Listening to Billie by Alice Adams Page A

weight battered against her. And she truly hated Kathleen’s rage at Miriam. Sometimes Eliza felt so protective of Miriam that she had considered adopting her, and then had thought, Do I really need an eighteen-year-old black daughter?
    To combat her unease, she created some minor chores for herself.
    She went into the kitchen, where she got out the blender and a bowl of leftover vegetables for soup, a thrifty habit she had learned early from Josephine—to whom frugality was a virtue, if
haute cuisine
was not.
    What Eliza really wanted to be doing was any one of three other things: waxing a newly stripped walnut coffee table, walking in the marvelous light air outside or working on a poem. But perhaps she did not want to do any of those strongly enough? she was truly suspended between wants? As she saw it just then, those were treats to be saved for later on. In the meantime, having ground the vegetables and added chicken soup, she cleaned the blender and turned her attention to the inside of the stove.
    She decided that when the phone rang next she would not answer it, knowing quite well what was coming: an inevitable and unpleasant call from Gilbert Branner, of whom she had managed not to think.
    The previous Friday afternoon had been entirely terrible for him: a humiliation. For her it was sad and embarrassing. And unpleasant: unable to perform, he had commanded help from her, and she complied, despite distaste (and was that why her help hadn’t worked?), despite annoyance at her own compliant, female nature. She ended more annoyed at herself than at him. And afterward she even thought that she would have to see him again, when he asked, as he surely would, just for the sake of his aging and vulnerable ego. But then she thought, No, I’ve done too much of that, too much yielding and pretending, and it’s too expensive for me. Why should I see him again, when I don’t want to at all, and when he can easily find someone who likes and values him more than I do?
    She went upstairs with a vague plan about going through old winter clothes, then reminded herself that winter was only in abeyance, that the insane heat was not a sign of spring. Yet it was with a sort of springtime dreaming lethargy that she fell across her bed, looking out the window at the small garden below in which some of the shrubbery had been deceived into a sudden flowering.
    By the time the phone rang, she had forgotten not to answer it.
    Gilbert Branner said, “Well, what luck to find you at home on such an exceptionally beautiful Sunday.”
    She murmured something, and trusted that her sound was polite.
    “I was hoping I could persuade you to come out for a little while on my boat. It’s a perfect day for the Bay.”
    Not if it has berths, it occurred to Eliza to say. Instead she said, “That’s terribly nice, but I promised my daughter a walk through Chinatown. New Year’s is still going on.”
    At that he chuckled. “Say, do you want to hear a good one?” And he told her a joke about Chinese girls that was racist, sexist, unfunny but mercifully short.
    “Well,” he said, and he had begun to sound a little awkward; were her unsaid thoughts traversing the few blocks’distance between them? He attempted a little laugh. “I do think we should have a rerun sometime. A new start?”
    She murmured something negative, aware of rising tension—a tightening in her throat.
    He said, “Of course it’s entirely up to you, but I do think you’re being a little unjust, if I may say so.” His tone had hardened and grown colder as he spoke, so that the last phrase was pure ice.
    “It’s not just that—” It’s not your sexual performance, or lack of it; it’s everything about you, she would have liked to say. I thought you’d be fun for an afternoon. My mistake, not yours. But I really don’t like you at all, any more than—probably—you like most of the girls you screw.
    None of which she was able to say to Gilbert Branner. Instead she