Almost Perfect

by Alice Adams

  Hurrying out, passing Marina, he pats her arm. “You’ll be okay now,” he murmurs. “They’ll take good care of you.”

  “But, Rickie—”

  He is gone.

  He wants to see Andrew Bacci. His Dog Shoes. He desperately wants to see Andrew, he does not know why. To fuck Andrew, or let himself be fucked by Andrew, at last?

  No.

  No, of course not. For one thing it would be dangerous, since Andrew tested positive.

  He just wants to see Andrew, or just talk to him. If he gets Andrew’s answering tape he will die. Explode.

  “Dog Shoes? You don’t sound like yourself, what’s the matter? Did I wake you up? At three in the afternoon? Well, I envy you. But I might just go home and do the same. To my studio, I mean. I’m in a phone booth, and I’ve had such a day. Full of crazy women. I do need a nap. Well, it sounds like you’re just getting up when I’m going down. So to speak. Well, I might. But then again I might not. But don’t bother to knock.”

  “Just relax,” says Andrew, close to Richard’s ear. “I’ll stop if you don’t like it. I told you.”

  “It sort of hurts—oh!”

  “But you sort of like it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Relax, darling boy. You feel beautiful.”

  “Yes. Touch me.”

  “Yes—”

  “But did you put on—?”

  “Yes, I’m wearing. Can’t you—?”

  “Yes. Oh Jesus—yes—yes—”

  “Oh, Richard, great Christ! you’re lovely—”

  “Yes!”

  18

  Living Together

  “How much rent do you pay for this ghastly dump anyway?”

  That sentence, spoken by Andrew Bacci to Margot Carlisle, was in fact the first clear signal from Andrew that he wanted Margot to move in with him, but Margot conveniently manages to forget both that sentence and the ensuing conversation. In her later recountings of just how this move came about, and even in her own recollections, these negotiations are obscured in the soft, golden glow of affectionate, quasi-romantic feelings, like a cloud that hides sharp rocks. “Andrew and I have always cared most terrifically for each other,” she may say, sometimes adding, with her slightly dirty laugh, “in our fashions.” And then, rather piously, “I always somehow knew we’d end up together.”

  But at the time it actually went like this:

  “Oh, far too much,” Margot answered Andrew’s very rude question. “I really can’t afford it.”

  “Come on, babes. Don’t play games. You know how much you pay.”

  “Well. It’s just been raised.” Margot lowered her voice. “Twelve hundred dollars. Is that a scandal?”

  “It’s a lot less than I pay. I’ll tell you what, Mrs. Carlisle. You move into my place with me and pay me, oh, say seven fifty? That way, you can save some dollars, and I can afford to keep my pad. And you get me.” He smiled at her.

  “Andrew, really. What an idea. I have to admit, I’m quite startled.” This was the literal truth. Margot’s breath stopped, as her quick imagination whirled through rooms—his rooms, their rooms, filled with his-their furniture, and everywhere Andrew. She felt herself enchanted, even as a tiny mean voice within her whispered, Andrew is sick. He only wants someone to be around to care for him when he gets really sick, and he knows you will. He knows you’ll do anything for him.

  “Actually I thought it was your idea, our living together. A few months back,” Andrew reminded her.

  “Oh, but I was only kidding,” Margot lied, remembering that occasion only too well. And she laughed, to prove what an all-round joke that conversation was. And then, flirtatiously, “But you really mean it, don’t you, darling Andrew?”

  “Yes, in fact I do. We’d get on, don’t you think? Once we’d laid down certain ground rules. Like no conversation at breakfast, I can’t bear chatter in the morning.”

  “Oh! nor I. In fact must we breakfast together at all? I’d much rather not. I like to make a cup of coffee and take it back to bed with me, with the papers, and that’s breakfast.”

  “Really? Good. You see? We will get along. We might have been made for each other.”

  At this they both laughed very merrily, rejoicing in their mutual sophistication and in their sheer affection for each other—or so it seemed for the moment.

  “And no pretty boys in your room,” Andrew added. At which they both laughed again.

  “She loves me, is the point. She’ll do anything for me, including taking care of me when I get sick. I have plans to turn her into a very smart Mother Teresa,” is how Andrew explains it to his friend Simon Daniels. “Besides, she’s promised. She can never say to me, Look, you’re too sick, get out. Well, I know Richard loves me too, sort of, but he’s so unreliable. He also loves his dowdy little Stella, and God knows who else. Richard forgets about people when they’re not there. No, Margot’s my best bet, she really is. Besides, a lot of the time we have fun together. She’s very smart, and she can be mean as a snake. I love it when she’s mean. Simon, you don’t really know her. Trust me. I do.”

  “How do you mean, Richard loves you too?” Simon thinks he has caught some odd pride in Andrew’s tone. Something new.

  “Oh, like a pal, unfortunately. You know how straight men are. Even the kinkiest of them.”

  The matter of furniture, private possessions, has worked out far better than anyone could have predicted, or even imagined. Margot’s new bedroom is huge, so large in fact that most of her furniture is thus taken care of. A huge room, but it has no view. Andrew’s bedroom has the famous bay view, with Angel Island, the bluffs and hills of Marin, and the bridge. Which is fine with Margot. She tells Andrew that she does not especially like views. “You don’t like them because you can’t decorate them,” he teases. Pleased, she laughs, and does not tell him that nearsightedness prevents her from seeing more than a few feet out the window.

  In the living room, their living room, the few of Margot’s things that have been inserted here and there have added an interesting, slightly offbeat note: a tiny inlaid box here; a large, dim, heavily gold-framed family portrait over there, in the corner; two small French chairs in the entry hall.

  Their domestic habits also seem to work out well with each other. Without telling her why (he hardly has to), Andrew has adopted Margot’s lifelong nutritionist views; their kitchen now abounds in shelves of vitamins, and vegetables and fruits. Jars of grains, and beans and rice and pasta. And that is what they have for dinner, mostly. “This stuff is really quite delicious, you know. And it makes you feel so much better,” they say to each other.

  They separate early in the evenings, off to their private bedrooms for reading. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, or early in the morning, Margot will hear a tap at her door, and then, standing next to her bed, in a lovely striped silk robe, there will be Andrew. Andrew saying, “Margot, babes, I’m lonely. I’m scared. Why don’t you tell me a story?”

  The first night that he came to her in that way, Margot was seriously frightened—first out of uncertainty that it was indeed Andrew outside her door, rapping lightly. And, second, out of some wild fear that they had misunderstood each other all along. That Andrew might have crazily misinterpreted the nature of her love, her passion for him. Which would never do.

  But seemingly not.

  Andrew, having murmured his name, comes in and arranges himself, in his handsome robe, in the pretty (Louis Seize) chair nearest Margot’s bed, and asks for a story.

  Sitting up, pulling ruffled sheets up around her gown, and pushing her long hair back, Margot tells him, “But, darling Andrew, I’m not sure I know any stories. I’m not very inventive, you know.” And she laughs.

  “Don’t invent. Just tell me the story of your life. Tell the truth. We’ve got forever now.”

  “Shall I tell you about the time I almost had an affair with Picasso?”

  “Yes. Tell me everything.”

  “Well. It was in 1947, j
ust after the war, and I was sitting in the Flore one afternoon, and I looked across the street—Saint Germain was so beautifully quiet back then, just a nice neighborhood—and anyway there he was, coming out of the Brasserie Lipp. I knew him right away. Those eyes.”

  “Even from across the street?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well. I was with my friend Anne-Marie—a great friend of Juliette Greco, by the way, which is a whole other story—but he knew Anne-Marie, Picasso did, and so he came over to our table, and he stared at me. And stared. That look. I almost fainted, so intense. But worse luck, I already had a dinner date that night, this enchanting boy from Morocco, and so I couldn’t go on to the party they were going to, although he begged and begged, and when I couldn’t he really seemed annoyed …”

  And so on. (She did not see Picasso again, and soon heard that he had left for Spain.)

  Andrew loves her stories, and Margot quickly develops an extreme sensitivity to his needs, in terms of narrative. He likes visual details, likes to hear about costume and decoration, furniture. Flowers. He is not especially interested in details of weather. He likes names, especially of course famous ones. Likes tales of social and/or sexual intrigue. He does not want any too-intimate details from Margot’s or actually from anyone’s life. On the whole he prefers humor to sentiment, and Margot can almost always make him laugh.

  Every afternoon at precisely four they take tea together, an herbal tea, with cucumber or watercress sandwiches that Margot has carefully made. Occasionally some friend is invited in to partake of this very ceremonial rite, but more often they are alone, gossiping over their still fairly separate social lives. Their friends, their plans for decoration, or possible small trips together.

  “It’s turning out even better than I thought,” Andrew confides to Simon, and to a couple of formerly dubious pals. “We have our own lives, and she’s as clean as a cat, always tidying up or polishing something. She even irons the cocktail napkins, and she has some heavenly furniture polish. But the truth is, she keeps me amused.”

  “It’s an almost perfect marriage,” Margot says happily to Stella, on the phone. “Or maybe it is perfect. You know, I’ve never thought that living with the person you’re having sex with was at all a good idea. So unromantic. Breakfast. I always wanted my lovers to get up and leave, and a lot of them really seemed to resent that.”

  “How different we are,” is Stella’s comment.

  “Yes, darling Stella. Aren’t we, though.”

  Fairly often, over tea, Richard and Stella are a topic of discussion, chez Margot and Andrew. What is not discussed, of course, or even disclosed, is the fact that Andrew visits Richard in his studio from time to time. Every week or so. Andrew would tell no one of this, not ever, although he can’t resist an occasional hint, thrown out to Simon, say—which he will then deny. He believes that this is his first experience of true love. But he still finds that he is able to discuss Richard quite dispassionately with Margot. Or so he thinks.

  “Richard is in many ways a very dependent person,” Andrew pontificates; as always, he is vastly energized by the first shot of tea. “He has to be attached to some woman, and it’s hard for him to become unattached. In many ways marriage is ideal for Richard. If Stella had better sense she’d insist on it.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to marry him, darling. You know how feminists are these days.”

  “Well, I’ll bet she’ll somehow lose him if she doesn’t. I think being unmarried makes Richard a little nervous.”

  “My dearest Andrew, Richard is nervous. Look how much he drinks. I know I sound like an old puritan, but that’s never, never a very good sign. And of course one has no idea how he felt about that gorgeous German girl I saw him with.”

  “Just window dressing, probably.” Andrew is actually somewhat piqued that Richard has never mentioned any large blond German girl; he would prefer to think that he himself is Richard’s only infidelity to Stella.

  “He certainly looked crazy about her,” says Margot, as she has before.

  “Drunk, probably,” Andrew muses; and then he says, “This Fillmore job is really going to put Richard over the top. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took off in a whole new direction after this.”

  “But suppose it doesn’t work out?” asks Margot. “Al Bolling is very difficult. A troubled person, I’ve told you.” After Stella and Richard’s party, Margot had dinner twice with Al Bolling; in her view, an almost total loss. For one thing he is very cheap and takes her to rather dingy, unknown places. And he drinks too much.

  Andrew laughs. “Richard’s great with difficult people. It’s his specialty, or one of them.” He laughs again, in a pleased way that signals more to clever Margot than he intended.

  “Stella’s the success I’m betting on,” says Margot. “I think Stella’s going to be really rich and famous.”

  “Oh, you feminists.”

  “Me? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “But she is getting better-looking, don’t you think?” asks Andrew. “I wonder if Richard’s helping her with her clothes.”

  19

  Justine and Bunny and John

  Since deciding not to marry Bunny, and decisively turning him down, Justine has had occasion from time to time to wonder about her decision. “Friendship” has been their agreed-upon mode (non-explicitly meaning they don’t make love), and although as a friend Bunny is very nice indeed, both a wiser and a more interesting man than she once thought, still, the truth is she misses the sex. Very much. And she thinks, This is ridiculous: does making love mean we have to marry? Crazy!

  Furthermore, she has liked his son very much indeed, on sight. Young John Schmidt, a doctor. A smaller, much thinner man than Bunny is, John is also darker, a thin small dark young man with Collin’s wide blue eyes, which on him, with all that dark hair and skin, look somewhat exotic. And to make all this still more attractive, John does not seem at all to know that he is handsome; he has in no way the demeanor of a good-looking man. He is neither vain nor self-conscious—an innocent, Justine decides, and she wonders how this could be possible: whatever are young girls like these days? how do they manage not to spoil handsome men?

  A young man like that would be very easy to spoil, she further thinks—and then flushes, seeing the direction and the full implication of her thoughts.

  The three of them, Justine and Collin and John, are having lunch in Justine’s garden on a sunny November day. It is almost too sunny; it is hot, in what should be the rainy season but that seems to mark, instead, the start of another drought. Collin is in shirtsleeves, his habitual blue work shirt, but buttoned almost to the neck; Justine has had to resist the wifely (or mistressly?) impulse to unbutton one or two. John, with only an hour to spare from the hospital, came in his lab coat (all starched and white, so handsome!). Justine is wearing an old pink cotton dress and wishing, at this moment of unruly lust (so unbecoming, so unwelcome), that she had worn something prettier, maybe sexier? maybe bare black? (But is she mad? bare black in November, for lunch in her own garden?)

  “Fortunately I’ve been too busy to think much about it.” John finishes whatever he was saying to his father. “I’m just a clinician, you know. I leave research to the scientists, the artists of our trade.”

  “But doesn’t it interest you, research? I mean, with all that’s going on in Africa? That’s where I’d be, artist or not. Scientist or not.”

  “Dad, there’s a lot of AIDS right here in town, or hadn’t you heard.”

  His somewhat literal, slightly snotty tone has made Justine like him just slightly less, she observes with a certain relief. And from recent articles in the paper and elsewhere, she knows a fair amount about AIDS research in Africa; she also knows a couple of doctors involved in it, whom John must know? She names a few people, tells John that she has talked to them, and agrees with Collin that she finds what is going on in Africa intensely interesting.

  Now in total contro
l of herself, she sounds, she knows, just that: controlled. As well as intelligent, very. (Well, she knows she’s exceptionally bright; that has always been among the givens of her existence, along with height and large breasts and a Texas accent. Gray hair. No money.)

  “Well, damn, I’ve got to get back there now,” says John, rising to his feet. “It’s been great, Ms. Jones, uh, Justine. And, Dad, good to see you.”

  “I worry about that boy,” says Collin, classically, once John has gone.

  “Oh, why?” Because he’s so attractive? But he can’t mean that, not Bunny, who is possibly not even aware of his son’s good looks. Because the boy has no sense of humor? (It has come to Justine that this must be the case with John; he almost never smiled.)

  Collin surprises her. “For a good-looking boy like that, he leads such a narrow life. No dating, or whatever they call it now. Of course I’m proud that he’s so dedicated, but he overdoes it. He’s had only one serious girlfriend since college.”

  “What happened with her?” Justine is unable to control specific curiosity; she would like to hear all John’s sexual history.

  “She died. Estelle. Cancer. So sad; she was a wonderful young woman. I think John’s a little like his old man. Monogamous. Serious. I think he overdoes it.”

  Maybe you do too, Justine does not say.

  She is fighting off a fantasy in which John occasionally comes by to talk. (Her house is quite near his hospital, U.C.) A nice cup of tea with an older woman. Maybe she could make him laugh? A few laughs, and then, who knows?

  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.