Almost Perfect Read online

  The center of the room, its focus, is Richard’s worktable, on which there is further chaos: piles of papers; small bottles of ink, in all colors; jars of pencils and brushes. Above the table is an elaborate cut-glass candelabra, refracting light and frequently shedding bright beams on Richard’s light mass of hair.

  At the back of the room is a balcony, with stairs leading up to a space that is clear and efficient, surprisingly, with filing cabinets, a drafting table, and various machines: copier, typewriter, computer, adding machine, stereo. Below the balcony, behind a door, is Richard’s living suite: his bedroom and bath, a pullman kitchen—all perfectly functional, all small. The bedroom is smallest of all, a tapestried cave, walls lined with coarse brown linen. There is a queen-size bed, a bureau with mirror, an easy chair, a lamp. “It’s the sexiest room I’ve ever seen,” snarled Marina, furiously, instantly sure that Richard “brought girls there,” as she would put it, which of course he did. Especially beautiful Claudia, rich and married, who after a lot of trouble became his second wife, for a rough two years. Richard will never marry again; it spoils everything, he knows that.

  Richard’s clothes are in a larger room, a big closet that forms the passageway to his bath and kitchen, the kitchen where on a tall stool Richard now sits over coffee, still smiling, still pleased with the day. Looking back to the passageway at his clothes, he thinks as he often has before that he has too many, far too many clothes—and he determines (as he has before) that he will get a bunch of them together for homeless people. Some shelter. He will definitely do that this week.

  Presentation time. That is what this day is for him, what he is almost about to get together—and then at the end of the day that interview, which even now he knows he may forget, what with so much else going on. Big clients coming. Big money involved.

  Webster Wines.

  Three hours later, at almost noon, the hour of the presentation, Richard’s studio is totally transformed. It has become a wonderland of bright glass bubbles: thousands of them—five thousand exactly. He should know; he ordered and paid for them, and they cost the earth, but they are worth it. Tiny glass translucent balls, hung from everywhere in that enormous space, from tiny gilt cornices on mirrors, from tips of philodendron leaves—everywhere bubbles.

  And that is the theme of this whole presentation: Bubble time, the campaign for the new champagne from Webster Wines.

  “You’re an absolute genius, you know that, Dick?”

  “Richard, it’s so beautiful I could cry.”

  “Man, you’re really a crazy SOB, but this is super, very very super, I mean it.”

  “What a great party! Rich, when you do it you really do it, you know what I mean?”

  Along with the champagne, courtesy Webster Winery, Richard has provided small pastry puffs of caviar (“Well, of course, what else but caviar?”), puffs of cheese, and, for the more abstemious, grapes and melon balls. (“It’s all balls, did you notice? Call it bubbles if you want to, but it’s basically balls. Right, Rich?”)

  In his pale-gray blazer, smiling his smile, Richard moves through his party, adoring every minute, every overheard or directly spoken word of praise. Each pat on the back, each kiss. He loves this, this makes it all worthwhile, his often lousy work. He loves all this love and praise, it warms his blood. Love vibrates in his chest.

  And it all could vanish in a breath, he knows that. Like soap bubbles vanishing. It’s all unreal; he is playing with funny money; it could all be dust tomorrow. As he could be dust, lying dead and dirty in an alley somewhere. What he does is as fake, as phony, as what all the others do, all the people in this room, the art directors and the clients, the hotshot moneybags clients; they could lose it all, as easily as anyone. As easily as he himself could lose it all. As Richard Fallon, Esquire.

  But in the meantime he might as well enjoy it, mightn’t he?

  “Say, Richard man, this is really the greatest.”

  “Dick, old man, a lot of the time I think you’re an asshole, but you’re also a fucking genius, you know that?”

  “Richard darling, I never saw anything quite so beautiful. You must leave it like this forever!”

  Of course all these people are jerks.

  On the other hand, a few of them are fairly attractive.

  Linda, who wants him to keep his studio like this forever, is not too bad. Hair a little long for her age, and that pink shirt is definitely a mistake, but still, Linda is not too bad.

  She is across the room by now and is talking to someone else, some old advertising broad, he’s seen her around. Approaching the two women, Richard smiles, he gleams at them both, and then, as the older woman turns for a moment to someone else, into Linda’s ear he whispers, “Why don’t you ever call me?”

  “Call you? Richard, for heaven’s sake, why would I?” But she is blushing.

  “Because I’d really like it if you did. Isn’t that a reason?”

  She laughs. “I’ll think about it.”

  She will, he knows she’ll call. But why did he have to ask her? Most women just call, and call. Even Claudia, to whom he was recently married, still calls.

  And some men call.

  Like Andrew Bacci, who in fact did call this very morning to say, “You know, we could just put in a little more time together. Hang out. Preferably siesta time, but if not, not. Don’t you ever get tired of women? Of—that horrible word you guys use—of ‘cunt’? I wouldn’t do anything you don’t want, I promise. I’ll stop the minute you say to. But honestly, kiddo, I think you might like it.”

  Andrew is very good-looking, if you like that curly, long-lashed Italian look, and Richard sort of does; he has to admit it. Andrew is young, twenty-something, and smart, very smart. A stockbroker. Funny too. Richard always has a lot of laughs on the phone or having a couple of drinks with Andrew. And as far as that other stuff goes … well, Andrew could be right. He might like it. And that might be a problem.

  This quick reverie on Andrew—which, Richard has to admit, has turned him on, it really has—is interrupted by a woman named Margot Carlisle, a dark and extremely chic (there is no other word for Margot’s style) older woman, whom Richard distrusts and almost dislikes and is not at all turned on by. Margot in fact is a good friend of Andrew Bacci’s. For all Margot’s big reputation for sexiness and lovers—she has lived all over the world, known almost everyone and slept with most people—Margot is almost always with gay men, and she seems to like Andrew best of all.

  She begins her conversations with a tiny deep-throat laugh, usually. She does so now, the little laugh, before saying, “Darling Richard, you’ve really outdone yourself. This is truly fantastic.” Her manner is somewhat campy, with always too many gestures, eyebrow raisings, like a bad imitation of Garbo.

  “Well, dollings,” Richard tells her, Bronx style, “thanks. Coming from you … well, really, thanks.”

  Margot swings her sheaf of black hair. “I hear a friend of mine is coming to talk to you.”

  “Oh?” His mind is a blank.

  “Yes, the dearest young woman. Stella Blake. Quite a brilliant girl, actually. Hardly your type, no style at all. She’s working for some paper. But you be nice to her, Richard. A man I used to know, a big director, wasn’t nice to her at all. Although for a while he adored her.”

  “I’m always nice.”

  “That’s not exactly what I’ve heard.” Margot smirks.

  “Anyway the whole idea seems so dumb. An interview. Christ. I don’t like to talk.”

  “It doesn’t matter at all what you say, don’t worry.” Margot pauses to scan the room, plotting her next move, before she turns back to Richard. Then, “I had lunch yesterday with darling Andrew,” she tells him, batting her eyelashes. “He’s absolutely pining.”

  “Jesus Christ, Margot. You know perfectly well.”

  Giving him a long vamp smile, complicit, amused and knowing, Margot slides into the crowd—as from somewhere Richard hears “Dick, phone for you. A lady, naturally.”r />
  “I’ll take it inside.”

  Knowing, somehow, that it will be Claudia, and knowing too how the conversation will end, Richard takes his time getting to the phone, noting as he does so that the party is winding down. He’ll give it another half hour, but the best part is over, and Richard sighs with great and genuine sadness. What everyone said was true: what he did was really fantastic, almost perfect; in his way he is a sort of genius.

  The first time Richard ever saw Claudia—it must be ten years ago now—what he thought was: That’s it, that’s her. That’s the most beautiful woman I ever saw. That’s her. The perfect one. Stark naked, standing in front of him, in a puddle of red silk.

  He had been working all day on his cabin up the coast. He even remembers the colors of that day: an April mauve-pink-blue day, the sky that color all day, and the sea reflective, calm. Richard was up there alone, just working. Marina had stayed home, for some damn reason or other of her own. One of her nutcake intuitions, probably. But he was all alone and working well, on the beautiful house of his own design, his own labor. And he had that day the most marvelous sense of his own good work; he had imagined this house, all out of his head, and made drawings. Got a contractor for the foundation and the frame, a plumber for all that stuff, and here it was, beautiful and almost done. It worked. That day he was shingling the roof, stopping now and then to breathe the clean salt air, to admire the sky and the sea, the swooping gulls.

  He barely remembered, in fact, that he had been asked to a party that night at Sea Ranch; some client had bought a huge spread there recently.

  But then he did remember, and he thought it might be fun; he hadn’t been to a party alone for a while, what the hell. Marina was unreliable, partywise; sometimes she hated a party on sight and wanted to go home, other times she got fairly drunk and wanted to stay all night. Now he even remembers a lilting sense of expectancy as he drove along the coast in the fresh spring dark, the dark-blue sky star-sprinkled, to the huge low-lying “contemporary” house, with its show-off Frank Lloyd Wright winged roof, its pretentious fancy brass door.

  A blast of party hit Richard, opening that door when no one came to his knock. Extreme noise: there must have been two bands, several speaker systems. And people trying to shout above all that sound, as though they had something to say. Richard, whose nose is exceptionally sensitive, smelled garlic and fish and booze, cigarette and cigar smoke and some dope, and about a hundred fabulous French perfumes. Too rich, this is all too rich for my old thin Irish blood, Richard thought, aware of an urgent and private need: I’d like to piss all over this place, he thought, asking someone for directions to the can.

  He went down a hall and he opened, as directed, the second door to the right, to a brilliant black-tiled bathroom, in the middle of which was standing, naked as a jaybird, a ravishing golden girl.

  Who shrieked and tried to cover her snatch and her tits, but she was laughing too; Richard could feel her looking him over, and he knew how he must look to her, in his white party coat, dark-blue silk scarf. With his hair, and his eyes.

  She laughed and laughed, giving up on her body, using her hands to cover her face, and not even succeeding at that too well.

  He threw her a towel from the rack on the door. It was all he could do; he couldn’t speak.

  “So chivalrous!” she cried out. “God, couldn’t you knock?”

  “I didn’t know it would open. Don’t you lock doors?”

  “Oh, go away!”

  Near her feet lay a red silk dress, some lacy red silk under-things, and hose. God knows why she had to take all that stuff off to pee.

  “See you later,” Richard was barely able to say.

  About half an hour later, by which time Richard had found an empty bathroom and had also found his host and the bar, he was introduced to this ravishing girl in red, a girl with a big full mane of dark-blond hair, not far from the color of his own hair (and a dark-blond muff and pink tits), a girl who blushed terrifically as he said to her, “I do think we’ve met somewhere.”

  Claudia Farnsworth.

  “I never saw you before in my life,” she said.

  “Would you dance with me anyway?”

  “Well, I might.”

  Claudia was a flirt, very vain and selfish, but she was also smart, in a certain way; even that first night, Richard recognized in her some of his own survival-in-the-jungle qualities. A girl from Salt Lake City, she had sold cosmetics at I. Magnin, modelled a little, until she met and as soon as possible married Bucky Farnsworth, married the quantities of “old money” that made her feel both inferior and secure.

  Which was almost how Richard felt, at parties like that one: he knew he was better-looking and probably as smart as anyone there, but at the same time he was very aware of not having gone to their schools, of not having known them for very long. Of being from Paterson, New Jersey, which was not exactly what any of them meant when they said “the East.”

  “You’ll have to come to my house sometime,” he said to Claudia, dancing close.

  “You mean in the city?”

  “No, up here, on the coast.”

  “Oh, we have a house up here too, and one at Tahoe. But where do you live in the city?”

  “Oh, up near Twin Peaks, at the moment. But my studio’s in North Beach.”

  “I’ve never been to Twin Peaks, I don’t think.”

  “You don’t have to. Come to my studio. Call me.”

  “Oh, you.” Her laugh was as pretty as everything about her, high and soft, a little burst of silver.

  Later that night Richard met her husband, red-faced Bucky Farnsworth, who mentioned both Exeter and Yale within minutes of their introduction.

  Later still, in fact very late, some hours after midnight, Richard managed to get Claudia out onto one of the porches, where through clusters of pines and hemlocks and aspens they could see the blackly glittering sea and an almost clearing new day. Clinging together, they kissed, for Richard a kiss of such sweetness, such innocence (she tasted of apricots). A kiss of true love. He felt that his heart would break.

  “I feel like a child,” he whispered to her, to lovely Claudia, as they pulled apart.

  “Me too—that’s how I feel.” She shivered. “We’d better go in, though.”

  After that, for the weeks of spring and into summer, almost everywhere that Richard went he saw her, beautiful Claudia. For at that time he and Marina seemed to be taken up by a certain group, rich people with houses at Tahoe and up on the coast, people who gave a lot of parties. And since Richard’s house had turned out so perfectly, a small showplace, really, photographed all over, everyone loved it, and they were invited everywhere, Richard and Marina Fallon, the new smart couple. Richard saw Claudia at all those parties, in all her marvelous clothes—and he thought of her naked, red silk at her pretty feet. He was truly in love with her, he knew that, but he never made a real move in her direction. There were only those rare, intensely sweet and almost innocent kisses.

  Until the afternoon when Claudia called him, and she came to his studio and told him that she could not live without him, not another moment. Which was, as Richard now sees it, the beginning of the end. Everything after that was more or less predictable, and more or less downhill: the impassioned afternoons, and evening quarrels at home. Divorce, and marriage to Claudia.

  More quarrels. Another divorce.

  Not that Richard ever forgot about those early afternoons—they were lovely, and she was indeed a lovely-looking woman. They even had, occasionally, a good conversation; Claudia was almost as mean as he was about the people they both knew, as mean and as ambivalent.

  But she was basically a very stupid woman, and vain, and selfish. Richard was almost relieved when she told him, finally, that an old boyfriend from Salt Lake had shown up in her life (terrifically rich, that went without saying). She wanted out. And so Richard moved back into his studio—not, as poor Marina would have liked, to Twin Peaks with her.

  And now
occasionally Claudia still calls, and sometimes they get together, for a couple of hours in his studio, in bed. He actually misses her children, two nice little boys, much more than he misses Claudia.

  Living alone, though, Richard has moments, even days, of the most appalling aloneness, a sense of cold vacancy in his very soul. He worries about Marina, who often acts crazy. He worries about Claudia’s boys, believing that she is too stupid to take proper care of them. For all these reasons, he often ends up drinking too much, one way or another, and he spends time with people he does not even much like—stupid people, no life to them. Including, sometimes, Claudia.

  “Sometimes I absolutely can’t believe that we could fail. I mean, where did we go wrong? You’re the most beautiful guy in the world, and I really love us together. I absolutely don’t understand it.”

  Claudia says this as, late that afternoon, on the day of his bubble party, they lie together naked across his bed and she happily fingers the light growth of hair on his chest. But she has said all that before, and Richard has no new answers for her.

  “It’s just marriage,” he says, as he has said before. “Not us.”

  “But I love you so much, and it’s so good with you!”

  Richard pats her sleek thigh. “I have to say, today was a big success,” he tells her. “They really went for it.”

  “Darling, of course they did. The room looked fabulous.”

  “You just saw the remnants.” Richard told Claudia very firmly that she must not arrive before three—at which time he knew the last guests would be gone. Which indeed was the case, though he had a little trouble with Linda, who seemed to feel that the afternoon was hers, hers with Richard. “It was really incredible about noon,” he tells Claudia, “when people began to show up. And the sun—”

  “Oh God, it’s almost five. I have to go!” Scrambling from the bed, Claudia stumbles into the bathroom, where she leaves the door open, and goes on talking, while she thoroughly washes herself. This habit, the open door, is one that Richard does not like at all; he does not want to see her doing all that, and even if he closes his eyes he knows. He can see her still.