In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  “You always called me Blake,” Maurow said.

  “Right,” Carlo said. “I called your father Mr. Maurow, when I was a little boy. You look like your father, now.”

  Maurow thought about this. “It’s like a visit from my father, risen from the grave. Not like a return of your old friend Blake?”

  Carlo tried to laugh. Maurow didn’t know why. He didn’t think he had said anything funny. He realized now that he was smiling involuntarily, smiling stupidly into Carlo’s awkward laugh.

  Carlo steered the small rig, as the island gradually came into view, the wide beach surrounded by palm trees, and the buildings set back from shore on which daily and nightly parties were once held for tourists taking a day cruise from the mainland. “Once many people came here every day,” he said.

  “What was it like?” Maurow asked.

  Carlo reminisced for a moment about the parties on the island over the years. Insisted that back in the late seventies, sometimes complete strangers would meet in the night and have sex off in the forest. “But that was the seventies,” he said, by way of explanation, and by way of explaining why it had long ago stopped happening. Maurow didn’t really believe that happened too often, even back in the seventies. “It was always an island filled with sort of phony-baloney happiness,” Carlo said.

  “What do you mean?” Maurow asked.

  “People all would say that if they just lived there, on that island, in those bungalows, they would be happy forever. Everybody thought that.” He smiled at Maurow. “You will be saying that too, very soon.”

  Maurow nodded. “I will, I’m sure. But I think it’s true. For me.”

  “It’s not true,” Carlo said, and Maurow didn’t argue; the subject seemed closed. Carlo steered the boat a little bit east, heading towards the old dock. “Now, hardly anyone comes. Sometimes, rarely, a few people come by to sun-bathe. But mostly, it scares people away. The signs of all the fun from all those years ago.”

  “Only a few years,” Maurow said. Now he could see a large banner, ripped and tattered and flapping in the breeze. WELCOME! the banner shouted, to no one at all. “This island will smile again,” Maurow promised.

  “Okay,” Carlo said, as the boat pulled up to the dock. “Here we are.”

  Carlo’s boat faded away on the horizon, until Maurow could hear nothing. He unlocked the front door of the little building, tossed his bags in the front hall, then walked back outside into the sun.

  He pushed into the overgrowth that had spread around the buildings, and he started walking, trudging through the thick jungle-like forest. Everything was the same, and just a little bit different — trees that he still recognized, little streams flowing through the forest, the one larger river that cut through the island to the east that he came upon as though it were an old friend. Animals scurried about underfoot, and colorful birds darted from branch to branch overhead; the same animals and birds he had chased through the woods fifty years ago; birds and animals whose names he hadn’t known then, and which he didn’t know now.

  He sat by the side of the river, just watching it flow by, for a very long time, until dusk began to descend, then he turned south and followed the water until it emptied out into the ocean, then walked barefoot in the surf until, in darkness, he returned to the cluster of buildings huddled on the western shore. He noticed with a bit of surprise that he could feel a big, comfortable smile on his lips, and he wondered when it had begun. It wasn’t the composed, almost contrived smile he pushed himself to wear for associates and friends and even for Alice; it was a child’s smile, the smile of a creature who smiles even though doesn’t know that he’s supposed to. Captain Wombat’s smile. He wished that he had a picture of his smile in all its stages during the afternoon; he wished that he could have watched it grow.

  All alone on his island, lost in his own smile, a sudden, unexpected impulse grabbed him, and he threw off his clothes and fell to the sand, stretching out his arms above his head. The waves crashed over him, strong and rough from the chilly night breezes.

  Naked on the shore, facing the sea in the dark black-blue night, Blake Maurow thought: What a very atypical thing for me to do.

  Shortly after Eden kissed Alice, Eden accepted an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine to interview some movie director out in Los Angeles with respect to some Chinese-related film. An hour later, a car rushed her out to the airport, and a few hours after that her plane touched down in California.

  A year earlier, she’d written a magazine profile about a female performer, a young woman who composed angry hostile songs bashing men, or bashing a certain man. Eden had been chosen as the reporter because the singer was half-Vietnamese, and the print media viewed Eden as a spokesperson for the new generation of young, assimilated Westernized Asian women. The singer had been in a Los Angeles band performing hard-edged but tuneful ditties written by her boyfriend, but had dropped him when record executives had beckoned. She’d left one song on her album written by the ex-boyfriend, but otherwise kept him out of her life entirely. As part of the article, Eden had interviewed the abandoned boyfriend by telephone. His name was Derek. He’d apparently enjoyed something about their conversation, because after that he’d been calling her pretty consistently. It was an ambiguous thing — he’d felt comfortable leaving messages with Roger when Eden had been out. Roger had mocked him as “the rock star.” But Eden liked their conversations, and she found his near-stardom touching. He was a footnote to pop history. He was there, already, guaranteed, a bona fide footnote. That was something, anyway. So from the airplane, a little bit drunk, she called him in his car. He was stuck in a traffic jam, but he sounded happy. “They give me something to fill my day, traffic jams!” he shouted over the noise of the wind. “Come see me, Eden! Let me put a face to the soul!” He thought he knew her soul. That was sweet. Incorrect, but sweet.

  The next day, in the afternoon, she interviewed the film director over at the studio. To the interview, Eden wore a very short dress, something she thought made her look like a reporter from MTV, which is what she thought reporters out in LA looked like. The director was the sort of fellow who seemed long ago to have given up paying attention to his appearance. His hair was uncombed, he wore a plaid shirt and baggy corduroy pants, all of which hung loosely off his lanky frame. He was helpful and sincere and frail-looking. Insecure with his English (which was generally excellent), he was the type who thinks that anyone, at any time, can knock over his house of cards. At once, she envied him his success, and pitied him his inability to revel in it.

  After that, she drove and drove, and after a while she wasn’t sure if she was still in Los Angeles — but she was never sure whether she was still in Los Angeles — and she pulled into the driveway of Derek’s house just as dusk was falling. He had a little house tucked away under an orchard of grapefruit trees that spread onto the adjoining property and off into the setting sun.

  Derek was less handsome than she’d imagined, but less ugly than she’d feared. He dressed well. He had nice, clean shiny brown hair. He was lean and a little tanned; young, maybe younger than Eden; and he had wide blue eyes. He seemed self-consciously reflective. His smile was shy, infrequent and brief, and when he did smile it was as though he thought it was expected, and was willing but unenthusiastic about complying.

  Derek drove her all over the place. He took her to a restaurant filled with pretty smiling big-white-toothed people in pretty Los Angeles clothes. He drove her to a big cavernous club that looked like the sort of thing one were likely to see in a movie set in Los Angeles. In the club, people came up to Derek and slapped him on the back and smiled at him and acted friendly, but then kept their distance. Derek seemed proud of the attention, but Eden figured they were all just playing it safe, just in case Derek ever made a comeback. Derek guzzled ginger ale the whole night. Eden wondered why, but thought it might be rude to ask.

  Back at his house. He was sitting on the couch, resting his guitar in his lap, holding it with a certa
in familiar affection, but not strumming or even touching the strings.

  “Do you play in a band?” Eden asked, and he shook his head, and she asked, “Are you writing any music?” and he said, “No, I’ve given up writing music,” and she asked what he was doing now, and he shrugged and said, “Nothing. I sort of live in the past. My life is filled with might-have-beens. I imagine a better place. That sort of thing. My parents gave me this house. I have enough money to live and to eat and all of that. Some people still like me. That’s sort of a nice feeling. That’s kind of my life. I was almost somebody very famous and important. That’s just who I am.”

  “Does this ever frustrate you?” she asked. “I mean, how do you keep going?”

  “I don’t keep going,” he said. “You see, Eden, I can’t write without her. She is the voice to my words. Together, we achieved perfect artistic synthesis. There’s no point, now. I have enough money to eat and live for the rest of my life. You see?”

  He had thought this out so carefully.

  “No,” she said. “You’re wrong. You have to struggle, to swim against the current. I will fight and fight and fight before I go down in history as a failure.”

  “But you’re convinced,” he said, “that you will go down in history as a failure. Why spend all that energy fighting?”

  “Not convinced,” Eden said. “Although I recognize the likelihood, the odds. Still: Life is a struggle, a constant effort. If you think that you need her to make great music, you should try to convince her, you should not give up.”

  “She lives in a mansion with the head of her record company, with servants and swimming pools and tennis courts, and ... god, things I can’t imagine.” He shook his head. “That’s over. She’s another species. She’s not the same person, now.”

  Eden sighed. “So what fills your brain, if not your music?”

  Holding his guitar close to him, he leaned forward, and he replied, “I think about the next life. That gives me comfort. I think, things came so close to working out in this life, I’m sure I’ll get another chance next time around. I will meet up with her again. Something inside of her will click — she will realize that she made a terrible mistake, and she won’t want to make such a mistake again. So she’ll be drawn to me, right? She won’t know why. And she’ll follow me, and I’ll let her follow me. I don’t know who we’ll be. Maybe she’ll be a rocket ship commander, and I’ll be a cyborg. But within a day, or an hour, or even just a few minutes, she’ll be singing my words.”

  Eden thought about this philosophy. It was a beautiful story, but it didn’t seem like a good idea. It disappointed her; she liked him less. Maybe she didn’t like him at all anymore. The wind blew through the orchard outside, and the grapefruits bobbed about in the flood lights.

  “Do you want to stay over?” he asked suddenly.

  Eden shook her head. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ve got a hotel room. It’s free, and all that.”

  He nodded. “If I was famous, you would stay over.”

  Eden didn’t know how to respond, but she didn’t think he was right. “I don’t know what I’d do if you were famous,” she said. “I don’t think we’d be sitting here, like this, in this exact situation, if you were famous.”

  “Do you want a ride?”

  “My car’s parked out front of your house.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “Oh yeah. I remember.”

  “You’re waiting for your next life. You’re waiting for everything bad that’s happened to you to just erase itself.”

  “Yeah.” He smiled a little.

  “I have no place here,” Eden said. “See? Sitting around while you wait to die? No fun. Next time you’ve got a girl over here, just lie.”

  “Maybe I’ll get over it someday. I’ve never been able to stick with any one thing for very long.”

  “But tonight, you don’t really care if I stay or go. You’re so crazy in love with someone else.”

  He shook his head. “You’re wrong. You look really good in that little black dress.”

  Eden thought. “Really worked you up?”

  He nodded. Lazily. “Yeah, I guess. Men are optically oriented, you know. Women are tactile.”

  She leaned forward in the big chair, let her dress slip further up her leg. “I have a book contract,” she said. “People say my novel will be a classic. In print for decades. Maybe for centuries. Would you like to play a scene in my book? So that years later, you can open up to the page, look at it, and know that it’s you?”

  Outside, in the cool breezes, standing under the smog and the big flood lights, blazing out over the grapefruit trees. As the light played with the shadows, the grapefruits looked obscene, like hideously deformed buttocks, breasts and testicles.

  “This will be our secret, right?” he asked.

  “It will be our secret. I’ll give you an acknowledgment in the book if you want. But I won’t say what for.”

  “So what do I have to do?”

  “Whatever you would do anyway. Just let me sit there and watch, and take notes.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Nothing. You have to pretend you’re alone. Can you do that?”

  “I guess so. Then I’ll be in the book.”

  “Yeah. But talk to me first, so I’ll know sort of what you’re thinking.”

  “Talk to you. What do you want to know?”

  “The basics. How does it work?”

  He stammered out an explanation. “You know. Come home. Take off my clothes. You know.”

  “You can only do it when you’re naked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does that vary? I mean, do different guys do it differently? Do some just unzip their flies?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t know,” she agreed. “How would you know what other guys do, after all?”

  He laughed, embarrassed.

  “Then what’s going on in your head?”

  “Thinking.”

  “And what will you think about?”

  “You in that dress. Your legs.”

  “You would just picture my legs? And that would do it?”

  “Yeah. That would be about it.”

  “Would you think about us doing it?”

  “No,” he said. “I’d just picture your legs.”

  “Would you think about feelings, emotions?”

  “No,” he said. “Look, I told you already. You have nice legs. That’s enough. Come inside. I’ll show you.”

  “Should I just ignore you?”

  “Just ignore me.” Eden sat on a big chair in the middle of his living room.

  “Okay,” he said. He stared at Eden. She had a notepad in her lap, and a pen in her left hand, poised to begin taking notes. She stared back intently.

  “Pretend I’m not here,” Eden said.

  He nodded. He just stood there, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

  “I’m having trouble with the illusion,” he said.

  “Pretend,” Eden said, “that the house is completely empty. Except for you.”

  Derek smiled, his face turning red.

  “You’ve got your pen in your left hand,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You left-handed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh,” Derek said. “How about that. A lefty.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You know what?” Derek said.

  “What?”

  “I have no sense of smell. You’re left-handed, and I have no sense of smell.”

  He just stood there, staring at Eden. Then he tried to look away. He took a deep breath, and then looked back at her.

  “Just ignore me,” Eden pleaded.

  He shrugged. “Listen, I better leave, and come back in again.” He turned out all the lights, left the house, locked the door, hopped in his car and drove off. Eden sat in the dark.

  Two minutes later, Eden thought she heard the car rumbling into the driveway. But then who
ever it was continued on down the road. After a while, she was sure she heard a key in the lock. But it was nothing. The house rattling, all by itself. She sat there in the dark, pen in hand, pad in lap.

  Later, she drove back to the hotel. She tried to imagine what it would have been like, had Derek returned, had she not sat and waited for him in the dark for two and a half hours. She longed for beautiful and poetic similes and metaphors that almost didn’t seem to pause in her head before alighting on her keyboard, Derek’s lusty nakedness suddenly and completely transformed into the stuff of high art. The way things used to be, when Eden could type up a page, and then another, and then another, her entire novel seeming to swim out from underneath her, like a beautiful swan completely out-of-control plummeting down white water rapids. Years ago, nights when Eden didn’t go to sleep, chapter after chapter simply blown out of her head by the force of her own imagination. She tried to imagine it — Derek’s self-lust — but she could not, and the shame she felt at the sluggishness of her own brain kept her up worrying and fretting until she had only two hours before she’d have to drop off her car, and then she just turned on the bedside lamp, worried that even if she were able to fall asleep she wouldn’t be able to wake up, and that she’d miss her airplane. She didn’t know what would happen if she missed her airplane. She didn’t know where she would stay in L.A., or how she would scrape together the money to fly back to New York. So she just stayed awake. She called for a pot of coffee from room service, then another. Somewhere in the back of her head, she realized, too, that she would never see Derek again. She would never receive another gently flirting telephone call from him. Many days later, she realized that this was an idea that made her sad.