In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  He paused for a bit, and he seemed to be wondering whether to take her seriously; whether this was a negotiating stance. After all, she had to pretend, at least, to believe in this murderer’s plight, whatever she actually believed deep down.

  At last, he smiled. “Anything for a buck,” he said softly.

  She shook her head, and her anger grew.

  “You’re the one who knows about that,” she said. “I never take any money.”

  The smile on his face wavered, hovered on his lips like a ghost.

  “Sorry?” he said, as though he’d misheard.

  “If the client is wealthy, he donates my fee to charity. I never see a penny. I believe money would create a conflict-of-interest. It would make me more likely to take clients based on ability to pay, or likelihood of success in court, rather than the justice of their cases.”

  She could see this idea working its way through his head; this alien, shocking idea.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Interesting.”

  Suddenly she knew that Eric was a better man, deep down, than Manello, and she wondered how that could be possible.

  “Would you represent corrupt prison guards for free?” she asked him.

  He smiled uneasily. “It’s my position that the guards were not corrupt.”

  “Anyway,” she said. She turned in the direction of her car. “So that’s why I never accept any money.”

  She got in her car, forgetting the settlement negotiations that her adversary had intended to open. Manello stood on the corner, watching her, still thinking about the idea of a lawyer who never took a fee, not ever, not for anything. She put the key in the ignition, started the car, and she drove home.

  She clicked on the speaker phone in her car, punched in her answering service, listened to a few messages. One, from a man with a gray, haggard voice, made her angry. She instantly pounded in the man’s number in California, demanded that he be found when his secretary pled ignorance, then hollered angrily when he came wearily to the phone.

  “I received your message, and it is unacceptable!” she shouted.

  “Why?” he whispered, barely audible over the traffic on either side of her car. He was a man who always did as he was told. What was he really thinking, ever?

  She switched aggressively into the left lane, sped up, passed the laggard ahead of her.

  “I told you that there is no deal unless Maurow is involved in negotiations!” she said. “Whatever he’s doing that’s so important, he can be interrupted, unless you want Carly Barrows humiliated in every tabloid in the country.”

  The man said, “Why is Maurow so important?”

  “Because he’s important,” Harriet said. “Because it shows that your company takes this seriously. Because he started it. Because I want you to do something for me to show good faith. For a jumble of reasons.” Impatiently: “Okay?”

  His voice seemed to sink an entire octave. “He’ll do what he wants,” he said. “I can’t tell him. Right now, the answer is no.”

  The car in front of Harriet slammed on its brakes, and Harriet pushed her brake pedal, skidding and screeching across the asphalt. The car behind her thudded against her bumper, but Harriet didn’t blink.

  “Make the answer yes by tomorrow at nine in the morning,” she said, “or I make your life miserable.”

  The driver who had crashed into her was getting out of his car, but Harriet ignored him and sped away.

  One cold February, almost a year after their wedding, and several years before Harriet Pointer breezed into town, Blake and Alice found themselves driving through swirling milky whiteness, some two hours outside of New York City, on an icy, two-lane country road, after a season of snow unparalleled since the blizzard of 1888, as all the weathermen reminded their listeners, day after day. To those who lost children and spouses that winter, the weather seemed to acknowledge and mourn their loved one’s death, and the general misery of the northeast made their own personal misery easier to bear.

  Blake looked at his watch, then back at the road. The windshield wipers whipped furiously. “Tell me we’re not lost,” he said, sounding as though he relished the idea. “Can this be right? Does anyone hold a wedding out here?” Alice looked out at the farmland, the snow and ice covering the last remnants of the crops.

  “Not your friends,” she said, amused by the distance between them. “But Fran and Tom have $150,000 in student loans.”

  “I hope we’re lost,” he said gently. “Because then you can just send a letter of apology, explain your husband’s foolishness — ‘he’s so much like a man, just wouldn’t ask directions’ you’ll say — and we’ll get them a present more expensive than anything anyone else bought for them so that they can’t possibly be angry at us.”

  She reached over and tugged at an earlobe, and the car skidded a bit to the left. “The great Blake Maurow, who fears no one. You’re scared, darling.” She had begun to call him “darling” to make herself feel of his generation. It was a term of affection that women used in old movies, and it seemed just right when she was with Blake.

  “You think of me as fearless?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How fearless?”

  “Completely fearless, Blake.”

  He laughed, as though she were joking.

  “In the newspaper, at your office, people look to you with such admiration. You know you deserve it, too. Everyone there wants your approval.” She sighed, and some stray hail battered against the rooftop. “I wish I had your fearlessness.”

  He took his right hand off the steering wheel and reached out to rub his fingers against hers. He was still watching the road.

  “I’m always scared,” he said quietly.

  Alice thought about this for a moment. “Not always,” she insisted.

  “Always. Did I ever tell you that when I was a kid, until I was in my twenties, I stammered terribly?”

  She smiled quizzically. The confession hung in the air. “No,” Alice replied, “you haven’t ever told me that.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “You don’t stammer now. Not at all.”

  “Yes, that’s right. I don’t seem to stammer at all.”

  “How did you lose it?”

  “It’s strange,” he said. “I overcame it by trying very hard not to stammer. That was all.”

  “That’s all it took?”

  He nodded. “I’m very careful, very exacting. The way I talk, the way I move. So that I won’t stammer, won’t stumble.” He turned to her briefly, then back to the road. “You can see this, am I right?”

  “Yes,” Alice said.

  “And whether I’m negotiating, talking to a colleague, or to a telephone salesman, or to you ... no matter what, every syllable I try very hard not to stammer. Every syllable. I can feel the stammer on my tongue, wanting to make a fool of me. I push it down. I fight it.”

  Blake glanced for a moment at his young wife, and the white of the blizzard lit up his fifty-year-old face. She leaned over and pinched his cheek and stared straight ahead into the thick snow spattering the windshield. “You can stammer with me,” she said. “Blake, you don’t need to try so hard. Let down your guard. You know how I feel about you.”

  She stared at him, quietly encouraged him.

  “Stammer away,” she insisted.

  But he never did. Until the end of their life together, she would never hear him stammer, which would always make her profoundly sad, even as an old woman, just thinking back.

  In front of about one hundred guests, Fran and Tom married in an Ethical Culture ceremony that lasted half an hour and included Native American poetry, readings from the Bible, the Koran, Kahlil Gibran, and an old Chinese classic about a talking monkey. Two of their friends — one who played the harp and one who played the cello —performed Saint-Saens’ “The Swan.” (It was a lot to cover in thirty minutes!) Alice thought that “The Swan” was about an old and feeble bird very near death, until Blake explained that w
as the theme of the ballet based on the piece, but not the piece itself, which might just as well be about a young and graceful bird floating happily and in love through the ripples of a pond. Fran and Tom both read their own vows. Fran had some trouble remembering hers, but Tom reminded her, and she laughed, and the snow-speckled guests laughed, and then she started crying, and she recited the rest of her vows through tears, and the guests cried too, and in the years to come everyone would insist that Fran’s vows had been exceedingly, painfully beautiful, but on reflection no one would be able to remember what she said.

  One small moment in the evening bothered Alice, and its significance would not become clear to her until years later. Before they entered the banquet hall, Blake loosened his tie and scratched at his neck, his eyes scanning the names on the place cards. Alice reached down and snatched theirs. “We’re at table four,” she said. She felt his hand go cold in hers. He was staring at the place cards, and his face seemed, in this light, drained of all color and life. He dropped her hand. She asked him if anything was wrong, and he shook his head. A few moments later, when they reached table four, he was calmer, more relaxed. Table 4 was a “young table,” and placing the two of them there was clearly a decision that Fran and Tom must have taken a great deal of time to reach, but it all turned out all right, because the twenty-somethings treated Blake with the respect due a thirty-eight-year-old, not the heightened, detached and slightly mocking deference due a fifty-year-old.

  The night was otherwise uneventful. Alice was surprised to be seated at the same table with Mark and his new girlfriend Sylvia, a young blonde with an aggressive prettiness, and who seemed, in her brash and bouncy manner, to be of another time, like the villainess in a silent movie who schemes to steal the chaste heroine’s boyfriend. “I think it’s great that you’ve landed on your feet,” Sylvia said to Alice within a few minutes of their introduction, and Alice replied, “What do you mean? I don’t know what you mean,” and Sylvia smiled coyly and lifted a napkin to her lips, and then she changed the subject.

  Mark and Sylvia had politely declined to attend Alice and Blake’s sudden wedding, but had made the trip across the continent for Fran. Mark had been involved with Fran for a short six months, as opposed to the two years he’d devoted to Alice. Mark looked handsome and untouched by time, kept youthful by Sylvia, who Alice now imagined was a film star of the twenties who’d made a pact with the devil, or returned to Earth as an angel, or a ghost. What woman of today had a name like “Sylvia” anyway? That was obviously a name for beautiful women in the 1920s, women who never grew old. Blake talked about archaeology with Sylvia, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in ancient Mesopotamian history, or something like that.

  After the reception, Alice and her husband returned to their hotel room, fell heavily and a little bit drunkenly into bed. Before long Blake was asleep, his back to his wife. Alice lay awake for hours. A little bit past 3 a.m., Blake awoke, rolled over, and saw the white of Alice’s eyes.

  “No luck?” he whispered.

  “Nope,” she said softly, sounding sadder than she felt.

  Blake propped himself up on one elbow. With his other hand, he gently ran his fingers through Alice’s short black hair.

  “I could tell you a story,” he whispered.

  She laughed. “A story about what? About the board of directors of a mutual fund, and how they adequately performed their fiduciary duties?” She shut her eyes.

  “No, not exactly. A story about a little girl named Alice, and a little boy named Blake, and an adventure they took one starry night, when they built a boat with nothing but their imagination and set sail on the high seas to a strange world all the way on the other side of the planet, and through a couple of holes in space, and on the opposite end of two dozen universes.” His voice sounded unfamiliar, younger, excited, and his fingers, running over her head and sliding down the side of her face, did not feel like his fingers — they were bursting with little sparks of electricity. She opened her eyes and stared, but his face was just a dark shadow.

  “Why do they build this boat?” she asked.

  “Alice can’t sleep, and she gets up out of bed and tiptoes down the hallway, and tumbles down the stairs, and gets up and stumbles into the kitchen and opens up the fridge. And Blake can’t sleep either, so he meets her at the fridge.”

  “Do they live in the same house?” Alice asks.

  “Hmm.” Maurow thought. “Okay, they live in the same house.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Blake is five. Alice is four.”

  “Are they boyfriend-girlfriend?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What are they, then?”

  “Just confused, pre-latency kids who dig each other but don’t know why.” He laughed.

  Alice realized that this was the only time she’d ever heard her husband use the word “dig” in this context. He said it without any apparent irony, as though this exercise had hooked him into some other time and place, a strange world all the way on the other side of the planet, through a couple of holes in space, and on the opposite end of two dozen universes.

  “Okay,” Alice said. “What happened then?”

  “Alice said she was bored, and that’s why she couldn’t sleep — because the day had not filled up her mind, and so her noggin was unsatisfied, and it wouldn’t agree to turn off the day and fall asleep until it was satisfied. Blake smiled and pointed outside their window, and the stars drifted down from the heavens until they were floating in the backyard, and Alice and Blake imagined a boat, and as they imagined it, the boat grew, just like that, outside their kitchen window. Then Blake climbed over the sink and onto the sill, and he pushed the window open, and he jumped onto the boat, and he held out his arms and called to Alice, and she jumped too. Blake and Alice pulled up the anchor, and the boat floated off on a sea of stars.”

  He went on like that, in a voice both soothing and excitedly full of life, telling of some battles with little pirate children on the twinkling waves, and about a strange land that they reached once the pirates, having realized the power of goodness and innocence and light, had joined Alice and Blake in their journey.

  After listening to Blake Maurow tell his story for a little while, Alice’s noggin was satisfied, and she fell asleep without learning how it ended. She supposed everything turned out all right. Lying in bed the next morning, watching her husband shave in the bathroom mirror, Alice smiled at the memory of the fairy tale, but, for some reason, she never told him how much she had enjoyed his story. Blake’s sudden fright, earlier in the evening, was, for the moment, gone from her mind.

  In fact, she didn’t mention that mystery until a few years later, precisely one week before his first negotiation with Harriet Pointer. Blake was in his mid-to-late fifties, not his early fifties anymore, but he was still thin and could still usually keep up with Alice when she ran her seven-mile loop around the park. One day, when they’d gone about five miles, she said to him, “Whose name did you see on the table list at Fran’s wedding?” and he said, “Wha?”, huffing and puffing so heavily that he couldn’t even finish the word. The path opened up on the lake, and the early morning sunlight glinted on the water. Alice thought Blake was being purposely dim. “We went to a wedding for my friend Fran,” she said very slowly. “Do you remember that?”

  Blake nodded, brushing sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “Of course.”

  “And at a wedding, typically, there’s a table filled with place cards. When I found our card, you looked around, you looked at another card, you did a double-take, and then you turned white.” She looked back at her husband, red-faced and bathed in sweat. She wondered now, for the first time, until what age a man should continue to exercise so vigorously. Was he doing this just for her, just to prove something? No matter how fast she ran, or how slow, he ran just slightly behind her, struggling too much, sweating too much and gasping for air. They ran together beneath a low tree branch, and Blake ducked his head a littl
e bit.

  “Whose name did you see?” Alice went on. “Whose name was on the card? It was someone who either frightened you a great deal or whose presence at the wedding made you shiver with anticipation.” She said this dramatically, as though the whole question were just a little joke instead of a mystery that had puzzled her now for nearly a half-decade, and which sometimes made her more than a little angry.

  “Hitler,” Blake gasped, “or Alice Faye.”

  “Even you’re too young to pine for Alice Faye, darling,” she said, as the wind whipped up around her. “Can’t you be serious? Can’t you tell me the truth? I think it’s because of you that I became a mystery writer.” She began to slow, as they approached the end of the loop. He stopped running, then bent down, grasping his legs and coughing. “Never mind,” she whispered, staring at her husband. Blake coughed and coughed, and when he looked up at her he was pale, and his eyes seemed too large for his skull, like those fancy goldfish, or that rubber children’s toy from the late 1970s whose eyes burst out of his head when you squeezed his stomach. What was that called? Obie. She was filled with almost overwhelming tenderness and love for him at that moment, but it was the same love she had felt for her grandfather in his feeble last years, and she realized it too late. She touched Blake’s sweaty face, smiled into his bulging eyes and whispered, “My poor little old man,” and Blake didn’t smile back.

  In Eastern Europe, a hotel receptionist, just getting used to her new job and her new responsibilities in her post-Communist life, picked up the telephone. It was a man’s voice, and the receptionist knew that he was speaking English, and she knew that she understood English, but it all just fell out of her head, leaving her speechless. She just kept repeating in her own language that she was sorry, very sorry. She was twenty-one, and this was her second day on the job, and the man’s flurry of English made her very frightened. Then he was speaking another language that she did not understand, and then another language, and then another language. And finally he found a language that she understood, from just over the border, a country she had lived in between the ages of six and eleven. The man’s message was very simple. “Find Carly Barrows’ room. C-A-R-L-Y B-A-R-R-O-W-S,” he said. “Tell her it’s Blake Maurow,” he said. “M-A-U-R-O-W. Tell her to call me when she returns. Tell her it’s urgent.”