Rich Rewards by Alice Adams Read Free Book Online Page B

been carved down from the beach, so that it seemed to be at water level. Otherwise, it was perfectly nice but in no way remarkable. But someone, Agatha, or Ruth, must have told him that I was a decorator, and he wanted me to see his room, the fruit of his idle richness.
    Trying not to feel put down, trying to focus on that boring room, I next saw that it contained a remarkable number of jungle animals, lions, some zebras on the run, an obscene rhinoceros. Too many animals, and all of them too large.
    Going from one photograph to another, which seemed the sensible, the expected thing to do, I tried to cope with my feelings of rejection. Turned on by Royce, I would have expected him to feel the same. So far it had generally been like that for me. God knows I was not everyone’s cup of tea, so to speak, but then neither was everyone mine. And I wondered: Was this the way it was going to be from now on? Have I reached an age to be turned down by men of my own age?
    “I shot all these myself,” Royce was saying, which restored a little reality to my musings, the reality of irritation: a strong bias against hunting, guns, people who do all that. I asked, “You hunt a lot?”
    “Oh, no.” He sounded appalled, and quite as priggish as I must have sounded. “With my camera. I like to photograph animals. I go on camera safaris. East Africa. Next time I’m trying to persuade Ruth and the kids to come along.”
    “Oh.”
    “And here’s my house at Tahoe,” he was saying. “It doesn’t look like much, but it’s really beautiful.”
    He showed me a picture of a small, entirely ordinary house, and I exclaimed, because he seemed to expect it—and because there had begun to seem something rather touching in his thus exhibiting his treasures—“Oh, how nice,” I said, examining the picture of a small house. Not knowing that I was to spend the happiest week of my life in that house, though not with Royce.
    “Well,” Royce said, “I guess we’d better get back to the others.”
    We went upstairs; we re-entered the party and no one looked at us with anything like suspicion.
    Later, coming out of the bathroom, I encountered my hostess, Ruth Houston. She was standing at the mirror in a bedroom, combing her short brown hair with a total lack of interest. She was escaping from her own party, and she didn’t care who knew it.
    I said that I liked her house.
    “Well, it’s much more important to Royce than it is to me,” she remarked. “He’s from very poor people—Okies, really—and he cares about spending a lot of money. Boats, safaris, cars. My folks weren’t rich but they were richer than his were. I think it makes a difference.”
    This longish speech had not really been directed to me; it could have been just something that she said to people sometimes. And so an assenting murmur seemed sufficient. Intimate revelations from people I’m not close to make me uncomfortable. But she had struck a familiar, nostalgic note: she reminded me of certain women from my Wisconsin childhood, women who would just say whatever was on their minds, in a free, frank way.
    I muttered something ambiguous in response, and Ruth went on with her hair. And I wondered again if she felt leftout, with all that intense feeling running between her husband and children. Not to mention Stacy.
    When I came back into the main room, there indeed was Stacy, and she was talking in a hyper-animated way to Whitey. They were across the room from me; in the continuing din I had no idea what they were saying, but their two postures said a lot. Stacy was in perpetual motion, gesturing with everything—her eyebrows, hands, hips, legs; arching her back so that her breasts pointed straight out. And Whitey watched her; absolutely still, he had a slightly passive smile. And I had an evil thought about how passive he must be in bed, waiting to be pleased.
    Then a small and pretty young man, a decorator to whom I had earlier been introduced, went over to Stacy