The Stories of Alice Adams (v5)

by Alice Adams

  “She’ll come back, and if you want her to stick around you’d better be very kind. Just remember, a lot of women have been really nice to you. Be understanding. Sensitive. You’re good at that.”

  He is? Entirely flustered, Duncan gulps at wine, hitherto untouched in his swirled dark blue glass. “I find it extremely hard to believe that you’re right,” he tells Emily, “that she’s coming back.”

  “You just wait.” She gives a confident flash of her regular, somewhat large teeth, and then she frowns. “The real problem may be whether or not you really want her back.”

  “Oh, that’s more or less what Jasper said.”

  Emily’s frown becomes a scowl. “That expert. Well, probably you shouldn’t listen to anyone, really. Just see what happens, and then see what you feel like doing about it. But I’ll bet she does come back. And quite soon, I’d imagine.”

  Once more picking up his key at the hotel desk, as he notes the absence of any phone message, nothing pink, Duncan’s tremulous, wavering heart informs him that he has actually feared as much as he has been hoping for a message from Cath. He is so tired, so extraordinarily tired; he has neither the stamina for Cath’s return nor for her continued absence. Which is worse? Oh, everything is worse!

  In his room, in bed (so depressing, the great size of hotel beds, when you travel alone), feeling weakened rather than tipsy from the moderate amount of wine that he has drunk, nevertheless Duncan’s imagination begins to wander quite wildly, and he thinks again of assaulting Ocracoke—oh, the whole bloody island, all those couples, the tall blond lovers, all racing around. As waves crash, as winds hurl sheets of sand, maybe even a hurricane.

  Sleepless, disoriented, Duncan feels the sharp anguish of someone very young—of a young man whose beautiful wife has been stolen away. The forsaken merman.

  He feels in fact as though he had been forsaken by everyone—by Jasper and by Marcus, even by Emily, with her great superior health and all her hoards of female wisdom. By Cath especially of course, and by Brennan O’Donahue. By all the people on Ocracoke Island—that most beautiful, isolated and imperiled scrap of ground, the one place to which he can never, ever go, and for which Duncan’s whole tormented landlocked soul now longs.

  Your Doctor Loves You

  After her husband, Sebastian, had left her, all alone in their beautiful, entirely impractical house (drafty, leaking, often cold and dark), Holly Jones felt loss as something sharp in the cavity of her chest. Her pain was severe, and in those terrible days, and weeks, then months, Holly, a basically friendly, chatty young woman, sought to ease that pain, somewhat, by talk. By trying to talk it out.

  Those obsessive conversations went on continuously, like tapes. Some were entirely silent, going on in her head, and those were with—or, rather, to—Sebastian. Sebastian, a handsome, old-family-rich, nonviolent alcoholic, often impotent—an unsuccessful though talented painter (so he and Holly thought)—had gone off to New York, it seemed for good. He often used to go there, on gallery or family business, but this time he had been gone for three months, during the last of which he had not communicated with Holly.

  These Sebastian talks were a terrible mix of cold analysis and warm vituperation, often with more than a little scalding lust thrown in; Holly had always wanted Sebastian, she did still. But gradually she came to see that all this quiet talk to him, these silent screams did her no good, and she made a serious effort to stop all that. (And she called a lawyer.)

  Her actual, voiced conversations were mostly with her friend Mary, a sculptor, a somewhat older and at least temporarily happier woman, married to a pediatrician. These real conversations were frequent; kindly Mary made a lot of time for Holly. And generally they were helpful, though sometimes not. Sometimes just a heavy dose of Sebastian-talk could throw Holly backward, into tears or worse, back into her wide unshared bed, in the lovely glassed-in bedroom that now, in January, was often freezing cold. In Ross, California, just north of San Francisco.

  Occasionally, in a deliberate way, both Holly and Mary tried to shift the focus of their talk away from Sebastian and onto almost anything else: the weather, Reagan, the contras, the Democratic candidates. Clothes, old friends, gossip. Their friendship predated both marriages. It went back to the days when they lived in North Beach, in San Francisco, and were fairly broke, working at odd jobs. Holly, a leggy blonde, did mostly modeling while she took courses at the Art Institute; and Mary, who cooked in an Italian restaurant, also studied sculpture at the Institute. They had always liked each other, although “when I first met you I thought you were so pretty you had to be some kind of a bubble head,” Mary had confessed. In stages, Mary first, both women had moved to Marin. With husbands. Their social lives had diverged (Sebastian did not much like Mary; as some men will, he suspected the “best friend” of sharing evil confidences concerning himself). But they still knew enough people in common to talk about.

  One of the people they knew and mentioned from time to time was a man named Jonathan Green, Dr. Green, an internist in Mill Valley, to whom they both went as patients. Jonathan was tall and dark and heavy, a serious, kindly-looking man in his middle fifties (Sebastian’s age). Even today, in Marin County, Jonathan made house calls; he seemed to care incredibly for his patients. Some time ago Mary had heard (through Mark, her husband) that Jonathan was getting a divorce.

  And one morning, the day after her annual checkup with Jonathan, Mary remarked rather carelessly to Holly, “You know, I get the impression that Jonathan’s really interested in you.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I really think so. You’re all he talks about, he knows we’re friends. He wanted to know if you felt better now. Really, Holly, he could be in love.” She laughed. “Why not give it a whirl? Why not call him and ask him to dinner?”

  “Oh. Well. Well, really, it seems so unlikely. I mean, I know Jonathan likes me, but I think he likes all his patients. Love! Honestly, Mary.”

  But Holly’s heart, like an uncaged bird, had begun to soar into higher air as ancient, buried hopes revived.

  Just suppose it were true, she thought. Just suppose. Jonathan Green. Well, why not? He was not as handsome or fun as Sebastian at his best could be, but on the other hand not an alcoholic, not vain or irresponsible or mean. A caring person, a man unlikely to hurt her. Someone serious. A doctor.

  Indeed, why not ask him for dinner?

  She telephoned Jonathan, one of whose virtues was phone-availability to patients. She heard his pleasant, soft, somewhat tentative voice almost right away. “Well, I hardly know what to say. How nice” was Jonathan’s response.

  But then a certain amount of trouble set in: finding an evening that would work out for them both. Jonathan was on call a lot, it seemed, he had a medical society meeting, an evening with his kids. Holly had only one date, with an old friend up from L.A. She never broke dates, although this time she was tempted. But at last a night was established, ten days off. Jonathan would come over to her house for dinner.

  “It’s too far off,” Holly complained to Mary. “Too much time for me to think and get nervous. God, a date. I haven’t had a date in ten years.”

  “You already sound better, though. It’ll be good for you.”

  It was true that Holly felt better.

  Married to Sebastian, she had always been aware of his acute, censorious, controlling eye. The look of the house could never be quite right, nor the meals. Nor, God knows, Holly’s opinions. Unstated but heavily, coldly present was the fact that Holly had grown up in a trailer park near Tucson; her father was a Yugoslavian metalworker, a drunk, whose awful name, Jewerelsky, Holly had happily given up for Jones—and for Sebastian. Holly could thus not be expected to do things, anything, correctly, although Sebastian did expect things of her, actually. He expected everything.

  However, there was no reason to believe that Jonathan Green was at all like that. A busy doctor, he might not even notice how his house looked, or not notice in the meticulous, cruel way t
hat Sebastian did.

  Holly went about in a happy flurry of straightening up, cleaning, and polishing. Even rearranging, putting a vase of flowers on the hearth, daring to remove a couple of Sebastian’s paintings (stark steel girders, flying freeways), and substituting an old one of her own, of flowers.

  Sebastian married Holly and bought this house on what now seemed (to Holly) a single impulse, a manic summer whim. “Oh, you’re the prettiest girl in the world. You know what you are? You’re cute, you’re a living doll,” he had crooned to her, that first summer (drunkenly, but you had to know Sebastian very well indeed to know when he was drunk. He “drank like a gentleman”). And “I’ll have to buy you the prettiest house in Marin. It’s all wonderful wood, all windows and skylights, and everything around it green, all flowing.” And Holly, tipsy herself on champagne (she did not drink much and, according to Sebastian, did not know how), Holly was charmed into love with Sebastian, and later with the house.

  Sebastian then was in his mid-forties, his dark blond handsomeness in its ripest phase. “My autumn,” he said of himself, one long finger caressing the cleft in his chin. “If I grew a beard it would come out gray. You should have known me when I was young and gorgeous, baby doll.”

  “You’re gorgeous enough. I mean, you’re plenty gorgeous.”

  In those days she could usually make him laugh.

  And Holly did fall in love with the house, along with Sebastian. It was a lovely summer house, built as such near the turn of the century by some San Francisco people seeking escape from the city’s summer fog. There was a single, very large high-beamed room; as Sebastian said, all wood and windows and skylights. A small glassed-in bedroom to one side, surrounded by ancient, giant ferns and live oaks, cypress, manzanita. The house was a dream that Holly herself could have had, in the trailer, in the desert, a dream of hills and greenery, of polished wooden spaces, and no sand, anywhere, to sweep.

  Lovingly, Sebastian chose all the furniture, their bed with its intricate brass headboard was his especial pride, and the track lights installed to illuminate his paintings. His house. And for ten years Holly went along with all that, yielding to his superior taste and wisdom. Wishing he would drink less and make love to her more often.

  Holly was literally crazy about Sebastian, she knew that. She thought he was the most beautiful person she had ever seen. Or touched. These days, she wept to remember the exceptional smoothness of all his body skin, the perfect small patch of hair on his chest, so soft and fine. In the night, when they were together, she used sometimes to reach to stroke his back—to no avail, he almost never turned to her. Or if he did it was with a reluctant sigh.

  His presence became a tease to Holly; he was constantly tantalizing, simply being there. And once he had gone, his absence, especially in bed, was horrible.

  So fixated was she on Sebastian (“A true addiction,” she had said more than once to Mary. “So that now I’m in withdrawal”) that she had not thought much about herself. A slight, fair girl when they married, when Sebastian found her so pretty, cute, Holly as a neglected wife had felt herself grow heavier. She thought she sagged all over.

  And in that neglected phase, to make her feel even uglier, some ugly physical things began to go wrong with her. Pain, colitis. It was all very neurotic, probably (Sebastian said she was being neurotic. “Slavic,” he called her behavior). But still her symptoms had to be checked out. (Mary insisted that she go to someone.) And so she went to Jonathan Green, who took everything she said very seriously, listening with his great dark sympathetic eyes. Jonathan, who seemed to like her and not think that she was crazy, even having heard and seen all the worst of her. Her rejected body.

  Now anticipating Jonathan as a lover (well, of course she was, of course that was what she was doing), Holly thought that if Jonathan loved her, or even just liked her a lot, it would mean she was all right. An okay person. Even, once more, possibly, cute.

  “It’s great, the house is getting to look a lot more like you. Less Sebastian.” Mary, arrived for a drink, had been looking around.

  “Well, that’s what I had in mind. He always wanted everything so bare. But you know, this is really a little sick. I’m doing it all for Jonathan Green. And that’s crazy, that’s as bad as doing everything for Sebastian.”

  “Not quite. Jonathan is a much nicer person.”

  “We hope.” Holly had begun to see herself as chasing a rainbow named Jonathan Green, and all from an idea of Mary’s that could easily be wrong (“I think Jonathan Green is interested in you”). She was in a sort of frenzy, she recognized that.

  Mary now said, “As a matter of fact I will have another glass of wine. What the hell, I’m getting so fat it hardly matters.”

  “Oh Mary, you’re not.” Mary, a tall, dark, strong woman looked more or less the same to Holly, always. However, looking now more closely, she saw that Mary had indeed put on a few pounds. And she thought, Oh dear, I’ve been so upset, so self-absorbed that I haven’t really looked at Mary.

  However, over their second drinks Mary seemed okay, her old self. “Actually, you and Jonathan could get married right in this house,” she said. “And I’ll take pictures and send them along to Sebastian, that’ll really thrill him. And I’ll make the cake and the wedding food, and Mark will give you away, and I’ll be friend of honor.”

  “Mary, come on, that’s not even funny.”

  “Yes, it is. And after the wedding we’ll all live very happily ever after. Take trips together, all that nerdy middle-aged stuff. Cruises, when we get really old. How would you feel about having children with Jonathan?”

  “Mary, cut it out!” But Holly was laughing too, and actually, she was also thinking, why not? She could marry again, if her lawyer ever pulled himself together and had papers served on Sebastian, as he was supposed to be doing. And she could have children. Why not with Jonathan Green? So handy, his being a doctor.

  “Maybe you’re right, I need a doctor around the house,” she said to Mary.

  “Well, I think Jonathan should be really grateful that we’ve got his life all worked out for him,” said Mary finally.

  Five more days, still, until the famous date. And Holly found that instead of talking to Sebastian in her head, or to Mary, she was having very long, silent, and extremely interesting (to her) conversations with Jonathan Green.

  “So typical, his leaving me with this stupid name,” Holly in her mind told Jonathan. “Holly Jones, of all the plain-Jane names. Whereas Sebastian Jones has a lot of style, don’t you think? I should have kept my old name, but is Jewerelsky really any better? I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter, after all.”

  And she told him, “I think I’m sort of like a convalescent person. Getting better from something serious. I do okay and then I have a kind of relapse. Isn’t that what people do when they’re getting well?” She liked the medical analogy, something Jonathan would appreciate, she thought.

  She did not tell Jonathan about the form of those relapses: the crying. Hours, sometimes whole days, it seemed, of tears. Unable to stop, she found it impossible too to phone for help, not even to Mary. Holly hated those tears, she hated crying. It was like some loathsome disease, incapacitating, shameful.

  She wondered if she would ever be able to make love to another man without weeping for Sebastian. Sometimes she thought that she could not, and she despaired.

  Preparing for Jonathan, their date, she tried not to think of tears, of crying. She concentrated on household tasks, her house.

  “In summer it’s really wonderful,” she told Jonathan Green, in her mind. “All the flowers outside in bloom, the breezes, the cool. And it’s great having so much space.” But what was this, an advertisement for her house? Did she want him to come and live there?

  In the two days immediately preceding the date, Holly changed her mind several dozen times on the two crucial issues of what to serve for dinner, and what to wear.

  “Make something really simple, obviously,” Mary cou
nseled. “A good make-ahead stew, I could give you a new recipe I’ve been doing. And have lots of flowers all over. You might as well wear something pretty, maybe one of those long silk numbers?”

  Good advice, but it still left considerable latitude for obsessive thought, which Holly gave it. Which stew? What kind of flowers? And which long silk dress, the blue or the black?

  • • •

  And Holly knew, intelligent, streetwise Holly knew all along that she was making (dangerously) too much of this. Much too much. She was asking for trouble, begging for it, she knew that she was.

  She almost began to hope that Jonathan would have to break the date, or forget it.

  Jonathan not only did not forget, he arrived quite promptly at seven. Hearing his car, a new Porsche, then observing his approach as he walked up the path to her house and came across the porch, Holly half-consciously made two notes: one, he looks nervous, his shoulders are tight. And, two, why is he wearing that pink sweater? She herself was wearing the long black silk, much too dressed up but too late now to change.

  At her door they shook hands, both said how nice to see each other, as though it were accidental. And in a quick agitated way Jonathan took in her house.

  “What a nice big place,” he said, with what looked like a tiny shiver, as Holly thought, He doesn’t like it. Well, neither do I, actually.

  Seated, he accepted a glass of Perrier.

  “A nice big house,” he repeated, once they were settled with drinks.

  He is wearing that sweater to make himself look younger, was what Holly was thinking. At a certain point Sebastian had begun to wear a lot of pink.

  “Where are you living now?” Holly asked Jonathan.

  “Well, it’s a little complicated. I’m still in what was the family house. My wife, the children, school …” He said all this at some length, managing curiously to omit saying where he lived.

  Jonathan was fairly handsome, better-looking than Holly had previously observed. However, she reminded herself, I was so hung up on the beauty of Sebastian that I didn’t notice any male attractiveness, only his. I only saw Sebastian.