I should have known better.
Yet the description was not inaccurate: David's "cottage" was a tall two-story wooden structure, dazzling white and Spanish in conception, with black wrought-iron balconies outside the upper windows. Thick columns flanked the massive front door. Behind the house we could see the endless blue ocean, a long way down. I took our suitcases from the trunk of the car and went up the steps and opened the door. Alma followed.
After going through a small tiled vestibule, we were in a vast room where various areas were raised and others sunken. A thick white carpet rolled over it all. Massive couches and glass-topped tables stood in the different areas of the room. Exposed beams had been polished and varnished across the width of the ceiling.
I knew what I would find even before we inspected the house, I knew there would be a sauna and a Jacuzzi and a hot tub, an expensive stereo system, a Cuisinart in the kitchen, a bookshelf filled with educational porn in the bedroom-and all this we found as we went through the house. Also a Betamax, a French bread rack serving as shelf space for Art Deco gewgaws, a bed the size of a swimming pool, a bidet in every bathroom… almost immediately I felt trapped inside someone else's fantasy. I'd had no idea David had made so much money during his years in California; neither had I known that his taste stayed on the level of a hustling young Jaycee.
"You don't like it, do you?" asked Alma.
"I'm surprised by it."
"What's your brother's name?"
I told her.
"And where does he work?"
She nodded when I named the firm, not as "Rachel Varney" would have done, with a detached irony, but as though she were checking the name against a list.
Yet of course she was correct: I did not like David's Xanadu.
Still, there we were: we had to spend three nights in the house. And Alma accepted it as if it were hers. But as she cooked in the gadget-laden kitchen, as she reveled in David's collection of expensive toys, I grew increasingly sour. I thought she had adapted to the house in some uncanny fashion, had subtly altered from the student of Virginia Woolf to a suburban wife: suddenly I could see her stocking up on chip dip at the supermarket.
Once again I am compressing ideas about Alma into a single paragraph, but in this case I am condensing the impressions of two days, not of three times that many months; and the change in her was merely a matter of degree. Yet I had the uneasy feeling that, just as in her apartment she was perfectly the embodiment of the Bohemian rich girl, in David's house she threw off hints of a personality suited to Jacuzzi baths and home saunas. She became more garrulous. The sentences about how we would live after our marriage became essays: I found out where we would make our base while we traveled (Vermont), how many children we would have (three)-on and on.
And worse, she began to talk endlessly about Tasker Martin.
"Tasker was a big man, Don, and he had beautiful white hair and a strong face with the most piercing blue eyes. What Tasker used to like was… Did I ever tell you about Tasker's… One day Tasker and I…"
This more than anything marked the end of my infatuation.
But even then I found it difficult to accept that my feelings had changed. While she described the characters of our children, I would find myself mentally crossing my fingers-almost shuddering. Realizing what I was doing, I would say to myself: "But you're in love, aren't you? You can even put up with the fantasy of Tasker Martin, can't you? For her sake?"
The weather made everything worse. Though we had had warm sunshine on the day we arrived, our first night in Still Valley was submerged in dark dense fog that endured for the next three days. When I looked out the rear windows toward the ocean, it was as though the ocean were all around us, gray and deadening. (Of course, this is what "Saul Malkin" imagines in his Paris hotel room with "Rachel Varney.") At times you could see halfway down to the valley road, but at other times you saw about as far ahead as you could extend your arms. A flashlight in that damp grayness simply lost heart.
Thus, there we are, mornings and afternoons in David's house while gray fog slides past the windows and the noise of waves slapping the beach far down suggests that any minute water will begin to come in through the bottom of the door. Alma is elegantly curled on one of the sofas, holding a cup of tea or a plate with an orange divided into equal sections. "Tasker used to say that I'd be the most beautiful woman in America when I was thirty. Well, "I'm twenty-five now, and I think I'll disappoint him. Tasker used to…"
What I felt was dread.
On the second night she rolled out of bed naked, waking me. I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes in the gloom. Alma walked across the cold gray bedroom to the window. We had not closed the drapes, and Alma stood with her back to me, staring at-at nothing at all. The bedroom windows faced the ocean, but though we could hear the cold noises of water all through the night, the window revealed nothing but surging gray.
I expected her to speak. Her back looked very long and pale in the murky room.
"What is it, Alma?" I asked.
She did not move or speak.
"Is anything wrong?" Her skin seemed lifeless, white cold marble. "What happened?"
She turned very slightly toward me and said, "I saw a ghost." (That, at any rate, is what "Rachael Varney" tells "Saul Malkin"; but did Alma actually say, "I am a ghost?" I could not be sure; she spoke very softly. I'd had more than enough of Tasker Martin, and my first response was a groan. But if she had said I am a ghost, would I have responded differently?)
"Oh, Alma," I said, not as fed up as I would have been in the daytime. The chill in the room, the dark window and the girl's long white body, these made Tasker a more real presence than he had been. I was a little frightened. "Tell him to go away," I said. "Come back to bed."
But it was no good. She picked her robe off the bed, put it around her and sat down, turning her chair toward the window. "Alma?" She would not answer or turn around. I lay down again and finally went back to sleep.
After the long weekend in Still Valley things moved to their inevitable conclusion. I often thought that Alma was half-mad. She never explained her behavior of that night, and after what happened to David, I wondered if all her actions comprised what I had once called a game: if she had been playfully, consciously manipulating my mind and feelings. Passive rich girl, terrorist of the occult, student of Virginia Woolf, semilunatic- she did not cohere.
She continued to project us into our future, but after Still Valley I began to invent excuses for avoiding her. I thought that I loved her, but the love was overshadowed by dread. Tasker, Greg Benton, the zombies of the X.X.X.-how could I marry all that?
And then I felt a physical as well as a moral revulsion. Over the two months following Still Valley, we had generally ceased making love, though I sometimes spent the night in her bed. When I kissed her, when I held or touched her, I overheard my own thinking: not much longer.
My teaching, except for rare flashes in the writing classes, had become remote and dull; I had stopped my own writing altogether. One day Lieberman asked me to see him in his office and when I arrived he said, "One of your colleagues described your Stephen Crane lecture to me. Did you actually say that The Red Badge was a ghost story without a ghost?" When I nodded, he asked, "Would you mind telling me what that means?"
"I don't know what it means. My mind was wandering. My rhetoric got out of hand."
He looked at me in disgust. "I thought you made a good start," he said, and I knew there was no longer any question of my staying on another year.
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