Almost Perfect Read Free Page B

you … well, really, thanks.”
    Margot swings her sheaf of black hair. “I hear a friend of mine is coming to talk to you.”
    “Oh?” His mind is a blank.
    “Yes, the dearest young woman. Stella Blake. Quite a brilliant girl, actually. Hardly your type, no style at all. She’s working for some paper. But you be nice to her, Richard. A man I used to know, a big director, wasn’t nice to her at all. Although for a while he adored her.”
    “I’m always nice.”
    “That’s not exactly what I’ve heard.” Margot smirks.
    “Anyway the whole idea seems so dumb. An interview. Christ. I don’t like to talk.”
    “It doesn’t matter at all what you say, don’t worry.” Margot pauses to scan the room, plotting her next move, before she turns back to Richard. Then, “I had lunch yesterday with darling Andrew,” she tells him, batting her eyelashes. “He’s absolutely pining.”
    “Jesus Christ, Margot. You know perfectly well.”
    Giving him a long vamp smile, complicit, amused and knowing, Margot slides into the crowd—as from somewhere Richard hears “Dick, phone for you. A lady, naturally.”
    “I’ll take it inside.”
    Knowing, somehow, that it will be Claudia, and knowing too how the conversation will end, Richard takes his time getting to the phone, noting as he does so that the party is winding down. He’ll give it another half hour, but the best part is over, and Richard sighs with great and genuine sadness. What everyone said was true: what he did was really fantastic, almost perfect; in his way he is a sort of genius.
    The first time Richard ever saw Claudia—it must be ten years ago now—what he thought was: That’s it, that’s her. That’s the most beautiful woman I ever saw. That’s
her
. The perfect one. Stark naked, standing in front of him, in a puddle of red silk.
    He had been working all day on his cabin up the coast. He even remembers the colors of that day: an April mauve-pink-blue day, the sky that color all day, and the sea reflective, calm. Richard was up there alone, just working. Marina had stayed home, for some damn reason or other of her own. One of her nutcake intuitions, probably. But he was all alone and working well, on the beautiful house of his own design, his own labor. And he had that day the most marvelous sense of his own good work; he had imagined this house, all out of his head, and made drawings. Got a contractor for the foundation and the frame, a plumber for all that stuff, and here it was, beautiful and almost done. It worked. That day he was shingling the roof, stopping now and then to breathe the clean salt air, to admire the sky and the sea, the swooping gulls.
    He barely remembered, in fact, that he had been asked to aparty that night at Sea Ranch; some client had bought a huge spread there recently.
    But then he did remember, and he thought it might be fun; he hadn’t been to a party alone for a while, what the hell. Marina was unreliable, partywise; sometimes she hated a party on sight and wanted to go home, other times she got fairly drunk and wanted to stay all night. Now he even remembers a lilting sense of expectancy as he drove along the coast in the fresh spring dark, the dark-blue sky star-sprinkled, to the huge low-lying “contemporary” house, with its show-off Frank Lloyd Wright winged roof, its pretentious fancy brass door.
    A blast of party hit Richard, opening that door when no one came to his knock. Extreme noise: there must have been two bands, several speaker systems. And people trying to shout above all that sound, as though they had something to say. Richard, whose nose is exceptionally sensitive, smelled garlic and fish and booze, cigarette and cigar smoke and some dope, and about a hundred fabulous French perfumes. Too rich, this is all too rich for my old thin Irish blood, Richard thought, aware of an urgent and private need: I’d like to piss all over this place, he thought, asking someone for directions to the can.
    He went