In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  The doors of the car flew open and the crowds toppled out onto the platform. Maurow fell on top of a thin Indian woman, and then a fat man fell on top of Maurow, the man’s buttocks nearly snapping his neck.

  A cop sorted out the crowd, picking people up one-by-one. “False alarm,” he said, again and again. Everyone seemed fine, and no ambulance was summoned. From what Maurow could ascertain from the blare of the loudspeaker, the muffled comments from the cops, and gossip from other passengers, his train was going out of service. He would have to switch to the N train, take it two blocks, take a crosstown Shuttle train, switch to something else, switch to something again, then switch and go back uptown on the same line he’d just taken downtown. Maurow followed the crowd.

  The crowd ran down a long corridor to the N train platform, but Maurow spotted a staircase with a sign for the B train at the far end, kept going, aiming for towards the B train, figuring it probably would get him someplace where he could switch to another train that might take him where he was headed. He and this crowd were just bad news — he wanted to lose them. He could feel his hands shaking — from the long caffeine-logged night, from the anxiety involved in begging Alice to return — and his startled and still-growing realization of how deeply he needed her, which made facing his new, Alice-less life an almost hellish task — and from the terrible-horrible trauma of taking the subway. So he ran, through the damp heat-clogged tunnels, past bad musicians and good musicians, and beggars and madmen, and a mad begging dancer, and strangers screaming at each other on platforms, and lovers screaming at each other in long winding tunnels, through fluorescent light and sudden darkness, rats scrambling underfoot, his clothes clinging to him, his hair matted down on the top of his head. He passed by a thin, strikingly beautiful woman, blue-eyes-blond-hair creature, and, like an image from a huge billboard, she wore above the waist only a blindingly bright white brassiere, her shirt tied casually around her hips. As he passed her, her eyes blared straight ahead, as though he were invisible, but he could not help staring, for just the second that he zipped by, at her very clean, very white brassiere, at her very tiny, very daintily pierced navel. She seemed utterly innocent, he could see it in her hypnotic blue eyes — just a beautiful young woman who was underground in the heat, and who knew, as the heat struck her, that she was wearing a very new, very clean undergarment, and that no one would mind if she took off her shirt. Such events did not happen above ground, but in troll-land, perhaps they were the stuff that made life bearable. His spirit momentarily lifted; but once he had passed her, he felt sad again, and all the sadder because the intersection of his life with that of the blue-eyed waif in the bright white brassiere had now passed, irrevocably. And on he ran.

  Maurow was relieved to see that the B platform was nearly empty, though he was still jittery, his hands still shook, his legs still trembled, and he still dreaded the life that lay before him. He walked to the far end of the platform, where the front of the train would stop. He shut his eyes. Then he worried about falling asleep, falling asleep and slipping quietly onto the tracks. He held his eyes open with both hands. He was very close to the edge of the platform. He stared down at the tracks, and at some large corpulent rats running up and over the dull metal rails. He felt his eyes shut again. He’d never heard of someone falling asleep standing up, after all. And shutting his eyes was so relaxing. It felt so good. He thought about backing over to the wall, settling down on a wooden bench. But he couldn’t move. He was stuck to one spot.

  A moment of unconsciousness followed, then a frightening moment of weightlessness that smashed through the darkness, and Maurow jerked his eyes open as he felt his knees buckle and his body fall. He grabbed onto a post, regained balance. He heard a loud beeping from far in the distance, and he could see headlights coming around a bend in the tunnel. His legs were shaking. His hands were shaking. He stepped back from the tracks, and he turned around. From the corner of his eye, he saw someone running towards him. He swung his head in that direction, and he could see a tall black man, running — no, lunging — in his direction. His face seemed very angry, his eyes close to rage.

  To Maurow, this was a frightening sight.

  The black guy running wildly in his direction, Maurow didn’t stop to think. He took one involuntary, defensive step back. The black guy was now terribly close, his face still severe and pitiless, and as he thrust out one hand as though to push his prey to the tracks, Maurow stumbled even further.

  His head craned to the left, and as he felt himself falling backwards into the black space between the platform and the tracks, he saw the headlights of a train careening toward him, blinding him. Straining for balance as he toppled over the edge, he saw the look of disappointment and anguish on the black guy’s face. The man’s hand was still held out, reaching, trying to save Maurow, not to hurt him. His eyes looked so sad.

  Maurow thought in that split second that this stranger would probably mourn him more than anyone he actually knew — more than Alice, who must hate him now, and more than Harriet, who had so much as told him so — and so Maurow figured that he might as well die, and he gave up trying to struggle against gravity, and his muscles relaxed and he just let himself fall in front of the oncoming train. He wondered how his brother would learn the whereabouts of the funeral, or even of his death.

  Then, when it was surely too late anyway, he changed his mind.

  Maurow fell backward, and his arms flew above his head as he fell, and out of the corner of his right eye, he saw the headlights of the train, felt a whoosh of air coming toward him, pushing him outward and sucking him under the oncoming wheels. The only thought running through his head was what an awful buffoon he was, a stupid buffoon who’d chosen just the wrong moment to be impulsive.

  He was not sure exactly what happened next, how he was able to interrupt his downward velocity, swing his arms back down in front of his chest, reach out in front of his torso and grab hold of the black guy’s hand. The guy was positioned with his left arm behind a column for support. He pulled on Maurow’s arm with great strength. Maurow’s legs shot out behind him, he flew forward, and he landed with a thud on his stomach a few feet from the track. He couldn’t breathe for a few moments.

  The black guy crouched down beside him on the subway tiles.

  “I’m probably even happier that I pulled you out from the path of that train than you are,” the guy said. His name was Virgil. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, and he was wearing a very nice summer suit. He had a friendly, relaxed smile. Maurow was buying him an expensive lunch in a dark, cavernous restaurant with large round tables and black table-cloths. He had decided that he would never tell Alice about his brush with death. Not all of it, anyway. He didn’t want Alice to restrain him as trains passed, or to keep him away from tall buildings, especially since his equilibrium, he was certain, had now returned, along with his urge to purchase a quiet house someplace on dark, windy cliffs. He and Virgil were splitting a bottle of two-hundred-dollar champagne.

  “Why are you happier than me?” Maurow asked. “Because you get the free lunch, and I have to pay for it?”

  He shook his head. “Because if you’d gotten crunched, all anyone on the platform would have seen was my reaching my hand out, and you falling backwards in front of a moving train. A witness would think I’d pushed you. Probably, he’d think he’d seen me push you. He’d be an eyewitness to your murder.”

  Maurow looked the guy up and down. He was too rich to be a policeman or detective. Maurow tapped himself on the forehead. “You’re a shrink, right?” he asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah, I’m a psychiatrist.”

  “A shrink to the very rich, right? Judging from your suit. You charge quite a bit. No Medicaid.”

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “I help very rich people with their problems.”

  “What would your motive be? To kill me?”

  “That’s easy. African-American from a poor family never quite adjusted to having money. Flipped out, pushed a r
ich white guy off a subway platform.”

  “Hmmm.” Maurow thought about this. “So I saved your life too.” Then he changed the subject. “Why were you running?”

  “I was trying to get to the first car. I can catch my connection better from there. And I wasn’t running. Just walking very fast. You saw me out of the corner of your eye, and the movement frightened you, I guess.”

  “You looked,” Maurow insisted, “very angry. You looked panicked and angry, and you looked like you wanted to kill a stranger.”

  “I was just in a rush,” Virgil said.

  “I never took a subway before,” Maurow admitted. “Maybe it all made me a little bit jumpy.”

  “You fell backwards, and then I ran and held out my hand to catch you.”

  “It’s strange almost dying,” Maurow said.

  “I guess it would be.”

  “How am I supposed to feel?”

  “Supposed to feel?”

  “How would the average man in my shoes feel?”

  “Thankful. Mostly embarrassed and guilty. Like he accidentally dropped his pants in public, and he has no one to blame but himself.” He took a very small sip of champagne, watched the bubbles foaming around the edge of the flute. “When other people see you almost die, it’s like they’ve seen you naked. You’re more human than you want others to realize. Is that how you feel?”

  Maurow was nodding, but he said softly, “I don’t know.”

  “Unless this moment in your life — unless it’s particularly complicated,” Virgil said. “Then your feelings would be more complicated.”

  “Complicated,” Maurow agreed. “What should I have been thinking, in the last moment?”’

  “What were you thinking?”

  “I wondered if my brother would find out about my death in time for the funeral.” He paused, and he sipped his champagne. “See, my brother walked out the door of my father’s house when we were both seventeen. He renounced the fortune my dad had acquired. Every once in a while, I’d get a postcard or letter from him. Always very vague, always postmarked in some other state. Sometimes, rarely, another country. I don’t know what he did with his life. Every couple of years, he’d pop into whatever city I was living in, ring me up, and we’d have dinner. He’d ask a lot of questions, I’d give a lot of answers. He dressed nicely enough. Not spectacular. I always wondered how he made his money. I imagine that he’s some sort of international thief. Like in the old days, one of those gentleman criminals. That would be funny, because he threw away enough money to live in high luxury forever. He’s my twin brother, so it made me nervous and excited to think that there was someone who looked just like me going around the world committing crimes. I hired a few private detectives to track him down. Even, once, one tried to follow him after he had dinner with me, but the trail always went cold.” He smiled, and then he laughed. “I somehow feel that he’s still alive, and I want him at my funeral. I’d feel bad if he weren’t there. So as I toppled toward the tracks, I wondered how to get word to my brother.”

  Maurow stopped talking, and he flushed.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Unloading on you, like one of your patients, I guess. This is very undignified of me. I apologize.”

  Virgil disagreed. “This is just a conversation,” he said. “Perfectly normal.”

  Maurow was surprised by the doctor’s interpretation. “Normal,” he mused, and he shrugged. “Listen. One thing I can’t figure out. I was falling backwards, and my hands were above my head. Then I reached down, and I caught your hand.” With unexpected emotion: “Like the hand of God. I can’t explain to you how it felt. The warmth and protecting grace that I felt in your hand, Virgil.”

  His savior smiled, and a little bit of red flushed his dark skin.

  Maurow conspicuously cleared his throat. “I could draw myself a diagram, and I still can’t figure out how that’s possible. Momentum was that way, and I had nothing to hold onto, and I reversed the momentum somehow. I thought I had touched the hand of God, because I know physics, and I knew it was impossible that I had grabbed hold of anything in this life.” He shook his head. “How did it look to you?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea how I caught you,” he admitted. “I just reached forward and prayed.”

  Maurow thought about this a few moments more. “Well, I guess I got a B minus in physics, after all, and that was three or four decades ago. Still — ” He held out his hand, shut his eyes, re-lived the whole thing again. And then again.

  “Blake....”

  Maurow shook away the memory, opened his eyes and smiled. “I’m just lucky, I suppose,” he said. “A very lucky man.”

  A few hours after the race, Alice lingered on Eden’s front stoop, as the sun began to settle down behind the buildings on the west side, and rosy hues burst off the Hudson, exploded through the grayish smoggy clouds and glowed in the wiggly haze of the August air. Alice drank from a bottle of spring water, and sweat dripped off her brow. Eden was upstairs in her apartment, and Alice was down on the stoop by herself, watching the beautiful sunrise.

  After only a few minutes, Eden stuck her head out the window, and called for Alice to come inside.

  “Who was on the machine?” Alice asked.

  Eden was smiling.

  “It was Blake,” she said. “Begging you to come back to him.”

  “Begging?” Alice asked.

  “Well, I don’t know. But he wants you to come back. He really wants you home again. You can listen to it yourself.”

  Alice sat down on the convertible, tucked one leg underneath her. “Let me hear. Play it for me.”

  She waited to hear Blake’s voice again. A voice she missed.

  Eden stood by the door, squinting at the answering machine. She pressed one button. Then she frowned, and she pushed the button again. “Damn,” she muttered. “Sometimes when I play a message, it erases it. I don’t know why.” She fidgeted with the machine, then gave it a sharp whap with her fist. Turned and looked over at Alice. “Oh well,” she said. “He asked you to come home. You can ask him to say it again. I’m sure he will.”

  Alice nodded, and she looked over at the wall, at the picture of Eden in the desert, signed and numbered by her old boyfriend.

  Absently, Alice said, “Blake once started a book that he never finished. He had a contract for the book, he’d drawn some illustrations, he’d taken the publisher’s money. But he never finished it, because he was too sad. Did I tell you that?”

  Eden shook her head.

  “What are you going to do?” Eden asked.

  Without moving, Alice said. “I’ll go back to him. I guess. Adopt a baby. Write my little stories. Get drunk with you, Eden, and go home and seduce my husband.” With a barely visible shrug. “It’s not a bad life.”

  “No,” Eden agreed.

  “I’d rather stay with you, darling,” Alice said, not looking at Eden, just studying the photograph. “But I wouldn’t. Not even if you’d have me.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Eden’s voice betrayed no opinion on this possibility. Maybe she was flattered. Alice wondered.

  “So I’ll return to him.” Still looking at the photograph of Eden, sitting so still on the edge of the cliff, out in Colorado or Utah or somewhere in the dry hot desert air, her back to the camera. What was on her face and in her mind at that precise moment? Maybe smiling and thinking about her Roger, just feeling his presence behind her, singing Roger’s poetry in her head and the life they would share together, or maybe just thinking about getting back to their hotel and sitting with Roger in the Jacuzzi. Maybe thinking about a lot of things destined never to happen. Frozen in that moment, on the edge of that cliff, the sun baking her skin brown; happy, forever.

  After their brief brush with separation, and Maurow’s loss of employment, her husband changed a lot. Suddenly, he was a different man; a younger man. He could now keep up with Alice when she ran through the park. He reminisced about all the things he’d done in his life. He lik
ed ice cream, all of a sudden. He liked candy corn, and roller coasters. He took her to places like Sardinia, where he introduced her to idle vapid people whom she liked very much.

  Alice’s book was a success, beyond even the hopes of her publisher. She became rather well-known, and she quickly fled the country, installing herself in Blake’s Parisian digs.

  From overseas, Alice watched her sales rise and counted her dollars. It was nothing compared to her husband’s wealth, but it was her wealth, and so adding it up meant something to her. Of course, Carly Barrows never made her TV movie; Carly’s star faded somewhat in the weeks following the book auction. In Paris, Alice started pounding out a sequel that would feature a less perky, more bitter and subversive Andrea. Andrea’s husband had chased her barefoot through the forest with a gun, then plummeted bleeding to his death over a jagged ravine, and Alice thought that Andrea would probably not remain the same girl after that. She’d have all the same romantic yearnings, and she would still solve crimes, but she might get a little ... jaded. She’d have an angrier mind; and a dirtier mind.

  Meanwhile, Blake became the man from her dream waiting for her in a Venetian café, a friendly, romantic and pleasingly inconstant presence. He stayed behind in New York for a while, trying to straighten out his finances, meeting with accountants and lawyers. From time to time, he and Alice would arrange a rendezvous in some world capital. Maurow spent long hours listening to music and experiencing the pleasure of anticipating the next time he would see Alice’s smile. Sometimes, also, Maurow would pick up a paint brush and dabble a little. Sometimes he painted obscure parts of the beautiful countries he visited with Alice. In Nepal, he spent several days painting a tree root that jutted out of the ground. Sometimes he painted Alice. Alice thought he made her look too beautiful, unflatteringly beautiful, like an underwear model. She thought his paintings of her, in their perfection, lacked character, like a perfectly round and empty bubble floating through the spring air. Blake also painted pictures of strangers they met on their travels, or of the apartments or houses they lived in. Some of his paintings were good, Alice thought.