Free Families and Survivors by Alice Adams

Jewishness. Andrew also envies Michael’s laziness (he castigates his own compulsive habits of work); Michael’s unbridled appetite (Andrew has ulcers and a generally difficult stomach).
    Much later in life Louisa is to decide that to love Michael is to hate oneself.
    Andrew is a trim dark boy, with interesting heavy eyebrows, who reminds Kate very slightly of David, except that David’s face is witty, wry, whereas this boy is very serious. (In fact he is desperate: he wants to write, to be a writer, and he cannot write.) He is also very rich; the first Andrew invested his meteoric twenties’ earnings very astutely. Sally, his wife, is a small neat blonde, with soft peach fuzz on her chin (later to bristle), who “adores” her husband. She is a bright girl in her own right, but she is brainwashed by currently popular ideas about the functions of wives.Also, her own parents divorced and frequently remarried—she won’t do that (she is only to marry twice).
    Kate has just been struck with an idea—or, rather, a perception so startling that she thinks she must be drunk, although she knows that she is not: looking at Michael, at his broad Slavic brow and arrogant nose, she sees that beneath his soft flesh and fair hair is the skull of Jack Calloway. Not that they look alike—Jack’s skin is florid and his hair quite dark—but the bones are the same. What can this mean? Has Louisa noticed? Why didn’t someone stop this marriage?
    Michael has gone back to lecturing Andrew on Trilling. “Also,” he winds up, “I always thought that story of his—what was the name? Time or something.”
    “ ‘Of This Time, Of That Place,’ ” Kate surprisingly (to Michael) fills in for him. It happens to be a favorite story of hers.
    “Yes, I think you’re right,” Michael says. “Anyway, I always thought it was a very homosexual story.”
    “What on earth do you mean by that?” Kate bursts out. “I don’t think you mean anything at all.” She hopes that this is the worst that she is going to say, and fears that it is not.
    Michael takes on a patient tone. “Naturally I don’t mean literally homosexual, but the central concern is with relationships between men. One might in the same way say that Hemingway is a homosexual writer.”
    “God,” says Kate, who is beginning to feel that she has had more than she can stand. This is the intellectual world? She repeats, “I don’t think you mean anything at all.”
    Michael is enjoying this exchange. Attracted to Kate, and very self-absorbed, he has a poor sense of audience—of how he is coming across. He believes that Kate is enjoying the conversation, too (or that she should). He says, “I meanhomosexual in the sense that I might describe your relationship with Louisa as homosexual, in that it was most intense in your prepuberty days, wasn’t it? A sort or preadolescent love affair.”
    “ NO !” Kate cries out, meaning no to everything he says.
    At last Michael understands that she is irritated, and he does not help by saying, “I think you’re being a little literal.”
    “
I’m
literal! You’re the literal one! You’ve got to put the same label on everything.”
    Louisa has risen and is clearing the table. She looks very uncomfortable. Kate makes a gesture to help, but she is refused, and she is then spurred on by the sight of her pregnant friend bearing piles of dirty dishes.
    “And why does Louisa have to work in a purchasing department? Why aren’t you working and letting her get a degree in something? I’m sure she’d rather.”
    “You don’t see a difference in roles?” Michael asks, again warming to the discussion. “I prefer the tension between opposites. Louisa’s femaleness makes me feel more male. You don’t believe in sexual polarity?”
    “No, I don’t think so,” says Kate, and for the first time she begins to be aware of what she does think, and in her enthusiasm about a new idea her anger at Michael somewhat diminishes. “I