Rich Rewards

by Alice Adams

  Once I said, “It’s almost predictable, isn’t it. Whitey getting himself killed in a fight near a goddam oil pipeline, in Alaska.”

  And Tony said, “Yeah. It sure figures.”

  Only when we were crossing the bridge, on the way back into San Francisco, did it occur to me that Agatha well might not be there. However, a strong inner voice insisted that she would be, in her California Street place, and also that she would already know.

  Tony asked if I wanted him to go back to the house; he could get some work done, he said. I said sure.

  Agatha was indeed at home; she answered the buzzer as though she had been waiting for me. But when I knocked at the door and she opened it and saw me there, she looked surprised. “Oh. We thought you might be Ruth,” she said.

  We. Standing there, towering behind small Agatha, was Royce, who looked stricken, ravaged, almost destroyed.

  No question, then, of telling them anything. They knew.

  Stupidly I said that I was sorry. “I was at Stacy’s doing some work,” I said, not knowing how else to explain. “And Ruth—”

  “Ruth called Stacy?” Royce was hoarse, as though he had been talking, or shouting, for hours. Screaming, maybe.

  “No, she came by. Ruth came to Stacy’s.” As I said this, I knew that it sounded crazy, but just then I couldn’t have invented another version.

  “She’s gone crazy,” Royce said. “That’s insane. She can’t stand Stacy.”

  I said that I thought she’d be okay there, for the moment; that Stacy was getting a doctor to take care of her. No point in adding that Ruth was not only crazy but in a faint. Royce had already had much more than he could deal with, and maybe Agatha too.

  He said, “Oh,” and sat down heavily on the sofa.

  Agatha and I sat down too. Whatever she was making of this, the Ruth-Royce-Stacy connection, I couldn’t tell. All I could read on her face was the most intense tight-lipped grief for Royce. And love.

  For myself, I thought Royce was exactly right: Ruth had gone crazy. And how pitiful, as well as mad, for her to go to Stacy with her grief. It was as though—dimly, crazily—she went there in order to become Stacy: a beautiful woman who was loved by Royce, a woman with no husband or children to plague her, alive or dead. She would not have come to Agatha, her old friend, a woman in many ways much closer to herself.

  Looking at Royce, I could see, or feel, the most terrible guilt: all his fault, he would think, all of it—the torn-up family, Ruth’s insanity, and Whitey’s death—would lead back to him, to him and Stacy. If he had not “fallen in love” with Stacy, hadn’t had that affair, not fucked her, none of these things would have happened to his people—so Royce would think; he would discount all the rest of the world.

  I wondered if Agatha could possibly sort it all out for him, or even diminish the guilt a little, and for one instant I thought, Well, maybe she can.

  A sound came from the kitchen, a sort of hissing splash, and Agatha said, “Oh, I forgot, I was making coffee.”

  Royce said, “Baby, do you think I could have a drink instead?”

  “Sure.”

  Baby. I tried to digest that—but what an endearment for Agatha, who had been born grown-up, for whom no nickname was ever possible. However, I was in no mood to blame Royce for anything, least of all for questionable taste in affectionate words.

  I went into the kitchen with Agatha, thinking that I could be more useful in a domestic way than with larger issues. And that was precisely the case: she may have had a strong sense of Royce—how he was feeling, and how to give comfort—but the task of organizing a tray of coffee cups and making a drink was quite beyond her. I did those things, and it was good to have something to do; God knows we had little enough to say just then.

  The drink seemed helpful to Royce. I could see a little color creep back into that big pale craggy face, and the slightest lessening of tension in his posture.

  By then I had been in Agatha’s apartment for about fifteen minutes, which had seemed a very long time. For one thing, there was the always odd situation of two women being with the lover of one of them, the man probably wondering how much has been told to the friend; and then there was the question of the feelings of the not-in-love couple, in this case Royce and I. I have to admit that I still found him terrifically attractive, even so nearly demolished, but I doubt if I impinged on his consciousness at all, especially not that day. Anyway, even in those extreme circumstances I felt that my being there was awkward; they should be alone.

  God knows I was not being much help, and so I got up to go, having gulped down hot weak coffee. I said to call if there was anything I could do—of course.

  Surprisingly, Royce looked up and said, “If you could go out and see Caroline? I’d really appreciate it.” He added, “I just talked to her, she knows about—her brother.”

  And Agatha, “Yes, Daphne, do you think you could?”

  I said of course, I’d go there right away.

  It was on the way to Caroline’s that the reality of what had happened began to get through to me, that Whitey was dead, killed in a fight, in Alaska. Up to then I had been so intensely involved with other people, thinking about Stacy and Tony, Ruth, and Agatha and Royce, so preoccupied with their reactions that I had not really thought about Whitey. Now, alone, driving the couple of miles through the rain to Caroline’s, I did think about him, dead. But where there should have been an emotion I felt a dullness, a vacant space. This was my first experience of the death of someone I had known whom I had not liked, not at all. It was of course quite different from the death of a not-liked public figure: Senator X is dead—oh, good. In an abstract way I was even sorry that Whitey was dead.

  I mainly felt sorry for Caroline, and, cowardly, I did not look forward to seeing her.

  She answered the door almost immediately, and she greeted me with a small kiss on the cheek, an uncharacteristic and quite touching gesture.

  Together we walked the length of the room, and we sat down on the hard wooden chairs beside her kitchen table, beneath the square window that was now a dark picture of rain, that leaked cold and wind. There was a strange new smell in the room, familiar but at first unplaceable, and then I recognized it: the strong clammy smell of wet wool, maybe of wet sheep. Moisture from outdoors had seeped in and permeated Caroline’s wool; the hangings that lined the room now smelled.

  Caroline looked pale and calm, powerfully controlled. For the first time I saw a look of Royce across her narrower, much darker features; I saw too how much stronger she was than her mother.

  There were some dirty coffee cups on the table, and an ashtray full of butts. By way of explanation Caroline said that Thomas had just left, and then she said, “Jesus. Men. I’m about to give up on them all. Half the time they just don’t know what to say. And even when they want to be nice they don’t know how.”

  I made an assenting sound, but actually I didn’t know what to say either, nor how to be nice to Caroline, any more than Thomas had.

  “I just wish I didn’t need them for sex,” said Caroline.

  Certainly I too had had that thought, usually at the end of some bad love affair; just after Derek, when I first came to San Francisco, I remembered thinking exactly that, and I said as much to Caroline.

  “But I think I’m too old to start in as a dyke,” she said, with a little laugh.

  “Me too.” But what a strangely timed conversation that was, all that anti-man talk, with Whitey just dead. Maybe Caroline thought so too, for then she asked, “Were you surprised about Whitey?”

  I thought for a second. “No, not really,” I admitted.

  “Of course you weren’t,” she said, with a sort of triumph. “Anyone could see where he was headed. That’s why he went to Alaska—to get himself killed. All that money talk he was giving out was just an excuse; he was just trying to sound like a normal person. Someone sane.”

  I murmured some sort of agreement, but I was impressed by her insight. So many otherwis
e smart people are so obtuse—myopic, actually—when it comes to their own families. And in this case such exceptionally strong feeling had been involved—I was remembering my first sight of Caroline and Whitey and Royce together, their intense rapport.

  What was slightly alarming in Caroline now was her apparent absence of feeling, what shrinks call lack of affect. It was perhaps to elicit a more human response from Caroline that I added, “Still, it is terrible.”

  “Fuck. What’s terrible was Whitey. And he was always the same. Only when he was a little kid it didn’t look so bad. But he was always too big and too good-looking and too rich, and a greedy bully besides. I mean, what kind of a person would enjoy Vietnam?”

  “He did?”

  “He had a ball, he loved it there. The high point of his whole fucking life.” Caroline was clearly beginning a speech, I guess her final speech about her brother; she was gaining momentum and intensity (“affect”) as she went along. “It’s so easy to imagine what happened in that bar, in Anchorage, wherever,” she said. “Whitey half drunk and thinking he could push some other guy around, only this time he picked the wrong one, a secret black belt, maybe, who broke his neck.”

  Then she said, “It’s not like beating up your kid sister.”

  I heard that sentence clearly enough, and of course she was saying what I had always known, in a way. Still, it took a while to sink in. During that minute, I must have been staring at her, with God knows what written on my face.

  In a soft voice she asked me, “You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “In a way. I thought so.”

  “Sure, of course you did.” Her voice got very high and tight, wound up. “He came over, drunk, and wanted some more money for booze. And I thought, Shit, for once I won’t give him any money. At first he was sort of kidding around about it, playing he was slapping me around. But then he really got into it, maybe because I said I didn’t like it. It was like he’d always wanted to see how hard he could hit me.”

  “Jesus Christ.” What I was feeling was certainly not surprise; I had known. Still, hearing about it and being able to easily visualize the whole scene was horrible.

  Then Caroline said, “Daphne, you’re a really nice woman. You were nice to come over.” She sighed, and then she looked at me directly and said, very softly, “I think I’d better spend some time by myself right now. Okay?”

  At the door we exchanged another friendly kiss, and I went back out into the rain.

  Well, the truth was, I hadn’t surely known that Whitey was the one who beat up Caroline. I had just darkly and strongly suspected that to have been the case.

  But now, with my suspicion confirmed, I felt—maybe crazily, surely irrationally—that a couple of my other strongest and darkest ideas had been corroborated.

  Whitey had beat up Caroline, and that to me meant, as I had also believed all along, that the General had got his money from murderous right-wing Chileans, or the I.T.T., or some combination thereof. And Betty Smith was murdered so that no one would ever find out.

  And I am still convinced of both those facts, although by now it is truly impossible to find out for sure.

  Part Two

  23

  The next few weeks at least were relatively calm. We all may have been in something of a state of shock—we oddly assorted people, my California nucleus. I know that I was. All that violence, which on the surface had nothing to do with me, had nevertheless been powerfully disturbing; I had been deeply upset by Caroline’s being beaten, upset in another way by Whitey’s ugly death. Even by Betty Smith’s murder-accident. And the news about Tony had been in its way quite shocking too, his being in effect a male prostitute. Beautiful Tony!

  And when Caroline finally told me that yes, it had been Whitey who beat her up, as I have said, all the other information fell into place, about the General’s money and Betty Smith’s death; it all fell into place and it stayed there.

  From time to time Agatha and I talked on the phone, but we did not see each other often. She was much involved with Royce, and everything with him was very difficult, I gathered; I am sure that he still suffered strongly over Whitey.

  No one had heard from Ruth, except for some curt business conversations that she had with Royce pertaining to the proposed property settlement, their divorce. Agatha reported that Royce had said it was really rough being up against a lawyer, which I found funny: I had had several women friends, married to lawyers, who had suffered from the same circumstance when they divorced.

  Royce and Agatha seemed to feel that Ruth was all right now, functioning—not crazy at all. It was as though the impact of Whitey’s death had jolted her back into reality, into sanity, as shock treatment is supposed to do. Royce thought she must be “seeing someone,” a notion that both Agatha and I dismissed as old-fashioned, even sexist. But of course he knew Ruth much better than we did, and it turned out that he was right.

  Caroline was okay, working quietly. I don’t think she was seeing Thomas any more—as things turned out, she clearly was not.

  Stacy, whom I continued in a mild way to like, was “into” various fashionable mid-Seventies activities: she ran, she meditated, she took tap-dancing lessons, and lessons in the cuisines of North China and Sicily. She bought a lot of expensive clothes. I don’t think that she was “seeing” anyone either. In fact I saw her as a very Seventies figure, Stacy: if the Sixties were concerned with peace and freedom, free sexuality, the Seventies struck me as dedicated to consumership—although my so-called profession may have given me a somewhat biased view, representing as it did a sort of epitome of crazy spending.

  Some sort of nonverbal friendship, or trust, seemed to have been at last established between Tony and me. We both worked hard, sometimes together, in Stacy’s huge house, or in Agatha’s, which now seemed home, since I lacked any other at the moment. Work, in fact, was all that interested me at that particular period; and maybe in my way I was a very Seventies person too—temporarily asexual, earning too much money. Any other area seemed too difficult, and dangerous.

  For a long time, it now appeared, I had been making a career out of personal relationships, and on the whole that had not worked out too well. It had led me, seemingly, to this network of violence and craziness in California. And since in a superstitious way I do not quite believe in accidents, I could not believe that my presence, there and then, among those particular people was entirely accidental. I was there for some purpose, which sometimes seemed to be a negative instruction: Do not go on as you are, it will lead to nothing good; you have to change.

  The weather, too, had been conducive to little but work; the days were cold and bleak with rain, nights of wind, more rain. Everyone said what unusual weather we were having, but I was convinced that any weather in California would be unusual.

  And then, as I had always believed that it should, the first day of spring turned everything around; it was, in fact, a great deal more disruptive than I could have bargained for.

  March 21st. The sky showed signs of clearing; there was the lightest rain in weeks, or months, and the brightest air.

  At breakfast I took note of the fact that I had now been in California for six months. Among other, more crucial issues, I had suffered six months of boredom-irritation with the local paper, which in an addicted way I continued to read, an awful paper being superior to none; once I met a woman who said she always read poetry with her breakfast, instead of news, but I have never managed to be so high-minded.

  Was it Balzac who so frequently wrote about a “provincial capital”? I now saw what he meant. Local news always took up the first eight or ten pages of the paper: local politics, controversies over the preservation of “historic” buildings, local muggings and robberies. On page 11 or 12 you might read about the new independence of some African country, an election in Canada, a border skirmish in Israel or Libya, an atomic accident in northern Italy. And then there were the local columnists, with their unbelievable ruminations on the perfect razor b
lade, and on what San Francisco was really like thirty years ago.

  Well, in the midst of all that, on the first day of spring, on page 17 I came across this item: “… the Regents of the University of California have announced the appointment of Jean-Paul ——, the distinguished French Socialist economist writer, for a special series of lectures at the Berkeley campus, beginning in June of this summer.…”

  Christ!

  My first reaction was one of the wildest joy: Jean-Paul in Berkeley! The most marvelous thing in the world, a gift, how fantastic! How wonderful the Regents all must be, to have chosen Jean-Paul, to have given him back to me, as it were. I wondered how many Regents there were. Could I send them all flowers? Letters of love? Jesus, how incredible! For an hour or so I could not stop smiling, idiotically.

  But then, in a practical way, I began to think of other considerations. Just how would we see each other? I would call him and I would say—but what would I say? And suppose he should answer, Daphne who? And why did I assume that he would come to Berkeley alone, why not with a wife and children—or, worse, some glamorous friend. Why assume that he would remember me, if he did at all, in the way that I still so violently remembered him? He might only recall a big dumb sexy American girl, ordering a martini.

  Or, even worse, he might only remember the scene that I made the last time we saw each other, when he told me that he had to leave a day early, when I wept and carried on, when I said that I couldn’t stand it—well, at the time I actually believed that I could not. But twenty years later, who would want a woman who behaved like that? For all he knew, I could have become a specialist in such scenes, which would certainly be less attractive at forty than it had been twenty years ago.

  Managing for a little while to block that memory, that line of thought, I drifted back to the hours just before that announcement of Jean-Paul’s, that he had to leave. I thought of our afternoon in the big lumpy bed, his attic room in the Place d’Italie, the louvered window open to a warm rainy sky, a gray view of tiled roofs, a church tower. And, in bed, Jean-Paul: his high white forehead, straight dark eyebrows and slant blue eyes. Straight nose, curved mouth and strong white teeth. Deeply indented chin. Strong smooth white young body, and that lovely cock.