Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

I smiled, showing my tolerant indifference to prurience, to vulgar curiosity. “Of course, the legendary love affair,” I said.

“By now I’m quite an expert on the legend,” Ms. Heffelfinger assured me, looking off into a distance that might have contained her notes. “You came to Hilton not long after Luanda Caldwell died, is that right? Mr. Caldwell at that time was still in mourning for his wife?”

“In his way. Yes. Mourning.” I had never met Lucinda, of course, but I too, in my way, had sometimes mourned for her.

And while I had strayed off in that direction, poor Lucinda’s, Ms. Heffelfinger slowly inserted her knife into my heart.

“One thing I don’t quite understand,” she said, beginning gently, so that I hardly felt it. Then, “About Gloria Bingham.” In . “Just when was it that she first came here, and met Randolph Caldwell?”

All the books and articles, if they mention her at all, other than as a footnote, make it perfectly clear that Gloria Bingham was a totally unimportant figure in Ran’s life, a girl who came after Lucinda, and before me, his major love. But I was unable just then to parrot the legend to Ms. Heffelfinger—or even, had I wanted to, to tell her that it was a bloody lie. I began to cough, passionately, as though I were trying to cough up my heart, that sudden cold stone in my chest.

Candida Heffelfinger looked alarmed, of course. She got up—for a moment I thought she meant to hit me on the back; fortunately she decided not to. She looked wildly about, and at last discovered the bar. She went over and brought me a glass of water, so helpful.

By then I could thank her, weakly. “But I really don’t think I can talk anymore just now. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I told her. “You’re staying at the inn?” In fact, I was not at all sure that I would call her— why ?

She said yes, fine, and got up to go. I did not rise, I barely could have. I gave her a limp old lady’s hand to shake, and I watched as she walked down the hall to the door, then turned to wave. Her suit was now rumpled, as though that brief encounter with me had messed up her clothes, as well as her good intentions.

It was the maid’s night off, and so I decided not to bother with dinner. I made myself another drink, and then another, and later I had some cheese for nourishment. I watched the stars come out among the blackened pine and oak boughs, and then a waning moon come up, and I thought about life, and truth, and lies, as an old drunk person is very apt to do.

The true story, my—“our”—story, began a long time ago, in the Thirties, my own late twenties, when I came to Hilton to begin an instructorship in the art department. I rented a tiny house, a cabin, on the road leading up to the Caldwell house, in the deepest, leafiest, most romantic Southern woods. And on that white road I first saw, driving fast in a snappy open car, a handsome man in early middle age, with thick gray hair, dark eyes and a bright red plaid wool shirt. Randolph Caldwell, the composer, I was told when I asked Dr. James, the head of the art department, about my conspicuous neighbor. (This was just after Lucinda Caldwell had died, and no one then had ever heard of Gloria Bingham. So you may conclude, Ms. Heffelfinger, that it was I, not Gloria, who formed the unimportant link, who came between Lucinda and Gloria.)

And later it was Dr. James who introduced me to Ran, in the A. & P., at the vegetable counter.

“I’m delighted to meet a near neighbor,” he said as he took my hand, but his eyes glazed over in the automatic way of a man meeting a not pretty woman, a look I knew.

“I’ve admired your car,” I told him, half-lying, and hoping that he would not imagine I knew anything whatsoever about cars.

But his voice and his eyes were beautiful. I loved him.

Actually I loved the whole town, the crazily heterogeneous architecture of the campus: cracked yellow plaster on its oldest buildings, with their ferociously clinging red Virginia creeper; and the newer brick additions, with their corny Corinthian pillars, which now, several generations later, look almost authentic. I loved my cabin in the woods, on a slope of poplars, looking out to early fall dusks, almost unpopulated hills of black, like a sea, the darkness stippled here and there with straight blue lines of smoke from other cabins, country people, mostly Negroes. The town and its surrounding hills, its woods, were exotic to me; I might have just arrived in Scotland, or East Africa. And, given my age and general inclinations, that excitement had to find a focus, a sexual object. I had to fall in love, and there was Ran, so handsome and seemingly unavailable, a man of the age I was used to choosing.

The next day I managed to be on the road just before he came by. I thought, even hoped, that he would wave in a friendly way, but he was much too Southern to let a lady walk; he stopped, and elaborately opened the door for me, and smiled, and instantly launched into a complicated monologue about the weather.

I soon worked out his schedule so that I could always be in his path. I would linger there in the smell of pines and leaves and dust and sunlight until I heard the sound of his car, and then I would move on briskly, until he should see me and stop. If he had passed me by, just waving, in a hurry, I would probably have died, my heart stricken and stilled then and there, and with a not pretty girl’s dark imagination I always thought that would happen, but it never did—or never until he had Gloria with him in the car, and then they would both smile and wave, and hurry on.

Until Gloria, he would stop and open the door and I would clumsily get in; I was so dizzy, so wild with love, or lust, whatever, that I could hardly look at him. I am sure that he never noticed then, although much later, after we were lovers, of a sort, he claimed that he had always noticed everything about me. A typical Southern man’s lie.

Now when I try to remember what we talked about, on those short important drives, I come up with nothing. The weather, the passage of time, the changing seasons. But that particular fall, I do remember, was extraordinarily beautiful, with vibrant, brilliant leaves against a vivid sky; it was more than worthy of our notice.

One problem in the way of talk was Ran’s quite impenetrable accent. You think of a Southern accent as being slow, and lazy; Ran spoke more quickly than anyone I had ever known, and he constantly smoked—all those quick light Southern words arrived filtered through all that smoke. Half the time I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about, but I was excited by his voice, as I was by everything about him, his hair and his sad dark eyes, his cigarettes; his hunting shirts, his shabby tweeds, his snappy car. At worst, you could call it a crush.

Once in those early days he said to me, and this came out more distinctly than most of his sentences: “Lucinda never liked it here, you know. A Boston girl. She always said the woods down here were too cluttered for her taste,” and he gestured with an elegant large white hand in the direction of the piny woods through which we passed, with their bright leaves, thick undergrowth.

For me just that luxuriance, that overplentitude of bush and wild grass and weed, was beautiful, was vaguely sexual. Still, I responded to her word, “cluttered,” with the odd emphasis that Ran had given it; he had almost made me hear her Boston voice. I liked Lucinda’s precision, and I felt a curious linkage with her, my dead rival.

Much later, during one of our more terrible drunken fights, Ran cried out, “You might as well be Lucinda, I can’t stand it,” and I countered, “You’re just so stupid, you think all women are alike.”

Still, he had a point; though I hadn’t known her I sensed an affinity with Lucinda, as strong as my total antipathy to Gloria.