by Alice Adams
A darker inner voice, however, insists that there is something more than a little wrong: he does not quite look at the person he’s talking to, he does not quite make sense. He must have drunk too much. And Celeste thinks, Oh dear, I never should have said that about getting married, which was really a sort of joke, a Valentine’s joke. (Wasn’t it? She makes this inquiry of herself and comes up with no answer.)
Others in the room, for the most part fairly heavy drinkers themselves, of an old-fashioned sort, Scotch and gin and vodka drinkers (Sara is the only white-wine consumer present)—those people have come to much the same conclusion: this Bill has drunk too much, it’s made him gabby.
Dudley, who in some ways is more “in touch” than the rest, has come to another conclusion, which is that Bill must have done time in est or some similar self-realization enterprise. She thinks she can recognize the vocabulary: his “comfortable with,” his “spaces.” And she too believes that he must drink a great deal: he is not as comfortable in this particular space as he says he is; in fact he has begun, observably, even from a distance, to perspire.
To Sara, who has been watching Bill with possibly the coolest, clearest eyes in the room (she is also the lightest drinker present), it is obvious that he is doing a lot of coke. She knows the signs, and she is also sure (she would make book on this) that he is either getting close or perhaps has already come to the end of his stash. And so she plans to continue to watch. To see what happens. She is fairly certain that something will happen.
This party, though, by almost any definition is not a success. Except in a purely visual way: on the surface it looks quite wonderful. But in more rudimentary ways it could be described as a bust: most people ate and drank too much, and around eleven they began to start off home.
Anxiety about the weather, that seemingly unabating, lashing storm could indeed be blamed; certainly that was the given excuse as guests began to reclaim their wraps. But at another, better party the bad weather could have played quite another role: everyone could have chosen to wait it out, which as things turned out would have been the wiser choice: by midnight this storm was dead and gone.
Quite depressed, for a number of related and unrelated reasons, Sara starts toward her own rooms, her bedroom and bath. The bedroom door is open, she sees from the hall, although she knows she left it closed, and just as she has thought, Shit, some old drunk using my bathroom, a tall thin person comes out. A man. “Bill.”
So startled that she almost screams, Sara cries, “What in hell! What do you think you’re doing in my room?”
She pushes past him so that she stands in her doorframe, then turns to stare up at him.
Bill’s face is very white, and sweat runs down the narrow indented cheeks as he tries to smile. “Baby, you’re someone I can relate to, I can tell. The truth is, I thought you might have something for me.”
“Asshole! I don’t do any dope.”
“Look, I’m serious.” His face has entirely changed, all attempts at ingratiation vanished. “I have to connect,” he tells her.
“That’s your problem, creepo.”
“But I don’t even know this town. I’ve never been here—”
“Get out of here. Get lost.”
Staring at him with almost the purest hatred she can remember, Sara still does not quite dare to say his name, what she believes to be his name. She does not say, Priest, you goddam Judas Priest, although those words are pounding in her brain so loudly it seems impossible he cannot hear them.
And perhaps he does, for with yet another shift in expression, a muttered “Bitch, fucking bitch,” Bill turns and leaves, rushing not toward the bedroom that has been prepared for him, for his comfort, but toward the front door. Unseen by Celeste, who is helping the maids clean up in the kitchen.
He is out the door. Gone.
Celeste’s tired voice shows strain. And with an uncomfortable lurch of affection for this woman whom half the time she doesn’t even like—deploring her vanity, what could even be called shallowness—Sara now thinks, Oh, why couldn’t you just say that you wonder why the party didn’t go? Or that you really wonder what everyone thought of Bill?
Instead, sitting edgily forward on the deep white sofa, her chin at its accustomed forward angle, Celeste speaks of Charles. “We often quarreled, Charles and I,” she tells Sara. “Sometimes for days at a time. But then in some very sweet way we’d make it up. And I think he kept up with a few old girlfriends—you know Charles was always just catnip to women, they were all crazy about him. He probably even saw his old girls, you know, even spent time with them when he went on his trips.” She laughs shortly, sharply, and shrugs. A large shrug. “He could even have, uh, made love to them, for all I know. But still he always came back to me, and we had each other. We were always in some way in love. And then when he died I simply couldn’t accept it. I kept thinking we’d had a fight, or he was off on some trip and he’d come back. The finality—I couldn’t believe it. But you see how silly old people get, dear Sara?”
“How long was it before you met Bill?” Sara knows her question to be brusque, but she has said it deliberately. We might as well get right to it, is what she thinks.
But she has reckoned without the practiced evasions of Celeste.
“All the beaux I had,” Celeste now ruminates, “they never took care of things, or maybe sometimes one of them might fix a radio, or something, might carry something upstairs for me. But Charles did everything. I got so spoiled! I got so I just couldn’t cope with insurance forms and all that, the IRS things, all that mess.”
“You really met Bill at the IRS, in San Francisco?” Sara persists, determined at last to get the whole story. “When?”
Celeste frowns, then shivers, recollecting. “Since you ask, it was last November, after Charles died. And such a terrible cold day. I had a lot of trouble parking, that awful Polk Street neighborhood. I had to walk a long way, and then at the Federal Building there were all these pickets, all kinds of people with placards. Big signs about Nicaragua, about not fighting there. Big anti-Reagan signs. But these terribly friendly people, and a lot of them quite well dressed. I was really surprised.” She laughs, a small mild laugh, apparently at herself. “They thought I had come to be part of them, or else they pretended they did. ‘Come on in,’ they kept saying, and they’d hold out their hands. ‘We can use you,’ they told me. They were all singing some song I didn’t know. But you know I was really tempted, in the craziest way. I thought I’d just join them, and not bother with the IRS.”
It is easy for Sara to visualize that scene: the “well-dressed” (middle class, middle age) strays among the radical young, the undeterrable old activists. The middle-aged rather manic at the sheer unusualness of their action, and extending their hands to Celeste: Please come and join us, be one of us. It’s fun.
“Well, sometimes I think I should have,” Celeste somewhat surprisingly now says. “It was like the sixties—sometimes I even wanted to join those people, those funny kids with their banners and tambourines. But with Charles that was out of the question. But now Charles was gone, and I could have changed my whole life right there. I mean, not that it already wasn’t.”
But Celeste did not linger with the protesters that day, well-dressed and middle-class though they appeared. She went straight up to an office, and there was Bill. Bill Jones.
“Well, I almost fainted. People say that all the time about fainting, but I really did. At first so much like Charles. Then I thought it must be some incredibly cruel joke, some actor got up to look like Charles. But who on earth would do that to me? And it turns out that Bill actually was an actor for a while during the fifties.”
During his acting days, Bill had lived in and around L.A., Celeste told Sara. Twice married, no children, at that time nothing in his life really working out. And then he began to do work in TV, mostly announcing. And he met a lot of people. Big executives in the industry, who liked him very much. (In fact, Bill told Celeste, he came wit
hin a hairsbreadth of getting the job that Reagan did so well with, with General Electric.)
Somehow the TV work led Bill into government work, although Celeste is vague as to how this connection was made. By the sixties, anyway, he was all the way out of TV and into some government agencies, their San Francisco offices. In charge of the West Coast.
“What agencies, Celeste? He must have told you?” Sara hesitates; the extreme tension that she feels will show in her voice, she knows; always voices are the total giveaway. But she has to ask, to find out. “Was it FBI?” (Shit, her voice did crack, just barely but it did.) “CIA?”
Celeste unconvincingly laughs. “Oh, they’re all so alike, those letters. And I still think in terms of the nice old agencies, the war ones. NLRB, and OPA. And further back the NRA, and the CCC. WPA.”
“Celeste, do you think it was CIA?”
“Well, Sara, it certainly could have been.”
Sara leans back and regulates her breath. In, out. In, out. Celeste too is quiet, and she too breathes very deeply. (Is she upset, or simply very tired?) Sara at last is able to bring herself under control.
The “help” has all gone home by now. Someone left an open window, somewhere, no doubt to clear out all the lingering smoke and perfume smells, the too rich food odors; now freshly washed, cool night air drifts through all the rooms, on strong clean currents.
And the silence between the two women prolongs itself. Ostensibly resting, they sit there, each with her eyes closed, and each powerfully engaged in serious thoughts, so that an outside observer, had there been one, would have viewed them as linked in a common ritual. And in a sense perhaps they are: two women worrying, heavily. Two women trying to comprehend the ways of men.
At last it is Celeste who breaks it, laughing lightly, asking, “So sweet of Bill to go around telling everyone how he hoped to talk to them again. I really think he meant it, don’t you?”
To which Sara with a frown responds, “Not me. He did not tell me that he hoped to talk to me again.”
But then, as though there had been no silence between them, Celeste takes it up again. “So we met in the IRS, but we hardly talked there, he just directed me to where I was supposed to be going in the first place. But we must have registered something. I certainly did. Anyway, that afternoon there he was again, in an antique store in Jackson Square. You know, it did seem fated.”
“I suppose it did.”
And then rather surprisingly Celeste remarks, “He probably thinks I have a great deal more money than I do.”
16
Those resident in San Sebastian are quite apt to forget that the sea is very near, by car. It sometimes takes a visitor, some eager newcomer, to remind them of their almost coastal situation; at other times they think of the sea because of its sporadic acts of violence: ferocious, ravaging storms, shipwrecks. Drownings, loss. On the day following Celeste’s party, then, both conditions pertain: Sara, the visitor, has said all along how she wishes to see that coast. Also, the night before, during those very party hours, two fishing boats were lost in the storm, no trace as yet but a couple of ominously empty lifeboats, their vacant oarlocks rattling in the wind.
But now the weather is perfectly, innocently clear, the sky pale and soft, small fleecy clouds adrift near the unmenacing blue horizon.
The sea itself, though, some twenty or thirty feet below the flattened, grassy area where Dudley and Sara now walk, in the balmy sunlight—that sea is still violent, lashing at rocks, churning, leaping, breaking into foam. It is terrifying to look down: the two women stay respectfully back from the edge, yet are unable not to peer down for quick momentary glimpses of peril, of doom.
They have been speaking, naturally, of last night’s party, and particularly of Bill, who, Sara has just informed Dudley, telephoned Celeste this morning to say that he would be away for a while. Something about a sick cousin in upstate New York.
“She was so upset,” Sara emphasizes. “In that awful schoolgirl way he seems to engender. I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, really. But I’m just so tired of the way men infantilize us, so many of them. The truth is, I’m really worried about Celeste.”
“Really I am too,” Dudley tells her, with a small frown.
“Her upset seemed so extreme, as though he’d died, or gone off for good,” Sara next says. “I got the feeling that she thinks she won’t see him again. And the point is, I think she’s right.”
“Well, maybe she won’t,” supposes Dudley. “Celeste is uncanny, in some ways. She’s very in touch, she has this curious sort of power. She and Sam are sort of alike in that, these extraordinary insights, and instincts.”
“Do you mean, she thinks she might die?” Blunt Sara.
“Well, uh, I guess that is one of the things I mean. She might.”
“Do you think she’s got some specific worry, healthwise?” Sara persists in asking.
“Oh, not that I know of. But she certainly might have, and she wouldn’t necessarily tell me about it. Her worry,” Dudley says.
This conversation is difficult and painful, even, for Dudley, who is extremely worried over Sam—and determined not to say so. Sam is at home in bed, feeling, he says, just plain terrible. Sam who is never sick, who never stays in bed. Dudley herself is almost sick with worry, but she believes that she would only feel worse if she talked about it—current views to the contrary notwithstanding.
“I just get a feeling that she’s concerned about her health,” says Sara. “No special reason, and I’m not especially intuitive. Or I don’t think I am.”
“What you’re saying,” Dudley attempts, “is that all this upset seems to go beyond strong feelings over Bill.”
“Exactly.” Sara looks over at Dudley, and they smile at each other, beginning a friendship. “It has a lot to do with still mourning for Charles, I think.”
“Oh, of course!” If Sam should die, she might behave—oh, any way at all, it now occurs to Dudley. And she remembers poor Caitlin Thomas after Dylan died, sleeping with all those people, that boy in Italy. And then writing about it all. Leftover Life to Kill, the saddest title ever, and exactly right.
Would she get in touch with Brooks Burgess? Well, she might even do that. And then she begins to berate herself. How can she so callously contemplate the death of Sam, her great true love, whom she hates a great deal of the time, who is only at home sick with the flu (probably)?
Sara too is preoccupied with thoughts that she has so far not chosen to communicate to Dudley, despite strong new feelings of friendship. She is thinking about “Bill Jones,” who according to Celeste works at both the IRS and at a Jackson Square antique store—in itself a little odd; is an IRS person allowed to have another line of work, even if he only has “an interest” in a store? Or, is it the IRS in which he only has an interest? But he is a strange and terrible person, Sara thinks, in view of the night before.
And she is almost sure that he is the man whom she knew in Berkeley as Priest. The trouble is that she only saw that person once, and then not too clearly. Not to mention the inevitable blur of time. Twenty years.
What she remembers, though, is a night in a San Francisco restaurant. What restaurant? She has no idea, just one more North Beach joint with curtained booths, serving huge portions of okay food, for not too high prices.
Ten of them, that long past night, in a booth. All close-knit movement people, except for two: Alex, brought along by Sara; and another man who had sort of hung around them. “Priest,” who was Carol’s new love. “Really okay, not political at all but all right,” Carol had assured them. Carol, the most politically correct of them all—and Priest, the quintessential hippie, then: the John Lennon glasses, long hair and beard. Rags and sandals. (An odd way to dress if he was not “political,” is Sara’s retrospective perception.) At the time he looked very much like a lot of other people, if a little more so.
(As he now looks like Charles? “Bill” the actor?)
Whose idea was it that they all turn
on, once dinner was over and they sat around with coffee, all in a festive, self-congratulatory mood: there had been a huge peace march the day before, to which even the Chronicle gave some space. But was it Priest who brought out the joints? It could have been anyone; still, they were usually more cautious about restaurants, public places.
Full of food and wine, then, warmed with a group sense of self-approval, virtuous activity rewarded, flushed with wine and rectitude and affection for each other—they all lit up, became silently happy, in that blurry, dopey sixties way—when, suddenly, plunging and crashing into their booth were huge uniformed Nazis, black plastic hats, big nightsticks. But not Nazis, of course: the Tac Squad. Instantly familiar and recognizable to them all from rallies, protests. But why now, why when they were only smoking dope in a restaurant? Celebrating a peace march, at which they had all behaved very well?
Curtis, who was very small and black, got the worst of it. Hearing a crack, wood on bone (she can hear it still, always), Sara turned to see Curtis all bloody, dark red blood streaming down his dark black face. Curtis’s hands reaching up to staunch his blood, his fingers leaking blood.
Sara began to throw up. Her stomach clenched, a fierce spasm. She retched, erupted.
“Get that woman out of here!” someone shouted. And another, “Wash her off, but bring her right back.”
Alex grabbed her arm up, pulled her from the booth and headed with her not for the rest room; he jerked her along in the other direction, toward the kitchen, and then all through the kitchen, everyone staring but standing back. Out into a dark cool alley. Free. And later to the far side of a gas station where there was a rest room, where at least superficially she could wash.
The others were taken in the wagon to the North Beach Station, in Vallejo Street. Released on O.R. Probation: no more actions.
But why the Tac Squad, for a bunch of kids from Berkeley blowing joints? Why not just one cop, whom a mean waiter might have called?