Rich Rewards (20 page)

One afternoon early in May, Agatha called, and she sounded, for her, quite upset: Ruth Houston had disappeared, gone, no trace. If her office knew where she was, they were not giving it out.

Disloyally, I found myself quite unmoved by this latest crisis in a family with whom I felt myself so accidentally involved. I had seen Ruth only twice, after all—well, three times if you count that passing in the hospital corridor after Whitey beat up Caroline. In a human way I hoped no harm had come to her, but it was not as though Agatha had disappeared, for example, or even Stacy. And some instinct, from
somewhere, told me that this too would pass; Ruth would be found, and she would be okay, and nothing much would change.

The real truth was, I guess, that I was getting tired of this obsessive love affair of Agatha’s; to say that Royce was unworthy of her attention was to understate the case, as I saw it. Another truth is that the force of my own obsession, the force of Jean-Paul, had shortened my sympathetic attention span.

Agatha of course sensed all this, though I had tried to be polite, and she changed the subject, or almost changed it, to Caroline. “Do you know how Caroline is?” she asked. “Royce hasn’t seen her for a while.”

“No, me neither.” Actually, I realized with a certain pang that in recent weeks I had hardly thought of Caroline. “But I’ll call her, and maybe go out there to see her,” I said. “Otherwise, how are you?”

“Okay, I guess. Working along as ineffectually as ever, hating most other doctors. Sometimes I think I’m in the wrong line of work.”

“I know I am,” I told her.

I did call Caroline, who surprised me by saying very warmly that she had been wanting to see me: could I come out for lunch the next day, Saturday?

I walked along Clement Street in the balmy blue May air, the first reasonable weather I had experienced in California, and I climbed the stairs to Caroline’s apartment, where I had not been since the night she told me that it had been Whitey who beat her up, just after we got the news of his death.

Caroline greeted me in a friendly but very serious way; it was a greeting from a very busy person, someone with a high regard for the value of time. Together we walked down
to the end of her long room, and we seated ourselves in those now familiar stiff wooden chairs. She asked if I’d like a glass of wine.

I said that I would; and she produced two glasses from the refrigerator, already filled with wine; no waste motion seemed to be the order of the day. And she looked almost too well-organized, her beautiful hair pulled severely back, her sweater a drab shade of green.

All that made me slightly nervous, so much efficiency. I felt as though I were being hurried along, and when I asked her, “Well, how’ve you been?” she almost interrupted in her eagerness to tell me, or maybe just to get the telling over with.

“I’ve been having this really rewarding new relationship,” she rapidly told me.

“Oh, have you?”

“Yes, it’s really interesting.” She smiled, and I was struck with how happy she looked, more content than I had seen her for months. She opened her mouth to say something more, but at that moment the phone at the other end of the room shrilled out. Caroline said, “
Shit
” and went to answer it. “Oh, hi,” she said, and she frowned.

It was not her lover, then, but someone she did not especially want to talk to; the tone of all her very short answers during that conversation expressed forbearance, no real affection or interest. “Oh, really?” she would say, from time to time, to what seemed a lengthy narrative. “Well, that’s neat, I guess,” she commented, at one point.

The length of her call did give me a little time for thought, and what I thought, for no identifiable reason, was: Caroline’s new lover is a woman. For the moment she has given up on men. Or, less negatively, she has discovered women, in that way. And I found that I hoped two things for her: one, that she had chosen her lover out of love, not
for reasons of theory or that year’s bisexual fashion, although that last would have seemed out of character for Caroline; she was in no way a trendy person. The other hope of course was that the person was nice.

She finished her conversation and hung up. “That was my mother,” she said.

“Really? She’s back? Where was she?”

“In Puerto Rico, getting a divorce.” The bitterness in Caroline’s voice when she mentioned her mother was painful to hear, and she now looked somehow all disarranged, undone. The earlier look of contentment had vanished.

“I thought she still wanted to have Royce come back.”

“She changed her mind very suddenly. It’s a family trait.” There was even more bitterness in Caroline’s small laugh. “Now she’s all divorced, and she’s going to marry this really wonderful man. Of course he’s a little younger than she is, about twenty years, but that doesn’t make any difference, he’s just terrific. He’s a potter, in Mendocino, and she met him—are you ready for this?—because he came around looking for Whitey, he’s an old army buddy of Whitey’s. It gives them a lot in common, she says. Christ, what a thing to have in common.
Whitey.
”

“How is Thomas?”

“I don’t see him too much. He’s trying to get into law school, and he’s really into that. Wants to join the straight world.”

She sighed, in a deep, hopeless way. The moment for whatever she had wanted to say about a new friend had clearly passed, and I let it go—it would have seemed wrong to ask her.

“Jesus,” she said after a minute or two. “How did I ever get into this family?”

A week or so after my visit with Caroline, toward the end of May—
three weeks
before Jean-Paul was to arrive in Berkeley—I got two very disturbing phone calls on the same day.

The first was from a man who spoke poor English, and who muttered, but I managed to understand that he was a friend of Tony’s and that Tony was in jail.

Tony was between jobs with me, so to speak; he had taken a few weeks off between one phase and the next. Actually, he had so nearly finished that this time off was simply a postponement of a few days’ work.

Tony was so unhappy in jail, this person said; maybe I would write to him? I said of course I would. Tony was in the Hall of Justice, on Bryant Street.

I tried to find out more, but I had little luck. The friend did not know the name of Tony’s lawyer, nor indeed if he had one; nor how long he was likely to be there. It did not occur to me to ask what he had been jailed for; I knew.

And the next day in the paper there was an article describing the arrest of several male prostitutes who frequented the Hilton area. Big news. A feminist “spokesperson” was described as saying what a great step this was, arresting men
as well as women for prostitution. Personally I saw no reason to arrest either men or women for such a sad non-crime.

After talking to the friend I sat down immediately to write to Tony: how was he, what would he like or need that I could send? I must have sounded very maternal, but I couldn’t avoid that sound, and in fact I did feel guilty and terrible in just the ways that a mother well might feel, I thought.

My second call was from Agatha, and it began in a by now familiar, non-startling way. We had talked a lot in the week since Ruth’s call to Caroline, her announcement about herself and her marriage. Agatha had told me that Royce was more and more upset, was drinking more.

In any case Agatha had been having a lot of trouble—a lot
more
trouble—with Royce, and so when she began a sentence by saying “Royce and I have decided to—” I finished it quickly, in my mind, with
break up
, and I prepared myself to be kind and supportive. But that is not how her sentence ended; its last words were “get married.”

Silenced—actually I was horrified—I struggled for something to say; finding nothing “appropriate,” I began to babble, “Oh, really? Well, great, that’s terrific, when?” I must have sounded as though Agatha were someone I hardly knew. And when I was able to think, I began to wonder if that is how it would be between us, a diminution, a diluting of friendship. It is one thing to discuss or even to complain about an ongoing love affair, but marriage is quite different, requiring more severe loyalty. And, once so committed, it seems undignified to complain. Or so I felt it, and I knew that Agatha would too.

She said, “Next week. It seems rushed, but why wait around? It will just be a small church wedding.” Only Agatha
could have injected irony into that sentence. “You’ll come, of course?”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

“In fact you’d better plan on being maid of honor—person of honor? Or maybe you’d rather give me away.”

At that we could both laugh a little, and by the time we hung up I felt a little better, but not much.

Ironic coincidence: the next morning a brief note came from Derek saying that he—
too
—was going to be married. Amusingly, I thought, in view of his former habits of unwelcome disclosure, he said almost nothing by way of describing his intended, only telling me that her name was Monica Reddington, which I guess he supposed to have an impressive sound. Instead, to me it conjured up a strawberry blonde with slightly crossed eyes, very lanky, with a whinneying sort of speech. However, no doubt that was just a malicious wish; in any case, I was never to know what Monica actually looked like, nor to hear from Derek again.

On Agatha’s wedding day she was truly, vividly beautiful, more so—at forty—than at any time during the years I had known her.

She was a wonderful exception, I thought that day, to the dubious rule that (along with other biological inequities, like menstrual periods and relatively more difficult orgasms) men, more often than women, get handsomer with age.

Her dress was a pale blue, almost silver, so that her blue eyes deepened and darkened. Her skin was pink and white, delicate. But mainly she just looked happy, an illuminated woman. Someone seeing her then, for the first time—and this must have been true for several of the wedding guests—such
a person would not imagine for her a previously more than difficult life, early deprivations and loneliness—true disorder and early sorrow. A dead mother and a cruelly selfish, neglectful father, the late General. One would simply have seen an exceptionally attractive, intelligent woman—which of course was another accurate description.

Royce too looked wonderful: somehow larger, more shiningly blond than ever, and his face, like Agatha’s, showed not the slightest trace of past grief or turbulence. He too looked purely happy.

They stood together in the sunny courtyard of the church, radiating love.

Caroline was there, of course, with a tall blonde woman whom at first I took to be Stacy; closer up, she was younger and much less fashionable that Stacy was. She was Caroline’s lover, I guess.

Very curious, the relationship between Stacy and this family: at first, seeing her with Royce at the Stinson Beach party, I had imagined them to be married, and then, later, I had thought she looked enough like Whitey to be his sister. In any case, it seemed both odd and fated that Caroline should choose a tall blonde lover.

The other guests were either colleague-friends of Agatha’s—doctors, doctors’ husbands and wives—or Royce’s friends. It was easy to tell them apart, the Royce-friends being so much more stylish.

After a while there came a sound of organ music, Bach, “Sheep may safely graze,” and we all filed into the church. Without much ado, Agatha and Royce and the minister took their places in the transept, the music became softer and the minister began.

“Dearly Beloved, we are gathered …”

I began to cry.

A letter from almost anyone with whom one has not had a written relationship can be a real shock. Even after all the years that we have known each other, I have never got used to letters from Agatha; they are so trite and dry—so
boring
—so unlike her.

On the other hand, there are those rare people who sound like themselves. One extreme would be Ethel, whose letters were as stupid as her speech; like many semi-illiterates, she underlined a great deal, sometimes three or four times, for great emphasis—some editor must have had a terrific time with her prostitute novel. Ellie Osborne’s letters were arrogant, with even a nasal sound. Jacob’s letters were brilliant and funny and outrageous and kind. Letters from Jean-Paul were somehow heroic; his prose had a Miltonic grandeur.

No letters in my experience, however, would have prepared me for the one that came from Tony Brown, in South Lake Tahoe.

To begin with, it had exactly the look of a kindergarten exercise paper, and indeed the paper was lined, in that way. The very look of it made me sad, as though I had again learned something about Tony that I did not want to know. But probably this was just my own bias in favor of good
clear prose. Tony very likely didn’t care how his handwriting looked, nor that the only word he could spell correctly was the pronoun “I.”

I did wonder, however, about California schools; or maybe all schools now are letting out people who can’t write letters—which does seem a basic skill.

In any case, there he was at South Lake Tahoe, the gambling center, the best place (“bezt plaice”) he had ever been. He was working for a lot of money on some condos (“condoz”); he was staying out of the casinos. He was fine. He would come back to San Francisco in August and finish up my work.

Well, some happiness came through with all that, and for that happiness I was truly glad.

In the weeks which soon narrowed down to days before the arrival of Jean-Paul in Berkeley, I did nothing whatsoever that was sensible. I did not call the Department of Economics to find out where he was staying, or if he was to come alone; and God knows I did not leave my name anywhere for him to call. I did not even inquire, as I might have done quite anonymously, about just where and when his public lectures were to be, although attending one of them was still my vaguely formed plan. I felt his advent to be so momentous that I did not dare breathe in its direction, not even over the phone.

But the scheduled day did at last arrive, and it was the most beautiful day I had ever seen in California, a pure blue and golden day. I knew that he must be safely here, on this edge of the continent with me; there was nothing in the paper or on TV news about plane crashes—no crashes anywhere, no accidents; there seemed to have been a suspension of calamities that day. And I was as giddily happy as if I were sure of seeing him again, of being with Jean-Paul.