Rich Rewards

by Alice Adams

  I told her a little about my love affairs, and read bits of my letters to her, and she listened in that absorbed way she had, and still now has.

  Once, the only time that I remember, the General came to St. Margaret’s to visit his daughter. He had often promised visits that did not materialize; so deeply hurting to Agatha, I am sure, that she had stopped mentioning his promises. A rotten person all around, I thought. And on the occasion that he did actually arrive, he took Agatha and me out to lunch, and I found him a sorry disappointment; first, because he was out of uniform, in an ordinary business suit, and so being seen with him gave us no clout with the other girls. Secondly, he was a most unimpressive-looking man, small and pale. His hair was an unnatural shade of brown. Actually he and Agatha looked strongly alike, except that his face lacked the slight irregularity and thus the wit of hers. His manner was quiet, nondescript. Of that lunch I only remember giggling with Agatha and eating too much—boarding-school girls out for a treat. The General seemed distantly to disapprove; however, some vestigial sense of guilt over his less than successful role as a father must have kept him from overt scolding—and prevented him as well from ever coming back.

  That day he gave off a sense of being in a hurry to be somewhere else. Later, when I heard more about him—from newspapers, Time; not from Agatha—it was hard to see that small mild man as the playboy escort of titled ladies. He never remarried, and was still swinging around Washington at the time of his death, a couple of years ago. And it was hard, too, to see him as one of the authors of our policy in Southeast Asia. When I read about the banality of evil, General Patterson always comes to mind.

  His money, of course, was, and is, the greatest mystery of all: how could he have amassed so many millions?

  Since the school was Episcopalian, in a maudlin way we were all somewhat religious, weeping over Lenten hymns and full of Christian joy at Christmas. What I didn’t know was how important all that was to Agatha; she really believed it. I was surprised, all those years later in San Francisco, to find out that she still went to church sometimes. “I’m a primitive Christian, with a very literal mind,” she once explained.

  After St. Margaret’s I headed up to Wellesley, drawn by the proximity of all those men in neighboring schools, Harvard almost next door, and all those others within a few hours by fast car. Agatha went out to Berkeley, which seemed at the time an eccentric choice, and one which she did not explain: Agatha never explained anything. I now think she simply wanted to get as far away as possible from the General. She went from Berkeley to medical school at Stanford.

  I married Marshall, went to England, fell in love with Jean-Paul, came back. I lived in New York and Washington, and went briefly home to Madison when my mother died.

  By 1960, I was divorced, very broke and trying to be a decorator, a trade into which I had fallen accidentally: because I moved so often, people would admire an apartment, something I had done with it, pulled together, and they would ask, “How did you do that—get that?”

  Most of my friends shared my own rather laggard and adversary relationship to the economy—professional people, “creative” people, who in one way or another were not making a lot of money. Who were enemies of the I.R.S., A. T. & T., the utilities companies. Small-time rebels, all of us. For such friends I would do apartments as cheaply as though their places had been my own; I liked to think that for them I could spend ten dollars and make it look like a hundred. But because of Wellesley, and other accidents of the time, I also knew a lot of rich people, and thus I got into a sort of Robin Hood situation: the money that I made from the rich helped me help my friends, as well as sustaining my own existence.

  I was also embarked on a series of love affairs that were much more of an occupation than my work. And my love affairs were always expensive: clothes, my refrigerator stocked with delicacies, my bedroom with perfume and flowers. It frequently occurred to me that both my work and my life of love were seriously awry, but I could not see a way to change either one—or both.

  While I was thus frivolously occupied, Agatha was getting through med school, then involving herself in the social protest movements of the Sixties. She marched on Birmingham, helped to register black voters, then lived and worked for a couple of years in Tallahassee as a free pediatrician. She got into the peace movement, and spent some time in the Santa Rita jail, having been arrested in Oakland at the depot from which napalm was being shipped out.

  Meanwhile, back at his desk in Washington, the General was urging the bombers on: get Cambodia, back to the Stone Age with those yellow bastards.

  But to talk about the General in that way is to denigrate Agatha’s idealism, really. Hers was not at all a simple rebellion; of that I am absolutely certain. She believed entirely in what she did; in fact as she saw it she had no choice. When someone said that there was to be a demonstration at the Oakland depot, she had to be there, first in line.

  By 1973, she and the General were not even formally in touch, and so it is strange that he did not rewrite his will, disinheriting her. My own idea is that, like so many people, he thought he would die if he made and signed a will; he planned to live forever. Stranger still is the fact that he turned out to have so much money. He had always lived in a high-handed, affluent way, Agatha said, but if she thought of it at all, she simply assumed that he must be very well paid for whatever he did at the Pentagon, and that he was spending all he made.

  At his death, then, Agatha got over five million dollars, after taxes. And we talked endlessly, we speculated endlessly, about where he could have got all that money—both of us feeling, but not quite saying, that it must be somehow tainted. Blood money of some sort.

  In any case, that is how Agatha, an unlikely person, came to be an heiress, and finally brought herself to buy a big house that she was crazy about.

  And then she called me in New York.

  She said, “You’ll like the house. It’s big, sort of crazy. Great long windows, and a yard with some old trees. I just don’t know what to do with it.”

  I was thinking how surprised Derek would be when I left. Derek, my cruel lover. And thinking how, in a new and interesting place, I would probably not miss him at all. I might even give up having affairs altogether.

  I told Agatha that I would get there as soon as I could, and I did, within a month.

  3

  There were many things to be said about my English Boston lover, Derek Churchill, and at one time or another I must have said them all: selfish, inconsiderate, self-absorbed, overweight and given to drink. But I said them silently, and only to myself. He was also bright and literate, sexually enthusiastic and, in his own dry way, a considerable wit. However, we were always antagonistic lovers, never anything like friends. Derek was not at all a “friendly” person, which could not be blamed entirely on his being English, although I tended to make that excuse for him.

  He always looked and dressed like an upper-class Englishman, a banker or a publisher: sandy hair perfectly smooth; red-faced; in well-cut not-new tweeds. However, he was not what he looked to be, not a famous Churchill, but working-class, as he rather too frequently pointed out, calculatedly: he knew that I would like that fact about him, that I would not have liked it if he had been related to the Churchills. He was a lawyer, corporation law. An American convert.

  We met, then, at a party in New York. He took me out to dinner, I took him home to bed—which could describe the beginning of most of my affairs at that time; I’m the wrong generation for singles bars, and too shy besides. In bed Derek was a great surprise; or I must have had some idea that Englishmen were always unremarkable in that way. He liked me too; he thought our screwing was terrific. “My girl, you’re quite amazing” is what he said.

  What is it that is so seductive about being praised in an English accent? Maybe because the clipped sounds don’t go with the words? It is basically not an accent for enthusiasm?

  Derek came back to New York the next weekend, and a couple of weekends aft
er that he invited me up to Boston to see him, in his comfortable shabby flat on Chestnut Street.

  We began to spend most of our weekends together, but not all, and we never saw each other for longer than a weekend, except on that fatal trip to Paris—six whole days of being together.

  Since we spent much less than all our time together, it was assumed between us without any explicit statement that we both saw other people sometimes. “Saw” in that context meaning fell into bed with, fucked. With me that was not the case. I went out for an occasional dinner with an old friend, usually a woman or some nice gay man. Never to bed. In a sexual way I was completely addicted to Derek.

  He did see other people, and what was cruel and unforgivable was that he let me know all about it, in his cryptic, half-drunken English way.

  For example, about six months after our relationship began, I became aware that he was “seeing” a Radcliffe girl. During one of my Boston weekends, it struck me that we were spending an unusual amount of time driving around Harvard Square, going to mediocre restaurants in Cambridge: those were the earliest signs. Then he asked me why I had gone to Wellesley; why not Radcliffe? Later he remarked that he hadn’t known until recently that Californians had accents. “Curious, rather unlike other American speech.” And so there she was: a Radcliffe girl, from California.

  One night in bed he asked me if I had ever minded having such large breasts. I did not say, as I wanted to, You dumb jerk, of course I’ve minded. But I thought, Oh, hers are small, and no doubt perfect.

  He had given me a whole girl, with whom I could torture myself.

  At another time it became clear that he was seeing someone Spanish.

  Of course, if I had confronted him with any of this, he could have thought and said that I was crazy. Delusional.

  His delusion, a real one, was that I wanted to get married. Any slight complaint of mine, any hint that our getting along was less than perfectly satisfactory to me, and he would sigh, “Ah, well, my dear, I’m afraid what you really need is a proper husband, and you know that’s not my niche.”

  I wonder if much younger women have this problem too, that of convincing men that they don’t want to get married. I really hope not.

  And although I genuinely did not want to get married—I had not liked marriage to Marshall at all, and I had never wanted to have children—it did occur to me that my clinging to Derek, despite all that he did, probably had in it a marital element. I was like a wife who will put up with anything in order to save the marriage.

  I considered going to a shrink, but all the shrinks I had ever met in a social way had been so dull and flat, so unshakable in their self-esteem. Instead I talked to friends; sometimes I would call Agatha in San Francisco. Once I said to her—very insightfully, I thought: “You know, when a man is really treating me badly I’m afraid to leave him; he might do something worse.”

  “Well, I guess that makes sense.”

  At another time, a rather coarse friend, a man, an unsuccessful writer, said to me, “You know, Daphne, you remind me of a man who puts on a tuxedo to take a crap.” I didn’t quite understand that, but I caught the drift.

  I was, however, finally on the verge of leaving Derek when he craftily suggested a trip to Paris.

  Six days in Paris!

  He had business there; of course his business was the real reason for our trip, something to do with the Common Market, but still— We would have all our evenings together there: perhaps Paris would magically transform us?

  I told Derek that I would much rather stay on the Left Bank, and although he said that he rather fancied the George V, we compromised on the Lutetia, Boulevard Raspail—a little too grand for me, and not quite grand enough for him, as things turned out.

  On the plane going over, high above the Atlantic, over his third vodka, true to form, Derek remarked, “One thing I do like about you, Daphne, my girl, is that you’re not a child. Younger women—their problems—lamentable.” Lamentable, accent on the first syllable.

  He had been having trouble with a younger woman? Well, obviously so. And despite the number of times he had done precisely this to me before, that thought lodged itself within me like a barb. My response was Pavlovian, or something even more stupid.

  Then, as we circled the hedge-crossed fields, the red-tiled country rooftops of France, Derek asked me if I had ever known anyone with a strong Southern accent. “Impossible to understand,” he said.

  A very young Southern woman. Jesus Christ.

  Nevertheless, there was Paris, gray and lovely, strangled in traffic, reeking of fumes—and poignantly, piercingly familiar. Or was I simply pierced with pain from Derek? At that moment it was hard to tell.

  As we dressed for dinner, he remarked that he had noticed I did not go in for black lace underthings. He found them attractive, rather.

  Why in hell didn’t you bring your young Southern twat in her black lace skivvies instead of me? Why do I have to hear this stuff? I was silently screaming all that at Derek, although I could never have managed to bring out those words; they would have sounded crazy, or so I thought.

  At dinner, Lucas-Carton, which was terribly posh and formal—not a good choice—for some reason I told Derek a very modified version of my history with Jean-Paul. Maybe in a feeble way I was trying to get back at him; if so, that was a total failure. An observation: people are never jealous when you want them to be, only when you do not. What Derek said was “Well, just as well you can’t see him now, I’m sure. Those middle-class Frenchmen always run to fat, and they get bald early on. You may have even passed each other in the street.”

  Of course this was long before I had heard anything about the present Jean-Paul, although I somehow knew that he could be neither bald nor fat. Nor, for that matter, could he ever have been described as middle-class. But I was too depressed, too beaten down to argue. And I was certainly too low-spirited to think of trying to get in touch with Jean-Paul on that trip.

  I didn’t even call Ellie Osborne, although I knew from Agatha that she was there.

  I walked through streets that once had been familiar, and loved; I went to the Louvre, Notre Dame, Sainte-Chapelle. I stood on Pont Neuf and regarded the river. I had a solitary drink on the terrace of the Flore, where once I had shared a beer with Jean-Paul. An attractive blond man—a Dane, perhaps, some sort of Scandinavian—tried manfully to pick me up, with nice smiles, bright white teeth and sea-blue eyes, but I wasn’t equal to anything like that, not then.

  Derek and I got back late on a Tuesday afternoon; he rushed up to Boston—to see his young black-laced Southern friend is what I assumed. Alone in my apartment, I unpacked and bathed, and lay down for a nap. I was incredibly tired.

  I woke up at some strange pre-dawn hour, completely out of touch with time, with my place on the globe. I felt as an alcoholic woman must feel, waking and not sure how she got into that bed, nor what day it was.

  And I wondered, How had I got into such a situation, so skewered with pain, impaled on jealous thrusts from an inconsiderate, really cruel man?

  Crazy: it would be as crazy to continue with Derek as it would be for that lost alcoholic to go on drinking. I simply would not. I would give him up. Break off, cut out. Never mind that I should have done this months ago, clearly.

  And the next day, miraculously—God liked me, after all—Agatha called and told me about her house in California. I know that I would have broken off with Derek anyway—I really was ready to—but knowing his sort of perversity, I was sure that he would have made it as difficult as possible, mightily exercising himself to keep me around. A strong excuse for getting out of town, all the way to California, was a tremendous help.

  Agatha had saved me.

  4

  For my first couple of weeks in San Francisco, then, I walked about and looked at the city; I spent time with Agatha—I moped about Jean-Paul, and gave a few angry backward thoughts in the direction of Derek. And I thought about the house surrounding me, trying to see what
I could make of it, what shape it would take, what forms and colors.

  One morning, as I was contemplating the kitchen in that speculative way, someone rang the doorbell.

  I went to answer it, and there on the stoop was a very tall, very blond young man, in what looked like old army clothes, faded green. His long white-blond hair was pulled back into a sort of ponytail, tied with a thong; a moustache and a full beard covered a lot of his face.

  He introduced himself. “I’m Royce Houston.” And he handed me a card, using his left hand, from which two fingers were missing. He was a carpenter, he said, and so his card announced. In case I was thinking about any remodeling.

  At first, for a moment, this seemed an answer to some telepathic summons, but then I realized that it was of course a clever, not too farfetched calculation on Royce Houston’s part: the house had recently changed hands; new owners often remodeled. He would have just been waiting around, watching me. Choosing what seemed a propitious moment.

  His smile too looked calculated, a quick gesture that did not match his eyes, which were distant and vaguely hostile. “I’m staying with my folks, out at Stinson Beach, temporarily,” he told me. “So if you call there, ask for Whitey. I’m called that, inevitably. The old man’s named Royce too.”

  The “inevitably” had been as jarring, as off-key as his smile, and infinitely condescending. Toward me? Toward his parents? In fact he was a little scarey, Whitey Houston was: shell-shocked, a Vietnam vet? On drugs of some sort? I was sure that I would never call him, but of course I took his card and thanked him—and was treated to another quick hostile smile.

  I was very glad to see him go. That encounter had shaken me up, and in a businesslike way I tried to concentrate on the kitchen.

  I thought that I would create a central island, butcher-blocked: a small sink, chopping areas, a chute for garbage. And around the walls of the room I would have some banquettes made, upholstered in a bright sturdy fabric that would cost the earth and look very simple and inexpensive.