Almost Perfect Page 6

After a long time of this sweet kissing, touching, groping at each other (how long it was, Stella could have no clear idea), in the midst of their breathy, steaming silence, with what seems terrific abruptness, Richard announces, “This is crazy, but I have to leave for Carmel. I mean right now. They’re shooting a big spread on Point Lobos, some damn thing.…”

  Gently disengaging himself, he stands up, and Stella stands too. For more kissing. A long farewell.

  “Try to think of me,” he says, with his smile. “I’ll call you. Whenever I can.”

  Unused to drinking (in the old days with Liam she always drank diet Cokes, which for him was part of her childish charm), Stella spends the next two or three days in the throes of a fiendish hangover. Streaks of pain attack her eyes, her throat; her stomach is held in a twisting vise.

  Fortunately this is a weekend for which she did not have urgent plans, and so she can simply lie about in bed. And wait for the phone to ring.

  Richard calls several times a day, but it is mostly to tell her about the shoot. “Wouldn’t you know, the heaviest fog of the year,” he tells her. “You can’t see your own face, much less anything out in front of it. And the birds are totally refusing cooperation; they’d rather sleep.” And he says, “Oh, I can’t wait to see you! Do you miss me at all?”

  “All the time. I feel terrible.”

  He laughs, sounding pleased. “You’re in love. Those are the signs. You can’t eat, right?”

  “Yes. No.”

  Perhaps she is—in love. Is love the true meaning of this illness that she experiences? This sick derangement, this inability to eat or sleep? Surely those are the classic symptoms, as he says, if slightly schoolgirlish ones. But Stella tends to yield to the feeling. She thinks of storybook-handsome Richard, and she thinks, Oh, I love him!

  Two days later, Sunday night, having called from South Palo Alto (“Can you believe there is such a place?”), Richard arrives at her door, tired and unshaven. Incredibly beautiful.

  And again Stella feeds him some soup and bread and wine—between kisses, endearments, small laughs of astonishment.

  And at last, amid cries of love and of sheer wonder at their luck at finding each other, in being together so freely, they go off to bed. And at last they make love. All night.

  At some point in the middle of that long night Stella awakens from a dream—a dream of flowers, of lovely pale-pink plum blossoms on a dark twisted bough. She smiles to herself at the triteness, the corny metaphor, but that is what she dreamed. Of the loveliest flowers.

  8

  A New Romance

  After that first night of love, Stella and Richard begin to see each other every night, and the pattern of their evenings together rarely varies from what they so early on established:

  Richard arrives, bearing wine and sometimes bourbon, often flowers, and after an endless, languishing kiss at the door they settle in the living room for several drinks, for talking and kissing. Next they proceed to the kitchen for whatever needs to be done in terms of cooking. Richard takes an active part; he makes salads, or a mustard sauce for salmon steaks, he peels potatoes and chops up parsley.

  With dinner they drink a lot of wine, but before quite having finished either their food or their wine they rush off to bed. To love.

  In the morning Richard brings orange juice to Stella, who is still in bed. She gets up, and while he shaves and showers she does a few dishes, clearing up some of the mess from the night before. Then she makes coffee and toast, often bacon and eggs: Richard thinks all the fuss about cholesterol is silly.

  There is no time in all that for Stella to wash and dress, and besides, Richard is in the bathroom. By the time he leaves she feels somewhat frowsy, and eager for her shower, her own clean clothes and makeup. But generally she does not have to be at the paper at a specified time; she and Richard both lead more or less free-lance lives, which for the moment seems to work out well. It does not matter at what precise time they start their days, although sometimes Stella does wish that hers could begin a little earlier.

  When they talk, it is mostly about how they feel about each other, the wonder of it all—including invidious comparisons with others. And they give much mutual praise, endless praise. Richard finds odd and interesting things to praise in Stella: “Your knees are so beautiful, I love your knees. I love the way you move around in the kitchen, all your motions are so vague. I never saw anyone slice a tomato in midair before.”

  This marvelous particularity as much as anything that he says convinces Stella of love (or almost), but sometimes she thinks that she would rather have been a woman to whom he said, You’re so beautiful, I love your face (as he must have said to Claudia, and possibly to Marina). Sometimes in the mornings he will gently whisper to her, “Oh! you were so lovely last night,” with great feeling; but this refers, she feels, to how she makes love rather than to her person.

  It is not so much that he makes her feel non-beautiful (whereas with Liam she always felt very beautiful, his beautiful child) as that, with Richard, she becomes so concentrated on how she looks. In an obsessive way she thinks of her face, her body, and particularly her clothes, for suddenly nothing that she owns seems right, seems worthy. The skirts and pants, the sweaters and shirts that she normally wears all seem so dowdy and old.

  To remedy this, Stella goes downtown one afternoon just for shopping, but she can find nothing—or nothing that she can be sure Richard will like.

  Outside the store, on Sutter Street, she suddenly sees Richard’s unmistakable old convertible, with Richard driving, alone. In an instant she could have hailed him, but she does not, and so he passes on, not seeing her.

  Heavyhearted, Stella continues on to the newspaper office, in her old boots, old skirt and blazer. She is aware that if she had been wearing something smart and new she would have called out to Richard, and they could have gone out to lunch, in a festive way.

  Or is all this disapproval only in her own head? Some neurotic transference of disapproval from disapproving Prentice, her (mostly) mean father? Stella simply does not know.

  That night she says to Richard, “Oh, I saw you driving by today on Sutter Street, and I almost called out to you, but I was in such a hurry.”

  “Oh, me too, sweetie. God, what a day!”

  But this is all wrong, Stella knows it is. If she had seen Justine in her car on Sutter Street, or even Margot, any friend, she would have called out, Hi! She would have been pleased at the chance that put them together at that moment downtown. Why could she not call out to Richard?

  This concentration on the surface of herself is all wrong, she knows that it is wrong.

  For a couple of days, and into the nights, there is suddenly a heat wave; unseasonal, everyone says unseasonal, and the papers carry articles about the untoward effects of the winter heat: people fainting, swimming in the highly polluted bay. And there are pictures of sunbathers, strewn all over the city’s high green parks. Many trees, mistaking the season, put forth great bursts of generous pink blossoms.

  What to wear?

  Reaching into her closet, Stella finds a long bright-pink cotton dress from Oaxaca. She puts it on, before hurrying into the kitchen for the last touches on a special cold fish soup that she is making, with red peppers and cilantro.

  “Sweetie, you look—oh! you look so beautiful,” Richard exclaims as he enters, then he holds her off to look at. Before kissing her, again and again. “Beautiful!” he repeats, and he laughs. “Funny I never quite saw it before.”

  She asks him, “It’s the pink you like?” She is thinking, I could buy everything pink from now on.

  “I guess, although I wouldn’t have thought so. But that particular shade, it’s perfect for you.” A deep laugh. “When I’m in a position to pick out all your clothes, I’ll keep that shade in mind.”

  Does he mean that he plans to marry her, that he wants them to get married? At least half aware that she does not want to marry Richard—although much in love, she sees that marriag
e would be a mistake—Stella is still made anxious by this ambiguity. What could he mean?

  “You know, you could do a lot with this place.” Richard gestures at the somewhat dingy, mostly empty space around them: Stella’s flat, on a Saturday afternoon that Richard has devoted, househusband-like, to washing windows.

  “Really? How?” But even asking this, Stella is apprehensive: he will mean that she should spend a lot of money, buy good furniture, rugs, big plants, gold-framed mirrors. Like some of the things in his studio. And she is so broke, always doing small sums in her head for survival: pay MasterCard so much, so much to Macy’s, a lot to her dentist. Richard probably has no idea how little money she has; he would be horrified if he knew. Maybe love her less.

  But he does not say furniture. “If you opened it out,” he says, with large gestures (always in the core of his gestures there is a gentle turn of his wrists, which Stella finds infinitely moving). “All these walls,” he says. “And that tiny window. It should be open across that whole wall, so you’d see all the green out there. Then you could just throw out all your furniture. Buy a few big cushions from Cost Plus, and sit around and admire your view. But don’t throw out your bed; we need that.”

  This is all so evidently, eminently impractical that Stella laughs. “Oh great, just knock out a few walls and cut some big picture windows. Mr. Wong would really go for that.”

  Pleased with himself, Richard smiles. “Have you ever asked him? He just might. Improve his property.”

  “He scares me. I don’t even dare ask him if I could get a cat, which I used to want.”

  “Before you got me, right?” He takes her into his arms. “Do you know what I love about your face? The way your forehead curves. It’s so nice. I could sculpt it, if I could sculpt.”

  They laugh, and kiss, and decide it’s time for a nap.

  They drink a lot, but for the moment this is not worrying to Stella. It is simply so much fun. Old-fashioneds before dinner, and each night some good new California wine with the meal, and maybe more wine, or maybe bourbon highballs after dinner. Which they often take to bed and do not get around to drinking. (Horrible, though, is the smell of bourbon in the morning.)

  And there are other, more surprising times of drinking, invented by Richard: Bloody Marys at breakfast (not exactly original, but something Stella has never done before). Or bullshots. A bottle of champagne in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, for no reason at all. Margaritas for lunch, beer for breakfast. Gin and tonic in a dark cool bar on a hot afternoon. Not all of this every day, of course not, but almost every day, in one way or another, they do a lot of drinking. And for the moment it seems very festive, a way of heightening their pleasure in each other. Even of intensifying their love.

  We don’t go out very much, Stella sometimes thinks. No concerts or plays or even neighborhood movies. At most, on a weekend, they may go for a drive to look at the ocean; on rare occasions they go to restaurants. But dinners out are less successful, generally, than eating at home; they both feel this. They are happier cooking together, eating and hurrying off to bed.

  This is their pattern—their shtick, as Richard sometimes calls it—and they are both somewhat afraid to break it.

  9

  Friends of Friends

  “Your friends won’t necessarily love me as much as you do,” Richard tells Stella, one Saturday at breakfast. They are eating late, and eating too much: bullshots, and then bagels and lox and scrambled eggs and too much coffee. Stella has just come back from the telephone with an invitation to a cocktail party at Justine’s. A week from Sunday.

  “I should hope not.” Stella laughs, but inwardly she acknowledges that he is right. What she herself loves in Richard—and even now she would have a hard time defining it, finding any words for what seems pure feeling—what she is in love with in Richard, might not appeal or even be apparent to her friends. He is not their type would be one way to put it. He is extremely bright; in his own way he may well be a genius (Stella thinks he is), but his brilliance is not the sort that her friends are used to. And he is much too handsome, and he dresses too well, is too conscious of his clothes. “Superficial” would be the easiest word for a dismissal of Richard. (Can a person be deeply superficial? Disloyally, Stella has wondered.)

  And then there is the question of Richard’s own friends, about whom Stella has no fixed notion. From what she can make out, he seems to know people from two distinct groups: workmen compose the first. He is especially close to a cabinetmaker named Tony Russo, whom Richard inexplicably calls Cats. Tony has a new girlfriend, named Valerie; apparently Richard and Tony discuss their love affairs with each other—unusual for men, in Stella’s experience.

  “But why do you call him Cats?”

  Richard laughs. “He looks like a cat. A small brown cat.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t you like cats? You could get one.”

  “I meant to get a dog or a cat, I’ve told you. Actually I don’t know too much about cats.”

  “You’ll have to meet my Cats.”

  Richard’s other group of friends could be described as “social.” Rich and stylish types, addicted to parties, openings, boats and skiing. People, Stella gathers, whom he knew through Claudia and now does not see very much. But there is something in his voice when Richard mentions these people, their houses and parties and trips, that Stella finds disturbing. Ostensibly he puts them down, he makes jokes about how dumb and silly they are, but still Stella feels that on some level he misses his life in that group, and for all she knows he misses Claudia. She wonders too just how accepting all those people, including Claudia, really were of her handsome Richard: did they possibly find him beautiful but not quite right, in their own terms? The clothes a little too much, the accent slightly off?

  And just why is Stella herself having such thoughts as these, projecting snobberies worthy of her father at his worst? (Prentice, in what have literally been his declining years, has begun to sound much as his Edwardian mother must have sounded: full of complaints and comments about accents and clothes—observations that in better and stronger times he would have considered beneath his notice.) Why does Stella at this point sound like her father? Is she herself, underneath it all, as much of a snob as he?

  “This is our enchanted cottage,” Richard tells her. “We’re probably wise not to let anyone else come in.”

  But that can’t last very long, has been one of Stella’s reactions. And is that what he really has in mind—something very intense (God knows they are intense) and brief?

  The very next day Richard calls Stella at the paper to ask her, “How would you feel about meeting Cats and Valerie for dinner? He’s found some place out in the Mission with fabulous food and great music. Want to give it a try?”

  Fighting anxiety—an unaccountable wave of panic has hit her at the mention of this innocent plan—Stella says, “Sure! Great.”

  Tony Russo, Richard’s Cats, is indeed a small brown man, with brown hair and weathered brown skin, brown beard, and long serious brown eyes. Stella does not see the cat resemblance, but then, as she has told Richard, she does not know much about cats. Cats’s new girlfriend, Valerie, is a very large blonde, with big teeth and prominent breasts, huge blue eyes that are blackly lined and lashed. She wears a tight white sweater, a short black skirt that shows long legs in black net stockings. They have just met, just fallen in love, she and Tony—Cats—and they are all over each other, hands clutching and groping, unchaste kisses exchanged. As the two couples face each other in a green plastic booth. In the Jump Room, in the Outer Mission.

  They are drinking margaritas. This is a Mexican place; at one end of the room, an enthusiastic mariachi group, in taut black pants, flowing ties and large black hats, is singing an endless ballad of love and betrayal and blood. From the ceiling, Christmas decorations are still suspended, tinfoil angels and stars, dusty green plastic wreaths.

  “You feel right at home here?” Richard whispered this to Stell
a as they first came in and sat down. His smile was teasing.

  “Well, not exactly.” But she smiled too, as though she really liked it anyway.

  In any case, she does not feel at home with Tony and Valerie. She tells herself that they are very good, nice, kind and generally well-intentioned people (probably), especially Tony; she can see how Richard would like him and feel at home with him. But they express themselves in ways that she is unused to, that she cannot fall in with.

  “You’re Mexican?” Tony asks her, early on, having clearly been primed by Richard (but she wonders: Exactly what did Richard say, explaining her to Tony?).

  “Uh, yes. My mother’s Mexican.”

  “I love Mexicans.” Tony beams.

  “Me too.” Saying this, Valerie looks at Tony. “They’re so—so real.”

  But my mother wasn’t real at all, Stella does not say. My mother, Delia, had dyed-blond hair and did not even look very Mexican, not in one of the thousands of ways of looking “Mexican.” My mother was ashamed of her own mother, Serena, the vendor of flowers; when we visited Serena in Oaxaca, my mother pretended to be a tourist. And going to Dalton and Hunter College did not exactly fill me with national pride. But none of this seems possible to explain, certainly not now, in this group.

  “These drinks are just so good,” says Valerie, beaming, to Tony. “I just don’t care if they make me drunk. Or fat.”

  “Baby, I love every ounce you’ve got.” Tony beams back.

  “These are good margaritas,” Stella tells Richard. A lie: the drinks are much too sweet.

  “You don’t think they’re a little too sweet?” he counters, frowning.

  “Well, I guess.”

  Across the table Tony and Valerie are kissing—again. Do they love each other more than we do? Stella wonders. Accept each other more? She feels very stiff and uncomfortable. Lost. Unconnected to Richard, as though whatever bond had drawn and bound them together had dissolved in this smoky, noisy air. Or perhaps had never existed; perhaps it was false and all wrong from the start.