by Alice Adams
(Younger and in one way or another very talented, the first three of them, Duncan reflects. More talented than he? That was surely a problem with Jessica, the first wife, a poet who took a very low view of criticism. Less so with Emily, perhaps because painting is—well, not literary, and they were not together very long. The worst was Janice, herself a professor, a literary critic. Undoubtedly, Janice in her way was responsible for Cath, who is talentless, a born appreciator.)
But unless he exercises the utmost caution, for which he feels himself much too tired, devoid of resources, Duncan fears that he will simply repeat the follies of the day, with Emily, tonight. He will talk again—perhaps even more ridiculously—about Cath; obviously he will do so, since she and Emily have met. Emily by now is probably—is undoubtedly a feminist; she could finish him off entirely.
At the hotel desk Duncan looks longingly toward the cubbyholes of messages. If only there were a pink phone slip from Emily, canceling, for whatever reason. (Or a slip saying Cath had called?) But there is nothing, and heavily now Duncan walks over to the elevator. He rings, ascends.
This making a fool of himself began for Duncan at breakfast, in the somewhat dingy dining room of his hotel, as he talked (or tried to explain) to Jasper Wilkes, a former student, and began to babble. “In point of fact I actually encouraged her to have an affair—or affairs; one can’t say I wasn’t generous. Ironically enough, she could be said to be doing just what I told her to do. In a sense.”
Jasper repeated “In a sense” with perhaps too much relish. A highly successful advertising executive since abandoning academe, Jasper is a prematurely, quite shiningly bald young man, with clever, hooded eyes.
“After all,” Duncan continued, long fingers playing with his croissant’s cold buttery remains, “I’m very busy. And besides …” He smiled briefly, sadly, implying much.
“Of course.” Jasper’s eyes closed, but his voice had an agreeing sound.
Gulping at strong lukewarm coffee—he had just sent back for fresh—Duncan had a nervously exhilarated sense that this was not how men talked to each other, or not usually. Or perhaps these days they do? They are “open” with each other, as women have always been? In any case, he hoped that he had not got out of his depth with Jasper. The coffee had made him feel a little drunk.
And at the word “depth” his mind stopped totally, and replayed, depth, depth. He had suddenly, involuntarily seen Atlantic waves, brilliant and mountainous, quite possibly fatal. He had imagined Ocracoke Island. Again.
But could Jasper be in a hurry? Off somewhere? Duncan was conscious of wanting to prolong (oh! all day) this relieving, if highly unusual, conversation. “Precisely,” he hastened to agree with what he imagined Jasper just had said. “I intended something discreet and, I suppose I also hoped, something minor. A dalliance more or less along my own lines. My old lines, I suppose I should say.” He attempted a modest laugh, but the sound was bleak.
“Right,” Jasper agreed. “Something to take up a certain amount of her time and energy. Rather like going to a gym.”
“Oh, precisely.”
The two men exchanged looks in which there was expressed some shock at their complicitous cynicism, but more pure pleasure—or so Duncan for the moment believed.
The coffee arrived, at which Jasper frowned, conclusively proving to Duncan that he was after all in a hurry; he did not even want more coffee.
“The point is,” said Jasper, in a summing-up way, “whether or not you want her back. One. And, two, if you do, how to get her.”
Unprepared for this précis, Duncan felt quite dizzied.
Nor was he prepared for what came next, which was Jasper’s efficient departure: a smooth rise to his feet, and a firm, sincere handshake. Lots of eye contact. Murmurs of friendship. And then Jasper was gone, last glimpsed as a narrow, animated back departing through the door that led out to the lobby.
Quite disconcerted, and alone with his hot, unconsoling coffee, Duncan looked around. This room had got uglier, he thought, trying to recall what he used to like about it. Surely not the pictures, the big bright oils that all looked like copies of famous works, giving the room a spurious look of “taste”? Never the pictures, he concluded, and surely not the inferior coffee, and fake croissants. Dismally he reminded himself that he had always chosen this hotel for reasons of economy, never for charm.
Now everything seemed to disturb him, though: the room with its awful art, the bad coffee, and particularly his just ended conversation with Jasper Wilkes. And why? Rerunning that conversation, he succeeded in finding nothing truly objectionable. (Unless that crack about going to gyms—would that have been a “put-on”?) Bright Jasper, though. All agreement, stating and restating Duncan’s own views in a clear succinct way. But perhaps that very succinctness was the problem? Especially at the end, just before Jasper hurried off to wherever?
Leaning back into the once pneumatic banquette, for reassurance Duncan stroked his hair, now white but still gratifyingly thick and fine. How Jasper must envy his hair! That in itself could explain quite a lot.
Duncan thought then of the old days, when Jasper as a student came petitioning with his poetry. In conference with Jasper, Duncan might sneak a quick took at his large grandfather clock while pretending to allow his gaze to wander. And apprised of the time, he, Duncan, might then too brusquely sum up his view of Jasper’s poem, or poems: Jasper had been all too prolific. And as Jasper at last got up reluctantly to leave, the also departing Duncan, a man in early middle age, might well be off to visit some pert-breasted, ambitious literary girl, for something “discreet,” and “minor.”
As though Jasper had encouraged him—seduced him, even—into all that talk about Cath, Duncan felt a pained resentment. Especially he resented Jasper’s just getting up and leaving him like that—all at sea, almost drowned in ungovernable feelings.
But at lunchtime Duncan could be said to have done it again.
“It was really the way she left that I so much minded,” he remarked to his lunch companion, Marcus Thistlethwaite, an English critic, a very old friend. They were seated in a corner of a pretty new Upper West Side restaurant, banks of fall flowers in the windows, filtered sunshine. “I would have given a maid more notice,” Duncan added, and then reflected that his analogy had been slightly confused: just who did he mean was whose maid, and who gave notice? He hoped that Marcus had not observed this, but naturally no such luck.
“I’m not sure just who was whose maid,” said Marcus, with his ratchety, cropped-off laugh. “But I believe I rather catch your drift, as it were.” And then, “Is this quite the proper thing to do with lobster claws?”
“Oh yes, you just crack them like nuts,” instructed Duncan, who had just wondered why on earth he had ordered something he had never much liked, and that was at best quite difficult to eat. (And that reminded him inevitably of the seacoast.)
Marcus’s hair is thin and silvery, like tinsel; draped across his bright impressive skull, it ornaments his head. Duncan has always been somewhat in awe of Marcus, of his erudition and his cool, uncluttered, passionless judgments. And so why on earth did he have to make that silly remark about Cath, and the dismissal of maids? “Say what you like about New York,” he then attempted, striving for an even tone despite a certain pressure in his chest, “the autumns here are wonderful. You know, I walked up through the park from my hotel, and the air—so brisk! And the color of the sky, and those flowers.”
Marcus just perceptibly inclined his head, acknowledging flowers, and weather. And then he launched into one of the mini-speeches to which he is given. “An interesting fact, and one that I’ve made note of”—to those who know Marcus, a familiar beginning, very likely boding no good to his audience, be it plural or singular—“and of which you, my dear Duncan, have just furnished further proof, in any case so interesting, is the human tendency in times of distress at some ill-treatment by a fellow human to complain of the method of treatment, the form it took, rather than the actuality. The
cruel event itself is not mentioned, even. A man who is fired from his job invariably sounds as though a little more tact would have made it perfectly acceptable. And a fellow whose mistress has taken off—well, I’m sure you quite see what I mean.”
“In my own case, I do think even some slight warning might have been in order,” Duncan bravely, if weakly, managed to say. “And she was not my mistress—my wife. We’d been married for almost three years.”
“My dear fellow, naturally I was speaking in a general way, and you know how I tend to run on. Well, I don’t think I much care for these lobsters of yours. What’s our next course? I seem already to have forgotten.”
What an old bore Marcus has become, so opinionated, so—so insensitive, thought Duncan, once they parted and he began his walk. However, irritation soon gave way to the sound of darker voices, which asked if he himself was not almost as old, and as boring. And perhaps Marcus was less insensitive than he, Duncan, was hypersensitive, an open wound.
At which point he made—or, rather, his probing tongue made—the most unwelcome discovery about his missing tooth.
Back at last in his hotel room, that cold and perilous park walk done with, behind him, Duncan picks up the phone and almost instantly he succeeds (the day’s first small piece of luck) in reaching his dentist. Who is reassuring. Nothing to worry about, the dentist tells Duncan, happens all the time. He adds that it probably does not look as unsightly as Duncan thinks it does; and gives him an appointment for the following week.
The bathroom mirror informs Duncan that his missing tooth, his “black hole,” is unsightly only when he very broadly grins, which he can surely see no reason for doing at any foreseeable time.
Lying at last across his oversized bed, eyes closed, Duncan attempts to generalize about his situation; particulars are what finally do you in, he has found—and so he will not think about Cath’s pretty shoulders, not her odd harsh mountain consonants. He strives instead for abstraction, beginning some mental notes on jealousy in an older person, as opposed to what is experienced by the young.
When one is young, he thinks, the emotion of jealousy is wracking, torturous, but at the same time very arousing (he has to admit), an almost delicious pain. Whereas when one is older, and jealous, there is only deep, irremovable sadness, deprivation, hopelessness.
(So much for notes.)
Cath: just a pallid, slightly gangling, easily blushing, mild-tempered girl from the land of the Great Smoky Mountains, from whence those consonants, those vowels. But a girl with an amazing ear for poetry, and a passion for it. Cath was (she is, oh, surely she still is) literally crazy about the verse of Andrew Marvell, Herrick, Donne. Wallace Stevens (Duncan’s own particular enthusiasm) and more recently some women whose names he now forgets. And most recently of all, Mr. Brennan O’Donahue.
Though at first she did not even want to go to his reading. “It’s too hot to go anywhere,” she complained.
“But you’re crazy about O’Donahue,” Duncan (oh irony!) reminded her, and he added, “He’s just back from Nicaragua, remember? Besides, I do think one of us should go.” Duncan sniffed to emphasize the bad summer cold from which he was suffering (and he now remembers that self-pitying, self-justifying sniff with such shame, such regret). “I’m sure the Taylors would come by for you,” he added, naming a younger, obsequious colleague, with a silly wife.
Cath sighed. “Oh, I’ll go by myself. That way I can come home early. And Bipsy Taylor is such a nerd.” Another sigh. “If I can work out what to wear in this weather.”
It was an especially hot September, everything limp and drooping, or fallen to the ground. Bleached rose petals on yellow lawns, and out in the woods where Duncan liked to walk the silence was thick and heavy, as though even the birds were prostrate, drugged with heat.
Cath chose to wear her barest dress that night, which seemed sensible, if slightly inappropriate for a poetry reading. But Duncan felt that it would not do to object: he was making her go there, was he not? And so she went out alone, bare-armed and braless, in her loose black cotton; her sun-bleached hair loosely failing, her small round shoulders lightly tanned.
You look almost beautiful, is what Duncan thought of saying, and fortunately or not forbore; too often he said things to Cath that he later lived to regret. His suggestion—half-joking, actually—that she could have an affair had aroused real rage. An obscene suggestion, she seemed to take it as; clear evidence of lack of love. Whereas he was not even really serious (God knows he was not). And so as she left that night Duncan only said, “I hope it won’t be too dull for you, my love.”
“Oh no, don’t worry. But you take care of your cold, now. I put the bottle of C pills right next to your bed.”
She came home very late, explaining at breakfast that there had been a party at the Taylors’, who lived out of town. She had not wanted to wake Duncan with a phone call. She had driven O’Donahue back to the Hilton, where he was staying. The reading was good. He was nice. She thought she would go downtown to do some shopping. Would probably not be back before Duncan’s afternoon seminar.
And Duncan returned late that afternoon, after the seminar that included a sherry hour, to find her note. Gone off to Ocracoke Island, with Brennan O’Donahue.
The Village restaurant in which Duncan meets Emily for dinner is a comforting surprise, however; a most unfashionable homey old-bohemian decor, checkered tablecloths and multicolored candles in fat dark green wine bottles, a look dearly familiar to Duncan, who spent feckless youthful years in this neighborhood. Then he was a handsome young man, very easy with women—with a great deal to say about literature, he thought.
Emily, at least at first, seems determinedly nice. “It’s wonderfully corny, don’t you think?” she says of the restaurant. “But with our luck this look will come back and be madly fashionable. Oh dear, do you suppose it has, and we’re the last to know?” And she laughs companionably. “I’m taking you to dinner,” she tells him. “We’re celebrating a grant I just got.”
“You look splendid, my dear, you really do,” Duncan tells her gratefully as they are seated; he has never been taken to dinner by a woman before, and he rather enjoys the sensation. This is feminism? And it is true that Emily in early middle age, or wherever she is, has never looked better. A tall woman, she had put on a little weight, in her case very becoming (but can you say that to a woman?). Short curled gray hair, gray eyes, and very white teeth. She looks strong, and immensely healthy. “You look so—so very fit,” Duncan says to her. “Do you, er, jog, or something?”
Emily laughs again. “Well, I have, but I didn’t like it much. Now I just walk a lot.”
“Well, I must say, I’m glad to hear that. I find runners such a grim group, they quite scare me,” Duncan confesses.
“Oh, me too, they never smile. But, dear Duncan, why are you smiling in that somewhat odd way?”
“I’ve lost a tooth.”
“Well, we all do,” Emily tells him. “But you don’t have to twist your mouth that way. It’s only a gap.”
Quite amiably then she talks about her work: painting, teaching, a summer workshop in Provincetown—until Duncan suspects that she is being consciously nice to him, that she is purposefully not mentioning Cath (whom he himself has determined not to talk about).
Well, if that is the case he surely does not mind; nice is perfectly okay with him, Duncan decides, and then he wonders, Are women after all really nicer than men are? (He does not voice this question, however, not just then wanting to hear Emily too strongly agree.)
But Emily does at last bring up the subject of Cath, though gently. “I am sorry about Cath,” she says. “That must be rough for you.”
“Well, yes, it is. But it’s nice of you to say so.” Which it was.
“I’m sure your literary friends have been enormously comforting, though,” Emily in a changed tone goes on, her irony so heavy that Duncan is quite taken aback until he remembers just how much she disliked his “literary” frien
ds, especially Jasper Wilkes, who was still a poet when Emily knew him.
Duncan can only be straightforward with her now. “You’re right,” he says. “The friends I’ve talked to have succeeded in making me feel much worse. I had it coming, seems to be the general view.”
Emily smiles, her eyes bright. “Oh, you could say that to almost anyone, I think. It’s even said to cancer patients. But it really doesn’t seem to me that you’ve been any worse than most men are.”
Grasping at even this dubious compliment, Duncan smiles, and then he further complains, “You know, even well-deserved pain is painful.”
“Of course it is.”
Why did he ever leave Emily, who is as intelligent as she is kind—and attractive? But he did not leave Emily, Duncan then recalls; Emily left him, with sensible remarks about not being cut out for marriage, either of them. Which did not stop her from marrying an Indian painter a few years later, and a sculptor soon after that—nor did it stop Duncan from marrying Janice, and then Cath.
In any case, kind or not, right or wrong, Emily is far better to talk to than Jasper or Marcus. Duncan feels safe with Emily—which leads him to yet another confession. “I did one really dumb thing, though. At some point I told Cath that she should have an affair. Of course I spoke in jest, but can she have taken me seriously?”
Emily frowns. “Well, jesting or not, that’s really worse than dumb. That’s cruel. It’s what men say to wives they want to get rid of.”
“Oh, but I surely didn’t mean—” Crestfallen Duncan.
Fortunately just at that moment the food arrives, and it is after some silence between them that Emily asks, “You do know that she’ll be back?”
“Oh no, no, of course I don’t know that at all.” Duncan feels dizzy.
“Well, she will. She’s basically very sensible, I think. She’ll see that Brennan O’Donahue is no one to live with. Running off with poets is just something young women do. Or some of them do.”
“Oh? They do?”
“She’ll come back, and if you want her to stick around you’d better be very kind. Just remember, a lot of women have been really nice to you. Be understanding. Sensitive. You’re good at that.”
