Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

I further observed a young man, also alone, but seemingly having attached himself to a group of older people. He was not really as young as he felt that he was. He would be very good with old ladies, except for a certain kind of old lady (the kind I plan to be), who will suddenly wonder why she is paying for all his drinks, and will decide that he is not quite worth it. I watched as, each time someone in the group was due to sign for drinks, that aging boy would be engaged in animated conversation somewhere else—as, still unobserved by him, the smiles around him congealed and froze.

Which is one reason that whenever I fell in with a group at the bar I made a point of buying more than my share of drinks.

I looked, and thought, and observed, and I wrote down a great deal in a daybook that I had begun to keep, begun just after Walter died. Two friends had suggested this, women who did not know each other. A coincidence, possibly, but enough to make me listen—although I later concluded that they were both influenced by the fact that I write letters much more often than I telephone.

Also, like so many women of my generation (and I would hope some men and younger women, too), I had been powerfully moved by Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook . Not that I saw much connection between myself and her heroine, Anna (or with Lessing herself); still, for weeks and then months after Walter died, I made myself write everything down, like Anna in the Blue Notebook section, trying to understand.

And it did help, quite a lot. I could see a certain progress from the rage and despair of the first entries, the nightmare scene at the funeral parlor. I had not wanted to “view” Walter; I was talked into it—shamed into it, really—by my oldest daughter, the married one, and by, of course, the funeral-parlor person. How wonderful he looks, they both murmured, though in a questioning way; he looks asleep. Having spent many hours looking at Walter asleep—he always slept well, whereas I had occasional insomnia—I thought he did not look asleep; he looked dead, very dead, dead for good. I hated myself for breaking down and crying noisily in that place.

Well, all that was vividly in my notebook, and then there were some better days recorded, and a few more bad ones. Kind friends, insensitive friends, intuitive strangers.

It was encouraging on those bad days to look back to worse ones, earlier on, and when I actually felt well, restored to my old self, competent and strong—with what pride I recorded that sense.

It was not until I was in the taxi, heading home from the airport, and thinking with foolish pleasure about my check for twenty-five dollars, that I realized that my notebook was in the missing suitcase, along with the stained robe and the other things I didn’t much care about. And in that moment of understanding that my notebook could be gone forever, I did not see how I could go on with my life. Everything within me sank. It was as though my respirator, whatever essential machine had kept me breathing, was cruelly removed. This is worse than Walter’s death, I crazily thought, and then amended (I revised, as I had learned to do with crazy thoughts) so that in my mind it now read, I can deal with this less well than I did with Walter’s death.

Arrived at my door, I paid for the taxi with several of my last vacation dollars, and I let myself into my small (though now too large) “safe” flat.

There was a pile of letters on the floor which, since I had no bag to unpack, I immediately sat down to read. And there, among the bills and circulars, the demands, were three letters which, had I been in a more normal mood, might have made me happy: two of them from two of my scattered children, both simply nice, kind and friendly—sounding like the sort of people I would have wanted them to turn out to be—and the third from a lawyer for whom I had once worked, offering sensible job-getting advice and strong encouragement. As I say, had it not been for my missing bag and my lost notebook, it would have been a good homecoming.

I lay awake planning phone calls.

Toltec Airlines, as it turned out the following morning, did not have its own Lost and Found (a bad sign right there, I thought); its losses and finds were reported to another airline, Griffith International. I described my bag to a cheerfully inattentive girl: a cheap make, I said, black vinyl, with a safety pin in the zipper. Yes, it was clearly marked with my name and address.

Had I reported its loss?

Yes, of course. Last night.

Well, most bags eventually turn up, she said, and I must believe that they were just as eager to return my bag to me as I was to get it.

I could not possibly believe that, I told her severely; it was simply untrue. And then, as though it were an afterthought, I asked about the twenty-five-dollar compensation check.

Oh, that’s only for people just stopping over, she said.

Oh.

She suggested that I might want to call the night person at Toltec Airlines; he comes on every night at six, she said, and she gave me a number.

The man’s name was Dick Parker—a too simple, forgettable name, but I managed to keep it in my mind all day; in fact I thought of nothing else.

He turned out to be both less interested and less optimistic than the morning girl. Well, sometimes bags did get stolen, he said. Nothing the airlines could do, thefts happen.

Even old shabby bags like mine?

Older, shabbier ones got ripped off. For all the thieves knew, there were diamonds inside, he picturesquely said.

After a long pause, during which I tried to digest his gloomy and irrefutable logic, I asked about compensation.

The airline pays three hundred dollars after two weeks, he said.

Oh.

The young woman who answered the Lost and Found number the next morning sounded Mexican, I thought, which I found irrationally cheering, as though national pride would encourage more strenuous efforts on her part. I again described my bag, and again she went off to look. Only later did it occur to me that she might—she should have had that description already filed.

No, she announced on her return; my bag was not there, I should immediately call Mr. Playa, Pablo Playa, who was in charge of Toltec Airlines, and she gave me a number.

This was encouraging—someone in charge—and I was charmed by the name Pablo Playa. The numbers that I dialed, however, felt familiar; just as Mr. Playa answered, I realized that it was the number of Dick Parker: Pablo Playa was the daytime Dick Parker.

But he had a mellifluous Latin voice, Pablo Playa did, and his tone was the most, if not the only, sympathetic official voice that I had heard. Of course I was upset, he said,and everything would be done to find my bag. I must believe him, the bag would be returned to me within days. And also, at the very worst, the airline paid five hundred dollars for lost bags, within fifteen days.

For a few minutes I felt vastly cheered—my automatic response to warmth and charm, to promises—and then, with a characteristic reversal, certain grim and obvious truths appeared, to rebuke my foolish optimism. First, none of those people knew what the others were doing; there was no one in charge. Second, there was no fixed policy about compensation. Third, there was no concentrated or even directed effort to retrieve my bag.

That night I again called Dick Parker, who instantly confirmed all those suspicions. How long had it been since I lost my bag, he wanted to know.

It was not I who had lost the bag, I reminded him; it was them . And maybe they should coordinate their files, as well as their efforts.

Thank you for telling me how to do my job, he said, in a furious way.

I think we both hung up at the same moment.