by Alice Adams
“She was so insistent: a sort of command performance,” says Justine, as she laughs. “My new best friend. But she’s really not a bad sort.”
* * *
This constant possibility of Richard, which she feels as his imminence, is both frightening and deeply unsettling to Stella. He might be anywhere at all, she feels. Wherever she goes she might find him. Any ring of her phone or knock at her door might be Richard. Going anywhere at all seems unsafe: suppose, in some restaurant, Richard just happened to be there? (With a tall thin Nordic blonde, her polar opposite and Richard’s true type, Stella believes.)
Or just Richard by himself, on the street.
Richard, anywhere.
She is haunted by the possibility of Richard.
She manages to get herself to Margot’s party, and she instantly feels, even from outside the door, that Richard will not be there. He simply won’t; he could never turn up at a party, to see old friends, and so for a couple of hours she is safe. Among friends.
Laughing her silent wild laugh, almost choking on her own laughter, and whispering to each person, Margot greets her guests. In a shimmering pale-blue silk dress, very tight; her sharp bones protrude here and there.
“Guess what we did this afternoon?” she says to everyone who comes to her party, at the door. “Andrew and I got married! We actually did, we’re married. I’m Mrs. Andrew Julio Bacci, if I should choose to use that most improbable name.” And she laughs once more. “This is our wedding reception.”
And so people generally laugh too; they accept this act, this marriage, as simply too ridiculous (as Margot herself might put it), as hilarious—and so what might have been a real tear-jerker of a party (as Stella and Justine later describe it to each other) is fairly funny.
Justine is there with Collin. Her move to New York, which is imminent, has improved their connection vastly, Justine has said. Collin, at first disapproving, even (it seemed) reluctant to release her, has now come around and is looking forward to visits—his to New York (“Shows! Restaurants! All your new friends”) and hers back there, to San Francisco: Justine will stay with him when she comes out, he will see her more than ever. At the moment, as a couple, they exude a happy sensual rapport—for Stella, painful to observe. What a shit I am, she thinks, increasing her misery. Can’t I even bear to see a favorite friend happy?
Andrew, very thin, faintly tan from Mexico, looks luminous, intense. As their eyes meet, Andrew’s and Stella’s, Stella in that flash of darkness sees … too much. She sees a look that she can almost but not quite read. A look that is an acknowledgment, but of what? Love of Richard? Death?
They approach each other and exchange routine social greetings. How are you? You look great! Stella somehow manages to neglect to mention the new marriage, which for that moment she has actually forgotten. And the next thing Andrew says is not about Richard at all; he says, “Oh, I heard from our friend Simon Daniels. He’s terribly excited; he’s had some sort of first word on his book, and it’s really good.” He pauses. “The one on your father.” (As though Stella might not know what book he meant.)
“That’s great,” she says, and then adds, “It’s odd, though. You know my father wasn’t all that famous.”
“It could be just a good book, then. Good on its own, I mean.”
“Of course. I hope so.”
They stare at each other in a helpless, floundering way for a moment or two, before Stella says, as lightly as she can, “You think we’ll ever hear from Richard?”
Still staring at her, seeming to search for what to say, Andrew at last tells her, “I don’t think so somehow. He’d be holed up in his house, don’t you imagine?”
Stella has indeed imagined Richard at his house (has continued to call him there, to no avail), but not “holed up.” That phrase has for her a suggestion of coziness, of a perhaps needed vacation. Whereas she has thought of Richard as being in a state of desperation, hiding out. She asks, “You mean you think he’s okay?”
“Oh, probably.” But Andrew’s eyes have gone vague, almost glazed. And anyway, how would he know? Why is his guess any better than Stella’s?
Quite unreasonably, though, Stella feels a small spurt of cheer: Richard is okay, probably. He just needed a sort of rest. Even a rest from her.
Though at the same time another part of her mind insists: Richard is not okay. He is desperate. Sick.
To Andrew she says, with a sudden uncontrollable brightness, “I’m so glad you got married. That’s so nice.”
“Do you think so? We were trying to be funny.”
Obligingly Stella laughs. “Well, it is funny,” she tells him. “Nice and funny.”
When she goes home, Stella begins what is not exactly a letter to Richard but rather a sort of journal that is headed in his direction. She is to write many pages of this sort, which, for the moment, she simply saves, in a corner of a shelf.
“What I think is,” she writes, “although I know this is impossible, and wrong, I think you could just walk back into this house. Anybody home? in your announcing voice. And you could just be here. Ordinarily. And sometimes I think that is what I most miss, the daily words, the small connections. The continuity. The silly jokes about Legs.
“You could just walk in, we could casually kiss, as though nothing, none of this, had happened. It is very hard for me to believe that you can’t or won’t do that. And that I am alone for good, with this screaming loss.
“My dreams are still full of trouble, darkness and panic. But in all my waking fantasies you are here. Friendly, jokey. Ordinary, or as ordinary as is possible for you, for us. Strong and warm. You are here, and busy, and mostly in motion.
“You are very beautiful.
“You love me.”
32
Richard
Richard is not all right.
He can’t even do a decent job of killing himself. Those are the words that he repeats, and repeats, lying across his bed in the fogbound, cool spring night, the damp air resounding with waves. Over and over, to himself but aloud, he says, He can’t even do a decent job.
On the brink, on the very cold edge, the slippery cold rim of that cauldron, that churning, deathly hole, at the crucial moment, that night in the dark, Richard became some other person. He became a cowardly person who flung himself headlong down on the long wet grass, the scratchy weeds. He was suddenly someone afraid to jump, to die like that.
He remembered Stella, how terrified she had been at that place, that edge. As though he were inhabited by Stella. As though he were Stella, a frightened woman.
His bowels felt tight and hot. Unmanly.
Eventually he got up from the grass, and he slunk back to his car at the side of the road. That is how he saw himself, a slinking, dishonored person, a sneak and a thief. God knows, a liar. (And at least half queer, to boot.)
In his car he headed north, partly because he saw no point in turning around. No point in doing anything. But he drove and drove, beneath the thick black boring desolate sky. Past motels where people were probably not even fucking anymore.
He was hungry, he knew he was. On the other hand, why should he bother to eat? He did not deserve food, he knew that. But he stopped at an all-night coffee shop kind of place, where he knew beforehand that the booths would be cracked red vinyl and that there would be a round plastic-covered display of cakes and pies, all yellowed, sick.
He did not know, though, that in one of those bulbous booths, slumped over a cup of coffee, he would suddenly see the most beautiful boy: a young man, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with stringy blond hair and the loveliest mouth, with a pouted lower lip. And a perfect nose. The nose in fact was very much like someone’s: whose? And then Richard saw that the nose was exactly like his own. It was enough to make him smile, almost. The mouth, though, was not his, he was sure of that: the mouth was Eva’s, her pouted lip, so sexy. This boy could be their son, his and Eva’s. Tears stung Richard’s eyes at this thought, this dream of a son with Eva.
>
He sat down in the booth right next to the boy’s, sat so that they faced each other, and he imagined himself as this boy must see him: an old guy, middle-aged or more, in his silly checked shirt (the clothes he had meant to die in).
How he longed for that boy! Not sexually, nothing like that. He longed just to sleep with that boy in his arms. His son, his child.
The waitress was fat and dark. Mexican. Unpretty. Richard ordered scrambled eggs (why? he hates them), and as the woman left his booth he caught the boy’s eye, and they exchanged the slightest, smallest possible smile. Anything more, Richard perfectly well knew, and the boy would think he was coming on to him. Which, looking like that, with that mouth (and that nose!), must happen fairly often.
In Richard’s car there was still an envelope of bills for Stella, the almost five grand. (Actually, $4,987.31.) His last money, or nearly; it had taken three IRAs to pull that together for her. The least he could do, since he owes her forty thou. The least, but all he could do.
But on a quick, frenzied impulse, in that ratty all-night place, Richard got up and left his booth, his coffee, his cooling, coagulating eggs. He rushed out to his car for the envelope, just lying there on the seat. Back in the restaurant, breathless, he worked for a moment at obliterating Stella’s name and address with a marker pen. And then, pushing a ten onto his table, getting up and casually passing that lovely boy’s booth, he flipped the hidden money in its fat envelope onto the table, only saying, “I guess this is for you,” with a small hand salute.
And then Richard was out of there, gone. Still hungry and now without money. Almost.
At least for the rest of that night he had good thoughts, though. Dreams, although he never slept. He dreamed of that lovely mouth, all surprised and smiling, as the boy counted out the bills. Maybe took a few to the bank the next day to see if they were okay. Smiling, making plans.
Five grand is enough to change your life for at least a little, if you’re very young. Make a down payment on a certain kind of car. Take a trip to Mexico or even Europe; you could make it to France or Germany with that much money. Maybe the boy would go to Cologne? Or Venice; he had a romantic look to him, with his fallen hair and wild blue eyes. He could be a boy with a secret itch for Venice, and how easily Richard can imagine him there, in a gondola, his amazed young eyes lifted to the sight of an arched stone bridge, or to some magnificent palace, all beautifully dank, rotting into the depths of the Grand Canal.
* * *
Now, though, alone and cold in his own decaying house, Richard is not imagining Venice. That boy could just as well have been some young hooker, on his way down from Seattle to give glamorous San Francisco a try. Or he could be all mixed up with some dopey girl who needs an abortion, or needs a house, or a diamond ring, for Christ’s sake. So that he, Richard, has paid for a ring for some young bimbo. With Stella’s money.
How low can you sink without actually dying of it?
He has no money, almost none, for anything. Not the PG&E, much less the mortgage. It isn’t his house anymore, not really, and his credit at the grocery store is getting thin. He’ll be lucky to get through the summer up here.
His landlord at the studio in San Francisco, Mr. Caruso, has said he would try to sell all Richard’s things. But so far no action on that—and a secret that Richard knows, and no one else would guess, is that most of that stuff is junk. It looked good, was probably worthless. Like himself.
He still sometimes thinks of just driving down to the city, to Stella. Just walking right in, the way he always did. But he’s almost sure that it’s much too late for that.
He has waited too long to go back to Stella.
Besides, he owes her all that money.
He is actually a homeless person now. And that is where he will have to go, eventually. He will have to go someplace where there are shelters for the homeless. Shelters and soup kitchens. Feeding stations.
Probably it really won’t be too bad. Less lonely than now. Guys to talk to, everyone with his story. No more middle-class consumer-competitive shit to cope with, all day every day. Just down-and-outers like himself.
He’ll grow a beard and dye his hair dark; he wouldn’t want to run into anyone he knows. Used to know. Who would believe that dark-haired and shabby man, in dirty clothes, was him, handsome Richard, former clotheshorse, former hotshot lover?
Poor Stella would die if she saw him like that. It is almost tempting to see that she does, somehow.
But all in all it won’t be too bad, Richard thinks. Soup and muscatel. In many ways an improvement. Less stress. At least until it gets cold.
33
Stella
In Stella’s mind, all that long and cold fogged summer, Richard is almost anywhere, although she now knows that he is actually in his seacoast house. Collin Schmidt went up there, and after what sounded like a considerable search he found Richard.
“We didn’t talk long,” Bunny reported back. “He wouldn’t. Didn’t want to.” He added, “I think he feels bad about not getting in touch with you, Stella.”
(But: did Richard say he felt bad, or did kind Collin-Bunny simply assume that he would—or should?)
“I think he’s sort of embarrassed,” added Bunny.
This seemed plausible, and a wave of pity flushed through Stella’s veins, as she thought of Richard’s humiliation. His fall from every grace. His diminished self.
Somewhat later, though, another reaction set in, and with some anger she thought: How cruel of Richard to send me no word at all. He knew how I would feel. How I loved him.
A month or so later Bunny went up again and this time could not find Richard. “But I think he’s still living there. Stuff lying around. Sort of camped out. You might say hiding out, I guess.”
But is he still up there? Sometimes Stella imagines that horrifying crater in the earth, the unholy hole, up on that bluff: the roiling, crashing surf down below, and the sharp wet rocks all the way down that long descent. Could Richard have fallen there, accidentally or purposefully?
She thinks not, she does not believe that Richard is dead, but still—still, she is haunted.
Or could Richard indeed have abandoned his house and come back to town? Could he be a homeless person? Walking anywhere in San Francisco, past shabby, huddled men slumped down on side-walks, Stella feels a terror that one of them could be Richard.
(Very few homeless men have pale-blond hair, she notes.)
Sometimes she can make up stories about him, stories with happy endings. In the most convincing of these (to her), Richard has gone off to some very small town, someplace off in the valley, say, and there he has got work as a gardener. From time to time he used to say (she can hear him saying this): “What I do is such shit, as shitty as money is. I should have done something honestly dirty, like working in gardens. I’d be good at it, you know how I love flowers, and I really know quite a bit. I’d get tired and eat a lot and drink less, and sleep well.” Richard said that, and so why not? Why couldn’t Richard be living that life right now, working in gardens, maybe even with some young tall blond country girl that he had found along the way.
(I must be getting much better, Stella thinks, if I can wish for a girl for Richard. I must be a nicer, more grown-up person than I generally think.)
Somewhat later it occurs to her that most people in small towns tend their own gardens; especially in these depressed days, they do not hire new fancy gardeners from the city. And so that small fantasy explodes.
* * *
From her own desk, looking out into the woods, Stella watches the summer strollers there: couples, people with dogs, with children. Occasionally a man alone, a man with blond hair who turns out not to be Richard.
One day, at last, she thinks, This is crazy, out of control. Self-destructive. I am making a career of the loss of Richard. Ridiculous. I already have a career.
The next day she rents an office in a downtown building—very expensive, because she wants it right away and because
it has a very small postcard view of the bay, the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island. Cars, sails, freighters. Lost seagulls. No people.
Expensive, but to Stella entirely worth it; her strategy works. In this room where, God knows, Richard has never been, and where the version of herself who loved and lived with Richard has not been either, Stella does not think of him. She works, and she is slowly aware of the emergence within herself of a saner, stronger person.
34
Richard
Standing in a phone booth on a corner in downtown Mendocino, as he scolds an operator and mutters, out of her earshot, “Bitch. Retard. Jesus Christ!” Richard also observes the passing parade of late-summer tourists, all misshapen, fat, or scrawny or somehow twisted, in their awful, awful clothes. He does not look across the street and down across bluffs to the water, the beach, and the wide green mouth of the river—which he used to find breathtaking, mind-stopping, beautiful.
“My darling man, why on earth are you calling collect?” says Andrew, in an unfamiliar voice. A thin voice, faintly rasping.
“Because I don’t have any money. Why do you think?” But Richard laughs; of course he is joking. And then he asks, “So how’s by you?”
“Not great. Fucking plague. I’m going, Rich. I really am.”
“No,” says Richard, as though a question had been asked. “Guess what, old Dog Shoes? I won’t let you go.”
“So what’ll you do to save me, Dickie Bird?”
“Anything. Far as that goes, I may have it too, you know?”
“You may, but I doubt it. Safe sex, remember? But all my fault, right?”
“Well, I liked it, you know.” Saying this required an effort, but if he can make Andrew feel any better at all, Richard somewhat vaguely thinks, things will improve for them both.
And Andrew’s voice does sound a little stronger as he says, “Well. Thanks.”
A long, probably expensive pause ensues, during which Richard watches a fat family. Mom and Dad in matching purple sweatshirts, fat kids with sticky faces, and the baby wearing glasses, already broken and mended with Scotch tape.