Almost Perfect Read online

  At which her friend in her turn laughs. “No, I actually did it sort of against Collin. He kept going on and on about my beautiful gray hair, and I began to think it was a sort of wifely attribute for him.”

  “Come on, Justine. All you had to do was say no. You don’t have to dye your hair. What is this, some sort of semiotics?”

  This conversation is proceeding on a dirty bench in Union Square, at lunchtime. The two women have seated themselves among the new and old homeless, the visibly alcoholic and/or drugged—and the others, who are simply people with nowhere to live. And a scattering of middle-class people more or less like themselves, people with houses and jobs. With lives. At the far end of the square some sort of protest is going on, pitifully small: fifteen or twenty struggling men and women, a few tattered posters, which Stella and Justine are unable to read. They wonder to each other about those people: who? for what cause? Both women, knee-jerk liberals, find their sympathies almost automatically aroused.

  Justine’s bright new blond hair, in the bright new sunlight, seems to make her look older than the softening gray did—or so Stella thinks. Justine is still very attractive, but also more ordinary. “You look like someone who lives in Burlingame, very Peninsula,” is what she says to her friend.

  “Well, thanks a lot. A Peninsula matron, my favorite role model. Is success going to make you mean, do you think?”

  At which Stella, unaccountably, almost cries; there are tears in her eyes, which she just manages to blink away. “Damn,” is all that she says, more or less to herself. And then, to Justine, “This new sale is somehow making me terrifically nervous.”

  “Well, I can sort of see how that might be.” As always, Justine has given her whole attention to what has been said to her; she enters the world of another person with remarkable ease.

  And so Stella tells her more. “When I sold that first piece, it just seemed a purely marvelous fluke. And then the second, icing on the cake. But now three. It’s like I’m committed to something. I have to keep doing it.”

  Justine laughs, though gently. “Like after three dates it’s a love affair.”

  “More like taking three steps out onto the tightrope,” Stella tells her.

  Having taken that in, Justine frowns. “Oh dear.” And then she says, “I do see what you mean. You have to keep on going, or fall. You can’t just go back to being a newspaper hack. I felt a little that way after the Nieman.”

  “Exactly.”

  They are quiet then for a while, both somewhat inattentively watching as the small group in the corner begins to disperse, its banners and placards still unreadable but having a foreign look. And the band of marchers themselves, departing, look alien, very dark.

  “Iraqis, maybe?” suggests Justine.

  “Maybe. I know they’re not Mexican. Pakistanis?”

  “Could be.” And then Justine, with an air of pulling herself together, of getting down to business, says to Stella, “I have to tell you, babes, I’ve been getting a little static from upstairs concerning you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. You know what those old boys are like. I’m hearing phrases like ‘taking advantage’ and ‘not serious journalism.’ ”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “Yes. Indeed. But easy enough to fix. Just show up around the shop a little more. Make your presence felt. You know, the more busy women around, the more important they all feel.”

  “So they won’t think I’m writing for New York on their precious time.”

  “Right. You’ve got it.”

  Stella’s mood of anxiety, though, persists into the afternoon. Despite all Justine’s intelligent sympathy. She would even like to call Richard and say to him, Look, I don’t really feel like celebrating. I know it’s sort of neurotic, but couldn’t we just have a quiet dinner at home? However, she does not call.

  “That Bolling. Some Marbles. Honestly, I really wonder.” These ambiguous phrases, more or less muttered into his martini, are Richard’s first utterances of the evening, as, drink from the bar in hand, he slides into the booth beside Stella. Scowling. And then the scowl goes, and he kisses her. (But martinis? Richard never drinks martinis.)

  She asks, “What’s the matter with Al—acting up?” She has tried to make it a joke.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It could be just me. I’m not the easiest guy in the world to get along with. Or so I’ve been told.” He flashes a familiar smile.

  “Now, who would say a thing like that?”

  They both laugh, a little uneasily. In the last week or so they have had a couple of almost major fights, which were her fault quite as much as his, Stella believes.

  Does he want to talk about Bolling? As is so often the case, Richard’s signals are ambiguous. And so, tentatively, Stella tries. “You mean Bolling’s being difficult?”

  Richard makes a sound that is half laugh, half snort. Derisory of both herself and Bolling, Stella at that instant feels.

  “You could put it like that,” says Richard. And then he adds, “Don’t ask.”

  “This place was a good idea,” Stella tells him, brightly, after a somber pause. “It’s so good-looking, I’ve been wanting to come here. Have you seen it before?”

  “No, never,” he says (too quickly?). “I mean yes, I came once with Bolling, actually, and we had a drink at the bar.” (It is in fact the place where, observed by Margot, Richard first had dinner with Eva.)

  “Oh.” Obscurely disturbed, Stella decides that perhaps she should at least try to talk more openly to Richard, more honestly than she usually does. In a friendly way (she hopes), she begins, “I don’t know why, but selling this new piece has upset me in some curious way. It’s hard to understand. You’d think—”

  Richard has been staring at her as she speaks. Unsympathetically; his look is almost hostile, Stella feels. In any case, it is totally without comprehension. And he says, “I sure don’t get it. I just don’t. Tell that to one of your literary friends. Jesus Christ. Ten grand.”

  “We could go to Europe,” says Stella suddenly. Desperately.

  “Europe. Good Christ, Stella, get real. I’ve got work to do.”

  But then he smiles and reaches for her hand. “Thanks for the offer, though. Well, shall we order? The food’s really good here, as I remember.”

  But (Stella starts to say and does not) you said you just had a drink here.

  She has not said this, but Richard seems to have felt or sensed the question. “Bolling and I had a few hors d’oeuvres at the bar,” he tells her. “Damned hearty hors d’oeuvres, and damned good.”

  “Damned” is not a word that Richard uses in that way. Is he suddenly sounding like Al Bolling? And if so, why?

  Dinner is good, though, and they drink a lot of good wine. Quite a lot. By the time they get home they are tired and merry, and faintly amorous. For a while.

  Later Stella cannot even remember what they were talking about—only that suddenly the ground between them flared into fury, inflammable as an oil spill. Boiling blood. Pure rage. Crazy! they scream at each other. You’re crazy! As, in some small part of her mind, Stella sickly thinks, We’re both right, we both are crazy. If I were not crazy I would not be living with Richard, and maybe that is true of him too.

  Richard’s face is red and swollen with anger and hatred. His wild eyes dart about. How he longs to be away from her! Stella can see that. Perhaps he longs to kill her?

  She begins to scream like a child, a very sick child. Rushing toward him, she beats on Richard with small clenched fists, hitting against his chest. How she longs to hurt him! But how horrible, how incredible! What she is doing is mad. Hitting and screaming. Crazy!

  “Crazy fucking bitch.” Richard has grasped her wrists and holds them hard.

  Stella bursts into tears. “You’re hurting me,” she tells him. Although actually he is not, not hurting her wrists. But the tears (perhaps it is the tears) serve to prevent his running away. He drops her wrists, and she falls against him. And they fall
together.

  Fall, somehow, into bed.

  A few hours later they wake, simultaneously. Both thirsty. Both needing to use the bathroom. “You go first,” Stella tells him.

  After her turn, creeping back into bed, she asks him, “Do you think we’re both crazy?”

  He mutters, “I guess.”

  “I think we’ve got to drink less. For one thing.”

  “I guess.”

  He turns on his side, away from her, and Stella clings to his back, as though for life.

  17

  Richard’s Relationships

  “Yes indeed. I think Stella’s going to be very, very successful,” says Richard to Bolling one lunchtime that fall. They are in one of the few remaining old North Beach Italian restaurants, sitting at the long, dark, high-polished bar (a bar that they are agreed is a classic, perfect). Drinking Negronis.

  “But I’m not at all sure that Stella’s equipped to handle success,” Richard continues.

  Al is not especially interested in hearing about Stella, Richard can tell—and actually why should he be? Richard was only talking to keep the ball rolling, so to speak; otherwise Al is given to long black sullen lapses. But now he seems to respond. “That’s a problem with my daughter, Alexis,” he tells Richard. “Such a will to fail. I honestly believe that affected her, uh, sexual direction. Afraid of failing with men. Which was all my fault. Naturally.”

  Bolling’s litanies of self-reproach and self-pity are very boring, very repetitive, but Richard forces himself to listen supportively, since—Christ!—if this job fails he will really, really, really be up shit creek without a paddle. “It’s hard to understand about your daughter,” he says to Bolling, as he has more than once before. “Such a beautiful girl, from her pictures.” And then he adds, obliquely, “It’s not exactly the same problem with Stella.”

  “I suppose not.”

  Bolling is drinking more than usual, as he has been for several weeks, which is one of the things that are worrying to Richard. Bolling is such a somber drinker; he talks and talks, but never jokes. No fun and games. Or else that silence. And sometimes when he talks he makes very little sense.

  And it’s very hard to get him to focus back on business, when Richard very much needs to do just that.

  “A real touch of fall in the air today,” he next attempts.

  “Not surprising. October.” Bolling frowns into his drink.

  “I guess not. But about now’s when I always start to think of skiing.”

  “Almost November. I think of the Day of the Dead,” says Bolling. “Mexico. So interesting, their celebrations of death. Decorating skeletons, all that. The processions. Didn’t you tell me your girlfriend had some Mexican connection?”

  “Yes, her mother—”

  “I’d like to talk to her sometime. Does she have special feelings about death, would you say?”

  “She doesn’t talk about it much. Stella’s pretty young, you know.” And so am I, you gloomy old crock, Richard does not say. But he forces himself to go on. “She’s thinking of taking up skiing this year,” he lies; Stella has admitted to a severe fear of heights, but said she’d be happy to go along on a trip to wherever for skiing.

  “What would you say was the basis for her problem with success?” Bolling unexpectedly asks. Just like him, Richard bitterly reflects: you think he isn’t paying attention when he is, and vice versa.

  “Well, uh, it’s hard to say. Something to do with her father, probably. I guess he was pretty hard on her, most of the time.”

  Bolling scowls. “It’s a tough road, being a father.”

  “Oh, for sure,” agrees Richard—at that moment passionately hating Al Bolling. How he longs to tell Al what he can do with his whole fucking project, and with his ugly dyke daughter. “Sometimes I think I’m very lucky not to have kids,” he states piously.

  This seems to work.

  “You’re quite right there,” says Bolling. “Stupidest thing I ever did. Siring children.” And then, with what Richard thinks of as one of his lapses into sanity, Bolling says, “I take it that you’ve got some idea about ski pictures, for the Fillmore?”

  “Oh, do I!” Richard almost shouts and laughs with relief, but he forces himself to remain very serious and sober. “Only the greatest idea I ever had,” he says.

  “Meet me in Reno!” Richard shouts into the telephone, across thousands and thousands of miles. To Eva, in Madrid. “In Nevada! Reno! I’ll meet you, and we’ll go to Squaw Valley. Ski. It’s marvelous there. I have to see you. I can’t live like this, without you …”

  The Prado is just across the street from the Ritz, where she is, Eva is saying. She is sitting there in her suite, looking across to the Prado. So wonderful, the most marvelous collection of Flemish. Memling. Bosch. He should come there, Eva tells him; in fact why not right away? She too cannot wait.

  “Christ, Eva. I can’t come right now. But in a month or so, early snow, come to Reno. I’ll meet you.”

  She has heard of Reno, Eva tells him, her harsh, shadowed voice throbbing across all that distance. Reno is where, she understands, Americans go to divorce? This is perhaps his intention? She laughs deeply, almost gutturally.

  “Eva, you know I’m not married. Jesus Christ, I’m talking about skiing. I love you!”

  She too does, does love him, her handsomest Richard, says Eva. But at this moment she is most terrifically tired. Does he know that it is almost midnight where she is? (In the Ritz, across from the Prado.)

  Oh. He could kill her. Bitch! Kraut cunt! with her perfect teeth and skin and breasts and—Christ!—everything! with her body, that length of grace. Her scents of intimacy. Oh Jesus, her intimate blond hair! How he wishes her dead. His sister. His twin. His mirror image.

  At first, an hour or so later, Richard does not recognize the female voice on the phone, although of all women’s voices in the world, he knows this one best—or has known it longest: it is Marina, his former and his first and in a sense his only wife (Claudia never counted as a wife). But this voice is low and deep: at first for a wild moment he thinks it could be Stella imitating Eva—but how …?

  “I think you’d better come over,” this woman says. “Rickie, I need you. I’m over on Jersey Street, near the Castro.” And Marina gives him a number.

  The tone of her voice has left Richard no choice at all: she is sick, or crazy, or both. She needs him.

  Panic encircles Richard, as he drives up Castro. All those boys on corners, leather-jacketed gay couples, feeling each other’s asses as they walk. The stores, all full of kinky gay merchandise. Even the movie house, the Castro, with its Hepburn revival week. Is everyone staring at him as he drives along? Do they imagine that he belongs here, among them? Richard feels eyes watching, observing him, and looks rigidly ahead.

  Arrived at the number on Jersey Street, he presses a bell. At which nothing happens. He stands there, in the baking October sunlight, still a little drunk from lunch. And it is so hot, it will never snow. He is thinking that he must have been wrong, must have heard it wrong, or else crazy Marina gave him the wrong house number, maybe even the wrong street. Jesus.

  But the next thing he knows, there is Marina, coming out the front door to stand beside him. Or he guesses it must be Marina. She looks so terrible, he could have passed her on the street. Nothing pretty about her anymore, or young. Drab long dirty-blond hair, and an awful too-long rag of a dress. Not quite looking up at him, she says, “I’m really sick. Just take me somewhere, would you?”

  “Sick how? what kind of sick?” he asks her, even as he dreads her telling him something, some female detail that he does not want to hear. Cannot hear.

  But instead she laughs. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to see you, lovely Rickie.”

  Oh Jesus. She isn’t sick in a physical way at all, just crazy. She’s really crazy now, Richard thinks. I will take her somewhere. A psycho ward, that’s where she should be.

  A chain of associations then goes off i
n his mind, leading him to think, Mount Zion Hospital. It’s sort of Jewish. Jews, psychiatry. I’ll take her to Mount Zion; they must have a crazy ward there. Out of the Castro.

  In the car, Marina seems to forget how she looks, and she almost tries to flirt—to flirt!—with her former husband who met her in Paterson when they were both eighteen. Is that crazy?

  “You know I do miss seeing you, old handsome, and it doesn’t seem right, especially since you’re not with that Claudia anymore. Don’t you think we could, you know, try it out sometime?” Through terrible dangling hair, she leers up sideways at him. “For a long time I was with this other person, his wife was a cop, did I tell you that? And jealous? I’m here to tell you.” She laughs, tossing hair from her face. Horribly. “But he’s not around anymore, and so, Rickie, gee, why not?”

  Minutes later, as they turn onto Divisadero, she asks him, “Rickie, where are we going?”

  Clutching his arm as he drives too fast, she says, “Rickie, you know I never loved anyone but you.”

  He makes a fast right off Divisadero and onto Sutter, pulls into Emergency. Ambulances, attendants. Fortunately no big emergency going on right now, just some nurses and intern-looking people walking slowly through the revolving door.

  But he can’t just leave her right there, can he? Can he leave now, get out of there?

  “Rickie, don’t leave me, please!”

  Not looking at her, and feeling the rise of panic in his veins, Richard parks beside an idling ambulance, calls “Be right out!” to the driver, and propels Marina through the doors. And into a scene of hell: old people, black people, middle-aged people, kids, lying there on gurneys or sitting in wheelchairs. Fright, anguish, despair or simple stoic rage on every face. Taking it all in, for one instant Richard closes his eyes.

  He grasps at a man who must be a doctor—green scrub clothes, a stethoscope around his neck; he points over to Marina, now cowering by a water cooler. Her eyes are more scared than any other eyes in that room. Richard whispers to the doctor, “That woman is psychotic. Maybe dangerous. I’ve got to get out of here.”