Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

“This is Jane Phelps,” I said in a clear strong voice, quite startling to my ears: who would have thought I could manage it? “I’ve just got back from Italy, and I thought—”

“Well, my dear Jane,” he crashed into my sentence, as though he had been waiting to hear from me. “What an entirely delightful surprise, how quite wonderful to hear from you! And Italy, ah, how I would love to hear of your stay there, all of it. I don’t suppose you could possibly—”

He was asking me up to his house for a bite of supper, as he put it, and I was saying yes. Yes, yes.

As we approached his door, Ran having gallantly driven down to pick me up at five-thirty—“Well, we might as well start with the cocktail hour, don’t you agree?”—Ran seemed to have forgotten that I had never been to his house before, and I saw no reason to mention it. He did mumble as we entered that he was afraid it was a little messy, the “girl” got in his way; she hadn’t been there for a while. I then walked into a huge room, the room that is now my own, to a scene of the most incredible squalor: spilled drinks and spilling-over ashtrays, scattered newspapers, magazines, unopened letters, face-down books. Dust rabbits at the edges of the rugs. Long grime-streaked windows that looked out to the lovely leaves, the hills, the gentle June twilight.

It was obviously the dwelling place of a person too miserable to function in a normal way, incapable of emptying an ashtray, of reading, finishing anything, probably of eating, and I wondered about the bite of supper. But mainly I was stricken with waves of pity for Ran, perhaps my first kindly emotion in his direction, which did nothing to diminish my other feelings. I sat down in a cleared space on a sofa as Ran went off for drinks. I knew that I would do well not even to think about the kitchen.

Sorrow, what he had recently been through, even too much bourbon had not made Ran less attractive; if anything, he looked better, leaner and sadder, his dark eyes larger and his hair, I thought, a shade more white. That night he was wearing, as I will (evidently) always remember, an old plaid wool shirt, probably from L. L. Bean, his favorite store.

We sat for a long time, there in the deepening dusk; from time to time Ran would get up and go and “sweeten” our drinks, not turning on any lights. And we talked, as Dr. James had more or less instructed, about Italy. Ran was upset that I had only gone to Florence and Rome; he didn’t count Genoa. “But Siena,” he said. “Bergamo. And Todi, Gubbio, Spoleto. Ravello! You can’t believe the views of hills of olives. But after all you are so young, you can go many times to Italy.” At that last I thought I heard a small quaver in his voice, but I could have been wrong. In truth I was barely listening; I was only looking at him, wanting to touch him, to be touched. And I was a little afraid: I knew that I could not stand another evening that ended as our last evening of intimacy had ended; this time I would behave very badly indeed.

Another fear was that he would get drunk and pass out: I didn’t yet know that Ran was the stay-up-all-night sort of drinker.

He had been sitting on an armchair near my perch on the sofa. Coming back with what must have been our fifth or sixth drinks, he then sat down instead on the sofa, on another cleared space near mine, with only a pile of letters, bills, whatever, stacked between us. It was I who finally reached across, reached for Ran, but at least he was responsive; as though he had been waiting for just that gesture, and maybe in a way he had been, he grasped and kissed me, and at last, in the fumbling way of adolescents in a darkened room, on a cluttered family sofa, we managed to make love. And when Ran cried out, “Oh, my darling,” although I partly knew that he did not mean me, my heart leapt gratefully anyway.

And that was the beginning of our legendary love affair, the great love of Jane Phelps and Randolph Caldwell. From then on we saw each other almost every day, one way or another, as the seasons changed around our separate houses on that road, in the deep beautiful woods. Wisely enough, we never even considered moving in together; after a night of love one or the other of us would return to his or her own dwelling. We both knew that we needed those hours apart, sometimes simply to gather more energy for love, at other, too frequent times to refuel a quarrel, to lick our wounds.

After the lush green summer, of honeysuckle, roses, wisteria everywhere, came an autumn landscape of the most brilliant leaves, crimson and gold against a blue, blue sky, in the brighter, colder air. Then winter, sometimes snow, or more often just cold, the woods full of thin crisp leaves, and the smell of wood smoke from the Negro cabins, far down the hill. As much as with Ran, I fell in love with that landscape, his countryside. Permanently.

One great shared pleasure, discovered early between us, was in talking about our work. It was the deep, extraordinary excitement between two people whose pursuits are quite separate, but whose dedication to these activities is similar, two people who can thus find areas of the most passionate affinity. These conversations occurred infrequently; like most “creative” people, neither of us was often moved to talk in that vein, but when we did it was entirely wonderful, talk that even now gives me the greatest joy to remember.

But a sad fact about these conversations, of course, was that for Ran it was all in the past; he was talking about how he used to feel, what he once had done. Whereas I had just begun to work in a serious way; I worked furiously, excited about what I was producing, what I dreamed of making in the future. In those early days I was just moving from small carved wooden sculptures to larger figures, and in my mind were even larger constructions, the sort of shapes that I eventually achieved.

What demons, then, drove us so frequently to ugly rages, unspeakable recriminations? We would goad each other on, until Ran would say that no, he did not love me at all, he never had, I did not know what real love was. Or I would go on and on about my great and numerous Italian lovers, exaggerating wildly, until Ran would get up and lurch toward me, and slap my face—this happened more than once, and then I would hit him back, of course.

Too much drink was certainly a cause of trouble between us, that endless succession of bourbons-and-water, but booze was not a necessary cause, I wouldn’t think. Surely there must be at least a few blowsy alcoholic couples who get along affectionately, slurring their words of love?

No, with us there were at least two basic and seemingly irreparable causes of conflict, deep-rooted, unavailable to rational thought, or control.

To blame Ran first: one of our troubles was his basic mistrust-suspicion of sex, especially good sex, and ours was mostly excellent—hard to explain, but there it was, great sex. Although he never would have admitted it, being such a sophisticated man, a distinguished composer, Ran really believed all those Protestant-Puritan myths, especially strong in small-town Southern men, I think. He believed that sex weakened your intellectual processes: “Well, my dear, I fear that I must bid you an early adieu; I have to get a great deal done in the morning,” he would say, over my impassioned protests, my threats, and this was not something that we could ever talk about. He believed too that nice women, good women, didn’t really like sex; my evident sensual relish made me suspect, was probably proof of a bad character.

The other problem, maybe worse, was mine: my own unshakable, implacable self-dislike. Its causes no longer interest me; it was just a fact, like being tall. And we all know how it is with such people: anyone who claims to love us is either lying or soft in the head, inferior; at various times I accused Ran of both conditions, but mostly of lying. Even when he assured me, as he often did, that the happiest moments in his life had been with me, that he had never truly cared so much for any woman, and for so long, I was always sure that his heart and mind were still vividly inhabited by Gloria. I believed that even in our most tender moments he thought of her, and that to me he was simply being polite, saying what he felt the situation called for.