Almost Perfect (19 page)

And then she thinks, This is seriously deranged. Some midlife flash of craziness, such thoughts of this younger and probably uninteresting man. That small fling with Cats was quite bad enough.

This is what happened with Cats: After the celebration party, Justine went out with Cats exactly twice—a neat though unknown parallel to Margot’s record with Al Bolling. She liked Cats, she
thought; he was cute, sort of sexy. But then, the morning after their second date, on which they had kissed good night with some promising passion, Cats called to say, Guess what? Valerie’s back, and I guess I have to let her stick around. I guess you do, Justine agreed, and she remained unmoved when he called three days later to say that Valerie was gone again, so couldn’t they? wouldn’t Justine? She said no; no, he was very nice, but she really didn’t think so.

“But I’m a lot more worried about my old pal Richard than I am about my boy,” says Collin, with a worried smile.

The remark seems sudden, or perhaps her own quite foolish self-absorption has made it so, Justine inwardly muses, even as she directs her attention to the question of Richard. “Why so?”

Collin’s frown deepens. “I’m not sure. Just small things, here and there. He reminds me of a tightrope walker. Very good at his act, but it’s risky.”

This is so precisely Justine’s own sense of Richard that she smiles, liking Collin very much for his perception. She asks, “But hasn’t he always been like that?”

“Not so much. I don’t know. He used to be a little closer to the ground. Just a regular sort of guy. Really good with his hands, with tools and stuff. A good workman.” And then he says, “I wonder how Stella feels.”

Justine laughs a little. “We know how she feels. In love. But how she sees him, I really don’t know. I wonder if she does. I have no idea how clearly she thinks of him.”

“She must be kind of worried.”

“I don’t know,” repeats Justine. And then she says, “Would you mind a lot if I unbuttoned the top button of that shirt?”

He laughs. “Not at all. Unbutton away. I’m game.” He leans toward her, very close.

They begin to kiss.

Which one of them was crazy? That crude question, sometimes voiced, seemed central to all the conflict between Stella and Richard. “You’re crazy!” one or the other of them would desperately, furiously, drunkenly yell at the other. It was as though craziness were a heavy black rubber ball (so Stella imagined it) tossed back and forth between them; thus if one of them had it, the other did not.

Richard thought Stella was crazy; he did not in a deep way think about himself. Certain of her opinions seemed crazy: if Stella seriously said, “Now that the Cold War’s over, why can’t all of everyone’s weapons just be junked, so we can get on with some big new social program?” Richard would silently look at her in a particular way, an expression compounded of hopelessness and contempt, which meant, You’re the one, you’re crazy.

In a somewhat more complicated and illogical way, Stella thought that if she was crazy, as Richard said she was (and a long look at her history and her parentage might well support this view)—if she was crazy, then Richard was not.

Certainly at the start of their connection, on the face of it Richard had not looked especially mad. A handsome and healthy person, good both at his work and at various practical tasks that often defeated Stella (he could even fix his old car), he looked perfectly okay. Whereas she, in her offbeat clothes, with her makeshift job and her failing finances, looked at best eccentric, a person not quite making it. And she was prey to certain secret fears and anxieties; true states of panic could attack her in a drugstore, or at the approach of a friend. She had trouble making phone calls.

However, more recently Stella has felt less sure of who is crazy. Now that she is doing well in her work, even earning money, she feels less offbeat, less incompetent. Less fearful, more okay.

So does that mean that Richard is crazy? And if he is, Stella more or less for the first time thinks, I am crazy to stay with him.

But for much, perhaps most of the time, Stella and Richard do not seem crazy to each other. They do not talk about craziness. They begin to take small trips together, and Stella even finds that she can work, travelling with Richard. While he is off sketching, she writes.

“I know this is sudden, but how about Squaw Valley this weekend?” is how Richard broaches one of those first trips, one January Wednesday. Hitherto he has mostly gone sketching alone, to places fairly near at hand, to Carmel or to Napa, the Alexander Valley, Mendocino. They have talked of Stella’s going along, but so far that has not worked out; she has deadlines, commitments. (She has almost, but not quite, welcomed his absence. Almost admitted to herself the relief that she felt.)

Which is another reason for agreeing to this trip, although it is late and she does have a lot to do.

Off to a late start on Friday night, they nevertheless drive up in high spirits, anticipating snow, a new landscape. Richard has managed to rent a condo for the weekend. Right on the slopes, he says.

In a roadhouse near Auburn they eat a large steak dinner, something they do not ordinarily have, but it seems appropriate to skiing, snow. They drink wine in a slow, controlled way; Richard is a little worried about driving in the snow, he says. “I’d better take it easy on the sauce.” In moderation, the wine tastes so good, Stella thinks: why couldn’t they drink like this all the time?

Richard, in his heavy dark sweater, fair hair gleaming, looks Nordic, a Viking hero, with pale sea-blue eyes. Animated and excited, but not at all drunk, he is very beautiful. Stella’s whole heart yearns toward him. It is all she can do not to say, I love you, I love you more than I can bear. I will always love you.

About half an hour later, as they begin to wind up into the mountains, in the dark, it starts to snow. Traffic slows and thickens. Massed cars and trucks are ahead of them, and off to the side of the road are more stopped cars, and men in yellow slickers, flashing strong lights. A sign above the highway then spells out
CHAIN CONTROL
.

“I outsmarted those greedy bastards, I brought along chains. Rented them in town, and I know how to put them on,” Richard mutters, getting out of the car with the package of chains.

The men in slickers can be hired to put on your chains, Stella observes, watching adjacent cars. She wonders how much they charge, and reasons that it could not be enormous: ten dollars? fifteen? So why didn’t Richard …? But then she understands that this has nothing to do with money; this is Richard the competent protector, braving snow and cold and oncoming traffic to do it himself. Which is foolhardy, maybe, but surely not crazy. Or only crazy in the sense that all men are crazy in their need to be brave. To take risks.

Later, as they roll along on their tightly chained tires across a broad meadow of snow, driving directly into the snow, it looks as though all the flakes were magnetized into their headlights, all whirling toward them, all the billions of flakes, all the white. As though there were nothing in the world but snow, and sudden light.

The condo is an A-frame, with a huge bed snuggled under low eaves, and floor-to-ceiling windows that face the white descent of snow, the slopes.

“Romantic, no?” Richard is ironic, but he is smiling.

“But, darling, it is romantic.”

Making love to her later that night, Richard murmurs, “Oh, I love all your long tall body.”

But I’m quite small, Stella does not say. Who are you with? she does not ask.

“Oh, I love you!” Richard murmurs, kissing her neck.

“I love you too.”

Another trip.

In early February they go down to Santa Barbara, where it is suddenly as warm as summer. They walk barefoot along the beach, trying not to step on the black oil patches that have appeared here and there; they look out to sea to the oil rigs—so weird, extraterrestrial. And back along the shore to discreetly beautiful houses of the very rich, with lovely old overgrown gardens and glassed-in sunrooms.

“They have a sort of New England look, don’t you think?” says Stella, of those houses.

“If you say so.”

“How about sketching the oil rigs?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“As a matter of fact, I was.”

“Oh. Good.”

In this mood Richard is quite unreachable. Stella watches as he picks up a small stone and hurls it angrily against the sand. Mad that it isn’t pretty enough to keep? Stella crazily thinks this, just then.

But she is unable not to try to reach him, still. “These houses remind me a little of my grandparents’ house,” she tells him. “Prentice’s parents.”

“Oh. The rich Communists. Right.”

“Well, actually they weren’t. Sort of liberal Republicans, actually. And not all that rich.”

“Listen, by Jersey standards they were fucking rich. And Communists.”

“
Okay
.”

Disliking him very much just then, Stella tries instead to think of those pretty houses. She supposes the lives lived within them to be unimaginably peaceful, sunny and light; she knows this to be total nonsense: surely those houses enclose their full share of quarrels and pain, loneliness and death. But from her present vantage point, walking along so silently with angry Richard, almost any house looks like a refuge. As indeed her grandparents’ house was for her a refuge from noisily angry parents and all their furious drunken friends.

But actually, Stella reminds herself, most of her own life at this moment is not, viewed objectively, so bad. She is selling one long piece to
The Gotham
every month (she is now under contract to them, with a guaranteed escalating word rate and other nice features), and she just sold a small piece about a young Cambodian woman, a painter of Victorian houses, to
The Atlantic
(
The Gotham
said very nice but not for them). She is working hard, she is doing very well (she tells herself this, but it is true).

Having more or less forgotten Richard’s mood in the course of these happier thoughts, Stella now asks him, “How are things going with Bolling, generally, would you say?”

Richard, who has been walking somewhat ahead, now turns and comes to a full stop, there in the now cooling coarse gray sand. “Well, as you know, he dinged the ski scene. Too much snow and too few skiers, he said. And he may be in the process of dinging Mendocino. And he’s making a serious effort to drink himself to death. Anything else you want to know about Bolling?”

“Uh, I guess not.”

“Needless to say, I’m not head-over-heels enthusiastic about
starting the next new phase. Santa Barbara oil rigs, maybe. ‘Great for a Sierra Club poster, old man.’ Christ, I can hear that phony Yale voice. That man can’t open his mouth without putting someone down, somewhere. Christ, no wonder his daughter hates men.”

“I just don’t think—” Stella begins.

“Christ, spare me your depth psychology on lesbians. Dykes. It’s a wonder we’re all not queer, is what I think. Christ, we all had parents.”

Despite herself, Stella laughs. “Well, you’re right there,” she tells him.

Fortunately the laughter, or something in the cool salt air, works to defuse Richard, as it were, although all he says is, “I’m tired of California, you know that? Really fucking tired of this whole state.”

“Oh, so’m I,” agrees Stella; with all her new money, she has had a lot of Europe fantasies lately. Or Mexico. Canada? She asks, “Have you ever been to Canada?”

“Christ no. You know I’ve never been anywhere. This is not Liam O’Gara you’re dealing with these days.”

“We could go to Venice,” Stella attempts.

He scowls. “I’m not all that sure I want to go to Venice. How about Germany? Castles on the Rhine, all that?”

“I’d really rather go to Italy,” Stella tells him.

“Okay, okay, we’ll go to Italy. If I ever finish this fucking job.” But he smiles and takes her hand, as they walk along the beach.

On a long weekend in March, as a semi-vacation they go up to Richard’s house, and at last, Justine and Collin-Bunny come along as guests. Stella has gathered from indirect remarks of Justine’s that they have been “seeing” each other again, after what has seemed a hiatus. Justine would never in a direct way have described the intimate nature of their connection, any more than Stella would have.

And on Saturday night at dinner, Justine makes a startling announcement.

They arrived in the late afternoon, and Stella noted that Justine seemed keyed up, wired, laughing a lot and reckless in her gestures. “Oh, it’s so beautiful,” she almost instantly cried out. “Can’t we all go for a walk right now?”

“But dinner …” Stella was making a somewhat complicated seafood stew, time-consuming in that mussels and shrimp must be cleaned and shelled, tomatoes peeled. Richard had offered to help, but she had quite deliberately chosen to do it herself, and so she had to. “Why don’t you all go?” she suggested.

In the end it was Collin and Justine who walked, Richard having some urgent project in the basement.

Working there in the kitchen, alone with the spectacular view of the sea, steep wet rocks and cliffs of wet green ferns, and a molten, golden sky, thick and heavy with sunlight, Stella still thinks of her friend, of Justine, and she wonders, Is it possible that Collin and Justine have worked something out, like getting married? At the same time a reliable inner voice says, No, that’s not it. On the other hand, what else? In any case, she thinks, as she scrubs at the mussel shells, Justine looks great, with her lovely gray-white hair. In her faded blue-violet sweater and narrow old faded jeans.

“Do we change for dinner?” Laughing, flushed from the warm outdoors, Justine asks this on her return.

“Oh no, you look super.”

“Besides, it’s time to drink,” Richard cuts in, just then taking over as host.

“You know, old man, this house is looking better all the time,” Collin obligingly supplies.

“Well, it’s not so bad. A nice house.” But Richard smiles with deep pleasure, with love for this house.

“Dinner in a minute,” Stella tells them, after drinks.