The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  “Thanks. Anyway, he was persuaded to forget it. There were really ugly things about preteenage Asian girls. We made a bargain: the papers would print only the stuff about his ‘tax problems’ if he’d bow out.” She sighs, a little ruefully. “I don’t know. It might have been better to let him get into politics; he might have done less harm that way.”

  This walk, and the conversation, are serving both to calm and to excite the doctor. Simultaneously. Most peculiar. He feels a calm, and at the same time a strange, warm, quiet excitement. “How do you mean?” he asks Carla.

  “Oh, he got in deeper and deeper. Getting richer and richer.”

  “I got richer and richer, too, back then. Sometimes I felt like I owned the whole goddam city.” Benito is paying very little attention to what he is saying; it is now all he can do to prevent himself from speaking his heart, from saying, “When will you marry me? How soon can that be?”

  “But that’s great that you made so much money,” Carla says. “That way you could start those clinics, and do so much good.”

  Barely listening, Benito murmurs, “I suppose …”

  She could redecorate the house any way she would like to, he thinks. Throw things out, repaint, reupholster, hang mirrors. His imagination sees, all completed, a brilliant house, with Carla its brilliant, shining center.

  “How did you happen to know Dolores?” Carla is asking.

  By now they have reached the end of the beach: a high mass of rocks left there by mammoth storms the year before. Impassable. Beyond lies more beach, more cliffs, more headlands, all along the way to the sight of the distant city.

  “Actually, Dolores was an old girlfriend, you might say.” Since he cares so much for this girl, Benito will never lie to her, he thinks. “You might not believe this, but she was quite a beauty in her day.”

  “Oh, I believe you. She’s still so vain. That hair.”

  Benito laughs, feeling pleased, and wondering, Can this adorable girl be, even slightly, jealous? “You’re right there,” he tells Carla. “Very vain, always was. Of course, she’s a few years older than I am.”

  “I guess we have to turn around now,” says Carla.

  “And now Dolores tells me that she and Posey Pendergast were at one time, uh, lovers,” Benito continues, in his honest mode.

  “I guess they could have been,” Carla muses. “On the other hand, it’s my impression that Dolores lies a lot. And Posey I’m just not sure about. Nor any of that group, for that matter. Tolliver, all those people. It’s worrying.” She laughs. “I guess I sort of hoped you might know something about them. Sort of explain them to me.”

  Not having listened carefully to much of this, Benito rephrases the question he does not remember having begun to ask before, which Dolores interrupted: “How do you know Posey?” he asks Carla.

  “It’s mostly her son I know, Patrick. He’s my fiancé, I guess you could say. We were planning to make it legal, and I guess we will. Any day now.” And she goes on, “Actually, Patrick was supposed to come today, and then he couldn’t, and then I thought—I thought of you.”

  The sun has sunk into the ocean, and Benito’s heart has sunk with it, drowned. He shudders, despising himself. How could he possibly have imagined, how not have guessed?

  “How nice,” Benito remarks, without meaning, and then he babbles on, “You know, the whole city seems so corrupt these days. It’s all real estate, and deals.”

  “Get real,” she chides him, in her harsh young voice. “That’s what it’s like all over.”

  “Well, I’ll be awfully glad to get back to Mexico. At least I more or less understand the corruption there.”

  “Are you going back for long?”

  The wind is really cold now. Benito sniffs, wishing he had his handkerchief back, and unable to ask for it. “Oh, permanently,” he tells Carla. “A permanent move. I want to be near my clinics. See how they’re doing. Maybe help.”

  The doctor had no plan to say (much less to do) any of this before he spoke, but he knows that he is now committed to this action. This permanent move. He will buy a house in San Cristóbal de las Casas, and will bring his mother there, from Oaxaca, to live in that house for as long as she lasts. And he, for as long as he lasts, will work in his clinics, with his own poor.

  “Well, that’s great. Maybe we could work out a little interview before you go.”

  “Well, maybe.”

  “I wonder if we couldn’t just bypass the party for now,” says Carla. “I’m just not up to going in again, going through all that, with those people.”

  “Nor I,” the doctor tells her. “Good idea.”

  “I’ll call Posey as soon as we get back. Did she tell you the house was up for sale? She may have sold it today—all those people …”

  Half hearing her, the doctor is wrestling with the idea of a return to the city, which is suddenly unaccountably terrible to him; he dreads the first pale, romantic view of it from the bridge, and then the drive across town to his empty house, after dropping Carla off on Telegraph Hill. His house with its night views of city hills and lights. But he braces himself with the thought that he won’t be in San Francisco long this time. That as soon as he can arrange things he will be back in Chiapas, in Mexico. For the rest of his life.

  And thus he manages to walk on, following Carla past the big, fancy house, for sale—and all those people, the house’s rich and crazily corrupt population. He manages to walk across the sand toward his car, and the long, circuitous, and risky drive to the city.

  The Islands

  What does it mean to love an animal, a pet, in my case a cat, in the fierce, entire, and unambivalent way that some of us do? I really want to know this. Does the cat (did the cat) represent some person, a parent, or a child? some part of one’s self? I don’t think so—and none of the words or phrases that one uses for human connections sounds quite right: “crazy about,” “really liked,” “very fond of”—none of those describes how I felt and still feel about my cat. Many years ago, soon after we got the cat (her name was Pink), I went to Rome with my husband, Andrew, whom I really liked; I was crazy about Andrew, and very fond of him too. And I have a most vivid memory of lying awake in Rome, in the pretty bed in its deep alcove, in the nice small hotel near the Borghese Gardens—lying there, so fortunate to be in Rome, with Andrew, and missing Pink, a small striped cat with no tail—missing Pink unbearably. Even blaming Andrew for having brought me there, although he loved her too, almost as much as I did. And now Pink has died, and I cannot accept or believe in her death, any more than I could believe in Rome. (Andrew also died, three years ago, but this is not his story.)

  A couple of days after Pink died (this has all been recent), I went to Hawaii with a new friend, Slater. It had not been planned that way; I had known for months that Pink was slowly failing (she was nineteen), but I did not expect her to die. She just suddenly did, and then I went off to “the islands,” as my old friend Zoe Pinkerton used to call them, in her nasal, moneyed voice. I went to Hawaii as planned, which interfered with my proper mourning for Pink. I feel as though those islands interposed themselves between her death and me. When I needed to be alone, to absorb her death, I was over there with Slater.

  Slater is a developer; malls and condominium complexes all over the world. Andrew would not have approved of Slater, and sometimes I don’t think I do either. Slater is tall and lean, red-haired, a little younger than I am, and very attractive, I suppose, although on first meeting Slater I was not at all drawn to him (which I have come to think is one of the reasons he found me so attractive, calling me the next day, insisting on dinner that night; he was probably used to women who found him terrific, right off). But I thought Slater talked too much about money, or just talked too much, period.

  Later on, when I began to like him a little better (I was flattered by all that attention, is the truth), I thought that Slater’s very differences from Andrew should be a good sign. You’re supposed to look for opposites, not reproduc
tions, I read somewhere.

  Andrew and I had acquired Pink from Zoe, a very rich alcoholic, at that time a new neighbor of ours in Berkeley. Having met Andrew down in his bookstore, she invited us to what turned out to be a very long Sunday-lunch party in her splendidly decked and viewed new Berkeley hills house. Getting to know some of the least offensive neighbors, is how she probably thought of it. Her style was harsh, abrasive; anything for a laugh was surely one of her mottoes, but she was pretty funny, fairly often. We saw her around when she first moved to Berkeley (from Ireland: a brief experiment that had not worked out too well). And then she met Andrew in his store, and found that we were neighbors, and she invited us to her party, and Andrew fell in love with a beautiful cat. “The most beautiful cat I ever saw,” he told Zoe, and she was, soft and silver, with great blue eyes. The mother of Pink.

  “Well, you’re in luck,” Zoe told us. “That’s Molly Bloom, and she just had five kittens. They’re all in a box downstairs, in my bedroom, and you get to choose any one you want. It’s your door prize for being such a handsome couple.”

  Andrew went off to look at the kittens, and then came back up to me. “There’s one that’s really great,” he said. “A tailless wonder. Must be part Manx.”

  As in several Berkeley hills houses, Zoe’s great sprawl of a bedroom was downstairs, with its own narrow deck, its view of the bay and the bridge, and of San Francisco. The room was the most appalling mess I had ever seen. Clothes, papers, books, dirty glasses, spilled powder, more clothes dumped everywhere. I was surprised that my tidy, somewhat censorious husband even entered, and that he was able to find the big wicker basket (filled with what looked to be discarded silk under-things, presumably clean) in which five very tiny kittens mewed and tried to rise and stalk about on thin, uncertain legs.

  The one that Andrew had picked was gray striped, a tabby, with a stub of a tail, very large eyes, and tall ears. I agreed that she was darling, how great it would be to have a cat again; our last cat, Lily, who was sweet and pretty but undistinguished, had died some years ago. And so Andrew and I went back upstairs and told Zoe, who was almost very drunk, that we wanted the one with no tail.

  “Oh, Stubs,” she rasped. “You don’t have to take that one. What are you guys, some kind of Berkeley bleeding hearts? You can have a whole cat.” And she laughed, delighted as always with her own wit.

  No, we told her. We wanted that particular cat. We liked her best.

  Aside from seeing the cats—our first sight of Pink!—the best part of Zoe’s lunch was her daughter, Lucy, a shy, pretty, and very gentle young woman—as opposed to the other guests, a rowdy, oil-rich group, old friends of Zoe’s from Texas.

  “What a curious litter,” I remarked to Andrew, walking home up Marin to our considerably smaller house. “All different. Five different patterns of cat.”

  “Five fathers.” Andrew had read a book about this, I could tell. Andrew read everything. “It’s called multiple insemination, and occurs fairly often in cats. It’s theoretically possible in humans, but they haven’t come across any instances.” He laughed, really pleased with this lore.

  “It’s sure something to think about.”

  “Just don’t.”

  Andrew. An extremely smart, passionate, selfish, and generous man, a medium-successful bookstore owner. A former academic: he left teaching in order to have more time to read, he said. Also (I thought) he much preferred being alone in his store to the company of students or, worse, of other professors—a loner, Andrew. Small and almost handsome, competitive, a gifted tennis player, mediocre pianist. Gray hair and gray-green eyes. As I have said, I was crazy about Andrew (usually). I found him funny and interestingly observant, sexy and smart. His death was more grievous to me than I can (or will) say.

  “You guys don’t have to take Stubs; you can have a whole cat all your own.” Zoe Pinkerton on the phone, a few days later. Like many alcoholics, she tended to repeat herself, although in Zoe’s case some vast Texas store of self-confidence may have fueled her repetitions.

  And we in our turn repeated: we wanted the little one with no tail.

  Zoe told us that she would bring “Stubs” over in a week or so; then the kittens would be old enough to leave Molly Bloom.

  Andrew: “Molly Bloom indeed.”

  I: “No wonder she got multiply inseminated.”

  Andrew: “Exactly.”

  We both, though somewhat warily, liked Zoe. Or we were both somewhat charmed by her. For one thing, she made it clear that she thought we were great. For another, she was smart; she had read even more than Andrew had.

  A very small woman, she walked with a swagger; her laugh was loud, and liberal. I sometimes felt that Pink was a little like Zoe—a tiny cat with a high, proud walk; a cat with a lot to say.

  In a couple of weeks, then, Zoe called, and she came over with this tiny tailless kitten under her arm. A Saturday afternoon. Andrew was at home, puttering in the garden like the good Berkeley husband that he did not intend to be.

  Zoe arrived in her purple suede pants and a vivid orange sweater (this picture is a little poignant; fairly soon after that the booze began to get the better of her legs, and she stopped taking walks at all). She held out a tiny kitten, all huge gray eyes and pointed ears. A kitten who took one look at us and began to purr; she purred for several days, it seemed, as she walked all over our house and made it her own. This is absolutely the best place I’ve ever been, she seemed to say, and you are the greatest people—you are my people.

  From the beginning, then, our connection with Pink seemed like a privilege; automatically we accorded her rights that poor Lily would never have aspired to.

  She decided to sleep with us. In the middle of the night there came a light soft plop on our bed, which was low and wide, and then a small sound, mmrrr, a little announcement of her presence. “Littlest announcer,” said Andrew, and we called her that, among her other names. Neither of us ever mentioned locking her out.

  Several times in the night she would leave us and then return, each time with the same small sound, the littlest announcement.

  In those days, the early days of Pink, I was doing a lot of freelance editing for local small presses, which is to say that I spent many waking hours at my desk. Pink assessed my habits early on, and decided to make them her own; or perhaps she decided that she too was an editor. In any case she would come up to my lap, where she would sit, often looking up with something to say. She was in fact the only cat I have ever known with whom a sort of conversation was possible; we made sounds back and forth at each other, very politely, and though mine were mostly nonsense syllables, Pink seemed pleased.

  Pink was her main name, about which Zoe Pinkerton was very happy. “Lordy, no one’s ever named a cat for me before.” But Andrew and I used many other names for her. I had an idea that Pink liked a new name occasionally; maybe we all would? In any case we called her a lot of other, mostly P-starting names: Peppercorn, Pipsy Doodler, Poipu Beach. This last was a favorite place of Zoe’s, when she went out to “the islands.” Pink seemed to like all those names; she regarded us both with her great gray eyes—especially me; she was always mostly my cat.

  Worried about raccoons and Berkeley free-roaming dogs, we decided early on that Pink was to be a house cat, for good. She was not expendable. But Andrew and I liked to take weekend trips, and after she came to live with us we often took Pink along. She liked car travel right away; settled on the seat between us, she would join right in whenever we broke what had been a silence—not interrupting, just adding her own small voice, a sort of soft clear mew.

  This must have been in the early seventies; we talked a lot about Nixon and Watergate. “Mew if you think he’s guilty,” Andrew would say to Pink, who always responded satisfactorily.

  Sometimes, especially on summer trips, we would take Pink out for a semiwalk; our following Pink is what it usually amounted to, as she bounded into some meadow grass, with miniature leaps. Once, before I could stop her, s
he suddenly raced ahead—to a chipmunk. I was horrified. But then she raced back to me with the chipmunk in her mouth, and after a tiny shake she let him go, and the chipmunk ran off, unscathed. (Pink had what hunters call a soft mouth. Of course she did.)

  We went to Rome and I missed her, very much; and we went off to the Piazza Argentina and gave a lot of lire to the very old woman there who was feeding all those mangy, half-blind cats. In honor of Pink.

  I hope that I am not describing some idealized “perfect” adorable cat, because Pink was never that. She was entirely herself, sometimes cross and always independent. On the few occasions when I swatted her (very gently), she would hit me right back, a return swat on the hand—though always with sheathed claws.

  I like to think that her long life with us, and then just with me, was a very happy one. Her version, though, would undoubtedly state that she was perfectly happy until Black and Brown moved in.

  Another Berkeley lunch. A weekday, and all the women present work, and have very little time, and so this getting together seems a rare treat. Our hostess, a diminutive and brilliant art historian, announces that her cat, Parsley, is extremely pregnant. “Honestly, any minute,” she laughs, and this is clearly true; the poor burdened cat, a brown Burmese, comes into the room, heavy and uncomfortable and restless. Searching.

  A little later, in the midst of serving our many-salad lunch, the hostess says that the cat is actually having her kittens now, in the kitchen closet. We all troop out into the kitchen to watch.

  The first tiny sac-enclosed kitten to barrel out is a black one, instantly vigorous, eager to stand up and get on with her life. Then three more come at intervals; it is harder to make out their colors.

  “More multiple insemination,” I told Andrew that night.

  “It must be rife in Berkeley, like everyone says.”

  “It was fascinating, watching them being born.”

  “I guess, if you like obstetrics.”

  A month or so later the art historian friend called with a very sad story; she had just been diagnosed as being very clearly allergic to cats. “I thought I wasn’t feeling too well, but I never thought it could be the cats. I know you already have that marvelous Pink, but do you think—until I find someone to take them? Just the two that are left?”