Almost Perfect Read Online Free PDF Page B

leaving me. Sometimes he’s apologetic, saying he wishes it were more, other times he makes a big deal about how generous he is.”
    “He’s crazy.” Justine says this very gently, very sparingly.
    “Yes, but he’s also dying.” Stella sighs, painfully; almost any thought of her father is for her filled with pain. And this linkage of his death with unspecified but supposedly large sums of money is in every way terrible: a seditious bribe, an evil push toward wishes for his death.
    Justine as a rule speaks very little of herself, a quality that Stella has tried and failed to emulate. Justine asks questions and she listens, wonderfully—Justine is one of the great listeners. She speaks about general topics. Thus Stella often knows very little about her current life. It is very surprising, then, to Stella to hear Justine say, “This quite curious thing has come up in my life. A man I know, whom I’ve been, uh, going out with from time to time, now has decided that we must get married, and I find myself very confused. Totally. Confused.”
    “Justine, how nice, that’s terrific.” But even as she says thisStella wonders, Is it terrific? Why does she make this assumption? Does she herself wish to be married? She would rather have thought that she prided herself on not marrying, on avoiding that particular form of trouble.
    “I’m not so sure,” says Justine, as though in answer to all of Stella’s unspoken questions. “But I must say I’m a little embarrassed at how pleased I am to be asked. And to make it even more embarrassing, he’s sort of rich; not really rich but what my poor old mother would call comfortable. And he
is
comfortable. I really like him.”
    For whatever reasons, possibly including the proposal, Justine is in one of her very young-looking phases. In an old heavy soft-blue sweater, a scarf and jeans (Margot: “Your Okie friend really takes the prize for dowdy”), her light hair tied back with a ribbon, her blue eyes bright, she looks like a friend of Stella’s own age, or even a younger friend.
    “Funnily enough, he’s a contractor,” Justine now tells Stella, long, strong fingers toying with her wineglass. “Funnier still, I met him in a bar. I really wish it hadn’t happened like that, in a way, but it did. I’d just had a really bad day downtown, and I was so tired, and I thought, How nice just to have a glass of wine at some cheery place. So I went into Le Central, forgetting it was Friday, so crowded—and there he was, this nice fat man moving over to let me get a drink, and then talking to me, and then saying why don’t we go and have dinner. And so we did.”
    Stella laughs. “And so, as they say, one thing led to another.”
    “Well yes, eventually. In fact very eventually; it was all very slow and deliberate, and so nice; I never felt rushed, or pushed.” She smiles at Stella. “Another funny thing—in fact everything about this story is very odd, wouldn’t you say? But Collin, my contractor, seems to know that advertising type who stood you up. You remember, Mr. Fallon?”
    A strange flush of heat goes through Stella—so stupid;
why?
—even as quite coolly she is saying, “Everyone seems to know him, one way or another. But how does Collin?”
    “Collin mostly builds houses. And he was showing me some pictures—he keeps files on them all, of course—and he came to one, rather small but so beautiful, really super, up the coast. Andhe said it was the best house he’d ever built, and that some advertising type had just drawn it on a cocktail napkin, and he built it from the drawing, and it turned out perfect. A crazy genius, he said, named Richard Fallon. So, you know how I am about names; my old head is literally stuffed with them. And so I thought, Oh, Richard Fallon. Stella’s missing interview.” Justine smiles, rather pleased with this tidy tying together of things.
    “What did it look like, the house?” Asking this, Stella realizes that she is short of