Almost Perfect (21 page)

Furiously embarrassed, Stella would have liked to set her straight, to deny both assumptions: they are not married, Richard is not proud of her. Instead she smiled and touched Richard’s arm, reminded him that they were due back at the Fiegenbaums’.

“I’ll certainly look for your name!” called out the woman from behind them, as Richard flashed her his warm-wonderful smile and called back, “See you again!” then muttered to Stella, “Christ, she really gets the ugly-teeth prize, did you notice?”

She would not get angry, Stella decided; it never worked. Anger was only estranging, and always in the long run it made her look worse. And so, linking her arm into Richard’s arm (why? such an out-of-character gesture, that), she began, “Darling, I know you meant really well, but you embarrassed me …”

“Why should it? I don’t see that at all.”

“Well, you know I’m shy, and I just didn’t see the point. I mean, such a big deal …” She was floundering, she knew she was, not saying what she meant.

“You’re the one making a big deal. Shy.
Shit
, that’s your problem.”

His sentences never quite connected, Stella not for the first time thought; or it seemed to her that (maybe) Richard’s responses did not quite make sense. Or am I the one not making sense? This too was a familiar question.

The air that had been cool and lively a scant half hour before, as they searched for the store, was heavy then, and hot, and still. And the other tourists looked heavier, and slow. As Stella felt herself to be: dowdy, shamed, small, and powerless.

Now, in the dying, blazing sunlight, beside the long black oval of the pool, Richard is telling a joke. “This is guaranteed to offend almost everyone,” he announces, pale blue-gray eyes wide and barely moving, but taking in (Stella can see this) group reactions. Checking his hold on everyone there.

And he must sense some lapse, or some degree less than the welcoming, full attention he generally commands, for his voice rises aggressively as he continues. “This happened in the days of Jesus Christ. The living Christ, out riding around on his donkey.”

This is Richard’s currently favorite joke, one that Stella has heard approximately twenty times in the past four or five months (Richard sticks to jokes for quite a while). But he also told it that morning to the Fiegenbaums, who laughed appreciatively enough, although Stella sensed that Jerry too had heard it before and that Tracy was not especially fond of jokes. Is it possible that he has forgotten already, forgotten that he told the joke this morning? or does he remember but simply not care, not think it’s important
that three people out of an audience of five have heard it before? Stella does not understand Richard, she decides for the thousandth time.

It is, unhappily, the beautiful Irene whose attention is flickering off—who is looking, in fact, at Stella, with a questioning semi-smile. Can she be going to interrupt Richard, wanting to ask Stella something? This possibility is suddenly terrifying; Stella must prevent it, and so she does: she turns dismissively away from Irene, giving all her own full attention to Richard and his joke, not hearing the words but admiring, adoring, as always, his most incredibly beautiful face, the bones and planes of his forehead, his strong nose, flat cheeks and deeply cleft chin.

“Let you who is without sin cast the first stone,” says Richard, with faintly leering emphasis.

What Stella attempted did not work: Irene has leaned forward to whisper, “I’d give anything to know what you’re working on now.”

“Not much at the moment.” Not looking at Irene, Stella has expelled these words on a single breath, a very soft one.

But Richard of course caught the whole exchange. “If you ladies wouldn’t mind,” he says softly, with a menacing smile. “Maybe you could tell your stories later?” And he turns back to the audience whose sympathy he assumes, two fellow men.

Irene and Stella, thus linked, exchange a look, in which much is contained: men are crazy, aren’t they? but we mustn’t make too much of it, must we?

“And Jesus said, ‘You know, Mom, sometimes you really piss me off,’ ” concludes Richard, his punch line.

“A guy in our office, he gets these really good new jokes all the time,” says Jerry Fiegenbaum, with what Stella takes to be unconscious wistfulness.

Richard, though, takes it otherwise. “Well, I can’t compete with fresh sources,” he says with his angry smile. “But maybe you haven’t heard this one. About the contest between three samurai swordsmen? the fly-slicing contest?”

Pleasant Jerry says, “No, I don’t think I know that one.” However, he does glance at his watch. “Say, if you kids are going to make it to the opera, you’d better think about moving along.”

“Well, these three top expert swordsmen—I suppose you girls would say swordspersons?—they got up to test their skills, and the first one …”

Richard is crazy.

Stella has never before thought this so simply and clearly. As such a pure statement of fact. Richard is crazy. It is not
her
craziness. So often he has said to her, You’re crazy, that she has come at least half to believe him. He even has a certain facial expression that signifies exactly those words:
You’re crazy.
An expression of fury and impatience—and fear: he is deeply afraid of madness.

“That fry will never fruck again,” says Richard, amid laughter from the men.

“You guys had really better move it along if you want to get to the opera,” says Jerry, again.

Consulting his Rolex, Gregory disagrees. “I calculate precisely the time for one more drink.”

Richard grins. “Now, there’s a man after my own—”

“Actually the overture is what I almost like best in
Figaro
,” Stella murmurs, to no one.

Richard turns on her. “Then maybe you’d rather not go? Since we might miss the fucking overture?”

In fact, some twenty, twenty-five minutes later, as in their rented car Stella and Richard swing into the parking lot of the opera house, miles out of town, up on the crest of a very long, circular hill, the overture to
Figaro
is what they clearly hear, and despite herself, despite everything, including Richard, Stella is cheered, exhilarated by the music.

Their seats, good ones that Stella ordered from San Francisco, are just under the sheltering roof. Out beyond the stage set, all that eighteenth-century scenery, they can see the dead or dying embers of the sunset, the faint red burn line, above the black New Mexico horizon.

Events onstage proceed, choruses and arias, stiffly costumed people move about. It is all familiar; Stella has probably seen this opera five or six times before; but tonight she is following none
of it. She is only hearing the music, responding to the music, resonating to the lovely strains of Mozart.

It is almost without forethought, and astoundingly without excitement, fear or anger, that she turns and whispers to Richard, “We have to separate. Not live together anymore. You’ll be much happier this way, and so will I. We have to.”

Some tiny motion of a muscle in his face, a vein, a nerve, tells Stella that he has heard her. But otherwise nothing. No words.

Even, later that night, in bed, as Stella clings to Richard’s back, as she always has, and she whispers, “You’ll be much happier without me, you’ll see …,” even then Richard says nothing at all, although of course he has heard her.

Will I ever tell anyone about this? Stella wonders. Could I ever possibly say, We broke up while listening to
The Marriage of Figaro
?

The next morning, though, seems problematic to Stella: should they, as planned, drive up to Taos and spend the night there? or should they try for tickets that would take them immediately back to San Francisco? Stella rather thinks the latter: surely some major change should be instantly apparent, to themselves as well as to the Fiegenbaums?

She almost instantly reads from Richard, though, from his face and his every gesture, that his plan is to carry on as usual. He is his usual self, or one of those selves; he is mildly cross, a little remote, and hurried. Enclosed.

By the time they are clean and dressed and out in the kitchen, Jerry has gone to work and Tracy is about to go off to one of her classes. “Coffee,” she points. “Eggs and fruit and stuff in the fridge. Take anything, please. And tomorrow I’ll expect you when I see you, okay?”

“Did you get the idea she wanted to get away from us?” asks Richard, once Tracy has hurried out to her car.

“A little. Maybe.”

“I can’t think why, such happy, attractive guests.” His irony, so familiar, is still so wounding, and scary.

The drive to Taos is through canyon country: vast vistas of sand and eroded clay, weird rock formations, deformed gray cactus. Emptiness. Space. A huge river gorge. It is a nightmare landscape, the earth after nuclear disaster. And at the same time it is beautiful. Very beautiful. Unreal. As unreal as death.

As the end of love.

Somewhere, in some town, they stop for lunch. A pleasant small restaurant. They order margaritas. On the small banquette, in the room full of white wrought-iron furniture, they sit side by side behind their green glass table with its woven blue straw mats. Stella sips at her drink and thinks of Mexico, of the good margaritas there. Although actually this one is excellent. She begins to cry, small quiet tears falling down her face.

“Well, I guess we should order lunch,” Richard tells her. “What do you feel like?”

“Oh. Anything.”

After lunch, for no reason that Stella can later remember, they go into several stores in the town.

Where Richard buys things.

In a shop full of stamped tinware he buys belts and picture frames and some large tin trays, three or four of each, all charged and sent to himself in San Francisco.

Feeling herself to be withdrawn, not entering into this sport that Richard enjoys, this shopping, feeling that she is indeed a spoilsport, a killjoy, Stella fingers a belt; it was all right from a distance, mildly pretty, but on close inspection it is shoddily made, not pretty.

“Buy it!” Richard encourages. “You won’t find it in San Francisco.”

“I don’t really want it,” Stella tells him; she did not mean to have said this, it simply surfaced: the truth.

He gives her a steely look.

In another store, an art store, they find some posters by an artist whose work they saw in a gallery in Santa Fe, with the Fiegenbaums. Mostly landscapes, large skies and clouds, and small adobe houses. All in pastels. Very nice, and undistinguished.

“I have lots of time. Sit down if you’d like, and I’ll show you,” instructs the storekeeper, a tiny, wizened, very dark woman, laden with turquoise jewelry, earrings, necklaces, belt; she looks like an overdressed doll, a grandmother Indian doll, with shining, emphatic eyes. A little like Stella’s own grandmother, Stella thinks, except that Serena was poor, not jeweled.

Richard and Stella sit down on the camp stools indicated, and the doll-woman opens a portfolio and begins to leaf through. At almost every poster Richard stops her. “I’ll take one of those. A dozen. Eight of that one.” And so on, until he must have bought a couple of hundred posters.

Watching him as he sits there, noting the look in his eyes, which is both greedy and frightened (someone might find him out), Stella also observes his increased weight. He dresses so well, in such beautiful clothes, and generally manages to sit or stand in positions that make his paunch unobtrusive—and naked, it simply does not matter. But his posture there on the camp stool, which must be very uncomfortable for such a large man, shows his girth. He looks heavy.

And quite crazy.

And for the first time Stella thinks, He is having some sort of breakdown. He is going mad. How can I leave a man who is going mad?

Their motel in Taos is large and extremely plain, a sort of barn construction. And the upstairs room to which Stella and Richard are shown is barnlike, oversized and bare, with raw pine beams and unstained pine-slab walls. Unadorned. Two beds, both medium wide.

Stella sprawls across one of those beds. This is not a position in which she usually works, but there is no desk or table, and she has chosen to stay in the room and work, or try to work, while Richard goes off to a museum.

She is writing about Serena, the vendor of flowers, in Oaxaca. Serena, whose feet were as brown and gnarled as roots, toes swollen and bent from a lifetime of walking barefoot over harsh rocks and pavements, of exposure to cold and broken glass and thorns in the flower market.

Stella is thinking about Serena; as she writes, she is seeing Serena’s feet and her terrible clenched hands; she is not really thinking of Richard. Of whether or not they will continue to live together. Of whether or not he is truly crazy. Mad.

So
great
, the greatest thing that ever happened. The luckiest chance: Richard is going to
Germany.
To an international food conference in Cologne. Cologne, Germany. Where she is. Eva. Eva, who laughed that slow deep laugh of hers as she told him, “Well, my darling handsome Richard, this is indeed great luck. My grandparents live in Cologne, they always keep a beautiful house there, and they retire to the country. Cologne is marvelous. And in October—perfect.”

Perfect. Cologne. The rivers. Germany. Eva.

And all this came about because of that craphead bubble party he put on. Webster Wines. God, before he even met Eva. (Or Stella either, come to think of it.) His bubble days of innocence.
(Before Andrew Bacci.) But that dumb party is what got him invited to this conference. International, on food and wine.

Clothes. Surely he has enough?

He makes lists, coordinating blazers and slacks, sweaters and shirts and ties. Shoes and socks. A couple of suits. Scarves. He draws small pictures of some favorite outfits, imagining himself wearing them there. With Eva.

He may need some new things, after all.

But he doesn’t really have the right luggage for this stuff. Doesn’t even know who carries the very best luggage in town.

“Oddly enough, Magnin’s does,” Andrew tells him. “Still. And have you thought about a passport, old man? I mean, you’ve got some time, but those things can take a while.”