by Alice Adams
“… while, in actual fact, the only European unity, the only truly international movement is among the terrorists,” Jean-Paul was saying—and then that cough.
It had to be jet-lag, or a cold, I prayed, thinking of course of lung cancer or, somewhat more romantically, TB.
During one of my few moments of coherence, in the course of that violently charged hour, I decided that what I was doing was quite right, after all; it was right for me to come and listen to Jean-Paul; and it would have been wrong for me to call or write and say that I was here, available, that for this season I was living nearby, in San Francisco. I would come to all his lectures, and between times I would study. Having always felt and sometimes said that I was a Socialist, meaning that I didn’t think capitalism was working out very well, now in a serious way I would study Socialism. I would read Michael Harrington, David Dellinger, Gramsci, Hegel, C. Wright Mills, Galbraith. And, first off, anything by Jean-Paul that I could lay my hands on.
He coughed again, and with one raised hand he signaled that he had come to the lecture’s end, all done. Wild applause began; he seemed to have struck off something even in those children of the Seventies, and in the other professors, wives, friends and visitors, like me. I watched as people surged forward to crowd around him.
Then I got up and left the hall, not looking back.
Outside, I realized that the one precaution I had not taken was to make sure of my bearings; now I was not exactly lost, but I was very confused. I wandered up a path, and realized that I had taken a wrong direction. But without too much trouble I made my way back to Herz Hall.
And there on the steps, was Jean-Paul. With a group of students. There was no way for me to walk past them without looking straight at Jean-Paul.
Who suddenly looked up—who called out, “Daphne.”
As those kids stood around and stared, we hurried toward each other; not yet touching, we took in each other’s faces, staring hard, and then our hands met, and held.
Jean-Paul, with more audience awareness than I possessed, turned briefly to the students. With a gesture of his head he dismissed them, saying pleasantly but finally, “Good night.” That gesture, and those words, seemed also to dismiss the years between us.
29
We stood there kissing, like people famished for love—and for me certainly that was true. We stood blotted together; it is amazing that we didn’t fall as we swayed, pressing closer to each other.
For a while all that we spoke were endearments, and words of incredulity. Jean-Paul especially could not believe it, my being there in California, waiting. And I could not believe that we were actually together, that he was real.
At last he said, “They have put me in a club. I have just this small room, but will you—?”
“I have a house. We’ll get a taxi.”
The luck of lovers: at that moment an empty cab cruised toward us; we hailed it and got in, and we began the journey back to San Francisco in the sparkling darkness.
On that trip, between our continuing, ravenous embraces, we did talk a little, about immediate things, not yet touching on the twenty years between and behind us. I explained how it was that I came to be in San Francisco: Agatha’s house, my job.
Jean-Paul said that he would be in Berkeley for only two weeks, but that he had meant to spend the rest of the summer in this country, traveling about, a few professional engagements: more speeches, articles, meeting editors and activists. Well, for the moment the summer sounded like the rest of our lives.
He coughed, and he explained that he had “a little” emphysema. “But it is not serious,” he said.
Sometimes, in the sudden light from a passing car, or streetlights, glaring bridge lights, in a flash I could see his face, and he had aged: there were deep lines and shadows, and his skin was drawn more tightly to his skull, but surely I would have known him anywhere. With my fingers I traced his forehead, eyebrows, the sockets of closed eyes. His smooth mouth, and sharply indented chin—as I had twenty years before. I could have wept, but happily did not.
Back at Agatha’s, I led him into my—our—darkened house, into the kitchen, where we opened a bottle of wine, poured it into glasses and toasted each other, standing there.
In the strong kitchen light we looked at each other, really for the first time, and Jean-Paul said, “In my life I have never known a woman so beautiful as you.” Well, I am sure that was not true; in the first place I am not a beautiful woman, nowhere near. Still, it was nice—if very French—of him to say that, and I took it to mean that he loved me. Still.
Of course soon after that we went to bed, and for the rest of the night our only talk was words of love.
One bit of conversation I do remember clearly, though.
“Making love is different after you pass forty or so, isn’t it.”
“Yes, it’s much better.”
The funny part is that I cannot remember which of us spoke which line.
30
After several days and nights of tearing back and forth to Berkeley, of trying sometimes to eat and sleep a little—of being almost always with Jean-Paul—I managed to catch enough of my breath for a phone call to Agatha; and I gave her a somewhat underplayed version of what was going on with me. How I was.
I can’t have underplayed it quite enough, though, for at the end of my account she said, “Good Lord, that sounds totally exhausting. Look, why don’t you go up to Tahoe for a week or so, after Jean-Paul is done lecturing? Royce has that house, and we’re so understaffed at the hospital that I know I can’t get away this month.”
Well, Jean-Paul, after his lectures, had those other commitments, in other places—some, not all, of which he kept. When he did I traveled with him, to Chicago, to Portland, Oregon. We did not get up to Tahoe until August.
And that is how we came to spend our week in Royce’s cabin on the lake, the happiest and most entirely beautiful week of my life—so far, but then I don’t actually have the highest hopes for the rest.
A great advantage that comes with reaching a certain age is that when you’re really happy you know you are, and you give thanks. As I said earlier, I had a lot of happy times when I was young, particularly during my sexy girlhood in Madison, but I was too young to appreciate how I felt, and too crazily in a hurry to get on with growing up.
It was a small house, set back and up from the lake, on a rocky knoll, among pines and poplars. The lake was clear and shallow at the shore, gently rippling over smooth brown rounded rocks—and cold: sometimes we waded out a little way; a few times we actually swam, but not for long.
There was a stand of aspens near the edge of the water, just above that level cleared space, where Royce had put a table, and that was where we ate our salads and wine and cheese for our lunches, all that week.
The house itself was of two stories, one room to a floor; the downstairs a combined living room and kitchen, upstairs the bath and the bedroom, our bed, from which every morning, when we first woke up, we could see the sun as it rose above the Nevada mountains, on the other side of the lake. And all day we would watch the changes of light and color, shifts from dark to light, blue to gold, on the mountains and on the water of the lake. We watched pale mauve-to-lavender sunsets, and small fleet sunstruck clouds. And that is what we talked about, for the most part. We observed and noted the changes in our immediate surroundings. We watched the small chipmunks and tiny birds that abounded in that place; we laughed at their scurryings and sudden stops to look around, and we put out bread crumbs.
We praised and blessed each other, for everything.
Otherwise, we talked rather remarkably little, and what I learned of Jean-Paul’s life over the past twenty years came out largely by indirection; he tossed out pieces of his life like inconsequential objects, and I think that is more or less how he felt about it, being a vastly modest man. He told me that he had never married, partly out of conviction, but I gathered that there had usually been someone around, some woman. In that r
egard he sounded a little like me. One woman he had lived with was an Italian movie star, who had died tragically, in a fire—I thought I remembered reading about that. He had spent a lot of time traveling, mainly to meetings, conferences. Vienna, Rome, Dubrovnik, a couple of times to Moscow, recently to Cuba. He had taught at various universities, and lived for some years in Bologna, in Montpellier—had edited magazines, published a lot of books. In the fall he would go back to teaching at the Sorbonne. “Sometimes I cannot believe the respectable person I have become,” he told me, not finding that entirely funny.
He had brought one of his own early books with him, by accident. “I reached for another book and came back with this old primer.” Well, it was not exactly a primer; it was a thick, obviously very ambitious book. Seeing its size, I thought of those heavy volumes in his room in the Place d’Italie; when he reached out, his hand must have simply settled on a familiar size. His book was a survey of Socialist thought, from Marx up to the present—it was published in 1965. Plus a long final chapter on the possible future of Socialism. “It is a young man’s book. I was much more idealist in those days,” Jean-Paul told me, handing it over; I did not remind him that it was only ten years back, when he had been about the age that I was now.
I have found that the most brilliant theoretical exposition is often not the most difficult to understand, and so it was with Jean-Paul. Even when he dealt with what were to me new concepts, economic theories, possible Socialist solutions, he was dazzlingly clear—even in French. I found it all deeply stirring, too: visions of justice, equal chances, an end to starvation and war.
As I read on, at moments I was of course visited by a suspicion that it was rather Jean-Paul himself to whom I thrilled, the proximity of his sad clear blue eyes, his tall and very lean, now suntanned body. But it seemed to me, really, that both were possible: I could be in love with Jean-Paul and also with ideas of social justice; surely there are much less plausible combinations of affection.
However, it was love that we talked about as we basked, half-naked in the August sun, in the privacy of our porch. We exclaimed at the marvelous smell of each other’s sun-warmed skin; sometimes we would begin to kiss and caress each other, and then we would hurry inside and upstairs to our bed.
One way or another, borrowed houses always yield up their owners, at last, in new lights, and Royce’s cabin was no exception; its version of Royce was surely one that I had not seen before. The cabin had an appealing, comfortable, lived-in shabbiness, whereas hitherto everything that I had seen of Royce had been so large and expensive—the Stinson Beach house, his cars and his very person. This must have been a house bought early in that ill-fated marriage, for a not-rich young couple with two small growing children.
In one corner of the living room, with its big glass windows facing the lake, there were some bookshelves, and a small, curiously touching library, entirely devoted to studies of the area. Books on wildflowers, birds and local animals, histories of the region, including, inevitably, the luckless Donner Party. Trail maps, contour maps, a map of the lake itself that showed its varying depths. Some old books, some fairly new. All in all, it was the sort of library that could not be calculated—or faked: in my former trade, decorating, I had sometimes been asked to do just that, to manufacture a convincing library. Royce’s books were those of a man in love with their subject matter, this area of land, this beautiful North Tahoe scenery, which of course made him much more sympathetic in my view. I thought too that now we would have a topic of conversation, Royce and I; whenever I saw him, we could talk about how much I had loved this place, and he could tell me more about it.
This was all to happen in some distant future, with Agatha and Royce and me established as old friends.
Sometimes, as Jean-Paul and I talked about Agatha and Royce, Ruth and Caroline, and Tony—of whom I sometimes thought as I looked across the lake to where he probably was—I wondered why: why did I happen to become so involved in the violent downfall of that family? What did it mean, my year in California? Jean-Paul laughed at that form of speculation: “It had no meaning at all,” he said. “You met them all by accident, because you all were there. It is how history occurs.”
Later I thought he was probably right, and sometimes I still think it did not mean anything, especially. But at that romantic moment, that interval of love in the bright mountain air, it seemed to me that all the year had been leading to this one enchanted week with Jean-Paul. I had come to California because Royce was to lend us this house.
Is all determinism ultimately so sentimental? Well, maybe so.
It was sometime during that week that we decided, without much discussion, really—it seemed obvious—that in the fall I would move back to Paris with Jean-Paul. By then I would have finished Agatha’s house, and Stacy’s. Agatha and Royce could move into their house as Jean-Paul and I moved out. We would cross the country and then the Atlantic, going to the small flat that he now owns, on the Rue de Savoie, in Paris.
All the money that I had earned would come in handy, of course, as well as the money from that crazy chair. In Paris I planned to study furniture design in a serious way. What with the various uncertainties involved in our plan, including Jean-Paul’s health, I had, at last, to concentrate on work.
We came to our last afternoon. It was almost hot, and in the faint breeze that rippled the blue blue lake, there was the slightest, yet eerily unmistakable hint of fall, like the dissenting notes of a cello in a sunny quintet, or like falling yellow leaves. Everywhere you looked the scene said summer, all the blue green gold day, and although you desperately wanted to believe that it was summer, and that the summer would last forever, still you knew—you couldn’t not know, that autumn was fairly close at hand. I would, at that time, have given anything in the world for time to go back just one week, to let us start our week up there over again. But soon it would be September, then October; and often in November the snows begin around there, I had read in one of Royce’s books on local weather.
I wondered if we would be warm enough in Jean-Paul’s flat, but I couldn’t exactly ask him.
In fact there were quite a few dangers in our plan, and I made an effort to force myself to think of them, to face them. One of course was Jean-Paul’s emphysema. I had asked Agatha about it before we left San Francisco, but what she said was rather vague: it is not always a “life-threatening” disease; that depends on how badly you have it. Serious, “advanced” cases do kill people off, eventually, and it is not a good way to go. Jean-Paul at first had said that his case was mild, “a touch.” And I had not asked again. But what about all that coughing?
Other perils were implicit in the huge romantic risk we took: suppose, in a long-run day-to-day way, we just didn’t get along too well? For one thing, our verbal rapport was considerably less than perfect, his excellent English and my fair French notwithstanding. Sometimes it was clear that we were missing each other’s drift. However, as I have said, the only person with whom I have ever felt a perfect understanding along those lines was Agatha—and maybe Jacob. I think communication with Jean-Paul will probably improve. Well, I hope so.
Another worry, although minor and silly-sounding, maybe, is that except for physical love, Jean-Paul is not a deeply sensual person. To matters of food and drink he is indifferent, although very polite when I have gone to a lot of trouble with a mustard sauce for salmon, for example. I drink more wine than he does, and food and wine are deeply important to me. He is more like Agatha, really, in that regard, maybe having to do with their both having essentially saintly characters. Anyway, I don’t see that as an occasion for trouble. You could have that sort of difference with anyone, unless you find a twin, and that probably wouldn’t work out too well either.
Jean-Paul had with him, at Tahoe, a small street map of Paris. I love maps, and I pored over that one, saying aloud to myself the magic names of those streets in the area in which we were going to live: the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and the smaller streets off and
around it—the Rue de Seine, Rue Bonaparte, Rue Jacob, Rue du Bac.
And so it was with both exhilaration and apprehension that I thought of our life in Paris.
In any case, that’s our plan.
Books by Alice Adams
Careless Love
Careless Love
Families and Survivors
Listening to Billie
Beautiful Girl (stories)
Rich Rewards
To See You Again (stories)
Superior Women
Return Trips (stories)
After You’ve Gone (stories)
Caroline’s Daughters
Mexico: Some Travels and Travelers There
Almost Perfect
A Southern Exposure
Medicine Men
The Last Lovely City (stories)
After the War
The Stories of Alice Adams
A Note About the Author
Alice Adams was born in Virginia and graduated from Radcliffe College. She was the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in San Francisco until her death in 1999.
