Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

“I haven’t a clue. I don’t know her, actually.”

“Funny, she and that Italian boy look rather alike.”

The economist peered in the direction indicated. The idea of a conversation about an instructor’s wife bored him a great deal, but then so had the one they were just having, about prices in Paris before the war. “If you ask me they both look drunk,” he decisively said.

“My country is—how do you say?—a complete mess,” Vittorio seriously told Diana, during a long pause between records. “So torn in pieces, so everywhere divided. People with not homes. And the political parties, everybody fighting. Communists fighting Socialists, fighting Christian Democrats, fighting Monarchists. So much to do. I have to find some place in all that. Some work.”

“Which is your party?” asked Diana, with timid but intense interest.

“It is called the Action Party. Mainly former partisans. But it is so small, it will be absorbed by some larger, stronger party, either Socialists or Communists.”

His high seriousness was stirring to Diana; he seemed to take a useful life for granted; work to be done meant that he must do it. She tried to think of her own country, the States, in that way, and she then sighed with helplessness; undoubtedly there too were things to be done, but she would not know how to start, having so far never thought in those terms.

Very gently Vittorio asked her, “And you, what of your life?”

The truth was that for the moment Diana planned to follow the course currently prescribed for wives of graduate students. She would get a job and help support her husband until he got his doctorate (William McBride did not hand out a lot of money, not believing in “spoiling” his son, unaware that he already had); then, according to this pattern, the husband with the Ph.D. could get a job and the wife could start having babies.

So far, this is what Diana had vaguely imagined would happen, but suddenly, seeing it from the center of Europe, as she stood so close to Vittorio Garibaldi, she was unable to commit herself to such a plan, unable even to say it. Instead she told him what was half a lie. With a little laugh she said, “Actually, I’ve thought of going to law school.” It was true that once she had thought about law school, but that was quite a few years ago, as a freshman in college, an enthusiastic innocent, long before meeting Braxton, years before this marriage.

Naturally, Vittorio took her at her word. “That is marvelous,” he told her, with great warmth, a wide white smile. “You will be a wonderful lawyer, I know that.”

And then he said, “I have never seen brown eyes to have so much gold in them as yours do.”

Vittorio was a highly serious young man; gold-brown eyes cannot have been all that drew him to Diana, and he was powerfully drawn. He must have sensed a potentiality in her of which no one else was then aware, not her husband, nor her former professor Howard Stein, nor, surely, Diana herself. Vittorio thought she would be a good lawyer, would even attain some greatness.

Stanley Morris, aware that he had been caught at that ignominious activity, that adolescent wrestling with a vulgar little girl from nowhere, irrationally but quite humanly directed his rage toward her.

“You stupid little tease,” he whispered into her ear, the ear that a moment ago was listening to his endearments, his amorous persuasions. “You’re nothing but a waste of my time.” He sat up and began to rearrange his disordered clothes.

The Estonian girl began to cry, as softly as a kitten.

In total disgust, for he now thought the whole summer had been a waste of time, not getting him anywhere, Stanley went back into the hall, where the dance was still going on.

If he could find Howard Stein and engage him in serious conversation, thus reassuring Howard that he, Stanley, was a worthwhile person, the evening could not be counted as a total loss. But Howard did not seem to be around.

“Honey—” That nasal sound announced the plump presence of Braxton McBride, her young husband, at Diana’s elbow. Her just-soaring spirits dropped as she turned around.

“Honey, I think I’m getting a sort of a headache. I’d better go on to bed. No, you stay, I’ll be all right.”

According to the previous rules of their relationship, Diana was then supposed to express strong sympathy and concern: Braxton had frequent terrible headaches. And of course she should accompany him to bed. But tonight she did not do this. She said, “Well, okay. Sleep is probably the best thing. I’ll be along later.”

Braxton was surprised, but there was not much he could say. With a martyred look he kissed her left cheek. He said good night and left.

The party seemed to be winding down. The wine was not strong enough for any long-range effect, and by now they had run out of it. And the good fellowship engendered by general awareness that this was the last night was running out too.

A conversation between the organizing, success-oriented dean and a visiting anthropologist came apart when the anthropologist described the seminar as “a bizarre but predictable group situation.”

The dean scowled as the anthropologist tried to explain. “I mean, all the groups acted within their assigned national characters. The Danes were noble, high-minded, the Austrians untrustworthy, the Spaniards dark and mysterious. The Italians were sexually active, the Americans foolishly ignorant and the Germans pigs.”

This did not work. The dean was thinking: Christ, these generalizing, bigoted remarks from an anthropologist? And that sentence could be read on his face.

“Of course I am generalizing,” said the anthropologist.

They parted in mutual distrust, dislike.

Various people went off to their beds.

No one was any longer playing records, the old man having gone to his bed in a narrow room just off the kitchen.

And, strangely, the still night was hotter than ever.

One of the “mysterious” dark Spaniards, an intelligent and kindly fellow, walked out onto the porch for a taste of air, and there he came upon the Estonian girl, still crying. For several weeks he had been looking at her with a sort of lustful affection, and so he sat down beside her and did the obvious thing, which was to take her in his arms and stroke her hair.

She soon calmed down, and in a gentle way they talked, in French—whispering, because it was so late and dark. It turned out that by the most wonderful coincidence, the two of them would be attending the Sorbonne that fall. They would see each other again very soon—in Paris!

Quite suddenly visited by despair—it was over, their evening—Diana said, very soft-voiced, to Vittorio, “I guess I ought to go now. To bed.”

“No, you must not.”

Taking her hand, he led her strongly out through the door, across the porch and into the hot black still night, past the clearing where, among the ghostly statuary, Howard Stein had made his hopeful commencing speech.

After the clearing there was a small forest of pines that ran along the lake, and within that forest there was a ring of small thick trees, forming a cave. Into the cave Vittorio led Diana. Where, kissing, embracing each other, they slowly removed their clothes.

At a certain point he said to her, sighingly, “Ah, you are so thin .”

And suddenly, for Diana, who had always felt scrawny, inadequate, “thin” was the most beautiful word in the world. Thin .

Years later she would sometimes hear that word said in a certain way, and she would be pierced through with remembering Vittorio, his voice and those dark hours that ended sometime close to dawn.

Since all those events took place so long ago, more than thirty years, it is possible now to know how things turned out, what happened to everyone.