Rich Rewards (5 page)

I was very glad to see him go. That encounter had shaken me up, and in a businesslike way I tried to concentrate on the kitchen.

I thought that I would create a central island, butcher-blocked: a small sink, chopping areas, a chute for garbage. And around the walls of the room I would have some banquettes made, upholstered in a bright sturdy fabric that would cost the earth and look very simple and inexpensive.

But I was still unnerved, not quite concentrating, and so next I went out for a walk, out into the lovely clear fall weather, in my beautiful corner of the city, overlooking the Bay. In that neighborhood I was constantly riveted by some sudden blue vista of that Bay, glimpsed from some broad space between the imposing houses, or from the top of a wide descending street. Blue water, white sails and often a big white liner, pushing out toward the Golden Gate, or a tanker, coming in.

The architecture of that particular neighborhood interested me much less. Except for a few imaginative departures, the houses were standard upper-class fare, massive and bulky, totally lacking in grace. And the people on those streets also looked familiar enough: the suburban affluent of the middle
Seventies; lots of expensive boots and imported denim, good sweaters and English raincoats. Large women out walking little dogs. Joggers, smartly outfitted. Kids on skateboards or bikes.

That morning I noticed a thin pretty woman with short gray hair and large, dark, very sad eyes, out walking a small and lively dog. I wondered if she could possibly be the woman whose husband was shot. As we passed each other, I smiled, intending friendliness, but she looked away. Her dog was a short-haired, nutty-looking mutt, frisking ridiculously—a promiscuous sniffer. He rushed up to me and I bent down and patted him, and then the woman turned around and smiled: two dog lovers, acknowledging each other. I very much hoped that she was not the one whose husband was killed, but I felt that she was.

Back home in Agatha’s house, I decided that one long window could be made into a French door, leading out onto a small deck, among those beautiful old trees, in the California sun.

That night I had an angry, drunken call from Derek, accusing me of irrationality, of craziness—as he usually did. Agatha would never pay me, he predicted; friends never did. I would come back more broke than ever, the implication being that poverty would return me to Derek. And “Just don’t count on my being around for your return,” he admonished.

“Derek, I wouldn’t think of it,” I promised, hanging up.

But I felt grateful to him, really, for behaving so badly, reminding me of all his worst qualities. “Getting over” Derek had been much easier than I could have hoped.

Leaving the telephone, I went over to my improvised desk, in the space where the kitchen table would be, and I
wrote a longish letter to Ellie Osborne in Paris, whose address I had got from Agatha. And I asked her, in passing, if perhaps she had ever heard of the famous economic theorist, the Socialist writer Jean-Paul ——.

On the way to Stinson Beach, the following Sunday, I told Agatha about my short visit from Whitey Houston.

Before I had even finished the story, I noticed that she was looking at me oddly, her sidewise look. And so I knew what she would say almost before she could get it out: “That’s where we’re going today, to the Houstons’,” she said. “They’re friends of mine. Whitey’s parents.”

But I don’t want to meet them, I started to say, and then did not. I just said, “Well.”

Agatha gave a short laugh. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s an awfully small town. You’ll get used to this kind of coincidence.” And she added, “You’re right about Whitey, though. You wouldn’t get along with him.”

We were driving then over the steep green and perilous hills of Marin County, north of the bridge. At intervals one side of the road would drop away into a cavernous gorge; there were spectacular views of further rolling green deep-valleyed hills that literally took your breath away, they were so vast and beautiful. And with anyone else at the wheel I would have been nervous—Derek always drove his Porsche maniacally; he and I would never have made it over these hills. But with Agatha I felt and knew myself to be absolutely safe: she was blessed.

As she drove, she told me a little about the Houstons, who were to figure so largely in my life, who were to become, for me,
the
Californians.

Ruth Houston, Whitey’s mother, was a lawyer; like Agatha, she had been a Sixties political activist, which was how they knew each other. There were two children, Whitey and his slightly older sister, Caroline. The two kids had always got along well, great friends, but there had always been trouble, real trouble, between Ruth and her son Whitey. This hit a sort of peak, family fights and scenes, during the Vietnam war. Whitey was all for it: get in there, kill, win. So he volunteered and went to war, and Ruth went off marching and organizing for peace.

I asked about the other two, Whitey’s father and the girl.

When Agatha is unsure of what she’s saying, or feels in some way uneasy, her voice tightens, as it did now. “That was never quite clear,” she said. “My feeling was that they both pretty much agreed with Ruth, although neither of them is really political, and they’re both really crazy about Whitey. At first those two, Royce and Caroline, kept out of it, out of the fights as much as they could, but then it was too late and Whitey was gone.”

We were coming out of a dark grove of trees, pine and fir and eucalyptus, redwoods and huge bay trees, and then suddenly, beyond open green sloping fields, there was the sea—that day a dazzling blue, glinting sunlight.

“When Whitey came back, he’d changed his mind, of course,” Agatha said. “I guess he had a pretty awful time.”

“Unlike other people who loved it there.”

We both laughed, although a little uneasily—trying for our old brand of black wit.

Determinedly she went on; it was somehow necessary to prepare me for the Houstons. “Anyway,” she said, “they seem to have patched things up somehow. Although Ruth
seems—I don’t know—even more changed than Whitey is. Not adjusting to the Seventies.” This last of course was heavily ironic.

I asked what the father, Royce Houston, did.

Again that tight voice. “Well, not much, and I guess that’s something of a problem. Ruth is a maniac about work. What’s that dumb new word—‘workaholic’? Royce made a lot of money in real estate, a while back, and since then he’s sort of dabbled.” Her voice tighter yet, she added, “He’s very attractive.”

I thought, Ah, poor Agatha; she’s in love with the husband of a friend. How unlike her.

We had reached the sea, and we turned right and drove on past a cluster of somewhat shabby gray-shingled houses, sprawling and divergent in shape and size. Then a crossroads, a stoplight and stores. A mile or so later we turned left onto a dirt road, beside smaller, shabbier houses that at intervals blocked our view of the sea.

On the other side of the road was a long lagoon, flat and quiescent, surrounded by huge clumps of wild pampas grass, and weeds. Seabirds gathered there in scattered groups.

We stopped at a gate, and Agatha gave the guard the Houstons’ name, and we were admitted to a “development” of obviously very expensive, design-controlled, close-together houses. At last we stopped at one of the largest, on the ocean side—a huge house, really, with shining areas of glass. We parked there, Agatha’s old VW among the new German or English or Italian sports cars; we got out and walked toward the open front patio of the house.

Agatha had seemed to be telling me a lot about the Houstons; I had felt well prepared for them, maybe over-prepared, but as two very tall, blond and extremely handsome people came out toward us from the patio, I thought:
How strange of her not to say that Ruth is a tall blonde beauty, as well as an activist lawyer. Why didn’t she say how
sexy
those two people are?

Well, how like her not to, really, was my second thought; Agatha doesn’t think in terms of sex and beauty.

But then we were introduced, and it turned out that although the man was indeed Royce Houston, father of Whitey—they looked considerably alike—the tall blonde woman, in pink clothes, was called Stacy something.

Why do some people look so clearly sexual, so that you react to them instantly in that way? Obvious physical characteristics aside, I think they look sexy because that is what is on their minds.

Royce was not only large—very: about six five—and blond and good-looking, green-eyed, his smile was very sexy. Whereas I would have guessed that his son, who was not sexy-looking, had mainly hostile thoughts.

Stacy looked sexy too, at least at that moment; otherwise hers was a rather vacuous face—it could and did quite easily go blank. I found that I disliked her in an instant primitive way, which at first I took to be pure sexual jealousy; she was so much what I was not—blonde and small-breasted, with an overall look of smooth perfection that was quite unachievable for me, even had I ever tried. She was probably stupid-shrewd, I thought, and I consigned her to that alimony-rich group of divorcées whom I had recognized in other places, women who are getting so much alimony that they have to marry upward, as it were. In the meantime they use gay men for escorts and married men for sex. Like most clandestine lovers, she and Royce had no idea how obvious their connection was, to anyone; they may even have thought that a public show of friendliness would be misleading. And I thought again, Oh, poor Agatha.

Ruth Houston, whom we met once we got inside the house, was quite a surprise, a most curious match for Royce: a small dark woman, with large unhappy eyes and a tight clenched mouth. I thought she even looked a little crazy, desperate. She wore a gaudy orange cotton caftan that did nothing to brighten her look.

And I met a quantity of other people, crowding that large, dramatically beamed and windowed room, half open to a long view of dunes, the sea. Everyone was very dressed up, in a way that people I knew in the East had not been, not for years; in fact I was more conscious of all those clothes than of the people. I could have been looking at a room full of mannequins, in their leather and silk and velvet, their silver Indian jewelry, their mid-Seventies opulence.

The food, too, already laid out on a long bandanna-clothed table, was also predictably opulent: the crab and white wine, varieties of quiches, the tray of tiny pastries for dessert.

It was really depressing, all those smiling laughing eating people, in all those clothes, behaving as though they were doing something important. Lonely is probably what I actually felt, but lonely for any particular person? Surely not for Derek—for Jean-Paul? More likely it was simple loneliness, that of a woman too unused to being alone.

Agatha and I never talked in an explicit way about her love affairs; I just assumed that she sometimes had them. Generally I talked about mine, and she listened. Once, though, I do remember saying to her, during some particularly ill-advised affair of my own—maybe when it had finally become clear to me that Jacob was hopelessly on heroin: a junkie—and at a time when it seemed to me that all the women I knew were involved in some sort of bad love affairs, then I said to Agatha that there seemed to be an inverse relationship between
the intelligence of women and their choice of men. To which Agatha quickly answered, “Well, in that case I must be a genius.” We laughed a lot at that, true and unfunny as it was.

Now that I was seeing her on home ground, I wondered: Would I hear more about her lovers, maybe meet them? Were any of them in this room, right now? Given that particular rather homogeneous group, it seemed unlikely, but then so did Royce Houston, even as the object of a “crush” of Agatha’s.

Agatha looked less out of place with those people than I would have expected, however. In her neat Levis and dark blue turtleneck she looked simply young, and rather old-fashioned.

Ruth Houston, in her own house, looked very out of place. The bright caftan was all wrong; it might once have been becoming, at some other and perhaps happier time of her life—not now. I assumed that she must be unhappy about Royce and big blonde Stacy, but if she was she seemed remarkably unaware of them. Normally I would have felt a sort of female-bonding sympathy for Ruth, but she looked as angry as she did unhappy, and when she forgot my name for the third time trying to introduce me to someone—How many people does she know named Daphne? I wondered—I decided that she was a worse than indifferent hostess, and I wasn’t really interested in her problems.

And maybe I let this hostility of Ruth Houston’s serve as an excuse, for normally I am not at all drawn to other women’s husbands, or their lovers, and I have to admit: at first I was powerfully drawn to Royce Houston, despite Ruth, and Stacy, and even Agatha’s possible feelings. I wondered what he did all day. I wanted him to notice me in some way.

While coffee was being served, by a trio of handsome young blond men in red jackets, yet another good-looking young couple arrived, hurrying through the patio and into the living room, laughing, seemingly delighted with each other. At first glance one would surely have taken them for lovers. A tall blond young man, a much smaller, darker girl. But then I recognized the man: it was Whitey, but all dressed up in something suède.

Royce went over to greet his son—enthusiastically, hugging his shoulders, obviously crazy about his boy—and then he hugged the girl, and I heard him say, “Ah, Caroline. You got here.”

So—the young couple were Whitey and his sister Caroline, not lovers. Caroline looked very like her mother, small and dark, but she was much happier, more attractive than her mother was, although with something wistful in her eyes. And I thought how strange the genes were in that family. Sexist genes: the large blond beauty all going unfairly to the men.

How strongly, too, they all felt about each other, Royce and his son and daughter! Did Ruth, the mother, feel left out? Powerful feelings were visible in their very postures as they stood there together for a minute. Caroline seemed to adore her father and her brother; that was on her face when she looked from one to the other of those men, their similar handsome faces—similar except for Whitey’s moustache and beard. And Royce adored both his kids. Did Whitey “adore” anyone? His face, as he looked at his sister and responded to something she had said, bespoke amusement and affection, maybe some stronger feeling too. I got no sense of how he felt about his father.