Rich Rewards by Alice Adams

and Whitey, and extracted Stacy, who was apparently his date. Time to go home.
    Agatha came up to me and said that she thought it was time to go. She looked exhausted, and harried; I understood then that having me along was supposed to have made the party easier for her; I should have been a sort of buffer against her strong feelings about that difficult, maybe impossible family.
    I agreed that yes, we certainly should leave.

6
    I know: this year when a woman feels nervously horny—and this year it’s perfectly okay for a woman to be horny—she is supposed to get a vibrator, masturbate and at least to think about making it with another woman. But suppose you aren’t turned on at all in a sexual way by women, including yourself?
    That describes my own condition; I simply did not want to do any of those things. I was not even sure that I could.
    Many shrinks, and many feminists too, of course, would say that this is a lack in me—a gap in my instincts, as it were. Still, nevertheless, I do not believe in forcing things of that nature. I don’t think you should do anything that you don’t want to do in bed, either to please another person or for theoretical reasons.
    A much-married man, an aging Liberal I had once known in New York, told me he felt that he should have a sexual relationship with a black man—he
should
, for political reasons. To me that sounded ridiculous.
    Well, my inhibitions left me sexually bound to men, and sometimes I ended up with near-psychopaths: Jake the junkie, mean Derek. On the other hand that’s really no excuse; I’m sure that lots of women with my same sexual bent have lifetimes of pleasant lovers, or even a nice husband or so. Butwhatever had led me and tied me for a while to Derek, the experience had been scarey, as well as cautionary. And so, the day after the party at the Houstons’, I began to think that it was probably lucky, Royce’s not being taken with me. For all I knew, he could turn out to be as mean as Derek was; also, confused as I was in my feelings about Ruth, it was still a lousy thing to do to another woman. Ruth certainly had enough trouble without me in her life.
    The real truth was that I knew it was time, high time, to get along for a while without an ongoing love affair. To concentrate on work, and friendships. Read, get a lot of exercise. Not brood about Jean-Paul, or anyone.
    Let absent or dead lovers rest in peace.

7
    Like so much else in San Francisco, Jackson Square, the center for decorators, antique dealers, fabric houses, was at first glance both original and exceptionally attractive: a few blocks of pleasantly restored, nice old brick buildings, freshly painted Victorian wood. Nothing over three stories high. A closed-off mall for strollers, meanderers. Trees, and flower boxes of geraniums or marguerites. Big glass windows that displayed appealing wares, old brass and well-designed new furniture.
    And then, with a harder look, it all became sadly familiar. I had seen those same strolling couples before, the peacock men in tight-fitting, light-shaded clothes, the dowdy, too heavy women with red alcoholic faces, in double-knit suits. I recognized them as my
confrères
, my colleagues, the local decorators. Their clients, too, fell into recognizable categories: the elderly rich, looking somehow Midwestern, and dazzled by it all; and the stylishly thin, recently well-divorced young women. I had even seen all that furniture before, in showrooms in New York and Boston, and Washington, D.C. And as for the restoration itself, the more I looked the less novel it became. It was simply smaller and prettier than other such efforts, in other cities, as San Francisco itself is a small and pretty city.
    In New York I have methods of avoiding this depressing scene: I visit and buy from mills in Lebanon, New Hampshire—in recent years I would then detour to Boston for a visit, of sorts, with Derek. And I have a crazy infallible genius of a cabinetmaker in Hackensack.