Almost Perfect (12 page)

“You don’t know Prentice. I mean, there wasn’t necessarily any policy at all. Or he could have taken one out a long time ago in some manic fit and then not paid it.”

Obviously, she would have to call Alexandra. Who told her, “Really, Stella, you know how Prentice was. Promises, promises. He thought big. Honestly, if I had a nickel for every imaginary present. Pie in the sky. Or, new stereo locked in the head of Prentice Blake. Naturally, if any insurance company comes around I’ll let you know, but, sweetie, I frankly doubt it.”

And so, probably, neither a face-lift nor a house. Nor a paying off of debts. Doctors and dentists, Macy’s, credit cards. Much less a trip to New York.

Stella tried very hard not to mind, but she did mind. She felt as though she had received a posthumous letter from Prentice, saying, I never cared about you at all. I didn’t love you. I only pretended sometimes.

She told herself, It’s only the money. Or alternately, It isn’t really the money that I mind. But she did mind about the money; she could have used even a small amount. And she minded even more what she felt was the message of uncaringness from Prentice.

Her cold got worse.

And Richard acted worse.

*  *  *

One night he arrived at her house for dinner a little after seven, already drunk. A big lunch with clients, he said. His new Germans. His face was red and swollen, and he blinked a lot, as though trying to focus. He looked ugly, and threatening.

“You know, I don’t really feel too well,” Stella whispered. “Maybe … I just don’t feel like making dinner. Could you … do you think …”

“Oh Christ.” He stared at her, enraged, his face bull-red and coarse. “I think you’re asking me to leave. You don’t want to have dinner with me, I can tell.”

“I guess not,” she whispered.

“Well, in that case.” He lurched to his feet. “But you don’t have to worry about the Germans anymore,” she heard him say. “All gone.”

Instead of rushing over to him, as she sometimes did, to cling to him and beg him please to stay, Stella leaned back against the sofa and closed her eyes. She was so vastly tired, she ached all over. Dimly, from behind closed lids, she heard Richard heading for the door. The opening, the slam.

And that time, instead of anguish and hysteria, her usual response to Richard’s departures, what Stella felt was mostly physical in nature: heat, and an ache in her heart, and some tightening of her breath.

“Richard and I have broken up,” she announces to Justine the next morning, on the phone, partly to test the saying of this sentence: Is it true? have they in fact broken up? “He was so drunk and terrible,” Stella says to her friend. “But you know, this goddam cold that I have is so bad that I really don’t care. Odd logic: I think when I get over the cold I’ll be over Richard too.”

“Honey, I think you should call your doctor. Honestly, though, this weather is enough to put anyone under. So cold, and the wind. Days like these, I think more kindly than usual of Texas.”

Neither her cold nor the pain of breaking with Richard seems to diminish. Stella can barely make it to work; she sniffles and
coughs all day, and her chest hurts. In bed at night she finds it hard to breathe.

Piercing memories of Richard make sleep impossible. He seems then, at night, to exist in her mind more vividly than in actual life; she can hear his voice, can see his face, smell his skin more sharply than if he were actually there. And crazily, all that she recalls of him is good; the only Richard in her mind is loving and warm, and kind and laughing, strong and passionately in love with her. And saying so, all night.

Finally she does call her doctor, who says that he would like to see her. That afternoon. And in his office, after listening to her chest, checking pulse and heart rate, he tells her, “I just don’t much like what I see. And from what you say, this has gone on for much too long. The hospital. Tests. Check in as soon as you can. I’m sure your insurance. I’ll see you there around six.”

Stella calls Justine, arranges for some sick leave from the office (“God, I hope he’s right about my insurance”) and arranges for Mr. Wong to feed the cat, pretty Eve. (Mr. Wong has turned out to be a secret lover of cats; he is crazy about Eve—or so Richard once reported. Richard who himself was getting very thick with Mr. Wong.) And Stella, even more sick than she is terrified, checks into the hospital, which is not far from where she lives.

For several days (and nights: the nights are terrible) she does not get better at all—despite a barrage of drugs, and tests, and doctor visits. What she has, she is told, is a particularly resistant strain of pneumonia. (What people used to die of, Stella thinks.)

During those nights, in her noisy, low-lit room, Stella becomes a total prey to terror. She dreams of, or half imagines, giant wild animals, rustling down the corridors. She hears the mammoth wheels of plundering tanks, smells the killer world of night.

In the daytime, awakened for tests, for gurney trips down to X-ray, she thinks, This is more than an illness, I am obviously
having some sort of breakdown. Prentice dying, and then the breakup with Richard, and this pneumonia—everything at once has been too much.

And she does not succeed in separating out those elements; too often she lapses back into tears, and panic, an awful debilitation.

Sometimes during the day she has a few rational moments, though. When Justine comes to visit she even speaks more or less rationally about Richard. What happened. “It’s lucky we weren’t together much longer,” she says. “The addiction or whatever it was could have got worse. And I’m sure it would have.”

“That’s probably true,” says Justine.

A pause, and then Stella asks, “How’re things at work?”

“About the same.” Justine relates some gossip, a few new rumors of takeovers, dismissals.

“And you and Collin?”

Justine laughs, very shortly. “About the same.”

But after that visit Stella notes that she is better.

Margot arrives with a great sheaf of purple flowers. She tells Stella their name, but Stella instantly forgets it.

Even in her own unreal state, Stella can see that Margot is not herself; she looks older, and distracted; even her hair is awry, disheveled. And she talks in a brittle, unconvincing way (as though she were trying not to cry, it occurs to Stella).

There is even some chatter about feminism, vaguely linked to Justine, that Stella, befogged, has trouble following. “Feminists don’t really seem to have things sorted out any better than the rest of us,” Margot babbles. “Oh, darling, of course I know you are one, but not like Justine, she can be awfully strident. And I asked her the simplest question, and she had absolutely no feminist answer. Well, let me try it out on you.”

“Okay.” Stella finds that she very much wishes Margot would just go away, or just be quiet.

“Tell me, if you were involved with some guy who was cheating on you, would you want to know about it?”

Half understanding the question, but having grasped that Margot herself is very disturbed, Stella says, “No, I don’t think so. But, Margot, are you okay? You just don’t look … like yourself.”

Evidently unused to sympathy, Margot bridles. “Why? You must mean my hair. I know it’s a mess, but Andrew called just as I was doing it, and he can be so upsetting. Honestly, he’s such a hypochondriac.”

“I hardly know him,” Stella whispers; by now she is truly exhausted. Dimly she is glad that she has not told Margot about Richard. Breaking up with Richard. Richard gone.

She must have fallen asleep, for when she next is conscious Margot is gone and the purple flowers are drooping in their vase. And a nurse is waking her up for another test.

That night she dreams, or imagines, or hallucinates, that Richard is there in the room with her, at some unreal past-midnight hour. Richard is standing at the foot of her bed, holding three pale, very full-blown roses. She can even smell the roses, so vivid is this dream. But Richard’s voice is strange, as he tells her, “Oh, Stella, I’ve been so terrible, I never meant to. I love you, I love
you
, you can’t imagine how much I love you. Stella, please don’t leave me, I need you.” Was he crying? Was this Richard?

He comes toward her, in this incredible dream, he stands beside her and bends down to kiss her forehead. He even laughs! “Christ,” he says. “Hospital smells. I’ve got to get you out of here. I love you!”

Stella seems then to fall asleep, and when she wakes again Richard is gone. Of course he is; the dream is over. Stella sleeps again, very soundly; her best sleep for weeks.

She sleeps until she is awakened by a nurse, who is saying, “What lovely roses you have here. Honey, can you smell them? Lovely! But they’re so full, the petals are falling off.”

Richard does not exactly move into Stella’s house, and at no time do they ever admit to each other that they are living together; but after Stella comes home from the hospital—Richard collects her there, bundling her and her clothes and flowers into his open car and handing her out like a prize—he is always at her house. Living there.

In the late afternoons, usually, Stella hears him call out, “Anybody home?” and the sound of his saying that always makes her smile: Where else would she be but at home, expecting him? But she rushes to where he is, in the entranceway.

She has sometimes wondered: Is that what he heard as a boy? Did his father use to enter the house in that way, at night? Calling out, Anybody home? (Did he do that on the night he killed his wife, Richard’s mother?)

*  *  *

During the first few days of Stella’s convalescence, Richard usually arrives with great sacks of groceries—food that they somehow, together, turn into a dinner, or two or three dinners, with wine and booze. And flowers; he almost always brings flowers.

And Stella gets much better very quickly; even her doctor agrees that her progress is remarkable. So that soon she is able to do at least some of the shopping; she plans meals and cooks for Richard, with love and high ambitions and considerable nervousness; Richard sets a high standard with his own cooking and prides himself on his palate. Thus the “Anybody home” may find Stella with her hands all floured or smelling violently of garlic. Then she rushes to kiss him with upraised hands and arms, laughing, and he seizes her the more violently, laughing at her, at her semi-fake distress.

Cooking goes well with the work that she is trying to do, Stella finds. The writing. Going back and forth, from her typewriter to the chopping board, the stove, the sink, she feels vastly fulfilled. She believes that she did indeed have some sort of breakdown (which she now attributes mostly to the death of Prentice and to pneumonia, her “resistant strain”) and that she recovered to greater strength. She has, for perhaps the first time in her life, a sense of working to capacity—or of all or almost all of her capacities in use at once. Her capacities for work and for love, in ways that are new.

Interruptions from the demands of cooking are not as jarring, as disturbing as other interruptions are, Stella finds. Some culinary need is nowhere near as bad or as importunate as a phone call, nor as some salesman at her door. To remember suddenly that a chicken should be basted, a soup stirred, some bread pushed down, does not distract her from work in a way that makes it difficult to go back to work—just as certain gentle interruptions to one’s sleep make it possible to sleep again, to continue with one’s dream, while others do not.

*  *  *

Richard fixes things around the house, to Stella’s surprise: she has never known a man before who could fix anything. Prentice felt that any domestic problem was the province of wives; and Liam hired people to do all that. But Stella gradually realizes that Richard not only fixes things, he likes to do so, in the way that he likes to cook. He takes all her knives to be sharpened; he oils the hinge on a door that has always been noisy; he makes a new rack for the kitchen implements, nearer the stove. So wonderful: Stella has tended to accept certain conditions as inevitable, like a noisy door, dull knives and inconveniently placed kitchen tools. To have all that changed seems to her almost miraculous.

Richard downplays his helpfulness, though. “Cosmetic stuff. What I’m good at, I guess.” He looks around and sighs. “What this place needs … Jesus, it’s endless.”

That is how their days mostly go, these days. Love and cooking and small domestic conversations and chores. A lot of laughing at silly mutual jokes. A lot of cat jokes. Eve, whose name Richard seems to have changed to Legs (“Eve is really too serious a name for a cat, don’t you think?”)—Legs is growing up to be quite ungainly; she has, for a cat, a curious lack of grace. She stumbles about on long thin legs, as Stella and Richard watch her, laughing gently and softly. (“It’s as though we didn’t want to hurt her feelings.” “Well, we don’t, do we.”) Legs the cat, formerly Eve.

Sometimes Richard brings home flowers quite unfamiliar to Stella. Ranunculuses. Poppy-like, with their limp silk petals, they seem to bloom in a marvelous spectrum of colors, mostly yellow, pale oranges, but sometimes purple, or red. Richard loves them, he fills the house with ranunculuses with bright petals, bowls and vases everywhere of these flowers, with mirrors reflecting them back, multiplying flowers. Or he often brings home roses. Richard knows a special shop on Union Street; their roses are all grown somewhere down on the Peninsula—for scent, these are
roses that smell like roses. Richard brings home lovely pale bouquets; the rooms smell of roses. And he has a special trick with dried rose petals, bowls of them, here and there. Or freesias. Or stock. Stella so often arrives home to the sight and the scent of flowers that they come to seem a part of the atmosphere in which she and Richard live.

Sometimes, in the night, waking next to Richard, Stella is aware of greater sheer happiness than she can bear. It seems undeserved, and almost unreal, this joy at his presence in her bed, his smooth and fleshy back, the flesh padding large bones and muscles, pulsing blood. His masses of pale fine hair. As she presses her dark skinny body there, to his back, an arm circling his chest, her hand just grazes a small patch of light crinkly hair. It is too much for her, the pleasure that suffuses her heart at such moments, these mornings of sunlight. Of Richard, in bed.