Free The Last Lovely City by Alice Adams Page B

saying, “Look, I’m sorry, but I just don’t like you very much. And sexually, I know it’s not your fault and I’m sorry you have this problem, but it just doesn’t work for me. I’m sorry I pretended,” Lucretia hoped he would somehow understand. It did not occur to her until later that she could just have not seen him again, without apology.
    Because he did not understand; he seemed now to want to see her all the time.
    He took her to a banquet at which he was the guest of honor, long tables at the Fairmont Hotel, important political people. Men whose names, at least, she knew.
    Lucretia, in her proper, “appropriate” black dress and her proper pearls, felt fraudulent; she wanted almost to announce: I’m not his lady friend, we are not, not,
not
getting married.
    Burt’s friends were roughly the same age as Lucretia was, like Burt himself, but they all seemed considerably older. She thought this could be delusional on her part, a delusion of youth, although she knew that she was generally a realist in that way. Vain, perhaps, she surely was that, caring too much about how she looked. But not kidding herself that she was a kid anymore.
    She was not quite sure what this “older” quality consisted of; the best she could do was to describe it as a sort of settledheaviness, in both minds and bodies. They all looked pleasantly invulnerable, these people, Burt and his friends. No longer subject to much change. Or to passion. They did not much mind being overweight. Or that their expensive clothes were out of style.
    Lucretia was not exactly smug about looking younger, and better; she knew it was largely accidental. She had been born pretty, and most of it had lasted. She ate almost what she wanted to, and nevertheless stayed fairly thin. She exercised, but not immoderately. She had not had anything “done” to herself in a surgical way, although she had thought about it.
    “You’re the sexiest women I ever met. I’m crazy for you,” Burt breathed into her ear.
    “But—”
    “Maybe a little cruise somewhere? Alaska, maybe, or Baja.”
    “Cruises—”
    “Look, forget you’re a travel writer. Just come along. Enjoy.”
    At the time of the cruise conversation (she had been on a number of cruises and very much disliked them all) Lucretia was much involved in writing a series of articles on shelters for battered women. She tried to tell Burt just how involved she was, how she cared about this particular piece.
    Which did not go over well with Burt. “You should throw your weight around more,” he told her. “Such as it is,” and he laughed at his own mild joke. He often teased her about being what he called “underweight.” “You’ve been there long enough and won enough prizes,” he scolded. “You should be calling the shots. Not taking these really tough assignments.”
    I’m trying my best to call the shots with you, she thought, but did not say. And I like writing this piece; I like these women.
    It was Burt’s mouth that gave his face its severity, shedecided. A small mouth, set and firm, made smaller-seeming by the surrounding beard. Had someone long ago said that small mouths were a bad sign, that they meant an ungiving, stingy nature? Actually, Burt was somewhat stingy, she had come to see; “careful” would be the kinder word, but he was super-careful, hyperconcerned with prices, costs, and he was surprised and somewhat annoyed by her ignorance of these things.
    “It’s not that I don’t care what things cost,” she tried to explain. “It’s just that I get confused. I’m not good with numbers.”
    She tried going to bed with him a few more times, deeply knowing this to be a mistake but saying to herself that this time it might work; she might feel the pleasure she pretended (and she knew her pretense to be a serious error, politically incorrect). But, because of what he referred to as his “problem,” Lucretia found it hard to put him off entirely; she understood how much