by Alice Adams
“Pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig!” she screamed. “Horrible fat ugly murdering pig, you killed him with your never time to see him and your wall of fat German business friends always around you and your everything for a purpose and your filthy pig-minded greed and your all-American pig success and your so socially acceptable ambitions. Richard was all Greek to you and you never tried to learn him, how lovely he was and suffering and you found him not socially acceptable to your new society and your new pig friends and I would even rather be thin and miserable and ugly me than fat you with your blubber neck and your compound interest and you couldn’t believe his heart and now you can get filthy blubber fatter on his money—”
She seemed to have run down, and into the pause Roger asked, “Ellen, do you need money? I’d be more than happy—”
She screamed, but it was less a scream than a sound of total despair, from an absolute aloneness.
Then she hung up, and a few weeks later Roger heard that she had had a complete breakdown and was hospitalized, perhaps for good.
After the excellent dinner of moussaka, salad and strawberries in cream, Karen and Roger settled in the living room with strong coffee and snifters of brandy. It was an attractive, comfortable, if somewhat disheveled room, very much a family room. Karen’s tastes were simpler than those of her parents. Her furnishings were contemporary; the fabrics were sturdy wools or linen; the broad sofa was done in dark-brown leather.
Roger leaned back; he blinked and then sighed, looking up to the ceiling. Karen could tell that he was going to say something about Richard.
“I sometimes wish,” said Roger, “that I’d taken the time somewhere along the line to have learned a little Greek. It seemed to give Richard so much pleasure.”
“But, darling, when would you ever have had the time?”
“That’s just it, I never had the time.” Roger’s tone when talking about or in any way alluding to his brother was one of a softly sentimental regret; Karen gathered that he regretted both his brother’s death and their lack of rapport in those final years.
Roger also sounded sentimentally regretful when he referred to anything cultural—those soft pleasures which he valued but for which he had never had time.
“I wonder what’s ever happened to that girl. Ellen,” said Karen.
“I’m not sure I’d even want to know,” said Roger. “Did I ever tell you that she called me the night he died?”
“Really? No.”
“Yes, she was quite hysterical. I think she was angry because she knew I was Richard’s heir.” By now Roger had come to believe that this was indeed the case. He was convinced that other people’s motives were basically identical to his own. “Yes,” he said. “She probably thought I should give her some of his money.”
In the large safe room, beneath other large rooms where her sons were all sleeping, Karen shuddered, and together she and Roger sighed, for Richard’s pain and death and for poor lost Ellen’s madness.
“Here,” said Karen, “have more coffee. Poor darling, you look as though you need it.”
“You’re right. I do.” And Roger reached out to stroke his big wife’s smooth dark cheek.
A Jealous Husband
On being told that his wife was having an affair with a black orderly in the hospital where she worked, Stuart Macmillan experienced great rage and a piercing anguish; and also, to almost the same degree, he felt vastly surprised. It was not something that he would ever have expected of Martha.
To begin with, she was plump. Although her face was smooth and pretty, her body ballooned out above short legs. “The thalidomide kid” was how she sometimes referred to herself. She had a quick mean mind that always appealed to Stuart. But one of his reactions was that she had been singled out for love.
Aside from the fact that he liked her face and her head, Stuart had probably singled her out at least partly because he was fairly funny-looking too. He was tall and scrawny, with small bright eyes and a long scraggly black beard. He moved along lopingly, like a bird that might take off into flight. As a couple they appealed to most people’s sense of humor, including their own, but somehow Stuart did not think the black orderly had chosen Martha for laughs.
• • •
Stuart and Martha were from a medium-sized city in Virginia, and there they had gone to high school together, and halfway through college, until simultaneously they decided to drop out and head West, and, more or less incidentally, to marry. Apart from their somewhat freakish looks, the circumstance that made them friends was their I.Q.s, known city-wide as staggeringly high. Thus they were alone together at the top of the class, sharing prizes and similarly poor at sports or dancing. They were known locally as hippies, in a town that the hippie movement had totally bypassed.
The town also viewed Stuart’s attachment to Martha as a sign of great virtue—in him. This very Southern and sexually chauvinistic view stemmed from a theory that such a fat girl was lucky to have a beau at all; it ignored Stuart’s equal (in conventional terms) unattractiveness. Martha should be grateful, and the fact that she was not, that she was mean to Stuart, made him look even better to the town. “That boy must be a saint to put up with that mean old fat little girl” was the general view.
“Go peddle your masochism” was what Martha sometimes said to Stuart, and he had to admit that there was something to her theory.
But he argued: “Your self-hatred is really the problem. You think anyone who digs you is crazy, of all the banal female hang-ups.”
Most of their conversation, and their fights, took place in an outlandish bar just out of town called the Porthole. They chose it for its sheer dreadfulness, from the dingy brass rail around the roof outside to the jaunty saltshaker that was in the shape of a sailor boy. They also liked it because no one they knew from school would ever have dreamed of going there. They sat drinking beer, which made Stuart moody and introspective, and which only added to Martha’s fat.
She had long straight brown hair that streaked blond in the summer, big dark-blue eyes and smooth tan skin. In his simpler moments Stuart thought he dug her because she was so pretty—reason enough for a healthy Virginia boy. But his simple moments were few. Having gone from Alan Watts to Ouspensky and back and forth to Camus and Kierkegaard, he was very much hung up on levels of awareness, on consciousness. Why was he obsessed with a mean fat girl who didn’t especially like him? Even if her I.Q. was almost as high as his own, why did his stomach seem to contort at a sudden chance sight of her?
On certain levels they got along very well. They both regarded the city where they lived, and actually most of the South, with a sort of total outrage. “It’s absurd, it is absolutely absurd,” said Stuart, who had also been reading Sartre, and they laughed, aghast, at politicians who spoke out on miscegenation and small-town sheriffs who shot black people. They did not, however, associate themselves with any of the radical groups, such as they were, in the area; neither of them could have functioned in a group.
Then gradually over the summer, as they discussed themselves and the world, Stuart began to feel that Martha liked him better, particularly when they were not talking about how they felt about each other, a subject that always made her edgy. Sometimes in the back seat of Stuart’s car they made love, which was not a tremendous success for either of them—but better than fighting, Stuart thought.
By the end of the summer they had exhausted their surroundings as a focus for contempt, and so Stuart said the logical next thing: “Why do we stick around here, then? Why don’t we head for San Francisco?” And, almost as an afterthought, “The trip would be easier if we got married.”
• • •
But marriage, as it will, changed their relationship considerably, perhaps even more than the move to San Francisco did. Now that they were legally joined, and living under a single roof, their lives seemed to diverge.
Their apartment was the top floor of an old house out on Valencia Street. Some homing instinct must have led them t
here, for it had very much the look of a Southern country house, with its bay windows and narrow side porch; there were even columns overgrown with wisteria. They chose it instantly, and gave the last of their savings, on a two-year lease, to the Mexican woman whose house it was. Their apartment was cut up into useless small rooms, but the back windows overlooked a small apple and cherry orchard, and from the front they could sometimes see as far as the Bay.
Their ways began to separate when Martha, almost immediately, found an excellent job as a medical secretary in one of the larger private hospitals. Whereupon Stuart slackened the pace of his search, which hadn’t been vigorous to begin with. Martha, diligent and compulsive, had to leave for work at 8:45, since the hospital was in a distant neighborhood. Stuart slept late, and perused the want ads over his breakfast and coffee. There was seldom anything that promised much; also, being exceptionally shy, Stuart could hardly bear the thought of presenting himself to anyone, and, finally, the reading of ads became his sole form of job-hunting.
Each day, after he had showered and got into clean jeans and a shirt, he went out into the city, his heart swelling as it once had at the prospect of seeing Martha. In fact, marrying Martha had largely released him from his obsession with her; he now loved her without anxiety. He was free to fall in love again, and he fell in love with the city. He became a passionate walker, a watcher of everything, everyone, every place. He walked through the Mission District to Market Street, idling among the sailors and shoppers, the freaks and drunks; he went from Union Square through Chinatown to North Beach, then across Russian Hill and along Union Street, up to Pacific Heights and out to Golden Gate Park, observing in detail each person and animal and tree. He was literally intoxicated by the city.
He was still reading a lot, and thinking, and he often felt that he was on the verge of giant realizations. It seemed the happiest period of his life.
Although older people may have taken him for a hippie, he was not regarded as one by the hippies themselves, who were able to recognize their own. They knew that Stuart was something else.
One of the things that excited him about the city was the variety of available foods, and it became his habit to bring home treats for dinner. He brought fresh ravioli, egg rolls and tortillas, bread from North Beach and cracked crab from Fisherman’s Wharf. While Martha, exhausted from work and standing up on buses, took off her shoes and lay back on the mohair sofa with a book, Stuart made their dinner.
During the meal, conversation was mainly about what they were eating: where it came from, how much it had cost and how it compared to their other recent gastronomic adventures.
Martha usually went to bed right after dinner, while Stuart stayed up to read. Sometimes, for love, he woke her when he came to bed, and she was usually nice about it, but it was nothing terrific, not what he would have imagined love should be.
Later, after his terrible discovery, Stuart focused on that first year of their marriage, recognizing that he really had not paid much attention to her. He lacerated himself for that, and also for letting her work at a demanding job while he lay around in parks all day. They both could have got part-time jobs; an arrangement like that would have been more just, he later thought.
Also, he searched the past for clues that might have told him what Martha had been doing, but he found very few. Martha had read a lot of books about black people; she read Claude Brown and Cleaver and Malcolm X, but a lot of people read those books that year. At times she made sounds of discontent; once she had said, “I really wonder why we came out here!” But Martha had always sounded discontent. And her fatigue was readily explained by work and public transportation. Stuart was never able to find anything that might have prepared him for the phone call which came one Friday morning.
A black girl’s voice asked: “This Stuart Macmillan? Your wife works over to the hospital?”
“Yes.” Anticipating everything but what he actually heard, still Stuart held his breath.
The girl’s voice rose, became shrill: “You tell your wife stop messing around with my old man—you tell her leave Jackson Walker alone!”
“What? What’re you talking about?”
“You heard me!” By then the girl was screaming. “He got stoned and told me, stoned and bragging on his white chick—you tell her stop!” And she hung up in Stuart’s ear.
Stuart, who had been standing up, sat down. He sat upright, his back hard against the chair, as though impaled there by what he had heard. Then slowly he got up to take his shower and to dress, as usual.
It was an exceptionally beautiful April day, warm and clear. Stuart took a book to Golden Gate Park and lay there on a grassy, sheltered knoll. He watched a group of black boys with natural hair, and he wondered why his chest tightened at the sight of them, until he remembered the phone call.
He thought he was reading, then noticed that his book was upside down. He went home without buying any treats for supper.
When Martha came in, he stopped her near the door. Gripping her shoulders, he shouted at her, “What do you mean, screwing that black guy? What do you mean?”
“What are you talking about?” But she began to tremble within his grasp, and her blue eyes widened.
“Who’s Jackson Walker, then? Christ, did he have to tell his wife? Did I have to hear about it? Christ, how dare you!”
In a tiny voice she said, “I thought you didn’t like me anymore.”
“Christ, you dumb trite bitch!” He hit her then, as hard as he could, across the face—twice, so that the palm of his hand stung.
Her face was instantly imprinted with scarlet. He saw his harsh mark on her delicate skin, and he began to cry, as she did, and he took her in his arms. Somehow, then, they moved toward the bedroom, the bed. Martha was still crying. Stuart had stopped. He undressed her, then himself, and then he made love to her, with a fury, with an abandon so wild he could never have imagined himself capable of it.
Later that night he went out and got hamburgers, which they ate in bed, and then they made love again.
The next day, as he perused the paper, Stuart saw an ad that appealed to him. “Carpenter’s assistant, Potrero Hill. $2.50 hr.” And a phone number to call. The money was of course absurd, but he liked the idea of carpentry and he liked Potrero Hill, with its wide bare streets and its views of the industrial district and the Bay. He called and was given an address, to which he went and found a very small Italian carpenter, Mario, who hired him on the spot. “So tall a boy! Such a help to Mario!” and they spent a pleasant afternoon together, putting up shelves in a house that some professors were remodeling.
“What he really wants, of course, is a son,” Stuart said to Martha, over dinner.
“Well, don’t knock it.” This seemed very funny to them, in their nervous state; they both laughed.
With his first day’s wages—Mario paid daily, in cash, with no deductions—Stuart took Martha out to dinner. Being out together in a dim North Beach restaurant combined with the melodrama of the night before to make them both nervous; they were slightly unreal to each other. They laughed a lot, like people on a “date,” and they ate very little, like people recently in love.
They did not explicitly discuss what had happened between Martha and the orderly. But as Stuart looked at her across the table, and later when he held her in his arms, he experienced a pain so intense that it was almost sweet, at the thought of Martha with another man, another man who had seen and touched her naked, who had heard her laugh and cry out. The thought stabbed into his chest, then gripped his stomach like a hard cold hand.
In a way he wanted to ask Martha and to have her tell him all the details of the affair, as though sharing it would exorcise his pain. But he knew that he could not have borne to hear about it. And so he tortured himself with trying to imagine how it had been. He wondered where they went to do it—then remembered that hospitals are full of rooms with beds.
Sometimes what made him angriest was the relationship that Martha had cr
eated between him and that black man, that Jackson Walker. What contempt Walker must feel for him, Stuart thought: for a man whose wife would cheat on him after less than two years of marriage. What had she said about him? Once or twice he awoke in the night enraged by such thoughts, and decided that he would have to fight Jackson Walker, whom he imagined to be stronger, heavier, much better built than himself.
But, aside from the hell that he created frequently inside his head, Stuart’s life with Martha went into a golden, halcyon phase.
For one thing, the seventy or eighty dollars a week that he brought home meant money to spare. Unused to having extra cash, he put it in a bank, and then one day, on impulse, he bought a car, a completely characterless 1955 Chevrolet that turned out to have a very good engine. He and Martha began to explore the countryside. Every weekend, all during that sunny spring, they drove somewhere, taking picnics of cheese and bread, fruit and wine.
Once on a Sunday late in June, they headed for the wine country. Put off by the crowds of tourists lined up to go through the big wineries, they struck out on a narrow white dirt road that ran through some green vineyards, and suddenly, at a bend in the road, they came upon a big square stone building, covered with rippling green leaves, probably an abandoned winery. They stopped the car and got out, and then, as they approached the building, a white owl flew out from a high small window. It disappeared in an instant, so quickly that they were not quite sure they had actually seen it; nevertheless it was an image that stayed in their minds, along with that of the lovely romantic vine-covered stone, and the enormous bay tree, beneath which they spread their blanket and ate and drank their picnic. Years later one of them would ask the other, “Do you remember the white owl we saw?” Meaning: do you remember that afternoon under the bay tree?
Because he was so close to her, Stuart seldom really looked at Martha, but partly because of the newness of this place, he did so now, and he saw that the lines of her face had slightly changed: more bones showed, and bones showed even along her thigh as she sat with her legs bent to one side, her denim skirt taut.