The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  Hanging up, I digested this outrageous suggestion, a neighborly call from me, as best I could, along with the news of Gloria’s defection. I found myself violently agitated, pacing about, unable to unpack, unable to do anything but smoke a lot of cigarettes and stare at nothing.

  At last, in a mood of what-the-hell, or, what-have-I-got-to-lose, I did exactly what Dr. James had suggested: I went to the telephone and I dialed the number that I had memorized two years ago, which I still knew, although I had never used it before.

  “This is Jane Phelps,” I said in a clear strong voice, quite startling to my ears: who would have thought I could manage it? “I’ve just got back from Italy, and I thought—”

  “Well, my dear Jane,” he crashed into my sentence, as though he had been waiting to hear from me. “What an entirely delightful surprise, how quite wonderful to hear from you! And Italy, ah, how I would love to hear of your stay there, all of it. I don’t suppose you could possibly—”

  He was asking me up to his house for a bite of supper, as he put it, and I was saying yes. Yes, yes.

  As we approached his door, Ran having gallantly driven down to pick me up at five-thirty—“Well, we might as well start with the cocktail hour, don’t you agree?”—Ran seemed to have forgotten that I had never been to his house before, and I saw no reason to mention it. He did mumble as we entered that he was afraid it was a little messy, the “girl” got in his way; she hadn’t been there for a while. I then walked into a huge room, the room that is now my own, to a scene of the most incredible squalor: spilled drinks and spilling-over ashtrays, scattered newspapers, magazines, unopened letters, face-down books. Dust rabbits at the edges of the rugs. Long grime-streaked windows that looked out to the lovely leaves, the hills, the gentle June twilight.

  It was obviously the dwelling place of a person too miserable to function in a normal way, incapable of emptying an ashtray, of reading, finishing anything, probably of eating, and I wondered about the bite of supper. But mainly I was stricken with waves of pity for Ran, perhaps my first kindly emotion in his direction, which did nothing to diminish my other feelings. I sat down in a cleared space on a sofa as Ran went off for drinks. I knew that I would do well not even to think about the kitchen.

  Sorrow, what he had recently been through, even too much bourbon had not made Ran less attractive; if anything, he looked better, leaner and sadder, his dark eyes larger and his hair, I thought, a shade more white. That night he was wearing, as I will (evidently) always remember, an old plaid wool shirt, probably from L. L. Bean, his favorite store.

  We sat for a long time, there in the deepening dusk; from time to time Ran would get up and go and “sweeten” our drinks, not turning on any lights. And we talked, as Dr. James had more or less instructed, about Italy. Ran was upset that I had only gone to Florence and Rome; he didn’t count Genoa. “But Siena,” he said. “Bergamo. And Todi, Gubbio, Spoleto. Ravello! You can’t believe the views of hills of olives. But after all you are so young, you can go many times to Italy.” At that last I thought I heard a small quaver in his voice, but I could have been wrong. In truth I was barely listening; I was only looking at him, wanting to touch him, to be touched. And I was a little afraid: I knew that I could not stand another evening that ended as our last evening of intimacy had ended; this time I would behave very badly indeed.

  Another fear was that he would get drunk and pass out: I didn’t yet know that Ran was the stay-up-all-night sort of drinker.

  He had been sitting on an armchair near my perch on the sofa. Coming back with what must have been our fifth or sixth drinks, he then sat down instead on the sofa, on another cleared space near mine, with only a pile of letters, bills, whatever, stacked between us. It was I who finally reached across, reached for Ran, but at least he was responsive; as though he had been waiting for just that gesture, and maybe in a way he had been, he grasped and kissed me, and at last, in the fumbling way of adolescents in a darkened room, on a cluttered family sofa, we managed to make love. And when Ran cried out, “Oh, my darling,” although I partly knew that he did not mean me, my heart leapt gratefully anyway.

  And that was the beginning of our legendary love affair, the great love of Jane Phelps and Randolph Caldwell. From then on we saw each other almost every day, one way or another, as the seasons changed around our separate houses on that road, in the deep beautiful woods. Wisely enough, we never even considered moving in together; after a night of love one or the other of us would return to his or her own dwelling. We both knew that we needed those hours apart, sometimes simply to gather more energy for love, at other, too frequent times to refuel a quarrel, to lick our wounds.

  After the lush green summer, of honeysuckle, roses, wisteria everywhere, came an autumn landscape of the most brilliant leaves, crimson and gold against a blue, blue sky, in the brighter, colder air. Then winter, sometimes snow, or more often just cold, the woods full of thin crisp leaves, and the smell of wood smoke from the Negro cabins, far down the hill. As much as with Ran, I fell in love with that landscape, his countryside. Permanently.

  One great shared pleasure, discovered early between us, was in talking about our work. It was the deep, extraordinary excitement between two people whose pursuits are quite separate, but whose dedication to these activities is similar, two people who can thus find areas of the most passionate affinity. These conversations occurred infrequently; like most “creative” people, neither of us was often moved to talk in that vein, but when we did it was entirely wonderful, talk that even now gives me the greatest joy to remember.

  But a sad fact about these conversations, of course, was that for Ran it was all in the past; he was talking about how he used to feel, what he once had done. Whereas I had just begun to work in a serious way; I worked furiously, excited about what I was producing, what I dreamed of making in the future. In those early days I was just moving from small carved wooden sculptures to larger figures, and in my mind were even larger constructions, the sort of shapes that I eventually achieved.

  What demons, then, drove us so frequently to ugly rages, unspeakable recriminations? We would goad each other on, until Ran would say that no, he did not love me at all, he never had, I did not know what real love was. Or I would go on and on about my great and numerous Italian lovers, exaggerating wildly, until Ran would get up and lurch toward me, and slap my face—this happened more than once, and then I would hit him back, of course.

  Too much drink was certainly a cause of trouble between us, that endless succession of bourbons-and-water, but booze was not a necessary cause, I wouldn’t think. Surely there must be at least a few blowsy alcoholic couples who get along affectionately, slurring their words of love?

  No, with us there were at least two basic and seemingly irreparable causes of conflict, deep-rooted, unavailable to rational thought, or control.

  To blame Ran first: one of our troubles was his basic mistrust-suspicion of sex, especially good sex, and ours was mostly excellent—hard to explain, but there it was, great sex. Although he never would have admitted it, being such a sophisticated man, a distinguished composer, Ran really believed all those Protestant-Puritan myths, especially strong in small-town Southern men, I think. He believed that sex weakened your intellectual processes: “Well, my dear, I fear that I must bid you an early adieu; I have to get a great deal done in the morning,” he would say, over my impassioned protests, my threats, and this was not something that we could ever talk about. He believed too that nice women, good women, didn’t really like sex; my evident sensual relish made me suspect, was probably proof of a bad character.

  The other problem, maybe worse, was mine: my own unshakable, implacable self-dislike. Its causes no longer interest me; it was just a fact, like being tall. And we all know how it is with such people: anyone who claims to love us is either lying or soft in the head, inferior; at various times I accused Ran of both conditions, but mostly of lying. Even when he assured me, as he often did, that the happiest moments in his l
ife had been with me, that he had never truly cared so much for any woman, and for so long, I was always sure that his heart and mind were still vividly inhabited by Gloria. I believed that even in our most tender moments he thought of her, and that to me he was simply being polite, saying what he felt the situation called for.

  (But is it possible, Ms. Heffelfinger, that I was wrong, that I was indeed much loved by Ran? A heady thought: I can hardly take it in.)

  The next phase of our “relationship” was mostly occupied with Ran’s illness, and it was mostly terrible.

  He had always coughed a lot, ever since I had known him, hardly surprising in such a perpetual smoker, although at the time I smoked as much as he and rarely coughed. We even joked sometimes about his smoker’s hack, since he seemed to cough most violently in bed. Then, in a gradual way, we both noticed that the cough was getting worse, and worse and worse. He would be taken with terrible paroxysms, fits, during which he would seem to be trying to cough up his very lungs; he would clutch his arms together, his face an awful red, and wet with sweat.

  I began to have secret fears of TB, then still relatively common, or of lung cancer, less prevalent, and not much known. At last I was so frightened that I dared his rage; I knew he would feel an imputation of illness as an accusation (one more!) but I said to him, “Ran, darling, that cough of yours is getting out of hand. You’ve got to get it seen to.”

  He answered so mildly that I was more alarmed than ever. “I know,” he said, “I’m going up to Johns Hopkins next week.”

  My first thought, which I managed not to say, was: But I have to go to New York next week, I can’t go with you. (I had begun, in the long course of my association with Ran, to enjoy some success, from a show in the small gallery of the Hilton art department, to several pieces in a statewide show, in the capital city, then moving north to a show in Washington, D.C. And then New York, Madison Avenue. The Whitney.)

  I did say, “You’ll give me a call? I’ll be in New York. The Brevoort.”

  “Okay, if you’re going to be such a silly bitch about it.”

  “Yes, I am, you dumb bastard.”

  That was how we often spoke to each other, affection concealed in abuse. I think Ran may even have felt rather daring, calling a woman a bitch right to her face, and God knows he often meant it.

  • • •

  Most of that trip to New York I spent on the phone, leaving messages as to my whereabouts: if Mr. Caldwell called I would be having a drink at the Plaza, in the Oak Room; I would be with Betty Parsons; I was back in the hotel, having dinner on the terrace, by myself.

  By now we were in the early forties. Ran and I had been together for almost ten years, and the country was at war. New York, that bright October, was full of uniforms, arrivals and departures. Since the Brevoort was fairly expensive most of the uniforms there were officers’, lots of brass and braid, ribbons and stars. I had just got rid of a very drunk colonel, who was insisting that he join me—how dare I have dinner alone, didn’t I know there was a war on?—when there, where the colonel had been, was Ran, very dashing, very happy, almost drunk.

  He kissed me lavishly, which was unusual: he disliked a public display. He sat down across from me, and he spoke the great news: “I thought I should tell you in person that I am a certified healthy man. Those gentlemen, with their innumerable tests, which were not at all pleasant—they all failed to turn up a single evil diagnosis. I have no infections, no malignancies.”

  Well. We celebrated with champagne and lobsters, and more champagne for breakfast. I took Ran around to some galleries, and he was very proud of me, I think. Later we met some old music friends of his for drinks, on Patchen Place, and more friends for dinner, at Luchow’s. We had never had such a good time: how wonderful, Ran was not seriously sick.

  What we both ignored, or failed for quite a while to see as significant, was that he was still coughing, badly.

  Back in Hilton nothing else had changed much either. We drank and quarreled and talked as much as ever. I think we made love a little less, by then.

  Sometime the following spring Ran announced that he had been offered a teaching job in the music department in Tucson, the University of Arizona. “Although I confess that the word ‘emeritus’ rather gives me pause,” he said.

  He rambled on, but I wasn’t listening at all; I was thinking Gloria. Gloria had moved out to Phoenix or Tucson, to me almost the same place. Out West. Of course she must be Ran’s true direction. That night we had one of our bad quarrels, about something else—naturally.

  I went out to visit him in October, which was not one of our best times together.

  For one thing, the place itself was so strange that it made us seem alien even to each other. Surrounded by the bizarre, inimical desert, the flat, palm-lined, unnaturally sunny town, Ran’s apartment had the look of a motel: stucco, one-storied, part of a complex built around a large, much too blue swimming pool, in which it was never quite warm enough to swim.

  Motels have always seemed somehow sexual to me, and I was unable to rid myself of fantasies involving Ran and Gloria: had she visited him there, did she maybe come for visits frequently? All morning, every day, when Ran was off teaching his classes, I would ransack his apartment (though tidily, a cautious spy), every cranny and corner, drawer and wastebasket, his desk, even the linen closet, in a search for Gloria, any trace of her—a quest that was as compulsive as it was humiliating, degrading. And it was also fruitless, yielding up nothing but a crick in my back, a broken fingernail and dust.

  At night we went out and ate Mexican food and drank too much Mexican beer, and, out of character for us, we neither quarreled nor talked very much. I was afraid—in fact, I knew—that if we did talk much of it would lead to a fight, and any conversation might summon Gloria. And Ran had, seemingly, almost no energy. He coughed a lot, and we almost never made love.

  (But then tonight, Ms. Heffelfinger, as I remembered that time, from such a long distance, and I recalled my desperate need to know about Gloria, I came to an odd conclusion: I thought, How strange of me to care, when really it didn’t matter. What was the difference, finally, whether or not Gloria spent an afternoon or a weekend with Ran, within those garish stucco walls. Even whether or not they made love. I could almost hope they had; I could almost, if belatedly, halfheartedly, wish for a little almost final happiness for Ran. But not too much, and I was still consoled by the fixed idea that Gloria would have been uninteresting in bed.)

  • • •

  When he came back to Hilton, at the beginning of the following summer, I knew that Ran must be very sick indeed—his speech was so radically altered. Whereas before he had said everything so elaborately, with such a smoke screen of complicated verbiage, now he spoke very simply and directly, as though he had not much time or breath remaining. Which in fact he did not: he had what we now know as emphysema, he was dying of it.

  That summer we spent most evenings in Ran’s huge high glassed-in living room, watching fireflies and the lengthening shadows, among the barely stirring summer leaves, the flowering shrubbery.

  “Sometimes I can’t remember when you first came here,” Ran said one night. “Was it before or after Lucinda killed herself?”

  “Just after,” I told him as I digested what I had only half known, or heard as rumor before, what he thought I already knew—Lucinda’s suicide. And I sadly wished that he had been able to say this before; it might have eased some pain for him, I thought. And I thought about Lucinda, her long novels and small madrigals, her dislike of the “cluttered” landscape, and I cursed her for adding to a deeply guilty man’s store of guilt. In the long run, really, Gloria had done him a lot less harm.

  “I guess by now I think you’ve always been around,” he said, with a new half-smile, so that my heart lurched with an aching, unfamiliar tenderness for him.

  On another evening of that summer Ran told me that he was going to sell his house. “It’s too big,” he said. “Taxes. So many rooms. Maids.
The windows.” He had a new and alarming habit of quick breaths between almost each word, and deep difficult breaths between sentences. Now, after such a labored pause, he added, “I’m tired of it.”

  “You lying bastard.” Fear made me rough; it was at about this time that I began to adopt my stance of gruffness, to perfect my just-not-rude snort. “You wouldn’t know what to do without this house,” I told him, and then I laughed. “But if you really want to sell it, I’ll buy it from you.”

  That night was as close as we had come to quarreling for some time, but in the course of those hours we worked out a highly original real-estate deal, whereby I would buy Ran’s house, but I would not take possession of it until I had paid for over half of it, by which time we both knew that Ran would be dead.

  • • •

  And that, Ms. Heffelfinger, in brief, is how it went. I bought Ran’s house, and soon afterward, early that fall, he died, and I moved in. I sorted and labeled and stored away all his papers, his manuscripts, his library, as though it had all been infinitely valuable, which, to me, it was. (He had kept no letters from Gloria, which was both gratifying and frustrating.)

  After so much heavy thought, and so much to drink, I should have awakened the next day in a state of hung-over exhaustion—a state that my poor guilty Presbyterian Ran used to describe as being “richly deserved.” But I did not feel terrible, not at all. I got up and made myself a healthy breakfast, and then I telephoned the inn, for Candida Heffelfinger.