Almost Perfect (24 page)

And so it is with her grandfather’s house (of all the minor issues). Stella has not exactly lied about that house; however, walking on the beach that day at Santa Barbara, she more or less implied that the Blake house was similar to those houses but indeed somewhat simpler. Whereas, in fact, the Blake house was closer in style and in scope to the Bush mansion in Kennebunkport
or the Kennedy compound on the Cape. Prentice Blake was exactly what Richard so angrily, scathingly called him: an upper-crust Communist. But Prentice had grown up richer and more upper-crust than Richard had any idea of. The Blake fortune, a New England amalgam of leather goods and lumber, had been immense. (And whatever had happened to all that money? Stella wondered. She supposed that Prentice squandered his share on marriages and good causes and the Communist Party. And that his parents, with whom he had many times quarreled, left the rest to charities and to Harvard.) In any case, the gray-timbered pile of a house on a large lake in southern New Hampshire was truly immense—and frightening and very confusing to a small half-Mexican child on her infrequent visits there with her father. Delia never came to New Hampshire, by whose wish or by what edict Stella was never sure.

It was in New Hampshire, one hot green June afternoon, out on the sun porch, which was Stella’s private jungle, her retreat—it was there that as though for the very first time she saw her father and she fell in love with him.

The event was extraordinary, as was its memory. As a young child, a year or so after that memorable day—when she was three or four instead of only two—she would think, That was when I first saw Prentice. It was not of course when she first saw Prentice, actually: she had lived with him in New York and in Mexico, with Prentice and Delia.

Still later, recalling her sense of his newness, and her delight, she thought of it as falling in love.

There she was, on the floor beside the faded floral chintz settee, playing with a little painted wooden train that her grandmother had found for her up in the attic, where the books and toys from the childhoods of Prentice and his sisters were all kept. The dolls were considered too fragile for further use, as were the oversized and delicately furnished dolls’ houses. Stella was given a host of stuffed animals, building blocks, balls and cars and trains, with which she was dizzily happy, such an abundance. But in the way of children, which is so often viewed as perverse by the adult world, she especially liked this simple, workable train. She liked to pull it along through the large bright squares of sunlight, on the high-gloss parquet floor—under chairs, between the spiky
bamboo legs of tables, carefully around the wicker frames of plant stands and the trailing strands of ivy.

There she was, looking up at the sound of grown-up footsteps creaking across the uncarpeted library floor (there were Oriental scatter rugs), adjacent to the sunroom, where she was. And then he came in, her father, Prentice, whom of course she knew, had recently lived with, but he seemed to her, just then, a brand-new person.

As she must have seemed to him—for looking down, and then bending toward her, her father exclaimed, “Well, hello. My, you are a cute little thing, aren’t you now?” And he sat right down beside her, with his dark leather skin and blue eyes, the smell of his pipe, his knees in gray flannel, his long, thin feet in ragged white tennis shoes. He picked up the train and smiled. “It’s very satisfying, don’t you find it so?”

“Yes,” Stella told him. “Wood won’t break like plastic.”

He laughed. “You’re a smart little kid. You must get that from me,” and he laughed again.

That was their encounter. No more to it than that. A couple of minutes for Stella to remember, always—minutes to which in later years she would attach new meaning: falling in love.

The rest of that visit with her grandparents and her father passed unmemorably. During those years the grownups were using the same words over and over: McCarthy. FBI. Witch hunt. Russia. Communist menace. Her father did most of the talking; his parents, who were very old, were quiet, sad-looking. At the dinner table and then again at breakfast, and lunch, her father ranted on: Red scare. HUAC. The Smith Act. McCarran. Treachery. Friends. Loyalties. Frida, Diego. Lillian, Hammett. Miller. Kazan.

In the daytime they swam in the lake and took small excursions in the long green canvas canoes, Old Towns, that were tied up for the summer to the heavy dock pilings on slimy green ropes. Out on the water, passing an enclave of smaller, cozier-looking houses along the lakeshore, Stella used to think, but did not quite dare to say, that the three of them, she and Prentice and Delia, could have lived all together and alone in such a house. Lived happily ever after, maybe.

Later on there was a period, dimmer and more distant, more
confused in Stella’s mind than the summer when she discovered and fell in love with Prentice—a long period in which she was mostly in Mexico, in Oaxaca and sometimes Cuernavaca, sometimes Mexico City, with Delia. During that time she rarely saw her father; she saw him only in New Hampshire, where he seemed to be living with his parents, and a new blond woman who sometimes seemed to visit.

Hiding out, she later supposed him to be doing, as she grew older and understood something of the atmosphere of the Fifties. When she understood at last that “witch hunt” had nothing to do with black costumes and pointy hats.

In a sense it was surprising, Stella later thought, that they took him in at all, those old super-rich entrenched Republicans. But that surprise lessened as she grew older still and understood a little more of the complexity of human affections, especially those in families.

She gathered that later, though, Prentice quarrelled in a final way with his parents, and that on their deaths his rich sisters, the very right-wing and proper aunts whom Stella had never met, were made richer still, whereas Prentice received what must have been for his parents a mere token, and his half-Mexican child was unmentioned in the will. As she was, in effect, in the will of Prentice himself. A chain of disinheritance.

“But I’m not going to Cologne. There is no Cologne!” Richard bursts out, to his own surprise and shock and horror. He has been sitting in this shabby terrible bar forever. With Al Bolling, who likes it here. He has been saying a lot more than he ever meant to say, Richard has, at the end of this horrible day. And so, having said everything else that he did not intend to say, it is not surprising that he should explode with this news of Cologne.

News that he has not told anyone. Not Stella. Or Andrew.

Or even Eva.

The day began, or it seemed to begin, with the phone call on his office tape. About Marina. Who was found dead in that place where she lived out on Bush Street; it seemed to have taken them
a week to find his address. The female voice on the tape did not announce her identity. A neighbor? an official? Richard is not to know.

Marina was bruised and “pretty much banged up,” and lying beside her was an empty bottle of Halcion, which is certainly not supposed to kill you. The person left a number at which she could be reached.

Richard turned off the tape and began to think of Marina, so beautiful that she took his breath away when he was eighteen and flunking out of high school, smoking dope and drinking Gallo Hearty Burgundy. In New Jersey. There she was, so tall and fair and frail; all blue veins, she seemed more blue than blond. His blue girl: he named her that right away. Blue.

She always cried a lot. That is how he remembers Marina, crying, wiping her eyes and her nose, shredding Kleenex. Thin shoulders shaking as he held them. And why? why did she cry so much? Even crying he could always make her come, at first with his fingers and then with himself, his cock. She always came. So why wasn’t Marina happy?

At last he dialled the number that was left for him (it must have been a neighbor), getting her after many rings. Wasn’t there an investigation? he asked. For instance, who beat her up? That’s not something that even unhappy Marina could do to herself. The woman gave him some crazy routine about friends on the force, some cop that Marina knew, so there wasn’t any investigation. And Richard remembered Marina boasting about this cop she knew, who no doubt beat her up.

Sitting there at his studio table, in the room so crammed with
things
, all things that he used to find so beautiful, that he coveted and bargained for, Richard longed to weep for poor Marina. He could like himself so much better if he cried, if he could think of himself as a man moved to tears by the death of a woman he used to love. He lowered his face into his hands, as though to cradle sobs, but it didn’t work; the smooth vibrant familiar fresh-shaved feel of his skin on his hands reminded him crazily of Claudia’s hands. He remembered Claudia stroking his face (they were hiding in a bathroom, at someone’s party up at Tahoe, during ski season). And then he remembered crazy jealous Marina, making scenes at a party. So that instead of weeping for
Marina he remembered how he had hated her sometimes. And he thought, What a shit I am, what a total shit.

The next thing that happened, on that awful day, was that Cats came by, just a knock at the door and there he was, small and dark and cute. Richard’s Cats. But totally down; Cats was down: Richard read deep depression in his friend’s walk, his posture, even before Cats had come across the room to Richard’s desk and slumped down into the chair.

“It’s her, of course,” Cats told Richard. “Fucking whore. She’s getting married. To this old rich guy. Whom she’s been seeing
all along.
”

“Jesus,” was all that Richard could think of to say. “Oh Jesus.” And then, unhelpfully, “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure, you asshole. It’s not something I’d make up. She came out and admitted it, finally. ‘How come I’ve got all these great clothes that you like so much?’ She asked me that, like I was really dumb.”

“Jesus,” said Richard again.

“I know, there could have been other explanations. But then she smiled in this particular way and she said, Presents. Well, shit, man, I know what that means as well as you do.”

Hating to be called “man,” and by cute little Cats, who ordinarily didn’t talk like that, Richard was reduced to saying, “Well, I don’t know.”

“Hell, you do know, Rich. You know what she’s like. Just look at her.”

“But.” But you were in love with her, Richard did not say.

The two of them stared at each other across the crowded table, glum and helpless. Richard considered telling Cats about some of his own problems; it would be the friendly male-bonding thing to do, but then he thought, Fuck it, why should I share my head with this stupid dago furnituremaker? Who will walk out of here and find another Valerie in the next bar he walks into? And so, instead of acting like himself, like warm charming Richard, Richard made a small speech. “You’ve got to pull yourself together, old man,” is what Richard said. “Stiff upper lip, all that sort of thing.” (Why on earth was he sounding like Al Bolling? So Yale, so incredibly stupid.)

Cats of course looked unhappier yet. He frowned, his small
dark face deeply lined with misery and incomprehension. “Ah, Rich,” he pleaded.

“I mean it, Cats Pie. Be a little tough with yourself. Give it a try.”

“But, Rich, I loved her.”

“Christ, don’t be so fucking silly.”

“Shit, man, you really know how to hit a fellow when he’s down.”

“And for God’s sake don’t call me man! I can’t stand it.” By the time he had said that, Richard was standing up, shouting.

So that Cats could only scramble to his feet and stand up too, giving Richard one last look as he said, “What a shit you are, Richard Fallon. Just one pretty shit.”

Richard watched Cats’s receding back, leaving the studio very possibly for the last time. He noted both the slump of those small shoulders and the jaunty effort that Cats was making to get out of there as quickly as possible, and he almost called out to him, Cats, dear old Cats, come back. I didn’t mean it. That wasn’t me talking.

But he did not call out to Cats. Instead he put his head down on his desk, the cold wood pressing his forehead, and he sobbed. Sobbed, crying for Cats and for poor dead Marina. For poor Al Bolling, so deeply troubled. And for himself, poor Richard, who is, as Cats said, just a pretty shit.

An hour or so after lunch, Stella called to say that she had won some sort of prize. Some literary deal. Not much money but really an honor, she said. Richard could tell that she was playing it down, pretending that it was nothing much; she just thought she’d mention that she got it. But that really, really, she thought it was the cat’s pajamas. Whatever the hell it was she got. What prize.

Richard could hardly respond to what she was saying. As usual, her timing was terrible. Not her fault, but shouldn’t she really have some sense about things like that? Shouldn’t she know how he feels?

He managed, though, not to put her down too much. He just said, How great, and he told her, again, that he’s not exactly
an expert on literary prizes but it’s great that she got one. He wishes they could go out to celebrate tonight, if that’s what she had in mind, but he has this thing with Al Bolling, and it could be late.

She sounded disappointed, but not as though she couldn’t handle it. Stella is not Marina, thank God.

Richard actually did not have any such plan with Al Bolling, but now he called and fairly readily made the date. Al never seemed to have much to do these days, poor old Marbles. But he insisted on his favorite bar, Al did: this awful place out on Geary, all dark green and black and shabby, so
shabby.
The pure ugliness of the place literally hurts Richard’s eyes: the wax flowers in a false-flute vase behind the bar (and anthuriums, for God’s sake; bad enough when they’re real); the sunset-on-black-velvet painting, framed in nail-studded brass; the bar itself, with its cheap cheap black Formica; the fat cracked Naugahyde barstools; and the fucking floor, dirty linoleum, with black and purple Art Deco swirls. A bar from hell. Richard has never been anywhere so ugly. (But in fact he has: his mother’s living room was almost this ugly, and sort of in the same way. She even liked anthuriums. Odd he never remembered before.)