Almost Perfect (26 page)

“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.

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 always?

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?”

“No; no, thanks. Tea would be wonderful. But where’s Andrew?”

“Oh …” A pause. “He’s off to Mexico. So foolish. He’ll only get sick. Or sicker.” Margot is almost tearful as she says this.

“Lucky Andrew. I’d give almost anything to be in Mexico,” says Stella, with conscious foolishness—but realizing as she speaks that she would love to be almost anywhere, away from San Francisco. Even away from Richard, and so much trouble.

“I’m afraid he thinks it’ll be some terrific help to him, going
to Mexico,” Margot explains. “He’ll get all healthy, he thinks. He’s at some beach place I never heard of. Escondido.”

“South of Oaxaca,” Stella tells her. “It’s getting popular.”

“Yes, but I’d feel safer if he went to some normal place. Like Vallarta or even Acapulco. If he did get sick they’d have good doctors.”

But even good doctors can’t do a lot for people with AIDS. Stella of course does not say this, although she feels that her ensuing silence must speak, must imply her true hopelessness, and so she breaks it, saying, “He could get a lot of sun, and exercise, and come back at least feeling better.”

Margot frowns. “Yes, but infections. Any infection, don’t you see?”

“Yes, I do see.”

Stella sees too, or begins to see, the extent of Margot’s panic. Like a cloud, like weather, it fills the room, infecting the air.

Margot continues. “What’s that terrible phrase they use? Opportunistic infections—is that it?”

Stella tries a small laugh. “I think so. Sounds right. I wonder if doctors ever think of metaphors.”

“Oh, they can’t have time. Excuse me, I’ll go make tea. Sit down. Why are we standing about like this?”

We’re standing because we’re both much too agitated to sit. Stella could have told her this but does not. Partaking of Margot’s concern for Andrew, Stella has pushed Richard to some invisible depth of her consciousness, but still he is there, an enormous ache. A longing. A terrified premonition of loss.

“Well,” says Margot, returning with their tea sometime later (it has seemed an hour but cannot have been more than ten minutes). “How is gorgeous Richard these days?”

“Oh, I think he was sort of disappointed at not going to Cologne.” Why did she say this? Stella cannot imagine. Nor does she know why she then goes on to say, “This food conference there, you know. He was invited and all set to go, and then it was cancelled.” She emphasizes, “He was really looking forward to it.”

Meaningfully Margot takes this up. “I’ll
bet
he was disappointed.”

“Well, he was. I guess he would have mentioned it to Andrew?” But why ask Margot this? What on earth does it matter, Richard talking to Andrew; who cares what they say? “And then there was that man who jumped off the bridge,” she hurries on. “Al Bolling. Richard knew him pretty well; he was doing some work with him.”

“I knew Al Bolling,” Margot reminds her. “I met him at your party, remember? We went out for dinner. Twice. I can’t say I was surprised that he did what he did. I mean, of course I was sorry to hear it, but what a drunk, and you know those drinkers get really depressed.”

After the smallest of pauses, during which Stella and possibly Margot too considers Richard’s drinking, Stella says, “And then Richard’s poor wife. His first wife, Marina. Getting killed like that. So sad.”

Ignoring poor Marina, Margot next says, “I think Richard must be
really
worried over Andrew.”

“Oh, do you?” Somewhat surprised that Margot would claim such intimate knowledge of Richard, Stella for the moment only grasps at this further (possible) explanation for Richard’s being so terribly depressed: of course, he likes Andrew, and Andrew, who is HIV positive, will almost certainly die of AIDS.

“Yes,” says Margot, and with what later strikes Stella as undue emphasis, she adds, “Very worried.”

At the time, as Stella sips her tea and considers where to go next, the knot in her stomach that is worry over Richard tightens, so that it is hard to breathe, much less think. Or respond to what is being said.

They talk very little more, and Stella leaves as soon as she can.

At the paper, amid all the good, reassuring, familiar and sometimes intolerable clatter, the clacking and humming machines, the talk, endless talk, and laughs, screeches, noisy sighs—there Stella at last is able to work. It is as though the part of her mind that has been focussed on Richard, anxiously whirling in circles around the problem of Richard, is now taken up or absorbed by the sounds of other people, leaving the rest of Stella’s attention for her work.

*  *  *

What to have for dinner.

By late afternoon this looms as an enormous problem for Stella. And it is one that has always been so easily resolved: Usually at some point during the day, if this has not been discussed at breakfast, Stella and Richard will talk on the phone, telling what happened to each of them so far in his and her day. And then one or the other will say, Shall we go out for dinner, try that new place, Suppers? It sounds good. Or, I feel like cooking, okay? I’ll make a surprise. (Either of them might say this, since they both really like to cook.) Or, shall I pick up something in North Beach?