloom and as taken for granted (by me) as the grass, as the sweeping view of hills and fields, of everything green—a view that no longer exists from that house.

  I am writing, then, at least in part, about the vagaries of memory and about the house that in dreams I permanently inhabit—or, it might be more accurate to say, the house that inhabits me.

  Indoors, even before the final ungainly additions to the house, some strangeness prevailed, some awkwardness as to proportion and transition from one room to another. Upstairs, there was even a dead-end hall and several completely nonfunctional closets. The final, large addition to the house was built where my father’s study had been. This new wing included a big living room and a big new study
for my father, a prominent feature of which was a locked liquor closet (Verlie, who worked for us, was thought to drink). Upstairs was a double bedroom for my parents, a guest room and a sleeping porch. In actual fact, my mother slept in the guest room and my father out on the sleeping porch, an arrangement that seemed perfectly normal to me at the time.

  Other people, though, did remark on the size of that house for just three people. “Don’t you all get lost in all these rooms?” was the standard question. I did not exactly see us as lost, but I do remember a not-quite-conscious feeling that my parents were too far away from where I slept; that they were also far from each other did not strike me as strange until sometime later.

  Below us, in a small house down the hill (even closer to tacky Pittsboro), lived a family of six: two parents, four small children. Very likely they were truly needy people. I somehow learned, or heard, that they all slept together in one bed. And I felt the most passionate envy of that condition, that bodily family warmth. As I imagined it, they would all lie cuddled like puppies, with the mother and father on the outside edges, protectively.

  For reasons I can no longer remember, I was moved about among those oddly shaped bedrooms in the old part of the house. I slept alone, of course, and was generally frightened at night—until I learned to read. Then, as now, books served to keep the terrifying world at bay for a while.

  Downstairs was generally more cheerful than up; the house was splendid for parties, for bringing people home to. Everyone admired its impressive size and the splendid view. And we three difficult, isolated people got along much better when there were others around. Even Verlie, she who supposedly drank (my own view is that my father simply thought she might if tempted; it is what he thought Negro servants did), liked cooking for parties more than for just us three. So my parents entertained a lot, and later I was encouraged to also. “We love to have your friends here,” I was always told.