Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Over the long haul of my life, I have noticed that even the most upsetting things get better with the simple passage of time; even deaths become less painful. But it was not so with my missing bag; it was, in many ways, like the aftermath of a robbery. Once, Walter and I had been burglarized, and for weeks I kept discovering more things that were not there: a set of silver grapefruit spoons, some pretty cocktail napkins, all the Beethoven quartets (a tasteful ripper-offer, that one was). And now, having thought everything but my notebook valueless, I began to remember a nice old pink cotton shirt, inexplicably becoming; some big white beads (cheap, from Cost Plus, but where would I find them again).

Far worse was my deranged sense of being crippled without my notebook, my notes; and my awareness that it made no sense was not much help. I considered, and discarded, the obvious theory that this was a substitute mourning for Walter, that it was actually Walter whom I could not live without; that explanation simply did not grip me in the way that a true insight invariably does. I also asked myself if the lost notebook was an excuse for postponing other tasks at hand, like scrubbing the open kitchen shelves. Looking for a job.

The next day, as though to refute that thought, I did scrub the shelves. I’ve read somewhere that all women have a least favorite household task, and that is mine: the irritation of putting those little spice jars and bottles somewhere else, displacing the adorable little keepsakes, spilling the cleaning stuff on the floor. Et cetera.

And then, like a reward, it came to me, something that probably anyone else would have thought of days before: I would go out and buy another notebook, I would write down all that I could remember from the former entries and then I would start in again. Obviously, I had become addicted to writing things down; that was the core of my problem.

A wonderful idea, a solution—but in the stationery store I hesitated. The lost notebook, whose duplicate was right there on the shelf before me, had been rather expensive, seven dollars, now up to eight-fifty. (I could measure the time since Walter’s death by the rate of inflation, I thought.) Maybe I would get the old notebook back? In that mood, I compromised on a much smaller, though matching, book; its spine was also stamped RECORD, and it cost two-fifty.

I took it home, and eagerly, right away, I began to record the newest chapter in my life, which I headed, of course, Lost Luggage.

By rights my suitcase should then have been returned—my reward for maturity and strength—and I superstitiously believed that it actually would be. It had been missing now for five full days. And, still expecting that it would reappear, I concentrated on writing. I stopped calling the Toltec people and, instead, I called my travel agent and told her of those troubles; she would take care of everything, she said.

I had imagined that I might try, as a sort of exercise, to record some of what I had felt and had written in my original book about the days and months just after Walter’s death, but I did not. I wrote about the colors of Mexico, still lively and brilliant in my mind, and from there I moved farther back, much farther, to some childhood colors: the calm blue-black depths of a New Hampshire lake in summer; gray winter slush on Tremont Street, in Boston. I had no purpose, really; I only knew that the hour or so I spent writing every day was a happy time for me. I finished that notebook and I bought another small one, and probably I will keep on buying them. And, without really noticing it as something remarkable, I began to feel a great deal better.

Fate, as I should have recognized by now, tends to reward happiness rather than virtue: having to a large extent cheered up, in the same week I acquired both a paying guest and a good part-time job. The guest was a younger friend, Daisy, with whom I had worked on a couple of political campaigns; she had split with her most recent lover, and she wondered if maybe—now that—I would like to rent her a room. Well, knowing Daisy, it would not be for long, but she was entertaining, and kind, and reliable, in her way. And if this was not the cooperative venture I’d earlier dreamed of, it could be a step in that direction.

The job was with the lawyer for whom I’d worked before—a little less work than I needed, but, like the room arrangement, it seemed a strong step forward.

And, a month or so after that, I received, through my travel agent, a check for $343.79, from Toltec Airlines—a figure that I will never understand, but it paid a couple of bills.

I don’t think much anymore about my lost notebook, or of those sad early days that it recorded, although I do occasionally wonder if Dick Parker, the night man at Toltec, could possibly have been right—if some misguided thief could have believed that I carried diamonds or cocaine in that shabby old bag, and found, instead, some well-worn summer clothes and the unhappy jottings of a very confused, a searching, woman.

I don’t plan to go back to that particular Mexican resort; I believe that it has served its purpose in my life. But it has occurred to me that the next time I go on any trip, one of these new notebooks will fit easily into a carryon bag, and that even if the book were to be lost, the loss would be minimal.

Although Charlotte O’Mara lived in San Francisco, and her third and final stepmother, Blanche, in Berkeley, just across the bay, they traditionally communicated by postcard, an aversion to the telephone being one of the few things they had in common. Thus it was by way of a crowded card from Blanche that Charlotte first heard that the Berkeley house in which she had grown up was being sold.

That night, at dinner with her lover, Lyman Clay, a bookseller from Portland, Maine, a tall towheaded young man, Charlotte drank too much wine, and she cried out to Lyman, “You don’t know how much I loved that house!”

Since theirs was a relatively recent friendship, a couple of months old, Charlotte had not, so far, talked much, if at all, about her parents, both now dead. And she had said nothing about the house other than that it was in the Berkeley hills. And so, although kind and intelligent, intuitive, Lyman was understandably puzzled at the extremity of her reaction. “It was a really great house?” he asked.

“No, actually it was pretty peculiar. Adobe, all sprawled out. It’s just that—just that I always lived there,” she told him hopelessly.

The next day, along with some gratitude for Lyman’s kindness, and a slight hangover, Charlotte had an embarrassed sense of falseness. “Love” was too simple a word for her feelings about that house. She had reacted to its sale with rage and anguish, with an acute and wild sense of loss that she could not, for the moment, fathom, any more than she could get rid of the pain.

Charlotte was a painter, and in that precarious way she made her living—although that year, the year of the sale of the house, she had a very good fellowship. She thought she knew a lot about joy and grief, about broke and flush, failure and relative success. Still, she was surprised at the violence of her feelings about the house, about Blanche’s selling it. Waking at three in the morning, she thought of crossing the Bay Bridge from Potrero Hill, where in their separate flats both she and Lyman lived, and going over to Grizzly Peak Boulevard, in Berkeley, where the house was. And burning it down. If I can’t have it no one will, she wildly thought, at that most vulnerable predawn hour.

And she had no right to any of those emotions, any more than she had any “legal” right to the house. After all, her father, Ian O’Mara, had left the house to Blanche, his fourth wife, “to make her feel more secure.” He had told Charlotte this in the same letter in which he first told about his will. But at that time Charlotte was living in Paris, studying, happily broke, and she hardly paid attention to what he said. She could not then focus on anything as distant and unlikely as her father’s death.