Almost Perfect

by Alice Adams

  “But I’m a lot more worried about my old pal Richard than I am about my boy,” says Collin, with a worried smile.

  The remark seems sudden, or perhaps her own quite foolish self-absorption has made it so, Justine inwardly muses, even as she directs her attention to the question of Richard. “Why so?”

  Collin’s frown deepens. “I’m not sure. Just small things, here and there. He reminds me of a tightrope walker. Very good at his act, but it’s risky.”

  This is so precisely Justine’s own sense of Richard that she smiles, liking Collin very much for his perception. She asks, “But hasn’t he always been like that?”

  “Not so much. I don’t know. He used to be a little closer to the ground. Just a regular sort of guy. Really good with his hands, with tools and stuff. A good workman.” And then he says, “I wonder how Stella feels.”

  Justine laughs a little. “We know how she feels. In love. But how she sees him, I really don’t know. I wonder if she does. I have no idea how clearly she thinks of him.”

  “She must be kind of worried.”

  “I don’t know,” repeats Justine. And then she says, “Would you mind a lot if I unbuttoned the top button of that shirt?”

  He laughs. “Not at all. Unbutton away. I’m game.” He leans toward her, very close.

  They begin to kiss.

  20

  Crazy

  Which one of them was crazy? That crude question, sometimes voiced, seemed central to all the conflict between Stella and Richard. “You’re crazy!” one or the other of them would desperately, furiously, drunkenly yell at the other. It was as though craziness were a heavy black rubber ball (so Stella imagined it) tossed back and forth between them; thus if one of them had it, the other did not.

  Richard thought Stella was crazy; he did not in a deep way think about himself. Certain of her opinions seemed crazy: if Stella seriously said, “Now that the Cold War’s over, why can’t all of everyone’s weapons just be junked, so we can get on with some big new social program?” Richard would silently look at her in a particular way, an expression compounded of hopelessness and contempt, which meant, You’re the one, you’re crazy.

  In a somewhat more complicated and illogical way, Stella thought that if she was crazy, as Richard said she was (and a long look at her history and her parentage might well support this view)—if she was crazy, then Richard was not.

  Certainly at the start of their connection, on the face of it Richard had not looked especially mad. A handsome and healthy person, good both at his work and at various practical tasks that often defeated Stella (he could even fix his old car), he looked perfectly okay. Whereas she, in her offbeat clothes, with her makeshift job and her failing finances, looked at best eccentric, a person not quite making it. And she was prey to certain secret fears and anxieties; true states of panic could attack her in a drugstore, or at the approach of a friend. She had trouble making phone calls.

  However, more recently Stella has felt less sure of who is crazy. Now that she is doing well in her work, even earning money, she feels less offbeat, less incompetent. Less fearful, more okay.

  So does that mean that Richard is crazy? And if he is, Stella more or less for the first time thinks, I am crazy to stay with him.

  But for much, perhaps most of the time, Stella and Richard do not seem crazy to each other. They do not talk about craziness. They begin to take small trips together, and Stella even finds that she can work, travelling with Richard. While he is off sketching, she writes.

  “I know this is sudden, but how about Squaw Valley this weekend?” is how Richard broaches one of those first trips, one January Wednesday. Hitherto he has mostly gone sketching alone, to places fairly near at hand, to Carmel or to Napa, the Alexander Valley, Mendocino. They have talked of Stella’s going along, but so far that has not worked out; she has deadlines, commitments. (She has almost, but not quite, welcomed his absence. Almost admitted to herself the relief that she felt.)

  Which is another reason for agreeing to this trip, although it is late and she does have a lot to do.

  Off to a late start on Friday night, they nevertheless drive up in high spirits, anticipating snow, a new landscape. Richard has managed to rent a condo for the weekend. Right on the slopes, he says.

  In a roadhouse near Auburn they eat a large steak dinner, something they do not ordinarily have, but it seems appropriate to skiing, snow. They drink wine in a slow, controlled way; Richard is a little worried about driving in the snow, he says. “I’d better take it easy on the sauce.” In moderation, the wine tastes so good, Stella thinks: why couldn’t they drink like this all the time?

  Richard, in his heavy dark sweater, fair hair gleaming, looks Nordic, a Viking hero, with pale sea-blue eyes. Animated and excited, but not at all drunk, he is very beautiful. Stella’s whole heart yearns toward him. It is all she can do not to say, I love you, I love you more than I can bear. I will always love you.

  About half an hour later, as they begin to wind up into the mountains, in the dark, it starts to snow. Traffic slows and thickens. Massed cars and trucks are ahead of them, and off to the side of the road are more stopped cars, and men in yellow slickers, flashing strong lights. A sign above the highway then spells out CHAIN CONTROL.

  “I outsmarted those greedy bastards, I brought along chains. Rented them in town, and I know how to put them on,” Richard mutters, getting out of the car with the package of chains.

  The men in slickers can be hired to put on your chains, Stella observes, watching adjacent cars. She wonders how much they charge, and reasons that it could not be enormous: ten dollars? fifteen? So why didn’t Richard …? But then she understands that this has nothing to do with money; this is Richard the competent protector, braving snow and cold and oncoming traffic to do it himself. Which is foolhardy, maybe, but surely not crazy. Or only crazy in the sense that all men are crazy in their need to be brave. To take risks.

  Later, as they roll along on their tightly chained tires across a broad meadow of snow, driving directly into the snow, it looks as though all the flakes were magnetized into their headlights, all whirling toward them, all the billions of flakes, all the white. As though there were nothing in the world but snow, and sudden light.

  The condo is an A-frame, with a huge bed snuggled under low eaves, and floor-to-ceiling windows that face the white descent of snow, the slopes.

  “Romantic, no?” Richard is ironic, but he is smiling.

  “But, darling, it is romantic.”

  Making love to her later that night, Richard murmurs, “Oh, I love all your long tall body.”

  But I’m quite small, Stella does not say. Who are you with? she does not ask.

  “Oh, I love you!” Richard murmurs, kissing her neck.

  “I love you too.”

  Another trip.

  In early February they go down to Santa Barbara, where it is suddenly as warm as summer. They walk barefoot along the beach, trying not to step on the black oil patches that have appeared here and there; they look out to sea to the oil rigs—so weird, extraterrestrial. And back along the shore to discreetly beautiful houses of the very rich, with lovely old overgrown gardens and glassed-in sunrooms.

  “They have a sort of New England look, don’t you think?” says Stella, of those houses.

  “If you say so.”

  “How about sketching the oil rigs?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “As a matter of fact, I was.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  In this mood Richard is quite unreachable. Stella watches as he picks up a small stone and hurls it angrily against the sand. Mad that it isn’t pretty enough to keep? Stella crazily thinks this, just then.

  But she is unable not to try to reach him, still. “These houses remind me a little of my grandparents’ house,” she tells him. “Prentice’s parents.”

  “Oh. The rich Communists. Right.”

  “Well, actually they weren’t. Sort of liberal Republ
icans, actually. And not all that rich.”

  “Listen, by Jersey standards they were fucking rich. And Communists.”

  “Okay.”

  Disliking him very much just then, Stella tries instead to think of those pretty houses. She supposes the lives lived within them to be unimaginably peaceful, sunny and light; she knows this to be total nonsense: surely those houses enclose their full share of quarrels and pain, loneliness and death. But from her present vantage point, walking along so silently with angry Richard, almost any house looks like a refuge. As indeed her grandparents’ house was for her a refuge from noisily angry parents and all their furious drunken friends.

  But actually, Stella reminds herself, most of her own life at this moment is not, viewed objectively, so bad. She is selling one long piece to The Gotham every month (she is now under contract to them, with a guaranteed escalating word rate and other nice features), and she just sold a small piece about a young Cambodian woman, a painter of Victorian houses, to The Atlantic (The Gotham said very nice but not for them). She is working hard, she is doing very well (she tells herself this, but it is true).

  Having more or less forgotten Richard’s mood in the course of these happier thoughts, Stella now asks him, “How are things going with Bolling, generally, would you say?”

  Richard, who has been walking somewhat ahead, now turns and comes to a full stop, there in the now cooling coarse gray sand. “Well, as you know, he dinged the ski scene. Too much snow and too few skiers, he said. And he may be in the process of dinging Mendocino. And he’s making a serious effort to drink himself to death. Anything else you want to know about Bolling?”

  “Uh, I guess not.”

  “Needless to say, I’m not head-over-heels enthusiastic about starting the next new phase. Santa Barbara oil rigs, maybe. ‘Great for a Sierra Club poster, old man.’ Christ, I can hear that phony Yale voice. That man can’t open his mouth without putting someone down, somewhere. Christ, no wonder his daughter hates men.”

  “I just don’t think—” Stella begins.

  “Christ, spare me your depth psychology on lesbians. Dykes. It’s a wonder we’re all not queer, is what I think. Christ, we all had parents.”

  Despite herself, Stella laughs. “Well, you’re right there,” she tells him.

  Fortunately the laughter, or something in the cool salt air, works to defuse Richard, as it were, although all he says is, “I’m tired of California, you know that? Really fucking tired of this whole state.”

  “Oh, so’m I,” agrees Stella; with all her new money, she has had a lot of Europe fantasies lately. Or Mexico. Canada? She asks, “Have you ever been to Canada?”

  “Christ no. You know I’ve never been anywhere. This is not Liam O’Gara you’re dealing with these days.”

  “We could go to Venice,” Stella attempts.

  He scowls. “I’m not all that sure I want to go to Venice. How about Germany? Castles on the Rhine, all that?”

  “I’d really rather go to Italy,” Stella tells him.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll go to Italy. If I ever finish this fucking job.” But he smiles and takes her hand, as they walk along the beach.

  On a long weekend in March, as a semi-vacation they go up to Richard’s house, and at last, Justine and Collin-Bunny come along as guests. Stella has gathered from indirect remarks of Justine’s that they have been “seeing” each other again, after what has seemed a hiatus. Justine would never in a direct way have described the intimate nature of their connection, any more than Stella would have.

  And on Saturday night at dinner, Justine makes a startling announcement.

  They arrived in the late afternoon, and Stella noted that Justine seemed keyed up, wired, laughing a lot and reckless in her gestures. “Oh, it’s so beautiful,” she almost instantly cried out. “Can’t we all go for a walk right now?”

  “But dinner …” Stella was making a somewhat complicated seafood stew, time-consuming in that mussels and shrimp must be cleaned and shelled, tomatoes peeled. Richard had offered to help, but she had quite deliberately chosen to do it herself, and so she had to. “Why don’t you all go?” she suggested.

  In the end it was Collin and Justine who walked, Richard having some urgent project in the basement.

  Working there in the kitchen, alone with the spectacular view of the sea, steep wet rocks and cliffs of wet green ferns, and a molten, golden sky, thick and heavy with sunlight, Stella still thinks of her friend, of Justine, and she wonders, Is it possible that Collin and Justine have worked something out, like getting married? At the same time a reliable inner voice says, No, that’s not it. On the other hand, what else? In any case, she thinks, as she scrubs at the mussel shells, Justine looks great, with her lovely gray-white hair. In her faded blue-violet sweater and narrow old faded jeans.

  “Do we change for dinner?” Laughing, flushed from the warm outdoors, Justine asks this on her return.

  “Oh no, you look super.”

  “Besides, it’s time to drink,” Richard cuts in, just then taking over as host.

  “You know, old man, this house is looking better all the time,” Collin obligingly supplies.

  “Well, it’s not so bad. A nice house.” But Richard smiles with deep pleasure, with love for this house.

  “Dinner in a minute,” Stella tells them, after drinks.

  “Time for a rammer?” Richard asks everyone. No one wants another drink but Richard himself, who gulps it down.

  Stella gets dinner on, thinking as she does so how pretty the table is, with its vase of field grasses, the bleached wood-handled cutlery, pale-blue plates and bowls. All Richard’s doing, all perfect. And she has quite suddenly, then, a curious thought: she wonders, If I were to live alone now, in some new place, could I pull together a house that is beautiful? Have I learned that much from Richard? (Richard, who sometimes says, “I should have been a goddam interior desecrator. That’s my true vocation, you know that?”)

  At dinner, while Stella busies herself with serving food, bringing in bread and salad, Richard pours out lots of wine, a nice Beaujolais, and he tells several jokes. Long jokes, and fairly good ones, and he tells them well, but Stella has heard them all before. Several times. She even says, soft-voiced, “But, darling, I’ve heard that one a lot.”

  He glares. “Collin and Justine haven’t heard it. I’m telling them.”

  He tells the joke, and everyone laughs. Even Stella—dutifully.

  And then Justine drops her bomb. With no preamble, she says to the group at large: “Well, kids, guess what? I’m pulling up stakes and moving to New York.”

  What? What do you mean? Do you have a job? When? Where will you live? Why?

  They all ask all these things, or rather, Stella and Richard do; Collin presumably has been told before and must be more or less accepting.

  Justine tries to explain, to defend herself. No, she does not have a job there, but she knows a few people. Things are tough back there, she’s aware of that. Even worse than here. Layoffs on all the papers. She knows what she’s jumping out into, but that is more or less the point, if they see what she means. She wants to jump, to see what happens. Her job here at the paper is much too easy; she is cushioned, not working hard enough. She wants to see what she can do. What will happen. Besides, more goes on in New York than in San Francisco.

  To this last, only Richard takes exception. “Oh come on, Justine. You mean New York is where it’s at? That’s just childish.”

  He has said this more or less jokingly, but Justine chooses to answer him seriously.

  She says, “I mean that things seem to happen first in New York. And almost simultaneously but with a difference in L.A. San Francisco often seems a sort of pretty side street, or a suburb. And more to the point for me is the lousy paper, my silly job there.” She suddenly laughs. “I’m fifty years old. I have to get into something serious.”

  I’ll go with you! it suddenly occurs to Stella to say. Of course she does not say this.


  “Justine is really crazy, you know that?” Richard mutters to Stella, much later that night. In bed. Fairly drunk, they have not made love.

  “I don’t think so,” Stella tells him, adding, “I just know I’ll miss her. Terrifically.”

  “No you won’t. You’ll write to her for a while, talk about how much you miss her and fill her in on what’s happening here. And then you’ll both forget you ever knew each other.”

  “Oh, Richard.”

  “Oh, Richard, nothing. You’ll see. You’re both crazy. Poor old Bunny,” he gets out. And then is asleep.

  The next day (unfairly) everyone but Richard is hung over, and it is Richard who cleans up the kitchen and produces an elaborate breakfast, popovers and sausages and scrambled eggs. “Your cholesterol fix,” he tells them all, serving things out.

  “This is so good, I don’t even feel guilty about it,” says Justine, as Richard beams. (And Stella wonders, Does he really think she’s crazy—sane Justine?)

  That day they talk less in general terms about Justine’s large move than in specifics: how and when she will break it to the paper that she is leaving, where in New York she might live.

  “I’d like to try some whole new area,” Justine tells them. “Everyone I know used to be down in the Village, and now they’re all Upper West Side. There must be somewhere else.”

  “Try Jersey; you’d love it there,” Richard tells her.

  Collin laughs. “Try Staten Island, baby. You might like it.”

  The day itself is ravishingly beautiful. Pure spring, the air light and pale and fresh, new wildflowers strewn everywhere, the broad green meadows above the sea all dotted with white and pink and blue and butter yellow, and the sea itself calm and flat, and shining blue.