Rich Rewards by Alice Adams Read Free Book Online

perfection that was quite unachievable for me, even had I ever tried. She was probably stupid-shrewd, I thought, and I consigned her to that alimony-rich group of divorcées whom I had recognized in other places, women who are getting so much alimony that they have to marry upward, as it were. In the meantime they use gay men for escorts and married men for sex. Like most clandestine lovers, she and Royce had no idea how obvious their connection was, to anyone; they may even have thought that a public show of friendliness would be misleading. And I thought again, Oh, poor Agatha.
    Ruth Houston, whom we met once we got inside the house, was quite a surprise, a most curious match for Royce: a small dark woman, with large unhappy eyes and a tight clenched mouth. I thought she even looked a little crazy, desperate. She wore a gaudy orange cotton caftan that did nothing to brighten her look.
    And I met a quantity of other people, crowding that large, dramatically beamed and windowed room, half open to a long view of dunes, the sea. Everyone was very dressed up, in a way that people I knew in the East had not been, not for years; in fact I was more conscious of all those clothes than of the people. I could have been looking at a room full of mannequins, in their leather and silk and velvet, their silver Indian jewelry, their mid-Seventies opulence.
    The food, too, already laid out on a long bandanna-clothed table, was also predictably opulent: the crab and white wine, varieties of quiches, the tray of tiny pastries for dessert.
    It was really depressing, all those smiling laughing eating people, in all those clothes, behaving as though they were doing something important. Lonely is probably what I actually felt, but lonely for any particular person? Surely not for Derek—for Jean-Paul? More likely it was simple loneliness, that of a woman too unused to being alone.
    Agatha and I never talked in an explicit way about her love affairs; I just assumed that she sometimes had them. Generally I talked about mine, and she listened. Once, though, I do remember saying to her, during some particularly ill-advised affair of my own—maybe when it had finally become clear to me that Jacob was hopelessly on heroin: a junkie—and at a time when it seemed to me that all the women I knew were involved in some sort of bad love affairs, then I said to Agatha that there seemed to be an inverse relationship betweenthe intelligence of women and their choice of men. To which Agatha quickly answered, “Well, in that case I must be a genius.” We laughed a lot at that, true and unfunny as it was.
    Now that I was seeing her on home ground, I wondered: Would I hear more about her lovers, maybe meet them? Were any of them in this room, right now? Given that particular rather homogeneous group, it seemed unlikely, but then so did Royce Houston, even as the object of a “crush” of Agatha’s.
    Agatha looked less out of place with those people than I would have expected, however. In her neat Levis and dark blue turtleneck she looked simply young, and rather old-fashioned.
    Ruth Houston, in her own house, looked very out of place. The bright caftan was all wrong; it might once have been becoming, at some other and perhaps happier time of her life—not now. I assumed that she must be unhappy about Royce and big blonde Stacy, but if she was she seemed remarkably unaware of them. Normally I would have felt a sort of female-bonding sympathy for Ruth, but she looked as angry as she did unhappy, and when she forgot my name for the third time trying to introduce me to someone—How many people does she know named Daphne? I wondered—I decided that she was a worse than indifferent hostess, and I wasn’t really interested in her problems.
    And maybe I let this hostility of Ruth Houston’s serve as an excuse, for normally I am not at all drawn to other women’s husbands, or their lovers, and I have to admit: at first I was powerfully drawn to Royce Houston,