Free Almost Perfect by Alice Adams

shade in mind.”
    Does he mean that he plans to marry her, that he wants them to get married? At least half aware that she does not want to marry Richard—although much in love, she sees that marriage would be a mistake—Stella is still made anxious by this ambiguity. What could he mean?
    “You know, you could do a lot with this place.” Richard gestures at the somewhat dingy, mostly empty space around them: Stella’s flat, on a Saturday afternoon that Richard has devoted, househusband-like, to washing windows.
    “Really? How?” But even asking this, Stella is apprehensive: he will mean that she should spend a lot of money, buy good furniture, rugs, big plants, gold-framed mirrors. Like some of the things in his studio. And she is so broke, always doing small sums in her head for survival: pay MasterCard so much, so much to Macy’s, a lot to her dentist. Richard probably has no idea how little money she has; he would be horrified if he knew. Maybe love her less.
    But he does not say furniture. “If you opened it out,” he says, with large gestures (always in the core of his gestures there is a gentle turn of his wrists, which Stella finds infinitely moving). “All these walls,” he says. “And that tiny window. It should be open across that whole wall, so you’d see all the green out there.Then you could just throw out all your furniture. Buy a few big cushions from Cost Plus, and sit around and admire your view. But don’t throw out your bed; we need that.”
    This is all so evidently, eminently impractical that Stella laughs. “Oh great, just knock out a few walls and cut some big picture windows. Mr. Wong would really go for that.”
    Pleased with himself, Richard smiles. “Have you ever asked him? He just might. Improve his property.”
    “He scares me. I don’t even dare ask him if I could get a cat, which I used to want.”
    “Before you got me, right?” He takes her into his arms. “Do you know what I love about your face? The way your forehead curves. It’s so nice. I could sculpt it, if I could sculpt.”
    They laugh, and kiss, and decide it’s time for a nap.
    They drink a lot, but for the moment this is not worrying to Stella. It is simply so much fun. Old-fashioneds before dinner, and each night some good new California wine with the meal, and maybe more wine, or maybe bourbon highballs after dinner. Which they often take to bed and do not get around to drinking. (Horrible, though, is the smell of bourbon in the morning.)
    And there are other, more surprising times of drinking, invented by Richard: Bloody Marys at breakfast (not exactly original, but something Stella has never done before). Or bullshots. A bottle of champagne in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, for no reason at all. Margaritas for lunch, beer for breakfast. Gin and tonic in a dark cool bar on a hot afternoon. Not all of this every day, of course not, but almost every day, in one way or another, they do a lot of drinking. And for the moment it seems very festive, a way of heightening their pleasure in each other. Even of intensifying their love.
    We don’t go out very much, Stella sometimes thinks. No concerts or plays or even neighborhood movies. At most, on a weekend, they may go for a drive to look at the ocean; on rare occasions they go to restaurants. But dinners out are lesssuccessful, generally, than eating at home; they both feel this. They are happier cooking together, eating and hurrying off to bed.
    This is their pattern—their shtick, as Richard sometimes calls it—and they are both somewhat afraid to break it.

9
  Friends of Friends  
    “Your friends won’t necessarily love me as much as you do,” Richard tells Stella, one Saturday at breakfast. They are eating late, and eating too much: bullshots, and then bagels and lox and scrambled eggs and too much coffee. Stella has just come back from the telephone with an invitation to a cocktail party at Justine’s. A week from Sunday.
    “I should hope