by Alice Adams
Sensing Thomas’s strong, evident attractiveness, I had a guilty pang for Tony, so much smaller, so lovely but less powerful a man. Did Tony know about Thomas? Had they maybe even met? Wondering about all that, wondering how this generation worked out such things, I wondered too just who it was that Thomas so strongly reminded me of—and then I realized that it was Royce, both of them huge and confident men, with even the same narrowly shaped eyes, although Royce’s were so green, Thomas’s very dark brown. The notion of what either of them would make of such a suggested resemblance was enough to make me smile.
Caroline and Thomas had been talking, it seemed, about Whitey’s proposed trip to Alaska, the pipeline plan that Tony had just mentioned to me. I gathered that Thomas and Whitey were or had been friends; it later turned out that they had been in Vietnam together, along with Tony.
“It might be the best thing for that man,” said Thomas, in his deep, judicial voice—it occurred to me that if he sang he would sound like Paul Robeson, a thing I would not have said, with its somehow racist implications. “There’s just not enough action in this town for Whitey Houston,” Thomas said.
“Living alone with my father is really getting to him,” said Caroline, to me. “They just drink all the time, sitting around out there.”
Caroline, and possibly Whitey too, did not seem to know about Agatha’s involvement with Royce, which I found mildly disturbing. Why didn’t they? Why did Agatha, with Royce, have to be in a more or less illicit position? I resented it for her.
Caroline continued, about her family: “Whitey really dug all those parties out there,” she said. “He thought it was going to be like that for good, a houseful of blond hair and classy clothes.”
This was, in fact, an extremely astute observation on Whitey’s character, and as sad as it was accurate. I remembered how happy and satisfied Whitey had looked at the Houston party Agatha and I went to, that long-past Sunday. He must have thought that all his father’s new friends constituted a genuine arrival, a permanent condition of fun. An opulent, fashionable life was to be his compensation for the rotten war—like the gaudy, glittering Forties that followed the end of that war. I did not think that Whitey made these historical comparisons, though.
Thomas got up then and said he had to go. I should have left before him, of course, but there wasn’t time. He was just suddenly gone.
Caroline came back from seeing him to the door and sat down across from me.
I would have liked to say something about Thomas, but what? Wow, he’s really terrific: that sounded ridiculous, and besides, it would be presumptuous for me to make any comment at all. I had not been invited there for an inspection of Thomas.
My instinct about that must have been right, for Caroline said, “Just let me throw on a few clothes, and we can start in with some samples.”
I remembered then what I had come to Caroline’s about: my present to Agatha. Caroline was to make a large wool sculpture, which I thought would be wonderful for Agatha’s bedroom.
In a few minutes Caroline reappeared from the bathroom in jeans and a sweater. She stood for a while in front of the open shelves on which she kept her piles of wool; from time to time she would reach in for something, consider it, either put it back or drop it into the growing pile at her feet.
At last she bent and picked up all the samples from the floor and brought them over to me. And I saw that she had worked out a spectrum, gray-blues to gray, to blue, to black. She was going to make something beautiful, a perfect present for Agatha.
15
One afternoon, rather late, the telephone rang, and there on the other end was Derek, but Derek without the hollow sound in the background that indicates a long-distance call. It was Derek in San Francisco.
“Well, my girl, since I’ve come out all this way, you must surely allow me the pleasure of taking you out to dinner.”
I was not busy that night, although of course I could perfectly well have said I was. But curiosity and possibly a habit of acquiescence to Derek prevailed, and I agreed that yes, we would have dinner. I did not suggest that he should come to my house for a drink, however; he was not to call for me—I would meet him in the bar of his Nob Hill hotel.
“But, my dear, this place has half a dozen bars,” he argued, and that was true enough, since he was staying at the Mark Hopkins.
We settled on the Top, the famous Top of the Mark, where so far I had never been: it would never have occurred to Agatha to take me there, nor me to suggest it. My considerable fear of heights would have been one deterrent, along with the tourist reputation of the place.
And then we began, as we had often done before, to argue about where to go for dinner, since presumably a reservation must be made.
I mentioned a quiet, unpretentious French place that Agatha knew about, in North Beach. Excellent food. But Derek had been told that Trader Vic’s was the place where really knowing San Franciscans went, the only place. He had also been given the quite erroneous impression that you had to have some sort of introduction, some pull in order to be admitted, and he in fact had just that necessary connection; he had a friend who could arrange it all.
Well. The Top of the Mark. Trader Vic’s. Dressing, I reflected that for me this would be an entirely new version of San Francisco.
I have to admit I was glad that night of my good new wardrobe, my “designer” clothes, and at the same time I felt ashamed of needing them. And I thought about the essentially defensive nature of certain clothes, the armor that they provide for the insecure, which has nothing whatsoever to do with aesthetics, even with simple attractiveness. I have, or I had before my tasteful rip-off—for which I continue to believe that Whitey was responsible—an old yellow shirt in which I looked better than in anything else; there was something about that particular shade, and its softness was becoming. But even if I still had it, I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—wear an old cotton shirt to those Derek-chosen places. I needed my expensive uniform.
The express elevator to the Top went extremely fast, for a very long time, activating my acrophobia—and giving me time to think that this was a very poor choice for a meeting place. As soon as the door opened, I knew that I would hate it there: such huge views, from so terribly high up. Views of everything: other buildings, the Bay, both bridges, Marin County, Berkeley, Oakland—Christ, you could see everywhere.
But there was Derek at the bar, instantly seeing me, coming toward me—and I knew better than to remind him of my weak-minded fears; he would have enjoyed my discomfort, as he had before, when we flew together and he saw my tight grip on the seat divider.
“Well my dear, I must say that you look quite smashing” was his genial greeting, accompanied by a cheek-brushing friendly kiss. It was a good beginning, and I realized that, away from Derek, I tended always to concentrate on his evil qualities, his sadism and general insensitivity, his egotism, whereas I would forget his reliably good manners, his pleasant looks, even his considerable intelligence—all of which were apparent as we moved to a table and began to talk.
Thank God: no window table was available, and so I was able to situate myself with my back to the views. I planned to give Derek the flattering impression of total attention to him, rather than to our splendid surroundings, but of course he noticed and mentioned it right away.
“You’re avoiding the views,” he said, but then he made a very wrong guess. “Do you come here so often that it bores you?”
I said that actually I had not been there before, and I added that in fact I was not fond of such very large views.
“You probably don’t like views because there’s nothing you can do to them, is that it? Professional annoyance: how would you decorate a view?” He chortled with pleasure at this attempt.
It was another wrong guess, but in its way quite clever, I thought; in the case of many—maybe most—decorators he would have been right on, and I laughed appreciatively. I was thinking, Well, he’s not such a really bad person; maybe I can stop excoriati
ng myself for ever having loved him.
And then Derek began to talk about a book of short stories just out by a young man whom we both admired, and I was reminded of another forgotten worthy trait of his: he always seemed to be waiting with something urgent to discuss with me, often of a flatteringly elevated nature, such as this most talented young man.
Actually, though, we liked this young writer for quite dissimilar reasons. Derek was drawn to him for his geographic range: he seemed to have lived everywhere, even to have fought in wars in several places, as Derek had. Whereas I liked the quality of his prose, and I liked too his affectionate view of the people he wrote about, especially the women. After so many years of male-stud novels, heroes fucking everything in sight and never seeing a woman, this young man’s sexual tenderness was a vast relief. And for that I put up with his occasional wars and bloodiness. But he was still a very good choice as a conversational starter between Derek and me, reunited in this most unlikely place.
I had ordered, received and begun to drink a double vodka, which helped my view vertigo. After twenty minutes or so I was even able to look around, and to my great relief I found that some heavy fog had come in; it enveloped the tower we were in, so that only a few dim lights were visible. Above the din of the bar I could hear foghorns, their harsh and mourning bray.
Derek was saying, in what was for him a very low voice, “You see that red hair? Look, two tables over there. Looks unreal, doesn’t it, that particular color? But it’s genuine, I can tell. It’s the shade of red that always goes with light blue eyes.”
The old Derek, re-emerged.
He seemed very pleased with this odd piece of expertise, and so I let it go, but not without marking it down in my mind for possible future use.
Then he said that it was time to get on to Trader Vic’s.
Along with the entrée provided by his friend to that exalted restaurant, Derek had evidently also been given instructions on how to walk there from the hotel. “Only a few blocks,” I was told as we started out.
We pushed along in the fog, windblown and cold, and then I remembered Derek’s deep aversion to cabs. I guess everyone clutches somewhere, money-wise, but with Derek I would often have happily paid the taxi fare myself, which he would not allow either. He even had elaborately worked-out theories about why, in many circumstances, it is better to rent a car.
We turned left down a very steep street; normally I would have been apprehensive, afraid of falling on my face and breaking at least my neck, but tonight drink had made me heedless. And, in what must have been record time, we made it to the restaurant.
The entrance was probably deeply disappointing to Derek—in most ways a man of taste. Not having his high expectations, I was merely surprised that the first room you entered, in a supposedly elegant restaurant, could possibly be so tacky. It looked like a gift shop—well, it was a gift shop: silly souvenir-type things for sale, the motif being South Seas. There were even especially bottled vinegars, and cookbooks by the owner of the place. And the group of people who were already there, who had just made themselves known to the maître d’ and were being appreciatively made welcome, did not look like a group with Derek’s connections. They seemed rather to be rich Texans, wearing pounds of chinchilla and vicuña, Gucci, thick eye makeup, diamonds and gold. They reeked of oil.
“Hossein, this is absolutely the darlingest place!” I heard one of the women cry out, and then I noticed Hossein, the dark stranger in their midst, whose heavy brows gave him a strong resemblance to his deposed Shah. Quite possibly it was Hossein who was their host, and their connection.
Those people were taken off somewhere, and then Derek gave his name, and the name of his friend, and we were seated.
“You see? We’re not in the same room with them,” he observed triumphantly, but since neither of us was an expert on the status signs in that room, I thought that for all we knew “those people” got preferential treatment over us. Maybe “Trader Vic” was especially fond of Iranians and Texans—but I said none of this to Derek.
I was not, however, rewarded for restraint; instead Derek began to attack me for the tackiness of the place.
“Well my dear,” he led off familiarly—we could have been married for years—“if this is what San Francisco considers grand, I do rather wonder at your choice of residence.”
I countered weakly that I had never been there before, and realized with some surprise that I now felt defensive about San Francisco, although quite possibly that was because it was Derek who was doing the detracting. “And really, Derek,” I went on, “do you often judge cities by their most pretentious restaurants?”
“Touché, my dear.” Derek was generally a fair-minded person. “But it’s not exactly Maxim’s, is it now.”
“I never said that San Francisco was Paris, or even like Paris.”
“Well, at least you can’t defend your morning newspaper.”
“No, you’re right there. I wouldn’t think of it.”
For a while we chattered amiably about the deficiencies of the Chronicle; that morning Derek had been struck, as most visitors are, as I had been a couple of months ago, by its extreme localness. I agreed, of course, and that small conversation almost restored us to friendship, or something near it.
We had more drinks, and then we ordered our dinner. Derek wanted something Oriental, as I guess he had been told to do. I ordered salmon, having become a great fan of West Coast fish.
Fresh drinks.
Over his new Scotch, Derek began to tell me again how marvelous I looked. He praised my clothes, and he said that it was wonderful for me to be so tall. He had not said this before—in fact I could remember quite a few complaints about my height—but now he went on at some length about the advantages, for a woman, in being tall. He couldn’t stand an undersized woman, he told me. He spoke so venomously about short women that I knew he must be having an affair with one.
And then he asked me if I had ever thought of becoming a dancer. Well, that suggestion was ludicrous enough to make me laugh aloud. “Derek, for one thing, I have practically no sense of balance. You know that. I might as well take up tightrope walking.”
During dinner, Derek made several remarks about women who couldn’t cook—he knew that I could—and I made a note of that.
After dinner there was a belly-dance place that Derek had heard about. We had terrible drinks there, and above the dreadful music Derek shouted into my ear about what really awful people most dancers are.
Once you have noticed a persistent mannerism in another person, of course it becomes much more marked; the smallest hint of it looks like a caricature. I could hardly believe that Derek was going on and on with his old barely concealed jealousy ploy, but he was. He was worse than ever; or maybe his perception of my relative lack of response—not like the old days—was goading him on.
In any case, by that time we were really tired of each other, the difference between us being that I knew it, whereas Derek did not. Leaving that place, I saw from his face that I was supposed to ask him back to my house for a nightcap; he may even have expected to spend the night. But I had been working on a sneaky plan of my own, and I suggested my “favorite” North Beach bar, where actually I had been only once; what I liked about it—or, rather, what conformed to my plan—was its layout: a long entrance hall, invisible to the main room, off which was a Ladies.
Leaving Derek in the big room, with his brandy, I wrote him this note from the Ladies: “Dear Derek, I’m sorry you’re having trouble with your short red-haired blue-eyed non-cooking dancer. Better luck next time. I don’t think we have much more to say to each other.”
I sent the note in with a waiter.
I thought it was very funny, and I giggled drunkenly to myself all the way home in my Taxi. I knew that Derek would consider it beneath him to follow me home, or even to call, and I knew too that if he had come home with me there would have been an ugly scene.
In the morning, though, nothing seemed fu
nny at all. I felt terrible, and the note to Derek appeared simply a childish gesture. For a long time I was too heavy-headed, too aching in all my limbs, to get out of bed, and so I just lay there, plagued and tormented by everything I had ever done that was wrong. From my Episcopalian years at St. Margaret’s the General Confession came back to me, and ran dolorously through my head: “We have left undone those things that we ought to have done, and we have done those things that we ought not to have done.” Well, that summed it up rather tidily, I thought. Maybe I could somehow rejoin the church, in a serious way, like Agatha? But probably not.
One of the things that I “ought” to have done, long ago, was to run off with Jean-Paul. What a life that would have been! What a woefully missed opportunity it now seemed. That was my single chance for a significant, serious life, I thought—on that awful hung-over morning. Also, and I could handily blame Derek for this, I had not even tried to find Jean-Paul, the time we were in Paris.
The thought of Derek himself, that morning, was another source of self-laceration. How could I have had a lover, lost time and sleep over him, whom I didn’t even like? When he was both mean and pompous, never mind about intelligent and handsome. It was very depressing, and it got worse as I considered an array of not-liked lovers—all of them shits, really, as I now saw it—with whom at one time or another I had been “madly in love.” Only Jacob and Jean-Paul stood out, as liked and loved and tremendously admired. And Jake was dead, a savage junkie death, and Jean-Paul impossibly in Paris, busy being a leading Euro-Socialist.
At last my guilty ruminations began to seem ridiculous, even to me, and I forced myself up and out of bed, down to the kitchen for tomato juice, Fernet Branca and lots of vitamins. I was not up to eggs.
I was just dosing myself with those remedies when Tony came in. He took one look at me and then he did an amazing, if totally simple thing: he put his arms around me, he lightly kissed me and he said, “Oh, poor Daphne.” I don’t think he had ever said my name before.