by Alice Adams
26
A week or so after my visit with Caroline, toward the end of May—three weeks before Jean-Paul was to arrive in Berkeley—I got two very disturbing phone calls on the same day.
The first was from a man who spoke poor English, and who muttered, but I managed to understand that he was a friend of Tony’s and that Tony was in jail.
Tony was between jobs with me, so to speak; he had taken a few weeks off between one phase and the next. Actually, he had so nearly finished that this time off was simply a postponement of a few days’ work.
Tony was so unhappy in jail, this person said; maybe I would write to him? I said of course I would. Tony was in the Hall of Justice, on Bryant Street.
I tried to find out more, but I had little luck. The friend did not know the name of Tony’s lawyer, nor indeed if he had one; nor how long he was likely to be there. It did not occur to me to ask what he had been jailed for; I knew.
And the next day in the paper there was an article describing the arrest of several male prostitutes who frequented the Hilton area. Big news. A feminist “spokesperson” was described as saying what a great step this was, arresting men as well as women for prostitution. Personally I saw no reason to arrest either men or women for such a sad non-crime.
After talking to the friend I sat down immediately to write to Tony: how was he, what would he like or need that I could send? I must have sounded very maternal, but I couldn’t avoid that sound, and in fact I did feel guilty and terrible in just the ways that a mother well might feel, I thought.
My second call was from Agatha, and it began in a by now familiar, non-startling way. We had talked a lot in the week since Ruth’s call to Caroline, her announcement about herself and her marriage. Agatha had told me that Royce was more and more upset, was drinking more.
In any case Agatha had been having a lot of trouble—a lot more trouble—with Royce, and so when she began a sentence by saying “Royce and I have decided to—” I finished it quickly, in my mind, with break up, and I prepared myself to be kind and supportive. But that is not how her sentence ended; its last words were “get married.”
Silenced—actually I was horrified—I struggled for something to say; finding nothing “appropriate,” I began to babble, “Oh, really? Well, great, that’s terrific, when?” I must have sounded as though Agatha were someone I hardly knew. And when I was able to think, I began to wonder if that is how it would be between us, a diminution, a diluting of friendship. It is one thing to discuss or even to complain about an ongoing love affair, but marriage is quite different, requiring more severe loyalty. And, once so committed, it seems undignified to complain. Or so I felt it, and I knew that Agatha would too.
She said, “Next week. It seems rushed, but why wait around? It will just be a small church wedding.” Only Agatha could have injected irony into that sentence. “You’ll come, of course?”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
“In fact you’d better plan on being maid of honor—person of honor? Or maybe you’d rather give me away.”
At that we could both laugh a little, and by the time we hung up I felt a little better, but not much.
Ironic coincidence: the next morning a brief note came from Derek saying that he—too—was going to be married. Amusingly, I thought, in view of his former habits of unwelcome disclosure, he said almost nothing by way of describing his intended, only telling me that her name was Monica Reddington, which I guess he supposed to have an impressive sound. Instead, to me it conjured up a strawberry blonde with slightly crossed eyes, very lanky, with a whinneying sort of speech. However, no doubt that was just a malicious wish; in any case, I was never to know what Monica actually looked like, nor to hear from Derek again.
On Agatha’s wedding day she was truly, vividly beautiful, more so—at forty—than at any time during the years I had known her.
She was a wonderful exception, I thought that day, to the dubious rule that (along with other biological inequities, like menstrual periods and relatively more difficult orgasms) men, more often than women, get handsomer with age.
Her dress was a pale blue, almost silver, so that her blue eyes deepened and darkened. Her skin was pink and white, delicate. But mainly she just looked happy, an illuminated woman. Someone seeing her then, for the first time—and this must have been true for several of the wedding guests—such a person would not imagine for her a previously more than difficult life, early deprivations and loneliness—true disorder and early sorrow. A dead mother and a cruelly selfish, neglectful father, the late General. One would simply have seen an exceptionally attractive, intelligent woman—which of course was another accurate description.
Royce too looked wonderful: somehow larger, more shiningly blond than ever, and his face, like Agatha’s, showed not the slightest trace of past grief or turbulence. He too looked purely happy.
They stood together in the sunny courtyard of the church, radiating love.
Caroline was there, of course, with a tall blonde woman whom at first I took to be Stacy; closer up, she was younger and much less fashionable that Stacy was. She was Caroline’s lover, I guess.
Very curious, the relationship between Stacy and this family: at first, seeing her with Royce at the Stinson Beach party, I had imagined them to be married, and then, later, I had thought she looked enough like Whitey to be his sister. In any case, it seemed both odd and fated that Caroline should choose a tall blonde lover.
The other guests were either colleague-friends of Agatha’s—doctors, doctors’ husbands and wives—or Royce’s friends. It was easy to tell them apart, the Royce-friends being so much more stylish.
After a while there came a sound of organ music, Bach, “Sheep may safely graze,” and we all filed into the church. Without much ado, Agatha and Royce and the minister took their places in the transept, the music became softer and the minister began.
“Dearly Beloved, we are gathered …”
I began to cry.
27
A letter from almost anyone with whom one has not had a written relationship can be a real shock. Even after all the years that we have known each other, I have never got used to letters from Agatha; they are so trite and dry—so boring—so unlike her.
On the other hand, there are those rare people who sound like themselves. One extreme would be Ethel, whose letters were as stupid as her speech; like many semi-illiterates, she underlined a great deal, sometimes three or four times, for great emphasis—some editor must have had a terrific time with her prostitute novel. Ellie Osborne’s letters were arrogant, with even a nasal sound. Jacob’s letters were brilliant and funny and outrageous and kind. Letters from Jean-Paul were somehow heroic; his prose had a Miltonic grandeur.
No letters in my experience, however, would have prepared me for the one that came from Tony Brown, in South Lake Tahoe.
To begin with, it had exactly the look of a kindergarten exercise paper, and indeed the paper was lined, in that way. The very look of it made me sad, as though I had again learned something about Tony that I did not want to know. But probably this was just my own bias in favor of good clear prose. Tony very likely didn’t care how his handwriting looked, nor that the only word he could spell correctly was the pronoun “I.”
I did wonder, however, about California schools; or maybe all schools now are letting out people who can’t write letters—which does seem a basic skill.
In any case, there he was at South Lake Tahoe, the gambling center, the best place (“bezt plaice”) he had ever been. He was working for a lot of money on some condos (“condoz”); he was staying out of the casinos. He was fine. He would come back to San Francisco in August and finish up my work.
Well, some happiness came through with all that, and for that happiness I was truly glad.
28
In the weeks which soon narrowed down to days before the arrival of Jean-Paul in Berkeley, I did nothing whatsoever that was sensible. I did not call the Department of Economics to find ou
t where he was staying, or if he was to come alone; and God knows I did not leave my name anywhere for him to call. I did not even inquire, as I might have done quite anonymously, about just where and when his public lectures were to be, although attending one of them was still my vaguely formed plan. I felt his advent to be so momentous that I did not dare breathe in its direction, not even over the phone.
But the scheduled day did at last arrive, and it was the most beautiful day I had ever seen in California, a pure blue and golden day. I knew that he must be safely here, on this edge of the continent with me; there was nothing in the paper or on TV news about plane crashes—no crashes anywhere, no accidents; there seemed to have been a suspension of calamities that day. And I was as giddily happy as if I were sure of seeing him again, of being with Jean-Paul.
I was so silly, so dizzy, in fact that I did not at all take in the significance of a letter that came that morning from my furniture person in Hoboken, Mr. Evring. I only saw it then as a very good omen, whereas actually it was considerably better than an omen.
What it came down to, the letter, was that someone from Bloomingdale’s wanted a large order of an expensive chair that I had designed, and Mr. Evring had made for me, some time ago. Actually, a few months before this—when I must have been in the midst of some upset over Caroline, Whitey, Agatha or Royce, my California people—a former client-friend had written to ask about those chairs, of which she had one, and she had mentioned the Bloomingdale person. Mr. Evring now specified the size of the order, and he made his suggestion about my share—that most meticulously honest of men. Anyway, it came to somewhat more than a normal year’s earnings for me; it was like getting a Guggenheim.
The only thing about the chair that made me a little uneasy was its very expensiveness: it would have to retail for a couple of thousand dollars, with all its carved walnut and glove leather and down; I had designed it almost as a joke, a parody of expensiveness. However, I had not counted on the mass production of my parodic intent; it made me wonder, again, about my own connection with inflation, and with an entire economic structure of which I disapproved.
But for the first time in my life I would have an income that I did not have to work for every day, an income that I had in fact earned some time ago. I did not in any immediate practical way connect this with the coming of Jean-Paul, which is to say that I did not make instant plans for trips to France. As I have said, it just seemed another most propitious sign, along with the lovely weather.
Everything in my mind, during those first strange days of knowing that Jean-Paul was half an hour away, was vague, and vaguely marvelous. I made no plans. I had stopped wondering about how or when—or even if—we would meet. Whether he would know me, would remember anything of me. No more imagined conversations about whether we would or would not make love. I was simply and stupidly happy in my knowledge of his proximity. I was floating.
Agatha telephoned me on the day after the Arrival, and she even seemed to share my mood, although for somewhat different reasons. She too was foolish with happiness—though, being Agatha, she could not quite say so. She and Royce had been up at Tahoe, on what she deliberately did not refer to as their honeymoon; they had stayed in Royce’s house on the lake. What Agatha said was “It was really pretty, all the time. The lake. Really pretty.”
In Agatha’s prim vocabulary “pretty” stands for terrific, marvelous, beautiful—in anyone else’s overblown language. She would only use “gorgeous” as a joke. In fact we had once talked about “gorgeous,” and we agreed that that word is to the Seventies as “beautiful” was to the Sixties, and we found great significance in the difference. Wouldn’t any right-thinking person rather be beautiful? Anyway, Agatha sticks with “pretty.”
She did not precisely mention Royce, not his name, that is; but she kept saying “we”: we swam a lot, we hiked, we watched a storm. It was from Agatha an unfamiliar pronoun, making me feel strongly the presence of Royce. And I remembered the picture Royce had shown me of the small house on the blue lake, where I had never been, so far. At the time of course I did not know about my own week there, and so I thought about Agatha and Royce, married to each other. And I thought, Well, maybe they will work it out, and be at least reasonably happy with each other. Interesting how one’s hopes for happiness, even for one’s favorite friends, tend to diminish with increasing age and wisdom.
I thought too of all the blows that Royce had in the past few months sustained: his wife having left him—never mind how he felt about her, nor that he also had a girl friend; it would still be a blow. His son Whitey beating up his daughter, his adored Caroline, and then that same son being murdered in a barroom brawl, in Alaska. And then his former wife marrying a very young man. Was it possible for Agatha to counterbalance all that, as it were? After so much pain, to make him happy? For the moment, at least, it looked as though she could. As though she had.
“M. Jean-Paul —— [misspelled, trust the local paper] the distinguished French economist, will present the first of a series of lectures on the general topic of Euro-Socialism, tomorrow night at 8 p.m. in Herz Hall, on the Berkeley campus. The lecture is open to the public.”
This item sprang out at me from the paper, a couple of days after Jean-Paul’s arrival, and one of the things that came to my mind was: Oh, poor thing, he just got here. They’re really pushing him, getting their money’s worth.
However, I was not surprised by the item; it was rather as though I had been given a signal, the one for which I had been waiting. And so, in a most disorderly way, I began to think about what to wear, and how to get to Berkeley. How to find Herz Hall, once there, and, almost incidentally, what I could conceivably say in the possible event of a confrontation with Jean-Paul.
Thus I had about thirty-six hours during which to consider possible ways of getting there, possible clothes. I thought of driving over by myself, but I might get lost. I could take the bus, or BART, but suppose I couldn’t find a cab, once there? I could take a taxi all the way from San Francisco, which would be expensive, but it might be the best way, after all—but how would I then get home? And in the same way, discarding one thing after another, I went through all my clothes: new red blazer, old trench coat. My total illogic was dizzying.
And I could not wait. During those thirty-six hours, I learned the real meaning of that phrase. Had I known any possible means of doing away with that time, the time before seeing Jean-Paul, I would have seized upon it, but I did not. I find Valium depressing, and I don’t much like to drink during the day, except very festively, with other people.
I was stuck with consciousness. With waiting.
By the following night I was so deranged with anticipation, so weakened by vacillating fantasies and plans, that certain decisions came to me ready-made: just as I was unable to eat any dinner other than a soft-boiled egg, so too I could not have put on any but my most ordinary clothes, black turtle-neck and jeans and boots, my old trench coat. And I could not possibly have driven myself to Berkeley, or made it to BART or a bus. I called a cab.
Only inside the taxi, as we crawled, it seemed to me, across the nighttime city, approaching the Bay Bridge, its murky yellow lights—only then did it cross my mind that I was wearing almost exactly what had been my uniform in Paris twenty years before. If I had meant to costume myself as that Daphne of the past, I could not have done better.
At last we got there, got to somewhere in Berkeley, that is; and the driver pointed to a building, through the fog, that he said was Herz Hall. As I was paying him, I considered telling him to come back for me at around ten-thirty, but then I saw a lighted public telephone booth, and I thought I could more easily call when I actually wanted a cab. Who knows? More than half an hour of seeing Jean-Paul might do me in, and I might have to bolt.
I was rather pleased, even, at the practical line my thoughts were taking, knowing myself to be in such a dangerously overwrought state. I could easily have left the house without my keys, or not enough money for cab fa
re, any of those innocent acts of self-destruction, but I had checked all those possibilities out, and so far I was relatively okay.
Another wise precaution had been to time my trip so that there would not be too long a time to wait; natural inclinations would have led me to arrive at least half an hour early, and quite possibly to die of anxiety in the interim.
Thus I walked into a large hall in which there was already a number of people, all waiting for Jean-Paul, the distinguished French Socialist economist, and the great love of my so-far foolish life. I sat about halfway down, on an aisle, both because aisle seats are generally better for excessively long legs like mine, and because I still had some idea that I might want or need to leave, in a sudden way.
The other people in the audience were mostly young, strange Seventies kids with trim hair and tidy clothes; even their beards were neat. Many of the girls had that frizzy-curled hair—a look that in the distant Fifties we would have done anything to avoid—and blood-black lipstick. I felt myself to be somehow invisible among them, a dim dark middle-aged ghost.
At last a tall, thin graying man came out on the stage—the professor chosen to introduce Jean-Paul, I imagined. He reached the lectern, and then he began to cough, and I thought, Oh, poor fellow. But then the coughing stopped and he smiled and said, “Please excuse,” in familiarly accented English.
Jean-Paul. It was Jean-Paul.
I think that at the moment of hearing his voice I went into a mild form of shock, for literally, for the next hour or so, I heard almost nothing of what he said, just sometimes that worrying cough, which recurred, and a few scattered words and phrases. I have no idea where my mind was while he spoke, beyond being totally, dizzingly absorbed in his presence. But at least some part of my consciousness had gone back to those narrow, once intimately known streets of Paris, where with another, much younger Jean-Paul I had wandered, all those years ago.
