Almost Perfect (16 page)

“Why didn’t you hold out for ten? why are you so grateful?” But he is smiling and happy and warm, kissing and embracing her, telling her then, “You’re so lovely, I’m so happy you’re happy.”

“Where shall we go for dinner?” asks Stella. “Let me take you. Somewhere great.”

They settle on the Nob Hill, the grandest restaurant they know; they agree to meet there at seven.

All that day long Stella is smiling. This is what happiness is, she thinks. To have love in your life, and especially love in the beautiful form of Richard. And some success in your work, people saying that what you do is really okay, is in fact quite good. And lots of money. Oh, those three things are really enough to make her (or anyone!) entirely happy. How lucky she is! Even if
The Gotham
never takes another piece by her, she will still be very happy, Stella thinks, and for the moment she believes that this is true.

At work everyone congratulates her. “
The Gotham
, wow!” “That’s really the best in the business right now. As good as
The New Yorker
used to be.” “That’s super! How lucky those old fools upstairs turned it down.” “That’s great!”

Stella is struck by the real warmth in all those reactions; today she feels that everyone genuinely wishes her well, that everyone is pleased for her.

“It’s partly because they know you’ve paid your dues,” says Justine, over a quick but celebratory lunchtime salad. “They all know you’ve been working very hard and you’ve been as underpaid as they are.”

“And I’m not twenty-one. Not some bumptious suddenly successful kid,” says Stella, very seriously.

“No. It’s lucky you’re so old. Otherwise everyone would be very mean and envious.”

They laugh, and then Justine asks, very lightly, “Richard’s pleased?”

“Of course. Really pleased. But why? You’d think he wouldn’t be?”

“Well, it’s supposed to be very hard on men. The success of women.”

“I know, but Richard isn’t like that. Not a dumb macho bone in his body. He’s very ‘in touch with his femaleness,’ you know? And with mine. I think.” But this exchange is making her just slightly anxious, Stella notes; she feels a small, painful thrust of worry, a tiny shadow cast on her sunny day. Which almost instantly passes.

“The fact that Richard is so intensely creative too, and successful at it, that must make a big difference. If he were just some ordinary advertising jerk …,” says Justine.

“But in that case we wouldn’t be together at all,” Stella points out, laughing, her happiness restored.

Dinner at the Nob Hill is a great success. Two happy and successful people. Eating and drinking much too much good food and wine. And going home, amazingly, to love. To amazing love.

“You’re really hot at
The Gotham
,” Gloria Bergstein has told Stella. “And they’ve got money to burn. Send them anything. Your high school essay contest entry, maybe.”

“I don’t really have a thing right now, but I’ll think.”

What Stella does have is an entirely private project, undertaken more or less as therapy after Prentice died when she was trying so hard to shake off all the anger and hurt around his death. At that time she began a sort of reminiscence of some good times with Prentice, in his parents’ house in New Hampshire: the wonderful library there of Victorian children’s books (including
Sara Crewe
); the attic full of toys. And the lake, the beaches and rocks, and canoes, and picnics. The grandparents getting drunk and singing hymns. Prentice cooking steaks like a regular father. Prentice kind and affectionate with her.

She has written all that, but it makes her shy to think of sending it to
The Gotham
.

She could show it to Justine, she thinks, and ask her opinion, but Stella decides instead (she is not sure just why) to show the piece to Richard. To ask him what he thinks.

“You read it to me,” he tells her. “You know how I hate to read. I’m the illiterate lover.”

And so, after dinner, she does read the whole fairly long piece to Richard, who listens with great intentness, smiling, with a small laugh here and there. And then,
“Well,”
he tells her. “That’s really super. I think it’s the best thing you’ve done; I know they’ll take it.” Rather hesitantly he adds, “But wouldn’t it maybe be a little better if you started with the picnic?—I don’t know—and then the books and the dolls?”

“That sounds right—in fact I know you’re right. Richard, you are a genius!”

“All the girls tell me that.”

But he is very pleased, she can tell. And actually his was a brilliant suggestion; the piece now has a dramatic structure, a form that it lacked before. “You’re absolutely brilliant,” Stella tells him, when she has printed out her piece and sent it off to Gloria.

“A whole new career for me.” Richard laughs. “Illiterate boy finds work as literary critic.”

The Gotham
buys the piece. This time for twelve thousand.

With Richard, Stella admits only to the wildest happiness, and she credits him with the success of this latest piece. “It was all in the way you shifted things around. Honestly, that made all the difference.”

“Stell, come on! But where shall we go to celebrate?”

To Simon Daniels, who calls, as he sometimes does, to give a sort of progress report on the Prentice Blake project, Stella
admits a somewhat less positive reaction. “It scares me,” she says to Simon. “I know it’s silly, but it does. I don’t do well with success.”

“That’s not so silly,” Simon tells her. “It is scary. The slightest success. Especially in this crazy country we live in, where every day we see how dangerous it is. Success
or
failure, I think. I do wonder if that’s true anywhere else, or as true. I would rather guess not, but it would be interesting to know, don’t you think?”

“Extremely,” Stella tells him—though she is actually thinking less about success in England or France or China than about her own trepidations. But Simon’s question has been interesting, and she forces herself to carry on with it. “You’d think we’d know,” she says to Simon. “Or at least that someone would.”

“Actually I have a pal in London I can ask about how things are there, success-wise. He’s really on the fringe himself, so he’d be the first to know.”

Stella then asks how the Prentice book is going, and Simon tells her, “Hard work. Everyone contradicts everyone else. It’s honestly hard to believe they’re all talking about the same guy.”

“Well, he was pretty complicated,” Stella tries to reassure him.

“But his politics! Really schizo.”

“I know.”

“I’ve begun to think he could have been CIA.”

“Oh Lord!”

“Justine, what on earth, what’ve you done to your hair?”

“Calm down, Stella. It’s just a rinse. It’ll go away.” But Justine frowns a little, and very slightly blushes, as she explains, “Don’t you ever think a person could get tired of plain old gray-blond hair?”

Stella laughs. “Oh sure, but I loved it, Justine. Your gray is really beautiful.” And then, her voice darkening with suspicion, “Did you do this for Collin? I mean, did he—”

At which her friend in her turn laughs. “No, I actually did it sort of against Collin. He kept going on and on about my
beautiful gray hair, and I began to think it was a sort of wifely attribute for him.”

“Come on, Justine. All you had to do was say no. You don’t have to dye your hair. What is this, some sort of semiotics?”

This conversation is proceeding on a dirty bench in Union Square, at lunchtime. The two women have seated themselves among the new and old homeless, the visibly alcoholic and/or drugged—and the others, who are simply people with nowhere to live. And a scattering of middle-class people more or less like themselves, people with houses and jobs. With lives. At the far end of the square some sort of protest is going on, pitifully small: fifteen or twenty struggling men and women, a few tattered posters, which Stella and Justine are unable to read. They wonder to each other about those people: who? for what cause? Both women, knee-jerk liberals, find their sympathies almost automatically aroused.

Justine’s bright new blond hair, in the bright new sunlight, seems to make her look older than the softening gray did—or so Stella thinks. Justine is still very attractive, but also more ordinary. “You look like someone who lives in Burlingame, very Peninsula,” is what she says to her friend.

“Well, thanks a lot. A Peninsula matron, my favorite role model. Is success going to make you mean, do you think?”

At which Stella, unaccountably, almost cries; there are tears in her eyes, which she just manages to blink away. “Damn,” is all that she says, more or less to herself. And then, to Justine, “This new sale is somehow making me terrifically nervous.”

“Well, I can sort of see how that might be.” As always, Justine has given her whole attention to what has been said to her; she enters the world of another person with remarkable ease.

And so Stella tells her more. “When I sold that first piece, it just seemed a purely marvelous fluke. And then the second, icing on the cake. But now three. It’s like I’m committed to something. I have to keep doing it.”

Justine laughs, though gently. “Like after three dates it’s a love affair.”

“More like taking three steps out onto the tightrope,” Stella tells her.

Having taken that in, Justine frowns. “Oh dear.” And then she says, “I do see what you mean. You have to keep on going, or fall. You can’t just go back to being a newspaper hack. I felt a little that way after the Nieman.”

“Exactly.”

They are quiet then for a while, both somewhat inattentively watching as the small group in the corner begins to disperse, its banners and placards still unreadable but having a foreign look. And the band of marchers themselves, departing, look alien, very dark.

“Iraqis, maybe?” suggests Justine.

“Maybe. I know they’re not Mexican. Pakistanis?”

“Could be.” And then Justine, with an air of pulling herself together, of getting down to business, says to Stella, “I have to tell you, babes, I’ve been getting a little static from upstairs concerning you.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. You know what those old boys are like. I’m hearing phrases like ‘taking advantage’ and ‘not serious journalism.’ ”

“Oh Jesus.”

“Yes. Indeed. But easy enough to fix. Just show up around the shop a little more. Make your presence felt. You know, the more busy women around, the more important they all feel.”

“So they won’t think I’m writing for New York on their precious time.”

“Right. You’ve got it.”

Stella’s mood of anxiety, though, persists into the afternoon. Despite all Justine’s intelligent sympathy. She would even like to call Richard and say to him, Look, I don’t really feel like celebrating. I know it’s sort of neurotic, but couldn’t we just have a quiet dinner at home? However, she does not call.

“That Bolling. Some Marbles. Honestly, I really wonder.” These ambiguous phrases, more or less muttered into his martini, are Richard’s first utterances of the evening, as, drink from the bar in hand, he slides into the booth beside Stella. Scowling. And then the scowl goes, and he kisses her. (But martinis? Richard never drinks martinis.)

She asks, “What’s the matter with Al—acting up?” She has tried to make it a joke.

“Oh, I don’t know. It could be just me. I’m not the easiest guy in the world to get along with. Or so I’ve been told.” He flashes a familiar smile.

“Now, who would say a thing like that?”

They both laugh, a little uneasily. In the last week or so they have had a couple of almost major fights, which were her fault quite as much as his, Stella believes.

Does he want to talk about Bolling? As is so often the case, Richard’s signals are ambiguous. And so, tentatively, Stella tries. “You mean Bolling’s being difficult?”

Richard makes a sound that is half laugh, half snort. Derisory of both herself and Bolling, Stella at that instant feels.

“You could put it like that,” says Richard. And then he adds, “Don’t ask.”

“This place was a good idea,” Stella tells him, brightly, after a somber pause. “It’s so good-looking, I’ve been wanting to come here. Have you seen it before?”

“No, never,” he says (too quickly?). “I mean yes, I came once with Bolling, actually, and we had a drink at the bar.” (It is in fact the place where, observed by Margot, Richard first had dinner with Eva.)

“Oh.” Obscurely disturbed, Stella decides that perhaps she should at least try to talk more openly to Richard, more honestly than she usually does. In a friendly way (she hopes), she begins, “I don’t know why, but selling this new piece has upset me in some curious way. It’s hard to understand. You’d think—”

Richard has been staring at her as she speaks. Unsympathetically; his look is almost hostile, Stella feels. In any case, it is totally without comprehension. And he says, “I sure don’t get it. I just don’t. Tell that to one of your literary friends. Jesus Christ. Ten grand.”

“We could go to Europe,” says Stella suddenly. Desperately.

“Europe. Good Christ, Stella, get real. I’ve got work to do.”

But then he smiles and reaches for her hand. “Thanks for the offer, though. Well, shall we order? The food’s really good here, as I remember.”

But (Stella starts to say and does not) you said you just had a drink here.

She has not said this, but Richard seems to have felt or sensed the question. “Bolling and I had a few hors d’oeuvres at the bar,” he tells her. “Damned hearty hors d’oeuvres, and damned good.”

“Damned” is not a word that Richard uses in that way. Is he suddenly sounding like Al Bolling? And if so, why?

Dinner is good, though, and they drink a lot of good wine.
Quite
a lot. By the time they get home they are tired and merry, and faintly amorous. For a while.

Later Stella cannot even remember what they were talking about—only that suddenly the ground between them flared into fury, inflammable as an oil spill. Boiling blood. Pure rage.
Crazy!
they scream at each other.
You’re crazy!
As, in some small part of her mind, Stella sickly thinks, We’re both right, we both are crazy. If I were not crazy I would not be living with Richard, and maybe that is true of him too.