Beautiful Girl

by Alice Adams

  The one person who paid attention to Pauline is also the only person who is looking out to the churning gray sea: a young girl, about twelve, Nell Ashbury, from New York; she is visiting her father and her stepmother. She listened to Pauline because her hostess has come across to her more vividly than any of the other adults present (discounting her father, Jason Ashbury, the writer, about whom she has the most passionate curiosity, not knowing him well at all). Pauline, to Nell, is more present than anyone else there. Her mother’s Village circle includes a lot of writers, editors, agents; Nell is tired of literary people, who all talk too much. Perhaps she herself will be a painter, like Pauline? And Pauline listens; so many grown-ups (her mother’s writers) ask questions and then don’t wait to hear the answer. Pauline is kind; she has in fact wrapped reed-thin Nell in an old Irish sweater of her own, in which the girl now sits, enveloped—it comes down to her knees—looking out across a grass-tufted rise of sand to the turbulent sea, and thinking, Pacific?

  But at Pauline’s words—“I hate California”—Nell has turned to listen, and it occurs to her that she does not like it here much either; it is terribly windy and cold, not at all like a summer day at a real beach, not like Crane’s Beach, at Ipswich, where she and her mother go for the month of August every summer. Nell has a tendency to take people at their word (she believes that Pauline hates California), and partly because she is so young, she believes that what is said is meant, for good.

  Nell also (half-consciously) understands Pauline to mean that she does not like her party, her guests—and possibly she does not like her husband, the blond man, rather short, who is pouring out the reddish drinks.

  “It’s not a place that’s fit for human beings,” declaims Pauline, who has not had a show of her paintings for years, although she still works, if spasmodically, and who has unhappily become used to inattention. “Perhaps mountain lions,” she continues. “Feel that wind, in June.”

  Pauline’s size is a further reason for Nell’s instinct about her not liking her husband. “Women who hate their husbands always put on weight,” Nell’s mother has said, herself purposefully thin (and unremarried), and Nell has as yet found no evidence against this theory. Her stepmother, who visibly “adores” her father, is even trimmer than Nell’s mother is. Given the ten years or so difference in their ages, they look rather alike, Nell thinks—and would of course not say to either of them. Brown-skinned blondes, blue-eyed, rather athletic. What her father likes?

  In fact Nell has seen rather few fat women among the friends of either parent, and this too gives Pauline a certain interest: what nerve, to be so large. And her size is somehow sexy, all that energetic flesh. The other guests look vaguely alike and are dressed quite similarly: they are in stylishly good shape; they wear pants and expensive old sweaters.

  Nell herself is physically a curious replica of her father: sandy-haired, with light-gray eyes. Everyone has remarked on the likeness, and Nell has sometimes wondered if this is one thing that makes him uneasy with her: it must be strange for Jason to see his coloring, his own long nose and impossibly high brow on a girl, a thin young girl. Sometimes Nell catches him staring at her in an unnerved way, and he seems not to know what to say to her. The phrase “pale imitation” has unfortunately stuck in her mind. They were divorced so long ago, Jason and her mother, when Nell was a baby and Jason a hugely successful novelist. On the heels of his greatest success—that rarity, a book that six or eight superior critics praised and that several hundred thousand people bought—he stopped writing entirely. He has lived a lot in Italy, in southern France and Greece.

  Although she is the one complaining about the weather, Pauline has not dressed to defend herself from it: the long-sleeved pink cotton smock from which her spatulate-fingered, muscular brown hands extend is thin (“Fat women always love bright colors,” Nell’s mother has said, safe in navy or black); she is barefoot, and sand adheres to her large brown feet. She says, “I can’t bear this wind!”

  “Well, Pauline,” says Jason, in his glancing, nonserious way that no one seems to know how to take (is he serious?), “you could chuck it all and run off to some warmer clime.”

  So, Nell thinks, he too has been listening to Pauline?

  Pauline’s great eyes flash across him; she says, “I just may.”

  But her husband, blond Stephen, has spoken much more loudly than she. “Pauline would rather stick around and make dramatic complaints,” he says, sounding smug with his knowledge (and possession?) of Pauline.

  Obviously these two men, Nell’s father and Stephen, do not like each other much, and Nell begins to regard the party with slightly more interest. Just possibly something could happen? In general, her parents’ friends do not make scenes, just talk, and she had sometimes thought that it would be more fun if they did.

  “In fact I might join you there, wherever,” Jason continues, as though Stephen had not spoken. “It is awfully goddam cold.” He turns to his small blond wife. “And how would you like that, my love?”

  Neither what he said nor his look has been clear: did he mean that he would take his wife or leave her there in the California cold? Nell’s stepmother visibly does not know, but in a calm, controlled way she says, “Well, in the meantime I think I’ll go inside. It is terribly cold.” She starts in, and everyone begins to follow her, as though an excuse or perhaps a leader was needed.

  Jason laughs, as Nell wonders why: At what private joke?

  “I need help!” wildly says Pauline as people are trooping past her into the house, and then, in a more rational way, she addresses Nell—who has taken her seriously and is staring in dismay. “Nell, do come in the kitchen with me. You look as though you were good at sorting things out.”

  The kitchen is farther away and thus more separate from the living room than is usual in the houses Nell has known. She and Pauline walk down a hall, past bedrooms, to what is the largest room in the house: a huge square, two stories high, with a backward-looking view of steep, ravined hills, all shades and shapes and varieties of green, here and there patched with sunlight, in other areas cloud-darkened, almost black. “There’s only one painter out here who can do that,” says Pauline (sadly? enviously? Nell can’t tell). “I’ve never tried. Perhaps I should? This is my favorite room,” she says. “I like to be alone here. I can’t bear people who come out to try to help me—I can’t be helped.” She laughs, a short harsh definite sound. “Of course I don’t mean you, little Nell—I asked you in.” And Nell is then given a large handful of silver which, for a moment, she is afraid that she is supposed to polish; this has not been done for some time.

  “Just sort it out into little piles,” instructs Pauline. “You know, to be wrapped in a napkin. Something for everyone. And now tell me all about your mother.”

  “She’s fine,” Nell automatically says, and then asks, “Did you know her?”

  “Oh, yes,” says Pauline, sounding bored. “We all used to know each other. But that was terribly long ago. In the Forties, in fact. Of course we were terribly young.”

  The Forties. Wanting to know more (what was everyone like then? what was her father like?), Nell has understood that Pauline does not want to answer questions—she will talk more or less to herself.

  Pauline is drinking vodka from a wineglass. “God, how I hate sangria,” she abruptly says, in much her tone of hating California. And then she asks, “Are you very tired of conversations about why your father doesn’t write anymore?”

  Nell hesitates, at a loss. “No, we don’t talk about that much,” she honestly says, at last.

  “Oh, I suppose not. Your mother would have lost interest, lucky for her. Out here it’s quite a favorite topic, among his friends. That’s partly what I mean about California. It’s as vacuous as it is windy, in fact it’s a chilly windbag of a place.” And she laughs, in a pleased way—she will clearly say this again. “The truth is,” she then continues, “Jason is scared. His last book was so good that it scared him to death, almost.”


  Nell smiles politely. She is the sort of child to whom adults often talk, perhaps in some (erroneous) belief that innocence prevents her understanding. She is by now used to nearly incomprehensible remarks that later make considerable sense, and so now she tucks away this notion of California, and of her father’s work. And she wonders: Is Pauline talking about herself?

  The salad that Pauline is making, in a huge wooden bowl on the large butcher-block table, also looks (at first) familiar to Nell: several kinds of lettuce, thinly sliced onion, parsley. But then other things from dishes in the giant refrigerator are added: fish-smelling things, pink, and indistinguishable in shape. “Mussels and clams,” Pauline says. “Fruits de mer. They’ll absolutely hate it. Everyone except your father. He loves all this stuff too.”

  Did Pauline once love her father? Did they have an affair, back in the Forties? This thought, or question, has been slowly forming in Nell’s mind. Nell’s mother and her friends talk a lot about people having affairs, which Nell takes to mean making out with someone you’re not married to. She is very interested, although she herself has so far only observed other kids at parties smoking grass, making out.

  And she of course enjoys being talked to by adults, but only up to a point. She does not like it—is in fact frightened—when voices begin to slur, when eyes grow vague and at the same time wild. She now with alarm observes the onset of these symptoms in Pauline, as Pauline says, staring at Nell too intently, “If I could only get thin again, then I could work. It’s all this fat that holds me.”

  Nell can no more imagine being fat than she can being dead, and she has only the vaguest ideas about work. But she has, still, a strong sense that Pauline even semi-drunk is someone to whom she should pay attention.

  Pauline says, “The really important thing is never to marry.”

  Well, Nell had decided that for herself already, years ago.

  Just then a dark man whom Nell has not much noticed before comes into the room, and Pauline embraces him in a way that Nell has seen before: grown-ups in a kitchen (usually) lurching at each other.

  Pauline croons, “Ah, my long-lost love, why couldn’t everything last?”

  There are tears in her manic eyes that to Nell look real, but the man seems not to take them seriously. He pats her shoulder in a dismissing way; he even says, “There,” and he goes back out, looking embarrassed.

  Pauline gives Nell a sober, calculating look of complicity; was she then pretending with that man to be drunk, or much drunker than she is, in order to make fun of him? What will she do next? Nell fully believes in Pauline’s desperation.

  Now Pauline goes over to the oven, and efficiently (undrunkenly) with asbestos gloves she removes a huge steaming garlic-smelling casserole. This and the salad and the napkin-wrapped silver are placed on a wire-wheeled cart, and propelled into the living room. Nell follows at a little distance in her wake.

  People line up and help themselves. Not sure what to do, or where to be, Nell is surprised to see her father coming toward her, carrying two full plates, saying, “Come on, let’s go over there.”

  And then, when they are seated, in a tone unusual for him, with her, he says, “I hope this isn’t too bad a party for you? I didn’t know there’d be so many people. And somehow I wanted you to meet Pauline. Anyway, sometimes it’s easier to talk in the middle of a crowd, have you noticed that yet? And we haven’t had much of a chance to talk, have we? Have I seemed preoccupied? The thing is—please, you won’t mention this to anyone? I’m sure you won’t. I wanted to tell you—”

  Nell is to find that life often provides too much at once: just as her heart jumps with pleasure at her father’s telling her something important, in confidence—just at that crucial moment they both hear Pauline shouting from across the room; they see Pauline wildly waving her arms—Pauline making a scene. “Well, goodbye, one and all. I’m off for a walk. Don’t eat and run—I’ll be gone for hours. Unless—would anyone like to come along?” There is a terrible pause, especially terrible for Nell, who believes that the invitation, or summons, was for her—who is frozen in her corner. “Well, then, O.K. Sorry I asked.” A door is slammed, and Pauline is gone.

  Nell looks at her father, and she sees her own feelings apparent on his face, written across his features so similar to her own: Jason looks stricken, deeply shocked, as she is. And Nell is aware of real panic: a friend of her mother’s, a woman writer who often drank too much, committed suicide at last. What will happen to Pauline? Will she plunge drunkenly into that cold bleak ocean, that terrible Pacific?

  She looks questioningly at her father, who only says, “Well,” in an exhausted way.

  Unable not to, Nell asks him, “You wanted to tell me—”

  He looks at her forgetfully. “Oh, just a novel. I’ve begun one.”

  Naturally enough, people do eat and run. In a flustered way Stephen serves coffee, which everyone seems to gulp, and then there is a general movement toward cars.

  The drive home, to Nell, does not seem dangerous; she trusts her father’s skill at the wheel. And the scenery is extraordinary: once they have left the beach, and the now golden glimpses of the sea, they climb steeply into what could be a rain forest, dense variegated vegetation, trees, giant ferns—into what must have been the view from Pauline’s kitchen, and Nell remembers what Pauline said about its being a country for mountain lions. It smells of bay leaves.

  Her stepmother is talking about Pauline. “Well, I never saw drink hit her quite like that. She has put on weight, hasn’t she? Anyway, she always manages to put out a great lunch. Although I could have done without all those bits of seafood in the salad. I wonder why she ever married Stephen. She seems to fall in love with giants and marry pygmies. What do you suppose struck her, finally? Three ex-lovers all suddenly at the same party?”

  Nell finds all this vaguely disturbing, less vaguely unpleasant. She is still worried about Pauline; why is no one else worried?

  Her father makes a sound that for him is completely in character, that is brief and impossible to read. And Nell is suddenly aware of a rush of the most intense and private love for him.

  A month or so later Nell and her mother are sitting on the beach—Crane’s Beach, at Ipswich. A perfect beach, of fine white silk sand that squeaks underfoot. Dunes, grass. And a perfect hot still day. From time to time Nell has been thinking of Pauline. (She has gathered that nothing horrible happened to her; someone would have said.) Now she wonders if this was the way Pauline thought a beach should be, and that summers should produce this sort of day? Yes, probably, she decides, and then she experiences again a tiny pang of guilt-regret at not having gone for that walk with Pauline, Pauline leaving her own party, so furiously. Although, of course, it was impossible at the time; she was talking to her father.

  These days Nell’s mother is extremely happy, almost giddily so: a man she knows, in fact an old family friend, is getting a divorce, and he and Nell’s mother are going to get married. He works for a firm that is moving to Houston, and that is where they will all live. Houston, Texas. “We can take wonderful trips to Mexico, and New Orleans,” her mother has said, with her new young laugh. Nell wonders about parties in Houston, and what will happen to her there.

  The sea is very calm today; the barest waves, translucent, lap the sand, where at the edge, on their crazy useless-looking legs, the sandpipers skitter past. And overhead white gulls wheel and dip, as though drunk with sunlight. Pauline would love it here, is what at that moment Nell thinks. She is also thinking that there are only about four more months until Christmas, which is when she can go to visit her father again. It has been agreed that she can now go more often.

  Her mother, reading letters beside Nell on the sand, suddenly laughs. Nell has seen that this one is from her father, whose letters to his former wife do not usually make her laugh. “Well,” her mother says, “everyone seems to be breaking up these days.” (Does she mean Nell’s father? Will she have a new stepmother? This quick notion is
enough to make Nell queasy for an instant as her mother reads on.) “You met Pauline Field, didn’t you, darling? Well, she’s up and left poor old Stephen, and she’s gone off to San Miguel de Allende, to study painting there.”

  Nell makes an ambiguous noise, not unlike her father’s noncommittal sound. Then she asks, “That’s probably good for her to do, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose. She was quite terrific, in her way.” Nell’s mother adds, “I never understood that marriage to Stephen. Or any of her marriages, for that matter.”

  Nell says what she has not said before: “She was sort of upset at her party that we went to. She said”—they both know that this “she” refers to Nell’s stepmother—“something about three ex-lovers at the same party. Can a husband be counted as an ex-lover?”

  Her mother laughs a lot. “Darling, what a marvelous question. Well, actually one of them would of course have been Jason. They had a tremendous love affair, just before me. Sometimes I thought he’d never get over it, and I used to wish he’d married her. Instead of me. Maybe he would have gone on writing, or at least got her out of his system.”

  Digesting this news, which is not news at all, but something deeply known or felt before, Nell experiences a kind of gladness. Things seem to fit, or to have sorted themselves out, after all.

  And, later still, although she has been told that San Miguel is in the middle of Mexico, nowhere near the coast, and although she has not been told that her father and stepmother are separating, what she imagines is—Jason and Pauline (a Pauline brown and thin, renewed) on a bright hot windless tropical beach. For good.