Almost Perfect

by Alice Adams

  For one insane instant Richard is tempted to go over to her, get her into his car, and drive somewhere and get blown. Well, he’s never had a whore; why not? It’s what the big boys like Bolling do, he thinks. But then he thinks, Jesus, no. AIDS, herpes, God knows what all. Besides, the shape he’s in, he probably couldn’t even get it up.

  He thinks about whores. Romantic, legendary San Francisco and her whores, with their big gold hearts. They’re what the city smells of, Richard thinks. A hundred years and more of whores and pimps and their grimy loot, their putrid beds all covered over now with pretty parks and cable cars and clean white rows of curly Victorian houses. But underneath all that the city stinks. It’s getting old and broke and it smells, smells of homeless people and AIDS and poverty and loneliness and cancer. And suicide.

  The night is terrifically black. Richard has never seen such a thickly black night, so heavy and quiet, almost no traffic. Dead. A dead night.

  Out on Lake Street, almost home, a fast-speeding long black car, an old Jag, comes up behind him and passes, looping far out into the oncoming lane to do so. Some drunk, and then Richard has the sudden idea, next the near conviction, that that was Bolling, who drives an old Jag like that one. Al Bolling on his way to the bridge, where he will start across and then stop in the middle, look both ways to see if other cars might notice him. Get out of the car and hurry to the railing—and then what? Will he pause for an instant, maybe reconsider, maybe think about his life? No, old Bolling will just lurch on over, over, over the railing and down, down much faster than thought to the black cold slap of water.

  Oh God! Poor Marbles.

  Richard considers driving on to the bridge himself, following Bolling—but how could he be sure that was Bolling? But it was, he is almost sure it was Marbles, and maybe he could manage to stop him. Look, old Marbles, he could say, we’re both in the soup, but you’re still rich, and I don’t really give a fuck, and so why don’t we pool our resources and run off to Mexico?

  Would that save either of their lives, running off to Mexico?

  Drunk as he is, Richard very much doubts it, and pulling his own car over to the curb, he sits there and, for the second time that day, begins to weep, for Cats, for dead Marina, and for poor wet cold dead Al Bolling (probably).

  And for Stella, big feminist, big success.

  And for himself.

  28

  Richard and Stella

  “Of course my father didn’t kill my mother. Did you believe that? I was just trying to make myself more colorful. More interesting to you. I thought you’d like me better.”

  “Oh.” And then, “How could I have liked you better?” murmurs Stella.

  This somewhat unreal conversation takes place on a brilliantly sunny day in early February, up on the northern California coast. Not far from Richard’s house. Having taken a fairly long walk, a couple of hours, along the grassy bluffs, they are now seated some feet apart on a sort of hillock, overlooking the bright spreading azure sea.

  A little earlier they stopped at what was to Stella a terrifying sight: there suddenly, cut into a dip in this billowing green land, was an enormous crater, a huge round hole, looking far down to a circle of water, tunnelled in from the plunging, churning sea. Interior cliffs of steep sharp rock lined this treacherous cavity; ferns and small flowers sprouted here and there from their tiny crevices. But down below was always that dark flooding water, waiting. Horrifying. Stella quickly stepped back, not liking to see Richard standing there on the edge, peering down; she closed her eyes, and as, together, they left that place she said to Richard, “What a frightful place. Shouldn’t there be a fence or something?”

  Unexpectedly docile (this is a new and alarming mood in Richard), he said, “I suppose.”

  And then they walked on some more, now in the direction of Richard’s house. And sat down in the sun to rest and to begin, somehow, to talk about parents.

  “They fought a lot,” Stella said, of Prentice Blake and Delia. “Drank and fought, the way people did in the Fifties. The other side of togetherness. They both had filthy tempers. It’s odd that I don’t, I guess, or maybe that’s why,” she mused. “I was too scared.” And then, “Did yours fight much?” She paused, “I mean before …”

  The pause was her first reference, ever, to Richard’s early confession: “I’ve never told anyone this. My old man killed my mom.” (Of course at the time she believed him.) And Richard, understanding that pause, getting the reference, then tells her, “Of course my father didn’t kill my mother.”

  And Stella answers, helplessly, “How could I have liked you better?”

  This past month or so, Richard has seemed at least twenty years older than his actual age. An old man, terrifically sad. His posture and his walk have perhaps shown it most of all. He once walked with such confidence, a big man, quick and certain, flaunting his marvelous body before the world. Now he slumps and seems to sag. His movements are slow, uncertain.

  Stella is sure that much more is oppressively on his mind than she knows about, but she can list at least a few of the causes of his sorrows: the conference at Cologne, which he was so excited about and which then seemed to dissolve and disappear. The death of Marina: “I should have stayed married to her, I know I could have saved her,” Richard has ranted, drunkenly, crazily. And the suicide of Al Bolling. Richard: “I could have saved him. Christ! I had a chance to. Dinner, we could have really talked for once, I could have talked him out of it. I know I could have. And then he drove right past me! I knew it was him, I could have followed him. Saved his life. Jesus, it is my fault! It’s what I get—holy Jesus!”

  Somewhere in all this, along with his other panics, Stella senses that Richard is terrified about money. The loss of Bolling also means the loss of the Fillmore job; Richard has said that this was so, but he has not, so far, said that he is worried about money. (It is so like the two of them, Stella has thought, not to mention money.) But she knows that it is something that they have to talk about.

  Now, in response to what Stella has said about liking him better, Richard tells her, “You love me. I’m not so sure that you like me very much. But that’s the story of my life. I’m loved but not liked a lot.”

  Struck by the (probable) accuracy of this, Stella nevertheless assures him, “Of course I like you. A lot of people do.”

  “No they don’t. I make them feel sentimental, or I make them laugh. Or I sex them up. But that’s not the same as liking.” He laughs a little. “You’re the one people like, Stell.”

  And you don’t love me, or like me, she thinks but does not say. She only says, “I suppose,” aware that this conversation is bringing her close to tears. In fact Richard’s sadness penetrates to her bones, like a wind. She has even in a conscious way to control her way of walking, so as not to slump and lag as he does. His sorrow is truly contagious; she fights succumbing to it as best she can, while at the same time she is desperate to help him.

  Partly to shake this mood, she gets to her feet. “Let’s go,” she says. “I’m hungry, aren’t you? Let’s have a real lunch with some wine, okay?”

  * * *

  Richard drinks very little of the wine and eats only part of his pasta. No salad. Stella gulps down what are for her unusual amounts of all these things.

  In the afternoon, in Richard’s large and beautiful sunny bedroom, which is open to views of the bluffs, the grass and sky and sea—in his broad white linen-upholstered bed, they try to make love. With good intentions, some passion and much tenderness, and at last some desperation, they try everything they know, and nothing works. They can’t make it, they can’t make love.

  And afterwards Stella can’t fall asleep.

  Beside her, Richard sleeps heavily. He breathes in long gasps, like someone dying. In his sleep, where is he? Stella wonders. Is he at home in New Jersey, with very ordinary, embattled, but not murderous parents? Or is he off skiing somewhere? Or in Cologne, where he longed to go, with such strange and unsettling intens
ity?

  They decide to go out for dinner.

  And there in the slightly garish, very Fifties-looking road-house, Italian style, over bad roast chicken they finally talk in a practical way about Richard’s problems.

  “I’m much worse off than you think,” he tells Stella across the blue-and-white-checkered oilcloth tablecloth. “I’m in too deep. It’s hopeless. I’m hopeless.”

  “How do you mean? Richard, please tell me.”

  “I’ve robbed Peter to pay Paul. It’s all fucked, completely.” He says this with a curious enthusiasm, though. Stella has an odd sense that he is rushing out to embrace his fate.

  “But how?” she asks. “Just tell me.”

  He glances about the room and seems to decide that the other people there, mainly locals in work clothes, are safe, won’t hurt him. Although he still lowers his voice as he tells her, “I’ve taken money for work I haven’t done, and now it’s too late. I can’t. There’s too much. And so some of them want it back. I was counting too much on the Fillmore job. You know, actually Al tried to tell me it was over.”

  Stella asks him, “You mean you owe a lot of money?”

  Richard is very pale. Even his blue eyes seem to have paled, and his perfect nose is sharper, whiter than usual. He looks wildly around the room. He says, almost whispering, “Oh Christ, you can’t imagine. I could go to jail. What I’ve done is like embezzling. Taking money I shouldn’t have. I had no right—”

  “Richard darling, how much money?” Stella feels very adult, very in charge as she asks this, and she thinks, How odd and terrible that having money should be required to turn you into a grownup.

  “Oh, a lot. Maybe thirty or forty thousand. I haven’t had the nerve to add it all up.”

  “Richard, I could so easily lend you that,” she tells him. “I have much more than that, just lying around in the bank.”

  “No.”

  “Come on. My crazy Gotham money. I haven’t even thought about what I’d do with it. I thought some trips for us, but this is more urgent.”

  “You’re an incredibly wise woman, Stella. Do you know that?”

  “I don’t feel very wise. Or not often.”

  “You are. You’re a marvelous woman.”

  He is looking at her as though she were enormously tall, and powerful. And distant. I’m not any of those things, she would like to say to him. I’m small and unwise. And I love you. Oh, how I love you!

  “And you’re getting beautiful,” Richard tells her. “It’s amazing. In a couple of years you’ll be a really beautiful woman.”

  “Well, thanks.” But he has sounded elegiac, as though mourning a beauty that he will not be around to see, so that Stella shivers, terrified.

  He says, “My whole life is shot. Down the tubes. Everything. You’re probably just wasting your money.”

  “It’s what I want to do.”

  “You’re a very great woman,” he says again, but distantly, as though from somewhere very far away.

  Thinking suddenly of that crater, that dizzy plunge down to rolling, ravening black waves, the dark cave of water, Stella shudders—as though Richard had fallen there, in the night, and were lost to her, for good.

  29

  Richard

  The shrink, recommended by Justine, to whom Stella goes to talk about Richard (from whom to possibly “get help”) is younger than she expected. About her own age, in fact. Blond and boyish-looking. Handsome, she supposes—although, not looking like Richard, not being Richard, how could he be handsome?

  He lives and works in a comfortable small Victorian in Lower Pacific Heights, on Pine Street. In his study are all the requisite book-lined walls and leather chairs. The couch with its Oriental rug, its discreetly napkined pillow.

  “Well, of course I agree that he sounds depressed,” says Dr. Perle. “But as you can imagine, I don’t diagnose at a distance. And I certainly can’t prescribe.”

  He says in his rather cold voice these obvious things—as Stella thinks, Of course. And she wonders what she expected. What possible help. Magic pills to take home to Richard? Even brilliantly illuminating words? She says, “Of course. Of course you can’t,” as her own cold heart sinks lower in her chest.

  “What are the chances of getting him in to see me?”

  “Not so good, I wouldn’t think.”

  “Well, you could give it a try.”

  You don’t know Richard, Stella starts to say; then only says, “I will.” A lie. Richard would take the very suggestion as some further accusation.

  Dr. Perle then asks, “But how about you, Miss Blake? All this must be pretty hard on you. I know it’s not easy, living with a very depressed person.”

  “Oh, I’m okay. It’s really not so bad—” But having said that, Stella to her horror bursts into tears, a seizure of tears and sobbing from the depths of her body, it seems. She weeps helplessly, powerless to stop.

  Mercifully, after several very long minutes (during which she thought she might cry for the rest of her life), she is able to stop and to reach for his handy box of Kleenex. She even smiles as she says, “I feel like a patient.” She blows her nose, and she tells him, “I guess really I’m not in the most wonderful shape in the world. It’s sort of getting to me.”

  “I’m here if you want to see me. Either of you. Or both.”

  “You do that too? Couple therapy?”

  “A little. I don’t make a specialty of it. Too difficult.” He smiles, and although Stella has not been there for the full fifty minutes, she gets up to leave. She says, “I guess that’s all I can say right now,” and she thanks him. For almost nothing.

  Outside in the balmy April air, a pale sky with innocent small fleecy clouds lying over the darker, peaceful bay, despite all that she knows of Richard, Stella has a sudden vision of herself and Richard at the doctor’s office. Together. An ordinary couple, perhaps a little more “high-strung,” more “creative” than most, they have simply been “having problems.” As everyone does. And there in the bland and tasteful office of the shrink, Dr. Perle, they will talk about these problems. Bring dark things to light, expunging anger, guilt, resentments, black frustrations. They will have a perfectly rational three-way conversation.

  Instantly of course she knows that they cannot do that, not she and Richard. They are not like that, neither of them is, or could be. Whatever is wrong is blackly rooted around their hearts, their brains and guts, requiring surgery that would kill them in the process. Ah, Richard, she thinks, through tears that have suddenly returned, as she starts up her car. Richard, we were truly made for each other.

  Tenderness overcomes the small wave of irony as, driving home, she thinks of Richard as he is now, his utter despair. His slow, slumped-over walk. His new hesitant smile. How she loves him, after all! She will do anything, will do everything, to save him.

  But at the sight of his car, parked near their house, she is frightened, and aware that her emotions are sliding about like marbles: what color will come up next? Some red of passion, or maybe green for fresh grief?

  Richard is supposed to be at his studio: her fear informs Stella that she thinks he could wretchedly, angrily kill himself at any time.

  Still and terrified, she forces herself to walk into the apartment.

  There is Richard, in an old gray robe; has she seen it before? She does not remember. It could be a costume for depression. He is watching television. “That’s right,” he says, to everything on her face, all that she has not said. “I’m here, and I’m watching soaps.” He turns back to the screen, where an adolescent couple in matching sweaters is walking toward a white-pillared house, hand in hand.

  But you’ve got all that work to do, Stella does not say. Nor does she remind him of promises: you said you would.

  She only asks, “Can I make you some lunch?”

  “No, thanks.” His voice is cold and dead, and his eyes too, so cold and blank.

  How he must hate me, Stella thinks. And she wonders, Has he alw
ays?

  She says, “I think I’ll go down to the office. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do down there.”

  “Can’t stand to be around me, right? I don’t blame you.”

  She goes over and puts her arms around him, as he sits there. “Darling Richard, you’re sick. This is called being depressed. But you don’t have to feel like this. Doctors—they have pills.” His body as she holds him is as stiff and unyielding as an angry child’s body.

  He says, “I’m not depressed. I’ve just got myself in a lot of trouble. I have to figure out what to do.”

  It is true: she cannot stand to be with him. “I’ll see you later,” she says. “Dinner here? I’ll get some stuff.”

  “Where else?” He adds, “I’m not very hungry.

  Justine is in New York, looking at apartments. Looking around. Stella feels her absence keenly; she needs her friend. As she drives in an idle way across town, it seems to Stella that all her friends are out of town. Gone somewhere. Unavailable.

  On an impulse, and partly because she sees a place to park right there, she stops in front of the building where Margot and Andrew live, on Russian Hill. She parks and, in their lobby, rings their bell.

  Margot’s voice says, Hello? And then, as Stella identifies herself, “Darling, come right up. You’re an answered prayer.” But over the intercom her voice is ghostly, strange.

  And at her door, Margot warns, “You must take me as you find me. I’m the most total wreck. I look ghastly.” She has in fact a white linen scarf tied unbecomingly over her hair, and her trim jeans are dust-spattered, stained. “I’m cleaning house,” she explains. “Since Andrew’s away. But you’re my excuse to stop for tea. Just don’t mind how I look. Do you want a sandwich?”