Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Nor did she appreciate his work. When she had an anaphylactic reaction accompanied by changes in her EKG after eating undercooked salmon, Simon insisted she undergo a full cardiology evaluation. He also paid attention to her breathing when she slept and referred her to a pulmonologist for sleep apnea because he noticed her snores had become louder and her breathing more rapid.19

  Another issue that stood between Alice and Dan was his indifference to cats, of which she usually owned three. When she had to put her beloved tall-eared, tailless Ferg down a few days before she traveled with Dan to Kauai, he simply could not respond to her grief, which was enhanced by being in “such an alien place.”

  Again, a story told the deep emotional truth as Alice felt it. “Islands” (anthologized in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Classics Series’ Cat Stories) also speaks about Adams’s love of coincidences, which she liked to see as evidence of “the mysterious ways” of God. The narrator goes to the island of Kauai, a place much loved by the woman named Zoe Pinkerton who gave her the striped, tailless cat she named Pink.II Her late husband also loved the cat, so in missing the cat she also misses him. She travels with Slater, a developer whose business plans will lead to the destruction of the island culture that Zoe cherished. The narrator and Slater encounter several cats in Kauai. Fatally for the relationship, Slater asserts that a cat they encounter, “a black cat with some yellow tortoise markings, a long thin curve of a tail,” looks like Pink. “What—Pink? But her tail—Jesus, didn’t you even see my cat?”

  In her notebook, as she worked on the story, Alice wrote: “Men who don’t like cats: bullies… Cats won’t fawn, or be manipulated. Men who hate the female in themselves hate cats.”20 Bob, of course, had loved cats—another reason she missed the man he had once been.

  * * *

  Alice’s relationship with Dan Simon didn’t end quickly. She hoped a trip with him to Zihuatanejo in May would improve their relationship and prove to her that she was really over Bob. That trip failed in several ways, most of them included in the story “The Haunted Beach,” in which Penelope arrives with expectations that “some special Mexican balm” will “make everything come right, would impart its own magic” to her affair with a new man. But she concludes, “Alas, poor Mexico, you can hardly heal yourself, much less me.” Afterward she tells her closest friend that she did not think about either her old lover or her new one on this trip. “But I thought a lot about Mexico… the trip made me feel a lot better,” Penelope continues. “About everything. More free.” She adds, with a laugh, “I can’t think why.”

  Freedom was clearly what Alice craved. Dan Simon loomed as a sort of patriarchal presence, resented but also deeply necessary to Alice. “I remember a time I was up there, it was after she and Bob split up,” Carolyn See said. “We were having wonderful strong coffee and croissants on the terrace that looked out on the city, and I said, ‘You live so beautifully,’ and she said, ‘Yes, but I’m unbearably lonely.’ ” But she told an interviewer, “There’s a lot to be said for writers living alone.” Likewise she found that living in San Francisco suited her because she preferred to be “surrounded by people doing other things,” whereas she believed she’d be “claustrophobic and depressed” in New York surrounded by many other writers.21

  Some version of that happened when the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an honor society limited to 250 writers, artists, and musicians elected for life, chose Adams for an Arts and Letters Award in literature. In New York for the award ceremony in May 1992, she was seated onstage between Elizabeth Spencer and E. L. Doctorow and near Ralph Ellison. Pleased to receive the $7,500 award, she was also impressed by the company, which included: Alice Munro, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Jackie Kennedy, John Updike, and Alfred Kazin, the man who’d brought her and Mark Linenthal to the Salzburg Seminar in 1947. The pomp of the occasion combined with simply being in New York City plagued Alice with warring feelings of panic and rage. She simultaneously wished “(1) not to be there, or if there invisible (2) to rise and dominate.” What would it mean to rise and dominate? Alison Lurie had been an elected member of the academy for several years; Diane Johnson then held a lucrative five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award. Younger, less productive short-story writers than Alice Adams had also been elected to permanent membership. Sitting on the stage as a guest before the academy’s 120 esteemed members, Alice was not sure if she’d rather be out of the fray in San Francisco or elevated to the full membership she deserved in this predominantly white, male club. It was a question she never had to answer.22

  * * *

  Adams composed her “Book of Bob” during the first two years of the 1990s. She titled it Almost Perfect, a phrase that seems to describe the novel’s protagonist but (tellingly) is never actually applied to him in the book. When Victoria Wilson returned the edited manuscript in September 1992, she immediately declared, “It is without question your best book. I had a wonderful time reading it. It seems to me a real reach and successfully done at that.”23

  The novel is not the story of Alice and Bob. It is the story of destructive love between two people who borrow many of their characteristics. Like Alice, Stella Blake is a struggling writer at the beginning of the novel and a successful one at the end. Like Bob, Richard Fallon is a handsome, self-made, self-employed visual artist (he does advertising work but is talented at home design too) who came to San Francisco from a humdrum town. Alice tried to make herself unrecognizable in Stella, a small, dowdy, half-Mexican woman with an “overreceptive imagination” whose father, a minor novelist, knew important people in the 1920s, and whose Mexican mother was “a pal of Frida Kahlo’s.” As a very young woman Stella was the lover of a famous actor. Despite those disguises, the novel’s financial and sexual themes are transformed versions of the joys and difficulties that Alice and Bob experienced during twenty-three years together.

  Adams condensed her life with Bob into a plot that covers just two years. She drew an X-diagram showing the rising pattern of Stella’s life and the downward slide of Richard’s and stuck to that plan. She outlined chapters and controlled the flow of information she gave her readers (abandoning her usual loose omniscience) by alternating chapters among the viewpoints of Stella, Richard, and other friends. Stella falls in love with Richard despite her own and her friends’ hunch that she is not the type of Nordic blonde he prefers. Richard drinks heavily and Stella tries to keep up. He moves her out of her own apartment while he has it renovated and redecorated—spending more than he can afford. But affection for Richard prods Stella to earn more money and think more seriously about her career. And, as Bob had done for “The Swastika on Our Door” before Alice sold it to the New Yorker, Richard suggests a restructuring of the first article Stella sells to a magazine called the Gotham.

  Richard, whose first wife is mentally ill and often hysterical, is frightened by emotion: “He can hear his mother’s voice, and the note that all women sound, sooner or later.” He cringes from Stella’s calls (answering machines figure in this novel) when her father dies, and then neglects to call back because he’s in bed with Eva, a German model he’s just met. But when Stella is hospitalized with pneumonia, he returns to take care of her. They live together blissfully for some months, even as his flashes of anger remind Stella “there are so many versions of Richard, and she lives with all those different men.” One of these different Richards finds emotional and sexual relief with his young, gay friend Andrew Bacci. After Richard dumps his ex-wife, Marina, in an emergency room lobby and tells a passing doctor, “She’s psychotic,” he invites Andrew to visit him in the bedroom behind his studio. There HIV-positive Andrew makes love to Richard. Andrew wears a condom. Richard exclaims with pleasure.

  Stella does not know about Richard’s involvement with Eva or Andrew. Adams keeps Richard from seeming wholly monstrous by using his viewpoint to let readers understand “his insecurities and their symptomatic manifestations in bisexuality and deceit,” as one reviewer wrote.24
But as Richard’s secrets multiply, his behavior becomes more erratic. Stella tries to reason away her apprehensions: “Richard is dangerous. That is a sentence sometimes whispered by that same sane (feminist) woman of Stella’s imagination. However, since she knows her imagination to be fairly wild and unreliable, and also since she deals in words all day, it is no small wonder that various random sentences enter her mind.”

  Richard and Stella fight with intensely personal attacks. “Which one of them was crazy? That crude question, sometimes voiced, seemed central to all the conflict between Stella and Richard. ‘You’re crazy!’ one or the other of them would desperately, furiously, drunkenly yell at the other. It was as though craziness were a heavy black rubber ball (so Stella imagined it) tossed back and forth between them; thus if one of them had it, the other did not.”

  Their discontent comes to a crisis at a performance of The Marriage of Figaro in Santa Fe, as did Alice and Bob’s in 1982. After that it’s downhill for Richard. A design convention in Germany is canceled, thereby killing his plan to see Eva. When his first wife, Marina, is murdered by an abusive lover shortly after she is released from the mental ward, Richard knows he should cry but remembers “crazy jealous Marina, making scenes at a party.” Instead of weeping for Marina he remembers “how he… hated her sometimes,” while at the same time he thinks, “What a shit I am, what a total shit.” After a man Richard had counted on for an important artistic commission jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge—a suicide that Richard anticipated and imagines he might have prevented—he becomes clinically depressed.

  On an impulse, Richard gives away five thousand dollars he meant to leave for Stella to a beautiful boy he sees in a diner, imagining this gift from a stranger might make the boy’s life better than his own has been. Then he goes to drown himself in a sea cave near Stinson Beach, thinking, “This should all be on video: a man who is reasonably young, and handsome (well, everyone says he is, and women in the street still stare, and some men). This handsome brave man walking with such resolution, walking toward his own anonymous extinction. His death march.” The vanity so clearly displayed in that thought prevents Richard from diving to his death.III

  For months, Richard avoids everyone, living alone in his beach house. The ending of Almost Perfect—pure invention—shows Stella in a relationship with a younger man who admires her while Richard has come out of his seclusion to telephone Andrew. He learns that Andrew is dying of AIDS and agrees to travel with him to Mexico for a “cure” offered at a clinic there.

  Being in Mexico City stokes Richard’s ego and he enters a new manic phase. He believes his handsomeness is enhanced by being among shorter, darker people. Indeed, he feels so happy, his racist narcissism full-blown, that he imagines he can return to Stella:

  He loves Mexicans, all those lovely dark-eyed, dark-haired people, many with brownish skins. How blond he feels, and how tall! How they stare! I would not have liked it in Cologne, he decides; I would have looked too much like everyone else there. Eva and I looked too much alike. No wonder Stella loved me so much, he thinks.

  He is seeing bits of Stella everywhere. Stella, in all the faces in Mexico.

  I was never so beautiful as when I was with Stella, Richard thinks.

  In a way that’s really too bad.

  Maybe someday he’ll go back to Stella.

  The subplot of Richard’s love affair with a gay man surprised many who knew Bob and read Almost Perfect. Might vindictiveness against Bob or unacknowledged homophobia have led Adams to invent this aspect of Richard? Diane Johnson, who’d known Bob and Alice for years, thought making Richard actively bisexual in the novel was “so much the quality of the kind of thing Alice would make up after she became angry with Bob,” and explained, “Of course, Bob had a feminine side and he was a decorator, but if he’d been French it would be okay for him to know about china and furniture, it’s partly cultural. He definitely did not give off gay signals. And he had that period of mental illness that could have affected him.” Indeed, most people considered Bob McNie “a flirt but basically straight” (as Margot says about Richard in the novel). As a designer in San Francisco, he associated with many gay men, including his good friend architect Dmitri Vedensky (the one Alice had instructed never again to come to Zihuatanejo when they were there), who teased him about being an interior “desecrator.” Nonetheless, McNie worked hard to maintain his reputation as the “only” straight designer in San Francisco, and family, clients, and colleagues believed him.

  Frances Kiernan was shocked “to learn how dark that relationship had been.” She said that she and Victoria Wilson, both experienced editors, “knew that most fiction is not made up out of whole cloth. Alice had at times touched on her life with Bob in a fairly disguised fashion, but it hadn’t occurred to us that some of the darkness there might actually be true. Fact is, I didn’t want to believe it.” Peter Linenthal was also shocked when he read Almost Perfect, both by the idea that Bob was bisexual and by his mother’s boldness in writing about the topic. He had difficulty believing that his mother had known Bob was bisexual. “I don’t believe she would have tolerated sharing a lover,” he said. “She was just not that kind of person. She was too focused, too devoted—not someone I could imagine taking disloyalty lightly.”

  Nonetheless, we can be fairly certain that Alice did not invent the bisexual theme. After he and Alice separated, Bob lived in the Webster Street apartment, which he’d turned into a “madman’s lair packed to the ceiling with pack-ratted stuff.” He’d painted the walls of the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen gloss black, and glued dominoes on the door frames. Tiny pathways connected the rooms. He never went outside during the daytime. When, one day in the early 1990s, he felt alive again, he walked into a clothing store on Grant and told the owner, Marcus Livingston, “I’ve been in a catatonic depression for five years and you are the first person that I’ve talked to since I began coming out of that.” “He was so fired up,” Livingston recalled, “that you couldn’t send him away. Forceful. Just rocking the whole time, like he had saved it up! Putting it all out there as fast and enthusiastically as he possibly could.” They began having lunch about once a week until Livingston tired of Bob’s performance and ended the friendship.

  In his new manic state, Bob hoped to win Alice back. He wrote her letters and sent her one hundred yellow roses. She rejected these overtures—“kindly,” one friend said. In about 1992 he began seeing the artist Elaine Badgley Arnoux. “I was in love with Bob for about fifteen minutes,” she said later. But “at the beginning it was very wonderful to fall in love and he knew how to do that. He said to me, ‘I thank God when I wake up in the morning that I found you.’ That was in the blissful days of the first six months.” Under the spell of that ripe intimacy, Bob confided in Elaine about his sexual history. “He didn’t tell me their names, but he told me there were three or four girlfriends who came to his studio bedroom while he was with Alice and then he said he had these affairs with men.” The possibility that Bob was bisexual was further confirmed to Elaine by his need to arouse himself with “a pretty men’s book OR a women’s lesbian book, but not a [heterosexual] couple book,” when they went to bed together. “That’s the only way he could perform. But that was how we managed to have some sexual interplay.”

  Almost Perfect was published in June 1993, when Bob had come out of his depression and was already with Elaine. Bob’s daughter, Morissa, wrote about it to her best friend, therapist Deborah Sparks: “Elaine said she couldn’t stomach it, but father is reading it straight through and seeing himself in a true way through Alice’s partial distortion.”25

  In October 1993, Elaine Badgley Arnoux exhibited one of the most celebrated projects at the opening of San Francisco’s new Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens. She installed a train of twenty shopping carts seen as covered wagons, which she decorated with assistance from homeless artists.26 Elaine was unable to enjoy the success of her daunting project because Bob was jealous of the attention she
received. A year later, while she and Bob were in Taos, New Mexico, Elaine noticed that Bob seemed distracted and frequently went off to make private phone calls. Then she discovered a letter he was composing and heard phone messages that showed he was sexually interested in a man who lived in his apartment building. She confronted him, he reacted violently and said the letter was a fantasy, and she broke with him. After that, she did read Almost Perfect; then, she said, “I knew it wasn’t a fantasy.” Even though Elaine felt that Almost Perfect confirmed her fears, she thought it was too harsh: “She didn’t need to dice him up into so many little pieces toward the end.”

  Still, novels are fiction, memories are flawed, and sexual orientation is a subject beset by ambiguity. Despite society’s recent openness about it (and oddly oxymoronic need to categorize it), an individual’s needs and ways of satisfying them vary over time. The explosion of sexual freedoms in the late 1960s and 1970s prompted a lot of people to explore homosexuality; fear of AIDS in the 1980s caused the same people to become more conventional again. Although we can be fairly certain that Bob displayed an interest in homosexuality, we have only hearsay evidence that he was actively involved with any man. Besides what Bob confided to Elaine Badgley Arnoux, we have just this recollection from Sandy Boucher, in whom Alice sometimes confided things that she did not tell people in her social group: “After she was no longer with Bob, Alice told me he was having affairs with men the whole time he was with her.” If that is correctly remembered, Alice had reason to worry about her exposure to HIV.