by Alice Adams
Our conversation at lunch was mainly about food, not surprisingly: my compliments were interspersed with Agatha’s running in and out of the kitchen.
She was in fact so nervous, so anxiety-fraught that she was virtually unreachable; my small attempted jokes fell flat, although they were in our usual language, our old private irony. I felt as though I were a new guest—or perhaps someone visiting a sick friend.
Over coffee we discussed Ruth’s breakdown, its chief manifestation seeming to be her obdurate insistence that Royce come back, that they be married again. She often called him in the middle of the night, Royce told Agatha, and then she would carry on like a crazy person, screams and threats, long senseless monologues. “Royce says he thinks a lot of it is acting—she’s trying to make him think she’s crazy, so he’ll have to do something about her,” Agatha said. “But as I told him, beyond a certain point pretending to be crazy and being crazy are pretty much the same thing.”
I agreed, but at that moment I was really thinking about Royce and Stacy; I was wondering how much he saw of her, if at all. For example, today: was Royce really taking care of Ruth, or could he be with Stacy?
With her coffee Agatha was smoking again, and I began to be aware of certain uncomfortable physical symptoms: a curious agitation in my chest, a flutter in my eyelids, a muscle in one arm that twitched. I wondered if I could be allergic to smoke, although that seemed unlikely; all Derek’s heavy smoking had produced no such symptoms, and I had spent a lot of time, perforce, with other smokers.
Then, inadvertently, Agatha explained it: “I think she really is crazy,” Agatha said, of Ruth. “I know because I can feel myself catching it, through Royce. I read a paper about that recently, in one of the journals, about people who transmit extreme anxiety states without necessarily feeling it themselves. I’m catching what Ruth is feeling.”
As I was catching Agatha’s anxiety, I then understood; my symptoms were those of an anxiety state, not an allergy.
Agatha indeed looked somewhat feverish, patches of red on each cheek, high up, her eyes too bright. I felt so badly about her, and for her, and I knew that there was absolutely nothing I could do. And I wanted to leave, very much.
Just then, mercifully for both of us, the phone rang; we both knew that it would be Royce.
After the briefest of conversations Agatha came back, radiant. “He’s coming over.”
Then I could laugh at her. “Well, you really won’t mind if I leave?”
She laughed. “Well—”
We exchanged a quick kiss, and said Merry Christmas to each other, much in our old ironic way, and we parted on that note.
I had some time before going out to Caroline’s. Once home, I left the car and started out for a walk, a tour of Pacific Heights, on Christmas afternoon. The city—that expensive, northwestern part of it—had never looked more brilliantly beautiful, more dazzling, more unreal. The huge houses were all so newly, cleanly painted, in bright pastels, each Victorian cornice shining and unshadowed. The lawns were a bright sharp green, unnatural and almost convincing. But it was Christmas, December 25th, the middle of the winter, the bottom of the year.
21
When I got to Caroline’s, out on Clement Street, I rang the bell, and when at first no one answered, I had a strong impulse just to leave—an impulse that later on I very much wished I had followed.
But then I heard Caroline’s voice. “Come on in, it’s not locked.”
I went in and there they were, Caroline and Thomas, both lolling across the mattress. Not getting up. I said hi, and went and sat down.
The room was a mess, the bed coverings disarrayed and dirty cups and glasses everywhere. From the west windows, some harsh final rays of the winter sunlight entered—no help at all.
Caroline and Thomas seemed to have been drinking for most of the afternoon, probably making love, falling asleep. They were not really drunk, but drink, along with their sexual exhaustion, put them at a certain remove from me. Conversationally they were very hard to reach, even had I been in a mood to make a stronger effort. As it was, everything I said sounded false and silly—“social,” even when it wasn’t. I asked Caroline how she was feeling, and I really wanted to know.
“Well, I’ve just never felt better in my life,” she said, and in an unfriendly way she laughed. I understood that she wanted to pretend that no such thing as a beating had taken place, which was all right with me but a little difficult: there she sat, still badly bruised, although the bruises were lighter now and her hair was lively and clean and bright again. She was wearing the rough, many-shaded sweater which I had first seen her in, all those long weeks ago, at Stinson Beach.
Thomas looked very sleepy. His slant dark eyes were red, and he yawned a lot.
For every reason, then, I decided to make this visit as short as possible. God knows I wasn’t hungry, after Agatha’s mad repast.
In the meantime, by way of making conversation, which I seemed unable not to do, I asked Caroline if she had seen Tony over the holidays; he hadn’t been around my house for several days. And this turned out to be my second ill-chosen question.
Looking mean, Caroline told me, “He’s out hustling the Christmas tourists, I guess.”
Panhandling, did she mean? I thought this was unlikely, and I guess I looked uncertain.
“Standing around the Hilton with his pretty ass stuck out,” Caroline went on, more shockingly. But as soon as she said it, I knew; I felt entirely that what she said was true. And I thought, Ah, poor Tony, poor pretty Tony Brown.
Aching for him, I nevertheless asked, “He does that a lot?” I tried to sound much less concerned than I felt, but I doubt if I successfully hid much.
Seeming then to wake up, Thomas spoke thunderously: “No, not a lot. Jesus God, Caroline, you think it’s any of your business? What a mouth you got.” And then, as though he owed me an explanation, he said, “It’s just something that Tony got into, kind of a habit, like, overseas. There was always some old guys, some rich old officers in Tokyo, Hanoi, fellows who really dug him. And Tony, he can’t say no to no one. It was more than wanting the loot, or the coke, whatever they gave him. But you know, he’s a really nice boy, Tony is. Just fucked up. Like who ain’t.”
“Oh, you poor fucked-over vets,” said Caroline.
“Shut up, cunt.”
Why is it impossible to leave two people who are having a fight? I don’t know, but it is. I was dying to get out of there, and I was immobilized. I was thinking, Do they fight like this a lot? Was it Thomas who beat up Caroline?
Maybe to ease the moment—or possibly to explain why she was being so mean—Caroline said, “My mother was just here for an hour or so. Lord, you should have seen her. In her fucking mink, in this heat.”
“She wears that mink to get your Dad’s goat” Thomas said, with marvelous comic emphasis. “She acts like you sometimes do. Jesus God, one crazy family. You all could be a series on TV.”
“You’re right there,” Caroline agreed.
By now the half an hour or so that I’d been there seemed very long indeed, and I thought it would be all right to leave. Which I did, as unceremoniously as I had come in.
None of us said anything about Christmas.
I walked home in the just-chilling early evening. It was almost dark, and fog had begun to creep through the streets, coming in from the sea. I suppose that walk was dangerous, at such a violent, suicidal time of the year, but I was too sad to be frightened. I was thinking about Tony, how appalling that he could put so low a value on himself.
My heart and my mind revolted from this new information about him. I would have given anything for it not to be true, but it surely was; it made perfect sense.
I reached Pacific Heights, those cold blank huge houses, these days with grilled gates, long windows heavily draped and barred. A big dog snarled as I approached his house and then, in the nuttily friendly way of some large dogs, who can’t take their roles as watchdogs quite seriously, he pranc
ed over to be patted on the head. A golden retriever, very handsome, with his noble head and long plume-feathered tail. I stood there with him for several minutes, making friends.
Once, years ago, with Jacob, at one of our winter beach retreats, we stopped to watch a big black dog who kept tearing into the ocean after sticks that his master, a young boy, threw out for him. The waves were high, slate-gray, and the water must have been freezing, with a stinging cold salt spray. I hated seeing the dog go through all that for a stick and a pat on the head, for that careless boy’s just saying, “Good dog, good old Max.” Jacob saw how I hated it—he saw everything—and he said, “Of course you hate it. It reminds you of yourself.”
I realized that of course he was perfectly right, especially since we had just been talking about a recent suicidally stupid love affair of mine. It would have been just like me to rush out into cold water for a stick and a pat on the head.
And I now understood the ways in which Tony and I were alike, after all. Obvious dissimilarities aside, we shared an addiction to even the meanest forms of love. Which could explain the strength of the affinity I felt for him.
I got home unscathed, except by what was going on in my own mind. But I knew that Christmas was a dangerous time, a prime time for self-pity, self-laceration, corrosive memories.
As a guard against all that, I poured myself a glass of wine in the kitchen, and I took the wine and a volume of Trollope that I was rereading up to bed.
But outside a mean wind pushed against the house, rattling windows, creaking boards and reminding me of everything I did not want to think about: Betty Smith and the General, Agatha and Royce, Whitey, Caroline, Thomas. Crazy Ruth, and Tony. They were not exactly a cheering group.
Going further back was not much help either: Jacob, dead; and Jean-Paul, lost to me, in Paris.
As I thought about those people, however, I felt curiously linked to them all, the living and the dead. We were in it together, somehow, together in this downward race to darkness.
At last, with a terrific effort, I was able to concentrate on Trollope, and I managed to stop thinking about anyone I knew, or had ever known.
So much for Christmas.
22
Once Christmas is over, I always imagine that everything will improve; there will be an end to that downward descent, and there will be spring, balmy weather, feathery new leaves and flowers. Of course I am often wrong, but never so wrong as I was that year in San Francisco.
Meteorologically, what happened was: the drought ended with a burst of cold dark rain, days of wind and wet which for a while, though uncomfortable, were welcome. But those dark watery days became weeks, an endless cold gloom in which the difference between night and day was indistinct. In an irresponsible way I began to long for a return of the drought, those lovely warm bright dry days, like a sharp longing for something illicit. I would guess that other people must have felt that too.
In the meantime, events in the lives of the people I knew in that city all seemed to get much worse, with a sort of terrible synchronism.
I had begun, at last, to do some work on Stacy’s house. Together we had gone to Henry Calvin and chosen some linen for the living-room draperies, those impossibly high huge windows. And I had found a seamstress who said that she could do the job, and a drapery-hanger to install them. All that remained to put the work in motion was the most crucial step of all, the measurement of those monster windows, which Tony had said that he could do.
The appointment was made. As usual, with Stacy, there was trouble about hitting on a convenient time, but at last we found a couple of hours on a Thursday morning. It turned out to be the darkest wettest day of all, a day of angry black lashing rains and wind. As Tony and I drove up into the hills of Belvedere, leaves flattened themselves against the windshield, clogging the wiper; we couldn’t make out street signs, and a trip that should have taken twenty minutes took over an hour.
At least, however, the difficulties of the drive and the state of emergency in which we found ourselves had provided Tony and me with a subject matter. We concentrated on the raging elements, we talked about the rain. I had been uneasy with him, or more uneasy, since hearing from Caroline and Thomas about his hustling, and even in my lively dream fantasies about Tony, sex had always been the only language between us. Thus the raging weather helped.
Stacy greeted us at the door. “Well, I honestly didn’t think you’d be able to make it—what a day!” And she took a long look at Tony, and then went into her act: widening her eyes, dazzlingly; and, as I introduced them, she whispered his name. Preceding us down the hall, she twitched her narrow ass, that day in polished cotton.
I had wondered a little about just how Stacy would be with Tony—if the fact of his somewhat menial capacity and his curious color would put him out of her range, so to speak. Had that been the case, I would surely have liked her much less.
But batting her eyes, Stacy offered coffee—toast? Cookies, brandy, anything?
Tony had already got a look at those windows, however, and had seen the shape of his work, and he said no, he couldn’t have anything; he’d better get started. Stacy and I sat together on the mammoth sofa, and together we watched as he clambered up to the narrow windowsills and perched there, with his tape measure and his tiny notebook. And we made conversation.
It was a funny scene, really, two big grown women, tall blonde Stacy and I, bigger and taller and dark, watching with our lustful-protective female eyes as Tony, diminished in scale by the size of those windows, climbed and clung like an especially beautiful, freakish monkey, a changeling. Probably Stacy would have liked to ask if I had ever been to bed with Tony, and if so how was he. And I could have said, Well, no, but I sure had thought about it. But neither of us said those things, and at that time I did not really see the humor of our situation, I was so tired of rain and trouble, and assuredly not ready for any more.
When the doorbell rang, it startled Tony, up on the window ledge; having almost gasped with relief, we both watched him recover. And as Stacy got up and went toward the door, I thought, Oh, Christ, it must be Royce again; why can’t Stacy get her life sorted out?
It wasn’t Royce. From the hall I heard another woman’s voice, and from Stacy sounds that were falsely enthusiastic, falsely warm.
It was not Royce Houston; it was Ruth. Ruth Houston, soaking wet, in what looked like summer clothes, cotton, and with a bland smile that bore no relation to her condition.
She said how wonderful to see me, how wonderful I looked. I surely did not look wonderful at all, that day—and she said that she had just been driving by and it started to rain and she thought she would just come in for a minute. All this in a voice as bland, as expressionless as her face, her narrow dark face that was so much like Caroline’s.
But this was crazy: the rain had been going on for several weeks, and for weeks it had been too cold for summer clothes. And no one would be just “driving by” on Stacy’s isolated and impossible street.
What Agatha and Royce had been saying was true: Ruth was mad.
Tony had stopped work and was staring down at Ruth, who had not noticed him, although they may have met sometime: Whitey’s mom.
Ruth sat down gingerly on the room’s least comfortable chair, tubular steel, which was probably a good choice, she was so wet. She spoke again, in a chatty, unnerving way, saying how nice it was to see us both, and then in just the same voice she said, “Actually I just had a rather curious experience. A person called me from somewhere, I think he said Alaska, and he said that a person up there named Royce Houston, sometimes called Whitey, was dead. Killed in a fight.”
As she finished, Ruth looked up at us with the expression of a woman who has been gossiping with friends and who has just told them some news, nothing important, but a little hard to believe.
And then she closed her eyes, and in a slow, deliberate way she slid off her chair to the floor, in a faint—or I hoped it was a faint: she could have been dead of a strok
e for all I knew.
More quickly than I would have believed possible—he must have flown—Tony was down there, squatting beside Ruth, his fingers on her pulse as he stared into her face. I was wondering how he knew about pulses, and breath, and then I remembered: of course, he had been over there.
“Just fainted,” Tony said. “I think she’ll be out for a while.” And then, to me, “Jesus. Whitey.” We looked at each other for a sad and helpless moment.
I was hopelessly confused, not taking things in nor knowing what to do.
Fortunately, Tony was clear on what to do, and he took charge. “Get a blanket, or a warm quilt,” he told Stacy. “Just keep her warm and quiet for a while.”
Stacy obediently went off, and Tony said to me, “I wonder if his old man knows. Royce Houston.”
“Maybe she thought she’d find him here.”
“Oh, that’s right. Whitey told me he thought they had something going.” Tony scowled with what could have been moral disapproval. “Jesus, what a family.”
I wondered what his family was like, and I was pretty sure I would never know.
Stacy came back with a billowing, flowered comforter, presumably from her bedroom; gently she placed it around Ruth, and she said she thought she should call a doctor. “I actually know one who’ll make a house call,” she said. And then she said, “I wonder why she came here. Can she possibly have thought—?” And she blushed and went off toward the phone.
My own thoughts, or at least my feelings, were becoming a little clearer: Whitey was dead, and the next person for me to see was Agatha. Quite possibly I would have to be the one to tell her the news. I said this to Tony, and a few minutes later we left. Stacy had come back to say that the doctor would be there in half an hour.
Tony drove, and we talked very little on the trip down from Belvedere; we concentrated on getting through the rain and wind, the leaves, to Agatha’s apartment—as though by just getting there we would save the world, or at least improve it.
