Almost Perfect (7 page)

Thinking such thoughts, Stella walks through the brilliant false-green, false-spring woods in the Presidio, near her house. In November, after one more month of drought. She is struck by the blackness of the trees, and the bright clear blue of the afternoon, and she thinks, I would like to be in love with someone again.

That is the night that he calls her. The phone rings just as she gets in from her walk, as though he knew just when that would be.

“It’s me—Richard,” he says, as though he knew that she would be more or less waiting for his call. “I know it’s late, but I’ve been away, and I really want to see you before I have to go away again. Tonight. Could we possibly have dinner?”

Stella’s plan for that night was soup and a bath and early to bed with some magazines. She has already made the soup, Serena’s recipe, a meatball soup, and so, without much thought, she says to Richard, “I’ve made a sort of Mexican soup. It’s good if you like cilantro. And some salad. Would that be enough?”

“Sounds great. I love cilantro. You really cook?” He laughs. “Actually I do too. But my wives never cooked.”

I’m not your wife, and I have no plans along those lines, Stella thinks of pointing out. She is suddenly tired of him and wishes that she had not asked him to dinner. A drink would have been sufficient. But she only says, “I sometimes cook.”

“Great,” he repeats. “I’ll bring some wine, okay? Anything else?”

Again, without calculation, Stella tells him what is true. “I need some scallions for the salad. If you could.”

“Of course, nothing easier than scallions. Or lighter, for that matter.” Again the laugh—deep, almost theatrical.

And so he arrives, with a small domestic-looking paper bag, scallion tops just prettily showing (arranged to show?), two bottles of wine in another bag. A small sheaf of purple irises.

He comes in and puts the things down without kissing her, Stella notes. He only smiles. They could have been married for years.

He looks very odd in her surroundings, Stella thinks, over their pre-dinner glasses of wine. So fair, so composed, in his perfect just-shabby old tweed jacket and trim gray flannels, he seems another order of physical presence, as though the molecules and atoms that make up his being have no connection with anything else in the room. (With her.)

But their conversation at dinner seems ordinary enough. Divorced-man talk, of the sort that Stella has heard before, with variants. Several times.

“I was totally knocked out,” he says, speaking of the time when his first wife, Marina, asked him for a divorce. “You know, the old saw: I thought it couldn’t happen to me. I thought Marina and I were forever, no matter what. I thought I could talk her out of it, and so I suggested a weekend in La Jolla, where we used to go on vacations sometimes, and she said that was just like me, appealing to her weakness. Sex.”

Saying that last word, “sex,” Richard’s eyes flick up at Stella: is he asking how she feels about it? She gives him the tiniest frown, thinking all this a little obvious, and very bluntly she asks him, “Did Marina know about Claudia?”

His frown is deeper than hers. “You really get right at it, don’t you. Well, she sort of knew. Strongly suspected. Jesus, she wasn’t blind. But she could have been wrong, you know what I mean? And that wouldn’t have made any difference to her. She’s a really punitive woman. Eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth.”

Stella does see what he means, but she finds his logic a little skewed.

He gets up and brings in another bottle of wine. Admiring his walk, and his deft hands and the grace of his wrists, Stella also thinks, This is too much wine, but it tastes marvelous, such fun to have so much. She tells him, “This is really good wine.”

“I don’t know the first thing about wine. You probably do. Claudia did. Jesus, she was a walking wine encyclopedia.”

“I’m not; I don’t know much about it either.” And Stella notes the old male trick, often observed before: the setting up of women against each other. Inciting them to compete. She will not do that, she vows, no matter how many ex-wives he trots out.

She notes too that his eyes are perhaps one centimeter too close together; they are large and beautiful and blue-gray, with an odd shading of yellow. Beautiful eyes but, yes, too close.

“I don’t know much about anything is the truth of it,” he tells her. “I may be the most ignorant person you ever met, bookwise.”

“I haven’t read all that much myself.” But actually she has; Stella has read a great deal, by most standards. Why with Richard does she feel that she has to apologize for all that reading?

“You must let me cook for you next time,” he then says. “I’m not too bad at cooking. Jesus, I had to be good. Marina couldn’t cook worth a damn; she’s basically not interested in food—anorexic, I suspected. And Claudia, she thought it was something maids did. Her kids loved my cooking. That’s something I still miss, cooking for Claudia’s boys. I even made their box lunches.”

“My father could cook,” Stella tells him, and then wishes she had not. She adds, “Just a few things.”

“Do you go back to New York to see him very much?”

“Not much, but I should go soon. He’s pretty sick, and he’s really old. In his eighties now.”

“I never go back there. I despise New York.” Richard’s violence comes as a shock; it is even a little scary. Stella represses an impulse to calm him by saying that she too hates New York, which would have been a lie. She loves the city; she would like to go there more often—if she had more money. And if she did
not have to see Prentice and her stepmother, mean Alexandra, on each visit. Her mother, Delia, died while Stella was in college.

“I think you look a little younger than you are,” Richard tells her quite suddenly, staring at her. “You have a sort of child’s face; just at this moment you look like a child, you could be a little girl. All flat surfaces, like children have. Not quite beautiful but interesting, very.”

Feeling herself flush, Stella gets up. “I’ll bring in the salad,” she tells him.

Throughout all that more or less inconsequential conversation, the air between them has been heavily charged: with sexuality, of course, but also with some other quality. They are like two people walking through a thick fog, close together, feeling their way. Unable to separate but at the same time aware of the accident that has placed them together, and they wonder, Why us? why us together?

This charge between them, this tension, becomes more marked as they leave the dinner table and go into the living room, with the after-dinner bourbons that are Richard’s idea.

They stop talking, there on the dark lumpy sofa, and they look at each other, still wondering. To break that look, to break something, Richard smiles, a small shy smile, and he gets up to fix more bourbon.

Returning, handing her the drink, he then asks, “Shall we fall madly in love, do you think? Have a really tremendous affair?”

This makes no sense, has no context, but it is so much what Stella has wanted to hear—no man for a long time in her life has mentioned love—that she forgets that for stretches of this evening she has not liked Richard very much. Her heart dances out to him as she dizzily smiles, as she moves toward his kiss.

He is clumsier, more boyish than Stella would have imagined, pulling at her blouse, holding her too hard, but he is still very arousing, especially his mouth, which never leaves her mouth. An endless kiss.

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.

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.