Almost Perfect (20 page)

“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.

Walking for a moment alone with Justine, Stella says to her, half facetiously, “How can you leave California? It’s so incredibly beautiful here.”

And again Justine answers her seriously. “But that’s almost a reason I have to, don’t you see?”

Stella does see.

“I’m so fucking tired of California. It’s too fucking beautiful,” says Richard, on the long drive home, exactly as though he had heard Stella’s conversation with Justine.

“We could go somewhere else.”

“Haven’t we had this conversation a few times before?”

“How about Santa Fe?” she asks him. “We could go to the opera. I have some really nice friends there.”

“Or we could go to Venice. I know. Or Germany. Now that you’re such a big rich successful lady.” His laugh is unpleasant, but then he (surprisingly) smiles, and he says, “Okay. Let’s go to the opera in Santa Fe. At least we’ve never done that before.”

This house, toward which Stella and Richard and their hosts, Stella’s friends the Fiegenbaums, have driven for miles out into the scrubby canyon country, out from Santa Fe—the house seems all windows, multiple plate glass just now ablaze with late-afternoon sunlight. A desert garden, an effusion of exotic cactus with spiky, wild-colored flowers, surrounds the house and spreads off at one side in the direction of some scrim-fenced tennis courts and an enormous oblong swimming pool.

I won’t like these people but Richard will, is what Stella is thinking, as the four of them approach the house. And we’ll all drink too much and maybe miss the opera, she thinks. And then she reverses to tell herself, Christ, Richard is right: I really am negative, a killjoy, a spoilsport. I haven’t even seen these people, and already they’re making me late to the opera.

The front door, high-gloss black with bright brass trimmings, then opens—and there is Richard’s perfect woman, his type, the paradigmatic blonde. Tall, with long legs and visible breasts, in a pink silk T-shirt, white pants. Long fluffy fair hair and oversized eyes, slightly wild, blue. Stella looks over at Richard for one instant, to see him beginning his warm killer-sexy smile. Stella has never felt so small, so dark. So Mexican.

But what the woman says is, to Stella, “Stella
Blake
! I can’t tell you how glad I am, I’m such a fan, I’ve been dying to meet you. This is so
great
!”

“That’s so nice, that’s kind of you,” Stella stumbles, glancing again at Richard, somewhat fearfully. His smile has gone blank, pale blue-gray eyes slate, opaque.

“Well, I’ve read everything you’ve written; those last pieces in
The Gotham
, so wonderful—”

“I hate to interrupt this love feast, but couldn’t we all be introduced?” The husband, whose name they have been told is Gregory—does not like to be called Greg—is small, barrel-chested, with a heavy, jutting jaw. “I’m Gregory,” he says, “and the blonde is Irene. Ma femme.”

Tracy Fiegenbaum, also tall and blond and very thin (too thin for Richard, Stella has half-consciously thought), laughs uncomfortably and says, “Oh—I should have—Stella and Richard, Irene and Gregory.”

“Richard Fallon,” Richard says, just emphasizing his own last name, as in a manly way he shakes hands with Gregory (Baker, Banker? somehow the last name was lost).

“You’re here for the opera?” Gregory too is very deep-voiced. (How odd men are together, Stella notes, sensing immediate Gregory-Richard bonds.)

“Mostly to see Jerry and Tracy, here.” Richard gracefully backs up to stand next to (very close to) Tracy, who looks surprised and then smiles, going faintly pink.

In a gradual way, then, those six somewhat uneasily linked people begin to move toward the pool, rather than into the house. Stella has hoped for the house; it might be cooler there, and also she is curious: how could any two people fill so much space? But they walk along a path among marvelous gaudy flowers, to an
area of white gravel, white wrought iron—lacy-looking, nice—beside the very long black pool. They all arrange themselves across the furniture.

“Anyone care to swim?” Puckering her forehead, sure that no one will swim, blond Irene still asks, adding, “I’m sure it’s warm enough.”

She has spoken mostly to Stella, who is thinking that in fact she would have loved to swim, if only there weren’t all that business about bathing suits. She does not like to think of herself in a suit that belonged to perfect Irene.

“Honey, for Christ’s sake, we all want a drink. It’s drink time, not body-dunking time. That bloody pool,” he tells his guests. “Costs its weight in uranium, or truffles, maybe. Don’t know why we put in the damn thing.”

“You can’t beat a custom pool, though,” says Richard, instantly a pool expert. “And that black, that was really a smart move.”

What Stella likes best, so far, about Santa Fe is the sky, the giant wafting clouds, now tinged with pale gold from the slowly setting sun. In the two days that they have been here, she has observed the most amazing cloud shifts and changes, from fleecy sheep clouds to thunderheads, in minutes. Yesterday in the afternoon there was a terrific thunderstorm, reminding her of New England thunderstorms, with her grandparents, in the summer, which she managed not to say: Richard much dislikes these reminders. (“He’s very threatened by New England,” she once remarked to Justine, but they could not work out why, and they laughed a lot instead; it did sound silly, once you got away from Richard and his aura of scariness.) And after the thunderstorm yesterday, a perfect clarity, a lovely cool clear evening. Today, though, is still hot at sunset: perhaps it will storm later? For some reason the notion is ominous, although generally Stella likes rain, and thunderstorms. And their opera seats are sheltered.

The morning was cool and breezy, clouds moved swiftly across the sky, and along Canyon Road the poplar leaves rustled, as merchants hovered nervously about their wares and scanned
the sky, as though eager tourists might be coming from up there. Stella and Richard had been heading for—or, rather, looking for—a store that San Francisco friends had said was “marvelous.” But it had a name they could not remember. Something about an owl, they both thought.

“On the other hand,” Stella pointed out, “do we really want to find a store that Margot recommended? Her taste is so precious, so predictable. You used to say that every time.”

“Yes, but she really knows Santa Fe; she’s been here a lot. Andrew told me.”

They both ignored the slight illogic of this; in fact Richard much dislikes “logic,” seeming to feel that it is some female trick. Unlike most men, he believes that women, and especially Stella, are highly, punitively rational, whereas he, with his instinctive grasp of everything, is right, and not only right but more in tune, more a part of the world, the universe.

Unfortunately a new idea along those lines, rational lines, occurred to Stella at just that moment. “We do take advice from odd people, have you noticed? Remember the restaurant in Capitola that that dopey girlfriend of Cats’s told us to go to? and the hotel in Mendocino? It’s as though we think almost anyone knows more than we do.”

Richard scowled—though beautifully. This is precisely the sort of speculation he most dislikes—and Stella knows how he dislikes it, but still, sometimes, she finds herself going on and on in that vein. Speculating. Rationally.

“Write an article about it,” said Richard. “Tell it to
The Gotham
.”

“Oh, that must be the store.” Stella was grateful at that moment for a hanging sign that swayed in the stiffening breeze, announcing
The Unstuffed Owl
.

“My God, pure Margot,” Stella whispered, as they entered.

Antiques: tiny fruitwood tables crowded with amethyst paperweights and filigreed silver frames; carved mahogany tables; heavily framed oil portraits on the walls, the canvas dark and cracked.

The owner, though, looked purely Sante Fe: a plumpish blond woman in a starched ruffled blouse, a denim skirt, and the
requisite silver conch belt (hers somewhat larger and heavier than most, Stella and no doubt Richard also noted). A woman of unidentifiable age, and little manifest charm or attractiveness—whom Richard, ever quixotic, decided to win.

“I can certainly see that you haven’t limited your travels to the Southwest,” he began.

“Oh no. Actually, England. And New England. Sometimes France.” She beamed, showing large tobacco-stained teeth.

“We travel quite a lot too …”

Stella at that point began to disengage from them, and from that conversation, and to wander, though much impeded by sheer clutter, through other rooms, to which she paid minimal attention. More of the same, everywhere. She had recently been asked by
The Gotham
to do some travel pieces, with emphasis on women travelling alone. (“But mostly I don’t travel alone.” “Try it, you might like it.” They both laughed, she and the editor.) It might not be a bad idea, Stella thought, as ostensibly she examined a grandfather clock (are there grandmother clocks? she wondered). She could take a few trips alone, let Richard fend for himself occasionally—but at that thought the familiar net of anxieties in which he kept her bound descended again, and she thought, Oh, if I go on a trip he might do … anything.

Just at that moment she heard the voice of Richard, who was saying, “Stella has a contract with
The Gotham
; they want to see everything she writes. Stella Blake, maybe you’ve read her?”

“No, actually we don’t, I don’t subscribe to
The Gotham
yet. But I’ll certainly …”

And as Stella came back into the room (no choice: she saw no other way to exit from the store, much as she would have liked to), she heard the woman say, “My, your husband is certainly proud of you,” beaming, with all those dirty teeth.