Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Given Ian, then, it is hardly surprising that Charlotte should have had her share of troubles with men. And maybe more. It sometimes seemed that way to Charlotte. She had been known to fall madly in love with the most impossible men—but a lot of women did that. What Charlotte also did, and what seemed even more dangerous, was: on the rare occasions when she was involved with a nice man, she would somehow induce him to behave in a cruel way. Or, even if she did not really succeed in that enterprise, she would somehow, nevertheless, begin to see the nice man as cruel.

The next Blanche postcard announced that since the house was for sale, and she was thinking of moving to Santa Barbara, she was putting the furniture in storage; if there was anything Charlotte wanted, would she please come over and get it right away, at least before next Tuesday. Well, “next Tuesday” was the day after Charlotte got the card, and for that and several other reasons she decided not to take Blanche up on her offer.

Other considerations being: if there was anything Charlotte really wanted, Blanche would come up with a strong justification for not giving it to her. That had been established when Ian died and the carved Spanish bench that Charlotte asked for turned out to have already been promised to a distant cousin.

“I just never would have known you wanted that little old bench,” rambled Blanche, in her explanatory postcard. “You never once sat on it when you came here to visit, and I just knew it was too teeny and old-fashioned to be anything you’d ever want.”

Of course I never sat there, not since I was a child, but I liked to look at it, it’s so graceful and pretty—is what Charlotte despaired of trying to say to Blanche. Except for the bench, which would have been nice, furniture was actually the last thing Charlotte needed, her apartment being already crowded with canvases. Finally, and maybe most important, she could truly not bear the thought of going to the house, and going over all those remaining things, those silver and mahogany souvenirs of her past. With Blanche.

Any more than she could bear the house’s being sold.

“It isn’t so much the money that’s involved,” Charlotte had said to Margery when telling her of the house, “but it hurt my feelings, being disinherited.” She had meant what she said, but as she listened to the echo of her words she heard an unexpected sanctimoniousness in them, a falseness, really. It was certainly true that her feelings had been hurt, badly hurt, but it was also true that she minded about the money. Her livelihood was precarious; certainly she could have used the proceeds from the sale of a large house.

“How much do you think she’ll get for the house?” asked Margery, who had never seen it, Charlotte not being given to taking friends over to meet Blanche.

“I haven’t any idea. I don’t know about real estate,” Charlotte said. “It’s a big house, though. Sort of spread out.”

“Well, anything in the Berkeley hills is worth at least two hundred grand,” said Margery, who did know about those things.

Two hundred thousand dollars. With even half that, decently invested, Charlotte figured that she could live for the rest of her life. Not worry about selling paintings. Just paint.

But, in a way, the realization that something as concrete as money figured in her pain was comforting; it made her feel less blackly doomed—less crazy.

Margery mused, “It would be interesting to know what she’ll get for it.”

“I can’t exactly ask her, though.”

“Maybe I could find out.”

As though things in her life were not difficult enough at that moment, Lyman Clay began to push Charlotte toward getting married. Or that is how Charlotte felt: pushed.

Typically, he presented his ideas in a literary way, over a dinner at his place. A dinner that he had cooked. And Lyman’s cooking was another source of amazement and slight suspicion for Charlotte.

“A marriage is like the imposition of form on feeling in poetry,” Lyman said. “Or in painting, for heaven’s sake.”

With a sharp leap of her heart, Charlotte saw what he meant; she felt it, but she was too disturbed—about the house, about Blanche, about Ian—to think in a serious way about what Lyman was suggesting.

And gloomily she foresaw that she and Lyman would eventually come to a parting over this issue, since he was clearly serious in what he said. A year or so later, when Lyman had married someone else (lots of women really want to marry, she knew, and Lyman was exceptionally nice), she, Charlotte, would wish that she were with him; then she would mourn for Lyman, as she had for various other departed men.

It was at Lyman’s that Margery reached her—not wanting to wait to call Charlotte in the morning. She had to tell her the news.

“I can’t believe this,” said Margery over the phone. “The place is going for a hundred thousand. Honestly, Char, it must be a wreck.”

Not grasping the sum of money, her mind instead wandering back to the actual house (a wreck?), Charlotte only said, “Well, it didn’t use to be.”

“Who ever would have thought that a hundred thousand could come to look like a bargain?” said Margery.

Vaguely offended at the word “bargain” being attached to her house, Charlotte murmured, “Not I.”

An odd lapse, or confusion, of memory had been disturbing Charlotte, along with her other troubles, ever since first hearing from Blanche about the house: simply, she could not remember whether a giant pine that had been near the side porch had been cut down or not. In her earliest memories it was there; as a small child she had played with dolls and Dinky toys among its roots. And she could remember it when, as an older girl, she had sat there on the porch, making out with some boy. But then: had there been talk about cutting it down? Had Ian said it had to go, that it menaced the roof, or the porch? Possessed of an unusually active visual imagination, Charlotte could see the waving heavy-boughed pine, and she could also see its stump, raw and flat and new—or was she seeing the stump from another tree, somewhere else?

Without waiting to show it to Lyman or to Margery—to anyone—Charlotte took the yellow landscape to her gallery, a new one, in Embarcadero Center, and it was sold the next day, for more money than Charlotte could believe: enough to live on for five or six months, she thought.

To celebrate, and because, marriage or not, he was an extremely nice man, Charlotte took Lyman out to dinner, inviting him to a new French place, all polished brass and big mirrors and white linen, which they had sometimes walked past.

Exactly the kind of occasion that should be fun and won’t be, Charlotte thought as she dressed, putting on an unaccustomed skirt and silk shirt and high sandals. Lyman will make some dumb scene about not letting me pay, and we won’t have anything to talk about except the food, which will not be good.

The restaurant was attractive. And as they sat down, Lyman in a coat and tie, straw hair under control, Charlotte thought, Well, we do make a fairly handsome couple.

Easily, Lyman told the waiter to put the wine on a separate check, he would take care of that.

“ Mais bien sûr, Monsieur .”

As Charlotte thought, Well, so far so good.

The food, too, was good, but then after a while something in the tone of the restaurant, maybe, began to make them unfamiliar to themselves. Charlotte heard Lyman talking in a new and stilted way—indeed, discussing the food—and she began to think, I was right.

Mainly for something new to say, she asked, “How come you never talk about Portland?” more complainingly than she had meant to. “Did you like it, growing up there?”