Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

A stalemate, no more letters.

And then Bayard died.

Claire went home for the funeral, dreading everything: what would have to be a maudlin, probably drunken reunion with her mother, and the likelihood of some glimpse or word of Spencer Goddard. And she was wrong, all around.

Isabel had stopped drinking entirely and, even more out of character, stopped dyeing her hair. What had been gloriously, if artificially, red was now plain and gray, and Isabel further announced that she was going back to the Catholic Church, from which, she now said, Bayard had stolen her away.

Bayard’s funeral, however, was Episcopalian, and also, to Claire’s even greater relief, it was not attended by Spencer; she saw and heard nothing of him on that visit.

There followed a period of friendship, or something like it, between Claire and her mother. Claire wrote letters about San Francisco and her job, never mentioning lovers; and Isabel wrote about her new happiness and peace, and her new friends, an order of nuns, cloistered nuns whom she was uniquely privileged to see.

And then quite suddenly Isabel died, and it turned out that she had left the house to the nuns. Which should not have surprised Claire in the least; it was very much an Isabel sort of gesture: attention-getting and absolute. But Claire was surprised, and hurt.

Having been left some money by her father, and being on the whole a fair-minded person, she could not object on material grounds; she could even see the appropriateness of a large stone hilltop house for a cloistered order. It was upsetting, though: the thought of those nuns, whom she envisioned as all clothed in white—white ghosts in all the rooms where Isabel and Bayard had shouted each other down, rooms where, all that summer, Claire and Spencer had violently made love; and the fact of those nuns made the house irrevocably alien, not only not hers but forbidden to her, forever.

“Well, you do look absolutely great” is the first thing that Susan says to Claire, at Dulles Airport, in Washington. “The trip’s been a success?” Trim blond Susan, who does not look great; she looks tired and strained, too pale.

They are in the baggage area, waiting for Claire’s suitcase. “Oh yes, on the whole,” says Claire. “I learned a lot. I’ve got a suitcase full of notes.” As an afterthought, she adds, “One funny thing—we landed at the Raleigh-Durham airport. An unscheduled stop.”

Their eyes meet as Susan asks, “Oh, how did it look?”

“Shabby as ever. You know.” Claire looks away for a tiny instant, then turns back to Susan as, smiling, she says, “And I really hated the food in New Orleans. I have this theory …” And, still smiling, she tells about the underground kitchen that supplies all the restaurants, and the black vat of béchamel.

Susan laughs, and then Claire asks, “Well, how’s Jack?”

Three years ago, Susan was planning to leave Jack, her husband; she even came out to San Francisco, to get away and talk, and to be comforted, presumably. But then she went home and apparently decided not to go through with it. And now she says, “Oh, he’s fine. Working too hard. You know.”

The two women exchange a reassuring, quick smile, acknowledging that this is not to be a visit for serious conversation; neither of them is up to that, just now, but surely, some other time, they will talk again.

That night Susan and Jack give a party for Claire. Although she has met several of their friends before, people who know that she comes from Hilton, she does not explain, if they ask, how come she went almost all over the South but not to Hilton, and several people do ask that. “I just decided not to, this time,” she says.

Nor does she drink too much, or urge anyone, particularly anyone’s husband, to be sure to call her when he comes to San Francisco.

Nor, at this party, do Jack and Susan quarrel.

On the way to the airport with Susan, leaving Washington and heading for San Francisco, Claire remembers the story about the cabdriver in Atlanta, which she tells (“Once they’s had they lunch …”). She and Susan laugh, and then Claire says, “It’s curious, the ways in which it will absolutely never change.”

“Yes—”

“On the whole I think I prefer the landscape to the people.”

Susan laughs again. “Well, that’s a good line. You could use it in your piece.”

“Well, I just might.”

Back in San Francisco, in her small house on the eastern slope of Telegraph Hill, her sanctuary, Claire, who at the moment has no ongoing love affair to disturb and distract her, begins to get to work on her article; she stays home from the office, and for long periods of time she turns off her phone. But not even a good title offers itself. In fact, from the beginning, the trouble that she has with this piece is an unwelcome surprise. Seated at her broad desk, before her window that looks out to the bay, Bay Bridge, Treasure Island and the Oakland hills—to water, boats and birds—in a laborious and quite unfamiliar way she lists possible topics, she tries for a plausible central thesis. At the desk, where she has so often worried and suffered acutely over love affairs,and at the same time managed to work quite hard and well, she now worries and begins to suffer over her work, over what has become an impossible assignment.

After a few such days it does begin to go a little better, but it is sheer labor; at no time does she feel the pleasure that she usually experiences in work, that lively joy in her own competence.

This is all very troubling to Claire, who has prided herself, always, on functioning in a highly professional manner, who has even been somewhat critical of those who do not.

Telegraph Hill is in many ways a small town, or perhaps several small towns; there are neighborhood feuds and passionate loyalties, complex and concentric circles of current and former lovers, husbands and wives, all of whom meet in the local restaurants and bars, the grocery stores and Laundromats along Grant Avenue, Green Street, Vallejo Street, Columbus Avenue. Many people who, like Claire, are for one reason or another alienated from where they grew up feel very much at home on Telegraph Hill.

One of Claire’s long-standing, non-lover friends is a man named Dan Breckenridge, an aging, still-handsome bachelor, whose pattern with women is invariable, and unfortunate: a gambit going from heavy pursuit to a few weeks of heady love, quickly followed by elusiveness and distance—to, when he finds it necessary, downright meanness. But as a friend he is perfectly all right; he is amusing and generous and kind. From time to time he makes a semi-serious pass at Claire, a sort of sexual feint in her direction which is easy to head off, although (she has admitted to herself) she does find him attractive. They remain good friends, and their friendship is undoubtedly enhanced by this not-acted-out attraction.

Like many adoptive Californians (he is originally from Chicago), Dan is enthusiastic about California wine; he has usually just found something new and wonderful, from a small vineyard that no one else has heard of yet.

A week or so after her return from her trip, he invites Claire to dinner and he serves a nice dry Pinot Chardonnay—of which he and Claire both drink too much.

So that when he says, in his decisive Midwestern way, “There must be some reason for that article’s hanging you up; I wish you’d really tell me about your trip,” she does tell him.

She tells him about the cloying prettiness of Charleston; the more interesting beauty of Savannah; New Orleans food, and the vat of béchamel; the new architecture of Atlanta; the racist cabdriver.

And then she tells about flying from Atlanta to Washington. “I was looking down at the woods, and they looked so familiar,” she said, “and then one of the men across from me said it must be Hilton—and, Dan, it was horrible, I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it. God, it was awful.”