Rich Rewards by Alice Adams

Wednesday night, and the next day, Thursday, being the help’s day off at Stacy’s, Royce was supposed to go over there for lunch.
    A great mistake.
    Having been told the news, over the ritual glass of wine, which they sometimes enlivened with coke, Stacy said, “Well,I can see how you’d be a little surprised, but I honestly can’t see why you’re sounding so
gloomy
about it.”
    Gloomy: Stacy’s most pejorative word; she was a positive thinker, basically.
    Accused, Royce floundered. “I don’t either,” he admitted. “I guess I’m in some sort of shock.”
    Stacy that day was wearing a blue silk shirt, white pants. No bra. No shoes. Her small breasts and even her feet were very beautiful; Royce was often stimulated by the sight of those perfect toenails, polished, pink. But not today. In fact today he felt terrible.
    Stacy continued, with a slight elevation of her lovely dimpled chin. “And I’m not exactly the ideal person for you to come to for sympathy in this case,” she rather reasonably said. “Just think, Royce—
God
—now we can go out.”
    “Going out” with Stacy, Royce suddenly understood, was what in the entire world he least of all wanted to do. He did not even want to consider the possibility for some future occasion. He wanted to stay at home, and in his own way to mourn for Ruth, whom he had already begun to idealize, like a person who has died.
    Or he would like to get drunk somewhere, and Stacy, like most highly self-conscious beauties, drank very little.
    He managed to make love to her that afternoon, but only once, instead of their usual twice, or sometimes thrice. And then Royce went home and got drunk. Later Whitey came in, and the two of them really tied one on, as they put it to each other the following morning. They were both excessively hung over.
    Royce remained extremely disturbed: Ruth refused to come home; she almost refused to speak to him. On someimpulse Royce called Agatha and told her how upset he was. Maybe he could come over and talk to her?
    Seated across from Agatha, the familiar family friend, in her funny, Danish-dowdy apartment, Royce tried to tell her how he felt; an essentially nonverbal person, he tried out phrases on her. Grown apart; conflicting interests; should have made more of an effort; not communicating. He said all those things, but none of them quite seemed to fit. He stopped trying, and just said that he felt sad. Miserable, in fact.
    Agatha listened, as she does, and the more he talked the more he became aware of the quality of her listening, of her small sad mouth. What he really wanted, he suddenly thought, was just to take her out to dinner, to a nice quiet place. To be nice to Agatha.

13
    Of course I thought, and thought and thought, about that long conversation with Agatha, which was by far the most intimate of our long association. And since I was really much more interested in her than I was in Royce—to say the least, what struck and interested me most were the revelations of her character.
    Her compassionate concern for Royce I would have taken for granted, as I would have known that she would be touched by the fact of the family’s being originally Okies; it was rather as I had felt about the working-class origins of Derek—and so much for reverse snobbery on both our parts.
    What was new, and to me most surprising, was Agatha’s clear familiarity with the mechanics and the pitfalls of illicit sexual affairs. Oh ho, so you’ve been there too, and quite extensively, is what I thought.
    Another novelty was the unbridled malice with which Agatha spoke of Stacy; for Agatha, that had been a genuinely vicious description.
    And again I thought, Oh well, then, we really have more in common than I had ever known.
    *
    In the midst of these and similar thoughts, plus a few constructive musings about Agatha’s house, one morning I went out to the mailbox, not hoping for much, and there was a thick envelope from Paris. From Ellie Osborne. A news