In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  “Why do you think?”

  “I don’t know. When I first met her, at Lincoln Center, she just started telling me everything. She used to be rich, she used to be happy. I was there with this old girlfriend, some woman I hadn’t seen in years, married and divorced since our relationship. I was getting two glasses of champagne for us, and I stood with Alice in line. She just went on and on, as though I could somehow help.”

  “Well, you could.”

  “Sure, but why would I?”

  “I find people like that annoying,” Harriet said.

  “But she wasn’t annoying.”

  “Because she’s so pretty, that’s why.”

  “I dropped off the woman I brought to the concert, and driving home, I had to double back.”

  “Had to, or wanted to?” Harriet asked, smiling.

  “Had to. Alice was out of my thoughts. But when I passed Lincoln Center, there was Alice, still standing by that bus stop surrounded by a crowd, but shivering in the night. She was really shivering, Harriet. Cabs were going by. She had her arms folded together, and she was trembling in the night, and she was too poor to hail a cab.”

  “How did you feel when you saw her? Love at first sight.”

  “I felt utterly sorry for her. I can’t tell you. Obviously, she was someone who’d worked all her life, met with early success, and now was nowhere. I wouldn’t have been able to drive by her and then fall asleep that night.”

  “Why’d she let you give her a ride?”

  “Oh,” he said, “she’d heard of me. How I rescued that boatload of drowning lawyers. She felt safe.”

  “And you pitied her.”

  “I never thought I’d wind up married to her. I was rescuing a sad street urchin from the cold. I was just driving her home. And only when she was in the car with me did I realize something about her, something I can’t even really describe. I thought she was a person who deserved to live a remarkable life. And I was lucky to know her.”

  “She was someone who didn’t need you,” Harriet said.

  “But thought she did,” Maurow said. “And I was glad that she was deluded.”

  “And you rescued her from everything, just the way you rescued all those drowning lawyers.”

  “The metaphor for my life. Those lawyers were lucky I rescued them. But for Alice, I don’t know. I sometimes feel I’ve taken her strength from her. She could have saved herself, but she doesn’t know it.”

  “When you do bad things, Maurow, you’re wracked with guilt. Even when you do good things, you’re filled with angst. It’s sort of funny.”

  “Driving her back to her sad little home,” Blake went on, “I just listened to her talk, and I was sorry when the drive was over. And I was also sorry that I was — I thought — too old for her.” He shook his head, embarrassed at having told this story, and to have explained how his unforeseen passion had grown into something genuine and undeniable. “So strange,” he added, “how things like this happen.”

  A few hours later, they were submerged in alcohol and also immersed even more drunkenly in trivia — the first words Maurow ever uttered to Harriet, and her acerbic reply, what Harriet had ordered at the first meal they shared together, the first movie they ever saw together (and their disparate reactions — Harriet thought it was a work of genius, but Blake fell asleep), the first Christmas they spent together, the first time Maurow met Harriet’s parents, and Harriet’s off-putting introduction to Maurow’s old man. When Harriet could no longer speak in coherent sentences, she tried to stand, holding onto Maurow’s shoulder, but she stumbled and fell. Maurow stood, hoisted her up, and, arms about each other for support, they staggered the few yards along the beach to the main house. Inside, Harriet sat down in a chair in the front parlor, shut her eyes, and didn’t move. Maurow leaned against a wall, slid down to the floor, and stayed there until morning.

  The next morning, when he woke up, Harriet was staring at him quizzically.

  “When did you turn against the war in Vietnam?”

  Maurow stopped to think. Harriet was kneeling on the floor. She’d taken off his shoes and socks, and she was massaging his left foot. It felt good, Harriet digging her fingers into his skin. He was quite sure that she had never done it while they were married, but now it was almost thoughtless, like brushing one’s teeth in the morning. It must have been a Pointer ritual.

  “The war,” Harriet asked. “When did you turn against it?”

  “Yeah, I heard you,” he said, yawning. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Why does it matter why I want to know?”

  “I’m just wondering.”

  “I want to know because I want to know. I think it was an important moment in history. I want to know your feelings.”

  “Okay. Let me try to remember. I guess the answer is that I never officially turned against the war. I leave those questions to the experts. I guess I never liked it. Who could like a war? But I figured if I went out into the streets and yelled and screamed, the next thing I knew, we’d pull out and then lose Australia or something. I didn’t want that on my hands.”

  Harriet didn’t say a word, just stared back at him. His response seemed to bother her.

  A short distance out to sea, Harriet and Blake pulled on their masks, stuck snorkels in their mouths, jumped off their boat, and swam out to a coral reef, still anchored to the same random spot after all these years. They dove down a few feet below the surface, hovered about in the middle of a school of bright yellow fish that swam by without concern. They ran out of air simultaneously and floated back up.

  Harriet pulled her head above the water, grabbed Blake’s shoulder to get his attention. “Do you think they remember me?” she asked.

  “I think,” Maurow said, shouting over the surf, “that they’ve been missing you and missing you.”

  “Here’s something that will embarrass you,” Harriet said, sitting on the edge of the boat as they roared back to the dock. “Sometime ten years from now, you’ll be out with your wife, and with a couple of kids, right? Little beautiful kids who could be in commercials or something, kids who look like little Blakes and little Alices, running around looking beautiful and smiling and laughing. You’ll still do all that stuff, racing through the park, dying your hair. Hair implants, or whatever you do. Health food, right? Maybe you’ll get a face lift, so that when you’re hanging around with your fortyish wife, people won’t stare. But I’ll really look my age. You know, people these days insist I look ‘divine,’ or ‘handsome,’ a compliment you can make about a woman my age. But, even if they’re telling me the truth and not just being kind, this is still the last little reprieve that I’ve got. After a few years, I’ll collapse. I’ll be fat, I’ll bet, and I’ll be old. I’ll just be an old fat wrinkled lady. When you see me, you’ll nearly have a heart attack, even though you’ve been doing all this stuff to keep your ticker healthy. Your kids will say, Who’s that? Your wife will know something’s up, but she’ll try to make a joke. Daddy’s just shocked at how ugly that lady is. Really catty, right? Because she’ll know that I must be someone you bonked at one time or another. You won’t be able to defend me. You’ll try to laugh and then you’ll start stammering, and it will just be embarrassing all around. Your kids will wonder about it their whole lives, and after you and Alice are dead, sometimes they’ll reminisce about that day and wonder who I was.”

  Blake didn’t even smile at this. “No,” he said. “I don’t know, maybe we’ll adopt. Alice and I decided to marry when she got pregnant, and then ... you know, whatever it was. The kid was ... you know. Whatever.” He shrugged. “Now she can’t have any kids. At first, she wondered what the baby — or fetus, or whatever — looked like. But then she stopped talking about it. Maybe stopped thinking about it. I don’t know.”

  Harriet sighed, and she waited a long time before she said anything. Beautiful little laughing kids who looked like Blake and also like Alice running through a sunny day — that image melted out of her mind.
Suddenly, those kids were dead.

  “Sorry, buster,” she said. “I was just trying to tell a funny story at my own expense.” She wondered whether, unconsciously, she had told the story as a roundabout way of asking Blake why he and Alice were childless. “Change the story,” she said. “They’re your adopted kids.”

  “Maybe.” He steered the boat, slowing down as they approached the dock. “I used to bring it up every once in a while, but it made Alice cry. So I don’t mention it anymore.”

  Harriet could think of nothing to say, so she just nodded, and she turned away, letting the water run through her fingers as the boat cut into the waves.

  That night, Carlo brought them their dinner, still warm, on a silver platter under a silver cover. They sat at a little table at the edge of the water, their candle flickering behind a big glass wind-protector, and they watched Carlo disappear into the darkness.

  “Your wife doesn’t understand you,” Harriet said suddenly. “She doesn’t realize how silly you are.”

  He nodded. “No, she doesn’t. No one ever understood that the way you did.”

  She laughed, and he smiled a little.

  “She must respect you,” Harriet said, “the way the young respect the old.”

  Harriet took his hand.

  “Would you have married Alice if she hadn’t gotten pregnant?” she asked. “I mean, if you want to answer that question.”

  “No,” he said.

  “No what?”

  “No, I wouldn’t have married her. And no, I don’t want to answer that question.” Then he paused. “That’s terrible, and unfair to Alice. I didn’t expect to get married. I wasn’t looking to get married. Had she not become pregnant, I wouldn’t have married her, I suppose. It wouldn’t have been right for her. Still, that her pregnancy pushed me into a relationship for which I hadn’t planned doesn’t mean that I regret my marriage.” Very careful, very well-chosen words. He felt like a presidential spokesman.

  “You went through so many years before Alice. Lots of women, I assume.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I guess,” he added. Then, into the wind: “I don’t know what ‘lots’ would be.”

  More quietly, Harriet asked, “What were you waiting for, Blake?”

  He frowned, and he kept quiet.

  “Blake.”

  He nodded, turned to her, waited. But she had nothing more to say to that, just his name and a little gasp caught somewhere in her windpipe. Maurow smiled very gently, almost guiltily, and then either he grabbed her or she grabbed him, or they both reacted to an invisible current in the air that hit each of them right there with a chemical or a smell or a little tickle, and they collided not like shooting stars but like two big old bears falling together with a passion grown tired and sluggish after months or years or even decades of hibernation. Harriet’s kisses on his neck felt the same, and different, fueled by the same intense affection but older and softer and slower, like Harriet herself. The candle tumbled to the beach and went out with a hiss in the sand.

  Later that night, in bed, in complete darkness, she said, “I wish we could stay on this island forever.” It was a whisper, but her voice was very loud in his ear.

  Staring at the ceiling: “Harriet, so do I.”

  “Don’t just leave me and go away forever, Maurow. Okay?”

  He nodded. Then, realizing that she could not see him nodding, he grunted yes.

  “Maybe,” she suggested, “we could do this once a year. You could run off, and we could go somewhere exotic once a year. You know. Eventually your wife would figure everything out, but maybe she wouldn’t even care. One of those things. One of those things that no one could mind or disapprove of.”

  “Hmmm.” It didn’t sound like a very good idea.

  The next morning, Alice and Eden floated around the pool on inflated rafts, passing each other every once in a while, holding out their hands and letting their fingers touch as they drifted by. There was no wind and the water was perfectly still. Alice was drinking a mimosa with a little champagne, and Eden was drinking a mimosa with a lot of champagne.

  As she floated past Eden, the sun came out from behind a cloud, and Alice asked, “Have you told your parents?”

  Eden paused for a long time. Alice could tell that she was trying to ignore the question. Eden wasn’t breathing.

  “I said,” Alice went on, in a slightly louder voice, “have you told your parents?”

  Eden let out her breath. Looked around the pool, and off into the distance, as though Alice might have been addressing someone else.

  “Told my parents what?” she said at last. She sounded as though she were trying to pretend that she honestly hadn’t understood the question.

  “You know.”

  “What?”

  It wasn’t in Alice’s nature just to shut up unless she thought there were some reason to shut up, and so Alice kept speaking.

  “You know what I mean,” Alice said. She didn’t want to spell it out; she wanted Eden either to say that, yes, her parents knew all about it, or no, her parents did not know all about it.

  “No,” Eden insisted, “I don’t know what you mean,” even though she did know, and Alice knew from her agitated tone that she knew, and Eden knew that Alice knew she knew, but still she feigned ignorance.

  Eden’s raft wobbled back and forth, threatening to flip her into the pool.

  “‘Come out’ to your parents,” Alice said. “Have you?”

  “No, I haven’t ‘come out’ to my parents.” Her muscles tense, her face covered with absolute disgust. “I haven’t ‘come out’ to anyone, because I have no place to ‘come out’ of. I’m not a lesbian.”

  “Not a lesbian.” Alice thought about this a moment. “What would you be? Bisexual? Aren’t bisexual women considered lesbians? Or isn’t that the right word?”

  “I’m not bisexual,” Eden said, sitting up and leaning over on her side, sinking into the middle of her raft. “Are you bisexual? Alice?”

  “Not strictly speaking, I guess,” Alice said, startled by Eden’s defensiveness. “The last few days, though.... I mean, these last few days, I wouldn’t know what else to call it.”

  “Are you a closeted person, Alice?” Eden asked sharply. “Hiding somewhere in a closet for more than thirty years, just waiting to emerge? Lying to everyone? I don’t think people should spend so much time making grand announcements and explaining themselves to other people — they should just do what they want, without excuses. Are you a dyke, Alice?”

  Alice shook her head. “Can you be temporarily bisexual? Like temporarily insane? I was just swept off my feet there for a while. Like on a wave. On a really big wave that’s still got me in its grip. Pulled out to sea by the undertow.” She smiled. “You’re my little undertow, darling.” She shut her eyes, smiling up into the sun, and she imagined being sucked down by a big wave, sucked down under the water to some other, happier world.

  Eden nodded. “And I’m just floating through life along on a gentle breeze, like a little feather.”

  In the car. “I don’t know,” Alice said, sitting in the passenger seat, watching the world zip by in a green, sun-drenched blur. “You take this too seriously. I like the word ‘lesbian.’ ” They passed by a rich middle-aged couple with a shopping bag, walking down the sidewalk behind a rich young couple with tennis rackets and bright white shorts and tidy-looking sweat on their foreheads. Laughing: “You know what else I like? ‘Lesbo.’ ”

  “Please,” Eden said, pained. She didn’t look at Alice. She stared ahead at the traffic on the little road.

  “It sounds like the sort of thing on sitcoms that makes people spit their coffee across the room. Like, no matter what it meant, it would still sound interesting and funny. Like ‘Buick.’ Or ‘hernia.’ ‘Cleveland.’ ‘Ligula.’ ” She laughed. “If I could call myself a lesbo, I would. Just to hear it fly out of my mouth.”

  Eden pulled over to the side of the road, stopped in a parking space between a store t
hat sold beach umbrellas and a pasta restaurant with tables out on the sidewalk. She kicked the emergency brake and flipped the car into park.

  “Listen, to me,” she said, holding up her pointer finger.

  “What?” Alice said, genuinely baffled. “What’s bothering you?”

  “It’s like you’re calling me names. You’re laughing and calling me names that bother me. I ask you to stop, but you don’t stop. You’re making fun of me like we’re in elementary school. I say stop stop and you keep going, to make my face red, to make me angry and embarrassed.”

  “No, I don’t,” Alice said. “I’m just musing. Like, this is new to me.”

  “ ‘This’ what?”

  “Huh?”

  “What is the ‘this’ that’s new to you, Alice?”

  “You know,” Alice said desperately. “All this stuff. You know. Doing stuff with another girl. You know what I’m talking about. This stuff is the ‘this’ that’s new to me.”

  “Life is new. Everything new that happens is new. You and me together in bed is new — it isn’t old for me and new for you. There is no ‘this.’ You’re not participating in the ritual of an alien culture. Okay? We’re just people, you and me.”

  Quietly: “Okay.” So sharply and righteously rebuked, Alice felt suitably guilty, but she didn’t know exactly why. “We’re people,” she said. “I knew that.”

  On the beach, Alice and Eden lay in reclining chairs under the big shadow of a thatch umbrella they’d rented for fifteen dollars. They split a sandwich from a restaurant at the edge of the sand, and they both drank a strong drink served in an oversized glass, with bits of fruit floating around in it. Two college guys came over and talked to them, smiling and flirting and bragging. Pretty nice-looking guys in boxer bathing suits, with tans that were perfectly fashionable for the moment, just dark enough but not too dangerous. After a while, they said good-bye and left, and Alice wondered why, and she wondered if Eden wondered why these boys were leaving. Alice wanted to call them back; she wanted to flirt with them more vigorously, and dance with them at sunset, and keep them with her as long as she could. She stared at them as they walked away, at their broad shoulders, their light-brown backs. She stared at their butts as they walked. “If I were free again — if I could just catch Blake with another woman,” Alice said as she watched them walk away, and the unexpected longing in her own voice embarrassed her, and she laughed. An hour later, as the sun began to fade, Alice and Eden both ran into the ocean. At first they were swimming along together, fingers touching frequently, but after a while Alice dove under a forming wave, and she left Eden behind. Swimming farther out to sea, she even saw some fish that scurried up close to her, close enough to touch (though she was afraid to touch them) and when she put her head above water, Eden was back on the shore, shading her eyes with her hand, scanning the horizon. Eden looked tiny; Alice had swum out too far. Treading water, she raised a hand above her head. Eden breathed a sigh of relief, and she waved back, urgently. Alice dove under the waves, and she swam back to shore.