Free Return Trips by Alice Adams Page B

real Sunday walk.”
    Later on, he will tell her what he thought about their moving away—and as Jonathan phrases that announcement he considers how odd it is for him to think of New York as “away.”
    Over their first glass of wine they talk in a neutral but slightly stilted way, the way of people who are postponing an urgent subject; the absence of the McElroys, their broken plans, trivializes any other topic.
    At some point, in part to gain time, Jonathan asks her, “Have I seen that dress before?” (He is aware of the “husbandliness” of the question; classically,
they
don’t notice.)
    Sarah smiles. “Well, actually not. I bought it a couple of months ago. I just haven’t worn it.” And then, with a recognizable shift in tone, and a tightening of her voice, she plunges in. “Remember that night when you were talking about the McElroys? When you said we weren’t so high on their priority list?”
    Well, Jesus, of course he remembers, in detail; but Jonathan only says, very flatly, “Yes.”
    “Well, it’s interesting. Of course I’ve been thinking about them all day, off and on. And what you said. And oh dear, how right you were. I mean, I knew you were
right
—that was partly what I objected to.” Saying this, Sarah raises her face in a full look at him, acknowledging past pain.
    What can he say? He is quiet, waiting, as she continues.
    “But it’s interesting, how you put it,” she tells him. “How accurately. Prophetic, really. A lot of talk, and those letters! All about wonderful us, how great we are. But when you come right down to it—”
    “The bottom line is old friends,” Jonathan contributes, tentatively.
    Pleased with him, Sarah laughs, or nearly; the sound she makes is closer to a small cough. But “Exactly,” she says. “They poke a lot of fun at Popsie Hooker, but the reality is, that’s where they are.”
    He tries again. “Friendships with outsiders don’t really count? Does that cut out all Yankees, really?” He is thinking, Maybe we don’t have to leave, after all? Maybe Sarah was just settling in? Eventually she will be all right here?
    Grasping at only his stated question, about Yankees, Sarah gleefully answers, “Oh, very likely!” and she does laugh. “Because Yankees might do, oh, almost anything at all. You just can’t trust a one of them.”
    As she laughs again, as she looks at Jonathan, he recognizes some obscure and nameless danger in the enthusiastic glitter of her eyes, and he has then the quite irrational thought that she is looking at him as though he were her new best friend.
    However, he is able quickly to dismiss that flashed perception, in the happiness of having his old bright strong Sarah restored to him, their old mutually appreciative dialogue continuing.
    He asks her, “Well, time to go out to dinner?”
    “Oh yes! Let’s go,” she says, quickly getting to her feet.

Time in Santa Fe
    It is midafternoon, on a brilliant August day, and I am sitting in a darkened bar, here in Santa Fe. I am drinking white wine with Jeffrey, an old friend who at any moment is going to tell me about his new gay life. I do not especially look forward to hearing his story; nothing against gayness, it is just that I have problems of my own that seem to make me selfish, a poor listener—although, being very fond of Jeffrey, I plan to make an effort.
    We have a window table, and at this odd hour there is no one in the bar but us and the lanky, bored bartender, who is almost invisible, behind the bar, in the shadowy depths of the room. We can look out across Santa Fe’s central square, the Plaza, where some Indians (“native craftsmen”) have set up tables of brass jewelry, dazzling, flashing white gold, in the violently pure sunlight. On the other side of the Plaza more native craftspersons sit or squat behind their wares, over there mostly silver and turquoise. They are sheltered by the wide, outspread tiled eaves of an ancient Spanish building. And, spreading