Rich Rewards (8 page)

I accepted, we both finished our fish transactions and together we walked a block down Clement Street.

Caroline’s studio was a huge bare room, one flight up above a grocery store. At one end there was a wide mattress on the floor, covered with something bright, woven wool. And along the walls there were big woolen sculptures, almost obscured by giant ferns. At the other end of the room was a kitchen area, a table and a couple of chairs, small refrigerator, stove. A wall telephone.

We were sitting at her kitchen table, drinking fragrant and very hot tea, when she abruptly told me about her parents: they had just split up, she said.

“So dumb, the way she left” was how Caroline put it to me. “Sneaking out in the middle of the night, after one of their parties.” Her face and her voice showed total exasperation;
she had had it with crazy grown-ups, with her parents. Caroline, about twenty-two.

“Sneaked out in the middle of the night” did seem a strange way to end a marriage. I asked, “She left a note?”

“No, no note. Dad was really upset. Of course he saw her car was gone, but Jesus, she could have driven over a cliff. Or jumped off the bridge.”

That was quite true, I thought, remembering Ruth’s desperate face, her slightly crazy delivery. And I thought, Well, this will make things easier for Royce and Stacy, and I felt a little envious: how nice for lovers when people just move out of their way, and how infrequently that happens. And how unfair that it should happen to Stacy, already so gifted with beauty, and with money.

However, I next thought, maybe Stacy would not be entirely pleased? Maybe Royce was not quite rich enough to be acceptable as an unmarried man? Maybe he was only as rich as her former husband had been, which wouldn’t do.

“Finally Dad called her office,” Caroline went on, “and there she was. She’s living there, on Pine Street. She told him that she’d never been happier in her life.”

“Couldn’t that be true?”

“Oh, sure, I guess. Actually I don’t see why he’s so shook up about it. He keeps going on and on about the terrible neighborhood. How she’ll get beaten up, or shot, or something.”

“Well, that can happen anywhere.” And I told her about the woman on my street out walking her dog and her husband getting shot, my first week in San Francisco. Caroline seemed not to have read about it, and I gave her points, at least, for avoiding the local papers.

In fact, she couldn’t seem to focus on anything other than her parents’ splitting up, although their story obviously
irritated and depressed her. To my account of the murdered man, his wife and the dog, she merely said, “Oh, wow,” which I already knew was not the way she talked.

Then, “Let’s leave this mess,” she said, gesturing at the cups and saucers, the teapot. Not my idea of much of a mess, but Caroline was a tidy person; the whole room showed that she was.

We went down to the other end of the room, and we both sat—or, rather, sprawled—on the piles of pillows there, beneath the long windows, at that hour filled with strong western sunlight streaming in. In that illumination I saw for the first time that Caroline’s brown hair was really a combination of yellows and golds, like her sweater. I told her how pretty I thought it was, her hair. “It’s the liveliest brown I’ve ever seen,” I said—which was true.

“Oh, it’s just clean,” she said. “I’m a clean-hair freak.” But she was pleased. I think women of her age don’t compliment each other much, or not on things like pretty hair; in their way they are much more serious than we were.

The telephone in the kitchen area rang just then, a long turned-down sound that Caroline seemed attuned to. She got up, excusing herself, and went back to that corner of the room.

During her monosyllabic but rather prolonged conversation, I looked around—having tendencies to snoopiness. However, Caroline was so orderly, everything put away, that there was not much to see. Therefore, the pair of earrings on top of her bookcase struck my attention for several reasons: most obviously, because they were duplicates of the ones ripped off from me; secondly, that seemed a funny place for them to be, as though Caroline had for some reason not known what to do with them; and third, I could not imagine her wearing them. With so much long hair, big earrings wouldn’t work; they were not in her style at all.

And looking at those earrings made me nervous, perhaps foolishly; I next concentrated on her books. A sympathetic, if not distinguished library, it was at least eclectic: Jane Austen, Colette, some Dickens, too much Anaïs Nin; Forster’s
Howards End
—somehow this last was the most unlikely inclusion; odd to see a copy of my old favorite book in young Caroline’s library. Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, Marcuse, Tolkien, Jung.

I looked up at the earrings again. Most likely she had got them at Magnin’s, I decided; maybe a present from her father, Royce?

Or may be Caroline had been the thief
?

That thought, as irrational as it was unavoidable, flooded me with a sudden extreme embarrassment at having entertained it for even a second. And as soon as the thought had gone, I thought, How crazy, untrue, impossible. And then I forgave myself.

Coming back, Caroline said, “That was a friend of mine. He’s a carpenter, in fact, and I said he could come over for a minute. You don’t mind? If you’re still looking for someone—”

Then she looked over at where the earrings lay, and she said, “Someone just gave me those. I really don’t like them very much,” and she blushed.

It was Whitey who ripped off, burglarized my house. And he gave the earrings to Caroline. Those two sentences raced through my mind with the steel-cold ring of truth, and I too blushed.

However, a minute later I decided that he of course would not have told Caroline where they came from. If she knew or guessed that he had stolen them, she would certainly not know from where, or whom. And so I was able to look up and face Caroline, who had begun to talk about her parents—again.

She said, “You know, in her crazy way I think my mom is still crazy about my father.”

She had spoken so unhappily; for that and every other reason I decided against mentioning Stacy, and offered, instead: “But even if that’s true, couldn’t they possibly be better off not together?”

Caroline looked sadder yet. “I just don’t think so. I don’t know; I’m sure it’s all going to get a lot worse.”

She was very convincing, and certainly her unhappiness was real. From some comforting impulse I asked her, “Have you thought about moving away somewhere? Mightn’t it be easier for you if you weren’t around all this?”

This seemed to strike Caroline as quite an aberrant suggestion. “But where would I go?” she asked. “I’ve been to New York a couple of times, and I really hated it there.”

Later I came to understand that this was a very San Franciscan attitude. Where else
could
you live? was the usual position. As a stance I found it quite hard to imagine, always wanting to stay in the place where you were born, and where you had grown up. I liked Madison, my native place, very much indeed; I still feel nostalgic, sometimes, about the lakes, the pink twilight winter vistas of snow in the hills that surround the town. But that nostalgia is rather for my adolescence, which was spent among those scenes. Unlike most people I know, I loved the years from about thirteen to twenty, except for time out at St. Margaret’s; I disliked my earliest childhood years, and those that began with my marriage but I have wonderful memories of dances and necking in steamy parked cars. I loved all that. But I couldn’t wait to get away from Madison; I was always led on by visions of New York or London, Paris. And I sensed that Caroline would not even be tempted by those places. They were too far from San Francisco.

In fact, their mania for their city could be seen as a sort
of trap for San Franciscans; they are caught and bound in civic affection. And as I think of this, there comes to mind a picture that undoubtedly originates in Forties newsreels: people are leaving a besieged or ruined city; they walk in groups along a highway, carrying their pitiful possessions. In the case of a bombed-out San Francisco, this march would take place across one or both of the bridges, or down a superhighway to the Peninsula, the south. And with these visions came my notion that the city was a trap, as beautiful as it was confining.

Someone knocked at the door. Caroline went to open it, and she came back with what I can only describe as the loveliest young man I had ever seen. A beautiful brown boy, at first he looked; on second glance, he was a little older, maybe thirty. Blackish soft curly hair, long-lashed dark eyes, a curving mouth. Tall and graceful, lithe, with brown-gold skin. God knows what ethnic mix produced him: Tony Brown. Caroline introduced him, and he shook my hand formally. His hands were smaller than mine, but hard and strong.

Tony Brown was not only beautiful, but he was nice; his niceness and gentleness were instantly clear. And if I have made him sound effeminate, I didn’t mean to. He was just beautiful to look at, and clearly of a gentle disposition. I was as drawn to him in a positive, human way—okay, also attracted—as I was turned off by Whitey.

He had brought some drawings of an interior, a living room. Caroline later told me that he had drawn them himself; they were beautifully, delicately done.

He spread them out on the floor, and we all peered down as Tony pointed to a fireplace and to the broad blank hood above it, surrounded by an intricate splaying of beams.
He said, “That’s all brass, the whole hood. Lord, the money they’re throwing into this place. But I thought maybe something of yours could go right there, Caroline. If you felt like doing it.”

Tony’s voice was soft, his accent lilting and vaguely “foreign”; Jamaican? Balinese? His tone, as he spoke to Caroline, was tentative, somewhat shy.

She said, “I don’t know, it’s a little too rich for my blood. I just can’t see anything of mine hung up there. And all those fucking beams. It’s really pretentious as hell.”

“Well, it’s totally up to you,” Tony told her. “I just said I’d ask you. And they’re really loaded.” This last was a hesitant afterthought.

“So I see. And I could use the dough.” She sighed. “Well, I’ll see.”

Tony Brown, the tasteful, scrupulous carpenter. I was not quite so rash as to hire him on sight, but I almost did.

He was saying to Caroline, “And later we could check out what’s happening at the Boarding House, if you felt like it.”

She seemed to consider, and then she said, “I’ll think about it. I’ll call you later on.”

He smiled, accepting this answer as though used to it. Caroline did not quite smile back.

Whereas to me that small exchange had been amazing. Always with men I had said such an emphatic “Yes,” or “No.” Never a cool “I’ll think about it.” And certainly never “I’ll call you.” That was what
they
said.

I also thought that it was time for me to go, but just then beautiful Tony Brown got up and said that he had to go and meet someone, something about a job. We shook hands again, as formally as before; we said how nice to have met. Tony didn’t shake hands with Caroline, nor for that matter did they kiss goodbye. They just vaguely waved at
each other, and Tony walked across the room and out the door.

I asked Caroline if he was really a good carpenter.

“Oh, he’s really good,” she said. “He and Whitey used to work together but they fell out. I think now they’re not even speaking to each other. Well, I have to admit it, Whitey isn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with,” and she sighed, as she often seemed to do when talking about her family.

What she had said struck me as confirmation of my own judgment: a nice and beautiful boy who had fallen out with Whitey could not be all bad.

And in that way I found the carpenter for Agatha’s house.

By mid-November of that year there had been no rain in northern California, nor snow up in the Sierras, two hundred miles away. A dangerous situation: potential drought, water shortages. Still, it was hard not to enjoy the balmy, golden weather, the vistas of sunlight out on the Bay, the clear skies, the dry yellow sycamore leaves that crackled in any light breeze and scudded along the gutters, reminding me of Paris, other falls. Reminding me of Jean-Paul, for whom I still pined.

Mainly, though, that fall I was absorbed in doing Agatha’s house. I had indeed called Tony Brown, and together we had worked out a remodeling plan: a wide deck off the kitchen, with space for pots of flowers, maybe a couple of lemon trees, some herbs and a broad bench for sitting in the sun. And above that deck there was to be a narrower one, just off the largest bedroom, which would be Agatha’s. The bedroom in which I was now more or less camped out.

Tony got right to work, and he was a steady joy to watch, and just to have around.

He really liked to work. He usually arrived a little early, around eight; he would be smiling, humming something, eager to get started. And his work was fast, deft and
competent. All this in addition to his beauty: Tony was a prize.

I assumed that he and Caroline were lovers, although without too much reason for that assumption. Just that sometimes he would ask if he could use the phone, and then I would hear her name. Or sometimes, when I was with Caroline, she would mention him, although more or less in passing.

I spent considerable time scouting for furniture and fabrics, and walked a lot, admiring that most beautiful city. I had an occasional cup of tea with Caroline, out in her Clement Street studio, and an occasional dinner with Agatha, usually in some restaurant. In fact, I was finally living as I had often thought I should: alone, concentrating on work, getting exercise, seeing only a couple of friends. No “social” life, not much to drink and nothing that even resembled a love affair. And I was as content as I could ever remember being. Just sometimes a little frustrated, which I didn’t really think about.

Then one afternoon Agatha called, and she asked if I was free that night: could I come over to her place for dinner? That was unusual in itself; Agatha does not have much of a feeling for food, and we had both enjoyed our mutual exploration of the city’s cheap ethnic fare. And then she said something even more unusual: tight-voiced, with a tight, small laugh, she said, “I seem to have this problem.”