by Alice Adams
However, one day in late June, there is no mistaking Blond Beard, who comes up to me on Arguello, near Clement: I am just coming out of the croissant place where I treated myself to a cup of hot chocolate. I am celebrating, in a way: the day before I had pulled all my courage together and went out to a new “rehabilitation place” for old people, out in the Sunset, and they really seemed to like me. I am almost hired, I think. They would give me a place to live—I could leave home!
“Hey! I know you from swimming, don’t I? In Rossi?” Blond Beard has come up close to me; he is grinning confidently up into my face. His clothes are very sharp, all clean and new, like from a window at Sears.
“You look so good, all that swimming’s really trimmed you down,” he tells me. And then, “This is a coincidence, running into you like this when I was needing a cup of coffee. Come on back in and keep me company. My treat.”
He is breathing hard up into my face, standing there in the soft new sunlight. I am overwhelmed by the smell of Juicy Fruit—so much, much worse than garlic, I suddenly decide. And I hate sharp clothes.
Stepping back I say, “Thanks, but I have to go home now,” and I move as smoothly as though through water.
I leave him standing there.
I swim away.
Waiting for Stella
Actually it is Jimmy, Stella’s fourth and final husband (Stella died a month ago), for whom everyone is waiting, all these old people, in this large sunny clearing in a grove of ancient redwoods. It is high noon, on a bright October day, and time for lunch, but Rachel, the hostess, has delayed serving the food, because of Jimmy’s lateness. This will be everyone’s first sight of him since Stella’s death; he took off for Santa Barbara just afterward to visit a sister there, and presumably to recuperate, travelling in Stella’s old car. Perhaps the car is making him late this morning? The guests, old friends, sip nervously at tomato juice or club soda, while a few of the hardier ones have white wine; they are all in their seventies or eighties, except for a young dark, vividly pretty girl, Day, a visiting friend of Rachel’s, who will help with lunch.
Everyone, including Rachel and her husband, Baxter, and Day, the visiting girl, is seated at a long bandanna-cloth-covered table, on benches. Not far from the table is a small oval concrete swimming pool, its unused murky water now flat and still. Here and there in the grove are clumps of huge thick-fronded ferns, a dusty gray green, quite motionless, in the moted sunlight.
They are all waiting for Jimmy, of course, but it is Stella whose lively absence dominates the mood, so that several people, especially Rachel and Baxter, have to remind themselves that they are waiting for Jimmy, not for Stella.
Rachel and Baxter’s house is up on a knoll, invisible from the pool, among tall thick eucalyptus trees, gray thickets of manzanita. It is a big house, though cheaply and somewhat flimsily constructed of clapboard, now nicely weathered to silver. It was a great bargain forty years ago when Rachel and her first husband had it built. Now it is probably worth a lot of money, as she and Baxter wryly say to each other from time to time, and they add, “but only if we sell it.” (Baxter is Rachel’s third husband, and surely her last, she thinks.) Near the house, a little way down toward the pool, is the guest cabin, slatted, green.
All the houses in this small enclave, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, are somewhat similar, as, not quite accidentally, are their owners; friends, they all were professional people, “liberais,” mildly intellectual. Rachel was a doctor, a professor of medicine, rather distinguished; Baxter, although he inherited money, was an art critic. Stella was a painter.
What once were vacation homes now house their retirements.
In those younger, summer days, feelings sometimes ran high: dissensions occurred over love affairs, real or imagined; opposing political views split their ranks. But now old feuds are quieted, if not forgotten—especially today, as in an almost unified way they think about Stella, the first of them to die, and they think about Jimmy, who is very late.
Now, conferring with Day, Rachel decides to go ahead and serve the first course, a gazpacho, which has already been brought down and is sitting there on the table, in its huge green-glazed tureen. And so Rachel ladles out the soup, and Day takes the bowls around to everyone.
Actually, Stella has always been a sort of unifying principle for this group, in that they have generally been united in opposition to whatever she was doing. Not actual opposition to her views, but Stella always, somehow, went too far. Wonderful of her to march in Selma at already sixty-odd, but did she have to get arrested, so purposefully, and spend a week in that jail? Or, more recently, was it necessary, really, that she scale the fence at Diablo Canyon, protesting nuclear power? Not to mention the fact that she often drank too much, and almost always talked too much, with her proud white tooth-flashing grin; she had too many husbands and lovers (though fortunately, it was sometimes remarked, no children).
Her final marriage to Jimmy Scott, a former alcoholic, former film director (not important), was hard to understand, the other husbands having been, in their ways, almost predictable: Jack, a Communist, and Jewish (this was daring, in 1922, for a New England girl of “good”—Republican, Unitarian—family); Horace, a black longshoreman; and Yosh, a Japanese painter, whom she married just after Pearl Harbor (of course). But—Jimmy?
During the illness preceding Stella’s death, however, the mercifully short three months, Jimmy’s behavior toward her was observed to be exemplary. It was hardly a time when anyone would have behaved badly, but still his patience was remarkable. He searched for out-of-print books that Stella mentioned wanting to reread, for out-of-season flowers for her bedroom (they were not rich people, not at all), for special delicate foods, rare fruits to tempt her waning appetite.
In the last awful month of her life, although she stayed at home, in the house up the road from Rachel and Baxter’s, Stella refused (through Jimmy, of course) to let anyone visit her; not even Rachel, a doctor, was allowed to see her then, which no one quite understood, except, just possibly, Rachel.
Of the dozen people there—thirteen, counting Day—only Day is not thinking in a concentrated way about Stella. Day is thinking painfully, obsessively of Allen, the lover whom she came to California to see, but with whom things did not work out; they just broke up in San Francisco, where Allen lives. Scenes and quarrels, all terrible to recall. Passing bread-sticks, Day considers the phrase “to break up.” It is odd, she thinks, that people always say “break up with,” since the whole point of breaking up is that you are no longer with but alone.
In order not to think about Allen, and then, too, because it seems appropriate, Day makes a conscious effort to think about Stella, whom she met fairly often, over the years, at Rachel’s. (Day’s mother, also a doctor, a friend of Rachel’s, named Day for her heroine, Dorothy Day, who was also much admired by Rachel.) Stella was perfectly all right, Day thinks, but she talked so much. And that hair. Bright red hair, for a woman in her seventies or (probably) eighties? More generously, Day then admits to herself that you can’t tell what you’ll do that far ahead. She herself at eighty might dye her hair purple, or green, a one-person revival of punk, in the year two thousand and whatever, out of sheer boredom with living that long.
Stella never seemed bored with her old age—you had to give her that. And even if Jimmy bored her she never let it be known. (“Jimmy was actually more interesting as an alcoholic,” Baxter has remarked. “Poor Stella! No luck at all with men.”)
Day, who in her grief is not even aware of how pretty she is, now sits down with her own cold bowl of soup, next to Baxter, who must have been extremely handsome, a long time ago, Day imagines.
Baxter, who dislikes gazpacho (the peppers seem to disagree with him, or perhaps the cucumbers), looks for diversion at Day’s long thin brown legs, now exposed beneath her loose flowered skirt, in high rope clogs. Day’s legs, which Baxter much admires, lead him back to a sensual dream of Stella. He sees a room in the Sherry Netherland, in
New York (he has just married Rachel; she is waiting for him, up in Connecticut—she is giving a seminar at Yale). Gold coverlets drawn back on sumptuous beds, in the half-light of an August afternoon. Champagne in a silver bucket, two chilled glasses. And Stella: all that pink-gold flesh (she was fairly plump in those days), all that flesh, half revealed, half concealed. Silk, rows of lace. That flesh, breasts, and that brilliant hair, spread on her pillow, his pillow.
But even in his dream he, Baxter, is actually sitting there alone, and fully dressed. And he never saw any flesh of Stella’s beyond that revealed in a modest bathing suit. For Stella, if the truth were known, and he trusts that it is not—Stella had stood him up. There he was, expecting her, in that room, with champagne, and the next day she had the consummate gall to say, “But Baxter, darling, I can’t believe you were serious.” And that awful laugh. What a bitch, when you came right down to it—really surprising that more people didn’t see through her. He wonders if Rachel did; he has never been sure just how Rachel felt about Stella. Well, there’s no possibility of understanding women, as he has always said.
More crossly than he meant to, Baxter whispers to Day, “Why do you think Rachel serves this damned soup so often?”
Startled, Day answers him literally. “She thinks it’s good in hot weather, I guess.” And then she says the next thing that enters her grief-dulled mind: “And it seems a more leftist sort of soup than vichyssoise.”
Baxter emits a loud cackling laugh. “Oh, very good,” he tells Day, who has not meant to be funny, especially. “A leftist soup. That’s very good.”
Baxter’s laugh and some words of this small exchange have caught everyone’s attention, so that it all has to be repeated several times, and explained, many of those old ears not being quite what they once were. No one seems to think “leftist soup” is quite as funny as Baxter did. (Rachel especially, in the way of wives, did not find it awfully funny. Why did she marry Baxter, she wonders. But even if she knew, it is much too late to reconsider.) However, at least a diversion was created, from so many sad thoughts of Stella, and such anxiety as how to deal with Jimmy: how will he be?
This October day is unseasonably hot; everyone has agreed on that, and commented at length. Even in this shaded glen, where usually it is cool, often cold, almost always too cold for swimming in the dark greenish pool, today it is very warm, so that swimming is at least discussed. Warm shafts of light fall dustily between the redwoods, on the thick still tessellated fronds of ferns.
Stella, of course, would have been in hours ago, flopping around like a porpoise and exhorting everyone else to come in, too. No one has remarked on this probability, but what Stella would have been doing has occurred to everyone there. They will continue to think, in other contexts, of what Stella would have done.
However, the heat is actually a relief to so many old bones; they bask and relax in it. And the warm weather seems a reprieve of sorts, to these old people. The fact is that their location, in these mountains south of San Francisco, is not an ideal spot for the retired, for the very old. They are vulnerable to such extremes of cold, and to floods, from mountain streams, as well as to spectres of isolation, loneliness, helplessness. Danger. They have all thought and talked from time to time of moving somewhere else, but where? And for them to move would seem a sort of giving up, giving in, a yielding to old age and infirmity.
This day, though, is reassuring; they are still all right, exactly where they are.
And, as no one says, and perhaps no one is really aware, it is rather a relief not to have Stella around, loudly splashing in the pool, and always urging them all to exceed themselves, somehow.
Although they were very close friends, as far as anyone knew, and were almost exactly the same age, Rachel’s and Stella’s personal styles were very different. Rachel’s low-key, toned-down quiet mode could almost have been developed in opposition to Stella’s flamboyance. All three of Rachel’s husbands, including Baxter, have affectionately compared her to a wren, a coincidence that tactful Rachel has mentioned to no one, surely not to Baxter, who despite his money and good looks is quite insecure.
Rachel is small, with neat gray-brown hair and finely lined lightly tanned skin. When Baxter came home to her that time in Connecticut, just mentioning that he had “caught a glimpse” of Stella in New York, Rachel quite accurately surmised what had happened: Baxter had made a pass, of some sort, and Stella in some way had turned him down. Curiously, at first she was a little annoyed at Stella: poor Baxter, aging is hard on such a handsome man. But it soon came to her, causing a wry, inward smile, that after all if Stella had said yes, she, Rachel, would have been considerably more annoyed.
Standing just off from the group, near the end of the table, Day and Rachel now consult with each other, Rachel saying, “Well, I just don’t know. Jimmy’s usually so punctual,” and she frowns.
“He might feel worse if we waited,” Day offers. “Worse about everything, I mean.”
Rachel gives Day an attentive, interested look. (Rachel listens to what other people say.) “Well, of course you’re absolutely right,” she says. “Besides, it’s making everyone nervous. We’ll just go ahead with the salmon.”
“He might always call and say that he isn’t coming after all,” Day further contributes. She is thinking: Allen might call.
“Oh, right,” says Rachel.
It is true that the prolonged absence of Jimmy is nervously felt, all around. People speculate about what could have happened. Flat tires are mentioned, as well as being out of gas, or lost. What no one voices is the fear, felt by almost all of them, that he could have started drinking again. Stella was believed to have helped get him off the bottle.
Someone, more mean-spirited than the rest, has just said, “I hope our dear Jimmy hasn’t stopped off at some bar,” when fortunately Rachel and Day arrive with their platters of cold salmon, the glistening silvery pink surrounded by various shades of green—parsley and several sauces—so that everyone can exclaim over the beauty of the food.
• • •
One moment after everyone is served, there comes the sound and then a quick flashed glimpse in the driveway above of a hastily braked and parked red sports car.
What an odd car for a man whose wife has just died is what everyone instantly, simultaneously thinks—everyone but Day, who has recognized the car. It is not Jimmy’s car but Allen’s, and she begins to run back up the path that she has just come down with her platter, now going several times as fast as before: she is almost flying.
Behind her, a guest who has not yet understood that it is not Jimmy’s car after all, and who has apparently not forgotten some ancient political feud, is heard to mutter, “Perfect car for a red-haired Communist!”
Half an hour later (still no sign of Jimmy), a few people are on their second helpings of salmon. Rachel keeps an experienced-hostess eye on all the plates; she is hoping for not much left over, Baxter not being overly fond of salmon (hard to think what he does like, really), and she cannot bear waste. It is sad, she thinks, the loss of appetite suffered by the old, and she remembers her own gnawing hungers as a scrawny Brooklyn girl. It is far worse than the diminution of sexual appetite, one’s lessening interest in food. After all, most people eat three times a day, most not truly poor Americans.
She is allowing her mind to wander foolishly. Rachel looks across the table at Day and Allen, who appear to be absolutely, heedlessly absorbed in each other. She looks at her watch, unobtrusively, she hopes, and frowns.
It is so strange, Day is thinking, her feelings on being with Allen. Now. He is so near that she can smell him, his known scents of clean skin and recent soap, clean cotton work shirt just slightly perspired on. He is so near, so known and loved (she supposes) and still so strange, unreal to her. Their quarrels, too, are unreal, all suddenly dissolved. “Whatever was that all about?” Allen asked her, after their long greeting kiss, as hand in hand they walked down to the shaded dell together, and Day said, “Oh, I don�
��t know.”
Now, though, it is as if she had known all along that Allen would come to her here; she has been waiting for Allen, as everyone else waited for Jimmy, and thought about Stella.
But, most curiously, she is aware in some depth of herself of the faintest disappointment that he has come, after all. She feels the lack of her recent misery; weirdly, she misses its bite; the very sharpness of that anguish seems a loss.
Then quite suddenly everything that is happening is interrupted, all the eating and serving and clearing, all the intense thoughts of everyone there, all rudely broken into by the sharp repeated blast of a horn, the country sound of a very old Ford. Stella’s car: it is Jimmy at last, of course.
Straining to look up through the immense, thick trees, enormous trunks of the venerable redwoods, the smaller eucalyptus, manzanitas, they can just see the old rattletrap that Stella always drove, as shabby and dusty as though she drove it still. The door slams three, then four times (it is remembered that Stella never could get that door shut), and from way up there comes the jaunty sound of Jimmy calling, “Hallooo, hallooo!”
“Oh dear, he must be drunk,” someone says.
“Oh, I hope not,” says Baxter eagerly, clearly hoping that he is.
“He is not drunk,” Rachel fiercely tells them both.
What Day first sees of Jimmy, and maybe the others, too, is the bright stripes of the sweater he is wearing, a brilliant orangy red, on a darker background. What Day thinks is: How amazing, his sweater is striped with the color of Stella’s hair.
In a curious way, Jimmy looks both smaller and livelier than usual. He fairly runs down the path toward them all.
Watching him, as everyone is, several people seem to decide that perhaps so much attention paid to his arrival will be awkward, and small attempts are made at conversation, here and there. However, none succeed, and by the time Jimmy, quite out of breath, arrives at the end of the table, Rachel’s end, they are all staring, and smiling welcomes in his direction.