In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  At night, after dinner, they walked through a little clearing in the woods behind Blake’s house, then along the deserted beach. Alice carried a bottle of wine in her left hand, and she took a sip every once in a while, and every once in a while Eden took a sip of the wine too. They were both dressed in cutoff jeans and a white t-shirt, and, each with long black hair tied behind her head, they looked from a distance like identical twins.

  Sitting down on the beach, Alice asked, “Did flirting with those boys make you feel better?”

  “Nope.”

  She sunk her feet into the sand. Eden sat down next to her and put an arm around her.

  “Listen,” she said, slurring her words just a little bit, “I was gonna marry Roger. Happily gonna marry Roger. I liked everything male about him, Al. The hair on his chest. The hair on his legs. Maybe I might have preferred someone taller. I loved his poetry.” She shook her head. “And I loved his voice. For a while, he was poetry walking. More than a person, a sort of beautiful graceful thing. I think about it, sometimes, what a great guy he was. I close my eyes and I imagine that I have him back as he once was; I fantasize about him whispering his poetry in my ear, I pretend that I can feel his breath as he’s whispering to me. He was a great guy at one time. A great guy.”

  Alice nodded. “But you’ve done stuff with girls before,” she insisted. “Because you said to me, ‘That’s how this works.’ ”

  “Yeah.” Somewhere far in the distance, a man was laughing. The first laughing voice was then joined by a second, somebody very drunk laughing even more loudly at the other end of the beach. Eden looked bothered by this, as though they were laughing at her. “But I’ve also done stuff with boys,” she said. “And I received very good marks in health class. And I’m an avid reader. So you can ask me anything, I’ll tell you how it works.”

  “Yes, but the way you said, That’s how this works, it was like you were the expert who was going to guide me, which made me feel better. You know? I thought it was like if you were a clock-maker, and you were going to show an apprentice how to make a clock. That’s how this works, you might say. And when you got angry, it was as though I’d called you a clock-maker, and you screamed at me that you also build bridges.” She shrugged. “That’s just how it seemed to me.”

  “I guess so,” Eden sighed. “But I’m so confusing to myself, it makes me angry when someone tries to sum me up in a word.” She turned to her friend. “Chink, for example, as though I was any different from any other kid growing up in England. ‘Cause I was a little genius kid, when I started skipping grades, kids my age called me genius or brain, intended as an insult. Then I tried not to be so smart, stopped working so hard, and a teacher told my mom that I was lazy. That’s all she could say about me: lazy, as though that was all there was. People were so mean that I got too shy to talk, so when I got to college at the tender age of fifteen, people called me a bitch. A stuck-up bitch. One night on your balcony you asked to be kissed. So I kissed you. You turned up at my apartment begging me to take you to bed, so I took you to bed. Now, you call me a dyke. Some thanks.”

  Laughing, Alice shook her head adamantly. “I know the tragedy of being too damn complex, dear. And you’re wrong, Eden. You called me a dyke. I called you a lesbo.” After some thought, and prodded by Alice’s rather insistent giggles, Eden began to find this funny too, or pretended to find it funny, and so she gave up and laughed along with Alice, and then Alice put her arms around Eden, Eden moved in closer, and Alice kissed Eden or Eden kissed Alice, and then a moment later they were lying together on the sand on the beach behind Blake Maurow’s house, drowning each other in whispered insults and passionate kisses.

  “Like the President of the United States in his second term,” Alice said, “I’m thinking about my legacy.” She flipped over in bed. “How will history remember me? I’m thinking that maybe I’ll have Andrea sleep with another woman. Then solve a mystery, of course. Carly Barrows will be part of the first girl-girl romantic mystery crime solving team, and it will make television history. All the high school girls around the country who admire her and want to wear her shade of lip gloss will start having sex with their best friends. When they write my autobiography, years after Blake’s death, they’ll say that you were my muse.” She smiled, thinking about all this. “Just kidding,” she added.

  Eden sighed, and she rested one hand on Alice’s thigh, just settled it there, comfortably. “I’ll write a book when I’m middle-aged about my affair with a married woman,” she said. “I’ll have a couple of kids and a handsome young husband and the book will be very loosely fictionalized so that everyone will know that it’s really about me, but so that I can still be coy. People will wonder who the woman is, but I’ll never tell. Someone will make it into a very sexy movie, and two famous movie stars will be in it, one sort of young and starting up, and the other a little older and past her prime, and they’ll both be naked and kiss each other, and it’ll be the sort of thing that has to be edited from its original X rating, doesn’t do too well in theaters in America but makes all its money in Europe and is a big smash hit in U.S. video stores in its unedited version. When you’re sixty-five, you’ll rent it and take it over to the old person’s home where Blake lives, and it’ll get him all hot and bothered for the first time in decades, and then you’ll thank me all over again.”

  At four in the morning, still half-awake, drifting in and out of sleep, both of them wrapped tightly together.

  “Whatever happens,” Alice said, “you’ll stay my best friend, right? This won’t embarrass us so much that we won’t be able to talk to each other again?”

  “Hope not,” Eden said. “I’ll still talk to you. If you don’t pass me on the street with your rich husband and turn up your nose and ignore me.” Moonlight or street lamps reflected off the Venetian blinds in zigzag patterns across Eden’s bare shoulder.

  “What will we do? Will it be a little long-ago memory that we’ll joke about together all the time, little surreptitious winks when we’re out with our husbands? Or when this ends, will it be something that we try to forget and never mention again, just rewinding the tape and erasing all of this? Or could this possibly be something that won’t end, that will last our whole lives?”

  Alice smiled at this last idea, that she and Eden would be together forever, an illicit extramarital relationship more important and meaningful than her marriage, just as their friendship already was. She hadn’t considered this before.

  “Is that possible?” Alice asked, sounding amused at the concept.

  “I don’t know,” Eden said. “We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? You want to outline your whole life. We’ll work it out.” She smiled, let her lips rest for a moment on Alice’s mouth, then kissed her cheek, then her ear. “Don’t think about it,” she whispered, very close.

  Alice fell asleep for a while, and then she woke up to Eden’s voice.

  “Alice,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” in a quieter whisper.

  “Remember, when you came to my door, and you were scared?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said that you love me,” Eden said, her voice far-away, as though she were talking in her sleep, speaking to Alice from inside a dream, a place where Eden was more honest. “Remember?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “But you said, ‘In so many ways.’ ”

  “Right.”

  “And I said that I love you, too.”

  Alice nodded, and Eden could feel her nod, her cheek brushing against Eden’s cheek.

  “What did you mean, ‘In so many ways’?”

  Alice thought. She explained: When she said it, she loved Eden in so many confusing ways that she was lost. Now, she loved her in every way. So she could say the same thing again, but it would mean something different, something better, comforting instead of confusing. That was all.

  Eden said, “Hmmm,” and sounded hugely satisfied by this answer, seemed to find this a beautiful, wonderful sentimen
t, maybe only because she was so soothed and tired and warm.

  Then the doorbell rang, and it was the loudest doorbell either of them had ever heard.

  They tried to ignore it for a while. When it stopped, someone outside started shouting Alice’s name. At first, Alice thought that it was a hysterical woman, but then she realized that it was a frenzied man, shouting in a high-pitched voice.

  “Is that Blake?” Eden asked.

  “Not Blake,” Alice said. “Blake never shouts.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Ignore it? Pretend it never happened? Call the police? I don’t know.”

  After a while, the man started throwing pebbles at windows. At each window, he threw two pebbles, shouted “Alice!” then moved on to another window. After a few tries, he hit the window of the room in which Alice and Eden lay in bed. The pebbles bounced off the window pane, the first pebble with a thud, the second with a ping. “Alice!” the man shouted.

  “I can’t stand it,” Eden said. She got up out of bed, wrapped herself in Blake’s robe, and walked to the window. She heaved it open and leaned out.

  “Who are you?” she called down. She saw a skinny man below, jumping up and down in the darkness. He looked up, and his eyes glowed like a wolf.

  “Alice?” he called, staring up at her. “You’re not Alice!” He seemed angry and disappointed at this discovery, as though Eden were somehow culpable.

  “No!” she shouted. “Who are you?”

  “If Alice is in there, tell her it’s Ewell!” he shouted. “Tell her it’s Ewell, her funny European man!”

  Eden went back to the bed. “It’s your funny European man,” she said.

  Alice nodded, frowning.

  “I’m very surprised by this,” she said, unnecessarily. She could not remember the last time she’d thought of Ewell. It was strange, she supposed, that he had been so completely banished from memory, and she wondered why it was.

  “Who is he?”

  “Some guy,” Alice said. “Some guy I had like one date with years and years ago. I barely remember him.” Alice left out details, like her trans-Atlantic flight to meet him, and the fact that the date had lasted for several sunny days in a little seaside village, and that, as she realized now, he was the man in her dream, sitting in a café, with a certain joie or savoir faire. Still, to Alice, this man’s legacy was like a briefly pleasant twenty-minute coffee break many years earlier that had ended badly.

  “What kind of a name is ‘Ewell’?”

  “I don’t know. Scandinavian.”

  “He’s your funny European man?” Eden asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  “I guess everybody has one,” Eden said, and she laughed.

  At the door, Alice and Eden in robes, standing close together, Ewell on the front steps.

  “It was hard to find you,” Ewell said. “I’m sorry to interrupt your sleep, but I have an important speech tomorrow to the American Medical Association, and I spent the whole day and night tracking you down.”

  Alice stood there, staring at Ewell. He was sillier than she’d remembered, the way he looked, the way his voice sounded, his silly smile, like some big dog. He was still skinny and awkward, he still seemed impossibly shy, even given his effrontery in turning up here in the middle of the night. He seemed a little older, mostly around the eyes, but mostly he seemed the same.

  “I have to talk to you,” he said.

  “Talk,” Alice said, still blocking the doorway.

  “Walk with me out to the beach,” he said. “Please, I came a long way to see you, and I braved hardship, and all of that.”

  Alice thought. She looked at Eden. “Maybe I should just hear this guy out. He won’t go away otherwise. It’s all coming back to me. Ewell just won’t quit.” She hoped that she was embarrassing him, but when she looked back at Ewell, he seemed as eager and excited as ever.

  “Yes,” he said. “Come with me, and we’ll sit on the sand, and we can talk.”

  Eden said no. “This is dangerous.”

  “He’s harmless,” Alice said.

  “If you have to go, I’ll keep a few yards behind, watching to make sure everything’s okay. I can call the police if this guy goes crazy.”

  Alice wanted Eden to keep arguing, to demand the opportunity to protect her. “I’m sure it’s not necessary.”

  “No, I insist,” Eden said.

  Alice finally agreed. “Wait out here,” she said to Ewell. “We’ll go get dressed. But only a few minutes, all right?”

  Ewell nodded, still smiling as though this were going very well.

  Alice stuck her head out the door as Eden made her way up the stairs. “Eden and I are girlfriend-girlfriend,” she whispered. “We’re lesbians.” Alice knew that Eden would be angry at this statement, and the word came out in a giggle, like a little tickle running across her stomach.

  Ewell just stood there in the dark, still smiling that same moronically optimistic smile. Maybe he just didn’t know the word “lesbian.” Or it was just one more obstacle among many, and he was so happy to see Alice that he just didn’t mind. Or something.

  On the mainland, natives arrived early in the morning on the back of big trucks, then watered gardens and plucked weeds at big hotels, sweat dripping from their brows, as the sun singed the asphalt. Tourists with big smiles and big handbags trampled hapless locals, dined in expensive restaurants, wore knick-knacks around their necks and on the tops of their heads, drank colorful drinks on the sidewalks, and tossed a coin or two to beggar/musicians on the corner.

  “Was it like this when we were young?” Harriet asked. They sat on the beach in the blinding heat under a parasol, staring out to sea at their distant speck of an island, flickering on the horizon like a mirage, or a star from a far away, long ago galaxy. “I want to go back,” she said quickly, not waiting for an answer. “I want to go back there and stay, just the two of us.” She stood up. “I’m going to swim there,” she insisted.

  She still had beautiful legs. They were still the legs of his little Harriet. Blake loved Harriet’s legs. In a one-piece bathing suit, Harriet didn’t look old, she looked sturdy and strong and solid and well-positioned to survive the storms of the future, like the low risk investment company on the board of which Maurow currently sat.

  “You remind me,” he said, “somehow ... of the Freedom Balanced Fund.” Harriet said, “That’s not very sexy,” and Blake disagreed. “No,” he said. “No. It’s a very sexy mutual fund.”

  Cheek to cheek, music blanketing his island’s little dance club. Blake couldn’t get the disco ball working.

  “There’s something we haven’t talked about,” Harriet said. Her voice was level and solid.

  “There’s a reason for that,” Blake said.

  “It can be nice to remember things, to think about your life, even if some of it’s bittersweet, or just bitter.”

  Maurow said nothing.

  “It’s the reason you wouldn’t look at our Christmas cards,” she continued, “when we were together in the hotel restaurant, in Manhattan.”

  Maurow shut his eyes, pulled her in closer. “I’m changing the subject,” he said. “I want to talk about the Knicks.”

  Harriet sighed, not in a bad way — just shaking sad thoughts out of her head.

  “Sometimes,” Harriet said, “I imagine that I have some young boyfriend. It’s too embarrassing, or unseemly or something, so the fantasy doesn’t stay in my head very long. Maybe it could, if I didn’t have kids. I don’t know. You know what I mean? So that’s a little old lady fantasy for you. Or I dream that my husband is still alive. My second husband, in case that wasn’t clear.”

  Her hand resting on his shoulder, his hand firmly pressed against her back, their cheeks touching just a little bit.

  “I understood what you meant,” Blake said.

  “But look at you,” she went on. “Old guy, you look young still. Married to a beautiful young woman. You’re rich. And they say that you’re v
ery charming now, and that people sort of like you, so probably you have a couple of mistresses. If you don’t it’s only because you don’t want to. What could you fantasize about?”

  He smiled, and she could feel his smile, his cheek brushing against hers.

  “You’re making fun,” he said softly.

  “No,” she said. “Is this what you fantasize about? Coming to this island with an old lady?”

  “No.” He waited a few beats, dipped her, then pulled her back. He flashed her a grin that made him look young, or maybe like an older version of the Blake Maurow she used to know, the one who grinned like a boy. “How about that?” he laughed. “Wasn’t that something?”