by Alice Adams
So minutely observing this new grown-up Alex, Sara thinks, Shit, he looks great. He always will, no matter what happens to him.
Now, relieved of not having even the small task of making tea, Sara understands that she is more than flustered (that quaint word being the one that comes). She is more upset than she should be, much. In the kitchen, simply coping with ice, Perrier, she assures herself that she is simply feeling the effects of flu, she is not up to much.
And why, then, did she even ask him over for tea? But that question instantly answers itself as she recalls: I didn’t actually ask him, he invited himself. He said he had an appointment in this neighborhood. (This neighborhood? With Nixon? With Mrs. Onassis?) An appointment at five-twenty, could he possibly come up? He’d like to see her. And so Sara had said tea.
Returning to the living room, the room termed the library by Nancy’s parents, with her tray of Perrier, ice, glasses, wedges of lemon (it turned out to be more trouble than she had thought, after all), Sara observes how perfectly in keeping with this room Alex has proved to be—and she wishes she had changed her clothes. And she chides herself: Changed clothes? And for what purpose, exactly? However, there is Alex, clearly at home in that heavy aura of expensiveness (but from what is called old money: old books, embossed in gold, leather-bound. Old money). He has made her feel shy, in her old denim skirt, her silly faded T-shirt (A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A MONKEY NEEDS A MUSHROOM, fortunately hard to read). And she hates herself for that shyness.
“Well, you’re not exactly the Vietnam vet I thought I might see,” she blurts out, defiantly, even before setting the tray down.
Alex laughs, a warm light sound that Sara remembers, but does he also, very slightly, blush?
“I didn’t go,” he tells her. “I don’t think I ever really meant to. I was just a silly kid, sounding off.” He seems then to wince at this memory of himself. “Besides,” he adds, “I was getting a lot of static from my parents that I didn’t tell you about. How could I? They wanted me to go to Vietnam. You see? You look shocked.”
“I guess I am, a little.” Oh, poor Alex, is what Sara just prevents herself from saying.
“But now tell me what you’ve been doing,” Alex commands her. “I really want to know.”
At which they both laugh, acknowledging the sheer impossibility of bridging twenty years.
But Sara tries. “I’ve moved around a lot,” she tells him. “Different jobs. Different people. Nothing very conclusive. But now I’m going out to California.” Wryly: “A fresh start.” And she explains a little about Celeste, and the death of Charles. San Sebastian. “But what about you?”
Poor Alex blushes again as he tells her, “I have a feeling that you didn’t know much about me at all, in Berkeley. I mean, where I came from, anything like that. Well, I guess in a way none of us did, it wasn’t what we were talking about. We barely knew each other’s last names.”
Sara laughs, suddenly liking him a lot. Suddenly feeling him as a trusted, interested old friend. “I guess I just thought you were ‘Eastern,’ ” she says. “I guess from New York.”
“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.” His look at her then is very intent, and worried. “I didn’t know how to say it to you. How to say, ‘Look, Sara, by the way, my dad is really rich. And he’s also CIA.’ Because that’s how it was. Is.”
He has so perfectly imitated a Berkeley sixties voice (his own) that Sara laughs, even as she says, “But how come I didn’t know any of this? I mean, no hints?”
He too laughs. “I can be very cagey. It’s an inherited trait.” And then he continues: “I don’t mean the CIA is how my father made his money. You know, the other way around. He’s just the kind of guy they used to recruit back then. A rich boy, from old money. Princeton. For what he is, he’s an okay person, really. Sort of idealistic. Of course we still fight a lot.”
Alex is more or less between jobs, Sara gathers. He describes himself as a free-lance editor, naming magazines; he also says that from time to time he has taught at community colleges. He does not say that he lives on money from home, which may well be the case. He is studying Spanish. When he gets it together (“as we used to say”), he plans to go to Nicaragua.
Sara finds much of this, his job trouble, fairly familiar. Theirs is not exactly a work-oriented generation, she has thought. She files his Nicaragua plan in her mind for future conversations, noting as she does so that she must have decided that they are friends now, he and she.
And for the moment she is most interested in what she did not know before: his family. Money, the CIA. “I still can’t quite believe it,” she repeats. “And if you’d told me I would have been sympathetic, I think. Your arguments with your father. I could have identified with that, all my fights with Charles.”
“But I was really intimidated by you,” he tells her. “You and your friends. I remember when you told me your mother wasn’t married, plus being a Trotskyist—I didn’t even know what it was until I got up the nerve to ask someone.”
“You were intimidated,” Sara gets out weakly, feeling herself to be in some area past irony, even past laughing. “I thought you were the sun-god.”
“Well, you see? If you’d known I had money too, it would have spoiled everything. But I did feel cheap when you paid for that trip to Mexico. I think that’s one of the reasons I acted like such a shit. A guilty shit.”
They laugh quite amiably. And then, quite as though she were alone, Sara closes her eyes, and hears the rain, and whine of wind.
What has been entirely left out of the story of Alex’s life is any hint of the personal: no friends have appeared, much less any lovers, girlfriends. Maybe even a wife or two, why not? Most rich and handsome men have married at least once or twice by forty, Sara thinks. But then so of course have most women, most women at forty.
In the abrupt way that she recognizes as rude but can no longer control, Sara asks him, “What about girls, though? Women. You didn’t mention at all—”
At this Alex blushes, but he gives a sober, even rational (for a while) romantic history. “I got married just out of school. Blonde beautiful Cecelia. Now she’s a tap dancer, a teacher, in Tenafly, New Jersey. Where she’s from. We lasted a year. I don’t know why. Why we lasted or why we broke up either. Then, just women, a sort of line of them. Some lasting longer than others. It got sort of frantic. Meeting people, drinking, getting high. Doing some coke, a couple of other drugs. Someone’s bed. All faster and faster. I began to think, If I could just spend some time alone. Get off. Maybe, even in some religious way, I could find a retreat. I’ve got a friend, a guy I grew up with, who’s an Episcopal priest. I thought he could help.” He laughs. “You see? I’m desperate.” He has looked away from Sara in the course of all this; now he turns back to her, and in a resolute way he says, “I think I just don’t want anything close with anyone, you know?”
“That’s pretty much how I feel, though for sort of different reasons,” Sara says—to reassure him? Maybe, she decides. But what she says to him is true: for almost a year now she has felt herself as an asexual person, and she has wondered, Is this how it is to be forty? Is this for good? What’s all this I hear about geriatric sex: does that come later?
“Oh Jesus,” Alex suddenly cries out. “Do you know it’s after six-thirty? Holy shit.”
“You missed your five-twenty,” unnecessarily Sara comments. “Something important?”
Alex starts to laugh. “Just my shrink. Honestly. I’ve never done this before, missed an hour. It’s sort of funny. But she might not think so.”
“You could send me the money instead.”
“One fifty? I’ll have to pay her anyway, the stingy bitch.”
“Is that what it is these days? Good God. Well, direct your check to some shelter.”
“That’s the price for us rich,” Alex tells her. “And of course I send money to shelters. But couldn’t we go out to dinner? First let me make two phone calls. I have to let her know I’m
not dead.”
Digesting the information that Alex, so tired of women, of “relationships,” would still choose to go to a woman psychiatrist, Sara asks him, “Do I have to change?”
“Not unless you want to.” He hesitates. “But maybe. Well, yes.”
“I don’t know,” Alex ponders, somewhat later in the restaurant. His attention is now directed to Sara’s immediate future. “I don’t know,” he repeats. “What I’m not really clear about is how you feel about Celeste. I mean beyond gratitude, old loyalty. All that.”
“But all that’s quite a lot.”
“Oh, of course. I just meant in terms of getting along with her. The day-to-day rub. Small conversations. You know.”
Sara laughs. “Not to mention basic issues.”
“Oh, right, those crucial basic issues. But honestly, Sara, for all you know she could be really right wing. Lots of people are these days.”
“Well, I know she’s too snobbish to have gone for Nixon. I’m sure of that. Also she’d hate a scandal. Publicity. Which pretty much cuts out Ronnie-babe too. But of course I have thought, and worried.”
“You really don’t know her very well,” Alex unhelpfully sums it up.
“That’s true, I don’t.”
But who, as far as that goes, who do I know very well? Including you, dear beautiful Alexander. Sara asks herself this, and then smiles at an odd new thought, appearing not quite for the first time in her mind. Men are much more at ease when you’ve made it clear you don’t want them, is what she thinks. So odd, and really quite a change. Previously, in the old sexual mythology, men were always eager and women the ones who had to be lulled into ease. A theory sometimes employed to get someone, some woman into bed, a lulled woman being an unsuspicious one, in theory.
But that is not what she is doing with Alex; this is not the lull before a seduction, it really is not. Sara even wonders how much longer she can sit up in this restaurant. She feels very, very weak.
The restaurant itself is very pleasant, a good choice on Alex’s part: a converted brownstone, up in the East Eighties, more or less around the corner from Sara’s borrowed digs. Alex and Sara have a small room entirely to themselves, all dark and severely paneled. Old wood that gleams in the candlelight, from their pale blue linen table.
We are always in the most romantic places in the most non-romantic circumstances, is one of the things that Sara has thought, from time to time.
But the food is very, very good, the first that she has been able to taste for some time, the flu having deadened all her senses. But still she thinks, When I was in love with Alex, and maybe he with me, in his way, we spent all our time in dirty coffeehouses, and made love on broken boardinghouse beds—or sometimes, a big treat, we would go to some seedy motel down on University, smoke dope and drink awful wine and ravage each other’s bodies, endlessly. And we ended up in jail, in Mexico, hating each other—as we watched that other couple, the dirty Florida blonde and the Mexican boy, humping, humping. Filthy, empty-eyed.
Whereas now, nowhere near in love, we bask in glamorously suggestive privacy and, both almost middle-aged people, we discuss the new directions our lives are taking.
“Well, I really hope it works out for you,” Alex tells her, with his instant, still very boyish smile. “I might even come out to check up on you.”
“You would?”
“Well, sure.” But Alex’s laugh is uncomfortable, as though he in some way still wonders why she called him, just what she was up to. For surely she, a woman, must be up to something?
Feeling his unease, and just then liking him very much, despite all his trouble (or because of it? She wouldn’t put that past herself), Sara speculates aloud: “I wonder whether extreme beauty isn’t really harder on men than it is on women. Oh, poor Alex!” But has she, despite herself, sounded unpleasant. She intended an idle remark—she thinks.
And Alex, though blushing, bears up fairly well. “Just knock it off, Sara, will you? Aren’t we old friends?”
Considerably later, lying in her oversized bed, very much alone, exhausted, sleepless and nervously irritated, Sara castigates herself for what may well have sounded like rudeness. Why tease Alex in that way, about his good looks, which he really can’t help? Alex, a vulnerable, confused but essentially decent person.
Why put him off with dumb jokes, when actually—actually, Sara tells herself, you long for Alex to be here with you now. And he could be, he could easily have come home, come to bed, if you had been even slightly nicer. If you had been the kind, humane woman you always pretend to be. Whereas in truth you are a total, an absolute crude jerk, and no one will ever love you or even like you again. Not ever. You are the fat forty-year-old person whom you have always scorned and dreaded. The fat white middle-class middle-aged woman. The enemy is you.
She is more or less used to these bouts of self-laceration, and they do not keep her awake for very long.
12
What Celeste first thinks—or, rather, what she feels—on seeing Sara is an impulse to turn and run. Sara, just off her plane and emerging from the flight tunnel in the San Francisco airport. Celeste would like to pretend not to be there, or not to have seen Sara.
Dark, tall, heavy-looking Sara, who is fortyish (that is perhaps the biggest surprise) but still unmistakably herself, in an awful sheepskin coat, a denim skirt and some big old boots, all pale and scuffed. Her hair is long and bedraggled, worn in no discernible style.
Why have I done this? Celeste cries out, within herself. And, almost at the same time: Whatever will Bill think when he meets her? Her third thought is, by contrast, a pious one: Thank God Charles isn’t here to see her.
“Darling Sara, how wonderful! But you must be exhausted” is what Celeste actually cries out, aloud.
They embrace. Sara smells of shampoo, and some sharp rather lemony astringent. Nice smells, really. A nice surprise.
“Well, I am sort of exhausted,” Sara says, in a voice so familiar that Celeste experiences a rush of affection, despite how Sara looks. If she could just keep her eyes closed, could simply smell and hear Sara, it would be all right, she quite nuttily thinks, and she smiles a little bleakly to herself. Since Charles’s death, Celeste has felt that she is sentenced to private jokes.
“This thing is pretty heavy, though,” Sara continues, shifting the bulging, strapped and patched brown knapsack on her shoulder.
“It’s immense,” marvels Celeste, as though admiring strength. “I wonder they let you on the plane.”
“Well, you have to get on carrying it as though there were no possible question, you have every right to have it with you,” instructs Sara, quite as though Celeste would ever travel with such a burden.
By this time they are walking together along the broad corridor to the terminal—and an odd couple they must make, thinks Celeste. She in her little black Valentino, trimmed with the red silk braid, an old suit but still a Valentino. And Sara in those, those clothes. “We’ll pick up your luggage downstairs,” Celeste chatters, imagining God knows what sort of trunk, probably something with a rope around it. And she thinks again, How fortunate I didn’t ask Bill to come along, or anyone else, for that matter.
Although Dudley offered and seemed genuinely to want to come. “You may need help,” Dudley somewhat ambiguously said: could she have somehow foreseen how Sara would look? Did she mean that sort of help, support? But no, more likely she was thinking of luggage. Carrying things.
“This is my luggage,” Sara tells Celeste. “This is it. Funny how traveling light can turn out to be so heavy.”
“Well—” is all that Celeste can manage to say. Trotting alongside big Sara is taking all her breath, although she herself generally walks quite fast. “Well,” she repeats. “How wonderful that we don’t have to go down and wait for luggage. And so often they lose it,” she babbles. “Impossible!”
She must stop talking, she truly must or she will faint. And so Celeste concentrates on looking at the crowds, all those o
thers hurrying toward or past them, or just slopping along in the same direction that she and Sara are moving. And how terrible most people do look, these days, in airports! Celeste, though of course not actually traveling, is dressed quite as she used to believe that everyone should dress for trips: something dark, for practicality. And in those days a hat and gloves.
And how handsome all the men looked then in their hats. Celeste now sighs (a considerable expense of breath) at the sudden vivid picture with which she is assailed: Grand Central Station, the main concourse on a summer evening. All that elegant marble space, all the gilt, and those wonderful-looking men with their summer tans from weekends, in their linen or seersucker jackets, or dark blazers, their rep striped ties, and their hats!—those wonderful panamas, or dark straws with madras bands. When was the last time I saw a handsome man in a hat? she wonders. Even dear Charles had stopped wearing hats, except for his funny old Irish tweed caps for the country. Would Bill wear a hat if she went to Brooks and found him a wonderful one? Celeste very much doubts it; he just wouldn’t. Bill is too young for hats.
“… so cold in New York,” Sara seems at that moment to be saying. “And rainstorms. From this place I was staying in, the one I told you about, I could watch the storms in Central Park. Really violent.”
“It sounded like such a nice place.”
“Well.” Sara can be seen to scowl. “I have to admit it was comfortable. Physically. Chock full of creature comforts. Christ, I was choking on comfort. Warmth and bath salts. But mostly I hated it there.”
At which Celeste’s strong but aging heart sinks, as at her first sight of Sara, and she wonders how Sara will feel about her house, this time. All the warmth and bath salts. “But in a way you enjoyed being in New York?” she asks hopefully.
“No, I didn’t. I hated it.” Defiant Sara. Always defiant—she hasn’t changed at all.