Rich Rewards

by Alice Adams

  I was stricken with a longing that was both violent and diffuse: I longed for Jean-Paul, and for Paris, and perhaps most of all I was longing for an irrecoverable period of time, for those moments of twenty years past. And as I sighed for all that, I decided it would be a serious mistake, our seeing each other again, Jean-Paul and I.

  His being in Berkeley notwithstanding.

  Twenty minutes away.

  24

  “Terminal decadence” was the phrase that Agatha used over the phone as she described the new restaurant we were going to try, and later, though I recognized the phrase, neither of us could remember its origin. It would have come from a writer we both admired, but that covered a lot of ground: Michael Harrington, Mr. Galbraith, Nora Ephron? In any case, it perfectly described the place to which we went—appropriately enough, owned by an Iranian who had left Iran, trailing his Shah, with his hundreds of millions.

  The décor was dominated by huge stumps, real ones, from giant trees, and transported—at what must have been the most terrific expense: I know a lot about transportation costs, dealing with them as frequently as I do. And sandblasted—another mammoth expense—until the real wood, the real stumps, created an atmosphere of the most total unreality.

  The high ceiling was made of wide wooden beams, also sandblasted to a shining, unreal pallor, and the floor was of broad, joined polished planks. Round wooden tables, wooden chairs. And in all the far recesses of the room there were giant frothy ferns in slatted redwood tubs. Agatha told me that she had read somewhere that the total cost of the place was over three million, which she could not believe, but I could believe it; I believed every terminal cent of it.

  And in that palace of insanity, that tribute to rampant greed, self-aggrandizement, all those marvelous capitalist virtues, I was thinking of Jean-Paul—I had thought of nothing, no one else since reading that he was to come to Berkeley. I thought of him as Agatha and I talked, as we ordered and ate our expensive food.

  What I was thinking, and trying to decide about, was should I tell Agatha that Jean-Paul was coming? I had not mentioned him, naturally not, since that night last fall after I had read about him in the column, when Agatha and I went out to dinner and I was so undone by those French songs. And so much had happened since; I would have to start at the beginning, to refresh her memory of how it all began.

  I had thought a lot, in a general way, about the effects of “telling,” and I had come to a few conclusions, the main one being that there is an effect; what is told about is altered, if only slightly, by the fact of the telling—of its exposure to air, so to speak. More precisely, its exposure to another person. A long time ago, when I was married to Marshall, I confided at last to a friend that in truth I could not stand Marshall; and after saying so I found that I could stand him even less. More recently, during my “relationship”—California word, a bad sign—with Derek, I used to make bright jokes about his terribleness, his cruelty, with various bright New York friends, and that helped; it did serve to diminish some of the hurt that I felt. I never talked to anyone about Jacob: how to explain the world’s most brilliant, most talented and kindest junkie? Just after he died, I did call Agatha, who was already in San Francisco, and that modified the horror of his dying, just a little.

  However, the actual, imminent approach of Jean-Paul made an odd situation. I absolutely did not know what to do, how to handle it. Very likely I needed some advice, I thought.

  Most of the other people in that enormous room looked very young, but also nondescript, or perhaps that was an effect of the overwhelming décor. Their bright T-shirts and swinging flowered skirts and high stacked heels—that year’s young-girl style—looked ineffectual and bland.

  Agatha was talking about Royce, in the hesitant way that I had recently got used to with her. “I can certainly see why he’d want to drink so much,” she said judiciously, as though he were someone she didn’t know very well. And then, her voice tightening, she added, “But it’s fairly awful to see. Like watching a person hit himself over the head with a brick, again and again.”

  Having had a couple of drunken lovers, and gone through at least one time of too much drink myself, I knew what she meant, all too well.

  I murmured in a sympathetic way, I hoped, and then it occurred to me that maybe another good reason for telling her about Jean-Paul would be that of making a diversion. We were not getting anywhere with Royce, and my own feeling was that we never would. I thought he would get worse and worse, like the rest of the world, and all I could do was wait for Agatha to see it. And listen.

  And so I said, “Something really strange has happened lately.”

  We had finished our salads. I ordered some fruit and cheese, and more white wine, and so, thus sustained, I began to tell Agatha about Jean-Paul. I reminded her of the beginning of the story—just as well, it all seemed new to her; well, God knows she had been distracted. I told her about the shameful time when I said that I had to have a martini, and she laughed at that, in a gentle, helpful way. I tried to say what I had felt about him—how, ridiculously, I still felt for him.

  I did not say anything about his sex; contrary to a few currently fashionable notions about supposed conversations between “liberated” women, we never talked in that way.

  With the possible exception of Jacob, who had a wonderful way of hearing whatever I said, and often a great deal more, Agatha is the finest listener I have ever known. She takes it all in, saying almost nothing, but somehow giving what must be an emanation, an impression that she feels each slightest nuance of what is said to her, each shade of pain or shame—or even, in this case, although I did not quite say it, of sexual passion.

  I went through it all sequentially, beginning in Paris, my London-Paris trips, and then the increasingly desperate, futile letters we wrote, up to and including my feeling of a final abandonment when he said—correctly, in answer to an unhappy letter of mine—that he was sure I needed a “presence.” And I told her how I had felt, last September, reading his name in the newspaper column. And how I had felt two days ago, learning that he was to come to Berkeley.

  I finished up, “So I just don’t know what to do. About his being here. You know, it’s not like deciding whether or not to go back to France and find him there, which is how I was more or less thinking last fall. But Berkeley, Christ! You can get there in twenty minutes.”

  “And phone for twenty cents.” Agatha laughed, and then she frowned a little. “I do see what you mean. You can’t just let him be there.”

  “Exactly. On the other hand, I could do just that. That would be the ultraromantic gesture. Like not ever revisiting an ideal place.”

  “There’s that.”

  Thinking it out, as I always did when I talked to Agatha, I said, “I could even go over there, to Berkeley. Go to a lecture he was giving, or something. See him but not say anything, not let him see me.”

  “Actually you could do just that,” Agatha said. “It could be a way to decide about seeing him. You’d look at him and then see how you felt.”

  “Agatha, that’s perfect. You’re wonderful, that’s exactly what I will do.”

  She laughed at me. “Dope. It was your idea.”

  I believed then that was just what I would do; the plan seemed a perfect solution to my quandary, and we left it more or less on that note: my thanks, her depreciation of her own wisdom.

  Coming out of the restaurant, emerging into the early spring night bustle of Union Street, seemed itself a minor liberation. I had not quite realized how oppressive all that expensiveness was, those blasted, imported real stumps. I said to Agatha, “I’ve suddenly got the most terrific idea for your living room.”

  She laughed. “I know, don’t tell me. Stumps with real roots. Right?”

  That night I lay awake in bed for a very long time, and in my mind I went on talking to Agatha.

  Well, I will have to see him, that’s clear, I said to her. Ridiculous not to, what a waste. If for no other reason, simpl
e curiosity would force me to. Or complex curiosity.

  But see in what way—as friends? Well, why not? I have thought sometimes that I am best as a friend. Never having been a mother, I don’t know about that, but I suspect that I would have flubbed it, in one way or another. And my record with lovers is not commendable. But on the whole, with friends I am okay. Maybe we could, or should be friends, Jean-Paul and I.

  Of course the real issue, which I saw that I was not too subtly skirting, was whether or not we should go to bed. And at one or two in the morning, whatever it was, that day, I saw almost everything against it. For one thing, I would be withheld by sheer vanity: he would remember the body of someone twenty, not that of a woman of forty, being in “good shape” notwithstanding.

  Interesting: I did not consider possible changes in his body, and he was ten years older than I was. I think this is often true of women; we worry so much about our own aging that we forget that men age too, sometimes they get fat or scrawny, bald and wrinkled.

  Much more important was the possibility that the act of love might not be equal to the feelings involved—my feelings, that is; suppose it should somehow not be superb, ecstatic—not marvelous? I thought then, and in my mind I reminded Agatha, of a passage in a favorite book of ours, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, where two people who love each other in a most complicated way at last make love, I believe on a train, and the act itself is a failure. “Flesh, poor flesh”—something like that.

  In a logical way, then, I had sorted it all out: there was everything to be said for seeing Jean-Paul, for our becoming friends.

  And everything to be said against our making love. Again.

  Except that I was sure that I would want to.

  25

  April, that year in San Francisco, was cold and wet. Sometimes I overheard the natives arguing about whether the moisture was rain or fog; the more patriotic view seemed to hold with fog, rain being an un-Californian phenomenon. Even Agatha, an adoptive Californian, would insist on fog.

  I thought about Jean-Paul all the time, that spring; there was no moment when he did not occupy some part of my mind. And I came to a dozen conclusions, all conflicting and each to be abandoned, at one time or another, with the same enthusiasm which that very conclusion had originally engendered.

  The least plausible idea, and the one which I furtively and hopelessly cherished, was that we would meet and fall in love again and live happily together ever after, preferably in Paris. Vividly I could see us there together, even as I accused myself of a total derangement, a failed sense of reality.

  Curiously, and despite my overwhelming obsession, I was getting a lot of work done, on Agatha’s house and on Stacy’s. I spent days in Jackson Square or at the Ice House, or Henry Calvin’s; I made decisions and wrote purchase orders and follow-up orders, and made phone calls, dozens of phone calls.

  I had always thought that my work was more than a little crazy, those preposterous prices, and all that unreal, unrelated splendor; now it seemed to have got even crazier. For example, I called a furniture manufacturer in North Carolina to order some captain’s chairs for one of Stacy’s several decks; fine, yes, they could supply the chairs in the color I specified—in TWO YEARS AND TWO MONTHS. I could hardly believe it. The world could be over by then, I thought: nuclear “accidents,” universal famines, cancer, earthquakes.

  Or, at the very least, Stacy could have sold her house and gone to Paris.

  In just that way, the thought of Jean-Paul pervaded all my other thoughts: of course it was I who wanted to move to Paris.

  Then I ordered some carpeting for Agatha’s wide front stairs; they were highly polished, slippery, dangerous—I may have been thinking of Royce in that house, falling drunkenly downstairs. My source in Los Angeles gave me a price, which sounded very high indeed. And, looking in my book, I saw that the price of that carpet, albeit a very nice one, in two years had more than tripled. My profession began to seem not only crazy but somehow evil, one more adjunct to a basically criminal system.

  One afternoon early in May, Agatha called, and she sounded, for her, quite upset: Ruth Houston had disappeared, gone, no trace. If her office knew where she was, they were not giving it out.

  Disloyally, I found myself quite unmoved by this latest crisis in a family with whom I felt myself so accidentally involved. I had seen Ruth only twice, after all—well, three times if you count that passing in the hospital corridor after Whitey beat up Caroline. In a human way I hoped no harm had come to her, but it was not as though Agatha had disappeared, for example, or even Stacy. And some instinct, from somewhere, told me that this too would pass; Ruth would be found, and she would be okay, and nothing much would change.

  The real truth was, I guess, that I was getting tired of this obsessive love affair of Agatha’s; to say that Royce was unworthy of her attention was to understate the case, as I saw it. Another truth is that the force of my own obsession, the force of Jean-Paul, had shortened my sympathetic attention span.

  Agatha of course sensed all this, though I had tried to be polite, and she changed the subject, or almost changed it, to Caroline. “Do you know how Caroline is?” she asked. “Royce hasn’t seen her for a while.”

  “No, me neither.” Actually, I realized with a certain pang that in recent weeks I had hardly thought of Caroline. “But I’ll call her, and maybe go out there to see her,” I said. “Otherwise, how are you?”

  “Okay, I guess. Working along as ineffectually as ever, hating most other doctors. Sometimes I think I’m in the wrong line of work.”

  “I know I am,” I told her.

  I did call Caroline, who surprised me by saying very warmly that she had been wanting to see me: could I come out for lunch the next day, Saturday?

  I walked along Clement Street in the balmy blue May air, the first reasonable weather I had experienced in California, and I climbed the stairs to Caroline’s apartment, where I had not been since the night she told me that it had been Whitey who beat her up, just after we got the news of his death.

  Caroline greeted me in a friendly but very serious way; it was a greeting from a very busy person, someone with a high regard for the value of time. Together we walked down to the end of her long room, and we seated ourselves in those now familiar stiff wooden chairs. She asked if I’d like a glass of wine.

  I said that I would; and she produced two glasses from the refrigerator, already filled with wine; no waste motion seemed to be the order of the day. And she looked almost too well-organized, her beautiful hair pulled severely back, her sweater a drab shade of green.

  All that made me slightly nervous, so much efficiency. I felt as though I were being hurried along, and when I asked her, “Well, how’ve you been?” she almost interrupted in her eagerness to tell me, or maybe just to get the telling over with.

  “I’ve been having this really rewarding new relationship,” she rapidly told me.

  “Oh, have you?”

  “Yes, it’s really interesting.” She smiled, and I was struck with how happy she looked, more content than I had seen her for months. She opened her mouth to say something more, but at that moment the phone at the other end of the room shrilled out. Caroline said, “Shit” and went to answer it. “Oh, hi,” she said, and she frowned.

  It was not her lover, then, but someone she did not especially want to talk to; the tone of all her very short answers during that conversation expressed forbearance, no real affection or interest. “Oh, really?” she would say, from time to time, to what seemed a lengthy narrative. “Well, that’s neat, I guess,” she commented, at one point.

  The length of her call did give me a little time for thought, and what I thought, for no identifiable reason, was: Caroline’s new lover is a woman. For the moment she has given up on men. Or, less negatively, she has discovered women, in that way. And I found that I hoped two things for her: one, that she had chosen her lover out of love, not for reasons of theory or that year’s bisexual fashion, although that last
would have seemed out of character for Caroline; she was in no way a trendy person. The other hope of course was that the person was nice.

  She finished her conversation and hung up. “That was my mother,” she said.

  “Really? She’s back? Where was she?”

  “In Puerto Rico, getting a divorce.” The bitterness in Caroline’s voice when she mentioned her mother was painful to hear, and she now looked somehow all disarranged, undone. The earlier look of contentment had vanished.

  “I thought she still wanted to have Royce come back.”

  “She changed her mind very suddenly. It’s a family trait.” There was even more bitterness in Caroline’s small laugh. “Now she’s all divorced, and she’s going to marry this really wonderful man. Of course he’s a little younger than she is, about twenty years, but that doesn’t make any difference, he’s just terrific. He’s a potter, in Mendocino, and she met him—are you ready for this?—because he came around looking for Whitey, he’s an old army buddy of Whitey’s. It gives them a lot in common, she says. Christ, what a thing to have in common. Whitey.”

  “How is Thomas?”

  “I don’t see him too much. He’s trying to get into law school, and he’s really into that. Wants to join the straight world.”

  She sighed, in a deep, hopeless way. The moment for whatever she had wanted to say about a new friend had clearly passed, and I let it go—it would have seemed wrong to ask her.

  “Jesus,” she said after a minute or two. “How did I ever get into this family?”