Almost Perfect (11 page)

A horrified “Oh” from Margot.

“And, baby, I can’t believe you haven’t heard that very word in your parlor before.”

A stiff pause, and then Margot asks, “Well. What kind of a drink would you like, Andrew?”

“Some gin. On ice. Please, ma’m.”

Is it possible that Andrew has had a drink, or drinks, already this morning? He looks much the same as always, but then again, not quite: his shirt and his hair are not quite as perfect as usual; both show some muss.

Oh, queers, thinks Margot. Why do I spend all my time with them? They’re so utterly unreliable. Just when you think how nice and pretty they are, they go off and do some horrible butch thing, like drinking. Using ugly words.

Back in her living room, she hands Andrew his drink, in a heavy (Bohemian) glass, with a tiny linen napkin.

“Honestly, Margot, you’d think you were giving me medicine. Thanks, Mom,” and he grins in an evil way, before gulping down the gin.

“Well, you don’t have to drink it like medicine.” Margot could not help saying this, and wishes she had not.

“You’re wrong, I do have to. Can’t you tell?” Andrew stares out at her, from gorgeous dark long-lashed eyes. Italian. Ravishing. And even though his hair is indeed a little messy, and his
shirt not perfectly fresh, he is so beautiful, and so distracting to Margot, that she finds it hard to concentrate on a conversation. With an effort she asks him, “You’re not feeling well?”

“Oh, I feel fine. I feel randy-dandy so far. But I had to go and take the test, you see? I had to be
tested
.”

“Tested?” Margot knows that she has lost some important thread. This tends to happen when she and Andrew try to talk seriously.

“The HIV test. Good Christ, Margot, surely you’ve heard it’s around?”

“But, darling, you don’t have AIDS.” Only lower-class people get AIDS, has been Margot’s thought. Awful men who go out to public baths. Polk Street prostitutes.

Andrew laughs in a horrible shrill way. “We don’t know that. We won’t know that until next week. But I’m sure a prime candidate.” He turns on her. “And what will you do then, Miss Garbo? When I’m covered with big dark blotches and gone half blind and lame? Will you still be thrusting your offers of hospitality on me? How about it, Margot? Are you up for a stint of nursing?”

Margot forces a laugh. “Well, in the first place you don’t have it, of course you don’t. And in the second I’m a much nicer person than you think. Of course I’d always take care of a friend who was sick. A good friend, I mean. But, Andrew, you’re not sick.”

Andrew laughs, a short ugly bitter sound. “If you say so, lady. A more expert view might be that if I’m not, I’m goddam lucky so far.”

And before Margot can say anything to stop him—though what it would have been she is not at all sure—Andrew is out of his seat and up and gone.

Why, then, did he come over? Margot has a puzzled sense that Andrew wanted something of her, something that she most clearly failed to provide. She has disappointed Andrew, gorgeous Andrew. Margot frowns, then remembers how bad frowns are for your face, and stops.

Well, she thinks, if (God forbid!) Andrew does get sick, sick
with anything at all, even with that horrible plague that he surely will not get, not only will she take care of him but she will insist that he stay right there with her. She will buy all the right clothes for nursing, and she will buy lovely fruits, and she will make delicious soups to make him well. She will be the best nurse, the most devoted, that anyone ever heard of. She will show everyone what she is really like.

Happier now, as in the kitchen she washes out Andrew’s glass, Margot reflects too with some pleasure that she did manage not to tell Andrew about Richard and his German blonde after all; she kept that bit of news to herself, and so she has it still to tell, at some opportune time. Like having money to spend.

Just to test herself, she decides to call Justine, who after all is Stella’s very big friend. She will call Justine and not tell the awful news of Richard, not even hint.

But almost the first thing that Justine tells her is that Stella’s father is dead; or rather, Justine asks if Margot has heard this news.

“Well, no. You know how bad I am about reading the papers.” Not reading the papers is actually a pose of Margot’s, part of her air of not quite participating in the contemporary world, of which she in so many ways disapproves. The truth is, she spends a lot of time reading newspapers, though in a very selective way: she does not read about famines, wars, or pestilence (and thus she is somewhat ill-informed about AIDS). She often skips the obituaries; too depressing. And so she easily missed the news of the death of Prentice Blake. (But why didn’t Stella call her? Does Stella think she is not really a sympathetic person? She resolves to send Stella some very expensive flowers.)

“Oh, poor darling Stella,” she says to Justine. “Poor girl. But I hope he’s left her something nice; he must have a little money, and she was his only daughter, wasn’t she? I think actually an only child. Oh, poor Stella! I must call her, and of course I’ll send flowers. So lucky she has that handsome Richard to take care of her, don’t you think?” And then, as an afterthought, she asks, “Tell me, Justine. I know you’re a true-blue feminist. If you know that some man’s been cheating on his wife, or his lover, are you supposed to tell the wife, or the lover? … Well,
Justine, I honestly can’t see why you think this is funny. I meant it as a very serious question.”

Hanging up, annoyed by the burst of laughter with which her really serious question was greeted, Margot senses that all her earlier moments of happiness have evaporated like morning mists—and through no fault of her own!

Andrew was so cross with her, and so mean, so selfishly preoccupied. And if he does get sick he would probably not even want Margot to take care of him.

And with Stella’s father just dead, of course there can be no question of telling anyone about Richard’s big affair. It would be just too awful if it did get back to Stella, and naturally everyone would blame Margot, as though it were all her fault that Richard Fallon was a cheat and that Stella was too dumb to see it.

The summer that Stella was later to remember as the summer when her father died (and when she had pneumonia, and when she broke with Richard in a way that seemed to be permanent)—that summer was also the coldest, darkest, windiest San Francisco summer that anyone remembered. Black fog billowed in through the Golden Gate, enshrouding the bridge, slowing early-morning traffic; blackness lay like a pall over all the trees in the Presidio—where Stella lived, and mourned, and tried to cheer up, to pull herself together and get well and get to work.

But in the mornings as she left her dark string of rooms to walk to the bus stop, wind cut into her head like knives, exposing the hopeless, anguished muddle of her brain, where all was confusion: pain at the loss of her father, and hurt at his will; then pain at lack of love from Richard when she felt that she most
needed love from him, and then his loss; and her prolonged, insufferable cold. And all those conditions seemed to fuel each other, each making the others more severe, more unbearable.

Some years earlier—about ten years before the summer when he died—when Stella went out with her father in New York, everyone always stared, which vain Prentice interpreted in his own way: he believed himself to be both famous and handsome. Although, those days, in a comparative sense he was neither—especially at the Algonquin, where he liked to go for drinks; no one in that place was likely to have heard of him, and so many stars of varying degrees of beauty and fame had hung out there: rock stars, movie stars, handsome young writers—Prentice earned all those stares with sheer oddity: his sheaf of yellow-white hair, his ranging wild blue eyes. He looked very odd indeed in his battered old black clothes; there was always the possibility that he might be someone. But savoring all the attention, he leaned back in his leather chair and continued to lecture his erring daughter.

“The point is,” he told her (often), “I know guys like Liam O’Gara, and you don’t. You just don’t. They use women up, those guys. To them a woman of twenty-one is old, a discard. We had guys like him in the Brigade, going crazy over very young Spanish girls, and I mean girls: those kids were all well under twenty, some of them only about fourteen or fifteen. Jailbait, we used to call them in the States. Liam thinks he’s some kind of an Errol Flynn. And I have to tell you, Stell, it’s downright embarrassing for me to have my daughter connected with his name. Not to mention pictures in a vulgar newsmagazine.”

The vulgar magazine in question was
Time
, which had run a picture of Liam O’Gara “on location in Ásolo, north of Venice, with his current companion, unidentified.” Unidentified Stella, looking even younger than she was, in an old bathing suit that made her look undeveloped, childish, her long black hair in a single girlish braid. “They didn’t even use my name,” Stella told her father, for the dozenth time. “Who’d know? Who’d care?”

“I, for one,” intoned Prentice. “The capitalist press at its
worst. Always has been the most terrible magazine. The China lobby. Henry Luce. Look what they did to Paul Robeson.” Although his politics had predictably veered right, Prentice still sounded, usually, like a Thirties Stalinist.

“Oh, Daddy, really.” The old childish name had slipped out; more often Stella called her father Prentice, which he preferred.

“And my friends. They knew you. In fact a woman you’ve not even met, name of Alexandra, an exceptional type, asked me if that girl with Liam O’Gara could possibly be my daughter. Thought she saw some resemblance to some pictures I had around.”

Which is how Stella first heard of her new stepmother, Alexandra Minsky, an actress—even as she digested Prentice’s clear lie: he did not keep pictures of his daughter lying about. The stepmother-before-last, Rachel, had been visibly surprised to find that Prentice had an almost grown-up daughter. (Rachel, the antiquarian book dealer for whom Prentice had ditched Delia, mother of Stella.) Her father lied; Stella had known and reluctantly admitted that fact to herself for some time, and excused it in various ways: he’s a writer, he deals in fictions—or, his life has been disappointing, all his friends are more famous and successful than he is. But still, the sense that she could not trust him made Stella queasy; she was embarrassed for even his smallest lies. A man who fought in Spain should be a hero, Stella once believed. Or, having been heroic early, he should have remained so.

As though he had read her mind and been amused by its stupid innocence, Prentice laughed. “Prentice the silly old Commie—is that how you see your old man? Although I suppose some might say that only a very strong father fixation would lead you to a jerk like Liam O’Gara.” He leaned back with a challenging, happy smile.

“Actually you couldn’t be more different.” Blushing as she said this, Stella still believed it to be true, and often (to herself) she had cited instances of difference: Liam’s quiet, implacable self-assurance and his upright, severe Scottish conscience—perhaps as odd in a movie director as were Prentice’s quite opposite qualities in a hero. Stella had so often made this contrast that at times she wondered if Prentice and Liam could actually be two opposing halves of the same person, a classic schizophrenic.

The room in which they sat and drank, with its low, inviting chairs and nice round tables, was crowded; Prentice, always inattentive to his daughter, kept craning his conspicuous old head around, always searching: there always might be someone. But turning back to Stella, he announced, “Well, if you don’t shape up, I just may stop making those insurance payments. Think of that—to have me kick off without any compensation!”

“Oh, Prentice.”

“But don’t you worry, my girl. I’ll keep up that rotten expensive policy until my dying day. Literally. And I want you to do something sensible with the money. Like buy a house.” He looked at his watch. “Well, time I was shoving along, old dear. I have to meet the aforesaid Alexandra even farther uptown.”

Having imagined that they were to have dinner together (or did she imagine it? didn’t Prentice say dinner?), Stella gave a moment’s thought to the refrigerator of the friend with whom she was staying, also uptown but West Side: surely she saw some eggs?

“I suppose you’ll be meeting Mr. O’Gara somewhere very grand.” This was a statement from Prentice, not a question.

“Well, I guess not, not tonight.” This seemed hardly the time to tell him that she and Mr. O’Gara were through: the fact that he always, conscientiously, told her about his other, newer and younger loves (younger than twenty-one: Prentice of course was right) made them no easier to bear, Stella had finally, forcefully said to Liam.

Prentice made these unseemly references to an insurance policy fairly often, along with instructions, which were sometimes facetious: “Your first face-lift, if you’re your mother’s daughter.” Or, more sensibly if much more extravagantly, “Buy a house.” The house advice surely suggested a lot of money, and the facelift less, but still, it meant something substantial.

And now, on Prentice’s death, there had been the actual will—and nothing from an insurance company. A copy of the will, mailed out by Alexandra, stated clearly that all Prentice’s worldly goods went to his beloved wife, Alexandra Minsky Blake; or, should that wife predecease him, everything went to the Libertarian
Party of New York, with a street address. (Libertarians! This seemed strange news indeed.) But all in all the will was painful to read; telling no one, Stella crumpled those papers into her garbage can, along with the kitty litter, dead flowers and coffee grounds.

But after several weeks of no further word from Alexandra, much less from an insurance company (Stella had no idea how those things work), she said to Justine, “Prentice kept talking about this insurance policy. For me, I mean. What do you think I should do?”

Laughing, Justine told her, “Honey, I think you have to know which insurance company. You can’t just write to them all. But there must be a policy around somewhere.”