Rich Rewards (11 page)

I had of course assumed love affairs for Jean-Paul, over the years. But I guess I had imagined that he would not have
put in too much time in that way, being so busy. Unlike me. But in that picture it looked as though he had put in a lot of time, a lot of love affairs.

I could not work out an approach to him, nor what to say once I had thought of one.

One morning Tony Brown came in considerably later than usual, at almost nine. He looked terrible, as though ashes had been rubbed into his beautiful warm brown skin. When he opened the door, I was sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast. I thought he must be sick, but I didn’t like to ask. Besides, we hardly ever had conversations beyond what was necessary in the way of directions from me, and his explanations about what he was doing, and where and when. Or when I praised his work. I felt much affection for Tony, of a restfully unconversational sort; it had seemed to me that much too much of my life had been taken up in conversation, not all of it constructive, or even always fun.

However, when Tony glanced down at my eggs and looked even more ashen, I knew absolutely what was wrong: the poor kid had a horrible hangover. I said, “Tony, for God’s sake, sit down. I can’t stand to see you looking like that.”

He Sat, with a grimace, and I went to fetch him a dose of Fernet Branca, with a water chaser, and then for good measure a bunch of Brewer’s Yeast tablets.

He got all that down, with some effort, and he said, “You’re right, I don’t feel too good today. Me and Whitey, we ran into each other over on Potrero, and we decided to quit fighting each other. After all, we was buddies, over
there. Then we went out to do some drinking, kind of to celebrate, and that man can really pour it down.”

“Was Caroline along?” Instantly I wondered why I had asked that, and I very much hoped that it had not been out of curiosity about the sexual life of Tony Brown.

“No, I don’t think she and him are getting along any too good these days.”

That surprised me; I guess I had taken for granted the intense brother-sister connection that I had observed, and I may have thought too that Caroline would be an influence in bringing Tony and Whitey back together. She would want them to be friends, I would have thought.

But then, not having had any, I don’t have too much instinct for sibling relationships. And one of the bad aspects of the only-child condition is that we are extremely inept at fights: we think that any fight is final; most of us are devastated by quarrels. In my imagination brothers and sisters fight all the time, in a cheerful bear-cub way, and then they quickly get over it—cleansed, as it were. But maybe they don’t.

I asked Tony if Caroline and Whitey had had a fight.

“No, nothing like that. They don’t fight too much. Whitey just gets real mean when he drinks, and I think Caroline’s pretty much had it with his shit.” He stood up then, announcing, “So am I, really tired of that man. I’m not going to do any more drinking with him, not any more.”

I could not help feeling a mean-spirited sort of pleasure at the idea of Whitey’s being shunned by his former friend, and by his sister. But at the same time it was a little frightening, the thought of Whitey unleashed on the world, looking for trouble, and revenge.

“Anyway, he’s talking about going up to Alaska, getting work on the pipeline,” Tony said.

“That sounds like a good idea.”

“His dad’s dead against it, but I don’t think that’s going to stop Whitey for long.”

I didn’t think so either, and then I began to wonder what Agatha’s connection with Whitey was like, how she felt about him. At this point I did not feel I could ask her, and I wondered if she would ever say.

Already Tony was looking much better, almost his old self, and I considered enviously the recuperative powers of youth—although he was probably not ten years younger than I was. And that morning, as always, I was struck by the extreme cleanliness of all his clothes, the bleached-out work shirts, and faded jeans, never ironed but always just washed. The combination of that soft pale blue cloth with his lovely brown skin was beautiful. And my appreciation of Tony did not arise from a generalized hard-upness, I am fairly sure. I think that under any circumstances I would have found him enchanting to look at, as lithe and graceful as a cat, with those luminous dark eyes and lovely thick dark lashes.

Besides, as well as liking to look at Tony I
liked
him, and I daily blessed my luck in having him around. Incredibly enough, he was about to complete the work in the kitchen ahead of schedule, and to start on the small upstairs deck.

Some sudden strong impulse made me say, that morning, what I had often thought: “Tony, I really don’t know what I would have done without you.”

Tony’s smile came slowly to his face, and it usually involved a sidewise motion of his head. He went through that gesture now, completing a strong full grin.

Conversely, I have noticed that people with flashing smiles, of the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t variety, are generally quite mean, hostile people. Derek smiled like that; the expression came from nowhere, and as suddenly disappeared. A grin without an emotion.

Tony just said, “I’m real glad it’s worked out,” and the smile remained.

I looked out at the neatly railed deck, its redwood floor, and at the deep rows of kitchen shelves, all clear smooth new wood, and at the round kitchen table and the benches against the walls, and I said that I too was very glad.

Then Tony got to work and I headed out to Clement Street, to visit Caroline.

Generally she was an early riser, early to start to work; over the phone she had said to come over around ten—she would take a coffee break with me. But when I got there, exactly at ten, she was still eating breakfast. With a huge black man, whom she introduced as Thomas Baskerville. He had an exceptionally deep voice, its inflections Deep South. As we shook hands, I liked him right away; he seemed a serious person, a man of consequence.

Caroline was very fresh-faced, bright-eyed, in her old brown corduroy robe, her hair long and loose. She was clearly crazy about this Thomas, in a way that seemed out of character for her—cool Caroline. She kept touching him, reaching for his hand, stroking his back as she passed with honey and milk for our coffee.

Sensing Thomas’s strong, evident attractiveness, I had a guilty pang for Tony, so much smaller, so lovely but less powerful a man. Did Tony know about Thomas? Had they maybe even met? Wondering about all that, wondering how this generation worked out such things, I wondered too just who it was that Thomas so strongly reminded me of—and then I realized that it was Royce, both of them huge and confident men, with even the same narrowly shaped eyes, although Royce’s were so green, Thomas’s very dark brown.
The notion of what either of them would make of such a suggested resemblance was enough to make me smile.

Caroline and Thomas had been talking, it seemed, about Whitey’s proposed trip to Alaska, the pipeline plan that Tony had just mentioned to me. I gathered that Thomas and Whitey were or had been friends; it later turned out that they had been in Vietnam together, along with Tony.

“It might be the best thing for that man,” said Thomas, in his deep, judicial voice—it occurred to me that if he sang he would sound like Paul Robeson, a thing I would not have said, with its somehow racist implications. “There’s just not enough action in this town for Whitey Houston,” Thomas said.

“Living alone with my father is really getting to him,” said Caroline, to me. “They just drink all the time, sitting around out there.”

Caroline, and possibly Whitey too, did not seem to know about Agatha’s involvement with Royce, which I found mildly disturbing. Why didn’t they? Why did Agatha, with Royce, have to be in a more or less illicit position? I resented it for her.

Caroline continued, about her family: “Whitey really dug all those parties out there,” she said. “He thought it was going to be like that for good, a houseful of blond hair and classy clothes.”

This was, in fact, an extremely astute observation on Whitey’s character, and as sad as it was accurate. I remembered how happy and satisfied Whitey had looked at the Houston party Agatha and I went to, that long-past Sunday. He must have thought that all his father’s new friends constituted a genuine arrival, a permanent condition of fun. An opulent, fashionable life was to be his compensation for the rotten war—like the gaudy, glittering Forties that followed
the end of
that
war. I did not think that Whitey made these historical comparisons, though.

Thomas got up then and said he had to go. I should have left before him, of course, but there wasn’t time. He was just suddenly gone.

Caroline came back from seeing him to the door and sat down across from me.

I would have liked to say something about Thomas, but what?
Wow, he’s really terrific
: that sounded ridiculous, and besides, it would be presumptuous for me to make any comment at all. I had not been invited there for an inspection of Thomas.

My instinct about that must have been right, for Caroline said, “Just let me throw on a few clothes, and we can start in with some samples.”

I remembered then what I had come to Caroline’s about: my present to Agatha. Caroline was to make a large wool sculpture, which I thought would be wonderful for Agatha’s bedroom.

In a few minutes Caroline reappeared from the bathroom in jeans and a sweater. She stood for a while in front of the open shelves on which she kept her piles of wool; from time to time she would reach in for something, consider it, either put it back or drop it into the growing pile at her feet.

At last she bent and picked up all the samples from the floor and brought them over to me. And I saw that she had worked out a spectrum, gray-blues to gray, to blue, to black. She was going to make something beautiful, a perfect present for Agatha.

One afternoon, rather late, the telephone rang, and there on the other end was Derek, but Derek without the hollow sound in the background that indicates a long-distance call. It was Derek in San Francisco.

“Well, my girl, since I’ve come out all this way, you must surely allow me the pleasure of taking you out to dinner.”

I was not busy that night, although of course I could perfectly well have said I was. But curiosity and possibly a habit of acquiescence to Derek prevailed, and I agreed that yes, we would have dinner. I did not suggest that he should come to my house for a drink, however; he was not to call for me—I would meet him in the bar of his Nob Hill hotel.

“But, my dear, this place has half a dozen bars,” he argued, and that was true enough, since he was staying at the Mark Hopkins.

We settled on the Top, the famous Top of the Mark, where so far I had never been: it would never have occurred to Agatha to take me there, nor me to suggest it. My considerable fear of heights would have been one deterrent, along with the tourist reputation of the place.

And then we began, as we had often done before, to argue about where to go for dinner, since presumably a reservation must be made.

I mentioned a quiet, unpretentious French place that Agatha knew about, in North Beach. Excellent food. But Derek had been told that Trader Vic’s was the place where really knowing San Franciscans went, the only place. He had also been given the quite erroneous impression that you had to have some sort of introduction, some pull in order to be admitted, and he in fact had just that necessary connection; he had a friend who could arrange it all.

Well. The Top of the Mark. Trader Vic’s. Dressing, I reflected that for me this would be an entirely new version of San Francisco.

I have to admit I was glad that night of my good new wardrobe, my “designer” clothes, and at the same time I felt ashamed of needing them. And I thought about the essentially defensive nature of certain clothes, the armor that they provide for the insecure, which has nothing whatsoever to do with aesthetics, even with simple attractiveness. I have, or I had before my tasteful rip-off—for which I continue to believe that Whitey was responsible—an old yellow shirt in which I looked better than in anything else; there was something about that particular shade, and its softness was becoming. But even if I still had it, I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—wear an old cotton shirt to those Derek-chosen places. I needed my expensive uniform.

The express elevator to the Top went extremely fast, for a very long time, activating my acrophobia—and giving me time to think that this was a very poor choice for a meeting place. As soon as the door opened, I knew that I would hate it there: such huge views, from so terribly high up. Views of everything: other buildings, the Bay, both bridges, Marin County, Berkeley, Oakland—Christ, you could see everywhere.

But there was Derek at the bar, instantly seeing me, coming toward me—and I knew better than to remind him of my weak-minded fears; he would have enjoyed my discomfort, as he had before, when we flew together and he saw my tight grip on the seat divider.

“Well my dear, I must say that you look quite smashing” was his genial greeting, accompanied by a cheek-brushing friendly kiss. It was a good beginning, and I realized that, away from Derek, I tended always to concentrate on his evil qualities, his sadism and general insensitivity, his egotism, whereas I would forget his reliably good manners, his pleasant looks, even his considerable intelligence—all of which were apparent as we moved to a table and began to talk.

Thank God: no window table was available, and so I was able to situate myself with my back to the views. I planned to give Derek the flattering impression of total attention to him, rather than to our splendid surroundings, but of course he noticed and mentioned it right away.

“You’re avoiding the views,” he said, but then he made a very wrong guess. “Do you come here so often that it bores you?”

I said that actually I had not been there before, and I added that in fact I was not fond of such very
large
views.

“You probably don’t like views because there’s nothing you can do to them, is that it? Professional annoyance: how would you decorate a view?” He chortled with pleasure at this attempt.