The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  • • •

  At about five a.m. they arrive at Ixtapa: a cluster of thick pale high buildings (an eruption of poisonous growths, Miriam thinks) in the sulfurous light. Across the way an endless golf course spreads, the smooth grass now all silverish gray.

  They enter a building; there are red tiles, wooden arches hung with cut-tin ornaments.

  From behind the desk a sleepy clerk hands out room keys.

  In a heavily carpeted, perfectly silent elevator they all ascend.

  Miriam and Eric’s room has a gigantic bed, thickly quilted in red and orange. Two big chairs, and on the walls several huge garish paintings, of improbable bright flowers. A mammoth mirror, all shining.

  Beyond exhaustion, they each in a perfunctory way wash up; they remove a few clothes and fall into bed.

  Lying there, in the yellowish semi-dark, Miriam has a vivid sense of having arrived at last in hell. Beside her, Eric has gone instantly to sleep; his heavy breath rasps, regularly. She closes her eyes, but then uncontrollably re-sees, with perfect clarity, that tragic roadside scene—the covered bodies, blood, the protruding brown bare dusty feet.

  Quickly opening her eyes, she feels that all her senses are conspiring to make sleep out of the question; she is so overtired, so hungry, so afraid. She lies there for a while, eyes wide.

  When she closes her eyes once more, however, Miriam has quite another vision: she sees herself on the second-class bus again, but she is headed back toward Escondido, and this time she’s wearing a cotton dress, her bright blue, and she is alone. The bus rumbles along, much faster this trip, although from time to time it stops for passengers, and once more windows are opened, food passed through. And Miriam eats, everything she wants! Spicy aromatic meats and flaky pastries, pulpy fruits and tall sweet, colored fruity drinks. All exotic, delicious. And at Puerto Escondido the grounds have been all cleaned up; here and there are clumps of tropical vegetation, flowering bushes, small trees. And then the hotel itself, with its lovely bright covering bougainvillea.

  Her room is clean and bright. She puts her bag down, undresses quickly, puts on her bathing suit and sandals. Grabs up a towel.

  And she rushes, at last, down the winding rooted pathway, almost stumbling in her hurry—to the beach! She runs across the sand, to the gently lapping, warm clear water.

  Half waking from what she recognizes as a dream (but how real it was, the water against her skin), Miriam tries, and fails, to read its meaning. Further awake, she realizes, too, that she is refreshed, as though she had indeed dipped into the ocean, or certainly had slept for more than the couple of hours which is actually the case.

  Eric is still asleep. Carefully she slips out of bed and goes over to the window; she parts the heavy gold-threaded draperies and looks out. The menacing dawn has become an overcast, gray day, with strange dark clouds at the horizon. Closer in, on the beach, dozens of people are lying out on towels, body to body almost, all oiled as though there were sun—or as though they were dead.

  Miriam unpacks some toilet things and goes into the bathroom, into further garish opulence: thick green towels, glistening green tile. And everything is scented, so sickly sweet that she hurries through washing.

  Distantly, from the bedroom, she hears a knock at their door, in Russell’s familiar rhythm—then Eric’s sleepy voice, and Russell’s. The closing door.

  When she reänters the room Eric is sitting on the edge of the bed. He is still mostly unwashed, of course, his face blue-shadowed, blond stubble on his chin and his cheeks. But he looks cheerful, restored to himself. “A great place, huh?” he asks her. “Finally.” And then he says, “Well, Joanie and Russ think a swim might be just the thing.”

  “Let them go swimming, then.” Miriam has spoken with a calm, an assurance, that is absolute. “I think it looks dangerous.” Let them drown, she does not say.

  In her blue robe she goes over to stand beside him. She says, “I have to leave here.” At that moment she is taller than he is.

  He looks up at her, worriedly, uncomprehending. “You mean, just us?”

  “I don’t care. I have to leave.”

  Intelligent Eric has almost understood her, though. Reaching for the phone, he says, “I’ll try for an afternoon plane,” and he smiles, his old blond dazzling smile. “In the meantime, you don’t want a swim?”

  “No, I don’t. But you go on, if you want to,” and she smiles back.

  Miriam. A small woman, who can suddenly, vividly see her husband Eric’s body washed up on a beach, blond hair spread against cold sand, and long pale legs crookedly stretched down to the murky, turbulent sea.

  Elizabeth

  For every reason, including conventional wisdom’s dictates that one should not go back to the scene of exceptional past happiness, I did not at all want to return to the Mexican beach at which I had not only been happy, my whole inner balance had seemed restored to me there, there at the extraordinarily lovely beach, with Elizabeth, my friend who now was dying and whom I could in no way restore, or save.

  Since Elizabeth is—was about thirty years older than I am, you say that her role in my life was maternal; my mother, a psychoanalyst, as my father is, does say just that; she is also aware of her own jealousy of Elizabeth—of course she is, both jealous and aware. To me that is not how it seemed at all; I did not see Elizabeth as “mother”; I simply liked her, and I admired her more than anyone I knew. For a long time I wondered whether my feelings for Judson, to whom I now am married, were colored by the fact that I first met him in her house. I have concluded that yes, they were, and are; after all, they loved each other too. Elizabeth and Judson.

  In any case I did not at all want to go back to Mexico, to the beach and to Elizabeth’s house, where now my friend lay miserably dying, of emphysema. And I knew at last that I had to go, although of course Elizabeth did not say so—Elizabeth, the most elegantly tactful, most graceful of all people. I had been conscientiously writing her at least a couple of times a week, since she had allowed me to know of her illness, and for a while I managed to convince myself that that was better; many warm “interesting” letters might be less disturbing to her than an actual visit.

  Then Judson, with whom I was not exactly in touch at that time—our connection was tentative, indefinite, perhaps anomalous—Judson telephoned me from Iowa, where he was living and teaching that year (Judson is a poet; I am a lawyer and I live—we live in Oakland, California). Judson said that I had better go down to see Elizabeth.

  “It’s simple, Minerva,” he said. “If you don’t you won’t see her again.”

  Judson’s poetry is minimalist, nor in personal conversation does he tend to waste words. I probably waste most things, certainly time and energy. Sometimes friendship, or love.

  I asked him, “Will you go too?”

  “If I can.”

  Judson and I had talked a lot, becoming friends, that first summer at San Angel, and once we had kissed. Not what anyone would term an affair, or even a “relationship”; still, the kiss took it a little out of the pure friendship class.

  But I think I should begin with meeting Elizabeth, all those years back, the August when I was house-sitting for my parents in the hills of Berkeley. Being shrinks they both always took August off, and they usually rented a house in Wellfleet, Mass., where they got to see a lot of other shrinks. Then as now I was living in Oakland, and at that time I was going to law school, at U.C., in Berkeley. And so it made sense to stay in my parents’ big house during August, to take care of their plants and the pool. They even offered to pay me, which I proudly refused.

  At some point, along with various instructions, in an afterthought-sounding way my father said, “Oh. Your mother and I met an interesting woman at the Garsons’. An art historian. Originally Viennese, I think. She’s renting the Jefferson cottage up the street and we told her to come use the pool if she ever felt like it.” Piously he added, “Of course we told her to call you first.”

  “Dad. Really.” My fa
ther knew perfectly well that I was having a relationship with a lawyer who was married but who spared me an occasional afternoon.

  “Well, as you know it’ll probably be cold all August anyway. How often we wonder whatever made us dream of putting in a pool. She might very well never call. Anyway you might like her.”

  If anyone else talked like that my father would call it “cross-signalling,” which I believe is supposed to be “schizophrenogenic,” but in himself he does not, of course. And in fact I am not especially schizy, more given to depression, unfortunately—although schizes probably don’t much like their condition either.

  “Her name is Elizabeth Loewenstein,” my father added, and he repeated, “I really think you might like her. She has a very beautiful voice.”

  Only that last statement came as a surprise. Funnily enough, in view of his trade, my father is not at all a good listener, and so I was struck by the notion of a voice so beautiful that he would listen to it.

  As things turned out, he was wrong only about the weather of that August, which was record-breakingly warm and clear, amazing and beautiful. From my parents’ giant picture windows I watched the sun set over San Francisco and the bay, all implausibly gold and glistening.

  Elizabeth Loewenstein, the possibly garrulous nuisance whom I had feared, never phoned, and it is hard to recall on just what impulse I finally called her and asked her over for a swim. Partly it was because I was lonely—were I a believer, though, I would say that God had instructed me. As it is I see my call to her as a piece of sheer good luck, for me. In any case, I did call, and she said that yes, she would like to come over for a swim.

  Elizabeth was small and dark, with short, graying curly hair and gray-green eyes. Lightly lined pale skin, a bony nose. Her manner was tentative, rather shy—and she had the most attractive voice that I had ever heard. (It was almost annoying, to have my father proved so accurate.) A low voice, slightly hoarse, and very slightly accented. A voice with great range: warm brightness, and a complicated depth of shadows. “Your voice has chiaroscuro,” I once said to Elizabeth, and she laughed, of course, but she was pleased. She had a certain, highly characteristic way of saying “Ah!” like a tiny bark. That “Ah” was one of her responsive, listening sounds; she listened more actively than anyone, I thought—I think so still. She smoked a lot.

  God knows what we talked about, that first afternoon. I only remember liking her very much and urging her to stay. She left after less than half an hour, and I told her please to come back whenever she could.

  Nor do I remember much of the content of later conversations; it is rather the quality of being with Elizabeth that I remember. And her voice, and that tiny barked “Ah!” And her just-hoarse laugh.

  Rather little of our talk was personal. Elizabeth almost never talked about herself, and so I was not encouraged to do so—which, that summer, was quite all right with me; I was tired of talking or even thinking about my troublesome, somewhat sordid love affair. Elizabeth often talked about places, her passion for Venice, and for the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. And she told me about the extravagant, wildly impractical (not even quite legal) gesture of buying a house in Mexico, near the beach.

  Once I talked to a Berkeley woman who also admired and liked Elizabeth, and that woman said, “Oh, Elizabeth is so wonderful. You can do absolutely anything you want around her. Say anything.”

  Well, that was entirely to miss the point of Elizabeth, I thought. I would never knowingly have expressed a trivial or mean-spirited thought to Elizabeth; her own elegant, supremely intelligent demeanor forbade it. And actually one of the reasons that I so much liked Elizabeth was that she, as the phrase goes, “brought out my best.” With her I was less trivial and mean, and much more intelligent, more finely observant than usual, and if not elegant at least restrained. Judson and I have talked about this, and he says that he felt the same. “Elevated,” is a word he used. “Ennobled, even,” Judson said.

  This is the much abbreviated story of Elizabeth’s life, as I pieced it together from stray remarks, tiny glimpses over our years of conversation, and all our letters.

  She was born not in Vienna but in Paris, and later, before the Anschluss, she had studied in Vienna. Her parents were deported to camps in Germany, where they died (very little about this from Elizabeth). After the war she studied in Florence, in Bologna, and at Oxford. In addition to those places she had lived in Lisbon and in Cuernavaca, and in her Mexican beach town, San Angel. And in New York and Boston. She had been married three times, twice divorced, once widowed—but of those relationships I know nothing. Once she spent some time at Lake Tahoe with a man who was trying to get a divorce in Reno but did not (out of character, this intimate glimpse arrived in a letter, like a present, when she knew that I was having some troubles of that nature). When I first knew her she was living in Boston, out in Berkeley on a studying visit. Later she moved down to New York. And later still, she moved to San Angel, to her small house in the manzanita thickets. For good.

  That first summer in Berkeley Elizabeth and I saw each other mostly for late afternoon swims. We also went to the Berkeley and the Oakland art museums. Elizabeth looked as actively as she listened, as intently. I can see her: a small woman in something elegantly plain, gray linen, maybe brown, bending forward to see yet more clearly, her eyes narrowed in the effort, as she stands before a big canvas of some enormous, primitive animals, by Joan Brown.

  Elizabeth was especially fond of that Oakland museum; to my great pleasure she preferred it to the San Francisco MOMA. “So much less pretentious,” she remarked, quite accurately, I thought. “A more real museum, and architecturally it is marvelous, a beauty.”

  I have said that most of my talk with Elizabeth was impersonal; however, I do remember one conversation which became intimate, oddly enough having to do with our noses.

  I had spent too many hours the week before just lying beside the pool, ostensibly studying for the bar, actually worrying about my life, as I enjoyed the sun. As a reward for that self-indulgence my nose first blistered, then peeled (I have inherited my mother’s white Irish skin, my father’s Polish-Jewish nose).

  “I wish it would peel away,” I said to Elizabeth, as though joking. “Peel down to a tiny snub nose, like my mother’s. Why did I just get her skin?”

  Elizabeth laughed, accepting my joke, but she said, “You’re too tall for a tiny snub nose, Minerva. Besides, yours is distinguished, like an Italian Renaissance lady.” And then she sighed. “But I know about hating noses. For years I despaired of mine. And Minerva, I had more reason, you will admit. I am a very small woman with a very large nose.”

  “But yours is beautiful!”

  “Ah! There, you see?”

  We both laughed then, in the end-of-August almost cooling air, an hour or so before the sun would set.

  • • •

  In September Elizabeth went back to Boston. My parents came home, and I moved back into my own small Oakland apartment; I studied hard, I spent time with friends and with my lover, with whom I quarrelled a lot—on whom I made, according to him, impossible demands.

  And I began what was to become a rich and wonderfully gratifying correspondence with Elizabeth. (I have it still, now boxed and tied up with heavy string. I always mean to take it out for rereading, but so far I have not.) It turned out that for us both letters were a form of conversation. I have sometimes even thought letters more satisfactory and God knows safer than most human contact, and it is possible that Elizabeth felt so too. In any case we wrote to each other quite often, and generally at some length. Only on trips Elizabeth might confine herself to postcards, with beautiful pictures: Venice, Spoleto, Siena.

  And even cards from Elizabeth had the unique, quite unmistakable sound of her voice. I have sometimes had quite the opposite experience, very likely everyone has: the stiff, ungiving letters from friends who in person are both warm and amusing; dull letters from people one thought bright. Elizabeth’s letters and her cards were
exactly like herself, including her very slight, to-me-delightful mistakes in English.

  Then, over the next months and the following years everything in my life went black, and wrong. I had passed the bar, and got a job with an okay firm in Oakland, specializing in labor law; but I felt that I was overworked, too many sudden trips to Chicago or Los Angeles, for depositions. Worse, I began to have serious doubts about the law itself, or rather about its current practice, its practitioners. My lover left for New Haven, with his wife. I got along with my parents even less well than usual, and I quarrelled in a serious way with a couple of longstanding friends. I was very tired. I imagined myself as a piece of old elastic, all gone gray, all the stretch and give worn out.

  Well, a classic depression, but no one’s depression seems “classic” to the person enduring it. And in my case, such overexposure to shrinks made it hard for me even to think, This is a depression, this too will pass. I did not even consider the possible aid of some therapy.

  The very weather that year seemed inimical: a long fall and winter of cold rain, ferocious winds, followed by a spring of no respite but more cold and winds, a perpetual black-gray fog, looming up from the bay.

  I had not written to Elizabeth that I was depressed, or whatever I was, but she may of course have sensed it. I did write about the frightful summer weather, the dark fog and cold, the perpetual wind.

  Elizabeth wrote back that she would be in her house in Mexico for all of November, and that I must get some time off and come to visit her then. “I know how it is with long cold summers,” she wrote. “You believe them to last forever, as sometimes they do. But maybe the idea of a warm white beach and many flowers will help a little to get you through the next few months.” She further explained that she had already promised “such guest quarters as there are” to another friend—“a poet, Judson Venable, you might sometime have read him?” I had not.