by Alice Adams
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2011
Copyright © 1980 by Alice Adams
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2011. Previously published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 1980.
Vintage Contemporaries is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
The author would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for its generous help during the time that this book was being written.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79825-1
www.vintagebooks.com
For my friends
Diane Johnson, John Murray,
and
Richard Poirier
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part Two Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Other Books by This Author
A Note About the Author
Part One
1
More and more I have come to credit first impressions. People I have been crazy about on sight—Agatha, and in a different, much more violent way, Jean-Paul—I seem to love permanently. When I start with distrust or dislike, getting a whiff of right-wing politics, racism, arrogance, stinginess, to name a few unlovable qualities, I generally come back to that first view. I believe too that first events in a new place are significant, the way a city receives you, so to speak. If it rains, unseasonably cold, on your first week in London, you might as well push on to Paris. However, had I followed that rule and given up on San Francisco right away, I would never again have seen Jean-Paul.
My first week in San Francisco, then, was crazy and menacing enough to tell me that I might have done better to leave. Except that, like most people who come to that spoiled and lovely city, I had come partly for negative reasons: I was almost out of other places to go, and I was running away from a bad love affair in Boston. More positively, I was “doing” a house for Agatha (I am a decorator, of sorts), who had just mysteriously inherited all that money from the General, her father.
The arrangement with Agatha was that I should live in her house, more or less camping out there, while I was doing it. In that way she would not be bothered with carpenters, carpet-layers, all those noisy people; I would cope with all that, rent-free, while she continued her diligent doctor’s life—she is a pediatrician, specializing in infant lung problems—from the modest apartment on California Street, near Polk, where she had lived for years. Her new house was in Pacific Heights, one of the city’s most expensive, conservative, peaceful, fog-ridden and beautiful neighborhoods—a curious choice for Agatha, the Episcopalian-radical, but she had fallen in love with the barny old house. I loved it too, although my stay there was strange and difficult from the start.
The first thing that happened, on my second day there, was that my garbage can was stolen. I had tidily taken garbage out the night before, leavings from my unpacking, and I had wondered why the can was so near the front porch, then remembered that there was no kitchen entrance: I would have to build a deck. And the next morning when I went out with more trash, there was no garbage can.
At first, I thought that it must be a San Francisco system of garbage collection with which I was unfamiliar, picking up the can along with the garbage. But this seemed impractical, and then I remembered the early Sixties, in New York, when people kept saying, “My God, they’re stealing our garbage cans, what next?” Well, what came to be called “urban violence” was next. Anyway, there in San Francisco, my second day in town, my garbage can was stolen.
The next thing that happened, two days later, was the murder of a man, two blocks away from where I lived. Out walking his dog, one night, with his wife, and a car drove past, slowed up; someone stuck a gun out the window and fired two shots. A “random killing”—the dead man could have been anyone, or they could have hit his wife, or the dog. I had gone out for dinner with Agatha that night, and so I didn’t hear the shots, as I might have, or an ambulance, anything. I only read about it in the next day’s morning paper, and although living in New York and spending time in Boston with my lover could have hardened me to murders, it had not; I was chilled, and terrified.
Going about my work that day, mainly walking slowly through large empty rooms and trying to envision something there—as I did that, I thought a lot about the wife of the murdered man. Married eighteen years, the paper said. If they had married in their twenties, she was probably about my age, around forty, maybe a little older. Had she liked her husband? Suppose it had been me, out for a walk with Derek, the Boston lover whom I had come West to escape? There was a sense in which I hated Derek, and not without cause, but would I have been relieved if he had been shot? Suppose that woman had really cared about her husband? And I wondered how she now felt about her dog, the innocent and unscathed cause of the walk.
And I wondered how long it would be before San Francisco more and more closely resembled New York. “Manhattanization” was a word I had already picked up from the papers, although I gathered that it referred to high-rise buildings, not to murder.
The third thing that happened was that Jean-Paul reentered my life—curiously, by way of the Sunday paper.
I was sitting at the table that I had set up in the middle of the kitchen, my island of order in what would increasingly be the chaos of remodeling, and I was doing several things at once: reading the paper (although I hated it, I was already addicted), drinking coffee and thinking about just where the deck should go, which window to enlarge into a door. The farthest southwest corner, I decided, the one that looked out to a tall clump of eucalyptus trees.
One advantage the Sunday paper has over the daily ones is that there are more of the good, nationally syndicated columnists; the daily papers tend to be incredibly local. I was reading such a columnist, a man whom I usually agree with and like, as he described a recent visit to France, and what he had gathered there concerning Euro-Communism, and Euro-Socialism. The most interesting, impressive man that he had spoken to, he said, was Jean-Paul ——, an economic theorist, professor, editor, who had said …
And so Jean-Paul, in that unlikely way, rushed back full-force into my life—or, rather, into my heart and blood—from across almost twenty years.
Where to start? I remembered everything about him all at once, an avalanche of vivid memories, under which I was suddenly buried: I saw our last parting, standing between trains, our eyes and our hands straining toward each other. I saw our crazy first night, the night we met, in the Club Méphisto. And I saw the beautiful unforgettable shape of his cock, and felt its taste.
To begin with that last, his sex: I had never seen an uncircumcised penis before, nor had that ever occurred to me as a place for kissing, for tongues. I know, unimaginative; but I was about twenty then, and the men I had
made love with so far, including Marshall, my then husband, seemed not to go in for oral sex either, or perhaps not with nice girls like me. Anyway, Jean-Paul had a lovely cock, young and fresh and pink and delicately blue-veined, delicious.
Now, this is curious: all the greatest loves of my life, the four—or is it five?—have been uncircumcised. Even Jacob, who was Jewish: he explained that his liberated parents didn’t believe in it—quite right, I think. What is strange is that this fact, foreskin or not, could not be known or even guessed at ahead of time, ahead of love. Also, there have been uncircumcised men whom I have not fallen in love with, just fucked—I mean, I don’t automatically flip out at the sight of a foreskin. Just sometimes. I have wondered about my father: was he, as the French say, entier? No way to know; my mother would not have remembered, and anyway how could I have asked her? But actually I don’t want to know about my father, whom after all I hardly knew, he died so young. I would prefer to believe that in some curiously effective way I was “imprinted” by Jean-Paul, phallus-wise, and such indeed would seem to be the case.
But I suppose I should tell about Jean-Paul in a logical way—causally, as it were.
In the middle Fifties I was living in London, in Kensington. With Marshall, to whom I had been married for less than a year, and with whom I was already not getting along. Marshall had money from home; he was studying at the London School, and I, doing nothing, was entirely dependent on him for money. In early November I persuaded him that a weekend in Paris would do us both good—and how right I was, although not in the way that I had imagined.
We found a cheap hotel on the Rue de Tournon. Marshall hated it—dusty, impractically shaped; I was crazy about it. In fact I loved everything in Paris on sight, especially those small, then quiet Left Bank streets, the gray façLades of buildings, lovely scrolled balconies. If I believed in such things, I would think that I had lived there in another life, that I was recognizing my spiritual home; of course I don’t believe that, but that is how it felt. I experienced a sort of euphoria, just walking around, crossing those beautiful stone bridges and stopping to stare down into the dark quiet river.
Small wonder that I should fall in love.
We had dinner in a cheap student restaurant, on Rue Benoit, and we responded predictably: I with enthusiasm, Marshall sourly. In fact our marriage was a typical Fifties error: I imagined that being married would rescue me from what had begun to seem a chronically turbulent sexual life—too many, too chaotic affairs—and Marshall thought a regular sexual life, in his case “intercourse” once a week, would free him for work. And in 1955, when we married, neither of those ideas would have sounded mad.
After dinner we went to a nightclub that someone in London had told us about—the Méphisto, on the Rue de Seine. And there was a tall, square-faced young man standing at the bar, with fresh fair skin and slightly slant blue eyes. A friendly smile. Jean-Paul.
He watched me as Marshall and I danced, he smiled as we sat down. He came over and asked if he could buy us a drink: had we yet tried Pernod? We hadn’t, and he ordered some for us, a nice French host to visiting young Americans. He was about ten years older than we were, in his early thirties; an economist, he and some friends (“comrades”) were just starting a magazine of political commentary. Most of this was for Marshall’s benefit, I knew; he was waiting to ask me to dance, which he did, as soon as there was something slow, some oldy from the Forties. He maneuvered me out of Marshall’s view, and we pressed together, barely moving. It was surely an instant, explosive attraction between us, but I was a little wary; I had had a few too many of those since marriage to Marshall—not acting on any of them, not yet, but still I was scared. Something must be wrong with me; I knew that marriage was not supposed to affect people in that way.
Surprisingly, I said that to Jean-Paul. “I’m really frightened,” I whispered to his ear.
“Do not be. I can tell, you are a wonderful woman.”
I imagined that to him “wonderful” just meant big, especially big-breasted; still, it was gratifying, even exciting to hear.
The evening went on more or less like that, sexy dancing alternating with intellectual discussion: the deposition of Stalin by Khrushchev, the revolt of Polish workers in Poznan. Jean-Paul approved of both, although he carefully explained that he was a Socialist, a non-Communist.
We all got very, very drunk. But I still do not quite understand how the next thing happened, which was—the three of us went back to our hotel, mine and Marshall’s, and we all fell into bed together.
Oh yes, one would say in the Seventies, well, of course: threesies. But it wasn’t like that, really. None of us was “into” kinky sex; we hadn’t even heard of it, although the idea must have been somewhere in our minds. More explicitly, there was some token reason for the arrangement: the Métro had closed down for the night, and Jean-Paul lived out near the Place d’Italie, something like that. Anyway, there the three of us were, stripped down to a few modest undergarments, in our bed. Me in between the two men.
Drunkenness put Marshall instantly to sleep, and he was always an exceptionally heavy sleeper. I think that Jean-Paul and I were awake all night, wordlessly stroking, caressing—our hands making love to each other. Incredible, thinking of it now, to have been so drunk and so wide awake and so violently aroused, all night.
Around dawn I whispered to Jean-Paul that he should dress; I would meet him outside in five minutes. He whispered back that we would not have long; he had an important meeting at eight.
For the next couple of hours, we wandered around those streets, down to the river, beside it, in the chilly, rising mists, in the smells of a Paris dawn. I don’t think breakfast, eating anything, occurred to either of us.
“You will come back? You could come alone, from London?” Jean-Paul asked me at some point.
“Yes, in a week or so I’ll come.” God knows how I thought I would manage this, but I knew that I would. I had to.
“I think that I love you very much,” Jean-Paul said later, in a highly serious, considering way.
It was easier for me. “I love you—”
But how readily we both attached that word to all we felt, our whole complex of emotions, our lust and fatigue and simple human affection, simple curiosity about each other. In my case, love also had to do with prior loneliness, despair; for Jean-Paul it must have arrived confused with political idealism, hopes for mankind.
We separated on a corner near the Sorbonne, where Jean-Paul’s meeting was, having exchanged addresses, phone numbers. Tears, and impassioned kisses.
I went back to our hotel and to Marshall, and that afternoon he and I took the boat train back to London. Le Havre, Dover, Victoria Station.
In London I began to go every afternoon to American Express to ask for letters, under my own, my maiden name, Daphne Matthiessen, that having been my arrangement with Jean-Paul. Every afternoon, as my heart pounded, nerves tightened, the clerk would leaf through all the letters under “M” and then, with porcelain English courtesy, he would inform me that there was nothing. After several days of this, I decided to ask also as Daphne White, using Marshall’s name, although no one ever wrote us there. Jean-Paul had met me as Daphne White; would he have forgotten Matthiessen, a harder name? No, there was nothing for Daphne White either.
Not hearing from Jean-Paul made me desperate, wild: I had to see him. Only much later in life did I learn that certain men, although they may love you a great deal, do not write letters.
For Marshall I concocted a story about a friend from my boarding-school days, St. Margaret’s: Ellie Osborne was going to be in Paris for a weekend. She was terrifically rich, I could stay at her hotel with her, I wouldn’t need much money. And she was such a rude arrogant person that Marshall would not like her at all. Besides, he had a lot of work to do, didn’t he? And we had just been to Paris, and he hadn’t liked it.
I did in fact have a rich arrogant friend from St. Margaret’s named Ellie Osborne; Agatha and I used to
imitate her nasal bray.
Marshall just said, “Okay, for heaven’s sake, go.”
Next I went to a post office to put through a call to Jean-Paul, which took an hour of the most excruciating anxiety, ending with a terrible connection. Jean-Paul’s voice faded in and out, as though drowning in the waves of the Channel which separated us. But I heard him say that he loved me, he had missed me horribly. He would meet me at the Gare du Nord.
It was a terrible trip, fraught with much more anxiety: I so feared that he had not actually heard me—one of us would get the time or the station wrong. What I really feared, but could not admit to myself, was that finally being together, finally making love, could not live up to the violence and weight of our expectations. In any case, on that Channel boat and then on the train to Paris, I was anything but a happy young woman, a budding adulteress, gaily off to meet her handsome French lover in Paris.
But he was there, beautiful Jean-Paul, as I got off the train; clinging together, we passed through all the barriers, we raced down long hollow corridors, we jolted along on the Métro, across the whole city to the Place d’Italie, where he lived. And we made love almost as soon as we were inside his room—one attic room, one big lumpy bed, chairs, books—and we were entirely delighted with each other.
How serious we were as lovers, though—how unrelievedly intense. It is amazing that we could stand it, with no leavening laughs, no simple silliness. We both behaved as though the world’s future depended on the perfection of our congress, and very likely we thought that it did.
The room where we were, for most of that weekend, was large and bare, books being almost Jean-Paul’s only personal possessions, and he could not afford many books. Moby Dick, Ulysses, Don Quixote—he seemed to have been fond of the heavier classics—and an enormous book that he later gave me by a writer of whom I had not heard: David Rousset, Les Jours de notre morts, about the concentration camps. I labored through it, a true labor of love, and of anguish; by then my pain for the lack of Jean-Paul was mingled with the horrors of the Holocaust.
