In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  One night, after they had fallen in love, Alice stood on Blake’s terrace, wrapped in a big blanket, drinking champagne. She lured Blake out into the crisp autumn air. They looked down at the city lights.

  “I used to have an apartment like this,” she smiled, wobbly from the champagne, still feeling him inside of her. Blake in loose slacks and an old sweater. “It was small, very small, but it was high up in the air.” Sighing, facing the breeze: “Blake. Could we ever be happy if we were poor?”

  “Of course. You need only simple things. I need only simple things.”

  Alice, with a tight smile, replied, “Spoken like a man who’s always been rich.”

  Later that same night, looking at the dark sky and imagining where all the stars would be if they could only see them, she asked him about his deflowering. That’s exactly the way she put it, to make the question jokey, to disguise the curiosity that was eating her up inside. “I don’t believe in the concept of virginity,” she added, “but you know what I mean.” Was it decades and decades ago? she wondered aloud. “Was it before I was born? Of course, it must have been.”

  He laughed easily; he had his answer ready.

  “I don’t talk about those things with women,” he said.

  “Not with women, Blake,” she exclaimed. “With me!”

  “Especially with you,” he said. “I’m not one for this sort of self-revelation. You know. Those things should remain private.” If he were to discuss with her his past love affairs, she might misinterpret a sigh or a melancholy smile. She would wonder whether he still loved the women who had vanished in time. “You’d resent them,” he said, “and grow to hate them.”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said.

  “I won’t risk it.” Then, after a moment of thought: “You are absolutely the first woman I have ever loved.”

  She knew this must be a lie, but she liked hearing it.

  “Still,” Alice sighed, almost giving up. “I want you to know all about me. About who I am.”

  He took her hand, warming it between his own. “I know all about you. I know who you are. I don’t want to know who you were.”

  “Okay, then,” Alice said, trying a new strategy a few minutes later. “I have to feel special, Maurow. Tell me something about yourself that you’ve never told anyone else. Just so I’ll feel special.”

  “Something that I’ve never told anyone?” he said.

  “Yes. Something that no one else has ever heard. Some little insight that only I can know.”

  He thought. “Does it have to be earth-shaking, traumatic, life-changing? Or can it just be a little story?”

  “Whatever you want to tell me,” she said.

  “Can it be something that someone else might have known, or suspected, but now he’s dead, and the only person who knows is me?”

  “Yes!” Alice exclaimed. “That’s perfect!”

  “Okay.” He nodded.

  This is the story he told her. When Blake was just six years old, or maybe five, or maybe even four, his mother and father had a dinner party. There were about forty guests, all milling around in his parents’ big living room. Caterers ran about with little appetizers, and there was a constant hum. Adults talking and laughing, their mouths filled with food. Laughing at things that didn’t make any sense to Blake. Acting like adults. Little Blake was wandering around, trying to help, answering the condescending questions that adults ask children. He talked about playing ball, his favorite books. Running through the meadows in the hazy heat of summer. He didn’t know better than to roll his eyes when he answered their questions. Little Blake thought that it must be perfectly clear to all of them that they were behaving like big-headed grownups, and he didn’t know that they were trying to be nice, that they weren’t trying to treat him as though a child were a dog, a little kitten, even maybe a stuffed animal someone had won at a carnival, something cute and cuddly and almost not alive. Finally, one man with a trim van dyke beard crouched down on his knees, patted Blake on the head, gazed at him with a big smile that, although the two had never before met, was filled with an attempt to feign almost paternal affection, yet Blake sensed in the adult a surface disdain, and, somewhere deeper inside, a raging sadism, although the little boy, at that age, had never heard the word. “How are you this evening, Blakey?” the man asked. Little Blake muttered, “M’okay,” and dashed across the room, into his mother’s protective arms. Sure enough, a few months later, when lingering behind a group of friends being led across town by Blake’s nanny, he spotted this same man in a side alley, beating the hell out of a hobo. (“That’s what we called them back then,” he explained unnecessarily to Alice. “Hobos.”) There was a gleeful smile on the man’s face, a glare of excitement in his eyes. The old tramp begged him to stop, but the man did not seem to hear. Blake ran to the nanny, grabbed her arm, crying and speaking too fast. When he finally managed to drag her to the alley, both men were gone. Blake somehow knew why this fight had taken place. Because the man with the van dyke beard thought it would be fun to beat someone up, and the hobo had seemed a safe choice. That was all. So six weeks hence, when the man was scheduled to dine with Blake’s parents, Blake carefully tracked the route the man would take. He filled a water balloon with pea soup and mustard, climbed out his window, partway down the side of the building, hopped into a tree, then another tree. As the man passed on the street, Blake tried to call out the man’s name, but his voice caught in his throat, so all that came out was a grunt, which sounded very low, guttural, and animal. When the man looked up, Blake carefully hid his face behind several layers of branches and leaves. Blake wanted to shout: “I am watching you! I know what you’ve done. Beware!” But again, his voice failed him. What to an observer must have sounded like the roar of a wounded cat bellowed from the tree branches. Yet in a moment too perfect for Blake to believe even years later, the man took off his hat and stared up into the tree. And down fell the water balloon, a perfect shot across the man’s brow. Finally, his rage and fear subsided, and the little boy could speak. “Revenge,” Blake shouted, “from Captain Wombat!” He leapt from the tree to another tree, then another, then scurried up a drainpipe and, certain he was out of sight, slipped into his bedroom window.

  “Who was Captain Wombat?” Alice asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t remember. It was probably someone I made up. Or it might have been my favorite comic book, or radio show.”

  “A superhero?”

  “We didn’t have that many superheroes. He was probably a war hero. Or even more likely someone from the future traveling through space, like Buck Rogers.”

  “What was dinner like?”

  “It’s not a detail that stuck. The guy must have borrowed a suit from my dad. I seem to recall that he may have stared at me suspiciously during the meal. I don’t even know whether he had any idea what he was being punished for. If the guilty party is punished, but doesn’t know why he’s being punished, is it still just retribution? That question, expressed more simply, bothered me for months afterwards. But, anyway, at least I tried.”

  “Okay,” Alice said. “Thanks.” She had her story. Something about Blake Maurow that no one else knew.

  In the 1960s, Blake Maurow started buying up property. It sometimes seemed to Alice that everyplace he traveled during those years, he would buy a home. This was a trait that he seemed to have inherited from his father, who on a whim, fifty or sixty years ago, bought a small uninhabited island off the coast of Mexico or Belize or something. Blake mostly cashed in and sold these properties during the mid-1980s — earning a substantial profit — but he did keep a few. His father’s island, which back in the day had generated a regular income. A house on the bay in Maine that he and Alice would occasionally visit for a few days in the summertime or early fall. A great powerful fortress of a house on the New York shore to which they would escape on many sunny weekends. An apartment in Paris that he and Alice would visit infrequently, and a cabin in the mountains of Colorado that Alice woul
d never see, not even in pictures.

  Alice once asked him what he had been thinking back then, decades ago, when he went on his real estate binge. “Finding places to settle down in,” he said. “To retire to. For when I was ready to settle down.” She asked him when he thought he would be ready, and he said that he didn’t know, and he sounded distracted when he said that.

  Two times a year, she and Blake would fly off to some other part of the globe entirely, sometimes to a place she never would have thought of going without her husband’s prodding. Sometimes, when they would travel together, Blake would seem to remember things, and he would smile fondly, or he would grimace. Alice would ask him what he was thinking about, and he would say, “Nothing.” The distant past, and his big, filled-up, inscrutable brain, were black holes from which nothing could escape.

  Invariably, wherever they traveled, Blake would ultimately say, “I could really see myself staying here forever,” or some variation on that sentiment, and she would hear his mind working, sorting through the possibilities. She wouldn’t ask him questions, because he was really saying it to himself, just letting her eavesdrop.

  Years after Maurow Sr. died, a big multi-national made an offer for Maurow Enterprises, the closely held business he had nurtured throughout his life, and Maurow Jr. didn’t have to think very long about it; in the deal, in addition to buckets of cash, Blake clinched some sort of executive position with a nice golden parachute. He was essentially an adviser to the company that he’d once owned but that now didn’t really exist anymore. His title and position seemed to change from month-to-month, but he was still doing the same basic thing: ordering people around, keeping tabs on big celebrities with endorsement deals, getting a lot of phone calls about this and that, and standing around at big fancy gatherings drinking champagne, with one arm draped around Alice’s ever-slimmer waist, while smiling old men breathing money out their noses stared at her legs. Maurow spent a lot of time taking the money he’d earned from the acquisition and moving it around — taking over companies in tandem with other investors, flying around and checking out potential investments. Making himself and Alice richer and richer. He admitted that he probably spent more time sitting in board meetings and attending to his own finances than he did advancing the company’s interests, but however he spent his days, they were long, and he worked rather hard.

  After Alice’s appearance in his life, Maurow’s behavior changed. His smile was more sincere; his laugh was more open. Colleagues realized what had been missing in Blake Maurow’s polished charm; friends became closer. He threw himself into his work with more vigor. If asked, Maurow would readily agree that he was trying to increase his fortune for Alice’s sake, so that she could live on after his death without even the possibility of a care ever popping into her noggin. Each investment and every deal, however significant or minor, seemed to have become to Blake Maurow an almost sacred act of love. “I’ll tell you the difference,” a friend said to Maurow, when they met in California to try to hammer out an investment in a start-up software outfit. “You care about things now? Right?”

  The corporation where Blake Maurow worked seemed to spend all its time gobbling up smaller companies and becoming a little bit bigger each time. His large office was in an imposing building on Fifty-Third Street. Each department or subsidiary had its own front reception area where a very young and beautiful model-thin woman sat at a big mahogany desk with a very beautiful smile on her porcelain face, and, everywhere, scurrying by on bouncy carpeting, white men in impossibly expensive suits wore impossibly frantic expressions on their rich pasty-pale faces. On the 53rd floor, down a hallway lined with an elaborate display of colorful classical paintings, was Blake’s large corner office, looking out at midtown scrapers and down on the East River several blocks away. Sometimes, after they married, Alice liked to take a car across town for lunch, just so that she could go up to Blake’s office and look out the windows.

  When they first married, Alice asked the wives of some of Blake’s rich friends how they occupied their time. A few of them quickly and eagerly pulled her into a new world. Blake hired a man to decide what Alice would wear when she ventured out into society. Alice hired a personal trainer. Alice always looked terrific. She became rather amazed at how routinely terrific she now looked on a regular basis. Her new friends looked terrific on a regular basis, too. But during personal moments at quiet private lunches their dazzling smiles faded; they talked cynically about their broken dreams, and about their prenups. Alice didn’t want to admit that she didn’t have a prenup; she didn’t want to think about her broken dreams. So she just stayed quiet.

  Doodling one day in front of an old black and white rerun, Alice had an epiphany that couldn’t be denied for even a moment. She grabbed her checkbook, a ballpoint pen, a business-sized envelope and a single stamp, and, not hesitating long enough even to turn off the television, she ran down the stairs, out onto the street, and ran along the sidewalk for fifteen blocks until she came to a magazine store she’d been in before, the sort with long eye-popping rows of obscure, colorful publications, enough to cover any subject that might spring to mind. Alice bought an expensive copy of a beautifully-illustrated magazine called Animation Journal, stood outside leaning against the store window in the bright sun, shuffling through the pages of the magazine. She found an organization that advertised a correspondence course in cartoon production, ripped out the page, scribbled her name on the order form, wrote out a check for a few hundred dollars, addressed the envelope, affixed the stamp, and mailed it off at a post office two blocks uptown.

  A week later, Alice read a newspaper article about some awful thing happening in some foreign country, and she began dialing up her new friends, suggesting that they all band together, organize a benefit, form a non-profit. Her ideas started a little buzz. Blake seemed to approve; other husbands offered their help and their Rolodexes. Just when the buzz seemed to reach its peak, however, she received an animation kit and three instructional CD-ROMs in the mail. Her epiphany returned, now stronger and even more undeniable. Resigning her duties on the non-profit, Alice dropped from view. Her sight turning green and foggy from too many hours in front of the computer monitor, Alice zipped through her cartooning lessons. Skipping a storyboard or script, Alice immediately began sketching out brief film sequences, and soon her study was filled with stacks of scene folders and randomly organized animation paper — Alice, who discovered that she was partial to camera pans, tended to draw on the widest width, 18 field, and she tried to throw nothing away, to waste not even the slightest ounce of precious effort, recognizing with increasing trepidation and excitement as each new day dawned the enormous task she had set for herself.

  She would rise before Blake in the morning and kiss him good night as he went to bed in the evening before she returned to her personal study. For eight months, she averaged four or five hours of sleep each night. She canceled their vacations; she declined dinner and lunch invitations. Blake would attend engagements alone and charmingly describe the project that had taken up all his wife’s time. “She’s drawing each frame by hand,” he would say. “She’s taking no short-cuts. It will be,” he would add proudly, “fully -animated.” He had probably never thought about it before — the difference between cartoons drawn frame by frame, and those that relied on puppet-like cut-outs, or those in which one part of a character’s body moved, the remainder of its form remaining immobile — but suddenly the achievement of full animation seemed to be terribly important to him. “It will be shot ‘on ones,’ ” he might add. “That is, even the best animated films are often shot on twos — one drawing for every two frames of film. But Alice will draw one drawing per frame for perfect fluidity of motion, that is, twenty-four drawings per second, or, to put it another way, for a ten second sequence consisting of two characters, 440 character drawings, or for a twenty second sequence consisting of four characters, seventeen hundred and sixty character drawings.” Heads would nod, perhaps more at Maurow’s b
reathless pride in his wife than in any genuine admiration for Alice’s ambitions. (And had Alice been able to eavesdrop on Blake’s proud descriptions of her impending triumph, and his unblinking defense of her purist philosophy of cartooning, it would have surprised her, brought tears to her eyes, and sent tingles down to her toes.)

  As each new scene was completed and perfected, Alice scanned the pencil-smudged sketches into her computer, quickly colored each drawing using another CD-ROM program, then scanned in a classic painting to use as the background (or “B.G.,” in the animator’s lingo that she had proudly acquired). She watched as her movie slowly — very slowly — came alive before her eyes, dancing on the tiny nickelodeon of her computer screen with an energy that she could have barely imagined as she drew each motionless sketch.

  Once the film was completed, stored and backed up in triplicate on numerous computer disks, Alice slipped a new CD-ROM into her drive — “Compose Your Own Symphony!” it was called, and she bought it cut-out for nine dollars — and within a couple of days, she’d created a passable musical score that matched, as well as could be expected for a first effort, the action on the screen. Approximately one exhausting year after her giddy inspiration in front of I Love Lucy, Alice had a three-minute film to her credit, about two pretty, black-haired and fair-skinned little twin girls, one serious and smart but a little bit crazy, the other one dumb and carefree, and the dizzying and colorful adventures they experienced after joining forces with a dashing, mysterious and unreadable spaceship commander named Captain Wombat.

  She sent the computer disks away to be transferred to 35 millimeter, and with a month’s notice, Maurow invited thirty rich people over to dinner to premiere the film. Ten of Alice’s old friends were roused from their careers and trudged over to her castle in the sky. After cocktails, tuxedoed caterers with white gloves handed each guest a box of popcorn. Blake dimmed the lights, wheeled out the projector he had purchased for this purpose only, and for the next three minutes, everyone laughed appreciatively at Alice’s work. Everybody laughed at different moments, though. Because the film was so short, Blake showed it again, and the second time, the appreciative laughter was more consistently timed. During dinner, the guests sought Maurow’s favor by over-praising Alice’s work, suggesting that she enter it in festivals, overestimating her chances for acclaim. Alice just smiled at all this. “Aren’t you sweet!” she would exclaim to one flatterer; and “Why thank you!” to another, but she remained noncommittal in the face of their gushings. Alice had a pretty good time at the party, when all was said and done, and she loved Blake for planning the whole thing, and her movie was pretty good, if it were a movie made by someone you knew, or someone married to someone you knew. The colors looked nice, the little girls were cute, Captain Wombat was dashing and handsome, and the movement was relatively fluid. It was no embarrassment, really, although Alice had to admit that it was hard to watch, and that it moved a little bit too fast, the result of an impatient, inexperienced animator. But she’d set out to animate a cartoon, and she had done it, and that was pretty cool.