Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

In the early Seventies, perhaps as an outcome of the growing women’s movement, Diana was elected a district judge. She was tremendously proud of that office, and she worked extremely hard. And she, like Vittorio some five or six thousand miles away, acquired a reputation for fairness, for honesty and kindness—a coincidence all around, which neither of them could possibly have known about, and which, assuredly, no one could account for.

In a fairly new Porsche, on a Friday night early in June, two people—a young woman and an almost middle-aged man, Cynthia and Roger—are driving up from San Francisco, toward an exceptionally beautiful house in the mountains, near Lake Tahoe. A house that was broken into the night before. They have been talking, unhappily and disjointedly, about knowing versus not knowing about the break-in in advance of their arrival—as though there had been a choice. They have agreed that it is on the whole better to know, despite this present miserable anticipation.

The house belongs to Roger, but since they plan to marry in the fall it soon will be partly Cynthia’s, and sometimes she sighs at the thought of such responsibility; she is unused to owning things, her instincts being somewhat nomadic. And the news of this break-in has deeply upset her; she feels an unaccustomed rage and an ugly desire for vengeance: whoever broke in should be punished, and this sentiment is out of character too, for Cynthia.

Once a couple of years ago, Roger, probably with another girl, arrived to find the house flooded, dirty water everywhere, stained upholstery. Another time he came up to find it severely burglarized, all the pewter and copper things tastefully selected and removed. He says that it is better to know.

Cynthia, who is in her late twenties, works as a reader for a local publishers’ representative. In fact, just before meeting Roger, she had a rather silly affair with her employer, an erratic and on the whole irresponsible young man. Roger’s stability as well as his age have seemed reassuring. She has never married, just had a lot of affairs, most of which in retrospect also look silly, if great fun at the time. Roger has been married three times, each ending in divorce; no children. But he is ready to try again; he really wants to marry Cynthia. They both think that it is time she married. They look well together: small, red-haired, brown-eyed and lively Cynthia, and large, just-graying Roger, who does not look ten years older than she, not really. He likes the commitment of marriage, an attitude new to Cynthia, who is used to more feckless younger men.

Cynthia means to marry Roger, but he has one habit that bothers her: he sometimes calls her by the names of his former wives: Charlotte, Caroline, Christine. “You see? I’m faithful to the letter C,” he teases. But none of those names sound like Cynthia; can’t he tell the difference?

Lately, before the rip-off, Cynthia has begun to wonder if the house doesn’t figure, perhaps, too prominently in her marriage dreams: does she think of marrying Roger, and like the thought, partly because he has such an exceptional house? Roger inherited the house from his mother, a famous beauty in her day, and sometimes Cynthia thinks he cares too much about it, but by now so does she, and this break-in has sorely afflicted her spirits.

The phone call came that morning from an aging and lonely mountain neighbor, Mary Drake. She had no phone,and was calling from a gas station, in her oddly childish voice, among the other voices and sounds of cars and trucks and dogs. On her way to the Safeway that morning she had noticed that the draperies in Roger’s house were drawn and a light was still on. Going bravely to look in a window, she saw, she told Roger, “all this broken glass and food spilled all over. Liquor bottles.” From the Safeway she had called the sheriff, who, by the time she finished shopping, was at the house, and with him she went in. “I think someone got sick,” she indistinctly, and horrifyingly, told Roger.

Still, Cynthia and Roger were glad to be forewarned, although they were powerless to do anything but race toward the house, both their minds full of appalling images.

“Free-floating” anxiety (Why free? she has wondered) is sometimes a problem for Cynthia; she dislikes vague problems like when to end a love affair, when to marry. She functions better when, as now, there is something concrete to deal with. She stares out the window at the speeding scenery, the lovely slopes of ground, live oaks, cows, and she tells herself that it is only a house. This works, and she achieves some degree of calm.

Roger, to whom it is not only a house; it is his house—Roger is less generally anxious than she is; he is more direct. In extreme situations, like this one, he copes by outstripping the stimulus, so to speak. He shouts and swears, he makes things even worse than they are; he keeps the small car racing up the highway.

“Let’s face it,” he says grimly. “This is a lot worse than those frozen pipes, and rusty muddy water all over the house.” And Cynthia has to agree that yes, it is probably much worse. Food and waste are intimately revolting, totally so (not to mention the horror of “sick”). They are worse than rust, than any impersonal dirt.

And much worse than theft.

Twice in the past few years Cynthia has had minor but unpleasant surgery, for cysts that turned out to be benign, and she thinks of these operations now; she is reminded of their scheduled unpleasantness. Of feeling well, but knowing that at 7 a.m. she would be rolled onto a gurney and wheeled into a green operating room, from which she would later emerge and wake up feeling terrible. She now feels well, really, but knows that at about five-thirty they will arrive at the house, where they will open a familiar door, and see—something horrible.

She looks across at Roger, whose face is tense, and she decides not to tell him about this analogy. He feels bad enough already. Besides, he has never had an operation.

They have so often driven this exact route that it is possible to be blind to the racing views: the elaborate motel-restaurant clusters, the curious isolated bars that now advertise TOPLESS AND BOTTOMLESS. It is possible to ignore the strong homey smell of onions as they pass the packing plant at Vacaville.

Cynthia is, in fact, thinking about her first visit to that house, when the now familiar door first opened, and she saw that most beautiful room, that house.

It was nine months ago, a warm September day, air that held the barest hint of fall. Cynthia and Roger had only met in June, had been lovers (“in love”) for almost that long, an enchanted summer of discovery. They moved back and forth between Cynthia’s rambling, ferny Mission District flat, and Roger’s trim Telegraph Hill apartment, which held no traces of former wives, or, indeed, little sense of Roger himself. He apologized for its austereness, saying that it wasn’t really where he lived, and he showed her pictures of his true house: long, low-lying, shingled, with a slate roof and stone chimney, on the river. In some pictures there were banks of snow up to the level of the row of windows. Cynthia said yes, it was really beautiful. And still she was unprepared.

They drove across the narrow black bridge; they turned onto a white dirt road, through a meadow of tall grasses, between tall strict dark pines, toward the house. It looked like its pictures, only more beautiful. The shingles just turning silver, the leaves of a wild rosebush beside the steps just yellowing. Cynthia felt her face smile automatically, and at the same time she felt a queasy excitement, in some unspecified place.

They got out of the car, in the clean pine-smelling air, in the sounds of the rushing river, and walked up flagstone steps, across a stone porch, to a massive brassbound door. Which, first putting down their suitcases, Roger with difficulty unlocked. “It always sticks,” he affectionately said; he might have been speaking of an unruly pet.