Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

“What is it that you do out here, Joseph?” Cam asked.

“I’m a psychiatrist. Mainly children.”

“I married my doctor,” said Avery, as though she were making a joke.

Consciously refraining from telling any of the psychiatrist jokes he knew, Cameron said, “Well, if you’re interested in children you’ll like this story about this little old gal here, your Avery.” And he told the story about the spelling bee. And at the end in his gentle way he chuckled, and he said, “Helen Jane never did catch on, but of course Avery did.”

“What did you do then?” Joseph asked Avery.

“I ran upstairs crying, of course,” Avery said.

“Did you, old sweetheart?” old Cameron asked. “I didn’t remember that.”

By the middle of dessert, Joseph, who had indeed been drinking a lot, beginning with the vodka sneaked into his tomato juice, to cope with the hangover from the night before, slumped over in his seat. His unconscious face was no longer handsome, but swollen and coarse. “The ugliest old thing you’d ever want to see” is how Lillian later, with considerable exaggeration, described Joseph’s passed-out face to Helen Jane and Ken, of the C.I.A.

But after one glance each of those Southern-trained people pretended that he was not there—what had happened had not happened—and none of them glanced a second time.

And after dinner Joseph was left snoring at the table; they all (those three Southern people) went into the living room, where Avery served coffee, and Lillian showed pictures of the grandchildren and of her daughter’s marriage to Ken. And then Lillian and Cameron got up to go, and to make their prolonged Southern ritual of farewell.

At last that was over and Cameron had bundled Lillian into their rented Mercedes and he stood on the sidewalk with Avery, in the cold San Francisco summer night. Avery’s arms were bare and she shivered, and at that moment Cameron was seized with an impulse toward her that was violent and obscure and inadmissibly sexual. He reached toward her—surely he had simply meant to kiss her good night?—but as he stepped forward everything went wrong and his heavy foot bore down on the uncovered instep of her high-arched foot, so that she cried out in pain.

“Oh, my darling, I’m so sorry!” breathed old Cam, drawing back.

“It’s all right, I know you are,” she said.

(“But why did you ask them to dinner?” Joseph asked her sometime the next day.

“I don’t know, I think just the sound of their voices over the phone. When I was little I thought Cam was the most marvelous, glamorous man alive,” and she sighed. Then, “I thought they’d be nice!” she cried out. “God, don’t they know? How I must have felt about a little girl who could just smile to get love and not have to spell Constantinople?”)

“What took you so long? What on earth were you talking about?” Lillian asked Cameron, in the heavy, purring car.

“I—uh—stepped on her foot. Didn’t mean to, of course. Had to say I was sorry.”

“My, you are the clumsiest old boy, now aren’t you.” And Lillian chuckled, quite satisfied with them both, and with the evening.

Just a year ago, another balmy blue May, here in San Francisco, I was newly and madly in love with a man I had met a couple of weeks before. We were silly, like adolescents; love seemed to us our own unique invention—love meaning, of course, the most overwhelming, most intense and inexhaustible sensuality. We thought that no lovers had ever made love so frequently, or so violently as we. David, a just-divorced father of three, a lawyer. I am, and was then, a divorced mother of one, and an editor, part time.

We met, David and I, in the Washington Square Bar and Grill, where I had gone to dinner with a friend, Anna, an actress, who is talented but often unemployed; we see each other fairly often, more for lunches than for dinner, since she is usually involved with some man or other. I am usually not.

I had not been to that particular restaurant before, perhaps because I had heard almost too much about it; it is the sort of place mentioned in columns, locally. Anna goes there a lot; she lives in North Beach, she says it’s her neighborhood pub. And the “singles” aspect of the bar, as we waited for a table, hemmed in by such a lively crowd, made me feel somewhat shy; Anna, dramatically blond, handles situations of that nature considerably better.

In any case, we were standing there in the crowd, hoping to get a table soon, I suppose looking somewhat helpless, when a smallish man with thick gray hair (obviously premature; he looked young) and sad brown eyes moved closer to us and asked if he couldn’t buy us a drink. He had on a dark gray suit (with a vest!) but looked okay. I was the one he had addressed, oddly enough, but it was Anna who said yes, he sure could; we’d love some white wine. At that moment the most striking thing about him, aside from the gray hair, and that vest, was the fact that he had a big fistful of silver dollars, jiggling them in his hand. And when Anna said we’d like white wine he went off to the bar to pay for the drinks—with silver, probably. He came back with the glasses of wine at the same instant that the waiter said our table was ready, and so it seemed polite to ask him to come along—Anna asked him.

In that way we three sat down in a booth together, David seated across from Anna and me. Right off, after introducing himself, he explained about the silver dollars: he had spent the weekend in Las Vegas, and made a lot of money there. Anna and I laughed at the very idea of Las Vegas, of making money in that way, and he laughed too. The first real luck he’d had in several months, David said, since his divorce. Being single was okay, he guessed, but he missed his kids. Handsome David, with that thick surprising hair, slightly slanted brown eyes, a strong nose and rather delicate narrow mouth—from the start I was very aware of his mouth.

He told us that he was a lawyer, and I was struck, at that moment, by the odd fact that the only lawyers I know these days are young women—friends of about my own age, I mean. The men I know are in what could be loosely described as the arts, although you would have to stretch that to include journalism and some commercial art. Which, according to a rather conservative friend of mine, explains why I have so often been dumped: I tend to be drawn to “unreliable” artists, beginning with my husband, a painter, who cut out for New York when I was pregnant with Barbara, just leaving a note. (This was not as bad as it sounds; we were not getting along well at all, and it is probably harder to bring up a child with a husband you don’t get along with than by yourself, or that’s what I imagine. Besides, like so many good artists, my husband—my former husband—was much more successful in New York than out here, and sometimes sent money for Barbara.)

Anna asked David what kind of law he practiced, and he said that actually he was in investments. “I still find it exciting, sometimes,” he said, and he laughed in an appealing way. “Basically I’m just a gambler.”

I said that sounded like fun, which it suddenly did, and I got a beautiful smile from David. “Well, it is,” he said.

How is it that certain things between people become so quickly clear? I don’t know, no idea, but quite soon it was obvious that David and I were—relating? communicating?—were compellingly drawn to each other, would probably spend the rest of the evening together, and probably in bed. It was clear too that Anna didn’t mind or feel left out; actually she seemed pleased at the situation, as though she had introduced us to each other, and I could feel her thinking, Oh, at last someone sensible for Maud, a lawyer in a three-piece suit. Also—the early luck of lovers—she was meeting the current man in her own life at the airport, coming up from L.A., later on. And so we all three talked and laughed, and David and I stared at each other with curiosity, sneaking smiles—and with an almost breathless anticipatory lust.