Almost Perfect (6 page)

Collin even has nice children, of whom he is modestly proud. Two daughters, married now and living somewhere around, and a son, whom Collin describes as “a little too handsome for his own good.” The son is a doctor.

Could she, at her age, possibly become a stepmother? Justine almost blushes with discomfort at the thought.

But when she really thinks of Collin, what most frequently comes to mind is not his children or all that sunny Mill Valley peace: what Justine thinks of, often, is Collin in bed. The sexual Collin. And he is, in that regard, quite a piece of work, as Justine puts it to herself, with a small pleased private smile—as she could not say, possibly, to anyone else (not even to Stella, who would certainly be very interested; they just don’t talk like that). For Collin, sexually, is something else. Indefatigable, enthusiastic, sensitive, generous and kind—he is truly an amazing lover. Justine does not see how she could ever give him up, and she hopes (sometimes) that this does not mean that she has to marry him.

“Bunny.” Collin, beside her in the sun, chuckles. “Can you beat that?”

She leans over to kiss his mouth. “No,” says Justine. “I can’t.”

“You could sit here. Pretend you’re a client,” Richard suggests, indicating the small bentwood chair across from his desk, and he smiles at her, radiantly, his private radiance fuelling the magnificence of his room, by which Stella is already both bedazzled and confused. She feels herself diminished, and somehow darkened, dimmed, so large is the scale, so brilliant and beautiful the composition of gilt and oil and wood, of mirror glass, of prisms and polished brass globes. But mostly it is the radiance of Richard himself that dazzles Stella, her sense of his warmth, his energy: he is like a sun.

They have hit on this somewhat odd hour for an interview, nine-thirty at night, as the only one possible for them both for days. Stella on this evening was suddenly sent to cover a convention of social workers at a hotel in Berkeley, a dinner meeting.

And so, having taken BART back from Berkeley, here she is, in this room, almost unable to sit down as she is bidden.

Curiously, as soon as she does sit down she is visited by a very strong longing for a drink, odd, since she barely drinks anything alcoholic. But just now she would give anything for a glass of wine, anything. Apparently, though, she cannot say this to Richard Fallon.

Who almost immediately (telepathically?) says, “What can I offer you to drink? I’ve got—I’ve got some champagne on ice, or do you really sophisticated types all dislike champagne?”

“I love champagne,” Stella lies. “I’m not all that sophisticated. I don’t think I am at all.…”

“You sure have it all over me,” he tells her. “With your background. I’ve been really nervous.…” The sentence trails off, as he walks into some other area, all darkened.

Minutes later, minutes during which Stella has tried and failed to get used to her surroundings, even in the most casual sense, Richard returns with a champagne bottle and two frosted tulip glasses on a small enamelled tray, which he places on his desk.

More defiantly than she meant to, Stella asks him, “What do you mean, my background?” And then, checking herself, she reminds him, “I’m supposed to be interviewing you, remember?” And she laughs, suddenly fortified by the first small sip of wine—and remembering that somewhere along the line she forgot to eat dinner.

Richard sits down behind his desk, as light from the candelabra feathers his hair. He laughs, very friendly. “I won’t be mysterious. This is such a small town. I went to a party with a friend, or not exactly a friend—a guy I know.”

Stella wonders, Why all this elaboration about who he went with?

“And there was this man who’d just met and interviewed you, about your old man, I guess. Prentice Blake?”

“Yes. A man called Simon Daniels interviewed me. Sort of.”

“Daniels. Right. Nice guy. Thank God I’m not all hung up about gays. I readily admit I could have gone that way myself, under certain circumstances. Say out at sea or something. Anyway I liked Daniels. I like a lot of those guys.”

“Sure. Me too.” But Stella does not quite know what to make of his tone, or of the peculiar excited energy he seems to emit, with his restless gestures, his glancing, lively eyes, as he leans toward her.

“Anyway,” Richard tells her excitedly, “Daniels was really impressed with you. On and on about all the people your folks know, that you grew up with, I guess. Jesus, I can’t even remember the names. Not that I recognized most of them. Frida Kahlo?”

A little defensively, Stella explains, “For me it wasn’t like growing up with famous people. I thought they were just a bunch of old drunks who hung out with my father. Has-beens. All of them fairly seedy, no money or clothes. To me it just seemed disorderly, and sort of scary.” Stella thinks, I must be getting drunk; I never talk so much. And she goes on talking. “There were all these wives all the time, their new wives, and a lot of shouting at the parties. I was scared. I liked it better in Mexico, where I lived with my grandmother, Serena. Sometimes. In Oaxaca. She sold flowers in the market there, and her house was very small and tidy and quiet.”

A long pause envelops them both, and then Richard says, very quietly, “You probably don’t tell a lot of people about Serena.”

“Oh, well, not too many, I guess.” Actually Stella rather likes talking about Serena, and she has tried to write about her, the problem being to describe Serena as she was, gnarled dirty feet and smelly aprons and all, without sentimentalizing. But she cannot just now (if ever) explain all that to Richard; she does not want to contradict what seems curiously important to him, or to break the very strange mood between them that now seems to fill this room, like music or the scent of flowers. She smiles, and speaks very gently. “But we’re supposed to be talking about you.” She pauses. “How about your parents? Do they still live back East?”

Richard stares at her, his face bare and haunted, and then, startlingly, terribly, his face contracts, contorts, his features for one instant twisted, before he covers it with his hands.

Stella feels panic: is he going to cry? Her experience with the
weeping of men has been horrifying: it is so violent, and they hate it so. She saw her father cry drunkenly, a couple of times, usually wild ugly tears of rage. And Liam O’Gara once, when his youngest son had drowned in a flood, in Spain.

But when Richard uncovers his face it is pale, dry of tears and empty; Stella has never seen such a frightening blank. “My father killed my mother,” he tells her, flat-voiced. “He was drunk and he shot her. I was out with a friend and came home to find all these cops and no parents. Nobody much cared, a drunk Irish bartender and his housekeeper wife. It barely made the papers, and he got put away for thirty years. He’s out now, for all I know. But that’s why I left town.” He stares at Stella—who notes that a little color and some expression have come back into his face. An expression that she is unable to read, however.

“I’ve never told anyone that before,” Richard tells her. “I wonder why you?”

“I don’t know.” Stella has found this hard to believe, his choosing her to tell; nevertheless she has trouble with her voice, and her breath.

He says, “There must be something that relates us.”

“I … guess.”

“Maybe we’ll find out what it is.”

For Stella this is both melodramatic and vague. It feels false. B-film, as Liam would have put it. But very likely she is being hard, she thinks; she knows that she tends to be judgmental. This man is in some pain, and he has confided in her, for whatever reasons.

But all this precludes the possibility of an interview, she vaguely feels.

Still staring at her, Richard speaks very slowly. “I think I’ll take you home now, if that’s okay.”

Does he mean take her home and then to bed, to make love? Stella has not the slightest idea of his intention, and Richard gives no clue. She is not at all sure that she wants that, such a sudden collision with a man she does not know, not at all. And does not quite entirely trust: something is wrong; how could she trust him? (And besides, this isn’t the Sixties; you’re not supposed to do that anymore, just fall into bed with someone new.) But the
very idea, the bare small possibility that they might later on make love, is enough to take her breath, as together they stand up and walk out of his studio, and onto the street, to his car.

And all across the city, North Beach to Van Ness Avenue, out Sacramento Street, Clay, and then Lake, to the Richmond, where Stella lives—all that way, Stella wonders what they are up to, just what they are doing together, in this cool fog-ridden night. At the same time her mind crowds with more familiar anxieties: just how clean is her house, should he mean to come in? And more basically, she wonders about her own person: she showered this morning, but is she still all perfectly, fragrantly clean?

These anxieties cloud the more real question of what it is that she really wants to do, assuming that she has some choice. What does she really want of Richard?

His car is an old convertible. Insensitive to cars, a non-driver, Stella has no idea of make or year. But the broad deep seats and cracked leather remind her of her adolescence somewhere. Drives out to Long Island, when she was a New York kid.

“It’s a funny old car,” remarks Richard, at the exact moment of these thoughts in Stella’s mind. A coincidence, undoubtedly, but one that Stella notes: it is when she begins to think that he can read her mind.

“You probably haven’t seen a car like this since you were a kid,” says Richard.

“That’s right; I was thinking that. Though I really don’t know much about cars,” she tells him.

And a little later, “This is where I live,” says Stella.

He stops, and parks, and very chivalrously he comes around to her side of the car and hands her out.

He walks along with her to the half-lit entranceway, where, with a long and deliberate unfolding of himself, he bends down to take her in his arms, to meet her mouth in a kiss of surpassing sweetness. And of, for Stella, the most instant and violent excitement.

Then, very gently disengaging himself, Richard speaks what is obviously meant as a parting note. “You’re lovely. I’ll call you. Or you call me if you want to.”

He turns and goes back to his car, as Stella, fumbling as usual with her key, almost expects to hear his returning steps behind her: he will change his mind?

But what she next hears is the starting up of his car, as she turns to watch him swing out into the street.

And he is gone.

Fortunately for Stella, in the days and weeks following her “interview” or whatever that was with Richard Fallon, she is busy. The social worker piece led, somewhat circuitously, to another, an interview with a young Mexican-American priest who works with pregnant girls, boys with AIDS—all high school kids, out in the Mission District. A priest who has come into considerable conflict with the Church’s higher powers. Reflecting that she has not met a very young priest for a very long time, Stella finds herself very moved by this boy, who cannot be much over twenty, and all that he faces: illness, opprobrium, very possibly excommunication. She guesses that he is gay, which could give him another set of consequences to face.

And she goes down to Stanford to interview two experts on Central America: one from the Hoover Institute, a willowy Yalie
type, with a confusing accent compounded of Yale and New Jersey, who speaks clearly and succinctly of the need for a U.S.-backed police force; the other a Salvadoran poet, small and lithe, rather beautiful, who raises his hands very gracefully in sheer despair at the poverty and corruption and sheer ignorance among his people. “I am Mexican,” Stella tells him (they have been speaking in Spanish). “My feelings for my own people are as yours are. I see little hope on either of our horizons.”

She goes home with a heavy sack of discouraging tapes—and in her dreams that night she compounds all those men, the young priest and the two academics, and herself, the supposedly objective reporter. In the dream she is actually a sort of spy, and she does not know for whom.

Though busy, she thinks of Richard Fallon often, and with a curious discomfort. She feels that he has claimed her somehow—as though he still held her tightly by one wrist. As though by telling her his melodramatic black secret (and was it even true? did his father really kill his mother, as he said?) and then by kissing her, as he did, he had set her aside, in some way, so that now she is forced to wait around, to see what he does next. And she thinks, He can’t have been serious when he said that I should call him; why would I? But she looks up his number in the phone book and then is unable to forget it.

She explains to Justine as best she can that she will probably not do the interview with Richard Fallon. “I think he really deserves Malcolm.” Malcolm is the paper’s aged art critic, brilliant, acerbic and alcoholic, and probably dying of emphysema. “He’s not just an advertising type,” Stella tells Justine, of Richard. “His studio is really something; it’s amazing. I’m not up to it. And besides, it got sort of out of hand. I don’t mean he came on to me, it wasn’t like that. I mean I think he’s a little out of control. Around women. Or maybe it’s just me. I don’t know.”

At all of which Justine smiles wisely and comes to her own conclusions. Which she does not communicate to Stella.

*  *  *

Stella was waiting to be kissed again. At times it all came to that, she thought. The sweet pressure of their mouths together, their bodies, for that long instant. Standing at her door, in the porch light. It was the kiss that she thought of, remembered, was somehow imprinted with. It was as though that kiss had begun some process within her that had to be continued, perhaps concluded. And Stella was not sure that actual sex would be the logical ending. It could be simply more kissing, she thought.

And she also thought, He really is so vain. That studio of his is a sort of temple to himself. On the other hand, it is very beautiful—as he is. Richard Fallon is an exceptionally handsome man, and if he is somewhat vain about his looks, so what?