Rich Rewards

by Alice Adams

  It was a questioning, tentative kiss, however—an invitation rather than a gesture. Which I declined. Without a thought—this surprised me later on, when I did think about it—I said, “Ah, Tony, you’re so nice, you make me feel much better,” but in a clearly dismissing way.

  He understood, of course, and smiled, and went off to work. I guessed that he felt a little relieved. He would have been agreeable to taking me to bed if I had wanted to, but I didn’t think he really wanted that kind of complication either—nor, I had to face it, had he wanted me very much. I was the one with the sexual fantasies in his direction. He had just felt that he should make the offer of himself.

  Which said a lot about Tony, and I began then to wonder how much of his charming posturing was accidental. Maybe he was the same sort of automatic flirt that Stacy, for example, was.

  I wondered too about Tony’s connection with Caroline; it seemed more and more likely that they were indeed “just friends.”

  God knows what Tony’s true sexual nature was, I thought then—and how I wish that I had never happened to find out.

  16

  Like many people of my generation and my sort of education—an education involving good schools, good books and a lazy, haphazard sort of mind—my friends and I did a lot of emotional temperature-taking, so to speak. We were always very interested in how we were. Agatha alone was exempt from this preoccupation; I had decided finally that she was genuinely not interested in her own mental health—it was her spiritual condition that concerned her.

  Other friends and I all used certain key phrases in regard to ourselves and others—phrases dull enough in themselves but for us significant. “In bad shape” meant terrible, nearly suicidal, probably; and so on upward, through various, intimately known gradations, until we arrived at “better,” an ideal state. I really think I’m better indicated true happiness: not euphoria—we all knew the dangers inherent in that—but warm contentment, our goal. We were certain too that happiness meant some good balance of love and work, and probably some money.

  Working on Agatha’s house at that time, with no love affair going on, earning money, I really did feel better—there were my lecherous fantasies about Tony, about which I felt a little guilty, until I thought, Well, men have such fantasies about us all the time, or they say they do.

  In fact I felt a lot better, until the night when Whitey came over and I began to feel really terrible, and that evening could so perfectly easily not have happened at all.

  But it did happen. Agatha was coming for dinner, and since I had to be out all afternoon, in search of some brass fittings for the bathroom, and, I hoped, some striped canvas for deck awnings, I made the dinner in the morning, a nice winey, garlicky stew, with lots of rosemary, which would be even better heated up for dinner.

  However, when I got home late that afternoon, exhausted and unsuccessful, having found nothing that I liked in canvas or in brass, the phone was ringing as I opened the door. I ran to answer it—unfortunately forgetting the unlocked door—and it was Agatha, saying that she couldn’t come. She was sorry; she had been trying to get me all afternoon, she said. Something had come up, with Royce.

  I was furious and quite hurt, most irrationally so—although I did not say this to Agatha. I do react badly to changed plans about meals, something infantile to do with food, I guess. For another thing, I did think Agatha was being a little adolescent about her love affair; grown-up women don’t break dates with each other because at that moment a man is more pressingly important to them, not any more.

  I was so used to seeing Tony’s battered VW in my driveway that I had not consciously registered seeing it just now, coming home, but in the throes of my disappointed anger with Agatha I remembered: the car was there, and so Tony was still here, in the house.

  I ran upstairs and there he was, and I had to make an effort to restrain the joy I felt at the sight of him, tired dusty beautiful Tony, my reliable friend.

  Attempting cool, I said, “Tony, I have a neat idea. I made some lamb stew this morning—why don’t you stay and have it with me?”

  I think I would have died, or cried, if Tony had said that he was sorry, he had something else on for that night—as he very well could have said.

  So maybe I was not so much better, after all?

  But he smiled, in his lovely slow all-over way, and he said that that would be really nice. “Good coincidence,” he said. “There’s somewhere I haven’t got to go either. I just found out.”

  I laughed, very pleased.

  Tony asked if it would be okay if he took a shower.

  Of course.

  He came out a little later, immaculate as usual; he had worn, that day, a wonderful red-polished shirt, as though he had known that he would be asked to stay to dinner.

  I couldn’t have had dinner with Tony, who looked so splendid, in anything ordinary, and so I put on a long yellow dress that I had bought with the insurance money—for heaven knows what purpose: perhaps this one.

  And that is how it happened that about nine that night Tony and I were sitting at my dinner table, with candlelight and wine, in our intimate fancy clothes.

  When Whitey walked in.

  “What the fuck, you guys can’t be bothered with locking your door?” That was how he greeted us.

  And of course he was right: I had hurried in to answer the phone, not locked the door, maybe even left it slightly ajar.

  His look accused us of not only leaving the door open but of some somehow ugly sexual complicity—as if all the fantasies I had ever had concerning Tony had been the actuality of our situation; in a sense, he was right about us—or at least about me. And certainly, I have later thought, if he had not showed up, the evening might have ended very differently. My asking Tony to stay to dinner was a little odd, as was the yellow dress—with Whitey, I felt guilty as charged.

  Drunkenly he sat down across from us, staring enraged, his eyes going from one to the other of us. Occasionally, left-handed, he would reach up to scratch at his beard, so that the missing fingers were in blatant evidence.

  God knows what was in his mind, but it almost didn’t matter; he looked like a man out to kill whatever crossed his path, like someone in a war, out on patrol: Tony and I were random objects in his path. He began to mutter, incomprehensibly, under his breath, and I felt the swollen presence of murder in his eyes.

  Crazily, or maybe because he understood Whitey in a way that I did not, Tony chose to behave as though everything were perfectly okay: a friend had dropped in to see two other friends, who happened to be having dinner together. Tony said, “You care for a glass of wine, man? I’m afraid we’ve done for the stew.”

  In the midst of my terror I was trying to work out just why Whitey hated me so much; the fact that I had not hired him to work on the house did not explain it. I thought it must be something visceral, or like an allergy.

  Tony continued to make inane conversation, none of which Whitey answered. He just stared, eyes bulging with hatred, while I thought: The sharp knives are in the farthest kitchen drawer. Where do you stick a knife in a person if you just want to scare them, not to kill? Or maybe I should hit him with something heavy. How hard do you hit non-fatally? Impossible questions that certainly had never been anywhere near my mind before. But maybe those are things we all should know, along with first aid and how to dislodge things stuck in someone’s throat.

  Whitey was ignoring Tony’s foolish, bland remarks—which, to my ears at least, had begun to sound grotesque. But then suddenly he turned fully on Tony—I could tell that he had forgotten I was there—and he shouted, “You’re really at home here, aren’t you, old asshole buddy—you fucking whore!”

  An odd thing for a man to call another man, but Tony just looked at him, in an animal, patient way, in the echoing silence that followed Whitey’s outburst.

  Whitey was bigger and probably stronger than Tony, but he was drunk. If they really got into it, I would either knife or hit Whitey, I decided; fuck
being fair.

  Whitey kept on muttering and glaring murderously. Inside my yellow silk I felt sweat running down under my arms, under my breasts. It was hard to breathe. I didn’t want to look at Whitey, but I couldn’t not.

  After what seemed like an hour but was probably ten or fifteen minutes, Tony stood up and said, “How about let’s head out for a beer, Whitey, man?” And he looked at me. “You care to come along?”

  I knew that he didn’t mean for me to come, and of course I wouldn’t have. I said no, barely getting out the sound.

  Tony came around to where I was sitting and he gave me an unfamiliar pat on my shoulder, and then he went out the door.

  Whitey lurched out after Tony, with a backward look of the purest rage, unfocused but in my general direction.

  Once they were gone, I double-locked the door and checked all the street-level windows, and I checked the phone to see if it still worked. Whitey might even have cut the wires, I thought, as he came in. But it was okay.

  The sweat on my body had turned cold; in fact I was shaking with cold, and pure terror.

  Clearing the table and cleaning up the kitchen was difficult, but it took up a lot of time, until whatever was to happen next. I was sure that the night wasn’t over yet.

  Whitey could murder Tony, and then come back for me, I thought.

  Or someone in a bar could kill them both, enraged by Whitey and assuming them to be one of a kind, in it together.

  They could both be killed in an accident.

  It was certainly clear to me that I was not better, after all: I was terrible; I was in bad shape.

  But those tired old phrases made me smile, a little, for the first time in several hours.

  I went upstairs with a book, and I stared at all the words, sometimes turning pages.

  Around midnight the phone rang, and it was Tony; he was clearly drunk but he was also clearly alive. “Baby, you worry too much,” he mumbled when I had expressed some tiny part of the fear that I had felt. “You take that Whitey too serious.”

  “Fuck you!” I shouted into the phone.

  “Baby, I see you tomorrow.”

  I hung up, and then I began very weakly to cry, as much from exhaustion as from any nameable emotion.

  17

  Partly out of guilt, I am sure, for breaking our date, Agatha insisted on taking me out to dinner later that week; and she suggested a huge Chinese place out on Geary Boulevard. “It’s so awful-looking that it’s funny,” she said. “But the food’s terrific.”

  She was right all around. The décor consisted of a lot of red plush and green scrolls, and some horribly bright blue plumes in ornate vases. And the food was wonderful, delicately spiced and served with elegance, course by course, not all jumbled together as so often happens in lesser restaurants.

  At first we sipped some wine and talked about what to order. Agatha was very nervous; I recognized the dry tightness in her voice, her slightly cracking laugh. We both knew that eventually she would tell me about Royce’s emergency—she would have to, really—but in the meantime we both stalled.

  The night of Whitey’s visit was still very much in my mind. Tony and I were friends again, or whatever we were, but I felt scarred by having been so frightened; the terror that I had experienced, thinking about knives and blunt instruments, would not entirely dissipate. Some instinct made me not tell Agatha about it, though I wanted to, and would have welcomed any reassurance. But I felt that in a way it would have sounded like an accusation of Royce: like father like son, or something.

  Groping about for something safe, a neutral topic, I came up with a book that a woman we both knew had written, and just published. Strangely enough, it was a novel about a prostitute; strange because Ethel, the writer, was as old as Agatha and I were—she too dated back to St. Margaret’s—and she was a lot more square, or straight, whatever. The truth is, she was a very dumb and totally conventional woman. At St. Margaret’s she had been famous both for dumbness and for tidiness, the oft-cited example being a term paper on which a Miss McGing, a wonderful dour wit among gloomier teachers, had given Ethel an A-plus over a D, the A-plus being for neatness and the D for content. Agatha, a messy person, had sometimes got just those grades in reverse. But in a way we both had rather liked Ethel: maybe we found her restful after heavy doses of brighter, more erratic friends.

  The book was a “paperback original,” which Agatha hadn’t seen but I had; I’d read most of it standing up in Walgreen’s at the paperback rack.

  “Odd,” Agatha said. “The last time I heard from her she was just going on about her house and children and husband, I think in that order.”

  I was mildly surprised at Agatha’s having heard from Ethel at all; she had not been a particular friend of either of ours for years. But Agatha is the sort of person whom other people at stray moments think of, and then write to.

  “The book is worse than you could believe,” I told Agatha.

  “Poor Ethel is really very dumb.” From Agatha, this was an uncharacteristically harsh remark, except that sometimes she sounded like me. I suppose that I sound like her, on occasion, too.

  “Such a mistake, dumb friends,” I put in.

  “The problem is,” said Agatha, and I could feel her warming to the conversation, welcoming its abstraction as a relief from whatever was bothering her, “the trouble with dumb friends is that they don’t recognize their function in your life. They don’t see themselves as dumb friends.”

  I laughed. “No, and then they do something presumptuous like having an opinion about a book, or writing one, for God’s sake.”

  This was the sort of talk we both liked: not quite personal and highly speculative. Amusing, or so we thought.

  Agatha kept it up with more energy than usual, and I guessed that she was very anxious to postpone whatever was on her mind. “Of course, the fact of being your friends makes them think that they couldn’t be really stupid,” she said. “Daphne wouldn’t have a stupid friend, they think.”

  “Oh, you’re absolutely right, and I won’t have any more dumb friends; they’re just not worth it,” I told her.

  The conversation seemed to languish then, and I tried to push it along; I didn’t much want to go on to anything else either. “But have you noticed how they’re all absolutely marvelous housekeepers?” I asked, just having been struck, from somewhere, by that fact. “Ethel isn’t the only dumb immaculate.” And it seemed to be true: Ethel’s Scarsdale house was always surgically clean—who would have known she was entertaining prostitute fantasies? All the dumb friends we could think of that night were also terrifically neat. We thought of some bright people who were also very tidy; Caroline was the first who came to my mind—but in general that was harder.

  Some of our food came, and we talked about how good it was.

  Then, abruptly, Agatha said, “I’m really worried about this Betty Smith business.”

  “Why? What’s happening?” I felt an interested premonitory flutter; the Betty Smith problem, and that of the General, offered more interest than did Agatha’s affair with Royce, I thought.

  “Well, she just goes on pushing it, and the lawyer sounds scared and mad at the same time. I’d rather just give her the money, but he won’t let me. Actually I can’t help feeling sorry for her. The General did promise things and then wouldn’t come through, all the time. One of his tricks.”

  Agatha seemed on the verge of saying more, and then did not. She might have been going to recount what I myself had often witnessed: all the times he said he would come to see her and then did not, at St. Margaret’s, and a couple of birthdays that he forgot entirely. Legitimate sources of pain, I thought, and hard to forget—I knew this although my own mother had been very kind and reliable in those ways. But I had had lovers who forgot about birthdays, were mean at Christmas. Agatha would not have allowed herself that sort of self-pity, though; instead she felt sorry for Betty Smith. And in a way I did too. He was such a total bastard, the General was. I wondere
d if maybe Betty Smith was a little like me; that is to say, addicted to even the most miserable forms of love. But probably she was not—not like me; I would never have instigated a lawsuit. Or perhaps someone had told her to?

  Suddenly switching topics, in a resolute, pulled-together way, Agatha said, “Royce is terribly worried about Ruth.”

  “Oh, really?” I regretted the change of direction.

  “Well, it’s dangerous where she lives. You know, out on Pine. He thinks she’s asking for trouble. A kind of suicide.”

  I did not say, What a vain man, to think that his wife would want to kill herself without him; but that is what I thought. And I also thought it was very self-indulgent of Royce to confide in Agatha his worries over Ruth.

  And—how censorious I was becoming! It was as though, having recovered from my own propensity for troubled love affairs, even cruel lovers, I didn’t want anyone else to have them either; I was a reformed drunk, an ex-junkie.

  As for dangerous places: what neither of us could have known, Agatha nor I, was that the very garish restaurant in which we then sat, enjoying our Mongolian lamb, some months hence would be the scene of a ghastly shoot-out, a Chinese gang war, five dead and seven wounded.

  What I mean is, anywhere is dangerous.

  Maybe out of a mutual, unspoken realization that talking about Royce, or Ruth, was almost impossible, Agatha and I spent the rest of the evening on Betty Smith. And the General.

  “What in God’s name do you think they were doing in Chile?” I asked.

  Agatha took the question seriously, and slowly. “It could have been innocent tourism,” she said. “He was great on keeping up with old army buddies. I guess that’s one thing the army’s good for, making permanent buddies. Maybe some other old Point person lived down there.”

  “Maybe some old buddy died and left him a lot of money.” I was trying to be helpful, to aid her in making the whole thing sound innocent. Much as I disliked the General, dead or alive, everything about him, the idea of a full-scale investigation was a little scarey, especially the ways in which Agatha would be involved in it.