The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  Would knowing any more, though, improve her head, which threatens to split open like a watermelon in the sun? If she knew where she was, for example, would she feel any better?

  She does not really believe that any such knowledge would help her. If she rang room service, and they told her, This is the Palmer House, in Cincinnati (if there is a Palmer House in Cincinnati), why would that improve her day? She doesn’t see it, although her husband, a psychiatrist, undoubtedly would. Julian, Karen’s husband, is committed to what he calls emotional information.

  If she phoned Julian could he possibly tell her what went on last night here in her room? Well, of course not.

  If she had played a concert, though, she would remember; she always does. And so, did she cancel a concert? That seems likely; quite possibly she canceled at about this same time yesterday, perhaps from this room, this bedside pink princess telephone. Noon is Karen’s usual canceling time, her cop-out hour.

  Whatever it was she did last night, for which she must have canceled her concert, made the most incredible whirlwind mess of the room. Karen closes her eyes against the sight of it: wadded-up clothes (hers), and sheets, so many sheets! all also wadded up. And knocked-over lamps, two of them on the floor. Full ashtrays. Karen doesn’t smoke; they smell awful. Reeking glasses, partly filled with undrunk booze. Lord God, did she throw a party? Who?

  What she can least well face, Karen has learned from other such mornings, is the sight of her own face. I can’t face my face, she once thought, on some other occasion, and it almost made her laugh. She is surely not laughing now, though. She is seriously concerned with the logistics of getting in and out of the bathroom with no smallest glimpse of herself in any mirror. She knows that even if you wrap yourself in a sheet you are apt to see, but she manages not to.

  Once back from the bathroom, where she found her watch (stopped), and where she was able to braid her hair without looking at it—she is good at this—Karen decides that what she really needs is something to drink. Then she can begin with the guilt over whatever went on last night. But first she will telephone Julian, in California.

  If another person should enter that room, for instance the elderly black waiter delivering the wine that Karen is about to order (this hotel, which is famous, is in Atlanta), he would see, in addition to the mess, a woman whose face is the color of white linen. A crazy-looking woman, with the whitest face and the biggest eyes, dark lake-blue, and the longest, thickest rope of red hair that he has ever seen.

  It is actually only about nine-thirty in Atlanta. Karen has slept less than she thinks she has. Thus in California it is about six-thirty.

  It is early for a phone call, especially since Julian is not alone in his bed, their bed, his and Karen’s. He is there with his lover, Lila Lewisohn, also a psychiatrist. (“Julian’s girl,” would be Karen’s phrase for what Lila is—girl, with ugly emphasis—if Karen actually knew what she now only strongly suspects.)

  This is something that Julian and Lila have never done before, slept together at Julian’s house. Usually there are children at home, as well as Karen, and until recently there was Lila’s husband to whom she had to return, Garrett Lewisohn, a lawyer.

  And tonight, after dinner in Sausalito, they had meant to go back to Lila’s house, on the western, seaward slope of San Francisco. However, as they approached the Golden Gate, the yellow fog lights and heavy traffic, they learned from another motorist that there had been an accident on the bridge, and it would be closed for at least another half hour. Not long to wait; ordinarily they would have done just that: Lila and Julian are accustomed to postponements, to deferral of pleasure. Tonight, though, for whatever reasons, an unusual mood of urgency was upon them (the wine, and the fact that they hadn’t been together for several weeks, Julian having been occupied with holding Karen together for her tour). In the restaurant their hands often met, eyes meeting too, laughing but complicitous, sexual.

  And so, “I don’t want to wait, do you?” Julian.

  “No. But—”

  Julian however had begun to turn the car about and to head too fast toward Mill Valley. Up the winding road to his very large, ultracontemporary house, all glass and steel, among giant redwoods, mammoth ferns.

  Lila has been there before, of course. She and Julian, after all, are colleagues. And the two couples, Julian and Karen, Garrett and Lila, were for a time ostensibly friends.

  As lovers, though, Lila and Julian have mostly gone to motels for love, always as far from the city as they have had time for: Half Moon Bay, Bodega Bay—they seem to seek the coast. More recently, since Garrett left (moving down to Atherton with his pregnant young girlfriend), they have enjoyed the privacy—the incredible luxury, it seems to them—of Lila’s small but pleasant house.

  Tonight, though, Julian’s house. Or Karen’s house. Her room. Her bed.

  • • •

  Just before the phone rings and long before any sunlight penetrates the morning fog that envelops Julian’s house, naked Lila’s very long brown legs are entangled in sheets, her upper body pressed to Julian’s bare bony back. They breathe in unison, deeply.

  (This is a scene that Karen has often imagined. Her most frequent and blackest fantasies are of Lila and Julian, in sexual poses. She has also thought of Julian with female patients; she has imagined him with some sad woman on the worn brown leather sofa in his office, humping away—although this seems much less likely than Julian with Lila.)

  The phone bell. A soft, sudden, and terrible sound.

  Both Julian and Lila, trained doctors, are instantly awake. And both, in the second before Julian answers it, think, Karen. Or maybe a patient; they both hope it will be a patient.

  “This is Dr. Brownfield. Well Karen, of course I’m here, but my dear it is rather early. Six-thirty. Well, I know it’s later where you are. Tuesday, you must be in Atlanta.” He laughs, then coughs. “How is Atlanta? The concert? Well Karen, I’m really sorry. No I didn’t—No I don’t. Karen, I’m sorry. No I didn’t. No of course I don’t blame you. No one will—of course you can’t play when you’re sick. Yes it is unpredictable. No Karen, I am not mad at you. Yes, I do. No, I don’t think I should come to Atlanta, even if I could. No. No. If you need a doctor—No Karen, I am not mad. Yes. Right. Good. Good for you. Goodbye. Love.”

  Hanging up, he leans back against the headboard and looks at Lila.

  She sees that he is utterly, totally exhausted.

  “Karen has a bad cold,” says Julian. “She says.”

  “Oh.” As though Karen could see her, Lila begins to pull sheets up around herself, covering bare breasts.

  “She had to cancel the concert. Of course.”

  “By the way, what’s your name?” Karen, in Atlanta, is speaking to the man who has brought her the wine, a man who is large and old and black, with big gnarled hands. The bottle that he has brought on a napkined silver tray is tall and green, cold, glistening rivulets running down its sides.

  “Calvin Montgomery, ma’am.”

  “Oh Lord, please don’t call me ma’am. My name is Karen, Mrs. Brownfield. But you have a beautiful name.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Brown. Field.”

  Karen laughs. “And now if you could just open it. I’m a pianist, but I feel all thumbs today. Plus which I’ve got a cold.” She laughs again.

  As she watches him closely, eagerly, Calvin Montgomery with his big hands uncorks the wine in a single practiced gesture. “There you are. There’s your cold cure.”

  They both laugh.

  “Oh, Mr. Montgomery, thank you.”

  “Shall I make breakfast here?” Julian asks this of Lila. They are now sitting up in bed, both with sheets drawn up around them.

  Looking at Julian, his thinning gray-brown hair, large sad and gray eyes, Lila thinks as she has before of the deep affinities binding them to each other. We could be brother and sister, she has sometimes thought. Blood ties.

  “I don’t think breakfast,” she tells him. “I don’t feet q
uite, you know, easy here.” Knowing that he must feel the same about her being there. “I’d rather my house. If we have to eat breakfast.”

  “Well, something? Orange juice?” Julian has gotten up, is pulling on a robe. “You’ll feel better after some juice,” he reminds her.

  Lila smiles, grateful. “Or I could just go home. But my car.” Her car of course has been left in San Francisco, and suddenly this transportation problem seems both insuperable and highly symbolic. They are surely not supposed to sleep in this house.

  Tendrils of fog reach around the smallest branches of Julian’s huge redwoods, mysterious white feathers. And from somewhere comes the gentle, ambiguous sound of mourning doves, their softly descending notes.

  I am simply not used to being here, Lila thinks, standing up and beginning to get into her clothes. I’ve never seen it before in the daytime, or almost day. All this fog. Julian is right, she thinks, I need some juice. Blood sugar.

  • • •

  The wine makes Karen feel at the same time physically improved and considerably worse in her head. As shadows disperse and she begins to remember.

  An interview. Yesterday about this time, or was it later? At lunch? Yes, lunch. In any case, she was being interviewed in a strange restaurant in the below-street-level part of this hotel. A more famous, possibly preferable restaurant is billed as “rooftop,” to Karen a terrifying word. And so, this subterranean room, all stones and small calculated waterfalls, and walls of sheet water, quite effective really but slightly scaring.

  Her interviewer is a pale and puffy young man, with a small rosy mouth and blinking white-blue eyes. A Southern, very Southern voice.

  At first he was hard to understand, but gradually, after the skirmishes of small talk, he began to come through. “Married to a psychiatrist,” he was saying. “Must be extremely interesting. Though I don’t suppose they talk a lot about their cases, not supposed to anyways. But don’t you find it just the least little bit of what you might call a threat?”

  “Oh, I do,” Karen said. No one, certainly not the shrink that she herself once went to, though not for long, has ever quite asked this. And Karen realized that from the start she had felt something very sympathetic about this young man. Karen likes fat people; she finds them comforting. Julian is so extremely thin, all sharp bones and stretched dry skin.

  “I don’t need to tell you that the question is solely motivated by a personal curiosity,” the young man assured her, blinking, signaling his commitment to truth. Hal, did he say his name was? Yes. Hal.

  “I’ve just put in so much time with those fellows and lady shrinks too, that for the life of me I can’t imagine a home life with any one of them,” said Hal.

  “Oh, you’re absolutely right,” Karen told him. And then she confided, “I think I’m coming down with a really bad cold. Can you hear it in my voice?”

  “Oh, I sure can. Well, maybe this here ice tea was a mistake.” At first this seemed an odd remark, and then not odd. Karen recognized a certain gleam in those pale eyes, along with a certain timid question in his voice.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she told him, laughing lightly and tossing her long braid back over her shoulder. “We need some stronger stuff. What do folks around here mostly drink?” (Lord, where had she suddenly got that accent?)

  “Bourbon, mostly. Although I’ve gone off that hard stuff myself.” Righteous Hal. “But I can tell you, there’s a certain very nice concoction—” He snapped his fingers for the waiter.

  The concoction when it came was fairly sweet and very strong. Karen could tell it was strong. And watching Hal as he drank, his eager quick repeated sips, she thought, No wonder I like you.

  They had a couple of concoctions, all the time talking in a very civilized way about Karen’s professional history, Hal taking notes: Wellesley, Juilliard, the Paris Conservatory. Brahms, Chopin, Debussy.

  And then, maybe on the third of those drinks, they returned to the question of shrinks. Living with them. Talking to them. The terror.

  “Most probably in their spare time they ought to just only talk to each other,” Hal said (fatally).

  “Oh, you are so right,” Karen told him. “My husband, Julian Brownfield, has this big friend, and when I say big I mean really, really big, you never in your life saw such a big tall woman. Name of Lila Lewisohn.” And out it all poured, in that crazy new sweet Southern voice. All Karen’s worst fears, her ugliest, most powerful fantasies.

  “I can just see her big long legs in some great big old bed, some motel I guess, all wrapped around my skinny white old Julian.”

  Along with the new accent Karen seemed to have acquired a new persona, and one that she liked a lot. She liked being a silly, pretty, somewhat flirty, complaining little woman, talking to that nice big fat old boy. Telling him just about everything.

  Her cold by then was making her sniffle and sneeze, and quite naturally Karen had a lot to say about her condition. “It’s still just coming on strong. I can feel it all over me,” she told Hal. “Although these concoctions of yours are really something else. But you know if you’ll just excuse me I think I’ve got to call my agent. There’s just no way I can play a concert tonight. As a matter of fact I think I’d better make the call from my room. Why don’t you just come on up with me, give me some moral support? Lord God, will he be mad! I’m telling you, fit to kill.”

  So far Karen remembers it all, the whole conversation now plays as precisely as a tape, in her grimed, exhausted mind.

  Now, continuing in her new Southern voice, she thinks, Julian wasn’t very nice to me on the phone. He tells me he cares how I feel, but he doesn’t, not really. All he really cares about is his patients, and that awful old Lila.

  Julian and Lila have left Mill Valley, crossed the bridge, and reached San Francisco, Lila’s house. But although alone in those familiar surroundings they are not quite restored to each other. For one thing there is almost no time. Both have morning patients; Julian must leave. And for another Karen is so present to them both, having just arisen from her bed, been awakened by her voice.

  Lila has made coffee and heated two bagels. With this small nourishment they are perched at Lila’s round kitchen table. It would be pleasant simply to enjoy the moment for what it is, but the fact of what they are, what they do, prevents an avoidance of the subject. Of Karen.

  Julian. “Amazing, really amazing. I still feel a certain amount of guilt over not going to Atlanta.”

  Lila. “Julian the caretaker.”

  “I know; we seem to have struck a perfect balance, she and I.”

  “Right. Whereas Garrett and I were so unbalanced that he had to leave. Or one of us did and it turned out to be him.” But they have already talked a great deal about Garrett—of course they have. They have even discussed at some length the possibility of their needing Garrett for some balance of their own: Since Julian is married to Karen, how will things work out in terms of Julian and Lila, now that Lila is unmarried? They talk a lot, they speculate.

  Not so long ago, all four of those people sat at that same round kitchen table, Lila and Garrett playing host to Julian and Karen. All drinking champagne, good French stuff bought by Garrett. And they were eating something fancy that he had whipped up, crab and mushrooms. After a concert of Karen’s, in Berkeley.

  Karen had played beautifully. Brahms, Mozart, Debussy. A silly Satie. A safe concert, as reviewers would hasten to point out (Karen was unpopular with local critics; her habit of cancellation did not win friends), but still, Karen’s particular lyric flow was present. Playing, she sang. Wonderfully.

  That night Lila, as she looked at Karen, the small exhausted woman hunched over the table, her fallen silk hair a mess, white hands gripping the stem of her glass (Karen tended to break glasses; she did so later, a good glass from Lila’s mother; Garrett was angry)—watching Karen, then, it seemed astounding to Lila that she could have played at all.

  Karen’s beauty, too, was always astounding, even totall
y disheveled, entirely tired. That white, translucent skin, the very wide, dark-blue eyes, small nose, and long delicate mouth. The amazing long red silk hair.

  Sometimes, envisioning Karen, Lila has thought, Well, no wonder. No wonder Julian wants her around just to look at, even if she is so often drunk, impossible. She is so beautiful, and impressively talented. He feels what I would feel, probably.

  “I have this really wonderful group of friends at home,” Karen now remembers telling Hal, once they were up in her room and she had made the phone call. “All people who like to drink, well, you know, too much. And who’ve tried the shrink route, A.A., Betty Ford, all that grim stuff. Well, we all got together and we formed this little club, we called it the Drinking Club. We meet every now and then and we really drink, I mean we just drink up a storm. But the rest of the time, stone-cold sober.”

  By the time she had finished all this about her club, both Karen and Hal were laughing so hard they were crying, she sitting up on her big pink bed and he in a chair near the window—a huge piece of floor-to-ceiling glass that seemed to slant into the room.

  “Only trouble was,” Karen continued, “we got to having our meetings all the time.”

  “You know what?” Hal said, when either of them could speak. “You know what, I’m going to start me a branch of your club right here in Atlanta, and I’m going to start promoting the first meeting right here in this room, right now.”

  And Hal picked up the bedside pink princess phone and began to tap out numbers, and to talk. In the mirror across the room Karen could see herself as he did so: a pretty little woman lying back on the bed, her loosened hair fanned out, prettily (the same bed which is now such a horrible mess).