In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  Ewell thought of his mother often, and his father less often, because it was her face that he witnessed in the very last moment of life. And because, he supposed, he loved her more. She was very unlucky. He pitied her, not being able to write her own epilogue. And he longed for her. And wished that he had been able to save her, because he could have saved her, had he known.

  One morning, after leaving his house and walking through the woods beyond his back yard, Ewell came upon Aila standing on the bridge, leaning over the edge and looking at the little stream of water trickling over the cracking layers of ice.

  Ewell said hello to her, and he tried to keep walking, but she grabbed hold of his arm, and he stopped, standing next to her on the bridge. As though she’d been standing there waiting for him; he sincerely hoped that she hadn’t been standing there waiting for him because, searching his mind in that split second, he could think of no good and happy reason why this woman who had shown scorn for him so many years ago — and in more subtle ways during the many years since — would stand on a bridge in the cold, waiting for him.

  “I’ll miss my bus,” he said.

  “You go to the bus stop ten minutes early every morning,” Aila said. “You’ll never miss your bus.” Her voice was cold and white as the snow on the trees. Never missing his bus was a character flaw to her, a trait that seemed perhaps inexplicably unhuman to the big, adventurous, frequently drunken Aila. Ewell remembered now, in a sudden unexpected flashback, how overwhelmed he often felt with her, back when they were lovers, years ago.

  “What do you want, then?” he asked, shaking off the memory. He was trying to sound helpful, but he could tell that he sounded impatient instead, and so he added: “I mean to appear helpful, not impatient. It’s just that I become very nervous when I can’t get to the bus stop early.”

  “All right,” she said. “I won’t keep you waiting. I know how much you value the time you spend standing alone in the cold at the bus stop.” She scoffed.

  “Thank you.” Pretending he hadn’t heard her scoff.

  “Marja’s worried, you know,” she said. “You want me to get to the point, I get to the point.”

  “About what?” Ewell said. Aila was about to answer, but he stopped her. “I don’t think that we should talk about this,” he said.

  “About your trip to New York,” she said.

  “I know that,” he said. “I don’t feel it’s appropriate for you to discuss this with me. And anyway there’s no sense in worrying.”

  He did not know what that meant. Did he mean that there was nothing to worry about? Or did he mean that, because there was nothing anyone could do about Ewell and his crazy whims, his wife might as well not bother worrying?

  Aila frowned.

  “It is unfair to her,” she said. “Can you see that? No one can trust you not to crack up, Ewell. You should take her with you and let her watch you and protect you from yourself, and you shouldn’t put her through this. It’s bad enough that you’ve let her know that you love her second best, but you shouldn’t torture her like this.” She sighed. “That’s what I have to say.”

  “Fine, then,” he said. “Listen to what I have to say. I don’t think this is any of your concern, Aila. I think that you shouldn’t have gotten up early and ambushed me here. This is embarrassing, and I don’t see how this is any of your concern.”

  “If this is anyone’s concern,” she said, “it’s mine.”

  She looked away.

  “Why, Aila? Why don’t you go home, be a good wife, drink coffee with your husband? Take the time you were going to spend bothering me and instead suck him before work or something. Why meddle in my life?”

  She leaned over and whispered in his ear in a voice more tender than she had ever used with him before: “I don’t want you to crack up and die. I need to see you happy. I miss you every day of my life, Ewell,” and then without looking in his eyes, she stood up straight and walked away, over the little wooden bridge, through the trees, and into the darkness.

  “You haven’t run in a long time,” Alice said. “You’re keeping up pretty well.”

  This wasn’t exactly true. Blake was lagging behind, breathing too hard. She wanted to let him try to impress her. She slowed down to let Blake pull ahead, but every time she slowed down, he slowed down as well. He was running stiffly, his ankles and knees barely bending. The old man was losing his elasticity. They were out by the seashore, a few miles from their vacation home, running the last stretch of a route that Alice had mapped out, which varied between dense forest and open beach.

  “You’re doing really well,” Alice said, hoping that by repeating this, she could make it come true.

  “Yeah, well,” he puffed. “I do the NordicTrack at work.”

  She laughed. “My mom has a NordicTrack.”

  That also wasn’t exactly true — it was her dad who had the NordicTrack, but she didn’t want to compare Blake to her dad. Her mom had a stationary bike. Or used to. Alice didn’t know what her parents did for exercise in their big mansion in Africa. Maybe they hunted rhinos, or something.

  “Well,” Blake said, and he almost went on, but then he tried to catch his breath, and he slowed down a little, and he stopped talking.

  After a few minutes, he gasped, “Thank God. The end.”

  Alice shook her head. “I’m going around again. I like running out here. It doesn’t remind me of my runs with Eden every step of the way.” She didn’t know why she said that; she was afraid that the sentence sounded too mournful.

  “Problems with Eden?” he asked absently.

  She nodded.

  “I don’t know,” she added. Then: “I’m just tired. I haven’t been sleeping. You ever get like that? Not sleeping?”

  She didn’t say anything more, and Blake didn’t ask her anything else about it.

  “Well,” he said. “I’m quitting.” He stopped, and Alice jogged in place. “I’ll see you back at the house.” Almost as an afterthought — but what seemed a carefully calculated, precisely-phrased afterthought — he added, “I’m going to California on business in a few days, Alice, by the way. Then to check on some investments out West. I’ll tell you more later.”

  He waved goodbye and she ran off.

  Now Alice ran slower; it was lonely. The beauty all around her was louder, more cacophonous and intrusive. Robins, crows, ducks. Rats running in front of her on the path.

  Alice thought that there was something that her husband was not telling her about his business in California. There was a definite mystery there, and she had two pieces of evidence. First, in mentioning the meeting he was both vague and carefully nonchalant, as though he were trying not to worry her with details. Second, he had made certain to tell her about the meeting, although he seemed to have procrastinated until the very last minute of their run. She felt mildly proud of her detective work, and ambivalent about Blake’s meeting. After all, even if he were thrown out of his job, it would do nothing to eat up the money that should be able to support him until the end of his life, and then support Alice, in turn, until the end of her life, both in considerable luxury. Plus, although she didn’t know for certain, she suspected that Blake had a generous golden parachute built up over the years — severance and stock options and whatnot — which might make his termination more lucrative than his continued employment.

  For a few moments, she was curious, even excited, about this prospect. Then, at a particularly sharp bend in the path, her mind turned to other things.

  The path she was following cut through the woods and then out again to a more heavily-traveled, smoother loop. As she was about to intersect with the busier route, she realized that she was heading straight toward a young man who was running at almost exactly her pace, an astonishingly handsome blond young man in a tank top, with a model-perfect profile, and somehow the sexiest calf muscles she had ever seen. No wedding band on his left hand. He looked exactly twenty-two. The two paths came together, and he ran along beside her for a
while. He didn’t try to pass her; whenever she sped up a little bit, he sped up, too. He glanced over at her every once in a while. Maybe, she thought, he was just pacing himself. Maybe he was flirting. After some time, he asked her how far she was going. She said she didn’t know. Maybe ten miles. Maybe eight. He said something about the weather. He was boring, but he was out of breath and exhausted, so boring was okay, expected; and he was handsome, and just instinctively she was relieved that his voice didn’t sound gay, and for some reason she was fascinated by those calf muscles, almost like two perfectly round tennis balls, but it was the almost part of it that made them so perfect, such perfectly beautiful and sexy calf muscles.

  “Are you an actor?” she asked him, and he said that he was; that he was also a model, and a singer. “How does a boy get calf muscles like that?” she asked, and he told her. He had a very specific calf muscle regimen, and he had worked very hard on them, and he knew exactly what to do.

  “Do you like them?” he asked, and she said that she did, that they were very very nice calf muscles.

  “I’ve been almost fetishizing them,” she said, “if that’s the right word.”

  He said that he thought that was the right word, and then he added, “I like your legs,” and she thanked him, and then he said, “And your smile,” and she figured that such a beautiful guy could say things like that and probably score every time; she was flattered that he liked her legs and her smile.

  “I run all the time,” she said, “so my legs are pretty powerful, but I think that my arms are kinda flabby,” and he said that they weren’t, and he said he liked how her arms were really thin but also looked strong. “I use little weights sometimes,” Alice said, “but not big weights. So my arms aren’t as round as yours.”

  He said that his legs were strong and his arms and shoulders were strong — Alice agreed that he did in fact have nice broad shoulders — but he thought that his chest still needed work.

  “No, no!” Alice insisted, looking over at him, the way his chest looked through his tank top, his arms sliding back and forth as he ran. “You have very nice tits for a boy! Any bigger and you couldn’t wear a suit without looking like one of those older guys with that embarrassing problem.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  That settled that. Alice was glad that she had been able to help. He could have ruined everything.

  Then, as the conversation started dwindling away: “Well, thank you for fetishizing my calf muscles.” Was he going to pursue this, ask her out, flirt some more, make more awkwardly flattering comments about her limbs? Maybe he’d noticed her wedding band, or some reticence, unconsciously conveyed. There was no future in this, after all. But, still, Alice didn’t want to say goodbye. She didn’t want to lose his attention just yet.

  “Let’s see if you can catch me,” she said, and she accelerated. She felt as though her deep fatigue, today, was helping her run faster, and it felt as though her feet were barely touching the ground. Tossing a glance behind her, she could see him speeding up, too. What would happen when he caught her? Gripped by endorphins and so excited by his beauty and so flattered that he was excited by hers, all she wanted was to capture him by making him capture her. That he was speeding up made her happy and flattered, and the end result of all this flirting did not immediately enter her mind.

  He began gaining on her, pulling within five or six feet, so she sped up again, her short legs moving at twice the speed of his long ones.

  “What if I catch you?” he shouted teasingly, trying to take the mystery out of it.

  A sweaty kiss? he might have been wondering. Or a whole night in Alice’s arms?

  “I’ll buy you an ice cream?” she laughed, sounding uncertain.

  Maybe her answer was lost in the wind, because he didn’t seem confused or disappointed or amused, just determined as before. She turned left and ran downhill into the woods, and he turned left too, his feet skidding on the gravel. He was now ten or twelve feet behind her, and she was increasing the distance between them. She looked back, caught his eye, saw him grit his teeth and push himself harder, moving faster to catch her. His resolve almost frightened her, how hard he was pushing himself, something sort of like desire burning in his eyes. She might actually have to make out with this guy, or something. Not because he would force her to, but because without knowing it or thinking about it, she’d sort of agreed to, and to put him through all this physically punishing almost dangerous exertion and then back out wouldn’t be fair. She pushed herself harder too, tearing into the woods, wind blowing the sweat off her forehead. After maybe two minutes of this almost impossible new pace, she finally heard a groan of ineffable disappointment, turned back and saw the man leaning against a tree, holding his side, gasping for air.

  She turned around and ran in place, smiling at him and waving goodbye.

  “Train harder,” she said. “Maybe next time.” She was happier to linger in his thoughts forever and to haunt his dreams than to collapse with him in a sweaty embrace. She turned and ran into the woods, around a bend and out of his life. She missed him immediately.

  The night before Blake was scheduled to leave for California, he spent some time explaining to Alice the purpose of the trip, but he zipped through concepts that she didn’t understand, and she soon gave up trying to understand.

  She lay awake for hours that night, not even thinking of anything. Alice had insomnia, and she had it bad. This had gone on for several nights, but it hit her worst tonight. The unfairness of it kept her awake even longer. Hour followed hour. At one point, she got up and padded around the apartment. Then she watched some television. She tried to write her novel. Her joints ached. Her head hurt. Her feet were sore. She was tired, so tired. She returned to bed, but still she couldn’t sleep.

  After some time, Maurow’s alarm went off. She glanced over at her husband, sitting on the edge of the bed, turning off his alarm. Then, in a secretive huddle, he appeared to be turning off her alarm, which she had set so that she could say goodbye to him before he left. She tried to shrug off her suspicions, and sleep finally descended, brief and fitful.

  Waking, she heard Blake downstairs in the kitchen, listening to the radio. She bolted up out of bed. She ran out of the room in her pajamas, took the stairs two at a time and skidded into the kitchen. Blake stood up from the newspaper, his tie untied.

  Alice threw her arms around his neck. “Avoiding me, darling?” she asked, as though it were the most ridiculous idea in the world. “Rushing out to see your girlfriend?” which was, Alice still believed, a thoroughly ridiculous idea, given Blake’s famous decency. She planted a kiss on his neck. Then, playfully, lips close to his left ear: “You know how I feel about you, Mr. Maurow, Mr. Moron.” Her light affection was forced. His hands rested on the back of her thin pajama top; the touch of his palms cool through the fabric.

  “I know,” he whispered. “I think you’re wonderful, Alice. I have an early plane.” Three rambling thoughts, strung awkwardly together. He ducked out of her embrace and was out the door a moment later. His tie fell off in the hallway, and he bent over and picked it up. She followed him out to the elevator in her pajamas.

  “Alice,” he whispered. “You’re embarrassing me.”

  “I’m going with you to the airport,” she said. “I want to stand on the ground, waving goodbye to you as the plane passes over my head.”

  He smiled at this. “They won’t let you out on the runway, little Alice,” he said. “And if I wait for you to get ready, I’ll miss the plane.”

  “Do you really think I’m wonderful?” she asked.

  “Go inside. The neighbors will see.”

  “Let them. Nothing illegal is showing. I think I look cute. Do you really think I’m wonderful?”

  “I do.” A voice so gentle — as Eden laughingly described it to Alice after the party: like mist floating around mountain peaks.

  “Then tell me again.”

  With a little smile. “I told you once already.�
�� Then the elevator arrived. A moment before the doors shut: “I think you’re wonderful.” And he was gone.

  Alice went back inside the apartment. She didn’t know why she was worried, but she didn’t think her instinct was wrong. Maurow’s inordinately secretive behavior since the day of her party, his heavy-handed intrigue this morning, and now, especially, his almost desperate escape from their apartment, all combined to raise in her an ambiguous suspicion that something far worse than his business dealings had gone terribly awry.

  She took a long shower, staring at the wall tiles for long minutes. At 10 a.m., she sat in her robe, hair still wet, listening to the last minutes of a morning disk jockey’s allegedly shocking radio show. The phone rang. She hoped that it was Blake calling from the airport. To apologize for his coldness, and to explain why he had turned off her alarm. She quickly answered the phone; it turned out to be Alice’s only TV star friend.

  Carly Barrows could not successfully remain sober. On the telephone to Alice, she wallowed in her drunkenness, in her personal destruction. Listening to her vodka-soaked voice, Alice could imagine veins bursting in Carly’s perfect face; she envisioned the tragicamp film role that, many decades hence, would win Carly her Oscar and usher in her second coming.

  Carly was screaming and cursing. “Fuck them!” she shouted. “Fuck them!” she exclaimed; just like that, emphasizing them the second time, as though clarifying for Alice who, exactly, should get fucked.

  Alice listened for a while.

  “I’m drinking!” Carly exclaimed. “They’ve driven me to this. To drinking. Listen, Alice. Listen: I’m drinking.” Carly held her glass up to the phone; ice clinked around. “Hear that? Booze. Vodka. I’m drinking, because I don’t give a fuck anymore.”