In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  IN LOVE WITH ALICE

  “Alon Preiss’s In Love with Alice weaves a complex, magical web of love, betrayal, and secrets that spans years and continents. Graceful, passionate, and earthy, Preiss’s narrative skillfully conveys emotions and the means by which they are masked.… Secrets, and what we do to hide them, take center stage in this novel that is at once dreamlike and prosaic, poetic and practical…. Each of the novel’s themes, and each of the several relationships portrayed, is intense and poignant in its own right, and the frailties and foibles of Preiss’s characters are revealed in a manner that is at once guarded and intimate.”

  — Kristine Morris, Foreword Reviews

  “In Love with Alice is a spellbinding love story that is both intimate and universal. In beautifully fluid prose, Alon Preiss explores the ecstasy and despair of his characters' passions from every possible angle, as well as their consequences across decades. At the same time, this is a novel about the missing pieces in our lives—first loves, absent siblings, parents dead or distant—and how we are haunted by them. In Love with Alice is a complex tapestry of tortured relationships that will stay with me for a long time. And I'm a little bit in love with Alice myself.”

  — Clifford Garstang, author of What the Zhang Boys Know and In an Uncharted Country (Press 53)

  “From the opening page readers will know that they are in the hands of a master: a writer who can take us from Europe to Hollywood to the deepest recesses of his characters' hearts.”

  — Donna Levin, author of California Street (Simon & Schuster)

  “A charming portrait of love and heartbreak, success and disappointment, in the closing decades of the 20th- century. Against the backdrop of New York's social elite, Preiss explores the intensity and fragility of romantic love, and the search for fulfillment in a time of social and technological change. This a memorable and touching novel."

  — Matthew C. Simpson, author, Rousseau, A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury)

  “Alice lives in Blake’s shadow, and their relationship seems to be built more on what they do not know about each other than what they do know…. every character in the novel has secrets, and what we really see here is how [the effort] it takes to hide secrets really affects our lives. We are looking at emotions that are masked here, and I must say that Alon Preiss does so in passionate and beautiful prose, the kind I wish every author would write.”

  — Amos Lassen, Reviews by Amos Lassen

  “What I really like about this novel is the author’s unflinching honesty about relationships: they are messy and it’s not easy to figure out how to make them work. But boy, does the reader have fun watching these characters try!”

  — Granville Burgess, playwright, Conrack, author, Stone in the Crick (Honey Brook Publishers)

  “ ‘It was great being young and rich’ says a main character. But was it? In Love With Alice is an unapologetic look at lives most of us can only imagine, lives carefully drawn with shadow and maybe ever so slight a nod to Wolfe’s Bonfire…maybe a ‘phony-baloney happiness’ another character makes reference to. We are asked, with skillful foreshadowing, to notice tiny hints and clues that make us excited to get home at night, after our mundane day has ended, to pick up the book again. Just to see how it all keeps coming together, the latching and unlatching of these mysterious lives.”

  — Nina Gaby, editor of Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women (She Writes Press)

  IN LOVE WITH ALICE

  A THIRTOVER NOVEL

  Alon Preiss

  Chickadee Prince Books

  New York

  Copyright © 2017 by Alon Preiss

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  ISBN 978-0-9913274-5-4

  Front cover illustration, “Vigil 6” by Aron Wiesenfeld.

  Book design by Daniel Middleton, Scribe Freelance

  Chickadee Prince Logo by Garrett Gilchrist

  Visit us at www.ChickadeePrince. com

  First Printing

  To Isabel

  IN LOVE WITH ALICE

  A long, intricate series of connections and coincidences led Ewell to Alice, but once he met her, he was hooked, and he was hooked for good. He was thirty the summer that he first heard her voice over a crackling, long-distance telephone line, and she was a few years younger, but she was more successful than he was. She was, in fact, just weeks away from calling herself a millionaire, and she’d done it without much effort or special talent, just spinning up into the heavens with the rest of the American economy in the 1980s. It made Ewell long to be an American; so did Alice’s beautiful voice on the telephone. To walk in those bustling streets, to speak English in that crazy-charming accent with all its rough edges, to stand in the California smog drinking watery beer, to be a millionaire.

  A month later, she sent him her photograph. Alice looked slight and delicate, with a smile that confounded and confused and charmed, and she was pretty enough to be called pretty in the real world. In the picture, she was leaning against a fence, and behind her were fields of corn. She had jet-black hair and smooth white skin, and pretty round cheekbones, and she looked like the physical embodiment of the type of girl who in sad novels would fall madly in love then die young. But her eyes hinted at steely resolve. Come visit me, Ewell! she wrote on the back of the photograph. He sent back his own picture. He was tall and lanky, and he didn’t look thirty — he was still outgrowing the awkwardness of youth. But she wrote to him that she loved his smile, and that he looked exactly as she had imagined from their phone calls and letters. What was that thing behind you in the picture? she wrote. Was that a fjord? Is that what that was? Write back soon!!! He wrote back: No. That was not a fjord.

  Their next batch of letters brought a downturn in the relationship. He wrote to her that he did not want to travel to America because he was afraid that she would not like him once he arrived there, and then he would be stuck alone in a country whose every billboard, every street corner, every crested butte, would remind him of Alice. She wrote to him that she was in love with a man named Mark, and she was filled with confusion. I loved him in college, and I broke up with him a few months after graduation. I thought it was a real breakup, but I realized later that I had done it to pressure him to marry me, or at least to become engaged to me. He took it as the end. He went on with his life. And so did I. But I’m not really over him. And I thought you should know this. I don’t know why. All my love, Alice. They had begun very quickly to sign their letters with some variation of the word love, but neither had so far dared to place the word all by itself on the page. Ewell wrote back that she was right to be honest with him, and there are things in one’s life that one never gets over, and that’s just one of the dangers of being human, and he certainly would not hold such a thing against her. I once thought that I loved a woman named Aila, he wrote. And then, when it is no more, those feelings fade. If Fate means for you to be together, and to be in love, you will be. If not, you will not, and what must be false love will fade away, and one day you will be happy, and this is just part of the Adventure of Life. I am glad that you told me, and that I told you, because now we know each other better, and now we are closer. All my love, Ewell. She responded with something approaching glee. She’d had a very good day at work, had made a lot of money that day, then returned home to find his tender and beautiful letter waiting for her. This is how it made me feel! she wrote, and she enclosed a picture of herself smiling a very big smile. She also suggested that, if America made him so nervous, they might
meet on “neutral territory,” someplace in Italy or Greece or someplace like that, in a remote and beautiful fishing village where they could swim and drink the sort of coffee that people drink in Europe and lie on the beach, and talk all day and get drunk and tan. He agreed in his next letter, and he suggested a place that he had read about that matched her description. The first night, they should stay at inns at the opposite end of town, spend their entire first day by themselves, getting used to the tranquil life and, in Alice’s case, recovering from jet-lag. Then, the second night, they would meet at a little restaurant in the center of town that looked out across the river at the castle, with the peacocks strolling around the grounds among the rose bushes. We will share a bottle of the local wine, and the scene will be perfect — the castle lit up in purple and blue and red, the waves of the ocean crashing on the shore, swans floating by on the river. If we do not like each other then, with everything so perfect, we will not like each other at all. That way, he explained, I could get on the next train, and I will be out of your life. You can still enjoy your vacation and have a very nice time. You will not be surrounded by my countrymen all looking and talking like me and driving you mad. I know that you work very hard, and if I do not please you in some way, I would not want that to ruin your rare vacation. With love, Ewell. P.S. Do not worry — if you decide to send me away, before I get on the train, I will help you plan your itinerary.

  She actually telephoned him. “You don’t need to be so careful. I’m sure I will like you,” she insisted again. “I love your smile.”

  “I love your smile too,” he said. “But just in case.”

  A few weeks later, Ewell was riding in a train heading south for his first date with Alice, when an airplane passed overhead, angled at a slight incline in preparation for landing. Ewell wondered whether Alice were on that plane, and whether she were looking down at that exact moment, wondering whether Ewell were on the train. He told himself that he would remember to ask her that sometime during the week, but he never did. And every once in a while, for the rest of his life, he would wonder whether Alice had looked down at the train from her seat up in the clouds, and whether she had thought about him.

  The inn he chose was in the old section of town just a few feet away from an outdoor market. The inn had a steep winding staircase, and his room smelled like old wood. This was a good smell, Ewell decided; a smell Alice would like.

  His first night in town, he bought a bottle of wine and sat out by the ocean, his feet buried in the sand, thinking about coming here the next night with Alice, practicing things he would say. Making sure that he didn’t tell her that thing about his past, that weird thing that scared girls away. And practicing his laugh. He had a “goofy” laugh, as another American girl had once described it. He would need to work on it. And so he did, laughing into the empty air, his laughter drifting out to sea on the chilly wind.

  Ewell arrived at that café early, and everything was as he had described it to Alice. He asked for a table outside and sat in the cool breeze, looked around for Alice, then tried not to look around so much. He had brought a novel to read, but it was filled with brooding, and it did not hold his interest. Suddenly around the corner and out of the darkness came Alice, looking like her photograph but not like her photograph — now, relaxed, moving quickly through the night, her smile easier, her eyes wider and more hopeful; and then when she saw him stand up to greet her, she started to run, and when she’d reached his table, she was a little bit out of breath, and he smiled, and she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and she said, with a little laugh, “I’m Alice.”

  One of the peacocks on the opposite bank of the river was walking about with its tail open, which was a rare sight, but was not surprising, actually, given the magic of the evening as Ewell perceived it. After the first glass of wine, gazing admiringly across the river at the peacock bathed in purple light as it stood proudly before the centuries-old castle like a magician’s guard dog, Alice asked Ewell whether this was where he took all the American girls, and he said, “No. Only you,” and right after he said it he realized that she’d been trying to make some sort of a joke, and so he laughed, his big silly laugh, and it even felt silly as it came out of his throat, but it made her laugh twice as hard. On the second glass of wine, she was holding his hand, and she told him that his touch felt familiar, but not like anyone she’d ever known before tonight. “I don’t want to go back to my inn,” she said. They walked east through the town arm-in-arm along deserted, cobble-stone streets, stopping to kiss every few minutes in the electric-blue night. Back at the room, they threw themselves together with a hungry intensity, collided like shooting stars, and then they fell asleep wrapped in a tight embrace. When Ewell woke, Alice opened one eye. “See,” she said, “I told you I’d like you.”

  An hour later, after showering, Ewell came out of the bathroom naked, and Alice was sitting on the bed, squinting through her camera. She hesitated just a moment, focusing, and her ambush was ruined; Ewell protested, covered himself quickly with both hands, his white face a rosy blush. Alice put her camera down and pleaded with him. “Let me take a picture of your little man,” she said. “I won’t even get your face in the picture. Just your fellow.” He dropped his hands, looked down at Alice quizzically, ready to cover himself again if she raised the camera. Alice, admiringly, without any elaboration: “It’s like none other that I’ve ever seen or heard about.” Alice sitting naked and cross-legged on sticky and sweaty sheets, staring at her lover’s penis but going to great lengths to avoid saying the word, a word too embarrassing for her to utter. “A munchkin like none other,” Alice repeated. Ewell asked whether that was a good or a bad thing, and Alice replied, “An interesting thing, and a memorable thing,” and so he put his hands behind his head. Alice lowered her camera to crotch level, focused, and clicked the shutter.

  The village was in a crevice in the coast of the continent, well-known to European tourists but less frequented by Americans. Alice took pictures of everything, of bridges and trees, old buildings, used her zoom lens to take secret pictures of the fishermen, snapped many photos of Ewell smiling his uneasy smile. Ewell had lost his camera on the train, but Alice promised him that she would send him copies from America. They drank coffee and wine every day and grew dark in the sun. Did Alice tell jokes? Had she led an interesting life? They talked almost non-stop, but Ewell soon enough would wish that he had written down some of the things that Alice had said, because he would remember only assorted impressions of their days together, sometimes only colors. Alice sitting in the glistening white European sands in front of the dark ocean, wearing only a blue bikini bottom and stretching her thin legs out in front of her, toe-nails painted pink and purple, the summer heat beating down on her. She turned over on her side, walked her fingers up his arm and brushed them across his shoulder, then touched his face with the palm of her hand, and her smile was brighter than even the sun, and this moment burned a memory in his mind, so that, in the years to come, whenever he thought of Alice, this was the image that would appear to him, polished and perfected by the passage of time.

  On their fourth night, Alice and Ewell sat in the cool night, their arms wrapped about each other in the darkness, looking out from their terrace at the narrow side street three floors below, lit up by the glimmer of the stars and the glow of the moon. A thin young man walked along in the moonlight, for some reason carrying a rather large sheep. He seemed to be having some trouble with the sheep; it kept squirming in his arms, and the man looked tired. He glanced up at Alice and Ewell, shouted something in his language; then he laughed. “What did he say?” Alice asked, and Ewell said he wasn’t sure. Alice sort of laughed, and Ewell reddened. Suddenly, he wanted Alice to know something about himself, his one and only rather remarkable skill. When he was a little boy, he had learned to read Chinese, literally in weeks, then had turned his attention to Japanese, then Korean, then some of the more obscure languages of Asia. He could never learn to speak or hear any fo
reign language at all with any sort of grace, not even the easy ones, like English and French. But those little pictures flowed through his head as though they were old friends. Back then, doctors claimed that, in this one area, he was some sort of genius, and he wanted Alice to know about this. He wanted her to know that she was spending the week with someone who, at least in one way, was remarkable, as remarkable as she was. He didn’t know exactly how to broach this subject.

  Alice leaned back against Ewell, the softness of her hair against his face.

  “Do we know each other yet?” he asked. “There are two Alices so far — the one whose handwriting I know so well, and the one whose voice I hear in the dark.”

  “We know each other,” she said. “The important things. Like looking into your eyes and seeing your soul and knowing what’s in there.” She turned and smiled at him and laughed. “Stuff like that,” she added, self-mockingly. Then, quietly and more seriously: “Stuff like how when I first saw you at your table, and I suddenly recognized you in the night, I wanted to know you forever.”

  Ewell let this comment float through his body, warm and soothing like a glass of red wine. Then he said, “And I felt that way too; even from before, from before you came into the light, before I even saw you, when I just felt that you were about to come in from the street. Something that I felt, I don’t know why or how.” He blushed furiously, but he thought that probably Alice couldn’t tell in the dark.

  “Really?” Alice exclaimed, touched at this incoherent, extrasensory confession. “Is that really true?”