Beautiful Girl

by Alice Adams

  But he was not supposed to voice as strong an emotion as hatred in the presence of Cathy, and he sensed reproof in Barbara’s slightly stiffened posture. She was an extremely nice woman who wanted things to be perfect—her house, her husband, her daughter and especially herself. Now, instead of reproving Bill, she smiled at him, sighed and said, “God, I’m tired. I really did have a day.”

  “You didn’t like your father?” Cathy asked in a neutral voice that bore, for Bill, an unnerving resemblance to Dr. Fredericks’s therapeutic blandness. But it was almost the first personal question that he could remember Cathy’s ever asking him, and he found that his chest warmed and expanded with pleasure. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was very much afraid of him. The way I find hunters frightening.”

  “Oh,” said Cathy, and then for no reason she giggled.

  “We’re having a really wicked dinner,” Barbara said. “Prawns with that sour-cream sauce. I absolutely couldn’t resist them in the Grant Market, so big and perfect. And, of course, rice.”

  “You are wicked,” Bill responded, since this was how they talked to each other, but he was hearing them both with Cathy’s ears, and he wondered how she could bear their middle-aged fatuity. She was staring at a small porcelain vase of tiny blue strawflowers as though she had never seen it before. Bill asked Barbara if she wanted another drink.

  He made them strong, and by the end of dinner, during which he and Barbara drank wine and told Cathy illuminating vignettes from their own histories, stressing education and travel and friendship, reminding her that they had once been young—by the time all that was over, Bill was almost drunk and Barbara had a headache. But he was still aware of the troubled depths of tenderness in Barbara’s round brown eyes as she said good night to them both—quite out of character, she had decided to give in to her headache and go to bed.

  “Cathy and I will clear up,” said Bill decisively.

  The truth was that he liked to wash dishes, which his father had seen to it that he was not allowed to do. He liked all that warm, foamy water around his hands and the essential and marvelous simplicity of the task. He handed each hot, clean dish to Cathy, who dried it with a sparklingly clean white towel, in the blue-and-white-tiled, Philippine-mahogany room.

  For no real reason, a picture of Cathy the first time he had ever seen her came to Bill’s mind—a small, square girl with chocolate cake and frosting all over her face and hands. It was during what he and Barbara ironically referred to as their courtship, a protracted and difficult period during which they had both been concerned with Bill’s shedding his wife—and with the difficulty of seeing each other privately, what with Barbara’s child and his wife. Barbara’s first husband had moved to Dallas and had not seen Cathy since the divorce, but Barbara had felt that Bill and her daughter should not meet until Bill was actually free. So it was quite a while before Barbara could invite Bill for dinner. And on that occasion Cathy found the perfect, beautiful chocolate cake that Barbara had made and plunged her hands into its dark, moist depths, then smeared her face. Barbara had chosen to laugh rather than to scold, and Bill had liked her for that. Now the remembered sight of small, smeared Cathy moved him. He wanted to tell her about it, but he knew she would not understand; nor could she know that simply watching someone grow can make you care for them. So instead of any of that he said, “As a matter of fact I think James Fredericks is a jackass,” and handed her a wet wineglass.

  Carefully polishing, as she had been taught by her mother, Cathy asked, “Is he? I don’t know.”

  “God, yes. All he can talk about is what he likes to call ‘finances.’ He can’t say ‘money.’ Besides, you don’t see his name on any anti-war petitions of doctors, do you? He probably owns stock in Dow Chemical.”

  Plunging his hands back into the sink, Bill realized that he had been wanting to say this for a long time. He had forgotten that Cathy was not supposed to know that he and Barbara had gone to Fredericks, and he wanted to reassure her, to tell her that if she didn’t dig Fredericks it was certainly O.K. with him. But then he felt her mind float off to some clouded private distance of her own, and suddenly he couldn’t stand it, and he turned furiously to confront her. “Listen,” he said loudly, “you think you’re confused, and that the world is difficult. Christ, what do you think it’s like to be forty-one? Christ, talk about confused and difficult. Do you think I like getting outside myself and seeing a fatuous drunk whose scalp is beginning to show through? Christ! And believe me, being married is a hell of a lot more difficult than not being married, let me tell you. Your mother has to diet or she’d be fat, and she can’t stand fat. And it’s very hard to live without a lot of money and booze. You give it a little thought—just try.”

  Cathy’s round eyes did not blink and she went on polishing the second wineglass. Then she glanced quickly at Bill and said, “O.K.” Then she said, “I think I’ll go to bed now,” and Bill was left alone to clean the sink and wipe off the unvarnished wooden chopping table.

  After he had finished that, he went into the small room off the living room that was known as his study; his books were there, and some portfolios of old drawings, and a collection of dirty pipes that he would have smoked only in that room. Now as he entered he found placed squarely in the middle of his desk a white sheet of paper, and on it were what he recognized as two joints.

  He sat down in the comfortable green wool upholstered chair that Barbara had provided him, presumably for meditation, and he meditated, seeking a variety of explanations for Cathy’s present, or gesture—whatever it was. However, nothing rational came to his mind. Or, rather, reasonable explanations approached but then as quickly dissolved, like clouds or shadows. Instead, salty and unmasculine tears stung at his eyes, and then he fell asleep in his chair, having just decided not to think at all.

  Ripped Off

  The gentle, leafy day made Deborah high; she came home from her morning job light in her head and heart. When she saw that the small drawer from her desk had been pulled out and taken over to the bed and left there, its contents spilled out over the tousled blue sheets, she first thought, Wow, Philip, what are you trying to tell me? Philip lived with her in the Russian Hill flat, and what was—or had been—in the drawer were notes from him, notes or bits of paper that for one reason or another he had put his name on or drawn some small picture on. A couple of the messages said “Gone for walk. Later.” But on one, a torn-off match cover, he had written “I love you,” and passed it to her across a table in a restaurant. There was even a canceled check made out to and endorsed by him, from a couple of months ago when Deborah had lent him some money.

  Her second reaction was one of surprise; Philip was not nosy or jealous. Once she had known a boy, Juan, from Panama, who was both—violently so. She had had to burn her old letters and diaries so that he would not find them. In fact, he had finally left her because (he said) she was so friendly with other men. (She did not see herself as especially friendly to anyone.) It was not like Philip to search through her desk. She thought he must have been looking for a stamp or something. Still, why bring the drawer over to the bed? What was he trying to tell her?

  Deborah was a tall, rather oddly shaped girl. Her breasts were large but her body was otherwise skimpy, and with her long thin legs she had somewhat the look of a bird that might topple over but never quite did. Big front teeth made her appear shy, which she was. Her wide dark-brown eyes could show a great deal of pain or love. She wore her brown hair long and straight, but for her Kelly Girl job—taken for two reasons: to give herself freedom of movement (she only took morning work), and to embarrass her mother, who expected her to have some kind of career—she dressed in short non-mini skirts and straight shirts. She tended to look for clothes that would hide her—hide her identity as well as her breasts. Her mother and some of the neighbors in that expensive San Francisco block—she and Philip lived in a building owned by Deborah’s stepfather, who charged a ritualistic fifty a month for a high, wide stud
io room with an overwhelming view of the Bay and the ocean—described her as a hippie. Deborah felt that that was not quite right, although she could not have said what she was. She read a lot, and thought. Now she was mainly thinking about what to make for dinner for Philip, in case he came home for dinner.

  As she picked up the bits of paper (nothing missing) and replaced the drawer and made the bed—bending awkwardly, tugging at the recalcitrant sheets—her discovery seemed less funny all the time. It was painful for Philip to know she was so sentimental. She blushed and pressed her fingers over her mouth. Nobody but a thirteen-year-old or a middle-aged woman (her mother, with all her dead father’s Navy things, and pressed dead gardenias in a book of poems by Dorothy Parker) would keep stuff around like that. What would Philip think? Nothing between them was at all explicitly stated or defined. He had moved into the room shortly after they had met (at the Renaissance Fair, in Marin County—beautiful!) without much comment or any real plan, and he could presumably leave the same way. No one said anything about how long. Deborah sometimes thought he was there simply because of the coincidence in time between meeting her and the disbanding of his Mendocino commune and the start of a new term at the Art Institute. He was a little younger than she was—twenty-one to her twenty-three. His presence was kindly and peaceful, but he talked little, and it was not possible to tell what was in his mind. Sometimes he sang a line or two, like “It ain’t me, babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for, babe.” (Did he mean her?) Or, “Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed.” (Had he met a new girl?)

  As she straightened up from her own bed (the headboard of linen, not brass) she noticed what was incredible that she had not seen before: Philip had taken his zebra-skin rug. Loss hit her hard—so hard that she sat down on the bed and stared at the dusty space where the skins had been. He’s used that silly drawer as an excuse to go, she thought. Of course. That was why he emptied it onto the bed. He was telling her that she was a terrible, possessive woman, hoarding souvenirs (like her mother), trying to hang on to him. The rug was the first thing he had brought over, by way of moving in, and despite their ambivalence about it (they disapproved of hunting, and too, the skins had a suggestion of decorator chic), it had picked up the look of the room, enhancing Deborah’s wicker and white linen and black leather chairs—leavings from her mother’s tasteful (the taste of five years back) country house.

  Deborah was given to moments of total panic such as this, when the world seemed to lurch beneath her like the fun-house floor at Playland-at-the-Beach, when she gasped for air and found it hard to breathe. A psychiatrist had explained this tidily to her as a syndrome: she feared abandonment. Her father had gone off to war and been killed (“At three, you would have viewed this as a desertion—a deliberate one”), and it seemed (to the psychiatrist) that she tried to repeat that situation. She readily felt abandoned, and picked people who would abandon her, like Panamanian Juan. But no, she thought, she was at least able to make an effort to think things through in a reasonable way. She controlled her breathing (with Yoga breaths) and remembered that Philip had been talking about having the rug repaired. There was a rip in it that could get larger, or could trip one of them. It made sense—Philip finally took the rug off to be sewn. He had mentioned some people on Union Street who did things with hides and who had the right machines for skins.

  Having decided so rationally on what had happened, Deborah felt better, but not very much better. Some cobweb of fear or anxiety clung to her mind, and she could not brush it off. She knew that she would not feel entirely well and reassured until she spoke to Philip. She concentrated on his phone call, which always came early in the afternoon, though by no stated arrangement. They would say whatever had happened in the day so far, and make some plan for the evening. Or Philip would say that he would see her later—meaning ten or eleven that night.

  Naturally, since she was eager for Philip to call, several other people did instead, and each time her heart jumped as she answered, “Hello?”

  Her mother said, “Darling, how are you? I was wondering if you and Philip are possibly free to come to dinner tomorrow? A couple of my professors from State are coming—you know, the ones who were out on strike—and I thought you might have fun with them.”

  Meaning: her mother thought the professors, who must have been quite young, would have a better time (and think better of her) if they met her hippie daughter with her longhaired, bearded boyfriend.

  “Sure. I’ll check with Philip,” Deborah said, and then listened to her mother’s continuing voice, which was grateful and full of love.

  Once, when she was stoned, Deborah had said to Philip, “My mother’s love comes at me like jelly. I have to be careful and stay back from it, you know? All that total approval I get poured over me. She doesn’t even know who I am.”

  Philip’s mother, in Cincinnati (“She pronounces it with a broad ‘a’—can you imagine? Cincinnahti.” He, too, was a person displaced from the upper middle class), did not approve of him at all—his beard or his long hair, his Goodwill or Army-surplus clothes. Dropping out of Princeton to come to an art school in San Francisco. She had not been told about the commune in Mendocino; nor, presumably, about Deborah. “I don’t mind her,” he said. “She’s sort of abrasive, bracing, like good sandpaper. She does her own thing, and it’s very clear where we’re both at.”

  Philip talked that hip way somewhat ironically, hiding behind it. “I think I’m what those idiot behavioral scientists call a post-hippie,” he once said. “Sounds sort of like a wooden Indian, doesn’t it?” But he had indeed put various things behind him, including drugs, except for an occasional cigarette. For him, Deborah had thrown out all her posters, and with him she had moved from Hesse and Tolkien to Mann and Dostoevski. “Let’s face it, babe, they’ve got more to say. I mean, they’ve really got it all together.”

  After her mother’s call, two friends called (about nothing), and finally there was the call from Philip.

  She said, “Wow, Philip, what are you trying to tell me?” as she had planned to, but she felt no conviction.

  “What?”

  “The desk drawer on the bed.”

  “What drawer?”

  “Did you take the zebra rug to be sewn?”

  “No. Deb, are you trying to tell me that we’ve been ripped off, as they say?”

  Crazily enough, this was a possibility she had not considered, but now she thought, Of course, it happens all the time.

  “Debby,” he was saying, “would you please look around and see what else is gone?”

  As best she could, she did look around; she found her shoe box full of jewelry—the ugly inherited diamonds that she never wore—intact under her sweaters, and the stereo safely in its corner. The books, the records. His pictures. She came back to the phone and told him that.

  “But aside from the stereo what else could they have taken?” she asked. “We don’t have TV and appliances, stuff like that. Who wants our books?” She felt herself babbling, then said, “I’m really sorry about your rug.”

  “Oh, well. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to have it.”

  “Shall I call the cops?”

  “I guess. I’ll be home for dinner, O.K.?”

  Relief made Deborah efficient. Philip had not moved out, and he was coming home for dinner. She began to put together a rather elaborate lamb stew. (She always bought meat on the chance that he would come home, even though sometimes after several days of his absences she would have to throw it out.) She shaved fresh ginger into the lamb, and then she called the police.

  The two officers who arrived perhaps twenty minutes later were something of a surprise. They were young—about her age. (Who of her generation would want to be a cop, she wondered.) One of them was blond and looked a little like a short-haired, clean-shaven Philip. They were quite sympathetic and soft-spoken; they gave sensible advice. “Use the double lock when you go out,” the blond one said. “This one could be picked in a minute. And fix the b
olt on the kitchen door.”

  “Do it soon,” said the other. “They could be back for more.”

  “It’s sort of funny they didn’t take the stereo, too,” Deborah said, conversationally.

  “Hippies love those fur rugs,” they told her, unaware that they were not talking to a nice girl from the right side of Russian Hill, and that for her they had just become the enemy.

  “More likely junkies than hippies, don’t you think?” she coldly said.

  For Deborah, the preparation and serving of food were acts of love. She liked to serve Philip; she brought in plates and placed them gently before him, like presents, although her offhand manner denied this.

  “It’s that Indian stuff,” she said of the stew. Then, so that he would not be forced to comment on her cooking, she said, “It’s funny, their moving that drawer from my desk.”

  “Probably thought you kept valuables there—bonds and bank notes and stuff.” He was eating as though he were starved, which was how he always ate; he barely paused to look up and speak.

  She felt herself inwardly crying, “I do! You are infinitely valuable to me. Anything connected with you is valuable—please stay with me!” She managed not to say any of this; instead she blinked. He had been known to read her eyes.

  “This stew is really nice,” he told her. “And the wine—cool! Like wow!”

  They both laughed a little, their eyes briefly meeting.