by Alice Adams
However, despite all the cheery whitewashing things I was saying, I couldn’t help thinking: Suppose, on the other hand, the General was guilty as hell? Suppose he was sent down there by the C.I.A., I.T.T., Rockefellers—to see about killing Allende? It could even have been his own idea, hatched out in his Pentagon office. Maybe he went down there to pay off the people who finally did it.
I wondered just how that would work. What exactly would be said in the preliminary conversations—what words used? And how would they ever, actually, get down to the brass of it: here is so much money, he must be dead by such and such a date. Does all this happen in a bar, a coffee shop—a phone booth? Is the money in an expensive briefcase, or shabby envelopes?
And then how would the General be paid? With laundered money, naturally, but haw?
Flickering scenes of all those activities ran through my mind like old newsreels.
I imagined the General, white suit and Panama hat, at a sidewalk café with “Betty,” who would have to be a bouffant blonde.
Agatha interrupted these Graham Greene fantasies to say, in a sad thin voice, “I really wish I weren’t in love with Royce.”
“Oh?” All in all, I was a little startled, and I thought, What an odd thing for Agatha to say. She was never so direct, nor so self-revealing.
“It can’t work out,” she said. “There’s no way for it to end well. Whatever ‘ending well’ means, I don’t see that in our future.” Her voice cracked with the effort at irony; I’ve never known anyone who had so much trouble talking about herself.
“It could work out,” I told her. “When things settle down. You could even get married or something.”
Agatha turned dark red, so that I saw for the first time how much she would have liked to marry, to have the calm and settled life that marriage, a Christian marriage, is supposed to promise.
But, “It would never work,” she said.
18
“This is Stacy,” said a soft voice over the phone, early one morning. For several minutes no face came to my mind to accompany the voice, and then I saw the whole tall blond vacuous person, Stacy, at Ruth and Royce Houston’s lunch party. Stacy Page, presumably the former lover of Royce.
It was a strange conversation that we had, almost as strange as the fact of hearing from Stacy at all.
She knew I was terribly busy with Agatha’s house, she said, but she was just terribly unhappy with her place in Belvedere, and would I possibly—could I maybe just come over and look at it?
My first instinct was to ask, Why me? Why not Michael or John or Bob? But then I knew why: someone, probably Agatha, or maybe even Royce, if they still communicated, had said that I was not available for local work, and that was enough for Stacy: it had to be me. I knew this because almost exactly the same thing had happened a couple of times before; in New York too I had had a reputation for being in a general way not available, preferring to choose clients for my own eccentric reasons, among which large sums of money were, perhaps foolishly, absent. For a certain kind of woman this sets off a sense of violent urgency: you become the person who is essential to her happiness—this is true especially of very rich women, with their restless wandering greed. And so I was beyond being flattered by Stacy’s whim. It had nothing to do with me, certainly nothing to do with any skill of mine.
But in Stacy’s case, what I had to recognize as a lingering attraction to Royce Houston on my part, and thus a curiosity about him, made me also a little curious about Stacy: could she possibly be as one-dimensional as she appeared? And so, from this quite questionable motive, I agreed that I would come over to Belvedere some morning to look at Stacy’s house.
Settling on the right morning became more difficult than one would have thought, however. Stacy seemed to have a great many “appointments,” and although she insisted that none of them was at all important, still they took up her time. And I had a few appointments of my own: with a highly recommended—by Tony—cabinetmaker, and with Agatha, for a tour of Jackson Square—she would hate everything she saw, I knew that. And I was going to Caroline’s to see about the sculpture.
We finally agreed on a rather early morning hour, because Stacy’s maid was off that day, and she was having friends for lunch. I was glad about the lunch, being quite sure that I did not want to spend a lot of time with Stacy, and that would let me out.
I had a very hard time with directions, going to Stacy’s, up at the top of Belvedere Island. Streets were suddenly one-way, or they changed their names mid-block. Occasionally my anxiety over the time would be interrupted by a brilliant view down to the Bay: small boats and bright water, the gentle green shape of Angel Island. Or I would notice a wonderful house, some quasi-Maybeck, old and dark-shingled, surrounded with ancient shrubbery. But mostly I worried about being late, as though it mattered. And how I wished that I were not such a total slave to time; maybe punctuality is my substitute for tidiness.
At last I did find Stacy’s house, and at the sight of it I almost turned around again; I wanted to leave and make a phone call from somewhere saying that I had got hopelessly lost, that by now it was too late for me to come, which was almost true—I was so daunted by the size and splendor of that house. Windows, balconies, decks, expanses of wood and steel and glass, and on such a scale! It was the sort of house that makes my imagination go dead, and in another way my heart dies too: I don’t really believe that anyone should live in such a house. I am sure that it deforms the spirit.
Certain that I was making a mistake, I rang the bell anyway, and I heard, far within, a long discreet echo of chimes.
The tall blonde young woman who came to the door confused me: I had got the address wrong, after all?
She smiled, really a grin, and she said, “You don’t know me without my eyes on, do you? I’m Stacy. Hi, Daphne.”
We shook hands, and I saw that what she said was quite true; without all that eye makeup she was another person. She looked younger, and somewhat timid, and wearier, tired of it all.
She said how nice of me to come, and then I followed her into one of the largest and least attractive houses I had ever seen. The basic problem was simply that everything was much too big: huge windows, massive beams across the ceiling, a giant sofa, large chairs around a baronial oak coffee table. And everything there had been made to order: that was instantly clear to me; you don’t just find stuff like that at Sloane’s, I knew, and I knew too that it must have cost the earth.
Unutterably depressed by the house, I turned to Stacy, who was asking me if I would like some coffee. I said that indeed I would, and, not wanting to be alone in that awful awesome room, I followed her into the kitchen.
But there again, everything was oversized, more stainless steel than I had ever seen before. More formidable machines.
Rather plaintively Stacy said, “It’s just never felt right to me.”
God knows I saw what she meant. I was curious, too, about who had “done” the house—done this to Stacy—but I managed not to ask. Certainly it was partly an act of pure hostility; no human woman could have functioned happily in that kitchen—nor, really, in that house. It was all Stacy could do to pull together two cups of instant coffee, which we took into the living room.
We sat down, and then immediately, simultaneously, we both glanced down at our watches, which made us look at each other and smile: two time slaves who had recognized each other. I said again how sorry I was to be late, and Stacy, lying exactly as I would have done, said that it didn’t really matter at all, “except for lunch,” she murmured.
I had begun to like her a little, which was a surprise. For one thing, the Stacy I was seeing now, and liking, was totally unlike the woman I had met at the Houstons’ party. This un-madeup Stacy was direct and friendly, a little shy, whereas the “social” Stacy was in constant flirtatious motion, batting those vacuous blue eyes—that today, unadorned, looked considerably less vacuous. Two Stacys, then: one for men, another for women friends. One Stacy believing that men
won’t like her unless she goes into a sort of frenzied dance, and that being liked by men is the ultimate value; the other Stacy allowing herself to be warm, to seem slightly insecure. The pattern was depressingly familiar, and I thought how nice it would be if women did not have to do that any more. Maybe younger ones don’t?
I thought, too, of the odd sexual tastes of Royce Houston; from Stacy to Agatha seemed a very broad jump indeed. And then there was Ruth, whom presumably he had at one time liked. The possibility occurred to me that Royce could be the kind of man who always needs to have two women balanced in opposition to each other—satisfying conflicting needs, I guess. Derek had been like that; probably he still was. All the other girls, his strayings from me, whose characteristics he so clearly sketched out for me, had all been as unlike me as possible, as though chosen at least partially for that reason—small blondes as a sort of rebuke to my darkness, my large size. But as well as being a rebuke, and certainly hurtful, this balance of women, this duality in love, of course serves to prevent a real intimacy with either woman. Looking at Stacy, and thinking of Agatha, I very much hoped this not to be the case with Royce.
Stacy interrupted all this speculation to articulate what was almost exactly my own impression of her house. “It’s just so big,” she said. “I’m absolutely dwarfed by everything. When I bought it, it looked like a bargain, I guess, and then I got absolutely carried away. I got Chuck to do it for me”—Chuck?—“and of course since he doesn’t do much residential work I was flattered, but I tell you, by the time it was over I absolutely hated him. Hughie tried to help—I think you met him at the Houstons’—but by then it was really too late, it was too big for any of us.”
Too big for me, I thought but did not say, not just yet. I just said that yes, it was awfully big.
“A lot of gay men I really like,” said Stacy. “Some of my best friends,” and she laughed. “But Chuck: every time we were together I thought he was trying to say that if he was a woman he sure would be better at it than me.”
I had often had the same perception, and had been quite hurt by it; back in the distant Fifties, when “womanliness” was touted as being such a revered and crucial quality, none of us could stand to be accused of lacking in it. And “gay” men did sometimes seem to be saying just that, especially when we were in competition with each other, or felt ourselves to be. Some decorators can be really vicious in that way, and I often had thought that they went into the field for just that reason, to show women how superior they were at supposedly female preoccupations. In any case, I knew exactly what Stacy meant about “Chuck.”
“Since my divorce it’s been worse, of course,” said Stacy. “It’s all even bigger than it was.”
Looking about the indeed unbearably large room again, I saw that the mammoth windows were surely its worst feature; those huge brilliant views of sky and water and trees, boats and islands, all that intruded into the room—it was overwhelming. I asked, “Have you thought about draperies? I think they’d help.”
“Really? But Chuckie said we couldn’t, possibly.”
I explained in a general way about Austrian shades, which is what had come to my mind; they would be just possible for those giant apertures, and I mentioned the natural linen—Calvin—that I had also thought of.
Although I almost never give out this sort of offhand advice.
Stacy was delighted, and disproportionately grateful. When could I start?
I suggested that we both think it over for a couple of days, at least.
And then I had another idea—this too being quite out of character for me. “Maybe if you had a small room somewhere in the house of your own,” I said. “Furnished your own way.”
Well: Stacy was enchanted. Actually, she said, she did do some watercolors sometimes. When she and her husband had lived in San Francisco, in the flat on Jackson Street, she used to do needlepoint, mainly because that was a sort of fad among people she knew, but she had decided that needlepoint was ridiculous—I couldn’t have agreed more—and now she did watercolors. The point being, all she needed was a small studio room, just for herself and her work. But she had never had a clue what to put in it. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe we could have lunch sometime? And then go to Jackson Square and look around?”
I said yes, of course we could, and then realized that I had entirely lost track of the time. I stood up, meaning to take my leave. Stacy had realized the same thing at the same time; she was suddenly very flustered and began to walk quickly ahead of me, toward the front door.
Too late: the chimes sounded, her guests—or guest—had arrived, and there was nothing for Stacy to do but open the door and admit—Royce Houston.
Fortunately, I guess, he saw me at the same time he saw Stacy, so that whatever their greeting might have been otherwise was headed off. But still it was awkward. Very.
At least Royce did not pretend that he had just dropped by; I gave him a certain amount of credit for that. Nor did Stacy pretend not to have expected him. But we both knew that given his supposed commitment to Agatha, my friend, he should not have been there, even if the implications of his presence were misleading—and I do not for an instant believe that they were: I am sure that a romantic lunch, à deux, was their intention.
Royce that day looked particularly wonderful, so big and blond, so Californian, a mountain lion, down from the tawny hills.
I got out as soon as I could, but not before Stacy had gone into her “feminine” act; even saying goodbye to me, she twitched and fluttered.
I think I have heard about women wondering whether or not to tell a friend about an unfaithful man—a question for Dear Abby, I would think; and once a woman “friend” did tell me about an affair of Derek’s. Maybe irrationally, this made me hate her much more than I did Derek.
I didn’t wonder for an instant about telling Agatha where I had seen Royce: of course not, absolutely not, never.
It depressed me quite a lot, though, as well as making me angry. I drove across those lovely hills, still green despite the drought, with terribly lowered spirits. And the view of the Bay was especially beautiful that day, in the unnatural midwinter heat: I wondered what on earth I was doing in California, with my sad and aging dark heart, in the gorgeous land of the young and blond. Agatha and I should both leave, I thought then; clear out, the two of us. Royce and Stacy could have their California.
Being low-spirited in California is hard on a basically Puritan conscience like my own; you are not only depressed but you feel guilty about it, as though you had been ungrateful to generous Nature, who had placed such a bounty of beauty there before you. I sped over the hills, down to the pretty town of Sausalito and through it, speedily. Crossing the bridge, I could have been racing toward a lover, instead of just away from the sight of a beautiful day.
Back home, back in Agatha’s house, I was grateful for the shutters, the lack of views. For privacy.
Predictably, I guess, as I worked without much interest on a set of drawings for the upstairs room, I became prey to the most violent longings to be somewhere else. Visions of once-loved scenery paraded across my inner consciousness: I saw Portuguese beaches; a tropical rain forest in Mexico; Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park; bridges across the Arno, from a Florentine balcony, and at last I saw Paris, the last and loveliest city.
Once, when I was actually in Paris, I took one of those excursion boats that go down the Seine; they start not far from Concorde and go down along the Left Bank to the Ile de la Cité, past Notre Dame, around the Ile Saint-Louis and back again to the Right Bank, as far as the Trocadéro. As I now retook this trip, imaginatively, the view that most moved me was that of the far side of the Ile Saint-Louis: the thin bare poplars against the old stones of beautiful tall houses with leaded windows, entrancing walled gardens.
Twenty years ago I had walked there with Jean-Paul, and I had exclaimed, “Oh, this is where we should live together! This is the most beautiful—”
He laughed. “You also
pick by far the most expensive. In that house”—he narrowed his blue eyes speculatively—“I believe is the home of the Prince of Paris.”
The prospect of never living on the Ile Saint-Louis of course did not bother Jean-Paul at all, but I think that he minded for me; and at that time I had no way to tell him that I was not serious. I didn’t care at all where I lived, I didn’t really care about anything but him. That was the absolute truth of it, but had I made the statement, I think he would have found such total dedication to himself quite as alarming as my supposed desire to live in fancy places.
But maybe I should have said it anyway. He might as well have known.
And now, twenty years later, I still felt so strongly for Jean-Paul, and for all that I had missed by not spending my life with him, that I could hardly bear it.
19
If you happen, as I do, to be frequently depressed at Christmastime, you can even come to be bored by that depression, and recognition of that boredom can almost function as a cure: how tiresome to feel low just then, along with everyone else. It is not just the fact of Christmas, though, that I find so disheartening, not being especially plagued by bad memories of that holiday. It is rather a literal seasonal sense that makes me sad—if you take the winter solstice seriously, Christmas becomes the nadir of the year. I see the months and weeks before Christmas as a tumbling downward into darkness and cold. And once Christmas is over, I think it should be spring; January snow is always a surprise, and very unwelcome.
However, allowances for all my private superstitions notwithstanding, the Christmas I spent in California was particularly difficult; it was full of terrible, violent news, as well as the more ordinary forms of dreariness.
Crazily enough, in early December, I began to be unhappy about Tony, what was going on between us. Or, rather, not going on. I was still glad, on the whole, that we had never fallen into bed together, although I was afflicted with sexual fantasies, sometimes vivid dreams of sex with Tony. Rather like Lady Brett giving up her bullfighter—with the marked difference that I had not had Tony to give up—I had “felt good” about it. But now, near Christmas, it seemed to me that we were not only not making love, we were hardly speaking. He did his work in a new, glum way; he barely smiled. And of course I took this personally: he was tired of the job, or, much worse, he was aware of my sexual interest—he somehow knew about those dreams—and was definitively turning me down. It was not I who had said no, after all.
