by Alice Adams
And then there is Jimmy Hightower’s novel, that whole problem. The novel is awful. But Russ is not sure about what kind of awful. If he had written it himself—but that is impossible; he could never in all his born days have written a piece of garbage about early settlers in Oklahoma. Indians. Oil strikes. All that junk. The characters are all one-dimensional, sentimentalized, and, for Russ’s money, over-sexed. Which sounds like a surefire best-seller formula, except that it might not be. Russ is not at all sure of his judgment along those lines. And he is certainly not going to voice such an optimistic view to Jimmy, getting his hopes up so cruelly. On the other hand, should he even encourage Jimmy to send it off, to risk a highly possible rejection, and harsh, un-Southern-gentlemanly words?
All that sex. It has certainly made Russ wonder about the actual life of Jimmy. Of course he knows, he would be the first to know, about a writer’s fantasies, or actually any man’s. Still. He himself, for example, simply does not think all that much about sex; he has never done so, not since he was a boy.
In any case, he does not know what to do about this goddam book, nor about Jimmy himself, whom Russ, despite himself, Russ sort of halfway likes. And the more he likes him, the more tiresome and boring Russ finds him; that is the terrible paradoxical truth of it, a truth indecipherable to anyone but Russ himself (or possibly SallyJane), and even he is not quite sure of its deepest meaning. He is bored by people he likes? It is more interesting to be a little angry, a little disapproving, even?
Does he disapprove of Norris Drake? She walks right in with her case of Cokes, says “Where’s the goddam icebox,” and comes out of the kitchen swigging from a bottle. As SallyJane later puts it, “She sure gets right down to making herself at home.”
Norris stares at Russ again, and she grins her tight monkey grin, and then she says to SallyJane, “Well, I can see from the kitchen that you and me got our work cut out for us. Big party.”
As Russ knew she would, SallyJane demurs. “Oh no, I can—I’ve really got it all organized, much more than it looks.” Which Russ also knew was not quite true; poor SallyJane was never organized these days. Their meals were later and later, as SallyJane got slower and more confused. Sometimes his heart could break for SallyJane.
Knowing none of that, though, Norris can be brisk, “No, no, no, I have to help,” she says. “Whatever are houseguests for, now I ask you?” And she laughs, low and sexy, a surprising laugh from such a small woman.
And then, according to what SallyJane said later on, she really did help. With incredible speed and efficiency she did everything; she saw whatever was needed to be done and did it, without any directions or any discussion about it.
• • •
And the party arrived. All Russ’s familiar friends, their familiar smiles and gestures, known voices. Their same old clothes—their costumes. And Russ himself slips back into his part as the host, and his voice takes on his host accents, his hostly laugh, and smile. Genial, very country.
He watches poor pale fat SallyJane taking Norris and Clyde all around, introducing. Poor SallyJane, he can see that she believes herself in love with Clyde, in a sad, defeated hopeless helpless way, and for the first time he wonders: Could SallyJane be truly sick, something organic, not just all that heavy depression in her head? You would think that Clyde Drake would know, or would have noticed if she was sick; he’s supposed to be a doctor, isn’t he?
Dolly Bigelow, very demure and pretty in pale blue, sits there demurely next to Willard, her eyes dancing along with Clifton, who is getting drunk. Irene Lee is watching Clifton too, for all the good that will do, poor woman. Harry Baird, home from D.C. on a visit, is flirting very unseriously with every single woman in the room, making them all feel prettier, better (how Russ wishes that he could be so light, so unimpeded). And Cynthia Baird, who is beautiful if not exactly virginal in white, is watching, watching everyone and everything that happens. That is a woman whom Russ cannot understand, not at all.
And everywhere there is Norris Drake, flitting through the party like a firefly, in her light yellow silk, cupping her hands with their long crimson nails around the cigarettes that all the men hasten to light for her, her fingers always touching theirs. Observing all this play of fingers, of touches, for no reason Russ shivers.
Norris comes over to him for a drink—she asks for a Coke: why doesn’t she drink, or “hold with drinking”? He pours it for her as they exchange an empty look, a smile. But then, just as she is turning to go back to the party, she comes back to Russ, and with no smile at all she stands up on tiptoes, reaching to whisper. Her breath comes silky in his ear. “I want you to fuck me. I really do. You have to.”
And then, with a pure social and public smile, she is gone back into the crowd.
Never in his life has Russ heard a woman, any woman whatsoever, utter that word. Its shock is profound, echoing, rippling through his blood. But then he thinks, No, she did not say that. She’s a flirt and she teases, but she can’t have said that. Much less have meant what she said. What could she have said, or meant?
For the rest of that long and eventually drunken party, sober Russ feels a sort of nervous frenzy in his blood, much closer to fear than to desire. But what has he to fear? It is all impossible. What can she do? Besides, she didn’t really say that.
For some time now Russ has slept in his study, which is downstairs, almost in a separate wing of that huge house. He sleeps on a narrow cot; its discomfort wakes him from time to time and imparts a sense of monkish virtue, of sacrifice. Upstairs, in their wide deep marital bed, SallyJane sleeps the sleep of the deeply drugged, from which she sometimes cries out, loud and passionate cries, and groans. Impossible now to sleep with SallyJane.
But Russ, all alone, is deeply asleep when at some weird pre-dawn hour he feels again that sultry breath in his ear, and a whisper, “Don’t worry, I gave him some of that stuff he fills SallyJane up with—” And then a mouth against his mouth, a small strong tongue forcing it open, darting in. But not for long—nothing for long. The mouth and the breath move down, slowly down all the length of his naked body, coming at last to his sex—oh Christ! (He has heard about this act, read about it, but no one, not ever …)
Inside her mouth is all wet and slick, and the tongue now moving all around, and back and forth, up and down, until quite suddenly she has moved, changed everything, and is now up and astride him, and it is her place not her mouth that he is inside, her red hot place, as she rides him, rides him, pushing him down, her long nails pressing his arms, until his whole being breaks like a dam, and he is gone.
The silky voice in his ear, louder now, cries out, “Shit, I didn’t make it, shit, I never do, and it makes me sick, I am sick. I can’t even do it to myself.” She is sobbing against him.
Russ has never heard a woman say “shit” before.
26
“I don’t know, honey. I just can’t quite seem to get a handle on what Russ thinks I should do.”
“But, Jimmy—”
“I know, I’m a grown man and all that. But you know, comes to literature and the publishing business, I’m as ignorant as a field hand. And Russ—well, he was so very helpful. Up to a point. I don’t know.”
“How’s SallyJane doing?”
“I just can’t tell you. She sure is putting on weight, and seems to me like a most unhappy lady. She may be a lot on Russ’s mind these days. He sure seems, like, distracted.”
“And Deirdre Yates too.”
“What was that? This long distance, I couldn’t hear you.”
“I just said, and all those children too. This connection is terrible.”
“Anyways, I’m not getting any clues from Russ about how to handle this novel of mine. I just don’t know what to do with it.”
“Is that psychiatrist still around all the time?”
“Not so much, I don’t think. Not since that party.”
“Must have been some party.”
“Didn’t seem like too much at the time
. But I don’t know. Something’s sure changed since then. Up to and including Russ.”
“Jimmy, this new friend of mine, this Helen? Her brother’s a big shot at some publishing house. I’m just going to ask her what she thinks we should do.”
“Well, honey, are you sure?”
“Jimmy darling, good news. I met this brother of Helen’s, Stephen Ludwig, and he’s real interested in your book. Says he can’t promise anything, of course not, not even having seen it. Except a sympathetic reading. Seems he spent some time in Oklahoma a long time ago, and it’s my impression he has some romantic memories.”
“Must have been a long way back.”
“Well, he said why don’t you send it on up to him, and then the next time you’re up here for a visit you-all could talk.”
“Be pretty embarrassing if he doesn’t take to it.”
Esther hesitates. “I have to admit I thought of that. But you know, he’s been in this business all his life. He must have ways of handling situations.”
Jimmy laughs. “The last thing I want to be is a publishing ‘situation.’ But I guess I’m old enough to take bad news, if that’s how things turn out.”
Esther sighs, a sigh that is audible to Jimmy all those hundreds of miles from New York to the middle South. “Things aren’t so great around here,” she says. “The more it looks like war, the less we think we can get anybody out at all. Already some cities—like Lisbon, for one—are getting totally jammed with folks who want out, and most passages on the big boats are all booked, months ahead of time.” She says then, “Jimmy honey, I’m sort of scared. I really wish you’d come on up here, book or not.”
“Okay then, that’s exactly what I’ll do, baby doll. The book’s not the most important thing, after all.”
But to Jimmy, actually, it is the most important thing. And these two conversations, including his promise to come right on up to New York, have left him uneasy and anxious. Against some cooler and possibly better judgment, he decides to call Russ—who, surprisingly, says why not come over for a Coke later on in the afternoon.
“Things are a little confused around here,” Russ begins by explaining. “We seem to have these folks coming up again. Oh, you met them. The doctor Clyde Drake, and his wife, uh, Norris. SallyJane says that she enjoys having them but I’m not at all sure that’s true; she just works herself harder and harder, and the maid we’ve got now is no real help at all. But Ursula, the lady we met in Kansas when I ran over her pig, Ursula’s coming out again to stay for a while, and help out—sort of a housekeeper deal. SallyJane’s never been able to deal with help and now she’s considerably worse. Clyde Drake says, she doesn’t get better soon we’ll have to reconsider the shock. But here I am rattling on like a tired old woman about all my personal problems. I guess the truth is, Jimmy, old man, I don’t know what to tell you about your novel. These days I can hardly think about my own stuff, much less anyone else’s. I’ve got about as much sense about books as I do about women.”
All in all, this was a most remarkable and uncharacteristic speech from Russ, and Jimmy does not know what to make of it. Except to gather that neither Russ nor SallyJane is in very good shape. In different ways, of course. Jimmy senses a certain desperation in Russ; he sees, or hears a man whose life has run out of control, who is helpless among the major passions of women. Helpless and hopeless there in his very large house.
“Well, he can’t hurt anything but my feelings, and I’m too old to worry about a thing like that” is how Jimmy put it to Esther, speaking of Stephen Ludwig, the publisher. “So I reckon I’ll come on up there, with my manuscript under my arm.”
He has not told Esther about his most curious interview with Russ; he will never tell anyone. It occurs to him, strangely, to call Cynthia Baird, and to say that he is worried over Russ, but he decides against it. There are already too many women meddling in Russ’s life, Jimmy feels. SallyJane, and this Ursula, coming to be their sort of housekeeper, and now the Norris Drake woman—seems like she’s all over the place. He feels that either Esther or Cynthia, or the both of them, would have something sharply accurate to say about Russ, and whatever it would be Jimmy knows that he doesn’t want to hear it. Just as he has never even thought of showing his novel to Esther, who reads a lot, and who presumably has good sense about novels, books. As, for that matter, does Cynthia, who also reads all the time. He could not have explained his reluctance to let these women see his book.
• • •
Russ was drinking; that was the first surprise, the afternoon when Jimmy went over to see him. Russ was not a drinking man, which was just as well, since he famously had no head for the stuff, none at all. Everyone said that that was one of the reasons SallyJane’s father, President Caldwell, did not approve at all of Russ for his daughter. “The man can’t hold his liquor, he drinks like a darkie.” (He also regretted the fact that Russ was what was called a “self-help” student, which of course meant poor. “You don’t have to marry into poor these days,” said Ernest Caldwell. “But trust my daughter. Does not have the sense she was born with.”) But that afternoon Russ was slopping bourbon into his Coke—sweetening it, as he put it. “You sure you won’t have some, Jim, old man?” “I’m sure.”
The second surprise was Russ’s conversation—or, rather, his monologue.
He was going off to a monastery, Russ told Jimmy, in a blurry, slurred, but intensely serious voice. There was one in California that he had heard about, down near the Mexican border. That would take anyone—“even old sometimes-married Protestants.” Just prayers and working in a vegetable garden. Just monks. No women around, not even nuns.
“I have purely and simply got to get away from women. All women. They all play the devil with me, eventually. I can’t stand women. They make me crazy. If I could just never see one. The things they say. What they want. Intolerable to a man.”
And more like that. Genuinely shocked and upset, Jimmy was relieved to see that no response was expected from him. He was not sure that Russ really knew he was there, or even who he was. He certainly would not have known what to say. “But, Russ, I like women a lot, especially my wife.” Under the circumstances that would have sounded ridiculous.
And so, even had he wanted to, which, loyally, he did not, there was no way Jimmy could have described that conversation. To anyone.
Stephen Ludwig looks like a publisher in a movie. Pipe-smoking and handsome, grizzled, ruddy, with the dark red nose of a heavy drinker. And his office is a movie-set book-lined study; in the spaces without books there are etchings, and a few framed photographs of famous writers, just famous enough for Jimmy to recognize their faces.
They shake hands, Jimmy and Stephen Ludwig, and Jimmy is motioned to sit down.
For several moments, which seem very long to Jimmy, they are silent, smiling politely, examining each other. And then Ludwig says something amazing. He says, “To put it mildly, I really liked your book. I think it’s—well, terrific. A little work here and there, but nothing major. I hesitate to say this, but I just think we might have a very, very big success on our hands.”
Jimmy is there in Ludwig’s office for at least another half hour, but that is all of the conversation that he can recall, as he later tries to put it all together and tell Esther.
They are sitting on the terrace of the Hotel Brevoort, on lower Fifth Avenue.
“He said he’d only read it once so far,” Jimmy adds to his recital. “But that’s going pretty far out on a limb, wouldn’t you say? To go as far as he did? I mean, he can’t afford to talk like that to every person who sends him in a book.”
Even as he says this, though, all these self-congratulatory, self-reassuring sentences, and as Esther responds with a pleasure that is surely genuine, Jimmy has a strong sense of unreality. Even their setting, this attractive restaurant in an expensive neighborhood, where well-dressed couples are out walking their dogs or just walking home, enjoying the warm clear spring night—all this seems as unreal as Stephen
Ludwig, with his tweeds and his writer photographs, his pipe and (it seems to Jimmy) his farfetched optimism. None of it quite makes sense; it doesn’t mesh with what Jimmy thinks of as his real life, though he would find it hard to define that either; he hasn’t been near the oil fields of his young manhood for many years. But all that has happened today has seemed more like a movie, Jimmy Hightower Goes to New York, one in which he is not entirely comfortable. It would be better for Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper. One of those very tall guys.
He even has this aberrant and quite unusual thought: Do I really want to be a successful writer? Lord, just look at Russ. Russ, who might have been much happier as a small-town college professor, with maybe a play of his put on every now and then by the local company, and poems published in some quiet places, the Sewanee Review, the Virginia Quarterly (Jimmy can suddenly see this very clearly, as if it were another movie, another life of Russell Byrd). Does he, Jimmy, want all that money and fame, that kind of success, when he probably should have stayed home and tended his garden, and his investments?
He says to Esther, “It still could all not happen—you know that as well as I do. Just this one fellow’s starting enthusiasm.”
“Of course. And I think you’re very, very wise not to take him too seriously.” Esther, despite her new cloche hat over smartly bobbed short hair, and her pretty spring navy silk dress, still seems to mirror Jimmy’s own suddenly downward mood; she looks out of place in this handsome, festive, pre-dinner crowd in New York. As out of place as he himself feels.
They talk then for a while about other things, of their daughters and schools, new friends of Esther’s here in New York, and Esther’s work. But as they talk Jimmy finds himself more and more aware of the mood of the crowd around them, there on the terrace and passing on the sidewalk. It is a festive crowd, on the whole, but Jimmy senses somewhere an edge of panic—or hysteria, perhaps—in the midst of celebration. At first he attributes this insight to his own private mood of joy mixed with apprehension; but then he thinks, No, it’s not just me. We’re on the edge of a war, and no one knows how it will go, and we’re really scared, all of us.