by Alice Adams
“Tonight I’ll have to wash my hair and bake bread, in case he comes,” Kathleen said, as she so often had before. “God, why can’t I just tell him to shove it, will you tell me that?”
“You like him.” She did not say—of course not—that Lawry called her; not postcards—phone calls, from Los Angeles. Said he had to meet her. But she refused.
“Oh, I guess.”
It was hard for Miriam to listen to Kathleen all day. Miriam felt that her own life was terrible, but at least it was familiar to her; she knew all her own troubles even if she couldn’t lift them off. But Kathleen’s pinched and furious world was strange. And so sometimes Miriam talked just to make Kathleen be quiet.
“There was this guy talking to me on the way to work,” she said. “And he looked real good, in these bad pants, but I don’t know if he be a pimp. He had on these far-out clothes?”
This was of course not a question, but Kathleen chose to answer. “Miriam, you stay away from people like that! Like that guy who said he was going to take you to Vegas. Don’t you read the papers? Girls beaten up, stabbed to death?”
“I know, but he might not be one. He did look good. There anything you’d like for me to do?”
Kathleen sighed. She would rather have gone on talking, but she was conscientious, in her way—or, rather, terrified of being caught lacking. And so she said, “You can go to the cath lab and see if the caths on Gonzales and Hardy are ready. And have them copied. You know.”
Miriam walked out of the research building and across the street, to the hospital. Some people didn’t like her and they frowned whenever they saw her. Mr. Graham, who was head of something in the business office. Or several of them didn’t know what to do and so they pretended she wasn’t there. Several of the doctors did that: Dr. Branner, Dr. Stern. But there were a couple of interns who were pretty nice, and they liked her and kidded around with her. “Hey, Miriam, you look like you’re high!”
“Oh, I wish I was!”
What would it be like to have a white boyfriend? She had wondered about that sometimes. She thought that she would like to. But you didn’t see near as many white boys with black girls as black men with whites. One of her brothers had a girl friend who was Spanish.
Kathleen hated everyone in the hospital, and sometimes Miriam thought she had been hired by Kathleen to make them all mad. The only other black people who worked there were orderlies or maids, and they looked at Miriam funny as she walked past in her white lab coat, with her black, black hair.
She got the typed cath reports and crossed the street back to the copying room, where a girl from the business office was using the machine, so Miriam had to wait. The girl had on this little short skirt and a bright yellow sweater; she was dressed in a hip way but you could tell she wasn’t. Miriam did not know how. She was friendly—Lord, so friendly Miriam wanted to run.
“Miriam, how are you? I really love those shoes. You really look good in them but I just don’t. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all my skirts. You only got those three things to do? I can wait while you do them.”
“No, you go on ahead.”
Miriam sat down in a chair and closed her eyes, and she almost went to sleep, and she thought about these girls she knew who were whores, who lived in a big apartment on Twin Peaks; they’d had an interior decorator and had white carpets and white velvet sofas and gold lamps, and they wore all these different kinds of fur coats, and white shoes. She shuddered, thinking about it: what all did they have to do?
The friendly girl said, “Well, bye. Have a nice day.”
As soon as Miriam got back to the office, Kathleen started up talking again. “And I’ve just realized there’s a full moon in Scorpio this weekend! Anything could happen! He has three things in Scorpio, that’s really heavy. I’ll bet he does come up. I wonder how much dope I’ve got left. Why do I always have to provide everything, will you tell me that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I must really dig punishment. I guess I got it living all those years with my mother. Beating me up all the time. But if he doesn’t like me why did he pick me up at the bar and come on like that? No one’s ever come on at me in my life, not that way.”
Miriam wondered about that, too. She wondered why anyone would pick Kathleen. Kathleen was so unlike being a woman at all; she was more like some skinny little boy who got in fights all the time. Lawry was good-looking in his pictures, with lots of straight light hair and those big pale eyes, but maybe a little girlish-looking. There had to be something funny about him somewhere, choosing Kathleen. He sure acted funny, from the sound of it.
Kathleen asked, “You want to come over to my house? I’ll make some tuna sandwiches.”
“Okay, I’ll get us some Cokes.”
They walked along Fillmore Street, in the opposite direction from where that man would be waiting for Miriam at five, or maybe he wouldn’t be there—the man whom she would or would not go to meet.
Kathleen’s place didn’t have anything nice in it, just old furniture and Indian-looking things, but at least it was her own place. Miriam thought about getting herself a place, but she didn’t want to until she could fix it up nice. At Kathleen’s there was steam heat; it was always too hot there. In the Project nothing worked, and cold wind leaked in through the windows.
Sometimes Miriam wondered: Would she rather be her or Kathleen? Be Kathleen or be a hustler on Twin Peaks? Sometimes all the thinking that she did made her dizzy.
Kathleen brought in sandwiches and their Cokes, straws in the bottles, and they both sat on the wide day bed, which was the only place to sit.
Kathleen said, “If he could just settle down and we could have some kids. He really digs kids, we both do, and we could have one that was really beautiful. We wouldn’t have to get married or anything like that.”
“Be nice if he was at least around.”
“That’s true, you’re absolutely right.” Kathleen lit a cigarette and began to blow out smoke. Then she said, “You know, I’ve been thinking that Eliza was really more of a Leo than we always said. That grandstand way she left. I think basically she was a real Leo snob, and she couldn’t stand it that Dr. Branner wouldn’t pay any attention to her. She probably expected him to ask her out!”
Back at the office, there was really nothing to do. Kathleen stood at the window, staring out, smoking and cursing at random. “Damn you, Dr. Branner, I hope you break your neck. You, too, Dr. Stern.”
Miriam in her mind could still see the man from this morning, see his slant devil eyes, and his black face, and it came to her that he could be anything at all: a photographer, looking for models; a plainclothes pig; a narc. A crazy junkie with a knife. Or a pimp. Or just a man, like her brothers.
He looked mostly like a pimp, but would that be, like, his disguise?
One time, she had heard about the funeral of a pimp, and she had to laugh, it was so funny. Jimmy, the pimp, used to have this green Caddy with pale brown leather inside, and at the funeral there were all his whores, three black and two blond white girls, all wearing these green outfits, with pale brown leather trim. Still, Jimmy was dead, shot dead by the brother of a girl he’d pulled, one of his whores.
What did those guys have to say to pull a girl, to get her to be their whore?
Kathleen said, “Miriam! wake up. Suppose somebody comes in?”
Miriam could get home to the Project by walking along Webster Street and then down Steiner, instead of going along Fillmore, where he might be. But at five o’clock she still didn’t know; she didn’t know where to go.
“There was this bad purple outfit in the window this morning,” she said to Kathleen, and she suddenly wished that Kathleen were Eliza, who would at least say something nice. But she went on anyway. “Tunic and pants—it was bad. Where I saw that guy.”
“Lord, Miriam, all you think about is outfits. And guys.” Together they turned off the lights, and locked up, and walked down the stairs to the street, where f
or a moment they stood in parting conversation.
Miriam laughed; suddenly she felt very good. “Sometimes you sound like my mother,” she said. “Telling me what I don’t need.”
“You go to hell. Well, see you tomorrow. And you be on time!”
“Yeah, tomorrow.”
And Miriam walked off toward Fillmore Street, to where she now knew he would be waiting for her, with something—a Valentine?—he would have something for her. An outfit? A ride in his car and some kind of offer of a job?
Some stuff for a great new high?
8 / A Sudden Marriage
“How about it?” asked the man—Larry? Harry?—in the pink-and-black jacket who was introduced to Eliza about ten minutes ago. “How about it? I’ve got the tickets in my pocket. We could take the red-eye flight to Acapulco, have breakfast and grab a car and on to …” The name of the Mexican town he mentioned was unintelligible, lost in the din of the Kennerlies’ party. “We could be back by Wednesday or so,” he added.
Laughing politely (she was like that, generally), Eliza excused herself with the truth. “I have to go to unemployment on Tuesday.”
From Hollywood, although born in Berlin, Harry (not Larry) was used to people who did that; everyone sooner or later got unemployment checks. “Okay, sure,” he answered easily. “Tuesday it is.”
He did not, could not, know about her Tuesday traumas: the bus trips to a frightening part of town, Third and Bryant, standing in line with discouraged, tired people. Being given cash—being terrified.
In fact his reasonable tone, delivered in a still slightly Berlin-flavored accent, had begun to make Eliza wonder how could a reasonable man make such an insane suggestion. A very old-fashioned phrase even came to her mind: What kind of a girl do you think I am? And at the same time her imagination, which was quick and vivid, saw a stretching hot white Mexican beach, a tropical background of palms and manzanitas. Where they were, in Belvedere, across the Bay from San Francisco, it was a terribly cold dark day.
He even looked a little crazy, Harry did. His hair was a little too long for that time, its waves a little theatrical. His slightly protuberant blue eyes were too intense. (Too intense as she thought this, Eliza inwardly smiled; it was an odd phrase for one who had pursued intensity with lemming-like directness, who had generally thought the non-intense people were the crazy ones: Smith, her brother-in-law, and The Lawyer, her recent lover.) But the point was that, introduced to her fifteen minutes ago by their mutual host, Ted Kennerlie, this man was now asking her to go fly to Mexico for the weekend with him, in the midst of a perfectly ordinary California conversation about the length of the rainy season.
“The surf is really nice there, and the beach—” And just then, in mid-sentence, he surprised her again; he said, “Oh, my God, there’s someone over there I’ve got to talk to. But I’ll be back,” and with a quick intense pale look he was gone, pushing through the crowded room toward the huge window, the mammoth view of San Francisco Bay. And Eliza was left to assume, naturally enough, that he had seen a prettier, more chic or more pliant-looking girl.
Not that she was especially insecure in matters of attractiveness; she knew that some men were strongly drawn to her, certainly not all, but who on earth would want all men? And as for chic, she knew, or wryly recognized, that at the Kennerlies’ she tended to dress in conformity to their view of her, which is to say, to dress less well than she could. Now, in her black silk shirt, black skirt, she was aware that she looked vaguely arty, unsmart and somewhat waifish—exactly the Kennerlie and Kennerlie-friend view of her. They would not be at all surprised to hear that she now collected unemployment; they would view it as an eccentric joke, having themselves never been to Third and Bryant.
A remarkably homogeneous group, the other guests: attractive people in their late twenties, early thirties, who would all make a great deal of money in advertising, commercial art, architecture, something like that with a couple of bright young psychiatrists thrown in. The wives didn’t do those things; they were busy having children, decorating “homes”—keeping the whole show going, as some of them liked to put it. (Peggy Kennerlie, the hostess and Eliza’s college friend, often said this of herself.) And periodically Eliza came to these parties that the Kennerlies gave, and she wondered why. From one party to another she confused the names and faces—as they did hers: she is Ted and Peggy’s funny offbeat friend.
Peggy approached Eliza, and with a little gesture indicating secrecy she exhibited her left hand, where above the wide gold band that she had worn for years (ten) now appeared a new green circle of stones. Peggy, with her reddish hair and large brown eyes, had a weakness for green, today a too bright (Eliza thought) green knit dress. But the ring was very pretty indeed; this was clear even to Eliza, whose lusts did not run toward jewelry. “Oh, that’s so pretty,” she said.
Peggy was terribly pleased; regarding her becoming new ring, she smiled but said, “Well, it’s not too bad. I thought it was pretty nice, an anniversary present from the old boy.” She had a tendency to speak of Ted in this way, in a good-fellow tone, which was odd to Eliza’s ears, since she was sure that Peggy loved Ted. Ten years must mean love, mustn’t it?
Eliza asked, “But is this an anniversary party, then? Peggy, why didn’t you say?”
“Oh, well, we didn’t want to advertise. You know, presents and all that jazz.” Further proof to Eliza of the true intimacy of the Kennerlies; theirs was a private love.
And how did she, Eliza, really feel about this marriage, this successful love? At various times she had asked herself this question, and had come up with a variety of opposing reactions: pleasure, envy, boredom, disbelief. But she was fond of Peggy, on the whole.
Peggy laughed—her style included a lot of warm, small and inexplicable laughter, and she asked, “Well, tell me, what do you think of him?”
“Who?” She was, of course, pretending.
“Harry Argent, of course. Ted thinks he’s pretty terrific, really successful, and he certainly is attractive, don’t you think? Of course I guess he’s not exactly your type.”
“Do I have a type? I thought I was just promiscuous.”
“Oh, Eliza, what a thing—how can you say that?” Peggy laughed.
“Anyway, what does he do, Mr. Argent?”
“He’s in movies—of course not an actor. He’s obviously too bright for that. He produces them. Ted says he has tons of money. And some he’s even written and directed.” Peggy named a couple of movies that Eliza thought she had heard of, had not seen.
“Well, if he’s so terrific maybe I’ll run away with him. We’ll elope,” said Eliza.
Peggy laughed again, and moved away.
Eliza began to talk to some other people who were near her elbow, people whom she had met before and almost forgotten. They were talking about skiing, which is what they all had done the previous weekend, at Sugar Bowl. And Eliza, who did not ski, imagined white spaces of snow, and frozen blue lakes, as vividly as she had earlier pictured hot beaches in Mexico.
In fact, the huge windows of that expensive house were lashed with rain, rattled with violent and unremitting wind. It was a winter storm that seemed to promise to remain forever, with no warmth or light, no spring.
Someone was saying, “The intro could just be a shot of that window, with water streaking down it, and the clouds. Some heads bobbing around in this room, giving the sense of a party. Party clothes, animated faces. And then after the titles and credits, all that junk, a cut to the beach at Ixtapanejo. Plane trips are all the same, unless you crash, and that’s a kind of exploitation film that doesn’t interest me. Any more. Anyway, the beach—and a couple lying there alone in the sun. Who’ve just made love. Or maybe not—that would be up to you.” And Harry Argent, who was speaking from Eliza’s other, non-ski-talk elbow, looked at her with a sort of friendly inquiry.
Everything about him was so outrageous that she laughed, but at the same time she was glad to see him back.
He
took her arm and guided her expertly between people and furniture to a corner near the window; he asked, “No draft? You won’t be cold here? Well, tell me a little about yourself. Just a little, really. I’m not a good listener. You know, your current status, aside from being unemployed.”
“I’m divorced.” She always said this. Never: I’m a widow.
Impatiently he said, “Of course you are. Divorced. Only interesting if you’d done it five or six times, and at your age that’s pretty unlikely. Any kids?”
“One. Catherine. She’s ten.”
He was quick to say, “We could take her along. That would be a whole other trip. It might be interesting.”
“At the moment she’s in Boston, with my mother. Spring vacation. At her school what they call a ski break.”
“Jesus, a ski break. Some schools these days.” Berlin had become heavier in his voice.
“Oh, well, it’s probably simpler this way. Two people. Grownups.”
“Look.” Eliza faced him and laughed. “You can’t possibly think I’m coming to Mexico with you? To some preposterous town I’ve never heard of?”
“Well, why not? Look,” he said to her, “I’m not divorced, not quite, and my wife has been giving me a pretty hard time. I’d like to talk to a pretty, intelligent girl who has an imagination. I can see all that in you; I have an infallible instinct for friends, unfortunately not for wives. And I talk best on beaches, and Ixtapanejo is not preposterous. It’s there, and it’s really beautiful.”
• • •
“Plane trips are all the same, unless you crash.” This sentence revolved in Eliza’s hollowed head as the plane lurched, jolted sideways, and, beside her, Harry Argent peacefully slept, smiling slightly at whatever vision occupied his sleeping mind. And Eliza thought how strange that she should die with a man she didn’t know at all.
For distraction she concentrated on the two people across the aisle: an almost middle-aged and getting-fat couple, in cheap and garish Hollywood clothes; sleepily affectionate with each other, they exchanged words in accents that Eliza believed to be Australian. But what were they doing in those clothes, why going to Acapulco? What in life did they do? And why were they not afraid? Why was she the only person on the plane in such a state of panic?