by Alice Adams
Mary laughed. “You’re right. I just don’t want you to leave. But I agree that’s what you should do.”
For no particular reason—she had not been thinking of their doctor—Holly next asked, “What do you hear these days about Jonathan Green?”
“Oh, we sort of see him around. Mark and I do. You know, doctor parties.”
Mary’s tone had been rather studiedly vague, Holly thought, and so she pursued it. “With whom?” she asked Mary. “Surely not his wife?”
“Oh no, I think that’s all over. But Jonathan seems to be into the very young. Lord, the last one looked about sixteen.”
“She’s probably really forty but works out all the time. Plays baseball.”
They both laughed.
“What men don’t know,” Mary told Holly, “or one of the things they don’t know is how old those kids make them look. The contrast can be cruel.”
“I wonder if that’s what Sebastian is up to.”
“The dumb shit, I wouldn’t put it past him.”
That conversation took place around noon, a time of day when they often made contact, Holly and Mary.
In the course of that afternoon, Holly gave somewhat fleeting thought both to Jonathan and to Sebastian.
Of Sebastian she thought, I haven’t cried for a couple of weeks. I wouldn’t dare say that the pain is absolutely gone, very likely it won’t ever be. It’s something I have to live with, probably, the way some people have bad backs or trick knees. Ten years is just not a dismissible part of my life.
Of Jonathan she thought, How crazy that all was, pinning all those fantasies on him when he’s just a plain ordinary doctor. But what did he imagine that I would be, she wondered, that I wasn’t? Rich, possibly, in a house that was more to his liking? Better at talking, funnier? God knows he can’t have thought I’d be younger or prettier, Jonathan already knew what I looked like.
In the later afternoon, near dinnertime, as though telepathically summoned, Jonathan called Holly. She had not heard from him since the end of her flu, a couple of weeks ago.
And that is what he asked about. “How’s your flu?”
“Well, it seems to be all better. Just a little cough sometimes.”
“You’d better be careful, if you’re still coughing. I’ve seen some people down with it for a second or even a third time.”
“Oh, how terrible.” But why tell me about them? Holly wondered.
“And then there’s a brand-new strain of flu that we’re seeing. A really bad one. But if you come down with that we’ve got a pill that works.”
“Jonathan, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I just meant, if you get this new flu we have a specific for it.”
“Oh.” Is that what you called about? she wanted to ask. Instead she ventured, “Well, how’ve you been, otherwise?” Was this a social call? Was she supposed to make small talk?
Apparently not. Very briskly Jonathan told her, “Fine, really great in fact. Well, I just wanted to be sure you’re okay.”
“Well, I seem to be. As far as I know, I don’t have the new flu. Yet.”
He seemed to grasp that a small joke had been intended, and gave her a little laugh. “So far so good,” he said.
And minutes after that they said goodbye.
It was nice to hear from you, I guess, is what Holly thought.
And for some minutes she wondered just what had motivated that call. Simple curiosity as to how she was? A medical need to warn her about relapses and the dangerous new kind of flu? Or had he wanted to find her sick, and needing him in that way?
Any answer to any of those questions was possible, Holly decided, and she thought that Jonathan himself did not know, really, why he had called. In his own mind, probably, he was just a doctor checking on a patient who had been quite sick, with a child-sized fever.
Fleetingly, she wondered whether he would send her a bill.
He did. It arrived, perhaps by coincidence, the following day. House call and follow-up treatment. One hundred dollars.
After You’ve Gone
The truth is, for a while I managed very well indeed. I coped with the house and its curious breakages, and with the bad nights of remembering you only at your best, and the good days suddenly jolted by your ghost. I dealt with the defection of certain old friends, and the crowding-around of a few would-be new best friends. I did very well with all that, in the three months since your departure for Oregon, very well indeed until I began to get these letters from your new person (I reject “lover” as too explicit, and, knowing you, I am not at all sure that “friend” would be applicable). Anyway, Sally Ann.
(You do remember encouraging me to write to you, as somewhat precipitately you announced your departure—as though extending me a kindness? It will make you feel better, you just managed not to say. In any case, with my orderly lawyer’s mind, I am putting events—or “matters,” as we say—in order.)
The house. I know that it was and is not yours, despite that reckless moment at the Trident (too many margaritas, too palely glimmering a view of our city, San Francisco) when I offered to put it in both our names, as joint tenants, which I literally saw us as, even though it was I who made payments. However, your two-year occupancy and your incredibly skillful house-husbanding made it seem quite truly yours. (Is this question metaphysical, rather than legal? If the poet-husband of a house is not in fact a husband, whose is the house?) But what I am getting at is this. How could you have arranged for everything to break the week you left? Even the Cuisinart; no one else even heard of a broken Cuisinart, ever. And the vacuum. And the electric blanket. The dishwasher and the Disposal. Not to mention my Datsun. “Old wiring, these older flats,” the repair person diagnosed my household problems, adding, “But you’ve got a beautiful place here,” and he gestured across the park—green, pyramidal Alta Plaza, where even now I can see you running, running, in your eccentric non-regular-runner outfit: yellow shorts, and that parrot-green sweatshirt from God knows where, both a little tight.
My Datsun turned out simply to need a tune-up, and since you don’t drive I can hardly blame that on you. Still, the synchronism, everything going at once, was hard not to consider.
Friends. Large parties, but not small dinners, my post-you invitations ran. Or very small dinners—most welcome, from single women friends or gay men; unwelcome from wives-away husbands, or even from probably perfectly nice single men. I am just not quite up to all that yet.
People whom I had suspected of inviting us because of your poet fame predictably dropped off.
Nights. In my dreams of course you still are here, or you are leaving and I know that you are, and there is nothing to do to stop you (you have already told me, so sadly, about Sally Ann, and the houseboat in Portland). Recently I have remembered that after my father died I had similar dreams; in those dreams he was dying, I knew, yet I could not keep him alive. But those father dreams have a guilty sound, I think, and I truly see no cause for guilt on my part toward you. I truly loved you, in my way, and I did what I could (I thought) to keep us happy, and I never, never thought we would last very long. Isn’t two years a record of sorts for you, for maybe any nonmarrying poet? Sometimes I thought it was simply San Francisco that held you here, your City Lights-Tosca circuit, where you sought out ghosts of Beats. Well, in my dreams you are out there still, or else you are here with me in our (my) bed, and we awaken slowly, sleepily to love.
Once, a month or so ago, I thought I saw you sitting far back in a courtroom; I saw those damn black Irish curls and slanted eyes, your big nose and arrogant chin, with that cleft. A bad shock, that; for days I wondered if it actually could have been you, your notion of a joke, or some sort of test.
In all fairness, though—and since I mention it I would like to ask you something. Just why did my efforts at justice, even at seeing your side of arguments, so enrage you? I can hear you shouting: “Why do you have to be so goddam fair, what is this justice of yours?”
But as I began to say, in all fairness I have to concede that I miss your cooking. On the nights that you cooked, that is. I really liked your tripe soup and your special fettuccine with all those wild mushrooms. And the Sunday scrambled eggs that we never got to till early afternoon.
And you are a marvel at fixing things, even if they have a tendency not to stay fixed.
And, most importantly, a first-rate poet; Yale and now the Guggenheim people seem to think so, and surely as you hope the MacArthur group will come around. Having read so little poetry other than yours, I am probably no judge; however, as I repeatedly told you, to me it was magic, pure word-alchemy.
I do miss it all, the house-fixing and cooking, the love and poetry. But I did very well without it all. Until recently.
The letters. The first note, on that awful forget-me-not paper, in that small, tight, rounded hand, was a prim little apology: she felt badly about taking you away from me (a phrase from some junior high school, surely) but she also felt sure that I would “understand,” since I am such a fair-minded person (I saw right off that you had described my habits of thought in some detail). I would see that she, a relatively innocent person, would have found your handsomeness-brilliance-sexiness quite irresistible (at that point I wondered if you could have written the letter yourself, which still seems a possibility). She added that naturally by now I would have found a replacement for you, the natural thing for a woman like me, in a city like San Francisco. That last implication, as to the loose life-styles both of myself and of San Francisco, would seem to excuse the two of you fleeing to the innocence of Portland, Oregon.
A couple of false assumptions lay therein, however. Actually, in point of fact, I personally might do better, man-wise, in Portland than down here. The men I most frequently meet are young lawyers, hardcore yuppies, a group I find quite intolerable, totally unacceptable, along with the interchangeable young brokers—real-estate dealers and just plain dealers. Well, no wonder that I too took up with a poet, an out-of-shape man with no CDs or portfolio but a trunk full of wonderful books. (I miss your books, having got through barely half of them. And did you really have to take the Moby-Dick that I was in the middle of? Well, no matter; I went out to the Green Apple and stocked up, a huge carton of books, the day you left.)
In any case, I felt that she, your young person, your Sally Ann, from too much evidence had arrived at false conclusions. In some ways we are more alike, she and I, than she sees. I too was a setup, a perfect patsy for your charm, your “difference.”
But why should she have been told so much about me at all? Surely you must have a few other topics; reading poems aloud as you used to do with me would have done her more good, or at least less harm, I believe. But as I pondered this question, I also remembered several of our own conversations, yours and mine, having to do with former lovers. It was talk that I quite deliberately cut short, for two clear reasons: one, I felt an odd embarrassment at my relative lack of what used to be called experience; and, two, I did not want to hear about yours. You did keep on trying, though; there was one particular woman in New York, a successful young editor (though on a rather junky magazine, as I remember), a woman you wanted me to hear all about, but I would not. “She has nothing to do with us,” I told you (remember?). It now seems unfortunate that your new young woman, your Sally Ann, did not say the same about me.
Next came a letter which contained a seemingly innocent question: should Sally Ann go to law school, what did I think? On the surface this was a simple request for semi-expert advice; as she went on and on about it, though, and on and on, I saw that she was really asking me how she could turn herself into me, which struck me as both sad and somewhat deranged. Assuming that you have an ideal woman on whom Sally Ann could model herself, I am hardly that woman. You don’t even much like “lady lawyers,” as in some of your worst moments you used to phrase it.
Not having answered the first note at all (impossible; what could I have said?), I responded to this one, because it seemed required, with a typed postcard of fairly trite advice: the hard work involved, the overcrowding of the field, the plethora of even token women.
And now she had taken to writing me almost every day; I mean it, at least every other day. Does she have no other friends? No relatives, even, or old school ties? If she does, in her present state of disturbance they have faded from her mind (poor, poor Sally Ann, all alone with you, in Portland, on a Willamette River houseboat), and only I remain, a purely accidental, non-presence in her life.
The rains have begun in Portland, and she understands that they will continue throughout the winter. She does not really like living on a houseboat, she finds it frightening; the boat rocks, and you have told her that all boats rock, there is nothing to be done. (You must be not exactly in top form either. I never heard you admit to an inability to remedy anything—even my Datsun; you said you could fix it and you did, temporarily.)
You have found some old friends over at Reed College, she tells me; you hang out a lot over there, and you tell her that she would be very much happier with a job. Very likely she would, but you have taken her to an extremely high unemployment area.
She doesn’t understand your poetry at all, and doesn’t know what to say when you read it to her. Well, this is certainly a problem that I too could have had, except that I dealt with it head-on, as it were, simply and clearly saying that I didn’t understand poetry, that I had not read much or ever studied it. But that to me your poems sounded marvelous—which they did; I really miss the sound of them, your words.
You talk about me more and more.
You are at home less and less. And now Sally Ann confesses to me that she used to be a waitress at the Tosca; on some of the nights when I was at home, here in San Francisco (actually I used to be grateful for a little time to catch up on work), when I assumed you were just hanging out in North Beach, you were actually courting Sally Ann, so to speak. Well, at this point I find this new information quite painless to absorb; it simply makes me miss you even less. But Sally Ann wonders if I think you could possibly be seeing someone else now? She says that you’ve mentioned a French professor at Reed, a most talented woman, you’ve said. Do I think—?
Well, I most certainly do think; you seem to prefer women with very respectable professions, poor Sally Ann representing the single rule-proving exception, I suppose. Some sort of lapse in calculation on your part—or quite likely Sally Ann had more to do with me than with herself, if you see what I mean, and I think you will. In any case, a fatal error all around.
Because it is clear to me that in an emotional sense you are battering this young woman. She is being abused by you. I could prove it to a jury. And, unlike me, she is quite without defenses.
You must simply knock it off. For one thing, it’s beneath you, as you surely in your better, saner, kinder moments must clearly see (you’re not all bad; even in my own worst moments I recall much good, much kindness, even). Why don’t you just give her a ticket to somewhere, along with some gentle, ego-preserving words (heaven knows you’re at your best with words), and let her go? Then you can move in your Reed College French professor and live happily there on your houseboat—almost forever, at least until the Portland rains let up and you feel like moving on.
As for myself, it seems only fair to tell you that I have indeed found a new friend—or, rather, an old friend has reappeared in my life in another role. (Fair. As I write this, I wonder if in some way, maybe, you were right all along to object to my notion of fairness? There was always a slightly hostile getting-even element in my justice? Well, I will at least admit that possibility.) In any case, I am taking off on a small trip to Jackson, Wyoming, day after tomorrow, with my old-new friend. About whom I can only at this moment say so far so good, in fact very good indeed—although I have to admit that I am still a little wary, after you. However, at least for me he is a more known quality than you were (we were undergraduates together, in those distant romantic Berkeley days), and I very
much doubt that you’ll be getting any letter of complaint regarding me. He already knows what he’s getting, so to speak.
And so, please wish me well, as I do you (I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the MacArthur thing).
And, I repeat, let Sally Ann go. All three of us, you, me, and Sally Ann, will be much better off—you without her, and she without you. And me without the crazy burden of these letters, which, if I were really fair, I would send on to you.
His Women
“I think we should try it again. You move back in,” says Meredith, in her lovely, low, dishonest Southern voice.
Carter asks, “But—Adam?”
“I’m not seeing him anymore.” Her large face, not pretty but memorable, braves his look of disbelief. Her big, deep-brown eyes are set just too close; her shapely mouth is a little too full, and greedy. Big, tall, dark, sexy Meredith, who is still by law his wife. She adds, “I do see him around the campus, I mean, but we’re just friends now.”
That’s what you said before, Carter does not say, but that unspoken sentence hangs there in the empty space between them. She knows it as well as he does.
They are sitting in the garden behind her house—their house, actually, joint ownership being one of their central problems, as Carter sees it. In any case, now in early summer, in Chapel Hill, the garden is lovely. The roses over which Carter has labored in seasons past—pruning, spraying, and carefully, scientifically feeding—are in fragrant, delicately full bloom: great bursts of red and flame, yellow and pink and white. The beds are untidy now, neglected. Adam, who never actually moved in (Carter thinks), is not a gardener, and Meredith has grown careless.
She says, with a pretty laugh, “We’re not getting younger. Isn’t it time we did something mature, like making our marriage work?”
“Since we can’t afford a divorce.” He, too, laughs, but since what he says is true, no joke, it falls flat.