In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  Alone in London, Alice received an e-mail from Eden: I have decided to cease work on my book. If they ask for the advance back, I will somehow find a way to pay it back. I will maybe mary a rich man. She spelled marry wrong. Alice thought that Eden spelled it wrong unconsciously, because she found the idea so repellant. Pack your bags, and check your mailbox tomorrow, Alice zapped back. She quickly made arrangements to fly Eden to some remote spot in some exotic Asian country, and to meet her at the airport. Not China, or Taiwan, or even a place filled with Chinese people, but a place with the sort of Chinese-style landscape — mist and crooked curling trees reaching up toward distant snow-capped mountains — that played such a role in the few hundred pages of her book that Eden had managed to write. A place that would inspire Eden to think beautifully cultural thoughts, but would not raise in her the cultural anxiety that might result from seeing, swarming in front of her, everywhere, thousands upon thousands of people who looked like her but babbled in a language she couldn’t follow.

  Alice rented a little cottage in the woods that had all the necessary amenities and an eager and helpful staff just over the next hill and available at the ring of a bell, but which provided the illusion of monastic solitude. In that little cottage, Alice and Eden sat on the floor with Eden’s manuscript, some yellow legal pads, a lap-top computer, and a little tape dictation machine. Each day for several weeks, Alice kept repeating: “And then what happened, Eden?” and then taping, scribbling, or typing the response. Hundreds of pages flowed out of Eden. The book finished itself, just like that.

  To celebrate, they drank a bottle of champagne on the crumbling northern wall of an ancient temple in the thickest part of the jungle near their cottage. Stone statues, some stern, some joyous, one strangely smug, stared down at them from the center of the ruins. Alice made some toasts, things like, To the author! or To a promising career! Their voices floated out through the trees and vines, and into the thick darkness. A little bit tipped on bubbly and the anticipation of success, they returned to their cottage and rolled about naked in bed on sweaty, damply air-conditioned sheets. Afterwards, Eden sat on her heels at the foot of the bed, the starlight drifting over the gentle curve of her body. Eden said: “Do you still love me?” Her voice was heartbreakingly sincere. Alice said, “Yes.” She would have said yes even if it weren’t true; but it was true, and she hoped that her friend could hear it in her voice. Eden said: “Then live with me forever. Marry me, kind of.” Alice asked: “What about Blake?” and Eden replied: “Leave him, if you want to. But if you can’t, I’ll let you go see Blake when you need to. Maybe it’s something you could hide from him. Or maybe it’s something he would understand and endorse. I don’t care. So long as you always return home to me. So long as you wear my ring on your finger next to Blake’s.” In the balmy stickiness of the tropical night, and with the warmth of Eden’s lips still fresh on her skin, this sounded like a good idea, and a workable life. Alice nearly said yes. “Let me think,” she said instead. During the night, gunfire rattled the distant countryside. Fists pounded on their door. In the capital city, two government factions had begun to fight, and loyalists for one side or the other had taken up positions throughout the nation. It was no longer safe. Their cook loaded Alice and Eden and all their belongings into a jeep and drove them to the border. They passed through government check-points and rebel check-points. Neither side was in the business of killing tourists, especially the American kind. Everyone believed in capitalism and tourism and Americanism. At the border, Alice wanted to flee to Laos, where she was scheduled to meet Maurow in two weeks. Eden wanted to flee to Thailand. Alice grew frustrated with Eden, and Eden grew frustrated with Alice. They took trains in different directions. Eden’s train left first. Alice stood on the platform, watching her friend in the window as the train slowly began to move. Alice waved goodbye. At the last minute, Eden turned and saw Alice standing on the platform waving, and Eden glued a pretty expression to her lips, pretending to pretend to be smiling, and she waved back with artificial exuberance, a performance that left Alice insulted and embarrassed and sad. The train pulled out of the station with a noisy, smelly belch, gained speed, and vanished into the distance. During the next few weeks, as Alice awaited Blake’s arrival, she drafted and re-drafted e-mails to Eden that she never sent. A while later, Blake arrived.

  In a country filled with dark-haired women, Blake and Alice hired a surrogate mother who bore a striking resemblance to Alice — pale, fragile, with stubborn eyes. Dark-haired. She carried the baby to term, pocketed the cash, then vanished back into her world. Alice and Blake named the child Stephanie.

  Alice lugged Stephanie all over the world in a knapsack on her back, the baby’s little head sticking out into the sunlight. At periodic intervals, Blake met them in cafés in places like Capri and Rome, often with a draft of a new children’s book about Stephanie’s adventures stuck under his arm, illustrations of his little baby girl conquering evil-doers scrawled in an increasingly shaking hand. Despite Alice’s encouragement, Maurow refused to consider publication. “Little Stephanie,” he said sweetly, “does not belong to the world. She belongs to me.” He smiled down at his girl, and he kissed her on the nose.

  Stephanie was a happy baby. She almost never cried. She was always hungry. She did not seem to miss her father during his long absences, but Alice did. Alice loved Blake so terribly when he wasn’t around that she almost wished he would never return, that he would just keep teasing her with the delicious promise of his impending presence. Blake Maurow’s absence made her heart grow so fond that she was near bliss. He occupied her every waking thought, he filled up her dreams at night, she was passionately, madly in love with him. It was a phenomenon that, in later years, would convince her to deposit Stephanie in various boarding schools around the world — once she would even leave her child for a year in the care of her parents, off in Africa. Alice wanted to be a Santa Claus sort of mother, appearing regularly but not frequently to dispense joy and presents and long trips to exotic lands, and wise words about “Life.” The sort of mom her child would look up to and long for, and the sort she would love all the time, which would be impossible, Alice concluded, if she were actually hanging around all the time. She wanted to be a novelty mom, a storybook mom, an Indian summer mom. A Princess Diana sort of mom.

  Alice and Eden would never again experience together even a single moment of passion. This didn’t result from a pledge on the part of either one of them; the right moment just never arose again. Alice and Eden exchanged letters and e-mails and phone calls on a frequent basis, but they never again mentioned their love affair, either to each other or in the published fiction that they’d both promised.

  Eden finished the novel, and it was published. Some critics praised her; others found her work overlong and ponderous and derivative of books that had been started and completed long after the ink on Eden’s contract had dried. Book sales were healthy but a bit disappointing. Eden never became famous, and she would one day tell Alice that she found this fact a great relief. Eden married a Wall Street trader, a handsome and funny fellow who had a few very good earning years and then retired in quite spectacular luxury. He and Eden moved out to an estate in the countryside. From time to time, Alice visited Eden and her husband, and their five well-adjusted kids, and their three dogs. Sometimes, she brought Stephanie with her. Once, Maurow trudged along. Alice wondered whether Eden ever thought romantic thoughts about the two of them. Alice did, sometimes with frustrating frequency. But she kept these thoughts to herself.

  Alice’s third Andrea sequel — her careful but increasingly radical deconstruction of the perky techno-thriller girl — proved more popular than any of its more traditional predecessors and it spawned a successful R-rated film version. More money poured in. Alice soon became a reliably best-selling author, and also, she thought, as she settled into middle age, an Auntie Mame sort of figure, the woman she had once imagined, back in the early 1980s, giving her daughter a delightfully off
-beat and independent view of the world. She was sure she was raising an open-minded, perpetually curious young woman. Yet by the time Stephanie reached the age of twenty, she found it necessary to break completely with her parents. Given Alice’s prominence as an artfully smutty book writer, Stephanie’s life story also easily sold to a major publishing house. She rather roundly condemned her dad and adoptive mom for absenteeism and for vague and leftish parenting, and for some reason she felt it necessary to write flattering things about Jesus alongside the un-Christian insults she hurled at her family. Despite her persistent praise of family values, though, Stephanie didn’t attend Maurow’s burial. On the day of her father’s funeral, she taped an interview for a Christian television talk show.

  She and Alice, however, were destined to reconcile in the last years of Alice’s life, a reunion that Alice would view as essentially worthless. But she would allow her daughter closure. There was enough pain in the world, after all.

  Maurow, of course, died before Alice, which Alice had always expected. She was by his side when he closed his eyes in a Manhattan hospital. He actually closed his eyes to die, the way people died in old movies, his neck going a little limp and his head turning gently to one side; his gaze did not simply go blank all of a sudden, as in post-1970 cinema. Everyone thought that was very polite of him. “Blake was polite to the end,” everyone said. In the last half hour of his life, he told Alice that he loved her, over and over again. His last words were: “I love you, Alice. I love you so much.” Alice was bereft for weeks. Some days, she did nothing but cry. She didn’t eat, on those days. She thought about Blake dying so filled with his fondness for her that he could think of nothing to say about his life except how much he had loved her. She wished that he had stuttered those words; she had never heard him stutter, and this made her very sad.

  She was a late middle-aged woman, with, at that point in her life, a grown daughter who hated her. She was alone.

  As for Carly Barrows, her suspicions about internal intrigue at her television series proved correct. The outraged daughter of one of the nymphet’s lovers bought a gun one day, and the rest was Nielsen history. The murder attracted a large audience, but in Carly’s absence, ratings diminished, and the program on which she had once shined was canceled within two years.

  Carly made a few more TV movies, but the luster was off. Her co-stars dissed her in People Magazine. Late night talk show hosts made fun of her. Again and again, night after night, they told Carly Barrows jokes. At the peak of her power, they’d all treated her rather nicely, kissed her and hugged her hello and goodbye, stared at her legs and made cute little sexy jokes.

  Carly Barrows took the money from her brief spurt of fame, and she disappeared into the world.

  A few years later, Sergio made a few movies targeted for video and late night cable, erotic thrillers on a shoestring budget that made a pretty good profit, considering everything. A small profit, but better than expected. So pretty good. His name became familiar to a certain segment of the population. Then he vanished. No more movies, no more show-biz.

  Sometime later, when they were both solidly post-middle aged, Carly learned that Sergio had opened up a string of restaurants in Texas that had done well. He was actually a pretty successful businessman. Carly told herself that she was happy for him, and she occasionally wondered whether she would ever bump into him, just coincidentally. Sometimes she practiced what she would say, imagined scenarios, usually happy, sometimes ugly but dramatic and sad.

  Years went by, and she grew old. Not just relatively old for a TV star, or old compared to the spirit of youth she had embodied during her twenties, but genuinely old. So old that she didn’t even try to hide it anymore.

  On the very day that he was to receive some award from some Texas community organization, someone shot Sergio. He never regained consciousness. Ambulance paramedics lifted him off the sidewalk and rushed him to the hospital, but he died in the emergency room.

  Witnesses later identified the gunman as Sergio’s cousin Stefano, a lawyer from New York. Stefano left work at five o’clock one afternoon and took a train all the way from New York to Texas. There he bought a gun, put it into his briefcase shot Sergio in the street, just like that.

  The police never caught Stefano, and no one ever figured out exactly why he did it. Relatives told police that Stefano and Sergio didn’t seem to like each other very much. Decades earlier, during the first Bush administration, Stefano invited Sergio and his girlfriend over to dinner. Stefano cooked Sergio a meal, and they were all sitting at the dinner table in Stefano’s apartment: Stefano, his wife, Sergio, and the woman who was Sergio’s girlfriend companion at that time. During dinner, the two cousins disagreed about the Gulf War, the first one, which was ongoing. Sergio called his cousin all sorts of names, insulted Stefano’s wife, and stormed out of the apartment. The two never spoke again. Stefano seemed to react rather calmly, considering everything. Went about his business with no further comment. Whenever he saw Sergio at family gatherings, the two maintained a substantial physical distance. But then, years later, when they were both old men, and as a result of no recent provocation, he shot the guy. It seemed extraordinary that someone could hold a grudge of such intensity for so very long. It was as though he’d planned this crime his entire adult life.

  Carly heard the news on the radio as she sat in the back of a limousine, on her way to the Academy Awards. She had been nominated as best supporting actress for what turned out to be her comeback role as a tragic, campy, washed up drunken old has-been. She cried all the way there, checked her makeup in the ladies’ room, then held her tears in check for two more hours. Suddenly, when her category was announced, she knew that she would win. It was inconceivable that Sergio could die the day of the Oscars and that she would then lose.

  When they called her name, she sadly walked up the stairs to the stage, smiled bravely, and announced, “Today, I have lost the only man I ever have loved, and ever can love.” This was followed by an elegy so poetic and so painfully beautiful that, all over the globe, men, women and children sat in front of their television tubes with tears flowing freely down their cheeks.

  After the Oscars, Carly received a letter from Sergio’s sister. He never married, she wrote, because he loved you too terribly. Carly turned the letter over to the press. Now it was official: this was THE tragic love affair of the first half of the 21st century. The next day, she signed a contract to write a book about her romance with Sergio. Could their passion have survived so many decades if during those years they had actually spent a single moment together? Carly did not wonder. It didn’t matter.

  One night, decades after Sergio ended their engagement on that little boat in the middle of a foreign river that split in two a chaotic, post-communist city, decades after that, and some years after her Oscar had briefly resuscitated her career, and shortly after her on-set tantrums had lost her a plum part and resulted in her second Hollywood banishment, Carly caught one of Sergio’s movies on streaming video. It was the last year of her life, as it would turn out; she would die of natural causes two months later. She looked at his young-again face, listened to his deep, thickly accented voice singing out purple noirish dialogue. She imagined the TV film they never made together, and she thought to herself, Damn. It would have been good.

  As a somewhat older woman, Alice fell swooningly in love with a man her contemporary, a mathematics professor at a university out in California.

  They married after they’d known each other for only two months. Her new husband’s name was Zwaggott. He was very ugly. He was shorter than Alice, and he had a big black mole above his upper lip that looked like something hanging out of his nose. His eyes were slightly crossed, and he had one long caterpillar eyebrow crawling across his forehead. He had a very long and skinny torso, but a compact and heavy lower body. He had a hard time finding suits that fit him, so he had them tailor-made, ensembles with wide pants for a short fat guy and a jacket and vest for a tall skinny gu
y.

  She could listen to him talk for hours. He would tell her about sines and cosines, the trigonometric functions of an angle, about symmetry and invariance and elliptical curves, and it was like poetry, with the wind and the sea and the heavens singing behind him. One night, sitting on an old wooden dock that stretched into the bay behind his small home, she whispered, “Tell me again about Fermat.” And he did, and she sighed so deeply that she felt dizzy, and she nearly swooned off the dock and into the bay. But her husband caught her in the nick of time.

  Sometime after their sudden elopement, she took his name — she became Mrs. Zwaggott. Alice Zwaggott. During her marriage, she never experienced a moment of unhappiness. Her husband was beautiful in his compelling ugliness, and he was funny and interesting and attentive and loving. He was spectacularly passionate in bed. She liked to tug on the hair on his back. She walked about with a perpetual smile on her face. Love to her, in the waning years of her life, meant floating on a calm sea. Her love for Zwaggott was love without complication or friction, the way all the experts on love insist that love can never be. It was like those few days with Ewell. Like living inside a radiantly glowing orb of silver light that never ebbed. Sometimes she wondered if Zwaggott had hypnotized or drugged her; that’s how happy she was. “Why do I love you so much!” she asked him once, and he said, “Love, my little muskrat, is, like all natural elements, governed by the rules of Logic. You could not love me without a logical reason.” Alice asked, “What is the logical reason?” and Zwaggott replied, “You love me because I am the world’s foremost expert in the field of Gaussian cyclotomy, and because I could quite logically and without much exaggeration be described as the Leopold Kronecker of the 21st Century.” And Alice said, “Oh. Well, now I know, don’t I?”