Rich Rewards (12 page)

It was another wrong guess, but in its way quite clever, I thought; in the case of many—maybe most—decorators he would have been right on, and I laughed appreciatively. I was thinking, Well, he’s not such a really bad person; maybe I can stop excoriating myself for ever having loved him.

And then Derek began to talk about a book of short stories just out by a young man whom we both admired, and
I was reminded of another forgotten worthy trait of his: he always seemed to be waiting with something urgent to discuss with me, often of a flatteringly elevated nature, such as this most talented young man.

Actually, though, we liked this young writer for quite dissimilar reasons. Derek was drawn to him for his geographic range: he seemed to have lived everywhere, even to have fought in wars in several places, as Derek had. Whereas I liked the quality of his prose, and I liked too his affectionate view of the people he wrote about, especially the women. After so many years of male-stud novels, heroes fucking everything in sight and never
seeing
a woman, this young man’s sexual tenderness was a vast relief. And for that I put up with his occasional wars and bloodiness. But he was still a very good choice as a conversational starter between Derek and me, reunited in this most unlikely place.

I had ordered, received and begun to drink a double vodka, which helped my view vertigo. After twenty minutes or so I was even able to look around, and to my great relief I found that some heavy fog had come in; it enveloped the tower we were in, so that only a few dim lights were visible. Above the din of the bar I could hear foghorns, their harsh and mourning bray.

Derek was saying, in what was for him a very low voice, “You see that red hair? Look, two tables over there. Looks unreal, doesn’t it, that particular color? But it’s genuine, I can tell. It’s the shade of red that always goes with light blue eyes.”

The old Derek, re-emerged.

He seemed very pleased with this odd piece of expertise, and so I let it go, but not without marking it down in my mind for possible future use.

Then he said that it was time to get on to Trader Vic’s.

Along with the entrée provided by his friend to that
exalted restaurant, Derek had evidently also been given instructions on how to walk there from the hotel. “Only a few blocks,” I was told as we started out.

We pushed along in the fog, windblown and cold, and then I remembered Derek’s deep aversion to cabs. I guess everyone clutches somewhere, money-wise, but with Derek I would often have happily paid the taxi fare myself, which he would not allow either. He even had elaborately worked-out theories about why, in many circumstances, it is better to rent a car.

We turned left down a very steep street; normally I would have been apprehensive, afraid of falling on my face and breaking at least my neck, but tonight drink had made me heedless. And, in what must have been record time, we made it to the restaurant.

The entrance was probably deeply disappointing to Derek—in most ways a man of taste. Not having his high expectations, I was merely surprised that the first room you entered, in a supposedly elegant restaurant, could possibly be so tacky. It looked like a gift shop—well, it was a gift shop: silly souvenir-type things for sale, the motif being South Seas. There were even especially bottled vinegars, and cookbooks by the owner of the place. And the group of people who were already there, who had just made themselves known to the maître d’ and were being appreciatively made welcome, did not look like a group with Derek’s connections. They seemed rather to be rich Texans, wearing pounds of chinchilla and vicuña, Gucci, thick eye makeup, diamonds and gold. They reeked of oil.

“Hossein, this is absolutely the darlingest place!” I heard one of the women cry out, and then I noticed Hossein, the dark stranger in their midst, whose heavy brows gave him a strong resemblance to his deposed Shah. Quite possibly it was Hossein who was their host, and their connection.

Those people were taken off somewhere, and then Derek gave his name, and the name of his friend, and we were seated.

“You see? We’re not in the same room with them,” he observed triumphantly, but since neither of us was an expert on the status signs in that room, I thought that for all we knew “those people” got preferential treatment over us. Maybe “Trader Vic” was especially fond of Iranians and Texans—but I said none of this to Derek.

I was not, however, rewarded for restraint; instead Derek began to attack me for the tackiness of the place.

“Well my dear,” he led off familiarly—we could have been married for years—“if this is what San Francisco considers grand, I do rather wonder at your choice of residence.”

I countered weakly that I had never been there before, and realized with some surprise that I now felt defensive about San Francisco, although quite possibly that was because it was Derek who was doing the detracting. “And really, Derek,” I went on, “do you often judge cities by their most pretentious restaurants?”

“Touché, my dear.” Derek was generally a fair-minded person. “But it’s not exactly Maxim’s, is it now.”

“I never said that San Francisco was Paris, or even
like
Paris.”

“Well, at least you can’t defend your morning newspaper.”

“No, you’re right there. I wouldn’t think of it.”

For a while we chattered amiably about the deficiencies of the
Chronicle
; that morning Derek had been struck, as most visitors are, as I had been a couple of months ago, by its extreme localness. I agreed, of course, and that small conversation almost restored us to friendship, or something near it.

We had more drinks, and then we ordered our dinner. Derek wanted something Oriental, as I guess he had been told
to do. I ordered salmon, having become a great fan of West Coast fish.

Fresh drinks.

Over his new Scotch, Derek began to tell me again how marvelous I looked. He praised my clothes, and he said that it was wonderful for me to be so tall. He had not said this before—in fact I could remember quite a few complaints about my height—but now he went on at some length about the advantages, for a woman, in being tall. He couldn’t stand an undersized woman, he told me. He spoke so venomously about short women that I knew he must be having an affair with one.

And then he asked me if I had ever thought of becoming a dancer. Well, that suggestion was ludicrous enough to make me laugh aloud. “Derek, for one thing, I have practically no sense of balance. You know that. I might as well take up tightrope walking.”

During dinner, Derek made several remarks about women who couldn’t cook—he knew that I could—and I made a note of that.

After dinner there was a belly-dance place that Derek had heard about. We had terrible drinks there, and above the dreadful music Derek shouted into my ear about what really awful people most dancers are.

Once you have noticed a persistent mannerism in another person, of course it becomes much more marked; the smallest hint of it looks like a caricature. I could hardly believe that Derek was going on and on with his old barely concealed jealousy ploy, but he was. He was worse than ever; or maybe his perception of my relative lack of response—not like the old days—was goading him on.

In any case, by that time we were really tired of each other, the difference between us being that I knew it, whereas
Derek did not. Leaving that place, I saw from his face that I was supposed to ask him back to my house for a nightcap; he may even have expected to spend the night. But I had been working on a sneaky plan of my own, and I suggested my “favorite” North Beach bar, where actually I had been only once; what I liked about it—or, rather, what conformed to my plan—was its layout: a long entrance hall, invisible to the main room, off which was a Ladies.

Leaving Derek in the big room, with his brandy, I wrote him this note from the Ladies: “Dear Derek, I’m sorry you’re having trouble with your short red-haired blue-eyed non-cooking dancer. Better luck next time. I don’t think we have much more to say to each other.”

I sent the note in with a waiter.

I thought it was very funny, and I giggled drunkenly to myself all the way home in my Taxi. I knew that Derek would consider it beneath him to follow me home, or even to call, and I knew too that if he had come home with me there would have been an ugly scene.

In the morning, though, nothing seemed funny at all. I felt terrible, and the note to Derek appeared simply a childish gesture. For a long time I was too heavy-headed, too aching in all my limbs, to get out of bed, and so I just lay there, plagued and tormented by everything I had ever done that was wrong. From my Episcopalian years at St. Margaret’s the General Confession came back to me, and ran dolorously through my head: “We have left undone those things that we ought to have done, and we have done those things that we ought not to have done.” Well, that summed it up rather tidily, I thought. Maybe I could somehow rejoin the church, in a serious way, like Agatha? But probably not.

One of the things that I “ought” to have done, long ago,
was to run off with Jean-Paul. What a life that would have been! What a woefully missed opportunity it now seemed. That was my single chance for a significant, serious life, I thought—on that awful hung-over morning. Also, and I could handily blame Derek for this, I had not even tried to find Jean-Paul, the time we were in Paris.

The thought of Derek himself, that morning, was another source of self-laceration. How could I have had a lover, lost time and sleep over him, whom I didn’t even like? When he was both mean and pompous, never mind about intelligent and handsome. It was very depressing, and it got worse as I considered an array of not-liked lovers—all of them shits, really, as I now saw it—with whom at one time or another I had been “madly in love.” Only Jacob and Jean-Paul stood out, as liked and loved and tremendously admired. And Jake was dead, a savage junkie death, and Jean-Paul impossibly in Paris, busy being a leading Euro-Socialist.

At last my guilty ruminations began to seem ridiculous, even to me, and I forced myself up and out of bed, down to the kitchen for tomato juice, Fernet Branca and lots of vitamins. I was not up to eggs.

I was just dosing myself with those remedies when Tony came in. He took one look at me and then he did an amazing, if totally simple thing: he put his arms around me, he lightly kissed me and he said, “Oh, poor Daphne.” I don’t think he had ever said my name before.

It was a questioning, tentative kiss, however—an invitation rather than a gesture. Which I declined. Without a thought—this surprised me later on, when I did think about it—I said, “Ah, Tony, you’re so nice, you make me feel much better,” but in a clearly dismissing way.

He understood, of course, and smiled, and went off to work. I guessed that he felt a little relieved. He would have been agreeable to taking me to bed if I had wanted to, but I
didn’t think he really wanted that kind of complication either—nor, I had to face it, had he wanted me very much. I was the one with the sexual fantasies in his direction. He had just felt that he should make the offer of himself.

Which said a lot about Tony, and I began then to wonder how much of his charming posturing was accidental. Maybe he was the same sort of automatic flirt that Stacy, for example, was.

I wondered too about Tony’s connection with Caroline; it seemed more and more likely that they were indeed “just friends.”

God knows what Tony’s true sexual nature was, I thought then—and how I wish that I had never happened to find out.

Like many people of my generation and my sort of education—an education involving good schools, good books and a lazy, haphazard sort of mind—my friends and I did a lot of emotional temperature-taking, so to speak. We were always very interested in how we were. Agatha alone was exempt from this preoccupation; I had decided finally that she was genuinely not interested in her own mental health—it was her spiritual condition that concerned her.

Other friends and I all used certain key phrases in regard to ourselves and others—phrases dull enough in themselves but for us significant. “In bad shape” meant terrible, nearly suicidal, probably; and so on upward, through various, intimately known gradations, until we arrived at “better,” an ideal state.
I really think I’m better
indicated true happiness: not euphoria—we all knew the dangers inherent in that—but warm contentment, our goal. We were certain too that happiness meant some good balance of love and work, and probably some money.

Working on Agatha’s house at that time, with no love affair going on, earning money, I really did feel better—there were my lecherous fantasies about Tony, about which I felt a little guilty, until I thought, Well, men have such fantasies about us all the time, or they say they do.

In fact I felt a lot better, until the night when Whitey
came over and I began to feel really terrible, and that evening could so perfectly easily not have happened at all.

But it did happen. Agatha was coming for dinner, and since I had to be out all afternoon, in search of some brass fittings for the bathroom, and, I hoped, some striped canvas for deck awnings, I made the dinner in the morning, a nice winey, garlicky stew, with lots of rosemary, which would be even better heated up for dinner.

However, when I got home late that afternoon, exhausted and unsuccessful, having found nothing that I liked in canvas or in brass, the phone was ringing as I opened the door. I ran to answer it—unfortunately forgetting the unlocked door—and it was Agatha, saying that she couldn’t come. She was sorry; she had been trying to get me all afternoon, she said. Something had come up, with Royce.

I was furious and quite hurt, most irrationally so—although I did not say this to Agatha. I do react badly to changed plans about meals, something infantile to do with food, I guess. For another thing, I did think Agatha was being a little adolescent about her love affair; grown-up women don’t break dates with each other because at that moment a man is more pressingly important to them, not any more.

I was so used to seeing Tony’s battered VW in my driveway that I had not consciously registered seeing it just now, coming home, but in the throes of my disappointed anger with Agatha I remembered: the car was there, and so Tony was still here, in the house.