Rich Rewards (17 page)

“Oh, you poor fucked-over vets,” said Caroline.

“Shut up, cunt.”

Why is it impossible to leave two people who are having a fight? I don’t know, but it is. I was dying to get out of there, and I was immobilized. I was thinking, Do they fight like this a lot?
Was
it Thomas who beat up Caroline?

Maybe to ease the moment—or possibly to explain why she was being so mean—Caroline said, “My mother was just here for an hour or so. Lord, you should have seen her. In her fucking
mink
, in this
heat.
”

“She wears that
mink
to get your Dad’s
goat
” Thomas said, with marvelous comic emphasis. “She acts like you sometimes do. Jesus God, one crazy family. You all could be a series on TV.”

“You’re right there,” Caroline agreed.

By now the half an hour or so that I’d been there seemed very long indeed, and I thought it would be all right to leave. Which I did, as unceremoniously as I had come in.

None of us said anything about Christmas.

I walked home in the just-chilling early evening. It was almost dark, and fog had begun to creep through the streets, coming in from the sea. I suppose that walk was dangerous, at such a violent, suicidal time of the year, but I was too sad to be frightened. I was thinking about Tony, how appalling that he could put so low a value on himself.

My heart and my mind revolted from this new information about him. I would have given anything for it not to be true, but it surely was; it made perfect sense.

I reached Pacific Heights, those cold blank huge houses, these days with grilled gates, long windows heavily draped and barred. A big dog snarled as I approached his house and then, in the nuttily friendly way of some large dogs, who can’t take their roles as watchdogs quite seriously, he pranced over to be patted on the head. A golden retriever, very handsome, with his noble head and long plume-feathered tail. I stood there with him for several minutes, making friends.

Once, years ago, with Jacob, at one of our winter beach retreats, we stopped to watch a big black dog who kept tearing into the ocean after sticks that his master, a young boy, threw out for him. The waves were high, slate-gray, and the water must have been freezing, with a stinging cold salt spray. I hated seeing the dog go through all that for a stick and a pat on the head, for that careless boy’s just saying, “Good dog, good old Max.” Jacob saw how I hated it—he saw everything—and he said, “Of course you hate it. It reminds you of yourself.”

I realized that of course he was perfectly right, especially since we had just been talking about a recent suicidally stupid love affair of mine. It would have been just like me to rush out into cold water for a stick and a pat on the head.

And I now understood the ways in which Tony and I were alike, after all. Obvious dissimilarities aside, we shared an addiction to even the meanest forms of love. Which could explain the strength of the affinity I felt for him.

I got home unscathed, except by what was going on in my own mind. But I knew that Christmas was a dangerous time, a prime time for self-pity, self-laceration, corrosive memories.

As a guard against all that, I poured myself a glass of
wine in the kitchen, and I took the wine and a volume of Trollope that I was rereading up to bed.

But outside a mean wind pushed against the house, rattling windows, creaking boards and reminding me of everything I did not want to think about: Betty Smith and the General, Agatha and Royce, Whitey, Caroline, Thomas. Crazy Ruth, and Tony. They were not exactly a cheering group.

Going further back was not much help either: Jacob, dead; and Jean-Paul, lost to me, in Paris.

As I thought about those people, however, I felt curiously linked to them all, the living and the dead. We were in it together, somehow, together in this downward race to darkness.

At last, with a terrific effort, I was able to concentrate on Trollope, and I managed to stop thinking about anyone I knew, or had ever known.

So much for Christmas.

Once Christmas is over, I always imagine that everything will improve; there will be an end to that downward descent, and there will be spring, balmy weather, feathery new leaves and flowers. Of course I am often wrong, but never so wrong as I was that year in San Francisco.

Meteorologically, what happened was: the drought ended with a burst of cold dark rain, days of wind and wet which for a while, though uncomfortable, were welcome. But those dark watery days became weeks, an endless cold gloom in which the difference between night and day was indistinct. In an irresponsible way I began to long for a return of the drought, those lovely warm bright dry days, like a sharp longing for something illicit. I would guess that other people must have felt that too.

In the meantime, events in the lives of the people I knew in that city all seemed to get much worse, with a sort of terrible synchronism.

I had begun, at last, to do some work on Stacy’s house. Together we had gone to Henry Calvin and chosen some linen for the living-room draperies, those impossibly high huge windows. And I had found a seamstress who said that she could do the job, and a drapery-hanger to install them. All that
remained to put the work in motion was the most crucial step of all, the measurement of those monster windows, which Tony had said that he could do.

The appointment was made. As usual, with Stacy, there was trouble about hitting on a convenient time, but at last we found a couple of hours on a Thursday morning. It turned out to be the darkest wettest day of all, a day of angry black lashing rains and wind. As Tony and I drove up into the hills of Belvedere, leaves flattened themselves against the windshield, clogging the wiper; we couldn’t make out street signs, and a trip that should have taken twenty minutes took over an hour.

At least, however, the difficulties of the drive and the state of emergency in which we found ourselves had provided Tony and me with a subject matter. We concentrated on the raging elements, we talked about the rain. I had been uneasy with him, or more uneasy, since hearing from Caroline and Thomas about his hustling, and even in my lively dream fantasies about Tony, sex had always been the only language between us. Thus the raging weather helped.

Stacy greeted us at the door. “Well, I honestly didn’t think you’d be able to make it—what a day!” And she took a long look at Tony, and then went into her act: widening her eyes, dazzlingly; and, as I introduced them, she whispered his name. Preceding us down the hall, she twitched her narrow ass, that day in polished cotton.

I had wondered a little about just how Stacy would be with Tony—if the fact of his somewhat menial capacity and his curious color would put him out of her range, so to speak. Had that been the case, I would surely have liked her much less.

But batting her eyes, Stacy offered coffee—toast? Cookies, brandy,
anything
?

Tony had already got a look at those windows, however, and had seen the shape of his work, and he said no, he couldn’t have anything; he’d better get started. Stacy and I sat together on the mammoth sofa, and together we watched as he clambered up to the narrow windowsills and perched there, with his tape measure and his tiny notebook. And we made conversation.

It was a funny scene, really, two big grown women, tall blonde Stacy and I, bigger and taller and dark, watching with our lustful-protective female eyes as Tony, diminished in scale by the size of those windows, climbed and clung like an especially beautiful, freakish monkey, a changeling. Probably Stacy would have liked to ask if I had ever been to bed with Tony, and if so how was he. And I could have said, Well, no, but I sure had thought about it. But neither of us said those things, and at that time I did not really see the humor of our situation, I was so tired of rain and trouble, and assuredly not ready for any more.

When the doorbell rang, it startled Tony, up on the window ledge; having almost gasped with relief, we both watched him recover. And as Stacy got up and went toward the door, I thought, Oh, Christ, it must be Royce again; why can’t Stacy get her life sorted out?

It wasn’t Royce. From the hall I heard another woman’s voice, and from Stacy sounds that were falsely enthusiastic, falsely warm.

It was not Royce Houston; it was Ruth. Ruth Houston, soaking wet, in what looked like summer clothes, cotton, and with a bland smile that bore no relation to her condition.

She said how wonderful to see me, how wonderful I looked. I surely did not look wonderful at all, that day—and she said that she had just been driving by and it started to rain and she thought she would just come in for a minute.
All this in a voice as bland, as expressionless as her face, her narrow dark face that was so much like Caroline’s.

But this was crazy: the rain had been going on for several weeks, and for weeks it had been too cold for summer clothes. And no one would be just “driving by” on Stacy’s isolated and impossible street.

What Agatha and Royce had been saying was true: Ruth was mad.

Tony had stopped work and was staring down at Ruth, who had not noticed him, although they may have met sometime: Whitey’s mom.

Ruth sat down gingerly on the room’s least comfortable chair, tubular steel, which was probably a good choice, she was so wet. She spoke again, in a chatty, unnerving way, saying how nice it was to see us both, and then in just the same voice she said, “Actually I just had a rather curious experience. A person called me from somewhere, I think he said
Alaska
, and he said that a person up there named Royce Houston, sometimes called Whitey, was
dead.
Killed in a fight.”

As she finished, Ruth looked up at us with the expression of a woman who has been gossiping with friends and who has just told them some news, nothing important, but a little hard to believe.

And then she closed her eyes, and in a slow, deliberate way she slid off her chair to the floor, in a faint—or I hoped it was a faint: she could have been dead of a stroke for all I knew.

More quickly than I would have believed possible—he must have flown—Tony was down there, squatting beside Ruth, his fingers on her pulse as he stared into her face. I was wondering how he knew about pulses, and breath, and then I remembered: of course, he had been over there.

“Just fainted,” Tony said. “I think she’ll be out for a while.” And then, to me, “Jesus. Whitey.” We looked at each other for a sad and helpless moment.

I was hopelessly confused, not taking things in nor knowing what to do.

Fortunately, Tony was clear on what to do, and he took charge. “Get a blanket, or a warm quilt,” he told Stacy. “Just keep her warm and quiet for a while.”

Stacy obediently went off, and Tony said to me, “I wonder if his old man knows. Royce Houston.”

“Maybe she thought she’d find him here.”

“Oh, that’s right. Whitey told me he thought they had something going.” Tony scowled with what could have been moral disapproval. “Jesus, what a family.”

I wondered what his family was like, and I was pretty sure I would never know.

Stacy came back with a billowing, flowered comforter, presumably from her bedroom; gently she placed it around Ruth, and she said she thought she should call a doctor. “I actually know one who’ll make a house call,” she said. And then she said, “I wonder why she came here. Can she possibly have thought—?” And she blushed and went off toward the phone.

My own thoughts, or at least my feelings, were becoming a little clearer: Whitey was dead, and the next person for me to see was Agatha. Quite possibly I would have to be the one to tell her the news. I said this to Tony, and a few minutes later we left. Stacy had come back to say that the doctor would be there in half an hour.

Tony drove, and we talked very little on the trip down from Belvedere; we concentrated on getting through the rain and wind, the leaves, to Agatha’s apartment—as though by just getting there we would save the world, or at least improve it.

Once I said, “It’s almost predictable, isn’t it. Whitey getting himself killed in a fight near a goddam oil pipeline, in Alaska.”

And Tony said, “Yeah. It sure figures.”

Only when we were crossing the bridge, on the way back into San Francisco, did it occur to me that Agatha well might not be there. However, a strong inner voice insisted that she would be, in her California Street place, and also that she would already know.

Tony asked if I wanted him to go back to the house; he could get some work done, he said. I said sure.

Agatha was indeed at home; she answered the buzzer as though she had been waiting for me. But when I knocked at the door and she opened it and saw me there, she looked surprised. “Oh. We thought you might be Ruth,” she said.

We.
Standing there, towering behind small Agatha, was Royce, who looked stricken, ravaged, almost destroyed.

No question, then, of telling them anything. They knew.

Stupidly I said that I was sorry. “I was at Stacy’s doing some work,” I said, not knowing how else to explain. “And Ruth—”

“Ruth called
Stacy
?” Royce was hoarse, as though he had been talking, or shouting, for hours. Screaming, maybe.

“No, she came by. Ruth came to Stacy’s.” As I said this, I knew that it sounded crazy, but just then I couldn’t have invented another version.

“She’s gone crazy,” Royce said. “That’s insane. She can’t stand Stacy.”

I said that I thought she’d be okay there, for the moment; that Stacy was getting a doctor to take care of her. No point in adding that Ruth was not only crazy but in a faint. Royce had already had much more than he could deal with, and maybe Agatha too.

He said, “Oh,” and sat down heavily on the sofa.

Agatha and I sat down too. Whatever she was making of this, the Ruth-Royce-Stacy connection, I couldn’t tell. All I could read on her face was the most intense tight-lipped grief for Royce. And love.

For myself, I thought Royce was exactly right: Ruth had gone crazy. And how pitiful, as well as mad, for her to go to Stacy with her grief. It was as though—dimly, crazily—she went there in order to
become
Stacy: a beautiful woman who was loved by Royce, a woman with no husband or children to plague her, alive or dead. She would not have come to Agatha, her old friend, a woman in many ways much closer to herself.