Families and Survivors by Alice Adams Page B

again, and Kate said, well, perhaps not.
    “I was really scared,” Kate now tells Louisa. “I knew that I was very attracted to him, and I hadn’t seen David for so long. If he’d really made a pass—I wonder. And later I thought about it; suppose we had gone to a motel and made love, would that have been so terrible? I mean if no one knew?”
    Louisa murmurs something indistinct.
    “He’s very attractive. He reminded me a little of John.”
    “John?”
    “John Jeffreys. Louisa, really.” Kate muses, “But John was more definite, and God knows less serious, really. That fucking Southern charm. I don’t think Andrew even knew what he wanted. And he kept talking about his children. Such a father!”
    “Yes, he is.”
    “I don’t see John as a father, somehow, do you? He’d manage to get out of it.”
    “I suppose.”
    For every reason this story, this conversation, has made Louisa very uncomfortable: it reminds her humiliatingly of Andrew (“Andrew, I love you,” and then the taste of bile). Also how can she talk about making love? (It is a phrasethat she does not use, not yet in her life: Michael has always talked about fucking, and that is what they do. Dan sometimes says, “Okay, kid, care to screw?”) And how can she discuss the possibilities of unfaithfulness?
    But for a wild moment she imagines telling Kate about Dan, how awful he is, how he doesn’t love her at all. How terrible she feels, how worried about Maude. How she flinches from Michael’s slightest touch.
    She is too far gone, too sick (colitis was nothing to this depth of hopeless malaise) to realize that this would be a possible conversation; she is with a permanently affectionate friend. Who possibly could help.
    Instead she begins to feel irritable with Kate, at what seems such a simple, pleasant, and unquestioning life.
    And in a mean way she describes the visit to Michael. (The put-down of others is one of their few remaining sorts of conversation.)
    “Well, Kate’s become so ordinary. Another mother. I’m sure she hasn’t opened a book for years. I don’t know—she used to have a lot going, even a kind of originality. Or maybe I just thought so.”
    They smile at each other, momentarily united in their superiority to Kate and her boring life.
    Dan leaves town, and Louisa finds a man who likes her even less than he did: a beautiful bisexual black man, a painter, named King.
    “Can’t you see that I despise you? To me you’re an ugly white cunt, with no tits. Christ! I’m used to beauties.”
    Thus is Louisa addressed by King on a day near herthirtieth birthday, a time that she feels to be the bottom of her life. (She is right.)
    They are in King’s apartment, a series of low dingy rooms, a basement. “Of course,” he says. “I would have to live in a basement. Where else, outside of the Fillmore district?” King’s color is golden bronze. In exchange for his room he does janatorial chores in the building, which he loathes.
    “But she has a fever—I’m really sort of worried. I really should go.” Desperate Louisa is speaking of Maude. She is standing at the sink, having just finished washing the dishes from King’s dinner, having left the dishes from her own dinner in the sink, with Michael’s and Maude’s, rushed out of the house on some minor pretext.
    “Go, go on ahead. Take care of your little baby daughter and your big baby husband.”
    She wipes her hands on a limp towel. “I guess fifteen or twenty minutes more won’t make any difference. Do you want me to make coffee?”
    “I had something a little more—uh—interesting than coffee in mind for this evening.” He makes this very Southern, very Southern Negro, which he is not, with an evil, white-toothed grin.
    But he is lying; she knows he is lying. He almost never wants to make love, and he never announces such a desire. It is she who persuades him with various blandishments. (They are all degrading, but this is not a word that she can allow into