by Alice Adams
Did Gay Liberation and Freddy’s midlife crisis have to coincide so precisely? This is how Edward states the main source of his own unhappiness to himself. For Freddy, who became forty the previous June, had (not coincidentally) spent a great deal of the summer at a beach just south of San Francisco, a beach known for nudity and known too for being gay (and oh Christ, how Edward loathes and despises that word, in its current application). After years of discretion and relative monogamy (only a few quick encounters in Freddy’s case, which Edward could suspect with some certainty but also pretend to ignore; Edward himself was faithful, absolutely), Freddy, at forty, decided that he should “come out.” To do otherwise was to be hypocritical, if not downright reactionary, retrogressive. Freddy also began to feel that only gay men were truly sympathetic, and only gay restaurants permissible. Easy enough to find lots of both in San Francisco, in the seventies. But sometimes a great bore for Edward, who yearned for a good old-fashioned dinner out, in a straight place like Jack’s, or Sam’s.
And gay beaches.
Freddy’s idea, at least at first, seemed to be that Edward should come along; he encouraged a view of the two of them as sexual adventurers on a quite equal footing: loving friends who could also, if fleetingly, love others. However, Edward’s first exposure to that beach was a nightmare, and his second worse: lying there all stripped in the cold June California fog, his pale, scaly sixty-year-old flesh, with his paunch and his graying, thinning body hair. Edward felt his very sex shriveled down to snail size, a small cold gray slug between his ropy old legs: incompetent, entirely undesirable. As, somewhere near him, tautly muscled, small brown Freddy, who seemed destined by nature for nude beaches, cavorted and laughed with new friends, themselves all athletically lithe and firm and warm, eager-blooded. The genuinely gay, those already “out.” All in all a most horrible summer for Edward, one from which he has in no wise recovered. (Indeed his cancer surgery seemed at times a continuation of that nightmare—having to do, as initially it did, with formerly erotic areas of his body.)
He still has nightmares of those nude-beach afternoons, in which he is either there alone with Freddy, or else Freddy is there, and hardly alone, and he is not. All equally horrible, and a persistent vision—even now, in this strange warm October. He might be going mad, thinks Edward, forcing himself off in the direction of the bar for another drink. Or maybe it is really a Valium that he needs. Or a shot of Demerol, the hospital’s sole blessing.
* * *
It seems, though, that there really is some madness prevalent that night, at the overheated, crowded but beautiful party. It is as though Celeste’s ideas about age and exorcism had become actualized, made manifest. As though everyone present had been infected with Celeste’s earlier notion of the lateness of all their lives, their being past middle age. Of the propitiation of lurking disease.
By midnight these unconscious rites have taken the form, in some of the assembled guests, of an unaccustomed, heated sexual urge. The mouths of many people, mouths that for years have just not met, in dry, cool, “social” kisses—those mouths now part to each other, wetly, avidly, searchingly, in darkened corners of terraces, in small barely candlelit rooms.
Dudley, coming from the downstairs powder room, finds herself accosted, quite stopped in her tracks—“Say, Dudley, I’ve been looking all over for you”—by one of Charles’s Ross retiree friends, a man whom she has always half secretly liked. Brooks Burgess. Sam has joked that Brooks has a crush on Dudley—very funny, Sam seems to think this is. They now come upon each other in that small darkened passageway, Dudley and Brooks Burgess, and they fall upon each other like randy adolescents, kissing and groping. They remain upright, more or less, prep-school kids at the door of the dorm at curfew time. In some exhilarated corner of her mind Dudley thinks of this, remembers—as the genital area of Brooks Burgess thrusts against her, and Dudley comes, and comes.
Half an hour or so later Edward, also leaving what has been designated as the men’s room, has a similarly (for him) unusual and happy encounter: thank God he was not successful in persuading Freddy to come along home! This meeting is with a young man all in white whom Edward at first takes to be one of the waiters, as that man’s strong and very firm hands make his intentions absolutely clear. Edward first thinks, No, this is wrong, it’s condescending to have sex with working-class people, remember poor Forster. And he next thinks, For God’s sake, it’s Russell Carter’s nephew, out from Princeton. And really why does that make it any better, morally? He next laughs to himself in sheer pleasure, and follows the young man (who is neither a waiter nor Russell Carter’s nephew but a local boy gatecrashing, just for fun). This young man has apparently worked out a more private destination for the two of them. Edward goes along, he stops thinking at all. He enjoys, enjoys.
Unaware of course of what her guests are up to, in any detail, Celeste moves from group to group like a small yellow bird, the center of her party, the very source of all its mysterious energy.
In a way that she herself would be hard put to define, Celeste is a “believer,” just in what would be difficult to say. Charles has been heard to describe her as a transcendentalist: “Celeste finds immanence everywhere.” Which is not entirely wrong. “Religious” and “spiritual” are words also applied to Celeste occasionally, both of which she firmly rejects, the one as being too rigid, too circumscribed for the vagaries of her instincts. The other, spiritual, these days sounds more than a little vulgar, smacking as it does of cults and born-agains.
What Celeste clearly does believe in, and count on, though, is the strength of her own will—even its magical powers. When Polly was sickest, tube-sustained, dead-white, at the end of her strength, in her terrible hospital cubicle, at her bedside Celeste would sit and whisper, with all her own strength, her eyes and her voice both passionately intense, “You have to get well. You can’t die. You have to decide not to die. Polly, you have to get well. We love you. Decide. Now. Decide to get well.”
Later on, when Polly was in fact well, she would joke that Celeste had cured her. But she half believed it, and Celeste was quite sure that she had. She had simply forced Polly to live.
On this party night, though, Celeste’s powers seem not to extend to Charles. Perhaps he is overly conscious of her witchcraft by now, and thus is immune. Or it could be that severe and secret worries render him impervious to all her warm yellow magic.
One of Charles’s worries has in several ways to do with Sara, who seems more or less adopted by Celeste, since her mother, Emma, died—ominously close to the time when Celeste and Charles were married. (And why did Emma have to die? Lung cancer, very bad, but no worse than pancreatic, surely: couldn’t Celeste have managed to save her, as she managed to save Polly? Can Celeste save him? Charles wonders.)
Charles and Sara have always quarreled, on each occasion of their meeting—mostly over the war in Vietnam and Sara’s “pacifist” activities. Her actions, as she insists on terming them. Sara is a strident, pig-headed young woman, no doubt of that. However, in recent years, the early seventies, Charles himself has been so deeply rocked by the Watergate disclosures (one of his few remaining certainties is the fact that Ike never had much use for Nixon: Ike, whom Charles knew pretty well, and liked a lot)—Charles has been so upset that he has come to question almost everything in public life. Vietnam was of course not only Nixon’s war; still, when Sara ran on about Nixon and Kissinger (she seemed to hate them both with true vehemence; “callous killers” she called them both), some loud inner voice has cried out to Charles that she could be right.
But he and Sara have such a history of rancor that now when it seems important to make friends with her, he has no idea how to go about it. Should he simply write to her, and if so what to say? If he changed his will now, leaving something substantial to Sara but still the bulk to Celeste, should he tell Sara that?
And how could he make that change without alarming Celeste, since their lawyer is a longtime personal friend? Celeste w
ould know, and then she would also know of his fears.
Charles is convinced that Celeste will live forever, refusing always to die. Or maybe quite suddenly, almost whimsically, she will simply decide that it is time for her to go. An actress, stepping off stage. In any case he is sure that she will be in charge of her death.
Whereas he, Charles, may well not be in charge at all. And at the thought of his own mortality Charles is seized by a great wave of anxiety, deep in his chest, almost suffocating.
He will have to talk to Polly. There are certain symptoms that she may have had. He would simply like to know. To know everything that she knows, before he goes to any doctors.
Charles’s mind, in many ways excellent, is highly compartmentalized; most conveniently for himself, he is able to keep certain aspects of his life and even of his memory quite separate from each other. Thus, these days, in his dealings with a large, quite eccentric woman named Polly Blake, who is almost bald, and a conqueror of cancer, he sees her as the sum of just those and only those qualities: eccentric, fat and bald. Someone who beat out cancer. He does not connect her to the other Polly Blake who used to be so madly (embarrassingly, when you came right down to it) in love with him. The Polly Blake who in bed used to be so, so violent. So—abandoned. For a time he believed her to be a nymphomaniac, but then he read somewhere that nymphos almost never have actual orgasms, and Polly certainly did. Lord! like a torpedo going off, half the time.
And so it is not that strange young woman, that former Polly Blake, whom he now approaches as he sees her standing alone, among plants, in the floodlit atrium. Big Polly, her head in one of those scarves she always wears. The friend of Celeste.
“Well, Charlie. Hello there.”
Charlie. No one calls him that, and Charles recalls that Polly did not call him that either—before, in the period of which he never thinks. And so perhaps “Charlie” is her way of making him into someone new? In that case he decides to forgive her.
But Polly never misses a thing. “Such a benign smile,” she tells him. “What can I have done to deserve it?”
“Nothing at all, my dear. It’s just such a lovely, lovely night.”
“Yes, Celeste’s lovely party. As she herself would say, it’s divine.” Polly sniffs at something in the air. “But then Celeste is divine.”
Charles scans her face for irony, finds none. So that his second thought is a question. Can she mean that Celeste is too good for him? Very likely she does mean that, but at the moment he has no time for such female foolishness. “Oh, right. Absolutely” is what he says.
“Now everyone will love her even more than we already do.” Polly focuses those pale, oversized eyes of hers on his face. “Celeste is passionately greedy in that way, isn’t she? Never enough love, or approval. She’s famished.”
This strikes Charles as vaguely, slightly insulting to himself, and surely not a topic he wishes to pursue. In fact, why are they discussing Celeste at all? This is not quite what one does, in Charles’s view, not at all what one does. And perhaps this whole notion of talking to Polly, of asking her certain things was wrong.
Just then, though, a quick, familiar pain somewhere around the area of his stomach makes Charles gasp. He clutches at that region of his person, lets out an “Oh!”
Polly is instantly at his side, one arm pressed around his body. How strong she is!
“Charles, ah, my old darling,” Polly murmurs, so softly that later Charles is not entirely sure that she said that. Eventually he comes to believe that she did not.
“Honey, come on. You’re drunk as hell.” Sam to Dudley, whom he encounters emerging from a bathroom. She has not done a very good job of fixing up her face—Lord knows how it looked before she even tried.
“I most certainly am not drunk. Just because you—just because you happen to think.”
“Baby, come on. I’ll take you home.”
Dudley stiffens away from him. “I’m not at all sure,” she says.
“Honey, it’s time to go home. The party’s over.”
“But we haven’t even danced.”
“Neither has anyone else.” Sam has begun to laugh. “It wasn’t a dance, remember?”
“Well, in that case.” Dudley then allows herself to be led away.
An hour or so later the party is truly, entirely over, all the guests and all the help have gone, the house restored to cleanliness and order—except for the stray hidden Scotch-tinged glass of melted ice, the cigarette stub pushed into a potted rhododendron.
Perhaps looking for just those unlovely remains, Celeste still prowls about, in her yellow silk. Moving fast, looking everywhere.
Suddenly arrested by a sound, a household creak, she stops, hears the shuffle of footsteps. In an instant of alarm she imagines some barefoot intruder, lurking, waiting for her. But then of course a door opens, and it is Charles. Charles, in his handsomest dark red satin robe, just emerging from the study, which is actually his bedroom now. For years that room has been where he sleeps, alone.
And even though it is Charles and not some scary stranger, Celeste is still a little frightened: Charles goes to bed early, generally, and he goes instantly to sleep. Passing his room, she can always hear him snoring. He never gets up in the night. Never stalks around.
Going over to him and receiving a gentle, dry connubial kiss, Celeste asks, “Charles darling, are you all right?”
“Oh, yes, of course I am. But I heard you walking around, and I wanted to tell you something.”
With no idea what to expect, Celeste looks up at him.
What Charles says, after the briefest but still the strangest little pause, is “I just wanted you to know that you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever, ah, known. By a long shot the most beautiful, my dear Celeste.”
THE PRESENT
10
Somewhere in the hills that lie between San Sebastian and the coast there exists a strange tribe of wild goats, very shy. The tribe is small: nine goats. Dudley, who has been observing these creatures whenever she can, always counts them, and there are always nine, and only nine, as though at the birth of each kid a grandfather goat keels over, dead. Or do the other goats kill him, in some esoteric ritual of goats? Dudley is intensely curious about the habits of these animals but she has managed to find out next to nothing. She can’t find them in any books, and no one she knows has ever seen them. Walks with Edward or with Celeste invariably take place on days when the goats have chosen to be invisible. And Sam won’t take those walks with her at all. He does not even believe in her goats.
They are especially beautiful goats, in Dudley’s view. Their horns are large and very white, gracefully curved, like shells, and their hair is fairly long, some interesting pale color. Possibly it is silky—of course she has never seen them that close at hand, much less ever touched. And the goats seem to have some curious fifth or sixth sense about field glasses: whenever Dudley remembers to bring hers along, the good strong glasses inherited from her father, a noted Boston birdwatcher of his day, she either fails to see the goats at all or she catches only a glimpse of one of them: horns just protruding from above a rock, a tail just disappearing over the crest of a hill.
Her relation to these goats is intensely personal, Dudley feels. They are emblematic of some important area of her life, her consciousness—just what, or which, she is not at all sure. And in a practical way she worries about them: do they get enough to eat? Could someone ever possibly take a non-benign interest in them, with a view to capture—or, much more unthinkably, slaughter?
Voicing any of these goat thoughts to Sam invariably turns out to be an error; still, at times, under special circumstances, she does so. As on a rainy Sunday morning, near noon, when they are still in bed.
Not thinking at all, Dudley then says to Sam, “I do wonder about my goats. Do you think they get cold in this weather?”
And Sam begins to laugh. He starts to say something, and is then prevented by the laughter that shakes his throat, erup
ting from deep in his chest. So that Dudley laughs too. And as they look at each other it gets much worse, more impossible to stop laughing. So silly.
“Wet goats,” Sam manages at last to say—at which basically not very funny phrase they start in again, laughing, in their tousled, floral-sheeted bed, now redolent of sea smells, stained with love. In an ashtray on Sam’s nightstand are the sucked-down ends of two joints. Dirty roaches. And each of their nightstands holds an empty, high fluted champagne glass. Somewhere, quite possibly under the bed, is an empty split.
“Oh dear, how very dissolute we look” is Dudley’s comment, a little later.
“Who cares? Who can see us? But Christ, I’m absolutely starving. What’s for breakfast?”
“Breakfast. My God, let’s have lunch.” Sitting up, Dudley smooths her nightgown, her prettiest blue silk put on last night in hopes of just this occasion, this happy stoned morning with Sam, whom today she truly loves.
“I’d like a few pounds of pasta with lots of garlic and scallions and some cheese, and maybe a steak,” Sam tells her.
“Well, lucky you. We just happen to have all that stuff. Even steaks in the freezer.”
“And another split of champagne, don’t you think?”
“What I think is, why not?”
Dining as she so elegantly does with Bill, in San Francisco restaurants, Celeste nevertheless spends a great deal of time alone in those restaurants. With elaborate apologies both as he leaves and upon his usually delayed return, Bill goes off to make phone calls. Sometimes, if the phone is in sight, Celeste can watch him there, talking, gesticulating. Often looking in her direction and blowing kisses. Or quite often he just goes to the men’s room. At least that is where Celeste supposes he must be when he is out of sight.