by Alice Adams
“Hey,” he said, “you’ve got thin.”
“Well, not exactly thin,” she said. “Don’t lose your head over a couple of pounds.” But she smiled, very pleased with herself and with him, and she poured out more wine.
They were sitting near the stone building on a large plateau, above the vineyard, commanding a view of the green flowing vines that stretched for miles beneath the hot June sky, back to the highway. The warm air smelled winey, and was sweetened with bay leaves and stray flowers. Stuart had brought two joints, and as they smoked the scene became more fluid and brighter green, the wine scent stronger.
At some point a large yellow dog ambled up to them, where they lay on their spread-out blanket. He had a black spot that surrounded one eye—a cartoon of a dog.
“I’ll bet anything I know what your name is,” Martha told the dog, who sniffed the air suspiciously, gave them a long hard look, then suddenly turned and dashed off down the road.
This visitation, combined with the effect of the dope, made Martha and Stuart laugh like maniacs; they lay back on the blanket and laughed until their stomachs hurt and tears ran down their cheeks. It was a memorably long afternoon, and finally they fell asleep, curled up together like kittens.
Later, waking abruptly, his arms still holding his soft and pretty wife, Stuart was struck with a dark and terrible thought: for all he knew, Martha was still seeing (meaning screwing) Jackson Walker. Since their reconciliation—renewal would be the more accurate word—he had simply assumed her affair was over. Nevertheless, how could he be sure? What had she said? He was not sure, and that uncertainty caused a pain in his chest like that of angina, sharp, and hard to bear.
But as Martha woke and turned, smiled and kissed his face, the pain retreated, only to return from time to time (somewhat diminished) as all his worst thoughts did.
Their good life continued through the summer. Stuart went on working with Mario, enjoying his increasing skill; the fact that he was earning money with his hands appealed to him. And he was happy with Martha, who seemed to grow prettier and somewhat thinner—at least less fat—all the time. These days it was Martha who made dinner, since he got home later and was often more exhausted than she. She made wonderful stews and heavy soups, and she had a special skill with salads: she put everything into them and all the crisp flavors were glorious together.
But Stuart was still tortured by his thoughts; they obsessed him as Martha herself had, in their old pre-marriage days. He had frequent horrible fantasies about her with the black man, with Jackson Walker. He did not consider the fact of Walker’s blackness to be important; he was sure he would have felt just as terrible no matter who it had been. And he had read enough Freud to question his obsession; he knew about the homosexual implications of jealousy. Did he, a nice white Southern boy, secretly yearn for sexual union with a black man? He searched out his heart and his id, but honestly could not see how this theory applied to him.
Sometimes he imagined asking Martha very calmly some questions about the affair—for instance, how and when it had ended. But as he phrased the questions to himself, his calm departed and his chest vibrated with anxiety.
The only time they had anything resembling a conversation about her defection was after a party that Mario gave. It was a huge mixed bag of a party: Mario collected people. It was presided over by Esther, Mario’s wife, a placid blond giant of a woman. (Meeting her, Stuart had felt much closer to Mario: he understood about a mania for one’s physical antithesis.) And Mario’s guests seemed to have been invited for variety’s sake: there were two hippie girls with long blond hair, a middle-aged Spanish painter with his young Greek wife, three young black men with naturals, an octogenarian woman sculptor, a homosexual real-estate dealer, two timid boys who worked for the Welfare Department and an elegant black woman social worker. And Martha and Stuart.
To all these people Esther ladled out a watery stew as though it were marvelous, and she smiled blandly to conceal her dislike of them all. She loved Mario, but hated parties and most people. She turned up the volume of the stereo, which blared rock music into the room, and she kept refilling the glasses with cheap red wine. Since there had not been quite enough to eat, everyone got smashed, especially the people who were also smoking dope in the basement.
Having temporarily lost sight of Martha, Stuart talked to the black woman social worker. He asked her about the mayor’s plans for Hunter’s Point.
“What plans?”
Stuart wandered away, and eventually downstairs. There it was dark and sweet with smoke; the Beatles blasted out “Good Day, Sunshine!” At first he couldn’t find Martha, but then he did see her, dancing with a tall black man, shyly thrusting her pelvis in and out, her body writhing in response to the man’s more violent motion. All their contortions were perfectly synchronized; they might have been dancing together for years. Stuart and Martha had never danced well together, and watching those two was more than Stuart could stand. He pushed his way through the group on the stairs and walked out of the house.
He was confused about where he had parked the car, and before he could find it, Martha found him. They got into the car from opposite sides and sat there, not facing each other. Stuart did not start the motor.
They were high up on Potrero Hill, overlooking the darkened warehouse area. In silence they watched the bright stream of traffic along the Embarcadero, until Stuart said, “How can I trust you—ever again? How do I know you won’t find someone again?” He spoke hesitantly; saying those words was very painful to him.
She was as slow to answer. “Well,” she said, and he could see the gleam from the streetlight reflected in her serious eyes, “I suppose you can’t. But you could find someone too, you know. Who can promise anyone?”
“God, thanks a lot for being so honest!”
“Don’t you want me to be?”
“Of course not!” screamed Stuart, who was, in his way, considerably more honest than she.
They drove home in silence.
During the period of his obsession with Martha’s infidelity, Stuart often woke at three or four in the morning. Unable to sleep, he brooded about Martha and Jackson Walker, trying to imagine them together. So intense was his concentration, he sometimes felt that he was on the verge of actually seeing them. But one morning in February, at 3 a.m.—it was terribly dark, and a cold wet wind misted the windowpanes—he tried, as he had often tried, to discover why he spent so much time thinking about such a painful subject.
And then a frightening thought occurred to him: perhaps he was in love with Martha’s love affair?
It was as though an oracle had made the pronouncement. It had the ominous echo of total truth. The next day he felt tired and raw and depressed. He drank too much wine with Mario at lunch, and in the middle of dinner that night he fell asleep in his chair.
During the next few weeks, as the weather turned springlike and daphne bloomed in the garden below their window, Stuart began to regard himself with intense suspicion: now that he had found himself out, would the marriage fall apart? Had he, in truth, lost interest in Martha, since presumably she was no longer having the affair that had provided him with such orgies of jealous pleasure?
By April he had decided that his fears had been groundless. They still lived together fairly happily; they had a good time talking and sleeping together. One day he realized that he had not thought about Jackson Walker for weeks, and it struck him, too, that he missed his old preoccupation.
That night at dinner, as coolly as he could, he said, “I suppose your former black friend had a natural out to there?” And he gestured out from his own small head.
At first she looked surprised, and then she narrowed her eyes as though with an effort either at recollection or at fathoming her husband. “No,” she finally said, “it was pretty short.”
That information was enough to rekindle Stuart’s fantasies; for the next few weeks he was frequently shot through again with the sweet piercing pain that accompan
ied his image of Martha touching and caressing another man’s hair.
But gradually this phase too passed. The whole episode began to seem quite remote, and Stuart became desperate without it. And so, on another night at dinner, he braced himself, and asked, “I suppose all that stuff about black men being so great in the sack is a lot of bull?”
Again, considering, she narrowed her eyes, and it came to Stuart that she looked like the mean old Martha who had sat across from him in the Porthole, at home, putting down his love. Then, “No,” she said, quite deliberately, “as a matter of fact he was wild.”
Stuart got up and hit her across the mouth.
Flights
“Oh, yes, Valerie will like it very much,” said the energetic young man with blue-black hair and a sharply cleft chin, in an accent that was vaguely “English.” He and Jacob Eisenman were standing in the large shabby room that overlooked the crashing Pacific, on Kauai, one of Hawaii’s outermost and least populated islands.
Jacob later thought that the implications of his tone were a sort of introduction to Valerie, although at the time he had not entirely understood what was being implied. Jacob, the gaunt sardonic literary German who, incongruously, was the owner of this resort. Then he simply wondered why, why very much? The young man’s clothes were pale, Italian, expensive; it was unlikely that he (or Valerie) would be drawn by the price, which was what drew most of the other guests: older people, rather flabby and initially pale, from places like North Dakota and Idaho and, curiously, Alaska—and a few young couples, wan tired families with children. These people stayed but were not enthusiastic; they would have preferred a more modern place. (Jacob was subject to radar intuitions.) And so this young man’s eagerness to register for the room and pay in advance, which was unnecessary (with a hundreddollar bill), made Jacob apprehensive, as though he were being invaded—a sense that he dismissed as paranoia, to which he was also subject. But before he could sort out reactions, the young man had swung out of the driveway in his orange Datsun, presumably to fetch Valerie from the nearby hotel, which he had said they did not like. “So loud, you know?”
In fact, for no reason Jacob found that his heart was beating in jolts, so that quite out of character he went to the bar, unlocked it and poured himself a shot of brandy.
The bar, a narrow slat-roofed structure, was ten winding steps up from the pool, between the rental units and Jacob’s own office-apartment-library. Curiously, it was almost never used by the Alaskan-North Dakotans, the young couples. Nor was the neat functional built-in barbecue, which was adjacent. Most of the units had kitchenettes, but still wouldn’t they sometimes want to cook outside? The barbecue was the last “improvement” that Jacob had given to his resort. He had spent most of his earlier years in California, going from Los Angeles up to International House at Berkeley; he later concluded that he had been misled by that background; only Californians liked barbecues, and no one from California seemed to come his way.
Except for a disastrous visit from his best friend, fat Otto from I. House days, and Otto’s new wife—a visit which Jacob had determined not to think about.
The Datsun rushed back into the parking area, and “Valerie” got out. At first and somewhat distant glance, filtered through the bougainvillaea that hung about the bar, she was a delicately built young blonde. In dazzling white clothes. Huge dark glasses on a small face. An arrogant walk.
Jacob took a too large swallow of the rough brandy, which made him cough. So that both people turned to see him there at the bar, at eleven in the morning. (“You aroused such false expectations,” Valerie said, later on.)
The young man, registered as Larry Cobb, waved, and Valerie smiled indefinitely. And a few minutes later, all the way from the room that he had rented them, Jacob heard a loud harsh voice that boomed, “But, darling, it’s absolutely perfect.”
Could that voice have come from such a delicate girl? He supposed it must. Jacob pulled on the large straw hat he always wore—he detested the sun—and hurried away from the bar.
The practical or surface reason for Jacob’s presence in this unlikely setting was that he had inherited it from his parents. However, as Otto had pointed out more than once, he could have sold it when they died, when the place was still in good shape. Now he’d have to spend God knows how much to fix it up—assuming, as Otto did assume, that he wanted to sell.
The Eisenmans had fled Berlin in the early Thirties, with their young son and a few remnants of their once-thriving rare-book business; following the terrible and familiarly circuitous route of the time (theirs had included Hong Kong), they finally reached Los Angeles, where they set up shop again and were (finally) successful enough to send their son to Berkeley. Later they were persuaded to invest in and retire to a warm island resort. It worked out well. They loved Kauai, where the sun warmed their tired bones and all around them magnificent flowers—flowers hitherto associated with expensive florists—effortlessly bloomed. Birds of paradise. Poinsettias, and of course everywhere the violent colors of bougainvillaea and hibiscus. They tended their property lovingly, and, a loving couple, they died peacefully within a week of each other. Jacob flew out to settle the estate and quixotically decided to stay. Well, why not? His Berkeley landlady could, and did, ship his books; besides, he was tired of graduate school, instructorships. And, as he wrote to Otto, “You know I have a horror of airplane flights. This way I avoid the return trip.”
He promoted the woman who had been his parents’ housekeeper to the position of manageress. Mrs. Wong, whom he then instructed to hire some local girls to help with the cleaning up. He was aware—his radar told him—that some of the local islanders imagined Mrs. Wong to be his mistress. He didn’t mind; actually he liked her very much, but nothing could have been further from the truth.
Mrs. Wong was plain, round-faced, plump, and slovenly in her dress, and Jacob was sexually fastidious to the point of preferring celibacy to compromise. In fact in his entire life—he was almost fifty—he had had only three love affairs, and none of long duration; he was drawn to women who were violent, brilliant and intense, who were more than a little crazy. Crazy and extremely thin. “Basically I have a strong distaste for flesh,” he had once confided to Otto.
“Which would explain your affection for myself.” Otto had chuckled. “Pure masochism, of course.”
Their kind of joke, in the good old lost days.
“It was like labor pains,” Valerie loudly and accusingly said; she was speaking of the waves that later that afternoon had knocked her to the sandy bottom of the ocean, and from which the young man, Larry, had grabbed her out. “When Quentin was born, they kept coming back and back—”
She spoke furiously: why? From behind the bar where Jacob was making their drinks (he had never done this before, but the bar girl was sick and Mrs. Wong was somewhere else) he pondered her rage. At being a woman, forced painfully to bear children—blaming Larry for Quentin? No, they were not married; Larry certainly was not the father of Quentin, and she was not that silly. At Larry for having rescued her? No.
She was simply enraged at the sea for having knocked her down. It was an elemental rage, like Ahab’s, which Jacob could admire; that was how he felt about the sun.
In the vine-filtered sunlight he could see that Valerie was older than he had thought, was somewhere in her thirties. All across her face, over the small nose, the slight rise of cheekbones, were tiny white tracings. Tiny scars. An exquisitely repaired face: Jacob did not want to imagine the accident involved, but then he did—driving too fast (in a convertible, it would have to have been a convertible) north of Boston, she had gone through a windshield. Her eyes were large and very dark, at first glance black, then perceived as an extraordinary midnight blue. Her voice was rasping, a whiskey voice, the accent crisply Bostonian. She was wearing something made of stiff white lace, through which a very small brown bikini was visible.
She gulped at her drink: straight gin, with a twist of lime. “God,” she said, “I’
m all scratched.”
Larry asked her, “Does it hurt?”
“No, it just looks funny.” She turned to Jacob. “You’re so pale. Don’t you go swimming at all?”
“No, I hate to swim.”
She stared at him for an instant, and then seemed to understand a great deal at once; Jacob could literally feel her comprehension, which reached him like an affectionate hand.
She burst out laughing, a raucous, exhilarated laugh. “But that’s absolutely marvelous!” she cried out. “I absolutely love it! You also hate the sun, right?”
Jacob nodded. But at the same time that he felt touched he also felt some part of his privacy invaded, which made him uneasy. He had been recognized.
“You must have a marvelous time here,” said Larry, attempting a joke.
“I read a lot.”
Larry did not like him.
“I need another drink,” said Valerie, who probably had noted this too.
An impulse made Jacob say what he had not said before, to guests. “Look, I’m not always around. But if you want to drink that’s where the key is,” and he pointed to a spot at the top of a beam.
This was said to Larry (to make Larry like him better?), but it was Valerie who smiled and said, “That’s really nice of you.”
“We’ll keep track” was what Larry said, and finally forgot to do.
Jacob left as soon as he could. He had decided to start rereading Moby Dick.
Valerie liked his shabby place because she was rich, accustomed to grandeur. She was the opposite of upward ascendant: downward descendant? Was she that? Quite possible. Larry was somewhat younger than she, and rich in a different way: he had earned a lot of money, recently, in something trendy. A record company? TV? He resented Valerie’s carelessness, her easy lack of ambitions.