The Gold Diggers Page 2

  “Well, I don’t know why we’re here. I ought to be working now, or else I’ll have to work all night. I don’t like to just talk.”

  Nick suspected as much. They couldn’t talk yet. He saw what he kept wishing for in men like Sam. Nick begged to be listened to in a particular way, because he was the only one he knew who was so enchanted by the destiny of things. Where other men were scared, or just confused, he noticed the course of things—the price drift from a hundred and fifteen to a hundred and ninety, the routing of the roads to plug into the freeways, the state of the royal palms along the street by his office. He felt an arc in almost everything he met, could tell where it would lead in the end, whether he saw a Caterpillar earth machine poised in a field or a wedding party milling at the door of a church. He’d never thought he could say it well because everyone else seemed dashed by the meanness of fate. Nick thrilled to the world in flux. His mind ran to pattern and process. If he really talked about it, he didn’t know where it might lead. What he needed, he’d always thought, was the right man to say it to.

  “You know, I’m not trying to play with you,” Sam went on. “I think you’re terrific, and you turn me on. But so do a lot of people.”

  It didn’t matter. Nick hadn’t risked much on an aimless talk at an outdoor café. He had a better plan ready, just in case.

  “You have the craziest idea of who you are,” he said. He could feel Sam begin to freeze up, as if the muscles were about to take over and the feelings die away. He was ready to leave. The heart was best served if you treated it as just another muscle. “I exasperate you, Sam, but you must want to hear what I have to say. Because here you are.”

  “I came to tell you I’m not coming anymore.”

  “I have an option on some land in the hills above Malibu. A ranch.” He spoke as if Sam hadn’t; and as he did, he picked out on the lawn the figure of a woman gymnast stretching. She swung from one end of her body to the other, without a hitch. “They’ve just shut it down, and I want to take a ride up and look it over. You want to come?”

  “Now?”

  “Later in the week. Friday.” It was Monday. “It’s real. They used to board horses for westerns. Some guys from Texas ran it, trail men, so it feels like a cowboy’s place. Nobody’s messed it up yet and made it pretty.”

  “Are you a cowboy, Nick?” Sam asked him. He was gentler now, and he’d calculated in an instant that they were onto more uncharted matters. Nick, he seemed to understand, was more than a free man with money and a taste for infatuation.

  “Put it this way. I’ve gotten more western since I’ve gotten gay.”

  “We could poke around the bunkhouse,” Sam said. He put one hand in his shirt and massaged a muscle in his chest. “I’d need a new pair of boots.”

  “Of course. How much would they set you back?”

  “Two hundred. Two-fifty, maybe.”

  Nick took a fold of bills out of his pocket and peeled off three hundreds and laid them on the table. He thought: I’m not like this at all. And then wasn’t sure which role he was disavowing. It wasn’t the money. The act of making payment caused him no dislocation, because he’d had it for free ninety-nine times out of a hundred; and besides, he used to be poor and so saw money as a windfall, no matter how much work he did to make it. It was more the singlemindedness of the pursuit that had him shaking his head in wonder. He’d kept his word for four years now, that nothing would get in the way of him and Peter, and he’d kept it with special care because Peter wouldn’t promise. He’d never gone out of his way to go to bed with kids. They trusted sex too much, and they had a one-track mind about getting attention.

  Somehow, Sam proved that Nick was never going to get over being poor and young, either one. It was nothing but the pursuit of pleasure that threw the last two weeks off kilter. It was not like love at all. The three bills lay on the table, fanned like a hand of cards; and the sun went in and out of the haze, as pale as a white-skinned melon. Nick felt the sweat in the fit of his suit. He’d be more himself, he thought, when they got to the ranch.

  “I’ve died and gone to heaven,” Rita said, breaking into his reverie.

  This was what kept happening to time. Traveling back to Sam again and again was beginning to seem like a series of seizures, amnesiac episodes in which real life gave up. Twenty minutes here, an hour there, Nick thought as he turned from the pool to face her across the terrace, and no wonder he got nothing done. In the pearl light of late afternoon, she looked, tented in her green cape and brown pants, like a stray spirit of the woods of another country. The garden around the pool didn’t seem various enough for such a wildfire pair of eyes. She was a gypsy, but that was only the beginning.

  “Welcome to Crook House,” Nick said. He sounded to Rita like the governess in a Gothic novel.

  “What a name. Does it mean you stole it?”

  “There are people in Bel-Air who’d call it stealing, but no. It’s tucked into the fold between two hills. Built right in. That’s why you enter down the stairs from the roof, and why you can’t see it from the road. The road is above us.”

  “I know. It’s like coming down the rabbit hole. And then this,” she exclaimed as she spread her arms wide and capered up to the pool. She might have been about to burst into song, but in fact the moment struck her dumb. “This” was the whole of Los Angeles. They could see the reach of it through the trees of the dark green garden, miles of a plain with no borders but the haze. There wasn’t an inch of it that didn’t appear peopled and built, yet what held her immediately was the brute fact of the land. Rita’s only previous fling at geography involved her perception at age four that Central Park had two sides, East and West. Yet already she knew the hills from the basin plain in LA, and she sensed that the contrasts were such that she could never go back to not knowing. Her head cleared.

  “Where’s the Pacific?”

  “Straight out,” he said, pointing west. “You’ll see it one of these days. We have it almost all the time in the winter. How’s New York?”

  “The same. Too damn cold.” She was sure that it was dangerous to criticize New York. New York ought to be protected. In New York, she used to protect Europe. She cooked French and bought Italian shoes and read Jane Austen. She was sure, since Europe was double the distance away now, she had no skills for this city. That is why she worried about not being beautiful. It would have been something to fall back on.

  “Tell me about the house,” she said, turning things to real estate because she’d heard it was what they talked about here instead of the weather. She was standing next to Nick, and when she looked up at him, they caught each other’s eye. Being who they were, they learned a great deal from the gesture. He looks too beautiful to look so sad, she thought. His hair was dark and covered his head with light, thick curls. He had a wide mustache and great, rocky features. He didn’t look gay in the least, she thought, mentally slapping her hand.

  “It’s Spanish, sort of. It was built for Rusty Varda in 1920.” Then, because she didn’t make the connection, he started at the beginning. “He was a Hollywood producer in the teens and twenties. Silents. You’ve never seen any of them. They were lousy. He got bought out by better people. But in his heyday, every time he finished a movie he acquired another hundred acres in Los Angeles County. This was the desert up here when he came. So we live in a monument, if you can have a monument to just plain money.”

  “If there’s enough of it, you can,” she said. “J.P. Morgan’s house in New York is kept like a cathedral. I think it even has nuns.”

  “Do you want to change for the party?”

  “You mean my clothes? No. This is what I’d wear if I didn’t think about it, and I don’t want to think about everything. So what happened to Rusty Varda?”

  She could tell Nick knew what she meant. She’d wear what she wanted. She probably could have said what she was afraid of, too, that she couldn’t stand being alone any longer, and yet she had to if she gave up men, which she had to. Bu
t it wasn’t all put into words yet. She only knew she was jittery, and here was someone who must have been, not long before he was sad, scared to death. He had an ambushed look about his eyes, like the victims of natural disasters.

  “Nothing,” Nick said. “He died. He lived here forty-five years, collecting coins. When you’re rich enough, you get to collect money. He died without a will. No heirs. Enter the State of California.”

  “Did he die here?” she asked, looking down at the deep blue tiles, rimmed in gold, that paved the pool. She couldn’t imagine why she cared. It was a jumpy thing to want to know, the young bride’s line in the Gothic novel.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. He gave up the ghost one night in front of ‘The Late Show’ in his den. The house was empty eight years while they traced his phantom cousins and the lawyers siphoned off the liquid assets. We bought the house intact at auction. All the furniture in place. We junked just about everything. But we kept Hey.”

  “Who?”

  “The houseboy. The one who picked you up at the airport.”

  “We weren’t introduced,” she said apologetically. Nick might get the wrong idea that she was snotty with servants. But he started to laugh.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s nothing personal with him. He has bad days when he can’t stand people and talks to his parrot. Those eight years, he lived here all by himself.” As he leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper, she realized he was as conspiratorial when he told stories as she was. “Twenty-five years ago, he used to dance with Balanchine. Come on. We’d better get going.”

  They walked across the terrace to the house, passing tubs of flowering trees and the big old white wicker chairs that sit on the porches of northern islands. The stones underfoot were slate gray. The house was built in a “U” around the terrace, with wide, rough-beamed eaves and a terra-cotta roof. Casement windows, mahogany like a ship, and stucco walls. Spanish, sort of. All the windows faced in, toward the pool terrace and, beyond it, the garden and the city. There were no windows to speak of on the outer skin of the house, where the hillsides came down steeply. Seen from above or, even more, from the back, it would have looked like a fancy motel; but it was sited so as to mask that view. It was built on an idiotic principle, hugging the shape of the hills so that it cracked at the seams in earthquakes and shook all the glass into powder. Hey used to say they’d toted up a thousand years’ bad luck, just in cracked mirrors. Perversely, Rusty Varda loved the idea that the earth might swallow up him and his house and his sixteen thousand Greek and Roman coins at any moment. And these things equal out. It turned out that, when the fires swept down through Bel-Air, they tended to leap over Crook House, nestled as it was, burning the leaves off its trees as they passed and ripping into the houses on the bare hilltops.

  It was like walking into an opera. The room at the center, airy and high—with the spiral stairway going up to a balcony, where the front door was—appeared to be swathed in peach silk. Waves of it draped the terrace window, and it wrapped around the sofas, the chairs, and the footstools. Close up, you could see it was embroidered here and there with exquisite little peach bees. But it wasn’t a room intended for close-ups. It was a living room where nobody lived, designed for the view from the balcony. Nothing like a newspaper or telephone would have fit on any of the table surfaces. “Fit” in both senses. They wouldn’t have been suitable, as having too much to do with people; and there wouldn’t have been room either, what with the bowls of camellias and crystal eggs and covered silver boxes. It was a room that had to do with other rooms, measured against the way people lived who lived above the fray. Surprisingly, Rita was more proud of it than put off, because it showed how pure Peter’s work had gotten to be. There were rooms elsewhere in the house, no doubt, where people could live.

  Nick led Rita around behind the spiral stairs and opened a closet door which turned out to be a two-man elevator. As they rode up to street level, Nick ticked off the specifications of the house, but they didn’t register because Rita was reeling with the incongruity. The elevator was painted inside, trompe l’oeil, to look like the view from a balloon. The wicker of the gondola was painted waist-high, then the guy ropes, and above their heads the bottom of the great gas bag. For the view, they were supposed to be floating above an English park. Rita didn’t know what to say. Not wanting like a bumpkin to comment on everything, she let it pass. They got off at the balcony, walked out the front door and up a flight of steps shaded over by willowy trees, arriving at last at the driveway, high above the house. They took the Jaguar instead of the Mercedes. They drove down and down, out the east gate of Bel-Air to Sunset and left toward Beverly Hills. Nick tried to keep her posted on the lay of the land. She heard him all right, stone cold sober at last, but turned her mind to the string of vehicles. The DC-10, the Mercedes, the balloon elevator, and the Jaguar sedan. It was a very pricey game of musical chairs.

  She was half in love with him already. It was just a manner of speaking, “half in love,” and she’d use it to caution herself about men she shouldn’t get involved with. The problem was, she more often than not went ahead and got involved, no one to blame but herself. Or worse, she’d fall all the way in love because the man in the picture didn’t look twice at her, and she’d end up half-dead from the misery. Rita admitted she wasn’t good at the matter of the heart. She’d had a bad run of married men, one after the other, as if she willfully refused to learn a lesson. What did she want? She’d never dreamed of asking, but it had to do with being alone. It simply never occurred to her that that was the very thing she might ask of a man. She thought that to ask it was to call the love off. Nick would say she was all wrong. For one thing, you can’t be half in love, he’d say. He was a boy idealist about love, earnest and wide open. Tom Swift and His Pounding Heart. That’s what Rita was half in love with, and they hadn’t talked about anything yet.

  “Have you lived here all your life?”

  “In LA, yes. Not here,” he said, taking his hands from the wheel for a moment and gesturing at the close-clipped lawns on either side of the boulevard. “When you’re on your way up or down, you don’t live anywhere long.”

  “Haven’t you always been on the way up?”

  “More or less. Not as much as Peter. He’s the skyrocketing kind.” He spoke without awe of the process, and seemed to relish it. He knew that Peter would never have become a decorator if it hadn’t been for Rita, and he was asking her now to share the marvel of it.

  “I don’t even understand what happened,” she said. The leather smell in the Jaguar was a shade sweeter than the Mercedes, like the difference between two perfect tobaccos. She was always good at hairline distinctions. “He got a job arranging pots and pans in a store window. Then it was antiques. The next thing I knew, he was decorating a yacht. The rest is history. My friend Peter, the star.”

  “Superstar, you mean.”

  “Is there a difference?” she asked playfully. She had got Peter his first job, doing the flowers at a wedding. She made a thousand phone calls to get him the next one, but he couldn’t do it. His Village lover was jealous when he worked. Rita decided the Village lover had to go.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Nick said. “I’m one of the handful of people who knows. With stars, history is the last three weeks. They have all the time in the world to get their hair done and go shopping. Time is what superstars give up. It doesn’t exist.”

  “Peter doesn’t have any time?”

  “None. I wish I could buy him some, but he has more money than I do, so it mustn’t be for sale.”

  He spoke evenly, the skin around his eyes crinkling with pleasure. Not because the news about Peter was pleasant. He seemed happy that he had a handle on the situation, that he knew Peter well enough to see him through the haze. She didn’t think there was anything wrong between Nick and Peter. What was sad, what was making Nick talk rueful and portentous, was a split in their rhythm. Nick seemed to have all the time on his hands that P
eter gave up. He had time to kill. Rita didn’t know how she knew it, since she didn’t have any idea of what it took to do a day of real estate. Maybe because he’d taken time for her this afternoon, she thought, and then thought it didn’t say a lot about her self-image, if time with her was time killed.

  “So LA is a gold mine,” she said. She meant there were veins of it, and some people tapped into it and some didn’t, and then it had to be mined, pick and shovel. It was a remark about how difficult it was, not how easy.

  “You know those old prospectors they used to have in westerns?” Nick asked her as he turned into a driveway lined with freshly polished cars. “They’re all grizzled, and they cuss and have rotten hats.”

  “Yes,” she said, as if they’d seen the same movie that very day, projected in the middle of everything else, like a movie on a plane. “People who never make a strike. You wonder what they’d do with the money if it came to them now. After all that waiting.”

  “My grandfather,” Nick said, shaping the irony into one final photograph, sepia-toned and out of an album. He used to go off by himself to the middle of nowhere and hunt for minerals. I don’t know if it was a scheme about water or uranium or what; but when my father told me about it, I had a very clear picture of my grandfather putting a double handful of sand in a sifter. With a mule tied up nearby.”

  A boy who should have been in movies took the key to the car from Nick to park it, and the two of them made their way to the front of the house. It was an ordinary place, not so big, and Rita wasn’t in the mood to go overboard about it. But she forgot until she walked in, shying behind Nick and edging through the crowd in the front hall, all of whom seemed to be kissing good-bye, that she was here to see the latest piece of Peter’s work. If possible, there was more silk in this living room than in Peter’s own, pale as cream on every wall, upholstered to the room itself. The furniture was variously English, provincial French, and just a bit of wild-priced American, all of it old and perfect and brought together as if by an inner will to be beautiful in a well-protected place. This was what Rita said to herself, adopting the eye of a country-squire magazine, or, rather, its breathtaken voice. She turned to tell Nick she loved it, but he was gone to the bar to get them champagne. Peter appeared as she drew in her breath, before it turned into panic.