Balances

By Paul Gray

TO SEE YOU AGAIN by Alice Adams Knopf; 305 pages; $13.50

This collection of 19 short stories may surprise readers who have been led to think that all fictional California women are angst-ridden, sex-crazed or mellowed-out. As she has done in four novels and an earlier collection of stories, Author Alice Adams, 55, continues to specialize in heroines who cannot be hyphenated. Most of the ones in To See You Again live in San Francisco (as does Adams), but they are there because of job opportunities and pleasant surroundings, not drugs, macrobiotics or hot tubs. Surrounded by hedonistic enticements, they still experience the tugs of conscience. They are at an awkward age, stranded somewhere between hip and square, liberated enough to take younger lovers and conventional enough to worry about the consequences

A typical Adams story rattles such a woman out of her hard-earned equilibrium and then studies her attempt to regain balance. In Legends, a sculptor submits to yet another interview about her love affair with a famous composer, long dead; this time the questions prod her into a painful re-examination of the past and, ultimately, to the realization that she has produced work of value on her own. In The Girl Across the Room, a woman in her late 60s sits in a hotel dining room in northern California and watches a young girl being fawned over by a middle-aged man. The scene draws her unwillingly back to the early days of her marriage, when her professor husband may have fallen in love with a beautiful student named Susanna. Remembering her triumph at having kept him, the wife now finds new meanings in the episode. For one thing, the lost Susanna has played a larger role in her thoughts than in his. And she sees, belatedly, that she had always thought of saving him from himself, never considering until now what bright prospects might have been hers if she had let him go.

Memories dive through pain toward enlightenment. In Greyhound People, a woman rides a bus between San Francisco and Sacramento and rehearses the slow desertion of her ex-husband: "Looking back, I now see that it began with some tiny wistful remarks, made by him, when he would come across articles in the paper about swingers, swapping, singles bars. 'Well, maybe we should try some of that stuff,' he would say, with a laugh intended to prove nonseriousness." She traces the next stages, including a period of "a lot of half-explained or occasionally overexplained latenesses, and a seemingly chronic at-home fatigue." Moving on to his inevitable departure, the abandoned wife wonders how she could have been surprised.

Bitterness is conspicuously absent from this reverie and from the Adams women in general. They may occasionally feel like the victims of heartless or unworthy men, but they are too proud and intelligent to think of themselves in that fashion. They refuse to enlist in the war between the sexes. Both sides, they sense, are fighting on different fronts against common enemies: aging, disillusionment, what one character calls "the sheer fatigue of living." Adams generously gives her characters their victories, which, like the stories themselves, are no less exhilarating for being short.

--By Paul Gray

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