Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

The next morning, though, she is all right: refreshed, herself again. Even, in the mirror, her face is all right. I look like what I am, she thinks: a strong healthy older woman. She dresses and goes downstairs to breakfast, beginning to plan her day. Both the bellboy and the manager smile in a relieved way as she passes the desk, and she smiles back, amiably.

She will see as much of San Francisco as possible today, and arrange to leave tomorrow. Why wait around? This morning she will take a cab to Union Square, and walk from there along Grant Avenue, Chinatown, to North Beach, where she will have lunch. Then back to the hotel for a nap, then a walk, and dinner out—maybe Sam’s again.

She follows that plan, or most of it. On Union Square, she goes into a couple of stores, where she looks at some crazily overpriced clothes, and buys one beautiful gauzy Indian scarf, for a daughter’s coming birthday. Then down to Grant Avenue, to walk among the smells of Chinese food, the incense, on to North Beach, to a small Italian counter restaurant, where she has linguine with clam sauce, and a glass of red wine.

In the cab, going back to the hotel, she knows that she is too tired, has “overdone,” but it was worth it. She has enjoyed the city, after all.

An hour or so later, from a deep, deep sleep she is awakened by a knocking on her door, just as in her dream, the night before.

Groggily she calls out, “Who is it?” She is not even sure that the sound has been real; so easily this could be another dream.

A man’s impatient, irritated voice answers, “It’s me , of course.”

Me? She is still half asleep; she doesn’t know who he is. However, his tone has made her obedient, and she gets out of bed, pulling her pale robe about her, and goes to the door. And there is a tall, red-haired man, with bright blue eyes, whom of course she knows, was expecting—who embraces her violently. “Ah, Martin,” she breathes, when she can.

It is Martin, and she is awake.

The only unfamiliar thing about his face, she notes, when she can see him, is that a tooth is missing from his smile; there is a small gap that he covers with his hand as soon as she has noticed. And he says, “It broke right off! Right off a bridge. And my dentist said I’d have to wait a week. How could I send you a telegram about a goddam dentist? Anyway, I couldn’t wait a week to see you.”

They laugh (although there are tears somewhere near Felicia’s eyes), and then they embrace again.

And at last they are sitting down on the easy chairs near the window, next to the view, and they are quietly talking together, making plans for the rest of that day and night.

Partly because she was so very plain, large and cumbersome, like her name, at first I liked Candida Heffelfinger better than any interviewer who had come around for years. Tall, almost gaunt, she had a big white pockmarked face, lank brown hair and beautiful dark eyes—have you ever noticed how many otherwise ugly women have lovely eyes? Also, she had that special, unassuming niceness that plain women often have; I should know, it was years before I dared to be as mean and recalcitrant, as harsh-mannered as I had always wanted to be.

I liked her as soon as I saw her awkwardly getting out of the red Toyota that she must have rented at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, and start up the pine-strewn path to my (Ran’s) house. And I liked her although I knew that she would want to talk about my legendary love affair, about Ran, rather than about my work, the sculpture. I was used to that; it interested everyone, our “love,” and besides, what can you say about structures almost twenty feet high, some weighing thousands of pounds?

In a welcoming way, and also as a surprise—I would not be the ogress that almost anyone in New York would have warned her about—I went to the door to greet her.

“Miss Phelps?” she puffed out. “Jane Phelps?”

Well, who in hell else would I be? But I said yes, and asked her to come in, and what would she like to drink?

In her dowdy-expensive gray flannel suit she followed me into the living room, and said that she drank bourbon-and-water.

I made the drinks, and we both settled down in that high-ceilinged, glassed-in living room; we stared out at the fading November sunset, against the black lace network of trees. We smoked our cigarettes, and drank, and we made friendly small talk about her flight, the drive from the airport to Hilton. This house, its view.

I not only liked Ms. Heffelfinger; I felt that I knew a lot about her. With that name, and that flat, unaccented voice, she would be Midwestern, as I am, from somewhere in Minnesota, or Wisconsin. I imagined a rural childhood for her, and I saw her as the eldest in a family of brothers, whose care would often fall to her. Then adolescence—well, we all know about the adolescent years of ugly girls: the furtive sexual encounters with boys who later don’t speak to you in the halls at school, who invite small fluffy blondes to their parties. Then college, at a state university, where the social failure would be somewhat balanced by academic triumph, and maybe even a passingly satisfactory affair with a young instructor, although more likely an aging professor, paunchy and grimly married. Next the New York experience, the good job and the lonely love affairs: married men or alcoholics, or both, or worse.

You might ask why such an unattractive girl would be chosen in that way at all, but only if you had never heard the old saying that ugly women as lovers are fantastic. I remember the first time I heard that voiced, by a short, very truculent and quite untalented painter. I was entirely outraged, as though one of my most intimate secrets had been spoken aloud, for of course it is often true: a beautiful woman would expect to be made love to, we expect to make love.

Ms. Heffelfinger and I said what we could about the town—very old pre-Civil War—and the house, Ran’s house, which was built in the Twenties—and then considered very innovative, all that glass—with prize money from his first symphony. (Ran was once a famous composer.)

Perhaps by way of changing our direction, I asked her if she minded living alone in New York—and I was totally unprepared for her answer.

“Well, actually we don’t live in the city,” she said. “We live in a small town in northern New Jersey. It’s very unchic, but it’s great for the kids, they love it.”

We? Kids? Perhaps unfairly I felt that I had been deceived, or at least misled. I tried to keep surprise and suspicion from my face but they must have shown (everything does), for she laughed and said, “I know, I don’t look married, or much like a mother, but maybe that’s just as well?” And then she said, “Well, we might as well start? It’s okay to turn on the tape?”

I said yes as I noted what nice teeth she had, just then exhibited in her first smile. I thought too that I had better be on my guard, more than usually so.

Now the sky beyond all that naked glass was entirely black, and you would have thought that everything outside was stilled, unless you knew—as I, a night walker, knew—that in those depths of woods small leaves yet stirred, and tiny birds were settling for the night. Ms. Heffelfinger turned on her recorder, and she began to say what I had known that she would say: a small speech to the effect that she knew very little in a general way about sculpture, “although I am really moved by it, more so than any other visual form.” (Was that true?)

I said I understood, and I gave the snort that over the years I had perfected. “Actually no one knows a damn thing about my work but me, and sometimes I’m not at all sure that I do,” I told her.

She smiled, again those nice teeth, our smoke circled up to the arched, beamed ceiling, and then she made her second predictable speech; everyone said it, in one form or another. “Of course you realize that the main interest, prurient though it may be, is in your relationship with Randolph Caldwell.”