by Alice Adams
We went upstairs; we re-entered the party and no one looked at us with anything like suspicion.
Later, coming out of the bathroom, I encountered my hostess, Ruth Houston. She was standing at the mirror in a bedroom, combing her short brown hair with a total lack of interest. She was escaping from her own party, and she didn’t care who knew it.
I said that I liked her house.
“Well, it’s much more important to Royce than it is to me,” she remarked. “He’s from very poor people—Okies, really—and he cares about spending a lot of money. Boats, safaris, cars. My folks weren’t rich but they were richer than his were. I think it makes a difference.”
This longish speech had not really been directed to me; it could have been just something that she said to people sometimes. And so an assenting murmur seemed sufficient. Intimate revelations from people I’m not close to make me uncomfortable. But she had struck a familiar, nostalgic note: she reminded me of certain women from my Wisconsin childhood, women who would just say whatever was on their minds, in a free, frank way.
I muttered something ambiguous in response, and Ruth went on with her hair. And I wondered again if she felt left out, with all that intense feeling running between her husband and children. Not to mention Stacy.
When I came back into the main room, there indeed was Stacy, and she was talking in a hyper-animated way to Whitey. They were across the room from me; in the continuing din I had no idea what they were saying, but their two postures said a lot. Stacy was in perpetual motion, gesturing with everything—her eyebrows, hands, hips, legs; arching her back so that her breasts pointed straight out. And Whitey watched her; absolutely still, he had a slightly passive smile. And I had an evil thought about how passive he must be in bed, waiting to be pleased.
Then a small and pretty young man, a decorator to whom I had earlier been introduced, went over to Stacy and Whitey, and extracted Stacy, who was apparently his date. Time to go home.
Agatha came up to me and said that she thought it was time to go. She looked exhausted, and harried; I understood then that having me along was supposed to have made the party easier for her; I should have been a sort of buffer against her strong feelings about that difficult, maybe impossible family.
I agreed that yes, we certainly should leave.
6
I know: this year when a woman feels nervously horny—and this year it’s perfectly okay for a woman to be horny—she is supposed to get a vibrator, masturbate and at least to think about making it with another woman. But suppose you aren’t turned on at all in a sexual way by women, including yourself?
That describes my own condition; I simply did not want to do any of those things. I was not even sure that I could.
Many shrinks, and many feminists too, of course, would say that this is a lack in me—a gap in my instincts, as it were. Still, nevertheless, I do not believe in forcing things of that nature. I don’t think you should do anything that you don’t want to do in bed, either to please another person or for theoretical reasons.
A much-married man, an aging Liberal I had once known in New York, told me he felt that he should have a sexual relationship with a black man—he should, for political reasons. To me that sounded ridiculous.
Well, my inhibitions left me sexually bound to men, and sometimes I ended up with near-psychopaths: Jake the junkie, mean Derek. On the other hand that’s really no excuse; I’m sure that lots of women with my same sexual bent have lifetimes of pleasant lovers, or even a nice husband or so. But whatever had led me and tied me for a while to Derek, the experience had been scarey, as well as cautionary. And so, the day after the party at the Houstons’, I began to think that it was probably lucky, Royce’s not being taken with me. For all I knew, he could turn out to be as mean as Derek was; also, confused as I was in my feelings about Ruth, it was still a lousy thing to do to another woman. Ruth certainly had enough trouble without me in her life.
The real truth was that I knew it was time, high time, to get along for a while without an ongoing love affair. To concentrate on work, and friendships. Read, get a lot of exercise. Not brood about Jean-Paul, or anyone.
Let absent or dead lovers rest in peace.
7
Like so much else in San Francisco, Jackson Square, the center for decorators, antique dealers, fabric houses, was at first glance both original and exceptionally attractive: a few blocks of pleasantly restored, nice old brick buildings, freshly painted Victorian wood. Nothing over three stories high. A closed-off mall for strollers, meanderers. Trees, and flower boxes of geraniums or marguerites. Big glass windows that displayed appealing wares, old brass and well-designed new furniture.
And then, with a harder look, it all became sadly familiar. I had seen those same strolling couples before, the peacock men in tight-fitting, light-shaded clothes, the dowdy, too heavy women with red alcoholic faces, in double-knit suits. I recognized them as my confrères, my colleagues, the local decorators. Their clients, too, fell into recognizable categories: the elderly rich, looking somehow Midwestern, and dazzled by it all; and the stylishly thin, recently well-divorced young women. I had even seen all that furniture before, in showrooms in New York and Boston, and Washington, D.C. And as for the restoration itself, the more I looked the less novel it became. It was simply smaller and prettier than other such efforts, in other cities, as San Francisco itself is a small and pretty city.
In New York I have methods of avoiding this depressing scene: I visit and buy from mills in Lebanon, New Hampshire—in recent years I would then detour to Boston for a visit, of sorts, with Derek. And I have a crazy infallible genius of a cabinetmaker in Hackensack. Since so many of my clients have been broke friends, this has worked out well. They appreciate my efforts.
But there I was in San Francisco, with that huge house of Agatha’s, and all that money. And how ironic it was that the General’s money should in that sense have come to me: so often I had wondered how on earth he came by it, and none of my speculations had been at all flattering to him, the mean old bastard. I felt plunged into an unfamiliar and vastly overpriced—in fact a crazily costly—world, hitherto only glimpsed at infrequent intervals. In Jackson Square, all around me there were people spending enormous sums of money, and they were very serious about all that spending; they felt that it was the right thing to do, and they cared about what they bought, and owned, and displayed.
In the year that I spent in San Francisco, I was never to make any excursion without running across some person whom I had seen or met or heard of before; that day, across the street, I saw Stacy, of the Houston party. She was again with that pretty young man—her decorator, I guess. Her tall thin blonde body was, as always, in constant motion, but that day she seemed to be miming petulance; assuming they were having the kind of decorator-client quarrel that I knew about, I found it easy to avoid them. And I thought, Thank heaven she’s not my client; I know her type, restless and greedy, in a random, indecisive way.
*
The high point of my trip to Jackson Square was my discovery that my favorite line of linen had its headquarters a few blocks from there, unlike Brunschwig & Fils, Schumacher, et cetera, whose main office and showrooms are in New York. The Henry Calvin building, then, contained more beautiful linen samples than I could have imagined—perfect for Agatha, who is, like me, a linen freak. Even the company’s nice brick building had an old-world quality of excellence, of care. I spent a happy forty-five or fifty minutes there, marveling at beautiful fabrics—before I moved on to the shocking end of my day.
What happened was: when I got home, after one instant I knew that someone had been there. Someone had broken in, had been all over the house.
First off, I saw that my mail was piled up on the hall table. It had not yet arrived when I went out that morning; eager to hear from Ellie anything about Jean-Paul, I was highly aware of mail. Someone had picked up and neatly stacked my letters, which struck me as a most curious gesture, taking in your victim’s ma
il. But this was a most curious break-in, all around.
I suppose that by now almost everyone who lives in a city has been in some way robbed—houses broken into, cars stolen, been mugged in a familiar parking lot or an elevator—but so far none of it had happened to me, just the garbage can my second day in that house. Going through all the downstairs rooms, and then the upstairs, I began to experience the emotions that I had heard about so often from my robbed friends—a vicarious déjà vu, as it were. I felt both angry and afraid—it occurred to me that the person might still be there, in the house, although I was fairly sure that he was not. And I experienced a sense of violation, not exactly like being raped—I guess: that hasn’t happened to me either, not yet—but still a terrible sense of having been entirely, nakedly exposed to an unknown, hostile person.
In the kitchen the small portable TV was missing, along with my electric typewriter. Well, of course those would be the obvious things to take. Nothing else there gone, that I could see.
Upstairs, in the big bedroom where I was more or less camping out, I began to look through drawers, in the closet, and that is where my strong sense of defilement began: the person had been through literally everything I owned, and had chosen what to take with a keenly, most snobbishly selective eye. Gone were my few good silk blouses; I was left with synthetics. The same with sweaters: cashmere missing, lamb’s wool still in its place. Skirts and dresses—again, the good ones were gone. Even the few scarves and gloves that I had brought to California had been gone through, thinned out. It was hard not to feel in this a strong element of personal dislike, as though the ripper-offer had rebuked me for not having all good things. I tried to dismiss those feelings as a kind of situational paranoia, and I remembered—usefully—that several ripped-off friends had said they felt the same.
Another thing friends had said was that you could not be sure what was missing for several days; things from time to time would turn up gone, and so it was with me. In the meantime I telephoned Agatha.
Afternoons are when she sees patients, of course; she is apt to be extremely busy. But for once she seemed not to be. She listened, and she said she would call her insurance person, which I hadn’t even thought of. She would call me back.
Ten minutes later she did call, and she was chuckling to herself. “It’s kind of unbelievable,” she said. “I took out a policy on that house, and sort of without my knowing it they added a rider that covers you completely. It’s really funny: usually people think they’re covered and they’re not.”
“God must love you.”
“I should hope so, all the time I give Him.” And then she told me what I already knew, to make a list of what I had lost, but not for several days. To call the police and make a report.
Of course I felt considerably better; for a manic moment I even considered pretending to losses that I had not sustained, claiming jewelry and furs that I had never owned. And maybe if Agatha had not been involved I would have. Agatha is the most moral living Episcopalian; she does not believe in cheating anyone at all, whereas if I could get away with it I would love to cheat an insurance company, an oil company—or the I.R.S., for that matter.
But it was still depressing, the idea of someone’s having come in and poked about among my things. I still felt it as a sort of personal attack. Why me, I thought. I wondered if someone had been watching me, checking my habits of arrival and departure, maybe deciding that he or she—I had to admit, it could have been a woman—did not like me, that I deserved to be ripped off. The only clear fact about the breaker-in was that it was a person of taste, with a good eye for quality. But maybe these days all robbers are discriminating.
Discouraged, and a little scared, I went back upstairs, and it was then that I discovered my favorite earrings gone, big very plain wide silver hoops. Real silver, by some standards not expensive, but much more than I usually pay for earrings. And they were certainly not unique; I was sure that I could find their duplicates in some good San Francisco store. But the thought of buying them again was deeply, if irrationally depressing. Emblematic, I guess those earrings were.
That night, as I was making my dietetic dinner for one, steak tartare, which I had planned to season with some imported soy sauce from Cost Plus, I saw that the soy sauce was missing from its shelf. At that point all the emotions that I had felt about being robbed united in a single flare of rage. Chopping onions, crying over them, I muttered all the obscene words I could think of. Which didn’t make me feel much better either.
The next day I dutifully called the police and made my report, and a week later I made an honest list of my losses and handed it to Agatha.
8
I did not exactly keep to my resolution involving not brooding about old love affairs; in fact, as usual I thought of little else—after all, to what else, so far, had my life been dedicated? And I wondered, sometimes, just how it had all begun, this nutty obsessiveness with love and men. A shrink would tie it to my father’s early death, I guess, but I rather thought that my mania began with my Uncle Don, with whom I fell in love when I was five, the year my father died.
My mother went down to Palm Beach to recover—at that time a quiet, cheap resort—and I was sent from Madison, where we lived, to Frederick, a small town in Iowa, where actually I had been born, but I hardly knew the town. And, staying there with my stately grandparents, I fell in love with my Uncle Don, the husband of my father’s sister Margaret. Don was a perfectly nice, rather ordinary young man in his middle twenties, with a round, prematurely bald head, wide flaring ears and small irregular teeth. Toward him I behaved so terribly, with such consistent brattiness, that he could not have suspected love to be its cause. Besides, whoever heard of a five-year-old in love? Certainly not Don.
About my father’s death I understood very little, and it is possible that no one tried to explain; how could they? In any case, I was sad and shy and embarrassed, and deeply puzzled. Dead? No one else’s father had died, why mine? What was pneumonia? I am sure that my grandparents were saddened by their inability to communicate anything of what they felt to me, along with their natural grief at the death of a much-loved son.
Their household seems eccentric now; not so to any right-thinking person of that time. Simply, my grandfather had married a woman with three unmarried sisters, all of whom he supported in a small house attached to the rear of his own. From this distance it is hard to work out their ages, but since my parents were in their thirties when I was born, all those people would have been somewhere in their sixties. To me they seemed simply old—Old People, like those encountered in myths and fairy stories, and in the Bible.
And then there were Margaret and Don, younger than my parents; but they were still grown-ups, much older than I was. And their baby, Peggy, who was too young for me to think about.
My grandfather was my favorite of that aged group; to me he seemed both kind and reliable. He was the one who taught me to roller-skate, having decided that the old ladies of the house were much too frail for that task, and Margaret was too busy with her baby. In fact the grandmother and her sisters were all rather nervous and subject to headaches, fits of irritation.
Across a tidy space of lawn from my grandfather’s decorous and shiningly white house, and sharing the boxwood that separated it from the sidewalk, was a smaller, narrower, yellow house; Aunt Margaret and Uncle Don lived there, with baby Peggy. Margaret, in her twenties, was a beautiful dark young woman, warmly and sensuously in love with her husband, who was truly in love with her. Bald Don. Margaret was thin, heavy-breasted.
Don was an engineer, out of work in his profession—this was in 1940, just before the booming years of war. He had taken a job in a nearby cellophane factory. That winter we all, every evening just at four-thirty, ceremoniously went out to fetch him from the factory, in my grandfather’s dignified Chevrolet. I can still recall the smell of that factory, which was horrible but was mingled with my wild emotion at the prospect of seeing Don.
Every mornin
g all of us assembled in the parlor for morning prayers, the grandparents and the great-aunts, and me. Don and Margaret were excused from this ritual, probably because of his job, which everyone respected, and Margaret’s baby, whom they all foolishly—to my jealous mind—adored.
On weekdays I was driven to school after breakfast by Stuart, the black chauffeur, who also drove Uncle Don out to the factory. The school was private, a few children in a house in a not very good part of town. I did not exactly make friends there. We were all rather young for real friendships, and also I was very aware of my temporary status: Frederick was not where I lived, and those children’s accents were strange, whereas at home in Madison there were people I had always known; I imagined that I always would.
And, more important, my attention was so passionately focused on my surrounding world of adults that I had little emotional energy left for other children, perhaps even interest in them. School was simply a filler for my days, and bridged the hours until it was time to go and get Uncle Don.
But why, each evening that winter in Frederick, did all of us arrange ourselves in my grandfather’s car and drive out to the cellophane factory to fetch Uncle Don from work? Stuart could perfectly well have gone by himself, or Stuart and my grandfather. But no, we all went—all except the great-aunts, who stayed at home to take care of adorable little Peggy—every workday at four-thirty, in order to be there when the factory whistle blew at five. Quite possibly my grandfather thought our massed and dignified presence would somehow compensate for the indignity of Don’s job; I now think that must have been it.
Grandfather sat beside Stuart, up in the front seat; my grandmother and Margaret and I sat in the back.
When Don came out of the factory and walked over to where we were, and got in the back seat, I would move over to my grandmother’s lap, or Margaret’s.