Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Good, is what I thought again. Very good. I can take a cab home and buy some toothpaste, a brush, astringent, cream. For various reasons, mostly having to do with pride and with my new role as a single woman, I had spent too much money in Mexico, paid for too many rounds of margaritas, so I was quite conscious of even small sums of money. I assumed then that a check for twenty-five would come to me automatically, probably tomorrow.

The truth is that I was quite broke; I needed to get a job as soon as possible, Walter not having believed in insurance, but I wasn’t dealing with that problem yet. I had dealt as best I could with Walter’s death, I had successfully gone to Mexico. I would think about money and jobs tomorrow; I would go out looking while I still was tan.

Actually, and this did not make his death any easier, Walter and I had not liked each other much lately. We had married young, for love (well, sex, really); in our day that is what you did when strongly attracted. And as the physical intensity calmed down, diminished, all our other energies seemed to go in opposite directions. A familiar story, I guess, but that made it no easier to bear.

Like many lonely women, I became bookish, an obsessive reader, my favorites being long Victorian novels. (Once, reading The Egoist —Meredith’s best, I thought—I started to recommend it to Walter, such a wonderfully funny book. But then I recognized that Walter would not think it was funny at all.)

Walter’s major passion, his obsession, turned out to be cars: even after professionally he went from selling Fords to selling life insurance, he was constantly buying, selling, trading, trading in cars. We must have averaged four or five cars a year, and last year, the year he died, we went through seven. And always terrifically fancy ones; I now have a 1935 Franklin, in mint condition, up for sale. I hated to be unsympathetic, but I found all this car business scary, something we couldn’t afford, and I sometimes said as much. But Walter, a fast-talking red-haired Irishman, a looker, a flirt, was not much of a listener, or not to me. He would frown distractedly, and go on with his dreams of cars.

None of which helped when he died. Along with natural grief and shock, I felt guilty as hell: why couldn’t I have been nicer about a relatively harmless habit? He could have been “sleeping around,” as we used to say; well, maybe he was doing that, too. In any case, his death was a dreadful—an appalling—event.

None of our friends knew how little money Walter and I had (no doubt misled by all those fancy cars), any more than they knew how little we liked each other. Neither fact had been something that I could ever speak of, or maybe I had long ago got used to not saying those things—a New England habit of reserve. And there was a connection between those conditions: if we had had money, especially if I had had a little of my own—that enviable condition—we could have split up; but no, we had children very early on (red-haired, all of them, of course), four children who seemed to stay young forever as we aged. Now they were all away at school, except our oldest daughter, who was married, and when I say that I had no money I mean that I had barely enough to keep them there, and not enough to live on much longer by myself. Probably we would all have to go to work. I didn’t think it would hurt us much; more New England Puritanism, I guess.

And my choice of the Mexican beach had been connected with both of those unmentionable facts, lack of money and not getting along with Walter. It was extremely cheap, and it was where Walter and I had got along least well. I always loved it; he hated it there, and went along as a concession to my poor taste, if grudgingly. For one thing, there were no tennis courts within miles, and Walt was an impassioned tennis buff. (He died on the courts, in fact, after what I was told was a magnificent overhead smash. A good death, in that way, I guess you could call it.)

To a degree, naturally enough, my friends and children were right; it was lonely being there without even an unloved, quarrelsome Walter. And, as widows will, or anyone will just after a serious love affair, for a while I found it hard to remember anything but the good times between us, the early years when we both had jobs with conflicting schedules, his selling Fords, mine doing research for some lawyers; and so whenever we were even briefly at home together we would make love, as instantly and happily as mating birds.

Also, as I sat alone on my terrace, watching one of those incredible tropical sunsets, the whole sky covered with bright rags of clouds, I would feel really frightened, and not unreasonably so. There was not exactly a superabundance of jobs around, and suppose I couldn’t find one, or not for years? I was well trained, I’d had occasional research jobs along the way, helping out with family money, and I knew a lot of people; still, I was quite a few years over twenty-five, or even thirty. What would I do? (I know, nowhere near the poverty level; but still a cause for concern, I thought.)

At other times, however, down there in the balmy breezes, I would experience an exhilarating sense of adventure. I knew myself to be a strong woman: surely I could turn my life around? I was not really dependent on a middle-class support system, on certain styles of dress and entertaining, on “safe” neighborhoods. I could even, I imagined, find a big house to share with some other working women, about my age—not exactly a commune but a cooperative venture. Such prospects excited and to a degree sustained me.

And there was always the extreme beauty of the place itself, the big horseshoe cove of lovely water, with its white, white beach and rocky promontories at either edge. The green tropical growth that rose from the outer edge of sand into hills. And the clear enormous sky, its brilliant blue, then gaudy sunsets, and, later, billions of stars. Not to mention the flowers spilling over everywhere—the profusion of bougainvillea, of every shade of pink and orange. I could feel it all seeping into me, with the stillness, the peace.

Fortunately, in a way, the last time Walt and I were in Mexico was by far our worst. Nothing dramatic or specific—just a miasma of incommunicable depression that settled on us both. What exactly was on Walt’s mind I have no idea, just boredom and restlessness, perhaps—or he could have been having a “relationship” in San Francisco (I always at least half suspected that he was), with someone whom he missed. I myself was depressed at the changes that I saw in us, and in our bodies. Our slowing middle-aged flesh seemed to parody its former eager, quick incarnation, and I looked at the other couples, many considerably older than we were, who had come down to the tropics to warm their hardening bones—timorous people looking outward rather than toward each other, their flesh no longer joined. And I thought, Is that where we are going, Walt and I? Is the rest of our life together, if we stay together, to be such a process of attrition?

And so, in that sense, being there without Walt was better; I could remember the good days quite as easily as the bad—in fact, more easily; I was no longer daily, hourly reminded by his presence that we no longer loved or even much liked each other. In a dignified way I could be sad about him, even. He had enjoyed his life, his tennis and skiing, parties, drinking, and, for the most part, he had enjoyed and liked our children. It was grossly unfair that he should be cut off from all that, so relatively young.

At the beach, then, I thought my own thoughts, and swam a lot, and read, and I let the gentle beauty of the place drift through my mind. And I observed, rather than actively participating in, what social life there was.

I saw a woman who, like myself, seemed to be traveling alone; some years older than I was, she could easily have been a widow also, or maybe divorced. And she was talking too much. I would see her with groups on the beach, or at the bar, talking and talking. I had earlier noticed such an impulse in myself; as though to compensate for Walter’s lack, to say enough for us both, I had developed a new tendency to garrulousness. And now, in a distant, sympathetic way, I wanted to say to this woman, Please don’t, you don’t have to make up for being alone, in that way.