The Gold Diggers Read online

  And finally came face to face with Peter. She’d been aware for some time that the old prince—he must have been seventy-five then—didn’t live alone, but she thought the rustling from the kitchen was a maid. Or a valet, perhaps, someone who’d laid out Alexander Kirkov’s evening clothes ever since his first masked ball at the Winter Palace, except she was probably confusing it with the slaves in Mississippi. Then, one day, without preliminary, Peter came into the parlor carrying a tea tray, unbearably thin and pale, a young man made out of porcelain. He had finally decided to come out of hiding, as if he’d eavesdropped long enough to trust her. He wasn’t shy so much as he seemed, like a deer, to be tuned to a higher world’s rhythms, where the air was thin and the food music.

  “Tell me,” he said to her politely, “where you are exiled from.”

  The world at large, she might have said. From then on, Alexander Kirkov let the young man stay, and she pieced his story together from chance remarks. It seemed that Alexander Kirkov had ferreted out a Russian noblewoman shortly after he came to New York. They married and had two despicable children, a daughter who drowned herself and a son whom his father disowned when he changed his name to Kirk. Alexander Kirkov’s wife took Peter in when the daughter went under—Peter was thirteen—and she herself died the following year. Alexander Kirkov could not keep it straight who was to blame for what, but that it was all someone’s fault he knew for a fact. At least he didn’t take it out on Peter, like Cinderella’s stepmother. He sold an icon and sent him to prep school for two years; and when the school made Peter sick, he brought him home and brought in tutors. Piano, fencing, poetry, and art.

  The art proved to be afternoon trips to museums with a melancholy pederast, also Russian. In fact, nearly everyone Peter knew when Rita met him was Russian, and most were nearly eighty. He was twenty-three years old, but something about him seemed to have stopped when he was thirteen. Standard American was no longer his native tongue. He took care of his grandfather gladly, but he’d ended up taking care of several of his grandfather’s friends as well, aristocrats all of them. He took their treasures by the suitcaseful to dealers on Third Avenue. He went on all-day errands to buy tinned sturgeon and the best black bread. And while he plumped their pillows and made them comfortable, he heard the ceaseless lament for the lost world that stopped in 1917. Prince Alexander Kirkov never wavered in his belief that the Romanovs would be summoned again, and they would all return triumphantly to their estates and once more civilize the wilds of the earth. The old Russians tended to close their remarks with three cheers for Peter, whom they saw as if on a white horse coming home, restored to his ancient birthright. Alexander Kirkov didn’t try to hide it from Rita. The young man was being prepared for a prince’s destiny.

  “Peter,” she said one day in the midst of a brainstorm, for he had clearly begun to believe in the fairy tale ending and needed a dose of the real world. “I’ve always wanted to learn a little Russian. Come and teach me.”

  Because Rita was a realist, given to missing nothing when she walked down the street, casting a cold eye on her hit-and-run careers, she assumed her world was the real one. She was half-right. She harbored no illusions about herself, yet she had a habit of constructing castles in air around the people she loved. The Russian lesson was Tuesday and Thursday from ten to twelve at Rita’s place, followed by lunch and a bit of shopping. It didn’t take long for Rita to learn the truth about Peter, by which she meant his secret life, and it went two ways. One, he was gay. Two, he was mesmerized by Hollywood and spent his most rapturous hours at the movies. So he wasn’t so un-American after all.

  “It used to be that everyone wanted to be a prince,” she said to him as they wandered through Bendel’s. “Now even the princes want to be movie stars.”

  “I want to be an actor,” he said dramatically.

  “No, you don’t. That’s just because you’re gay. You have to do something practical.” She sounded insufferable. Don’t be his mother, she said to herself. “What color scarf should I wear with a peach blouse?”

  “Raspberry.”

  “Interesting. I was thinking green. You have to be able to think of both.”

  She wasn’t always so controlling. This, the period of the Russian lesson, went on for more than a year, and the two of them were conspicuously loose and undemanding of each other. But Rita was under considerable pressure at the time, in love with a stock manipulator from Short Hills who could see her only during lunch. So she had to serve a meal and make love in the same hour on Mondays and Wednesdays, and it sent her off balance on Tuesdays and Thursdays when she saw Peter. She didn’t absorb a hell of a lot of Russian. But it was a relief to be able to confide in Peter, who forced her to be hard on herself and abandon the men who fucked her over. Peter had less to own up to, since living with Alexander Kirkov meant he couldn’t bring a man home to bed. An occasional visit to the baths, or he’d get himself picked up in a bar, but mostly he sighed for a perfect love and tried to imagine it to Rita.

  She listened and didn’t raise a finger to object, though here was exactly the place where the real world ought to have come down hard, without the flowers and the buff-colored birds. But see what Rita does. She rids herself so of Lancelot-and-Guinevere that she’ll go get laid while the water boils for the speculator’s coffee. And only one day later, she sits with her chin in her hands and lets Peter moon about the man in his dreams.

  An actual, particular man, as it turned out. Peter was still getting over his first love. When he was sent off at fifteen to school in Connecticut, he had no friends and kept to himself. Rita imagined he must have looked like a changeling, unearthly in his navy blazer and white duck trousers. An older boy called Mark, the all-American sort, was charged by the grinning headmaster to keep an eye on the spooky little Russian who wasn’t joining in. Peter didn’t think he had anything to do with one thing leading to another. Mark was a senior and an athlete, and his body was a set of connections, perfectly in tune, between the way a boy moves and the way a grown man acts. Early on, before they even met, Peter watched Mark in the shower after soccer practice and would have turned him to stone if he could have, so as to run his hands over him whenever he wished. He wanted a Greek statue all his own, and he didn’t much care if someone touched him back. When Mark first dropped by to say hello, Peter could barely put one word after the next. He slipped into Mark’s room between classes and exchanged pillow cases with him. A week later, he rooted through Mark’s laundry bag and took a set of dirty underwear and gym clothes to dress up in.

  But he didn’t know Mark had feelings of his own. Just before Thanksgiving, just at the end of soccer season, Mark came into Peter’s bed one night late, and the lights stayed out. He arrived about midnight and stayed till nearly dawn nearly every night thereafter. As Peter told it, they got no sleep for the rest of the year. But they didn’t look it, and the headmaster patted himself on the back and thanked God for the manly virtues that lit up his beautiful school.

  That these things end is a matter of course, but no one had bothered to tell Peter. The head might even have remarked that it was just another case of boys being boys, nothing a caning or a lap around the track couldn’t cure. June came, and Mark graduated, and Peter spent the summer in Brooklyn Heights, thinking, “Now what?” He couldn’t believe it had come to nothing at all, but Mark didn’t call, didn’t write, and didn’t come back in the fall to visit. He was too busy with freshman soccer at Dartmouth. Peter went up to Connecticut for another year and fell apart, though the only evidence of it was the silence that settled around him. The headmaster wrote to Alexander Kirkov that it was just what he’d expected, with the history of drowning and all. As the winter settled in, Peter had still another affair, but he never went into any detail about it with Rita. It was just something to do on the way down. By the end of the year, he was as tubercular, as bone-pale as any of the dead-tired heroes in Russian novels. Alexander Kirkov remarked on the resemblance.

  Rita said he
would get over it; but even Rita, who took things hard and lived on butterscotch sundaes when love went bad, had to admit that six years’ brooding over Mark was tenacious beyond her experience. “Athletes die young,” she told him. “You know what he’ll look like in five years? I bet he’ll be fat and surly.” But her heart wasn’t in it; and Peter, who had fallen in love with his own nun-like faith in the long lost boy, seemed to prefer to sigh and shake his head. Rita was maddened by it. He was stuck like a broken record in the middle of the first act. She applauded Peter’s year of honeyed nights in the arms of his ancient Greek, but, after all, there were better things to do. She had an impulse to tell him what they were. She could have said that the second man got you over the first, the third the second, and so on. But she stopped short. It suddenly gave her the creeps to think about giving him lessons in love. It made her seem like an old whore. And an old whore, she thought, would at least be doing her teaching in bed.

  Peter and Rita got too close, so the language classes took a long summer break. She’d learned about enough to order a vodka at the Russian Tea Room. They spoke on the phone, and she still did a formal turn with Alexander Kirkov from time to time, a Sunday lunch or Tchaikovsky on the stereo and pound cake. Peter and Rita went about their business. The only reason they’d known each other for twelve years was that they managed to part for years at a time without any guilt. Peter really did want to be an actor until he moved in with his lover who didn’t want him to work. Rita was just as serious about taking risks of the heart. They were never sentimental about each other because they knew that if they were, they would outgrow each other. Only the truest lovers, Rita thought, have the latitude to get sentimental.

  Alexander Kirkov decided from the beginning that Peter was sleeping with Rita, and he was genuinely worried for Rita’s sake. He knew she wasn’t a whore. All he could think was that Rita was doing her part in a prince’s education, that she was clever and mournful and had her own reasons, like Garbo in Camille, the only movie he had ever liked that wasn’t Russian. He’d had so many qualms about the gap of passion in Peter’s bringing-up. In his own youth, he had pursued his mother’s lady’s maid, and when he finally bedded her down, in the linen room at the palace, he was just fifteen and knew at the time that he’d settled the business of longing for his mother. Ever after, sex recalled the scent of freshly ironed sheets, which was as it should be. When he was sixteen, his father fixed it for him to make love to the very chorus girl he himself had been showering with bracelets and oranges. That went on backstage at a theater, and the echo of it spoke of lust as something more exotic than the smell of laundry. Alexander Kirkov was always glad he had had the two women to compare things against. His own son, the ingrate, peasant-headed Kirk, had married at seventeen and so knew nothing at all. But Peter? Alexander Kirkov was beside himself until Rita appeared. Now he relaxed, sure that Peter had waited for the right woman. You could tell it was his governess Tova, not his mother, that he’d always wanted to cozy up to.

  The news that Peter was gay knocked more of the wind out of his grandfather than it might have a year or two before, before Rita. Peter walked in with the steeping tea and bread and butter sandwiches—“The bread is just a vehicle for the butter, Peter”—and told him he was moving to Manhattan.

  “Are you moving in with Rita?” Alexander Kirkov asked, a little irritated to be troubled at his tea. He thought it was possible to take these affairs too far, and perhaps it was past time for the boy to be over Rita. He didn’t even know that Peter and Rita were having a cooling-off, since Peter still spent his Tuesdays and Thursdays on leave from Brooklyn Heights.

  “Rita?” Peter asked helplessly, wondering how far away they would have to start, and then growing furious at the implications. He had been wonderful to Alexander Kirkov partly because they’d staked out a sexual DMZ, a no-man’s-land where they were as neutered as a choirboy and a lofty, thin-legged cleric. Peter saw the whole dumb plot that had grown in his grandfather’s head. The candle he carried for Mark flared in his hand; but, raised in a court’s tradition, he kept things gentlemanly as long as he could.

  “I have a friend,” Peter said, who had in truth never had one in Brooklyn Heights. “He’s made a room for me.”

  Somehow, Alexander Kirkov couldn’t let it go, and he kept pumping questions. It was because he didn’t see how he could let Peter go, but he was too proud to say that. So for the sake of a heart that couldn’t speak its mind, he hectored Peter about wasting time. He trundled out the chestnuts about making provisions for male heirs and beefing up the stock with a wife one might have met over croquet in Sebastopol, one of one’s own kind.

  “I’m in love with a man,” Peter said, upping the ante. “From Broadway.” Here he stretched the truth to get an equivalent for the chorus girl, a story he didn’t even know, but he needed a seedy shock effect his grandfather would recognize. It was true enough. Peter’s first lover, bear-like Alan with the Diner’s Club card in continuous use, put his money into things when he was flattered, and he’d put a bundle into plays that closed on opening nights. He was from Broadway to the degree that Broadway needed suckers. It would take Rita a year and a half to break them up because Peter got tenacious again, just to prove a point to his grandfather, who didn’t even notice. Peter also nursed the pipe dream that he could be an actor quicker if he got hooked up with a fat cat.

  Alexander Kirkov with the wind knocked out rattled like a serpent. He had protected this delicate boy in much the same spirit as his beloved Czar had protected his only son, the bleeder. Suddenly, all this refinement and faintheartedness of Peter’s, far from being truly Russian and connected with a blood too pure, were just the frills that went with sodomy. If he’d known that Peter was going to walk out that day forever, that they were both going to go the route of dispossession and unbroken silence, he might have reconsidered the verbal blows he rained down on Peter’s head. He was prince enough to long for Peter’s happiness before all castles and estates. But he probably figured they would be railing at each other for months about the new kink in events. It was about time they had an argument. Alexander Kirkov’s own father challenged his father to a duel before he was twenty, having to do with gambling debts. In a milder mood, Alexander Kirkov might even have said, sounding not unlike the headmaster in judiciousness, that fucking with another man was the sort of decadence to which an aristocrat might be momentarily drawn. Decadence went with the territory, so to speak.

  In an hour it was over, and Peter had fled. The final shouting match got out of hand, the last recriminations animal and infantile—“Pig!” from the old prince, “Donkey!” from the boy. Alexander Kirkov had a sinking spell. He realized that Peter had gone beyond the need to justify or even win, and the argument as old as the wind on the Steppes, of who owed what to whom and who was to blame for the argument, wasn’t going to take place in Brooklyn Heights. Alexander Kirkov needed to shout good sense at his loved ones because the shouting, he thought, kept it basic. The quiet in the heavily rugged apartment deepened into evening, and the prince skipped his dinner and ate a whole rice pudding—cried into it, really, and ate it as bitter herbs, because it was so cruelly humble. Cried for the whole hundred and fifteen miles on the Black Sea. And the Kirkov sapphires.

  They were sewn into his pillow, five of them in graduated sizes from a pea to a kidney bean, so blue they were almost black. They were given to him in Paris when he got out of the hospital, by the cousin who gave him the keys to his Swiss accounts. The remnants of the Kirkov family who had made it to France after the revolution had grouped and voted to turn over the stones to Alexander Kirkov because he was the most highly titled. The cousin had smuggled them out of Russia by swallowing them. He was on foot for two weeks dressed as a peddler, stopped and searched a couple of times a day, and methodically every morning he did his business in the bushes by the side of the road. He dug the sapphires out of the shit and boiled them in a tin next to the tin where his tea water cooked. And then ate them
again like vitamins, which in a way they were, because they kept him going. He had prized them himself out of a choker given to his wife—shot dead by revolutionaries with her baby in her arms—by the Empress Alexandra herself, as a memento of a trip through the fjords on the royal yacht Standart.

  Alexander Kirkov received the sapphires gravely and brought them to America. During most of the transatlantic voyage, he was so nervous for their safety that he held them tight in his hand. He walked the decks with his fist balled up, as if he had taken a war wound somewhere in his arm and was clenching against the pain. Ever since, he would lie down in bed at night and feel for the sapphires through the feathers in his pillow, where they were wrapped in a square of dove gray velvet. He went to sleep with his head exactly over them. He had never even shown them to his wife, since they had come to represent to him the Kirkov blood itself, the stuff of the male line.

  Then his own son broke his heart and didn’t deserve them. Peter was the only one who had a right, even if his mother had thrown away the Kirkov name when she married a fool named Gilmore. Alexander Kirkov always planned to hand them over to Peter as he lay near death. Over the years, he polished up a speech full of pearls that gleamed, when he thought of it, like beads of caviar. But the night Peter left, he moaned on his bed because it wasn’t going to happen as he’d always wished. He pounded the pillow with his fist until he was panting. He hid his face in it and gripped it as if he would tear it in two. The sapphires worked their way out of the velvet pouch and got buried among the feathers. Somewhere, the empire bided its time, but the Kirkov line was done.