by Alice Adams
But I now see that so far I have failed to give a sharply differentiated picture of Jean-Paul: handsome, virile, an intense young French intellectual—in Paris, in the middle Fifties. Surely that description would have fit a lot of young men at that time and place. Even the fact that he had fought in the Resistance, with the Maquis, and that he had a long scar on one leg and a minor limp—well, there were a lot of limping heroes around in those past days. But I supposed that he would remember me, if he did at all, just as vaguely: a big dark bosomy American girl, intense, with expensive American tastes—more about that humiliating last fact later.
I do remember what then seemed an exceptional quality of niceness in Jean-Paul; he was, and still is, a genuinely kind person. For example, this comes back: when I told him, what I had never said to a lover before, that such large breasts were quite a nuisance to me, so heavy and shapeless, really—instead of telling me that they were beautiful, terrific breasts, which I would have known to be untrue, in a very considering way he said, “I used to have a girl friend, here in Paris, and her breasts were what they call perfect. But your breasts, they say something to me, they are yours.”
Of course I loved him. Totally.
Between us that weekend we had almost no money. With a couple of implausible phone calls to Marshall, I had stretched the time out to almost a week: I was sick, I stupidly said. True to my begging description, my story about staying with rich Ellie Osborne, I had brought almost no money with me, and Jean-Paul was living on some sort of instructor’s stipend. We subsisted on eggs and cheese, occasionally some grapes—that fall, especially beautiful: perfectly rounded, an ashy dark blue and wet and sweet. We drank a little wine.
We walked: up through steep Rue Mouffetard, with its tempting open markets, occasionally as far as Boulevard Saint-Michel, and down to the Seine, passing but not stopping at those student cafés, those terraces of unconsciously jabbering people. Walking, clutching each other, talking—what about I cannot remember at all. I suppose we talked about our love and desperation, our hopelessness. Or maybe the future of Europe.
And then, one afternoon, although absolutely in love—this is going to be a vividly embarrassing moment—I was suddenly seized with a longing for a “perfect” martini. It was a hot day, but still, at this point in my life, I cannot think of a more boring, trite and exhausted topic than that of the perfect martini. (Several local columnists still seem to find it absorbing, which says a lot about San Francisco, I think.) In my mind—Christ, how inappropriately!—there arose a vision of the Ritz Bar in Boston, that small, whitely decorated room that to me, the year before as a Wellesley girl, had seemed a pinnacle of elegance. I wished that Jean-Paul and I were there, each with a cold martini.
“Do you know what I’d like right now?” I asked Jean-Paul, making it idle. “A cold martini.”
He smiled, fresh-skinned, clear-eyed, beautiful and kind. “Well, there is nothing so difficult in that. Let’s go in here.”
And he guided me onto a small terrace; we had wandered across the Seine, and were somewhere near Notre Dame. He ordered a martini, bien froid. And I got, of course, a glass of dark sweet vermouth with a twist of lemon and a piece of ice in it.
“It’s good, but it’s not exactly what I meant. It’s different in America,” I said, more or less explaining what must have been a clear look of disappointment.
It would probably be quite wrong to say that at that moment we both realized our futures did not lie together; quite possibly Jean-Paul, a realist, knew all along that I was just a big sexy American girl about whom he felt very intensely, for a while. Still, it is significant that that episode so clings to my mind.
And I do not remember any conversations about a possible future together; perhaps it only now occurs to me that this might have been? At that time Jean-Paul was telling me that he wanted badly to write a novel, but he was not sure he had the time. He was more concerned with the direction of his party, the National Liberation Front, which was an amalgamation of Resistance groups.
And I was concerned with Marshall, my lack of money—those dull and imponderable problems.
Well, we finished our drinks, my martini and Jean-Paul’s beer; we walked back to Jean-Paul’s room and we fell into the tangle of his bed, and made love, again and again. Our lovemaking forms a sort of continuum in my mind; it was what we always did. No single act was more, or less, memorable than another. Conversely, I do remember one particular act of love with Jacob, in a motel room near Ocean City, Maryland, one August afternoon: my first experience of sex with grass.
Then the next day Jean-Paul and I stood in the Gare du Nord: desperately serious, as only extremely young people can be—near tears, saying goodbye. Even our last time together had been cut short: a political emergency.
Once back in London, I got very sick, almost immediately: it was frightening; I was sicker than I had ever been before—or since. Sick with love is what I thought it was, and in a way I was right; for one thing, all those walks to American Express, where I hoped for some word from Jean-Paul, in the freezing London weather, cannot have helped. When I went out into the air, it was as though I had been scalped; any wind went through my head like knives. At last I yielded and stayed in bed for a while, and I began to get well enough to quarrel with Marshall—dully, hopelessly.
Finally I did hear from Jean-Paul, who said that he had been too miserable to write to me. Also he had been much of the time in Italy; his party was trying to effect a liaison with the Italian Action Party, another Resistance splinter group. His life would contain much travel now, he wrote; he would usually be not in Paris, but he could always be reached through his mother, in Fresnaye, a small town in Normandy, near the coast. And he gave me that address.
Well, anyone could tell what happened next: the impassioned letters that slowly diminished in their frequency, their intensity. Until, one day, although I still thought of myself as hopelessly, permanently in love with Jean-Paul—and I may even have been right, as I now see it—I was also, in another way, “in love” with someone else. Or with several people; this would have been soon after my divorce from Marshall—a festive, liberating time for me, all around. It could have been more or less the same for Jean-Paul.
Once, about ten years after we had seen each other, many years after we had not written, finally, any more—in a lonely mood, no doubt occasioned by the demise of another love affair—I did write to Jean-Paul. I cannot remember what I said, probably some wistful attempt to recall our gone young passion. He answered with wisdom and kindness, no wistfulness. He said, “I think you have the need at this moment for an actual presence, a person there with you. And that I cannot be for you. I live with a woman whom I think of as my wife. But please to write to me again. I do not want to lose you this time.”
But I did not write.
I have even been back to Paris a couple of times, and never called or seriously thought of calling Jean-Paul. I did, though, think of him; I wondered if we could be passing each other on certain streets, not recognizing each other. Once—such a mistake—I mentioned this fantasy to the man I was there with, mean Derek, and he said that most likely Jean-Paul and I had in fact done just that; we had passed and not recognized each other. He assured me that by now Jean-Paul would be middle-aged and fat, an anonymous French bourgeois. And so, in a way, until that morning in San Francisco, I must have accepted that version of Jean-Paul. Middle-aged. Fat, unrecognizable.
And suddenly, that day in San Francisco, everything changed: there he was in Paris, a leading Socialist economic theorist, and I did not know what to do. I could have written to him, except that I didn’t know where, and I did not believe his mother could still be there in Normandy, alive.
As I thought of him then, I had the most terrible sense of loss, as though lacking Jean-Paul I had wasted my life. As though everyone else I had ever loved had been a poor substitute for him.
And I saw that the true reason for not writing him was that I knew I could not have born
e it if he did not answer.
2
On the evening of the day when I read about Jean-Paul, and he in that way came back into my life, I was to have dinner with Agatha, in a new French restaurant; it was out in what is locally called “the avenues,” meaning a non-smart, middle-class area somewhat south and west of Pacific Heights, in the direction of the ocean but stopping short.
We had said that we would meet there, and I, chronically early and uncertain of the geography involved, got there first, and was seated at a small table. I ordered a glass of wine.
It was the sort of restaurant that began to be fashionable in New York about five years ago. French country style was the intent, although I am not sure that the whitewashed walls, brass railings and checked tablecloths achieved just that. But it was pleasant enough, and restfully uncluttered.
Dimly aware of music, records playing somewhere, I looked about at the other people, all of whom appeared to be as transient as myself; and I wondered, Is everyone in San Francisco basically a tourist? Is it “home” for anyone?
And then I recognized the music, I knew the songs that were being played. Piaf, Charles Trenet, Jean Sablon. Those piercingly nostalgic songs of love and loneliness and despair. “Vous, qui passez sans me voir …” And I, a forty-year-old woman, might as well have been an adolescent in a drugstore—Rennebohm’s, in Madison, Wisconsin—listening to Sinatra, insanely in love with someone. I was “in love,” and in that same ludicrous way, with Jean-Paul, who was now a man of fifty or so, whom I had not seen for twenty years. And I could not turn off those feelings.
But then Agatha came in—in the middle of “L’Autre Côté de la rue”—and some sanity returned to me. Her small, slightly crooked smile, her small voice saying “I’m sorry I’m late” were both so reassuringly familiar to me, and so dear.
I wondered if later on I would tell her about Jean-Paul, and decided that probably I would.
Agatha does not look much like an heiress, despite all the General’s unaccountable millions having passed on to her. She will never look like a rich person, and that was to be one of the conditions of my doing her house: she did not want the money that she spent to show.
To me, Agatha seemed to look, and in fact to dress, much as she did when we first met, at St. Margaret’s, more than twenty-five years back. Though this might be simply a function of my having known her for so long, a failure on my part to register change: the sort of persistence of vision that is often observable among old friends. We think our friend is the skinny, brown-curled person of many years back; we fail to notice fat and gray.
However, Agatha really was still a small neat person with indefinitely light hair and sad blue eyes. An off-center smile, small nose. She was wearing a dark blue sweater, gray flannel skirt. Only her boots were new and expensive, wonderful boots; in a minor way Agatha is a shoe fetishist, maybe because dainty feet are among the few things that she likes about herself.
Abruptly—before I had meant to, really—I said to her, “The god-damnedest thing happened to me this morning.” And I told her about reading the paper, and then, in a very condensed, dried-out way, about Jean-Paul, our time in Paris, all those years ago.
Agatha is probably the best listener I have ever known. The quality of her silence, her lonely eyes and her just-amused mouth all draw one on. I have talked more to Agatha than to anyone, ever.
At times I have worried about how little she says; even, sometimes, it has seemed stingy of her, to give so little back. But that is surely unjust. For one thing, her profession is so specialized: how could she talk about anomalies in the lungs of newborn infants?
Actually I too have put in a fair amount of good-listener time, but that has generally been with lovers.
“And so, I don’t know what to do,” I finished, as I so often have, telling some story to Agatha. “Of course I don’t have to do anything.”
“You could write to Ellie.”
Ellie was the girl whom Agatha and I had known at St. Margaret’s, whose visit to Paris I had invented, my excuse to Marshall when I went back to see Jean-Paul. This has happened several times in my life, in fact: my lies come true. Rude rich unlikable Ellie had indeed gone to Paris, and she had stayed on there. It had never been clear what she was doing—very likely nothing at all.
Agatha said, “She might know something, just from reading the papers there. And writing her would be something for you to do.”
Agatha understands me very well indeed, and what sounded like an idle suggestion turned out well.
Then Agatha said, “Next Sunday, some people have asked me to a party at Stinson Beach. Would you want to come? They said to bring a friend.”
“Agatha, you know perfectly well they don’t mean another woman.”
“Oh, well, I’m tired of inviting men, especially when I really don’t want to. And you are a friend.” She laughed, in her sudden, private way.
I said okay, I’d go to Stinson Beach with her.
Dinner was good, we had fun, as we nearly always did; and we drank a lot of wine. We made our stupid private jokes, and heard more French songs. And by the end of the evening, although I could still feel myself to be “in love” with Jean-Paul, it seemed a more distant fact. Agatha often has that effect: she brings things into focus.
Agatha.
When I first saw her, in some bleak dormitory room at St. Margaret’s, my first day there, I thought she must be someone’s younger sister. But I asked her, “Are you a new girl too?”
“No, actually I’m the oldest girl around.”
Actually. That word from that small pale girl, in her thin little voice, was funny and somehow appealing. I felt less shy, since she was shyer, less uneasy in that strange new atmosphere, a female dormitory—I was fresh from a big Midwestern high school.
“I’ve been here since kindergarten,” Agatha told me. “I’m a fixture. I wonder if they’ll ever let me graduate.” She smiled, one side of her mouth going up more than the other. I liked her a lot.
We were both in our early teens then, Agatha and I, but while I could have passed for eighteen—and sometimes did, in bars, with older boys—Agatha looked about twelve. Maybe some awareness of how funny we looked together contributed to our becoming friends; in any case we were friends, right away.
St. Margaret’s was, actually, a terrible school; without Agatha I would have had a very bad time there, and sometimes I did anyway. To begin with, I was sent there for somewhat punitive reasons: my “older” looks, my height and big breasts, especially breasts, were beginning to gain me a lot of attention at home in Madison; my nervous widowed mother was upset by those phone calls, by boys passing our house in cars and slowing up to honk. One of them had a horn that played “When my baby smiles at me”; my mother especially hated that. And she correctly guessed that I was wildly excited by all the attention. I was insane about boys; “boy-crazy” barely describes the degree of my mania. And the most depressing thing about St. Margaret’s was that there were no boys at all, just letters from boys. With what violent palpitations I raced up the stairs each day to the pigeonholes of mail—very like those that I later suffered on the way to American Express in London, dying for word from Jean-Paul.
The other bad aspects of the school were pretty much standard: don’t all such schools have bad food and ugly uniforms, and mean-spirited, unhappy teachers? And at St. Margaret’s, a Virginia Episcopal school, what a ferociously snobbish lot those teachers were, impressed by Southern names, of which we had quite a few, and by Northern money—considerably less of that. They seemed somehow to have been misinformed about Ellie Osborne, however; she had more money than anyone, old New York money. It must have been her exceptional rudeness that led them astray; in their experience very rich people, rich Southerners, were also very polite, and so Ellie got none of the deference that she might have, and that certainly she felt to be her due.
Agatha’s father was impressive to those ladies, being a real general, in the Pentagon; they always re
ferred to Agatha as “General Patterson’s daughter,” which must have sounded odd when she first arrived at the school, a tiny six-year-old.
I did not impress them at all, in any way, with my flat Midwestern voice, my general inattentiveness and air of wishing to be anywhere else at all, which I passionately did wish. And I had neither a famous Southern name nor a mink coat to recommend me.
A word here about uniforms, and clothes: if, as was true at St. Margaret’s, girls are allowed to wear their own clothes on weekends, the supposedly democratizing effect of uniforms is undercut, in fact demolished, so fierce becomes the competition over the Saturday night sweaters, the Sunday coats. I honestly believe that some of my later silliness about clothes, caring too much and spending too much money on them, may be partially explained by having had the “wrong” coat at St. Margaret’s, wrong sweaters, no “good” pearls.
Agatha was not boy-crazy—nor clothes-crazy, for that matter. She did not correspond with any boys, and her only letters seemed to be from some maiden aunts in Richmond, and from her father, the General. But she could joke about our deprived sexual condition as though she shared my fervor, and perhaps, in an unformed secret way, she did. “Unmated in mating season,” we lamented to each other in the springtime, laughing dementedly.
Agatha’s mother had died when she was two, which is why she was sent off to boarding school so young, and I guess the condition of her having no mother, and I no father, constituted a sort of bond. We once worked up a fantasy in which our two single parents got married to each other, but even our active imaginations failed to bring that off: my reclusive, rather scholarly mother, and the playboy General? It would never work.
Certainly we were unlike in many ways, Agatha and I. She studied hard and got top grades: already she was talking about being a doctor; at that time she meant to go to India and save everyone’s life. I just wrote letters, all during study hall, and I drew pictures, cartoons of the teachers and the girls I most disliked, to make Agatha laugh.
