About Alice by Calvin Trillin Page B

again.

II
When approached by young people in search of wisdom about how they might go about linking up with someone with whom they are likely to enjoy a long and happy marriage, the only strategy I can divine from what passed for my wife-seeking activities is “Wander into the right party.”
    â€”Family Man
    The party was thrown in late 1963 by
Monocle,
a doomed magazine of political satire.
Monocle
’s parties seemed to grow more elaborate as its financial situation became increasingly bleak. Three or four other couples with connections to
Monocle
met and eventually married; those unions, which we called “
Monocle
marriages” in our house, were all long-lasting. I have reminded the founder of
Monocle
—Victor Navasky, who is fortunate enough to have a
Monocle
marriage himself—that his brainchild proved to be more durable as a marriage brokerage than as a magazine. In Alice’s view,
Monocle
had existed in order to get everyone married, a project that might well require larger and larger parties, and, once that had occurred, it quite naturally folded.
    When I saw Alice at that
Monocle
party, she was wearing a hat. At least, I’ve always remembered her as wearing a hat. She later insisted that she’d never owned a hat of the sort I described. Maybe, but I can still see her in the hat—a white hat, cocked a bit to the side. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. She had blond hair, worn straight in those days, and a brow just a shade darker than her hair. (Our oldest grandchild, Isabelle Alice, who was born in 2002, has precisely that coloring, which may be one reason I sometimes have trouble taking my eyes off her.) Whether or not Alice was wearing a hat was not the only difference in the way we recalled that meeting. Alice’s father had grown up in rural North Carolina, in a Southern Baptist family named Stewart, but her mother was Jewish—a fact that was to come as a great relief to my own Jewish mother, once I reminded her that, according to the ancient Hebraic belief in matrilineal descent, anyone whose mother was Jewish is herself Jewish. Although some people thought that Alice looked like the quintessential
shiksa,
I always claimed that when I spotted her across the room that night I asked Navasky, “Who’s that cute little Jewish girl over by the punch bowl?” Alice always said that I’d made up that story and that, furthermore, there wasn’t any punch bowl.
    She was, as Roger Wilkins later wrote, so very pretty, but that wasn’t the first thing that struck me about her; it might have come as much as two or three seconds later. My first impression was that she looked more alive than anyone I’d ever seen. She seemed to glow. For one reason or another, I barely got to speak to her that evening. Two weeks later, though, after doing some intelligence work and juggling some obligations and dismissing as hearsay the vague impression of one mutual acquaintance that Alice was virtually engaged, I dashed back from a remote suburb to a party that I figured she’d be attending. So I couldn’t claim that I just wandered into that second party; in romantic matters, even those who need to depend mainly on dumb luck are usually up to one or two deliberate moves. At the second party, I did get to talk to her quite a lot. In fact, I must have hardly shut up. I was like a lounge comic who had been informed that a booker for
The Tonight Show
was in the audience. Recalling that party in later years, Alice would sometimes say, “You have never again been as funny as you were that night.”
    â€œYou mean I peaked in December of 1963?” I’d say, twenty or even thirty years later.
    â€œI’m afraid so.”
    But I never stopped trying to match that evening—not just trying to entertain her but trying to impress her. Decades later—after we had been married for more than thirty-five years, after our girls were grown—I