The Stories of Alice Adams Read online

  “Tell me, will you tell me something I want to know?” asked Penelope furiously. “Do you really like those southern Italian girls, or Mexicans best? Oh, I know, as long as they’re dark and sort of sleazy you don’t much care. The most beautiful girl I ever knew was Corsican—thick, thick black hair and wild eyes and the sexiest mouth. My God, why couldn’t you have met Maria? Why me? It’s like the end of Proust, where Swann says that he’s ruined his life for a woman who was not his type at all.”

  “I fell in love with you,” said Van, quite truthfully.

  “In love. Jesus. Well, have a divine time in the city. With whoever.” She sighed, and in an instant had fallen into one of her short but deep and blessed sleeps.

  Van went into the kitchen and told Miss Bird that he was going.

  Outside Penelope’s windows, the October landscape showed an extraordinary spectrum of yellow: the wild-rose bush that grew beside the door was pinkish yellow, next to the brighter-yellow lilac leaves. Out in the meadow the grasses were yellow green, and the yellow yarrow bloomed there still. Beside the river, willow leaves had turned to rust; in the dark rapids ridiculous birds, called bobbers, dipped and swam, and across the water, from a stand of aspens, fluttered the most brilliant yellow of all, as clear and pure as sunlight.

  Van’s floozy—he both winced and was amused at Penelope’s word—was in fact a pleasant and quite unspectacular girl named Joan, who had arrived in the office as a Kelly Girl, to help out the overburdened secretary. Neither Italian nor Mexican, in fact Scottish, Joan had pale-brown hair, more or less the color that Penelope’s had been.

  “What you don’t understand,” Van sometimes imagined saying to Penelope, as he drove the seemingly endless three-hour trip away from her, toward San Francisco and Joan, “what you don’t understand is that I might stare at those big sexy dark girls, or I might make a pass at one of them at a party, if I’d had enough to drink. But ten years ago it was you, you with what you continue to call your dirty-blond hair, that I fell in love with. And now for quite another kind of love there is Joan.” Impossible, of course, to say this to Penelope, and he found it harder and harder to talk to her at all. What can you say to someone who knows that she is dying, and who continuously rages at that deprivation?

  In fact, Van had had one and only one affair with the sort of girl who Penelope insisted was his “type.” She had been a woman of dazzling darkness, of a vast and careless voluptuousness. He had loved her wildly for a time, and the repeated failures of their acts of love had been to him a bitter and amazing disappointment. This was shortly before he met Penelope, who unfortunately remembered seeing him with his “dark prize” (her phrase) at a party some months earlier.

  He had fallen in love at once with Penelope; she had been an enchantment to him, stirring all his senses—a wild delight.

  She was at that time a thin young woman, divorced, with no children; she lived scantily on a part-time job in an art gallery. Her two manias, both unfamiliar to Van, were for chamber music and for conversation. When she wasn’t listening to music—composers he hadn’t heard of before: Telemann, Hummel, Boccherini—she was passionately talking, examining, commenting, then laughing a lot at it all. She read a lot of novels. They married rather hastily, they were often happy and sometimes they quarreled. And then she was sick—then dying.

  Aside from the color of her hair, Joan, Van’s Kelly Girl, his “floozy,” was as unlike Penelope as one woman could be to another. Soft and plump, Joan was so passive, so vague and dreamy in manner that at first, hiring her, Van had nervously wondered if she was stupid—or possibly drugged. But as she sat at her typewriter, looking tranced, her fingers literally flew over the keys, and her work was perfect: the most abstruse words correctly spelled, the legal forms all exact, and all this was produced with a speed that was embarrassing to the other, regular secretary. Joan was not dumb. Eventually Van decided that she was concentrated on some unknown area of her own mind, which he was never to discover.

  The “affair”—Van did not quite think of it as that; in fact he had no words for what went on between them, and tended to use Penelope’s: “floozy,” “getting laid,” although he liked Joan, and meant no disrespect—whatever it was had begun predictably enough. On a certain evening last spring Van had an unavoidable dinner engagement with clients. Also, there was more immediately important work than Joan could finish by five—papers that Van had to take with him to court early the following morning. “No sweat,” said Joan, in her pleasant passive way, lifting moony brown eyes to Van’s darker brown. “I live sort of near you, on Ashbury, and I’ve got a machine like this at home. You could stop and pick up the stuff on your way by.”

  Somehow what came through to him as most odd in this statement was the fact that she had such an expensive piece of office machinery at home, an IBM Selectric, but being hard-pressed he accepted her offer without much thought.

  The dinner with clients, at a “top” French restaurant, was carelessly seasoned and terribly expensive—was boring and unproductive. Driving away from it, having drunk an unnecessary final brandy, Van was assaulted by one of the awful and engulfing waves of self-pity that normally he was able to fight off. In that dark and rainy moment, driving through snarls of downtown night traffic, he saw himself as the hard-working husband of an ungratefully dying woman.

  And it was more or less in that mood that he arrived at Joan’s apartment, in the neighborhood that five years back had been loosely designated as “the Haight.”

  Concerned with himself, Van had not thought about Joan and her possible surroundings; probably he would have imagined plants and posters, what he thought of as the trappings of the young. Certainly he was not prepared for such visible luxury, so much soft pale leather, such a heavy bronze-bound glass coffee table, on which there was a huge jar of exotic flowers. In fact his look of surprise, on that first entrance, was enough to cause her to say, though softly, “I made a lot of money in the sixties, when anyone could.” (Weeks later, in a moment of intimacy, he could ask how—how had she got so rich, so young? “Dealing, mostly.” And when at first he did not understand she said, “Just grass, and sometimes acid. Never anything hard, and I don’t deal at all anymore.” She liked the variety of life as a Kelly Girl.)

  Nor was he prepared for the mild and friendly pleasures of being in bed with Joan, which he was, rather soon, that first night. “Love,” or whatever it was with Joan, was so totally unlike what love had been with Penelope that his guilt was decreased (a little); with Joan there were no wild sensual flights, there was no amazement. Ease and warmth and friendliness were what he felt with Joan. Some gratitude. Some guilt.

  The guilt in fact went in both directions—or, rather, toward both women. Guilt toward Joan because he spent so little time with her, never more than an hour, sometimes less; even when he was staying overnight in town he left her scrupulously early and went back to his own place to sleep, back to his own phone.

  Guilt toward Penelope because he was unable to keep her from dying.

  Now, in the bright and boring sunshine, the relentless three hours of the trip to San Francisco, Van was mildly thinking of Joan, whom he expected to see that night. He even (improbably) imagined a conversation about her with Penelope. “Not quite your ordinary Kelly Girl,” he imagined himself saying—to Penelope, who had sometimes accused him of being square. “She made a lot of money during the sixties selling dope. Sort of an interesting woman.”

  But, along with the too familiar smell of onions at Vacaville, an equally familiar depression settled into his mind. What, really, was so interesting about selling dope? Joan was not an interesting woman; Penelope was. Joan was simply very nice.

  One of the things that Van most hated about this drive, both ways, was his obsessive fear that Penelope might die while he was on the highway, locked into speeding steel and burning rubber, into the screaming monotony of a superhighway. She could die while he was concentrated on passing a giant diesel freight truck, straining o
n the final lap of its cross-country haul—could die while he was passing the tollbooth at Vallejo and thinking, Thirty more miles.

  Arrived at his office, in a converted Victorian house out on Pine Street, Van was informed by his secretary that his anticipated business lunch had been canceled—good: more uncluttered time for work. Miss Gibson had called—Joan, currently a Kelly Girl at an office somewhere in the Jack Tar Building. A court date had been shifted forward into December. A client had called to complain about his bill.

  Van calculated: if he worked through lunchtime, ordering something, he could spend that extra couple of hours taking Joan out to dinner—a thing that he had never done, and felt badly about not doing. He could still go to bed early in his own Twin Peaks place, and be up early and back to work as planned.

  But Miss Joan Gibson was unavailable on the phone, out of the office on an errand, or something, and it was midafternoon before Van reached her, and rather proudly invited her out for dinner.

  “Wow, that sounds so nice,” she said. “But of all the lousy breaks—my father’s in town today.”

  “Your father?” She had never mentioned a father, and for a single instant it occurred to Van that she might be lying. But Joan wouldn’t lie; she didn’t need to. She would have said, as she had a couple of times before, “I’m really sorry, but I’ve got something else that I have to do.”

  And now she laughed, softly and pleasantly. “Yes, my father. He lives in Salt Lake; he’s sort of a nice old guy. You’d like him. But I guess that’s not such a neat idea.”

  “No, I guess not. Well, I hope I’ll see you soon.”

  “Yes, really. And I’m sorry about tonight. Call me when you get back down, O.K.?”

  Such was the friendly and casually intimate tone of their connection. Leaving the phone, Van was smiling to himself.

  Then, recalculating his time and his work, he saw that if he again ordered something portable at his desk for dinner, and continued to work, he would be entirely through by nine or ten at the latest. He would not have to stay over; he could be back up in the mountains with Penelope by midnight or so.

  He had a ham-and-cheese sandwich for dinner, and coffee, and he left the office at a little after nine.

  And by eleven that night he had passed Auburn, and begun the third and final hour of his journey, the sixty miles or so of ascent into the mountains, from two to six thousand feet.

  On either side of the highway, in the darkness, the black shapes of trees diminished as he climbed, and at last he was up in a barren and lonely landscape of rocks, of stretching waste.

  Suddenly, near Donner Summit, the yellow edge of the rising moon appeared from behind an outcropping of rocks. A ridiculously shaped oval moon, a perfect egg—a Humpty-Dumpty moon that disappeared behind a rock as quickly, and as foolishly, as it had arisen.

  Penelope was awake.

  “Darling, what a lovely surprise,” she said, in a voice from months or years ago. She was sitting up in bed, reading by lamplight, with something pale and floating about her head.

  Van kissed her cheek, and then sat in the bedside chair. He told her about getting his work done, mentioning cases that he had talked about before. His trip home. The moon. “It was really a ludicrous moon. It looked just like Humpty-Dumpty,” he said.

  And Penelope laughed—her old light laugh that had once seemed to touch his skin like lace.

  Remission. That was the word that Miss Bird whispered to Van as they both witnessed Penelope during the next few days, then weeks. But Van rejected the word; he knew that he was in the presence of a miracle.

  Outside, in the bright cool October air, the leaves slowly darkened from yellow to burnished gold, and in the house the rooms were full of the sounds of flutes and clarinets, of violins and cellos—Brahms and Schubert, Boccherini, Telemann.

  Which is not to say that Penelope was really well: when, as she infrequently did, she got out of bed and moved around the house, her movements were painfully, haltingly slow. But she talked a lot now—gently, amusingly, affectionately. She was so nearly her old self that it was hard for Van not to hope: perhaps she could be like this for years?

  Only once—on the day, in fact, of the first snowfall of that season, a light white dusting that lay softly among the meadow grass—on that day, with the most terrible sadness, Penelope asked, “Do you know what this is like?” (She did not have to explain what she meant by “this.”) “It’s like having to separate from someone you’re wildly in love with. When you desperately think that you’d give twenty years of your life for another hour together. I wonder if maybe that’s what I’ve done. Taken extra hours. Made that bargain, somehow. Sometime.”

  Unbearably moved, at the same time Van experienced a spurt of jealousy. About whom had she felt such a desperate love? Not for him; their love affair had been passionate but without despair. No anguished separations. He himself had felt such desperation for his “dark prize,” a feeling that he had forgotten, or that did not occur to him now.

  But then smilingly Penelope said, “Van, darling, I do feel guilty about your staying up here so much, but of course it is lovely,” and she reached to touch his hand with her white, white blue-veined hand.

  She even looked, in a way, quite wonderful: the vague pale scarves about her head intensified the darkness of her eyes, the firm small structure of her nose. You look beautiful, he wanted to say, but he was afraid of a sound of mockery.

  • • •

  Early in the summer after Penelope died, Van married Joan. (Penelope died, as he had feared, while he was on the road, during one of those horrendously dull blurs between Auburn and San Francisco, early in November.) Van and Joan moved her expensive possessions up the hill from her Ashbury apartment to his Twin Peaks flat.

  It all worked out quite well, including the furniture, which fit. Joan stopped being a Kelly Girl and took cooking lessons, and became a skillful cook. They made love often, and for the most part happily.

  The only problem was—that Van was just slightly bored. As he had surmised some time ago, Joan was not a very interesting woman. But he didn’t really mind this touch of boredom; it left him more time to himself. Since they talked rather little, Van began to read books that he had “always meant” to read. Novels, in fact, that Penelope had recommended. Proust, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina and, finally, Wuthering Heights, which made him weep—all alone, over a final brandy.

  In fact, since Joan was a person who lived most vitally during the day (her favorite time for love was on waking, in the morning), and who often went to bed very early, Van took to drinking a little too much late at night, alone, confronted with his dark and sprawling city view of the light-scattered San Francisco hills. Penelope had been a night person; she had chosen this flat for its spectacular night view.

  He had sold the mountain house soon after Penelope died, at a loss, because he was unable to imagine a stay up there without her. And now sometimes he dreamily imagined that he was back in the mountains, imagined that the actual sounds of traffic below his windows were river sounds, and that he was with Penelope.

  Unhappily it was not always a loving and gentle Penelope that he believed he was with; he could remember Penelope the shrew quite accurately. (Had she been shrewish on purpose so that he would miss her less? He could believe that of complex Penelope.)

  But now when she hissed that he didn’t love her, that she was not his type—now he could say, and strongly enough to convince her, “You’re the most remarkable and interesting woman I’ve ever known. I’ve never really loved anyone but you.”

  Roses, Rhododendron

  One dark and rainy Boston spring of many years ago, I spent all my after-school and evening hours in the living room of our antique-crammed Cedar Street flat, writing down what the Ouija board said to my mother. My father, a spoiled and rowdy Irishman, a sometime engineer, had run off to New Orleans with a girl, and my mother hoped to learn from the board if he would come back. Then, one night in May, during a crashi
ng black thunderstorm (my mother was both afraid and much in awe of such storms), the board told her to move down South, to North Carolina, taking me and all the antiques she had been collecting for years, and to open a store in a small town down there. This is what we did, and shortly thereafter, for the first time in my life, I fell permanently in love: with a house, with a family of three people and with an area of countryside.

  Perhaps too little attention is paid to the necessary preconditions of “falling in love”—I mean the state of mind or place that precedes one’s first sight of the loved person (or house or land). In my own case, I remember the dark Boston afternoons as a precondition of love. Later on, for another important time, I recognized boredom in a job. And once the fear of growing old.

  In the town that she had chosen, my mother, Margot (she picked out her own name, having been christened Margaret), rented a small house on a pleasant back street. It had a big surrounding screened-in porch, where she put most of the antiques, and she put a discreet sign out in the front yard: “Margot—Antiques.” The store was open only in the afternoons. In the mornings and on Sundays, she drove around the countryside in our ancient and spacious Buick, searching for trophies among the area’s country stores and farms and barns. (She is nothing if not enterprising; no one else down there had thought of doing that before.)

  Although frequently embarrassed by her aggression—she thought nothing of making offers for furniture that was in use in a family’s rooms—I often drove with her during those first few weeks. I was excited by the novelty of the landscape. The red clay banks that led up to the thick pine groves, the swollen brown creeks half hidden by flowering tangled vines. Bare, shaded yards from which rose gaunt, narrow houses. Chickens that scattered, barefoot children who stared at our approach.

  “Hello, there. I’m Mrs. John Kilgore—Margot Kilgore—and I’m interested in buying old furniture. Family portraits. Silver.”