The Stories of Alice Adams Read online

  She burst out laughing, a raucous, exhilarated laugh. “But that’s absolutely marvelous!” she cried out. “I absolutely love it! You also hate the sun, right?”

  Jacob nodded. But at the same time that he felt touched he also felt some part of his privacy invaded, which made him uneasy. He had been recognized.

  “You must have a marvelous time here,” said Larry, attempting a joke.

  “I read a lot.”

  Larry did not like him.

  “I need another drink,” said Valerie, who probably had noted this too.

  An impulse made Jacob say what he had not said before, to guests. “Look, I’m not always around. But if you want to drink that’s where the key is,” and he pointed to a spot at the top of a beam.

  This was said to Larry (to make Larry like him better?), but it was Valerie who smiled and said, “That’s really nice of you.”

  “We’ll keep track” was what Larry said, and finally forgot to do.

  Jacob left as soon as he could. He had decided to start rereading Moby-Dick.

  Valerie liked his shabby place because she was rich, accustomed to grandeur. She was the opposite of upward ascendant: downward descendant? Was she that? Quite possible. Larry was somewhat younger than she, and rich in a different way: he had earned a lot of money, recently, in something trendy. A record company? TV? He resented Valerie’s carelessness, her easy lack of ambitions.

  Ahab said, “They think me mad, Starbuck does; but I’m demonic, I am madness maddened! that wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself—”

  Valerie had (probably) been married several times. Perhaps a husband had been with her when she smashed up the car? A now dead husband?

  At about eleven the next morning, when Jacob approached the bar, Valerie was perched on a high stool, her long thin brown legs drawn up childishly. She had made herself a tall drink. “Won’t you join me?”

  “I don’t drink much—no, thanks.” Then, to her raised eyebrows, he added, “Yesterday was out of character.”

  “You aroused such false expectations.” She let that go, and then asked, as though it were what they had been talking about for some time, “How do you feel about flying?”

  “I hate it. That’s one reason I’m here.”

  In an instant she had taken that in, and her riotous laugh broke out. “That’s terrific!” Then she said, “But what do you do about it?”

  “Obviously: I don’t fly.”

  “If I could only understand why I’m so afraid. Larry has driven off to Koloa,” she added, irrelevantly. “You’d think I’d be afraid to drive.” And she told him then about her accident, the crashed convertible in which her second husband had been killed, the crash that in some sense he had already seen.

  Jacob understood that they were communicating on levels that he could not fathom, that even made him somewhat uncomfortable. He could so vividly see and feel whatever she told him; apparently, in fact, even before she spoke.

  “I have some idiot faith that if I could understand it I wouldn’t be afraid anymore. Of flying,” Valerie said. “I think that’s what’s called shrink-conditioning. I’ve even tried to ‘associate’ to the fear, and I do remember something weird: myself, but in a white wicker carriage, a baby carriage—how could I remember that? Anyway my nurse is pushing it, a young Irish girl. And we’re at the top of a hill in Magnolia, near the shore, and some older kids tell her to let it go—”

  But she might as well have stopped talking, because Jacob could see it: a stone-fenced New England landscape, wild roses. A pretty dark maid with a tweed coat pulled over a white uniform. “But she didn’t let go,” he gently said.

  “Of course not. But what in hell does that have to do with being afraid to fly?”

  Larry arranged to go deep-sea fishing, near Lihue. Valerie sat by the pool, in a white bikini, with a stack of books. Seeing her there from above, as he conferred with Mrs. Wong about the necessity for a second visit from the plumber, Jacob was aware that he could go down to her and pull up a chair; they could talk all day. But that prospect was too much for him; it made his heart race. Instead he went back to the dim seclusion of his library; he went from Moby-Dick to Nerval, “Je suis le Ténébreux—le Veuf——” He went out into the sunlight.

  He and Valerie had a brief conversation about Jane Austen, whom she was rereading. “I read her to regain some balance,” said Valerie.

  “You might try reading her on planes.”

  She gave him a long speculative look. “What a good idea.”

  Pretending busyness, Jacob went back to his office.

  In fact all that day was punctuated with such brief conversations. Her nondemanding cool friendliness, her independence made this possible; they matched, or supplemented, his vast diffidence.

  She asked, “How is it around Hanalei, the northern coast?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”

  “You’re absolutely marvelous.”

  “Do you think it’s a fear that someone will throw you out of the sky—like God?”

  “Alas, poor Icarus.”

  “Yes, that’s sort of it. As though you shouldn’t be up there, so high.”

  Sometime in the midafternoon he found her at the bar with a long drink.

  “You know what I really like about this place?” she asked. “The whales. They’re terrific, spouting out there.”

  “Yes.” Her tan intensified the whiteness of her scars, making a sort of jigsaw of her face. Her eyes were dark and wild, and after a little while Jacob realized that she was drunk, or nearly so: like most people, he had trouble recognizing conditions foreign to himself. It had taken him a long time to see that Otto’s wife, Joanne, was very stupid; at first he had thought her crazy, which was something he knew more about. In fact she was both.

  He said, “A long time ago a woman came here who hated the whales, she was terrified of them.”

  “Really?” Valerie leaned forward, toward his face, so that he caught a whiff of exotic perfume, of musk.

  “It finally turned out that she had them confused with sharks, and thought they would swim in and bite her.”

  “Good Christ.”

  “She was exceptionally stupid. My best friend’s wife.”

  The first surprise had been Otto’s extreme prosperity, as evidenced by the casual mention of buying several condominiums, on the peninsula south of San Francisco. “Well, I have to have them for tax shelters.” In fact he had come to Hawaii to talk to a group of businessmen in Honolulu who were interested in some California coastal property. Not to see Jacob. The second surprise (probably not wholly unconnected with the first) was Joanne. Joanne from San Antonio, with her raven hair and milk-white skin, her rosebud mouth. (Otto’s taste in women had never been original.) Big girlish breasts. A tiny well-focused mind. “Oh, I just think you’re so smart not to waste your money on paint and fixing things up. I mean, who’d care?” And, “Oh, I just love all these darling yellow-brown people; they don’t look a bit like darkies.” Over her head Jacob had at first sought Otto’s eyes, but Otto wasn’t listening; in fact he had never (Jacob remembered too late) enjoyed talking or listening to women; he probably didn’t hear a word she said. But Jacob heard it all, each abrasive idiocy, delivered in that nasal soprano. “Those are really whales out there? But how does anybody dare to go in swimming?”

  One curious—to Jacob, incomprehensible—facet of Joanne’s character was her imperviousness to coldness on another’s part, to slights. Not that Jacob really slighted her, but surely his politeness came across coldly? Actually he couldn’t stand her, and he found it hard to pretend otherwise. But she continued her bubbling smiles and winks (Christ, winks!) at him; on any pretext at all she stood so close that her glossy head touched his shoulder; she would introduce a sentence by touching his arm. Incredible! Jacob considered, and instantly dismissed, the insane possibility that she was sexually drawn to him; modesty aside, he found that unlikely. He had none of the qualities th
at would have drawn her to Otto, for example; he was not rich or ebullient or pleasure-loving (God knows, not that). Also he was bony, his dry skin was deeply lined, whereas Otto was sleek and fat. No, he decided, she was simply behaving as she always did with men.

  Such was his estimate of Joanne, and of their situation up to the final terrible night of which he would not think: the knock at his door. (He had somehow known it was Joanne, and had frighteningly thought that Otto must be sick.) But, “You can’t imagine how sound your old friend sleeps,” she had said, pushing past him in her frilly thigh-length gown, beneath which unleashed fat breasts bounced. “I thought we could have a tiny drinkie together,” she said. “I just feel as though I hardly know you at all.” Her young face shone with joyous self-adulation.

  Jacob couldn’t believe it, not then or later (now) remembering. How had he got rid of her? He had muttered something about a strep throat, clutching at his neck. An insane impulse that had worked: Joanne was terrified of germs.

  Most men of course would not have sent her away, and so friendship dictated that Jacob inform Otto. “You are married to a sub-moronic nymphomaniac. Even if you don’t listen to her conversation. She is a bad person. She will do you harm.” Of course the next day he said nothing of the sort, and for all Jacob knew Otto and Joanne were what is known as “happily married.” Otto rarely mentioned her in his letters.

  “One encouraging thing I recently read,” said Valerie, beginning to slur a little, “is that if you fall from more than six thousand feet—or was it sixty thousand?—you die of a heart attack before you hit the ground. If you call that encouraging.”

  “I suppose you could.”

  “Well, I do. Christ, I’m sleepy. I’m going in for a nap.”

  She walked off unsteadily, between the clamorously brilliant blooms. Jacob heard the slam of her screen door.

  That night, as he restlessly rebegan The Wanderer (he was slipping from book to book, a familiar bad sign), Jacob could hear them at the barbecue (its first use); in fact he could smell their steak. Valerie and Larry. Her rowdy laugh, his neat clipped voice.

  Then it turned into a quarrel; Jacob caught the tone but not the words. Very quietly he got up and opened his door. Without a sound he went out, walking away from them through the dark until he could hear nothing at all. Down the small road, past all the oversized blooming plants, he walked, toward the small arc of beach, the surfers’ beach, now coldly gray-white in the dark. There he stood on the mound of black lava rock, regarding the shining waves, their wicked curl before breaking, until one huge wave—as large, he imagined, as a giant whale—crashed near his rock and drove him back, and he started home. As he reached his door everything was still, no voices from the bar or anywhere. Only surf.

  He didn’t see Valerie (or Larry) all the next day until late afternoon when together they approached the bar, where Jacob had been talking to his liquor supplier, Mr. Mederious; he had needed to order more gin. Valerie and Larry were merry, friendly with each other, holding hands. Sand dried in their uncombed hair, his so dark, hers pale.

  “We found the most fabulous beach—”

  “—absolutely private, no one there at all.”

  “—really beautiful.”

  They had made love on the beach.

  “I could stay here forever,” said Valerie, dreamily.

  “Baby, some of us have to work,” Larry said, with some affection. But of course this was an issue between them. Also, Larry would have liked to marry her, and she didn’t want to get married, having done it so often before.

  Jacob knew everything.

  Re-embarked on his own Jane Austen, he found that at last he was able to concentrate. He spent the next few days alone with Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey—pure delight, a shining impeccable world, like Mozart, Flemish painting.

  When next he saw Valerie, in still another bikini—beside the pool, Larry had gone fishing again—she was even browner. She looked clear-eyed, younger. “When we were in Honolulu,” she told Jacob, “we saw the most amazing man on the sidewalk. Dressed in red, white and blue striped clothes, with an Uncle Sam hat. And sandwich boards with really crazy things written on them. Peace signs labeled ‘Chicken Tracks of a Coward.’ Something about abortion is murder. Really extraordinary—the superpatriot. I could not figure out what he was about.”

  Of course Jacob could see the man. Hunched over, lost.

  “You know,” she said, “I’ve got to get into some kind of work.” Her harsh laugh. “I might even try to finish school. Last time around I got married instead.”

  “I think you should.”

  She laughed again. “Larry will die.”

  “He will?”

  “He’s not strong on intellectual women.”

  One night, as Jacob lay half asleep on his narrow hard bed (his monk’s bed, as he thought of it), he heard what he imagined to be a knock on his door. At first he thought, Good Christ, Joanne? But of course Joanne was nowhere near, and his heart leaped up as he reached for the ancient canvas trench coat that served him as a robe, and he went to open the door.

  No one there. But had there been?

  He stood still in the starry flowering night, listening for any sound.

  Someone was at the bar, and he walked in that direction.

  Valerie. And at the instant that he saw her he also saw and heard the orange Datsun start up and swing out of the driveway, into the sleeping night.

  Valerie, in a tailored red silk robe, was applying ice cubes to one eye, ice cubes neatly wrapped in a paper napkin; her performance was expert, practiced. She said, “You catch me at a disadvantage. I seem to have walked into the proverbial door.”

  “Can I—” He was not sure what he had meant to offer.

  “No, I’ll be all right. Care for a drink?”

  She already had one, something dark on ice.

  Jacob poured himself a shot of brandy.

  She said, “You know, it’s too bad that children are brought up so much with globes for toys. They see the world as a small ball full of oceans, with those insecure patches of land.”

  She spoke with great intensity, her visible dark eye huge. She was not drunk but Jacob sensed that earlier she had been. He wanted to ask her if she had, in fact, knocked on his door.

  She said, “Tonight I was thinking about those old globes, and how these islands look on them, and I thought we might fall off into space. Do you think I’m going crazy?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “God, I may never get back on a plane.”

  Jacob wanted to say, Don’t. Don’t go anywhere, stay with me. Read all my books, and then I’ll send for more. Talk to me when you want to. Stay.

  Valerie stood up, stretching. She still kept the side of her face that must by now be swollen and discolored turned away. She said, “Well, I think I can sleep now. See you in the morning.”

  In the morning he could say to her what he had meant to say.

  Jacob went off to bed and while he was still reading (impossible then to sleep) he heard the Datsun return. Stop. Slam.

  In the morning Valerie and Larry came to Jacob’s office together, both dressed for travel—she in dark-blue linen, huge glasses covering whatever had happened to her eye, Larry in pale gray.

  They had simply and suddenly decided to leave. They felt that they had to get back. Larry’s new TV show. Quentin.

  Jacob and Valerie shook hands—their only touch. Her hand was small and hard and strong, and she wore a lot of rings. “I’m absolutely terrified,” she said, with a beautiful quick smile. “All those flights.”

  Jacob said, “You’ll be all right,” and he smiled too. Goodbye.

  But he was not at all sure of what he said. All that day he was terrified of her flights.

  Beautiful Girl

  Ardis Bascombe, the tobacco heiress, who twenty years ago was a North Carolina beauty queen, is now sitting in the kitchen of her San Francisco house, getting drunk. Four-thirty, an October afternoo
n, and Ardis, with a glass full of vodka and melted ice, a long cigarette going and another smoldering in an almost full ashtray, is actually doing several things at once: drinking and smoking, of course, killing herself, her older daughter, Linda, has said (Ardis is no longer speaking to Linda, who owns and runs a health-food store), and watching the news on her small color Sony TV. She is waiting for her younger daughter, Carrie, who goes to Stanford but lives at home and usually shows up about now. And she is waiting also for a guest, a man she knew way back when, who called this morning, whose name she is having trouble with. Black? White? Green? It is a color name; she is sure of that.

  Twenty years ago Ardis was a small and slender black-haired girl, with amazing wide, thickly lashed dark-azure eyes and smooth, pale, almost translucent skin—a classic Southern beauty, except for the sexily curled, contemptuous mouth. And brilliant, too: straight A’s at Chapel Hill. An infinitely promising, rarely lovely girl: everyone thought so. A large portrait of her then hangs framed on the kitchen wall: bare-shouldered, in something gauzy, light—she is dressed for a formal dance, the Winter Germans or the May Frolics. The portrait is flyspecked and streaked with grime from the kitchen fumes. Ardis despises cleaning up, and hates having maids around; periodically she calls a janitorial service, and sometimes she has various rooms repainted, covering the grime. Nevertheless, the picture shows the face of a beautiful young girl. Also hanging there, gilt-framed and similarly grimed, are several family portraits; elegant and upright ancestors, attesting to family substance—although in Ardis’s messy kitchen they have a slightly comic look of inappropriateness.

  Ardis’s daughter Carrie, who in a couple of years will inherit several of those tobacco millions, is now driving up from the peninsula, toward home, in her jaunty brown felt hat and patched faded jeans, in her dirty battered Ford pickup truck. She is trying to concentrate on Thomas Jefferson (History I) or the view: blond subdivided hills and groves of rattling dusty eucalyptus trees that smell like cat pee. She is listening to the conversations on her CB radio, but a vision of her mother, at the table, with her emptying glass and heavy blue aura of smoke, fills Carrie’s mind; she is pervaded by the prospect of her mother and filled with guilt, apprehension, sympathy. Her mother, who used to be so much fun, now looks as swollen and dead-eyed, as thick-skinned, as a frog.