Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

He grinned, showing white, white teeth. “Well, I really did,” he said. “It’s still small enough to be comprehensible, sort of. There are even some cobbled streets left. And we lived out on Cape Elizabeth, right on the Atlantic.”

He went on and on about Portland—the coast, the beaches, the rocks—and Charlotte could see it all vividly as he spoke.

But why was this conversation making her so sad? And then she knew: she was hearing the nostalgia in Lyman’s voice; his missing the place he came from was making her miss her own place, her house.

She also took Margery out, for lunch, for further celebration.

“I honestly think I must be going crazy,” Charlotte said. “Lyman could not be a nicer person; he’s kind and smart, and being five years younger than I am is not important, really. But I keep making trouble. If I had better sense I could be perfectly happy with Lyman. I sometimes am.”

Margery laughed. “If you had better sense you might not be a painter.”

“Well, I guess.”

Margery raised her wineglass in a toast, and then she asked, “What ever will you do with all that money?”

Charlotte frowned, her hands gestured helplessness. “I don’t know, it’s been worrying me. I should do something—sensible.”

“What about our buying the Berkeley house?”

“ What? ”

“Your house in Berkeley. I have some money saved up … and I could … and you could … we could … rent … invest … property values.”

Margery made the appointment and got the key from the real-estate agent—all the negotiations would have to be in her name, obviously—and on a bright October afternoon she and Charlotte drove over to Berkeley: two prospective buyers of an empty house.

They drove up Marin, and up and up, and then turned right on Grizzly Peak, at which point the sheer familiarity of everything she saw accelerated and heated the flow of Charlotte’s blood: how she knew all those particular turns of the road, those steep sudden views of the bay. And then there it was, in a clump of tall waving eucalyptus: her house. Sand-colored adobe bricks and a red tiled roof, a narrow wooden porch stuck out to one side like an ill-advised whim, long one-storied wings seeming to wander off behind. Perhaps because of the five years’ lapse since she had been there, or maybe because she was seeing it with Margery, Charlotte thought, What a nutty-looking house, it’s crazy. But that was an affectionate thought; the house could have been an eccentric relative. In fact, it reminded her considerably of Ian: uncontrolled, given over to impulse. (An adobe house in the Berkeley hills had been itself an eccentric impulse, or a sentimental one: Ian and her mother had spent their honeymoon in Mexico.)

When Margery had parked the car, they got out and walked toward it, toward Charlotte’s house. All the vines and shrubbery had increased considerably in the five years since her last visit; a green growth of wisteria almost covered the porch.

Like a thief, an accomplice in crime, Charlotte followed Margery up to the front door, which, with the real-estate agent’s key, Margery opened, and they walked into an absolutely empty, echoing house.

But why was Charlotte so frightened? She could have been an actual intruder, even a thief, so violent was her apprehension as they walked from room to room, both of them on tiptoe. And along with this fear came a total disorientation: was this small stained room the one that had always been called the guest room but where Ian slept from one wife to another? And was this smaller room her own, in which she had lain and listened to Eugenia’s weeping? Shivering, to Margery she whispered, “It all looks so small.”

“Rooms do, without any furniture. Honestly, they weren’t kidding about its being in bad shape.”

“I’m going back outside,” whispered Charlotte.

Outside was more familiar: the sweeping view of the bay—the water and sky, the darker skyline. The shrubs and trees and vines were all in their proper place, except for the big pine, which indeed was missing. Nor was there any stump where Charlotte thought the tree had been. Instead,in that spot Blanche (it must have been Blanche) had put in a bed of geraniums, her favorites; in the intense October sunlight they gave off a dusty, slightly rancid smell.

Margery came out at last, and together she and Charlotte walked around the house, Margery stopping to peer down at foundations, to mutter about dry rot.

Once back in the car, seemingly having put dry rot out of her mind, Margery began to talk animatedly about possible reconstruction of the house: “It really has marvelous potential; it needs a lot of work, but I could … knock out walls … open up … a deck.”

By this time they were on the bridge, crossing the shining water far below—that day an interesting slate blue, a color that wet stones sometimes are.

“Well, so what do you think?” asked Margery.

“I don’t know. I guess it really doesn’t seem my kind of thing,” Charlotte said, with a certain effort.

“But I thought you wanted—I thought it would help.” Although clearly intending kindness, sympathy, Margery sounded very slightly huffy: her professional imagination was being rebuffed.

Margery would get over her huffiness in time, Charlotte thought. And while Charlotte could not entirely “get over” her pain at the loss of what she continued to think of as her house, it would perhaps become bearable, little more than an occasional sharp twinge.

She began a new painting, this time all shades of blue, from slate to brightest azure.

When, a few weeks later, a postcard came from Blanche, in Santa Barbara, showing lots of palms and flowers, and announcing that she was going to marry the most wonderful (underlined) man with a lovely house on the ocean, near the Biltmore Hotel, Charlotte stuck the card in a box with letters that she meant to answer soon.

It was a few months after that, near Christmastime, that, waking with Lyman in his wide, eccentrically carved oak bed—their most recent decision had been to make no decision, no firm plans about legalities or moving in—in a wondering voice Charlotte said, “You know, it’s curious, I don’t dream that I live in Berkeley anymore. My dreams don’t take place in that house.”

“I didn’t know they ever did,” Lyman said.

Feeling sixteen, although in fact just a few months short of sixty, Felicia Lord checks into the San Francisco hotel at which her lover is to meet her the following day. Felicia is tall and thin, with the intense, somewhat startled look of a survivor—a recent widow, mother of five, a ceramicist who prefers to call herself a potter. A stylish gray-blonde. Mr. Voort, she is told, will be given the room next to hers when he arrives. Smiling to herself, she then follows the ancient, wizened bellboy into an antique elevator cage; once inside, as they creakingly ascend, he turns and smiles up at her, as though he knows what she is about. She herself is less sure.

The room to which he leads her is a suite, really: big, shabby-cozy living room, discreetly adjoining bedroom, large old-fashioned bath, on the top floor of this old San Francisco hotel, itself a survivor of the earthquake and fire, in an outlying neighborhood. All in all, she instantly decides, it is the perfect place for meeting Martin, for being with him, in the bright blue dazzling weather, this sudden May.

San Francisco itself, connected as it is with Felicia’s own history, has seemed a possibly dangerous choice: the scene of her early, unlikely premarital “romance” with Charles, her now dead husband; then the scene of holiday visits from Connecticut with the children, treat zoo visits and cable-car rides, Chinese restaurants; scene of a passionate ill-advised love affair, and a subsequent abortion—all that also took place in San Francisco, but years ago, in other hotels, other neighborhoods.