Rich Rewards (3 page)

And suddenly, that day in San Francisco, everything changed: there he was in Paris, a leading Socialist economic theorist, and I did not know what to do. I could have written to him, except that I didn’t know where, and I did not believe his mother could still be there in Normandy, alive.

As I thought of him then, I had the most terrible sense of loss, as though lacking Jean-Paul I had wasted my life. As though everyone else I had ever loved had been a poor substitute for him.

And I saw that the true reason for not writing him was that I knew I could not have borne it if he did not answer.

On the evening of the day when I read about Jean-Paul, and he in that way came back into my life, I was to have dinner with Agatha, in a new French restaurant; it was out in what is locally called “the avenues,” meaning a non-smart, middle-class area somewhat south and west of Pacific Heights, in the direction of the ocean but stopping short.

We had said that we would meet there, and I, chronically early and uncertain of the geography involved, got there first, and was seated at a small table. I ordered a glass of wine.

It was the sort of restaurant that began to be fashionable in New York about five years ago. French country style was the intent, although I am not sure that the whitewashed walls, brass railings and checked tablecloths achieved just that. But it was pleasant enough, and restfully uncluttered.

Dimly aware of music, records playing somewhere, I looked about at the other people, all of whom appeared to be as transient as myself; and I wondered, Is everyone in San Francisco basically a tourist? Is it “home” for anyone?

And then I recognized the music, I knew the songs that were being played. Piaf, Charles Trenet, Jean Sablon. Those piercingly nostalgic songs of love and loneliness and despair. “
Vous, qui passez sans me voir
 …” And I, a forty-year-old
woman, might as well have been an adolescent in a drugstore—Rennebohm’s, in Madison, Wisconsin—listening to Sinatra, insanely in love with someone. I was “in love,” and in that same ludicrous way, with Jean-Paul, who was now a man of fifty or so, whom I had not seen for twenty years. And I could not turn off those feelings.

But then Agatha came in—in the middle of “L’Autre Côté de la rue”—and some sanity returned to me. Her small, slightly crooked smile, her small voice saying “I’m sorry I’m late” were both so reassuringly familiar to me, and so dear.

I wondered if later on I would tell her about Jean-Paul, and decided that probably I would.

Agatha does not look much like an heiress, despite all the General’s unaccountable millions having passed on to her. She will never look like a rich person, and that was to be one of the conditions of my doing her house: she did not want the money that she spent to show.

To me, Agatha seemed to look, and in fact to dress, much as she did when we first met, at St. Margaret’s, more than twenty-five years back. Though this might be simply a function of my having known her for so long, a failure on my part to register change: the sort of persistence of vision that is often observable among old friends. We think our friend is the skinny, brown-curled person of many years back; we fail to notice fat and gray.

However, Agatha really was still a small neat person with indefinitely light hair and sad blue eyes. An off-center smile, small nose. She was wearing a dark blue sweater, gray flannel skirt. Only her boots were new and expensive, wonderful boots; in a minor way Agatha is a shoe fetishist, maybe because dainty feet are among the few things that she likes about herself.

Abruptly—before I had meant to, really—I said to her, “The god-damnedest thing happened to me this morning.”
And I told her about reading the paper, and then, in a very condensed, dried-out way, about Jean-Paul, our time in Paris, all those years ago.

Agatha is probably the best listener I have ever known. The quality of her silence, her lonely eyes and her just-amused mouth all draw one on. I have talked more to Agatha than to anyone, ever.

At times I have worried about how little she says; even, sometimes, it has seemed stingy of her, to give so little back. But that is surely unjust. For one thing, her profession is so specialized: how could she talk about anomalies in the lungs of newborn infants?

Actually I too have put in a fair amount of good-listener time, but that has generally been with lovers.

“And so, I don’t know what to do,” I finished, as I so often have, telling some story to Agatha. “Of course I don’t have to do anything.”

“You could write to Ellie.”

Ellie was the girl whom Agatha and I had known at St. Margaret’s, whose visit to Paris I had invented, my excuse to Marshall when I went back to see Jean-Paul. This has happened several times in my life, in fact: my lies come true. Rude rich unlikable Ellie had indeed gone to Paris, and she had stayed on there. It had never been clear what she was doing—very likely nothing at all.

Agatha said, “She might know something, just from reading the papers there. And writing her would be something for you to do.”

Agatha understands me very well indeed, and what sounded like an idle suggestion turned out well.

Then Agatha said, “Next Sunday, some people have asked me to a party at Stinson Beach. Would you want to come? They said to bring a friend.”

“Agatha, you know perfectly well they don’t mean another woman.”

“Oh, well, I’m tired of inviting men, especially when I really don’t want to. And you are a friend.” She laughed, in her sudden, private way.

I said okay, I’d go to Stinson Beach with her.

Dinner was good, we had fun, as we nearly always did; and we drank a lot of wine. We made our stupid private jokes, and heard more French songs. And by the end of the evening, although I could still feel myself to be “in love” with Jean-Paul, it seemed a more distant fact. Agatha often has that effect: she brings things into focus.

Agatha.

When I first saw her, in some bleak dormitory room at St. Margaret’s, my first day there, I thought she must be someone’s younger sister. But I asked her, “Are you a new girl too?”

“No, actually I’m the oldest girl around.”

Actually.
That word from that small pale girl, in her thin little voice, was funny and somehow appealing. I felt less shy, since she was shyer, less uneasy in that strange new atmosphere, a female dormitory—I was fresh from a big Midwestern high school.

“I’ve been here since kindergarten,” Agatha told me. “I’m a fixture. I wonder if they’ll ever let me graduate.” She smiled, one side of her mouth going up more than the other. I liked her a lot.

We were both in our early teens then, Agatha and I, but while I could have passed for eighteen—and sometimes did, in bars, with older boys—Agatha looked about twelve. Maybe some awareness of how funny we looked together contributed
to our becoming friends; in any case we were friends, right away.

St. Margaret’s was,
actually
, a terrible school; without Agatha I would have had a very bad time there, and sometimes I did anyway. To begin with, I was sent there for somewhat punitive reasons: my “older” looks, my height and big breasts, especially breasts, were beginning to gain me a lot of attention at home in Madison; my nervous widowed mother was upset by those phone calls, by boys passing our house in cars and slowing up to honk. One of them had a horn that played “When my baby smiles at me”; my mother especially hated that. And she correctly guessed that I was wildly excited by all the attention. I was insane about boys; “boy-crazy” barely describes the degree of my mania. And the most depressing thing about St. Margaret’s was that there were no boys at all, just letters from boys. With what violent palpitations I raced up the stairs each day to the pigeonholes of mail—very like those that I later suffered on the way to American Express in London, dying for word from Jean-Paul.

The other bad aspects of the school were pretty much standard: don’t all such schools have bad food and ugly uniforms, and mean-spirited, unhappy teachers? And at St. Margaret’s, a Virginia Episcopal school, what a ferociously snobbish lot those teachers were, impressed by Southern names, of which we had quite a few, and by Northern money—considerably less of that. They seemed somehow to have been misinformed about Ellie Osborne, however; she had more money than anyone, old New York money. It must have been her exceptional rudeness that led them astray; in their experience very rich people, rich Southerners, were also very polite, and so Ellie got none of the deference that she might have, and that certainly she felt to be her due.

Agatha’s father was impressive to those ladies, being a real general, in the Pentagon; they always referred to Agatha
as “General Patterson’s daughter,” which must have sounded odd when she first arrived at the school, a tiny six-year-old.

I did not impress them at all, in any way, with my flat Midwestern voice, my general inattentiveness and air of wishing to be anywhere else at all, which I passionately did wish. And I had neither a famous Southern name nor a mink coat to recommend me.

A word here about uniforms, and clothes: if, as was true at St. Margaret’s, girls are allowed to wear their own clothes on weekends, the supposedly democratizing effect of uniforms is undercut, in fact demolished, so fierce becomes the competition over the Saturday night sweaters, the Sunday coats. I honestly believe that some of my later silliness about clothes, caring too much and spending too much money on them, may be partially explained by having had the “wrong” coat at St. Margaret’s, wrong sweaters, no “good” pearls.

Agatha was not boy-crazy—nor clothes-crazy, for that matter. She did not correspond with any boys, and her only letters seemed to be from some maiden aunts in Richmond, and from her father, the General. But she could joke about our deprived sexual condition as though she shared my fervor, and perhaps, in an unformed secret way, she did. “Unmated in mating season,” we lamented to each other in the springtime, laughing dementedly.

Agatha’s mother had died when she was two, which is why she was sent off to boarding school so young, and I guess the condition of her having no mother, and I no father, constituted a sort of bond. We once worked up a fantasy in which our two single parents got married to each other, but even our active imaginations failed to bring that off: my reclusive, rather scholarly mother, and the playboy General? It would never work.

Certainly we were unlike in many ways, Agatha and I.
She studied hard and got top grades: already she was talking about being a doctor; at that time she meant to go to India and save everyone’s life. I just wrote letters, all during study hall, and I drew pictures, cartoons of the teachers and the girls I most disliked, to make Agatha laugh.

I told her a little about my love affairs, and read bits of my letters to her, and she listened in that absorbed way she had, and still now has.

Once, the only time that I remember, the General came to St. Margaret’s to visit his daughter. He had often promised visits that did not materialize; so deeply hurting to Agatha, I am sure, that she had stopped mentioning his promises. A rotten person all around, I thought. And on the occasion that he did actually arrive, he took Agatha and me out to lunch, and I found him a sorry disappointment; first, because he was out of uniform, in an ordinary business suit, and so being seen with him gave us no clout with the other girls. Secondly, he was a most unimpressive-looking man, small and pale. His hair was an unnatural shade of brown. Actually he and Agatha looked strongly alike, except that his face lacked the slight irregularity and thus the wit of hers. His manner was quiet, nondescript. Of that lunch I only remember giggling with Agatha and eating too much—boarding-school girls out for a treat. The General seemed distantly to disapprove; however, some vestigial sense of guilt over his less than successful role as a father must have kept him from overt scolding—and prevented him as well from ever coming back.

That day he gave off a sense of being in a hurry to be somewhere else. Later, when I heard more about him—from newspapers,
Time
; not from Agatha—it was hard to see that small mild man as the playboy escort of titled ladies. He never remarried, and was still swinging around Washington at the time of his death, a couple of years ago. And it was hard, too, to see him as one of the authors of our policy in
Southeast Asia. When I read about the banality of evil, General Patterson always comes to mind.

His money, of course, was, and is, the greatest mystery of all: how could he have amassed so many millions?

Since the school was Episcopalian, in a maudlin way we were all somewhat religious, weeping over Lenten hymns and full of Christian joy at Christmas. What I didn’t know was how important all that was to Agatha; she really believed it. I was surprised, all those years later in San Francisco, to find out that she still went to church sometimes. “I’m a primitive Christian, with a very literal mind,” she once explained.

After St. Margaret’s I headed up to Wellesley, drawn by the proximity of all those men in neighboring schools, Harvard almost next door, and all those others within a few hours by fast car. Agatha went out to Berkeley, which seemed at the time an eccentric choice, and one which she did not explain: Agatha never explained anything. I now think she simply wanted to get as far away as possible from the General. She went from Berkeley to medical school at Stanford.

I married Marshall, went to England, fell in love with Jean-Paul, came back. I lived in New York and Washington, and went briefly home to Madison when my mother died.

By 1960, I was divorced, very broke and trying to be a decorator, a trade into which I had fallen accidentally: because I moved so often, people would admire an apartment, something I had done with it, pulled together, and they would ask, “How did you
do
that—get that?”

Most of my friends shared my own rather laggard and adversary relationship to the economy—professional people, “creative” people, who in one way or another were not
making a lot of money. Who were enemies of the I.R.S., A. T. & T., the utilities companies. Small-time rebels, all of us. For such friends I would do apartments as cheaply as though their places had been my own; I liked to think that for them I could spend ten dollars and make it look like a hundred. But because of Wellesley, and other accidents of the time, I also knew a lot of rich people, and thus I got into a sort of Robin Hood situation: the money that I made from the rich helped me help my friends, as well as sustaining my own existence.