Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Knowing Matthew, Yvonne was sure that he spoke the truth, and she wryly thought, I undoubtedly think more often of that girl, that episode, than Matthew does.

And so she, too, stopped thinking of Susanna—or almost, except for an occasional reminder.

Leaving Rome, they traveled up to Florence, then Venice, Innsbruck, and Vienna.

That was the first of a succession of great trips.

Yvonne and Matthew remained, for the most part, very happy with each other, and over the years their sexual life declined only slightly. Then, in her late fifties, Yvonne became terribly sick, at first undiagnosably so. Surgery was indicated. On being told the probable nature of her illness—she had insisted on that—Yvonne remarked to her doctor, one of the chief surgeons at Massachusetts General, “Well, my chances are not exactly marvelous, then, are they?”

He looked embarrassed, and gazed in the direction of the Charles, just visible from his high office window. “No, not marvelous,” he admitted.

After surgery, oppressively drugged, Yvonne was mainly aware of pain, which surged in heavy waves toward her, almost overwhelming her, and very gradually receding. She was aware, too, of being handled a great deal, not always gently, of needles inserted, and tubes, of strong hands manipulating her small body.

Sometimes, half conscious, she would wonder if she was dreaming. But at least she knew that she was alive: dead people don’t wonder about anything, she was sure of that.

The first face that she was aware of was her surgeon’s: humorless, stern, seeming always to be saying, No, not marvelous. Then there was the face of a black nurse, kind and sad, a gentle, mourning face. At last she saw Matthew, so gaunt and stricken that she knew she had to live. It was that simple: dying was something she could not do to Matthew.

“She’s got to be the strongest woman I’ve ever seen, basically,” the dubious surgeon remarked later on to Matthew, who by then could beamingly agree.

Chemotherapy worked; it took most of her hair but fortunately did not make her sick. Yvonne very gradually regained strength, and some health, and with a great effort she put back on a few of the many lost pounds. Matthew learned to make a superior fettuccine, and he served it to her often.

After her illness and surgery, they did not make love anymore; they just did not. Yvonne missed it, in a dim sad way, but on the other hand she could sometimes smile at the very idea of such a ludicrous human activity, to which she herself had once devoted so much time. She was on the whole amused and a little skeptical of accounts of very sexually active seventy- and eighty-year-olds: why did they bother, really?

While she was recuperating, Yvonne finished a study of Marie Laurencin that she had been working on for years, and her book had considerable acclaim, even reasonably good sales. Matthew did not finish his Boccherini study, but from time to time he published articles in places like the Hudson Review, the Harvard Magazine .

A year ago, they left Cambridge and moved to the pleasant flat on Green Street, in San Francisco.

Now, on the porch in Mendocino, thinking of the girl across the room at dinner, and remembering Susanna, all that pain, Yvonne has a vivid insight as to how it would have been if she had abandoned Matthew to Susanna all those years ago. Matthew would, of course, have married the girl—that is how he is—and they would have been quite happy for a while. He would have gazed dotingly upon her in restaurants, like the man in the dining room, with his Susanna. And then somehow it would all have gone bad, with a sad old age for Matthew, the girl bored and irritable, Matthew worn out, not understanding anything.

But what of herself? What would have happened to her? The strange part is that Yvonne has never inquired into this before. Now, with perfect logic, she suddenly, jarringly sees just what would have happened: for a while, considerable unhappiness for her, a slow recovery. And then she would have been quite herself again, maybe a little improved. She would have remarried—amazing, she can almost see him! He is no one she knows, but a man much younger than herself, very dark. In fact, he is French; they have many intimate things in common. He might be a painter. He is very unlike Matthew. Would she still have had her great illness? She is not sure; her vision ends with that man, her marriage to him.

Something in her expression, probably, has made Matthew ask a question never asked between them, a question, in fact, for adolescent lovers: “What were you thinking about, just now?”

And he is given, by Yvonne, the requisite response: “I was thinking, my darling, of you. At least in part.”

The air on the porch is perceptibly chillier than when they first came out from dinner. Time to go in, and yet they are both reluctant to move: it is so beautiful where they are. In the distance, gray-white lines of foam cross the sea, beneath a calm pale evening sky; closer to hand are the surrounding, sheltering pines and cypresses.

Then, from whatever uncharacteristic moment of strong emotion, Matthew says another thing that he has not said before. “I was thinking,” he says, “that without you I would not have had much of a life at all.”

Does he mean if they had never met? Or does he mean if he had left her for that girl, for fair Susanna? Or if she had died? It is impossible to ask, and so Yvonne frowns, unseen, in the gathering dusk—both at the ambiguity and at the surprise of it. And she, too, says something new: “Ah, Matthew, what an absolute fool you are.” But she has said it lightly, and she adds, “You would have got along perfectly well without me.” She knows that out of her true fondness for Matthew she has lied, and that it is still necessary for her to survive him.

I can only explain my genuine lack of concern, when I first realized that my suitcase was missing, not coming up with the others off the plane, by saying that at that moment I was in a mood of more than usual self-approval; you could call it pride, or maybe hubris, even: I had just managed to enjoy a vacation alone—to come out unscathed, anyway—at a Mexican resort where I had often gone with my recently dead husband, a trip warned against by my children and well-meaning friends, of course. But it had been all right; I was glad that I had gone there. My other source of pride was sillier but forgivable, I think; it was simply that I was looking very well. I was tan, and the warm, gentle green Mexican water had been kind to my hair. I was brown and silver, like a weathering country house, and I did not mind the thought of myself as aging wood.

In any case, I watched the procession of luggage as it erupted from the maw of the baggage area in the San Francisco terminal, up from the Toltec Airlines plane that I had just got off; I watched each piece as it was claimed and lifted off the treadmill and taken away. With no sinking of my heart (that came much later), I waited until all the other bags were gone, as the empty treadmill moved in its creaking circle, and I realized that that was it: no more bags. An official-looking person confirmed that view: my suitcase was somewhere else, or lost, or irreparably smashed. And I was not at all upset.

I had not been so foolish as to take anything valuable (had I indeed owned anything of that sort of value) to a somewhat ratty resort, on a Mexican beach, and I even thought, Oh, good, now I won’t have to wash out that robe with the suntan-lotion stains.

A pretty black girl in the uniform of the airline gave me a form to fill out, describing the suitcase, and giving my name, Janet Stone Halloran, my address and phone. She gave me a claim number, and she said, “You’ll be given twenty-five dollars for makeup and drugs, you know, for tonight.”