Almost Perfect

by Alice Adams

  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.

  7

  Beginning

  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 hand
s 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?

  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 of
ten—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.