Almost Perfect by Alice Adams

tears of rage. And Liam O’Gara once, when his youngest son had drowned in a flood, in Spain.
    But when Richard uncovers his face it is pale, dry of tears and empty; Stella has never seen such a frightening blank. “My father killed my mother,” he tells her, flat-voiced. “He was drunk and he shot her. I was out with a friend and came home to find all these cops and no parents. Nobody much cared, a drunk Irish bartender and his housekeeper wife. It barely made the papers, and he got put away for thirty years. He’s out now, for all I know. But that’s why I left town.” He stares at Stella—who notes that a little color and some expression have come back into his face. An expression that she is unable to read, however.
    “I’ve never told anyone that before,” Richard tells her. “I wonder why you?”
    “I don’t know.” Stella has found this hard to believe, his choosing her to tell; nevertheless she has trouble with her voice, and her breath.
    He says, “There must be something that relates us.”
    “I … guess.”
    “Maybe we’ll find out what it is.”
    For Stella this is both melodramatic and vague. It feels false. B-film, as Liam would have put it. But very likely she is being hard, she thinks; she knows that she tends to be judgmental. This man is in some pain, and he has confided in her, for whatever reasons.
    But all this precludes the possibility of an interview, she vaguely feels.
    Still staring at her, Richard speaks very slowly. “I think I’ll take you home now, if that’s okay.”
    Does he mean take her home and then to bed, to make love? Stella has not the slightest idea of his intention, and Richard gives no clue. She is not at all sure that she wants that, such a sudden collision with a man she does not know, not at all. And does not quite entirely trust: something is wrong; how could she trust him? (And besides, this isn’t the Sixties; you’re not supposed to do that anymore, just fall into bed with someone new.) But thevery idea, the bare small possibility that they might later on make love, is enough to take her breath, as together they stand up and walk out of his studio, and onto the street, to his car.
    And all across the city, North Beach to Van Ness Avenue, out Sacramento Street, Clay, and then Lake, to the Richmond, where Stella lives—all that way, Stella wonders what they are up to, just what they are doing together, in this cool fog-ridden night. At the same time her mind crowds with more familiar anxieties: just how clean is her house, should he mean to come in? And more basically, she wonders about her own person: she showered this morning, but is she still all perfectly, fragrantly clean?
    These anxieties cloud the more real question of what it is that she really wants to do, assuming that she has some choice. What does she really want of Richard?
    His car is an old convertible. Insensitive to cars, a non-driver, Stella has no idea of make or year. But the broad deep seats and cracked leather remind her of her adolescence somewhere. Drives out to Long Island, when she was a New York kid.
    “It’s a funny old car,” remarks Richard, at the exact moment of these thoughts in Stella’s mind. A coincidence, undoubtedly, but one that Stella notes: it is when she begins to think that he can read her mind.
    “You probably haven’t seen a car like this since you were a kid,” says Richard.
    “That’s right; I was thinking that. Though I really don’t know much about cars,” she tells him.
    And a little later, “This is where I live,” says Stella.
    He stops, and parks, and very chivalrously he comes around to her side of the car and hands her out.
    He walks along with her to the half-lit entranceway, where, with a long and deliberate unfolding of himself, he bends down to take her in his arms, to meet her mouth in a kiss of surpassing sweetness. And of, for Stella, the most instant and violent excitement.
    Then, very gently disengaging himself, Richard speaks