Rich Rewards by Alice Adams Page B

lamb’s wool still in its place. Skirts and dresses—again, the good ones were gone. Even the few scarves and gloves that I had brought to California had been gone through, thinned out. It was hard not to feel in this a strong element of personal dislike, as though the ripper-offer had rebuked me for not having
all
good things. I tried to dismiss those feelings as a kind of situational paranoia, and I remembered—usefully—that several ripped-off friends had said they felt the same.
    Another thing friends had said was that you could not be sure what was missing for several days; things from time to time would turn up gone, and so it was with me. In the meantime I telephoned Agatha.
    Afternoons are when she sees patients, of course; she is apt to be extremely busy. But for once she seemed not to be. She listened, and she said she would call her insurance person, which I hadn’t even thought of. She would call me back.
    Ten minutes later she did call, and she was chuckling to herself. “It’s kind of unbelievable,” she said. “I took out apolicy on that house, and sort of without my knowing it they added a rider that covers you completely. It’s really funny: usually people think they’re covered and they’re not.”
    “God must love you.”
    “I should hope so, all the time I give Him.” And then she told me what I already knew, to make a list of what I had lost, but not for several days. To call the police and make a report.
    Of course I felt considerably better; for a manic moment I even considered pretending to losses that I had not sustained, claiming jewelry and furs that I had never owned. And maybe if Agatha had not been involved I would have. Agatha is the most moral living Episcopalian; she does not believe in cheating anyone at all, whereas if I could get away with it I would love to cheat an insurance company, an oil company—or the I.R.S., for that matter.
    But it was still depressing, the idea of someone’s having come in and poked about among my things. I still felt it as a sort of personal attack. Why me, I thought. I wondered if someone had been watching me, checking my habits of arrival and departure, maybe deciding that he or she—I had to admit, it could have been a woman—did not like me, that I deserved to be ripped off. The only clear fact about the breaker-in was that it was a person of taste, with a good eye for quality. But maybe these days all robbers are discriminating.
    Discouraged, and a little scared, I went back upstairs, and it was then that I discovered my favorite earrings gone, big very plain wide silver hoops. Real silver, by some standards not expensive, but much more than I usually pay for earrings. And they were certainly not unique; I was sure that I could find their duplicates in some good San Francisco store. But the thought of buying them again was deeply, ifirrationally depressing. Emblematic, I guess those earrings were.
    That night, as I was making my dietetic dinner for one, steak tartare, which I had planned to season with some imported soy sauce from Cost Plus, I saw that the soy sauce was missing from its shelf. At that point all the emotions that I had felt about being robbed united in a single flare of rage. Chopping onions, crying over them, I muttered all the obscene words I could think of. Which didn’t make me feel much better either.
    The next day I dutifully called the police and made my report, and a week later I made an honest list of my losses and handed it to Agatha.

8
    I did not exactly keep to my resolution involving not brooding about old love affairs; in fact, as usual I thought of little else—after all, to what else, so far, had my life been dedicated? And I wondered, sometimes, just how it had all begun, this nutty obsessiveness with love and men. A shrink would tie it to my father’s early death, I guess, but I rather thought that my mania began with my Uncle Don, with whom I fell in love when I was five, the year my father died.
    My