Beautiful Girl

by Alice Adams

  The room that I found late that afternoon was on the Rue de Seine. My high narrow windows overlooked the entrance to the Club Mephisto; I could see a fish market where the fat silver bellies were piled high, and a fruit stand bright with winter tomatoes and bunches of dark rose chrysanthemums. At the corner hardware store I bought a saucepan and a small tripod burner with some cans of Sterno, and felt myself prepared for warm domestic peace with Bruno.

  But though reunited we were never peaceful. In spite of my room, of which he approved, our passionate partings continued. I can hear now the angry sound of his boots on the narrow steep stairs as he left stormily after an impossible argument. And I remember lying half awake dreaming that he would come back.

  One afternoon, during a rift with Bruno that was more prolonged than usual, on an impulse I called Mme. Frenaye and asked her to have tea with me at the Ritz. She would be delighted, she said, and I remember that I wore my first New Look dress, which was gray silk with a terribly long skirt. The occasion was a great success. I was struck by how glad I was to see her. It seemed to me then that I had missed her, and that my life alone had been more difficult. Certainly that afternoon Madame was at her best. She complained pleasantly that the service was not what it had been before the war, nor the pastry, and after our tea we gossiped happily about the other women in the room.

  Madame did not ask me about my present living arrangements. Since I had come prepared to boast, this was slightly irritating, but at the same time I was relieved. Nor did she, as I had rather expected, say that she missed me. She was quite impersonally charming, and we parted with an exchange of pleasantries, but with no talk of a further meeting.

  The rain and cold continued into April. I remember bitterly deciding that the lyric burst one expected of spring in Paris would never come, that it was a myth.

  Joe and Laura had left, apologizing, for Hollywood in March. I went to lectures at the Sorbonne and in the lengthening intervals when I did not see Bruno I wandered alone about the city, hunched against the rain, wrapped in American tweed.

  Then, around the first of May, the weather changed, the chestnut and plane trees along the boulevards feathered into delicate green and the sky behind the square stone tower of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was pink and soft in the long light evenings.

  For at least a month Bruno and I got along happily. It was the tender penultimate stage of a love affair, before it became clear that I really wanted him to come to America and marry me, and that he had to live in Italy and did not want to get married, clear to us both that I was hopelessly domestic and bourgeois. He said, finally, that I would not be a suitable companion for an Italian statesman, and of course he was perfectly right.

  But before this finality, in some spirit of bravado, I called Mme. Frenaye and asked her to come to tea in my room—and asked Bruno to come too. I am not at all sure what I expected of either of them; perhaps I felt the dramatic necessity of a meeting between the two people who had that year been, variously, most important to me.

  Or perhaps this was my last defiance of Madame. If that were so I failed utterly, foiled again by her aplomb. Of course Bruno helped; he appeared uncharacteristically in a white shirt and tie, his brown hair brushed smooth; he could not have looked less like an Italian radical with a violent past. Mme. Frenaye first took him to be a nice American boy; her whole demeanor spoke a total acceptance and approval of him. She thought it very wise of him to study law in Paris, and she raised her lovely innocent blue eyes in attractive horror when he told her how many hours he had to study each day. “But then you are so young and strong,” she said, with a tender and admiring smile. Of course he liked her—who could not?

  She even approved of my room, though she sat rather stiffly and gingerly on the single straight wooden chair. She looked across the street to the piles of fish and remarked that she had noticed lower prices here than in her own quartier, but this was her only suggestion that I had come down in the world. And I thought then, but did not speak, of her beautiful poisson normand. She only said, “Such a nice clean room, Patience, and it must be so convenient for you.”

  I made tea, boiling the water over Sterno which Madame thought terribly ingenious, and we ate the pastries which I had bought. Bruno and Madame talked about the beauties of Italy, of Florence in early spring, Venice in October. And painting. I could imagine her saying of him, “Tellement cultivé, ce jeune Italien, tellement sensible.”

  After that day everything deteriorated. The weather turned cold and it rained fiercely as though to remind us all of the difficult past winter. When, finally, I booked passage on a boat which was to leave the third of June, I felt that my exit was being forced, the city and the time would have no more of me. I had accepted the impossibility of Bruno—we still saw each other but I wept and it always ended badly. I did not see Madame again. I did call her, meaning to say goodbye, but there was no answer.

  Sometimes it occurs to me to write to Madame, to send her pictures of my husband, my house and my children, as though to convince her that I have grown up, that I am no longer that odd girl who came to her in the wet summer coat, or who tried to charm her with tea made over Sterno in an unlikely room. Or I try to imagine her here, perhaps as the great-aunt whom, on shopping trips into town, I occasionally visit. But this is impossible: my aunt, an American Gothic puritan with a band of black grosgrain ribbon about her throat, my aunt laughing over the purchase of a tiny soutien-gorge, bringing in wine, l’essentiel? This won’t do. And I am forced to leave Madame, and Bruno of whom I never think, as and where they are, in that year of my own history.

  Gift of Grass

  “But what’s so great about money—or marriages and houses, for that matter?” Strengthened perhaps by two recent cups of tea (rose hips, brewed with honey and a few grass seeds), Cathy had raised herself on one elbow and turned to face the doctor. “Couldn’t there be other ways to live?” she asked, consciously childish and pleading.

  “Have you thought of one?” Oppressed by weariness and annoyance, Dr. Fredericks was unaware that both those emotions sounded in his soft, controlled voice. Once, in a burst of confidence, Cathy had said to him accusingly, “You speak so softly just to make me listen.” Now she said nothing. Believing himself to be in command, Dr. Fredericks also believed his patient to be overcome by what he saw as her transference. She saw her feelings toward him as simple dislike and a more complicated distrust.

  She lay back down, giving up, and reconsidered the large space that served as both the doctor’s office and his living room. It was coolly blue and green—olive walls and ceiling, royal-blue carpet, navy silk chair and sofa, pale-blue linen lampshades on green pottery lamps. Only the couch on which Cathy lay was neither green nor blue; it was upholstered with a worn Oriental rug, as though that might disguise its function. Like most children—she was sixteen—Cathy knew more than her elders thought she did. She knew that at one time her mother had been a patient of Dr. Fredericks’s, and she recognized her mother’s touch in that room. Her mother, who was an interior decorator, had evidently “done” it. As payment for her hours of lying there? It would have been an expensive job; Cathy saw that, too. God knows how many hours it would have taken to pay for all that silk.

  All her mother had ever said, in a tearful voice that was supposed to extract similar sincerity from Cathy, was “At one time in my life when I was very troubled, a psychiatrist really helped me a great deal. In fact, you might say that he saved our marriage, Bill’s and mine.” Not wanting Cathy to sense a conspiracy, she had not told Cathy that she was sending her to her own psychiatrist. This was in August, when Cathy had said that she was not going back to school in the fall, and her mother and Bill—her stepfather for the past ten years—had told her that in that case she must go to see Dr. Fredericks.

  “But I’m not troubled,” Cathy had lied. Then she had giggled in her unrelated, unnerving way. “Or married. I just don’t want to go to school for a while,” she had said.

  “But I
hope you will be married,” her mother had said. She had sighed, frowned and then smiled, attempting reassurance. “Dr. James helped me a great deal,” she said. “He’s one of the best doctors in San Francisco.” She used the first name of Dr. Fredericks—Dr. James Fredericks—which Cathy did not think was a very smart disguise.

  While the long pause after his question lasted, Dr. Fredericks struggled with his counter-transference. He stared down at Cathy’s rather squat, short body in its jeans and black turtleneck sweater, at the long, limp brown hair that fell from the edge of the couch and the perfectly round brown eyes in a pale, round face. He had to admit it—he couldn’t stand the little girl. Injecting kindliness into his voice, he said, “Isn’t there anything on your mind that you’d like to tell me about?”

  At this, Cathy burst into tears. A quick, noisy storm of sobs shook her shoulders and her chest, then stopped, and she said, “You dumb fink.”

  He leaned back comfortably in his raw-silk chair that did not creak. Seductively he said, “I suppose by your standards I am in some ways rather dumb.” He did not say, Such as they are.

  “Such as they are,” she said. “I’m not interested in standards, or school or earning money or getting married.”

  “I wish I knew what you were interested in,” he said.

  This seemed to Cathy his most heartfelt and least contrived remark of the hour, and she answered him. “Clouds,” she said. “And foghorns. I wonder where they all are.”

  “If you really wonder, you could go to the library and get a book.”

  “I’d rather wonder.” She giggled.

  “The ‘trip’ is more important than the destination, is that what you mean?” Despite himself, he had underlined “trip.”

  “I don’t drop acid, I’ve told you that,” she said, deadpan.

  “Well,” he said, warming to his task, “that’s a reasonable enough fear. But perhaps you have some other less reasonable fears.”

  “Deer-hunters. God, they have the worst faces I ever saw,” she suddenly brought out, forgetting him and remembering the weekend just past. She and her mother and Bill had driven up to Lake Tahoe—a jaunt intended to prove that they were not really angry with Cathy, that they loved her nevertheless. By an unfortunate coincidence, this was also the first weekend of the deer season. On the other side of Sacramento, winding up past Auburn through beautiful mountain rocks and trees, Highway 80 had been lined with white camper trucks bearing hunters. The men wore ugly red caps and red plaid shirts. They had looked remarkably alike, at least to Cathy—as alike as their campers. Fathers and sons and friends, their faces had been coarse and unintelligent, excited, jovial and greedy. “God, I hope they all shoot each other,” she said to Dr. Fredericks.

  “Well,” he said hopefully. “Let’s see if we can find out what deer-hunters mean to you. I doubt somehow that it’s sheer dislike of killing. For instance, you don’t seem to be upset about the war in Vietnam.”

  “That’s so bad I can’t think about it at all,” said Cathy, with total candor.

  “Well, let’s see.” Dr. Fredericks, almost alone among his colleagues, was more opposed to protesters than to the war, but bringing up Vietnam had been a ploy. He now thrust his real point home. “I do seem to remember that your stepfather is something of a hunter,” he said.

  Cathy heard the light note of triumph in his voice, to which she reacted with rage and despair and a prolonged silence. Why bother to tell him that Bill only hunted ducks—and only with his father, before that awful old man had died? During the silence, she listened to the leisurely sounds of outlying San Francisco traffic and the faint, distant foghorns from the Bay. Concentrating on these, she was able to stop the echo of Dr. Fredericks’s voice in her mind. Their voices were what she could stand least about adults: Dr. Fredericks’s bored hostility; her teachers’ voices, loud and smug; the alternately anxious and preening, knowing voice of her mother. The only thing that she could remember about her natural father, who had divorced her mother when Cathy was two, was his voice. It was high-pitched, almost a whine—nothing much to miss. Actually, Bill had a nice warm deep voice, until he drank too much and it blurred.

  A heavy truck went by, creaking and lumbering as though weighted with old furniture or barrels of china and glass. Brakes screeched several blocks away. Then the traffic sounds continued as before. For a few minutes there were no foghorns, and then there they were again, discordant, with no rhythm.

  Both Cathy and Dr. Fredericks glanced over at the clock on his desk. Five minutes to go. He sighed softly and pleasurably. He had recently stopped smoking and he enjoyed the air in his expanded lungs. Although he was nearing sixty, he was well preserved. Squash and swimming at his club had kept him in shape; he felt a certain snobbery toward many of his colleagues who were running to fat. He and his wife, who owned and ran an extremely successful chain of gift shops, spent vacations at health spas, playing tennis and dieting together. A blue-eyed Southerner, from West Virginia, Dr. Fredericks liked to view himself as a maverick among psychoanalysts—another breed, one might say.

  Cathy swung her short legs off the couch and sat up. She clutched her knees and faced him. “Look,” she said. “It’s hopeless. You and Mother think it’s important to get married and save marriages and get money and save that, and I don’t.”

  “We’re trying to find out what you do think is important,” he said. He did not bother to conceal his impatience.

  Neither did she. “So am I.”

  “Next week?” They both stood up.

  Out of context (he felt), she giggled.

  Cathy’s parents lived about ten blocks from Dr. Fredericks in the same expensive and fog-ridden San Francisco neighborhood, but instead of going home Cathy walked to the park she often went to, along the broad streets and down the hill leading toward the Bay. Here the sun was shining. She pulled a small box of raisins from her pocket and began to eat them as she walked.

  The park was surrounded by rolling woods of pine and fir, cypress and eucalyptus, through which on clear days one could catch blue views of the Bay, red glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge. Cathy walked past creaking swings and a slide crowded with small children. Out on a playing field, lounging about on the beaten grass, there were some kids her own age whom she thought she knew, so she hurried on toward the woods.

  Off the path, she came to a place where there was a large sloping patch of sand. She sat down and reached into the back pocket of her jeans, where there was a very mashed joint, which she lit. She lay back, her left arm protecting her hair from the sand. She sucked in and waited for the melting of her despair.

  The air smelled of the sea, of lemon-scented eucalyptus, of pine and of the dank, dark earth. It was nearly a clear day, but the foghorns sounded more strongly to her from the water. Soon the fog would come in, gigantically billowing through the Golden Gate. Now, in the visible sky above the dark thatched cypresses, there were only a few large clouds; they were as heavy and slow and lumbering as bulls, a slow-motion lumbering of bulls across the sky. Cathy concentrated on their changes, their slow and formal shifts in shape and pattern. Then, in the peace, in the warm silence, she fell asleep.

  Bill, Cathy’s stepfather, had at moments a few of the reactions to Cathy that she evoked in Dr. Fredericks. At worst, he despaired of ever reaching her. But he was exceptionally sensitive to the feelings of women. He could often feel what Cathy felt, and could bear it no better than she. It was his sensitivity, in fact, that had kept him from leaving Cathy’s mother, Barbara, who was his second wife. The extent of Barbara’s anxiety and despair when they first spoke of separation had got through to him. They had seen Dr. Fredericks, together and separately, for more than a year. But before their meetings with him began Bill had already decided not, after all, to leave Barbara for Ruth, his girl friend. (Ruth had been unhappy, too, but she was younger and more resilient; her despair hit Bill with lesser force.)

  Perhaps to avoid a discussion of Ruth, Bill had talked about his i
nheritance from his father, and Dr. Fredericks had given Bill good advice about investing it. Bill gave him credit for that. Actually investments were Fredericks’s real but unacknowledged field of expertise. Bill was a commercial artist, and not a terribly successful one. The investment had brought his income well within range of his wife’s, so it may have been Dr. Fredericks, after all, who saved the marriage.

  It was nearly dinnertime when Cathy came home from the park, and Bill and her mother were sitting in the living room having drinks. Barbara had done their living room, like Dr. Fredericks’s, in cool blues and greens, except for the brown leather sofa—a kind of tribute to Bill’s masculine presence; ordinarily, she did not use leather. Bill almost never sat on it. He would sit instead, as he did now, on a small Victorian dark-blue silk chair that must have been intended for Cathy. Fortunately, he was light—a very thin, narrowly built man with delicate bones and sparse blondish hair. Barbara, wearing a smart gray wool dress, was sitting on the leather sofa, and Cathy joined her there. During the cocktail hour, they would sit that way, at opposite ends of the sofa, facing Bill rather than each other.

  Mother and daughter appeared to Bill remarkably alike. Barbara’s eyes, too, were round and often opaque; her body tended to be squat. Its shape was childlike, which at times Bill found quite touching. At other times, it turned him off, and on to voluptuous Ruth. In Cathy, naturally enough, the sexlessness was more marked. Bill sometimes wondered how he would have felt with a voluptuous daughter, a swinging chick. Would it have made him more uncomfortable?

  “I told Dr. Fredericks how much I hated deer-hunters,” proffered Cathy. Since Barbara, on principle, would never ask what went on during “her hour,” Cathy would throw out indecipherable and tantalizing tidbits.

  Feeling his second drink, Bill said, “God, I hate them too. They all remind me of my father.” Bill’s father had been a mighty hunter, out of the great Northwest, with rather Bunyanesque notions of manhood, so that Bill had trouble from time to time believing in himself as a man, feeling that if those coarse, red-faced, hunting cretins were men he was not one. Indeed, he had been told by several women, including Barbara, that he played around only in order to prove his manhood to himself. At times, he thought that might be true. At other times, he thought it was simply because he very much liked women, lots of them.