what is obviously meant as a parting note. “You’re lovely. I’ll call you. Or you call me if you want to.”
He turns and goes back to his car, as Stella, fumbling as usual with her key, almost expects to hear his returning steps behind her: he will change his mind?
But what she next hears is the starting up of his car, as she turns to watch him swing out into the street.
And he is gone.
7
Beginning
Fortunately for Stella, in the days and weeks following her “interview” or whatever that was with Richard Fallon, she is busy. The social worker piece led, somewhat circuitously, to another, an interview with a young Mexican-American priest who works with pregnant girls, boys with AIDS—all high school kids, out in the Mission District. A priest who has come into considerable conflict with the Church’s higher powers. Reflecting that she has not met a very young priest for a very long time, Stella finds herself very moved by this boy, who cannot be much over twenty, and all that he faces: illness, opprobrium, very possibly excommunication. She guesses that he is gay, which could give him another set of consequences to face.
And she goes down to Stanford to interview two experts on Central America: one from the Hoover Institute, a willowy Yalietype, with a confusing accent compounded of Yale and New Jersey, who speaks clearly and succinctly of the need for a U.S.-backed police force; the other a Salvadoran poet, small and lithe, rather beautiful, who raises his hands very gracefully in sheer despair at the poverty and corruption and sheer ignorance among his people. “I am Mexican,” Stella tells him (they have been speaking in Spanish). “My feelings for my own people are as yours are. I see little hope on either of our horizons.”
She goes home with a heavy sack of discouraging tapes—and in her dreams that night she compounds all those men, the young priest and the two academics, and herself, the supposedly objective reporter. In the dream she is actually a sort of spy, and she does not know for whom.
Though busy, she thinks of Richard Fallon often, and with a curious discomfort. She feels that he has claimed her somehow—as though he still held her tightly by one wrist. As though by telling her his melodramatic black secret (and was it even true? did his father really kill his mother, as he said?) and then by kissing her, as he did, he had set her aside, in some way, so that now she is forced to wait around, to see what he does next. And she thinks, He can’t have been serious when he said that I should call him; why would I? But she looks up his number in the phone book and then is unable to forget it.
She explains to Justine as best she can that she will probably not do the interview with Richard Fallon. “I think he really deserves Malcolm.” Malcolm is the paper’s aged art critic, brilliant, acerbic and alcoholic, and probably dying of emphysema. “He’s not just an advertising type,” Stella tells Justine, of Richard. “His studio is really something; it’s amazing. I’m not up to it. And besides, it got sort of out of hand. I don’t mean he came on to me, it wasn’t like that. I mean I think he’s a little out of control. Around women. Or maybe it’s just me. I don’t know.”
At all of which Justine smiles wisely and comes to her own conclusions. Which she does not communicate to Stella.
* * *
Stella was waiting to be kissed again. At times it all came to that, she thought. The sweet pressure of their mouths together, their bodies, for that long instant. Standing at her door, in the porch light. It was the kiss that she thought of, remembered, was somehow imprinted with. It was as though that kiss had begun some process within her that had to be continued, perhaps concluded. And Stella was not sure that actual sex would be the logical ending. It could be simply more kissing, she thought.
And she also thought, He really is so vain. That studio of his is a sort of
He turns and goes back to his car, as Stella, fumbling as usual with her key, almost expects to hear his returning steps behind her: he will change his mind?
But what she next hears is the starting up of his car, as she turns to watch him swing out into the street.
And he is gone.
7
Beginning
Fortunately for Stella, in the days and weeks following her “interview” or whatever that was with Richard Fallon, she is busy. The social worker piece led, somewhat circuitously, to another, an interview with a young Mexican-American priest who works with pregnant girls, boys with AIDS—all high school kids, out in the Mission District. A priest who has come into considerable conflict with the Church’s higher powers. Reflecting that she has not met a very young priest for a very long time, Stella finds herself very moved by this boy, who cannot be much over twenty, and all that he faces: illness, opprobrium, very possibly excommunication. She guesses that he is gay, which could give him another set of consequences to face.
And she goes down to Stanford to interview two experts on Central America: one from the Hoover Institute, a willowy Yalietype, with a confusing accent compounded of Yale and New Jersey, who speaks clearly and succinctly of the need for a U.S.-backed police force; the other a Salvadoran poet, small and lithe, rather beautiful, who raises his hands very gracefully in sheer despair at the poverty and corruption and sheer ignorance among his people. “I am Mexican,” Stella tells him (they have been speaking in Spanish). “My feelings for my own people are as yours are. I see little hope on either of our horizons.”
She goes home with a heavy sack of discouraging tapes—and in her dreams that night she compounds all those men, the young priest and the two academics, and herself, the supposedly objective reporter. In the dream she is actually a sort of spy, and she does not know for whom.
Though busy, she thinks of Richard Fallon often, and with a curious discomfort. She feels that he has claimed her somehow—as though he still held her tightly by one wrist. As though by telling her his melodramatic black secret (and was it even true? did his father really kill his mother, as he said?) and then by kissing her, as he did, he had set her aside, in some way, so that now she is forced to wait around, to see what he does next. And she thinks, He can’t have been serious when he said that I should call him; why would I? But she looks up his number in the phone book and then is unable to forget it.
She explains to Justine as best she can that she will probably not do the interview with Richard Fallon. “I think he really deserves Malcolm.” Malcolm is the paper’s aged art critic, brilliant, acerbic and alcoholic, and probably dying of emphysema. “He’s not just an advertising type,” Stella tells Justine, of Richard. “His studio is really something; it’s amazing. I’m not up to it. And besides, it got sort of out of hand. I don’t mean he came on to me, it wasn’t like that. I mean I think he’s a little out of control. Around women. Or maybe it’s just me. I don’t know.”
At all of which Justine smiles wisely and comes to her own conclusions. Which she does not communicate to Stella.
* * *
Stella was waiting to be kissed again. At times it all came to that, she thought. The sweet pressure of their mouths together, their bodies, for that long instant. Standing at her door, in the porch light. It was the kiss that she thought of, remembered, was somehow imprinted with. It was as though that kiss had begun some process within her that had to be continued, perhaps concluded. And Stella was not sure that actual sex would be the logical ending. It could be simply more kissing, she thought.
And she also thought, He really is so vain. That studio of his is a sort of
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