by Alice Adams
In the spring Ruth and Royce moved to San Francisco, and although Ruth was pregnant by then she got a good job as a legal secretary.
Discouraged by the showrooms on Van Ness Avenue, Royce got a job in a new foreign-car place, in Mill Valley, and that is where they lived, a small house in a new subdivision there, surrounded by magnificent old trees, oaks and pines, eucalyptus, redwood, looking up to Mount Tamalpais. It was 1953.
Caroline was born the following September, and Royce junior—Whitey—ten months after that, a miscalculation that for a while was pretty hard on Ruth, two such young babies and not much money yet. But Royce adored those babies; he was always touching and kissing them. During the early evenings he played with them constantly, and during the weekends at home he sang to them; later he read books and threw balls with them. “Spoiled them” Ruth at some point began to say, which would set off a soon to be familiar argument over possible interpretations of Dr. Spock: what was spoiling, anyway?
By this time, Royce was out of the car business and into real estate, where in the late Fifties and early Sixties he began to make a great deal of money in Marin County. However, it seemed to him that Ruth was restless, discontent, and he encouraged her to go to law school, an old dream of hers. She studied hard and did extremely well, and after passing the bar she got a job with a small firm, and then a year later she opened her own office, in a Victorian house out on Pine Street.
Royce was rich and Ruth was very busy, and the kids were good-looking, happy-seeming adolescents, and everything should have been wonderful, the opposite of Royce’s own somewhat pinched youth—he had begun to think that both his parents had been more than a little crazy—but it wasn’t wonderful. Ruth became almost totally involved in various causes: civil rights, peace, eventually women; she was always at meetings and marches, writing letters, more meetings, and she and Whitey fought all the time, which made Caroline cry, made Royce wretched. Partly in reaction to all that trouble at home, he immersed himself in the rich social life of Marin County, lots of new friends in Ross and Kent-field, Belvedere. He distrusted the Sausalito–Mill Valley element; they looked like nuts to him.
Among the new friends was Stacy Page, at that time a very rich, just-divorced young woman—leery of ambitious bachelors, a perpetual flirt with most married men. Not unaware of how wonderful they looked together, both so tall and blond, she and Royce flirted a lot, for several years, at parties.
They flirted, until one morning Stacy called and invited Royce to lunch. During the drive over the hills from the Stinson Beach house, which they had just built, to Stacy’s place in Belvedere, Royce was unaccountably nervous, although he told himself that there would be other people, including her maid and the Filipino houseboy. He had been to Stacy’s huge high-up balconied house before; Stacy liked lunch parties, and the hastiness of this particular invitation probably just meant that someone else couldn’t come, some other man. After all, by now they were almost old friends, he and Stacy Page.
Stacy met him at the door, visibly alone, in gray linen pajamas; she led him into the living room, and he observed that she was quieter than usual, smiling rather than saying anything. She led him toward several bottles of chilled white Burgundy, a fish salad, cheese and coffee. And then she led him upstairs to her wide blue-flowered bed, with its view of Mount Tamalpais and the Bay, lots of sky, clouds, birds.
Even that first hyper-excited time there were certain problems about love with Stacy. For one thing, she was an awfully big girl; even big Royce felt lost within her. (Delicate Agatha put this to me as delicately as she could, simply saying, “Well, Stacy is awfully big. I mean, she made Royce feel—”) For another, although she must have been fairly experienced by then, she performed certain acts as though she had heard about them and always meant to try them out sometime; her performance was a little academic. True sensuality, real driving lust, did not seem to be what motivated Stacy.
Whereas Ruth was and continued to be a deeply sensual woman. Madly “in love” with Stacy, Royce still had a better time in bed with Ruth. Very strange; he could not figure that one out. Even, sometimes, he had a curious, unnerving sense that Stacy was using him in a sexual way. All those orgasms were good for her skin, kept her blood pressure low, something like that.
But they kept it up, he and Stacy, for quite a long time, well past the usual ten months of an intense illicit love affair. (This was Agatha’s generalization, not necessarily mine.) They kept up both the party flirtations and the twice-a-week afternoons of screwing: one afternoon a week at Stacy’s, on the help’s day off; another at some carefully chosen motel. Stacy’s favorite was the Flamingo, in Santa Rosa. “God, it’s so tacky, it’s perfect,” she would cry out. Occasionally they would also take a swim in a motel pool.
Ruth moved out on a Wednesday night, and the next day, Thursday, being the help’s day off at Stacy’s, Royce was supposed to go over there for lunch.
A great mistake.
Having been told the news, over the ritual glass of wine, which they sometimes enlivened with coke, Stacy said, “Well, I can see how you’d be a little surprised, but I honestly can’t see why you’re sounding so gloomy about it.”
Gloomy: Stacy’s most pejorative word; she was a positive thinker, basically.
Accused, Royce floundered. “I don’t either,” he admitted. “I guess I’m in some sort of shock.”
Stacy that day was wearing a blue silk shirt, white pants. No bra. No shoes. Her small breasts and even her feet were very beautiful; Royce was often stimulated by the sight of those perfect toenails, polished, pink. But not today. In fact today he felt terrible.
Stacy continued, with a slight elevation of her lovely dimpled chin. “And I’m not exactly the ideal person for you to come to for sympathy in this case,” she rather reasonably said. “Just think, Royce—God—now we can go out.”
“Going out” with Stacy, Royce suddenly understood, was what in the entire world he least of all wanted to do. He did not even want to consider the possibility for some future occasion. He wanted to stay at home, and in his own way to mourn for Ruth, whom he had already begun to idealize, like a person who has died.
Or he would like to get drunk somewhere, and Stacy, like most highly self-conscious beauties, drank very little.
He managed to make love to her that afternoon, but only once, instead of their usual twice, or sometimes thrice. And then Royce went home and got drunk. Later Whitey came in, and the two of them really tied one on, as they put it to each other the following morning. They were both excessively hung over.
Royce remained extremely disturbed: Ruth refused to come home; she almost refused to speak to him. On some impulse Royce called Agatha and told her how upset he was. Maybe he could come over and talk to her?
Seated across from Agatha, the familiar family friend, in her funny, Danish-dowdy apartment, Royce tried to tell her how he felt; an essentially nonverbal person, he tried out phrases on her. Grown apart; conflicting interests; should have made more of an effort; not communicating. He said all those things, but none of them quite seemed to fit. He stopped trying, and just said that he felt sad. Miserable, in fact.
Agatha listened, as she does, and the more he talked the more he became aware of the quality of her listening, of her small sad mouth. What he really wanted, he suddenly thought, was just to take her out to dinner, to a nice quiet place. To be nice to Agatha.
13
Of course I thought, and thought and thought, about that long conversation with Agatha, which was by far the most intimate of our long association. And since I was really much more interested in her than I was in Royce—to say the least, what struck and interested me most were the revelations of her character.
Her compassionate concern for Royce I would have taken for granted, as I would have known that she would be touched by the fact of the family’s being originally Okies; it was rather as I had felt about the working-class origins of Derek—and so much for reverse snobbery on both our parts.
What was new, and to me most surprising, was Agatha’s clear familiarity with the mechanics and the pitfalls of illicit sexual affairs. Oh ho, so you’ve been there too, and quite extensively, is what I thought.
Another novelty was the unbridled malice with which Agatha spoke of Stacy; for Agatha, that had been a genuinely vicious description.
And again I thought, Oh well, then, we really have more in common than I had ever known.
*
In the midst of these and similar thoughts, plus a few constructive musings about Agatha’s house, one morning I went out to the mailbox, not hoping for much, and there was a thick envelope from Paris. From Ellie Osborne. A news photo, and a long letter, which said, in part, “No, I have never met your friend Jean-Paul, but I have read about him a good deal in the press. You’d think a handsome man like that would get himself to a better barber, wouldn’t you?”
The words brought back the nasal arrogance of Ellie’s voice, the loud echoes of inherited money.
But I gave almost no thought to Ellie that morning, for there was Jean-Paul, staring out at me from a blurred black-and-white photograph. My hands were trembling, and my heart jumped around.
Ellie was right about the haircut, at least; it was much too short, shaved above the ears, giving him somehow a Middle Eastern look, or maybe Yugoslavian.
But his face.
What had been soft and smooth and boyish had hardened; at fifty, or whatever Jean-Paul would be by now, he was leaner, more taut than he had been at thirty. One thing I thought of was how totally wrong Derek had been, in all respects: Jean-Paul had got thin, not fat. And I would have known him anywhere.
He had a deeply lined high forehead, deep furrows down both cheeks, and still that dark indentation at the bottom of his chin. An anguished, perhaps an angry face. Silly Ellie had cut off the explanatory caption; the picture could have been taken at a political rally somewhere, or in the midst of a strike.
I was terribly, hopelessly moved by that photograph.
It was like falling in love with Jean-Paul for a second time, or maybe with a new, even stronger, even more exceptional Jean-Paul. And since I too, the person in love, was surely older and wiser and in most ways stronger now, the emotion was intensified.
When I was able to think clearly, or almost clearly, I began to run through various alternatives: I could write to him, or even telephone. After all, I never had, but people did call Paris—Derek was always making such far-off phonings. But I could not work out what to say. And there was always the slight but horrifying possibility that he would not remember me. I used to believe, in a very simplistic way, that one’s own feelings about a person are an accurate indication of how that person feels about you, which is of course ridiculous. I think that for a couple of men, at least, whom I did not much care about, I have been a major love; and it could plausibly be that way in reverse for me and Jean-Paul. There I was, twenty years later, pining away, and he could wonder at the sound or the sight of my name: Daphne who?
The following week Ellie sent me another picture of Jean-Paul, this one clipped from some French newsmagazine.
The second picture was entirely different from the first, almost not recognizable as the same person. The hair was still short, but tidily, even smartly so, just a trim neat cut. And he was wearing a nice tweed coat—in the first picture his clothes had been as ill-fitting as his hair. A striped tie.
And he was smiling—a pleased, very interested and very sensual smile. Perhaps the photographer was a woman who attracted him? It was somehow an intimate picture, suggesting that possibility.
And I did not know which Jean-Paul was the more forbidding, the impassioned political leader, or the sophisticated, elegantly turned out man.
I had of course assumed love affairs for Jean-Paul, over the years. But I guess I had imagined that he would not have put in too much time in that way, being so busy. Unlike me. But in that picture it looked as though he had put in a lot of time, a lot of love affairs.
I could not work out an approach to him, nor what to say once I had thought of one.
14
One morning Tony Brown came in considerably later than usual, at almost nine. He looked terrible, as though ashes had been rubbed into his beautiful warm brown skin. When he opened the door, I was sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast. I thought he must be sick, but I didn’t like to ask. Besides, we hardly ever had conversations beyond what was necessary in the way of directions from me, and his explanations about what he was doing, and where and when. Or when I praised his work. I felt much affection for Tony, of a restfully unconversational sort; it had seemed to me that much too much of my life had been taken up in conversation, not all of it constructive, or even always fun.
However, when Tony glanced down at my eggs and looked even more ashen, I knew absolutely what was wrong: the poor kid had a horrible hangover. I said, “Tony, for God’s sake, sit down. I can’t stand to see you looking like that.”
He Sat, with a grimace, and I went to fetch him a dose of Fernet Branca, with a water chaser, and then for good measure a bunch of Brewer’s Yeast tablets.
He got all that down, with some effort, and he said, “You’re right, I don’t feel too good today. Me and Whitey, we ran into each other over on Potrero, and we decided to quit fighting each other. After all, we was buddies, over there. Then we went out to do some drinking, kind of to celebrate, and that man can really pour it down.”
“Was Caroline along?” Instantly I wondered why I had asked that, and I very much hoped that it had not been out of curiosity about the sexual life of Tony Brown.
“No, I don’t think she and him are getting along any too good these days.”
That surprised me; I guess I had taken for granted the intense brother-sister connection that I had observed, and I may have thought too that Caroline would be an influence in bringing Tony and Whitey back together. She would want them to be friends, I would have thought.
But then, not having had any, I don’t have too much instinct for sibling relationships. And one of the bad aspects of the only-child condition is that we are extremely inept at fights: we think that any fight is final; most of us are devastated by quarrels. In my imagination brothers and sisters fight all the time, in a cheerful bear-cub way, and then they quickly get over it—cleansed, as it were. But maybe they don’t.
I asked Tony if Caroline and Whitey had had a fight.
“No, nothing like that. They don’t fight too much. Whitey just gets real mean when he drinks, and I think Caroline’s pretty much had it with his shit.” He stood up then, announcing, “So am I, really tired of that man. I’m not going to do any more drinking with him, not any more.”
I could not help feeling a mean-spirited sort of pleasure at the idea of Whitey’s being shunned by his former friend, and by his sister. But at the same time it was a little frightening, the thought of Whitey unleashed on the world, looking for trouble, and revenge.
“Anyway, he’s talking about going up to Alaska, getting work on the pipeline,” Tony said.
“That sounds like a good idea.”
“His dad’s dead against it, but I don’t think that’s going to stop Whitey for long.”
I didn’t think so either, and then I began to wonder what Agatha’s connection with Whitey was like, how she felt about him. At this point I did not feel I could ask her, and I wondered if she would ever say.
Already Tony was looking much better, almost his old self, and I considered enviously the recuperative powers of youth—although he was probably not ten years younger than I was. And that morning, as always, I was struck by the extreme cleanliness of all his clothes, the bleached-out work shirts, and faded jeans, never ironed but always just washed. The combination of that soft pale blue cloth with his lovely brown skin was beautiful. And my appreciation of Tony did not arise from a generalized hard-upness, I am fairly sure. I think that under any circumstances I would have found him enchanting to look at, as lithe and graceful
as a cat, with those luminous dark eyes and lovely thick dark lashes.
Besides, as well as liking to look at Tony I liked him, and I daily blessed my luck in having him around. Incredibly enough, he was about to complete the work in the kitchen ahead of schedule, and to start on the small upstairs deck.
Some sudden strong impulse made me say, that morning, what I had often thought: “Tony, I really don’t know what I would have done without you.”
Tony’s smile came slowly to his face, and it usually involved a sidewise motion of his head. He went through that gesture now, completing a strong full grin.
Conversely, I have noticed that people with flashing smiles, of the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t variety, are generally quite mean, hostile people. Derek smiled like that; the expression came from nowhere, and as suddenly disappeared. A grin without an emotion.
Tony just said, “I’m real glad it’s worked out,” and the smile remained.
I looked out at the neatly railed deck, its redwood floor, and at the deep rows of kitchen shelves, all clear smooth new wood, and at the round kitchen table and the benches against the walls, and I said that I too was very glad.
Then Tony got to work and I headed out to Clement Street, to visit Caroline.
Generally she was an early riser, early to start to work; over the phone she had said to come over around ten—she would take a coffee break with me. But when I got there, exactly at ten, she was still eating breakfast. With a huge black man, whom she introduced as Thomas Baskerville. He had an exceptionally deep voice, its inflections Deep South. As we shook hands, I liked him right away; he seemed a serious person, a man of consequence.
Caroline was very fresh-faced, bright-eyed, in her old brown corduroy robe, her hair long and loose. She was clearly crazy about this Thomas, in a way that seemed out of character for her—cool Caroline. She kept touching him, reaching for his hand, stroking his back as she passed with honey and milk for our coffee.