Free Almost Perfect by Alice Adams Page A

not.” Stella laughs, but inwardly she acknowledges that he is right. What she herself loves in Richard—and even now she would have a hard time defining it, finding any words for what seems pure feeling—what she is in love with in Richard, might not appeal or even be apparent to her friends. He is not their type would be one way to put it. He is extremely bright; in his own way he may well be a genius (Stella thinks he is), but his brilliance is not the sort that her friends are used to.And he is much too handsome, and he dresses too well, is too conscious of his clothes. “Superficial” would be the easiest word for a dismissal of Richard. (Can a person be deeply superficial? Disloyally, Stella has wondered.)
    And then there is the question of Richard’s own friends, about whom Stella has no fixed notion. From what she can make out, he seems to know people from two distinct groups: workmen compose the first. He is especially close to a cabinetmaker named Tony Russo, whom Richard inexplicably calls Cats. Tony has a new girlfriend, named Valerie; apparently Richard and Tony discuss their love affairs with each other—unusual for men, in Stella’s experience.
    “But why do you call him Cats?”
    Richard laughs. “He looks like a cat. A small brown cat.”
    “Oh.”
    “Don’t you like cats? You could get one.”
    “I meant to get a dog or a cat, I’ve told you. Actually I don’t know too much about cats.”
    “You’ll have to meet my Cats.”
    Richard’s other group of friends could be described as “social.” Rich and stylish types, addicted to parties, openings, boats and skiing. People, Stella gathers, whom he knew through Claudia and now does not see very much. But there is something in his voice when Richard mentions these people, their houses and parties and trips, that Stella finds disturbing. Ostensibly he puts them down, he makes jokes about how dumb and silly they are, but still Stella feels that on some level he misses his life in that group, and for all she knows he misses Claudia. She wonders too just how accepting all those people, including Claudia, really were of her handsome Richard: did they possibly find him beautiful but not quite right, in their own terms? The clothes a little too much, the accent slightly off?
    And just why is Stella herself having such thoughts as these, projecting snobberies worthy of her father at his worst? (Prentice, in what have literally been his declining years, has begun to sound much as his Edwardian mother must have sounded: full of complaints and comments about accents and clothes—observations that in better and stronger times he would haveconsidered beneath his notice.) Why does Stella at this point sound like her father? Is she herself, underneath it all, as much of a snob as he?
    “This is our enchanted cottage,” Richard tells her. “We’re probably wise not to let anyone else come in.”
    But that can’t last very long, has been one of Stella’s reactions. And is that what he really has in mind—something very intense (God knows they are intense) and brief?
    The very next day Richard calls Stella at the paper to ask her, “How would you feel about meeting Cats and Valerie for dinner? He’s found some place out in the Mission with fabulous food and great music. Want to give it a try?”
    Fighting anxiety—an unaccountable wave of panic has hit her at the mention of this innocent plan—Stella says, “Sure! Great.”
    Tony Russo, Richard’s Cats, is indeed a small brown man, with brown hair and weathered brown skin, brown beard, and long serious brown eyes. Stella does not see the cat resemblance, but then, as she has told Richard, she does not know much about cats. Cats’s new girlfriend, Valerie, is a very large blonde, with big teeth and prominent breasts, huge blue eyes that are blackly lined and lashed. She wears a tight white sweater, a short black skirt that shows long legs in black net stockings. They have just met, just fallen in