Rich Rewards by Alice Adams

Author:Alice Adams [Adams, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, United States, Man-Woman Relationships, General, Literary, Women, Women - United States - Fiction, Love Stories
ISBN: 9780394511016
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 1980-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

16

Like many people of my generation and my sort of education—an education involving good schools, good books and a lazy, haphazard sort of mind—my friends and I did a lot of emotional temperature-taking, so to speak. We were always very interested in how we were. Agatha alone was exempt from this preoccupation; I had decided finally that she was genuinely not interested in her own mental health—it was her spiritual condition that concerned her.

Other friends and I all used certain key phrases in regard to ourselves and others—phrases dull enough in themselves but for us significant. “In bad shape” meant terrible, nearly suicidal, probably; and so on upward, through various, intimately known gradations, until we arrived at “better,” an ideal state. I really think I’m better indicated true happiness: not euphoria—we all knew the dangers inherent in that—but warm contentment, our goal. We were certain too that happiness meant some good balance of love and work, and probably some money.

Working on Agatha’s house at that time, with no love affair going on, earning money, I really did feel better—there were my lecherous fantasies about Tony, about which I felt a little guilty, until I thought, Well, men have such fantasies about us all the time, or they say they do.

In fact I felt a lot better, until the night when Whitey came over and I began to feel really terrible, and that evening could so perfectly easily not have happened at all.

But it did happen. Agatha was coming for dinner, and since I had to be out all afternoon, in search of some brass fittings for the bathroom, and, I hoped, some striped canvas for deck awnings, I made the dinner in the morning, a nice winey, garlicky stew, with lots of rosemary, which would be even better heated up for dinner.

However, when I got home late that afternoon, exhausted and unsuccessful, having found nothing that I liked in canvas or in brass, the phone was ringing as I opened the door. I ran to answer it—unfortunately forgetting the unlocked door—and it was Agatha, saying that she couldn’t come. She was sorry; she had been trying to get me all afternoon, she said. Something had come up, with Royce.

I was furious and quite hurt, most irrationally so—although I did not say this to Agatha. I do react badly to changed plans about meals, something infantile to do with food, I guess. For another thing, I did think Agatha was being a little adolescent about her love affair; grown-up women don’t break dates with each other because at that moment a man is more pressingly important to them, not any more.

I was so used to seeing Tony’s battered VW in my driveway that I had not consciously registered seeing it just now, coming home, but in the throes of my disappointed anger with Agatha I remembered: the car was there, and so Tony was still here, in the house.

I ran upstairs and there he was, and I had to make an

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