Almost Perfect Read Free

is also the day that should end with the Stella Blake interview, whoever the hell she is.
    *  *  *
    Richard is a commercial artist (“Not quite commercial enough,” is his joke), and his studio, in the building where he also lives, is an enormously cluttered two-story brick-walled room. The clutter consists of everything: paintings, vases, wooden sculptures, bronze and marble statuary. Glossy green-leafed plants and feathery ferns. Various chairs, from comfortable broken leather to tiny gilt. Mirrors, several on each wall, some heavy, ornately framed, others plain.
    It is an opulent chaos, which, curiously, works; its effect is of an aesthetic whole, a design. “A beautiful accident,” was Richard’s first wife’s description (crazy Marina, with a very mean crazy tongue). “Sort of like you, Rickie.” Only Marina ever called him Rickie.
    The center of the room, its focus, is Richard’s worktable, on which there is further chaos: piles of papers; small bottles of ink, in all colors; jars of pencils and brushes. Above the table is an elaborate cut-glass candelabra, refracting light and frequently shedding bright beams on Richard’s light mass of hair.
    At the back of the room is a balcony, with stairs leading up to a space that is clear and efficient, surprisingly, with filing cabinets, a drafting table, and various machines: copier, typewriter, computer, adding machine, stereo. Below the balcony, behind a door, is Richard’s living suite: his bedroom and bath, a pullman kitchen—all perfectly functional, all small. The bedroom is smallest of all, a tapestried cave, walls lined with coarse brown linen. There is a queen-size bed, a bureau with mirror, an easy chair, a lamp. “It’s the sexiest room I’ve ever seen,” snarled Marina, furiously, instantly sure that Richard “brought girls there,” as she would put it, which of course he did. Especially beautiful Claudia, rich and married, who after a lot of trouble became his second wife, for a rough two years. Richard will never marry again; it spoils everything, he knows that.
    Richard’s clothes are in a larger room, a big closet that forms the passageway to his bath and kitchen, the kitchen where on a tall stool Richard now sits over coffee, still smiling, still pleased with the day. Looking back to the passageway at his clothes, he thinks as he often has before that he has too many, far too many clothes—and he determines (as he has before) that he will get abunch of them together for homeless people. Some shelter. He will definitely do that this week.
    Presentation time. That is what this day is for him, what he is almost about to get together—and then at the end of the day that interview, which even now he knows he may forget, what with so much else going on. Big clients coming. Big money involved.
    Webster Wines.
    Three hours later, at almost noon, the hour of the presentation, Richard’s studio is totally transformed. It has become a wonderland of bright glass bubbles: thousands of them—five thousand exactly. He should know; he ordered and paid for them, and they cost the earth, but they are worth it. Tiny glass translucent balls, hung from everywhere in that enormous space, from tiny gilt cornices on mirrors, from tips of philodendron leaves—everywhere bubbles.
    And that is the theme of this whole presentation: Bubble time, the campaign for the new champagne from Webster Wines.
    “You’re an absolute genius, you know that, Dick?”
    “Richard, it’s so beautiful I could cry.”
    “Man, you’re really a crazy SOB, but this is super, very very super, I mean it.”
    “What a great party! Rich, when you do it you really do it, you know what I mean?”
    Along with the champagne, courtesy Webster Winery, Richard has provided small pastry puffs of caviar (“Well, of course, what else but caviar?”), puffs of cheese, and, for the more abstemious, grapes and melon balls. (“It’s all balls, did you notice? Call it bubbles if you want to,