Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

I was as horrified as I was surprised, as stricken, as frustrated. And although I may have been too upset to know what I was doing, I’m afraid I did know; in any case, I then forced a passionate kiss upon his unwilling mouth, I forced my whole body up against his as I said, “Come in with me, I want you.”

“Well, my dear, I’m sure that would be delightful”—as though I had invited him in for cocoa—“but the fact is, it’s just terribly late, and so I will have to bid you adieu.”

He got away; he even waved as he got into his car and drove off, as I simply stood there.

Well, at least I didn’t run up the road after him, and pound on his door, shouting; that would have been even worse to remember, and if I had been a little older, or a little more drunk, that is precisely what I would have done, what every instinct wanted me to do. It is in fact just what some years later I did do, after one of our nights of drunken fighting, tears and threats, departures. That night, I only went into my house and went to bed, where all my crying failed to soothe my rage and pain, where I could not sleep.

I did not see Ran for a couple of weeks after that, first because he was in Atlanta, and then, when I knew he must be back, because I avoided the time when I knew he would be driving by. However, one day either I had miscalculated or he had sought me out, for there he was, racing up from behind a few minutes after I had left my house, stopping, reaching to open the door for me.

He began talking his head off—I might have known that the next time I saw Ran he would distance me with conversation. “Well, my dear girl, I don’t believe I’ve seen you since my recent sojourn in Atlanta.” Et cetera, on and on about Atlanta: the heat, the ugliness of the local architecture, the too many parties—“Too much bourbon would be stating the case more accurately, I fear.” The stupid hostesses who would not take no for an answer. “One of them even managed to wangle an invitation to come up here,” he told me. “Can you imagine such a thing?”

This is the first I heard of Gloria Bingham, and I might have guessed then from Ran’s excited tone exactly how it would all work out; I might also have guessed that Gloria was small and stupid-smart, in that special Southern way, and that she was beautiful. My total opposite, my natural enemy.

Gloria was “petite,” dark-haired; a more just God, I thought, would have given her small dark eyes to match, but no, her eyes were exceptionally large and blue, unfairly brilliant. And her voice was remarkably low, for such a little person. “I’m so very glad to meet you; Ran’s talked so much about his artistic neighbor,” she told me, the first time we met. She managed, in the special way she pronounced “artistic,” to combine awe with insult, a famous Southern-lady trick, at which Gloria was especially adept.

By the beginning of that summer two things were clear to me: first, that Gloria and Ran were embarked on a serious love affair, she would be coming up for lots of visits, if not to stay; and second, that I could not stand it, I really couldn’t. I couldn’t stand knowing that she was there, just up the road, with Ran, and I alone with my ugly, rampant fantasies—nor when they drove by, both waving, friendly and happy. Nor was it bearable to feel her presence in Ran’s mind, the few times I saw him alone after the advent of Gloria.

Out of sheer desperation I did what I had sworn never to do: I telephoned my banker-father, in Milwaukee, and said that I had to have some money for a year in Italy. We had quarreled badly ten years back, when I had first mentioned art school, so that now he was so startled at hearing from me at all, and maybe even a little pleased, stonehearted bastard that he was, that he gave in after almost perfunctory resistance—just a few mutterings about my extravagance, which we both knew to be trumped up; I had always been the soul of thrift. There were also a few stern warnings about the dangers of Italy under Mussolini, about which he was not very well informed either.

Next I went to Dr. James; I asked for and was granted a year’s leave of absence.

In early July I sailed for Genoa, on a cheap, rather small Greek freighter, during the course of which voyage I had an affair with a Greek sailor, who was very handsome, and I thought about Ran, obsessively.

In Italy I reverted to my old bad habit of affairs with married men, dark fat middle-aged Italians who spent pious afternoons in the museums, on the prowl for silly American girls; but these affairs were less lonely than their American counterparts; Italian men had more free time, their wives at home being more docile, less questioning. Among other things I learned to say “I love you” in Italian: Ti voglio bene , I wish you well. I thought considerably about the difference between that sentiment and what I felt for Ran, whom God knows I did not wish well—I often wished him dead—or, better still, painfully dying. I was obsessed with him in an ugly, violent way that seemed to preclude other softer, gentler feelings.

The most significant experience of my Italian year, by far, was that there for the first time I saw real Michelangelos, and it was as though I had never seen sculpture before. Later I said this to Ran, and he told me about the first time he heard a Beethoven symphony performed: he was very young, of course, and it was inevitably the Fifth, but he remembered thinking, Ah, so that’s what music is. In the Bargello, in Florence, I was tremendously moved by the great unfinished marbles, the huge figures just emerging from the stone, and later, at the monumental sculptures in Rome, in the Vatican, I felt the most extraordinary excitement, exhilaration.

I had not in Hilton made any friendships that would warrant a correspondence; therefore, on the boat that took me back from Genoa to New York, a voyage on which I had no affairs with sailors, I did not know what to expect on my return. The strongest possibility was that by now Ran and Gloria would be married, given the extremely conventional habits of everyone involved. While I faintly hoped that they would have decided to live in Atlanta—maybe Gloria would have a family house down there, a “showplace”—I was also braced for their proximity in Hilton; I even thought that occasional views of Ran, yoked to such a fatuous woman, might diminish him in my mind; I might recover from my crazed preoccupation, my ugly lust.

But no. On my first afternoon in Hilton, back in my small house in the woods, the tender bright green June trees that were leafed out all over the landscape, Dr. James informed me on the telephone, other business being out of the way, that a terrible misfortune had befallen my neighbor Randolph Caldwell: Ran had been engaged to marry Gloria Bingham, their wedding had been imminent; indeed it was on a shopping trip to New York for wedding and honeymoon clothes that Gloria had met a younger, much richer man, with whom she had run off out West. Phoenix, Tucson, some place like that. Poor Ran was in bad shape; he was said to be drinking too much, up there in his big glass house, all alone. Maybe, once I got settled, in a neighborly way I could call on him? I could tell him about my year in Italy? Ran had been there on his wedding trip with Lucinda, and later on a concert tour; he loved to talk about Italy, Dr. James assured me.

Hanging up, I digested this outrageous suggestion, a neighborly call from me, as best I could, along with the news of Gloria’s defection. I found myself violently agitated, pacing about, unable to unpack, unable to do anything but smoke a lot of cigarettes and stare at nothing.

At last, in a mood of what-the-hell, or, what-have-I-got-to-lose, I did exactly what Dr. James had suggested: I went to the telephone and I dialed the number that I had memorized two years ago, which I still knew, although I had never used it before.