Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

(But is it possible, Ms. Heffelfinger, that I was wrong, that I was indeed much loved by Ran? A heady thought: I can hardly take it in.)

The next phase of our “relationship” was mostly occupied with Ran’s illness, and it was mostly terrible.

He had always coughed a lot, ever since I had known him, hardly surprising in such a perpetual smoker, although at the time I smoked as much as he and rarely coughed. We even joked sometimes about his smoker’s hack, since he seemed to cough most violently in bed. Then, in a gradual way, we both noticed that the cough was getting worse, and worse and worse. He would be taken with terrible paroxysms, fits, during which he would seem to be trying to cough up his very lungs; he would clutch his arms together, his face an awful red, and wet with sweat.

I began to have secret fears of TB, then still relatively common, or of lung cancer, less prevalent, and not much known. At last I was so frightened that I dared his rage; I knew he would feel an imputation of illness as an accusation (one more!) but I said to him, “Ran, darling, that cough of yours is getting out of hand. You’ve got to get it seen to.”

He answered so mildly that I was more alarmed than ever. “I know,” he said. “I’m going up to Johns Hopkins next week.”

My first thought, which I managed not to say, was: But I have to go to New York next week, I can’t go with you. (I had begun, in the long course of my association with Ran, to enjoy some success, from a show in the small gallery of the Hilton art department, to several pieces in a statewide show, in the capital city, then moving north to a show in Washington, D.C. And then New York, Madison Avenue. The Whitney.)

I did say, “You’ll give me a call? I’ll be in New York. The Brevoort.”

“Okay, if you’re going to be such a silly bitch about it.”

“Yes, I am, you dumb bastard.”

That was how we often spoke to each other, affection concealed in abuse. I think Ran may even have felt rather daring, calling a woman a bitch right to her face, and God knows he often meant it.

Most of that trip to New York I spent on the phone, leaving messages as to my whereabouts: if Mr. Caldwell called I would be having a drink at the Plaza, in the Oak Room; I would be with Betty Parsons; I was back in the hotel, having dinner on the terrace, by myself.

By now we were in the early Forties. Ran and I had been together for almost ten years, and the country was at war. New York, that bright October, was full of uniforms, arrivals and departures. Since the Brevoort was fairly expensive most of the uniforms there were officers’, lots of brass and braid, ribbons and stars. I had just got rid of a very drunk colonel, who was insisting that he join me—how dare I have dinner alone, didn’t I know there was a war on?— when there, where the colonel had been, was Ran, very dashing, very happy, almost drunk.

He kissed me lavishly, which was unusual: he disliked a public display. He sat down across from me, and he spoke the great news: “I thought I should tell you in person that I am a certified healthy man. Those gentlemen, with their innumerable tests, which were not at all pleasant—they all failed to turn up a single evil diagnosis. I have no infections, no malignancies.”

Well . We celebrated with champagne and lobsters, and more champagne for breakfast. I took Ran around to some galleries, and he was very proud of me, I think. Later we met some old music friends of his for drinks, on Patchen Place, and more friends for dinner, at Luchow’s. We had never had such a good time: how wonderful, Ran was not seriously sick.

What we both ignored, or failed for quite a while to see as significant, was that he was still coughing, badly.

Back in Hilton nothing else had changed much either. We drank and quarreled and talked as much as ever. I think we made love a little less, by then.

Sometime the following spring Ran announced that he had been offered a teaching job in the music department in Tucson, the University of Arizona. “Although I confess that the word ‘emeritus’ rather gives me pause,” he said.

He rambled on, but I wasn’t listening at all; I was thinking Gloria. Gloria had moved out to Phoenix or Tucson, to me almost the same place. Out West. Of course she must be Ran’s true direction. That night we had one of our bad quarrels, about something else—naturally.

I went out to visit him in October, which was not one of our best times together.

For one thing, the place itself was so strange that it made us seem alien even to each other. Surrounded by the bizarre, inimical desert, the flat, palm-lined, unnaturally sunny town, Ran’s apartment had the look of a motel: stucco, one-storied, part of a complex built around a large, much too blue swimming pool, in which it was never quite warm enough to swim.

Motels have always seemed somehow sexual to me, and I was unable to rid myself of fantasies involving Ran and Gloria: had she visited him there, did she maybe come for visits frequently? All morning, every day, when Ran was off teaching his classes, I would ransack his apartment (though tidily, a cautious spy), every cranny and corner, drawer and wastebasket, his desk, even the linen closet, in a search for Gloria, any trace of her—a quest that was as compulsive as it was humiliating, degrading. And it was also fruitless, yielding up nothing but a crick in my back, a broken fingernail and dust.

At night we went out and ate Mexican food and drank too much Mexican beer, and, out of character for us, we neither quarreled nor talked very much. I was afraid—in fact, I knew—that if we did talk much of it would lead to a fight, and any conversation might summon Gloria. And Ran had, seemingly, almost no energy. He coughed a lot, and we almost never made love.

(But then tonight, Ms. Heffelfinger, as I remembered that time, from such a long distance, and I recalled my desperate need to know about Gloria, I came to an odd conclusion: I thought, How strange of me to care, when really it didn’t matter. What was the difference, finally, whether or not Gloria spent an afternoon or a weekend with Ran, within those garish stucco walls. Even whether or not they made love. I could almost hope they had; I could almost, if belatedly, halfheartedly, wish for a little almost final happiness for Ran. But not too much, and I was still consoled by the fixed idea that Gloria would have been uninteresting in bed.)

When he came back to Hilton, at the beginning of the following summer, I knew that Ran must be very sick indeed—his speech was so radically altered. Whereas before he had said everything so elaborately, with such a smoke screen of complicated verbiage, now he spoke very simply and directly, as though he had not much time or breath remaining. Which in fact he did not: he had what we now know as emphysema, he was dying of it.

That summer we spent most evenings in Ran’s huge high glassed-in living room, watching fireflies and the lengthening shadows, among the barely stirring summer leaves, the flowering shrubbery.

“Sometimes I can’t remember when you first came here,” Ran said one night. “Was it before or after Lucinda killed herself?”

“Just after,” I told him as I digested what I had only half known, or heard as rumor before, what he thought I already knew—Lucinda’s suicide. And I sadly wished that he had been able to say this before; it might have eased some pain for him, I thought. And I thought about Lucinda, her long novels and small madrigals, her dislike of the “cluttered” landscape, and I cursed her for adding to a deeply guilty man’s store of guilt. In the long run, really, Gloria had done him a lot less harm.

“I guess by now I think you’ve always been around,” he said, with a new half-smile, so that my heart lurched with an aching, unfamiliar tenderness for him.