Chapter 9

Friday evening we went to an excruciating academic dinner party. Saturday morning I was just settling down with Mrs. Behn when a small boy dragging a towel informed me that his mom said he could come over here. The children played a bit, Ann proposed an "eat whatever you want out of the fridge" luncheon, and soon thereafter we were off to La Jolla Shores. Hilda and Eric (the boy) fought over the Styrofoam surfboard and a group of idiots flinging sand at one another managed to impregnate Mrs. Behn.

I swam a bit. Ann waded and basked. We herded the kids and apparatus into the car. I perjured myself to Eric's mother concerning his behavior. We got home, showered and changed and chugged off to The Rancherita, where Ann and I downed a pitcher of wine margaritas and Hilda had her usual grilled cheese sandwich. I'm sure we also ate something. We drove home, got Hilda to bed and read ourselves to sleep.

Ann and Hilda left about 8:30 on Sunday morning -- bound for a day of delights at Knott's Berry Farm with Ann's sister and her brood. I drank coffee, looked at the Union, tried to shake the grit out of Aphra Behn, gave up, and decided to read in the UCSD library. Looking at the bus schedule, I discovered that there were only two on Sunday mornings and that I'd already missed one. I watched the beginning of a football game (they begin at 10 on the West Coast) and then strolled to the bus stop.

I got to the library a half hour before it opened. I cursed and sat down on a bench. I must have dozed in the sun, for it was 12:10 when I looked at my watch. Rubbing my eyes and stretching, I realized that I didn't want to read any more Gillespie. I didn't want to read Jens Peter Jacobsen, either. I thought of Alice. I had looked her up. And she'd made a remark about an article of mine.

In the library, at the bibliography table, I thought I'd look in the most recent volume. "Singleton, A." had two entries: a Ford and a Haggard. The previous year listed a piece on A.E. Coppard, whoever he (or she?) was. And the one before that featured an article on Anna of the Five Towns and one on Wilde and Beerbohm. I decided that five items would be enough and took the elevator upstairs, where the entire floor appeared deserted.

I hunted up the five journals, put them on a table near one of the panoramic windows and made myself comfortable. I caught myself staring out over the trees toward the Pacific, sighed, and opened Nineteenth-Century Fiction to "The Image of the Woman in She." It was awful. Not only was it a pastiche of Goethe's notions of the "eternal feminine" plus modern feminism, but the writing was bad. Trendy yet insubstantial. I went on to "'The Happy Prince' and The Happy Hypocrite: Two Myths." I only got two pages into it. It was worse than the Haggard. Alice seemed to pick article topics the way I'd pick canapes at a cocktail party: whatever looks OK, without regard for content.

Wilde and Beerbohm were linked by a chain of structuralism laced with dime-store psychoanalysis. The writing was better, though. I had to admit that.

I returned to looking out of the window. For the first time in two days I thought about Lt. Billings. He'd said he be "on" today -- Sunday. Well, probably his day off yesterday wasn't as lack-luster as mine. I looked at my watch. Already two! I'd just glance at the other two pieces and catch the bus in an hour. By then the drugstore ought to have The New York Times and I'd have a few hours with it before Ann and Hilda returned -- over-exhausted and semi-hysterical from a day at the amusement park.

It turned out that A.E. Coppard was a British short story writer. His first book appeared in 1921 and contained twelve stories. The second edition, the next year, contained nine more. Alice's article was a meticulous collation of the 1921, 1922 and 1926 editions of Adam and Eve and Pinch Me. Though I'd no interest in Coppard, it was clearly an excellent piece of work; one that researchers would make genuine use of.

The first articles had been awful; I could see the large, careless, effusive Alice I'd met producing them. I just couldn't fit this piece in with them or with her.

The work on Arnold Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns was something else again. Apparently, Bennett published Anna in 1902, the same year that saw his The Grand Babylon Hotel. Anna is a serious novel, a portrayal of the "Potteries," where Bennett was born and where he was brought up. The Babylon is an out-and-out spoof of an adventure novel. Alice's article was an attempt at showing how Bennett, the editor of a women's magazine, came to write both. It was interesting, but both dry and unliterary. Alice seemed to have missed all the fun in the adventures.