In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  At 6:30, Blake’s radio alarm went off. Alice’s eyes stayed glued shut as her husband listened for a minute to National Public Radio (a report about a politician from another state in terrible trouble), then smacked the snooze alarm too hard, groaned as the noise ceased, then what seemed just one second later the alarm blared again and Blake shut it off and hauled himself out of bed with a noise of such piteous distress that Alice thought about getting up to comfort him, but then she fell asleep again and didn’t wake until 9 a.m., when the phone rang. The summer heat pounded through the Venetian blinds, and she sweated through the sheets. She reached over and lifted up the phone, muttered an exaggeratedly exhausted hello into the mouthpiece, and stuck the telephone handset under her head.

  An enthusiastic, vaguely familiar female voice blurted out Alice’s name, and Alice said, “Yeah,” and the woman shouted: “The creator of the Andrea books?” and Alice said, “Yeah,” again, feeling a little bit of pride begin to rouse her.

  “I am Carly Barrows,” the woman said, and she didn’t explain any more, nor did she need to.

  Alice sat up.

  Carly was a young actress from Brentwood, CA, a popular prime-time soap opera, whose own fame was starting to trump that of her TV show. She starred in TV movies about allegedly important subjects; she’d portrayed a bulimic in one; she’d murdered her child-molesting mother in another; she’d been victimized by a stalker in a third; a fourth, scheduled to air the following week, was about a teenage heroin addict. Carly herself was ripped from today’s headlines — her big smiling face on the covers of People, the National Enquirer, TV Guide, her two real-life failed marriages the stuff of tawdry pot-boiler paperbacks.

  “I’m honored,” Alice said. “To what do I owe — ” Politely stilted, old-movie sentiments spilled out of her mouth. She rubbed her eyes.

  Somehow, the galleys of Alice’s second novel had landed on Carly Barrows’ bookshelf. Over a crystal-clear phone line from Los Angeles, Carly claimed to Alice that she loved the concept of the Andrea novels, and that since nearly every home was now plugged in to the Internet, her little mystery stories about technological Web-based intrigue could no longer be deemed threatening to middle America.

  “You may have heard about my recent brush with alcoholism,” Carly said, suddenly, out of nowhere.

  Alice remained silent. Was this something the celebrity would want her to have heard about? Was this a personal trauma that Carly had actively publicized to make herself human and beloved, or was it a vicious rumor that she’d done everything in her power to quash? Alice did not know. “Hmmm,” Alice finally murmured — this could mean, Yes, I know, or, Gosh, you don’t say! Then she kept her mouth tightly shut until Carly finally spoke.

  “Your book helped me through it,” she said.

  “No,” Alice said, and she was so dumbfounded that she couldn’t help laughing. “My little mystery story? Do you have the wrong number?”

  “Andrea’s strength. Her incredible, remarkable strength. She was an inspiration. I want to bring her into America’s living room.”

  “Thank you,” Alice said.

  “Through my production company,” Carly said, “I have bought an option for a TV movie.” To avoid any last minute feuding with Alice, she made it clear that she intended to order a script that would smooth out some of her young heroine’s roughest edges. Most significantly, Andrea would have to love men a little bit more than she did in the books. Not rely on them; just love them. Love the way they smell — the way they feel. Andrea would be, in the final product, perhaps a little less outspoken, a little more subtle.

  “Something of a flirt,” Carly explained. “Not afraid to show a little leg.”

  During the telephone conversation, Alice nodded a lot and agreed a lot, and she thanked Carly several more times. Carly ended the phone call by inviting Alice to lunch in New York the following week. “It will be the beginning of my research!” she shouted with nervous enthusiasm. “Every role I accept, I research thoroughly. Who is Andrea? Who is she really? You can help me with that. And I want to meet you. Meet the woman behind such a marvelous, miraculous creation!”

  “Thank you,” Alice said again, flattered beyond imagining, but also close to giggles, and she wondered now if this were just a practical joke.

  After Carly hung up the telephone, Alice grabbed the remote control and clicked on a morning talk show, one of the nice ones, with a nice host talking to a handsome and mildly funny celebrity from a television sitcom she’d never seen. It was part of her morning routine, but she was unable to pay attention, and so she tossed on a robe and left the bedroom, walked down the hallway to her study, passing Blake’s study, which adjoined hers. The door was half open, his work lamp still on. He had been in here the night before. The office was neat, almost inhumanly clean and careful. Like Blake Maurow himself. Alice glanced down at the Xerox of a journal article Blake had left atop his desk: Child-Rights Abuses and International Capitalism, by Doctor Somebody, and a newspaper editorial from The New York Times, entitled Child Slavery in Burma/Myanmar, written by a human rights lawyer named Harriet Something-Or-Other. Alice assumed — correctly, it would turn out — that one of Blake’s subsidiaries or affiliates, or whatever, had been manufacturing some type of product using child slave labor in Asia. She registered dim disapproval, and then she forgot about it. She didn’t know exactly what Blake did for a living, and she was determined never to find out. His touch was gentle and soft. The moral ambiguities of the business world were, for her, a thing of the past, and she thought she was glad of that.

  She walked into her study, picked up the ten pages of her new novel that she had written last night, threw open the shades and walked through blazing sunlight out onto the terrace, held onto the railing and looked out over the green forest of the park, at sidewalk vendors selling donuts and hot dogs, and mothers and nannies out in the sunshine with covered strollers, little confused white heads bobbing about as the wheels clattered over the red-brick sidewalk.

  A little before eleven o’clock, Alice went over to the benches near the children’s playground to meet her friend Eden for a run, a daily occurrence that, in the past few months, had become a more comforting and reliable routine than any single element in her marriage. Alice and Eden were training for the marathon in the Fall, and they had a few 6K and 10K races lined up for the late Spring and Summer. They approached all this with a seriousness suggesting that they were genuinely talented athletes, which, Alice supposed, they were not. She read articles about the sorts of women who entered such races — tall, pale, long-legged, powerful, muscular and athletic specimens from places in Europe with big powerful strong long thin white women, and tall, dark, long-legged, powerful, muscular and athletic specimens from nearly unknown countries in Africa. Still, Alice and Eden continued to dream.

  Beside her, three nannies gathered to laugh and gossip. The children they were minding were strapped into strollers. One little boy was talking to himself unintelligibly, his eyes blank. A little girl strained to free herself from her stroller. She twisted about; off in the distance, someplace behind her, she could hear other children laugh in the playground. There’s a kite, the third child, whose sex was unidentifiable, said to the nanny. There’s a kite. The nanny ignored the little child. On the street, just outside the park, a fat bearded man sold beachwear. He was teaching one young mother how to tie on a sarong, and a crowd of women gathered to watch him. “Do the walk,” he told the woman, once the sarong was secure. She walked a few feet, unsurely eyeing the man. “No, no,” the fat man said. “Do the sarong walk.” She looked around, saw the other women smiling benignly, and so she smiled too, spinning and walking vampishly up the block, twisting her hips as she strutted about in her sarong. The other women applauded. Was this truly a “sarong walk,” Alice wondered, or just some sort of generic whore walk? Alice didn’t understand young mothers.

  Alice leaned against a tree, stretching her muscles. After a minute or two, she spotted Eden walk
ing north along the Avenue. She was slender and always graceful, and her long black hair fluttered behind her in the wind. In this light, from this angle, Eden reminded Alice very much of a friend she had known years earlier, but who no longer spoke to Alice, for reasons Alice knew but denied she knew. She’d noticed the similarity before, but it was hard to define — Eden was Chinese, born in London, and Alice’s old friend was a Jew from New York. It was something very simple, simpler than race or nationality, so maybe it was the way Eden touched the top of her head when she was thinking very hard, the honest nature of her smile, or perhaps a word or two that Eden used that Alice’s long-ago friend had also used. They were both very nice, and they were both very pretty. Maybe that’s all it was.

  Sweating in the mid-day heat. They turned left off the main path and descended into the shaded darkness of the forest just north of the lake. Eden had been a genius kid, and she’d gone to college when she was very young. As a result, she spent all her time trying not to seem smarter than Alice, which meant that she always seemed a lot smarter than Alice. The heat abated a bit in the shade, and Eden pulled ahead of Alice; Alice increased her speed and drew up to her friend without much effort. “Don’t try that again,” she laughed, and they both slowed down.

  When Eden ran, her face turned slightly red, her eyes grew determined, her lips drew in tightly, and she seemed to relish every stab of pain as she cut smoothly through the hot sun. Dressed for the run, she wore a black halter top that showed her belly button, and that day, as always, in spite of or perhaps because of her ferocity, young men running the opposite direction would look at her and try to catch her eye and smile at her as they passed.

  Alice liked to consider herself a real writer, but when she thought of Eden, thought of how she would describe her friend at this moment if it were a scene in a book, this is all she could think of: Eden is like a bird. Like a bird you’ve never seen before, one that appears at your feeder in the suburbs, and everyone stops to stare. A bird that appears once, then flies away and never comes back, and no one knows what it is, but everyone remembers it later.

  Eden was really nothing like a bird. She was like Eden. Like her own unique self. Many years later, with her literary juices on full-throttle, Alice would come up with another simile, that Eden, at that moment, was like a young cello prodigy rehearsing the Lyric Suite for String Quartet, a difficult chamber music piece by Alban Berg.

  Alice was talking about her phone call from Carly Barrows.

  “I think I should be angry at this,” Alice said. “She loves my book, it practically drags her out of rehab, and then she tells me that she has to change it. Andrea has to show more leg.”

  “What makes you angry?” Eden asked. “That Andrea will show a little leg? That she’ll sleep with men? Why do you want to deny her that?”

  “Because Andrea doesn’t love men. She laughs at them. She outsmarts them and puts them in prison, or sends them to the chair. Or she kills them herself, with her own bare hands. You know?” Then: “The big powers want to change her, to ruin everything she stands for.”

  Eden tried to sympathize; “I’m so sorry, Alice. That’s terrible,” she said at first, but each half-hearted proclamation of shock was followed by a more whole-hearted caveat. “While Hollywood is a pimp,” for example, “isn’t the compromise worth it?”

  Alice realized with regret that she agreed. The payoff if the movie were actually made was substantial, and with Carly Barrows behind the film, the potential audience was immense, and the network indicated that the original film might be extended into a twice-yearly series of mysteries. Alice was just filling her voluminous free time, wasn’t she? Not actually creating Art for the ages. Andrea was just a mystery heroine, and for the first time, Alice wished that she were more. Reforming Andrea’s less mass market friendly personality kinks would not be like defacing the Mona Lisa. Eden, she thought for the first time, was the real writer between them. In Alice’s opinion, what Eden had managed to put down on paper was like poetry, whispered sentences bound together in golden thread, wrapped in a joke and a wink. Alice was a fan.

  Alice and Eden first met in a writer’s group in the neighborhood. In the group were four youngish women, all with artistic aspirations and self-consciously contemplative faces. There was one man; a young guy named Charles. He was only twenty years old, he had dropped out of NYU, and his parents paid him a small allowance each month while he worked on his poetry. She hated his voice, his fat face, the way he talked through his nose and smiled with pride when he read his smutty little poems. Charles bothered her a lot, and she wondered why.

  A feud eventually developed between Alice and a woman who, coincidentally, was also named Alice. Alice Dubinski. Alice Dubinski was thin and severe and cross-looking — an outside that matched her inside. Or maybe an inside that, giving up, had grown to conform to her outside. She’d once published a short story in a rather prestigious university literary magazine. Alice Dubinski had real talent of a certain sort, and she thought very little of Alice’s work, which was, even Alice herself recognized, inferior to her own. One week, Alice Dubinski would criticize Alice’s little mysteries for their political flaws, the next week for the clumsiness of the prose. That she was usually right was really beside the point.

  One week, Alice Dubinski pedantically explained to her, as a sixth grade English teacher might, that literature and popular culture shouldn’t mix.

  “This one line,” she said, holding Alice’s manuscript in the air above her head, having memorized the sentence she intended to ridicule. “ ‘This crazy role he played — Ward Cleaver as Los Angeles drug dealer.’ I don’t even know who that is.”

  Another young woman agreed; “I’ve never heard of him,” she said, and the others nodded.

  Charles said: “I think he’s from a television show. Me and the Otter. I’ve never seen it myself.” Whenever he said anything, no matter how important or insignificant, Alice was sure he was lying. Alice knew that each person in the room had not only heard of Leave it to Beaver, but had watched it religiously as a child. Hadn’t everyone in the nation?

  “Well,” Alice Dubinski said, “if he’s from a television program, if that’s the case, then I have to say that Ward Cleaver has no place in serious art.” She sat back, a little triumphant look on her face.

  Alice, in a big armchair, felt her anger rise. “To write about America in the second half of the 20th Century,” she insisted, “you have to know who Ward Cleaver is.” His presence, she explained, informs everything. He is everything we breathe. He is America — he is the sun on the desert, the lamps lighting city streets. He is heartbreak and lost dreams. He is the way we see ourselves, the way we wish we were, and everything we fear we will become. He is the motive behind every success, and every suicide. Ward Cleaver is America, and no one, not anyone alive today, can be an American writer without studying Ward Cleaver.

  The group fell silent. One woman laughed.

  Then Eden spoke up: “I agree.”

  She really did agree. Alice could tell from her voice, and from the big, proud smile on her face. And they were eternal friends from that day forward. Alice knew, at that second, that she and Eden would die friends.

  They ran together in silence, and after a while, Eden looked over at Alice, stumbled slightly.

  “I wonder about you,” Eden said. “I wonder what it would be like to be you, to walk around in your skin for one day.”

  With a small breath, Alice said, “Probably exactly the way you might imagine.”

  Alice and Eden turned at a fork in the trail and ran together up crumbling stone steps. Near the top of the hill, Eden said, “I mean, like to be married to a rich man.” She struggled up the last step, and they ran out of the forest and around the southern end of the lake.

  “A rich man who can make everything so easy for me?” Alice asked.

  “And a guy who’s so proud of you. I can’t wait to meet him. He seems so nice.”

  Alice said that was o
ne of Blake’s greatest skills: seeming very nice, and Eden asked, “Does that mean that he isn’t very nice?” and Alice said no, she hadn’t meant to imply that at all.

  “He’s very nice,” she said. “I can do no wrong. He’s my protector and my savior. He pulled me out of utter self-hatred. Blake was like a deus ex machina. Is that the right word? And the right pronunciation? I should have said ‘a Hollywood ending,’ I suppose. I wait eagerly for him to come home. I adore him, unquestioningly. He’s wonderful. He’s smart. He would never cheat on me. He has legions of admirers. I know I’m valuable, because I’ve won the love of a remarkable man. Who would I be without him? I mean, whom would I be. Nothing. He turned me from a frog into ... I dunno. Something really good and magic. He was my Prince. I mean, he is my Prince. The End. “

  “Have you stopped worrying about everything?” Eden asked. “You just walk around the neighborhood, you feel sorry for the kids with nannies, you enjoy the sunshine on your face?”

  Alice nodded. “Pretty much,” she said, and at that moment, it seemed to be true; her life — her life with Blake Maurow — was perfect.

  Eden was no fan of perfection. She swam in trivia, in the failures of the world. Her favorite music created by blues musicians from the 1920s who had never quite made it big, and who had died in obscurity, and her favorite television shows all canceled after only a few episodes ten years earlier. She read and re-read fifty-year-old books from defunct publishing houses, and she solicited type-written manuscripts from the survivors of deceased writers who had never found a venue for their work; she velobound these drafts and read them on the subway, or carried them into the park. Most of them were terrible. Some of them were good, mysteries, comedies, thrillers. One of them, so far, was downright great, a psychodrama from 1916 unlike anything she’d ever read before. She recited passages out loud to Alice, breathlessly; she looked up every few moments and smiled a joyous smile of discovery.