In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s good,” she said, not so sure.

  “I have no photographs of you anymore,” he said. “They were all destroyed in the fire. I have only a dim image of your face, from decades ago. A dim image of your little young face smiling, or crying. My new wife doesn’t know about our marriage.”

  “No? She doesn’t know you were married before?”

  “There was no reason or moment to tell Alice about all of this.”

  Harriet figured this was true. He’d never had any legal reason to keep in touch with her all those years, after she’d refused to accept a dime from him in alimony.

  “Then,” Maurow continued, “after some time had gone by and I hadn’t told her, it became too late. If I told her now, she would be angry that I hadn’t told her before. At least, I think she would. So I say nothing. We just float along, happily, she and I, for the most part. And that’s all I want. I just want her to be happy.”

  “That’s not right,” Harriet said. “I don’t think that’s right.”

  “I know it’s not,” Maurow readily agreed.

  “Well,” Harriet said. “No risk for you, I guess. I have no photographs either. How could anyone ever prove it really happened? Just deny, deny, deny.”

  They reached the other side of the Avenue, and Blake turned away from her, focusing on a taxi standing at a street light many blocks away, its off-duty light lit.

  “I still can’t really believe it’s you,” Maurow said.

  Harriet put one hand on his shoulder, touched him gently under the chin, and nudged his head in her direction.

  “I see someone pretending,” he said. “Like you’re playing a role. You know, like the whole Bewitched Darren switcharoo.” His mind wandering. “We were married during the first Darren. We were apart during the second Darren.” Laughing a little bit. “I never thought of it that way before. Not exactly like that. I don’t even know what you thought of the second Darren.”

  “Look at me, Blake,” she said. “Listen to me say your name. Look at these eyes.”

  He turned under her gentle prodding, and he obeyed — and she knew that he could see it, her eyes now filled with barbed fondness, with humor. The eyes of his little Harriet.

  A moment of affection seemed imminent; maybe even a hug in the works.

  Then, from around the corner, a young man running in their general direction, then veering straight toward Harriet. His arm stretched out, and he grabbed at her purse. The snap broke, and the thief was free, sprinting off across the street, a sweat-soaked blur.

  Harriet shrieked.

  Without hesitation, Blake tore off after the thief, dashing in front of cars, car horns blaring in his ears, as other pedestrians jumped out of his path. Harriet followed behind at a brisk stride. As Maurow ran, he screamed for someone to call the police. The thief was gaining ground, his blue-jeaned legs a blot of hazy motion off in the shrinking distance. Maurow’s knees cracked and buckled, his feet skidding about in his new black dress shoes. Harriet stared after him. This did not seem healthy for him. Were his lungs deflating, filled with humid pollution, slowly collapsing under the weight? Maurow seemed to slow down, and the distance between him and the thief increased. Harriet was glad. This was a ridiculous thing for Blake to do for her, after all. She didn’t need the purse. She could replace the credit cards. She didn’t want him to risk his life. She was glad to see him give up.

  But then he gained a second wind. Whatever reignited his energy, the soles of his shoes ripped into the pavement, and passersby would have to get out of his way or risk being flattened. He looked as though he were crashing into the sun.

  “Someone call the police!” he screamed, his arms flailing wildly, his legs flapping up behind him.

  Blake was closing the gap. Then, when he drew within half a block, the young man flipped around and stopped running, just hopping from foot to foot, staring straight into Blake’s eyes as the older man came near.

  Blake stopped running as well. A sweaty lock of hair fell in front of his eyes, and he blinked away the sting. His shirt was drenched with perspiration. So were his slacks. He stared back at the young man, who wasn’t taunting him, who was just watching him, twitching, and licking his lips. Dark-haired, small and nimble. He looked cornered, frightened. A crowd stood about, watching from across the street. But where Blake and the thief stood, their little stretch of sidewalk was deserted.

  “What now?” Blake said.

  The thief said nothing. He held Harriet’s purse, dangling from its broken strap. Not blinking.

  “Look, are we going to punch each other?” Maurow asked. “Are you going to shoot me or knife me and get gunned down by the police?” Now the exertion was taking its toll, and dizziness seemed to strike him. Blake held onto a lamp post for support. “Why don’t you just throw the purse down on the ground in front of you, run into the shadows, and go find Jesus? Or something like that.” The last four words, a little mumble. The thief nodded, without saying anything.

  Blake, limping back to Harriet, holding the purse. “I have to go sit down. Here’s your bag.”

  “That was funny,” Harriet said. She was out-of-breath, even though Blake had done all the running and jumping. “Very funny. Blake, you’re so dashing. Even now, in your sunset years. Are your knees okay?”

  Wiping droplets of sweat out of his eyes: “We’re not in our sunset years, Harriet. It’s late afternoon, if anything.”

  She frowned, not believing this. “Well,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Good bye.”

  “Uh huh,” he said, and she was off, walking away down the street.

  She could feel his gaze on her, and once again, he was watching her go, until she was out of sight.

  Maurow’s driver was waiting at 9 that night when his boss finally came out the front door of the office building and dropped into the back seat. He switched into drive and pulled out into traffic, the streets shiny and wet now from a thin coating of rain that had fallen during the early evening, clearing away the humidity. He passed some Italian restaurant with tables set up outside on the sidewalk, young couples sitting in the wet night holding hands, and the car radio played some song from decades ago that he’d first heard the summer he’d turned twenty-two. He glanced in the rear view mirror, saw Maurow back there, his eyelids drooping. Beside the cab, a young woman in very short cut-off jeans skated along on her roller blades, black pads on her knees and elbows. She held a tiny tape player in one hand, her long blond hair danced around her shoulders, and she was smiling, nodding along to a tune only she could hear.

  The driver switched into the left lane, tried to pass the taxi to his right, but the taxi sped up and then got stuck behind a truck that came to a skidding halt and then flashed its hazards. He clicked his turn signal, watched cars in the right lane speed up to block his way. He saw an opening, turned the wheel and slid into the right lane, listening as tires screeched and horns blared behind him. He accelerated freely for a moment or two, then traffic slowed down and stopped. Above the buildings, a billboard, twenty times or fifty times life-size — a young, waif-like model, about nineteen years old, wearing a half-shirt, her pierced navel bigger than the windows that faced her bare stomach from across the street. The model was glaring, her eyes empty and angry, her hair a dark greasy river flowing down over her face. The billboard was intended to advertise some sort of product.

  Listening to those old romantic ditties on the radio, he glanced from time-to-time in his rear-view mirror out through the trees in the park at the sunset that still dyed the world a deep, raging red. In the backseat, Maurow shut his eyes and let the rumbling of the engine lull him into a fitful sleep.

  Carly Barrows sat happily in a little café on the bank of some river, surrounded by centuries-old churches and castles with turrets that pricked the clouds. Everyone in the café, including Carly, was smoking cigarettes made in a factory th
at had once been owned by the Communist government but was now owned privately by a former Communist official, and which had kept its Brezhnev-era emblem as a symbol of hip irony, or maybe nostalgia, or loyalty, or something. Or maybe it was just laziness. The café was filled up with smoke. Sergio sat across the table from her, and Carly was holding both his hands, playing idly with his fingers. He had a carefully maintained two-day growth of beard, long hair, and a flatteringly and expensively casual wardrobe. His faux-Communist cigarette hung from his lower lip at an impossible cockeyed angle.

  “They don’t know me here,” Carly whispered. “They don’t have my show here, and so almost no one is staring at me.”

  “No one is staring at you, Carly.”

  “Sorry?” Distracted when she spotted a dirt-covered farmer walking his mule through a narrow side street off in the distance.

  “I said no one is staring at you. Not almost no one.” His accent was thick, and it always made him sound a little incriminating. Sergio’s mother had told Carly that her boy had been born mildly retarded, and he had always compensated for his feelings of insecurity by heaping insolent contempt on anyone and everyone who might, under normal circumstances, feel intellectually superior. Carly didn’t mind. She understood why Sergio was mean and bad and stupid. And, because she understood the pain that had made him this way, she loved him for it. “No one at all is staring at you,” he repeated.

  Carly shook her head. “Some people. Just regular staring. Like ‘Hey, who’s that? Who’s the pretty girl?’ That kind of staring.” Took one last, deep drag on her cigarette, then stamped it out in the ashtray. “Anyway, I have no ego about it. This is why I came here. Because my show was banned by the post-Communist Catholic government, and then by the post-post-Communist socialist coalition, and now negotiations for syndication here are going a little slowly. So this is one of the few Carly Barrows-free enclaves in the world.” Flashing her big smile, looking directly into his eyes.

  Sergio looked away. “Why do you always say ‘Carly Barrows’? Why don’t you ever say ‘me’?”

  “I say me. I say me all the time.”

  He sighed. “Yeah. I guess that’s true.” He turned and looked away, far off into the distance, at the river flowing around the bend past ice-capped mountains.

  Carly checked her messages that night before she went to sleep. Two more urgent messages from Blake Maurow. “Urgent,” he said the first time. “Very very urgent,” he insisted in the second message.

  “Who is Blake Maurow?” her boyfriend asked, sinking into his pillow.

  “A big shot. If he’s calling at all, it’s urgent. If he’s calling and saying it’s urgent, it’s catastrophic. He works with me on the Carly Barrows Designer Label. But I’m ignoring him for you, baby.”

  He opened one eye. “You see?” he said. “That’s what I mean. The ‘Carly Barrows’ Designer Label. That’s what I was talking about.” Olive oil on his breath; olive oil and garlic.

  He shut his eyes and fell asleep immediately, a thick sneer still on his lips.

  Walking along a cobble-stoned street that passed between two hulking buildings from the 15th century — one a church, the other a mansion, or sort of a castle — Carly asked Sergio, “Will you still love me when I’m old and ugly?”

  Sergio sighed, and he stared up at the highest window on the mansion, imagined himself looking down from there, imagined himself the man who built it, looking out on this city. “What do you want me to say, Carly?” he asked. “Do you want me to say yes? That I will love you when you’re old and ugly? Okay, then, I will say it. Carly, I will love you when you’re old and ugly.” Still looking up at that window, imagining.

  “I mean,” Carly said, “it’s inevitable. I will get old. I will not always be a beautiful young girl. One day, no teenage boy will have my poster hanging on his bedroom wall.”

  Sergio shook his head, and he laughed sadly. “Carly, don’t be ridiculous,” he said reproachfully. “The poster didn’t really sell as expected, did it? I mean, teenage boys don’t have that poster hanging in the bedroom now, do they?”

  Carly nodded, then she frowned and looked straight ahead. “Anyway,” she said. “You told me that you’ll still love me when I’m old. That’s all I wanted to know.”

  Carly Barrows finally called back Maurow a few days after his meeting with Harriet Pointer. When she heard the bad news, Carly spewed a thesaurus of obscenities into the telephone, nearly hung up, shouted “I blame you for this, Blake!” without any of the open-mindedness for which Blake had vouched, and she calmed down only after minutes of his insistently soothing reassurances. When he explained that the corporation would take the entire hit for the children’s fund and that none of it would come out of her share of the profits, he could hear her breathing more easily.

  “After all,” she said, more quietly now, “I have only my moment, my brief moment, and I’ve got to save for all those years of obscurity that will follow. I mean, where is Angela Cartwright today? I need every penny. But the corporation will live forever. Longer than God, right, Blake?”

  “Right,” he agreed. “About the corporation living longer than God, that is. And about our covering the expense of this little set-back. But you’re not right about your coming years of obscurity. I think you have a very interesting life to look forward to, Carly. You’re no Angela Cartwright.”

  “Oh well,” she said. “Thanks.” Then, with a little faraway tone in her voice, she added sadly, “You know, I really envied her when I was a kid. Angela Cartwright. In reruns, there was nobody cooler.”

  Maurow remained silent for a while, just waiting and listening, being polite.

  When Carly said nothing more on the subject of the former Lost in Space star, he broached the subject of Carly’s public apology. Carly said that she would sooner die. She hung up the phone, and Blake didn’t try to call her back.

  “Look at that!” Carly exclaimed, as their little boat drifted by hulking medieval ruins.

  “Yes,” Sergio said. “The ruins. That’s why we’re on this ride. I see them.” They were together in a small cramped boat, and behind them, a young post-Communist entrepreneur was rowing along slowly down the river that split the capital city in two. The boat wobbled back and forth on the gentle currents. The couple wore bright orange life preservers.

  Sergio shook his long mane of hair behind him and shut his eyes, felt the mid-day sun on his face. He was not yet used to the engagement ring that Carly had given him; it felt heavy and leaden on his finger. He did not often think about his promise to marry Carly — but now, with the ring, it was a decision that weighed on him twenty-four hours a day. He tried to think only of the good parts of the marriage. For example, the producers of her show would never deny her request to stick him into a mid-season episode as a significant guest star, and that would lead to new fans, and maybe a calendar. He had no pretensions about his acting. This was all he could expect, but it was good enough for a foreign fashion model whose pronunciation of the English language, while fluent, left much to the imagination. And he imagined long days of freedom living off Carly’s paycheck. He put the bad out of his mind; for example, trying to keep his infidelities out of the tabloids, or the possibility that he would be ridiculed as a man living off his wife, which, of course, he would be. Worst of all, Sergio tried not to think about the inevitable media frenzy when the marriage collapsed. Carly crying and cursing him on television. He wondered for a moment what the chances were that their divorce would be amicable. An amicable divorce. Was Carly capable of such a thing? He doubted it. She seemed to believe that they would be married forever. How could she believe such a silly thing? How could he be expected to stay married to her forever?

  “I read a book by Harold Brodkey,” she said softly, with a hint of pride. “He’s our Proust.”

  “Your Proust,” he repeated.

  “America’s Proust,” she explained.

  “Understood.”

  “He wrote this about gondolas
: ‘Gondolas,’ he wrote, ‘are atavistic.’ ”

  “Hmm,” he said, shutting his eyes again, listening to the water splash by.

  “I think it’s true,” she said. “I think gondolas are atavistic.”

  “You may be right at that,” he said. “But we’re not riding on a gondola. We’re in a row boat.”

  She was pouting. His eyes shut, he could hear her pouting.

  “It’s the same thing,” she said. “Row boats, gondolas. Brodkey’s analysis is equally valid for either.” She sighed and touched his hand. “Brodkey is post-modern, baby. Try to use your imagination.”

  “Post- modern,” he said. “Do you mean that he hasn’t been born yet?” Even though he knew what she meant. He opened his eyes and looked at Carly, the shining blue of her wide eyes, her beautiful face, like smooth ivory. She was an ethereal creature, surely. He slipped his ring off his finger. “I do not want this anymore,” he said, handing it to her.

  She seemed amazed, waiting a moment before sinking into heartbreak. She dropped her arms beside her, looking at his face, not at his outstretched hand and the ring in the center of his palm. “What do you mean, my love? My true love?”

  “I don’t want to marry you,” he said.

  “Don’t you love me anymore?”

  He shrugged and leaned back, his head near the edge of the boat. Misty droplets struck the side of his face and cooled him. “I don’t love you anymore,” he said.

  “Well, I won’t accept the ring. I won’t take it back.”

  “Then I will throw it in the river.”

  “I’ll kill myself,” she said, her voice trembling. “I’m heartbroken. I’ll throw myself into the river with your ring.”

  “Go ahead,” he said impatiently. “Throw yourself in the river. They’ll just fish you back out again.”