Almost Perfect

by Alice Adams

  She has sometimes wondered: Is that what he heard as a boy? Did his father use to enter the house in that way, at night? Calling out, Anybody home? (Did he do that on the night he killed his wife, Richard’s mother?)

  * * *

  During the first few days of Stella’s convalescence, Richard usually arrives with great sacks of groceries—food that they somehow, together, turn into a dinner, or two or three dinners, with wine and booze. And flowers; he almost always brings flowers.

  And Stella gets much better very quickly; even her doctor agrees that her progress is remarkable. So that soon she is able to do at least some of the shopping; she plans meals and cooks for Richard, with love and high ambitions and considerable nervousness; Richard sets a high standard with his own cooking and prides himself on his palate. Thus the “Anybody home” may find Stella with her hands all floured or smelling violently of garlic. Then she rushes to kiss him with upraised hands and arms, laughing, and he seizes her the more violently, laughing at her, at her semi-fake distress.

  Cooking goes well with the work that she is trying to do, Stella finds. The writing. Going back and forth, from her typewriter to the chopping board, the stove, the sink, she feels vastly fulfilled. She believes that she did indeed have some sort of breakdown (which she now attributes mostly to the death of Prentice and to pneumonia, her “resistant strain”) and that she recovered to greater strength. She has, for perhaps the first time in her life, a sense of working to capacity—or of all or almost all of her capacities in use at once. Her capacities for work and for love, in ways that are new.

  Interruptions from the demands of cooking are not as jarring, as disturbing as other interruptions are, Stella finds. Some culinary need is nowhere near as bad or as importunate as a phone call, nor as some salesman at her door. To remember suddenly that a chicken should be basted, a soup stirred, some bread pushed down, does not distract her from work in a way that makes it difficult to go back to work—just as certain gentle interruptions to one’s sleep make it possible to sleep again, to continue with one’s dream, while others do not.

  * * *

  Richard fixes things around the house, to Stella’s surprise: she has never known a man before who could fix anything. Prentice felt that any domestic problem was the province of wives; and Liam hired people to do all that. But Stella gradually realizes that Richard not only fixes things, he likes to do so, in the way that he likes to cook. He takes all her knives to be sharpened; he oils the hinge on a door that has always been noisy; he makes a new rack for the kitchen implements, nearer the stove. So wonderful: Stella has tended to accept certain conditions as inevitable, like a noisy door, dull knives and inconveniently placed kitchen tools. To have all that changed seems to her almost miraculous.

  Richard downplays his helpfulness, though. “Cosmetic stuff. What I’m good at, I guess.” He looks around and sighs. “What this place needs … Jesus, it’s endless.”

  That is how their days mostly go, these days. Love and cooking and small domestic conversations and chores. A lot of laughing at silly mutual jokes. A lot of cat jokes. Eve, whose name Richard seems to have changed to Legs (“Eve is really too serious a name for a cat, don’t you think?”)—Legs is growing up to be quite ungainly; she has, for a cat, a curious lack of grace. She stumbles about on long thin legs, as Stella and Richard watch her, laughing gently and softly. (“It’s as though we didn’t want to hurt her feelings.” “Well, we don’t, do we.”) Legs the cat, formerly Eve.

  Sometimes Richard brings home flowers quite unfamiliar to Stella. Ranunculuses. Poppy-like, with their limp silk petals, they seem to bloom in a marvelous spectrum of colors, mostly yellow, pale oranges, but sometimes purple, or red. Richard loves them, he fills the house with ranunculuses with bright petals, bowls and vases everywhere of these flowers, with mirrors reflecting them back, multiplying flowers. Or he often brings home roses. Richard knows a special shop on Union Street; their roses are all grown somewhere down on the Peninsula—for scent, these are roses that smell like roses. Richard brings home lovely pale bouquets; the rooms smell of roses. And he has a special trick with dried rose petals, bowls of them, here and there. Or freesias. Or stock. Stella so often arrives home to the sight and the scent of flowers that they come to seem a part of the atmosphere in which she and Richard live.

  Sometimes, in the night, waking next to Richard, Stella is aware of greater sheer happiness than she can bear. It seems undeserved, and almost unreal, this joy at his presence in her bed, his smooth and fleshy back, the flesh padding large bones and muscles, pulsing blood. His masses of pale fine hair. As she presses her dark skinny body there, to his back, an arm circling his chest, her hand just grazes a small patch of light crinkly hair. It is too much for her, the pleasure that suffuses her heart at such moments, these mornings of sunlight. Of Richard, in bed.

  She even sometimes thinks, This is not real, it cannot last. (These are dark whispers from an inner, old familiar voice.) This is out of tune with my life, says this voice. I was not intended for happy love with a man of surpassing beauty.

  When Liam loved her, then too Stella experienced a sense of unreality; but that affair was almost all unreal, with its backdrops of exotic cities, expensive hotels. It was obvious that none of that could last. And she herself, Stella always well knew, would not always be the child whom Liam adored. She was only eighteen at the start of that affair; at twenty she would look too old for him, she knew. And she did.

  But Richard’s back feels real, and instead of thinking, This can’t last, Stella often thinks, This is how life is supposed to be, filled with love and the scent of a loved person’s flesh—and roses—on a sunny morning, in bed.

  “This is great, but we have to let in some air, you know?”

  Stella does not quite know, not yet, what he means; she would like nothing to change. But still, she likes the idea that he is paying attention, is taking them seriously. He sounds so sane and healthy, and wise; quite unlike the other person, or persons, who are also Richard, who have sometimes scared her and seemed to her quite mad.

  “We tend to be a little hysterical,” Richard tells her, continuing in this vein. “We need to calm down and act like ordinary people. Work a lot, get more sleep.” He grins, beautifully. “Probably cut down on the booze. A little.”

  She tells him, “You’re right,” still not entirely sure what he has in mind.

  “We’ve got a great thing going, but it needs some concrete implementation, do you see what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  He laughs. “In the meantime, let’s have a drink.”

  And even though this is the last that Stella ever hears of this semi-plan of Richard’s, she continues to cherish this rarely seen side of him: the sensible person, taking charge. Calling a halt to excess and unreality. She needs that, she knows.

  Stella notices that Richard and Mr. Wong are spending a lot of time together, on Richard’s way in and out. They look somewhat conspiratorial, she thinks, and she next thinks, Lord, I hope Richard is not talking about getting another cat, or cats. Legs is fine. I love her, but she’s enough, in this small place.

  “Isn’t it time we checked out my place up the coast?”

  Stella’s still-convalescent heart leaps at the question, but she manages to say, “Well, sure. You mean this weekend?”

  “I had some longer period in mind, actually. How about this: you add a little work leave to your sick time, and we can go up for ten days or so? My new best friend, Standish Wong, is going to take care of Legs.”

  “I don’t know if I could, but that sounds … terrific.”

  “You’ll take work along? I’ll have to go back and forth to the city. A little.”

  * * *

  Richard’s house is so perfectly a part of its landscape, the surrounding sand, gray dunes, as to be almost invisible. It is indeed a moment before Stella recognizes that this is a house, this is the house, before which they have stopped. What at first she sees is a pile of
timbers, smooth and as gray as the sand; some horizontal, neatly piled, some upright. Until she realizes that she is looking at a wall and a narrow door.

  She says, “What a hideaway! You’re perfectly camouflaged.”

  “It’s my bunker. I could just hole up here. Sometimes I think I may.”

  As he opens the door, though, and she follows him in, Stella gasps in sheer and spontaneous amazement: she sees a beautiful long bright room, with broad high windows that frame a view of the sea. Fortuitously they have arrived just at sunset (or could Richard have planned it that way, timing it perfectly?); pale red light streams into the room, illuminating polished wood, falling softly on velvet cushions, a deep tapestry-covered couch. A large gray-stone fireplace, long refectory table. Some pewter things, brass lamps. Almost fearfully Stella turns to Richard, she hides her face in his chest. “It’s just so beautiful,” she whispers. “Incredible.”

  “Well, it really came out okay.” But she can hear the pride in his voice, his excitement about his house. “Old Bunny did a first-rate job,” he adds.

  “But he said it was all you.”

  Richard laughs. “Well, I guess I was the idea guy. That’s my shtick, I guess. But it took a little doing.”

  The kitchen area is at one end of that long room, then dining, then the sofa and chairs, and the fireplace. Through doors, at either end, are bedrooms and baths. “You see?” says Richard, showing her around. “The simplest design in the world. A kid could do it.”

  He really means this, Stella in a flash of insight understands; he sees his house as something that a kid, himself, has drawn and constructed. “A genius kid, I think,” she tells him, meaning it.

  He laughs again. “You’re prejudiced. You have no judgment.”

  * * *

  After a couple of days, even though she is becoming more familiar with the house, Stella, walking along the beach, feels something close to panic. Richard is in San Francisco, not much more than an hour away—but as she remembers the drive (so beautiful, such meadows and woods and sweet low-lying farms) it seems farther away, almost impossibly distant. And Richard is so unreliable, in terms of time; he might be really late. She hates the vision of herself waiting there, with the darkening sky all about. It is as though being anything but a very short distance from Richard were unbearable to her; and as Stella recognizes and examines this feeling, it seems ominous. She feels as though some very sane person were telling her, You are not supposed to feel this way, you don’t have to, neither your happiness nor your sanity should depend on Richard’s presence; come on, you’re a feminist. And Stella has to answer that woman (maybe Justine?): But so much does depend on Richard, for me. I am hooked. I am madly in love. Madly hooked.

  But perhaps it is the unfriendly beach itself that is causing this mood of darkness in Stella. From the water’s edge, where she walks, Stella looks back to the forbidding dunes, and then, at the beach’s end, to the high, deeply crevassed cliffs of clay. The sand itself is coarse and cold, brown-gray, and there at her feet among the dirty bits of foam lie squashed-out orange rinds, here and there a dead fish—which brings her back to “hooked,” that cruelly accurate metaphor.

  Also, her work is not going very well. She brought along her processor, all the information is there, at her fingertips, but it seems as knotted as fishing lines, impenetrable as knots. So that she stares with hatred at her expensive, efficient machine, once her old friend, her helper.

  Richard is dangerous. That is a sentence sometimes whispered by that same sane (feminist) woman of Stella’s imagination. However, since she knows her imagination to be fairly wild and unreliable, and also since she deals in words all day, it is no small wonder that various random sentences enter her mind. Probably she has thought “Richard is dangerous” simply to make her life more dramatic and exciting. Whereas, closer to the truth, she believes (she believes this most of the time), is the pleasant surprise of Richard as a warm, healthy and loving man, a man who likes to cook and eat and drink and make love. Who is good at carpentry, at things connected with houses. A domestic person. A man whose slightest touch is thrilling to her skin, to her bones.

  What is dangerous is her own imagination, as Stella should know by now. It has got her into trouble before.

  Out on the horizon, great long black boats, oil tankers, seem not to move at all. Impossible to calculate their direction: Seattle? Mazatlán, for Mexican oil? Stella, her mind returning to her work, sighs with sadness then for Mexico, a country that in a way she considers her own. It is just so ruined, poor Mexico, she thinks. Corruption like an acid everywhere, and the country exploding with babies, always babies, the single, simple pleasure of the poor.

  An hour or so later Stella admits to herself that she really does not like being in this house alone. Its beautiful bare bones reproach her somehow. Dead bones, needing Richard’s lively presence to revive them.

  As Stella needs that presence.

  Although since her pneumonia she and Richard have returned to an earlier, sunnier, almost perfectly idyllic time (in fact even happier than their earliest days), Stella still thinks, more or less in spite of herself, of those dark weeks preceding her illness. When Richard was always with those German clients, getting drunk with them, coming late or not at all to her house. And not only drunk but angry, abusive, terrible.

  Remembering those black and awful weeks, Stella sometimes further thinks that she could and quite possibly should have broken with Richard then. For good. If Prentice had not died at just that time, or if Prentice had left her some liberating cash—or if she had not got so sick just then—she might have been strong enough to say to him, I’m sorry, but we have to end all this. You don’t make me happy. You drink too much. I’m in love with you, I know I am, but sometimes I don’t think I like you very much. And sometimes I think you don’t like me either.

  She knows that Prentice’s death, and his will, and her pneumonia, are no real excuse; even when Richard came to see her in the hospital, with roses, she could have said those things.

  These thoughts, these revisions of circumstance and act, with accompanying self-accusations, are rare and fleeting, though. More often the very thought of a permanent break with Richard is intolerable to Stella—especially now, when she is alone and tired, in a darkened seacoast house, at night.

  From the windows she sees no remnants of the sunset, only black. And the sea’s salt smell invades the house, and the chill damp winds, and the pounding, pounding roar of the heavy waves. (How could she face being permanently alone?)

  The waves drown out almost everything. If the phone rang—Richard saying he’d be late, or maybe not coming at all—would she hear it? Of course she would, but did it possibly ring earlier, when she was taking her bath? (There is no answering machine in this house; Richard likes the idea of relative inaccessibility.)

  Stella sits there, shivering, forgetting to turn the heater on. In Richard’s beautiful house. In her clean warm pretty clothes.

  When suddenly she is aroused by a bursting blast, a sound and a voice, as the door breaks open: Anybody home?

  She runs to him. They kiss.

  14

  Richard’s Plans

  Richard is working hard on a great surprise for Stella; it is so great that his heart warms, his blood quickens, when he thinks of it. So marvelous! so exciting! He can’t wait to see her face when she sees it for the first time. He will work even harder and harder; he will get it all finished for her very soon.

  Or (maybe) he will fly to Venice to meet Eva. In hours, on the Concorde. Does the Concorde go to Italy? He isn’t sure, but probably.

  His mania for Venice is an important secret of Richard’s. Venice, where he has never been. (Shit, he has never been to Europe at all, and not even to Mexico, or Canada. Christ, Canada.) But Venice is the shimmering pinnacle of all his heart’s desires. He has read all the books he can find—James Morris, Mary McCarthy—but mostly he has looked at pictures, so that fixed in his inner vision are small gr
ay squares, little arched stone bridges over dark smooth canals; and restaurant terraces, full of handsome and lively people who gaze out across vistas of stone and water; a small obscure church, full of lovely Carpaccios; and the Academy itself, with its marvelous Bellinis, Canalettos. And all the grander, more obvious monuments—Piazza San Marco, Ducal Palace, the Grand Canal. The stones and waters of Venice.

  It strikes him as very trite, this passion of his. Christ, everyone loves Venice (but not as he does). He is almost ashamed, which is one reason for his never having told anyone at all, and perhaps a reason too for never seriously planning a trip to Venice. It might disappoint him, just possibly, like a lovely woman who turns out to smell, in some awful way.

  But: Venice with Eva! the most perfectly beautiful, perfect (almost perfect) woman of all. Great love with Eva, in a hotel overlooking the water and lovely carved stone. His loveliest Eva.

  One night he almost called her. She is now in Berlin, or he thinks she is in Berlin. He did dial her, and he got into some trouble with the overseas operator (that bitch!). Got nowhere. No Eva.

  And Eva after all went away mad (Richard tends often to forget this). “You seem curiously unavailable, my darling handsome Richard. Could there just possibly be another woman in your life? I get almost a smell of marriage. Or maybe some boy, as beautiful as you are yourself? That does not strike me as out of the question for you.” Eva said all that.

  At least Stella has never accused him of being queer. He loves Stella, loves her very much, almost all the time. He loves her knees, and the sweet round curve of her forehead, and the dumb way she slices tomatoes in the air. She makes him smile inside. He can’t wait to see her face when she comes back from his house on the coast. When she sees what he’s done. Her surprise.