Almost Perfect (25 page)

Al likes this bar because he thinks it’s a real
bar
, whatever the hell that means.

First off, for no good reason, Richard told Al about Marina, which seemed to open a can of worms for Al.

“My first wife, uh, killed herself,” Al said, looking straight ahead at the velvet sunset and the anthuriums. “Did I ever tell you that?”

Well, he had, a couple of times, but Richard politely shook his head no, in an interested way.

“Well, she did. Slit her wrists in the bathtub with a razor blade. Imagine finding a thing like that. Your naked wife, in all that blood? Christ, what a thing to do to a man! And our daughter—it was Alexis who found her, you know. Explains quite a lot, I think. But what anger! When I think about it, I could kill that woman. Killing myself would be more like it, I guess.” He paused. “A lot Alexis would care if I did.” Another pause. “Lucky for her, I guess.”

“Marina’s killing herself would not have been a big surprise to me,” said Richard.

“But that’s actually not how she died, now is it?” Al Bolling pointed out. (Helpfully? Not exactly.)

“No,” Richard agreed. “But she still could have, and Christ, for all I know she really provoked this man into beating her up.”

“You’re not supposed to talk that way these days,” instructed Bolling. “When women get beat up or raped, it is not their fault. It’s all our fault, fella, and we’d better face it.”

The irony was so heavy, leaden as clouds, that Richard realized how drunk Bolling was. He had no doubt been drinking since lunch, and lunch was very likely liquid too. Well, shit. There were a couple of things Richard really needed to say to Al Bolling. Things to get straight.

As though merely changing the subject and introducing a more pleasant topic, after a small pause Richard, as brightly as he could, remarked, “I’m really happy about the way my sketches are shaping up. If I do say so myself, they look
good.
”

“What sketches?”

Richard’s heart dropped, although there was no way that Bolling could be serious.
No way.
He managed to laugh. “Only the greatest drawings ever made. The northern California coast, in all its dramatic glory. The redwoods—”

“Oh, that shit. Jesus, sometimes I could tie a can to that whole project.”

He could not be serious. Although Richard felt that his stomach had risen to his throat, that he was being strangled, choked on his own inner organs, still he knew that this was not the time for pressure. That the last thing he should do, the very last, was in any way to force the issue with Bolling. To force it now. (But holy Christ, how could he have said that, even half drunk and half kidding? How could he have made that remark about tying a can to the Fillmore project? Doesn’t he know that that would ruin Richard’s whole life? Well, maybe he does know that. Rich people generally do know things, in Richard’s experience.)

“How’s Stella these days?” was Bolling’s next (somewhat surprising) inquiry.

“She’s terrific, doing just terrific. She just won some really important literary prize—can’t remember the name of it. But she’s terrific.”

“Well, that’s great. I’m glad to hear it. That way you can take early retirement and let her support you.”

Was Bolling actually saying that Richard was almost out of work? Before Richard could even think along those lines, Bolling came up with another killer question.

He asked, “How’s Stella reacting to your going off to Cologne? She doesn’t mind not going too?”

“But I’m not going to Cologne. There is no Cologne,” is what Richard then bursts out with.

People whom he has barely noticed in his peripheral vision, sitting near them at the bar, turn now to stare, and Richard stares back, for several horrified moments, and then he tries to laugh. “What’s the matter?” he says, more or less to the room at large. “A person can’t make a joke around here? What’d you think I meant, the start of World War Three? Cologne has been cancelled, not bombed.”

“I more or less thought that might happen,” says Bolling to Richard, very quietly.

Richard tries another laugh, with even less success. “Well, I wish you’d told me about it, old man,” he said. “If you had this inside information. Where’d you get it anyway? The Skull and Bones Gazette?”

Unsmilingly, Bolling tells him, “It’s just in the air. Everything’s fucked. Can’t you smell the rot?”

“I guess I can,” says Richard.

No Cologne and now, from the sound of it, the sound of Bolling, no Fillmore chain project. No heavy money for the next few years or maybe the rest of his life. Richard experiences a surge of depression so profound that it is peaceful. Like drowning, he imagines, and for one wild instant he wonders, When you jump off the bridge, is that what happens, you drown? Or does the water break your back first, or your neck? Or your heart?

He is suddenly a ruin. The wreck that he has always known that he would be, eventually, when everyone caught on to him. Eva caught on a long time ago, he now thinks; she never really loved him. Stella will be the last to get it.

“Well, how about dinner?” asks Al Bolling, with a big sloppy smile that does not include his eyes.

“I think I’ll pass on dinner,” Richard tells him, feeling cruel. Knowing that Bolling wants,
needs
company tonight. “Okay then, old man. Whatever you say.”

Driving across the city very slowly, with his leaden heart and his dizzy squeezed-out stomach, Richard pauses to stare at a couple of hookers on Polk Street. Tall, pretty black girls, in miniskirts, with those nice high hard asses that some black women have, and very long skinny legs. Richard watches as a car pulls up and one of them goes out to the curb, and after no time at all she gets into the car, and they pull off, while the other girl just stands there, smoking and smiling and contemplating the empty street.

For one insane instant Richard is tempted to go over to her, get her into his car, and drive somewhere and get blown. Well, he’s never had a whore; why not? It’s what the big boys like Bolling do, he thinks. But then he thinks, Jesus, no. AIDS, herpes, God knows what all. Besides, the shape he’s in, he probably couldn’t even get it up.

He thinks about whores. Romantic, legendary San Francisco and her whores, with their big gold hearts. They’re what the city smells of, Richard thinks. A hundred years and more of whores and pimps and their grimy loot, their putrid beds all covered over now with pretty parks and cable cars and clean white rows of curly Victorian houses. But underneath all that the city stinks. It’s getting old and broke and it smells, smells of homeless people and AIDS and poverty and loneliness and cancer. And suicide.

The night is terrifically black. Richard has never seen such a thickly black night, so heavy and quiet, almost no traffic. Dead. A dead night.

Out on Lake Street, almost home, a fast-speeding long black car, an old Jag, comes up behind him and passes, looping far out into the oncoming lane to do so. Some drunk, and then Richard has the sudden idea, next the near conviction, that that was Bolling, who drives an old Jag like that one. Al Bolling on his way to the bridge, where he will start across and then stop in the middle, look both ways to see if other cars might notice him.
Get out of the car and hurry to the railing—and then what? Will he pause for an instant, maybe reconsider, maybe think about his life? No, old Bolling will just lurch on over, over, over the railing and down, down much faster than thought to the black cold slap of water.

Oh God! Poor Marbles.

Richard considers driving on to the bridge himself, following Bolling—but how could he be sure that was Bolling? But it was, he is almost sure it was Marbles, and maybe he could manage to stop him. Look, old Marbles, he could say, we’re both in the soup, but you’re still rich, and I don’t really give a fuck, and so why don’t we pool our resources and run off to Mexico?

Would that save either of their lives, running off to Mexico?

Drunk as he is, Richard very much doubts it, and pulling his own car over to the curb, he sits there and, for the second time that day, begins to weep, for Cats, for dead Marina, and for poor wet cold dead Al Bolling (probably).

And for Stella, big feminist, big success.

And for himself.

“Of course my father didn’t kill my mother. Did you believe that? I was just trying to make myself more colorful. More interesting to you. I thought you’d like me better.”

“Oh.” And then, “How could I have liked you better?” murmurs Stella.

This somewhat unreal conversation takes place on a brilliantly sunny day in early February, up on the northern California coast. Not far from Richard’s house. Having taken a fairly long walk, a couple of hours, along the grassy bluffs, they are now seated some feet apart on a sort of hillock, overlooking the bright spreading azure sea.

A little earlier they stopped at what was to Stella a terrifying sight: there suddenly, cut into a dip in this billowing green land, was an enormous crater, a huge round hole, looking far down to
a circle of water, tunnelled in from the plunging, churning sea. Interior cliffs of steep sharp rock lined this treacherous cavity; ferns and small flowers sprouted here and there from their tiny crevices. But down below was always that dark flooding water, waiting. Horrifying. Stella quickly stepped back, not liking to see Richard standing there on the edge, peering down; she closed her eyes, and as, together, they left that place she said to Richard, “What a frightful place. Shouldn’t there be a fence or something?”

Unexpectedly docile (this is a new and alarming mood in Richard), he said, “I suppose.”

And then they walked on some more, now in the direction of Richard’s house. And sat down in the sun to rest and to begin, somehow, to talk about parents.

“They fought a lot,” Stella said, of Prentice Blake and Delia. “Drank and fought, the way people did in the Fifties. The other side of togetherness. They both had filthy tempers. It’s odd that I don’t, I guess, or maybe that’s why,” she mused. “I was too scared.” And then, “Did yours fight much?” She paused, “I mean before …”

The pause was her first reference, ever, to Richard’s early confession: “I’ve never told anyone this. My old man killed my mom.” (Of course at the time she believed him.) And Richard, understanding that pause, getting the reference, then tells her, “Of course my father didn’t kill my mother.”

And Stella answers, helplessly, “How could I have liked you better?”

This past month or so, Richard has seemed at least twenty years older than his actual age. An old man, terrifically sad. His posture and his walk have perhaps shown it most of all. He once walked with such confidence, a big man, quick and certain, flaunting his marvelous body before the world. Now he slumps and seems to sag. His movements are slow, uncertain.

Stella is sure that much more is oppressively on his mind than she knows about, but she can list at least a few of the causes of his sorrows: the conference at Cologne, which he was so excited
about and which then seemed to dissolve and disappear. The death of Marina: “I should have stayed married to her, I know I could have saved her,” Richard has ranted, drunkenly, crazily. And the suicide of Al Bolling. Richard: “I
could
have saved him. Christ! I had a chance to. Dinner, we could have really talked for once, I could have talked him out of it. I know I could have. And then he drove right past me! I knew it was him, I could have followed him. Saved his life. Jesus, it is my fault! It’s what I get—holy Jesus!”

Somewhere in all this, along with his other panics, Stella senses that Richard is terrified about money. The loss of Bolling also means the loss of the Fillmore job; Richard has said that this was so, but he has not, so far, said that he is worried about money. (It is so like the two of them, Stella has thought, not to mention money.) But she knows that it is something that they have to talk about.

Now, in response to what Stella has said about liking him better, Richard tells her, “You love me. I’m not so sure that you like me very much. But that’s the story of my life. I’m loved but not liked a lot.”

Struck by the (probable) accuracy of this, Stella nevertheless assures him, “Of course I like you. A lot of people do.”

“No they don’t. I make them feel sentimental, or I make them laugh. Or I sex them up. But that’s not the same as liking.” He laughs a little. “You’re the one people like, Stell.”

And you don’t love me, or like me, she thinks but does not say. She only says, “I suppose,” aware that this conversation is bringing her close to tears. In fact Richard’s sadness penetrates to her bones, like a wind. She has even in a conscious way to control her way of walking, so as not to slump and lag as he does. His sorrow is truly contagious; she fights succumbing to it as best she can, while at the same time she is desperate to help him.

Partly to shake this mood, she gets to her feet. “Let’s go,” she says. “I’m hungry, aren’t you? Let’s have a real lunch with some wine, okay?”

*  *  *

Richard drinks very little of the wine and eats only part of his pasta. No salad. Stella gulps down what are for her unusual amounts of all these things.

In the afternoon, in Richard’s large and beautiful sunny bedroom, which is open to views of the bluffs, the grass and sky and sea—in his broad white linen-upholstered bed, they try to make love. With good intentions, some passion and much tenderness, and at last some desperation, they try everything they know, and nothing works. They can’t make it, they can’t make love.

And afterwards Stella can’t fall asleep.

Beside her, Richard sleeps heavily. He breathes in long gasps, like someone dying. In his sleep, where is he? Stella wonders. Is he at home in New Jersey, with very ordinary, embattled, but not murderous parents? Or is he off skiing somewhere? Or in Cologne, where he longed to go, with such strange and unsettling intensity?

They decide to go out for dinner.

And there in the slightly garish, very Fifties-looking road-house, Italian style, over bad roast chicken they finally talk in a practical way about Richard’s problems.