After You've Gone

Careless Love

Families and Survivors

Listening to Billie

Beautiful Girl
  (
STORIES
)

Rich Rewards

To See You Again
  (
STORIES
)

Superior Women

Return Trips
  (
STORIES
)

After You've Gone
  (
STORIES
)

Caroline's Daughters

Mexico: Some Travels and Travelers There

Almost Perfect

A Southern Exposure

Medicine Men

The Last Lovely City
  (
STORIES
)

After the War

The Stories of Alice Adams

The truth is, for a while I managed very well indeed. I coped with the house and its curious breakages, and with the bad nights of remembering you only at your best, and the good days suddenly jolted by your ghost. I dealt with the defection of certain old friends, and the crowding-around of a few would-be new best friends. I did very well with all that, in the three months since your departure for Oregon, very well indeed until I began to get these letters from your new person (I reject “lover” as too explicit, and, knowing you, I am not at all sure that “friend” would be applicable). Anyway, Sally Ann.

(You do remember encouraging me to write to you, as somewhat precipitately you announced your departure—as though extending me a kindness? It will make you feel better, you just managed not to say. In any case, with my orderly lawyer's mind, I am putting events—or “matters,” as we say—in order.)

The house.
I know that it was and is not yours, despite that reckless moment at the Trident (too many margaritas, too
palely glimmering a view of our city, San Francisco) when I offered to put it in both our names, as joint tenants, which I literally saw us as, even though it was I who made payments. However, your two-year occupancy and your incredibly skillful house-husbanding made it seem quite truly yours. (Is this question metaphysical, rather than legal? If the poet-husband of a house is not in fact a husband, whose is the house?) But what I am getting at is this. How could you have arranged for everything to break the week you left? Even the Cuisinart; no one else even heard of a broken Cuisinart, ever. And the vacuum. And the electric blanket. The dishwasher and the Disposal. Not to mention my Datsun. “Old wiring, these older flats,” the repair person diagnosed my household problems, adding, “But you've got a beautiful place here,” and he gestured across the park—green, pyramidal Alta Plaza, where even now I can see you running, running, in your eccentric non-regular-runner outfit: yellow shorts, and that parrot-green sweatshirt from God knows where, both a little tight.

My Datsun turned out simply to need a tune-up, and since you don't drive I can hardly blame that on you. Still, the synchronism, everything going at once, was hard not to consider.

Friends.
Large parties, but not small dinners, my post-you invitations ran. Or very small dinners—most welcome, from single women friends or gay men; unwelcome from wives-away husbands, or even from probably perfectly nice single men. I am just not quite up to all that yet.

People whom I had suspected of inviting us because of your poet fame predictably dropped off.

Nights.
In my dreams of course you still are here, or you are leaving and I know that you are, and there is nothing to do to stop you (you have already told me, so sadly, about Sally Ann, and the houseboat in Portland). Recently I have remembered that after my father died I had similar dreams; in those dreams
he was dying, I knew, yet I could not keep him alive. But those father dreams have a guilty sound, I think, and I truly see no cause for guilt on my part toward you. I truly loved you, in my way, and I did what I could (I thought) to keep us happy, and I never, never thought we would last very long. Isn't two years a record of sorts for you, for maybe any non-marrying poet? Sometimes I thought it was simply San Francisco that held you here, your City Lights—Tosca circuit, where you sought out ghosts of Beats. Well, in my dreams you are out there still, or else you are here with me in our (my) bed, and we awaken slowly, sleepily to love.

Once, a month or so ago, I thought I saw you sitting far back in a courtroom; I saw those damn black Irish curls and slanted eyes, your big nose and arrogant chin, with that cleft. A bad shock, that; for days I wondered if it actually could have been you, your notion of a joke, or some sort of test.

In all fairness, though—and since I mention it I would like to ask you something. Just why did my efforts at justice, even at seeing your side of arguments, so enrage you? I can hear you shouting: “Why do you have to be so goddam
fair
, what
is
this justice of yours?”

But as I began to say, in all fairness I have to concede that I miss your cooking. On the nights that you cooked, that is. I really liked your tripe soup and your special fettuccine with all those wild mushrooms. And the Sunday scrambled eggs that we never got to till early afternoon.

And you are a marvel at fixing things, even if they have a tendency not to stay fixed.

And, most importantly, a first-rate poet; Yale and now the Guggenheim people seem to think so, and surely as you hope the MacArthur group will come around. Having read so little poetry other than yours, I am probably no judge; however, as I repeatedly told you, to me it was magic, pure word-alchemy.

I do miss it all, the house-fixing and cooking, the love and poetry. But I did very well without it all. Until recently.

The letters.
The first note, on that awful forget-me-not paper, in that small, tight, rounded hand, was a prim little apology: she felt badly about taking you away from me (a phrase from some junior high school, surely) but she also felt sure that I would “understand,” since I am such a fair-minded person (I saw right off that you had described my habits of thought in some detail). I would see that she, a relatively innocent person, would have found your handsomeness-brilliance-sexiness quite irresistible (at that point I wondered if you could have written the letter yourself, which still seems a possibility). She added that naturally by now I would have found a replacement for you, the natural thing for a woman like me, in a city like San Francisco. That last implication, as to the loose life-styles both of myself and of San Francisco, would seem to excuse the two of you fleeing to the innocence of Portland, Oregon.

A couple of false assumptions lay therein, however. Actually, in point of fact, I personally might do better, man-wise, in Portland than down here. The men I most frequently meet are young lawyers, hard-core yuppies, a group I find quite intolerable, totally unacceptable, along with the interchangeable young brokers—real-estate dealers and just plain dealers. Well, no wonder that I too took up with a poet, an out-of-shape man with no CDs or portfolio but a trunk full of wonderful books. (I miss your books, having got through barely half of them. And did you really have to take the
Moby-Dick
that I was in the middle of? Well, no matter; I went out to the Green Apple and stocked up, a huge carton of books, the day you left.)

In any case, I felt that she, your young person, your Sally Ann, from too much evidence had arrived at false conclusions.
In some ways we are more alike, she and I, than she sees. I too was a setup, a perfect patsy for your charm, your “difference.”

But why should she have been told so much about me at all? Surely you must have a few other topics; reading poems aloud as you used to do with me would have done her more good, or at least less harm, I believe. But as I pondered this question, I also remembered several of our own conversations, yours and mine, having to do with former lovers. It was talk that I quite deliberately cut short, for two clear reasons: one, I felt an odd embarrassment at my relative lack of what used to be called experience; and, two, I did not want to hear about yours. You did keep on trying, though; there was one particular woman in New York, a successful young editor (though on a rather junky magazine, as I remember), a woman you wanted me to hear all about, but I would not. “She has nothing to do with us,” I told you (remember?). It now seems unfortunate that your new young woman, your Sally Ann, did not say the same about me.

Next came a letter which contained a seemingly innocent question: should Sally Ann go to law school, what did I think? On the surface this was a simple request for semi-expert advice; as she went on and on about it, though, and on and on, I saw that she was really asking me how she could turn herself into me, which struck me as both sad and somewhat deranged. Assuming that you have an ideal woman on whom Sally Ann could model herself, I am hardly that woman. You don't even much like “lady lawyers,” as in some of your worst moments you used to phrase it.

Not having answered the first note at all (impossible; what could I have said?), I responded to this one, because it seemed required, with a typed postcard of fairly trite advice: the hard work involved, the overcrowding of the field, the plethora of even token women.

…

And now she had taken to writing me almost every day; I mean it, at least every other day. Does she have no other friends? No relatives, even, or old school ties? If she does, in her present state of disturbance they have faded from her mind (poor, poor Sally Ann, all alone with you, in Portland, on a Willamette River houseboat), and only I remain, a purely accidental, non-presence in her life.

The rains have begun in Portland, and she understands that they will continue throughout the winter. She does not really like living on a houseboat, she finds it frightening; the boat rocks, and you have told her that all boats rock, there is nothing to be done. (You must be not exactly in top form either. I never heard you admit to an inability to remedy anything—even my Datsun; you said you could fix it and you did, temporarily.)