The Gold Diggers Page 5

  “How hot is it? Can you see?”

  “Ninety-eight.”

  “That’s not hot enough,” Nick said. “And besides, I can still see you.”

  Nick and Peter usually made an appointment to meet in the steam room off their bedroom. Originally, they were being practical—no point in bringing the steam up twice. Lately, though, they were both so busy working that they made the arrangement to assure they would both get home at the same time now and then. They didn’t say so, but each had a troubled vision of the other sitting in the gathering fog all alone, and it was insupportable. Not the same as coming home and finding someone has gone ahead with dinner or left for the party already. More like forgetting someone waiting in a restaurant, all dressed up, shrugging off the look of being left in the lurch. Yet the steam room was only as intimate as they wanted to make it, in that way not unlike the bed in the next room. They were just as happy sitting on opposite benches, heads bent and breathing eucalyptus oil, as they were talking and giving each other a rubdown. But the place had a peculiar intensity, maybe because they were both naked, their voices filling the room, and the act of sweating loosened the tongue like fever. In their case, it happened that they first met in a steam room long ago, or, rather, they sucked each other off and met when they stepped out afterward into the pest-ridden corridor. This was in the baths on Hollywood Boulevard, over near Western Avenue. Nobody went there anymore, but for half a year it was the thousand and one nights.

  “It doesn’t matter, Nick,” Peter said, moving back through the clouds to where Nick sat. “I’ll get Hey to call the steam man and raise the pressure. Let me do your head.”

  Nick leaned forward and hung his head down. As Peter stood over him and gripped his scalp and began to knead it, Nick reached up instinctively and took hold of Peter’s thighs. Through the steam, it looked like something carnal going on, but the hold that each of them had on the other was classic as a wrestler’s and just as cool. They stood still sometimes, Nick had come to think, in a world of ancient games and dances where sex had not yet taken place. Close up, one might have even called them innocent, except the innocent aren’t conscious of what they do with their hands, and Nick and Peter were. The two of them sought consciousness in moments like these. As Nick’s head gave in to Peter’s rhythm, lolling and swaying, Peter had the feeling that he held Nick entirely in his hands. He knew what he would do for Nick and also what he didn’t have to do. Peter liked the difficulty of the two of them, and he didn’t mind the constant test of limits. As far as love went, he would have said, it was innocence that was a kind of sin.

  “Did you take a look at the ranch?” he asked, and wasn’t prepared for the tightening of the cords in the neck. He’d meant to be innocuous. What if the ranch was just a fiction? he wondered. Nick must have spent the day with the man who was tying him in knots, whoever that might be. They couldn’t talk about it yet.

  “Yes. This afternoon. I love it, Peter. It’s like the middle of Montana or something.”

  “Are you buying it or selling it?” The ranch was real enough, it seemed. It must have been that Nick took the new man there with him.

  “Both. I want to get it now and wait for a big buyer. Do you want to go into it with me?”

  Peter lifted Nick’s head and looked down at his face. He wiped the sweat off Nick’s forehead and out of his eyes with the back of his hand, as if he could physically clear the air between them. Nick was dark and tough from a day in the sun. Cowboys, Peter knew, were his fiercest daydream.

  “You must be thinking of someone else,” he said ironically. “I don’t like the West, remember? I’m the one who wants things civilized.”

  “You don’t even have to see it, Peter,” he said, curiously enthusiastic. “I mean as an investment.”

  “My money’s all tied up,” Peter said, letting Nick go and bringing up his hands to wipe his own face. He breathed in the smell of Nick’s gypsy hair. A sorrow came over him because he was suddenly countering the wall Nick had thrown up with a wall of his own. Let’s not talk about money, he thought. There were truckloads of property between them already, and not enough insurance, philosophically speaking. Lately, they did not seem able to decide together what it was they were trying to buy. The truth was, Peter just didn’t have the time. But it probably seemed to Nick that if Peter’s money was tied up, it was roped around with impossible projects. He was putting everything in his savings account, as if he were trying to bankroll a Russian palace and needed every penny. Nick thought they had to talk money because they had just moved into yet another new financial bracket, and they couldn’t stay where they were, even if they’d wanted to. Meanwhile, the money ought to be a way to bring them together, to make certain bets and take risks as crazy as the two of them. But Peter knew what he sounded like just now. Threatened, as if the money had started to separate them. He didn’t believe it, but he didn’t know how to say so. Here, too, he didn’t have the time.

  “What are we going to do about Rita?” he said out of nowhere.

  “Does something need to be done?” Nick asked mildly, going with the drift. “She seems terrific. Even Hey’s in love with her. Isn’t she good at the job?”

  “She’s fine.” Peter hadn’t told him yet about going into art, and he didn’t know why. “I mean men.”

  “Are you so sure she’s interested?” Nick said.

  What had gone wrong, he wondered, in what he’d said about the ranch? Ever since this afternoon with Sam, he’d wanted to make Peter part of the desert territory he had happened on. He was too much off balance, dazed by the heat that he and Sam threw off. They’d sat on a fence and watched an old chestnut horse doze above a water trough. They drove the pickup, sliding in and out of wheel ruts, up a wagon trail to the top of a high hill, where the spread of the land was as far as they could see. Barbed wire crisscrossed in the near distance, running in lines between Nick’s and the neighbors’ boundaries, but Nick didn’t care what was his and what wasn’t. If he bought this place, he was doing it to get a ticket to all that space, whomever it belonged to.

  And wherever they went, he and Sam were turning on more and more, but making no move until they couldn’t hold it any longer. It happened in the bunkhouse, on a wooden bed with a stack of horse blankets for a mattress. They pulled their pants down around their boots and did it with their clothes on. He’d gone too far, Nick thought, and here he didn’t mean sex. If only he could bring Peter into it. But he knew he’d picked the very place Peter had no use for. Somehow, he began to see, he was engineering things in such a way that he would end up unable to say what he wanted. Already he was hard put to talk to Sam or Peter about anything important because what was important now about each was the other. He did what he could to be with Peter now. But he might as well be all alone if Peter and Sam were going to cancel one another out.

  “I know Rita better than you,” Peter said. It was one thing to find themselves at cross-purposes, Nick thought, but Peter was getting ornery. “Do we know anyone?”

  “How about Amos?”

  “Amos?” Peter laughed and sat back on the opposite bench. It must have gotten hotter because Nick couldn’t see him now. “He only does it with himself. He can’t even do it in front of a mirror, in case the other person looks like he wants something.”

  “But he’s nice.”

  “Nice is not enough. Nice doesn’t fuck.”

  “If I were you,” Nick said after a moment when the pipes knocked as if someone were hammering them, “I’d wait until Rita asks.”

  “But you’re not, right?” Peter snapped. Nick was not Peter, particularly in the timing of moral appointments. Peter shook his head benignly, not about to be trapped in Nick’s system of cautions. And the gesture got through, even if, in the steam, it didn’t register to the eye. Suddenly they were sitting in silence—actually, in something of a hiss, like the sound of a tropical rain. They would have called this occasion neither a fight nor a thin slice of the human condition, though
they knew there was a white noise to which the missed connections led. They had learned at last, by way of each other, that the line in the liquor store, the misdelivered mail, and the fatal seating at a party were in the nature of things, pure and simple. They were alert for ways to love each other whenever they could. But they didn’t expect, just because they were together, that a sort of order was restored. Peter was Nick’s reality principle, Nick Peter’s, but it didn’t mean they could abandon themselves to expectations. The desultory talk in the steam doesn’t have to be harmless, and the world doesn’t go without saying. They let themselves bicker, if they had to, or come to no conclusion. They ran down sometimes like clockwork, right in the middle of something.

  After several minutes passed, Nick made his way across to Peter’s bench and straddled his legs where they stretched out in front of him. Peter was slumped like an unstrung puppet. Nick squeezed Peter’s thighs between his knees for no special reason, just to make contact. After the ranch, he was finished with desire for the time being, and his cock ached dully, like the root of a tooth. He leaned on the wet tiled wall against his elbows and buried his head in his hands. When he sagged forward sleepily, his belly brushed Peter’s face. Peter slowly shook his head against the hair around Nick’s navel, as if to wipe the sweat away. It was abstractedness that made their motions those of sleep instead of love. The sweating and the heavy air had slowed them down to a degree below passion. They beached against each other, their muscles full of cotton. They were so close that a third person coming in wouldn’t have been able to tell from across the room that it was two people here and not one. It was funny. They twined about each other because the steam made them punch-drunk, and they got closer than they sometimes did when they tried to.

  “Oh, Nick,” Peter said, panting in the heat and giving up, “if I don’t take a cold shower now, I won’t be able to go out tonight.”

  “I don’t want to go out,” Nick said, very groggy, as if he’d gone nine rounds already.

  “It’s Friday.” As if to say Friday was a law, bigger than both of them. Peter slid out from under him, touched him at random with both hands, and padded off. They had a dozen invitations between them that had accumulated during the week, and they hadn’t even pooled them yet. A possible route would reveal itself when they did—two or three parties in the same neighborhood, or on a straight line to Studio One by midnight, where they could dance until it closed. Play was work on Friday night. By Saturday night it was a profession.

  When Peter turned the shower on, at the end of the steam room near the door, the cold water gave off an aura that seemed to eat up the steam. The cold air rolled in, the opposite of fog. In a matter of seconds, Peter could see Nick clearly, still bent in a sweat against the wall. Peter stood with relief in the fall of water, his senses sharpening again. He watched Nick become aware that the cloak of vapor had disappeared. Nick brought his head out of the cradle of his arms like an animal waking to footsteps, as if he might have been confused for a moment about where he was. Then he stood up straight and stretched his arms behind his head.

  Peter thought he was as beautiful now, shrugging his torso in the white-tiled room, as he ever was. Peter was not possessed by a wandering eye. He didn’t want anyone else, no more than he did when Mark had emptied the world of everything but a soccer field on a hot fall day. Peter always made a lightning appraisal of everything he wanted—a Chinese jar, a chair, a watercolor—and he took home the very best, if it was for sale, and kept it forever and let it grow beautiful. Nick lumbered toward him. He slipped out of the shower to give it over, and he thought as they passed, one soaped clean, the other pouring sweat like a horse: I won’t let you leave without a fight.

  And if we have to fight about it, he went on to himself as he took an armful of towels and crossed the bedroom, I’ll win and you won’t leave after all, so don’t try. He threw open three or four towels on the bed, flung the rest of the pile down for a pillow, and then lay back to dry off. He reached for the telephone and dialed his answering service, hardly listening to the string of names and numbers he should call. Nothing serious. They’d all call back. He was thirsty, but he didn’t feel like tracking down Hey on the intercom to ask. He tried to make a picture in his head of his first painting. But he was trying to see it as if it were already done, so he tried instead to decide what it was a picture of. He couldn’t say.

  He heard the thump when Nick shut the door to the steam room, then the sound of him walking across to the armoire and the click of the latch as the double doors opened. Then nothing. He might have been staring inside at the stacks of shirts, sick of them all. Peter rolled onto his side and looked over. Nick was standing with his back to the room, holding the doors wide open with both hands, as if he’d surprised something going on inside. The muscles in his back stood out in perfect symmetry. He wore a towel hitched at his waist, not because it was modest but because it was sexy. He was looking over his arm and out the window, not at the shirts.

  “I was a bitch, Nick. I’m sorry.”

  “About Rita?” he asked. “Don’t worry. It slipped my mind already.”

  “She can take care of herself,” Peter said. “She’s got a line on everything. What are you thinking?”

  “I cleared twelve thousand dollars this week,” Nick said. “My father never made that in a year.”

  “Oh, that. Well, that’s not going to get you anywhere,” Peter said, whose own father’s disappearance with his platinum secretary and a bag full of negotiable securities had driven his mother to the water. It would have cheered him mightily to hear his father died without a penny. But he’d heard all this before from Nick and thought it was beside the point.

  “That may be, Peter, but that’s the way I feel.”

  “Misunderstood again,” Peter said lightly, and Nick turned to see what he thought was so funny. And the whole thing dawned on him as it had a moment since on Peter. The same old battle lines sprang up on the field while they weren’t watching. Peter annoyed at the pain Nick felt, because it was unoriginal. Nick lost in the stars because he and his father were doomed by ironies. Nick had been on the point of accusations. You don’t understand, he would have said in a minute, what it’s like to be poor. Turning it around so that Peter was to blame. But Peter saw it coming and stopped it cold.

  “Come here,” he said gently, “and I’ll dry you off.”

  Nick walked over to the bed and tumbled down next to him. Peter came up on his knees, took a towel in either hand, and began to pat Nick dry. Nick was still caught up in the twelve thousand twists of fate, but at least he felt them for what they were. It wasn’t Peter’s fault. Over the years, he knew, they’d had to call it a draw about the facts of life. Peter’s life began when he finally believed he was all alone—Alexander Kirkov’s cutting him loose from the dynasty and his arrival years later in LA were the two historic events. Nick was never convinced his life had really started because he was so alone. They avoided moralizing the worlds they inhabited before they met; and they lived with each other’s motley crew—fathers, overnight lovers, and traitorous boys—as best they could. The past was a gift they couldn’t refuse, after all. But they didn’t have to keep it in the living room.

  “You’re very thorough,” Nick said.

  “It comes from washing cars,” Peter said, rubbing him down inch by inch. “I always used to dry my Pontiac by hand. With a baby bunting. You know, my grandfather loved to tell me how much the family spent on things. They spent about twelve thousand a year on roses, for Christ’s sake. His mother would only take her bath in Vichy water, and they shipped it to Saint Petersburg in boxcars. Think how long it would have taken your father to afford that.”

  “Is that what we’ll do when we have a lot of money?”

  Peter leaned on Nick’s raised knees as he might have leaned across a bar, and he tilted his head to consider the reach of the question.

  “We’ll eat a lot of aspic,” he said, “with the choicest things suspended in i
t. And cold bass. That’s what they eat for lunch in magazine interviews. The water out of the tap gives me all the bath I want, so not that. Antiques and paintings, I guess. We have a lot of money already. What do you think?”

  “Land,” Nick said with a shrug, as if it were self-evident, but also as if he needed the Dakotas or his own archipelago to make the word work.

  “Poor Saint Nick,” Peter said. “Who ever thinks to fill his Christmas stocking? Is it because you were poor and straight at the same time that you need so much to fall back on now?”

  “How much money is enough?” Nick said playfully, a question for a question, rocking his knees so that Peter swayed back and forth.

  “Don’t act as if we have too much already,” Peter warned him. He knew the implication at large was that, if one of them lost his heart in his purse, it was going to be Peter and not Nick. “Think about what you really mean by land.”

  “I don’t mean a place the size of Connecticut,” Nick said, killing off the princes in Sebastopol. He was a storm of contradictions, and he knew it. He stamped his foot like Lenin over all the fat dominions on the Black Sea. He had a poor boy’s bitterness about the overstuffed aristocrats who wheeled around on pastry carts, cakes and clotted cream on every side. On the other hand, he permitted the cowboy on the palomino in his dreams to ride his fences, half a day’s journey at a time, without turning a corner. He let the lifeguard go home from the beach in an Aston-Martin. Nick wouldn’t have raised a finger in a real revolution, because he didn’t want things too equal. For him, money was one of the privileges of the hero. Anything the cowboy and the lifeguard wanted, they ought to be able to get.

  Peter spread Nick’s knees and pulled the towel loose.

  “My balls are already dry,” Nick said.

  “I want to see for myself.” And he bent down and put his face against the inside of Nick’s thigh. He took Nick’s cock in one hand and drew his finger back and forth along the skin behind his balls until the sack quickened and went tight. Nick began to swell, but Peter held his hand still and kept the pulse low. For the moment, he was doing something different from turning Nick on. Once, in the woods, he’d reached down and uprooted a handful of leaves while they were walking. He flattened them against Nick’s face as if he would smother him, and at the same time whispered “Mint!” Nick tottered. Between the perfume and the word, Nick knew when he sniffed it in that a man could mean exactly what he said. Peter stroked him now, and the tension increased like the string being pulled on a bow. Just as it throbbed in response, he said, “When can you take me up to see the ranch?”