Almost Perfect (17 page)

Richard’s face is red and swollen with anger and hatred. His wild eyes dart about. How he longs to be away from her! Stella can see that. Perhaps he longs to kill her?

She begins to scream like a child, a very sick child. Rushing toward him, she beats on Richard with small clenched fists, hitting against his chest. How she longs to hurt him! But how horrible, how incredible! What she is doing is mad. Hitting and screaming. Crazy!

“Crazy fucking bitch.” Richard has grasped her wrists and holds them hard.

Stella bursts into tears. “You’re hurting me,” she tells him. Although actually he is not, not hurting her wrists. But the tears (perhaps it is the tears) serve to prevent his running away. He drops her wrists, and she falls against him. And they fall together.

Fall, somehow, into bed.

A few hours later they wake, simultaneously. Both thirsty. Both needing to use the bathroom. “You go first,” Stella tells him.

After her turn, creeping back into bed, she asks him, “Do you think we’re both crazy?”

He mutters, “I guess.”

“I think we’ve got to drink less. For one thing.”

“I guess.”

He turns on his side, away from her, and Stella clings to his back, as though for life.

“Yes indeed. I think Stella’s going to be very, very successful,” says Richard to Bolling one lunchtime that fall. They are in one of the few remaining old North Beach Italian restaurants, sitting at the long, dark, high-polished bar (a bar that they are agreed is a classic, perfect). Drinking Negronis.

“But I’m not at all sure that Stella’s equipped to handle success,” Richard continues.

Al is not especially interested in hearing about Stella, Richard can tell—and actually why should he be? Richard was only talking to keep the ball rolling, so to speak; otherwise Al is given to long black sullen lapses. But now he seems to respond. “That’s a problem with my daughter, Alexis,” he tells Richard. “Such a will to fail. I honestly believe that affected her, uh, sexual direction. Afraid of failing with men. Which was all my fault. Naturally.”

Bolling’s litanies of self-reproach and self-pity are very boring, very repetitive, but Richard forces himself to listen supportively, since—Christ!—if this job fails he will really, really, really be up shit creek without a paddle. “It’s hard to understand about your daughter,” he says to Bolling, as he has more than once before. “Such a beautiful girl, from her pictures.” And then he adds, obliquely, “It’s not exactly the same problem with Stella.”

“I suppose not.”

Bolling is drinking more than usual, as he has been for several weeks, which is one of the things that are worrying to Richard. Bolling is such a somber drinker; he talks and talks, but never jokes. No fun and games. Or else that silence. And sometimes when he talks he makes very little sense.

And it’s very hard to get him to focus back on business, when Richard very much needs to do just that.

“A real touch of fall in the air today,” he next attempts.

“Not surprising. October.” Bolling frowns into his drink.

“I guess not. But about now’s when I always start to think of skiing.”

“Almost November. I think of the Day of the Dead,” says Bolling. “Mexico. So interesting, their celebrations of death. Decorating skeletons, all that. The processions. Didn’t you tell me your girlfriend had some Mexican connection?”

“Yes, her mother—”

“I’d like to talk to her sometime. Does she have special feelings about death, would you say?”

“She doesn’t talk about it much. Stella’s pretty young, you know.” And so am I, you gloomy old crock, Richard does not say. But he forces himself to go on. “She’s thinking of taking up skiing this year,” he lies; Stella has admitted to a severe fear of heights, but said she’d be happy to go along on a trip to wherever for skiing.

“What would you say was the basis for her problem with success?” Bolling unexpectedly asks. Just like him, Richard bitterly reflects: you think he isn’t paying attention when he is, and vice versa.

“Well, uh, it’s hard to say. Something to do with her father, probably. I guess he was pretty hard on her, most of the time.”

Bolling scowls. “It’s a tough road, being a father.”

“Oh, for sure,” agrees Richard—at that moment passionately hating Al Bolling. How he longs to tell Al what he can do with his whole fucking project, and with his ugly dyke daughter. “Sometimes I think I’m very lucky not to have kids,” he states piously.

This seems to work.

“You’re quite right there,” says Bolling. “Stupidest thing I ever did. Siring children.” And then, with what Richard thinks of as one of his lapses into sanity, Bolling says, “I take it that you’ve got some idea about ski pictures, for the Fillmore?”

“Oh, do I!” Richard almost shouts and laughs with relief, but he forces himself to remain very serious and sober. “Only the greatest idea I ever had,” he says.

“Meet me in Reno!” Richard shouts into the telephone, across thousands and thousands of miles. To Eva, in Madrid. “In Nevada! Reno! I’ll meet you, and we’ll go to Squaw Valley. Ski. It’s marvelous there. I have to see you. I can’t live like this, without you …”

The Prado is just across the street from the Ritz, where she is, Eva is saying. She is sitting there in her suite, looking across to the Prado. So wonderful, the most marvelous collection of Flemish. Memling. Bosch. He should come there, Eva tells him; in fact why not right away? She too cannot wait.

“Christ, Eva. I can’t come right now. But in a month or so, early snow, come to Reno. I’ll meet you.”

She has heard of Reno, Eva tells him, her harsh, shadowed voice throbbing across all that distance. Reno is where, she understands, Americans go to divorce? This is perhaps his intention? She laughs deeply, almost gutturally.

“Eva, you know I’m not married. Jesus Christ, I’m talking about skiing. I love you!”

She too does, does love him, her handsomest Richard, says Eva. But at this moment she is most terrifically tired. Does he know that it is almost midnight where she is? (In the Ritz, across from the Prado.)

Oh
. He could kill her. Bitch! Kraut cunt! with her perfect
teeth and skin and breasts and—Christ!—everything! with her
body
, that length of grace. Her scents of intimacy. Oh Jesus, her intimate blond hair! How he wishes her dead. His sister. His twin. His mirror image.

At first, an hour or so later, Richard does not recognize the female voice on the phone, although of all women’s voices in the world, he knows this one best—or has known it longest: it is Marina, his former and his first and in a sense his only wife (Claudia never counted as a wife). But this voice is low and deep: at first for a wild moment he thinks it could be Stella imitating Eva—but how …?

“I think you’d better come over,” this woman says. “Rickie, I need you. I’m over on Jersey Street, near the Castro.” And Marina gives him a number.

The tone of her voice has left Richard no choice at all: she is sick, or crazy, or both. She needs him.

Panic encircles Richard, as he drives up Castro. All those boys on corners, leather-jacketed gay couples, feeling each other’s asses as they walk. The stores, all full of kinky gay merchandise. Even the movie house, the Castro, with its Hepburn revival week. Is everyone staring at him as he drives along? Do they imagine that he belongs here, among
them
? Richard feels eyes watching, observing him, and looks rigidly ahead.

Arrived at the number on Jersey Street, he presses a bell. At which nothing happens. He stands there, in the baking October sunlight, still a little drunk from lunch. And it is so hot, it will never snow. He is thinking that he must have been wrong, must have heard it wrong, or else crazy Marina gave him the wrong house number, maybe even the wrong street.
Jesus
.

But the next thing he knows, there is Marina, coming out the front door to stand beside him. Or he guesses it must be Marina. She looks so terrible, he could have passed her on the street. Nothing pretty about her anymore, or young. Drab long dirty-blond hair, and an awful too-long rag of a dress. Not quite looking up at him, she says, “I’m really sick. Just take me somewhere, would you?”

“Sick how? what kind of sick?” he asks her, even as he dreads her telling him something, some female detail that he does not want to hear. Cannot hear.

But instead she laughs. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to see you, lovely Rickie.”

Oh Jesus. She isn’t sick in a physical way at all, just crazy. She’s really crazy now, Richard thinks. I will take her somewhere. A psycho ward, that’s where she should be.

A chain of associations then goes off in his mind, leading him to think, Mount Zion Hospital. It’s sort of Jewish. Jews, psychiatry. I’ll take her to Mount Zion; they must have a crazy ward there. Out of the Castro.

In the car, Marina seems to forget how she looks, and she almost tries to flirt—to flirt!—with her former husband who met her in Paterson when they were both eighteen. Is that crazy?

“You know I do miss seeing you, old handsome, and it doesn’t seem right, especially since you’re not with that Claudia anymore. Don’t you think we could, you know, try it out sometime?” Through terrible dangling hair, she leers up sideways at him. “For a long time I was with this other person, his wife was a cop, did I tell you that? And jealous? I’m here to tell you.” She laughs, tossing hair from her face. Horribly. “But he’s not around anymore, and so, Rickie, gee, why not?”

Minutes later, as they turn onto Divisadero, she asks him, “Rickie, where are we going?”

Clutching his arm as he drives too fast, she says, “Rickie, you know I never loved anyone but you.”

He makes a fast right off Divisadero and onto Sutter, pulls into Emergency. Ambulances, attendants. Fortunately no big emergency going on right now, just some nurses and intern-looking people walking slowly through the revolving door.

But he can’t just leave her right there, can he? Can he leave now, get out of there?

“Rickie, don’t leave me, please!”

Not looking at her, and feeling the rise of panic in his veins, Richard parks beside an idling ambulance, calls “Be right out!” to the driver, and propels Marina through the doors. And into a scene of hell: old people, black people, middle-aged people, kids,
lying there on gurneys or sitting in wheelchairs. Fright, anguish, despair or simple stoic rage on every face. Taking it all in, for one instant Richard closes his eyes.

He grasps at a man who must be a doctor—green scrub clothes, a stethoscope around his neck; he points over to Marina, now cowering by a water cooler. Her eyes are more scared than any other eyes in that room. Richard whispers to the doctor, “That woman is psychotic. Maybe dangerous. I’ve got to get out of here.”

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!
”

“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.