In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  “Blake,” Alice said in an angry whisper. “I want to sleep.” She put a pillow over her head. She pretended to snore.

  With a groan, her husband rolled over and picked up the phone. “Hey Carly, it’s Maurow.” He nodded, listening. “You didn’t wake us up.” He listened for fifteen seconds. “No, I’m not just saying that,” he lied. “We just got into bed a moment before you called. I just turned out the light. I didn’t even shut my eyes. Ha ha, Carly. No, you’re not ‘interrupting’ anything. Ha ha.” Blake laughing now, half-asleep, sounded so phony. Just like that: Ha ha. Like he wasn’t even trying. “Don’t you worry,” her husband continued, all breath mints and sunshine. “Alice is right here.” He handed her the phone. She ignored him, and she kept her head under the pillow. Blake put the phone back up to his face. “Here she is.” He tried to shove the telephone handset under the pillow, but Alice burrowed in and wouldn’t budge.

  “Just hold on,” Maurow told Carly. “I’m getting her.”

  He hit the mute button.

  “Blake,” she said. “Dammit.”

  “Keep her sane, okay, Alice? This is important.”

  “I don’t want to,” she muttered through clenched teeth.

  “Well,” Maurow said. “Now she knows you’re here, and awake, and if you don’t talk to her, she won’t make the Andrea movie.”

  He handed her the phone, flipped over and fell quickly asleep. Alice stared angrily at his back, and she walked into the next room, leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor. She turned the phone back on.

  “Carly,” she said, shutting her eyes. “Hello. It’s Alice.”

  Alice kept her eyes shut, and she planted a little sneer on her upper lip. She settled back against the wall, listening to Carly, picturing her face on billboards and magazine covers and print ads, that million-dollar face with the million-dollar smile. Alice pictured this face, pouring out years and years of angst and pain and rejection, enough for three lifetimes all crammed into fewer than three decades.

  “Do you know how that feels?” Carly asked, and Alice said, “Yeah,” and then Carly told another story, and she said, “Can you imagine how that felt?” and Alice said, “Sure can,” and at first Alice was just humoring Carly, trying to put enough sympathy into her voice to keep Carly happy, but then, at three in the morning, after relating the details of a particularly brutal and loveless humiliation, Carly asked, “Do you know how I feel?” and Alice thought, Dammit, I do know how she feels, and she replied, “Yes, Carly,” with unexpectedly heartbreaking pathos.

  Four-thirty, and the sky outside was getting ready for sunrise.

  “Sometimes,” Carly said, her voice grown woozy. “Sometimes, I think I need more love than the world can give. Do you know how that feels?”

  “Yeah,” Alice said. She felt tears coming to her eyes. She felt ashamed. “Yeah,” she said, fighting against her tears. “I know how that feels.”

  “What would Andrea do?” Carly asked desperately.

  “Andrea doesn’t need love,” Alice said. “She tried it once, and she didn’t like it. It all ended in bloodshed and sadness. And so she’s given up. She doesn’t need it. She gave up love.”

  “Yeah,” Carly said, thinking this over. “Just give it up.”

  “Just give it up.”

  Alice laughed through the tears that were starting to blur her vision. What was the matter with her? She sniffled, and she wiped her nose on the sleeve of her robe.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” Carly said.

  “I don’t think so either,” Alice said.

  From time to time, Alice and her husband went out for the evening for some business obligation, or some charitable obligation, or something that was a combination of the two, some important charitable event that was somehow connected with the division of the corporation run by Blake Maurow or one of the boards on which he sat. Sometimes, they went out to a purely social event that Blake viewed as a business event disguised as a social event. At business events, they would often wine and dine some old guy, or a bunch of old guys, usually with some of the old guys’ wives, who were often, but not always, rather young. Sometimes, someone would stand up and make flattering toasts about something or other. At business events disguised as social events, Blake and Alice would be seated together, or sometimes at separate tables, in the spectacular home of some society figure who threw spectacular parties. These evenings blurred together in Alice’s mind. She was reluctant to devote the energy necessary to distinguish them. She learned to smile radiantly and jump in when called upon, and even contribute a flattering yet unfawning remark of her own volition; but generally, her thoughts were elsewhere.

  There would sometimes be dancing. Alice learned to dance very well, and Blake was as good a dancer as one might have imagined: smooth, effortless, gentle and in firm control. Always, the food was excellent, food from the greatest chefs in the world, but Alice never ate very much, because she felt, implicitly, that for her to eat very much would upset everyone around her. She always left her plate half full. When her plate was taken away, she found herself staring after the waiter as he marched off with her food, then invariably thought longingly for the next day about the tiny, beautiful and delicious portion of duck forever lost to her.

  “You remember about tonight?” Blake said on the telephone.

  “Yeah,” Alice muttered. She was sitting in front of the computer monitor, sweating in her running clothes. She’d had an inspiration during her course around the park, and she was now trying to pound out her ideas before they left her mind forever. “I was up all night with Carly, I’m exhausted, and it’s your fault, you know. Don’t expect much from me tonight.”

  “What’s tonight?” he asked, testing her.

  “I don’t know, but the dress has arrived,” she said. She didn’t care. She would put her arm through his arm, and she would smile, and she would be distantly charming, and it would be good enough. Everyone would fawn over Blake, the men would flirt ambiguously with Blake’s wife, someone might ask Alice about her mystery novels and then coo appreciatively, Blake would tell a few stories that would get laughs, and then they would go home.

  “Remember your hair appointment,” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  The car took them over to the party, Alice and Blake sitting in the back seat. “You look terrific, by the way,” he said, staring at his watch, not even glancing at his wife. Just assuming.

  “I don’t,” she said. “If you were paying attention, you’d notice that I look awful.” She knew that she should look terrific — the dress had been picked out by a professional, her hair looked great, blah blah. But she looked even more desperately tired than she felt. She examined herself in the mirror of her compact, and she tried to cover up the dark shadows under her eyes. “You know, Blake, I think about that place in Colorado sometimes. I sometimes wish we would move there. Retire there.” She thought. “Maybe I have some sort of romantic image of it. I suppose there’s all sorts of things about it that aren’t so great. Probably long winters, I guess.”

  “I guess so,” he said. “Don’t think you’d like it.”

  “Maybe I’d miss Eden. Miss New York.”

  “Probably,” Blake said. He looked nervously at his watch again, not because they were running late, but just to look at his watch, charting the passage of time. “I think you’re a New Yorker down to your bones, Alice. I don’t think you’d like it there.”

  She tried to smile at her husband, but she couldn’t get his attention. Maurow’s face was up against the car window, and he seemed to stare almost longingly at each building they passed.

  “Do you love me Maurow?” she asked.

  “You know I do.”

  “Look at me,” she insisted, “and tell me.”

  He turned away from the window, stared straight into her eyes, and he told her how terribly and passionately he loved her.

  She smiled.

  “Come on, Maurow,” she said. �
��What’s in your noggin? Deep in the most hidden tissue of your crazy brain? You’re thinking of something. It’s something serious, and it’s been bothering you since the day of my party. Don’t lock me out, Darling. Won’t you tell me what it is?”

  “You’re imagining things, Alice,” he said, not unhappily. He turned away, and stared back out into the street, at the mad blur rushing by.

  It was a party on the Upper East Side, at some big apartment that didn’t look like an apartment at all but more like a banquet hall, with tuxedoed servants running this way and that. Alice knew that her husband had once explained to her why this was an invitation he could not decline. She’d forgotten, and now she wanted to know. She didn’t want to ask Maurow, because she knew that before explaining it to her, he would say, Don’t you remember? I already told you. At cocktails, Alice smiled and chatted with two of the rich wives with whom she sometimes lunched. They all smiled and swore to meet up once more. One of them mentioned the screening of tonight’s film, a formerly “lost” 10-reel classic from 1916 called “A Daughter of the Gods.” Alice figured that was the raison d’être of the evening, but she didn’t know what that had to do with Blake Maurow.

  Sitting with Blake at a table of six. She didn’t want to ask him why they were here, because she knew that he had told her, and she didn’t want to admit to him that sometimes she didn’t listen to his words, just to his voice, which she usually found more interesting and inspiring than the actual concepts that his beautiful voice was imparting. Among their dinner companions were an old man and his old wife. After some conversation, they revealed that they’d met at the age of twenty and had been together for nearly six decades. At first Maurow seemed to treat them with suspicion, as though their apparently genuine love for each other was some sort of charade. As the evening progressed, what Alice viewed as the couple’s rather mundane circumstances grew more and more fascinating to her husband. The two seemed charmed by Blake’s attentions, and Alice found it odd that her husband was choosing to offer something more than a frothy veneer of charm. She listened closely to the conversation. After a while, it seemed that there was something distastefully erotic about the couple’s affection, one for the other, and about her own husband’s affection for them both. The old couple were very rich, as was everyone in the room, but beyond that, they were like any old couple in the suburban neighborhood in which she’d been born. You get married, you grow old together.

  She felt as though she were growing smaller and smaller, and sinking away into the distance, as her husband laughed and smiled and charmed the old couple, listening to their stories about things that had happened to them in the 1940s, and the 1950s, and the ‘60s, and people they’d known in the ‘70s. Alice found it unpleasant that their identities had grown so intertwined — they were not two individuals, but some sort of two-headed monster. She didn’t like that; but her husband did, and she wondered why. What did he see there?

  Alice never did figure out why Blake had felt unable to avoid that dinner party. During the first reel of the film — which, it seemed, was a fantasy about a magical land inhabited by mermaids, and, with surprising frequency for a film from early in the century, prettily photographed naked women — a servant came to Alice with the message that an urgent phone call awaited her. She thanked him, and she and Blake excused themselves from the table, went into the front parlor. Alice took the phone and held it to her ear. An urgent appeal from her mother, it turned out, over a static-plagued phone line from Africa.

  Alice groaned. She turned to her husband. “It’s Carroll,” she whispered.

  He frowned. “Should I abandon this?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I’ll do this on my own. Urgency, but no emergency. Just the same old thing.” She planted a quick kiss on his cheek. “Can you come up with an excuse?”

  He nodded. “I usually try the truth. Some family problem that you had to take care of. Nothing disastrous, just uncomfortable, and a bit urgent. They’ll nod and say they’re sorry.”

  “Will they believe you?”

  “I’ll never know.”

  She reached into his pocket, pulled out his keys. “I’m stealing your car. Enjoy the night.”

  “Explain this to me,” Eden insisted, sitting in the driver’s seat of Blake’s car. “Where are we going? Explain why I’m driving.” She was sitting there in the car, and she had no idea why, and it hadn’t occurred to her until just that moment.

  “Blake can’t help. So I need your help instead.” She paused. “I’ll think of how to explain this. Let me think.”

  Eden sat still.

  Alice said: “Start the car.”

  Eden drove out of the parking garage, onto the Avenue, and Alice directed her out onto the FDR.

  “There are a lot of things that people never mention,” Alice said. “You know? For one reason or another. Or for no reason. Like, I’m thinking of something that happened when I was little.”

  Her gaze on the road, Alice began to tell a story that lasted for miles along the highway, a story about her father, and her mother’s long unmentioned first fiancé, who vanished during the war in Korea. Alice lost herself in the memory, the headlights and streetlights zipping up over her eyes. “At one time, I thought I could use that story somehow,” Alice told Eden. She pointed up at the green road sign. “I think we should take that exit, by the way. One half mile.”

  “You wanted to use that story?” Eden asked.

  She slowed the car down, looking ahead for the turnoff.

  “Sure,” Alice said. “The story shows how people are really just unknowable. My book is supposed to be all about people coming back into your life when you don’t expect it, people bearing terrible secrets.”

  “Terrible secrets,” Eden said, thinking. “Like you’re wondering again whose name Blake saw at the wedding that scared and exhilarated him so much. You wonder all the time, and he pretends he doesn’t know what you mean.”

  Alice nodded. “After I married Blake,” she said, “my mother and my father moved away to a country in Africa that nobody’s ever heard of. It was where my mother grew up, the daughter of this British colonial Tory ruling class guy who died of a heart attack when my mother was very young. My father bought the house my mother had grown up in. Decades ago, a revolution forced my mother and my grandmother to move away, back to England. She went to college in America. I guess that’s where she met the boy who died. But I don’t know for sure. Now the country where she grew up needs money, so everyone’s welcome again. And my father bought the house that my mother grew up in for a bargain price so that my mother almost wasn’t angry about the government confiscating it all those years ago. I’ve seen pictures — it’s a big white house, with green land all around, stretching far off into the distance. They moved there, leaving me and my sister alone.”

  “Your sister,” Eden said. “You know, I think you’ve never mentioned your sister before today.”

  “That’s right,” Alice said, nodding. “You see, and there’s a reason for that. I guess there’s a reason.” Staring straight ahead. “I think we should turn left here,” Alice said.

  “Where?” Eden asked.

  “This thing, coming up,” she said. Alice seemed confused, running on intuition. “This thing, Whatchamacallit Avenue. Right here! Stop!”

  Eden stopped, tires screeching in the middle of the street as she skidded into the middle of an intersection. Car horns blared.

  “Left here,” Alice said. In a softer voice: “Sorry, Eden.”

  Eden nodded, and she turned left.

  “We’re looking for your sister,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Alice said. “I can usually find her, somehow.”

  “You never told me about your sister because....”

  She stopped speaking.

  Alice stayed silent.

  “How much farther till I turn?” Eden asked awkwardly.

  “Just wait. I’ll know it when we come to it.”

  “Okay.”<
br />
  “And you’re right,” Alice said. “I mean, I guess you may be right. I probably never told you about my sister because she’s freaky. I don’t remember exactly what you call it.”

  “Oh.” Eden didn’t seem to believe this, but she didn’t argue.

  “When she gets lost, I have to go find her.”

  “Uh huh.”

  They drove along a little more, and then Alice laughed. “You’re going to meet her, so I should probably mention something. Before you meet her.” She shot a little glance at Eden, then looked back at the road. “She’s my twin. My identical twin.”

  Eden waited a long time to speak, trying hard to think of something to say.

  Finally, she said, “Oh.”

  “That’s kind of strange, I guess,” Alice added.

  The car fell silent, and after a while Eden turned on the radio, and a moment later Alice shouted, “Turn right here, right here!”

  When Alice was little, she was not one but two. She was named Alice, after Alice in Wonderland, and her identical twin sister was Carroll, named after the author of Alice in Wonderland, and their parents spelled her name just like that, too. Her parents, she thought, had an arrested sense of whimsy, which they had since demonstrated by moving away to a beautiful and terrifying country that no one had ever heard of, and that might as well be Never Never Land. Alice and Carroll looked exactly the same, except that Alice had blue eyes and her sister had brown eyes. Most people believed that were impossible in identical twins, but it was true. It must have been, a doctor once told Alice, the result of a spontaneous genetic mutation. Everyone loves blue eyes. Her parents called Alice ‘Old Blue Eyes,’ which made her sister angry, because she wanted blue eyes too. But she didn’t have them.

  Carroll was the smart one, Alice the one with over-sized emotions. Carroll sat in her room doing her homework, even back in kindergarten when her homework was coloring and practicing the letter ‘A’. Alice was the one who threw temper tantrums, who cried and yelled. Alice also hugged her parents and needed them desperately, which Carroll never did, even when she was very small.