Free Rich Rewards by Alice Adams Page B

mouth. Tall and graceful, lithe, with brown-gold skin. God knows what ethnic mix produced him: Tony Brown. Caroline introduced him, and he shook my hand formally. His hands were smaller than mine, but hard and strong.
    Tony Brown was not only beautiful, but he was nice; his niceness and gentleness were instantly clear. And if I have made him sound effeminate, I didn’t mean to. He was just beautiful to look at, and clearly of a gentle disposition. I was as drawn to him in a positive, human way—okay, also attracted—as I was turned off by Whitey.
    He had brought some drawings of an interior, a living room. Caroline later told me that he had drawn them himself; they were beautifully, delicately done.
    He spread them out on the floor, and we all peered down as Tony pointed to a fireplace and to the broad blank hood above it, surrounded by an intricate splaying of beams.He said, “That’s all brass, the whole hood. Lord, the money they’re throwing into this place. But I thought maybe something of yours could go right there, Caroline. If you felt like doing it.”
    Tony’s voice was soft, his accent lilting and vaguely “foreign”; Jamaican? Balinese? His tone, as he spoke to Caroline, was tentative, somewhat shy.
    She said, “I don’t know, it’s a little too rich for my blood. I just can’t see anything of mine hung up there. And all those fucking beams. It’s really pretentious as hell.”
    “Well, it’s totally up to you,” Tony told her. “I just said I’d ask you. And they’re really loaded.” This last was a hesitant afterthought.
    “So I see. And I could use the dough.” She sighed. “Well, I’ll see.”
    Tony Brown, the tasteful, scrupulous carpenter. I was not quite so rash as to hire him on sight, but I almost did.
    He was saying to Caroline, “And later we could check out what’s happening at the Boarding House, if you felt like it.”
    She seemed to consider, and then she said, “I’ll think about it. I’ll call you later on.”
    He smiled, accepting this answer as though used to it. Caroline did not quite smile back.
    Whereas to me that small exchange had been amazing. Always with men I had said such an emphatic “Yes,” or “No.” Never a cool “I’ll think about it.” And certainly never “I’ll call you.” That was what
they
said.
    I also thought that it was time for me to go, but just then beautiful Tony Brown got up and said that he had to go and meet someone, something about a job. We shook hands again, as formally as before; we said how nice to have met. Tony didn’t shake hands with Caroline, nor for that matter did they kiss goodbye. They just vaguely waved ateach other, and Tony walked across the room and out the door.
    I asked Caroline if he was really a good carpenter.
    “Oh, he’s really good,” she said. “He and Whitey used to work together but they fell out. I think now they’re not even speaking to each other. Well, I have to admit it, Whitey isn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with,” and she sighed, as she often seemed to do when talking about her family.
    What she had said struck me as confirmation of my own judgment: a nice and beautiful boy who had fallen out with Whitey could not be all bad.
    And in that way I found the carpenter for Agatha’s house.

10
    By mid-November of that year there had been no rain in northern California, nor snow up in the Sierras, two hundred miles away. A dangerous situation: potential drought, water shortages. Still, it was hard not to enjoy the balmy, golden weather, the vistas of sunlight out on the Bay, the clear skies, the dry yellow sycamore leaves that crackled in any light breeze and scudded along the gutters, reminding me of Paris, other falls. Reminding me of Jean-Paul, for whom I still pined.
    Mainly, though, that fall I was absorbed in doing Agatha’s house. I had indeed called Tony Brown, and together we had worked out a remodeling plan: a wide deck off the kitchen, with space for pots of