Rich Rewards by Alice Adams Page A

Since so many of my clients have been broke friends, this has worked out well. They appreciate my efforts.
    But there I was in San Francisco, with that huge house of Agatha’s, and all that money. And how ironic it was that the General’s money should in that sense have come to me: so often I had wondered how on earth he came by it, and none of my speculations had been at all flattering to him, the mean old bastard. I felt plunged into an unfamiliar and vastly overpriced—in fact a crazily costly—world, hitherto only glimpsed at infrequent intervals. In Jackson Square, all around me there were people spending enormous sums of money, and they were very serious about all that spending; they felt that it was the right thing to do, and they
cared
about what they bought, and owned, and displayed.
    In the year that I spent in San Francisco, I was never to make any excursion without running across some person whom I had seen or met or heard of before; that day, across the street, I saw Stacy, of the Houston party. She was again with that pretty young man—her decorator, I guess. Her tall thin blonde body was, as always, in constant motion, but that day she seemed to be miming petulance; assuming they were having the kind of decorator-client quarrel that I knew about, I found it easy to avoid them. And I thought, Thank heaven she’s not my client; I know her type, restless and greedy, in a random, indecisive way.
    *
    The high point of my trip to Jackson Square was my discovery that my favorite line of linen had its headquarters a few blocks from there, unlike Brunschwig & Fils, Schumacher, et cetera, whose main office and showrooms are in New York. The Henry Calvin building, then, contained more beautiful linen samples than I could have imagined—perfect for Agatha, who is, like me, a linen freak. Even the company’s nice brick building had an old-world quality of excellence, of care. I spent a happy forty-five or fifty minutes there, marveling at beautiful fabrics—before I moved on to the shocking end of my day.
    What happened was: when I got home, after one instant I knew that someone had been there. Someone had broken in, had been all over the house.
    First off, I saw that my mail was piled up on the hall table. It had not yet arrived when I went out that morning; eager to hear from Ellie anything about Jean-Paul, I was highly aware of mail. Someone had picked up and neatly stacked my letters, which struck me as a most curious gesture, taking in your victim’s mail. But this was a most curious break-in, all around.
    I suppose that by now almost everyone who lives in a city has been in some way robbed—houses broken into, cars stolen, been mugged in a familiar parking lot or an elevator—but so far none of it had happened to me, just the garbage can my second day in that house. Going through all the downstairs rooms, and then the upstairs, I began to experience the emotions that I had heard about so often from my robbed friends—a vicarious
déjà vu
, as it were. I felt both angry and afraid—it occurred to me that the person might still be there, in the house, although I was fairly sure that he was not. And I experienced a sense of violation, not exactly like being raped—I guess: that hasn’t happened to me either, not yet—but still a terrible sense of having been entirely, nakedly exposed to an unknown, hostile person.
    In the kitchen the small portable TV was missing, along with my electric typewriter. Well, of course those would be the obvious things to take. Nothing else there gone, that I could see.
    Upstairs, in the big bedroom where I was more or less camping out, I began to look through drawers, in the closet, and that is where my strong sense of defilement began: the person had been through literally everything I owned, and had chosen what to take with a keenly, most snobbishly selective eye. Gone were my few good silk blouses; I was left with synthetics. The same with sweaters: cashmere missing,