Almost Perfect Read online

  “And Donny is so impossible,” Claudia continues, from the toilet. “Sometimes I think God’s punishing me with him. Rich, do you think I should try to gain some weight?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Well, sort of. I read somewhere that older women have to sacrifice their figures to their faces.”

  “Christ. In the first place, you’re not an older woman.”

  “No, but I will be. And so will you. Older, I mean. Can you imagine being middle-aged? Like our parents, when we were kids?”

  Any mention of his parents, any stray thought of them, blackens Richard’s consciousness, as does the notion of age. “No,” he says vehemently—to everything, sitting up in bed and watching Claudia as she brushes on makeup.

  He suddenly feels that she has contrived to ruin his day. The day that started with such promise. The day of his big success. The next time she calls he will simply say, No, I don’t want to see you, Richard decides. Some women can ruin your life.

  After Claudia is gone he simply wanders about the studio, not yet ready to tackle cleaning it up, and noting that it looks like the devastation after Christmas. The catering girls took the food and all that mess, but there are still all those goddam glass bubbles everywhere, many broken, many still rolling around the floor like marbles. Richard imagines weeks and months of stray bits of broken glass.

  He feels vague pains in his chest and wonders if he is having a heart attack.

  When the doorbell rings, Richard’s first thought, curiously, is of Andrew Bacci, although Andrew has never just stopped by like that. Linda? And then he remembers: Jesus, the interview girl.

  Stella. Whatever the hell her name was.

  He heads toward the door, walking heavily. Fast, with more pain in his chest.

  3

  Friends

  “Actually I guess he forgot. I got there on time; you know me: even when I mean to be late. But he came to the door in a robe, not expecting me.”

  “Richard can be very careless,” Margot tells Stella. “He’s rather spoiled, I think. So handsome, though fortunately not at all my type. He’s not pretty, you know? I like men to be pretty. But no one was ever so pretty as George, and look how he treated me. Richard should never have married Claudia Farnsworth; the most total mistake. They could have gone on with that super affair forever. Andrew told me the two of them exuded steam. You know my friend Andrew Bacci, don’t you, Stell? Talk about pretty. But I guess Marina, Richard’s nutcake wife, got some of that steam blown in her face, and she threw him out, just like that. So stupid. Europeans have much more sense about these things.”

  This is a telephone conversation that some weeks hence Stella will strain to remember in detail, and fortunately journalistic training has given her a memory that records automatically. At the moment, though, she simply reflects on the general uninterestingness of gossip, however steamy, when it concerns people one does not know. And she reflects too on the extremely smalltown quality of San Francisco: only last week she did indeed meet Andrew Bacci, Margot’s pretty friend. She was covering a fund-raising dinner for AIDS, and Andrew was one of the sponsors. And he was, as Margot said, extremely pretty. And now it seems that both he and Margot are somehow connected to, or friends with, Richard Fallon, her non-interview. In fact Stella is later to think that a seeming web of friends could almost have been conspiring that she and Richard should meet.

  But at the moment, how bored she is with Margot! They met more or less through friends when Margot’s then husband, George, had just walked out, leaving Margot, who is considerably older than she looks, with no money, no job. With nothing. Stella, touched by this unfair plight, and by some quality in Margot herself, some brave undaunted verve, helped Margot get a job at a gallery out on Jackson Street. Not much of a job, but it helped a lot, and Margot was gracefully grateful. And they became, with limitations, friends, mostly phone friends: Margot, with not much to do but sit at the gallery, calls and talks, and Stella listens—as she has just noted, with decreasing interest.

  “In any case, so rude of Richard,” Margot now comments.

  “Actually he seems to feel very bad about it. He keeps calling to apologize.”

  “He must want to see you.”

  “I doubt it, really. And at this point I wouldn’t know him if I saw him.”

  “He’s very, very handsome. But of course you don’t care about anything so superficial, do you.”

  Stella laughs. “Of course not. Whether or not they’re politically correct and are fond of Wittgenstein, that’s my sole criterion.”

  “You even say you didn’t think Liam was handsome.”

  “Well, I guess he was. Is. Sort of.”

  “Everyone else certainly seems to think so.” And Margot sniffs.

  Her history is probably the most interesting thing about Margot; most interesting to Stella is the fact that Margot once knew (or simply met: this is not entirely clear) Liam O’Gara. Also, Margot once wrote a book, a novel that was popular some years ago and is now out of print. She has been married three times (probably), once to a man with whom she lived in England for several years, which is where and when she knew (or simply met) Liam O’Gara. She also lived in Mexico City, where she posed (it is said) for Diego Rivera. She has lived in Turkey, and of course in New York. She is not a name-dropper, not really, but it does come out that she knew various important people: Stephen Spender, Balanchine, Mary McCarthy, John Huston, Jackson Pollock. Halston and Christopher Isherwood. Liam O’Gara.

  Stella has said very little to Margot about Liam, their affair, beyond the indisputable fact that she used to see him. Margot of course would like to hear much more, and continually brings him up.

  “I hardly think of Liam,” Stella now tells her. She laughs. “I might not know him either, if I saw him somewhere. Other than in the tabloids.”

  “Oh, you.” Margot sighs. “Well, I’m glad that Richard at least feels that apologies are in order.”

  “Too many. I wish he’d knock it off.”

  That is not entirely true: Richard has actually called only twice, once to apologize hastily and once to set up another meeting, for next week. What is annoying—in fact this is irritating in the extreme—is how much Stella finds that she cares. How much she thinks of him. Imprinted in her consciousness is the shadowed face of that very tall man, with his backlit halo of pale tangled hair. She thinks of that face, and of his deep troubled voice; she thinks obsessively of the room behind him, his studio. All that she could see of it that night was that it was extremely large and full of objects. Looming furniture, plants.

  She is waiting for their next contact, the interview that is to take place next Tuesday, and no one, especially not Margot (and more especially not Richard Fallon himself), must have the smallest clue as to the excitement she feels. Which has nothing to do with the actual Richard Fallon, Stella tells herself; it was only an accidental small fire set to her overreceptive imagination—or, also likely, to her somewhat starved libido, after an overly long stretch “between beaux,” as her Texas friend, Justine Jones, likes to put it.

  Undoubtedly, by this time next week the whole obsession, if it is that, will have vanished, blown away. And in the meantime she does not want to talk about it.

  She gets Margot off the phone (not always an easy task) and starts to work on a series of interviews with homeless people around Civic Center and a group who want to feed them.

  She manages to concentrate, to get a great deal done.

  Stella’s flat is in the nondescript, amorphous area known as the Richmond District, in roughly the northwest quadrant of the city, and the flat itself is quite nondescript, its two virtues being its size (it is roomy) and its proximity to the Presidio, the Army-owned stretch of land that is mostly woods, dark and deep and very beautiful. Stella’s windows look out to these woods; from her narrow bedroom window she sees a sweep of cypress boughs, a grassy hillock, and the black trunks of pines and hemlocks, some wind-bent cypresses.

&nbs
p; Her large and clumsily proportioned living room is sparsely furnished, and decorated with somewhat childish souvenirs: posters, silver masks, ceramics. Lots of books. There is also a dining room, and another, very small room, for which she has never found a definite use; she puts things there, and periodically she has to clear them out. Her bathroom is large and papered with cabbage roses, vaguely matched by rose-colored tiles around the shower.

  Stella tends to spend time mostly in her bedroom; she reads there, and often works at a long cluttered table across from her bed.

  Richard Fallon is unimaginable in these rooms; that is one of the things that Stella thinks that day, after talking to Margot and observing, anew, the unruly piles of books by which she is surrounded. She sighs, and sits down at her desk, and gets to work.

  She has two hours before meeting a friend for lunch downtown, and she needs to make the most of them.

  This fairly frequent lunchtime friend is Justine Jones, some ten years older than Stella. A very close, maybe her closest friend, from a crossroads down in East Texas. A lean and lanky gray-blonde (a dust-bowl blonde, she terms herself), freckle-faced, incongruously heavy-breasted. Justine was scooped up into the giant university at Austin, where she prospered and won further scholarships, in journalism, to Columbia. And thence to the job in San Francisco. She is literally Stella’s boss, a fact they both tend to forget; Justine is in charge of feature stories, the section for which Stella mostly writes, what used to be called the women’s page.

  An avid talker, sometimes brilliant, always interesting, and often wise, Justine is monumentally discreet about her own life; she is even discreet about her own opinions. She tends to listen and to comment—in a word, an ideal friend, which is how Stella and quite a few other people view her, including the lovers of whom she does not often speak. Life in New York served to speed up her native delivery, but apparent in her speech are still certain flat vowels, as well as a frequent wry colloquial turn, which she is much too intelligent to overdo. The sounds of her voice are actually very beautiful, like soft sweet bells, sounding an upper range. She spent the past year with a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, but Cambridge seems not to have affected her speech.

  Once they settle at their table, Stella tells her friend, “I’m really okay. Just broke and sometimes lonely, but aren’t most people both those things?” Stella is aware, still, of having missed Justine for a year, and is anxious, still, to tell her everything—an effect that is frequent with Justine.

  “I do worry about Prentice,” Stella continues. “It’s hard when an ambivalently loved parent is dying.”

  “It sure is.”

  They pause delicately, both recognizing the problem: unloved, unloving Prentice Blake dying.

  It is Stella who breaks the silence then, saying, “And then there’s Liam. Always lurking somewhere in the tabloids. If a person can lurk in tabloids.”

  The two women laugh, with a small note of sadness, of rue, thrown in.

  “Just yesterday something in a gossip column,” Stella goes on. Justine is the only person to whom she speaks of Liam.

  “I saw it,” Justine tells her. “Honestly, baby-girl stars. At his age.” And then she asks Stella, “Why are you peering like that? See someone you know?”

  Caught out, Stella half lies. “Not really. I just thought I saw someone.” The truth is, she is more or less half looking for, half expecting to see, Richard Fallon. Who has, she now feels, insinuated himself into her imagination. She has found herself looking about, as (observably) she now is doing.

  Justine is a woman of exceptional intuitive powers; she could almost be counted on to divine the state of mind of her friend. And so it is really to change the subject, again, that Stella remarks, “In addition to dying, Prentice is more than a little strange about money, I think. He keeps going on about what he’s leaving me. Sometimes he’s apologetic, saying he wishes it were more, other times he makes a big deal about how generous he is.”

  “He’s crazy.” Justine says this very gently, very sparingly.

  “Yes, but he’s also dying.” Stella sighs, painfully; almost any thought of her father is for her filled with pain. And this linkage of his death with unspecified but supposedly large sums of money is in every way terrible: a seditious bribe, an evil push toward wishes for his death.

  Justine as a rule speaks very little of herself, a quality that Stella has tried and failed to emulate. Justine asks questions and she listens, wonderfully—Justine is one of the great listeners. She speaks about general topics. Thus Stella often knows very little about her current life. It is very surprising, then, to Stella to hear Justine say, “This quite curious thing has come up in my life. A man I know, whom I’ve been, uh, going out with from time to time, now has decided that we must get married, and I find myself very confused. Totally. Confused.”

  “Justine, how nice, that’s terrific.” But even as she says this Stella wonders, Is it terrific? Why does she make this assumption? Does she herself wish to be married? She would rather have thought that she prided herself on not marrying, on avoiding that particular form of trouble.

  “I’m not so sure,” says Justine, as though in answer to all of Stella’s unspoken questions. “But I must say I’m a little embarrassed at how pleased I am to be asked. And to make it even more embarrassing, he’s sort of rich; not really rich but what my poor old mother would call comfortable. And he is comfortable. I really like him.”

  For whatever reasons, possibly including the proposal, Justine is in one of her very young-looking phases. In an old heavy soft-blue sweater, a scarf and jeans (Margot: “Your Okie friend really takes the prize for dowdy”), her light hair tied back with a ribbon, her blue eyes bright, she looks like a friend of Stella’s own age, or even a younger friend.

  “Funnily enough, he’s a contractor,” Justine now tells Stella, long, strong fingers toying with her wineglass. “Funnier still, I met him in a bar. I really wish it hadn’t happened like that, in a way, but it did. I’d just had a really bad day downtown, and I was so tired, and I thought, How nice just to have a glass of wine at some cheery place. So I went into Le Central, forgetting it was Friday, so crowded—and there he was, this nice fat man moving over to let me get a drink, and then talking to me, and then saying why don’t we go and have dinner. And so we did.”

  Stella laughs. “And so, as they say, one thing led to another.”

  “Well yes, eventually. In fact very eventually; it was all very slow and deliberate, and so nice; I never felt rushed, or pushed.” She smiles at Stella. “Another funny thing—in fact everything about this story is very odd, wouldn’t you say? But Collin, my contractor, seems to know that advertising type who stood you up. You remember, Mr. Fallon?”

  A strange flush of heat goes through Stella—so stupid; why?—even as quite coolly she is saying, “Everyone seems to know him, one way or another. But how does Collin?”

  “Collin mostly builds houses. And he was showing me some pictures—he keeps files on them all, of course—and he came to one, rather small but so beautiful, really super, up the coast. And he said it was the best house he’d ever built, and that some advertising type had just drawn it on a cocktail napkin, and he built it from the drawing, and it turned out perfect. A crazy genius, he said, named Richard Fallon. So, you know how I am about names; my old head is literally stuffed with them. And so I thought, Oh, Richard Fallon. Stella’s missing interview.” Justine smiles, rather pleased with this tidy tying together of things.

  “What did it look like, the house?” Asking this, Stella realizes that she is short of breath.

  “Like a terribly sophisticated cabin. A pile of upright logs against a steep bank. Big windows. It’s hard to describe. Ask him. Did you ever get to the interview?”

  “Next week. I think.” Stella smiles across at her friend, taking breaths. “So, now. About this marriage idea,” she says.

  Justine flushes, looking younger yet. And she begins to talk. About Collin Schmidt. And herself.


  4

  More Friends

  Like many men, Richard Fallon is not given to close friendships with other men, although he has, perhaps, more friends than most men do. He has certain teasing intimacies here and there; bantering connections involving silly names and punch lines from old jokes. These friendships, with both straight and gay men, are all lightly flirtatious, in their way.

  Richard has names for everyone. His name for Collin Schmidt, whom he has known almost since he first came to town, is Bunny. What he calls Andrew Bacci is Dog Shoes, a senseless name that made Richard smile when he first thought of it and that he likes to use privately, with Andrew. Sometimes, though rarely in public, Andrew calls Richard Dickie Bird.

  Andrew does so now, on the phone. Andrew takes his major risks during phone conversations; he has been known to leave incriminating messages on tapes.

  “Dickie Bird,” says Andrew, “you’re not doing a damn thing this weekend, you said so yourself. You might as well come to this tiny party, up on Potrero. The big love of a friend of mine is in from New York, and my friend wants to impress him with local talent. You can be the token straight.”

  And that is how Richard finds himself on Potrero Hill, in the very same bare flat in which Stella was interviewed (one more filament in the web that will bind them together). Although today the flat is somewhat less austere. For the party for Simon Daniels, his lover, Jacob has placed what look like tiny test tubes, each containing a single flower, a ranunculus, here and there. And in one corner there is a very discreet table of white wine and Perrier.

  Simon Daniels is talking about the interview for which he ostensibly came to San Francisco—this odd woman named Stella Blake. “Quite an amazing young woman,” says this New York product, this bald and spectacled Harvard-speaking (Richard imagines these to be Harvard vowels) person. “She grew up in a way that one might romanticize, all those marvelous dead poets, in the last old days in the village. And then there was her mother, the Mexican, Delia, the pal of Frida Kahlo, in fact the old man likes to suggest something going on between those two ladies, but quién sabe, and how would he know, any more than his poor biographer does?”