In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel Read online

  Ewell nodded.

  “Well,” Alice said. “That’s so sweet.”

  “But do you want to know me better?” he asked. “To know me factually.” This word sounded funny to him when he said it, and he wondered whether it sounded right to Alice, and whether his bad spoken English was half his charm.

  “Sure,” she said. “Sure I would.”

  “Ask me something about myself, then.”

  “Hmm,” Alice said, scrunching up her face in a caricature of concentration. “Okay, I got it. What’s your favorite movie?” she asked.

  “That’s not important.”

  “It is,” she said. “The unimportant things are the most important, if you want to get to know a person. For example, my favorite song — my absolute favorite song in the world — is Frank Mills. That could probably tell you all kinds of things about me, if you wanted to give it serious thought. So tell me your favorite movie, okay?”

  “All right.” Ewell thought for just a moment, then he said something that Alice couldn’t understand, and he explained that it was a movie made in his country when he was a little boy and that he didn’t expect her to know it. She asked him what it was about, but he said that he couldn’t explain it in English — it was about something unique to his country, an emotion that Americans couldn’t understand, and there was no word for it in English.

  “Okay, then,” Alice said, “what’s your second favorite movie?”

  “Casablanca,” Ewell said.

  Alice wanted to know why.

  “It’s romantic — she thought her husband was dead, then she walks into his café all of a sudden. The two of them getting to know each other again, in a foreign place. In a place like this. A little town all full of — what’s the word?”

  “Ewell!” Alice laughed. “Humphrey Bogart wasn’t the husband that Ingrid Bergman thought was dead! That was the other guy! The jerk she doesn’t really love who ruins everything! She found Humphrey Bogart, the man she really loved, only because she thought her husband was dead, then she had to leave Bogart when she discovered that her husband was still alive, then she had to leave him again to fight Nazis!”

  “Oh yeah,” Ewell said, and he laughed. “Well, in my country people don’t really think about their favorite movie the way Americans do.” He didn’t mention to her that he’d said that Casablanca was his second favorite movie only because she was an American and he’d figured that she probably loved Casablanca. As a matter of fact, Ewell came from a family of die-hard and unrepentant Nazi sympathizers, and Casablanca had always made them all rather uncomfortable, come to think of it, though he did not admit this to Alice, nor did he admit that his second favorite movie was really the 1943 German version of Baron Müenchhausen. Now he most desperately yearned to tell Alice about his little area of linguistic brilliance, but Ewell could think of no way to work it into the conversation that would not sound haughty and self-inflating. So he never mentioned it.

  Some hours later, lying in bed, the blinds closed and the room completely dark, Alice was still buzzed on wine and romance. “I wish we could stay in this village forever,” she said; and also, “Don’t just leave me and go away, Ewell.” Alice said she wished she and Ewell could freeze this moment and just live in it until the universe collapsed in on itself. Ewell agreed with a wholehearted smile that she could not see in the dark, then with a sympathetic and loving laugh, though the idea of the universe collapsing in on itself — rather than expanding onward and outward while humanity generated new forms of energy to ensure survival of the species, which he’d thought was the currently accepted scientific view of the future of mankind — caused him to brood for a moment.

  The night outside still pitch dark. “Tell me your goal, Ewell,” Alice said, sounding half-asleep, and he said that he intended, someday, to cure a terrible disease. “Have you decided which terrible disease?” she asked, and he said that he had, that it was a very rare illness, that it afflicted only a hundred people each year, and that he was sure that she had never heard of it. Quickly, he turned the conversation to Alice. “Tell me your perfect life,” Ewell said, and Alice began imagining. “I have made all my money,” she said, “and I am independent, and I don’t need to rely on anyone. I have a child — first a baby, then she grows to a little girl, then a big girl. Only one. Absolutely, I only have one in this life. She looks up to me and wants to be just like me, and I teach her all about life. We travel all over the world together, and she’s a spoiled girl, but also a very smart girl, and a very nice girl.” After a pause: “I think that’s it.”

  “And a man?” Ewell asked. “In this perfect life, is there a man?”

  Alice laughed, and then she added, smoothly, “Of course. I forgot to mention it, Ewell, dear. There’s a man, too. A funny European man.”

  On the morning of their fifth day together, the telephone woke them at five. Ewell answered it, then he passed the receiver to Alice, and he muttered a woman’s name to her. “My assistant,” Alice groaned. Rubbing her eyes, she stuck the telephone handset on the pillow under her ear. She listened for a while. She groaned again, this time even more painfully. Ewell began to worry. She whispered unfamiliar phrases. What about X? and have you tried Y? and whatever happened to Z? Each question elicited an unheard response that apparently made Alice feel even worse. “Look,” she finally said, “is this something that I can solve right now?” and after another pause, she said, “That’s right — it was a rhetorical question. There’s nothing I can do to help over the phone. And my hopping on a plane and flying back today will only bust the bank even more, right?” Another long pause. “Yes,” she sighed, “you were right to call me, just to let me know. But now leave me alone, okay? Let me enjoy my last days as a rich woman, okay?” She nodded slowly, with deep resignation. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “If we go bust when I get back, we go bust when I get back.” She said a few more things that didn’t make sense to Ewell in context, and then she hung up the telephone, and she lay back in bed, her body tense. He looked over at her, and she no longer seemed to be here with him in this room; the telephone had stolen Alice, and now she was gone. He put a hand on her bare shoulder, and she shook him away.

  “Just tell me what’s the matter,” he said to her, as the two of them sat side by side, in the middle of the woods in a small clearing beside a stream. Birds he had never before seen flew from branch to branch, and little furry animals scurried about, hoping he or Alice would throw them a scrap of food. The stream flowed by, over large rocks jutting out of the water, around the bend and off into the far distance, almost noiselessly. They were eating sandwiches that they had bought in a local shop.

  “I don’t want to talk about real life,” Alice insisted. “Just let me relax, okay?”

  They settled into an awkward silence. He reached over and touched her hand. She stiffened.

  “I’m sorry,” Alice said, and she really did sound sorry. “Please....”

  He moved his hand away.

  Walking on the narrow path back to town, Alice was rigid and unsmiling, thinking about her mysterious catastrophe.

  “Are you relaxing yet?” Ewell said.

  He’d intended this as a joke, but she did not seem to understand.

  “Ewell,” Alice said. “I’m trying, okay? Please don’t pressure me to relax.” She was at once plaintive and challenging.

  “I didn’t mean to pressure you,” Ewell said softly.

  He stood three feet away from her; the distance between them felt like a concrete wall.

  “Don’t you know that you can’t pressure someone to relax?” Alice said again.

  “I was just trying to make you laugh,” Ewell said.

  Alice sighed. “It’s not working,” she said. “Just be quiet, okay?”

  Ewell left her alone for a few minutes, but then, at a particularly beautiful bend in the path, he looked again at the anger and pain on her face, and he broke his silence.

  “I care very much about you, Alice. Yo
ur problems are my problems....”

  “No, Ewell,” she said. “They are not your problems. I will return to America to face destitution. You will return to your welfare state.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” he replied. “Are we debating European socialism?”

  “Are you being funny?”

  “No. I wouldn’t try that again.”

  “Can’t you just leave me in peace for the last moments of this vacation?”

  “No,” Ewell said, his voice quiet and deeply unhappy. “I can’t do that. I can’t leave you alone. Especially not during our last moments together. I keep thinking that I’ll never see you again. That you’ll leave angry at me, angry at this week. I have to keep trying to help you.”

  Alice turned to him, stopped walking, stood directly in front of him, grabbed his shoulders in both her hands and shook him as if to wake him up. “There is no way that you can help me!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you understand?” She trembled with anger and frustration.

  “I’m sorry,” Ewell whispered. “I’m sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  Back at the inn, they were changing for dinner. Standing in her underwear in front of the mirror, Alice stared at her face: “Too dark,” she said. “Probably I’ve given myself melanoma. The perfect end to a glorious week, right?”

  “It has been a glorious week,” Ewell insisted. He sat on the bed with one long skinny leg folded beneath him. “Just today hasn’t been glorious.” Alice shook her head and sighed. Ewell buried his head in his hands.

  Ewell tried to say a few more nice things to her, reassuring things, that he wanted to be here in the sad times and the good, to share her unhappiness as well as her joy; and finally, he thought, either she had begun to understand his message or she’d decided that she could spare some pity for him. She turned and looked at him, and her body relaxed, the muscles in her face loosened. She walked over to him, gently touched a lock of his short blond hair. Her eyes were once again the eyes of the woman he loved, and she smiled a little smile. “I must be treating you just terribly,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She wrapped her arms around him, and he held her tightly. He ran his fingers over her naked skin, and he did not know that it would be for the very last time. She kissed his ear. “I don’t mean to take this out on you,” she whispered. “Just forgive me, okay? Let’s forget about all our problems, and let’s never fight again. Okay?”

  As they walked together to dinner, he could not utter a sentence or a phrase or even a word that did not anger her in some way. “You’re annoying me, Ewell,” she sighed, before they’d reached the restaurant. She started to turn back.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m moving to the other inn,” she said. Her words were lost in the wind, but he understood what she was saying even without hearing her speak. She began to walk quickly away from him, kicking up pebbles and dust with her little feet.

  “Alice!” he shouted. When she did not stop, he screamed, “I love you!” and then she turned around. From a few yards away, he could see tears in her eyes. He shouted again to her, the same thing in his own language. “Don’t you know how hard that is to say to you, now!” he hollered, near tears himself. “I’ll do anything to stop you from going!”

  Alice just shook her head, and she turned away, and she vanished over the top of the hill. Ewell could only think that this person who didn’t love him, this person full of anger and unshakable and deep unhappiness was not Alice; Alice, the real Alice, was the girl who had rolled over and smiled at him in the bright sunshine.

  When Alice returned to New York, she developed her film, five rolls. All the pictures were underexposed to the point of ruin except, strangely, her photograph of Ewell’s penis, which was sharp and clear and, in its own way, rather artistic. At home, Alice smiled for a moment at the memory, then she sealed the picture in an envelope and tossed it into the bottom of a drawer.

  For the next few months, Ewell sent Alice letters regularly; he even called her twice and left messages —once on her home machine, and once with her assistant. But Alice did not call back. Then one day, he called her office, and the phone had been disconnected, and he called her home, and he received the same recorded message. He gave up hope. Whenever Ewell thought about the week he had spent with her, he found himself convinced that he had met and lost the woman he was destined to love. For the rest of her life, when Alice thought of that week, she would remember the frantic 5 a.m. phone call from her assistant, she would remember her life falling apart, and if she thought of Ewell at all, she would remember only his annoyingly feckless efforts to cheer her during the final day of their holiday, and this would confirm for her how terribly wrong their match had been from the very start. She would not remember that she had almost offered to liquidate her business, move to Scandinavia with her million bucks, learn his language, whatever it was, and do whatever it was people did over there. Was his country in Scandinavia? she had wondered. Was he Scandinavian? What countries were in Scandinavia? Holland —she was sure of that. She’d learned that in 8th grade. And probably Germany. Her mind had wandered. She would never remember how genuinely blissful she had felt entertaining the fantasy of committing her life to Ewell. Some years later, busy planning her wedding to Blake Maurow, a rich man rather older than she, and packing her belongings to move in with her future husband in his castle in the sky, Alice would take care to retrieve her photograph of Ewell’s crotch. Purely as a defensive measure, with no particular animosity to speak of, she would rip the picture into dozens of pieces, cut up the negative, and throw it all away.

  Ewell married as well, to a woman named Marja who had once been his friend, a friend he’d known from infancy and who as an adult consoled him over his loss of Alice, who helped him out of his depression during the course of many months. A librarian at the local library in the town where Ewell was born. An unexciting turn of events, but, to Ewell, a comforting one. Still, as he walked down the aisle, Alice’s spirited laugh echoed in the spring air. A few years later, he learned that Alice had written a novel, a slim mystery book about a plucky single woman who solved crimes with the latest technology. It was not very successful in America, so it was never translated for Ewell’s country. He had to shell out a lot of money to import the book, and he slogged carefully through it three times, looking for some depiction however slight, or even some small residue, of the life they had lived together during their brief week in love. One of the police detectives, a good guy, was “lanky,” Ewell noticed, and blond, and had “a laugh so exuberant and startling that it scared away city-hardened pigeons.” The main character, Andrea, who bore a close resemblance to Alice’s idealization of herself, never fell in love with this police detective, but she liked him okay, and for this Ewell was tremendously grateful.

  (He would see her only one more time in his life, quite a while later, in New York. The reunion, as it turned out, would not be as he had imagined it. Nevertheless, for the rest of his life, whenever he would smile at a joke, he would wonder what Alice would have thought of that joke; whenever he would have a problem, he would wonder what Alice’s advice would have been. Marja’s counsel and companionship would seem always to suffer in comparison to the unknown ideal that Alice might have offered. But for that lingering sense of loss, he would believe that his marriage was otherwise a happy one; after his wife’s death sixty years later, he would realize that he did not know if Marja would have agreed.)

  One night, a few years after her vacation with Ewell, when Alice was still a young woman and still settling into the routine of marriage, she sat tapping away at her computer on her latest mystery opus. Suddenly, she found herself constructing a scene of rather fiendish violence, a scene so fiendishly violent, in fact, that Alice knew it would have to be cut. Nevertheless, she would see it through to its ghoulish conclusion, without ever knowing exactly why. Her computer blinked from time-to-time with e-mail messages from old friends, busy people she mostly didn’t s
ee anymore, people very much unlike Alice, with busy office careers or kids at home. As the World-Wide Web grew in prominence, an even larger number of old college chums now sent her e-mail messages, either jokes forwarded to legions of recipients, or a hurried little message from a hard-working somebody who might suddenly think of Alice in the middle of the day. Alice, trying to remember what a particular person looked or sounded like, would politely respond. Nearly all her relationships these days were virtual, the sudden beep of her friends and the clicking of her own fingers an unsatisfying substitute for real human contact.

  Behind her, Alice heard the door to her study open, she heard her husband’s distinctive footsteps behind her. She didn’t turn around. She felt his lips on the nape of her neck, both hands on her shoulders. She reached up and touched his fingers with her right hand, rested her cheek against his. “You know I adore you, Blake Maurow,” she said sleepily, and he said he adored her as well. He left the room, his footsteps tapping off into the hallway.

  In the middle of the night, in their big bed, he flipped over heavily beside her, and she awoke. She looked up, and she saw the dark outline of his shoulder, listened to his exhausted breathing.

  “I was having a dream,” she said. “I was having a dream that I traveled back in time to the nineteen-forties. I’ve always thought that was sort of a mythical era. So I was walking around on the street, with all these old cars driving by — but back then, they were new — and I was feeling real lost. And then I realized that I knew someone here. So I looked you up. And there you were, some sort of kid, walking out of a store with Bix Beiderbecke records under your arm. I talked to you. And you were a pretty nice kid.” She sighed. “It was the forties, and I just couldn’t get over it. I kept turning on the radio, and all I heard was the Andrews Sisters, and everyone was all worried about Hitler.” She sighed again, and she smiled in the darkness. “It was a time-travel story, and you were there.” Blake didn’t reply. His shoulder rose and fell with each heavy breath, and Alice suspected that he was just ignoring her, but she didn’t really mind. She was lost in her memory of little Blake, the dream-child.