Rich Rewards (6 page)

I was introduced to the kids, and it was soon clear both that Whitey remembered me very well and that he did not
like me at all. Quite possibly, of course, he had sensed what I felt about him; I certainly did not trust him—not at all.

Caroline and I liked each other very much, on sight. It was the sort of affinity that women sometimes feel toward each other—Agatha and I; I guess men too. It is not at all like “falling in love,” there being no sense of dizziness, of doom. Caroline said that she had heard I was doing Agatha’s house, how nice. She lived not far away from me, she said, out on Clement Street. She had a studio where she did sculptures in wool. I had seen some things of that sort in New York, and found them interesting. She said that I should come out to see her; have tea. There were some nice Russian tearooms out there, she said.

Good, I’d like that, I told her.

That day Caroline was wearing a sweater she must have made: very coarse, irregular wool, colors from natural to yellow to pale orange. Becoming to her hair, and her sun-brown skin. She had what is called an “interesting” face—meaning, I guess, more intelligent than pretty.

Something about me at that moment seemed to have caught Royce Houston’s attention. His son’s hostility? Caroline’s affection? My height? Impossible to tell. But he came over and said that he thought I hadn’t seen his study: would I like to?

Yes
, I would.

He opened a door to a flight of stairs, leading down. I followed his broad shoulders, narrow waist, tight Levi’s over a very handsome ass. Such a huge man, hard not to think about the size of his cock. I must have been a little tipsy, too, all that nervously gulped white wine. Dizzily, I imagined hot embraces.

At the bottom of the stairs, Royce turned and took my hand, and though I did not lurch against him, I am sure he
must have seen lust written all over my face—seen, and dismissed it. For which I never quite forgave him. He could have spared a Sunday afternoon kiss, I thought.

He said, not looking at me, “It’s kind of an interesting room, don’t you think?”

All that was interesting about it was its situation; it had somehow been carved down from the beach, so that it seemed to be at water level. Otherwise, it was perfectly nice but in no way remarkable. But someone, Agatha, or Ruth, must have told him that I was a decorator, and he wanted me to see his room, the fruit of his idle richness.

Trying not to feel put down, trying to focus on that boring room, I next saw that it contained a remarkable number of jungle animals, lions, some zebras on the run, an obscene rhinoceros. Too many animals, and all of them too large.

Going from one photograph to another, which seemed the sensible, the expected thing to do, I tried to cope with my feelings of rejection. Turned on by Royce, I would have expected him to feel the same. So far it had generally been like that for me. God knows I was not everyone’s cup of tea, so to speak, but then neither was everyone mine. And I wondered: Was this the way it was going to be from now on? Have I reached an age to be turned down by men of my own age?

“I shot all these myself,” Royce was saying, which restored a little reality to my musings, the reality of irritation: a strong bias against hunting, guns, people who do all that. I asked, “You hunt a lot?”

“Oh, no.” He sounded appalled, and quite as priggish as I must have sounded. “With my camera. I like to photograph animals. I go on camera safaris. East Africa. Next time I’m trying to persuade Ruth and the kids to come along.”

“Oh.”

“And here’s my house at Tahoe,” he was saying. “It doesn’t look like much, but it’s really beautiful.”

He showed me a picture of a small, entirely ordinary house, and I exclaimed, because he seemed to expect it—and because there had begun to seem something rather touching in his thus exhibiting his treasures—“Oh, how nice,” I said, examining the picture of a small house. Not knowing that I was to spend the happiest week of my life in that house, though not with Royce.

“Well,” Royce said, “I guess we’d better get back to the others.”

We went upstairs; we re-entered the party and no one looked at us with anything like suspicion.

Later, coming out of the bathroom, I encountered my hostess, Ruth Houston. She was standing at the mirror in a bedroom, combing her short brown hair with a total lack of interest. She was escaping from her own party, and she didn’t care who knew it.

I said that I liked her house.

“Well, it’s much more important to Royce than it is to me,” she remarked. “He’s from very poor people—Okies, really—and he cares about spending a lot of money. Boats, safaris, cars. My folks weren’t rich but they were richer than his were. I think it makes a difference.”

This longish speech had not really been directed to me; it could have been just something that she said to people sometimes. And so an assenting murmur seemed sufficient. Intimate revelations from people I’m not close to make me uncomfortable. But she had struck a familiar, nostalgic note: she reminded me of certain women from my Wisconsin childhood, women who would just say whatever was on their minds, in a free, frank way.

I muttered something ambiguous in response, and Ruth went on with her hair. And I wondered again if she felt left
out, with all that intense feeling running between her husband and children. Not to mention Stacy.

When I came back into the main room, there indeed was Stacy, and she was talking in a hyper-animated way to Whitey. They were across the room from me; in the continuing din I had no idea what they were saying, but their two postures said a lot. Stacy was in perpetual motion, gesturing with everything—her eyebrows, hands, hips, legs; arching her back so that her breasts pointed straight out. And Whitey watched her; absolutely still, he had a slightly passive smile. And I had an evil thought about how passive he must be in bed, waiting to be pleased.

Then a small and pretty young man, a decorator to whom I had earlier been introduced, went over to Stacy and Whitey, and extracted Stacy, who was apparently his date. Time to go home.

Agatha came up to me and said that she thought it was time to go. She looked exhausted, and harried; I understood then that having me along was supposed to have made the party easier for her; I should have been a sort of buffer against her strong feelings about that difficult, maybe impossible family.

I agreed that yes, we certainly should leave.

I know: this year when a woman feels nervously horny—and this year it’s perfectly okay for a woman to be horny—she is supposed to get a vibrator, masturbate and at least to think about making it with another woman. But suppose you aren’t turned on at all in a sexual way by women, including yourself?

That describes my own condition; I simply did not want to do any of those things. I was not even sure that I could.

Many shrinks, and many feminists too, of course, would say that this is a lack in me—a gap in my instincts, as it were. Still, nevertheless, I do not believe in forcing things of that nature. I don’t think you should do anything that you don’t want to do in bed, either to please another person or for theoretical reasons.

A much-married man, an aging Liberal I had once known in New York, told me he felt that he should have a sexual relationship with a black man—he
should
, for political reasons. To me that sounded ridiculous.

Well, my inhibitions left me sexually bound to men, and sometimes I ended up with near-psychopaths: Jake the junkie, mean Derek. On the other hand that’s really no excuse; I’m sure that lots of women with my same sexual bent have lifetimes of pleasant lovers, or even a nice husband or so. But
whatever had led me and tied me for a while to Derek, the experience had been scarey, as well as cautionary. And so, the day after the party at the Houstons’, I began to think that it was probably lucky, Royce’s not being taken with me. For all I knew, he could turn out to be as mean as Derek was; also, confused as I was in my feelings about Ruth, it was still a lousy thing to do to another woman. Ruth certainly had enough trouble without me in her life.

The real truth was that I knew it was time, high time, to get along for a while without an ongoing love affair. To concentrate on work, and friendships. Read, get a lot of exercise. Not brood about Jean-Paul, or anyone.

Let absent or dead lovers rest in peace.

Like so much else in San Francisco, Jackson Square, the center for decorators, antique dealers, fabric houses, was at first glance both original and exceptionally attractive: a few blocks of pleasantly restored, nice old brick buildings, freshly painted Victorian wood. Nothing over three stories high. A closed-off mall for strollers, meanderers. Trees, and flower boxes of geraniums or marguerites. Big glass windows that displayed appealing wares, old brass and well-designed new furniture.

And then, with a harder look, it all became sadly familiar. I had seen those same strolling couples before, the peacock men in tight-fitting, light-shaded clothes, the dowdy, too heavy women with red alcoholic faces, in double-knit suits. I recognized them as my
confrères
, my colleagues, the local decorators. Their clients, too, fell into recognizable categories: the elderly rich, looking somehow Midwestern, and dazzled by it all; and the stylishly thin, recently well-divorced young women. I had even seen all that furniture before, in showrooms in New York and Boston, and Washington, D.C. And as for the restoration itself, the more I looked the less novel it became. It was simply smaller and prettier than other such efforts, in other cities, as San Francisco itself is a small and pretty city.

In New York I have methods of avoiding this depressing scene: I visit and buy from mills in Lebanon, New Hampshire—in recent years I would then detour to Boston for a visit, of sorts, with Derek. And I have a crazy infallible genius of a cabinetmaker in Hackensack. Since so many of my clients have been broke friends, this has worked out well. They appreciate my efforts.

But there I was in San Francisco, with that huge house of Agatha’s, and all that money. And how ironic it was that the General’s money should in that sense have come to me: so often I had wondered how on earth he came by it, and none of my speculations had been at all flattering to him, the mean old bastard. I felt plunged into an unfamiliar and vastly overpriced—in fact a crazily costly—world, hitherto only glimpsed at infrequent intervals. In Jackson Square, all around me there were people spending enormous sums of money, and they were very serious about all that spending; they felt that it was the right thing to do, and they
cared
about what they bought, and owned, and displayed.

In the year that I spent in San Francisco, I was never to make any excursion without running across some person whom I had seen or met or heard of before; that day, across the street, I saw Stacy, of the Houston party. She was again with that pretty young man—her decorator, I guess. Her tall thin blonde body was, as always, in constant motion, but that day she seemed to be miming petulance; assuming they were having the kind of decorator-client quarrel that I knew about, I found it easy to avoid them. And I thought, Thank heaven she’s not my client; I know her type, restless and greedy, in a random, indecisive way.

*

The high point of my trip to Jackson Square was my discovery that my favorite line of linen had its headquarters a few blocks from there, unlike Brunschwig & Fils, Schumacher, et cetera, whose main office and showrooms are in New York. The Henry Calvin building, then, contained more beautiful linen samples than I could have imagined—perfect for Agatha, who is, like me, a linen freak. Even the company’s nice brick building had an old-world quality of excellence, of care. I spent a happy forty-five or fifty minutes there, marveling at beautiful fabrics—before I moved on to the shocking end of my day.

What happened was: when I got home, after one instant I knew that someone had been there. Someone had broken in, had been all over the house.

First off, I saw that my mail was piled up on the hall table. It had not yet arrived when I went out that morning; eager to hear from Ellie anything about Jean-Paul, I was highly aware of mail. Someone had picked up and neatly stacked my letters, which struck me as a most curious gesture, taking in your victim’s mail. But this was a most curious break-in, all around.

I suppose that by now almost everyone who lives in a city has been in some way robbed—houses broken into, cars stolen, been mugged in a familiar parking lot or an elevator—but so far none of it had happened to me, just the garbage can my second day in that house. Going through all the downstairs rooms, and then the upstairs, I began to experience the emotions that I had heard about so often from my robbed friends—a vicarious
déjà vu
, as it were. I felt both angry and afraid—it occurred to me that the person might still be there, in the house, although I was fairly sure that he was not. And I experienced a sense of violation, not exactly like being raped
—I guess: that hasn’t happened to me either, not yet—but still a terrible sense of having been entirely, nakedly exposed to an unknown, hostile person.

In the kitchen the small portable TV was missing, along with my electric typewriter. Well, of course those would be the obvious things to take. Nothing else there gone, that I could see.

Upstairs, in the big bedroom where I was more or less camping out, I began to look through drawers, in the closet, and that is where my strong sense of defilement began: the person had been through literally everything I owned, and had chosen what to take with a keenly, most snobbishly selective eye. Gone were my few good silk blouses; I was left with synthetics. The same with sweaters: cashmere missing, lamb’s wool still in its place. Skirts and dresses—again, the good ones were gone. Even the few scarves and gloves that I had brought to California had been gone through, thinned out. It was hard not to feel in this a strong element of personal dislike, as though the ripper-offer had rebuked me for not having
all
good things. I tried to dismiss those feelings as a kind of situational paranoia, and I remembered—usefully—that several ripped-off friends had said they felt the same.