In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  “It’s seven in the morning out there,” Alice said. “Carly, you’re drinking at 7 a.m.?”

  “I’ve been drinking all night!” Carly shouted. “I haven’t been to sleep! See? They’ve made me so crazy with their torture and cruelty that I’ve stayed up all night destroying myself!”

  Carly stopped talking; Alice could hear her chugging her vodka; glug glug glug, really loud on the phone.

  “What’s wrong, Carly?” Alice said, hoping the film version of the Andrea novels wasn’t in jeopardy — then upset at herself for hoping such a selfish thing.

  Now Carly sounded even drunker. She began muttering, theatrically, and she must have known that she was not making sense, but eventually Alice gleaned some meaning. Trouble on the set of Carly’s TV show. The whole cast, the big gang of twenty-something high-schoolers, had gone en masse to the producer’s office, to complain about their co-star. They’d threatened to walk away and to bring the show to a screeching halt, unless something were done. They’d called Carly an “asshole,” and a “bitch.” Some other things like that. The producers had met with Carly, had told her to stop treating the other stars abusively, to stop bossing them around, to become more of a team player, or she would be fired. In response, Carly stormed off and went on a drinking binge.

  “I wanna ask ya’,” Carly said, sounding like a drunk girl in some slapstick 1930s comedy. “Wha’ would Andrea do?”

  Alice had a quick answer. “She’d stop drinking, she’d sober up, she’d apologize to everyone, she’d keep her job, and she’d make that TV movie we’ve been planning.”

  “Apologize.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.”

  Carly sounded better now, suddenly more sober.

  “Good,” Alice said.

  Tentatively, Carly said, “I just have one more question for you, Alice.”

  “Yes?”

  “Sergio wants me back. What would Andrea do?”

  Of course, Alice automatically picked up the phone to call Eden, to laugh at Carly and to share this piece of inside dirt about one of the most popular teenage soap operas on the air. But then she put down the phone.

  “The next time Carly calls me to bother me with some stupid problem,” Alice said, “I’m going to tell her that I wrote the character of Michelle with someone in mind, and that she should cast my friend Grace.”

  Toby blinked and looked at his wine, looked at the light shining through his wine. “Why don’t you leave that alone?” he asked. “This Grace is — who is she?”

  “My masseuse,” Alice said. “And my friend.” Though that wasn’t precisely true. Grace was just Alice’s masseuse. But she felt such deep and tragic sympathy or empathy or pity or something like that whenever she thought of Grace that her feelings for her masseuse bordered on love.

  “Your masseuse.” Toby laughed. Around them in the small restaurant, the din grew louder. The man directly to Alice’s right was talking about starting up a new multi-manager small-cap growth fund. He elbowed Alice when he cut his chicken parmigiana, and he didn’t apologize.

  “Yes,” Alice said again. “My masseuse, and my friend. Toby, she’s so beautiful, and she could have been a famous model or movie star ten years ago or fifteen, but she fell for a guy and gave it all up. Now she’d be just about ready for her mid-life comeback if she’d been famous back then, and she’s just the right age for Michele. I already said I’d put in a good word for her.”

  Toby disagreed. “You can’t save everyone, Alice,” he said.

  The woman to Alice’s left was talking about a stock market computer model she was developing.

  “Alice, why don’t you order something?”

  “I’m not sleeping,” she said. “When I don’t sleep, I can’t eat.”

  “You look awful. Does this happen often?”

  She shook her head. “Not for a long time.” She remembered, and then she stopped remembering.

  “At least try to eat.”

  “Just listen to me a second,” Alice said. “Carly calls me up over every life decision. She talks my ear off over the telephone. She called me a few minutes before I left to come over here. I can just raise the issue.”

  “The second you do, she’ll think you’re interfering. She’ll start to lose interest. She’ll think you’re her confidante because you want something from her, just because she’s a TV star. She’ll think that you’re not really her friend, that you don’t really like her just for herself.”

  “That would be perceptive,” Alice muttered.

  “She’ll start to hate you. She’ll bad-mouth you in the press.” He tried to speak lightly, but Alice could tell he was genuinely worried that she might screw all this up. “You’re going to be rich and famous. You can’t take everyone with you.” With a laugh: “Just me.” He seemed to look at Alice in a new light, to think of her almost as a different person now, as a valuable commodity. Toby raised his wine glass, took a sip that was too loud. Alice wondered if he was famous in publishing circles for this trait, for the rather unnecessary slurping of his wine. She wondered if it had cost him clients and book deals and contacts.

  “Why am I about to be famous?” she asked. “What’s so special about this book? Woman falls for psycho, psycho tries to kill her, she blows him away. Hasn’t it been done before?”

  “No,” he said, “you’re wrong. In this case, it’s completely different. Usually, woman falls madly and genuinely in love, and guy turns out be psycho. But on the other hand, Andrea marries Jake for all the wrong reasons. She’s getting older, she thinks she’s pregnant, he’s got a lot of money. She convinces herself she loves him. Her parents think he’s great. She’s always sort of known otherwise, but she’s convinced herself. She can keep repeating how much she loves him, over and over again, like a mantra, and it will come true. She’ll really love him, he’ll really become the great guy she wants him to be. If it could happen to Andrea, couldn’t it happen to any woman in a time of vulnerability?”

  Alice stared at her agent drinking his wine. “Well,” she said. “Actually, no. It couldn’t happen to any woman, I don’t think.”

  Toby shrugged. “It’s high concept,” he said. That seemed to be that as far as he was concerned. Alice wondered whether people still used that phrase, “high concept.”

  Alice got home, and she wanted to call Eden and make fun of her agent, to laugh about all the agenty stuff he’d done during dinner, to imitate him slurping his wine. But she knew that she couldn’t call her and talk about something like that, the way they’d done just a few weeks ago. They could never again laugh about little things together. Nothing would ever be simple again. Alice made an effort; she picked up the telephone and dialed the first three numerals of Eden’s telephone number. Then she stopped, thought about it for a long time. A recorded voice told her to hang up the phone. Obediently, she hung up.

  That night, Alice sat home, waiting for Blake to call. She didn’t know what she was worrying about. She couldn’t write, and she didn’t know exactly why. She kept thinking about Blake, worrying about his increasingly distant manner, and the mystery of his most recent business trip. She went to the video store and rented some TV movie that Carly had starred in. Crime drama — Carly as a young woman caught up in a romance with a mafia thug. Alice was trying to live vicariously through her most famous fan. Entranced by Carly’s vapid stare, monotone emotion, and flat, perfectly toned midriff. Beautiful, perfect midriff. Carly walking around in her underwear. Was this Andrea — could this be Andrea? At a particularly dramatic moment of the film, when Carly was holding a gun on the thug, making all kinds of strong terrible threats in her tinny little voice, the thug looking scared, the gun shaking and her trigger finger twitching, the telephone rang. The machine clicked on: it was Carly, crying over the phone. While Carly on TV was an exemplar of rather unconvincing feminomacho strength, her voice on the phone was nothing but equally unconvincing sobs. Alice doubted that Carly was even trying to speak coherent Englis
h. Alice didn’t pick up the phone, because the sound of Carly’s crying voice touched her, gave her a sympathetic lump right in the middle of her throat, and she was afraid that if she got on the phone she would cry helplessly along with Carly, and that then the TV star wouldn’t need her anymore, wouldn’t admire Andrea’s strength anymore, wouldn’t want to make the movie. And Alice would never be a best-selling author, and she wouldn’t be famous, and she would be nothing.

  At eleven o’clock, Blake finally called, muttered what seemed to Alice chillingly antiseptic romantic sentiments, and quickly got off the telephone. Thirty seconds after she hung up, the phone rang again. “Hi,” she said, thinking it was Blake, sorry for his brusqueness. Instead, there was a momentary pause, a click, and then someone talking through a machine that distorted the voice — it sounded like an old woman’s voice, a threatening voice, like the villainess in a Disney cartoon, hissing indecent suggestions. Alice hung up the phone, her heart pounding. She couldn’t stand it anymore. She rehearsed what she would say to Eden. She would tell her friend that she was sorry she hadn’t called. And that nothing more needed to be said about anything that had ever happened between them, so far as she was concerned. Eden would quickly agree. Let me tell you some crazy things! Alice would then say, and Eden would say OK, and then they’d talk for a while. Maybe they could go have a nice dinner and not make out or anything. It sounded like a good plan. She pushed pause on the VCR, and Carly froze in place, standing in the middle of the kitchen in a black negligee, a gun in one hand and a cigar in the other.

  When Eden answered the telephone, her voice sounded so strong, and for a moment Alice imagined that their embrace on the terrace had been carefully calculated, that Eden had been waiting for Alice’s most vulnerable, weakest moment before making her move and pulling Alice into her vast underworld of lesbians — the method religious cults used in the 1970s, or drug-crazed hippies in the ‘60s, or Communists just before the McCarthy era. “Hello?” Eden said again, so strong, so assertive. Strong and assertive in a different way. Frightened, Alice hung up the phone without thinking. Then, ashamed, she picked up the phone, hit re-dial. Eden answered: “I have Caller ID, and I know who you are.” A deep angry voice one might use to scare away men. Eden didn’t have Caller ID. It hadn’t come to Manhattan yet. A roomful of laughter bubbled up in the background. Lesbians laughing, Alice thought. She’d interrupted a meeting, or something. She hung up the phone again, the laughter of lesbians, like the cackling of witches, still ringing in her ears. Now that she’d hung up Eden, Alice thought, she could never call her again.

  Alice lay in bed, thinking about Eden laughing, a whole room and Eden laughing at her. Carly called every ten minutes. Alice didn’t turn off the ringer. She just listened to the telephone ring, and she listened to Carly’s messages. Alice just lay there in bed, waiting for Carly to call. Sweat broke out on her brow. Carly called: “Alice, are you there?” Her entire body began dripping sweat. Sweat drenched the sheets. Alice began to tremble. Carly called. “Alice, where are you?” Alice shut her eyes, and she shivered and trembled, listening to Carly’s voice in her room. Alice pictured her sister sitting at the foot of the bed. Alice, where are you? Alice wondered where her sister was, right now. And then she knew. Carroll was here, in her head, feeling the sweat on her body, feeling the sheets stick to her skin, listening to Carly talking on and on and on, filling up her answering machine tape. “Alice, can you hear me?” Carly asked, and Carroll mimicked the TV star, dead-on: Alice, can you hear me.... Alice started laughing, and then Carroll started laughing, and then the two sisters were laughing, Alice lying in bed drenched in salty sweat, Carroll at the edge of the bed, not sitting but just hovering. Staring at her sister, and laughing inside of her head.

  Alice shut her eyes, and sweat dripped down over her eyelids. Carly called again. “Alice, you’re the only one who can help me. You and Andrea are the only people I know who really have their lives together.” Her hair plastered flat against her head, Alice covered her ears, shut her eyes tightly, tried to ignore Carly’s imploring, and her sister’s laughter, so loud in the room and in her head. She tried to sleep.

  After ducking out of Alice’s almost pleading embrace, Maurow hopped in a car that was waiting out front and which sped him efficiently to the airport, where he checked his bags in ten minutes, then stood around at the gate, looking at his watch. He asked the airline to page Harriet, as though she might be wandering through the terminals in some sort of fog. He heard the loudspeaker call her name once, and then again. He telephoned his machine, typed in his code. Nothing. He called his job, listened to messages on his voice mail about some new ad campaign, some new product, some celebrity who wanted to pitch some product. A deal to take over some company was falling through. Finally, a message from Harriet. Plans had changed. She couldn’t make this flight. She was forfeiting the plane ticket, and she would meet him in two days. She said that she was terribly sorry. She actually sounded terribly sorry, too, which touched him. “I will leave you messages on this machine twice a day, and you can listen to them on the other side of the world,” she said. “They will be filled with the affection I feel for you, my little man. And I will join you soon.” Her guilt had brought out the tenderness for which he longed. His disappointment dissolved in glee.

  The in-flight movie on the plane was “Rent-A-Cop,” starring Burt Reynolds and Liza Minelli. Maurow had already seen this movie, on an airplane, several years ago. He wondered idly whether Harriet had seen it. He wondered whether Harriet had seen it on an airplane. He wondered whether Harriet and her husband had gone to see Burt Reynolds movies during Hollywood’s Burt Reynolds era. He peered out the window at the ocean below him, at the tiny caps of white foam so far below. He wondered what Harriet was thinking at that very moment; he wondered whether she were thinking of him.

  Maurow’s plane landed early. He’d never heard of such a thing happening, but there you have it: his plane landed early. He ate dinner at four o’clock at a hotel restaurant, which was right on the beach, a few blocks from the dock from which he would soon set sail to his island. Maurow took a table under a big umbrella a few feet from the sand. There weren’t too many people on the beach this late in the season, and most of those now staggering back to their rooms were colored a painfully bright shade of red that burned Maurow’s eyes.

  A few people remained on the sands. Glistening with oil, a scrawny fifty-year-old man with droopy tits walked the beach in a too-big bathing suit that kept slipping down below his ass-crack. In his left hand he held a video camera; whenever he found himself within a few yards of a topless sunbathing girl, he held the camera up to his face and zoomed in. A hairy old man with a large belly that hung down over thong briefs trudged slowly through the ocean, his arm around a young, pretty woman in a blue bikini. Big fat dick flipping back and forth between monster-size thighs. The guy said something that made the girl laugh, and she reached up and tugged on a fist-size clump of his jungle of chest hair. He laughed a big laugh, which roared over the noise of the ocean. Maurow started adding everything up: How rich was this man? How much money separated him from the video guy? Looking like that, how rich did this man have to be to get a girl like that? And if he was so rich, what was he doing down here off-season? Having reached such an advanced age, and looking like that, and possessed of the irrational desire to show off so much of his desiccated, obese body in public, how rich did the guy have to be before he could attain a girl like that? (Then again, maybe she was a whore. He would need to be only a little bit rich.) Before he could stop himself, Maurow idly wondered what sort of mental calculus ran through the minds of tourists on the canal banks when Alice stole a kiss from him on a gondola in Venice. And he imagined what a touching contrast he and Harriet would have made, sitting here at this little table beside the sea, holding hands as they drifted, uncomplaining, into old age.

  Maurow walked one half mile, past old hotels, cheap, local-filled restaurants alongside glitzy, spanking new tourist h
otels and small narrow stalls stocked with t-shirts and colorful, mass-produced clay parrots. Maurow reached the dock, which now abutted a high-priced seafood restaurant. A portly, dark-skinned man sitting idly in the sun spotted Maurow, stared for a moment or two, then sprang to attention. Once Carlo had been young. But now he was old. As Maurow approached, and Carlo could confirm his old boss’s identity, his face broke out in an amused smile, as though the idea of Blake Maurow actually growing up into a middle-aged man was the funniest sort of joke.

  Carlo’s father had worked for Maurow’s father, and then Carlo had worked for Maurow. In the contract for use of the island, Maurow had stipulated that Carlo should always have work, and, in the event of his death, his wife or child should have the option of continuing the service. The Maurow family had provided a bit of Carlo’s livelihood since his birth, and Maurow assumed without really thinking about it that this would always be the case. He didn’t know how it had come to pass; he had never wondered how his father had found Carlo’s father, nor how and why they had forged such a bond of loyalty and affection.

  They spoke briefly and awkwardly, Maurow trying to remember why they had liked each other back in the 1960s. Maybe it was Harriet. Maybe Harriet was why they had once liked each other so much, Harriet a sort of electric conductor, translating Blake’s personality for Carlo’s world. But now, the effort seemed to exhaust them both, and so they switched to essentials; the number of deliveries of supplies Carlo would make to the island during Maurow’s stay, the condition of the boat swaying at the dock over there, the time of departure, the state of the generator and the radio. Carlo nodded and agreed to every request. Then, almost half-heartedly, he added, “It’s good to have you back, Mr. Maurow.” Perhaps hearing the effort in his own voice, he added a broad, unconvincing smile.