The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  Over dinner, which indeed is excellent—a succulent veal stew, with a risotto—Bynum scrutinizes Lisa, and what looks to be her new friend. Lisa is looking considerably less happy than the young man is, this Perry, in Bynum’s view. Could they possibly have made it in the car, on the way over here, and now Lisa is feeling regrets? Even to Bynum’s somewhat primitive imagination this seems unlikely.

  What Lisa regrets is simply having talked as much as she did to Perry as on the way over they remained locked in the fogbound traffic. She not only talked, she exaggerated, overemphasized Antonia’s occasional depression, even her worries over Reeve.

  And even while going on and on in that way, Lisa was visited by an odd perception, which was that she was really talking about herself. She, Lisa, suffers more than occasional depressions. It is her work, not Antonia’s (well, hardly Antonia’s), that seems to be going nowhere. And Lisa, with no Reeve or anyone interesting in her life at the moment, is worried that this very attractive young man will not like her (she has always liked small, dark, trimly built men like Perry). Which is really why she said so much about Antonia—gossip as gift, which is something she knows about, having done it far too often.

  The truth is—or one truth is—that she is deeply, permanently fond of Antonia. And another truth is that her jealous competitiveness keeps cropping up, like some ugly, uncontrolled weed. She has to face up to it, do something about it, somehow.

  “What a superb cook Antonia is,” she now says (this is true, but is she atoning?). “Her food is always such a treat.”

  “The truth is that Antonia does everything quite well,” Bynum intones. “Remember that little spate of jewelry design she went into? Therapy, she called it, and she gave it up pretty quickly, but she did some lovely stuff.”

  “Oh, Bynum,” Lisa is unable not to cry out. “How can you even mention that junk? She was so depressed when she did it, and it did not work as therapy. You know perfectly well that she looked dreadful with all those dangles. She’s too big.”

  Perry laughs as she says this, bur in a pleasant, rather sympathetic way, so that Lisa thinks that maybe, after all, he understood? understood about love as well as envy?

  Below them on the street now are the straining, dissonant, banging sounds of cars: people trying to park, trying to find their houses, to get home to rest. It is hard to separate one sound from another, to distinguish, identify. Thus, steps that must be Antonia’s, with whomever she is with, are practically upon them before anyone has time to say, “Oh, that must be Antonia.”

  It is, though: Antonia, her arm in its bright white muslin sling thrust before her, in a bright new shiny plaster cast. Tall Antonia, looking triumphant, if very pale. And taller Reeve, somewhat disheveled, longish sandy hair all awry, but also in his own way triumphant, smiling. His arm is around Antonia’s shoulder, in protective possession.

  First exclamations are in reaction to the cast. “Antonia, how terrible! However did you? How lucky that Reeve—How awful, does it still hurt? Your left arm, how lucky!”

  Reeve pulls out a chair for Antonia, and in an already practiced gesture with her good, lucky right arm she places the cast in her lap. In a somewhat embarrassed way (she has never been fond of center stage), she looks around at her friends. “I’m glad you went on with dinner” is the first thing she says. “Now you can feed us. God, I’m really starving.”

  “I came home and there she was on the floor—” Reeve begins, apparently about to start a speech.

  “The damn cat!” Antonia cries out. “I tripped over Baron. I was making the salad.”

  Reeve scowls. “It was very scary,” he tells everyone present. “Suppose I hadn’t come home just then? I could have been traveling somewhere, although—”

  This time he is interrupted by Bynum, who reasonably, if unnecessarily, states, “In that case, we would have been the ones to find Antonia. Phyllis and I.”

  “I do wish someone would just hand me a plate of that stew,” Antonia puts in.

  “Oh of course, you must be starved,” her friends all chorus. “Poor thing!”

  It is Lisa who places the full, steaming plate before Antonia, Lisa asking, “You can eat okay? You want me to butter some bread?”

  “Dear Lisa. Well, actually I do, I guess. God, I hope I don’t get to like this helplessness.”

  “Here.” Lisa passes a thick slice of New York rye, all buttered. “Oh, and this is Perry,” she says. “He’s been wanting to meet you. You know, we drove down from Marin together.”

  Antonia and Perry acknowledge each other with smiles and small murmurs, difficult for Antonia, since she is now eating, ravenously.

  • • •

  “Real bastards in the emergency ward,” Reeve is telling everyone; he obviously relishes his part in this rescue. “They let you wait forever,” he says.

  “Among bleeding people on gurneys,” Antonia shudders. “You could die there, and I’m sure some people do, if they’re poor enough.”

  “Does it hurt?” asks Lisa.

  “Not really. Really not at all. I just feel so clumsy. Clumsier than usual, I mean.”

  She and Lisa smile at each other: old friends, familiar irony.

  Now everyone has taken up forks again and begun to eat, along with Antonia. Wine is poured around, glasses refilled with red, or cold white, from pitchers.

  Reeve alone seems not to be eating much, or drinking—for whatever reasons of his own: sheer excitement, possibly, anyone who thinks about it could conclude. He seems nervy, geared up by his—their recent experience.

  The atmosphere is generally united, convivial, though. People tell their own accident stories, as they will when anyone has had an accident (hospital visitors like to tell the patient about their own operations). Bynum as a boy broke his right arm not once but twice, both times falling out of trees. Lisa broke her leg on some ice. “You remember, Antonia, that awful winter I lived in New York. Everything terrible happened.” Perry almost broke his back, “but just a fractured coccyx, as things turned out,” failing off a horse, in New Mexico (this story does not go over very well, somehow; a lack of response can be felt around the room). Phyllis broke her arm skiing in Idaho.

  Reeve refrains from such reminiscences—although he is such a tall, very vigorous young man; back in Wyoming, he must have broken something, sometime. He has the air of a man who is waiting for the main event, and who in the meantime chooses to distance himself.

  In any case, the conversation rambles on in a pleasant way, and no one is quite prepared to hear Antonia’s end-of-meal pronouncement. Leaning back and looking around, she says, “It’s odd that it’s taken me so long to see how much I hate it here.”

  This is surely something that she has never said before. However, Antonia has a known predilection for the most extreme, the most emotional statement of any given feeling, and so at first no one pays much serious attention.

  Lisa only says, “Well, the city’s not at its best in all this fog. And then your poor arm.”

  And Bynum? “You can’t mean this apartment, I’ve always loved it here.” (At which Phyllis gives him a speculative, not quite friendly look.)

  Looking at them all—at least she has everyone’s attention—Antonia says, “Well, I do mean this apartment. It’s so small, and so inconvenient having a studio five blocks away. Not to mention paying for both. Oh, I know I can afford it, but I hate to.” She looks over at Reeve, and a smile that everyone can read as significant passes between the two of them.

  One of Antonia’s cats, the guilty old tabby, Baron, has settled on her lap, and she leans to scratch the bridge of his nose, very gently.

  And so it is Reeve who announces, “I’ve talked Antonia into coming back to Wyoming with me. At least to recuperate.” He smiles widely (can he be blushing?), in evident pleasure at this continuation of his rescuer role.

  “I’m so excited!” Antonia then bursts out. “The Grand Tetons, imagine! I’ve always wanted to go there, and somehow I never dared. B
ut Reeve has this whole house, and a barn that’s already a studio.”

  “It’s actually in Wilson, which is just south of Jackson,” Reeve explains. “Much less touristic. It’s my folks’ old place.”

  If Antonia expected enthusiasm from her friends about this project, though, she is disappointed.

  Of them all Bynum looks most dejected, his big face sags with displeasure, with thwarted hopes. Phyllis also is displeased, visibly so (but quite possibly it is Bynum of whom she disapproves?).

  Lisa cries out, “But, Antonia, what’ll I do without you? I’ll miss you so, I’m not used to your being away. It’ll be like New York—”

  To which Antonia smilingly, instantly responds, “You must come visit. Do come, we could start some sort of colony. And, Bynum, you can use this place while I’m gone if you want to.”

  Perry of course is thinking of his article, of which he now can envision the ending: Antonia Love off to the wilds of Wyoming, putting fogbound, dangerous San Francisco behind her. He likes the sound of it, although he is not quite sure that Jackson or even Wilson would qualify as “wilds.” But there must be a way to find out.

  In any case, he now sees that he has been quite right in his estimate of Antonia: she is beautiful. At this moment, radiantly pale, in the barely candlelit, dim room, her face is stylized, almost abstract, with her broad, heavy forehead and heavy dark brows, her wide-spaced large black eyes and her wide, dark-painted mouth. It will be easy to describe her: stylized, abstract.

  She is of course not at all his type (he actually much prefers her friend Lisa, whom he has decided that he does like, very much; he plans to see her again)—nor does Perry see himself in Reeve, at all. He senses, however, some exceptional connection between the two of them, some heightened rapport, as though, already in Wyoming, they breathed the same heady, pure, exhilarating air.

  Antonia is talking about Wyoming now, her imagined refuge. “Mountains, clouds, water. Wildflowers,” she is saying, while near her side Reeve smiles, quite privately.

  And Perry believes that he has struck on the first sentence of his article: “Antonia Love these days is a very happy woman.”

  Tide Pools

  For some years I lived alone in a small white clapboard house, up on a high wooded bluff above the Mississippi River, which I could hardly see—so far down, glimpsed through thick vines and trees, and so narrow just there.

  This was near Minneapolis, where I was an assistant professor at a local college. Teaching marine biology. And I thought quite a lot about the irony of my situation—a sea specialty in the landlocked Midwest. (I am from Santa Barbara, California, originally, which may explain quite a bit.)

  During those Minnesota years, despite professional busyness, a heavy teaching load, labs, conferences, friends, and a few sporadic love affairs, I was often lonely, an embarrassing condition to which I would never have admitted. Still, and despite my relative isolation, at that time I regarded the telephone as an enemy, its shrill, imperative sound an interruption even to loneliness. When my phone rang, I did not anticipate a friendly chat. For one thing, most of my friends and lovers were also hard-working professionals, not much given to minor social exchange.

  Thus, on a summer night about a year ago, a rare warm clear twilight, reminding me of Southern California, I was far from pleased at the sound of the telephone. I had just taken a bath and finished dressing; I was going out to dinner with a man I had met recently, whom I thought I liked. (Was he calling to break the date? Native distrust has not helped my relationships with men, nor with women.) We were going out to celebrate my birthday, actually, but I did not imagine that the ringing phone meant someone calling with congratulations, my birthday not being something that I generally talk about.

  What I first heard on picking up that alien instrument was the hollow, whirring sound that meant a long-distance call, and I thought, How odd, what a strange hour for business. Then, as I said hello, and hello again, I heard silence. At last a female voice came on, very slurred. But then words formed. “Judith? Have I got Miss Judith Mallory? Dr. Mallory?”

  “Yes—”

  “Judy, is that you, truly? Truly, Jude? Judy, do you know who this is?” An excited, drunken voice, its cadence ineradicably familiar to me—and only one person has ever called me Jude. It was Jennifer Cartwright, my closest early-childhood friend, my almost inseparable pal—whom I had not heard from or about for more than twenty years, not since we both left Santa Barbara, where we grew up together, or tried to.

  I asked her, “Jennifer, how are you? Where are you? What are you doing now?”

  “Well, I’m back in our house, you know. I’ve come back home. I’ve been here since Mother died, and I guess I’m doing okay. Oh, Judy, it’s really you! I’m so happy …”

  Happy was the last thing that Jennifer sounded, though; her voice was almost tearful.

  “Oh, Jennifer.” I was assailed by an overwhelming affection for my friend, mixed with sadness over whatever ailed her just now, including being so drunk. I had not even known that her mother was dead. Nicola—Nickie Cartwright, whom I had also cared about a lot.

  My own parents had both been dead for some time, which is one reason I had had no news from Santa Barbara. Also, since they died of so-called alcohol-related ailments, I was perhaps unreasonably alarmed at Jennifer’s condition. A nervous stomach, which is no stomach at all for booze, had kept me, if unwillingly, abstemious.

  “And oh!” Jennifer’s voice sounded indeed much happier now. “I forgot to say happy birthday. Judy, Jude, happy happy birthday! Every year I think of you today, even if I haven’t ever called you.”

  “You’re so good to remember,” I told her. “But really, tell me how you are.”

  “Oh, you tell me! First off, you tell me just what you have on.” Such a perfect Jennifer question—or Nickie: Nickie too would have asked me what I was wearing, in order to see me, and to check on how I was.

  To please Jennifer, I should have described a beautiful, colorful dress, but a lack of imagination, I believe, has kept me honest; I tend to tell the truth. My former (only) husband observed that I had a very literal mind, and he might have been right, as he was with a few other accurate accusations. In any case, I told Jennifer, “Just a sweater and some pants. My uniform, I guess. But they’re both new. Black. Actually, I’m going out to dinner. This man I met—”

  Jennifer began to laugh, her old prolonged, slow, appreciative laugh, and I thought, Well, maybe she’s not so drunk. Just a little tipsy, maybe, and overexcited.

  “Oh, Jude.” Jennifer was laughing still. “You’re going out on a date, and we’re so old. But you sound like you’re about sixteen, and wearing something pink and gauzy.”

  Rational, sober person that I am, I could have cried.

  But Jennifer went on in a conversational, much less drunken way. “I think about you so much,” she said. “And everything back then. All the fun we had. Of course, since I’ve moved back here it’s all easier to remember.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear about Nickie,” I told her.

  “Well, just one more terrible thing. Everyone gets cancer, it seems like to me. Honestly, Jude, sometimes I think being grown up really sucks, don’t you? To use a word I truly hate.”

  “Well, I guess.”

  “Your parents die, and your husbands turn out bad. And your kids—oh, don’t even talk to me about kids.”

  Her voice trailed off into a total silence, and I thought, Oh dear, she’s fallen asleep at the telephone, out there in California, in that house I know so very well. The house right next door to the house where my parents and I used to live—in fact, its architectural twin—on what was called the Santa Barbara Gold Coast, up above the sea. I wondered what room Jennifer was in—her own room, in bed, I hoped. I called out “Jennifer!” over all that space, Minnesota to California. Calling out over time too, over many years.

  Her laugh came on again. “Oh, Jude, you thought I’d gone to sleep. But I hadn’t, I w
as just lying here thinking. In Mother and Dad’s big old bed. You remember?”

  “Oh, of course I do.” And with a rush I remembered the Sunday morning when Jennifer and I had run into the Cartwrights’ bedroom, I guess looking for the Sunday papers, and there was blond Scott and blonder Nickie in their tousled nightclothes, lying back among a pale-blue tangle of sheets. Not making love, although I think we must have caught them soon after love. They may have moved apart as we came in; Scott’s hand still lingered in Nickie’s bright, heavy uncombed hair. At the time, I was mostly struck by their sleepy affection for each other, so clearly present. I can see it now, those particular smiles, all over their pale morning faces.

  The room, with its seascape view, was almost identical to my parents’ bedroom, and their view. My parents slept in narrow, separate beds. They were silent at home except when they drank, which loosened them up a little, though it never made them anywhere near affectionate with each other.

  In any case, I surely remembered the Cartwrights’ broad, blue-sheeted carved-mahogany bed.

  I asked Jennifer, “Your father—Scott died too?” Although I think I knew that he must have. But I used to see Scott Cartwright as the strongest man I ever knew, as well as the most glamorous, with his golfer’s tan, and his stride.

  “Just after your mother died. They were all so young, weren’t they? Dad had a stroke on the golf course, but maybe that’s the best way to go. Poor Mother was sick for years. Oh, Judy, it’s all so scary. I hate to think about it.”

  She had begun to trail off again, and partly to keep her awake, in contact, I asked her if she had married more than once; I thought I had heard her say “husbands,” plural, but it was hard to tell, with her vagueness, slurring.

  But “Oh, three times!” Jennifer told me. “Each one worse. I never seem to learn.” But she sounded cheerful, and next she began to laugh. “You will not believe what their names were,” she said. “Tom, Dick, and Harry. That’s the truth. Well, not actually the whole truth—I can’t lie to my best old favorite friend. The whole truth is, the first two were Tom and Dick, and so when I went and got married the third time I had to call him Harry, even if his name was Jack.”