Almost Perfect Read Online Free PDF

sparsely furnished, and decorated with somewhat childish souvenirs: posters, silver masks, ceramics. Lots of books. There is also a dining room, and another, very small room, for which she has never found a definite use; she puts things there, and periodically she has to clear them out. Her bathroom is large and papered with cabbage roses, vaguely matched by rose-colored tiles around the shower.
    Stella tends to spend time mostly in her bedroom; she reads there, and often works at a long cluttered table across from her bed.
    Richard Fallon is unimaginable in these rooms; that is one of the things that Stella thinks that day, after talking to Margot and observing, anew, the unruly piles of books by which she is surrounded. She sighs, and sits down at her desk, and gets to work.
    She has two hours before meeting a friend for lunch downtown, and she needs to make the most of them.
    This fairly frequent lunchtime friend is Justine Jones, some ten years older than Stella. A very close, maybe her closest friend, from a crossroads down in East Texas. A lean and lanky gray-blonde (a dust-bowl blonde, she terms herself), freckle-faced, incongruously heavy-breasted. Justine was scooped up into the giant university at Austin, where she prospered and won further scholarships, in journalism, to Columbia. And thence to the job in San Francisco. She is literally Stella’s boss, a fact they both tend to forget; Justine is in charge of feature stories, the section for which Stella mostly writes, what used to be called the women’s page.
    An avid talker, sometimes brilliant, always interesting, and often wise, Justine is monumentally discreet about her own life; she is even discreet about her own opinions. She tends to listen and to comment—in a word, an ideal friend, which is how Stella and quite a few other people view her, including the lovers of whom she does not often speak. Life in New York served to speed up her native delivery, but apparent in her speech are still certain flat vowels, as well as a frequent wry colloquial turn, which she is much too intelligent to overdo. The sounds of her voice are actually very beautiful, like soft sweet bells, sounding an upper range. She spent the past year with a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, but Cambridge seems not to have affected her speech.
    Once they settle at their table, Stella tells her friend, “I’m really okay. Just broke and sometimes lonely, but aren’t most people both those things?” Stella is aware, still, of having missed Justine for a year, and is anxious, still, to tell her everything—an effect that is frequent with Justine.
    “I do worry about Prentice,” Stella continues. “It’s hard when an ambivalently loved parent is dying.”
    “It sure is.”
    They pause delicately, both recognizing the problem: unloved, unloving Prentice Blake dying.
    It is Stella who breaks the silence then, saying, “And then there’s Liam. Always lurking somewhere in the tabloids. If a person can
lurk
in tabloids.”
    The two women laugh, with a small note of sadness, of rue, thrown in.
    “Just yesterday something in a gossip column,” Stella goes on. Justine is the only person to whom she speaks of Liam.
    “I saw it,” Justine tells her. “Honestly, baby-girl stars. At his age.” And then she asks Stella, “Why are you peering like that? See someone you know?”
    Caught out, Stella half lies. “Not really. I just thought I saw someone.” The truth is, she is more or less half looking for, half expecting to see, Richard Fallon. Who has, she now feels, insinuated himself into her imagination. She has found herself looking about, as (observably) she now is doing.
    Justine is a woman of exceptional intuitive powers; she could almost be counted on to divine the state of mind of her friend. And so it is really to change the subject, again, that Stella remarks, “In addition to dying, Prentice is more than a little strange about money, I think. He keeps going on about what he’s