After You've Gone Read online

  BOOKS BY ALICE ADAMS

  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

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2011

  Copyright © 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 by Alice Adams

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2011. Previously published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 1986.

  Vintage Contemporaries is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Most of the stories in this collection were originally published in the following: The Boston Globe Magazine, Boulevard, Crosscurrents, New Woman, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Self. “Favors” was originally published in Grand Street; “Lost Cat” in Image, and later syndicated by Fiction Network; and “1940: Fall” in Shenandoah.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79817-6

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To Til and Charlie Stewart

  with much love

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  After You’ve Gone

  1940: Fall

  The End of the World

  Child’s Play

  Fog

  Lost Cat

  Tide Pools

  Favors

  Ocracoke Island

  On the Road

  A Sixties Romance

  What to Wear

  Traveling Together

  Your Doctor Loves You

  A Note About the Author

  AFTER YOU’VE GONE

  The truth is, for a while I managed very well indeed. I coped with the house and its curious breakages, and with the bad nights of remembering you only at your best, and the good days suddenly jolted by your ghost. I dealt with the defection of certain old friends, and the crowding-around of a few would-be new best friends. I did very well with all that, in the three months since your departure for Oregon, very well indeed until I began to get these letters from your new person (I reject “lover” as too explicit, and, knowing you, I am not at all sure that “friend” would be applicable). Anyway, Sally Ann.

  (You do remember encouraging me to write to you, as somewhat precipitately you announced your departure—as though extending me a kindness? It will make you feel better, you just managed not to say. In any case, with my orderly lawyer’s mind, I am putting events—or “matters,” as we say—in order.)

  The house. I know that it was and is not yours, despite that reckless moment at the Trident (too many margaritas, too palely glimmering a view of our city, San Francisco) when I offered to put it in both our names, as joint tenants, which I literally saw us as, even though it was I who made payments. However, your two-year occupancy and your incredibly skillful house-husbanding made it seem quite truly yours. (Is this question metaphysical, rather than legal? If the poet-husband of a house is not in fact a husband, whose is the house?) But what I am getting at is this. How could you have arranged for everything to break the week you left? Even the Cuisinart; no one else even heard of a broken Cuisinart, ever. And the vacuum. And the electric blanket. The dishwasher and the Disposal. Not to mention my Datsun. “Old wiring, these older flats,” the repair person diagnosed my household problems, adding, “But you’ve got a beautiful place here,” and he gestured across the park—green, pyramidal Alta Plaza, where even now I can see you running, running, in your eccentric non-regular-runner outfit: yellow shorts, and that parrot-green sweatshirt from God knows where, both a little tight.

  My Datsun turned out simply to need a tune-up, and since you don’t drive I can hardly blame that on you. Still, the synchronism, everything going at once, was hard not to consider.

  Friends. Large parties, but not small dinners, my post-you invitations ran. Or very small dinners—most welcome, from single women friends or gay men; unwelcome from wives-away husbands, or even from probably perfectly nice single men. I am just not quite up to all that yet.

  People whom I had suspected of inviting us because of your poet fame predictably dropped off.

  Nights. In my dreams of course you still are here, or you are leaving and I know that you are, and there is nothing to do to stop you (you have already told me, so sadly, about Sally Ann, and the houseboat in Portland). Recently I have remembered that after my father died I had similar dreams; in those dreams he was dying, I knew, yet I could not keep him alive. But those father dreams have a guilty sound, I think, and I truly see no cause for guilt on my part toward you. I truly loved you, in my way, and I did what I could (I thought) to keep us happy, and I never, never thought we would last very long. Isn’t two years a record of sorts for you, for maybe any non-marrying poet? Sometimes I thought it was simply San Francisco that held you here, your City Lights—Tosca circuit, where you sought out ghosts of Beats. Well, in my dreams you are out there still, or else you are here with me in our (my) bed, and we awaken slowly, sleepily to love.

  Once, a month or so ago, I thought I saw you sitting far back in a courtroom; I saw those damn black Irish curls and slanted eyes, your big nose and arrogant chin, with that cleft. A bad shock, that; for days I wondered if it actually could have been you, your notion of a joke, or some sort of test.

  In all fairness, though—and since I mention it I would like to ask you something. Just why did my efforts at justice, even at seeing your side of arguments, so enrage you? I can hear you shouting: “Why do you have to be so goddam fair, what is this justice of yours?”

  But as I began to say, in all fairness I have to concede that I miss your cooking. On the nights that you cooked, that is. I really liked your tripe soup and your special fettuccine with all those wild mushrooms. And the Sunday scrambled eggs that we never got to till early afternoon.

  And you are a marvel at fixing things, even if they have a tendency not to stay fixed.

  And, most importantly, a first-rate poet; Yale and now the Guggenheim people seem to think so, and surely as you hope the MacArthur group will come around. Having read so little poetry other than yours, I am probably no judge; however, as I repeatedly told you, to me it was magic, pure word-alchemy.

  I do miss it all, the house-fixing and cooking, the love and poetry. But I did very well without it all. Until recently.

  The letters. The first note, on that awful forget-me-not paper, in that small, tight, rounded hand, was a prim little apology: she felt badly about taking you away from me (a phrase from some junior high school, surely) but she also felt sure that I would “understand,” since I am such a fair-minded person (I saw right off that you had described my habits of thought in some detail). I would see that she, a relatively innocent person, would have found your handsomeness-brilliance-sexiness quite irresistible (at that point I wondered if you could have written the letter yourself, which still seems a possibility). She added that naturally by now I would have found a replacement for you, the natural thing for
a woman like me, in a city like San Francisco. That last implication, as to the loose life-styles both of myself and of San Francisco, would seem to excuse the two of you fleeing to the innocence of Portland, Oregon.

  A couple of false assumptions lay therein, however. Actually, in point of fact, I personally might do better, man-wise, in Portland than down here. The men I most frequently meet are young lawyers, hard-core yuppies, a group I find quite intolerable, totally unacceptable, along with the interchangeable young brokers—real-estate dealers and just plain dealers. Well, no wonder that I too took up with a poet, an out-of-shape man with no CDs or portfolio but a trunk full of wonderful books. (I miss your books, having got through barely half of them. And did you really have to take the Moby-Dick that I was in the middle of? Well, no matter; I went out to the Green Apple and stocked up, a huge carton of books, the day you left.)

  In any case, I felt that she, your young person, your Sally Ann, from too much evidence had arrived at false conclusions. In some ways we are more alike, she and I, than she sees. I too was a setup, a perfect patsy for your charm, your “difference.”

  But why should she have been told so much about me at all? Surely you must have a few other topics; reading poems aloud as you used to do with me would have done her more good, or at least less harm, I believe. But as I pondered this question, I also remembered several of our own conversations, yours and mine, having to do with former lovers. It was talk that I quite deliberately cut short, for two clear reasons: one, I felt an odd embarrassment at my relative lack of what used to be called experience; and, two, I did not want to hear about yours. You did keep on trying, though; there was one particular woman in New York, a successful young editor (though on a rather junky magazine, as I remember), a woman you wanted me to hear all about, but I would not. “She has nothing to do with us,” I told you (remember?). It now seems unfortunate that your new young woman, your Sally Ann, did not say the same about me.

  Next came a letter which contained a seemingly innocent question: should Sally Ann go to law school, what did I think? On the surface this was a simple request for semi-expert advice; as she went on and on about it, though, and on and on, I saw that she was really asking me how she could turn herself into me, which struck me as both sad and somewhat deranged. Assuming that you have an ideal woman on whom Sally Ann could model herself, I am hardly that woman. You don’t even much like “lady lawyers,” as in some of your worst moments you used to phrase it.

  Not having answered the first note at all (impossible; what could I have said?), I responded to this one, because it seemed required, with a typed postcard of fairly trite advice: the hard work involved, the overcrowding of the field, the plethora of even token women.

  …

  And now she had taken to writing me almost every day; I mean it, at least every other day. Does she have no other friends? No relatives, even, or old school ties? If she does, in her present state of disturbance they have faded from her mind (poor, poor Sally Ann, all alone with you, in Portland, on a Willamette River houseboat), and only I remain, a purely accidental, non-presence in her life.

  The rains have begun in Portland, and she understands that they will continue throughout the winter. She does not really like living on a houseboat, she finds it frightening; the boat rocks, and you have told her that all boats rock, there is nothing to be done. (You must be not exactly in top form either. I never heard you admit to an inability to remedy anything—even my Datsun; you said you could fix it and you did, temporarily.)

  You have found some old friends over at Reed College, she tells me; you hang out a lot over there, and you tell her that she would be very much happier with a job. Very likely she would, but you have taken her to an extremely high unemployment area.

  She doesn’t understand your poetry at all, and doesn’t know what to say when you read it to her. Well, this is certainly a problem that I too could have had, except that I dealt with it head-on, as it were, simply and clearly saying that I didn’t understand poetry, that I had not read much or ever studied it. But that to me your poems sounded marvelous—which they did; I really miss the sound of them, your words.

  You talk about me more and more.

  You are at home less and less. And now Sally Ann confesses to me that she used to be a waitress at the Tosca; on some of the nights when I was at home, here in San Francisco (actually I used to be grateful for a little time to catch up on work), when I assumed you were just hanging out in North Beach, you were actually courting Sally Ann, so to speak. Well, at this point I find this new information quite painless to absorb; it simply makes me miss you even less. But Sally Ann wonders if I think you could possibly be seeing someone else now? She says that you’ve mentioned a French professor at Reed, a most talented woman, you’ve said. Do I think—?

  Well, I most certainly do think; you seem to prefer women with very respectable professions, poor Sally Ann representing the single rule-proving exception, I suppose. Some sort of lapse in calculation on your part—or quite likely Sally Ann had more to do with me than with herself, if you see what I mean, and I think you will. In any case, a fatal error all around.

  Because it is clear to me that in an emotional sense you are battering this young woman. She is being abused by you. I could prove it to a jury. And, unlike me, she is quite without defenses.

  You must simply knock it off. For one thing, it’s beneath you, as you surely in your better, saner, kinder moments must clearly see (you’re not all bad; even in my own worst moments I recall much good, much kindness, even). Why don’t you just give her a ticket to somewhere, along with some gentle, ego-preserving words (heaven knows you’re at your best with words), and let her go? Then you can move in your Reed College French professor and live happily there on your houseboat—almost forever, at least until the Portland rains let up and you feel like moving on.

  As for myself, it seems only fair to tell you that I have indeed found a new friend—or, rather, an old friend has reappeared in my life in another role. (Fair. As I write this, I wonder if in some way, maybe, you were right all along to object to my notion of fairness? There was always a slightly hostile getting-even element in my justice? Well, I will at least admit that possibility.) In any case, I am taking off on a small trip to Jackson, Wyoming, day after tomorrow, with my old-new friend. About whom I can only at this moment say so far so good, in fact very good indeed—although I have to admit that I am still a little wary, after you. However, at least for me he is a more known quality than you were (we were undergraduates together, in those distant romantic Berkeley days), and I very much doubt that you’ll be getting any letter of complaint regarding me. He already knows what he’s getting, so to speak.

  And so, please wish me well, as I do you (I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the MacArthur thing).

  And, I repeat, let Sally Ann go. All three of us, you, me, and Sally Ann, will be much better off—you without her, and she without you. And me without the crazy burden of these letters, which, if I were really fair, I would send on to you.

  1940: FALL

  “Hasn’t anyone noticed those clouds? They’re incredibly beautiful.” These words were spoken with some despair, for indeed no one had noticed, by a woman named Caroline Gerhardt, on a late evening in September, 1940. Caroline Coffin Gerhardt, actually, or so she signed the many letters that she wrote to newspapers, both local and further afield: the Capitol Times, right there in Madison, Wisconsin, and Colonel McCormick’s infamous (Caroline’s word) Chicago Tribune.

  The ponderously shifting, immense white clouds contemplated by Caroline were moving across an enormous black sky, above one of Madison’s smaller lakes. This house, Caroline’s, was perched up on a fairly high bluff, yielding views of the dark water in which the reflected clouds were exaggerated, distorted by the tiny flicker of the waves. There was also a large full moon, but full moons—at least to Caroline—seemed much less remarkable than those clouds.

  No one else in the room noticed anything
remarkable, because almost all of them, all much younger than Caroline, were dancing slowly, slowly, body to body, to some slow, very sexy recorded music. The “children,” as Caroline thought of these steamy adolescents, especially her own two girls, have only taken romantic notice of the moon. Beautiful raven-haired Amy Gerhardt, who resembles her absent father rather than smaller, pale, and somewhat wispy Caroline—Amy’s perfectly painted lips have just grazed her partner’s ear as she whispered, “You see? Another full moon. That makes seven since February.” The boy pressed her more tightly into his own body. All those tall boys and smooth-haired, gardenia-smelling girls danced too closely, Caroline had observed, with pain. Hardly dancing at all. Six or eight couples, two or three stags, in the big, low-ceilinged, pine-paneled room—the game room. Dancing, their eyes half closed, not looking out to the lake, to the moon and sky.

  Caroline’s letters to the papers had to do with the coming war, with what Caroline saw as its clear necessity: Hitler must be stopped. The urgency of it possessed her, what Hitler was doing to the Jews, the horror of it always in her mind. And the smaller countries, systematically devastated. There in the isolationist Midwest she was excoriated as a warmonger (small, gentle, peaceable Caroline). Or worse: more than once—dirty toilet paper in the mail.

  She also received from quite other sources pictures that were just beginning to be smuggled out of the camps. Buchenwald, Dachau.

  She was actively involved in trying to help the refugees who had begun to arrive in Madison, with housing, jobs, sometimes at the university.

  There was in fact a refugee boy at the party in Caroline’s game room that night. Egon Heller, the son of an anti-Nazi editor, now dead in Auschwitz. Egon and his mother had arrived from England. Hearing of them, going over to see them, and liking the mother (able actually to help her with a translator job), Caroline impulsively invited the boy. “If you’re not busy tonight, there’s a little party at my house. My daughters—about your age. They’re both at Wisconsin High. Oh, you too? Oh, good.”