by Alice Adams
Ralph, a political man, a gregarious Texan as well, in a general way likes parties better than Caroline does, and she has deferred to this wish of his, his wish to be more sociable. Also, in Lisbon they were more or less isolated, thrown upon themselves, which was wonderful in its way (sort of), but they have had a large dose of that isolation.
At moments of low-ebb discouragement in Lisbon, days of not much to say and weeks of perfunctory sex (if any), Caroline, remembering the passionate intensity of her love affair with Ralph, all that heady talk and all that incredible, matchless sex—Caroline has even thought that the transition from marvellous, illicit love to the dailiness of marriage is too much for anyone. In saner, wiser (and far more frequent) moments, however, she has concluded that she and Ralph have done very well indeed with that transition: they talk a lot, generally, and their average for sexual love is high, very high.
In fact, of her three marriages, the only one that went bad was the marriage to Jim McAndrew, whom she married largely because she thought Sage needed a father (so unfair to Jim, she later thought)—her only marriage not preceded by passionate love.
The mansion in which this wedding is held (the daughter of an old friend of Caroline’s is marrying the son of a Marin County foreign-car dealer)—the place is very grand indeed: everywhere marble, pillars and floors, long vistas of marble halls, with appropriate statuary, and a central fountain playing, gently. And flowers, everywhere towering arrangements of the tallest, largest flowers. Huge heavy pastel blossoms, half hidden in showers of pale-green leaves.
Having decided against going to the church ceremony, which was to take place in a massive Episcopal church on Van Ness Avenue (not the cathedral, Caroline has somewhat snobbishly noted), Caroline and Ralph arrive at the reception at the marble mansion just barely past the specified time. And at the door they are given slips of paper with their table assignments. “Separate tables,” Caroline whispers to her husband. “What is this? Assignation time?” “Only if you’re lucky in the draw,” he whispers back.
First, though, there is a lot of milling around in the hall. “Mingling.” Waiters pass through with trays of champagne glasses, other waiters with white-napkin-wrapped bottles, for instant refills. And white-lace-aproned maids proffer trays of hors d’oeuvres, which Caroline notes are surprisingly good.
Everyone of course is at his or her most excessively dressed up: almost all the men in black tie (Ralph being one of the few in a plain dark business suit, that is as far as he will go: “I’m not renting a goddam uniform”). Older women wear long, extremely expensive dresses (what Caroline thinks of as Nancy Reagan dresses), with beaded or sequined tops, long swishy skirts. Long-legged young girls in pretty, short silk dresses, and high, high heels.
Caroline is wearing red, a red silk dress from Lisbon that cost about thirty dollars, she recalls with some pleasure. But now that she is here she feels the dress to be somewhat inappropriate; she knew as she put it on that you do not wear red or black to weddings, or for that matter white—but she also thought to herself, What the hell, doesn’t anything go these days? Besides, this is not the actual wedding. She had under-estimated, though, the extreme, old-establishment conservatism of this group; stronger than any perfume is the reek of old money. But now once more Caroline thinks, What the hell? It’s really a great dress, for a woman my age I look great—or as great as possible, for me.
And she is right, Caroline looks much better even than she thinks she does. She looks like a beautiful woman of sixty-five, or some years less, with her thick, swinging gray-blonde hair, her wide blue-green eyes and her smooth tan skin.
From somewhere she hears band music, old music, what she believes is a Forties sound, and she thinks, Just as well I’m not seated with Ralph, I might end up having a good time in all this, and I don’t think it’s his scene at all, and he hates to dance.
Married people should not be expected to go about so much together. Caroline had often thought this but has been unable to make any practical application of it, in any of her marriages. But it is quite unrealistic to expect two very separate, distinct and very different people to respond in similar ways to a given set of circumstances. To like the same people, the same parties. Even to want to go out together on the same given evening.
She and Ralph seem to have struck some sort of a balance, though, which may be all you can expect? (Marriage is still in a very primitive stage of development, according to Sage, and Caroline agrees.) At this particular party, then, Ralph, who insisted that they come here, is not looking about with a scowl, while Caroline, the reluctant guest, is lured by faint strains of sentimental music, from her distant youth.
The tables, of which there are thirty (Ralph counts), are in a long series of rooms, also marble—rooms all marble-pillared and bedecked with extraordinary flowers, down a small flight of stairs from the entrance hall. Somewhere there must also be a kitchen; in the course of things white-gloved waiters and busboys stream through, bearing trays of food (seven courses) and wines (five in all). Removing barely eaten food, on barely soiled dishes, and considerable untouched wine.
In fact some of the “help” have a very good time with all the leftover wine, quite a few of the busboys and waiters and the maids, who are moonlighting from various restaurants, including Fiona’s. Many of them are in various sexual ways involved with each other, and they are mostly quite young, and they quite possibly have more fun in the long run than anyone present.
(There is also in the kitchen, somewhat late that evening, a small group who help in an enterprise called No Waste; these people go around to “charity events” and huge banquets and enormous private parties like this one. By prearrangement, of course, they collect as much untouched food as possible, which they then take along to one of the shelters for homeless people, or a food distribution center for people at home with AIDS. Very few people know about this enterprise, so far.)
One of the things that plague Caroline through that very long evening is the presence of so many half- (or less than half-) remembered faces. There are so many people who look quite familiar, and it is hard to tell in what context she might conceivably have known them: is that a woman whom she used to see in the Cal-Mart, or a social acquaintance, a person with whom she exchanged dinners, possibly, a long time back, in her proper Jim McAndrew days? Caroline kept up with a few Pacific Heights friends in her later time with Ralph, but not many. And even within a city sheer geography plays a very large part in the patterns of friendship, she has thought.
Is that very pretty white-blonde young woman in black (did no one tell her not to?) just now dancing by, quite close to Caroline’s table (so close that Caroline notes a look of sheer panic, terror on that young face)—is that someone whom Caroline has met, or perhaps bought perfume from at Macy’s, or did she see her in Julius Kahn Playground, watching babies in the sandbox, with Liza? No way to know—or is she simply a type? An Eighties blonde, too thin, in astronomically expensive clothes; lots of heavy gold jewelry.
At the large round table to which Caroline has found her way the same condition persists, vague familiarity all around, and now this applies not only to faces but to names: the names that she hears in the rounds of introductions are quite possibly all known to her, but there again it is also quite possible that she has only read them somewhere.
And the noise level is so high, such a din of voices and plates and silverware and music, the somewhat conflicting sounds of a small band at either end of the room—so much noise that a true conversation would be quite out of the question, even if anyone could be sure whom he or she was addressing.
But no conversation is fine with Caroline. She is perfectly content for the moment to smile and nod, to mouth what she hopes and trusts are the appropriate inanities—and no matter if they actually are not. She is content to eat quite a lot of the surprisingly excellent food. Lord God, this party must be costing the absolute earth, thinks Caroline, as she polishes off her mounded caviar, then spoons into the sal
mon mousse on endive.
But what she really likes best is the music, so marvellously sappy, so quintessentially Forties.
When Caroline was a girl, back in very conservative New Canaan, Connecticut, her mother, Molly Blair, a young widow, either was actually under considerable social suspicion, because of her actress profession, or else simply felt that to be the case. Being “English” was somehow helpful, although there seemed to be some ambiguity as to class, an ambiguity that Molly herself, from working-class Liverpool, did nothing to clear up. But Molly felt called upon to be very proper indeed, and extremely strict with her daughter. Thus Caroline, a big blonde, very eager adolescent, was not allowed to go to any of the racier faraway places to dance, not the Glen Island Casino, which was popular with some of her wilder friends, and surely not into New York, no dancing at LaRue or at the Plaza.
However, in nearby Katonah, a scant hour’s drive away, there was a very nice little roadhouse (are there any roadhouses, these days, Caroline wonders?) with a small live band, on weekends. And Molly Blair, somewhat misguidedly, believed that going to dance in Katonah was perfectly okay, no trouble likely there. Or perhaps it was only the appearance of trouble that Molly feared: “Daughter of actress caught in raid.” A very smart woman, she must have known perfectly well that a lot could go on in the back seat of a car, coming home from Katonah. Not to mention all the possibilities for parking in all those secluded lanes, almost anywhere in Connecticut.
The band nearest Caroline’s table now is playing what she thinks of as Katonah music, which is to say early-Forties, pre-war dance tunes; it is all Caroline can do not to hum along. But her feet beneath the table do tap, a little. (In her day Caroline was known as a terrific dancer.)
And she is thinking how much fun all that was, actually, all that dancing and then all the kissing and groping and touching—and how terrifically frustrating, finally. No wonder I so eagerly followed Aaron Levine into his bed, thinks Caroline; he was just the first boy who really insisted. “I don’t have time for this kid stuff,” Aaron said, after they had spent several dozen hours doing what was known as “everything but.” And of course as things turned out he was right, they had very little time.
Aaron at first was just someone’s tall dark attractive friend down from Amherst; he was whispered to be “Jewish but terribly nice, and smart, of course they all are.” A very good dancer, and a tennis star. It was even whispered that he was “fun to kiss, really sophisticated.”
(Just now, remembering that particular phrase, boys saying it to her, “Mmm, you’re fun to kiss,” Caroline is wistfully positive that no one ever says that any more. Certainly she will never hear it again.)
And so Caroline and Aaron, in another phrase from that time, “got serious.” They progressed from parked cars to Aaron’s room at Amherst; Caroline by this time was a freshman at Vassar. And then, on some steamy afternoon in the spring of 1943, during one or another jubilant act of love, Caroline became pregnant, and so they got married, in Molly Blair’s pretty house. And then Aaron went off to war, to Okinawa, where he was killed. And Sage was born.
But it all really began out on the dance floor at the Katonah roadhouse, dancing to something pretty and quite ridiculous, like “Dancing in the Dark.” Which this band, at this preposterous party, is playing at this moment.
“Would you care to dance?” Unnoticed by Caroline, a man from across the table has got up and come around to stand beside her, just after the filet japonais. A tall dark bald man, shining skin taut across his bare skull, heavy dark brows and arrogant, sexy eyes. He too looks vaguely familiar—but, then, everyone does, in this room.
Murmuring some assent, Caroline gets up and follows him to a small dance floor (Katonah-sized), where other couples are making the same brave effort.
This man is an excellent dancer, graceful and confident, strong. Too bad there is not more room and a better band, thinks Caroline; they would have had so much more scope, she could follow this man through almost any dance, she thinks. What fun!
Believing, though, that women are supposed to make some sort of conversation, having been so instructed by Molly Blair, instead of just dancing, enjoying it, Caroline says, “I didn’t get your name, I’m sorry, so hard to hear—”
“Roland Gallo. And you’re Caroline Carter, formerly McAndrew, right?”
Caroline misses a beat and steps on his foot. “Oh, sorry.”
He holds her more closely but Caroline has stiffened. Then she silently laughs at herself as she thinks, Am I supposed to be the avenger of my daughter’s old broken heart? She smiles up at Roland Gallo. “Yes, I am Caroline Carter.”
And he smiles back, a very sexy, acknowledging look. “I do know some of your daughters,” he tells her. “As a matter of fact I met Fiona just last week, in her very spiffy restaurant.”
“We seem not to go there,” is Caroline’s comment, as she realizes that this fact might seem a little odd to anyone else. “My husband dislikes nouvelle cuisine,” she explains. As she is thinking, Oh, my poor Sage, this guy is a very sexy piece of business.
And then the dance is over, and Caroline and Roland Gallo exchange small regretful smiles, and push their way back through the dancers and then through tables to their own table, their separated seats.
Where at last the dessert is being served. The wedding cake.
Surely, thinks Caroline, after this it will be time to go home? However, apparently not. There is a general movement toward the dance floor, or floors, and just as Caroline has finished her last bit of cake, which was delicious, saffron-flavored, at her elbow she hears, “Caroline, couldn’t we have this dance?”
It is not Roland Gallo (no such luck), but a tall thin man with wispy thinning blond hair whom at first she does not quite know but who is—dear God, how could she not recognize him?—Jim McAndrew, her second husband. The father of three of her daughters. “How terribly nice,” she murmurs, assenting to the dance.
Jim is not a good dancer. Clumsy and insecure, no rhythm. Almost automatically Caroline finds herself taking over, helping out. As it was in their marriage. And what a joke, really, these relationship power struggles are, she thinks, when it matters so fiercely who does what, works at what, earns more. I do hope younger people manage to work things out better than we did, she thinks, though I don’t see a lot of hope in my daughters’ relationships.
“Well, how do you like San Francisco, now that you’re back?” Jim asks, speaking into her ear; they are just about the same height, due to Caroline’s heels.
“Oh, rather mixed,” she tells him. “I love our house, but I sort of miss the homey old neighborhood. You know, out in the Mission. And I think Ralph misses it even more than I do. He’s not exactly a Pacific Heights type, you know.”
A little stiffly, “I suppose not.”
Too late Caroline recalls that Jim does not know Ralph—oh Christ, of course not. He only knows what he’s read in the papers about this “labor firebrand, this hulking radical.” And he knows that Ralph was the man with whom he saw Caroline coming out of a motel on Lombard Street, fatally, late on a lovely spring Wednesday afternoon, when Jim was driving back from an innocent afternoon of tennis in Marin. And Caroline stood in that motel parking lot with Ralph Carter hulking beside her, Caroline smiling beatifically into the sun and not quite seeing Jim as he drove past. (This incident is one of Caroline’s reasons for insisting on the smallness of San Francisco.) “It’s great for us to be so near the girls,” she says—mainly to change the subject.
“I mostly see Sage, or sometimes Liza and the kids. But Sage comes around—” Jim’s voice trails off huskily.
And Caroline recalls what she has considered his somewhat mawkish affection, always, for her daughter, her daughter, when after all he has three of his own.
“Wonderful news of Sage, don’t you think?” Jim goes on so warmly and happily that Caroline chides herself for negative views. Jim is simply being kind to Sage, that’s all, and God knows Sage could use a l
ittle more kindness in her life, especially from men.
“It is great news; now Jill’s the one I worry about.” Caroline has not known that she would say this.
“Oh, why?”
“I don’t know, she’s so thin. She looks strained. Unhappy.”
“They’re all too thin. Stressed out.”
“I guess.”
Bumping around the small floor with Jim, for the first time Caroline thinks, And just where is Ralph?
And then she sees him: Ralph is dancing with the bride, in a far corner of the very small dance floor. Dancing to music that is slow and saccharine and very familiar. Tall heavy Ralph and the tall, very beautiful, truly radiant dark bride, small ringlets escaping from her smoothly knotted hair down her smooth olive-skinned neck. They are dancing, Ralph and that girl, barely moving, both smiling as though at some secret joke.
Caroline feels a sharp jolt, a lunge of heated blood: it is sexual jealousy, pure and simple and terrible, and instantly recognized as such—although jealousy has not really been experienced by Caroline for many years, not since the early days with Ralph, when she used to worry obsessively about all those former wives, all three of them, and those even more threatening lady friends. Along with the jealousy Caroline feels its frequent concomitant, strong sexual arousal, pure lust, so acute that she has to laugh at herself, though on the surface she is merely smiling, pleasantly, as she dances with her nice former husband, Jim McAndrew. But such craziness, and at her age! And all over Ralph, who is only doing what all gentlemen at weddings are supposed to do, he is dancing with the bride.
“It’s really nice to see you,” Jim is saying, as he steps sharply across her left instep. “Oh, sorry. Maybe we could—”
“Have tea or something? Well, that would be awfully nice. And now I must go collect Ralph. I’m sure he’s forgotten that we have an early date with a contractor tomorrow.”
“Some expensive bash.”
“Well, what do you think it cost? You know, I’m not great at calculations,” Caroline on the way home asks Ralph, rather tipsily.