Almost Perfect (29 page)

(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.

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.

Andrew says, “Well, old man, you certainly did a vanishing act.”

“I guess I did.” They have, collectively, the biggest asses he ever saw, that family. The poor baby will grow up not only nearsighted but heavy-assed, poor child.

“So.” Andrew pauses, and then, in his increasingly confident voice, he asks Richard, “Feel like doing it again?”

“How do you mean?”

But even as he asks this, Richard too feels a surge of confidence, of hope. A clear instinct told him to go out and call Andrew this afternoon, and now Andrew sounds as though he had been waiting for this call. Richard was right to call—in the sense that he is always right. His inner voice is right.

Andrew begins to explain. “There is this place in Mexico, near Guymas. They do this cure there, and I’ve been thinking about it. But I needed someone, I guess I needed you. Of course Margot doesn’t think it will work.” He pauses. “Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of money for us both. For almost forever.”

Richard is in love with Mexico City. The whole insane polluted overpopulated gorgeous mess. Walking along the streets and boulevards, he is time after time stopped in his tracks by some marvel: a small pale-green plaster house, with curling white
oversized scrolls around all the windows and the door. Or the dull gray and crazily carved wildly irregular facade of a church, with its entering courtyard of trees, now all leafed out. So beautiful! It almost makes him weep.

He walks all day. He walks until he almost drops and his eyes are strained and dizzy with seeing so much, and then he comes back to the hotel, and to Andrew. Poor pale exhausted Andrew, less beautiful now, who lies by the pool on a long pink plastic lounge chair, covered with towels.

They are staying in a large commercial hotel, down by Chapultepec Park (where the castle is! and the museum of carriages). In a few days, or more (Richard is secretly hoping for much longer), they will leave for Guymas. Andrew calls the clinic every day, but so far there are no vacancies. They’re really crowded.

“I guess that’s a good sign?” Andrew has asked this several times.

And Richard always reassures him: “Of course it is. The word’s got out.” Although privately he doesn’t think it’s such a great sign, necessarily; it only means more desperate people, clutching at what might be a little more life.

When they do go to the clinic, Richard himself plans to be tested, or he might even take the cure—prophylactically, as it were. Although he feels okay. Just tired. Not quite his old energy level, but it’s probably just the altitude. And so much walking.

He loves Mexicans, all those lovely dark-eyed, dark-haired people, many with brownish skins. How blond he feels, and how tall! How they stare! I would not have liked it in Cologne, he decides; I would have looked too much like everyone else there. Eva and I looked too much alike. No wonder Stella loved me so much, he thinks.

He is seeing bits of Stella everywhere. Stella, in all the faces in Mexico.

I was never so beautiful as when I was with Stella, Richard thinks.

In a way that’s really too bad.

Maybe someday he’ll go back to Stella.

“I love you! Oh, how I love you. Your body, all of you, so beautiful …”

Moved by these words, murmured close to her ear (how could she not be moved?), Stella, in another part of her mind, is registering a question: Who does he sound like? This is John Schmidt, her young lover; of course it is John who is speaking, she knows that. But those words have a ring of someone else.

Surely not Richard. He never talked like that, was never so reckless. And not Liam; his avowals were edited, were faintly literary, always.

And then in a rush it comes to her that John sounds like herself. Herself with Richard. Herself quite crazed, quite crazy in love.

John sounds like her, although she wonders, did she actually
say those things, or is that simply how she felt? But John is neither crazy nor out of control. He is simply an openhearted, generous young man. In love.

They are in a motel on the Oregon coast, high up on a bluff, overlooking a rocky beach and now, in late fall, a turbulent sea. The motel itself is simple, utilitarian; plain and clean. The view is the room’s main feature; one wall is all glass, all view. But the wall that faces the king-size, low-slung bed in which Stella and John now lie is papered over with a large, sepia-tinted photomural—incongruously, of snow. Snow-laden boughs, a narrow path cut through deep banks of snow. In the distance, a snow-peaked mountain. So that Stella has thought of Richard, Richard in the snow. Richard with his silly hat and runny nose, not beautiful but human. Entirely loved.

Earlier that morning, John got up to run, down on the beach, and Stella, looking at all that snow (and wondering why a snow scene, in an Oregon coast motel?), thought so powerfully of Richard, more strongly than for some months now, that she thought it must be Richard who would come back into the room. Richard out on some car errand, who would tap lightly on the door and then come back into the room where she lay waiting for him. Casual Richard, coming in as he had to their condo at Tahoe, or anywhere. No momentous return, for nothing momentous had happened; they had always been together.

But there was no knock, and of course it was John who came in, grinning, throwing her a kiss on the way to the shower. Who after a lot of rushing water came back into bed with her, all clean, and breathing, “I love you, oh, how I love you.” And touching her firmly, expertly.

“I love you too,” says Stella, more matter-of-factly. She believes this to be true.

Certainly she loves his openness, his willingness to be vulnerable, exposed. He seems to have no guile, no calculation in these matters. He is about five years younger than Stella, but she feels him to be of another generation, and she wonders, Are all young men like that these days? She very much hopes so.

And certainly in a sexual way she is drawn to John; although she would never say this aloud, not even to Justine (and although
she is ashamed, even, of these unbidden thoughts), Stella does make certain sexual comparisons. John and Richard. And by any reasonable standards, in a technical way John comes off much better. He is both livelier and more generous than Richard was; he makes love to her with an energetic, strong competence, and with love. Whereas with Richard, Stella had an occasional lurking sense that he and she together made love to him; they were joined in this essential enterprise of loving Richard.

But she is not in love with John. Although it is true that she loves him.

Young John Schmidt. Or sometimes “young Dr. Schmidt.” That was how Stella thought of him when they first met, about a month before this trip. Kindly Collin-Bunny called to ask Stella out to dinner, and then called again to ask, would it be okay to bring his son along? He could guarantee good behavior. Stella did not think, then or later, that Bunny had intended to fix them up; more likely he shied away from the idea of an evening all alone with Stella, who might (he might think) talk too much about Richard (actually she talked rather little about him these days, even to Justine).

As it was, the three of them, Bunny and Stella and John, ate an enormous amount of calamari and pasta, somewhere south of Market Street, and they drank a lot of wine and generally had fun.

Stella was much struck by the unlikeness between father and son: Bunny’s genial affability, John’s dark shyness. And struck too by their mutual honest good spirits and pleasure in each other’s company. That was what Stella mostly made of the evening: two exceptionally nice men, who seemed more friends than father and son. But then, she thought, I’m hardly an expert on families.

Partly they seemed unrelated biologically, because of physical dissimilarity: plump and rather florid, gray-bald Bunny—and smallish, dark, lithe John, with intelligent, wary gold-brown eyes. Only their mouths were very similar, both wide and firm, strong and shapely mouths. Sexy mouths, and she remembered Justine’s
saying, “It’s his mouth that gets me. It’s so—so competent.” With her laugh. Stella did notice John’s mouth, that first night.

John took her home, and he called the next day, and the next and the next, and he took her out to dinner on those nights. At her door, each night, he would kiss her, a light brush of his mouth against hers.

They had several such dinners, and kisses, and had a week or so apart when John was on call at the hospital. And then John asked if she had ever seen the Oregon coast. No. Would she like to? Yes.

“I think it’s too soon after Richard for anything serious, and he’s a very serious young man,” is how Stella put it to Justine, on the phone from New York.

“Is he? I just remember how attractive. I was quite bowled over.”

“Well, I’m not. Thank God. Who’d want that again.”

During that early dinner with John and Bunny, Stella heard several references to someone named Estelle—a friend of John’s, she gathered, but she noted that both John and Bunny spoke the name with a touch of sadness, of reverence, almost. And so it did not seem a matter for teasing questions, even were Stella given to that sort of thing. At a later point, though, when they began to discuss the trip to Oregon, John told her, “I did go up there with Estelle.”

“Oh. Estelle?” as though she had not heard the name before.

He must have been wanting to tell her, for then a great deal came out: Estelle had been John’s girlfriend (“We were very serious, going to get married”). And Estelle had died at twenty-five, of breast cancer. Terrible for Bunny too, John said; Bunny had been crazy about her.

Romantically, John and Stella waited to make love until their trip away. Stella also felt a strong superstitious fear of someone else in the bed she had shared with Richard—as though Richard,
still, might sense this alien presence and suddenly in the night return.

When at last they were together, in the first motel, which was still in northern California (not far from where Richard probably was), when John exclaimed his love, and spoke so fervently of passion, Stella was sure that she heard a longing in his voice that was not for her alone. He loved and longed for poor dead Estelle, as, when Stella returned his kisses, passionately, the passion and the longing were also for Richard.

Now, in the Oregon motel, John asks her, “What about it—shall we push on up north, or stick around here for another day or so?”

Stella laughs with pleasure at their indolence, their leisure. Pulling back her hair, she tells him, “I don’t even know where we are.”

“It’s called Port Orford.”

“Well, we do like it here.” She hesitates. “But maybe we should try farther on? Weren’t there supposed to be wonderful sand dunes somewhere?”

His husky voice: “I think so.” He hesitates. “I think I’d like it anywhere with you.”

“Let’s not put that to the test, okay?”

“Okay, lady. Whatever you say. But first, here, let me touch you.”

“Oh yes.” She closes her eyes, she moves to him.

Justine has come out to San Francisco to interview Stella. That is how she speaks of it, with a wondering small laugh. “I’ve come all the way out here for an interview with you!” in her special Texas-Harvard voice. Although the truth is that of course she wanted to come; she would use any excuse for a visit to what she now thinks of as home. “Back home in San Francisco” is her new joke. Still, both women are serious about the interview, which was commissioned by a new magazine,
YOU
, that Justine says looks very good so far. Competition for
The Gotham.