Listening to Billie Read online

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2011

  Copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977 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 1978.

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

  Portions of this book originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and Redbook.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following to reprint previously published material:

  Chappell & Co., Inc. (New York): For use of lyrics from “Now They Call It Swing” by Hirsch, Deleath, Cootier and Handman. Copyright © 1938 by Santly Bros.–Joy, Inc. Copyright renewed, assigned to Chappell & Co., Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Famous Music Corporation: For use of lyrics from “Blue Orchids” by Hoagie

  Carmichael. Copyright © 1939 by Famous Music Corporation. Copyright renewed 1966 by Famous Music Corporation.

  Chappell & Co. Ltd (United Kingdom): For use of lyrics from “I Cover the Waterfront” by John W. Green and Edward Heyman. Copyright © 1933 Harms Inc. Reproduced by kind permission of Victoria Music Publishing Co. Ltd (Chappell & Co. Ltd).

  Warner Bros. Inc: For use of lyrics from “I Cover the Waterfront” © 1933 Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Chappell & Co. Ltd (United Kingdom): For use of lyrics from “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” music by Harold Arlen, words by Ted Koehler. Copyright © 1932 Harms Inc. (Warner Bros.). Reproduced by kind permission of Chappell & Co. Ltd.

  Warner Bros. Inc.: For use of lyrics from “ I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” by Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen. © 1932 Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79822-0

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For Victoria Wilson

  with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1 - Billie, Alive

  2 - Eliza’s House

  3 - In Maine

  4 - In Paris

  5 - Office Work

  6 - Phone Calls and Firecrackers

  7 - Miriam

  8 - A Sudden Marriage

  9 - Bad News from All Over

  10 - And Some Good News

  11 - Expensive Hotels

  12 - Stopping Smoking

  13 - Josephine: Notes Toward an Autobiography

  14 - Daria and the White House

  15 - Fantastic Sex

  16 - Detritus: After Reed

  17 - Daria, Visited by Catherine

  18 - Women Friends

  19 - Catherine’s Baby

  20 - Eliza at Forty

  21 - Reed and Daria

  22 - Eliza and Kathleen

  23 - “Watergate”

  24 - Reed

  25 - Eliza, Listening to Herself

  26 - A House, a Lake and Islands

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  1 / Billie, Alive

  Billie is late—of course, she is always late—but the crowd in this small packed room is not resigned: people are restless, and tense. There is a lot of lighting of cigarettes, looking at watches, loud orders for more drinks. And there are scattered rumors: she’s sick, she’s not coming, been in a wreck—she’s just phoned to say she’ll be there in ten minutes. And eerily, throughout all that waiting for Billie, on the huge and garish jukebox one of her records is playing; from out of all that poison-colored neon tubing Billie’s beautiful, rich and lonely voice is singing, “I cover the waterfront, I’m watching the sea—”

  And then suddenly she is there, and everybody knows, and they crane their heads backward to see her, since she has come in by the street entrance like anyone else. Or, not like anyone else at all: she is more beautiful, more shining, holding her face forward like a flower, bright-eyed and smiling, high yellow cheekbones, white teeth and cream-white gardenia at her ear. She is wearing a big fur coat, and behind her is a slouch-hatted man with a huge dog, a Dane, that is straining on a leash. The man has a bandage on his hand: he is Billie’s manager, and the dog, Billie’s dog, bit him on the hand on the way to the show, and that is why they are late.

  With a wonderful gesture Billie throws her coat down on the stage, and for a moment she stands there in the spotlight, mouthing the words that are coming from the jukebox—“Will the one I love, be coming back to me?”—as everyone laughs and screams and applauds.

  Somewhere in that audience, probably up near the front, is a very young and pretty small girl, who is not paying much attention to Billie. Eliza Hamilton, with long smooth blond hair that curls suddenly at the ends, and dark blue eyes. She has serious and obsessive problems of her own: is she pregnant? Her heavy breasts are heavier, and sore. And if she is pregnant, what should she do? Should she marry Evan Quarles, the paler blond and sad, Deep Southern young man at her right? He would like them to marry, and that is strange: Eliza knows that she is more in love than he is, but it is he who urges marriage. He is deeply disturbing, mysterious to her; she is both excited and obscurely alarmed by Evan—is that “in love”? He wants them to marry. He has a teaching job for next fall at a small boys’ school. Raleigh, in New Hampshire. Now she looks at Evan with a mixture of enmity and curiosity: who is he?

  Eliza is barely listening to Billie, who now, with her small combo in the background, is singing, “Once they called it jazztime, to a buck and wing—”

  Singing, swinging it out.

  But Eliza retained that scene of Billie’s entrance, and Billie singing. (Singing what? What was she wearing?) She kept it somewhere in her mind; she brought it out and stared at it as she might a stone, something opalescent. At times she wondered how much of it she had imagined. She was a somewhat literary girl, who occasionally wrote poems, although she never finished them, and she did not take this occupation seriously, not yet. For one thing, she felt that she was not the right shape for a poet; a poet, a woman poet, should be tall and thin, like her mother, Josephine, who was a successful writer—powerful, impressive, really formidable—but not a poet. I am too small and round to be a poet, Eliza thought, and of that she thought, Ridiculous!

  • • •

  Should she have an abortion? Who would know a doctor who would do it? Who would pay for it? Not Evan, and certainly not Josephine; she could never even tell Josephine.

  But even in the midst of such frenzied speculations, Eliza is aware that this evening—these hours—are important; she knows she will remember. And she thinks of the following Monday, when she will be back in Connecticut, in school, and she will tell her friends about seeing Billie—how beautiful she was, her voice. How Evan Quarles, the interesting older man, took her to Fifty-second Street to hear Billie Holiday. She will not tell any friend that she might be pregnant.

  Billie has stopped singing, left the stage, and Evan says, “I’d buy you a gardenia if I weren’t allergic to them.” He laughs ambiguously, and he waves away the haggard, spike-lashed woman with the tray of corsages—gardenias, wilting rosebuds. “You haven’t finished your drink,” he says. “Drink up. God knows they’re weak enough.”

  Will he want to make love later? Will he take her back to his place, on Horatio Street, in the Village? Eliza can’t be sure of anything with Evan. She gulps at her drink obediently.

  Evan gestures
that the room is too noisy for conversation. True enough, but is he not having a good time?

  Eliza looks around at all the other talking people, and she suddenly perceives, feels, that there is an extraordinary number of handsome young men, all strangers, all unexplored and possible. She looks at them intently, the gray flannel suits or tweed coats, the young male faces, some still with summer tans—and so attractive, all of them. Aware of her own look, its intentness, she wonders what message she is delivering: is she somehow inviting them, or saying goodbye, as she would to other men if she should marry? And if she should not be pregnant, will she meet one of these new young men months later, and together will they remember hearing, seeing Billie? Will that happen?

  Then Eliza notices that the young woman at the next table is heavily pregnant, so huge she must sit back in her chair. Eliza’s spirits sink, her fantasy vanishes. She recognizes that young woman as an omen, a terrible sign: she, Eliza, is pregnant.

  Most of Evan’s friends lived near him in the Village, around Abingdon Square, West Fourteenth Street. Young men recently down from Harvard or Yale—a few from Princeton, Evan’s school. Some had graduated, a surprising number had been expelled—it was never quite clear for what.

  They worked in publishing, or on magazines. They were all vaguely “literary.” They “wrote.” All except Evan, who wanted to give up all that; he was serious about teaching. They were fond of Twenties’ fiction, Thirties’ poets. Firbank and Fitzgerald, Auden and Isherwood and Spender. They were also fond of veiled jokes about “boys who like boys,” and their code words for that condition, thanks to Senator McCarthy, were “Security Risk.” “Do you think he could be a Security Risk?” “Well, it’s not unlikely.” Discreet laughter.

  All, to Eliza, heady and hyper-sophisticated stuff.

  Some of them even smoked marijuana, then called “tea.” Evan didn’t like it. “I’ll stick to my proved old bourbon.” Heavy drinking was also new to Eliza. She and Evan always were a little drunk when they made love.

  Evan wanted to get away from his friends. Eliza understood that they made him nervous. He wanted to make a new life in the New England countryside. With her.

  Now Billie is walking back onto the stage; amid thundering applause, shouts and whistles, she saunters into the smoke-beamed center of light; she stands there, one hip thrust forward. She scans the crowd as though she could see everyone there. Is she possibly seeing the men and feeling the urgent attraction that Eliza felt a few minutes before? Her eyes are blank, and her smile says nothing.

  “She looks bad,” Evan whispers—too loudly, Eliza feels, even in that noisy room. “Drugs—she can’t last long.”

  “Georgia, Georgia, no peace I find …” sings Billie, whose beautiful face has come alive, whose eyes say everything.

  Married to Evan, and pregnant, Eliza sometimes played Billie’s records, always remembering her face and the creamy velvet flower in her hair.

  Evan was excessively busy; he took his teaching and his students with a passionate seriousness. He seemed to believe that sex was bad for pregnant women. Eliza felt heavily distasteful to herself, as well as to Evan.

  When their child was born, a fat blond girl whom they named Catherine, Eliza knew that she was no longer “in love” with Evan, but perhaps that had been replaced by motherhood? In any case she loved her daughter very much. Having vaguely felt that her own mother, successful Josephine, was unmaternal (did Josephine ever feed her? Eliza could only remember maids), Eliza concentrated on feeding and loving Catherine.

  Perhaps forgetting Evan?

  One bright fall day at lunch, in his soft Southern voice, Evan announced, “The most beautiful boy in the world has appeared in my Cicero class.”

  Eliza was feeding Catherine in her highchair. “Really?” she said. She was distracted, spooning mashed plums into Catherine’s purple mouth.

  “Really. He’s enough to make me wonder if I could be queer. A Security Risk.” Saying this, Evan laughed unsuccessfully, ending in a cough. He had gained a lot of weight in the past couple of years. He was drinking too much.

  Eliza was unpleasantly struck by what he had said, and she thought, perhaps unkindly, that he was not really sophisticated enough to get away with a remark of that sort. Or was he testing her sophistication? Also, since they almost never made love, what he said could only be depressing.

  But then, in the following months, as it became clear that Evan was truly, obsessionally in love with that beautiful boy, Eliza experienced a sort of relief: his distaste for her was not her fault; she was not a distasteful person, she was simply a woman.

  She was much less shocked by the idea of actual homosexuality than Evan was (it was not the same as jokes about Security Risks), and thus—or so she felt the situation—she was faced with two necessities: one, of comforting Evan, of saying that what he felt was all right (she was not worried about scandal; guilty Evan would not “make a pass” at that beautiful boy, would only follow him around helplessly); and two, of separating herself from him.

  Because of Catherine, it was more immediately practical for Evan to move out, and so he did, discreetly, to a local inn, called The Ark—an ancient, looming place, in which both Josephine and Eliza’s half-sister, Daria Paulus, had stayed for occasional visits.

  Once they were divorced, Eliza planned to move to California.

  One night, alone, in The Ark, Evan took an overdose of sleeping pills along with his bourbon.

  Seeing his dead face while she was still in shock—just before the rush of namable emotions, the grief and guilt and rage—Eliza first thought, How strange; how happy he looks now.

  2 / Eliza’s House

  With Evan’s insurance money, and with a little of her own capital, Eliza was able to buy, at last, a small cottage in San Francisco, on the eastern slope of Russian Hill. A small hilltop house from which enormous views were visible: a sweep of the Bay, Treasure Island and the long Bay Bridge, the hills of Oakland and Berkeley. Boats, and lights and stars. And the situation of the house was perfect, as people were apt to say. Its being on a cul-de-sac insured some privacy and safety—although parking was a considerable problem, which was one of the reasons that Eliza did not own a car. (Others were ideological; she disapproved of their fumes, and the danger of cars.)

  Her house had the shape of a drawing by a child: square, with a tall chimney and symmetrically slanted roof. Two large rooms upstairs, separated by a hall and a bathroom, and downstairs was the same arrangement: living room, and across the entrance hall a generous kitchen-dining room. Compact, complete.

  In the living room there was too much furniture: a lot of smooth bare wood—a carved mantel, salvaged from a wrecking company and lovingly stripped down to its warm mahogany, some small low tables, a rocker. Refinishing furniture was a minor occupation but a major pleasure of Eliza’s. She had a sensual feeling for wood, for its smooth unvarnished touch. She even enjoyed the messier aspects of stripping it, the Jasco and steel wool, fine sandpaper and turpentine.

  The upholstered things, the big sofa and three club chairs, were soft and somewhat shabby; Eliza, who was not handy at upholstery, had attempted to do it herself.

  However, the total effect of the house was generous and comfortable, if a little disheveled. It overflowed, literally, with books and records and magazines, usually with music and flowers and good smells of food.

  And at that time of her life Eliza’s visual effect was rather like that of her house; she, too, often looked a little disheveled, though attractive and comfortable; a generously built small woman. And just as her house beneath its surface mess was clean, so she was fastidious about baths and underclothing, but often wore jeans that were stained with Jasco or olive oil—something—and often old shabby sweaters.

  Sometimes a man who was in love with Eliza would feel that the house was too perfect, too complete, as the same man might feel that Eliza as a woman was too independent, that there was no room for him. A man whom she saw sometimes, whom she th
ought of as The Lawyer, felt an exclusion by the house, and he had no better house to offer Eliza—Eliza and her daughter Catherine. On the other hand, for another man, The Consul, an intense, illicit lover of a few years back—for The Consul’s purposes that house was ideal; it suited his dashing arrivals, often for brief visits while taxis waited expensively below. And on the many occasions when it was impossible for him to arrive, the thought of Eliza’s house assuaged his guilt; there she would be, nevertheless, safe and comfortable in her attractive house, among her records and her books, with her delightful small daughter for company.

  During the summer after Billie Holiday died, or killed herself, was killed—one could take any view—after that bad July night (Eliza reacted to the death in a violent, personal way), she did not play Billie’s records, but sometimes, with a morbid insistence, they came over the radio, unbidden.

  On one such night, that August, Eliza was sitting with a new young man, with whom she had earlier had dinner; he was neither a Lawyer nor a Consul; she was not quite sure what he did. Red-haired, slightly plump, a Boston accent. He had been told to “look up” Eliza by her half-sister, Daria, ten years younger than Eliza, now in school in Boston.

  From outside, a mean California summer wind enwrapped the house, its threatening whine clearly audible above the music, above Billie’s song. And perhaps for that reason—the wind—otherwise inexplicable tears came close to Eliza’s eyes, and she turned to the young man as though he might be of help.

  Possibly, probably, later on they would make love; his proprietary hand on Eliza’s knee made it clear that he believed that would happen, although as she thought of this, looking at him and even smiling, Eliza realized that she didn’t want to—she wished that she were alone. And she discovered in herself some warning, some certain sign of an approaching danger. For one thing, she did not come close to weeping every time she listened to Billie, even now; she was not so sentimental as that. And it had been years since she wept over Evan Quarles.