The Stories of Alice Adams Read online

  Out of some misguided sense of duty I spent Christmas Day that year with Madame rather than with Bruno. And it was a bad day. Madame was far from being at her best. She sniffed deprecatingly at my gift of a tiny bottle of perfume from Worth, telling me she had once calculated the contents of all the bottles on her dressing table and it came to more than two liters. “You can imagine,” she said, “how much that would be worth.” She had given me a pair of felt slippers from Trois Quartiers, and they were not very pretty.

  We rallied somewhat at dinner. There was an incredible roast chicken, an unheard-of luxury in Paris that year. But then, with the token glass of brandy, Mme. Frenaye grew sad again, and spoke of the death of her husband. “Over and over he said to me, ‘Ah, how good you are,’ ” and her great eyes misted. I was wildly impatient to go; I had promised to meet Bruno at the Flore at nine. I wanted to hear of no other love, no death.

  That night we fought because I lived so far away. Bruno found incomprehensible my refusal to move. “On purpose you isolate yourself in your gray prison,” he said. (Once he had accompanied me home, had seen from the outside the fortress of apartments on the Rue de Courcelles.) He said, his clear blue eyes near mine, “How much more time we would have if you even lived near the Sorbonne—I think you don’t want to be with me—you would rather stay safely beside your little fire.” I protested this violently, but in a sense it was perfectly true. I was afraid of him; life with Madame, though difficult, seemed safer than the exposure of a room alone.

  But at the same time that I resisted Bruno I found my fortress more and more impossible. I was extremely tense; the most petty annoyances grew large. I once calculated that with all the small sums of money which Madame had borrowed from time to time to tip porters, buy stamps, I could have bought Bruno a gaudy present.

  And there was the matter of my CARE packages. My anxious mother sent them punctually each month, thus assuring herself that I would never starve. I had written and asked her not to. Their arrival embarrassed me; I was sure the porter who carried them upstairs knew what they were, and thought of his own hungry family. I wanted badly to give them to him, but some misplaced shyness held me back. Madame adored all that American food. She appropriated each package and opened it on the marble-topped kitchen table. She exclaimed over, and later used, the boxes of cake mix, and she devised a marvelous method of stuffing baked potatoes with the liver pâté that came in large cans. The pancake mix she especially loved. “Ah, les crêpes américaines,” she would cry out lovingly, expressing her whole indulgent fondness for the young rich crazy country of dollars and handsome brave G.I.s, of fantastic machines that did everything, of her cherished Berkowitzes and of me.

  But in my new mood of sullen resentment I protested her appropriation. How dare she charge me ruinous rates for food and lodging and then accept such a bulk of food from my mother? In silence and secrecy my list of grievances against her mounted; that they were petty and degrading of course made them more unbearable. Also that I lacked the courage to say anything.

  It was perfectly appropriate to that year that my dilemma was finally resolved by a strike. And by Bruno.

  All during January, Bruno snarled and complained at my living arrangements. I remember an afternoon in the upstairs part of the Flore, where it was always warm and with luck one could stay for hours, seated on the plaid-covered banquettes, without having to order anything. We had, I remember, not enough money between us for hot chocolate—which we both felt could have saved the afternoon. Unkindly, Bruno reminded me that if I lived in the Quarter, in a cheap room, I could now be making hot chocolate and serving it in privacy. There was always a sort of European practicality about him—even in love, I thought—and in the phrase betrayed how American was my own romanticism. He gave a sense of the pressure of time, of destiny, as though along his way he could not be troubled with incidents of geography and money. By the end of the afternoon we had agreed never to meet again, and I wept conspicuously all the long Métro ride from Odéon to Place Péreire.

  The next week was unendurable. There was a violent cold black rain. The heat failed again in Madame’s long flat, the fires spluttered and would not burn. Wholly miserable, I mourned my forever lost love.

  Then came the mail strike. No letters at all, from anywhere. The papers described mountains of paper piled fantastically on post-office floors. I was completely dependent on letters from home for money, and now I could not pay Madame on the day when my fee came due. At dinner I tried to mention it casually to her. Much in the spirit of the times, I said, “After all, this strike can’t go on forever.”

  But Madame’s spirit was not at all with the times. “Strike or not, I have to shop for groceries,” she said with uncharacteristic terseness. I was totally upset; life, I felt, was too much for me; I had no resources. And even Madame, stronger and wiser and infinitely more charming, fell down. Apropos of nothing she told me again the story of Marion Berkowitz and the buying of the soutien-gorge, but the mention of high prices made us both nervous and we failed to be amused.

  That night, hunched frozen between the pink linen sheets, I decided that if I did not see Bruno again I would die.

  At breakfast my final long-delayed scene with Mme. Frenaye took place, over cups of powdered American coffee from my latest CARE package. I found that I had to say everything all at once. “I have to move,” I said. “It’s very nice here but I simply can’t afford it any longer. And really, you know, no one pays so much for a pension, I mean even in America this would be considered high. And also this is too far from my classes at the Sorbonne—you remember during the Métro strike I couldn’t even get there.”

  Madame listened to this somewhat with the air of a teacher of speech. And indeed it was a tribute to the French I had learned with her that I was able to get it out. She seemed, on the whole, to approve both my eloquence and my logic, for at the end she said, “Certainement,” in a final tone.

  I needed her to argue with me, and I added defiantly, “I want to live in the Latin Quarter.”

  “Oui, le Quartier Latin.” But she was not thinking about my proposed life on the Left Bank; her tone was completely neutral. And hearing it I realized suddenly that as far as she was concerned I had already gone. Also, and this was doubly infuriating, I realized that she had undoubtedly known for some time that I would go. Probably from that first wet day when we took our tea by her pretty fire she had known that I would not last the year. Any concession on her part—if she had said she could wait for the rent—might have made me weaken. But she was far too realistic and too economical for any emotional waste.

  • • •

  And so I packed that afternoon in a fury of frustration. I felt that I had been taken, conned out of my moment of righteous defiance by some ageless European trick of charm. As I hunted for shoe bags, I thought furiously that she had completely turned the tables. I was the one who had ended by being mercenary, petty.

  She came to the door later, and asked perfunctorily if there was anything that she could do to help, and I wanted to shout “No!” at her, but I did not; I only muttered negatively. She said, “Well, in that case I will say au revoir, Patience, et bonne chance.”

  We shook hands at the door to my erstwhile bedroom, and I said that I would call her when I was settled, and she said, “But please do,” and smiled with her beautiful wise blue eyes and was gone. I had no true parting scene.

  The room that I found late that afternoon was on the Rue de Seine. My high narrow windows overlooked the entrance to the Club Mephisto; I could see a fish market where the fat silver bellies were piled high, and a fruit stand bright with winter tomatoes and bunches of dark rose chrysanthemums. At the corner hardware store I bought a saucepan and a small tripod burner with some cans of Sterno, and felt myself prepared for warm domestic peace with Bruno.

  But though reunited we were never peaceful. In spite of my room, of which he approved, our passionate partings continued. I can hear now the angry sound of his boots o
n the narrow steep stairs as he left stormily after an impossible argument. And I remember lying half awake dreaming that he would come back.

  One afternoon, during a rift with Bruno that was more prolonged than usual, on an impulse I called Mme. Frenaye and asked her to have tea with me at the Ritz. She would be delighted, she said, and I remember that I wore my first New Look dress, which was gray silk with a terribly long skirt. The occasion was a great success. I was struck by how glad I was to see her. It seemed to me then that I had missed her, and that my life alone had been more difficult. Certainly that afternoon Madame was at her best. She complained pleasantly that the service was not what it had been before the war, nor the pastry, and after our tea we gossiped happily about the other women in the room.

  Madame did not ask me about my present living arrangements. Since I had come prepared to boast, this was slightly irritating, but at the same time I was relieved. Nor did she, as I had rather expected, say that she missed me. She was quite impersonally charming, and we parted with an exchange of pleasantries, but with no talk of a further meeting.

  The rain and cold continued into April. I remember bitterly deciding that the lyric burst one expected of spring in Paris would never come, that it was a myth.

  Joe and Laura had left, apologizing, for Hollywood in March. I went to lectures at the Sorbonne and in the lengthening intervals when I did not see Bruno I wandered alone about the city, hunched against the rain, wrapped in American tweed.

  Then, around the first of May, the weather changed, the chestnut and plane trees along the boulevards feathered into delicate green and the sky behind the square stone tower of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was pink and soft in the long light evenings.

  For at least a month Bruno and I got along happily. It was the tender penultimate stage of a love affair, before it became clear that I really wanted him to come to America and marry me, and that he had to live in Italy and did not want to get married, clear to us both that I was hopelessly domestic and bourgeois. He said, finally, that I would not be a suitable companion for an Italian statesman, and of course he was perfectly right.

  But before this finality, in some spirit of bravado, I called Mme. Frenaye and asked her to come to tea in my room—and asked Bruno to come too. I am not at all sure what I expected of either of them; perhaps I felt the dramatic necessity of a meeting between the two people who had that year been, variously, most important to me.

  Or perhaps this was my last defiance of Madame. If that were so I failed utterly, foiled again by her aplomb. Of course Bruno helped; he appeared uncharacteristically in a white shirt and tie, his brown hair brushed smooth; he could not have looked less like an Italian radical with a violent past. Mme. Frenaye first took him to be a nice American boy; her whole demeanor spoke a total acceptance and approval of him. She thought it very wise of him to study law in Paris, and she raised her lovely innocent blue eyes in attractive horror when he told her how many hours he had to study each day. “But then you are so young and strong,” she said, with a tender and admiring smile. Of course he liked her—who could not?

  She even approved of my room, though she sat rather stiffly and gingerly on the single straight wooden chair. She looked across the street to the piles of fish and remarked that she had noticed lower prices here than in her own quartier, but this was her only suggestion that I had come down in the world. And I thought then, but did not speak, of her beautiful poisson normand. She only said, “Such a nice clean room, Patience, and it must be so convenient for you.”

  I made tea, boiling the water over Sterno which Madame thought terribly ingenious, and we ate the pastries which I had bought. Bruno and Madame talked about the beauties of Italy, of Florence in early spring, Venice in October. And painting. I could imagine her saying of him, “Tellement cultivé, ce jeune Italien, tellement sensible.”

  After that day everything deteriorated. The weather turned cold and it rained fiercely as though to remind us all of the difficult past winter. When, finally, I booked passage on a boat which was to leave the third of June, I felt that my exit was being forced, the city and the time would have no more of me. I had accepted the impossibility of Bruno—we still saw each other but I wept and it always ended badly. I did not see Madame again. I did call her, meaning to say good-bye, but there was no answer.

  Sometimes it occurs to me to write to Madame, to send her pictures of my husband, my house and my children, as though to convince her that I have grown up, that I am no longer that odd girl who came to her in the wet summer coat, or who tried to charm her with tea made over Sterno in an unlikely room. Or I try to imagine her here, perhaps as the great-aunt whom, on shopping trips into town, I occasionally visit. But this is impossible: my aunt, an American Gothic puritan with a band of black grosgrain ribbon about her throat, my aunt laughing over the purchase of a tiny soutien-gorge, bringing in wine, l’essentiel? This won’t do. And I am forced to leave Madame, and Bruno of whom I never think, as and where they are, in that year of my own history.

  Ripped Off

  The gentle, leafy day made Deborah high; she came home from her morning job light in her head and heart. When she saw that the small drawer from her desk had been pulled out and taken over to the bed and left there, its contents spilled out over the tousled blue sheets, she first thought, Wow, Philip, what are you trying to tell me? Philip lived with her in the Russian Hill flat, and what was—or had been—in the drawer were notes from him, notes or bits of paper that for one reason or another he had put his name on or drawn some small picture on. A couple of the messages said “Gone for walk. Later.” But on one, a torn-off match cover, he had written “I love you,” and passed it to her across a table in a restaurant. There was even a canceled check made out to and endorsed by him, from a couple of months ago when Deborah had lent him some money.

  Her second reaction was one of surprise; Philip was not nosy or jealous. Once she had known a boy, Juan, from Panama, who was both—violently so. She had had to burn her old letters and diaries so that he would not find them. In fact, he had finally left her because (he said) she was so friendly with other men. (She did not see herself as especially friendly to anyone.) It was not like Philip to search through her desk. She thought he must have been looking for a stamp or something. Still, why bring the drawer over to the bed? What was he trying to tell her?

  Deborah was a tall, rather oddly shaped girl. Her breasts were large but her body was otherwise skimpy, and with her long thin legs she had somewhat the look of a bird that might topple over but never quite did. Big front teeth made her appear shy, which she was. Her wide dark-brown eyes could show a great deal of pain or love. She wore her brown hair long and straight, but for her Kelly Girl job—taken for two reasons: to give herself freedom of movement (she only took morning work), and to embarrass her mother, who expected her to have some kind of career—she dressed in short non-mini skirts and straight shirts. She tended to look for clothes that would hide her—hide her identity as well as her breasts. Her mother and some of the neighbors in that expensive San Francisco block—she and Philip lived in a building owned by Deborah’s stepfather, who charged a ritualistic fifty a month for a high, wide studio room with an overwhelming view of the Bay and the ocean—described her as a hippie. Deborah felt that that was not quite right, although she could not have said what she was. She read a lot, and thought. Now she was mainly thinking about what to make for dinner for Philip, in case he came home for dinner.

  As she picked up the bits of paper (nothing missing) and replaced the drawer and made the bed—bending awkwardly, tugging at the recalcitrant sheets—her discovery seemed less funny all the time. It was painful for Philip to know she was so sentimental. She blushed and pressed her fingers over her mouth. Nobody but a thirteen-year-old or a middle-aged woman (her mother, with all her dead father’s Navy things, and pressed dead gardenias in a book of poems by Dorothy Parker) would keep stuff around like that. What would Philip think? Nothing between them was at all explicitly stat
ed or defined. He had moved into the room shortly after they had met (at the Renaissance Fair, in Marin County—beautiful!) without much comment or any real plan, and he could presumably leave the same way. No one said anything about how long. Deborah sometimes thought he was there simply because of the coincidence in time between meeting her and the disbanding of his Mendocino commune and the start of a new term at the Art Institute. He was a little younger than she was—twenty-one to her twenty-three. His presence was kindly and peaceful, but he talked little, and it was not possible to tell what was in his mind. Sometimes he sang a line or two, like “It ain’t me, babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for, babe.” (Did he mean her?) Or, “Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed.” (Had he met a new girl?)

  As she straightened up from her own bed (the headboard of linen, not brass) she noticed what was incredible that she had not seen before: Philip had taken his zebra-skin rug. Loss hit her hard—so hard that she sat down on the bed and stared at the dusty space where the skins had been. He’s used that silly drawer as an excuse to go, she thought. Of course. That was why he emptied it onto the bed. He was telling her that she was a terrible, possessive woman, hoarding souvenirs (like her mother), trying to hang on to him. The rug was the first thing he had brought over, by way of moving in, and despite their ambivalence about it (they disapproved of hunting, and too, the skins had a suggestion of decorator chic), it had picked up the look of the room, enhancing Deborah’s wicker and white linen and black leather chairs—leavings from her mother’s tasteful (the taste of five years back) country house.