by Alice Adams
They don’t embrace, possibly because they are in Brooks Brothers, and alone. They make enthusiastic embracing gestures at each other. How marvelous to see you, they both say.
Andrew says, “Louisa, you’re so pretty. Really, you look great.” And then he says, “Say, I don’t suppose you’re free for lunch.”
Lunch. She’s free for anything, really.
He takes her to an elegant, New York-style restaurant (the one to which he also took Kate), a place that in years to come will be leveled to make way for a towering Hyatt House.
Across from each other at the small table, in the dim subdued room where ladies are wearing beautiful large hats, Louisa and Andrew smile foolishly at each other in embarrassed pleasure and surprise.
“Well,” they say simultaneously, “how is—” and they both laugh.
“You first,” Andrew tells her. “Michael—and Maude?”
This is depressing. “Michael’s fine,” she says quickly. “You know he got his degree finally? But his parents—” She instantly decides not to say anthing about Michael’s parents, those appalling monstrous monoliths, and in that instant she realizes how difficult it is to say anything about Michael without mentioning his parents. King, an orphan, was raised by an aunt, whom he never talks about. And Andrew never talks about his famous father.
“And Maude? I’d really like to see her.”
“She’s fine. She’s funny—she writes poems all the time. Sometimes limericks. You want to hear one? You wouldn’t mind?”
“No, really.”
And Louisa recites:
“There once was a pig named Sam
Who shook when someone mentioned ham
When someone mentioned bacon
He went right on shakin’
And when pork was mentioned he ran.”
“She wrote that? But that’s terrific.”
“Well, I know it’s awful to quote your kids.” She laughs. “Michael thinks it’s anti-Semitic.” Of course this is untrue; she is trying to be funny, and it works. Andrew laughs hard, his quirky eyebrows raised. “How are Sally and the boys?”
Everyone is fine; no one seems to have changed at all. Why do they no longer see each other? This question lies between them, insufficiently answered by the fact that Michael and Louisa have moved up to San Francisco.
They have drinks, but it is being with Andrew that makes Louisa high; she is elated, she feels herself transformed. And later, remembering that lunch, it becomes an almost holy event. “Andrew sort of saved my life, that day,” she tells John Jeffreys, whom many years later she loves, and marries. “I’d lost track of who I was.”
Wanting to know everything (really everything about Andrew), Louisa even asks about the Magowans.
“They’ve had a lot of trouble with Allison—that’s the middle kid,” says Andrew, and Louisa remembers a shy and too thin little girl, with scabs always on her bony knees (who couldn’t think where to hide Easter eggs, until her wonderful mother, Grace, told her where).
“She’s really sick,” says Andrew. “Sally says she won’t eat and she throws up all the time.”
“Anorexia,” Louisa mechanically says. Michael has explained that it is the opposite of (“and of course that makes it related to”) her colitis.
“What’s weird is that Grace makes it sound like a bad cold, and Alex never mentions it at all. It makes it hard to be with them.”
“I’ll bet. ‘Denial’ is what Michael would say they’re doing.”
But Louisa is too happy to talk about the Magowans, or Michael; she has already forgotten what Andrew has just told her about them.
What would Andrew say, she wonders at some point, if she told him that she was in love with a Negro, committing adultery with a Negro man? (Screwing and getting screwed by one.) But she is not, not now, in love with King. She despises him; she wishes he were dead.
She asks, “And, Andrew, what about you? Are you writing a lot?”
A sad smile. “Not really. I seem to spend all my time winding up to write, and then not. And you know, Sally and the boys—not that it’s their fault that I don’t write,” he says ambiguously.
And then he says, “Louisa, Lou—I don’t know how to say this, but I’d give five years of my life to go back to that time—that time with you. Jesus, what a stuffy ass I was.”
He takes her hand, very gently.
Louisa feels her face heating, her blood race. It is impossible to look at Andrew.
“If only—don’t you think we could?” he says softly (and too vaguely). He has no clear plan. He is not saying: “Let’s walk out to the lobby and take a room in the hotel upstairs.”
And so she has to say no (and besides her slip is torn and pinned together). She says, “Andrew, I’m afraid I have to get home—Maude—” (And she is fastidious, in her way: she is seeing King that night.)
“Of course. But may I call you sometime?”
“Sure.” (But he does not.)
Beyond her slip and Andrew’s uncertainty, the truth is that at this time Louisa does not feel that she “deserves” Andrew—she does not deserve an extremely bright and attractive man. (Just as, years back, she would not have felt that she deserved John Jeffreys. He was for attractive Kate, and she was grateful for Richard.)
“Well,” Andrew now says, “care for dessert, or coffee?”
“I guess not. No—no thanks.”
It has become embarrassingly important to get away from each other; suddenly there is nothing more to say. The waiter takes an inordinate amount of time with the check, it seems (and they both privately wonder if he is misinterpreting their haste).
Their cars are in separate garages, Louisa’s under Union Square, Andrew’s in a smaller (more expensive) garage off Kearny Street. And so at the entrance to Louisa’s garage they exchange hurried goodbyes.
Louisa gets her car with unusual speed, and even in the moment of driving out onto Geary Street she is beset with a total change of mind (or instinct or heart). Why shouldn’t she and Andrew make love? Why not, this afternoon? She loves Andrew (in a way); she always has. What would he care about a pin in her slip? Everyone does that sometimes; certainly Sally does. She could turn right, turn right again on Post Street, and go down to Kearny. Easy to find Andrew there waiting for his car—in a gay way to say, “Guess what, I’ve changed my mind. Where shall we go?”
But the lights are with her; she hurries along Geary Street, never turning right, until she reaches Van Ness Avenue, by which time it would be too late—probably.
Instead she spends a miserable afternoon (cross with Maude) of self-recrimination and regret.
As Andrew does. Speeding down the Bayshore (Michael’s idea of hell, and at this moment Andrew would agree), he wonders why (WHY?) he didn’t say: “Look, you have coffee and I’ll go and register at the hotel. I’ll say you’re joining me in ten or fifteen minutes. Lou—okay?”
If he had said that, she would have shyly smiled and said yes—he knows her; he is sure of that. Louisa would at least sometimes like to be told what to do. (Andrew thinks that is a mistake that Michael makes with her.)
Or—he could have taken her in his car out Lombard Street, to one of the motels there.
By the time he gets home, he has worked out the mechanics of that possible afternoon in innumerable ways. It is depressingly clear that it was all his fault that nothing happened.
“Well, you’re looking pretty sassy tonight,” King says later—horrifyingly: this is a favorite phrase of Louisa’s father.
And then he says, “What happened? You run into some kind of an old friend downtown?”
How could he have known? “Oh, you saw us?”
“I haven’t been out of the house.” This is probably true; King almost never goes out except at night, and then, almost invisible, he roams. (He mentions gyms on Market Street; he does not mention hustling outside downtown hotels.) “I just guessed,” he says.
He is a witch, a warlock; she has always known this ab
out him. She admits, “Yes, in fact I had lunch with an old friend.”
“Well, now, that’s all right; you don’t have to apologize.”
“I’m not.”
He has sprawled as usual across his couch, in his invariable clean white T-shirt. His eyes are large and luminous and tired. His mouth is tight.
Louisa sits, as always, uncomfortably forward on a stiff chair; she has thrown her coat across the couch, near King’s feet. Tonight the room looks strange to her, as King looks strange. (Why is she here?)
He says, “Well, I can’t exactly object to that. Matter of fact an old friend of mine blew into town, blew over to see me, if you don’t mind the expression.” He yawns, by way of emphasis, and then he watches Louisa.
She has a curious sense that he is lying; Bobbie was not there that afternoon, if indeed there is a Bobbie. In any case the old thrilling and addictive anxiety, usually stirred by any shadow of Bobbie, is missing now. Louisa simply looks at King (who is he?), and then she does what it is amazing that she has never done before: she picks up her coat and without a word she goes out the door.
This is not the end of it, not quite. King telephones, of course, and they act out a violent reconciliation.
This happens again.
And again.
By then it is late spring, a lovely May in which Louisa takes Maude on picnics, and long country drives to see the flowering trees. They spend afternoons at windy beaches that remind her of home, of beaches in Maryland and Virginia. It is an exceptional spring.
Louisa is working hard. Dozens of drawings, and she is thinking about drawing all the time.
(And she is on the verge of understanding that King and the others have been excuses for not leaving Michael.)
King decides to take his paintings (still unfinished) to New York, in fact to move there. He insists that Louisa follow him—he is madly in love with her by now. And she agrees, wondering if this is what she will do.
He telephones, he writes. Once he simply arrives. He has flown back to see her, if only for an afternoon.
She tells him that it is over; she is through. Such simple (and final) knowledge; she is just not glad to see him.
But King is insanely perverse. He continues to telephone, even when she hangs up at the sound of his voice. And some uncanny instinct, some lingering sense of her, makes him always telephone in moments of crisis—Louisa’s crisis. He calls when she is waiting for a call from Bayard, who comes close to breaking her heart.
He calls just after she has learned that her mother has died.
He is a ghost, who for years will haunt her life.
Seven / 1960
Late night, Louisa’s bedroom. It is also Michael’s bedroom, but for the past two years he has been sleeping in his study. Working there, he would fall asleep over books or periodicals. Then, for a time, his practice was to get up and come to the bed where Louisa already was. If she was at home. She was often out: art classes, movies with friends. Things like that. Out, home late.
Louisa has persuaded Michael that she hates to be awakened in the middle of the night. Can’t go back to sleep.
But tonight—having freshly showered and shaved, brushed teeth—he goes into the still dark room. Wanting her.
They have not made love for—he can’t remember when. (Ten months—she could remember; she could have told him that.)
He sits on the bed, knowing she is not asleep, waiting for her to stop pretending that she is.
He touches her hand, at which she retracts it; she pulls her knees up to her chest and clutches them, as she opens her eyes.
He touches her foot. “I want to make love to you, to kiss—.”
She pulls back the foot. “I think we should get a divorce.”
A harsh and unreal sentence, curiously loud. A sentence that continues to hang in the dark between them, with its own existence—or so Michael feels it.
Weakly he says, “What?”
“A divorce,” she repeats, as though making a reasonable demand. Expressing a choice.
Michael is suddenly aware that outside their windows (theirs?—hers?) a torrential rain has begun, lashing at the glass, creaking through the bones of the house. Playing for time—he is waiting for something, anything else to happen—he remarks on this. “It’s raining.”
“Yes.”
No help. Knowing how stupid he must sound, he says, “I can’t believe this is happening to us.”
She doesn’t answer, although he can feel her looking at him, and so he says something worse: “I thought in some ways we had a good marriage.”
She makes a short bitter sound. Then she says, “Christ, Michael.”
It occurs to him to say, Well, why not make love anyway? For once. What could it matter?
But even as these brave and uncharacteristic sentences form he realizes that he no longer wants to. Couldn’t, in fact, even if she did.
So that now there is simply the question of what else to say. And since there is nothing else, how to get out of the room. He begins to inch backward on the bed; then, aware that he is moving much too slowly, ridiculously, he suddenly stands up. He dimly feels that the less that is said the better. The quickest, perhaps, forgotten.
He says, “Well, see you in the morning.”
“Goodnight.”
It is barely possible that she is crying. He can’t tell.
The next day is a clear soft warm April day. It is bright enough to make the previous night unreal, and all that day Michael tries to tell himself (amazing, how nearly he succeeds in believing) that the night before did not, in fact, occur. Louisa did not say what, in the midst of the midnight storm, he thought he heard her say.
Ironically, most of the patients whom he sees that day are people with marital problems. (Or perhaps this is what everyone has? They “come and go”—are not serious?)
“Doctor, we don’t communicate—.”
“Doctor, it’s been four years since we—.”
“Doctor, just what is the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist?”
(Michael hates this question; for one thing, he is so tired of it.)
“Wasserman, what the hell kind of a name is that, if you don’t mind my asking.”
“Doctor, my father never did—.”
“—and now it’s too late.”
When he gets home, Louisa and Maude have just got back from the park, and their faces are a little pink from the unusual sun. Especially Maude’s since she is fairer. They are both cheerful and slightly out of breath, having had a good afternoon.
Remembering the night before, and for a moment quite sure that it was real—she did say that—Michael looks at Maude and feels a stabbing pain at the possibility of her loss. He goes over to her and strokes her fair hair. His own color hair. His child. “Honey, would you like me to read to you for a while?”
Louisa gives him an opaque look, but she says, “Terrific. I’ll get dinner.”
Chicken and rice. Asparagus. A green salad. Coconut cake (a bought one—Sara Lee). A dinner like any other.
Conversation, or lack of it, like any other. The two adults speak mainly to Maude. Michael for the first time notices this, and makes an attempt to talk to Louisa, to his wife. “I had a real old-fashioned anti-Semite of a patient today,” he begins, chuckling—she will like this story.
Maude interrupts. “Why are patients called ‘patients’?”
Interested, their attention caught, her parents stare at each other. Why, indeed, why patients? Odd that they had never thought of it.
Encouraged, Maude asks, “What do patients have to do with patience?”
Michael explains. “Both words are from the Latin root, the word for suffering, or enduring—.” But in the course of his explanation to Maude he has forgotten the story he meant to tell Louisa. Something about an anti-Semite, a patient? At that, a heavy vision of his mother intrudes on his mind, and he thinks of all that Louisa has suffered (and endured) at the hands of his parents. He
sighs, unaware that he is imitating his mother’s heavy sighs.
That is how things are for a week or so: no more communication but, on the other hand, no less. And what Michael least wants to do is to push the issue.
Then one afternoon he comes home to find Louisa also just home, and all dressed up and very excited. “Really, terrific news,” she tells him. She is very pretty in her navy suit, sweater, and pearls—in her excitement. ‘I’ve got a job!”
“Honey, that’s great.” But his heart lurches sideways: what does this mean, a job?
She describes a small advertising agency in an old building in North Beach. “Of course at first I’ll just be doing layouts, comprehensives and the salary isn’t much—.”
She goes on for some time, animatedly, after Michael has stopped listening: he is too anxious to listen to what she says. What will it mean, her having a job?
Clearly she has thought of everything: arranged for Maude to stay with a friendly neighbor for a couple of hours after school, and since it is only a part-time job Louisa will be home at two. And next fall Maude will be in school till two. She is going to see about a cleaning lady.
Louisa starts work the next Monday. When Michael comes home, she is there, with Maude, her stockinged feet in bedroom slippers. “God, I’m really tired!” But from the kitchen comes the satisfying warm garlicky smell of a carefully prepared casserole.
She talks a lot at dinner. She is nervy, excited. Tired, but her eyes are lighter than they have been for years. (What does this mean?) Michael can hardly listen to anything that she is saying.
Spring.
Summer.
…
Nothing happens. Except that one day Michael notices that Louisa never goes anywhere at night any more, no more movies with friends. But he can’t remember how long she has not been doing this.
She gets a lot of special delivery letters from New York, but what could that possibly mean?
During the days of his most acute anxiety, some cruel quirk in Michael’s mind makes him think only of the best times with Louisa; the bad days are unavailable to his needful memory. The first time they screwed, in the attic of his parents’ house in Boston, with his parents right downstairs! Louisa in a black dress, very animated, at a party. Introducing Louisa to Dr. Sampson. Sampson’s face.
